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

Bijoy pressed his fingers to his temples and said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I can’t think.’
    “ ‘You mustn’t go with him tomorrow,’ I said. ‘He can’t be trusted.’
    “But Bijoy fisted his hands and said, ‘I’ve got to find the ruby cave—for myself more than anyone else.’ And then he said, ‘Maybe I’ll talk to him when we’re alone on the river.’
    “ ‘You mustn’t do that,’ I said. ‘He might get desperate and do something, who knows what. And you don’t even know how to swim.’ But even as I said it I felt I was being melodramatic.
    “Bijoy must have thought the same, for he shook his head with a half-smile. ‘Oh, Didi!’ he said. ‘This isn’t the movies! What are you thinking? That Gopal will push me overboard and watch me drown?’
    “He was right. Gopal might be a liar, a fortune hunter, but he was no murderer. Besides, Bijoy was the head of the family. I had to believe that he would know how to handle this situation.
    “We did not speak of the matter again.
    “Bijoy did pranam to me before he left, touching my feet for blessing, and asked me to keep a lamp lit in front of the gods in the puja room. I held him as I whispered prayers into his hair, and for a moment a forgotten memory surfaced, from where I don’t know: how, before I left for my husband’s house, I would rock Bijoy in my arms—he was just a few years old then—his little body slumping into sleep, the smell of his hair like melted sugar.
    “I kept that lamp lit every day, I prayed each morning andnight to Ganesh, remover of obstacles, and Kali, protectress against evil. But I couldn’t stop the arrival of that death-bearing telegram.”
    How much time passes before I realize that Pishi is gone and I am alone on the terrace? Vaguely I remember her coming back up the stairs when the story had ended, with tears in her eyes. Her trying to comfort me, and me holding my body hard and stiff against her, shoving her from me.
    Now you see why I didn’t want to tell you, Sudha .
    Go away, go, leave me alone .
    For how long did I cry, and when did the tears get used up? Now laughter is spilling out of me in great, bitter gusts, because the past is not reliable and solid, the roots of a huge banyan, as Pishi has always led me to believe. The past is a Ferris wheel like the ones at the Maidan fair. A giant Ferris wheel, spun faster and faster by my father until it careens out of control. Until it is wrenched from earth, flung into the emptiness of the hot yellow sky.
    My father, the handsome rascal, the masquerader with the dangerous, diamond laugh, blown in on a bad-luck wind. Who took the lives of this household into his hands and with his thoughtless wanting broke them like rotted drywood.
    And my mother, who—it comes to me now—is my other secret.
    My beautiful mother with that haughty look always on her face. My mother hinting through a toss of her head, an angling of her elegant neck, how much better things had been in her parents’ household. My mother, who was really the daughter of peasants, washing soiled clothes by a muddy river, who thought to erase her ancestry with a clever tongue.
    The shame of their lies floods my head with thick crimson. Shame and more shame because others had watched them masquerade, first with suspicion and then with knowledge. Pishi, and surely if Pishi, Gouri Ma too. Watching them and me, knowing us for who we were long before I did.
    There’s a stabbing in my belly, again, again, so that I must double over with the pain. A cramp wrenches my whole body. Perhaps one can really die of shame, as the old tales say?
    Then I feel the hot trickle between my thighs, and know. Will the blood be the same color as the rubies my parents longed for, and with that longing brought catastrophe to the Chatterjee family?
    Ah, my sweet Anju with a world of love in your eyes, what would you say if you knew?
    The thought is a wave I could drown in. I hold my breath against it as I walk