Night Work Page 12

  So it was that Barot embarked on the marriage arrangements of his second daughter with mixed feelings, knowing how easy it could be, but fearing that karma would come around and kick him in the teeth.

  It did so, with a vengeance. The young man identified by the astrologer as an ideal match looked good enough on paper, as it were (although Barot was not exactly literate), but when his family got into the act, Barot felt as if he'd clasped a basket of boa constrictors to his chest.

  They squeezed. Oh, not at first—oh no. Only when arrangements were in their final stages, when the first gifts had been exchanged and everyone knew the chosen date, did the boy's harping mother flex her muscles and bare her teeth. The television chosen was not big enough for her fine son. The kitchen stove Barot was providing was inadequate. The rupees must be increased to cover the expenses they were incurring.

  Pulling out was impossible. The girl would be marked as having been tried and found wanting, rejected by one man and therefore of questionable value to the rest. Barot's future in-laws were careful never to drive their demands so high he was forced to withdraw entirely, but they upped the ante in stages that made him gulp, and tear his hair, but in the end submit.

  The alternative, after all, was to be burdened forever with an unmarriageable daughter.

  The marriage took place, the demands continued after the wedding parties returned to their homes, but by vast good fortune (and a vast number of expensive pujas at the temple) the bride quickly became pregnant, and to the joy of everyone except perhaps the groom's mother (who had had her eye on a video player), she gave birth to a son.

  Demands ceased, Barot took a deep breath at last— and looked at his fourteen-year-old Pramilla.

  There was simply no money for her to get married. If Barot managed to raise it, he and his noble young son would starve. She was a pretty little thing, to be sure, and as bright and as helpful to her menfolk as a father could ask, but there was still no money.

  There were offers, yes. A neighbor with an unfortunate facial deformity that made his speech nearly impossible to comprehend was willing to take the girl with only a small dowry. And a farmer in the next village was looking for a pretty young wife, but he was of a lower caste, and besides, Barot had heard talk about the man, and was too fond of his third daughter to feel easy about handing her over to a man who had not only gone through three wives already (all of whom had died of unfortunate accidents) but was older than Barot himself.

  So Barot went to see his cousin and the cousin's wife, who between them seemed to know everything and everyone between Jaipur and Delhi. It was the wife who came up with the idea of the advertisement in the Delhi Post. When Barot saw the sorts of advertisements the marriage column offered, he despaired, as it was full of girls with university degrees and professional training, but his cousin pointed out that he had little choice, and it was worth the investment as a gamble. The three of them together decided on the wording.

  Pretty young light-skinned village girl, hardworking, traditional, and respectful, no dowry but ideal for the right man.

  Barot could see that even his cousin's wife had grave doubts about the chances of a response, but she had to admit that the advert was honest, and that in a market bristling with nursing certificates and BA hon degrees, it had the advantage of its own simplicity. And Pramilla did have skin as light as a farmer's daughter could hope for. Maybe, just maybe, there was a rich man out there (or another schoolteacher with radical ideas) who valued a cowlike, hardworking girl of a respectable caste over an educated potential troublemaker with her own money.

  There was.

  To everyone's astonishment, three weeks later a letter came, on a piece of paper with a letterhead engraved on it, bearing a stamp from the United States of America.

  They read it at the house of Barot's cousin. The cousin's wife read it to them, stumbling over the more unfamiliar English words and translating tentatively as she went.

  The letter in its magnificent crisp typescript was from a man who called himself Peter Mehta. He was the Chief Executive Officer (a vastly impressive phrase) of a company with branches in Bombay, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (magic names all) whose business was not specified but was quite patently successful.

