She knows them now with a fierce intimacy denied even to her sisters: knows not only their names, which fall on her ear with exotic cadences (Aishwarya, Priyanka, Heidi, Gisele,), but their supple, nubile bodies; she knows their every curve and contour, the perfect indentations of their navels, the swell of their huge and honeyed breasts, the planes of their narrow and muscular thighs.   Beautiful, she thinks analytically.  She knows she is supposed to think them beautiful, though in many ways they repel and dismay her.  They are hyper-feminine yettroublingly masculine, and she cannot quite fathom their curiously androgynous eroticism.  She gazes at them for long stretches, trying to winkle out the secrets of their powerful allure.

The magazines are arranged in a vivid, glossy pile on the sleek kidney-shaped glass table at the center of their newly redecorated living room.  Vijay brings them each time he returns from one of his trips abroad.  Sometimes they are in foreign languages, French or Spanish, and these are even more sensual than the American ones, which she likes best.  They have encouraging titles — Shape, Glamour — and they seem to speak directly to her: “Butt-tastic: Get a sexy butt now!” “Beat that belly bloat!” they exhort her, and she yearns to rise to the challenge.

In her village she had been considered pretty, and she knows now how pathetic that appraisal had been.  She realizes, too, that her own vanity was foolish, predicated as it was on the conceits of a fair complexion and a yard of thick black hair.  The magazines have revealed to her that tanned skin — the color of a perfectly toasted cashew nut — and artfully cut and tousled hair are the true marks of cosmopolitan beauty.  She burns as she thinks of her own cloddish delusions.  Burns, too, as she thinks of the way Vijay looks at her, his cold expression, his indifferent gazeflicking across her body and then away.  If she were one of them, she thinks, he would be aroused, excited; but she is, emphatically, not.  The pale folds of her stomach spill over the waist of her sari, her arms jiggle slightly when she moves, her lips are thin and curving.  When she tries to emulate a bee-stung pout in the mirror, she looks so ridiculous that it makes her laugh and then, unexpectedly, sob.

“Maybe I will join a gym,” she says tentatively when her friend Arya drops in for tea.  “I saw a banner somewhere, what do they call it, Jazzercise ... I could try that.”

“Goodness,Sita,” Arya says with desultory surprise, “why would you do such a thing?”

She flushes and answers defensively, “For exercise.  It is good for you.”

“Oh, I suppose so,” Arya agrees.  “But it’s a lot of work, too.  I don’t really see the point.  My grandmother lived to be ninety-three and she never exercised at all.”  Arya reaches for a samosa and bites into the potato-filled pastry.  Oil glistens on her lips and she licks a stray crumb off the corner of her mouth, delicately, like a cat.

“Times have changed,” Sita says weakly.  Privately, she is terrified of the glossy new recreation centers that have sprung up in Bangalore, with their mirrored windows and gleaming architectural lines.  She does not know if she would ever have the courage to set foot in one.  She has only glimpsed them in passing, but she knows the sorts of people who go to such places — people who already know how to mimic the magazine models, people with chic coifs and polished accents.  She would be a pariah there.  They might even chase her out for spoiling the look of the place.  She can imagine the doorman sending her to the servants’ entrance or shooing her off, mistaking her for a cleaning lady or a beggar.

“Or, I think there are DVDs,” she continues.  “Or — I could learn to swim.”

“You? Swim?”  Arya chuckles and pats her arm.  “And what would you wear to go swimming, Sita, dear?  A Spandex sari?”  Seeing Sita’s dismayed face, she softens.  “Why not start with something simple, like a walk in the park?  Walking is good exercise.”

Yes, Sita thinks, she could manage that.  Perhaps in the evenings, when it isn’t so hot outside.  She’ll get the driver to take her to Cubbon Park and walk about watching the picnicking families and the old geezers out for their constitutionals.  That could be fun, if she could find a way to slip away.  Would it give her the muscular abdomen and hollow cheekbones of the models?  She wavers, then thinks resolutely: It would be a step in the right direction, anyway.

