by Shani Mootoo
First a big piece of the net, full of seaweed, washed up somewhere along the coastline. Then boards from the pirogue, one piece with the boat’s name, St. Peter, partially visible. One of the men’s jerseys, but not the red one she was hoping and not hoping for. A few days later, more flotsam and jetsam of a nighttime high tide. A month or so beyond that time, the engine was discovered a few miles up the shore, but no bodies were ever recovered.
Dolly would eventually remarry, but how could it be the same?
HUSTLING TO CATCH TAXI
No matter how the child jostled against his mother’s body as she ran breathless down Timbano Trace, he refused to awaken. He was heavy, and sweat streamed down Dolly’s face. If she missed the six o’clock taxi, it would be an hour before the next one passed. By then traffic would have piled up. She would end up being over an hour late.
She made haste, and with each breath the odor of the sea—crab, fish bones, seaweed, and chip-chip—made her skin crawl. The sand was damp, too; it must have rained, there must have been a storm last night. The smell told her that the sea had pitched back up some of what it had lassoed yesterday or even years back. It had crossed her mind when she first awakened to run down to the water and check if the sea had decided to return any of her belongings. But years of doing just this had taught her that the sea had secrets it held on to and would not give up for any amount of pleading or promises.
It must have been an offshore storm. An offshore storm with the audacity to make shore people sick with its sea-bottom foulness.
It was the cock in the yard clucking, clearing its throat, flapping about like stale news in wind, that woke her. She thought something was meddling with it. Whether it was a dog come to steal the hen’s eggs freshly laid under the house, or a man prowling about in the yard, it was she who had to fend for herself and the boy. So she got out of bed and peeped through a gap in the boards. Nothing. She nudged the lopsided window open for a better view. The sea air was damp, clinging to her skin. It was just the cock out there. She recognized it strutting and dancing and prancing. Suddenly eight, nine, ten of them spread throughout the area, made ruckus enough to rouse even the dead, be they on land or tangled up in the bottom of the ocean. Lately she’d had to shoo the one that was hers off the crown of the pawpaw tree. Such an old, heavy bird in such a young and tender tree. It would have brought down the tree if she had not put a stop to it. If her son had not been so attached to that particular bird—and why it was so, she could not understand—she would have wrung its neck and stewed it a long time ago. Clucking about and waking her up like that.
Hustle-hustle: she mustn’t miss the taxi.
God, her child had grown, overnight it seemed. Five years she had been carrying him like this, at this time of the morning when he remained asleep on her shoulder, to catch the regular Saturday ride into town. How heavy he had become, too heavy to be carrying so.
THE PROBLEM OF TRAVELING IN A TAXI WITH BLACK PEOPLE
Before taxis serviced the link road that connected up the south coast’s seaside villages, Raleigh being one of them, Dolly St. George hardly set foot beyond the walking distance between her house and Tante Eugenie’s. Raleigh people seldom traveled beyond the village. When they did, it was to obtain one kind of license or another from a government office in the capital city of Gloria, a birth certificate or death certificate, or to go to the hospital in Marion to visit an ailing relative or friend or to see a doctor themselves. If they’d had cause to travel, they would have gone the old way: hired horse cart, mule cart, or donkey cart. After the service became regular in the area, the Indian man from the village farther south, who used to give rides in his donkey cart for a few pence, painted a sign on the wood frame of his cart: NARINE DONKEY SERVICE. FOR HIRE. COMBATIVE RATES, FRENLY DRIVER. FRESH AIR & SEENIC ROUTE. GARANTEED. He and his donkey used to be regularly spotted transporting someone or something in the cart, but he had become scarce these days.
Dolly St. George was among the first to take the opportunity to travel the hour and half—on a good day, that is, twice that and more when the swamp flooded Link Road—into Marion to look for work. On the day she first took a taxi, she was one of three passengers in the car licensed to carry five. People from the area preferred to wait to hear if the vehicle really was able to make it all the way into the town and back safely. That trip was an investment: a shilling, which was a shilling more than she truly could spare. But thankfully, on that first day looking, she found the washing and ironing job to which she was traveling now.
The driver, Mr. Walter, didn’t grip the steering wheel as tightly as he had the first few times she rode in his car. The first day he picked her up, he was as hesitant as she. When she saw him, a black man driving, a man whose ancestors were brought from Africa, she had a moment of uncertainty, and it was only the prospect of work in Marion that made her, a lone Indian woman from the predominantly Negro village of Raleigh, get into the motor car with three black men. Let them run their mouths, she thought. She had a baby to mind; had any of them offered to clothe and feed him?
