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

the background as he confesses his admiration, his love for me. He slips onto my finger a ring with stones that sparkle like his eyes and tells me of the trips we will go on around the world, the books we will coauthor when I am his wife. (No arranged marriage like Aunt’s for me!) After dinner he takes me to his apartment overlooking the lake, where fairy lights twinkle and shiver on the water. He pulls me down, respectfully but ardently, on the couch. His lips are hot against my throat, his …
    But here my imagination, conditioned by a lifetime of maternal censorship, shuts itself down.

    After lunch the next day I walk out onto the narrow balcony. It is still cold, but the sun is finally out. The sky stretches over me, a sheet of polished metal. The skyscrapers of downtown Chicago float glimmering in the distance, enchanted towers out of an old storybook. The air is so new and crisp that it makes me suddenly happy, full of hope.
    As a child in India, sometimes I used to sing a song. Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land, where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold? My girlfriends and I would play skipping games to its rhythm, laughing carelessly, thoughtlessly. And now here I am. America , I think, and the word opens inside me like a folded paper flower placed in water, filling me until there is no room to breathe.
    The apartment with its faded cushions and its crookedly hung pictures seems newly oppressive when I go back inside. Aunt is in the kitchen—where I have noticed she spends most of her time—chopping vegetables.
    “Can we go for a walk?” I ask. “Please?”
    Aunt looks doubtful. “It is being very cold outside,” she tells me.
    “Oh no,” I assure her. “I was just out on the balcony and it’s lovely, it really is.”
    “Your uncle does not like me to go out. He is telling me it is dangerous.”
    “How can it be dangerous?” I say. It’s just a ploy of his to keep her shut up in the house and under his control. He would like to do the same with me, only I won’t let him. I pull her by the hand to the window. “Look,” I say. The streets areclean and empty and very wide. A gleaming blue car speeds by. A bus belches to a stop and two laughing girls get down.
    I can feel Aunt weakening. But she says, “Better to wait. This weekend he is taking us to the mall. So many big big shops there, you’ll like it. He says he will buy pizza for dinner. Do you know pizza? Is it coming to India yet?”
    I want to tell her that the walls are closing in on me. My brain is dying. Soon I will turn into one of those mournful-eyed cows in the painting behind the sofa.
    “Just a short walk for some exercise,” I say. “We’ll be back long before Uncle. He need not even know.”
    Maybe Aunt Pratima hears the longing in my voice. Maybe it makes her feel guilty. She lifts her thin face. When she smiles, she seems not that much older than me.
    “In the village before marriage I was always walking everywhere—it was so nice, the fresh air, the sky, the ponds with lotus flowers, the dogs and goats and chickens all around. Of course, here we cannot be expecting such country things….”
    I wait.
    “No harm in it, I am thinking,” she finally says. “As long as we are staying close to the house. As long as we are coming back in time to fix a nice dinner for your uncle.”
    “Just a half-hour walk,” I assure her. “Well be back in plenty of time.”
    As we walk down the dim corridor that smells, just like the apartment, of stale curry (do the neighbors mind?), she adds, a bit apologetically, “Please do not be saying anything to Uncle. It will make him angry.” She shakes her head. “He worries too much since …”
    I want to ask her since what, but I sense she doesn’t want to talk about it. I give her a bright smile.
    “I won’t say a word to Uncle. It’ll be our secret.”
    In coats and saris we walk down the street. A few pedestrians stare at us silently as they sidle past. I