Days pass by, lazy, unhurried. In the afternoons when everything is too warm we go into our rooms and lie under fans. The dogs find spots near the sprinklers in the garden where the ground is cool and wet. They lie curled like abalones, nose to paws.
I keep hearing Ma. It’s as if she’s down by the gate, locked outside, wandering around in a state of dementia, shouting. She’s like that woman Blake and I once saw in Charlotte, who asked us if we were running out of people. Lost, confused, tapping at car windows, grimacing. I hear her all the time. ‘Have you never lost anyone, then?’ But it’s Ma’s voice. Soft, then urgent. She’s always calling my name. I run out on the terrace, scalding the undersides of my feet, peering over the ledge, and of course, it’s nothing – only the casuarinas, their windswept topiaries petrified into a kind of silence. The sea murmuring.
We drink tea with biscuits at four. The dogs wait patiently for their treats. When they hear the crackle of the Milk Bikis packet they start drooling. I pop creamy rectangles into their hungry mouths. ‘Those are going to rot their teeth, don’t you know?’ Blake says. ‘Don’t you ever feel suffocated?’ he asks.
‘Sometimes I feel I can’t breathe. It’s all too much. Too hard. Then she’ll do something inexplicable. She’ll come over and squeeze my hand. She’ll look at me and start laughing, really laughing, as though I were tickling her. Other times she’s lost to me. She’s in a place I can’t know. And it isn’t sad so much, except I wonder what it’s about. I can’t explain it, but sometimes it feels to me that her knowledge is greater, grander than mine could ever be.’
‘I don’t mean by Lucia. I mean, don’t you feel suffocated being here all the time? It’s like a prison in a way. A beautiful prison.’
‘Can you believe my mother did this? Bought this place. Kept this secret. Kept so many secrets?’
‘You’re stuck, Grace. You keep tracing everything back to them, but here you are. Is this what you really want to be doing? Is this the best you can do?’
‘I feel I’m just beginning to understand things.’
‘I think you’ve always known.’
We get stoned one evening and watch The Sound of Music in Blake’s room. Lucia watches with us too.
‘I haven’t smoked since we were kids in Kodai,’ Blake says. ‘It’s terrific.’
We are lying on his bed. Lucia in the far corner. Blake and I squashed up on the other half.
I sing all the songs. Loudly, with conviction. Raindrops on roses and the hills are alive. ‘Isn’t Julie Andrews’ hair ridiculous?’ I say. ‘And honestly, the baroness is hot. Christopher Plummer is hot. Julie is just … it’s not convincing, is it?’
Lucia is sitting upright with her legs spread in front of her. All the hankies and socks in a pile between them. She’s swishing one sock around in her hand and she’s singing her own song – louder and stronger than mine. She’s moving forwards and backwards like a seesaw, droning.
‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’ Blake asks.
‘I like the idea of it, but no, not really.’
‘I think your sister is a prophet.’
I giggle. ‘No more weed for you.’
‘No, really. Look at her. There isn’t a line on that face. Nothing needs to be explained if you can understand the body. See the way she moves. She’s saying things all the time. Of course she understands everything. You don’t have to explain anything to her. She understands.’
‘Try that when we’re out of Coca-Cola. She shouts like a freaking banshee for hours.’
‘You’ve changed so much.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You used to be a woman who needed stuff. You loved things. You had a shelf of toiletries. Now you’re a woman who can travel with a toothbrush. It rarely works that way. Usually you start off with the toothbrush and get into accumulation. You’re finding things out.’
There’s a comfort in having known someone so long. All the shared bedrock of memories. We talk about the past as if it were a country we could return to any time we wanted. We dredge up moments. Sitting in his parents’ house on Observatory Road in front of a fire. Molly asking Blake to lay down forks and plates for dinner, and Blake complaining that he’s tired. Molly, looking at me, putting on her best Italian-American accent, ‘My son, he has problems, eh? He was born tired.’ All of us laughing. And later, after the table has been cleared, sitting against those upholstered chairs – Tom, Molly, Blake and I playing Scrabble. So, this is also family, I’d thought. We seem to have moved from house to house as easily as flies, and here we are, sitting in this house by the sea, chewing on olives, the flesh around their pitted hearts.
‘What about Misrak?’ Blake asks. ‘Do you still keep up with her?’
