The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

  We mothers are rather curious creatures at times, don’t you think, Mrs. Livingston? We gauge the risks we would have our children take by the intuitive understanding we have of them — and so we can never fully explain why we advise against a particular action. Here you are weak, we would have to say, or, Your interest in this field is unmatched by your talent — and how wounding that would be, how brutal. So we wound them instead with our silence. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I have attempted to avoid doing this with Yasmin — not always successfully, I might add — but on the whole I have not withheld my blessing even when I knew that, because of the world or because of her, I would one day have to soothe the hurt. So my mother-in-law was not a neglectful mother — and let me add right here and now that she treated her daughter no differently from Cyril and my husband, although I dare say Penny would probably see things differently. I suppose everyone was battle-axed in his or her own way …

  Yes, my dear, that goes for yours truly, too. Now shush? You know me by now. I’ll get there yet in my marshalling-yard sort of way.

  You see, for my mother-in-law, everything and everyone had its proper place in the world, and she was never quite sure that my place was in marriage to her elder son. Be that as it may, we established from early on a cordial and safely reticent relationship. We said our good-mornings and our thank-yous. I fulfilled my duties, such as they were. Bought the birthday and Christmas gifts. Helped with the deyas at Divali. Spent my meals admiring my mother-in-law’s manner, my afternoons talking and reading with Penny or Celia, my evenings with my husband and the rest of the family. All in all a rather leisurely life, come to think of it.

  And then one day, for reasons of her own, my mother-in-law decided to change all that.

  18

  CYRIL LEANS FORWARD in his chair, fingers interlacing. “So we hear you’re a famous lady up there in Canada.”

  “That’s overstating the case a bit,” Yasmin laughs. “I get recognized sometimes, but that’s incidental, really. All I do is read well.”

  “No,” Cyril says with dissatisfaction. “What you doin’ is important. You helping people find out what happened in their world. You helping them remember — and forgetting is a terrible thing.”

  “No,” Yasmin insists. “All I do is read well.”

  Her secret for reading the news is simple: She reads not in her own voice but in her mother’s. When she mouths the words that roll at a steady pace up the teleprompter screen, she hears her mother’s tones shaping them, coating them in appropriate drama: tones leavened by instinctive notions of human reaction. Her success is not hers alone.

  Occasionally, Yasmin has been asked to conduct an on-air interview, and her mother has always advised her to use moderation with the confrontational ones. “Weave the rope,” she once said. “Present them with the noose. You can even help them put it on. But let them tighten it themselves. Let them commit suicide, if you see what I mean — otherwise you’ll be seen as an executioner. And Yasmin, dear, very important: remember — yours is not the outrage. Outrage belongs to the viewer.”

  The technique exasperates Jim. “Why didn’t you move in for the kill?” he would ask. “Why didn’t you crush him?” Her reply — “Listen to what he says. He hangs himself” — arouses a snort of derision. She has learnt not to allow Jim’s reactions to influence her, although she wishes he would take the time to understand the subtleties of her craft: to see how she plays with the lights of her profession.

  Cyril sips his juice, sloshes it around, makes a face, swallows.

  Penny, reaching for a sweet, says, “Yasmin, Shakti ever tell you about the time Ma throw her out o’ the house?”

  She has, Yasmin realizes, been forgiven. “No.” Her mother’s stories were few, and distinctly undramatic. Of Yasmin’s grandmother she had said little, had offered an impression of imperious remoteness, which is what Yasmin sees in the face of the young woman in the photograph Penny has fetched from the living room: a smooth-face blankness; dark, serious eyes staring into the camera, unexpectant of the life still to be lived.

  Penny glances at Cyril, who says, “I remember. But to tell you the truth, Penny, I don’t know if I remember the thing itself — or if I just remember the story. I saw bits, I heard bits. I have pictures in my head —”

  “Same difference, then.”

  “No. If I remember, is my memory. If I remember the story, is somebody else memory. I mean, you think you can remember something that never happen to you?”

  But Penny shows no interest; such simple nuance, Yasmin sees, can only be exasperating to her essential practicality, or an unwelcome challenge to her version of events.

  Penny looks away, her gaze reeling out towards the horizon. “Shakti always thought she was too good for us, you know. Too good for Vernon. It was clear from the beginning — she din’t marry him for himself but for his prospects. This thing with Ma, for instance. If Shakti did only do what Ma wanted —”

  “Look, Penny, Ma was being unreasonable.”

  “So why you din’t say so at the time?”

  Cyril shuffles uneasily.

  “You told Celia not to get involved, not so?”

