Dassani Brides

Chapter 6

Shiv had not said a word.

That was what frightened Geetanjali most. She had spent the whole afternoon braced for the storm, replaying the garden, Dhananjaya's quiet *did Shiv put you up to this*, and her own useless silence. She had carried the news upstairs and laid it at her husband's feet like a confession. He had listened, risen, and walked out to meet his grandfather. When he came back, he said nothing at all.

No accusation, no cold summary of her failure. He took off his watch, sat down at his desk, and began to read.

A man who shouted could be endured. A man who went silent was weighing something, and in three years she had learned that Shiv's silences were never empty.

Dinner was worse. The long mahogany table, the silver and porcelain, the servants moving like shadows behind each chair, all of it was the same as every night, and yet the air had changed. Dhananjaya ate slowly and spoke to no one. Shiv sat at his right hand, his face smooth and unreadable, and the two of them did not look at each other once. Whatever had passed between them in the study sat at the table too, an unseen guest that everyone politely ignored.

Then Kartik walked in.

He came late, still in his travel clothes, and the room shifted around him. Geetanjali had met her brother-in-law only a handful of times before he left for the Soviet Union, and each time he had made the same impression: a man who took up no space and yet could not be overlooked. He greeted his grandfather with a short bow and took his seat without a word to anyone.

Meera, across the table, did not lift her eyes from her plate. Geetanjali noticed the way her fingers tightened once around her spoon and then deliberately relaxed. Nobody else seemed to notice. Everyone in this house had perfected the art of not seeing.

Dinner ended the way it always did, with the scrape of chairs and the soft retreat of the family into their separate wings. Dhananjaya left first, leaning on his stick. Shiv followed a few minutes later with a curt word to no one.

Geetanjali went into the kitchen, as she always did.

There was nothing left to do there. The plates were washed, the counters wiped, the leftovers covered and sent away. The staff had already gone to their quarters. She stood among the silent steel and marble and picked up a cloth only to give her hands something to hold.

She was not alone for long.

Meera came in without a sound, the way she always did, and went straight to the pantry. She came out with a small steel tin and began arranging cups on a tray that did not need arranging. She wiped a counter that was already clean. She moved a jar of spices from one shelf to another, then moved it back.

Geetanjali watched her for a long moment. This was not the Meera of the other night, the one with the cool half-smile and the peanuts, who could dismiss a question with a turned back. This Meera was restless. Her movements were small and precise, a person filling time because the alternative was unbearable.

"He is back," Geetanjali said softly.

Meera's hands paused over the tray. "Yes."

"You don't have to go up yet."

"No," Meera agreed. She did not ask how Geetanjali knew. She set down the cup in her hand and reached for another.

So they stayed. They did not talk about their husbands. They did not talk about much at all. Geetanjali dried cups that were already dry. Meera boiled water for tea neither of them drank. The clock on the wall ticked toward eleven, and then past it, and neither woman suggested that it might be time to go.

It occurred to Geetanjali, somewhere in that long, strange hour, that she had never before shared a silence with anyone that did not feel like a test. This one was different. It was the silence of two people who understood exactly why the other was still standing in a kitchen at midnight, and who had decided not to say it aloud.

At last Meera set down her cup. "I should go up."

"Yes," Geetanjali said. "Me too."

They looked at each other for a moment. Neither moved.

Then Meera gave a small, tired nod, the nod of someone going to meet something she cannot avoid, and walked out. Geetanjali listened until the sound of her footsteps faded down the corridor. She stood alone in the kitchen for a few minutes more. Then there was nothing left to wait for, and she climbed the stairs.

---

The bedroom was warm and dimly lit. Shiv sat at his desk beneath the lamp, a stack of papers spread before him, his pen moving steadily. He did not look up when she entered.

She slipped past him without a word and went into the washroom. She took her time. She unpinned her hair, washed her face, and changed out of her heavy saree into a soft cotton one. She folded the discarded silk twice, then once more, as slowly as she could. She counted her breaths. When she could stall no longer, she opened the door a crack.

Shiv was still at his desk, still writing.

She let out a breath she had not realized she was holding and crossed the room quietly. She did not go to the bed. She went to the tall glass door at the far end, the one that opened onto the narrow balcony.

She rarely used it. It looked out over the western gardens and the lit towers of the palace, a view that guests admired and that Geetanjali tried not to look at.

She stepped outside and drew the door nearly shut behind her.

