Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [33]
"So I ran away, when they were asleep. What else could I do, Sonali-di? I had to."
"You want to know what you could have done? With your Vasco degree and your wonderful English? You could have made Ma and Baba happy and married him. And if it didn't work out, you'd still get a better job than me."
Marry him? My sister hates me!
Sonali opened the steel trunk that had once contained her dowry of saris, bedding, and kitchen utensils. It was nearly empty. Like their mother, she preferred neem leaves to mothballs. Sonali handed a small pillow to Anjali. It reeked more of mildew than neem. "You can stay the night," she said.
"Thank you," Anjali mumbled, shocked. "I intend to be gone in the morning." Not exactly her initial plan, but now her only choice.
"In fact I'm glad you stopped by," said Sonali. And before Anjali could smile, she added, "I have to go out a little later. I don't expect Piyali to wake up, but if she does, you'll be here."
"Go out where?" Anjali asked, but from the look on her sister's face, she knew.
"Just an hour. Maybe less, maybe more," she said.
"What are you doing, Sonali-di? Seeing a man, isn't it?"
"You think a secretary is just a secretary?" Sonali asked. "You're such a child still." She gave the pillow a whack with her palm before slipping a pillowcase over it. "Men are men, they're all the same. You don't have to lead them on, it's in their nature." Piyali whimpered in her sleep, and Sonali immediately lowered her voice. "Look at us," she muttered, "take a good look at Piyali and me, do you really think I'm better off being divorced? Do you have any idea what the word divorced means to any man? It means 'Take it, it's free.' Wouldn't I be better off married, no matter what?"
"You had no choice, Sonali-di! He practically moved those women into your flat!"
"What do you know? Nothing, you know nothing, and you come to my house and lecture me? This handsome Mr. Mitra of yours thought—no, he was positive—that he was Baba's choice of jamai. What he does to you before the wedding or after, does it matter that much? Does it matter enough to ruin other people's lives? Four lives, in my case. Baba's and Ma's, Piyali's and mine?"
And so the great divide was not just the thirty years that separated Anjali from her parents—that wasn't a divide, it was a chasm—but the five years between her and her sister. Five years ago, Sonali had capitulated to her parents' demands. Five years ago, it would have been impossible for Sonali to have resisted, and fled. A wife might conceivably leave her properly arranged husband and move back in with her parents, even divorce him for cruelty or drunkenness, but never for the laughable motive of personal happiness.
"But you sent me money, didi," Angie said. "You're the one who told me not to cripple myself." Every few months, Sonali had sent her small money orders and inland air-letters, care of an unmarried, club-footed girlfriend she had gone to Hindi medium school with.
"That was for clothes and whatnot," she said. "It wasn't meant to heap more shame on the family."
That night, lying with her niece on the chowki while her sister "stepped out," Anjali thought about how the world had gone mad. Sonali was jealous of her sister's still-open future, Anjali decided, because she could do what Sonali hadn't. In just a day, India had gone from something green and lush and beautiful to something barren and hideous. Her sister had deserted her, and her parents were prepared to marry her off to a monster whose father demanded a set of golf clubs.
THERE ARE WAYS