Free Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

of the Chatterjees, yearned for and knew we could not be. Had our fathers been alive, the mothers might have been more lenient with us. But Gouri Ma’s promise to her dead husband seemed to have frozen our entire household, like the magic spell which, in Pishi’s stories, shrouded palaces in timeless sleep.
    I accepted this, but Anju never stopped fighting. “Why must Ramur Ma go with us every time we leave the house, even to get books from the neighborhood library?” she’d ask. “Why can’t we go to Sushmita’s birthday party when all the other girls in class are going, instead of sending a gift with Singhji? No wonder everyone thinks we’re stuck up.” And “I’m tired of these old-women saris you make us wear. You’d think we were living in the Dark Ages instead of in the eighties. I bet there isn’t another girl my age in all of Calcutta—except poor Sudha, of course—who’s forced to dress like this. Why can’t I wear pants, or a maxi, or at least some kurtas once in a while?”
    “Why, why, why,” my mother would say. “Uff, my head hurts with all your questions. Why can’t you be quiet and let your elders, who know more of the world than you, make the important decisions?”
    “We’d know as much about the world as you,” Anju would retort, “if you didn’t keep us penned in at home all the time like—like prize cows.”
    “Did you hear that, Didi?” Mother would cry, turning to Gouri Ma. Loud with outrage, her voice made my ears hurt and my stomach muscles clench up. “Did you hear how your daughter talked back to me? Never in all my years did I hear a child in my parents’ home speak so rudely. Are you going to let her get away with this kind of behavior? No wonder my Sudha’s getting so stubborn nowadays. I can see where she’s learning it.”
    Then everyone would be talking at once, Anju shouting, “Leave Sudha out of it, she never said a word, you’re always criticizing her for no reason.” And my mother: “See, Didi? See what I mean.” And Pishi, placating: “Don’t mind what the girl says, Nalini, you know how she is, born under the sign of the bull, never thinking what to speak and what not to speak before the words tumble from her mouth.” Until finally Gouri Ma would look up from the accounts book, which she brought home each evening, worry smudged like lampblack into the creases of her face.
    “Please, quiet everyone. Quiet!”
    And in the reluctant silence that followed she’d tell Anju, “The last promise I made to your father was that if anything happened to him I’d bring you up the way he wanted. The way a daughter of the Chatterjee family should be. You know that.”
    Those words would have been enough to silence me. And her voice, somber and a little removed—the kind of voice I imagined the queens of Pishi’s tales to have.
    Anju didn’t give up, though. “What’s more important, a living daughter’s happiness, or a promise you made to a dead man, who’s dead because he abandoned us to run after some stupid scheme?”
    “Don’t talk about your father like that,” Pishi cried sharply. “You ungrateful, disrespectful child.”
    “Or is it because I’m a daughter that my happiness doesn’t matter?” Anju’s breath came in gasps, and her voice wobbled as it always did just before she cried. “I bet if I were a boy you wouldn’t be saying no to me all the time like this.”
    “Hai bhagaban!” my mother said, turning her appealing eyes toward heaven. “Now she demands to be treated like a son.”
    “I am thinking of your happiness, keeping doors open to houses you might want to enter someday,” Gouri Ma said. “But I don’t expect you to see that yet.” It seemed there was a wistfulness, subtle as the echoing end of a raga, in her usually practicalvoice. But perhaps I was only being fanciful, for the next moment she sent us off to our rooms to do our homework.
    She convinced me. But she never convinced my headstrong Anju, who kicked at