Sister of My Heart

“There are other reasons why I can never hate Sudha. Once I made a list of them.

Because she is the most beautiful person I know, just like the princesses in the fairy tales Pishi tells us, with her skin that’s the warm brown of almond milk. Her hair soft like monsoon clouds all the way down her back, and her eyes that are the softest of all.

Because she can put her hand on my arm when I’m ready to kick the world for its stupidity, and it’s like a drink of clean, cold water on a hot day.

Because she believes in magic, demons and gods, and falling stars to wish on, the way I never could.

Because she’s the best storyteller, better even than Pishi. She can take the told tales and make them new by putting us in them. Us, Anju and Sudha, right in there among the demon queens and fairy princes and talking beasts.

Because I called her into the world and therefore must do all I can to make sure she is happy.”

This passage illustrates the close bond between Anju and Sudha and their sense of interdependence. Simultaneously, it establishes the two girls as foils to one another, introducing in tandem the theme of The Diversity of the Female Experience. The novel is interested, in part, in the myriad ways in which it is possible to be a woman. Sudha emerges as an imaginative storyteller and a romantic. The more pragmatic, rebellious, and skeptical Anju adores Sudha precisely because of the contrast between them.

“Then I feel the hot trickle between my thighs, and I know. Will the blood be the same color as the rubies my parents longed for, and with that longing brought catastrophe to the Chatterjee family?

Ah, my sweet Anju with a world of love in your eyes, what would you say if you knew?

The thought is a wave I could drown in. I hold my breath against it as I walk to the darkening mango strips. The sun has slid down until it is impaled on the thorny fronds of the coconut trees. It is long past the time when I should have turned the mangoes over, as I promised Pishi. I bend to them and begin my task even as blood soaks my underwear, even as I know what the result of my action will be. But I don’t care. I want my touch to rot it all, to turn everything in this faithless world black with fungus.”

In her distress at Pishi’s revelations, Sudha associates the red of the rubies with the menstrual blood soaking her underwear and takes both as a sign of filth and corruption, calling to mind the misogynistic myth that if a woman having her period touches drying mango slices, they will go moldy. She sees her hereditary blood-guilt reflected in the red setting sun itself, which she imagines as impaled and bleeding.

“Books! I’ll send away for books that are hard to find in this country. Books by writers the nuns mention disapprovingly. Kate Chopin. Sylvia Plath. Books where women do all kinds of crazy, marvelous things. I want the latest novels, to give me a taste of London and New York and Amsterdam. I want books that will spirit me into the cafés and nightclubs of Paris, the plantations of Louisiana, the rain forests of the Amazon and the Australian outback. All the places […] I’ll never get to visit because the mothers won’t let me.”

For Anju, reading is a way of escaping the constraints of her own life, and female authors exemplify the intellectual freedom for which she longs. Her idealized vision of the West will be somewhat challenged by her experience as a migrant after her marriage.

“Lying in bed in the midst of my suffocating rage, I think, strangely, of Hercules. At school we have been studying the legends of Greece and Rome. Though the nuns have cautioned us about the pagan heroes and heroines, I am fascinated by them. They seem closer to me than most of the people in my life. I have felt the blue air rushing beneath Icarus’s wings, the ominous trickle of wax down his arms. I have wept with Persephone when the black vaults closed above her head, and then wept again when Ceres took her in her arms the way my mother never does with me.

Tonight I know how Hercules must have felt, trapped in the poisoned cloak sent to him by the one who, he had believed, had only his welfare in mind. My body is pierced by needles of fire, rage against my mother and my powerlessness in her hands.”

Throughout the novel, Sudha uses stories to figuratively represent and better understand her own experiences and feelings. That her references bring together the mythology of ancient Greece, as in this example, with the Hindu pantheon and traditional Eastern and Western fairytales, is indicative of the universality of storytelling—its capacity to transcend time and space. Here, she compares herself to Hercules, who self-immolated after putting on a poisonous shirt given to him by his wife Deianira. The cloak was soaked in the blood of the dying centaur Nessus, who tricked Deianira into believing his blood would guarantee her husband’s fidelity. In fact, his blood was poisoned by the arrow with which Hercules shot him, an arrow that contained the venom of the Lernean hydra. Sudha takes the shirt as a metaphor for her mother’s actions, which, although ostensibly loving and protective, are causing her terrible pain.

