Free Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

the marble banister carved with lions all the way up the stairs.

    And so this morning Anju whispers, as we stand in the senior girls assembly line at school, “Let’s cut class in the afternoon and go see the new movie, okay?”
    “Are you crazy?” I say. Shock makes me forget to whisper, and Sister Baptista, the assembly monitor, turns toward me, her steel-rimmed glasses glittery with disapproval.
    “Don’t be such a coward,” Anju says without moving her lips—a feat which never fails to impress me—while she offers Sister an angel-innocent smile. “We’ve run off before, remember?”
    “And got caught, which you’ve conveniently forgotten. Don’t you remember how upset Gouri Ma was?” I whisper as softly as I can, but a wave of sibilant sound seems to ripple from my lips and Sister gives me a frightful frown.
    “We were a lot younger then,” Anju says, “and we didn’t know how not to get caught.” She ignores the last part of my sentence.
    “But we promised Gouri Ma—” I start to say. Her face rises in my mind, austere as a Bodhisattva statue I had once seen at the Calcutta museum. She had looked at me and Anju with such reproach—or is it the future I am envisioning? Since that terrible afternoon when I had learned that mothers could lie and fathers deceive, time coils in upon itself at moments, confusing me.
    “I should’ve known better than to ask you, little Miss Holiness,” snaps Anju. “All you ever want is to get into Mother’s good books. You’re probably just waiting to get home so you cantell her my plan. Well, I don’t care! I’m going to go whether you come or not.”
    Somehow I cannot be upset with Anju when she is in a temper like this, for I can see that behind the anger, her eyes are bright with tears she will not let fall. Dear Anju, for whom love means that we must want the same thing, always. That we must be the same. She has not yet learned that ultimately each person—even Anjali and Basudha—is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone.
    The thought catches me by surprise. When had I realized this? Was it on that afternoon of secrets, that afternoon of new blood and old tears? Was it on the day of the diamond earrings when I asked Anju why she loved me, and she gave me her answer, sweeter than a sudden spring in the desert of my heart? When had I made the decision not to burden her with the terrible knowledge that ate at me like a canker bug? When had I promised myself that I would spend the rest of my life making up to her for the way in which my father had deceived hers? The way he had tempted him to his death?
    Ah, how much older than Anju my promise makes me feel.
    “Sudha,” Anju hisses, and I turn to her to say—what? What words can I speak with my throat, which has turned blue as Lord Shiva’s from the poison I’ve swallowed so that Anju might continue to laugh and love and quarrel and make up? So that she might take for granted the surety of our intimacy the way I no longer can?
    But I am saved by Sister Baptista, who announces in her sternest tones to the entire room that Basudha Chatterjee is to move to the troublemaker’s row in the front of the room, this instant, for talking in assembly.
    As I walk forward, feeling the prick of a hundred eyes on my face, the smirks that say, Ah, finally one of the Chatterjee girls gets what she deserves, I hear Anju say, very softly, “If you were my true, true sister, you’d come with me.”

    On the streets it is so hot that the melted pitch sticks to our chappals. The cold-drink vendors with their carts filled with bright orange Fantas and pale yellow Juslas, the slabs of ice sweating under jute sacking, have gone home, having sold out of everything. But the cool darkness of the cinema is a magic country, no less wonderful than the images glimmering bright as jewels on the screen. Air-conditioned breezes wash over us like a blessing, and the slow whoosh of the ceiling fans is as comforting as a