Sister of My Heart, Page 2

  SOME DAYS in my life I hate everyone.

  I hate Aunt Nalini for constantly telling Sudha and me about how good girls should behave, which is exactly the opposite of whatever we’re doing at the moment. I hate the endless stories she insists on repeating about her childhood. I know those stories aren’t true—no one could possibly be so virtuous, especially not her. Worst of all is when she makes up little rhymes with morals tagged onto them. Good daughters are bright lamps, lighting their mothers’ name; wicked daughters are firebrands, scorching the family’s fame.

  I hate her friends, all those waistless women with their hair pulled back in greasy buns who gather every afternoon in our drawing room to drink liters and liters of tea and eat too many sweets and show off their jewelry and knit sweaters with complicated ugly designs. And gossip, which is what they’ve really come to do.

  I hate Pishi when she puts on her patient smile and sits in the back of the hall on feast days, not participating, because widows mustn’t. And if I tell her that’s rubbish, why, just look at Aunt N or even my mother, she only pats me on the cheek and says, That’s sweet of you, dear Anju, but you’re too young to understand these things.

  Once in a while I hate even Mother because she believes so much in me. It’s like a rock in the center of my chest, her certainty that I’m special. That I’ll make something beautiful and brilliant out of my life and be a fitting daughter of the illustrious Chatterjees.

  Most of all—when I allow myself to think of him—I hate my father. I hate the fact that he could go off so casually in search of adventure, without a single thought for what would happen to the rest of us. I blame him for the tired circles under Mother’s eyes, the taunts of the children at school because I don’t have a father. None of it would have happened if he hadn’t been so careless and got himself killed.

  But never Sudha. I could never hate Sudha. Because she is my other half. The sister of my heart.

  I can tell Sudha everything I feel and not have to explain any of it. She’ll look at me with those big unblinking eyes and smile a tiny smile, and I’ll know she understands me perfectly.

  Like no one else in the entire world does. Like no one else in the entire world will.

  Early in my life I realized something. People were jealous of Sudha and me.

  At first I thought it was because our family’s so old and respected. But it couldn’t be that, because everyone knows that we’ve fallen on hard times, and the bookstore that Mother runs is the only source of income we have left. Aunt N is always lamenting in her melodramatic fashion that she’s sitting on poverty’s doorstep, and it’s a good thing that her dear parents are departed, this way they’re spared from seeing their daughter’s sufferings. It couldn’t be our possessions—Sudha and I don’t have many. There just isn’t the money for that, in spite of the long hours Mother puts in at the store and her determination to get us whatever a daughter of the Chatterjees must have. (That’s something else I don’t understand. My mother’s the most intelligent person I know, and the most efficient. Still, the store never seems to make a profit, and each week she has to go over our household expenses in her careful, frowning way, trying to cut costs.)

  But finally I’ve figured it out. What people hate is how happy Sudha and I are when we’re together. How we don’t need anyone else.

  It’s been this way ever since we were born. Even before I could walk, Pishi has told me, I’d crawl down the maze of corridors looking for Sudha, both of us shrieking with baby laughter when I finally found her. We’d amuse ourselves for hours at a time, playing with each other’s toes and fingers and hair, and when Aunt N came to take Sudha away we’d throw such tantrums that she retreated, complaining bitterly to Pishi that she didn’t know why she’d gone through all the trouble of labor and birthing, because it was as if she didn’t have a daughter at all.

  All through childhood we bathed together and ate together, often from the same plate, feeding each other our favorite items: the crunchy brown triangles of parothas, fried eggplant, spongy-sweet rasogollah balls. Our favorite game was acting out the fairy tales Pishi told us, where Sudha was always the princess and I the prince who rescued her. At night we lay in twin beds in my room, though officially Sudha had a room of her own next to her mother’s, a dark ugly mausoleum filled with old oil paintings and heavy mahogany furniture. We whispered and giggled until Pishi came and threatened us with separation. And when we had nightmares, instead of going to our mothers for comfort, we squeezed into one bed and held each other.

