The Vine of Desire (5 page)

I reach the ocean first. My first ocean. My sari is bunched up at my knees like a heedless schoolgirl’s. The spray is soap and ice, and smells of sea horses. I imagine them somewhere deep and green, swaying. My toes curl in exhilaration. Anju has fallen behind, out of breath. Her panting sounds like the edge of a blade. She clutches at her side surreptitiously. She doesn’t want me to see. Anju, who used to be so strong. My banyan tree. Since the miscarriage, she startles at moths, echoes, the greetings of strangers. I force myself to smile. No tears, no tears now. Once we had known everything about each other. My smile is a bland expanse of white, dead as the shells underfoot. But loss
has made Anju incapable of detecting such things. She holds out her hand. I take it. Together we step into the sea.

He is carefully not watching us. He busies himself with amusing Dayita. Making funny faces. She gurgles at him and tries to grab his nose. He laughs and lets her, though her nails will leave sharp red moon-marks on his skin. When he looks at her, there is an odd gratitude on his face.

Each evening, coming home from the office, he goes straight to her crib to pick her up. Even before he takes off his shoes. He refuses to put her down the rest of the evening. Anju says, Sunil, you’re spoiling her. He acts as if he doesn’t hear. Even while he eats dinner or works at the computer, he balances Dayita easily, on one knee. His arm loops lightly around her. She grabs his spoon just as he brings it to his mouth. She swats at the keyboard, deleting crucial data. He smiles. Anju tells me he’s never been a patient man. He has surprised us all. Himself, too, I think. He only releases my daughter when I have to nurse her. He puts her down on the floor, so his hands won’t touch mine as I pick her up.

Later he lies on the bed with Dayita on his chest. He tells her all kinds of things. All the things he doesn’t talk to Anju about. The project he’s working on. The accident he saw on the freeway. The places he plans to take her soon. He riffles his fingers through her curls and gives her an edited version of the daily news. He tells her the plots of movies he saw growing up in India. He changes her diapers without consulting us, though we’re waiting to help.

I am jealous for Anju, who watches from the doorway.

And Dayita, who drives us crazy all day, crawling into corners, getting stuck under the bed, throwing tantrums every two minutes: she basks on his chest, listening to what happened on the stock market. Her iridescent eyes shine, the color of chameleons.

“When he’s with Dayita,” Anju tells me later, “all the bitterness falls away from him. He used to be like that when I was pregnant. Boyish and excited and tender. He’d make a world of plans—all the things he wanted to do for—” she swallows—“Prem. He would put his mouth against my stomach to whisper them. If only I’d been more careful—”

“There’s no point in torturing yourself over what’s happened already,” I say, as I have many times.

Useless words, falling between us like lopsided snowflakes. Melting.

“Somehow I feel I’ll never get another chance to be a mother,” Anju says. Her voice is toneless, it moves like a sleepwalker. “This child, he came to me too easily, and I was too casual about him. I’m going to have to pay for that….”

I’m frightened by that sleepwalker voice, its thin, icy glide. “What superstition!” I say, choosing harder words, clipping them close like nails. “You never used to be this way. Listen to you—you sound like my mother! Of course you’ll have more children. And isn’t Dayita your own, too? Even Sunil can see that—why can’t you?”

“Yes,” Anju says. It is a sound like a sigh. But what is she agreeing with?

There are things she doesn’t tell me about her marriage. I
see their shadows on the wall, shivery-brown and thin, like diseased branches. I try vainly to untangle silhouettes.

We do not discuss him again.

It began on the very first night, the night Dayita and I came into their house. I know because I dreamed it.

So much talk and tears. So much catching up with pain. So much still left unsaid between Anju and me, that would perhaps never be spoken. We were afraid to touch each other’s pasts, the way one is with a cut that’s just stopped bleeding. We read, in each other’s eyes, the questions that couldn’t be asked, couldn’t be answered.
Why did you really bring me here? Why did you really say no to him?
We fell to sleep exhausted on the carpet in my new room. Lying between us, lulled by our voices, my daughter, too, slept awhile. Then she awoke.

In the living room he was sitting at his computer. Staring at the screen, which for once could not save him from his thoughts. A can of Coke, gone warm and flat, stood untouched beside him. He wanted whiskey, though he wasn’t a drinker. Whiskey to dull the points of all those thoughts whizzing at his head like jugglers’ knives. But that would have been a victory for the women. (
The women
, that’s how he thought of us.) An admission that we’d gotten under his skin.

