But things change. This was a time when a lot of our young fellows were going off to England to become doctors or lawyers, and quite a few of them returned to the island with white wives. It was said — and whether this was true or not I cannot say — but it was said that the club was considering allowing in the wives but not the husbands, so that — had they not still been in England at the time — Celia, for instance, could become a member but my brother-in-law Cyril could not. He would be allowed to drive her there and then pick her up, of course. But if he wished to wait for her, he would have to sit in the car or while away the time in the botanical gardens across the street.
And so my husband got it into his head that our wedding reception would be held there, at the Majesty. He submitted a request for rental of the premises — and received a reply stating that the premises were not available on the requested day. He changed the day, and still the premises were booked. This was the usual tactic.
Now, by this time journalists had begun attaching themselves to my husband, so he had one of them call up an officer of the club. The newspaper, the hack claimed, was looking into reports that Mr. Vernon Ramessar, an up-and-coming political leader in the East Indian community, was being refused rental of the club’s premises for his wedding reception, a notable event in the community. Was there any truth to this?
The club’s members were not unmindful of the growing resentment against them; they were not unaware that profound forces were at work outside the confines of the Majesty. The club officer pleaded simple scheduling conflicts — but he assured the hack they were working on a solution. By the following day it was all arranged. The club asked only that there be no goat-slaughter on the premises, no outdoor cooking fires, and that noise be kept to a reasonable level.
It was something, I tell you, Mrs. Livingston. We were drummed into the Majesty in full regalia, me in my sari, my husband in turban, kurta and dhoti, heads held high. You could practically hear the sound of privilege crashing down. Even the kitchen and dining-room staff stood and applauded. You cannot possibly imagine what it was like, my dear. The discrimination —
Ahh, yes, of course. How insensitive of me. Your name tends to suggest a different history. One does forget, you know, that you acquired it from your husband. Italian immigrants after the war. You were still the enemy, weren’t you …
But listen to us, trading old humiliations — let us not forget the triumphs, too! Do you know, my dear, what I consider to be the greatest triumph of all? That we’ve survived, Mrs. Livingston. We’ve survived, and we’re here to savour it.
The next day there were photographs in the newspapers, and lengthy stories turned out by the hacks. But the real story, as everyone well understood, was that the Majesty Club could not go back to its old ways. We celebrated Old Year’s that year at the Majesty, and we were far from alone …
There’s a touch left, my dear. Would you …? No? Then I think I shall …
Yes, yes, I know. All this sugar. But I am treating myself just for today. I shall return to my sensible ways tomorrow, don’t you worry.
So to get back to your question, how did I see it? My dear Mrs. Livingston, I saw it as the action of the man I had agreed to marry. I didn’t judge it. I admired his courage — but I did think, I confess, that he might have chosen a more appropriate occasion …
Regret? No, I don’t think so. I entered this marriage with full knowledge of his ambition, but I was only just beginning to learn just how deep that ambition went.
But this explains, Mrs. Livingston, why I know what humiliation feels like, and far worse. It is, my dear, why the colour of my skin is precious to me, even though it does not define me. You see, on our wedding day my husband reclaimed the dignity that had so long been denied us, and dignity opens up the world. After that day, how could I be ashamed — of anything?
Precious, precarious world, isn’t it?
7
AFTER BREAKFAST IN the lounge — dark panelling and wicker greedily absorbing the sunshine from the steel-barred windows — Yasmin smiles at the new desk clerk, nods at the new guard, and steps outside. She expects to be called back, cautioned. But daylight changes everything: they barely acknowledge her.
The morning air is cooler than she expects, the sun bright and splintery and gentle on the skin. Across the street, swallowed by the darkness of the evening before, effaced in the diminished view through her windows, is a large park: trees and lawns and paths, beds of tended flowers, sprays of shrubbery. Tacked to the tree trunks and rising above the flowers are the rectangular plates of botanical identification.
She feels herself lighten, feels a smile come to her lips.
Farther down the street, she sees a sight a TV story producer would film for “local colour.” A discouraged horse harnessed to a wooden cart, the tray heavy with a mound of fresh coconuts. A man in ragged shorts and a hat leans against the tray, sipping from a metal cup. He is shirtless, so thin that his chest appears concave. A producer would get him to wield his machete, to open up a nut: local enterprise in the dying economy.
She thinks of Martinique, with Jim, two weeks in February a few years ago. A bus tour through the misty mountains of tropical rainforest, through the remnants of St. Pierre ruined at the turn of the century by volcanic eruption, past endless banana plantations. She remembers the tall coconut palms, with their clusters of green nuts high above. The woman in the seat ahead had pointed to them, asked her husband what they were. He didn’t know.
“Coconuts,” Yasmin had offered.
“Coconuts?” The woman was doubtful.
“Fresh coconuts. That’s how they grow.”
“You sure?” — the doubt in her voice hardening — “The only coconuts I’ve ever seen are brown.”
Yasmin had fallen silent at that. She saw the woman — wisps of grey revealed at the nape of her neck by the severe upsweep of too-brown hair — bridling at the possibility that the coconut could be other than she knew it to be. Like the many who tuned in to the newscast not to learn of the world but to confirm their views of it.
