Oleander Girl (9 page)

“Take the Strand Road.”

Asif hesitates. “Saab, that river road is empty so late at night. I hear some bad things happened there last week. One saab was driving when two cars came in front of him and two came behind. They blocked him off and forced him to stop. Broke his windows and—”

“Nonsense, A.A. Nothing will happen to us.”

Hearing his secret name on Rajat’s lips startles Asif into compliance. He is sure Pia-missy has never called him that in front of her family; she understands that they would frown on the casual intimacy the nickname implies. Does Rajat-saab, too, have his sources of knowledge? What else might he have learned about Asif? Concern distracts the chauffeur, who had until now believed himself to be invincible in his invisibility. He presses down on the accelerator, turning onto the deserted riverfront, into the night wind.

I lie in bed with Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics,
which I brought up from Grandfather’s library. The funeral was three weeks ago, but it feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind. I swing between numbness and grief, preferring the former, which stuffs my head with cotton wool. The hours blur together. How could they not, when Grandfather is no longer there to order each one into its slot? Who will knock on my bedroom door now, to wake me early so I’ll have enough time to join him for tea before I go off to college? Who will keep track of every test I take and glow with pride when he finds out I topped the class? Who will ask me to play chess and vainly try to hide his delight when I back him into a corner? Who will ask me to light the lamp for his evening worship and then sit by him in companionable silence? Bereft of his fierce energy, the entire household has grown dim. I can sense, vaguely, Grandmother and Rajat, like moths hovering in the half dark. I know they’re anxious about me. I know Grandmother is struggling with her own sorrow. But I can’t seem to reach her from this deep hole into which I’ve fallen.

Now I understand the calamity my mother’s ghost had come to warn me about.

Only Grandfather’s books, their solid heft in my hands, comfort me a little. I open this one and run my finger over his name on the title page, tracing the bold slashes made by his fountain pen. I wish I could find something of him in those pages, like the letter from my mother so long ago, but there is nothing. Still, it’s a comfort just to hold it—almost like touching him. I press the book to my cheek. It smells of a faint, wild sweetness, like the fennel seeds that Grandfather liked chewing after meals.

In the wake of that memory, a tide of others sweep in, tugging me toward happier times. How much clearer they seem than my present life. Sitting on his lap as he told me why volcanoes erupt. Holding his hand on our way to a rerun of
The Sound of Music,
him explaining the history behind the movie. The pride in his eyes the first time I beat him in chess. His waiting at the airport gate waving a bar of chocolate, face wreathed in smiles, when I returned from boarding school. I had never seen him smile at anyone else like that, not even Grandmother.

I close my eyes, allowing the book to grow heavy in my hand. I yearn for blessed sleep to carry me away. But Grandmother’s voice intrudes into my cocoon.

“Get up, you can’t sleep all day like this, you’ll make yourself sick. Clean your face and change your clothes; remember, Rajat will be here in just a while.” Determined to revive me, she refuses to leave until I splash water on my face and pull on a fresh salwar kameez.

Downstairs, Rajat is already waiting. He asks the same questions every day. I have nothing to offer him but the same desultory answers. I’m fine, everything’s okay. At the dining table, it hurts my eyes to look at Grandfather’s empty chair.

He had wanted his body cremated under an open sky. That’s why we ended up at the old-fashioned burning ghats at Keoratala, the sulfuric smell of ignited flesh all around us. Framed by garlands, Grandfather appeared mild and saintly, so unlike himself that I felt only unreality—and a slight outrage. Someone had tied a strip of cloth around his face and knotted it under the chin, as though he were an old woman with a toothache. The priest dipped a stick of wood in ghee and called for a son or a grandson. When Rajat stepped forward, I elbowed past him angrily. But I wasn’t as strong as I’d thought I was. When the priest lit the stick and pointed to Grandfather’s mouth, asking me to set him on fire, I couldn’t do it. Rajat had to take the flaming wood from my hand and begin the ceremony.

It had been terrible to see his body burn. Yet now, beside me, Rajat and Grandmother eat their dinner and discuss various mundane matters. Things have been a bit tense at the Boses’ warehouse between the Hindu and Muslim workers since the religious riots in Gujarat. The garden has been invaded by slugs. They’re eating even the oleanders. Grandmother wonders if an exterminator should be called.

Slugs! I push the food around on my plate. They’re talking about slugs.

I can’t keep my eyes from Grandfather’s chair, its vast emptiness. Passing by his bedroom on my way downstairs this evening, I noticed that his clothes had been taken from the almirah and stacked on the bed.
The untidiness of the heap bothered me. He was always so exact. Why would Grandmother do such a thing? The last time I saw him as himself, he’d been sitting on that bed. I remember again the fight, my last, unforgivable words. Why had he apologized in the hospital, just before he died? Why had he looked beyond me at the door, as though someone else were standing there? Had it been my mother’s ghost, come to help him on his final journey?

Once, feeling guilty about the precariously piled newspapers that Grandfather had loved to pore over, I looked through one. The news in it horrified me. Ordinary people, people just like our family, were killing each other in the streets. Without Grandfather in it to maintain equilibrium, the world had gone mad. I threw the rest of the pile in the garbage.

Grandmother says, “Korobi, shona, listen to Rajat—he wants to take you for a drive.” She eyes my plate. “Looks like you’re not going to eat any more. In that case, go ahead now. I don’t want you to be out too late.”

My body feels heavy with resentment. Why won’t they leave me alone? I tell them that I would rather stay home.

“You must go! You need the fresh air.”

“If fresh air’s so good,” I find myself retorting, “why don’t
you
go with him instead.”

“There’s no reason to be rude to Grandma!”