The magazines are full of ideas.  They promote step-by-step workouts that to Sita look like the contortions of the fakirs she used to watch at village fairs.  She turns the magazines this way and that, to try to figure out how to follow the instructions.  On her first attempt to execute a back lunge with bicep curl, she’dtumbled over, knocking down an end-table and sending a vase full of flowers crashing to the floor.  The maid had rushed in, exclaiming.  Sita was glad she hadn’t witnessed the ignominy of her exercise attempt.  Walking, she thinks.  Walking, I can handle.

“So clumsy,” her mother-in-law had said, watching the maid gather the shards of broken vase and squat to mop up the spilled water.  “Breaking everything in the house.  That was one of Vijay’s favorites. From Prague.”

“It was an accident,” Sita had answered humbly, wilting under her mother-in-law’s basilisk stare.  But she knows Mamee is right: she is graceless, clumsy, unsophisticated, unlike Heidi and Gisele and Adriana.  If she could become more like them, her world would be a happier place.

Mamee has come to live with her in Bangalore ostensibly to help out because Vijay is abroad on business so often.  “It’s a good thing I am here to manage this household,” she declares often.  “I don’t know what you’re doing half the time, Sita, wandering about with your head in the clouds.”  She has brought servants with her: a cook and a maid, who work to her exacting specifications.  She has taken over the management of laundry and cleaning; she’s moved furniture and rearranged the art on the walls: she favors large paintings of rural landscapes, featuring stiff-legged deer and gaudy sunsets.  Sita doesn’t really care, though: the apartment doesn’tfeel like her home, which may be why she bumps into furniture and stumbles into doors.  Things aren’t where she expects them to be.

Or perhaps she isn’t where she is supposed to be. Deep down, she knows this to be closer to the truth.  She is grossly out of place in this sleek, shining, contemporary penthouse, with its plate-glass windows and panoramic view of the mushrooming cityscape.  People, she thinks fiercely, were not meant to live up in the sky.  People were meant to be on the ground, in small thatched huts, where the smells and sounds of the earth waft into their ears and nostrils, and the ground is firm beneath their feet.  She recalls with a stab of longing the feeling of grass between her bare toes.

She summons the driver in the late afternoon, while her mother-in-law is napping, and tells him she wants to be taken to Cubbon Park that evening.  She knows it will be difficult to slip away, but she yearns, too, to be out of her hermetically sealed existence, to feel the hot breeze on her face and breathe in the scents of the evening, frangipani and smoke, spices from the street vendors’ pans.  And then there is the promise of walking: of working off the flab and softness of her body, of becoming thin and gorgeous, so that Vijay, on his return, will look at her with astonishment and then desire.  Walking promises all of these things: anticipation flickers within her, razor-edged.

She slips away while her mother-in-law is busy with the cook and the maid.  She can hear Mamee shrilly berating them for various oversights during the day, running through a long list of instructions for the evening and the next day; she’sfully occupied and doesn’t notice when Sita slides out of the door, closing it softly behind her.  In the park, she is giddy with the rush of freedom that seizes her as she slides out of the car.  At first, her steps are light and hurried, but she finds herself quickly winded.  As she slows, she becomes acutely aware of the tumult around her.  Whooping childrenchase each other, geriatrics amble about, park attendants desultorily sweep up trash.  Everything seems vivid, sharply defined, as brilliant as a film or a painting, chimerical, or maybe hallucinatory.  It seems worlds away from her life in the apartment; worlds away, too, from the directives of the magazines, the spas and salons and shopping centers with their promises of eternal beauty and love.

On a bench, a man sits calmly, gazing straight ahead.  His skin is blue-black and Sita cannot see his eyes; he’s wearing sunglasses so dark they are like a mask across his face.  She can feel his gaze upon her as she drifts past him and she sucks in her stomach and lifts her chin, looking haughtily away, then casting a sidelong glance toward him.  She is chagrined when she notices a white cane on the bench beside him.  His lips curl into a smile, and she flushes, uncertain of what to make of this exchange: he has not seen her, yet it seems he has some sense of her presence and also of her foolishness. Her cheeks burn.

She returns to the car too soon, knowing she must do better than this: she must not become distracted by the whirl of life around her; she must focus on walking vigorously and taking long purposeful strides.  Her goal, she realizes, is not freedom: it is discipline.