“Coconuts.” Jim, sitting beside her, had squeezed her hand. “Sure couldn’t tell just by looking at them.”
“Helps to ask,” she replied. “Usually.”
“Penny Pradesh, please.”
“Who callin’, please.”
“My name is Yasmin.”
“Jus’ a moment, please.”
Penny Pradesh is her aunt, her father’s sister. They have spoken only once before, when Yasmin called to give her aunt the news of her mother’s death, and to ask her help in its aftermath. Call Penny, if there’s anything her mother had said more than once. Call Penny … She had shown her where, in the little phone book, she could find Penny’s number, one of the few written in ink. And Yasmin has always known the sole circumstance in which she would call Penny.
Through the phone, she hears a distant shuffling, the sounds of Penny approaching.
Penny. Her aunt. Her father’s sister.
Yasmin has no belief in the romance of family ties. There is to her no point in comparing the thickness of blood and water: with time, with distance, with no network of shared experience, blood might as well be water. Yasmin knows Charlotte’s life to be more precious to her than Penny’s.
“Hello. Yasmin?” Penny has a rich, warm voice. A voice of a timbre that would do well on radio.
“I’m here,” Yasmin says. “At the hotel.”
“And Shakti?”
“It went well.”
There is a silence, and Yasmin wonders if Penny is struggling with the same image that comes to her: of flames licking at her mother’s face, enveloping her body.
“I coming pick you up,” Penny says. “Twenty minutes.”
8
YOU OFTEN SPEAK, my dear, of the first apartment you lived in with your husband. You have spoken of it as such a glorious time. You were happy, weren’t you? I was not so lucky, you know. This living on your own as a newly-wed couple — it simpl
y wasn’t done where I come from.
Instead, I moved into his family’s house, to his room really. He made space for my clothes in his wardrobe and then, well, he was gone much of the time. He was a surveyor by profession, you see, in government employ, and his duties took him all over the island. He would leave home early and return late. This was how he actually began his political career, you see, by travelling around, meeting people. Surveying the populace as much as he surveyed the land.
My life sounds lonely to you? Does it really? I see what you mean. I suppose there were moments, yes. But I managed to keep busy, you know. I spent my days at the house, working at my own duties, which were essentially to help the maid. Yes, my dear Mrs. Livingston, believe it or not, to help the maid. She was a young woman of approximately my own age. Amina. A mouse of a girl with little education, but certainly pleasant in every way. And embarrassed, I think, by having to share her work with me. But we managed, and grew as fond of one another as our stations would permit. She called me “mistress,” you see. I was the one to sweep the floors, but she was the one to wash them. We both knew that my duties were really like a game for my mother-in-law’s benefit. And that one day, in one way or another, the game would end for me —
A spill? Where? That? Oh, don’t bother your head, my dear, it’s only a few drops of tea. We’ll tend to it later. We are in no hurry, are we? At our age, time does not seem long, but it certainly does seem to sprawl, if you know what I mean. All this free time … I’ve always enjoyed companionship in my free time, you know.
Like those free afternoons once my chores were done. I would spend them with my sister-in-law, Penny. She was the youngest in the family, a bit younger than I, my husband being the eldest, followed by his brother, Cyril, who was away in England at the time, reading for a law degree. Their father — the man who had started it all, who had bought the land and built the house — had died accidentally some years before. He had just boarded an inner-island schooner for a visit to Trinidad, where he had relatives, when he realized he had forgotten his bag of religious implements on the dock. He was a pundit, you see, a holy man. He called out for it as the schooner was casting off and someone — the story never made it clear who precisely — flung it up towards him. The old man reached out for it desperately, missed it by a good foot or two and lost his balance. It was said that he and the bag hit the water at exactly the same moment, though which sank faster no one could say with any accuracy.
Mrs. Livingston! Well I never! Laughing! Don’t you realize this is a sad story? Well, I can’t say I blame you. It took me some time to realize it too. Whenever they trotted the story out, they mistook the water in my eyes for tears of sadness. They had sanctified the old man and his death, you see. But should I feel guilty that the image of this man in turban, kurta and dhoti plunging after his bag has always given me an acute case of the giggles?
In any case, Penny and I would while away the afternoons. Walking in the fields, or rocking the time away in hammocks strung up between the pillars that supported the house. It sat on a hill, and afforded a truly spectacular view of the bay. Often you would see ships heading into port from the open sea, and sometimes you could see storms blowing in. My husband claimed that, as a boy during the war, he once watched a cargo ship go down after being torpedoed. Penny and I were comfortable there, under the house. It was shaded and cool, and the floor of poured concrete tickled the soles of the feet in the most pleasant way …
My dear, will you please leave that spill alone? I’ve told you, it can wait. I do declare, sometimes it is like speaking to the Berlin Wall! Thank you …
One day, about a year later, I imagine, my husband received a letter from his brother announcing his imminent return from London. The letter said only that he was not well; that the doctors had prescribed a lengthy period of rest; that he had no choice but to postpone his final year of study until he was recovered. He and his wife — an English woman no one in the family had yet met — had already booked passage and would be arriving in a few weeks …
Oxford or Cambridge? I couldn’t really say, my dear. It was a British university, that’s all I remember. In any case, it hardly matters, does it now?