“Earlier tonight, when she pronounced that I must stay at home while Anju goes to college, I had an eerie sensation. I felt I was in a dark twisting tunnel that pressed in on me. It took me a moment to recognize it: the birth channel, narrow, suffocating. Only, I was receding up it, going back into the womb, where my mother would keep me, for ever and completely engulfed.”

Continuing to reflect on her resentment of her mother’s decision that she marry early, Sudha compares her sense of oppressive claustrophobia to a reverse birth: to being sucked back up the birth canal into the womb. Societal constraints have warped the mother-daughter relationship to the extent that the mother has gone from giving life to taking it away, and the womb, traditionally associated with nurture, safety, and peace, has become a dark prison. These images to some extent anticipate the novel’s later concern with sex-selective abortion.

“A bird may escape a cage built of hate, of the desire for power. But a cage built of need? Of love’s darkness?

I do not go to the cool sarai of water that waits in the hallway. I do not go to Anju, her sweet arms, the solace of our shared rage and rebellion. I walk back to my room, to the burning bedsheet that twists around me like an umbilical cord.”

Sudha continues to associate her mother’s oppressive control over her with reversed birth imagery. The twisting umbilical cord foreshadows the fate of baby Prem. The opposition between the cool water and the oppressively hot, womb-like room is a rather negative iteration of the blue/red dichotomy that recurs throughout the novel.

“Without a college education, what kind of life are you going to have? You might as well tie a bucket around your neck and jump into a well right now. You might as well put blinkers over your eyes and join the bullocks that go round and round the mustard mill. That’s all you’re going to be, a beast of burden for some man.”

Furious at Sudha for agreeing to abandon her college plans and marry early, Anju lashes out with words. In her claims, she associates being married without an education with blindness, death, and bestiality. Part of the novel’s aim in exploring the female experience includes looking at how different women may manifest their autonomy. While Anju finds her independence outside of motherhood, Sudha’s transformation will be rooted firmly in her experience of motherhood.

“Because he was the one to wake her and tell her about the magical universe of men—diamond light on sleek mango leaves, the kokils crying to their mates from the coconut trees. He rescued her from sameness and too much safety. There had been no mirrors in the palace. When she looked into his eyes, their dark center, she saw herself for the first time, tiny and doubled and beautiful. I think that’s why she loved him most. Without him she would never have known who he was.”

The fable of “The Princess in the Palace of Snakes” is emblematic of Sudha’s world vision in the first part of the novel. The princess lives in a trance-like state and remains utterly passive until the prince comes to rescue her. She only attains self-realization through her relationship with the prince: She sees and recognizes herself for the first time as she is reflected in his eyes.

“I’m not sure when Sudha started getting caught in the enchanted web of the stories she loved so much and told so well. When, in some place deep inside her impervious to logic, she had turned Ashok into the prince who has to save her from the clutches of the wicked king. Once he managed to place her on his milk-white steed, she would follow him faithfully to the ends of the earth. But until then the rules of the story didn’t permit her—and, by extension, me—to help him.”

Anju here comments more explicitly on docile passivity. Like a traditional fairytale princess, Sudha passively awaits rescue rather than seeking to take command of her own destiny. Anju recognizes this passiveness and, at some level, identifies within it the need for solidarity as a way to overcome Sudha’s challenges.

“I know I will have to pay for my wish, for that is the way of this world on the wrong side of the sky, where there is never enough happiness for all of us.”

When she sees a single falling star, Sudha superstitiously and fatalistically assumes that she must choose between wishing for herself and wishing for Anju. Happy with her choice to dedicate her wish to her cousin, Sudha is nonetheless convinced she has doomed her future relationship with Ashok. Sudha’s assessment of happiness as a finite resource, which will develop as the novel progresses, also plays into the theme of Resisting Patriarchy via Sisterhood. As the women begin to support one another, part of what they discover is the generative nature of love.