‘We’re terrible communicators. We talk maybe once a year on the phone but it’s always this hour-long conversation, rushing to say everything, and then we feel caught up and can move on with our lives. But I miss the everydayness of having a friend nearby. Someone you can have coffee with, someone you can go out with.’
‘And this man you’re seeing?’
‘That’s finished now.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘I hadn’t expected it to last.’
‘The thing is,’ Blake says, ‘I’ve met someone too.’
He dismantles everything. He’s telling me about her. She’s an architect. English with American ancestry. Emma. Loves Bauhaus and the Brutalists. Keeps parrots. Grew up on a farm in Hereford. I’m listening to him and it’s as if I’m travelling far from every place we’ve just visited. All those houses and fields, all those roads we just walked with our palms sticking together. Everything I had once wanted to move away from but now long to hold close. That girl I was getting to know again, she has vanished, leaving me only with this life, the one where I live alone with my sister, a pack of dogs and the wilderness.
‘Stop talking,’ I say. ‘Please.’
But he keeps going, because he’s earned the right to speak.
A sudden vision of the future. I am going to be one of those women who is alone. In her car, in restaurants, in the rooms of this house, waiting for a sign from the world. A telephone call. A letter. Nothing will come.
‘We’ll always know each other, Grace. We’ll always be in each other’s lives.’
‘No we won’t. You’ll fall through. One day I won’t remember your face.’
‘That’s crazy, come on.’
‘What was the point of all this?’ I say, my hands moving incoherently. ‘Why come back? Why not send me a Dear Grace letter? I’m fucking used to those, you know.’
‘I wanted to see you. I wanted to see the life you were living and know it, so that when we write and speak to each other I can imagine it.’
‘Now you know. Good.’
‘I missed you so much, I missed our life, but three years, I mean, you gave no sign you wanted to return. Life pushed me on.’
‘I suppose she’s dying to have children.’
‘We’ve talked about it, yes.’
I looked at him and he was a stranger again. The days we’d just spent together were already beginning to crack and slip through the windows. That body I’d once known and had been relearning. Those toes. ‘You should have said something earlier.’
‘I tried. I did try. I’m sorry.’
Kadar comes to pick him up the next afternoon. He has brought a champaca tree.
‘Where will you put it?’ he asks.
There is none of the jubilation of the arrival. The dogs are out somewhere on the beach. Lucia is on the floor of the sitting room, flapping away with her socks. ‘I’ll put it in front of the house, so I can look at the flowers while I’m drinking tea.’
‘No no,’ Kadar says nervously, ‘the sea air will kill it. Put it somewhere behind the house.’
Mallika and I stand at the steps and wave goodbye. Clutched in the centre of her palm are two 500-rupee notes, slipped to her by Blake as he was leaving. ‘Nice boy,’ she says, as
the taxi disappears around the corner.
I go upstairs and wait for it, but the grief is lying coiled tight under my skin. It will roll out in waves. It will come from that faraway sea wall and hit me in the face when I’ve stopped expecting it.
I plant the champaca in front of the house. I want to see if it will survive. If it will bring forth flowers of salt.
25
Lucia wants to wear a ghagra choli for the new temple’s inauguration. It is one of those bejewelled things she brought with her from the Sneha Centre – red velvet with gold sequins on the skirt, worn with great aplomb for Diwali and Christmas shows. Mallika has brought frangipani flowers from the trees. She makes a crown and places it gently on Lucy’s head, saying, ‘Now you’re looking super.’ Mallika herself is in a new sari – bright pink with gold checks – and a big red pottu in the middle of her head. Only I look like a faded nun in my beige salwar kameez.
Valluvan had said there would be an hour-long Carnatic concert followed by prayers, speeches and food. I’d hoped to time our entry towards the end of the concert, but of course, nothing is ever punctual, so they are still setting up the shamiana when we arrive. The musicians and the priest are sitting around listlessly drinking coffee from plastic cups. Six of Valluvan’s men immediately guide us towards the row of chairs in front of the makeshift stage. We are chief guests of sorts, so there is no escaping the show. Men are fiddling with the wires of the speakers strung up on poles, which make menacing squeaking sounds. I think of Papi and stifle a laugh.
