Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Yes, now that I am pregnant, all things—within the boundaries of my mother-in-law’s notions of seemliness—are permitted to me. I can ask my brothers-in-law to run errands for me. I can sleep in late and lie down in the afternoons, and no one is to disturb me. Should I wish to be alone, I can go to the balcony and sit in the shade of the neem tree as long as I want. Women get moody at this time, my mother-in-law will whisper to the maids. They have to be humored. At mealtimes I am served first, even before Ramesh. After all, as my mother-in-law dryly remarked once, his job is done. I am given the best portions—the coveted fish heads stewed with lentils and sprinkled with lemon, the crisp, golden-brown fried brinjals, the creamy top layer of the rice pudding that I love. When my mother-in-law called Calcutta to tell them my news, she asked Pishi about my favorite dishes. Now she makes sure Dinabandhu cooks at least one of them every day.
At times, embarrassed, I try to protest.
“Eat, eat, Bau Ma,” smiles my mother-in-law, counting out, by my plate, the expensive prenatal vitamin tablets she’s had shipped from Dey’s Medical Stores in Calcutta. “Remember, you’re eating for my grandson, too.” Even the fact that Ramesh, back from a trip to Murshidabad, has brought me a whole boxful of the silk saris which the region is famous for, does not bother her. Perhaps she thinks they are keeping her grandson warm.
At night after dinner we all sit and watch video movies. My mother-in-law likes me to watch comedies, or holy stories from the Ramayana. They’ll have a good effect on her grandson’s personality, she says. She was not pleased the other day when Ramesh’s brothers brought a video of the Rani of Jhansi, the widow-queen who led a rebellion against the British in the 1850s and died valiantly on the battlefield. Too much bloodshed, she complained. But I was fascinated. The Rani was so wondrously brave. When the priests proclaimed that as a childless widow she should devote her life to prayers, she boldly told them that her subjects were her children and she had to take care of them. She donned male garb and, a sword in each hand, led her soldiers into battle. Even when her forces were overwhelmed by the British guns, she didn’t give up. Fallen on the battlefield with a fatal wound, she scintillated with a desperate, abandoned joy. I watched that movie twice.
“I guess it’s all right for queens to be that way,” said my mother-in-law. “But I much prefer someone womanly and gentle-natured like our Bau Ma!”
Sweetness, sweetness all around, and yet why do I feel dissatisfied? Why does the inside of my mouth pucker up as though I have bitten into a sour plum? My mother says I should be down on my knees, forehead to the floor, giving thanks that my in-laws are so caring. But as I walk the prescribed mile around the terrace in the evenings, I cannot seem to forget that measuring look in my mother-in-law’s eyes when I couldn’t get pregnant. I am even suspicious of Ramesh. The most innocent of his questions—do I feel nauseous anymore, would I like him to rub my back—raises my hackles. If in bed he slips a hand, careful and cupped, over my belly, I shrug it away impatiently, though I know I’m hurting his feelings. All of this love and caring, I want to shout, is it for Sudha, or for the carrier of the new heir of the Sanyals?
Stupid girl, my mother would say. What’s the difference?
But there is one. I sense it. Walking around the terrace in the suddenly sad evening hour when the stars seem very far and dim, I wish Anju were here. With her keen logic, she would find the right words to give shape to my misgivings. She would tell me that I am right.
Chief among my inscrutable mother-in-law’s inscrutable actions is this: She has kept my pregnancy a secret. Except for the mothers and Anju, no one outside our household knows. Not even Aunt Tarini.
“I was sure she’d send her a telegram, first thing, with an even bigger box of sweets than the one Aunt gave us,” I say to Ramesh one day when he comes home early to join me on my evening terrace walk. (He’s allowed to do such things now.) But he too cannot figure it out.
“Maybe she’s afraid of you getting the evil eye from envious people. Or maybe she’s decided not to stoop to Aunt’s level anymore,” he replies. “Maybe she promised that to Goddess Shashti if she gave her a grandson.”
“That’s the other thing that bothers me,” I say irritably. “The way she’s so sure it’s going to be a boy. What if it isn’t?”
