The Vine of Desire (9 page)

All day Sudha works the way a deep-sea swimmer treads water, as though to stop were to drown. She cooks and vacuums and mops, she dusts the meager knickknacks in the living room. “Who would think that before I came to America I had never mopped a floor!” she says to Dayita, whom she keeps close by. “That girl’s into everything!” she’ll tell Anju later. “Can’t let her out of my sight a minute!” Does Anju sense that Sudha is afraid of: aloneness? When Dayita falls asleep, Sudha talks to herself.

She camouflages her daily cleaning by leaving a few newspapers scattered around. This is so that Anju will not scold her. (“Did I bring you here to turn you into a servant? I swear I’ll stop going to college if all you do when I’m gone is clean, clean, clean.”) She feeds Dayita and eats a little of the khichuri she has cooked for Anju. “It feels funny eating all by myself,” she grumbles. “Civilized humans weren’t meant to live like this, don’t you think?” She places a clove into her mouth and chews on it abstractedly. It is an old habit that has stayed with her from girlhood.

“Oh, Sudha, don’t tell me you still chew cloves like your mother made us do when we were children!” Anju exclaimed, laughing, after dinner on the first night. “Remember what she used to say
—Girls, it will give you sweeter mouths—and a husband always likes a wife with a sweet mouth!”
Then she clapped her hand over her mouth.

Sudha smiled, though a bit ruefully. “It’s okay, Anju! Just because
I’m divorced now doesn’t mean you can’t mention anything to do with marriage. Why then, we’ll never be able to speak of our growing-up days—because that’s what they were, a giant, nonending rehearsal for becoming married women!” Then she added, “Remember how I used to tell you that once I was married and out of Mother’s control, I’d never touch another clove? But when that day came, I found I couldn’t do without them.”

“How we grow addicted to our tortures!” Anju said.

Sunil shot her a glance. Perhaps he wondered if there was a second meaning to her words. He should have known, by now, that Anju wasn’t one to hide her meanings. She pointed her words toward people like arrows—that was the only way she knew to use them.

Now, dutifully, Sudha turns on the TV. Anju has told her she must, it will help her understand Americans. So she watches a weather report that states there’s a 70 percent chance of rain; a commercial for paper towels that features a giant male, a dirty floor, and a tiny, agitated woman; and the rerun of a game show. But when a plump woman who has correctly guessed the cost of a blender shrieks with delight and jumps up and down and throws her arms around the host to kiss him, she grimaces and switches it off.

“That’s disgusting!” she tells Dayita. “I’m sure that, as a self-respecting female, you’ll agree with me.” She plays finger games with her for a while, but she is distracted. You can see it in the way she turns her head suddenly, as though hoping to catch sight of something that lurks just outside the line of her vision. She opens the window all the way. Outside, the wind swoops and dives, scattering leaves and debris. It blows malicious grit into her eyes to make her weep. She rubs at them—a child’s gesture
unexpected in a woman who threw herself against the fence of marriage hard enough to knock it down—and sighs as she glances at the clock. It’s only three. “Let’s clean Anju Ma’s bedroom, shall we?” she says.

It is a surprising decision. Though she is vigilant about keeping the rest of the apartment spotless, Sudha never enters Anju’s bedroom (she thinks of it as
his bedroom)
on her own. Sometimes when Anju comes back from class, they lie on the bed in there, chatting, but that is only because Anju insists that it’s ridiculous for them to scrunch themselves onto Sudha’s tiny bed when her queen-sized one is sitting empty. Afterward, Sudha smooths from the bedspread every wrinkle that might betray she was there. Long before Sunil comes home, she is in the kitchen, safe behind a barricade of pots, veiled in fragrant steam.

Armed with sponges and sprays, Sudha enters the bedroom. She moves hesitantly, with trespasser footsteps. “Oh, what a mess!” she exclaims to Dayita, as though in justification—and it is. The dresser is cluttered with medicine bottles and college textbooks that have pushed Sunil’s colognes into a corner. On one end is a small TV-cum-VCR in which Sunil has taken to watching, late at nights, movies that Anju would not approve of if she were awake. Blankets are balled up at the foot of the bed, and Anju’s nightgown and damp towel lie in a heap on the bathroom floor. The toothpaste tube, left open, has bled blue gel onto the counter. Sudha kneels and scrubs the grime-ringed tub. There is an absorbed look on her face as she plies the cleaning brush, as she scrapes crusts of lime from the faucet. This is what she has come to America for: to set her cousin’s life in order. As long as her body is contained by such necessary actions,
she need not think beyond them to the blankness which is her future.

For a while the child follows the movement of her mother’s arm, the way it bends and straightens, the way cleanser bubbles bloom at the end of the brush’s bristles. But she doesn’t like the look on her mother’s face, that faraway look, as though the child weren’t there at all. She pulls at her arm, making sounds of protest.

“Just a minute,” her mother says, “I’ll feed you as soon as I’m done with the tub, okay?”

It is not okay with the child. She’s more important than any stupid tub, and she knows it. She lets out a full-bodied, indignant howl.

