*
I have new friends now. Boys and girls to sit on the lawns with, to study into the night with, to eat all the greasy requisites of student life with, to stand outside clubs with, and to smoke cigarettes with, which feels naughty and subversive because all around us is the message that smoking will kill us. The act feels at once calming, dangerous, and sexy, so I light up and feel part of a quiet community, those of us pulling smoke into our bodies.
Yet there are moments when I feel a continent apart, when their belonging seems easy and unforced and my own is only pantomime. How casually they bring up parental divorces, molestations, and assaults as if these are badges of honor, horrors they went through and survived. When these conversations start, I want to escape to the library, the quiet stacks of books, anywhere but here. I don’t want to hear these secrets told, witness these family closets flung wide open. I pull my hair over my face because invariably I know their curiosity will turn like a searchlight my way and then there will be prodding and poking as if they are fishermen trying to hook and reel in some deep-sea fish from my memory, up through my throat out of my body. So when I feel the tide of the conversation turning toward me, I slip away to the library, to my room, anywhere that the fortress of my solitude cannot be breached.
This too is happening: sex. In huge quantities and at all times of the day and night. Undergraduates slip in and out of each other’s rooms, wander home disheveled in the early hours, dressed in last night’s short skirts and stockings, shoes in hand. My roommate comes giggling to the door with whatever specimen of beefcake she has currently won, and I gather my books and leave them to it.
I kiss a few boys and let one do some other things to me. But it’s never worth it. There is always an accompanying panic, that seething of the waterweed all along my veins, a rancor rising in my throat, and I must push the boy away, leave before he realizes I am gone, shut the door as he says, “Hey! What’s wrong?” I walk home pulling my sweatshirt hood over my face. I turn my body into a castle, inviolate. If no one gets into my body, nothing dangerous can burst out of it, either. In this way safety is won.
In my room, under the covers I push the knife tip against my pulse until I am recast in time and space, and only then can I breathe again.
*
When Dharshi calls, months later, I don’t recognize her voice until she says my name the second time. We chat of different things, but I hear a flatness in her words that wasn’t there before. I’m castigating myself for not calling earlier, for forgetting her so completely in the midst of my own life and plans. My mother had said she wasn’t doing well, had asked me to call, and I had forgotten or let myself forget. Then her voice gets steely and she says, “I need to tell you something. I’ve decided to do something.”
“Dharshi? What?”
“I’m getting married.”
I start laughing. Surely she’s joking.
“No, really. I’ve decided. It’s the best thing.”
“What? To who?”
“A guy. His name is Roshan. Amma found him. He’s nice. He’ll take care of me.”
I can feel my eyebrows rise, my mouth make that oh of absolute shock. “What? Why?”
“I didn’t get scholarship money. This is the only way. Amma says this is the only way. Thatha lost a lot of our money, you know? We’re poor now.” An accusation. My mother has told me that Aunty Mallini is floundering. The grief is too heavy; she does little but sleep and cry, and she leaves the agency entirely to Amma.
“I’m going to marry him. He’ll take care of me.”
I’m silent. Ridiculous, but what comes to my head are those Wham! lyrics we used to spend all day bending over the old tape recorder to write down: “One, two, take a look at you/Death by matrimony.”
I say, “Do you love him?”
And knowing that this is the trump card, the one thing that will shut me up, she says with a twist in her voice, “Yes. I love him.”
*
I call my mother. “Why? Why is Aunty Mallini doing this? Why would she push Dharshi like this?” Amma listens, and then she says, “A mother shouldn’t eat off her daughter’s body.” There’s silence. But there’s more she wants to say. I can feel it, heavy in the air, so I wait. She clears her throat like something painful is caught there and says, “After our parents were gone, there were only the two of us. She had to take care of me. There were relatives, but we were nobody’s children. So when Sarath came, she didn’t love him, but he fell hard for her. She was so pretty. He wanted to marry her without a dowry, and his people were well off, so she did it. To save herself and me, do you see?”
I don’t see. What does any of that have to do with Dharshi? Amma continues, “She thinks it’s Dharshi’s responsibility like it was hers. To save them both. She thinks it’s the only way.”