“Let’s hope it is, or else she’ll surely blow a gasket,” says my engineer husband. The image, applied to my dignified mother-in-law, is so ridiculous that it makes us both break into guilty laughter.
Today as I finish my tea, my mother-in-law slides an aerogram across the table at me.
“From Anju,” she says, as though I had not recognized that pale blue I’ve come to love. “I hope your cousin is well. It must be hard for her, all alone in that faraway country, without a mother or mother-in-law to help her through this time,” she adds, kindly.
She has grown very kind recently, my mother-in-law.
Maybe I am being unnecessarily hard on her. Maybe this is her real nature, and that other, during those doctor visits and that afternoon at the shrine, was the cruelty that sometimes rises in us when we are desperate.
“If you don’t mind,” I say, standing up, “I’ll read it as I take my evening walk.”
“Not at all, Bau Ma, you go ahead,” she says. As I start up the stairs, she calls from behind, “Don’t stumble on anything though, while you’re busy reading.”
As always, I can hear Anju’s voice in her letter. Amused, extravagant, frank—and right now, very, very happy. She tells me how strange it feels to be pregnant, how she loves and hates it at the same time. How sometimes when she’s alone she takes off her clothes and stands in front of the mirror, examining the changes—the dark line of hair pointing downward from the navel, the nipples dark and glistening as the prunes she soaks overnight for her constipation, the luscious, obscene swell of her abdomen. Am I breathtakingly beautiful, Sudha, or overwhelmingly ugly? I can’t decide. I smile. Beautiful, Anju, I whisper into the sheet. She scolds me because I haven’t sent her a photo of myself in return for the one she mailed me last month. I sigh. I’ll have to explain to her that my mother-in-law thinks taking photos at this time brings bad luck.
When Anju tells me how Sunil has changed, I am glad for her. Perhaps now I will be able to shrug off that faint unease I have been carrying since the wedding, my fear that Anju needs him more than he needs her. The anticipation of fatherhood seems to have wrought a remarkable transformation in him. He thinks nothing of driving clear across town to Mumtaz Cuisine to fetch her fresh-made rasogollahs, her latest craving. In the evenings he massages her swollen feet with pine oil. He’s already opened an account at his credit union—not that they have anything to put in it—for the baby. He’s like one of those hundred-year redwoods he took me to visit, Anju writes, with their woodsy-smelling barks that you just can’t stop yourself from leaning on.
The part I love best is when Anju writes about her baby. He/ she is big as a lemon now—she knows this from her pregnancy book. The last time she went to the doctor, she listened to the baby’s heartbeat. It was like a runaway engine, full of furious energy. That’s when she realized how much she loved this little creature inside her, more a part of her life already than anyone else could ever be. I can die for him—or her—Sudha. I can kill. When I read that, I have to stop walking, because something thick and hot and molten is welling up in me like lava. I too, Anju, I think. I too.
The next part of her letter is hard to read. It has been written and rewritten, daubed over with some kind of chalky correcting paint until the paper is lumpy. Finally, impatiently, Anju has scratched it all out and written below, I’m really worried about something Ma wrote in her last letter. Remember that time when we went to visit one of our great-uncles in an old, crumbly house near the river? Remember the retarded boy locked up in the terrace room who scared us so much, and how Pishi explained he’d been born with a birth defect? No one had paid him much attention—they’d thought of him as some kind of freak accident. But
I hold the letter scrunched tight in my fist. I am breathless, as though someone has punched all the air out of my lungs. I can feel the cold prickle of sweat between my breasts. Gouri Ma hasn’t written a word of this to me. Gouri Ma, who loves me like a daughter, who would never want harm of any kind to come upon me. There’s only one explanation for her silence: she knew—as Pishi had suspected she did—that my father was an impostor, unrelated to her husband. She knew my baby and I were at no risk, for we did not share the Chatterjee blood.
