Read Online Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - Free Book Online Page B

belief in herself? In us? And why, for the first time in our lives, had she chosen to keep something so important from me?

THE NEW MOVIE had taken Calcutta by storm. Everywhere there were billboards, larger and brighter than life, depicting the hero and heroine. She in her exquisite gold-worked dancing skirt and dupatta, the innocent virgin in the midst of a corrupt court. Or weeping in the clutches of the evil nabab as her prince rushes on horseback to her rescue. At school the girls couldn’t stop whispering about how romantic it was, the lovers singing of eternal passion as they sail on a moonlit river. And then, just as they are to marry, his stern patrician father denouncing her because she is only a dancing girl. Her lovely eyes filling with tears as she decides to leave rather than ruin her beloved’s good name. Every paan shop in the city played the songs, “Chalo dildaar chalo, Come with me, heart of my heart, to the other side of the moon.” And “Saari raat chalte chalte, Traveling all night, miraculously, I have found you.” Every young woman’s heart beat faster as she listened, humming the words under her breath. Every young man’s heart must have beat faster too. But of that I was not sure. Thanks to the vigilance of the mothers, Anju and I did not know any young men.
    We moved in a world of women, my cousin and I, at home and outside. It was a world of filtered, submarine light, languid movements, eyes looking out from behind a frieze. Small muted sounds: the tinkling of bangles, female laughter. In our house the few menservants did not come up beyond the ground floor. AndSinghji—although his deformity seemed to place him in a separate, androgynous zone—never entered the house at all.
    At our all-girls convent school, no men were allowed past the darwan who guarded the gate, zealously twirling his metal-tipped lathi, making even the fathers wait on the street. At the few social occasions we attended, weddings or pujas, we sat among our women relatives, webbed around with gossip and song and old tales. Perhaps because we had no fathers, that other world—sweat and sunlight, male cologne, a man’s voice raised in a command to a passing servant—seemed distant and full of mystery, like the dim roar of an ocean seen through a telescope.
    Our existence was restrictive, yes. But I found it curiously comforting too.
    I knew most sixteen-year-old girls in Calcutta didn’t live like we did. I saw them on our way to school, pushing onto crowded buses, bargaining loudly with the roadside vegetable sellers as they shopped for their mothers, unabashedly fingering the lau and karala, pinching the sheem beans to check for freshness. Groups of teenagers gay as butterflies summoned the Qwality man and bought orange ices, giggling and wiping at their bright mouths when they were done. Women, young and old, hailed taxis and climbed in, on their way to New Market or Dalhausie; some maneuvered their scooters to work through streets packed with buses and pedestrians and stray cows, honking authoritatively. And once in a while in the dim alleyways where the flower sellers had their shops, I saw a girl holding hands with a young man, lowering her shy eyes as he pinned a garland to her hair.
    And their clothes. Salwaar kameezes shot through with metallic thread, gauzy dupattas allowed to slide artfully off shoulders. The westernized ones in jeans, or narrow-cut skirts that showed off their rounded hips, their slender ankles. Their saris, when they did wear them, were in the latest filmi designs and not the traditional bordered handlooms the mothers bought for us. Their summer blouses, generously sleeveless and cut low in the back,drew whistles from the streetside Romeos who leaned endlessly against the corner buildings, and made me blush.
    How bold and fascinating these women were. How uncaring of that fragile glass flower, reputation, that lay at the heart of Anju’s life and mine. They were all that we, as daughters