Arranged Marriage: Stories by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Read Free Book Online

perfect as people at home like to think. We all thought we’d become millionaires. But it’s not so easy.”
    “Please,” Aunt says, but he seems not to hear her. He tips his head back to swallow, and the scar on his neck glistens pinkly like a live thing. Budweiser , I read as he sets the can down, and am shocked to realize he’s drinking beer. At home in Calcutta none of the family touches alcohol, not even cousin Ramesh, who attends St. Xavier’s College and sports a navy-blue blazer and a British accent. Mother has always told me what a disgusting habit it is, and she’s right. I remember Grandfather’s village at harvesttime, the farmhands lying in ditches, drunk on palm-toddy, flies buzzing around their faces. I try not to let my distaste show on my face.
    Now Uncle’s tone is dark and raw. The bitterness in it coats my mouth like the karela juice Mother used to give me to cool my liver.
    “The Americans hate us. They’re always putting us down because we’re dark-skinned foreigners, kala admi . Blaming us for the damn economy, for taking away their jobs. You’ll see it for yourself soon enough.”
    What has made him detest this country so much?
    I look beyond Uncle’s head at the window. All I can see is a dark rectangle. But I know the sky outside is filled withstrange and beautiful stars, and I am suddenly angry with him for trying to ruin it all for me. I take a deep breath. I tell myself, I’ll wait to make up my own mind.
    At night I lie in my lumpy bed under a coarse green blanket. I try to sleep, but the night noises that still seem unfamiliar after a week—the desperate whee-whee of a siren, the wind sighing as it coils about the house—keep me awake. Small sounds filter, too, through the walls from Aunt’s bedroom. And though they are quite innocent—the bedsprings creaking as someone turns over in sleep, footsteps and then the hum of the exhaust as the bathroom light is switched on—each time I stiffen with embarrassment. I cannot stop thinking of Uncle and Aunt. I would rather think only of Aunt, but like the shawls of the bride and groom at an Indian wedding ceremony, their lives are inextricably knotted together. I try to imagine her arriving in this country, speaking only a little English, red-veiled, wearing the heavy, elaborate jewelry I’ve seen in the wedding photo. (What happened to it all? Now Aunt only wears a thin gold chain and the tiniest of pearls in her ears.) Her shock at discovering that her husband was not the owner of an automobile empire (as the matchmaker had assured her family) but only a mechanic who had a dingy garage in an undesirable part of town.
    I haven’t seen Uncle’s shop yet. Of course I haven’t seen anything else either, but as soon as the weather—which has been a bone-chilling gray—improves, I plan to. I’ve already called the people at Midwest Bus Tours, which picks up passengersfrom their homes for an extra five dollars. But I have a feeling I’ll never get to see the shop, and so—again spitefully—I make it, in my head, a cheerless place that smells of sweat and grease, where the hiss of hydraulics and the clanging of tools mix with the curses of mechanics who are all as surly as Bikram-uncle.
    But soon, with the self-absorption of the young, I move on the wings of imagination to more exciting matters. In my Modern Novel class at the university, I sit dressed in a plaid skirt and a matching sweater. My legs, elegant in knee-high boots like the ones I have seen on one of the afternoon TV shows that Aunt likes, are casually crossed. My bobbed hair swings around my face as I spiritedly argue against the handsome professors interpretation of Dreiser’s philosophy. I discourse brilliantly on the character of Sister Carrie until he is convinced, and later we go out for dinner to a quiet little French restaurant. Candlelight shines on the professor’s reddish hair, on his gold spectacle frames. On the rims of our wineglasses. Chopin plays in