“On the breath-end of that wish, just as the star burns out, comes a startling thought. If only Anju and I, like the wives of the heroes in the old tales, could marry the same man, our Arjun, our Krishna, who would love and treasure us both, and keep us both together.”

Sudha’s wish to some extent anticipates the problematic living arrangements at the end of the novel. Krishna has eight wives, each of whom symbolically represents a different facet of the deity. Arjun is a key warrior in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. He is mentored by Krishna and has four wives, who give him four sons.

“Words have no power to comfort me. To touch me is to be contaminated. Because once upon a time a man raised an oar and brought it down on another’s head. His rage is a river that runs through my body, and its waters are my blood. That is the blessing-gift my father has sent me.”

Sudha again associates her poisoned legacy from her father with bad blood (calling to mind the red color of the ruby). Her attitude is still very fatalistic at this point in the narrative. This fatalism is interwoven with her struggle to see herself beyond the lens of patriarchy, which still consistently warps her perception of her own capacity to define her fate.

“When he describes America to me, it seems almost as amazing as the fairy kingdoms of Pishi’s tales. ‘You can be anything in America, angel.’”

Anju idealizes the United States as offering all of the freedoms of which she feels deprived in her own day-to-day life. That her expectations are unrealistic is already to some extent implied in her comparison of her future home to a “fairy kingdom” from one of Pishi’s fantastic tales.

“Impulsively I ask, ‘Singhji, do you think we are going to be happy in our husband’s houses?’ Immediately I am irritated with myself. What can I expect this old man to say except for the traditional response: I’ll pray for it.

But I am wrong. ‘You must make your own happiness, Anju-didi,’ Singhji says with a passion that takes me aback. ‘You must be wise enough to recognize it when it comes. And if it doesn’t come in spite of all your efforts, you must do something about that as well.’”

Sudha asks Singhji for his opinion about her upcoming marriage and is surprised by his answer. She expects a commonplace passive, fatalistic response: “I’ll pray for it.” That is, she expects a reply that would leave her fate in the hands of the gods. Instead, Singhji urges her to seize control of her own destiny. Sudha’s expectations of Singhji at this point of the novel are colored by her assumption that he is a poor servant and no relation of hers.

“My days have such a sameness to them, a hypnotic placidity, like a pool into which nothing ever falls, leaf or stone or human life. I float on this pool. I know I am needed; I know I am liked. And so I am not unhappy.”

Sudha drifts passively through her early married life in a state of “hypnotic placidity.” The water imagery and Sudha’s dazed, placid state recall the “palace of snakes” narrative.

“After we’ve spoken our I-love-yous and hundred-blessings-to-you-boths and hung up, I wonder in frustration if we were even speaking the same language.

‘It’s not their fault,’ says Sunil. ‘You expect too much from people. You want them to understand instantly where you’re coming from. You want them to agree with everything you say. But you’ve changed since you came here. You see the world differently now. You can’t convey that over a telephone line, not without it costing a fortune.’”

Anju feels frustrated with her telephone communications with her family. Sunil points out that her experience in America has radically removed her perspective and expectations from those of her family.

“Desperately I try to recall that there is a saner world, where women study and work and go shopping and visit the cinema with their girlfriends, where it is permissible for them to live normal lives even if they cannot be mothers. I repeat to myself the names of classmates who have become doctors and teachers and famous dancers, but they are too far away. Reality is this bloodied, weeping girl next to me.”

Sudha has been sent to the shrine of Shasti to pray for a son. She is surrounded by other childless wives and is deeply distressed by the plight of a teenage girl who has been beating her head against the concrete and is afraid that her husband’s family will kill her if she does not manage to conceive. Sudha struggles to recall the liberal world of her upbringing, where women’s identity is not reduced to their reproductive function.