The night air was cool and still, carrying the faint sweetness of the jasmine below. It should have been peaceful. The palace spread out beneath her in a hundred lighted windows, each one a small, warm square of someone else's life.

But she had stood on this balcony before, on a night she could still feel in her bones.

It had been January, her first winter in this house. Madhu had decided that she needed a lesson, though Geetanjali never learned exactly what she had done wrong. She had been sent out here with a single thin shawl, and the door had been locked behind her. She remembered the cold more than anything. It had crept up through the stone into her bare feet, and then her ankles, and then her knees, until she could no longer feel her hands. She remembered the sound of laughter somewhere inside, and the lights going out one by one in the rooms below, until she was the only living thing awake in the entire silent palace. She had sat against the wall with her knees pulled to her chest and told herself that it would end by morning, and that she had survived worse.

It had ended by morning. A maid had unlocked the door at dawn, her face carefully blank. No one had ever spoken of it.

She had never stood on this balcony again without feeling it.

*I survived worse,* she told herself now, gripping the cold railing. *I always survive.*

"Geetanjali."

His voice was low and even. It cut through her thoughts like a blade through silk.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Then she turned and went back inside.

Shiv stood at his desk, squaring his papers into a tidy stack. He did not look at her. His shoulders were rigid beneath his shirt, and there was a tension in the line of his back that she did not recognize and did not like.

"Lock the door."

She stood frozen for a heartbeat. Then she turned, her fingers fumbling for the latch on the balcony door.

"Not that one."

She froze again, her hand on the cold glass.

"The door, Geetanjali." There was no impatience in his voice, and no anger. That was what made the chill go all the way through her. "The one you walked in through."

Slowly she turned. Her eyes went to the heavy oak door at the other end of the room, the one that led to the corridor.

Why would he want it locked?

No one in this house knocked on their door at night. No one dared. The only person it could possibly keep out was the rest of the world, and the only reason to lock out the rest of the world was to be sure that no one could hear.

Her mouth went dry.

She crossed the room with the careful steps of someone walking on a frozen pond and turned the heavy key in the lock. The click was very small. It seemed to echo.

Was this how it began? She thought of the watchman, the one who had worked at the east gate until two winters ago. She had passed his quarters one morning on her way to the temple and seen his wife sitting on the step with her sari pulled over her face, and the dark bloom of a bruise spreading from beneath it. She had seen the woman's hands shake as she lifted a cup. Later she had heard whispers that he did it every week, that it was a matter of habit, nothing to be remarked upon. She remembered how the woman had looked at her, one quick glance, as if to say: *you understand, don't you? You must. Every woman in this house does.*

Shiv had never done that. Whatever else he had done, whatever he had threatened, he had never beaten her as that man had. Not since the night in the east wing, when she had tried to run and he had taught her what it cost. That had been fear, and it had been enough. He had never needed to do it twice.

But she had never before seen him like this, so still and so deliberate, with a purpose in his face she could not read.

Behind her the room went dark and then light. He had switched off the bright overhead lamps and left only the soft glow of the night lamps by the bed. The corners of the room slid away into shadow.

She dared, for one foolish moment, to hope. Perhaps he was only tired. Perhaps whatever had passed between him and Dhananjaya had worn him down, and he had decided to overlook her failure for the night and go to bed. He had been known to do that, on rare occasions, when his mind was elsewhere.

She turned around.

He was standing close to her. She had not heard him cross the room. He was close enough that she could smell the faint cedar of his cologne and the starch of his shirt, and in the low light his eyes were very dark.

"Take off your clothes."

The words fell into the room like stones into still water.

For a moment she did not understand them. They were so strange, so far from anything she had braced herself for, that her mind simply refused them.

"What?" she whispered.

He did not repeat himself. He only looked at her, and in his face there was no anger and no desire. There was only that steady, calculating coldness, the look of a man carrying out a task he had decided upon and would not discuss.

Understanding came slowly, and with it a terror so total that her knees nearly gave out.

In three years of marriage he had never once touched her that way. She had understood, long ago, that he never would. It had been a wall between them, one of the few mercies of this marriage, and she had been so grateful for it that she had never allowed herself to wonder why it was there.

"Shiv," she said, and her voice came out cracked and small. "Please..."

He reached for her.

She stepped back. Her shoulders met the wall.

She tried to push his hands away. She tried to say his name again, in a voice she did not recognize as her own. None of it mattered. He was stronger than she was, and he was not angry, which was somehow the worst part. His hands were firm and sure. He was not losing control. He was never losing control. Every effort she made was met with a patient, absolute force that did not even seem to notice she was struggling.

