The Vine of Desire Read Online Free PDF

barefoot on sand, impatient for water. Our hurry makes a small wind. It is the color of our saris, which stream behind us like the eager start of a fire. We are dressed in the same color—one of the many childhood habits Anju and I have fallen back into. Today we wear rebel red. It is a color that belongs to married women, one I have forfeited. I wear it with defiance.
    I reach the ocean first. My first ocean. My sari is bunched up at my knees like a heedless schoolgirl’s. The spray is soap and ice, and smells of sea horses. I imagine them somewhere deep and green, swaying. My toes curl in exhilaration. Anju has fallen behind, out of breath. Her panting sounds like the edge of a blade. She clutches at her side surreptitiously. She doesn’t want me to see. Anju, who used to be so strong. My banyan tree. Since the miscarriage, she startles at moths, echoes, the greetings of strangers. I force myself to smile. No tears, no tears now. Once we had known everything about each other. My smile is a bland expanse of white, dead as the shells underfoot. But losshas made Anju incapable of detecting such things. She holds out her hand. I take it. Together we step into the sea.
    He is carefully not watching us. He busies himself with amusing Dayita. Making funny faces. She gurgles at him and tries to grab his nose. He laughs and lets her, though her nails will leave sharp red moon-marks on his skin. When he looks at her, there is an odd gratitude on his face.

    Each evening, coming home from the office, he goes straight to her crib to pick her up. Even before he takes off his shoes. He refuses to put her down the rest of the evening. Anju says, Sunil, you’re spoiling her. He acts as if he doesn’t hear. Even while he eats dinner or works at the computer, he balances Dayita easily, on one knee. His arm loops lightly around her. She grabs his spoon just as he brings it to his mouth. She swats at the keyboard, deleting crucial data. He smiles. Anju tells me he’s never been a patient man. He has surprised us all. Himself, too, I think. He only releases my daughter when I have to nurse her. He puts her down on the floor, so his hands won’t touch mine as I pick her up.
    Later he lies on the bed with Dayita on his chest. He tells her all kinds of things. All the things he doesn’t talk to Anju about. The project he’s working on. The accident he saw on the freeway. The places he plans to take her soon. He riffles his fingers through her curls and gives her an edited version of the daily news. He tells her the plots of movies he saw growing up in India. He changes her diapers without consulting us, though we’re waiting to help.
    I am jealous for Anju, who watches from the doorway.
    And Dayita, who drives us crazy all day, crawling into corners, getting stuck under the bed, throwing tantrums every two minutes: she basks on his chest, listening to what happened on the stock market. Her iridescent eyes shine, the color of chameleons.

    “When he’s with Dayita,” Anju tells me later, “all the bitterness falls away from him. He used to be like that when I was pregnant. Boyish and excited and tender. He’d make a world of plans—all the things he wanted to do for—” she swallows—“Prem. He would put his mouth against my stomach to whisper them. If only I’d been more careful—”
    “There’s no point in torturing yourself over what’s happened already,” I say, as I have many times.
    Useless words, falling between us like lopsided snowflakes. Melting.
    “Somehow I feel I’ll never get another chance to be a mother,” Anju says. Her voice is toneless, it moves like a sleepwalker. “This child, he came to me too easily, and I was too casual about him. I’m going to have to pay for that….”
    I’m frightened by that sleepwalker voice, its thin, icy glide. “What superstition!” I say, choosing harder words, clipping them close like nails. “You never used to be this way. Listen to you—you sound like my