The Henna Artist(12)

“I earned it. All of it.” And then, before I could help myself, “More than you ever did.”

A hard light came into his eyes. His mouth twisted. “I...? You deserted me, remember?” He closed his eyes and shook his head quickly, as if to shake off his anger. “I don’t want to get off to a bad start, Lakshmi. What’s done is done, right? I forgive you. We’ll start over.”

At first, looking at his clothes and the ragged state of him, I had been tempted to feel sympathy. How foolish of me! Granted, he had earned his bitterness: a barren wife is a thing of shame. A burden that justifies returning her to her family. At fifteen, I’d been too timid, too naive, to navigate Hari’s rough ways. In the intervening years, I had learned not to be cowed easily. I would make no apologies.

“You forgive me? After the way you treated me?”

He looked confused. “But your sister said...”

“Sister?” What was he talking about? “I don’t have a sister.”

His brows drew together as he turned his head to the door. “Did you lie to me?”

I followed his gaze. A girl, skinny as a neem twig, was standing in the shadows just inside the doorway. How had I not noticed her?

As if in a trance, she walked to the center of the room, her eyes locked on mine. She was half a head shorter than me. Her dark brown hair, dusty and loose, parted on the side and plaited down her back, hung almost to her waist. An orange cotton wrap covered half her ragged petticoat and wound up her back and around her shoulders. She wore a dull blue blouse. No jewelry, no shoes.

She lifted a hand as if to touch my shoulder. “Jiji?” she said.

I was nobody’s older sister! I took a step back. The knife in my hand glinted in the streetlight. She gasped.

Hari stepped between us. He pointed a finger at her. “Answer me!”

The girl jumped and wrapped her arms around her stomach.

I looked at Hari, at the girl, at Hari again. “What’s going on?”

Hari fished a matchbox out of his pocket and tossed it at my feet. “See for yourself.”

Was this a trick? To light a match, I had to set the knife down. I moved slowly, keeping an eye on Hari. His fists clenched and unclenched, but he remained where he was. I struck a match and held it to the girl’s face. Her green-blue eyes, the color of peacock feathers, iridescent, were enormous. Her nose was thin and straight, with a small bump in the middle. She had rosebud lips, round and pink. I lifted the match to her eyes again, which hadn’t blinked once.

Blood pounded in my ears. I shook my head. “How could—? After me, Maa carried two girls, but neither survived her first year.”

Hari seemed confused, too. “She told me she was born the year you left me. She said you knew.”

Maa was pregnant when I left Hari? With another baby girl? And I hadn’t even known? So many thoughts whirled around my brain. The expense of another dowry must have exasperated her! Like many poor women, my mother had felt burdened by girl children. But why hadn’t my parents come with her to Jaipur when I had sent them money to do so? Why hadn’t she come with Hari?

I looked at the girl’s body, using the light of the flame. I saw bruises on her arms. “What’s your name?”

She glanced at Hari before replying. “Radha.”

The match burned my fingers. I dropped it on the floor and struck another. My hands shook. “Where is Maa?” I asked.

Her eyes filled. “She’s gone, Jiji.” Her voice was small.

The words sank in. My legs felt rubbery. “And Pitaji?”

The girl moved her head to let me know my father had died, as well.

Both dead? “When?”

“Pitaji, eight months ago. Our Maa, two months.”

I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. All this time I’d been dreaming of a reunion with my parents, never once considering that I might never see them again. Had my mother and father gone to their pyres shrouded in shame? Surrounded by gossip about the undutiful daughter who had abandoned her husband?

My parents would never know how often I had considered leaving Hari in the two years I was married to him. The only thing that held me back was fear of what my desertion would do to their reputation—until the day I could no longer endure my husband’s beatings, the wounds that made me bleed, the words that cut me open. The mornings I could barely get up off the floor. And all for what? For the child I couldn’t give him. In the first year of our marriage, his mother, that dear woman, hoped that teas of wild yam and brews of red clover and peppermint would encourage my body to produce a baby. She made tonics from nettle leaves to strengthen my organs. I chewed pumpkin seeds to moisten my women’s parts until the inside of my mouth was covered in blisters.

My mother-in-law tended my body as diligently as I tended her medicinal garden—nurturing the soil, planting seeds, feeding the fragile plants. But all my saas’s patient ministering did not give her son what he craved most. To an Indian man, a son—or daughter—was proof of his virility. It meant he could take his proud and rightful place in the legions of men who would carry the next generation forward. Hari felt—as many men in his position would have—that I had robbed him of that right.

I could have explained it—all of it—to Maa and Pitaji if they had come to Jaipur. They might then have agreed that I was right to leave Hari, to build the shiny new life I had created. But they never came.