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Authors: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
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long are gone.
“I’m fine, Ma,” you say. “Everything’s all right.”
The first thing you did when you moved into his apartment was to put up the batik hanging, deep red flowers winding around a black circle. The late summer sun shone through the open window. Smell of California honeysuckle in the air, a radio next door playing Mozart. He walked in, narrowing his eyes, pausing to watch. You waited, pin in hand, the nubs of the fabric pulsing under your palm, erratic as a heart. “Not bad,” he nodded finally, and you let out your breath in a relieved shiver of a laugh.
“My mother gave it to me,” you said. “A going-away-to-college gift, a talisman….” You started to tell him how she had bought it at the Maidan fair on a day as beautiful as this one, the buds just coming out on the mango trees, the red-breasted bulbuls returning north. But he held up his hand, later . Swung you off the rickety chair and carried you to the bed. Lay on top, pinning you down. His eyes were sapphire stones. His hair caught the light, glinting like warm sandstone. Surge of electric (love or fear?) up your spine, making you shiver, making you forget what you wanted to say.
At night after lovemaking, you lie listening to his sleeping breath. His arm falls across you, warm, protective , you say to yourself. Outside, wind rattles the panes. A dry wind. (There hasn’t been rain for a long time.) I am cherished . But then the memories come.
Once when you were in college you had gone to see a popular Hindi movie with your girlfriends. Secretly, becauseMother said movies were frivolous, decadent. But there were no secrets in Calcutta. When you came home from classes the next day, a suitcase full of your clothes was on the doorstep. A note on it, in your mother’s hand. Better no daughter than a disobedient one, a shame to the family . Even now you remember how you felt, the dizzy fear that shriveled the edges of the day, the desperate knocking on the door that left your knuckles raw. You’d sat on the doorstep all afternoon, and passersby had glanced at you curiously. By evening it was cold. The numbness crept up your feet and covered you. When she’d finally opened the door after midnight, for a moment you couldn’t stand. She had pulled you up, and you had fallen into her arms, both of you crying. Later she had soaked your feet in hot water with boric soda. You still remember the softness of the towels with which she wiped them.
Why do you always focus on the sad things, you wonder. Is it some flaw in yourself, some cross-connection in the thin silver filaments of your brain? So many good things happened, too. Her sitting in the front row at your high school graduation, face bright as a dahlia above the white of her sari. The two of you going for a bath in the Ganga, the brown tug of the water on your clothes, the warm sleepy sun as you sat on the bank eating curried potatoes wrapped in hot puris . And further back, her teaching you to write, the soft curve of her hand over yours, helping you hold the chalk, the smell of her newly washed hair curling about your face.
But these memories are wary, fugitive. You have to coax them out of their dark recesses. They dissipate, foglike, even as you are looking at them. And suddenly his arm feels terribly heavy. You are suffocating beneath its weight, its muscular,hairy maleness. You slip out and step into the shower. The wind snatches at the straggly nasturtiums you planted on the little strip of balcony. What will you remember of him when it is all over? whispers the papery voice inside your skull. Light from the bathroom slashes the floor while against the dark wall the hanging glows fire-red.
The first month you moved in with him, your head pounded with fear and guilt every time the phone rang. You’d rush across the room to pick it up while he watched you from his tilted-back chair, raising an eyebrow. (You’d made him promise never to pick up the phone.) At night you slept
“I’m fine, Ma,” you say. “Everything’s all right.”
The first thing you did when you moved into his apartment was to put up the batik hanging, deep red flowers winding around a black circle. The late summer sun shone through the open window. Smell of California honeysuckle in the air, a radio next door playing Mozart. He walked in, narrowing his eyes, pausing to watch. You waited, pin in hand, the nubs of the fabric pulsing under your palm, erratic as a heart. “Not bad,” he nodded finally, and you let out your breath in a relieved shiver of a laugh.
“My mother gave it to me,” you said. “A going-away-to-college gift, a talisman….” You started to tell him how she had bought it at the Maidan fair on a day as beautiful as this one, the buds just coming out on the mango trees, the red-breasted bulbuls returning north. But he held up his hand, later . Swung you off the rickety chair and carried you to the bed. Lay on top, pinning you down. His eyes were sapphire stones. His hair caught the light, glinting like warm sandstone. Surge of electric (love or fear?) up your spine, making you shiver, making you forget what you wanted to say.
At night after lovemaking, you lie listening to his sleeping breath. His arm falls across you, warm, protective , you say to yourself. Outside, wind rattles the panes. A dry wind. (There hasn’t been rain for a long time.) I am cherished . But then the memories come.
Once when you were in college you had gone to see a popular Hindi movie with your girlfriends. Secretly, becauseMother said movies were frivolous, decadent. But there were no secrets in Calcutta. When you came home from classes the next day, a suitcase full of your clothes was on the doorstep. A note on it, in your mother’s hand. Better no daughter than a disobedient one, a shame to the family . Even now you remember how you felt, the dizzy fear that shriveled the edges of the day, the desperate knocking on the door that left your knuckles raw. You’d sat on the doorstep all afternoon, and passersby had glanced at you curiously. By evening it was cold. The numbness crept up your feet and covered you. When she’d finally opened the door after midnight, for a moment you couldn’t stand. She had pulled you up, and you had fallen into her arms, both of you crying. Later she had soaked your feet in hot water with boric soda. You still remember the softness of the towels with which she wiped them.
Why do you always focus on the sad things, you wonder. Is it some flaw in yourself, some cross-connection in the thin silver filaments of your brain? So many good things happened, too. Her sitting in the front row at your high school graduation, face bright as a dahlia above the white of her sari. The two of you going for a bath in the Ganga, the brown tug of the water on your clothes, the warm sleepy sun as you sat on the bank eating curried potatoes wrapped in hot puris . And further back, her teaching you to write, the soft curve of her hand over yours, helping you hold the chalk, the smell of her newly washed hair curling about your face.
But these memories are wary, fugitive. You have to coax them out of their dark recesses. They dissipate, foglike, even as you are looking at them. And suddenly his arm feels terribly heavy. You are suffocating beneath its weight, its muscular,hairy maleness. You slip out and step into the shower. The wind snatches at the straggly nasturtiums you planted on the little strip of balcony. What will you remember of him when it is all over? whispers the papery voice inside your skull. Light from the bathroom slashes the floor while against the dark wall the hanging glows fire-red.
The first month you moved in with him, your head pounded with fear and guilt every time the phone rang. You’d rush across the room to pick it up while he watched you from his tilted-back chair, raising an eyebrow. (You’d made him promise never to pick up the phone.) At night you slept
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