The Henna Artist(62)

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The next morning, there was still no sign of Radha. I hadn’t slept all night. I kept picturing her out in the streets, alone. I saw myself at Radha’s age, too shy to look at boys or men, much less talk to them. Maa had made sure of it: Men will eat even unripe fruit if it’s placed in front of them. When had my sister stopped heeding such warnings? Or had Maa been too dispirited by my desertion to teach Radha the same things she taught me? She might have felt that since her advice hadn’t kept me dutiful, it wouldn’t work on my sister, either.

I tried to imagine a past where I stayed with Hari, allowed myself to have children, watched Radha grow up with them. Would it really have been so bad? Radha would have been safe. She wouldn’t have ended up in this unfamiliar city, lecherous men at every corner.

When Malik showed up at dawn to work, I sent him immediately to Kanta’s. I kept myself busy, packing the tiffins we’d need for the day. In less than an hour, I heard a car outside. I ran to the window. A large gray sedan had stopped in front of my house. Baju was at the wheel. He got out and opened the back door. Malik stepped out and turned to help Kanta out of the car.

Within seconds, I was out my door and through my gate. When she saw me, Kanta cried, “Lakshmi!” Her face was ashen.

My heart hammered in my chest. Oh, Bhagwan, let Radha be safe! Don’t let anything happen to her!

“She’s at my house. She’s fine. But I’m the worst kind of auntie! How could I not have known or at least—”

As soon as I heard her say fine, my body relaxed. Radha was all right.

Kanta was speaking loudly enough to draw the attention of my neighbor, who had come out of her house and was pretending to water a scrawny lemon sapling in her yard.

“Kanta!” I said sharply. “Come inside for tea.”

Chastened, Kanta shut her mouth and allowed Malik and me to usher her inside. Baju returned to the car.

No sooner had I closed the door behind us than Kanta started to wail, her arms hugging her belly. “If I’d only known what it was doing to her! But I thought exposing her to Western ways would prepare her better—you know, for modern life, womanhood. I thought of it as an education! I was so impressed with my own forward thinking! Thought you’d be pleased, too. I never—I didn’t realize—”

I lit the kerosene lamp with shaky fingers. “What did Radha tell you?”

“Everything.” Kanta started to breathe in ragged gasps, as if the air had suddenly become too thin. “It’s terrible.”

I saw now she had been crying for some time. The skin around her eyes was swollen. Her skin was sallow. Guiding her by the shoulders, I eased her onto the charpoy and sat next to her.

Malik poured a glass of water from the mutki and handed it to Kanta. Then he went to the Primus and lit the stove for tea.

The air in the room was stale with scents from the move-in ceremony the day before, but I dared not open the windows in case my neighbors overheard us. Kanta brought with her a scent even more oppressive—fear.

“She—I—Oh, Bhagwan! Where do I begin?” She put her hand to her forehead. “Those novels of mine, the English ones she reads to me. I was thinking, ‘These will help her with English. They’ll teach her things about the larger world. And she can best those snobs at her school.’ And the films I took her to! Oh, God! I didn’t know she would confuse a story in a book or film with her own life.”

I closed my eyes. Radha’s imagination, shut tight six months ago, had been pried open. Without parents to quash her dreams of romance, her imagination had allowed her to turn fiction to fact.

Kanta was older than Radha and should have known better, but I was, after all, the one responsible for my sister. What kind of steward had I been?

Kanta was still railing. “All that talk of love and romance. Fine for English girls, but not for Indian ones.” She sounded like her saas. “I should have realized how young she is, how impressionable. She takes everything to heart, absorbs it like a sponge! And she learns so quickly—it flattered me that I was her teacher. We were having fun...”

I turned away from Kanta; I couldn’t let her see me fall apart. I looked down at the map of my life on the terrazzo as my tears blurred my vision. The pattern mutated. The shapes shifted into something I no longer recognized.

Kanta choked back another sob. “Oh, Lakshmi! I can’t believe our Radha is carrying a child! She hasn’t told me who the father is. She wants you to be there when she does.”

Radha wanted to confess in public. Like the monsoon rains, so fierce they eroded our temple friezes, my sister was about to destroy the fortress I had built. No question about it: my life, as I’d designed it, was about to change. Plans, meticulously plotted, were about to unravel. The room spun. I lost my balance, gripped the window ledge to prevent myself from falling.

Malik ran to catch me, but Kanta got there first. She eased me to the floor.

“I filled her head with bukwas! Me and my books and my films and my magazines and my ideas. My pregnancy has made me starkers! That’s the only way I can explain it. I thought it was all a good thing. And it’s Radha who will pay the price. And you, Lakshmi.”

She cried harder, and distractedly, I wondered if my neighbors would assume there had been a death in the family.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”