Kaya Days

by Carl de Souza

  Kaya

  Days

  Kaya

  Days

  CARL DE SOUZA

  TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY

  JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN

  Originally published as Les Jours Kaya

  © 2000 by Editions de l’Olivier

  Translation © 2021 by Jeffrey Zuckerman

  Two Lines Press

  582 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.twolinespress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-949641-19-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-949641-20-2

  Cover design by Gabriele Wilson

  Cover photo © Lexi Laine / Millennium Images, UK

  Design by Sloane | Samuel

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Names: Souza, Carl de, 1948- author.

  Zuckerman, Jeffrey, 1987- translator.

  Title: Kaya days / Carl de Souza ; translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman.

  Other titles: Jours Kaya. English

  Description: San Francisco, CA : Two Lines Press, [2021] Originally published as Les Jours Kaya.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021015291 (print) | LCCN 2021015292 (ebook) | ISBN 9781949641202 (ebook) | ISBN 9781949641196 (trade paperback)

  Classification: LCC PQ3989.2.S674 (ebook) | LCC PQ3989.2.S674 J6813 2021 (print) | DDC 843/.914--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015291

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  To Pramesh

  CONTENTS

  Kaya Days

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Santee always liked the bloody, ruddy reds. So Ram would pick the blacks, saying the dark offset the nickel-plated kogs even more. She and Ram would count them off as they parked, decked out by the families in garlands and balloons for a wedding, or as they started and stopped in campaign parades, flags tied to the rear dafs. Santee was pouting: she wouldn’t be debating with Ram today, they wouldn’t be sparring with words that Ma didn’t understand, with their own terms for blinkers and hubcaps. She was too old for all that, she knew, but if Ram had waited for her today, they could have played reds against blacks—she would have insisted, she would have begged until he relented, and would have won outright, and only then would they have gone back home on the last bus and Ma wouldn’t have asked any questions. The disappointment of this loss was far worse than any distress she felt at Ram being nowhere to be found.

  The shadows grew chilly along the low wall on which she was sitting, among the boys her little brother’s age, and Santee knew he was already gone. Nobody had said those words, but she knew, maybe she’d known even before coming to Rose-Hill. She wasn’t sure what exactly she was waiting for as she watched the parents in their cars picking up their sons. The boys’ dark uniforms were a stark contrast to her pink taffeta dress, her too-long limbs, and her braids gleaming with coconut oil. One of them had scoffed as she’d wavered in the doorway. The teacher had given her an earful and then, after checking a list, shrugged. Bissoonlall? Ram Bissoonlall? He’s left already. Everyone glared at her as if it was her fault. It was, she knew; she ought to have moved faster, come earlier, hurried like the boys rushing down the street, the parents who found their sons and sped off in their red cars. But Santee hadn’t been able to come earlier. When Ma had told her to pick up Ram, she’d been puzzled, wondering why Ma was asking her to go when she herself, despite being old, liked doing it. Something must have been off, or the tides were all wrong, Don’t you ever go against the tides was what Ma told Santee when she was thirteen and had come to her mother convinced that her stomach was ripping open. Ma had been trying to warn her of the dangers in store for her as a girl.

  Getting dressed had taken her more than an hour with some scolding, but not too much. Something was definitely wrong; any other day Ma would have reminded her sternly of her responsibilities as the older child. Santee let the first few buses at the Bienvenue stop go past; by the time she was on the next one, she wasn’t thinking about Ram anymore. The countryside was rolling by faster than all the other times she’d gone to Rose-Hill with Ma—little hills prickling with traveler’s palms, pale fields, sun-bleached temples. Nobody was headed into town; everybody was going home. In the huge bus careering upward, the empty seats rattled and there was only her, the driver with his hands swinging this way and that, and a long-haired, badly shaven conductor who stumbled down the aisle, his young face leering as he told her just how dangerous it was for a young girl to be traveling alone. She didn’t respond, just twisted her little hanky between her fingers and stared out at the sugarcane fields as the jeer blew past the nape of her neck like so much hot air.