Somewhere in the middle of it, she stopped being in the room.

It was not a decision. It was something her mind did on its own, the way it had once done on a burning train platform, the way it had done on a freezing balcony. She went somewhere far away and watched from a great distance as a woman in a cotton saree was pressed against a wall, as the lamps flickered in the quiet room, as the lock clicked in the door that no one would ever knock on.

What she remembered afterward was only fragments. The cold of the wall against her back. The smell of the lamp oil. The terrible quiet, because neither of them spoke. And one thought, repeated like a prayer, that she would not cry. She would not give him the satisfaction of her tears.

*I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry.*

But her voice, when it came, was not a prayer. It came out of her in a thin, bitter breath, and she did not know where it had come from. It was a line she had carried for years, a line she had never meant to speak.

"Have women stopped throwing themselves at you?"

---

**Flashback**

It was an ordinary dinner. Three months into her marriage, the cold had not yet broken, and the family sat at the long table beneath the chandeliers while the servants moved quietly with covered dishes.

Shiv had been midway through a sentence when he began to cough.

It started small, a clearing of the throat, and then it caught and deepened into something harsh and ragged. He pressed his napkin to his mouth. His shoulders shook. The cough went on and on, and Geetanjali, seated at the far end of the table, had risen before she even knew she was moving.

She poured a glass of water from the carafe by her place, crossed the room, and set it gently at his elbow. She did not touch him. She did not say a word. She only stood a moment, her hand hovering near his shoulder, until he took the glass and drank.

It was a small thing, the kind of thing any wife would have done.

She felt Madhu's eyes on her from across the table. When she looked up, her mother-in-law's face was perfectly composed, but there was a sharp, bright, calculating light in her gaze that Geetanjali had learned to fear.

Later that evening, when the family had dispersed and Geetanjali was walking back to her rooms through the long gallery, a hand closed around her arm.

"What were you trying to accomplish?"

Madhu's voice was low and level. She had drawn Geetanjali into an alcove behind a carved pillar, out of sight of the corridor.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand," Geetanjali stammered. "I only..."

Madhu twisted her arm.

It was a neat, vicious little motion, the kind that left no mark, and pain shot from her wrist to her shoulder. A cry broke from her before she could stop it.

"Don't you dare try to outsmart me," Madhu hissed. Her face was very close, and her breath smelled of cardamom. "Rushing to him with your little glass of water, so everyone can see what a devoted wife you are. Do you think I don't understand what you are doing? Do you think you can wind yourself around my son and turn him against his own mother?"

"No, Ma, you have it wrong..." Geetanjali's eyes stung. "Please, let go, it hurts..."

"I know girls like you. I know exactly what you..."

"Ma."

The voice was quiet and perfectly calm, and it came from behind them.

Both women turned.

Shiv stood at the end of the gallery, one hand in his pocket, his posture relaxed. He looked, if anything, mildly bored. In the dim light his face gave nothing away.

"You can let her go," he said.

Madhu's grip faltered.

"You needn't worry yourself." His voice was as even as if he were discussing the weather. "I assure you, I will be with her only if and when women stop throwing themselves at me."

The words dropped into the silence like a coin into a well.

Geetanjali did not move. She did not breathe. She felt the heat rise to her face and then drain away, leaving her cold.

Madhu's hand slid from her arm. For a long moment she studied her son's face, and then something in her expression eased, the tight line of her mouth softening into satisfaction.

"I know my son," she said, and now her voice was almost warm. "I trust him completely. I was only cautioning this girl not to play any games with you. I will not tolerate deceit or manipulation in this family."

She smoothed her pashmina over her shoulders and swept past them both, her footsteps fading down the gallery.

Shiv stood a moment longer. He did not look at Geetanjali. He did not ask whether she was hurt. He turned and walked back toward his rooms as if nothing at all had happened, and a few minutes later she heard the heavy door of the master bedroom close.

She stayed in the alcove for a long time, rubbing her aching wrist, trying to understand what she was meant to feel. He had saved her from his mother's grip. He had also reduced her, in four careless sentences, to a woman not worth the trouble of wanting.

She did not know whether she was grateful or humiliated. She suspected she was both.

That night she lay awake in the vast bed, and turned the words over and over in her mind. *If and when women stop throwing themselves at me.* She never forgot them. She carried them for three years, like a stone beneath her tongue.