  As we grew older, the nuns who ran our convent school were concerned at our closeness. It wasn’t normal, they said. It would stunt our development. They put us in different classes, but all it did was make me sulk. And it made Sudha cry. At recess I’d rush to meet her in the playground, feeling as though the morning had been a pillow held down over my face. When I saw her swollen eyes, rage burned my skin as if it had been rubbed with chili powder, and I’d want to kill someone. That’s when we started planning our escapes. At first we complained of stomachaches or headaches so we could stay home. When that didn’t work with Pishi, we sneaked out of the school compound at noon, along with the girls who went home for lunch, and spent the afternoon somewhere, anywhere, just so we could be together. We ate peanuts by the lake, walked through the animal market admiring the baby chickens, or rode the tram to the end of the line and back again just in time to meet Singhji at the school gate with our most guileless smiles.

  Somehow we’d believed we could get away with it. But of course our teachers complained, and the mothers called us into the study, that dank room filled with dog-eared ledgers and the smell of mildew, where we were summoned only when we were in real trouble. Aunt N insisted we should be given a good spanking, and even Mother, who’s usually so reasonable—her face was white with anger. But when I explained everything, a strange, sad look came into her eyes. And although she told us that our teachers were right, and our education was too important to ruin in this way, the sternness left her voice, and she put out a hand to touch my shoulder.

  Later I overheard her telling Pishi that she worried about us. Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable. And Pishi sighed and said, “Yes, we both know that, don’t we?”

  The following morning Mother didn’t go to the bookstore—something which hardly ever happened. Instead, she took us to school and, having waved good-bye to us, went into the principal’s office. She never discussed with us what she said in there. But from the next week we were put back in the same class.

  All of this didn’t make us popular at school, or later, when news traveled—as news always does in Calcutta—with our neighbors. “Oh those Chatterjee girls,” people said, “forever acting like they’re too good for our daughters. And Anju’s mother, what was she thinking, indulging them this way? Nalini was right, a good beating would have taught them to behave. To obey rules. You simply wait and see, their troubles are just starting. Everyone knows what happens to girls with that sort of high-nose attitude.”

  They didn’t understand that Sudha and I never felt we were better than other people. It was just that we found everything we needed in each other. As Pishi says, Why go to the lake to fetch water when you have a well in your own house already?

  One time a neighbor lady said to me, “You’d better not waste all your time with that Sudha. You should be making friends with girls from other important families, especially those who have eligible older brothers with whom your mother could fix up a match for you.” Then she’d added, in a low, confidential voice, “Why do you want to be around a girl who’s so much prettier than you, anyway? Don’t you know that when you’re together people notice your bony legs and teeth braces more than they would have otherwise?”

  I was so angry I couldn’t stop myself from telling her it was none of her business. Besides, I didn’t care if a bunch of silly people who didn’t have anything better to do compared our looks. I already knew Sudha was more beautiful. Did tha
t mean I should love her less?

  “So virtuous, aren’t you, Miss High and Mighty,” the neighbor woman said. “Watch out! The jealousy’s going to hit you bad one of these days.” She huffed away and I knew exactly what she’d go around telling everyone: what a junglee that Chatterjee girl has become, baap re, but what else can you expect when there’s no man in the house.

  But yesterday was the worst of all.

  Yesterday Sarita Aunty, one of Aunt N’s fat teatime friends who prides herself on her frankness, saw us entering the house hand in hand. Right away her eyebrows scrunched up in a horrendous frown. “Goodness,” she said, “don’t you girls ever do anything without each other? I swear, you’re like those twins, what do they call them, born stuck together.”

  I was about to say, So what if we are? But Sudha, who’s the polite one, gave my hand a warning squeeze. Then she surprised me by saying, “Didn’t you know, Aunty? We are twins.”