My husband’s first thought, as a practical man, was that there was not enough space in the house. Cyril and Celia could have Amina’s room — but where would we put Amina? In no time at all, he had that wonderful open space bricked in and divided up into storage and wash areas, and a bedroom for Amina. Oh, it was a loss but it couldn’t be avoided. That’s how I viewed it at the time. But you know, Mrs. Livingston, I resent it still today. The attitude, I mean. Practicality above all else. It makes for efficient ugliness.
The night before they arrived we were all up late, watching for their ship. And we saw it gliding in through the darkness just after midnight. My husband said, “That’s them.” My mother-in-law sighed. I couldn’t read my husband’s feelings just then. He wasn’t happy or sad or angry or apprehensive, or maybe he was all of those things. But there was a quality to the night — the silence, the stars, the lights of the ship — that made me, maybe all of us, uneasy. Then he took me by the arm — something he rarely did, this easy touching — and led Penny and me back inside. He said the ship would be hours docking, and it would be mid-morning before they disembarked. I remember sensing, at that moment, that he was almost turning his back on the night.
The next morning we met them at the docks. Cyril was very different from my husband, his physical opposite. More like their mother. He was short and round and his hair was already thinning. He wore thick glasses. His right eye was hidden behind a large bandage —
I’m coming to that, my dear. A little patience.
Celia was a little taller, thinner. She was already tanned, and had hair so fine — rather like yours, I should think — that I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to wonder how much hairspray she needed to give it shape. She greeted us with a smile that was so earnest it seemed forced. A smile that revealed how uneasy she was. I felt for her, and I wondered how we looked to her eyes. Oh, we had all seen white people before, but what made her seem alien was that she was a member of the family. And it occurred to me that we must have looked even more alien to her. Her smile was one of hysteria. We shook hands when my husband introduced us, and she held my hand a touch longer than she’d held the others, as if taking a little refuge. I felt then that she recognized me — a sister-in-law married into the family — as a fellow alien …
Oh, if you must! There’s a rag in the kitchen. At the sink. No, not that one, the blue one. There, are you happy now?
9
YASMIN, BUCKLING HER seat belt, says, “What should I call you?”
“Penny will do. Nothing else really fits, eh?”
She puts the car into gear and pulls out quickly. They turn a corner, then another.
Penny says, “You probably don’t remember much —”
“Nothing. Not really.”
“Well, you were so young. Three? Four?”
“Four.” Yasmin gazes through the tinted window: at the sidewalk, at houses — cream, white: strangely colourless — cool and inaccessible behind fences and shrubbery. And she, neither resident nor tourist, aid worker nor investor, senses herself distanced from it all. She thinks of the woman on the aircraft, and she wonders whether her cruelty had issued from her own indefinability, from an unsuspected envy. But she does not wish for greater involvement with, or even greater knowledge of, the world she sees through the window. She is here to fulfill an obligation. And then to leave.
So she turns away from that world and, with her eyes alone, looks at Penny. At her silver hair swept tight on her scalp and knotted into a bun at the back. At the face burnt a rich brown: the nose flat, the lips dark and finely shaped. A face, like her mother’s, without wrinkles, unblemished by the years. She does not — as her mother would say — look like a Penny.
She turns suddenly towards Yasmin, catches her gaze. Holds it for a moment, and smiles. Then h
er eyes fall to the purse on Yasmin’s lap. “You didn’t bring her,” she says.
“I’m not ready,” Yasmin replies. Bring her. Bring it. She is surprised at the depth of her unease.
Eyes on the road, Penny nods.
Yasmin is grateful for that, senses — hopes — that perhaps the warmth of the voice …
And then, with the turning of a corner, they are in traffic. The sidewalks are wider now, crowded with people and ramshackle booths festooned with colourful bric-à-brac. Almost hidden behind them, small stores huddle in the shadows, reminding her of the houses a street or two ago, inaccessible behind their walls and their shrubbery. A bustling street, but not lively. Fidgety, rather, Yasmin decides. Fretful.
“You feel it?” Penny says.
“What?”
“The frenzy.”
“They told me at the hotel things aren’t back to normal yet.”
“Yet!” Penny laughs, a cascade of throaty merriment. “Well, is good to know we still have some optimists in this place.”
Farther down the street, the backdrop of stores falls away to a sudden vision of apocalypse: to the broken husks of buildings, to wood turned charcoal, to walls blackened by fire, beams warped by heat. Block after block of the devastation she remembers introducing on the evening news.
Penny says, “They went after the big stores, but of course it just spread all over the place. We could a’ lose the whole town. As soon as they surrendered, the fire brigade moved in.”
Yasmin says nothing. There is nothing to say.
The street ends abruptly, branching to either side at a high stone wall. Just above it, Yasmin sees the sea — a brackish blue sprinkled with small boats — and a hazy horizon.
Penny turns right, driving swiftly along the sea road. “How your husband doing?” she asks.
The Worlds Within Her Page 4