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A black Mercedes pulled up to the curb and the black uniformed security guard who stood beside Sheetal opened the rear door for her. The boot of the car gaped, and the guard gestured for Sheetal’s shopping bag. “Please give it here, Madame,” he said in Hindi. “I’ll load it in the boot so you have plenty of room and are comfortable.”
Sheetal shook her head. She didn’t need more room and comfort. She tightened her grip on the handle of the bag with the sari tucked inside. He would never understand how precious the contents of this bag were. It wasn’t just any sari, but a designer sari with elaborate red and gold trimmings, the Karva Chauth gift destined for Megha, to confirm her sister-in-law’s marital bliss.
If only she could hold the silk between her fingers and squeeze its promise of love and happiness into her married life so she could reunite with her son. Her heart welled in her throat. Like most other married Hindu women, she would fast from dawn until moonrise and pray for her husband’s welfare, longevity, and prosperity. Karva Chauth was intended to bring every couple together and strengthen the foundation of their marriage. It was the tradition of her ancestors.
Sheetal remained on the sidewalk and looked at the traffic flowing toward northern Raigun, the poorer part of town, where her parents once lived. That was in the past, before her father’s business succeeded, and he was able to give her away to a prestigious family.
Her husband, Rakesh, the CEO of Dhanraj & Son, was away on business, as he was most of the time. The extra work hours, late nights, and excessive travel were part of his efforts to recoup the three-hundred-and-fifty-million-rupee debt incurred by her other sister-in-law’s wedding.
Rakesh was working hard. Too hard, perhaps? Like she was on her oil paintings and on her ten-year marriage. The marriage ensured their son had a family to return to from boarding school. It gave Mama, dying of cancer, reason to endure the chemotherapy and live for another day. It validated that she had done the right thing in marrying the man Mama and Papa had chosen for her.
Was she failing Rakesh when it came to his health and wellbeing?
Sheetal ducked and slid into the car. The door slammed shut behind her. She handed the guard a hundred-rupee note through the open window.
“Thank you, Madame.” He pressed both palms together in namaste, bowing his head several times.
“It’s fine.” Was it? Rakesh was the one suffering from weight loss and fatigue while she was fine. At least, that’s what the public thought.
“Where to next?” asked the chauffeur in his crisp, white uniform.
“Diamond Pearl.” The jewelry store where the Dhanrajs had their jewelry custom-made.
The car rolled forward and snaked through trucks, black and yellow taxis, private cars, and auto rickshaws. Pedestrians rushed along the pavements as diesel fumes from trucks’ tailpipes caused them to cough and sneeze. Perhaps if they worked as hard as Papa, they too could rise from the middle class. But what if they weren’t blessed for success or had erred in some way, causing the gods to withdraw fate and good luck?
Several pedestrians crossing the road paused between the bumpers of honking traffic, momentarily trapped.
Sheetal sank against the Mercedes’ seat, took a deep breath, and exhaled. If she’d married the man she once loved, she could have been one of those trapped pedestrians. She bit her lower lip. She had been twenty-two at the time. Any sensible Indian girl would also have chosen wealth and prestige over love.
She ran her right palm across the glossy back cover of the October issue of Vogue, India, that she’d been reading on the ride to the sari boutique.
The cover article entitled “Jump-Start His Engine” was a Top 10 list of guaranteed ways to rake the honeymoon back into stale marriages. Suggestions like keeping open channels of communication, being upfront in your desire for him, telling him you love him, demanding your man’s time and attention, splurging on new lingerie, and transforming dinners into dining with a candle-lit ambience “with you as dessert” had caused Sheetal to cringe. Rakesh wined and dined clients after work. Where was the question of transforming dinners into a dining experience when they hardly ever ate together? On the few occasions when they did, mealtimes included the whole family, and he perpetually turned a deaf ear.
The family. Sheetal bit her lower lip. They were always there. Everywhere.
Indian couples rarely expressed affection for one another in public. In privacy? Sheetal released her lower lip from her teeth. She had spent thousands of rupees on imported lingerie that stuck to her like a second skin by morning.
Then the article suggested, for those who were daring enough, to not wait. “Grab him in the nude and tell him you have to have him. Now.”
That’s when Sheetal closed the magazine and left it face down on the seat. Those suggestions might work for western women who were known to be forthright and demanding. Not for Indian women who accepted their fates.
There had to be another way. She straightened her posture. A better way.
“Here we are, Madame.” The chauffer eased the Mercedes to a halt in front of a shop with golden pillars and gold and silver letters.
Sheetal left the car, entered the shop’s glass doors, and was immediately greeted by the store manager, dressed in a suit and tie. Waist-high glass cabinets displaying readymade jewelry ran the perimeter of the shop. Salesmen in lime green shirts and gray trousers, and saleswomen in lime green saris with a gray temple border were busy attending to several customers. Sheetal followed the manager to the private showroom sealed behind a wooden door on the right. Several customers, probably friends shopping together, turned to look, pointed in her direction, and whispered to one another.