“All right! All right! I get it!” her mother says, washing hastily and unbuttoning her blouse. The child would prefer something more exciting, those crunchy cereal balls that the man lets her have from his bowl in the morning, perhaps. But she makes do with good grace. Actually, she rather likes the familiarity of her head in the crook of her mother’s elbow, the milk spraying warmth inside her mouth, its comforting smell, which is also the smell of the mother, the smell she would know at once, even in a dark room filled with strangers. She pounds on her mother’s breast approvingly.

“Ouch!” her mother says. “Quit! It’s time for you to go into your crib.”

The child has other ideas. She clings to her mother as she tries to lower her into the crib and emits a series of shrieks, each louder than the other. She doesn’t really like to do this—the
sound hurts her ears, too. But what option does she have when her mother refuses to be persuaded by gentler means? This strategy has worked well in the past, especially when Aunt Anju is around.

It’s successful today as well. “Oh, very well!” snaps her mother, hauling her back to Aunt Anju’s bedroom and plopping her—rather ungently, the child thinks—onto the bed. “Spoilt brat!” Perspiration lines her forehead. “I should smack you.” She narrows her eyes and raises her arm.

The child stops her crying. There’s no longer a need for it, and she isn’t one to waste her efforts. She watches her mother with some curiosity—before today, no one has threatened to hit her. But there’s something else in her gaze, something steady and measuring. She knows they’re engaged in some kind of battle—a staring battle maybe, and she isn’t going to lose. Her mother pulls back her arm, her palm flat and swordlike. Maybe it’s time to let out another wail?

But, look, she’s biting her lip, backing away. She’s stumbling toward the TV now, rummaging through a pile of children’s videos that the man bought for the child. She slams one of them into the VCR, a last act of temper. The child considers reprimanding her with a sob or two from her considerable repertoire, but a frog puppet has appeared on the screen. It begins to sing a song she knows. She sways from side to side to the beat.
Key Largo, Montego … that’s where we wanna go.
Everything else dwindles: small stuff, not worth sweating. In the back of her mind, she hears her mother shut the bathroom door.
Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama.
The child knows that she will weep in there for a while. The knowledge makes her suddenly sad, makes her lie down, curled into herself, thumb in her mouth.

By the time the mother returns, leaving behind a gleaming bathroom that is sure to earn her Aunt Anju’s wrath, the child is asleep. In sleep she senses that her mother’s eyes are reddened, that the end of her blue sari is wound untidily around her slender waist. Even this way, she is beautiful, with the kind of uncared-for beauty that makes people want to be a shield between her and the world. The child knows this because the man has told her so. The mother is smiling a rainy smile at the child, who looks so much like her with her cleft chin and a small mole high on her cheekbone—except there’s an added stubbornness to the child’s mouth, which pouts in sleep. The mother shakes her head. In India this stubbornness would have been a disadvantage, something to be scolded—even beaten—out of a girl. But here she’s not sure. All the rules are different in America, and she knows none of them yet.

She bends to pick the child up, then pauses.

“I’m scared you’ll wake up,” she whispers against her forehead. “And we all know what a terror you can be if your nap’s disturbed, don’t we!” She smiles an exhausted smile. All that kneeling and scrubbing and weeping has taken its toll. Is that why she lies down now, with a delicate, catlike yawn, curling her body around the child’s? Or is she merely acquiescing to the child’s wilder will? The child snuggles backward into that smell she knows so well. She is dreaming of the boy again. Cloud boy, she calls him on some days. Sandstorm boy who looks at her with such hunger. Today he flutters over them with pigeon wings.
No, no. Not here.
She wants to tell him not to be scared. What will be, will be. But she is distracted by the insistent wind, the way it presses against the windowpane, trying to find a crack so it can enter.

“Ah, mothers and daughters,” she hears her mother sigh, “how we wear each other out! No matter. Anju Ma will be here in an hour to wake us up.”

Four
P.M.
Her last class over, Anju stands on a campus pavement fidgeting with her sunglasses, which she wears even to class. She is trying to decide what to do. A part of her yearns homeward, but there’s the matter of the letter to her father. She knows she can’t write that letter in the apartment, its charged, gunpowder air. For that she needs a space empty of history and its attendant expectations.

It is the year of passings: Ionesco and Kojak, Jackie Onassis from cancer. Anju wonders if they are expected to share the same afterlife space. She fears it might be so. But maybe it is a mistake to fear, perhaps the dead do not care about such things. She thinks of Prem for a speck second, the way one might lay a finger on the coils of a still-hot burner, then snatch it back.
Death is the great equalizer.
Is this a phrase she created just now, or had she read it somewhere before? To her dismay, she cannot remember. A dark wind tugs at her hair, brings the smell of wet earth into the space between her sunglasses and her eyes. It sends a burger wrapper, a crinkled, attention-catching silver, tumbling down a pathway toward a small concrete building onto whose wall the rain is beginning to brush stroke its transient alphabet. There’s something about that tumble, a gay, I-don’t-care-what-happens abandonment that Anju hasn’t felt in years. She follows it—first her gaze, then her feet—and finds she is at the communications library, a building whose existence was unknown to her until today. Is this another omen? The automatic doors open all at once, like the arms of a long-lost
friend. She walks until she finds a room white as the inside of an egg, circular and without windows. This pleases her. She has always thought of windows as distractions, drawing a person out of herself. And right now she needs to delve inward, to dig up the old, buried shards of her life.