Читать книгу America for Beginners - Leah Franqui - Страница 11

Pival always blamed herself for her marriage, for the way it became and the way it began. Pival had been the first one to say hello, in a fashion. Ram Sengupta had been sitting in the canteen, reading her university newspaper. It was very much her university newspaper, as Pival was the editor, a fact that her delighted father would recount to anyone he could force to listen. Ram Sengupta, then thirty years old and somehow, to the grave distress of his family, unmarried, had picked up a copy of the Calcutta College Courier with amusement as he waited for his friend Charlie Roy, a professor teaching at the school, who was always late.

Pival, young and alive with purpose, watched this tall, slim, yet commanding stranger sneer at her paper and saw red. Who was this man? What did he know of journalism? She could not stand by and watch him scorn her hard work, her long nights of setting type and editing articles. A closer look revealed that this stranger, handsome as he was, was laughing at her own article, a piece she’d been quite proud of, detailing the city’s architecture as a troubling metaphor for the continued influence of British colonialism on Indian mentality and cultural consciousness. Her article was cautiously tinged with Naxalite rigor, coated in intellectual argument, and she was deeply proud of it. Pival was not one to stand by while her work was being impugned in such a cavalier manner. She marched up to this strange man and asked him in polite and careful English:

“What, exactly, is so very funny?”

Ram Sengupta looked up at this serious young woman, with her dark eyes glinting, and asked her to join him for tea. Pival was so flustered that she sat down without another word. When Charlie Roy finally showed up some thirty minutes later, he found his friend, a confirmed bachelor, assessing his future wife.

The two fused into a unit almost immediately. Ram’s authority destroyed Pival’s own sense of herself and replaced it with a version that Ram created, a version she liked better, for a time. For Pival’s part she had never met a man who looked at her with such a mix of calculation and interest, and she mistook his manipulative speculation for a deep true love. So, for that matter, did he. They were engaged within a month.

Looking back on her excitement at the time, Pival cursed herself for being ten times a fool. She had thought Ram would be the antidote to the loneliness and longing she had begun to feel. Instead, he became the cause of both. She had thought for a while that her marriage was normal, no worse than many, better than most. But it had proved weak, and in the end, rotten to the core.

But Ram was gone now. And she could have her son back, just as soon as she could wrench him from the grasp of the man in California. They could be together. And if he was really gone, if it hadn’t been, as she hoped, a kindly meant act that pierced her heart with its cruelty, she could die with Rahi. Even if she couldn’t live with him.