By Anjana Basu

Arabesques of nautch girls frozen in stone, four armed gods on lotus petalled thrones. She thought of words that sang like Bundelkhand and shivered at the ecstasy of it. Then the plane banked, dropping her out of her dream. "You'll have to wear a sari, " warned her bronze husband from the seat beside her.

Their marriage had been what he called 'quick and dirty' - a quick sweep into the Registrar's after an equally hurried meeting in a coffee shop. "I looked up and there you were." They had a set of useful sentences borrowed from the currently fashionable media terms, which they handed out to their friends, "We got married because we couldn't not get married."

Clothes had had very little to do with it. He'd shown her pictures of red and gilt brides wrapped like Christmas presents for a laugh, but made it clear he expected no such Christmas dressing from her. We're modern, we're cosmopolitan, he had told everyone proudly - and then, without warning, he had sprung the statement about the sari on her in the plane. She felt a little betrayed, but it was nothing serious, she could deal with it.

Marriage was about wearing the right clothes, about conformity and, without telling him, she had gone shopping in Southall with Dina Patel. They had had a lot of tittering sessions together while Dina wound and unwound her out of the six yards of glitz and floss silk. "I'm going to come out and knock him dead," she told herself as she padded barefoot down the blue length of plane carpet. In her heart of hearts, she had always wanted to marry an Indian man - they opened doors for you in restaurants, listened when you spoke and were so incredibly dark and sexy. Dina had raised her eyebrows when she had said that. "Don't let yourself be fooled," she had said. "All men are the same inside out."

When they arrived in Calcutta, she had reproduced Dina's instructions perfectly. There might have been a safety pin or two sticking out of the folds of the sari, but no one was likely to notice unless they looked very hard. He had given her one long glance, smirked slightly and carried on as if everything were still the same. There was a little reception committee of her husband's relatives waiting for them at the airport. She covered her head with a fold of her sari, as Dina had taught her, and waited for introductions. Her husband bent down and touched the feet of two elderly gentlemen. She found herself stranded in mid air and swooped frantically into a bend that sent her sari fold splashing on the ground at her feet. She was too busy collecting herself in a welter of décolletage to mind the formalities and so off balance that her fingers stubbed on the hard airport concrete.

"You might have told me!" she hissed in the car under cover of her sticky floss fold. Calcutta was like a warm wet blanket wrapped round her.

"I'm sorry, I forgot, " he said. "It's just a form of greeting.

You've got to do it to your elders...they wouldn't expect it of you, but it would look good if..."

"Mmmm," she answered.

She seemed to get along very well with her mother-in-law. She touched her feet gracefully and addressed her in the few words of Bengali she had parroted for the occasion. They made much of her, exclaiming at the fairness of her complexion, the sweetness of her disposition and the way she had become a perfect Bengali. There was some chatter of a Hindu ceremony - she quite liked the idea of being tied up in red and gold with white lace patterns on her face. Instead, all that happened was that a priest came, looked her up and down and spattered her with holy water while she sat garlanded in relatives. There was an uncle who insisted on weighing her neck down with heavy gardenia chains every time she met and, for fear of offending him, she didn't dare take it off till he had gone home.

"You're a Hindu now," they explained to her in their awful accents. "How good it is that you have an Indian name" She did, Sheila, but that hadn't occurred to her till now. "I feel rather like a sacred cow, " she told her husband. "But they're very sweet. You have such a sense of family, you Indians." I must do something about that 'you Indians' she told herself. After all, I'm one of them now.

She had done the reception in heavy blue and gold and yes, she had the white filigree all over her face. They dotted it on with a betel nut stem and it looked straight off a Paris catwalk. She had been very pleased with the way she had carried herself until this other girl had come along.

The girl was tall, graceful and, even wrapped in six yards of cotton and black graphic weaves, had managed to flow like water across the room. She had been introduced as Kal's old girlfriend and there was something about the introduction that implied that this was the girl Kal would have married if he hadn't left to work in England. Kal hadn't mentioned any old girlfriends when he had taken her through the family pictures. She stifled her growing doubt and managed to be sweet to Anisha.

For some reason, Anisha had announced that she would take Sheila's Indianisation into her care. "I know exactly what Kalyan expects," she had purred. That was more than Sheila did, but the whole family seemed to agree with Anisha. It shrugged Sheila off onto her with an imperceptible sigh of relief. Anisha took her in quick succession to the Victoria Memorial, New Market, and the Marble Palace with a quirk of superiority in her finely plucked eyebrows. Anisha was, in turns, over officious and rude.