  Mehta had seen Barot's advertisement in the Marriages Offered section of the Delhi Post that was flown in to his office in San Francisco several days a week. He was looking for a bride for his younger brother, Laxman, acting as the family representative since their parents were both dead. Laxman was a boy of simple tastes, according to the letter, and both brothers preferred a traditional arranged marriage to the haphazard dangers of the American system. If the girl's family was willing to have their daughter emigrate to America, would they please send a photograph, details of the girl's life and accomplishments, and a signed letter from the village health worker to the effect that she was healthy and capable of bearing children.

  The letter was couched in terms both more flowery and less direct than that, but all parties involved knew what was meant. She needed to be certified a virgin, she had to be shown to have the normal complement of eyes, ears, and teeth in a more or less pleasing arrangement, and they wanted something in writing that said who she was. Normally, a marriage broker or convenient uncle would take care of this, but the family seemed to have no relatives in the area, and they wanted assurance that their investment would reach them in an acceptable manner. Otherwise they would have to ship her home again, and the “no dowry” phrase had already established that Barot would be unable to reimburse them for the transportation costs.

  Barot held the pristine white sheet of paper in his trembling, work-roughened fingers, examining the bold signature of the Chief Executive Officer as if it were the stamp of a god. Salvation was at hand; Pramilla was saved from the clutches of a freak or a wife-beater; he and his son would not starve. And America—unbelievable! The land of golden opportunity had opened up, reaching out to a dusty village in Rajasthan, for surely this would mean that when Pramilla's brother was grown to be a man, her husband, this godlike Laxman Mehta who was younger brother to an American Chief Executive Officer named Peter, would reach out again to bring the boy into the fold of his extended family.

  It was only the cousin's wife who had doubts. Barot was from a good caste, granted, but the Mehtas were much higher. What did they want with a girl like Pramilla, when they could have someone both higher and with a degree? And San Francisco was so very far away, and Pramilla so young. Who knew this family of Mehtas? Was there no one here to speak for them?

  But her protests, admittedly mild, went unheard, for Barot and his cousin and the entire village were filled with joy and excitement. Even Pramilla herself was speechless with the thrill of it (for she had known of the two other suitors hovering in the wings of her father's vision, and had shuddered at both of them).

  The photographer was summoned from the next town, arriving with his heavy ancient camera and a choice of three grubby saris for the occasion. Pramilla yearned for the white sari heavy with silver thread, but the cousin's wife disapproved, saying it would make her look as if she could afford a dowry after all, and besides, the white would make her skin look much too dark even with rice powder. So she chose the sari with small sprigs of blue flowers on it, and dusted Pramilla's face and arms with the powder, and pronounced herself satisfied with the result.

  Pramilla was fourteen and a half years old, and looked twelve in the picture that landed on Peter Mehta's desk two weeks later. He grunted, felt a brief regret that he was not himself in need of a luscious young bride, and passed it over to Laxman for approval—unnecessary, perhaps, but this was America after all, and there was no reason to be too medieval about this.

  Laxman blushed and nodded, and the arrangements went ahead.

  One thing the bride's father had asked (with fawning trepidation in his ornate phrases, and at the firm suggestion of the cousin's wife), and that was whether the wedding might not take place in India, preferably in Jai
pur or, if that was not convenient, then Delhi—al-though the writer of the letter could fully understand if the Mehtas were to find this impossible, and it was only asked by the love Barot felt for this his last and most precious jewel of a daughter.

  Actually, visa arrangements were vastly simpler if the wedding took place outside the United States and the bride could be introduced as a fait accompli. It would mean fiddling with the date on her birth certificate, but Peter knew a man in Pune who was good at that sort of thing. No, it would not be a problem, and would all in all be preferable to deal with the matter in India. He even sent three third-class rail tickets, so the bride's family could accompany her.

  It was a full, no-expenses-spared Hindu wedding, with shamiana tents in the garden of the second-best hotel in Delhi, a white horse for the groom and rented jewelry for the bride, music until the early hours, and even some fireworks to light up the neighborhood and wake the restless beggars sleeping at the hotel gates. Barot was frankly terrified by Peter Mehta and had to fight down a sudden impulse to thrust Pramilla into the arms of the Chief Executive Officer who would soon be her brother-in-law and run away, but his first view of the younger brother, Laxman, brought with it a wave of relief mixed heavily with guilt.