Sheetal looked ahead, avoiding their gazes. Her left shoulder, covered by the heavily embroidered sari pallu, slumped beneath the burden of her status. Habit caused her to raise a hand to her left earlobe and touch the two-carat diamond solitaire earring. Diamond bangles tinkled along her wrist. More people turned to look in her direction, and Sheetal wished she had kept her hand by her side. It wasn’t the expensive pink georgette sari, the solitaires on each earlobe, the bangles on her wrist, or the ten-carat diamond solitaire on the third finger of her left hand that drew everyone’s attention. She was a renowned oil painter, but that wasn’t responsible for disturbing the harmony of the shop’s rhythm, either. The cause of the disturbance was simple. She was married to a Dhanraj, and the Dhanrajs had a way of making heads turn.
How she longed to be one of the women who stared and talked in hushed whispers. If only she could have friends to confide in so she wouldn’t have to live in a mansion of secrets. She could have lived her dream if she’d married the other man. But she didn’t. That decision was in the past. Over.
Sheetal settled onto a plush swivel chair at a round glass table in the center of the brightly lit private showroom and turned to the manager. “Please show me the latest full sets in precious stones and diamonds.”
Following the manager’s instructions, several salesmen and women hurried away to pull from the vault the latest in designer collections. Rings, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings containing diamonds set in gold cascaded before her. Fiery rubies, blue sapphires, and green emeralds sparkled across beds of plush black velvet, reminding Sheetal of oceans and lands her husband flew across countless times in search of the next business opportunity.
The manager unfolded a dark blue velvet cloth. A necklace with pink diamonds, tiny rubies, and white gold trim glittered in the yellow lights. “This one arrived yesterday.”
Sheetal’s breath caught. “How much is it?”
“Three crores for the necklace.”
Thirty million rupees. The price of Rakesh’s imported Lamborghini. Sheetal gulped. She couldn’t spend that much, even though the necklace matched perfectly the Karva Chauth gift for her sister-in-law.
“The earrings and bracelet are—”
“Just as beautiful, I’m sure,” Sheetal cut him short. “But it’s for a friend,” she lied. “Do you have anything less formal?” He was bound to understand that she meant something less expensive. What he probably wouldn’t understand was why a Dhanraj wanted something less expensive. He didn’t need to understand. The debt was her business.
A good wife hid family secrets and lived within her husband’s means—even if the husband put the family in debt. Like every good Indian woman from a good Indian family, her status at her in-laws’, her position in society, and her worth were measured by the strength of her marriage. Sheetal did everything possible to make her marriage appear intact.
The manager showed her a pendant necklace of mini pearls, rubies, and diamonds, and Sheetal laced her fingers through the strings of pearls that supported the pendant. The pearls were white, like the marble interior of the Dhanraj mansion. The mini palace offered seventy-thousand square feet of living space, but lately Sheetal had been suffocating beneath its sixty feet tall ceilings. She ran a thumb over a pearl. Cold. Like the heart of her marriage. “How much is it?”
“Four lakhs for the pendant.”
Four hundred thousand. Sheetal sat up. The price of a new Maruti Zen. That was better.
“The pearls are....”
Didn’t an oyster die when a pearl was extracted from its womb? What if she, like the oyster, had died eight years ago when her sari caught on fire? A shudder rippled up her spine. Like her husband, her son would have grown up without a real mother, trapped under the cruel dictatorship of her stepmother-in-law.
She was lucky to be alive. Her marriage? Not so lucky.
She released the pendant and watched it fall onto the bed of plush black. She couldn’t let her marriage collapse and risk her son’s future.
A good Indian wife didn’t give up. She forgave all sins, including those of her husband. Especially those of her husband, because that’s what kept the marriage intact. A good Indian wife was loving and caring. If she had needs and desires her husband couldn’t fulfill, she forgave him and filled her life with all that he could give. Even if he wanted little to do with her.
“This,” the manager held up a necklace, “is the latest in Jaipur Kundan work. Complete with earrings, rings, bangles....”
Sheetal took the inch-wide necklace—constructed in segments connected by tiny clasps. It, too, would match the sari she had chosen for Megha. She pulled opposite ends of the gold band to test the minute joints to see if they’d come apart. They didn’t. The necklace was sturdy. It would endure. It would stand the test of time. Rubies. Sapphires. Emeralds. Didn’t they weather the wrath of wind, water, earth, and fire to sparkle and shine? Her marriage would, too. It had to.
Sheetal ran the index finger of her right hand over a single diamond dangling from the necklace’s center. It slept in a bezel setting, surrounded by an ocean of twenty-two karat gold and held in position by four prongs.
It was trapped.
She was trapped.