The Vine of Desire (49 page)

The train is entering a tunnel. She blinks in the sudden dark. Small red emergency lights stud the tunnel like jewels in some underworld cave. In the window, her face is as pale and lovely as Persephone’s. She lifts a hand to the perfectly formed cheekbones, the beauty she both loves and hates. There are no wrinkles to show what she has been through, no circles of suffering under the eyes. How then will she convince Anju of her regret?

“Come here,” he says. “Come on now. Don’t be naughty. Let me check that diaper.” He reaches for her but the child toddles away, laughing. This is a new game, and she likes it. She’s glad to be out of that confining walker, the horrid cacophony of its wheels that echoed inside her head even after she stopped moving. She resolves to scream very loudly if her mother even thinks of putting her back in it. She flings her arms out in a burst of ecstasy, loses her balance and lands on her behind. She considers the situation for a moment, then decides to cry.

“My poor baby!” the old man says. He can’t bend very well, so he lowers himself to the floor stiff-hipped, one limb at a time, holding on to the bed. “Bad floor!” He strikes it with his cane.

The child likes this, too. “Bad floor!” she says, hitting the wood with her palm, though the words come out sounding different, as if her mouth were full of Froot Loops. And with that
thought she’s hungry. No, she’s starving. She pulls at the old man, but the fine, wrinkled skin on the back of his hand distracts her. She picks up a soft fold and lets it drop. Does it again. She straightens out his finger, then curls it inward into his palm. Straighten, curl up. Straighten, curl up. Why, he’s more fun than a whole boxful of toys! Then she’s starving again. “Eat,” she says emphatically, pointing to the kitchen. But she waits for him to get to his feet, creaking like an ancient tree. She lets him hold her hand.

The parking lot looks very large to Anju as she pulls in—larger than it really is. And very full. It seems to her that there are no spaces, that she will have to circle it forever. The tracks glitter faintly. A train is pulling in. Anju shades her eyes and looks. Is that her? Suddenly she cannot remember what Sudha looks like. Even the Passenger-Loading-Only-Driver-Must-Remain-with-Vehicle-at-All-Times spots are full. Anju parks illegally at a bus stop and watches her rearview mirror with some anxiety for the meter maid to whir up, avenging-angel-like, in her blue cart. From experience, she knows her parking karma is poor.

And so she doesn’t see Sudha until she reaches the car, until she taps, tentatively, on the window. As she leans over to unlock the door, the thought comes to Anju that her cousin’s hand, with its slender, ringless fingers and unpainted nails, resembles a white lotus.

They sit in silence for a while. Anju stares at the windshield, clasps the steering wheel, then puts her hands in her lap. She tries to regulate her breath, four counts in, pause, eight counts out, pause, as the instructor in the yoga class she has started taking advised, but she is having trouble drawing in air. She gropes
near Sudha’s foot for her water bottle, but it’s rolled to the other side of Sudha’s legs and she can’t reach it.

“Here,” Sudha says. Their hands touch as Anju fumbles for the bottle. Sudha’s palms are damp with nervousness.

“Your palms are sweating,” Anju says.

“Yours, too, I notice.”

They wipe their palms on their jeans, and one of them—it’s not clear—begins to laugh, a thin sound like an ice floe cracking. The other joins in.

“Don’t tell me you were afraid of meeting me,” Anju says.

“Not afraid,” Sudha says. “Terrified.”

“Me, too.”

They laugh again. Then comes the pause they feared, taut as a rubber band stretched to breaking. Sudha clears her throat, coughs.

“Want some water?” Anju asks.

Sudha nods, takes the bottle from Anju, drinks. When she hands it back, Anju drinks from it, too. Her lips touch the mouth of the bottle where Sudha’s mouth had been just a moment earlier.

“Anju,” Sudha is examining her nails, “are you still mad at me?”

Anju looks out the window at two blackbirds fighting over an abandoned container of French fries. She wonders if the fries will make them ill, if she should get out of the car and shoo them away. But the birds look tough and feisty, with impudent sequin eyes. They’ve probably been living on French fries and onion rings their entire lives. She hears herself saying, “No,” and is startled to find that it’s the truth.

“I want to tell you what really—”

Anju shakes her head. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“But—”

“No,” Anju says, her voice firm. “It took me a long time to close that door. Don’t start opening it again.”

“But unless you know, you’ll always blame me—”

“Whatever happened,” says Anju, her whole being focused on trying to find the right words for what she’s feeling, “I tell myself that it’s like the dream I had last night. What does it matter if it was a good dream or a bad one? Neither kind is going to help me live my life today, is it?”

Sudha frowns. She isn’t comfortable with this line of reasoning. She isn’t sure she understands where it leads. “How about me? How do I fit into that life? Or don’t I?”