Sleepless in front of that opal flicker, he felt thankfulness. He could see that, with my coming, some of the sadness had fallen from Anju. But he was annoyed, too. We made him feel unnecessary. At dinner I had enquired about his work. Anju had asked if he wanted more lasagna, more pudding. Still, he knew he was an interruption to our reunion.

The last knife, the last thought. When it struck him, a tense joy spurted forth. To him I was more beautiful than before. He wanted to lick away the worry lines at the corners of my eyes.
Like a glass flower, blossomed in fire.
The words hummed like wasps inside his skull. He was light-headed with his need to take care of me, and knew he must not.

He heard the snuffling noises Dayita was making. At first he didn’t know what to do. Should he let her cry until we awoke? But that might take forever. The poor child was starving—he could tell by her shrillness. He stepped gingerly into the room. He tried to keep his eyes away. There’s a nakedness about sleeping people—Anju and I lay with our arms around each other, as if we were girls again. Needy, unabashed. We embarrassed him.

But here was Dayita, kicking with vigor. Screeching like an entire chorus of harpies. Her face was splotched more with rage than hunger. For the first time since we came, he was amused.
You don’t like being ignored either, do you?
He leaned carefully over us to pick her up. It amazed him how light she was. And yet how solid, how real. Suddenly it was very important not to wake us. To have her to himself. She was quiet now. She stared at him, her eyes smoky with intelligence. She knew all the ways, he thought, in which he was hurting.

Shyly he laid his cheek on Dayita’s head. Curly, pulsing. She smelled like every baby on earth. Like herself only. Like grass. He was thinking—he didn’t allow himself to do that often—of Prem.

He fed her with the baby formula I had kept in the refrigerator. There was a rhythm to her sucking, a code he needed to decipher. He changed her and put her in the middle of his bed. He piled all the pillows he could find around her to keep her safe. Until he fell asleep he talked to her. Nonsense words at first,
then adult to adult. He told her he was afraid of what might happen to us all in the next few months. He used words like craziness. Conflagration. He didn’t mention my name to my daughter. (Of that I am thankful.) But he was happy she was here. He wanted her especially to know that.

That was how we found them in the morning. Sleep-entangled. Her arm flung over his eyes. His urgent hand grasping her foot as though she might fly away in the night. The way his Prem had once done.

I am not the only one in this house who dreams.

“Almost every night before you came,” Anju tells me, “I used to have a nightmare.” She stammers a little, shamefaced, as she describes it.

A point of light travels across a swirl of ink-blue. Its arc is serene, confident. It takes her a moment to recognize it: a planet in orbit. Then, from nowhere, another light, bigger and brighter and streaming fire. It hurls itself into the planet’s path. In a moment they will collide, shatter into nothingness. She moans and flails her sleeping arms, trying to avert the catastrophe. The giant meteor crashes into the planet—but there’s no explosion. Instead, the planet is thrown from its orbit. It falls spinning past the edge of the dream, flat as a coin, naive as a child’s cutout. The meteor takes its place, bristling with heat and life. Anju waits for someone to notice this treachery, to do something about it. All continues as before. The Milky Way shimmers, joyous chords swell in the background. She wakes with an ache in her throat, as though she’s swallowed a piece of bone.

“I’ve finally figured it out,” Anju says. “I was visualizing Dayita as the meteor and Prem as the planet. I was afraid she
would take my poor boy’s place, make me forget him. But it’s amazing, isn’t it, the way the heart expands when it needs to? I’m so glad you forced me, those first few days, to hold her, to feed her. Did you realize how scared I was? But now it’s like buds opening on a branch that I’d given up for dead. Not that I don’t think of Prem—I do, all the time. I think I always will. But it’s different, having a baby I can hold with my hands.”

Her face was hot and requesting. She wanted consolation, a hug at the very least. She deserved it. It was hard for her to talk of such things. But I couldn’t.

“What time is it?” I said stiffly. “We’d better start dinner.” Her eyes went shiny with hurt.

Later in the bathroom, in the middle of combing my hair, I came to a halt. Stared at the mirror a long time. I bundled all the strands into a tight, ugly knot, and took off my earrings. The dream had another meaning, though Anju didn’t recognize it. Some fears are like that, slippery and deep down as mudfish.

The planet was Anju herself.

If so, was I the meteor?