  Sarita Aunty’s nostrils quivered like an overwrought buffalo’s. “Ei, girl, don’t back-answer me,” she said. “You think I don’t know what’s what? You’re not even first cousins, let alone sisters. Your father was just some kind of distant relation of Anju’s father’s, nothing like a real brother.”

  Odd, isn’t it, how some people take pleasure in hurting others.

  I tried to say something scathing to shut her up, but I couldn’t speak. If Mother had been there, she would have come to my rescue with one of her cool, calm sayings. Who are we to judge relationships, Sarita? Are we not all related in God’s eye? But she was at the bookstore, and the words You’re not even first cousins, let alone sisters pounded inside my head like hammers gone berserk.

  Aunt N looked as if someone had made her bite into a lemon. She’s always going on and on about how much better things were in her father’s house—servants and children knowing their place, even the cows producing, obediently, more milk than any of the neighboring cattle—until you would have thought she wished she wasn’t related to us at all. But she doesn’t like anyone else reminding her of her tenuous connection to the Chatterjees.

  Sarita Aunty went on triumphantly, “The two of you weren’t even born at the same time, or under the same star either. Am I right, Nalini Di?”

  For a moment Aunt N acted as if she didn’t hear the question. But then she couldn’t resist the opportunity to be melodramatic. She gave a martyr’s sigh and said, “You’re quite right, because although Anju was born right at noon, Sudha”—here she looked accusingly at my cousin—”didn’t come until midnight. What a labor I had with her! The pain was like a thousand jabbing knives! I screamed and screamed, and I was losing blood also. The midwife, a youngish woman, not experienced like the ones at my mother’s confinements, was so frightened she said maybe they should send for the English doctor, although everyone knew he always cut open the mothers’ stomachs and quite a few of them died of the fever afterward.”

  We’d heard all this a hundred times. But Sudha looked up wide-eyed and said, as though it were a whole new story, “But he didn’t have to do that to you, did he?”

  “No …”

  “That’s because Anju saved you, isn’t it?”

  Aunt N glared at her daughter. She didn’t like being interrupted in the middle of an exciting story, particularly when she was the suffering heroine.

  “Actually I think it was the lucky childbirth amulet I’d had the forethought to buy the month before from a traveling roja—”

  “Tell what happened next,” Sudha interrupted, surprising me again. Usually she’s so quiet around her mother. “Tell about Gouri Ma.”

  Aunt N clicked her tongue in annoyance and made like she’d stop. But after a moment she continued, because at her heart she loves a good story as much as we do.

  “When your Gouri Aunty heard what was going on, she climbed out of bed. The midwife kept telling her she mustn’t, because she’d lost a lot of blood too, but she paid her no attention. Somehow she walked all the way across the hall with Anju in her arms and put her face-down on my stomach. Anju lay there for a moment, draped over my huge belly—I was very big, even though it was only the end of the eighth month. I tell you”—here Aunt N gave another dramatic sigh—”I simply never recovered my figure afterward. Anyway, I guess Anju didn’t like being there, because all at once she gave a loud cry, and right then I felt a contraction so strong it was like my backbone was snapping in two. Next thing I knew, the midwife was handing Sudha to me, saying It’s another girl.”

  “That’s why Anju’s my twin, don’t you see?” Sudha said, and it seemed to me that she was talking to her mother as well as to Sarita Aunty. “Because she called me out into the world.” And she put her arm around my neck, my usually quiet cousin, and smiled a brilliant smile that left the two women wordless.

  I couldn’t have done it better myself.

  There are other reasons why I can never hate Sudha. Once I made a list of them.

  Because she’s the most beautiful person I know, just like the princesses in the fairy tales Pishi tells us, with her skin that’s the warm brown of almond milk, her hair soft like monsoon clouds all the way down her back, and her eyes that are the softest of all.

  Because she can put her hand on my arm when I’m ready to kick the world for its stupidity, and it’s like a drink of clean cold water on a hot day.

  Because she believes in magic, demons and gods and falling stars to wish on, the way I never could.