"Sheela," she said, stretching the 'ees' in Sheila's name out to eternity, "you can't be a Bengali housewife until you know how to buy good fish. Kalyan loves his fish." And she had made Sheila wade through the slipperiness of squashed cabbage leaves and river mud and nameless things that squished through her blue and white thongs and clung to her toes until she was in the heart of the fishmarket. Unless to explain that she could just have taken a frozen pink and white packet out of a supermarket freezer and cooked it with curry masala without Kal knowing the difference. "The fish should smile at you," Anisha had insisted and Sheila's fingers had crawled over the scales.

She felt like Macbeth's wife wringing out her hands with rosewater every night and even then her fingers weren't free of the wet reek. Kal had joked about it saying that the smell of fish was sexy, but she didn't find it funny any more. Something, she thought, was happening to her and it was just a fishy smell.

And the phone kept jerking her out of her sleep at night. She would feel Kal move to answer it and hear a few murmured words of Bengali that she couldn't catch. The lamplight would fall on his dark shoulder and netted white singlet and, for a second, she thought she was in the frame of an art film, one of those intensely well lit scenes of sex. Then Anisha would materialize with her superior smile the next morning and wipe away any memory of sex, leaving only the words of the phone call. The sex was to stop her answering questions. He wasn't home very often these days. He said it was because he was a company man and bound to meetings. She knew it was because of Anisha and the fish.

Occasionally she found thoughts in her head that did not belong to a Sheila. Measures of dahl, pinches of five spice. The problem was that her husband wasn't there to be consulted Kalyan was somewhere else - and then she wondered how the easy Kal had slipped into the formal 'Kalyan'. Now she struggled with those fluid syllables that flowed ahead faster than her lips could shape them. Anisha cooed Kalyan like a mourning dove in spring and he ducked his head with pride and his jowls puffed whenever she cooed.

The thing to do was say, "This is not working," pack her bags and give up the fight - though she was unaware how things could have slipped so out of her control in a matter of three weeks. Three weeks ago she was still the girl who had risen on him in the coffee shop. They had walked hand in hand to a barbecue stand as the song went, her heels pattering a tune on the pavement. If it came to that, when was the last time she had met herself in the mirror?

She had become a bedraggled clod who perched on the end of a plank of wood and hacked at an earth clotted bundle of stems with a crescent blade. None of their friends would have recognized her, though Satyajit Ray might have smuggled her in the background of one of his frames. "I have such a good daughter in law," Kalyan's mother told her friends softly. "She works harder than any Bengali girl would." And while she was doing the good Bengali daughter in law bit, Kal was probably playing hands with Anisha under the gingham flounce of a five star hotel tablecloth.

Every morning, before the house was up, she doused herself in a bucketful of water, put on a clean sari and went out to the little patch of garden and scrabbled up the fallen orange and white flowers for her mother in law's puja. After a few years, she would probably tie a tight plait, streak her forehead with scarlet and dance in saffron down a street tinkling cymbals.

"Harre Keshto," her mother in law sniffed whenever she saw one of those processions. Perhaps, she thought wildly, she should email an application to the Hare Krishnas and be done with it once and for all. That was where this marriage of hers seemed to be plunging her.

She was quite determined to be a Bengali housewife - which seemed the only way she could get her own back. "Today," she announced to Kal "I learnt to make lentil soup - I mean dahl - two sorts of curries and mango chutney."

He was silent for a while, turning his cup of tea around and around in its saucer. "You know, "he said, "you're becoming a Bengali."

She smiled, "I'm glad you think so."

"It's good to see you so happy. I'm going to Hong Kong next week. Is there anything you'd like from there?"

Her face lit up. "Ooh, I'd just love a new pair of stockings. My old ones are all..."She paused and bit her lip. "I shan't be able to use the stockings, " she said. "You'd better get...oh, some French chiffon saris. I don't care what colour."

"Are you sure you wouldn't prefer stockings?"

She made a little gesture of hopelessness. "You know I don't have any use for them. French chiffons are very pretty. Pastel shades - light blue, rose pink or a soft lilac. Anisha says they're acceptable."

"I was asking whether you wanted anything, not whether Anisha did. You'll get your chiffons - if you really want them." There was nothing in her cupboard except yards and yards of material. All the skirts and halter-tops she had brought so hopefully with her were bundled away in a corner.

When she looked into the mirror, she saw a figure in a white sari with a red border, with dozens of gold bangles jangling on her arms and, for half a second, mistook it for Anisha.

