The Vine of Desire (12 page)

S
udha

Each afternoon I wander the pavements of the city, footstep by hard gray footstep, pushing Dayita in her baby carriage. She sucks her thumb and stares around her with eyes the color of wet licorice. The faded blue awning of a Chinese takeout. An Indian grocery where cardboard boxes of okra and bitter melon are set out on the pavement. A beauty salon that screams NAILS! ONLY $19.95! A Kmart outside which teenagers slouch, looking sulky in crew cuts and pants too big for them. She will not sleep, not until I return to the apartment. And then she will plummet into thick, exhausted dreams, refusing to wake for dinner. I am afraid she is losing weight. I am racked by guilt. Yet I find it impossible to remain in the apartment past noon. Is it fear that drives me, or desire?

I think from time to time with remorse of Singhji and the news of his death that Gouri Ma wrote of. How scared I used to be of his burned face when I was little, the disfigurement that was his disguise. All those years he worked for us—and no one had known who he was. He had loved us—me—mutely,
through his service. Loved me more than I deserved. Again and again, he took risks to bring Ashok and me together. He had known—better than I—that I should have married where my heart led. I think of the letter he slipped into my bag when I left for America, explaining that he was my father, long presumed dead, begging me to keep his secret. I should have written back, telling him that I loved him, too. But I was too unsure myself, teetering on the tightrope of my new life. I felt I had to keep my eyes fixed sternly ahead. One backward glance and I’d fall, crashing, into the nothingness below. How could I risk that? And now it’s too late.

Minutes fall around me in clumps, like cut hair. Keep track, keep track! I must be back on our street by the time the white-and-green bus pulls over to the side and huffs open its doors. When Anju steps out, I will be there to greet her. I will speak brightly about how nice it is to leave the apartment for a breath of fresh air. About the daffodils, eye-watering yellow by the library entrance. About the first leaves, their webbed fingers. Anju will lean down to Dayita. For a moment, her hair will enclose them in a silken fringe, faces stitched into the same tapestry. She will whisper into my daughter’s ears, filling her with secrets that make her giggle as she never does with me. I will feel a twinge. A numbness at my extremities, like frostbite. Foolish jealousy! This closeness between them—isn’t it the only gift I have to give Anju?

But underneath it all, I will be thinking about the kiss.

I have grown disenchanted with stories, the way my life veers away from the ones I long to emulate. But once in a while, remembering Pishi’s request, I tell Dayita tales from the Ramayana. I think she enjoys this—it is one of the few times when
I am not scolding. Does she understand? I don’t know. Still, it makes me feel motherly and good, which is rare for me.

The story I tell her as we walk today is about how the demon Ravan stole Sita from her home.

When Sita saw the golden deer outside her forest hut, she desired it more than anything she could imagine. She said to her husband, Ram, “I gave up the palace and came to live in the forest for love of you. If you loved me as much, you would catch the deer so I could have it as a pet.”

Ram suspected that the golden deer was not real but a demon trick, and he said so to Sita. But she would not listen.

“Now I know how little you care for me,” she cried.

So Ram took his bow and arrow and left to find the deer. He told his brother Lakshman to remain behind at the hut to guard Sita. After a while they heard a distant voice that sounded like Ram’s crying for help. Sita was distraught and asked Lakshman to go to his brother’s aid.

Lakshman said, “I think this is another demon trick. Ram is a great warrior and would never need to call for help.”

But Sita scolded him bitterly and said, “You are an unnatural brother. For all I know, you want Ram to die so that you can force me to become yours.”

Stung, the faithful Lakshman left in search of Ram, but before he went, he drew a circle in the earth around the hut. “Do not step outside this boundary,” he said to Sita. “As long as you are inside, no one can harm you.”

But as soon as he went away, the demon Ravan, disguised as a sannyasi, came to the hut and begged for alms. He tricked Sita into crossing the circle, captured her and took her to his island kingdom in Lanka. It would take many years of sorrow and searching, war and death, before Ram and Sita would be united again.

This is what I do not tell Dayita: Each of our lives has a magic circle drawn around it, one we must not cross. Chaos waits on the other side of the drawn line. Perhaps in leaving Ramesh I had already stepped outside my circle. With the kiss, Sunil trampled the circle his marriage had etched around him. What is there now to keep us safe from our demons?

I am angry with Sunil, but angrier with myself. When he kissed me, it was as though a lance went through me, striking me in my most secret parts. His tongue moved in my mouth. His odor was sour and addictive, like pickled plums. My treacherous lips did not want him to stop. I pushed him away, yes. But my breasts yearned toward him.
The husband of my sister
, said my brain. But the trembling in my legs said,
I don’t care.

I fear my body. I fear his. Because bodies can pull at us, whispering.

Why not.

I deserve more.

I am young, and life is passing.

What will our bodies do, the next time they are alone?

Preoccupied with storytelling, I’ve taken a different turn somewhere. I find myself in a park.

