RD: Anyway, your tactic worked. Congratulations.
GS: Worked? For about five minutes. We defused one crisis, but we couldn’t prevent the riot itself. Mobs were soon running rampant through the town, especially the Muslim quarter. Save your congratulations. I could use another drink.
~ ~ ~
from Lakshman’s journal
July 16, 1989
I look into her eyes, into those eyes so impossibly blue, eyes of a color I have never looked into before, and I know she cannot understand.
How could I, so well-read, so overeducated, so comfortable with her Western culture, have had an arranged marriage? We talk of Updike and Bellow and the Time magazine bestseller list, I play her my tapes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and the Grateful Dead, she speaks of “Death of a Salesman” and I counter with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and it is as if we so comfortably inhabit the same world. But even as I hold her white hand in my own dark one, I know that for her these cultural references go together with other things, with Saturday dates in oversized Chevrolets and dressing up for the prom, with love and romance and sex before marriage. Not with the way I got married: parents contacting parents through intrusive intermediaries, a brief visit to the others’ home for an elaborate tea, a glimpse of an overdressed girl and a conversation so stilted and artificial it could not possibly be the basis of a lifetime commitment, let alone one consecrated by matched horoscopes and gold jewelry and the gift of a house in Madras by her grateful father, proud to have an IAS officer for a son-in-law.
“But how could you?” Priscilla asks inevitably, when, in response to her questions, I tell her the story of my marriage to Geetha. We are in our favorite spot, the sunset room she calls it, at the top of the Kotli, and she is lying on me, the softness of her breasts pressed into my body, her face resting on my shoulder. We have just made love, and I feel she is entitled to anything, even an answer.
“It’s just the way it’s done,” I reply. “It is the way it’s always been done. It’s how my parents were married.”
“But you’re different,” she exclaims, half thumping me on the chest with her fists in mock exasperation. “You’ve been educated differently. You’re so — so Western.”
I imprison her fists in my hands, and it is as if I am praying, with her my votive offering. “I’m Indian,” I say simply. “I enjoy the Beatles and Bharata Natyam. I act in Oscar Wilde plays and I eat with my fingers. I read Marx, and I let my parents arrange my marriage.”
She raises herself a little to punctuate her reaction. “But didn’t you care at all? After all, this was the person you were going to spend the rest of your life with.”
I pull her down again, because I want to feel her body against mine, and because I don’t want to look into her eyes, not at this point. “I didn’t think of marriage that way,” I say quietly. “I thought of it as an extension of my obligations to my parents, part of the duties of a good son. You in America think of marriage as two people loving each other and wanting to be together. We in India see marriage as an arrangement between families, a means of perpetuating the social order.”
“But don’t Indian men and women love one another?” Her voice is muffled against my chest; her long slender finger idly traces a pattern on my rib cage.
“Of course we do,” I reply, “but love is supposed to come after marriage. How can you love someone until you know them, and how can you know them properly until after you’re married to them?”
She is silent now, but her fingernail moves on, to my side.
“That tickles,” I say.
“Shh,” she replies. “I’m writing something.” And her finger continues its elaborate curls and loops, stopping with a circled flourish. “Tell me what I wrote,” she says.
“I don’t know,” I respond. “I wasn’t aware you were writing till just now. The last letter was an O.”
She giggles. “It was a period, silly,” she says. “I’ll write it again.
Pay attention now.”
She props herself up on me, and I am dazzled by the gold of the sunlight in her hair. Her breasts are round and milky, their small nipples pinkly aureoled. It is difficult to concentrate on the letters she is now tracing across my trunk. But she is determined to make it easy for me, and her finger moves in exaggerated strokes, pausing after each letter to test my comprehension.
“I,” I say, and she nods delightedly. “L. O. U — no, V F? F?” She shakes her head, underscoring the third spoke of the E across my belly. “E. I love — V again. What’s this? I love Victor? Who’s Victor?” But I am laughing too much, and she tickles me mercilessly, so I am obliged to concede. “Y. Y. I get it.” Her exquisite finger draws a parabola that embraces my flabby belly, the hairs on my chest. “O.” And then she traces it again, beginning at my right shoulder blade, her finger gliding silken on my skin, rising to my left shoulder, failing only to complete the circle at the top. “U.”
“That’s right,” she says, and she is suddenly very serious, looking at me with that earnestness that struck me from the first as the hallmark of the expression with which she faced the world.
“I love you,” I conclude, with a smile.
“I thought you’d never say it,” she responds, but she is no longer looking so earnest. I bring her face down upon mine and kiss her so deeply that we are one body, one being, one breath.
“Wait — I have a message too,” I say at last. I roll her over on the mat so that she is on her back. The light illuminates her still-startling paleness. As I loom over her she stretches her arms, her fingers entwining behind my neck. “But I’m not going to use my finger.”
I bend and kiss each of her nipples. Then, slowly, gently, savoring each stroke, I trace the lines of my love with my tongue across the smooth velvet softness of her body. I cross the top and the bottom of my I, which confuses her at first, so I do it again, until she giggles with delight. My L begins with her right breast and ends at the bone above her left hip; my O takes in both nipples, now taut and redly rising; my V begins where my L had, descends till I have my nose buried in the soft blond down of her womanhood, then rises again, as she sighs, to end at her left breast; my E curves uninterruptedly like a Greek letter, my tongue a lambent caress, the middle prong of the letter quivering in her navel. By the time I am spelling out Y, O, U, she is moaning gently, her eyes closed, her legs parted beneath me, her breath shorter, but I am relentless, adding a T, its lower point plunging like a shaft into her moistness, and I have to do it again, because she is not expecting another word, and then she cries, “T,” with a purr of pleasure rarely associated with the enunciation of the alphabet, and I rush through the two Os that follow, because my need is urgent too, and we spell it out in unison, “I love you too,” our voices melding huskily with our bodies as I thrust myself into her.
And as I enter her I forget the roughness of the mat on the stone ledge in the alcove, as we move to our own rhythm I forget my wife, my work, my world, as her pelvis rises to meet mine I forget myself, and as she gasps in climax I burst into her like a flood, a flood of forgetting.