The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

before.” For a moment her voice sparks with an old anger. Then her shoulders slump under their own weight, as they must have at that first encounter. “It was too late to cancel the wedding. All the invitations sent, already out-of-town relatives arriving, even a news announcement put in the paper. Ah, how much money my poor father had spent because I was his oldest. And if I said no, my sisters would get a bad name too. Everyone would say, O those headstrong Chowdhary girls, better not to arrange a match with that family.
    So I married him. But inside I was furious. Inside I was calling him all kinds of insults—liar cheater son-of-a-pig. That first night lying in bed I wouldn’t talk to him. When he said sweet words, I turned my face. He tried to put his arm around me; I pushed it away.”
    She sighs.
    I sigh too, feeling for a moment pity for Ahuja, balding and potbellied and knowing it, approching with guilt this girl tender as green bamboo and yet at her core a hardness. Ahuja wanting so badly (and do we all not want it too) for love to happen.
    “One night, two nights,” says Ahuja’s wife, “he is patient. Then he too gets angry.”
    I think how it must have been. Maybe his friends were joking and talking, like men do. “
Arre yaar
, tell us, is it sweet as jaggery.” Or, “Look look, dark circles under Ahuja
bhai’s
eyes, his wife must keep him hard at work all night.”
    “And next time I push him away he grabs me and …”
    She falls silent. Perhaps it is the embarrassment, telling a stranger—for after all I am no more—what good wives should never. Perhaps it is surprise that she has dared so far.
    O almost Lalita whose mouth turmeric is beginning toopen like a morning flower, how can I tell you there is no shame in speaking out. How can I say I admire.
    Inside her head the images, tumbling hot and sere like clothes left too long in a dryer. A hard male elbow holding her down on the mattress, a knee pushing her thighs apart. And when she tries to claw, to bite (soundlessly, for no one outside the bedroom must know this
sharam)
, a slap to the head. Not hard, but the shock of it makes her go limp so he can do what he wants. The worst are the kisses after it is over, kisses that leave their wetness on her mouth, and his slaked repentant voice in her ear, lingering.
    Pyari, meri jaan
, my sweet love queen. Over and over and over. Every night until he leaves for America.
    “I thought of running away, but where could I go? I knew what happened to girls that left home. They ended up on the streets, or as kept women for men far worse than him. At least with him I had honor”—her lips twist a little at the word—“because I was a wife.”
    A question bursts from me, but I know its foolishness even before I have finished forming the words.
    “Couldn’t you tell someone, your mother maybe. Couldn’t you ask them not to send you here to him.”
    And now she bows her head, Ahuja’s wife who was earlier Chowdhary’s daughter, and her tears fall into the glass of tea, turning it salt. Until I must reach across the forbidden distance to wipe them away. Chowdhary’s daughter whose parents had brought her up in love and strictness the best they knew, to fit into her destiny, which was marriage. Who sensed her sorrow but were afraid to ask Daughter what is wrong, because whatwould they do if she answered. And she seeing that fear kept her silence kept her tears, for she loved them too, and hadn’t they done the most they could for her already.
    Silence and tears, silence and tears, all the way to America. Bloated sack of pain swelling inside her throat until at last today turmeric untied the knot and let it out.

     
    An hour later, and Ahuja’s wife is still talking, the words spilling as over the broken lip of a dam.
    “I knew better, but still I hoped as women do. For what else is there for us? Here in America maybe we could start again, away from those eyes, those mouths always telling us how a