Mr. Walter, for his part, was surprised to find a woman waiting for him, flagging him down, as he approached Timbano Trace. She was alone that first time, having left the baby with Tante Eugenie. Walter got out of the driver’s seat, came around to her, and said, “Mornin’, madam.” She didn’t like him calling her madam. She wondered what he meant by that. She wasn’t any madam. She set her face sternly and waited for him to open the door. He stood looking down Timbano Trace. He turned back to the car, took out a handkerchief from his pants pocket, and wiped the rear window. She still waited for him to open the door. The other two passengers, the two men who were also black-skinned, like Mr. Walter, had stayed in the car, but they were also curiously looking down Timbano Trace. Finally the driver stopped polishing his vehicle, looked all around, and said, “It have somebody else coming?” She shook her head. He raised his eyes and said, “You alone?” She said nothing and looked at the door handle. He said, “Marion?” She nodded. He said, “One shilling, return. If you have it. But you could owe me.” She turned her back to him and discreetly withdrew from her bodice a handkerchief that had been tucked in the crease of her bosom. She unwrapped it and, turning again to face him, held out a shilling. He took it from her, yet he laughed and said, “I trust you, you know.” Her face burned with shame for traveling in this new manner: by herself, with strangers, with men, ones of African descent at that. She wondered if, in so doing, she had encouraged him to be fresh with her. He opened the door. She backed herself onto the hardwood seat and sat down, reluctant to draw her sandy shoes into the clean interior. Mr. Walter mumbled to her not to worry, but he waited happily as she dusted off the sole of each shoe. Once she was safely in, he shut the door. Dolly stayed close to the door so as not to end up too near the other passengers. Mr. Walter said nothing more to her until he left her at the petrol station just outside Marion, but she had caught him watching her in the rearview mirror. When she got out, he addressed her, “Return trip from here, two o’clock. Sharp.” For a good while, on subsequent trips, he said little more to her than “Mornin’” and “Afternoon.”
THE MAN FAST FOR SO
Only when the taxi had left behind the seaside village of Raleigh did the child open his eyes. They passed fields of cane. A man flagged them, but there was no room, and he was left in a trail of dust and blue smoke of engine oil to wait the hour until another taxi came along. Mr. Walter had to swerve and hug his side of the road when a car approached and passed down the middle of the unpaved road. Mr. Walter surprised himself and everyone with a string of curses, but still he waved to the other driver as the cars passed. Mr. Walter’s passengers, including Dolly and her son, turned back to watch the other motorcar vanish down the road.
The child scratched sand-fly bites on the back of his hand. She held his hand tightly to stop him from turning new ones into fierce watery eruptions. He complained that he was hot, and in a whisper asked her to roll her window
down a little more. She sucked her teeth, ignored him. He sucked his teeth in response and sighed resignedly. Wearily, she unzipped the vinyl bag she carried. The smell of freshly fried dough and melted cheese rose out of the bag. The passenger next to her shifted to get a view. Dolly took out the brown paper containing the thin triangle of roti stuffed with cheese and shut the bag quickly. The boy nibbled at the buttery section of the flat bread, pushed it back at her, barely touched. Under the arch of the bridge, he pressed his face against the window to watch the mesmerizing passage of wood, iron railings, and wires, and through them snippets of the unfathomable black water. She caught his hand in hers just as he was about to reach for the window’s handle. Wrestling it out of hers, he whined in a whisper, “I not turning it down, Ma. Don’t hold my hand so. You hurting me.”
She rested her head back and closed her eyes.
On opening her eyes, she noticed Mr. Walter watching her in the rearview mirror yet again. What wrong with that damn good-for-nothing man? What he still watching so? she asked herself.
Mr. Walter, as if in response, threw his arm over the seat and turned back to face her, a move that caused the other passengers to gasp and, in varying words and expressions, demand that he keep his eyes on the road.
“I was there when they find him, you know.”
Dolly’s face drained; she didn’t know the body had been found. She put her hand to her mouth. The other passengers became stonily silent.
“What you mean, when they find him?” she whispered.
One passenger leaned forward and looked directly at Dolly, anticipating her reaction to Mr. Walter’s response.
Mr. Walter, realizing his words had been mistaken, spoke up rather quickly and loudly. “No, no, no. I don’t mean his body. His body never surface, ain’t so? No, girl, I mean I was there when they find him, a little boy bawling his eyes out on the steps of the dry-goods parlor.”
Dolly didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry. Her child was busy looking out the window. But she knew well enough that he heard everything, even if he might have appeared involved elsewhere.
“Two, three days so we wait for news that a child gone missing from some other village. But no such news. Then, you know, the old people, Mako and his lady—ent you know them? They say leave the child with them, that it is God who send this little boy for them to keep as their own. A Indian child they bring up, like if he is one of we. And you know, in time he come true-true like one of we!”
He don’t have no sense? she asks herself, talking so in front of the child? He driving motorcar and still he stupid so?
“But you know, he was a pretty child. Fair-fair, like Indians from town. Poor thing. He didn’t know where he was from or who drop him on the parlor steps. All he know was his name. It was Seudath, not so? But everybody call him Indian. All of we used to play cricket with him. Not just Mako and the lady. He grow up to be a nice fella.” Pointing to her son he added, “The child look like him for so.”
She turned to look through the window. Why he shaming her so, in front of her child, and in front of people she don’t know, she wonders. In a car full of black people who bound to say how Indians does throw-way their own, easy so.
In any case, she did not believe Mr. Walter. Everyone liked saying that they were there when the abandoned Indian boy was found outside Raleigh’s only shop. She wanted to tell him to mind his own business, but if he in truth did play cricket with her husband, for the sake of his memory, she would not be rude.