So when she returns to find dinner on the table and Mamee scowling at her absence, she tries to be guarded in what she eats.  Diet, too, the magazines say, is crucial to losing weight and gaining that toned, titillating figure.  Mamee watches disapprovingly as she picks at her rice and vegetables.  Afterward, Sita hears her scolding the cook.

“See, young madam is not eating.  There is too much salt in the food.  How can she bear me grandsons if she will not eat?”

And later, she says sharply to Sita, “It’s time you and Vijay started a family.  You’ve been married a year.  Grandsons will bring blessings on us all.”

Sita blushes and looks down, unsure of how to respond to this directive.  Your son doesn’t think I’m sexy, she wants to say.  He hasn’t touched me for months.  I’m working on it.  But she cannot bring herself to speak.

“You are too thin,” Mamee continues.  “You need a strong body to bear children.  Good wide childbearing hips.  You must eat more.  I will ask the cook to make food that’s good for fertility: yams, groundsel.”

But that’s not going to work, Sita thinks in despair.  I’ve got to get thinner, not bigger.  The models have hips like little boys.

When she looks up she can see the maid studying her impassively.  Their exchange has been in English, and she knows the maid cannot have understood, but she can feel the color mount to her face.  Everyone is watching, it seems: Mamee, the maid, the blind man in the park, the hollow-eyed vixens on the magazine covers, and Sita has nowhere to hide.  With an incoherent exclamation she turns away, stumbling blindly out to the balcony where the hot breeze only intensifies her misery and confusion.  She grips the railing and draws deep breaths, wishing she could sprout wings like one of the grimy city pigeons and fly back home, though she is not sure where home is any more: the village of her girlhood may not embrace the woman she has become, worldly, wealthy, insecure, someone she does not recognize and can no longer understand.

Slipping out to Cubbon Park that evening seems even more transgressive and liberating than before.  She starts off marching purposefully along the path, head up, stomach in, remembering the instructions for “power walking” in the recent Marie Claire, but when she realizes people are looking at her, the kids pointing and snickering, she abandons the effort.  It is nicer, anyway, to stroll, to listen to the birdsong and traffic noises, to let her mind wander.

At the curve in the path, the blind man is on his bench once again, and she slows down, glancing hesitantly at him.  Again, as she nears, he smiles.  “Good evening,” she says.

He leans forward, his face tilted intently toward her.  “I would like to fuck you,” he says.  Sita is stilled. They face each other.  After a long moment, she flees, her high-heeled sandals clicking and catching on the uneven pavement.  She scrambles into the car, gasping and sweaty.  On the drive home she begins to weep. She can feel the driver watching her impassively in the rear-view mirror.

Dinner that evening is a feast. The cook has produced an array of delicacies, some of which Sita has never seen before, and her walk has aroused her appetite; she eats voraciously under Mamee’s beady-eyed scrutiny.

“You must eat,” Mamee says.  “You will not bear me grandchildren otherwise.”  After the meal, as the maid is clearing the table, Mamee faces Sita.

“I hear from the driver that you are taking walks in the park,” she says.  “I have asked him to stop that.  What would Vijay say to your running about the city alone like a schoolgirl?  You’re not in the village any more, Sita.  You are a married woman, with responsibilities to the family.”

Sita cannot look at her.  She feels her heart beating faster in her chest.  She sits there for a long time, long after Mamee has gone to read her prayer-book in her room.  When she rises she catches a glimpse of the maid at the kitchen table, a plate with a single roti and a cup of dhal in front of her, one cheek propped on a thin wrist.  The maid’s blouse has an open back and Sita can see the bones of her spine.  She goes to the bathroom and rams a toothbrush down her throat, throwing up the rich, succulent meal she has just eaten.  She vomits with the same gusto as she ate.  The spicy taste lingers in her mouth afterward.  When she looks down, she can see the chubby orbs of her small soft breasts and the swell of her pale belly, rippled with cellulite, and with one hand she presses it in, watching with fascination as her fingers sink into the soft flesh, as into plasticine.

She sleeps fitfully that night, at once hungry and nauseous.  Her cell phone jangles at some ungodly hour: it is Vijay, calling from Tokyo, where he is in a taxi on the way to a meeting.  “I’ll be home in a few days,” he says cheerfully.  “Hope you and mother are doing well.  What would you like from Japan?”

