Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Read Free Book Online

for their mysterious partner insisted that no one must see him. There must be no breath of gossip, it was a matter of his honor. He told them that his own family did not know anything about Gopal and Bijoy either.
    “After the train journey they were to take the boat along the river and then into the swamps. Next they would hike into the heart of the jungle. The partner had arranged everything, proper equipment, tents, adibasi coolies to cook and carry for them. Beyond that they did not know, except that they were sure to be back in two weeks, long before the babies came. The ruby, which was indeed genuine, they left safely locked in the bank vault.
    “For weeks we waited, fretting for news. Then one morning the telegram arrived. It informed us that the Sundarban police had found two bodies and the charred remains of a launch in the swamp. No, only two bodies, said the police when we telephoned them, though of course there might have been others, the crocodiles may have got to them first. They were a small police force out there in the backwaters, after all, with a large area to cover. No, it wasn’t a robbery, one of the men still had his gold watch and cuff links. In the other’s pockets were two plastic-wrapped moneybags. Possibly Bijoy had given his to Gopal for safekeeping—it was the kind of thing he liked to do. The bags held a few rupees and some papers with our address on them. That’s how the police were able to track us down.
    “For weeks I would wake in the middle of the night, my chest aching with a sorrow so deep it was physical—as though someone had been pounding on my heart with a grain-crushing pestle. But even in my grief I realized that my loss was small compared to that of the two wives. Ah, I couldn’t bear to look at their faces as they took off their jewelry and put on widow’s white and wiped the marriage sindur from their foreheads as I had once done. Especially your Gouri Ma. I’d known her since she came to this house as a bride of seventeen. I’d held her and comforted her in the first homesick days when she wept for her parents, just as she would hold and comfort me a few years later after my husband’s death. I couldn’t stop thinking of the morning of the ill-fated journey when she had asked Bijoy, one more time, not to go. And then, when he said he must, she had said, ‘What if you don’t come back?’ He had laughed and touched her cheek and said, ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll be back before you even expect me.’ But Gouri had not smiled. She’d said, ‘But what if you don’t?’ And Bijoy, suddenly serious, had said, ‘Then I expect you to bring up my child as befits a descendent of the Chatterjees. Will you promise me that?’ And Gouri had looked at him with a sadness in her eyes, as though she knew already what was to come, and said, ‘I promise.’
    “She never forgot those words. In the days after the funeral, she wouldn’t allow herself to break down as your mother did. When I tried to get her to weep, to let the sorrow out of her heart, she said, ‘I don’t have the luxury. I made a promise and I must use all my energies to keep it.’ That’s when she started going to the bookstore every day—the pawned lands were forfeit already—and when people, even her own relatives, said that it was a scandal, no Chatterjee wife had ever done such a thing, she looked at them with a hard face and told them she would do whatever was necessary to ensure her daughter’s future.”
    We sit together, silent, pondering the mystery of the deaths, feeling once more their far, tragic reach into our lives. Finally,Pishi pushes herself to her feet with a sigh. The kirtan will start soon, and she must go. The past is the past, and regrets, as the priest at the temple said in his katha last week, imply a lack of piety, a resistance to God’s will.
    “Wait,” I shout as she reaches the edge of the stairs. “You didn’t tell me the secret.”
    “It was there in the story,”