Mallika doesn’t sit with us. She joins the throng of village women who are organising food behind the temple. Only Lucia and I have nothing to do except hold cold glass bottles of Coca-Cola. I would have preferred a fresh coconut water, but these were brought over so ceremoniously, it was impossible to make a different request.
I had seen Valluvan a few times in the past month about the upcoming elections. ‘You realise I don’t work?’ I told him. ‘I have no regular income coming in. Whatever I have is invested in such a way that it has to sustain me for the rest of my life.’ We agreed on half the amount he initially asked for. He was good-natured about it, although I don’t think he believed me.
At one point there had been a plan to make his wife Nila stand for elections because of the 33 per cent reservation quota for women in the Panchayat system. It was a common practice. The wife gets in on the quota, the husband rules. But they had not thought of it early enough and all the paperwork had already been filed. So there were posters of Valluvan all over the place – smiling widely, giving the thumbs-up sign, and next to him – the leader of the party – an aged poet in dark goggles on a throne with a saffron shawl around his neck. Between them was the party’s symbol, the rising sun, even though for some years now, the sun had been squashed by the current party in power.
Nila finds us. She is with her three daughters, and they have cut through the crowd like queens. ‘Where’s Lenin?’ I ask. ‘Playing all the time,’ she says, making a face. The girls are told to sit with me. They have ribbons in their plaits and they wear glittery long skirts and tops. Coloured glass bangles make clinking noises all along their wrists. ‘Hi Lucy-akka,’ they say, patting her thigh again and again, till Lucy is forced to acknowledge them. She smiles and squeezes each of their fingers in turn and then returns to swishing the one sock I’d allowed her to bring. The girls have always been fascinated by Lucia. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ they used to ask. Between Mallika and I, we tried explaining, but they didn’t seem to understand, as they’d never seen anyone like her. Now they are protective of her, and when other village children come up to Lucy and stare, they call them rowdies and swat them away.
Midway through the speeches I kick off my sandals and bury my feet in the sand. The new temple is multicoloured and bright, its gopuram rising like tiers of cake into the trees. The sea lies a few hundred feet to the east. We cannot hear it because the speakers billow out in every direction, but it sends a sweet breeze down the long alley that connects us.
I have forgotten what it was like to be in love. To be in lust. To have my body filled in some way with desire. I was sixteen when I kissed the Bernardi brothers in Italy. Nonna Rosa, Ma and I would close all the windows and sit in the kitchen listening to Gino Bernardi playing Bach suites on his violoncello next door. It was the saddest, deepest music I’d heard in all my life. And even though Gino was a weedy, pretentious kid who wore bow ties and orthotic devices for his flat feet, which went smack smack smack as he walked up the stairs, I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. When we finally kissed – on Gino’s bed, under a picture of his idol, Jacqueline du Pré, I had been disappointed. The kiss was startling, smelly, moist. It had none of the beauty of his music. I couldn’t get past the halitosis, the awkward tongue. It was not the melting in the loins I’d hoped for, but I still listened to him play and kept up with the bedside kisses.
And then one day, Gino’s older brother, Agostino, ambushed me at the gelateria. Agostino, who didn’t speak much English, who led me with his rough hands to the smoky billiards hall in Arcugnano, where we drank beer with his friends and laughed, even though I had no idea what they were saying. Something was happening with Agostino, something mysterious and terrible, and when he took me behind the billiards hall afterwards to grab my neck like a brute and kiss me, there was no clash of teeth and tongue, just a warm smoothness, the start of a hurricane.
It was the summer of 1989 and I grew thin with worry despite Nonna heaping my plate with extra pasta. All the nervous energy ate into my bones. My parents had fallen into their usual state of heaviness. Nonno and Nonna slept like two ancient dogs, emerging only for meals. The June days, hot and mortifying, descended over Vicenza. Everything radiated guilt – the trees, the glass in the windows, the brooding clouds. Wherever Agostino was, I went. His broad shoulders and worn-out leather jacket, his stupid mouth, which had nothing genius to say, but did funny things to my insides. I have forgotten what those Bernardi brothers looked like, and I can’t remember what the kisses felt like either. That bursting-out-of-your-skin feeling I had when I was sixteen has disappeared like a bird that once lived but has left no trace of itself.