I squeeze my eyes tightly shut to keep the tears in. All this time, somewhere in that place where unreasonable hope hides, I had nursed the idea that Pishi had been wrong. She was old, and it had all happened a long time back. She could have got the facts a little mixed up, embroidered the parts she’d forgotten. Now I no longer have that comfort. And as for not being at risk, who knows what diseases ran in the veins of my father the wastrel? What murderous genes he has planted in his grandchild?
I tear Anju’s letter into tiny bits and go straight to the kitchen. Veined with her pen strokes, the pieces gleam blue one last time on the coals before they begin to char. Don’t regret what you can’t change, I tell myself, shivering, my arms hugging my belly. But what I am really thinking is, If only I could burn away my past like this.
That night, while I am at dinner, my mother phones. She is all agitated about our cousin’s baby—the idiot boy, she calls him. “I went to see him today, and you could tell there wasn’t a bit of brain behind the walls of his skull, the way he just lay there. And his mother, the poor girl, I don’t think she’s stopped crying ever since the doctor’s diagnosis.” Now her voice goes shrill with virtue. “I thought to myself, Nalini, this is no time for false family pride. Not that Sudha, God bless her, is going to have a problem. After all, my side has never had any such happenings, not in fourteen generations. Still, you must tell Sudha’s mother-in-law, so that Sudha can get that test done, amio-something, you know, with the injection needle. No, no, girl, don’t tell me you’ll tell her later. I want to talk to her myself.”
Wearily, I call my mother-in-law to the phone and return to the table. I stare at my plate without appetite although Dinabandhu has cooked a jackfruit curry specially for me. Foolish, interfering woman, I think angrily. Now my mother-in-law will be all stirred up, like a nestful of hornets. There’ll be more doctor visits, more people poking and prodding at me. All for no reason.
But there’s something else bothering me, some unnameable apprehension.
“Yes indeed,” I hear my mother-in-law saying from the hallway. I’m perplexed by how gracious her voice sounds. Why isn’t she more upset? “I agree. You acted most responsibly. No, I won’t waste any time. In fact you’ll be happy to know I’d been thinking along the same lines—one can’t take any chances when dealing with the heir of an old, bonédi family like ours. I’ve already set up tests for Sudha. She’ll be going in next week. Yes, of course, I’ll call you with the results right away.”
THE DOCTOR’S waiting room is decorated in pale blues and pinks designed to soothe nervous parents-to-be. But they don’t do Sunil and me much good as we fidget in our plush chairs. I wonder how Sudha’s doing—she should have got her amniocentesis results yesterday. I shifted my date to match hers, so we’d both know around the same time if our babies were okay. I hope Ramesh went with her to the doctor, instead of that crusty old mother-in-law of hers. I hope he held her hand the way Sunil is holding mine. I doubt it. In India men don’t do those things—at least not the men I’ve seen. But I’ll know everything when I call her tonight.
The doctor is forty-five minutes late. He’s busy with a delivery, the nurse informs us smilingly. I give her a glare. Sure! He’s probably pacing his office right now, agonizing about how to break the news to us. I glance at Sunil, hoping he’ll flash me one of his quirky smiles. I want him to lift his eyebrows in that amused way that says, There you go again, Anju, with your overactive imagination. Didn’t the doctor tell you that the chances of a problem for women your age are very slight? He really only ordered the test because you insisted. But Sunil dabs at his upper lip, avoiding my eyes, and when I clasp his palm it’s as damp as mine.
What will I—we—do if … ? My mind freezes on that thought. I stare at the cover of the magazine on the table in front of me until I can feel the face of Princess Di being tattooed into my brain.
But just like Sunil says, once again I’ve tortured myself needlessly. The doctor breezes in, smiling plumply, waving a report. All is well with our baby—and it’s a boy! We follow him with sheepish, relieved grins to the examination room, where he goes over the results of some other tests with us. He’s concerned about my blood pressure, and the fact that my sugar’s too high. He wants me to rest a lot and cut out the salt and the sweets. I nod dutifully but I’m only half-hearing him. I’m rehearsing all the things I’ll say to Sudha tonight. I can’t wait to tell her my news, and to hear hers!