When he returned from Hong Kong, he found her in the kitchen perched precariously on a plank of wood on the floor, hacking away at some vegetables. Her sari was hitched up to her knees and her face was
gleaming with sweat. A lock of hair straggled over her eyes. She paused to push it away, then turned her attention to a bundle of spinach clotted with earth. As she struggled with the leaves, she gashed her finger on the blade of the cutter. She cried out. He hastily stepped forward and tied his handkerchief over the cut. As the blood blotted the white linen brown, their eyes met. Hers fell first. She scrambled to her feet. "When did you come back?" she asked. "Look, you'd better get out of here. You've got shoes on. You know your mother hates people with shoes in the kitchen."

"That's a fine sort of welcome, " he said. "You go and wash that cut on your finger and then come and see what I've brought you."

"It doesn't matter about the cut. What have you brought me?"

He took her to their room and showed her. There were two saris: one sky blue and white, the other rose and lilac. There was a bottle of perfume - she unscrewed the top and sniffed at it ecstatically. There was a white cardigan with pearl buttons embroidered with pink and blue flowers. "It's lovely!" she exclaimed. "Where did you get all that money?"

"That's not all, " he laughed. "I brought you these." He tossed her a pair of pale flesh coloured stockings.

She stared at them incredulously for a moment, then she burst into tears. "What's the matter?" he asked, alarmed.

"Nothing, " she sobbed. "It's just that - oh!" She dropped the stockings and ran out of the room.

Sometime after this, he found her sitting on a windowsill, smoking. The sight gave him a sort of perverse pleasure. "You'd better be careful," he told her. "You know smoking isn't allowed."

She took the cigarette from her mouth and looked at the smoke hanging blue on the soft air. "No one comes here, " she said contemptuously. "They won't catch me."

"True, " he agreed, "but it hardly goes with that." He indicated the bedraggled sari. She gave him a vicious stare, stubbed the cigarette and threw the butt out of the window. There was ash on the sari. She didn't attempt to brush it off. Bangles clashing, she stalked away.

He found her hacking vegetables mutinously in the kitchen with her slippers jutting out from the plank. She heard his footstep and, without looking round, quietly tucked the slippers away under the folds of her sari. "I appreciate the gesture, " he murmured. "It might have been more comfortable for you if you'd left your slippers outside."

"If that's all you have to say, you can go."

"It wasn't. I came to tell you that Bijoya will be coming shortly. No, it's a festival, not a person. On that day, you'll have to touch everyone's feet, including mine. It's a ritual ceremony." The mouth, which he had begun to notice, was glaring red with lipstick, exploded into four letter words.

"I thought you liked touching people's feet, " he said. "After all, you did it so well when you first came."

"I don't know what you're trying to do, " she said. "Whatever it is, I don't like it."

"I might say the same thing about you. For Christ's sake, do something to your hair. It looks like a wet dishcloth." A servant came into the room for something. Quietly she produced her feet from the folds of her sari and looked at the slippers. The servant saw them too before she slipped out of the kitchen again.

In the days that followed, she began to grow increasingly careless. She smoked quite openly. The household sat up and stared. She still cooked, of course, but even the cooking was careless. At first the servants were blamed. Then it was decided that 'the perfect Bengali bride' wasn't so perfect after all. Long delayed 'I told you so's' came into action. Finally she gave up wearing saris.

Her husband found her combing out her hair in her room. "Where are you going?" he asked.

"There's a dinner at the British High Commission." She indicated a card lying on the table. "You're invited too."

"You're not going."

"If you don't want to come with me, it's just too bad." She expanded her lips in front of the mirror and began to outline them with lipstick.

"I said you weren't going."

"You must have got me wrong. I said I was." She slipped her dress over her head, gave her hair a final stroke with the brush and left the room.

He spent the whole evening wondering what she was doing, before going to the party himself. There was a dance on when he arrived. She was on the floor twisting and turning with a tall white man. She saw him once as she nodded her face to the room and away again, and deliberately avoided looking in his direction. After the dance, she went to him. She was glowing and golden under the lights. Her hair swirled around her. He had forgotten what she could look like, out of a sari. Involuntarily, he smiled.

She smiled back. "I've worn your stockings, " she said, and stuck out a leg to show him...

He took her back to England.

The last she saw of Anisha's face was a blur of white with a red spot on the forehead. The red spot stayed in her eyes as the plane took off.

Image Courtesy Corbis