I have been in American parks before. But this time, looking with undistracted eyes, I see more. It is always this way. When I am alone, it is as though a scalpel has cut a cataract away.

Why then do I continue to resist loneliness?

A pretty park, clean, with new equipment. This must be a more affluent neighborhood. So neat, so bright, so much space between things. In Indian parks, people would jostle for space beneath the few banyan trees. The hot-gram and ice-cream sellers
would singsong their way between families with too many children. Piebald dogs would follow them, panting endlessly. Bus fumes, spicy pakoras, the too-sweet peaks of old woman’s hair candy. The odor of oleanders crushed under small, excited shoes. Anju and I always returned home exhausted, sticky with surfeit.

The slatted red cups of baby swings arc through the air. Tidy. Vivacious. On springs shaped like giant corkscrews, rocking horses bob their synchronized heads. Why should all this order make me sad? Children pour sand on each other, but it doesn’t show in their blond hair. Blond mothers dressed in coordinated outfits chat animatedly. I venture a smile, they do not see me. Is it their ignorance of my world that renders me invisible, or their distrust? If I were in their place, I wouldn’t have smiled either at a brown woman in a sari and windbreaker.

In the stroller Dayita scrambles and squeals. When I pick her up, she cries louder, twisting. Recently, she refuses to let me hold her. When did this start? Was it after the kiss? I am paranoid. How can a child her age understand? She stopped nursing two nights later. I’d been trying to wean her for weeks. Still, when she pushed my breast away, the condemnation in her fingertips stung my skin. All night my mouth was dry with shame.

I set Dayita down on the spongy surface of the play area that edges the sand. In America, even falls don’t hurt. Entire generations of children, growing up innocent of pain … Something feels wrong to me about this.

Why should I think this way? I’ve eaten my fill of pain. What good has it done me?

Then I notice the girl. She’s on the big-children’s swings. She wears cutoff jeans, makes the swing go way past safety. No, it’s a grown woman. Her black hair streams out, seal-sleek,
as the swing sweeps forward. She wears her tight purple T-shirt with a nonchalance I envy. Kicks out with naked brown feet. Her toenails are darkly iridescent. Mynah feathers. On the ground, a boy belted into a stroller laughs and claps his hands.

Up and down and up into the sky again. The wild abandon of that movement, the first way we learn of flight. That weightless moment poised at the highest point of the arc, that total quiet before the fall. I thought I’d forgotten it, along with my childhood.

I walk up and ask, “Are you Indian?” I cannot help it, though Anju has warned me that here people do not talk to strangers this way. Not even Indian strangers. A gust following in the swing’s wake blows away my words. I must shout them again. She is looking skyward, creasing her eyes, focusing on the dip and rise of the horizon. A sailor searching for a new geography. The boy looks at me, curious. His eyes are blue and brown. Her son? She does not turn to me. Her lips are the juicy red of ripe pomelos, curved in a joke she’s keeping to herself.

Mortified, I begin to move away.

Then she says, “Wait.”

I go back to the park day after day to see her. She is so unlike any woman I’ve ever met. And I am so hungry.

Each time she gives me a little piece of herself.

Her name is Sara. In India it was something else. Saraswati? Sarayu? Sarojini? She doesn’t tell me. It’s not important, not at this time in her life. Does she believe that her name will wait for her, obedient as a brooch one has put aside because it is too old-fashioned, until she is ready to wear it again?

“I came here as an exchange student,” she says. “It was only going to be for a year. I was all set to go back and get married to a guy I’d met in college in Bombay. Then, about a month before my return, it hit me that for the rest of my life I’d never have another chance to be alone. In-laws, kids, servants, you know how it is in India. Scary. So I bought myself a bus ticket to California. A last bit of adventure, I thought. Disneyland, Universal Studios, the Golden Gate Bridge—the usual tourist shit. I’d planned on being back by the end of the week, but the Greyhound broke down halfway between LA and San Francisco. Like it was fate.”

She got off the bus and walked into the dunes. She hitched rides along Highway 1, learning the names of trees as she went. Scarlet gum, Madrona, ironbark. Somewhere between a grove of cypresses and a rock on which seals sunned themselves, she got addicted.

All those years of Fair and Lovely Skin Lightening Lotion and Arnica Hair Vitalizer! She let her face grow dark in the sun. She let her hair coil into dreadlocks for a while, then cut it all off. She pierced her nose, her eyebrow, but let the holes close up after a while. When her visa expired, she took all the money she had left and bought a secondhand car. Sometimes, that’s where she sleeps.

She laughs at my expression. “Don’t look so scandalized! It isn’t hard. I love the freedom, the risk. It’s like being in a play.”

“What about your parents?”

She shrugs. “I send them postcards. That way they know I’m okay, but they can’t get to me! When I’m ready to go back to them, I’ll call, and they’ll send me a ticket.”

I want to dislike her selfishness, her arrogant confidence that she’ll be loved, always. I want to ask,
What if they don’t want you back?
But I’m caught in the net of her stories.