Sita is at a loss.  “I don’t know,” she says.  Visions of geishas and harajuku girls pop into her head.  “A fan?” she says, imagining herself gazing flirtatiously at him over its pretty array.

Vijay laughs; she can hear his disappointment.  “That’s just like you, Sita,” he replies.  “You can get fans in India.  You need to use your imagination a bit more.  Japan is an erotic paradise, you know.” She does not know how to respond to that, so she hangs up, the phone clicking quietly into silence.

The light at the window is bluish-gray; the sun has not quite risen.  Sita pushes back the coverlet and contemplates herself in the huge mirror that runs across the sliding closet doors.  She is disheveled in her gathered, embroidered nightgown, a wedding gift from her mother-in-law; it is rucked up around her thighs.  She can see folds of skin at her neck and wrists, and her cheeks are round and plump, as if she was holding nuts in them like a chipmunk.  There was a boy in her village who would have given his left arm to see her like this, half-dressed, sprawling on the bed like an odalisque; she can hear the rasping voice of the blind man in the park. And she can imagine how Vijay would look at her, his upper lip curling faintly, his eyes glinting with some emotion she has never been able to fathom, though she knows it is not ardor.  He will be back in three days, and she is still Sita, whom only a blind stranger would desire, not Heidi or Gisele or Adriana.

She emerges from her room and moves through the house, wanting to breathe in the cool morning air, wanting to clear her head.  She can hear a faint, rhythmic sound: the maid is ahead of her, working at the granite grinding stone her mother-in-law has installed on the balcony.  Only the traditional methods are suitable for certain aspects of Indian cuisine, Mamee has said.  Blenders are all very well for fruit drinks or soups, but the spice blends, the masalas and chutneys of real Indian fare, must be hand-milled.  “Vijay only likes it the traditional way,” Mamee has declared.  “He is a modern boy, but he has some old-fashioned tastes when it comes to important matters.”  And she smiled smugly, as if she herself were one of his important old-fashioned preferences.

Sita pauses at the balcony door.  The maid is bent over her task, rotating the big stone pestle in the giant mortar; the spices smell sharp and acrid.  She has been at it for a while: beads of sweat glisten on her copper-colored neck.  She is wearing the same tiny, open-backed blouse as yesterday, and her sari has slipped to her waist, and Sita can see that her waist is so small she could encircle it with both hands.  The maid’s arms are roped with muscles.  As she grinds, Sita watches them flex and shift, gleaming in the dim light.  There are muscles in her back, too, that ripple as she works.  She turns her head slightly, and sun flashes off her earring and the high plane of her cheekbone.

Sita thinks of Vijay, thinks of Vijay standing here and watching this girl, her slender toned body, her taut abdomen and firm strong haunches.  She thinks of his gaze moving from Sita to the maid, seeing the curls slip from the girl’s knot of hair to frame her angular face, watching a pulse throb in the hollow of her throat, between her delicate collarbones.  She imagines his eyes moving to her lovely brown breasts, pressed against the thin fabric of that skimpy blouse, down to the concave stomach, and then to the long legs visible through the worn cotton sari.

The thought is so painful she gasps, and the maid turns, startled.  Their eyes meet.  Something in Sita’s face jolts the girl, who stands and throws up her hands, backing away.  She whimpers as the balcony rail stabs into her back.  Sita advances.

 

She can think of nothing now but the way the girl’s thin shoulders will feel when she grasps them, how light the girl’s body will be, how sensual it will be tocrush her frailty against her own bulk just for a second, for one split second.  She reaches out as though to embrace the girl, who cries out, pinned against the balcony railing; for a moment they are locked in a lovers’ clinch.  And Sita realizes the pain, the pain that has haunted her, the terror that grips her at the thought of Vijay’s return, will soon be over; the thought makes her smile and then laugh aloud in delight.  She leans forward, and the girl clutches at her.  Her bare feet leave the ground.  And then they are in flight, their bodies weightless, their limbs tangled and then free as they drift apart, falling lightly, spinningthrough the flushed, now brilliant, sun-streakeddawn, through the glittering spires of the city, to the compassionate and clement earth.