  As long as cars kept coming she could keep on sitting on the low wall, as long as the stream was steady, dotted by reds like a pulse, she felt a sense of safety, even if she knew it was short-lived. For now, she didn’t have to watch the teacher dealing with the other boys, didn’t have to go from classroom to classroom only to hear his shouted name—Bissoonlall!—echoing in the empty rooms. Nobody would bother her as she took in this place Ram had the privilege to experience every day. For now, she could make sense of the scraps of the stories he parceled out when Ma interrogated him at dinner, paltry crumbs that now connected to something real, amid the foliage of the school’s grounds, the motors’ revving, the boys’ taunts.

  As long as the cars went by, she wouldn’t have to deal with the prospect of going back to Bienvenue without Ram, in a rush like everyone else, but for no clear reason. She was relishing those last few moments of stillness, the stone harsh against her skin. She let its chill seep through the fabric of her dress and across her lower body, knowing that any minute now everything would force her, just like the others, to go straight home. Ram hadn’t waited for her.

  But all this had happened gradually, with the quiet of a new beginning. She recalled the small shock she’d felt at Ma’s words, Go pick up Ram, and she remembered the particular weariness in Ma’s voice, how she seemed to withdraw in some way with those clipped words. Ma entrusted her with this responsibility, not because she trusted her daughter, but because she had no strength left. Santee didn’t hold it against her. What did Ma do after she left? She must have wrapped her odhni around her head, despite the heat, and gone into her bedroom. And then she’d have gone to sleep, even though Ma was never in bed during the day.

  The cars took away the last of the children and their chatter. The wind blew a wad of paper across the long stretch of asphalt with some rustling, and a few voices, the last ones, overlapped, mingled: I told you to check the classrooms, chief, can’t be leaving any of the kids behind, The Sacré Cœur’s on fire, haven’t you heard? Santee stood up.

  She followed a lady and her son heading down the street by the church toward Trèfles. The teacher locked up behind them. Santee watched the hand clutching the boy’s. At that age, there’s no holding their hand—they wander off, they kick pebbles as far as they can. Santee wondered if Ma would have taken Ram’s hand like that as they went to the Rose-Hill station; was that why he hadn’t waited? She remembered how damp Ram’s palms always were and how, when he was younger, everyone always insisted he’d been playing in the water and told him he’d catch a cold that way. The boy and his mother were talking in whispers, aimlessly; she must have hurried from work after the announcement had come on the radio to go pick up children from school, and she was taking him—her love, her life—home without paying any attention to the people standing in the doorways or the sirens blaring in the town center. Santee couldn’t recall ever having had her hand grabbed like that; she wasn’t wistful, but it had to feel odd to have your hand clutched in a woman’s thick fingers, to sense her sturdy frame beside yours. Santee’s eyes rested on the massive rear rolling like a gentle sea, and she let herself be led past the banks of wooden
houses. Men charged past them every so often. Snippets of small talk, bits of jokes and snickers. The sharp air stung as they forged ahead, toward the muffled explosions she could almost feel in her bones. She needed to stay in the lady’s wake, with Ram’s town all around her, sheltering her; he had to be here, she was sure of it, but where exactly? He’d been so unwilling to share this world with them, and now she knew it was because they would have floundered here, Ma being as weary as Santee was naïve. At Hugnin Road, the lady barely slowed down and crossed without looking either way for trucks: the boy’s hand in hers was her carte blanche. The traffic signals on both sides lay toppled, and acrid fumes wafted from burning tires. The lady shoved her way through a gaggle of men swigging bottles of beer outside a laboutik sinwa. Santee slipped through the gap. The men closed in behind them, shielding them from the explosions. They emerged onto a narrow side street in Trèfles. The mother, the son, and Santee—nobody else. Their footsteps resounded beneath the mango trees arching between the rows of houses. The lady kept looking back and glaring at her. But Santee wouldn’t be shaken off; she knew this wasn’t a place where she could afford to assume anything. She would rather let them take the lead. The mother and the boy came to a cast-iron gate shaped like a scallop and painted blue. She took out a key, opened it, and made her kid go in first. Santee heard him say: That’s Bissoonlall’s sister. The lady practically shoved the boy into a small garden with flowerpots and a birdcage. She stood by the gate until Santee disappeared down the alleyway.