On our way home, Sunil and I stop at the Golden Dragon to celebrate. We splurge on hot and sour soup, spring rolls, eggplant in black bean sauce, sweet and sour shrimp, and pork chow mein. Recklessly, I eat a whole plateful of the extra spicy (and extra salty) Kung Pao chicken. Sunil tries to stop me—but halfheartedly. He can see how much fun I’m having.
“Relax,” I tell him. “I know my body better than that doctor does. I won’t even get heartburn, you’ll see. Happiness is the best digestive tonic in the world!” As proof I show him the fortune in my cookie. It reads, A wonderful event is about to occur in your life.
“It is,” says Sunil. “Because I’m going to take you home and make love to you.”
And he does. The tenderness with which he kisses the curves of my breasts and hips makes me cry. I can’t even remember what the word sorrow means. Afterward, I lay my head on his damp chest, which gives off a scent like newly cut grass. His breath is gentle and rhythmic like deep-sea waves, and though I don’t intend to let it, it pulls me into sleep.
I jerk awake, my heart pounding with the feeling that I’ve forgotten something crucial. It’s after midnight, way past the time I promised Sudha I’d call her. Shit! I should have set the alarm. I aim a glare at the sleeping Sunil—it’s all his fault, the seducer!— and drag my body over to the phone. My sleepy fingers fumble with the numbers, and I have to start over a couple of times.
One of the brothers-in-law picks up the phone at the other end. When I ask to speak to Sudha, he hesitates. She’s resting, he finally says in an uncertain voice. I insist, so he tells me to hold. He’s gone for a long time. I chew the inside of my cheek and watch the phosphorescent dial on the clock.
Sudha’s voice, when I hear it, is a dead monotone I hardly recognize.
“Are you sick?” I ask, scared. “Shall I call back some other time?”
“No,” she says, then adds, with obvious effort, “How’s your baby?” Her words slur like she’s been drugged.
“He’s fine,” I say. A huge, awkward silence looms between us, filled by the question I don’t dare to ask.
“My baby—she’s okay too,” Sudha says, then makes a small, choking sound. “Can’t talk anymore now,” she says.
The line goes dead.
I sit in a daze, holding on to the phone. The muted dial tone buzzes in my ear for a while. There’s a bunch of metallic bleeps, then a female American voice instructs me politely to replace the receiver. I obey. My arms are made of wood, my joints stiff and unoiled. What could be wrong? If Sudha’s okay and her baby’s okay—could it be Ramesh or her mother-in-law? No—if it were that, Ramesh’s brother would have been more upset. Are they giving Sudha a hard time because it’s a girl? No, that would
It’s something else, something devastating, something—a chill travels down my spine as I think this—she couldn’t talk about in front of her in-laws. So it’s no use calling her back. I’m going to have to wait for her to call me. But where—and when—in that watchful household will she ever find the privacy for that?
I hold myself tight and rock back and forth, trying to dislodge the icy dread in my chest. Something horrifying is looming over Sudha, spreading its dark, scaly wings.
“Nonsense,” says Sunil when I finally wake him and sob out my incoherent fears. “If there was a problem, your mother would have known. She’d have called and told me, even if she didn’t want to upset you. Come to bed. You’ll make yourself sick carrying on like this.”
I sob some more, but Sunil’s voice is confident and commanding, and thankfully I give in to it. I snuggle down in bed and push my aching spine against him. His hand finds my hip and strokes the stretch marks that line it like silver seams. His breath ruffles the small hairs on the back of my neck, makes me sleepy. But he himself is wide awake. I know it in the hard precision of his shoulders, the too-still way he holds himself, like a wild animal might in the presence of danger. Just before I drift off the thought comes to me that perhaps he’s worried too. Perhaps—and I’m not sure if I should be happy about it, or disturbed—under his nonchalance, he cares more about what happens to Sudha than he’ll admit.
The next day I stay home, although I know I’ll miss my psych midterm with Professor Warner, who doesn’t allow makeups. I’m afraid to leave the phone even to go to the bathroom, though by now it’s past midnight in India. But I imagine Sudha tiptoeing down the dark staircase of the sleeping house and lifting the receiver with trembling fingers. I have to be here for her.