  Because she’s the best storyteller, better even than Pishi. She can take the old tales and make them new by putting us in them. Us, Anju and Sudha, right in there among the demon queens and fairy princes and talking beasts.

  Because I called her into the world and, therefore, must do all I can to make sure she is happy.

  ANJU GROWS UPSET whenever I ask Pishi about the day our fathers died. Why can’t you forget it? she says. Why can’t you just let it go? If you always look backward, you’ll never get anywhere in life. Besides, what’s there to know about two men who didn’t have the sense to stay home where they’d have been safe, instead of going gallivanting in search of some stupid adventure?

  There is truth in what she says, I admit it. And for once the mothers are on her side. My mother thinks it’s bad luck to talk of that day. Gouri Ma says it is better for us to focus our thoughts on more positive things. And Pishi, our enthusiastic informant in matters of the past, will give us only a few reluctant details before she changes the subject.

  I trust Pishi. I know she must have a reason for her silence. And yet I am strangely pulled to that day twelve years ago, day of my father’s end, day of my beginning, when perhaps our spirits crossed in mid-air, his rising to heaven, mine descending to earth. Recently the pull has grown more urgent, for any day now we will shed our child-selves, Anju and I, and become women. And how can we take on that new history if we know nothing of what came before?

  For my mother’s sake too, I want to know what happened that day—and what led to it. Perhaps it will help me understand why her heart is so bile-bitter, why she has only words of complaint and chastisement for me. Perhaps it will help me grow more daughterly toward her.

  So on Sunday morning when Anju is busy with a new American novel she has borrowed from the bookstore, I go looking for Pishi. I find her on the terrace setting out trayfuls of salted mangoes for drying. Pishi is an excellent pickle maker and knows it. Ever since she returned to her father’s house, she has told us proudly, the Chatterjees have never had to soil their lips with store-bought achar. In three days’ time, when the mango slices are crisped thin by the sun, she will mix in spiced mustard oil and chili powder and seal them in squat jars for us to enjoy through the year. Meanwhile she must stay up here to guard them from the black-faced monkeys which appear magically—for monkeys are not common here in the heart of Calcutta—every pickling season. Anju thinks they must escape from the Alipur Zoo, but Ramdin-mudi, who owns the corner grocery, insists they are descendents of the god Hanuman, whose image, with its
great coiled tail, hangs in his store above the tins of atta and oil.

  Pishi looks unhappy. There’s going to be a big kirtan in the neighborhood temple this afternoon, singers and dholak players who have come all the way from Nabadwip, and all the women she knows are going. Kirtans are one of the few pleasures Pishi considers suitable for widows and thus allows herself. But drying mangoes is an important job, not something she can trust to a maidservant, for everyone knows that if the slices are touched by a woman who hasn’t bathed, or has lain with a man that day, or is menstruating, they will turn furry with fungus.

  I’ll be happy to watch the mangoes for her, I say. I’ll be very clean and careful and turn them over at the right time so both sides get equal sun. If she will tell me a special story, one I’ve been wanting to hear all my life.

  Pishi knows at once which story it is that I desire. Her face grows dark and pinched with disapproval. Is it apprehension I see in her eyes? She orders me to go downstairs. But there’s a faint note of unsureness in her voice, which gives me the courage to resist.

  “Why won’t you tell me?” I cry. “I have a right to hear about my father. Haven’t you always told us that we’ll never really know who we are if we don’t learn about our past?”

  Pishi stares past me at the blank sky. Finally she says, “At the heart of the story you want to know, a secret lies buried. I am the only person left alive who knows it, though sometimes I think your aunt Gouri might have her suspicions. But she’s an intelligent woman—she knows that there are times when one should search for answers and times when one should let matters be.

  “I’ve always believed in the importance of telling you girls about your past—you know that. But this secret is so terrible that I’ve been reluctant to burden you with it. I’m afraid it will take away your childhood and destroy the love that you hold dearest. I’m afraid it will make you hate me.”