The crackle of Rajat’s voice makes me jump. He’s never spoken to me like this. In a way, I’m thankful. Since Grandfather’s death, everyone has been tiptoeing around me, and I’m sick of it. I’m ready for a good fight. But I don’t want to do it in front of Grandmother.

Rajat dismisses Asif and takes the car down toward Victoria Memorial, driving fast with the windows open. The night wind whips my tangled curls into my face. My skin smarts; I welcome the pain, clean, immediate, a good distraction from the muddled ache inside me.

A little distance from the lit white dome with its dark angel, where on a very different evening he had kissed me into love, Rajat stops the car.

“We have to talk.” His voice is measured. He’s trying to be calm, reasonable. “I’m concerned at what’s happening with you. I understand that you’ve suffered a great shock. But lying in bed all day is no good for you. It’s been three weeks. You’ve missed a lot of classes. You can’t just—”

I don’t let him finish. I remind him he hasn’t had anyone close to him die. How can he presume to understand how I’m feeling? What am I? A clockwork doll that he can wind up and say,
Three weeks have passed, enough moping, now smile and dance?

His jaw tightens. He takes a deep breath but doesn’t say anything.

Something has come over me. I tell him he’s insensitive. A tyrant. He wants to control my life. In the closed car, my voice ricochets like bullets. I keep saying these things though they’re making both of us feel worse.

He turns the car around. “You’re not yourself,” he says. “We’ll talk when you can see sense.” He’s upset. I can tell that by how he drives. He runs a red light, but luckily no one’s at the intersection. At the gate he lets me out, says he won’t come in.

“Try to remember that Grandma’s going through as much as you, if not more.” His voice sounds tired.

His words are like a slap. The worst part is I know they’re true. A tightness is growing in my chest like a giant abscess. I wish he’d fought with me. A fight would have burst it and let the poison out.

When Cook opens the door, I slam it behind me. I hear Grandmother asking what’s wrong. I push past her up to my room, to my almirah, where my chiffon engagement kurti hangs. I pull it out, rummage in my drawer.

“What are you doing?” Behind me, Grandmother is breathless, having hurried up the stairs. “Have you gone crazy?”

The scissors snag in the soft, thin material. They refuse to slice through it as I would like them to. I have to grab the kurti in both hands and tear it.

“Stop! Stop! Oh, your beautiful outfit. Why did you do that?” Her face is stricken and scared.

“Grandfather hated it. It brought on the heart attack, the fight we had about it.”

“That’s ridiculous. He’d been sick for a while.”

I shake my head. I don’t believe her.

“He’s gone, Korobi.” She clears her throat, though it still sounds rusty. “We loved him, but he’s gone, and we have to continue with our lives. Did Rajat talk to you about going back to college?”

But I’m stuck on her earlier words, the traitorous finality of the tense she used.
Loved.

“Is that why you’ve started removing his things?” I cry. “I saw it when I passed by the bedroom. His clothes in boxes. His books off the shelves—”

Guilt flits darkly over her face. “It’s not what you think. I’ve been looking for—oh, you won’t understand.”

“No, I don’t understand!” A wild abandon has taken hold of me. I notice how pale her face has become, like a wraith’s, but I can’t stop. “Don’t you have any respect for Grandfather’s memory? Don’t you care at all?”

Grandmother grasps the bedpost. “How easily you say that,” she whispers. “All my life I’ve cared only about what he wanted. Obeyed him even when my conscience cried out against it.”

“Grandfather had the highest principles,” I say coldly. “I don’t believe he would ever tell you to do anything against your conscience.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t!” I hadn’t known she was capable of such a bitter, rasping laugh. “You were always his golden child. You weren’t the one who had to put up with his black moods. You weren’t the one he dragged to the temple on the night Anu died, insisting that the baby never learn about her father. He made me promise in front of the goddess that I’d never tell you. He was determined that you would grow up believing that he’s dead.”

I can barely understand her as she gasps for breath. I know that her blood sugar has been erratic lately. She’s panting so hard that my anger turns to concern.

“Grandma, calm down! Here, sit beside me. I’m sorry I fought with you. Did you take your medicine today? You’re getting confused. My father died months before my mother, remember?”

“No, Korobi . . . that’s what I’m saying . . . It was a lie,” she says slowly and clearly, looking in my eyes. “Your dear grandfather lied to you—and forced me to do the same. Your father’s alive. His name is Rob. Yes, Rob. He lives in America.”

Sarojini lies in her marriage bed, vast as a desert, with a damp cloth over her throbbing forehead. It is perhaps two in the morning, perhaps three, she isn’t sure; the bedside clock that Bimal used to wind up every night before he slept has stopped working. Her mind will not stop replaying the quarrel, the look in Korobi’s eyes when disbelief was replaced by the shock of betrayal. The girl had made a choking sound and stumbled from the room, not looking back, though Sarojini had begged her to stop. She had heard the front door slam. Terrified at what she might do, Sarojini had sent Cook after her and had paced the bedroom until the woman returned to report that Korobi-baby was sitting on the temple steps. She wouldn’t answer Cook, not even to tell her to go away. It was as though she didn’t see her. Swarms of mosquitoes were attacking her, but she didn’t seem to care. Finally Cook lit a couple of mosquito coils, wrapped her in a shawl, shook awake a snoring Bahadur and told him to keep an eye on her, and came back to ask Sarojini what terrible thing had happened. Sarojini didn’t want to lie to Cook, who had been with her for so many years, so she closed her eyes and shook her head until Cook went away. Now she presses the wet cloth, hot and salty with tears and no longer comforting, against her throbbing eyes and thinks, Bimal was right. By breaking her word to him, she has lost her granddaughter.