Preview of China Room by Sunjeev Sahota
Preview of China Room by Sunjeev Sahota
Mehar is not so obedient a fifteen-year-old that she won't try to uncover which of the three brothers is her husband. Already, the morning after the wedding, and despite nervous, trembling hands, she combines varying amounts of lemon, garlic and spice in their side plates of sliced onions, and then attempts to detect the particular odour on the man who visits later that same night, invisible to her in the dark. It proves inconclusive, the strongest smell by far her fear, so she tries again after overhearing one of the trio complaining about the calluses on his hands. Her concentration is fierce when her husband's palm next strokes her naked arm, but then, too, she isn't certain. Maybe all male hands feel so rough, so clumsily eager and dry.
It is 1929, summer is erupting, and the brothers do not address her in one another's presence, indeed they barely speak to her at all, and she, it goes without saying, is expected to remain dutiful, veiled and silent, like the other new brides. Spying from her window, she sees only the brothers' likeness: close in age, they share the same narrow build, with unconvincing shoulders and grave eyes; serious faces that carry no slack, features that follow the same rules. The three are evenly bearded, the hair trimmed short and tight, and all day they wear loose turbans cut from the same saffron wrap. Most hours the brothers will be out working the fields, playing, drinking, while she weaves and cooks and shovels and milks, until those evenings when Mai, their mother, says to her, raising a tea-glass to grim lips:
'Not the china room tonight.'
This is the third time Mehar must finish washing the pewter pots at the courtyard water pump and, rather than join the women, take herself to the windowless chamber at the back of the farm. On the bed, she holds her knees close, seeing no point in lying down straight away. Five days married. Five nights since she'd first lain waiting in the pitch black, shuddering from arms to toes, hoping he wouldn't come to her and praying that there might be blood. The day before the wedding, Mehar's mother had folded a tiny blade into her daughter's hand. Cut your thumb, to be sure. Mehar hadn't done that, hadn't needed to, and Mai had been outside afterwards, waiting for the sheets. Her husband had said nothing to Mehar on that occasion, and little more on the next. Will he say more today, she wonders?
The tallow stick on its stony ledge has blown down to its crater and in the obliterating dazzle of the darkness she imagines she is underwater, in some submerged world of sea-goats and monsters. From across the courtyard she hears the distant protesting rasps of a charpoy and the scuffle of leather slippers being toed on. Her stomach does a small anticipatory flip, and she lies down as the door opens and he moves to sit at her side. She dares a sidelong glance at what must surely be his naked back, though it is impossible to make even a distinction between his hair and his cotton wrap, which she can hear him loosening. When she senses him unknotting the langot at his waist she averts her gaze to the black pool of the ceiling and waits.
'Undress,' he says, not unkindly, but with the contingent kindness of a husband who knows he will be obeyed. She tries to trap his voice inside her head, to parse its deep grain, its surprising hoarseness. Was he the one who'd called for more daal, who'd had her hurrying out to them earlier that day? She gathers the hem of her tunic up around her hips and unties her drawstring. She feels a rush of air against her calves as he slides off her salwar in a single swift motion, and then he bears down like something come to swallow her whole, until she can't even see the darkness on either side of him and fears that she really is inside his chest. He is neither rough nor gentle. A little frenetic perhaps, because all three brothers want a child, a child that must be a boy. Mehar's hands remain at her side, unmoving and cupped up. He smells strongly of grass and sweat, and of fenugreek and taro, the evening meal, but beyond that she can detect soap, and is glad that he had thought to wash before coming to her tonight. He grips her upper arm with one hand - calluses? Can she feel calluses? - then a final thrust, a stoppered exhalation, and he climbs off her, one leg at a time. His back to her again, she senses him return his penis into the pouch of his langot.
'You're learning the life here?'
'Everyone is very kind.'
He gives a wry little snort and she flicks her eyes towards the sound - nothing, she can see nothing. 'It's never been a kind house before,' he says, and shunts his feet back into the slippers.
From CHINA ROOM by SUNJEEV SAHOTA, published by VIKING, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2021 by Sunjeev Sahota.
Preview of The Women's March by Jennifer Chiaverini
