Page 61 of The Henna Artist

She took flight as swiftly as a hummingbird. As she ran past me, her chiffon skirt brushed the hair on my arm. I tried to grab her, but I felt as if I were moving through water, and I only managed to rip the delicate fabric off her dress. I heard the slap of her bare feet in the courtyard and then she was gone.

I watched the flicker of blue on the Primus stove, heard the water boiling. I wouldn’t need it now. I turned the burner off.

I crossed the room and fell onto thecharpoy. It must have been after three o’clock in the morning.

This was a day that should have ended in celebration, full of hope for the future. Instead, I felt a void as wide and as deep as the river Ganga.

Without my parents to witness the long road I had traveled to get here, the struggle to build my house seemed pointless. In their place, I’d been sent Radha to look after, and I’d ruined her future, as well.

Where would she go at this time of night? Not to her lover surely? Who was he? If not the milkman, Mr. Iyengar or Mr. Pandey, who?

The teachers at the Maharani School were women. It couldn’t have been the toothless old gateman? Impossible!

With a start, I thought:Samir?He had admired her beauty. But...no. Radha didn’t fit his pattern; she wasn’t a widow, and she was far too young, wasn’t she?

Wherever Radha was going, she would have to walk. Everyone, including thetonga-wallasand the rickshaw-wallas, was in bed. Radha had no money to take a train or even a bus. Would she sleep in the street as she and Hari had done when they first came to Jaipur? She couldn’t be going to Hari, surely?

Kanta would know. I should phone her. But how? At my lodgings I had used Mrs. Iyengar’s telephone with her permission, but I couldn’t afford a phone line here. The post office, where I sometimes paid a princely sum to use the phone, was closed.

If Radha didn’t return by morning, I would send Malik to Kanta’s with a note. I sighed. Another embarrassment. Girls from good families didn’t run away from home. Which is probably what the gossip-eaters had said about me thirteen years ago.

The next morning, there was still no sign of Radha. I hadn’t slept all night. I kept picturing her out in the streets, alone. I saw myself at Radha’s age, too shy to look at boys or men, much less talk to them. Maa had made sure of it:Men will eat even unripe fruit if it’s placed in front of them.When had my sister stopped heeding such warnings? Or had Maa been too dispirited by my desertion to teach Radha the same things she taught me? She might have felt that since her advice hadn’t kept me dutiful, it wouldn’t work on my sister, either.

I tried to imagine a past where I stayed with Hari, allowed myself to have children, watched Radha grow up with them. Would it really have been so bad? Radha would have been safe. She wouldn’t have ended up in this unfamiliar city, lecherous men at every corner.

When Malik showed up at dawn to work, I sent him immediately to Kanta’s. I kept myself busy, packing the tiffins we’d need for the day. In less than an hour, I heard a car outside. I ran to the window. A large gray sedan had stopped in front of my house. Baju was at the wheel. He got out and opened the back door. Malik stepped out and turned to help Kanta out of the car.

Within seconds, I was out my door and through my gate. When she saw me, Kanta cried, “Lakshmi!” Her face was ashen.

My heart hammered in my chest.Oh, Bhagwan, let Radha be safe! Don’t let anything happen to her!

“She’s at my house. She’s fine. But I’m the worst kind of auntie! How could I not have known or at least—”

As soon as I heard her sayfine, my body relaxed. Radha was all right.

Kanta was speaking loudly enough to draw the attention of my neighbor, who had come out of her house and was pretending to water a scrawny lemon sapling in her yard.

“Kanta!” I said sharply. “Come inside for tea.”

Chastened, Kanta shut her mouth and allowed Malik and me to usher her inside. Baju returned to the car.

No sooner had I closed the door behind us than Kanta started to wail, her arms hugging her belly. “If I’d only known what it was doing to her! But I thought exposing her to Western ways would prepare her better—you know, for modern life, womanhood. I thought of it as an education! I was so impressed with my own forward thinking! Thought you’d be pleased, too. I never—I didn’t realize—”

I lit the kerosene lamp with shaky fingers. “What did Radha tell you?”

“Everything.” Kanta started to breathe in ragged gasps, as if the air had suddenly become too thin. “It’s terrible.”

I saw now she had been crying for some time. The skin around her eyes was swollen. Her skin was sallow. Guiding her by the shoulders, I eased her onto thecharpoyand sat next to her.

Malik poured a glass of water from themutkiand handed it to Kanta. Then he went to the Primus and lit the stove for tea.

The air in the room was stale with scents from the move-in ceremony the day before, but I dared not open the windows in case my neighbors overheard us. Kanta brought with her a scent even more oppressive—fear.

“She—I—Oh, Bhagwan! Where do I begin?” She put her hand to her forehead. “Those novels of mine, the English ones she reads to me. I was thinking, ‘These will help her with English. They’ll teach her things about the larger world. And she can best those snobs at her school.’ And the films I took her to! Oh, God! I didn’t know she would confuse a story in a book or film with her own life.”

I closed my eyes. Radha’s imagination, shut tight six months ago, had been pried open. Without parents to quash her dreams of romance, her imagination had allowed her to turn fiction to fact.

Kanta was older than Radha and should have known better, but I was, after all, the one responsible for my sister. What kind of steward had I been?

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