First stop on the edge of Marion was for petrol at a station owned by an Indian man. Initially Dolly was shy to be seen by the man and his workers, all of whom were Indian, in the car otherwise full of black people. On the second trip there, one of the attendants, sitting idle atop an overturned wooden soft-drink crate, picking his teeth with a toothpick, winked at her, removed the pick, puckered his lips, sent a kiss in her direction, and then resumed cleaning his teeth. She sucked her teeth long and hard before turning away from him. But all day long, if the truth be known, she remembered the freshness of the idle attendant with a degree of pleasure, imagining herself as he might have seen her: hair long and thick, black and wavy, her skin almost as dark as a person of African origin, reddened by Raleigh’s sun, sea, and wind, her nose and lips unusually slim for an Indian’s. When her husband had brought her to Raleigh, Tante Eugenie, taking her pipe out of her mouth long enough to greet her, held her face in her hands, lifted it to the sun, and studying it, said, “Well, Indian couldn’t do better. You is the prettiest Indian woman I ever see. How much children you planning for? Don’t waste them good looks, you hear? That is all God in heaven does bless human being with looks for, you know.”
Dolly took the attendant’s attention to mean that caring for a child by herself, doing hard work to make a living, and living for a handful of years without any man in her life had not hurt her appeal. But still, since then, whenever they arrived at the station, she would lean her head against the backrest, close her eyes, and pretend to be fast asleep. If she had not done so, she surely would have noticed that the man was no longer around. If she were to have inquired, a most unlikely thing for her to do, she would have found out that the owner, who did not miss a thing on the grounds of his station, had seen his worker’s freshness that day and promptly terminated his employment.
The strong odor as the car’s tank was refueled, and the honking of car horns on the busy street, jolted the child. While his mother pretended to sleep, he sat upright expectantly. From Saturdays past, this smell and the sudden busyness had come to signal that they were mere minutes from the center of town, from Ashton Road, from Mrs. Sangha’s large spacious house, from what he most looked forward to from one Saturday to the next: an entire day of play with Mrs. Sangha’s daughter.
A WOMAN IN A BUSTLING TOWN
Even in the modern and bustling town of Marion, where certain Guanagasparians of Hindu Indian descent migrated when they left estates in the interior of the island, the day may well have begun with a washing of the body and a pooja. From the moment Mrs. Sangha awoke, however, before she applied the copper-handled hibiscus twig dipped in baking soda to her teeth, she went into the living room and switched on the Zenith radio her husband had brought home the week after they married. The radio remained on until last thing at night. To whomever else was in the house, it might have been little more than an audible backdrop to the cleaning and cooking going on. But not to her.
Sometimes she awoke early, after a fitful night of bad dreams and spurts of sitting up with worry caused by some aspect of the previous night’s news; the dire direction in which the world seemed to be careening filled her with concern for all humankind and for the future of her daughter and herself.
She would be up so early that when she turned on the radio, prerecorded music played as the station workers were still miles away, only just getting into buses and taxis heading for the station house in the capital. While she awaited the first live broadcast of the day, she would open a tin of New Brunswick sardines and mash the contents with half a tomato and a hard-boiled egg.
Bringing her plate and cup of sweet Ceylon tea with her, she would draw a chair close to the big radio box in the drawing room, and there she would sit listening until her daughter awoke. She would be in time to hear the anthem “God Save the Queen,” followed by Guanagaspar’s anthem. For these, the official opening of the day, she would stand at attention, one hand lightly touching the edge of the piece of furniture through which the music flowed, the other palm flat upon her breast.
Early morning and then again last thing in the evening, the BBC delivered to the island, via the airwaves, its ten-minute program of news and views of the world. Although the local news might have remained the same throughout the day, Mrs. Sangha would not, as long as she was in the house, miss its hourly broadcast.
At ten A.M. on the dot, an appalling dirge threw the house into moments of mourning. Mrs. Sangha would stand in the doorway demanding silence as she listened to th
e announcement of the previous day’s deaths throughout the island. With one hand pressed to her lips, she grieved immediately for the deceased and shook her head in sympathy for the list of bereaved: beloved wife of so-and-so, father of so-and-so, and so-and-so. Brother of this one, uncle of that one. Friend of so-and-so.
She listened to radio plays, comedy programs, and even the sports news, to the cricket scores at twenty after noon, and to commentary on the test matches played in the Caribbean, South Africa, India, and in the British Isles. She forever spoke of the excitement she felt as she sat all by herself and listened to live commentary as Augustus Martin ran for Guanagaspar in the Berlin Olympics. He had been expected to outrace all other contenders, so his name and the fact that he was from the island of Guanagaspar were invoked on the air time and again. She had the feeling, whenever she heard his and the island’s name, that she had become a relevant part of the big world. She held herself proudly on those occasions, as she had the feeling that the world had overnight come to know of her personally. Even though Augustus Martin did not finish the race, having pulled a muscle mere seconds into it, she felt that he had won for the island something bigger than a medal: a place for them on the map of the world.