Arranged Marriage: Stories by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

more loudly this time. “Get in here right now.”
    I kneel and help Aunt gather up some of her things, leaving the rest behind.
    Inside, Bikram-uncle yells, “Haven’t I told you not towalk around this trashy neighborhood? Haven’t I told you it wasn’t safe? Don’t you remember what happened to my shop last year, how they smashed everything? And still you had to go out, had to give them the chance to do this to you.” He draws in a ragged breath, like a sob. “My God, look at you.”
    I try not to stare at Aunt’s mud-splotched cheek, her ruined coat, her red-rimmed, pleading glance. But I can’t drag my eyes away. Once when I was little, I’d looked down into an old well behind Grandfather’s house and seen my face, pale and distorted, reflected in the brackish water. I have that same dizzying sensation now. Is this what my life too will be like?
    “It was my fault,” I say. “Aunt didn’t want to go.” But no one hears me.
    Aunt takes a hesitant, sideways step toward Uncle. It is a small movement, something aft injured animal might make toward its keeper. “They were only children,” she says in a wondering tone.
    “Bastards,” cries Uncle, his voice choking, his accent suddenly thick and Indian. “Bloody bastards. I want to kill them, all of them.” His entire face wavers, as though it will collapse in on itself. He raises his arm.
    “No,” I shout. I run toward them. But my body moves slowly, as though underwater. Perhaps it cannot believe that he will really do it.
    When the back of his hand catches Aunt Pratima across the mouth, I flinch as if his knuckles had made that thwacking bone sound against my own flesh. My mouth fills with an ominous salt taste.
    Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land?
    I put out my hand to shield Aunt, but Uncle is quicker. He has her already tight in his grasp. I look about wildly for something—perhaps a chair to bring crashing down on his head. Then I hear him.
    “Pratima,” he cries in a broken voice, “Pratima, Pratima.” He touches her face, his fingers groping uncertainly like a blind man’s, his whole body shaking.
    “Hush, Ram,” says my aunt. “Hush.” She strokes his hair as though he were a child, and perhaps he is.
    “Pratima, how could I….”
    “Shhh, I am understanding.”
    “Something exploded in my head … it was like that time at the shop … remember … how the fire they started took everything….”
    “Don’t be thinking of it now, Ram,” says Aunt Pratima. She pulls his head down to her breast and lays her cheek on his hair. Her fingers caress the scar on his neck. Her face is calm, almost happy. She—they—have forgotten me.
    I feel like an intruder, a fool. How little I’ve understood. As I turn to tiptoe away to my room, I hear my uncle say, “I tried so hard, Pratima. I wanted to give you so many things—but even your jewelry is gone.” Grief scrapes at his voice. “This damn country, like a dain , a witch—it pretends to give and then snatches everything back.”
    And Aunt’s voice, pure and musical with the lilt of a smile in it, “O Ram, I am having all I need.”

    Now it is night but no one has thought to turn on the family-room lights. Bikram-uncle sits in front of the TV, his feet up on the rickety coffee table. He is finishing his third beer. The can gleams faintly as it catches the uneven blue flickers from the tube. I feel I should say something to him, but he is not looking at me, and I don’t know what to say. Aunt Pratima is in the kitchen preparing dinner as though this were an evening like all others. I should go and help her. But I remain in my chair in the corner of the room. I am not sure how to face her either, how to start talking about what has happened. (In my head I am trying to make sense of it still.) Am I to ignore it all (can I?)—the hate-suffused faces of the boys, the swelling spreading its dark blotch across Aunt’s jaw, the memory of Uncle’s head pressed trembling to