The Direction of the Wind: A Novel(4)

The four thin gold bangles with tiny embedded diamonds that she always wore on her left hand jingled as she hoisted the suitcase from the bed she had shared with Rajiv for the past seven years. They had been a wedding gift from her mummy. It had been a tradition in her family to provide the new bride with a set of daily-use bangles that were delicate enough to be feminine but sturdy enough not to be damaged by her new wifely duties, like entertaining, child-rearing, and the occasional cooking when the maharaj was off for the day. Nita wore them every day of her marriage as a reminder of who she was meant to be. A wife. A mummy. Dutiful.

Her bag contained little more than her paintbrushes, some family photographs, and clothing but was heavier than she had expected. She supposed compressing the elements of her life into one small container would have weight to it. She wasn’t accustomed to lifting luggage or doing any form of manual labor. That was something the servants handled, but today she could not call upon them. The price of exposure was too high.

After Rajiv had left for work and her six-year-old daughter, Sophie, had gone to school, she had sent the servants to do time-consuming errands like getting papad from the old ba across town who moved like her feet were stuck to the floor with tamarind candy, ensuring Nita would have the sprawling bungalow to herself. She tugged the suitcase across the cold white marble floor to the edge of the stairs. Leaving the bag poised at the top, she took a deep breath and crossed the hallway to Sophie’s room. Like the other rooms in their home, it had stark white walls with no decorative items revealing anything about the occupant. In India, a bedroom was meant to be functional, not inspirational. That was part of the problem. Nita wanted to be inspired. She always had. Ever since she was Sophie’s age, her parents had said she lived with her head in the clouds. She’d never understood why that was wrong. She’d seen countless movies from the West in which the characters did just that, and they seemed creative, happy, and joyful. She so desperately wanted to feel those things inside of her. It had been so many years since she had.

“This is not practical,” her mummy would say when she would find young Nita in her room, painting a picture of the French countryside from a book she had spread before her instead of completing her chemistry homework. The greatest punishment her parents could inflict on her was taking away her paints. This had happened more often than she could remember, almost becoming a ritual of sorts, but the desire to re-create the fields of lavender or food markets along the Seine that she saw in colorful foreign books compelled her more than the deterrence of punishment could. Now, she thought of her parents in the way a child must think of them after they have passed. Nita knew they would be so disappointed when they learned what she had done. She would be bringing shame upon them, and there was no greater atrocity she could inflict. Her decision forced her to abandon everyone. And the fact that she was willing to do that in the first place was her proof that what she was about to do had never been a decision for her to make. It had always been decided for her.

She sat on Sophie’s bed in the corner of the room and pulled the folded rajai at the end to her lap. She held the densely woven, heavy blanket to her face to smell the clean little-girl scent that followed Sophie wherever she went, baby powder and sandalwood soap. The smell was familiar to her, and she would be able to identify it, but she didn’t inhale it the way that Rajiv did. She could see the love, adoration, and gratitude all over his face each night when he came home and wrapped Sophie in his arms, breathing in the scent of her hair. Nita kept hoping she would grow into that feeling. She told herself that it would come to her, the way it came to all mummies. But it hadn’t. It wasn’t Sophie’s fault. She was innocent in all of this. But Nita had never felt like a mummy. Not the way she knew she was supposed to. Sophie was getting older now, and Nita was less able to keep up the charade than she had been when Sophie was younger. Rajiv wanted another child, and Nita came up with excuse after excuse because she still didn’t feel the maternal bond she had expected with the child she already had. But how could she say those words to Rajiv? Sophie was his light. And with each passing year, Nita felt more and more darkness. Nita didn’t know what was wrong with her—only that something was. If she stayed, she was afraid her darkness would encroach on Sophie, and that was the last thing she wanted for her child.

She clenched the rajai, the maroon fibers smooth against her fingers. She pictured her daughter wrapped in this blanket with her small head poking out, a smile on her face as Nita read her the story of Ramayan before bed. The image should have conjured tears for Nita. Part of her maybe even hoped it would jolt her into going back and returning to her life as if nothing unusual had happened today. As if she wasn’t about to abandon Sophie and Rajiv. As if she hadn’t been thinking about it for the past eighteen months. Longer, if she were being honest with herself. As if she hadn’t started planning for it last year when she went across town to a place Rajiv would never visit and paid an agent in cash to begin the lengthy process of obtaining her French visa, with an added premium for not alerting her husband.

She released the rajai from her grip, smoothing it and questioning whether she could go back to being the mummy she had always been. But that was the problem. The mummy she had always been was an unhappy one. Picturing Sophie didn’t make her change her mind, confirming that Nita was making the right decision for all of them. Motherhood meant giving all of herself to Sophie, and Nita didn’t have anything left to give. Not beyond the jewels she had left for Sophie in the family safe at the bank. As her final maternal act, she had commissioned a local jeweler to create a set of four daily-wear diamond-and-gold bangles for Sophie, and she had left a note for Rajiv to pass those on to Sophie on her wedding day, just like Nita had received the family gift from her mummy when she married Rajiv.