As Sweet as Honey

24




We played with Scrap outside, went for pistachio ice cream and saw movies with Nalani. We had had weeks of mild weather. Meterling looked very sad to us, Grandmother worried, and Auntie Pa was exasperated with us for getting underfoot.

Uncle Thakur intervened.

“What does it matter what people think, or even what the Vedas say? We live in modern times.”

Maybe he could have convinced her, but Meterling herself thought it was wise to end things with Simon. It would be too much for Grandmother to bear. Simon argued with her, but to no avail. He believed, like we all did, that Grandmother would come around.

“When does love just turn to possession, Simon? We want to be together, but is it just the want we want?”

“Logic in love, Meti?”

“There has to be logic in some things. I don’t mind if we appear monstrous or grotesquely comic to others, but I don’t want Grandmother to crumple inside. She’s been through too much suffering and loss.”

“So have you. Don’t you feel you deserve happiness?”

“Maybe it’s too ingrained in me, the way my ancestors thought.”

“But with Archer?”

“You sound like a boy, now. I’m about to be a mother. There’s Oscar to think about.”

“He will need a father.”

“Imagine him at school, getting teased. His mother marries his father’s cousin, like … almost like Hamlet.”

“I don’t understand this.”

“I can’t, Simon, I mustn’t marry you.”

She was crying now.


Rasi and I discussed her decision with frustration. Although we were banned from seeing it, even if it was an old film, we knew that in Silsila Amitabh Bachchan marries Jaya Bhaduri (who is his real wife, anyway) because her fiancé dies in a plane crash. She is carrying the fiancé’s baby, and asks Amitabh to marry her, even though, unbeknownst to her, he loves Rekha (who in real life was his mistress, according to the gossip magazines we weren’t allowed to read).

“But by marrying Jaya Bhaduri, he makes a big mistake, ruining their lives, and the baby dies anyway. Then after he runs away with Rekha, Jaya Bhaduri becomes pregnant with his kid.”

“How is that possible, if he doesn’t love her? Did she have an affair, too, out of revenge?”

“I don’t know. I think husbands can have sex with their wives even if they love someone else. Anyway, he’s her husband; he can do what he wants. That’s the rule.”

“It’s a stupid rule.”

“I know. And poor Rekha, she doesn’t love her husband, either.”

“Rekha is married in the film?”

“Of course. How could she run off to Paris with Amitabh if she weren’t?”

“Do you think Simon has a secret love in England?”

“Maybe that’s what Grandmother is afraid of. After all, she saw Silsila, and Kabhi Kabhie, in which, you know—”

“I don’t know—you give away all the stories!”

“It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy them anyway.”

“What happens in Kabhi Kabhie?”

“Well, there is a girl whose mother also had a fiancé who she isn’t married to—”

“Enough,” I said, covering my ears with my hands.

“Anyway, it’s not like we’ll be allowed to go see these movies anyway.”

“I want to see Cinderella.”

“You know what happens to the mother there? She—”

“Rasi!”


But what if Simon did have a secret love in London? Someone who looked like Sally Potter, one of the English college students who lived in town to study at the ashram. When she first arrived, she wore vintage go-go boots and a short skirt and a see-through top. Now she wears brightly colored kurtas and long skirts, her hair scraggly and short. I think she looked better when she first arrived, so exotic and foreign, with long, straight brown hair that was probably ironed, Mary Angel told me, who’d heard it from her mother. Ironed or not, it fell like silk.

What would Simon’s secret girlfriend’s name be? Something English, like Lizzy or Pats? We had Pinkys and Dimples.

“Maybe her name is complicated, like Constance Adelaide Adele.”

“Do you thinks he loves her?”

“He might have gotten her pregnant, just like Uncle Archer got Auntie pregnant. Maybe she is really poor—or maybe, he’s already married to her!”

“He can’t have two wives!”

“Of course he can. Or maybe he really loves Aunt Meterling, but his other wife won’t let him get divorced, and maybe they already have kids, but there’s nothing to feed them, because the cupboard is always bare—like Mother Hubbard!—and maybe she has to work in a factory, and her chief officer is really mean, and threatens to take away their home, only Simon-Archer refuses to listen, because—because he wants to marry Aunt Meterling for her money!”

“No! She doesn’t have money.”

“She has three fields and a house. That’s more than Adelaide and her children have.”

“But he wouldn’t just leave her like that.”

“Maybe she threatens to kill herself if Simon doesn’t leave Aunt Meterling.”

“She wouldn’t know about Auntie.”

“Well, maybe she threatens to kill herself if Simon-Archer doesn’t return to England and make it right—or maybe, she will go to the police!”

“Why would she go to the police?”

“Maybe Uncle Simon poisoned Uncle Archer!”

“He died of an aneurysm. And anyway, none of this is true. Uncle Simon loves Aunt Meterling, and there is no secret love in England.”

“Probably. Look, there’s Sanjay—I think he has my transistor again.”