“I’m not sure. I’m not even sure how
I
fit into my life.”

“Oh, Anju!” Sudha says. She takes Anju’s hand in both of hers and strokes it as one might an injured child’s. “I wanted so much to help you, but I’ve done just the opposite, haven’t I?”

Anju shrugs. “I could say the same thing.” But she leaves her hand in her cousin’s.

There’s a rap at the window. Sure enough, it’s the meter maid—or man, to be exact. He twirls his pen and gestures at them to lower the window. “This is all very touching, ladies,” he drawls, “but unless you want a ticket, you’d better move the car.”

“As soon as you step back, Officer,” Anju says in syrupy tones, revving the engine. “You wouldn’t want me to run over your foot, would you?”

In the glass house, luncheon has been successfully concluded, with only minor damages—a plate that slipped from the old man’s hands, a few ketchupy handprints on the fridge door.

“Nothing a bowl of good hot soapy water won’t take care of,”
he says as Dayita wriggles down from her chair. “Hold still, Miss Naughtiness.” Amazingly, she does. He wipes her hands and mouth with a damp towel. His fingers shake a little. “Due to the excitement of being with you,” he explains. “Your mother will have to do the rest when she returns. Shall we change diapers now?”

Twenty minutes later, he steps back from the bed, eyeing the lopsided diaper he’s managed to get onto her. “A fine job, if I do say so myself! I think your mother will be proud of us, won’t she?” The child smiles and pulls strings of half-words out of her mouth.

“Exactly,” says the old man, wiping his forehead. “Just what I was thinking. Siesta time. There’s your little bed and blanket, on the floor, and here’s mine.” He lowers himself slowly onto his mattress, maneuvers his legs up under his quilt. He’s exhausted, though he’d never admit it to Sudha, not in a thousand years. He feels himself drifting off. He’s half-asleep when he feels the child pushing against his back with determined palms. He turns to make space for her under his quilt. She presses her back against his breastbone. She wiggles her head onto his pillow. It is slightly damp and smells, he thinks, of wild mustard greens. He takes a big breath and runs his fingers through the tangly curls. Under the softness of hair, the small, solid curvature of skull. When was the last time he held a child so close? He thinks, suddenly, of his wife, wrinkled and spectacled, in her red-bordered handloom sari, cutting brinjals in the kitchen for their lunch. In his memory, she looks up with a half-smile. She has a missing front tooth which she never cared to have replaced. Sunlight glints on the wire rims of her glasses.
Our grandchild?
He is not sure whether he hears the words inside his head, or whether he speaks them. How disappointed she had been when Trideep informed
them they weren’t going to have any children. He starts telling Dayita the story of how he met his wife on their wedding day. It was an old-fashioned marriage, even for those times. She was only fourteen, and he’d barely started college. Later, he’d climb the guava tree in the yard, pick her the best fruits from the top branches, just beginning to ripen. She liked to eat them with salt and chili powder. If they fought, she’d cry and say, I want to go back to my mother’s house. But then they fell in love. He’s trying to remember how it happened, but it was so long ago. She used to believe that the person you married in this life had been your spouse in earlier lifetimes, too. Just before she died, she beckoned him close and said, with that same half-smile, Wherever I’m going, I’ll wait for you. In the middle of telling this to the child, he falls asleep.

Sunil is walking in a forest. (It’s really the Houston Arboretum, but he likes to think of it as something wilder, more adventuresome.) Green ash, water oak, maple, pecan. He sees a hedge with tiny red berries. He must look up its name. The pine trees startled him the first time. He hadn’t known any would grow so far south. Every time he comes here, he writes in his diary—he’s started that habit recently
—I went for a walk in the woods.
The path leads past a lily pond with frogs, a stretch of swampland, a wooden lookout platform. Then he’s in his favorite spot, a small lake with an island in the middle where migrating birds nest. He sits on the pier and listens to them calling to their mates. On the far bank, turtles are sunning themselves. One lifts its head to look, and he notices the thin red stripes by its ears, the greenish sheen of its neck. Sunil likes turtles,
their
(he writes)
wise patience.
Sometimes he smuggles in chopped green
apples to feed them. The fields behind him are full of weeds. In spring, someone told him, the bluebonnets will bloom. I like weeds, too, Sunil said. He puts his chin on his knees and gazes at the water. Daddy longlegs skitter across, a small ripple widens and widens. The sun is warm on his shoulders. In his diary, he has written,
In winter, the Houston sun is very sweet. Can this be the same killing sun of summertime? But why should this surprise me? Are people not the same way, in the different seasons of their lives?
Sometimes he writes other things in his diary, aphorisms, jokes he made up himself.
To her lover, a beautiful woman is a blessing beyond belief, to a monk, she is a distraction, to a mosquito, a good meal.
And
How does one learn patience? Very slowly.