The Henna Artist(26)
Manu and Kanta had met while studying at Cambridge. Theirs had been a love marriage, much to her saas’s chagrin. Kanta had often joked how, emboldened by the freer Western atmosphere in England, they had started holding hands, which led to many stolen kisses, and had they not married, they wouldn’t have stopped there.
Her mother-in-law scoffed. Lowering herself and her voluminous white muslin sari onto the bedroom divan, she said to no one in particular, “Kanta is going to see me to my funeral pyre without the grandchildren I am owed.”
Kanta looked stricken. I was used to their affectionate bickering, but today, her mother-in-law’s words had a sharp edge. I knew the old woman felt the competition among her cronies, grandmothers twice, three times over. Most wives would have given birth to several babies by Kanta’s age. I felt the pressure, too; to date, all my herbal remedies to help Kanta conceive had ended in miscarriage.
“Now, you two,” I scolded them gently. “Saasuji, when you see this design, you will feel the baby is already here. And if I am to succeed, I need peace and quiet.”
The older woman placed a hand on each knee and heaved herself to standing. “Baju! Where is my buttermilk?” she called to the servant on her way out. “That old man moves slower than a dead elephant. All day he steals our ghee and eats our chapatti.”
When the door closed, I turned to Kanta with a chuckle, but she was staring at the ceiling, trying to blink away the tears in her eyes. “She’s at me night and day about grandchildren.”
I took Kanta’s hands in mine and led her to the divan. Sitting down next to her, I used a corner of my sari to wipe her eyes.
She turned to me with a haunted look. “It’s just—we have tried and tried...” Her desperation was palpable.
I grieved for my friend. “You and Manu have spent the last five years getting to know each other. You know whether he likes chapatti more than rice. Whether he prefers poems to prose. If he favors starch in his kurtas. And that’s so important because when the children come, you’ll be too busy asking him, ‘Arré, arra-garra-nathu-kara! Manu, you char-so-beece! Where have you hidden my girlish figure?’” My voice had risen in imitation of village women selling bitter melon in the market.
Kanta bit her lower lip and started to laugh. She looked at Radha, who was also giggling.
I was ready to begin. I told Kanta to lay down on the divan and lower her capris. We were covering her stomach with henna today, and she would need to be absolutely still. I dribbled some clove oil on my hands. “Radha, why don’t you read to Kanta while I work?”
“Splendid!” Kanta said. Restored to her cheerful self, she said, “Radha, choose a book from my bedside.”
Radha’s face brightened. She had told me last night that she had read and reread all of Pitaji’s books that the rats hadn’t chewed: Dickens, Austen, Hardy, Narayan, Tagore, Shakespeare. (I remembered those books fondly, too.) When Pitaji died, she said she began teaching the village children their letters and maths so she and Maa could go on living in the hut. Of course, after Maa died, the villagers would no longer allow a young girl to live in the schoolteacher’s house by herself.
I watched Radha examine the books on Kanta’s bedside table. “Jane Eyre. Bahagvad Gita. Lady Chatterley’s Lover?” As she read the last title, Radha looked at us; she was blushing.
Kanta laughed at the expression on her face. “If you haven’t already read Jane Eyre, let’s start with that. I read it every few years. I love how the orphan girl gets everything she wants at the end.”
I rubbed the clove oil on Kanta’s stomach while Radha started. Faltering at first, Radha gained confidence as she read aloud. The big words took her a little time, but her command of English was impressive. “‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner...’”
I began painting with henna. With a slim reed I drew a large circle around Kanta’s navel. Next, I painted six lines from the navel to the edges of the circle, like the spokes of a wheel. In each of the resulting triangles, I drew a baby eating, a baby sleeping. Reading. Playing with a ball. Putting on a shoe. Crying.
As Radha read about Jane Eyre’s isolation, I thought about Kanta’s loneliness. Jaipur was not as cosmopolitan as Calcutta, Bombay or New Delhi. The ideas here were far more traditional, the people more entrenched in the old India, less given to change. She felt separate from my ladies and longed for friendship. Motherhood, she felt, would be her entrée into a world of cozy chats, shared intimacies. She had faith that I could help her get there. And I was loath to disappoint her. I was continually trying different recipes for treats that might help strengthen the eggs in her womb. Today, I’d brought burfi: sweetened with yam and coated in sesame seeds. I didn’t let her sit up for tea but fed her lying down so the henna could dry properly. All the while, Radha read aloud, inflecting her voice with emotion and drama. Where had she learned to do that?
When it was time, I rubbed my hands vigorously with geranium oil and massaged Kanta’s belly to remove the dried henna. After I finished, she jumped off the divan and walked to the mirrored doors of her almirah. She turned left and right to admire the design, framing her flat stomach with her hands.
“Oh, Lakshmi! My very own baby. Six of them! I can’t wait to show Manu!” She turned to look at me. “But why is one of them crying?”