Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [29]
Lying in the dark after Subodh had left, staring at the slowly revolving ceiling fan, timing her inhale and exhale to the thumpa-thumpa of its wobbling orbit around the oily, dust-webbed post, she remembered the echoes of an earlier melodrama. "I will call —thumpa—astrologer. I will call —thumpa—printer. I will write —thumpa—boy's father." And in this room five years earlier, behind this door, in this very bed, she remembered Sonali's screaming, "Just give me the knife!" until she'd submitted, then apologized.
Her mother slept in the same room, on the same bed. Anjali, eyes closed, feigning sleep or exhaustion, waited for an opportunity to break the silence. She would have spilled the beans on Mr. Mitra, but her mother had simply collapsed on her bed and fallen asleep. Apparently, there was nothing of interest to discuss, not even a giddy welcome to the world of soon-to-be-married women—no "Hello, Mrs. Mitra! He's so handsome! You'll be so happy!" In the front room, just minutes after closing the door on Mr. Mitra and wishing him (if she heard correctly) "Godspeed" back to Asansol, her father dropped his trousers and began rattling the shutters with his snores. Just as though the world had not stopped.
She had expected to be assaulted by dreams. Alone in the bedroom, she'd been afraid to close her eyes until her mother came to bed, but when the rustling of the dress-sari and sleeping-sari was over, and the snoring began, she opened her eyes again. In her childhood, she'd felt the presence of ghosts. She'd often felt their weight on her bed. She and Sonali, lying side by side, had imagined ghostly faces beyond the lone high, unopened bedroom window. They'd filled the long nights with made-up names and the reasons for their reappearance. Any deceased relative could pop up unexpectedly. Family ghosts were always on a mission of vengeance. Their grievances—and she knew all of them, all the stories of rivalry and cheating, the bitterness and unkept promises, the favoritism, the thievery, the poverty, all the infidelities, the dead babies, the deserted wives, the cruel mothers-in-law—could transcend a single lifetime. Fifty years was too brief to avenge all of the indignities of a lifetime. They had to keep coming back. That was her father's excuse: his fate was cursed. A fortuneteller had once warned him he had a jealous uncle, long-long dead, who had blocked every male Bose's path to wealth and happiness. That was her mother's excuse: I must have the same name as a distant auntie; I must be paying for her misdeeds.
And now she knew the old stories were true. There were monsters, and innocent children were their victims, and no one, especially not her parents, could save her from them.
She slipped off the bed and walked through the house, staring down at her parents in their oblivious helplessness. She wandered like a ghost. She dropped her stained sari in a corner of the bathroom. Let her mother discover the traces of her glorious jamai. Nothing had changed in her house, but the world was different. She took Sonali's old red Samsonite from the cupboard and threw her two best saris and all her T-shirts and jeans into it. She stuffed her backpack with underwear and toiletries. She could have turned on the lights, banged shut the lid of the suitcase, dragged it across the stone floor, and neither of her snoring, dreaming parents would have noticed.
She took out her old Vasco da Gama exercise book, flipped through the dozens of pages of perfect schoolgirl handwriting, the meticulous notes she'd taken— all useless, useless! —and tore out two clean