  Relief because the lad was more than presentable, he was beautiful, long-lashed as a cow, slim as a young Krishna, and he looked not much older than his bride. He was older, Barot knew that, twice Pramilla's age, but he looked very like a young boy, white-faced and plucking at the front of his white silk kurta pajamas— more like a farm boy than a hard-driving company director, and infinitely more suited to Pramilla. And Barot knew guilt because he suspected that Pramilla was not really being given the man she deserved, but an immature boy who might never become anything else. All through that long day and night the farmer kept casting glances at the boy who would take his daughter, and in the end he decided that there was definitely something wrong with him. Not greatly so—he wasn't a drooling idiot by any means, just … slow.

  His cousin's wife, who had come with him instead of Barot's young son, agreed with his assessment, and managed to take the young bride aside for a private conversation at which phrases such as “patience” and “a loving heart” and “you will need to be your husband's backbone” played a part. The earnest advice confused Pramilla somewhat, but lodged in her heart, and her “auntie” assured herself that the child would find them there and remember them when the time came. She patted the child's cold hand and told her to remember that even the great god Shiva was nothing without the energies of his wife, Shakti; as she put it: “Shiva is shava [corpse] without shakti” (shakti being, Kate remembered from Roz's television panel, both the word for energy and the name of the goddess). Pramilla nodded dutifully and went back to take her place beside her pale, silent boy-husband.

  The marriage might never have been consummated had Pramilla waited for Laxman to make the first move. Indeed, it was not consummated in the five days they spent in Delhi, waiting for Peter to finish his business and for the authorities to come through with her travel papers. But once on the airplane, sitting in the roaring, rattling, utterly foreign compartment surrounded by poisonous smells, incomprehensible voices, and a husband who, though exceedingly beautiful, acted nothing like the filmi husbands she had seen on the flickering screen in her village, or even her neighbors' husbands, Pramilla Mehta watched in something close to terror as the sprawl of Delhi fell away beneath the wings of the plane, and the girl of not yet fifteen years began quietly to weep.

  Had she plotted for days, she could not have come up with a better way of making the boy at her side cleave to her. He had spent the last week not far from tears himself, and twice had succumbed to them after the unsatisfactory nightly ritual of going to this pretty stranger's bedroom, sitting rigidly on the edge of her bed and making attempts at conversation in a language she could barely understand, and retreating again having done nothing but briefly touch the back of her hand, once.

  But now she was the one in tears, this delicate, precious, daunting, sweet-faced young goddess, and without even pausing to consider his action, he reached out and took her hand. In response she sobbed aloud, and his heart simultaneously broke and swelled up in manly pride that at last he had found a role he could step into, even if it was only that of comforter.

  Sleeping and awake, they held hands all the way to San Francisco.

  It was not easy after that, and Pramilla was often in tears, but at least she had the vague comfort of knowing that her sorrows were those of all young wives, home in the village or here in this new country, and that she had only to endure and life would, in the end, sort itself out. Peter's wife, Rani, playing the part of mother in the family (and indeed, she was nearly old enough to be Laxman's mother), was hateful, even cruel, but that after all was what mothers-in-law were. She refused to speak Hindi with the newcomer, pretending that she did not understand the peasant girl's rural accents; she pinched Pramilla's arm when the girl put the spoons in the wrong place or failed to peel the vegetables to her satisfaction; worst of all from Pramilla's point of view, Rani encouraged her own children (who were not actually all that far from Pramilla's age) to mock her and treat her as a rather stupid family pet. And Laxman … Her husband was not a simple person to be with, since he seemed to know that he had something missing and was short-tempered because of it. He lost patience with her at the slightest irritation and occasionally shouted and sometimes slapped her, and bed was never easy, since she did not seem able to be anything but dry and tight against him. Still, even that was a thing that her knowledge of village marriages had prepared her for, and she soon folded away her picture of filmi romance as an outgrown (if never actually worn) garment.

