Read Online Oleander Girl by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - Free Book Online

grandfather’s library. The household has given up on breakfast, even the sacrosanct cup of morning tea. If Rajat, who comes by each evening, hadn’t insisted on having dinner here, that meal, too, might have disappeared.
    If it weren’t for Rajat, what would have happened to them? Sarojini wonders in gratitude. Each evening he enters the house brisk as a sea wind. He plans the next day’s menu and gives Bahadur shopping instructions. He checks whether the utility bills have been paid, whether Sarojini has enough diabetes medicine. He cajoles the women into walking around the garden with him. Best of all, he doesn’t try to fill the silence with small talk.
    The newspapers that Bimal Roy scrutinized each morning have piled up, unread, on the drawing-room table. Cocooned in shock, the householdremains ignorant of the Godhra riots and their aftermath, raging along the western edge of the country. Even if they had known, would the incidents have penetrated their numbness? The sorrows of others seem so distant compared to our own.
    Among all this torpor, Sarojini alone cannot seem to rest. She opens the doors of spare rooms she has not visited in years. She peers into the dark, cool pantry that smells of palm-date molasses, which Bimal had loved. Tonight, once the rest of the household has collapsed into sleep, she goes into the bedroom she has shared all these years with Bimal, removes his clothes from the almirah, and searches under the newspapers lining the shelves.
    Sarojini knows, guiltily, that Rajat would be upset if he knew what she was doing. He has asked her to stay away from this room, to sleep with Korobi. Much as she loves Korobi, Sarojini dislikes this arrangement. The girl is a restless sleeper, kicking her own pillows off the bed and then reaching for Sarojini’s, jolting her from uneasy dreams. Once awake, Sarojini cannot fall asleep again because the room is too quiet, devoid of Bimal’s disruptive snores.
    There’s nothing under the lining. A disappointed Sarojini turns, then catches her reflection in the floor-length, oval mirror. It startles her: a woman so colorless that she is almost transparent. White sari, bereft of the bright borders that she has always favored. Bare forehead, wiped clean of the vermilion of wifehood. Bare wrists, ears, neck, the jewelry jumbled into a drawer until someone—but who, now that Bimal is gone?—remembers to take it to the bank. Out of old habit the woman in the mirror pushes phantom bangles up her arm, then shakes her head with an embarrassed laugh.
    If Sarojini stands in front of the mirror long enough and unfocuses her eyes the right way, the woman’s image fades. Instead, Bimal appears in front of her. Sometimes he is knobby and querulous, as in recent months, waiting for her to peel him his after-dinner oranges. Sometimes he gives her a lopsided, newly married smile that takes her breath away. Today he is dressed in a cream kurta with an elaborate paisley design. When she sees that, Sarojini begins to shake. That was the kurta he had worn the night their daughter died.
    What’s the right thing for me to do now, Bimal? Should I tell Korobi?
    She wants a sign to guide her. But his face is frozen into the shocked expression it wore eighteen years ago. His eyes are furious with loss.
    The truth is like a mountain of iron pressing on my chest. Still, I’m willing to bear it. If only I could be sure that it’s the best thing for Korobi—
    He had thrown away the kurta after that night, in spite of its having been one of his favorites, and expensive. He wouldn’t even let her give it to Bahadur.
    Tell me! All my life you insisted on making the decisions until I forgot how to think for myself. And then you leave me like this?
    Tears fill her eyes. That’s always been Sarojini’s problem—she cries when she gets angry. When, having blinked away the wetness, she looks again, the mirror holds only her bleached, blanched self.

    An unexpected by-product of Rajat’s