Around us are fishermen, their wives and children, but also, small-town electrical engineers, plumbers and day labourers. There appears to be an informal segregation of the sexes. Except for Lucia and I, and a few grandmothers who have been parked in the audience, the chairs are mostly occupied by men. The women hold the periphery. Children move seamlessly between. It is almost nine by the time we eat. Valluvan and Nila’s girls watch Lucia while I get a plate of food from the tables set up outside. Halogen lights have been fixed to poles and coloured fairy lights hang from the trees. Tamil film songs thump mercilessly into the night. I feel lightheaded, dehydrated probably, but also, that wave of, What am I doing here? It is a feeling of displacement so strong, for a second, I must ask myself, Who am I? And what have I to do with these people?
I cannot imagine the security of being born in a place and knowing it to be mine. To think of ancestors whom I resemble, who knew this land, its language, its people. There must be such confidence in this existence, this knowledge that everything you have lived has been lived before by your parents and their parents. All my life I have stood outside, like my father, like my mother, standing behind glass, looking in. With Lucia, it’s more pronounced – that feeling of not belonging. On days like this it overwhelms me.
‘Akka, thanks for your contribution,’ Nila says, at the food counter.
‘Well, it’s our temple,’ I say. ‘We are part of the village, so we are happy to contribute.’
It is not what I believe, but what I parrot anyway. I would have preferred to have used that money to educate children, or to hire someone to clear the giant mountain of rubbish that is accumulating as we speak from all the plastic cups and plates that will clog up the backwaters. But I had not been given a choice. Valluvan’s men had come smiling with their request, and when I tried bar
gaining with them, they continued to smile but held their ground. In the end, I capitulated and gave them what they wanted.
‘No, no, not the money you gave for the temple. I’m talking about my husband’s election campaign. Unfortunately, we’re still lacking some funds. We need a proper security team and an accountant. This is also for our village’s benefit.’
I smile at Nila. The jewelled pin in her nose gleams. She is a handsome woman. I had seen her mostly at home, in a kaftan or a hurriedly tied sari. Today there is none of that sloppiness. She is in a crisp blue kancheevaram, face powdered, hair combed into an immaculate bun.
‘It is out of my reach, Nila. You know I must look after my sister. And her old school has many poor girls whose families cannot support them, so I pay a lot. But I cannot be paying all the time, no? Maybe I should marry a nice rich man?’ I say, laughing, hoping to steer the conversation.
‘You are already married, isn’t it? You should have children of your own,’ Nila says, ‘before it’s too late.’
It is past midnight when Lucia, Mallika and I walk back home. The celebrations will continue for a few more hours. The path is dark and it has turned cold. I point the torchlight of my phone ahead, and Mallika beats a stick on the ground as we walk, in case there are snakes along the path. We are so rarely outside the house at night that it feels dangerous, this journey home. Only once, we had gone out to the beach on a full-moon night. The dogs and Lucia were both confused. I had packed a flask of tea and sandwiches. We had been sitting on the picnic mat for fifteen minutes when we heard sounds coming from the southern end of the beach. There was a light moving towards us and a man’s voice, shouting. The dogs had barked, and the speed at which the light was moving unsettled me. I rushed Lucia back inside and, after bolting the doors, felt ashamed at my cowardice. It was probably just a crab hunter on his bicycle. He might have been calling out to someone he knew. But I hadn’t wanted to encounter him.
Everything alters in the dark. It is one thing to be inside the house watching it, another to be standing outside. A motorbike putters towards us and slows down. I grip Lucia’s hand tightly but she immediately shakes it away. The bike stops next to us. It is Mallika’s half-sister’s husband’s cousin – the one who works as the head gardener at the ashram next door, who lost his young boy to fits. ‘What are you doing walking alone like this?’ he barks at Mallika. ‘We were at the temple,’ she says. ‘Now we are going home.’ The man’s face is wide and angry, his eyes pop out like golf balls. ‘Stupid bitch,’ he says. ‘That lady has a car so why didn’t you drive there? Now is not the time to do all this. There are too many tensions. I’m just coming from Kadalur – there was a bunch of drunkards who wanted to come and make a noise here. All K. Alexander’s men. This Valluvan thinks he’s some kind of hero standing for elections, but he hasn’t paid the right people.’
Small Days and Nights Page 16