  Santee didn’t dare go back to ask the boy if he knew where Ram was. She could see the lights switching on in the ground-floor windows, then hands yanking the curtains shut. Bissoonlall’s out…Bissoonlall’s always out…Bissoonlall finn al kazino… Those whispers were her only hope of bringing him back home. It was getting dark under the mango trees. She had no hope of understanding, but that wasn’t what she needed to do, that wasn’t her job, she was just here because Ma couldn’t be. What she needed to do was find Ram; one of these alleys would lead to him, but which one?

  Santee had never been methodical when looking for Ram back in Bienvenue. She’d always run out into the street first, then gone behind the house and kept going all the way down to the river, yelling his name over and over as her hopes flagged. Those minutes, as Ram’s name hung over the house, were always terrifying. They stretched out. He always chose the perfect moment to end her torment, usually when the kitchen door opened and Ma added her voice to the chorus, tired of hearing Santee yelling all around the house. But here in Trèfles, where Creoles were living practically on top of one another, Santee couldn’t launch Ramesh’s name into the air, couldn’t send her anxious, Hindu intonation soaring.

  Raaaa-messshhhh.

  It was the sort of name that forged onward alone, breaking like a wave on the shore, across the tangled alleyways. She wouldn’t have had to repeat it. What she needed to do now was walk randomly amid the indistinguishable intersections, since she no longer had Corps de Garde mountain, the rocky face of which the woman and the child had more or less disappeared into, to orient her. When she decided to go back to talk to the boy, there was no seashell-shaped gate to be found. The road stretched out beneath a deepening night. Under a streetlight, men were talking over one another: They beat him, I’m telling you he had gone stone-cold turkey, No they punched his mouth in, Nobody saw it, They left him to die, Bullshit, ase koz kaka, they’ve done it to others, he’s not the first Creole to die in prison. Nobody looked twice at her. She didn’t dare ask them where the casino was; she would rather have found a woman to ask. Music floated from a store’s verandah, music and the voices of a few teenagers trying to stay in the shadows. The reddish glow of their joints was all she could make out. It was clear none of them had been talking, not for a good while. They had been smoking, smoking and singing snippets of a dirge that unfurled with the men’s bass tones, the women’s reedy voices. Santee got closer to make out their faces, but among the mass of dreadlocked heads nothing stood out. She aimed her question at an especially shrill voice in the corner. All she could see were the whites of eyes. Where do I find the casino? The song died, but no one paid attention to the newcomer, her question lingered, bothersome, nobody cared. The beer bottles were passed around, clinking, a ravanne’s beat continued past the song’s end. The casino? Nobody on the store’s verandah looked surprised, nothing seemed to reach them, the sound of the ravanne rose up and drew them back in. There’s a gambling house down Prince of Wales Street, but it might be closed? The girl pointed down the road and they picked up the song where they’d left off, the music even more insistent now. Santee set out. The girl had said to count off five streets. She shouldn’t make any mistakes this time, she had no excuse, each intersection was brightly lit. But when she paused at the second one, she realized the night was nipping at her heels, the soundless night—a darkness blacking out each intersection. Two men were following her. Two? She could hear their voices, calm yet implacable, voices that kept pace with her, their tone shifting as a rock was thrown at a streetlight bulb. They hit the mark each time. Santee started running to stay in the light. From the houses, she could hear televisions blaring the weather report. The characteristics of a slight high-pressure system over the Mascarenes, droned a reporter; Santee decided that was the explanation for the distant explosions she heard in Ram’s world—it was just the storm, even though these were nothing like the thunderclaps off Mulâtresse mountain in Bienvenue. The treetops were dark against a reddish blaze. Lightning bolts could be tinged that color, she thought, it’s electricity in the air, when we’re in Ram’s world that’s what it has to be. She could make out a rather busy main road ahead. The casino can’t be far off now. Police vans with flashing lights sped by every so often. A cab pulled in ahead of her with a squeal of the tires and stopped in front of a building. It let out two Chinese women who kept chatting with the driver. Santee headed toward them to ask which way the casino was. The cab drove off. The Chinese women were still talking, but Santee didn’t understand what they were saying. They had to be workers from one of the textile factories. They could talk all they liked, but she was only thinking about one thing: finding Ram. She asked them, very slowly, if they knew a boy by that name: I’m his sister, I’m from far away, I have to find him because… Their