“At night after dinner we sit and watch videos. My mother-in-law likes me to watch comedies, or holy stories from the Ramayana. They will have a good effect on her grandson’s personality, she says. She was not pleased the other day when Ramesh’s brothers brought a film of the Rani of Jhansi, the widow queen who led a rebellion against the British in the 1850s and died valiantly on the battlefield. Too much bloodshed, she complained. But I was fascinated. The Rani was so wondrously brave. When the priests proclaimed that as a childless widow she should devote her life to prayer, she boldly told them that her subjects were her children and she had to take care of them. She donned male garb and, a sword in each hand, led her soldiers into battle. Even when her forces were overwhelmed by the British guns, she didn’t give up. Fallen on the battlefield with a fatal wound, she shone with the satisfaction of a heroic death.”

Mrs. Sanyal continues to treat Sudha as a receptacle for the future family heir, allowing her to watch films that she believes will be of educational value to her grandson. Sudha is profoundly affected by the story of the Rani of Jhansi, one of a number of strong female political and military leaders in Indian history. The story will inspire the “Queen of Swords” narrative, which will mark Sudha’s transition from passive acceptance of the status quo to an active engagement with her own destiny.

“In the shower I scrub until the last vestige of red is washed down the drain. I am washing away unhappiness, I tell myself. I am washing away the stamp of duty. I am washing away the death sentence that was passed on my daughter. I am washing away everything the Bidhata Purush wrote, for I have had enough of living a life decreed by someone else. How easy it seems! What power we women can have if we believe in ourselves!”

Sudha showers to wash away the red sindoor from the parting of her hair, which symbolizes her married state. The red color recalls the red of the ruby and the red of the blood inheritance by which Sudha has always believed herself to be cursed. As she takes command of her destiny, she imagines herself washing away the deterministic writing of Bidhata Purush which has come, to a certain extent, to be associated with the repressive dictates of patriarchy.

“Isn’t it funny, I tell my daughter—for she and I have taken to having long conversations nowadays—how we spend so much time holding onto the old ways, not knowing how refreshing change can be? How, like a wind from the Ganga, it can sweep clean all the dust we’ve accumulated in the crannies of our mind?

She nods wisely inside me—already she is wiser than I, this child whose life was almost torn in two by the tug of war between change and the old ways. Isn’t it funny, she adds, that sometimes the thing we’ve feared most, year after year, turns out to be the best thing that could have happened to us?

[…] I had worked so hard at loving my in-laws, at being a good wife. I felt as though I had spent years pushing a rock uphill, and the moment I stopped, it rolled right back down to the bottom. But there was also a huge relief, and a small hope. I signed my name at the foot of the form with a flourish. We were starting anew, my daughter and I, and because there were no roles charted out for us by society, we could become anything we wanted.”

Sudha imagines her unborn daughter as a wise sage, advising her from her womb. She sees her daughter as straddling the difference between “change” and “the old ways.” She considers how much more relaxed the mothers are, now that they have stopped trying to hold on to the old Chatterjee house. Similarly, she feels hugely liberated now that she has stopped trying to conform to traditional ideals of wifehood. As elsewhere, Sudha represents her experience figuratively with reference to classical mythology, imagining herself as Sisyphus, condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a steep hill in Tartarus.

“More than any of us, she knows the power stories hold at their center, like a mango holds its seed. It is a power that dissipates with questioning.”

When Pishi does not insist on hearing the full story with which Sudha comforted Anju, Sudha reflects on her aunt’s understanding of storytelling. Pishi has always been the designated storyteller of the family, and she recognizes that to dissect and analyze a story is inevitably reductive.

“Why not? A future built by women out of their own wits, their own hands. A future where I lean on myself alone.”

Sudha imagines a future life of feminine self-determination, free from dependence on men. This position stands in dramatic contrast to the earlier perspective of the “palace of snakes”, where the princess can only perceive her true identity through her reflection in the prince’s loving eyes.

“Not until this morning at the airport, when I feel the mothers’ love pulling at me like a river pulls at your body just before you climb out, do I realize the dismaying finality of this moment […] What I am leaving behind—I cannot articulate what it is, but I know I will not find it, ever, in America.”

Sudha is suddenly struck by the implications of her departure from India and the mothers. The river image recalls the murder scene, which has been a constant source of shame for Sudha, but she now sees a more positive, comforting aspect of intergenerational continuity. Migration implies an uprooting from the continuum of family history and culture.