  So Pramilla Mehta went her way in the New World, walking a tightrope between an inadequate and easily frustrated husband and an oppressive mother-in-law figure, with no friends or family or even familiar surroundings to bolster her. Tens of millions of women had done the same, and like them, Pramilla could have been happier, but at least she had the degree of contentment that comes when one's expectations are met.

  The precarious balancing act held for precisely five months, until one evening when Rani, annoyed at some problem with a plumber and angry at Peter for working such long hours, pointed out with a voice that cut flesh that Laxman and 'Milla had been married for nearly half a year, why wasn't the girl pregnant?

  All four Mehtas ended up in a shouting match, which broke apart only when Peter slammed out of the house, Rani turned her wrath on Pramilla, and Laxman retreated from the scene. Later that night he came to his wife's room expecting her to sniffle and cuddle and comfort him by her need for his manly comforting. Instead Pramilla, still smarting from Rani's cruel words and her own fresh, sharp fear of childlessness, turned on him and demanded furiously why he, her husband, had not been a real man and stood up for her against his brother and sister-in-law.

  Laxman went berserk. He hit her and screamed at her, forced himself on her, and then collapsed in a storm of teary self-recrimination, kissing her bruised face and saying over and over how she must never again make him do that.

  She never did. In the seven months that remained to her, she was always careful, around him and around Rani (who conceived and miscarried what would have been her fifth child).

  The only outlets to Pramilla's spirit were the daytime television programs, which taught her English with their simple plot lines and filmi dialogue, and brief, uncertain conversations with a woman who lived down the street and seemed to know everything that was going on in Pramilla's life with Laxman.

  Her name was Amanda, and she was a being even more exotic to Pramilla than the people on the daytime television programs. She acted more like a man than any woman Pramilla had ever known, allowing her arms and legs to go bare—not like a prostitute, which was what many of these women looked like, but like the castes of women who carried stones and bricks to building projects, chattering loudly and ignoring their veils—or like t
he pictures of women athletes Pramilla had seen, strong and brazen. Pramilla couldn't understand why men weren't afraid of Amanda; she looked as if she would pull out a sword or a club at any moment, like Kali. She certainly frightened Pramilla, she was so overflowing with Western ease and power, and she fascinated Pramilla, because she was as strong and confident as Peter. Her independence was … godlike.

  They met at the local market, where Pramilla was puzzling over a display of unfamiliar greenery. A bare, browned arm snaked past her to snatch up a head of curly purple leaves, and paused to shake it under Pramilla's nose.

  “Great stuff,” said the voice attached to the arm. “You ever try it?”

  Pramilla glanced around to see if this stranger might not be speaking to someone else, then looked up into a face as sunburnt and roughened as that of a road-mender. She was as without manners as one of the road gangs, too, bluntly informal in that way that was both offensive and secretly appealing. Pramilla came up with a phrase her sister-in-law had used on a similar occasion. “I beg your pardon?” she said, but it did not come out the same way as Rani said it, and this Western woman took it as an invitation.

  “Purple kale, it's called,” she continued cheerfully. “Fry it for just a minute with butter and garlic, it's gorgeous and healthy, too.”

  Pramilla's English was sufficient to gather that the woman was telling her a recipe, although it sounded remarkably bland and nearly raw. Pretty, though, if the purple stayed in the leaves. Perhaps she could convince Rani to try it.

  “Amanda Bonner,” the woman said, and put the brown hand out at Pramilla. Very gingerly Pramilla extended her own fingers, allowing them to be clasped briefly and released.

  “My name is Pramilla Mehta,” she recited.

  “Pramilla. What a beautiful name. You live down the block from my parents, I think. I've seen you on the street.”