As Sweet as Honey

32




Soon it would be Diwali. Of course, she shouldn’t be celebrating Diwali; she was still a widow. Yet, she was also a bride, and a new mother, she wasn’t in Madhupur, and it would be her first Diwali with her new family. Simon was going to get sparklers, and she had bought tiny clay pots to fill with oil and wicks to line their terrace. She missed the children—Sanjay, Rasi, Mina—their voices, their brightness. She missed everything: little things like the clatter of the morning sweet-bun delivery, the way Grandmother lined them up for handfuls of spiced curd-rice, into which children and grown-ups alike dipped a thumb to create a well, to be filled with glorious spicy tamarind sambar. In the very same way, they’d pop a hole into a gol gappa, so that it could be filled with a thin sauce, before tossing it into their mouths.

Stop, she told herself, stop, this was dreaming and living in the past, and what good did it do her?

On Pi, Simon would … Simon would … Simon … Here her fantasy always stopped, because what would Simon do? Would he be as alien there as she felt here? And was it fair to him, he who had literally found her at the last moment, he whom she loved with both passion and devotion? And didn’t that Indian writer say no one could ever go back to his or her homeland again? That nostalgia by its very nature is imagination? In her letters from New Jersey, Mina’s mother, Jyoti, did not mention nostalgia; but then, her days were filled with science—that was how Meterling saw her, in a lab coat, peering into telescopes and test tubes, solving mysteries like Quincy, M.E. She was here, in London, with her two boys, and that was the reality.


Her two boys. Simon did seem boyish, grinning with excitement as he lay underneath her, like a kid with a Christmas present, and if truth were told, he made her feel like a girl. That sense of tingling hormones that were allowed breathing space in Western dating and teenage coupling, the frantic stolen kisses as well as the we-don’t-care-who’s-watching near-copulations she witnessed on the streets, were not easily available on Pi. When Meterling’s impulses and desires were released, it was like a wave of rediscovery. With Archer, she had been shy, curious, nearly studious as she watched him examine her body, poring over her like a patron of the arts, murmuring soft moans of appreciation. Eyeing his body had filled her with apprehension, and she was certain they wouldn’t fit, that it wouldn’t fit in it. She didn’t mind so much that what they were doing was desecrating the ancient laws that forbid premarital sex, but she minded her apprehension. She didn’t fully understand his wonder over this coupling, until he released her pleasure, leaving her both surprised and shocked. As she felt her body softening, he—intercoursed—and she had gasped at the pain while he, breathless, withdrew, but not quickly enough. They had only done it that once, that impossible one-in-a-million chance of sperm meeting egg—result: Oscar.

In London, though, desire blossomed in Meterling, quickening desire. In amazement, she found herself in a state between sleep-deprived torpor and acute sensitivity. Mostly, they lay together skin-to-skin, hardly moving, happy in the weight of one another. But other times, she hungrily sought Simon’s kisses, twining her arms around him, pulling him toward her. Weren’t new mothers supposed to transfer their desire to their infants? But Simon wasn’t the father, so maybe that need to repulse the father came from the subconscious knowledge that he was responsible for childbirth pain. There—a new psychological insight. But whom could she ask? Dr. Morgan? Pa would know, and Pa might even tell, but Pa wasn’t here.


One day, she was late returning to the flat. The sun was coming down as she strolled Oscar back home. It had been raining earlier, and the wet made the asphalt shiny. She breathed in the air, but caught nothing, no surge of freshness, no increased negative-ion activity. The store lights weren’t yet on, but in an hour, as teatime neared, they would be. She stopped in front of a store that sold beautiful cashmere sweaters, hung on steel hangers like artworks, in pale pastels and varying shades of gray. Looking up, she had seen for a moment her own face superimposed by the window’s reflection onto one of the headless mannequins wearing a wool lace miniskirt and boots that stretched over its thighs (did mannequins have thighs, or merely legs?). The breasts were bare and pointy, because either that was the fashion or the store clerk hadn’t finished dressing it and had popped out for a cigarette. The mannequin’s skin was stark white, and Meterling saw herself hovering over it like a ghost wearing its clothes. She pulled her raincoat closer to her body, wishing she’d mended the torn pocket, sewed the button. It belonged to Simon, and the lining smelled like him, which comforted her a bit.

They were in Kensington, and Pimlico wasn’t that far. Looking up, she noticed a black Mercedes pull up to the curb in front of the familiar green awnings of Harrods. The driver got out, and a woman in a burka emerged, wearing sunglasses. Why would she need sunglasses at dusk? She strode swiftly past Meterling and entered the store. On a whim, Meterling followed. She and Oscar could always take a cab home.

The woman headed for a set of elevators, quickly navigating among the crowd of people buying food for dinner. Smiling, she entered the elevator with the woman, joining a few other women. No one said a word as the lift ascended and the woman got out at the third floor: gift wares and bedding. She followed the woman, curious to see what the woman would buy. Sheets upon sheets of linen, it turned out, prettily packaged, deeply expensive, and forming thin, flat packages. Was she buying for a hotel? That would be a job done on the phone. No, it must be for her own boudoir. She must be the wife of a Saudi prince, or maybe she was an executive, a president of a company that didn’t mind women presidents. There were so many sheets. “Thank you, Ms. Mirazi,” said the clerk, handing her two dark-green bags. If she was someone so wealthy, wouldn’t she have a servant to carry her bags? And at the same moment Meterling thought this, a man stepped quietly from behind—where had he come from?—and took the bags. Her servant, or her guard, had been watching Meterling watching the mysterious woman. The pair headed back to the elevator.

Checking on Oscar, Meterling wandered a bit on this floor, until she came across tiny pottery figures of English houses. This was more like the house she had imagined, with a thatched roof. Oscar stirred.

“Do you think you’d like to live here?”

Oscar blinked at her.

“In a thatched cottage somewhere in the country, so when you grow, you can run around?”

Oscar made a spitball and drooled on his chin.

“Well, I guess you are a city boy, then,” she said.

“He should be eating sugarcane and running around barefoot,” said a voice near her ear. She flinched, but did not speak to Archer.