expressions turned serious, there was a quick back-and-forth, and then the two women each took one of her arms solemnly and escorted her into the building. A flashing sign indicated that they were walking into the Négus Pool House Night Club. A row of bare lightbulbs cast a yellow glare along the wall leading inside and zigged up a level. In the stairwell, a shabbily suited man’s slurred goodbyes echoed loudly. He clung drunkenly to the banister, slumped over it so they could get by him and head upstairs. A tall, elegant Taiwanese woman in a turquoise-striped dress stood next to him. There was a brief discussion between her and the two women, then they continued up to a cavernous room with Santee in tow. A billiard table covered by a tarp stood imposingly in the center. Along the walls, slot machines and electronic games jingled and squealed, distracting from the lack of customers. Santee saw, behind a bar covered with fake flowers across from the entrance, a young guy in a military shirt and sunglasses. Good evening, Shyam! the two Chinese women shouted. An elbow on the bar propped up his tilted head as he smiled curtly. His lips lazily formed words, and the tremors ran across the rest of his body, but Santee couldn’t hear him or even the music over the machines’ din. Above the bar, the plaster bust of a bearded man with high cheekbones bore the same knowing smile. It reassured Santee to come in from the night and see smiles. The welcoming presence of the bearded man, no doubt a Christian saint, set her at ease. Shyam had festooned him in the Hindu style so that HAILE was the only part of his nameplate she could see. The unexpected gleam and babble of the machines charmed Santee—all of this was just like Ram, who was always being given extravagant yet flimsy toys that the two of them tinkered with together. Santee began to smile as well. The guy at the bar pulled his hand
away from his cheek, revealing the cell phone he had been whispering into, stood upright, and called out to the two women. They rushed over to tell him something—they must have been explaining that Santee was just passing through, that she didn’t want to be a bother, and that she was just Ram’s sister. The guy put down his phone and fixed his eyes on her. The two women waited. Then Shyam shrugged: So that’s Ram’s sister, huh? He lost interest in the women, turning back to his phone with his enigmatic smile, and Santee was allowed to follow the women into a rear corridor. They stepped out onto a balcony abutting that of an old wood building. There were the smells of a kitchen. An infant’s cries rose over the electronics. A woman’s firm, sweet voice tried to soothe the baby. To their left ran a series of rooms; from one of them came the clink of dominoes. The women slipped into the next one. There was a row of disused urinals cocooned in green-polka-dotted covers, and, along a wall, metal desks dragged in from some office that had oval mirrors with carved wooden frames propped up on them. The same fake flowers were everywhere. None of it was dusty; someone kept the room squeaky clean. There was even a fan and a radio playing music, as well as two Formica-paneled armoires and a couch made out of old car seats where a Creole woman slept, her head thrown back, an arm shielding her eyes from the light. Her dress had slid up, revealing pink panties, and her bare legs swung back and forth. The two Chinese women pulled clothes out of the armoire, took off their jeans and T-shirts, and put on identical, striped dresses. The two were very different heights: one was willowy while the other was rather short and plump. Santee saw that, oddly enough, the dresses suited them both. She stood by the doorway and watched them both put on makeup. They had taken quite a few small containers out of the drawers beneath the counters, and now slathered large brown splotches of foundation on their cheeks, caked mascara on their eyelashes, and made crimson fruits out of their lips. The chubby one’s eyes paused when they met Santee’s in the mirror. She then went back to making herself up, intent, checking Santee’s reaction to see whether she approved. After a few casual pencil strokes, the tall one was done and headed back to the main room. The other one nodded Santee over; she sat down in front of the mirror. The girl didn’t dare to touch the makeup. She looked at her own face, at the too-thick eyebrows, the long lashes she batted anxiously as she stared at her light brown irises; it was all so unlike the smooth, perfectly done Chinese woman’s. The woman, too, was scrutinizing her chestnut skin gleaming under the lights with the sweat of having walked all the way across Trèfles, then she ran her finger across Santee’s damp forehead, leaving behind a matte streak. She began to wipe Santee’s temples dry with toilet paper, then untied the black velvet bow and let her hair free. Its thickness was surprising. She hesitated before trying to tame the mane and the girl’s unruly features. Santee waited patiently, her hands folded over her knees. Li Chen! the other woman yelled from the billiard room. Li Chen barked a reply as she began knotting Santee’s hair into a heavy chignon. Then she set to powdering her skin.