The Vine of Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’s sacrificing to come here to you?”
    Anju doesn’t answer. He knows what she means, she knows that. But always, where Sudha is concerned, he likes to act obtuse, likes to force her to explain, to drag out the emotions inside of her, unclothed, so they look sentimental, or superstitious, or plain foolish. Well, this time she isn’t going to do it. She lies there mutinous, lips pressed together, thinking about Ashok. All those years he waited for Sudha when she was married to someone else. Was it out of love, or the fear of loving again? I told him no , Sudha had written. Anju twists a strand of hair around her finger distractedly until it snaps, wondering about that no. Could she have said it, in Sudha’s place? If she weighed a man’s devotion against a cousin’s need, the security he offered against uncertainty, which is all she has to give Sudha, which way would the scales tip? She needs to think it through, and she cannot do it here, with Sunil’s hand snaking from behind to cup her breast, his arm pulling her back againsta chest that smells of Claiborne Sport, a tangy scent she once loved that now makes her feel slightly sick. But of course she can never tell him that. Does such consideration rise from caring, or merely habit? This, too, she needs to think about.
    She can feel him now, grown hard against her. A nuclear heat radiates from his bones. Escape, escape. She gathers up her nightdress in alarmed handfuls. From the sudden stillness of his body, his hands falling away, she knows she has offended him. He won’t try to stop her. He’s too proud for that. She slips silently from the bed—what good are words now, even if she could come up with the right ones?—and gropes her way next door, where she lies down in the bed she has prepared for the cousin who’s like a breathlessness inside her.
    And her husband, does she love him? She turns the question, hard as a nugget of iron, around and around in her head. Ultimately she cannot imagine a life without him—and what else is that but love? She keeps her eyes averted from the crib Sunil has set up for Dayita. Ah, there’s another problem, the child whom she doesn’t want in her house. She’s afraid she might start loving her, and that would be a betrayal of the dead. How is she to manage it, to pretend that the child does not exist? How is she to keep Dayita at arm’s length without hurting Sudha? When she finally stumbles into sleep, her dreams are a chiaroscuro of uneasy strategies.
    It is the year of accounting, the year of pardons, the year of uneasy alliances. Somewhere in America a man is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a black activist thirty years ago. Somewhere in India a bandit queen is released after eleven years in jail. Somewhere in Russia a cosmonaut is preparing to go into space, for the first time in the history of nations, on an American rocketship.
    But here is Sunil, alone in his bedroom. Is he asleep, too? No. In the blue night-light he has turned back on, his eyes are chips of stone. They glitter with a strange resignation. Under the sheet, his hand moves as he stares at Anju’s graduation photograph. A rapid blur of movement until his body stiffens and arcs, then slumps down into itself, and he whispers a name into the pillow his wife has left empty. A moth-wing of a name.
    Sudha.
    It was her picture he’d been looking at, all this time.
    But he whispered the name rather than calling it out in passion. Can we salvage a broken bit of hope from that? Out of consideration for Anju, he had whispered the name of the woman he’d been trying all this time to keep away. The woman he’d been mad for ever since he saw her in a garden tented with jasmine—too late, for by then he was already betrothed to her cousin.
    But was it consideration, or was it fear? No, not fear. Not that. For there is one thing about Sunil that even Anju knows: he is not afraid of anyone—except perhaps himself.

Two

    S udha
    We run