They decided that they couldn’t explore their lives outside of the college without each other, a wedding of friendship. They got married in her village. Her parents watched, still and wordless, but they prepared what was, for them, a sumptuous feast of paneer and roti. Only the four of them were there to eat it. (Although she was not the child of a diplomat, he was, and his parents were in China.) They both got better jobs teaching at Allahabad University, and they lived in an apartment that was hardly bigger than Jaideep’s first office had been.
Toward the end of Parvati’s dissertation—she was such a fast study that she ended up finishing hers a month before Jaideep finished his—she told him how she had coveted Prabha’s curves while still finding Prabha’s personality distasteful. Meanwhile, she expected Jaideep to reveal his own desire for men, but he said nothing. Instead, he taught her the word meaning “lesbian.” Still, she suspected that there were students of his—eager, expectant—with whom he had occasional dalliances. She did not have a problem with this. Her problem was fulfilling her own desire.
When they eventually had sex, hoping for a child, there was something endearing in having his hair hang into her face like an air-swayed tree. When she became pregnant, she felt her body become something out of the fairy tales that she had studied. Her stomach grew away from her as if striving for a journey. She soldiered into the changes, glad that her body was finally accomplishing something. “Dreams,” or “nightmares,” would not have been accurate to describe the episodes she had at night. She thought of them as “winds”: a wind of the child emerging as a tiger; a wind of its legs pedaling the air; a wind of leaving it in the field behind her parents’ house; a wind of the baby looking exactly like her, a grown woman, so she could study her body’s angles. She had grown up touching herself and not knowing what it meant, but now she knew what it meant: she loved her body. This was a solution. She didn’t need to look outside of herself for ways to fulfill her desire. This baby, what it was doing to her body, was an answer.
She had known a girl named Swati at school who had been part of the teasing throng, so Parvati named her daughter Swati because she wanted to transform the story: she would raise a girl who would not stand aside as others attacked.
She was thrilled when Swati emerged—not a tiger, nor a foundling, nor a mirror of Parvati but a bustling, happy baby.
Swati would not be normal because both of her parents were abnormal. Parvati became obsessed by this; the ecstasy of her pregnancy had given way to the fever of motherhood. She could not situate herself in the fairy tale now: was she the kind mother who saw the kids off to the forest path or the witch who trapped them on it? Within the next year or two, before Harit was born, she realized that not only would she quit her teaching but that she would erase all memory of it. She was terrified that if Swati read her academic writings about fairy tales, Swati would be daunted and fail to cultivate her own personality. Surprisingly, Jaideep did not discourage this. He welcomed it, supporting Parvati and releasing her from her academic studies as easily as he had once engaged her in debate.
As Swati grew, Parvati feared once again that something horrible would befall her daughter. She kept these thoughts private, sewing her terror inside herself. Every crawl of Swati’s, every amble, every cheery dance and discovery was an opportunity for Parvati to envision horrible things—a broken arm, a severed foot, a sickeningly thrilling moment in which Swati was consumed in flames until she was nothing but a smoking heap of cooling cinders. Parvati could not share such things with Jaideep, and something between them began to harden. But no matter. Once Harit arrived, she managed to hide her frenzy; in its place was a smooth, even hardness that she was convinced would make her a better parent. Each night, instead of coddling her children, she would lie straight in her bed, which sat next to Jaideep’s, and think of how dearly she loved Swati. Harit she loved, but it was her first child, whom she saw as the continuation of her willful youth, that she saw as the effort of her sacrifice. She had vanished her earlier life so that Swati could thrive.
Swati would not know about the small village and the mountains and the field, its rolling sameness, and the snooty professor and the quick leap that Parvati had taken to the higher edges of study, the man with the ponytail and his commanding sensuality. She would not know about what her mother had done to make her life richer, and this would increase Swati’s sense of isolation as she grew up.
It was not until Swati was gone that Parvati realized her folly: in trying to allow her daughter the space to become extraordinary, she had given her an entirely ordinary mother. She could not have expected that she would be the one to remain. Her parents had named her after change, but she could not have expected that cruelest of all changes, death.
Now she had Harit. Harit, who had always been quiet, who, if he was curious about the world, never told her as much. If she had sewn her grief into herself before, it now grew and filled her up, and she found it impossible to pull herself up and speak to him; a paralysis of sorts had set in. Harit, dear Harit, whom she had named after the color green because that is what she remembered of her field. She heard him coming home late, stumbling, the snacks she could hear him making—flour dumped into a pan of oil, wrappers split open to spill out a clatter of candies or chips. She suspected that he had picked up something of his father, a bend in the wrist and a sway to his walk, and when he first began that startling game of dressing up for her, she could not muster the strength to speak to him, playing along to satisfy the urges that he clearly needed to engage. If he would only come to her with a direct explanation of his feelings, she could explain herself, tell him the many things that she had withheld from him and Swati and even Jaideep, tell him that she had visited the doctor, with Gital, and found that cataracts were not that detrimental and could be treated, that “macular degeneration” was the ailment to truly fear—that she could still see relatively well. But unless he came to her as himself instead of in a disguise, she could not make the effort to speak with him. Her grief needed an equal force to shock it out of its cage.
Meanwhile, Gital had insinuated herself into their home, and Parvati was well aware that Gital had become obsessed with her. One quiet night, Gital lowered herself before Parvati’s chair and kissed her cheeks, then her mouth, and a few days later, Parvati lay with her on the couch, Gital touching Parvati’s lips with her own soft, lightly wrinkled lips. Gital twisted herself along Parvati’s length until she gave a tough but meaningful cry. Parvati then did the same with Gital, though no cry escaped her. No cry would escape her. She had given herself up to create something extraordinary, and then that extraordinary thing had died, and she could not muster up more strength after having mourned so thoroughly.
So, she waited.