  “I told her this had to do with Ma and Shakti.”

  “Meanin’?”

  “Meanin’, if it was anybody’s place to get involved, it was Ram’s.”

  “He had other things on his mind.”

  “Other things.” Cyril’s face brightens slightly. “Fact is, Penny, Ram was scared o’ Ma just like everybody else.”

  “Nobody was ever scared o’ Ma, Manager. Only you.” She gets to her feet, the abruptness of the movement belying the calm she maintains in face and voice. “So don’t try to blame him for your failure.” Announcing she must see to lunch, her back already turned, she leaves the porch.

  Cyril retreats for a brief moment into himself. Then he constructs a smile. “Is an old quarrel,” he says. “And pointless. But we can’ seem to let it go, you know?” He peers at the glass in his hand and with a sudden movement tosses the juice over the porch railing. “I wish we could, sometimes.”

  19

  YES, WELL. WHO would have thought daisies and daffodils would taste so —

  Oh, all right. So I’m exaggerating a little. We aren’t drinking daisies and daffodils. But still, who would have thought flowers would have such flavour? Thank you, my dear. Such a lovely gift. So … unanticipated.

  Now, to get back to my mother-in-law, the truth is, I understood her game from the very beginning. And because I understood it, I knew it had to be played out.

  Simply put, before I had moved into her house, my mother-in-law had made all the preparations for the perfect cup of tea. The water was boiled, and kept a-bubbling. The teapot was warmed, and kept warm. The tea leaves were measured and sprinkled into the teapot. Then she bided her time.

  When she judged the moment to be right, she filled the teapot with boiling water. The leaves lashed up and about in a tempestuous swirl. The water darkened. Steam rose like spray. Eventually, of course, the leaves would settle back down to where they had begun, at the bottom of the teapot — but only when my mother-in-law ceased stirring things up.

  Think of me, my dear, as the tea leaves …

  Uhh! Oh, dear me, I’ve scalded my tongue. You see what thinking of my mother-in-law still does to me? Even though I tried — I still try — to be understanding. Still, down through the years and even today, I have been unable to forgive her for involving Celia in what amounted to our personal affair. In so doing, you see, she changed forever the nature of my friendship with Celia. I do not for a moment believe that that was her intention, nor do I believe that once it was done she regretted it even for a moment. Of the two messages she sent, the only one that mattered was the one aimed — and I used the word in its most brutal sense — directly at me.

  I remember when she called me — Beti! Beti! — because it was so unusual, that she would call me, I mean. It was early morning still, wash day. M
y husband had just left the house, calling out good morning to Myra the washerwoman. She lived just down the street, in an old wooden house weathered grey and surrounded by an exuberance of banana trees and mango trees and pomerac trees and orange trees and God knows what else. She would come once a week to wash the clothes, hand-washing each piece on a scrubbing board at a concrete sink out back and hanging them out to dry on clotheslines. She used to sing quietly to herself as she worked. By the time all the wash was done, around midday, the first batches would be dry. She would have a quick lunch and then begin the ironing. Everything had to be ironed, including bedsheets and pillowcases, and by the time she was done the evening would always be well advanced. She was not a young woman, Myra, perhaps in her late fifties, and by the time she was done she always appeared to me to have aged by a good ten years. She had wrinkles on her face that she hadn’t had that morning; and her hands had endured so much — hours of immersion in soapy water; the endless rubbing and scrubbing; hours of gripping the hot and heavy iron — that they appeared mummified.

  But I may have been the only one to notice her exhaustion. Or perhaps to the others, none of this was particularly striking. One evening, as we were all sitting in the porch after dinner, ships’ lights sailing through the darkness, the men burping from time to time like miniature foghorns, I spoke of Myra’s hardships. I was, I admit, rather pleased with myself, touched by my own observation of her suffering. Showing my sympathy for Myra to the family that evening was a way of patting myself on the back. I expected that others would share my news, and that plans would be made to ease her lot. Already I could feel myself growing modest before Myra’s teary gratitude. All my talk about the wrinkles and the hands and the sweat I had seen running down her neck, the humming with which she, I imagined, comforted herself, met with silence. I remember the squeak of my husband’s rocking chair, Cyril’s unembarrassed burp. My mother-in-law sitting there, eyes shut, as impassive as Buddha. And finally Celia soothing the silence I had disturbed with a gentle Quite so, quite so.

  In bed that night, I returned to the topic. Hardly had I mentioned Myra before my husband said curtly that she was his mother’s employee. Thus ended my efforts at social reform.

  And probably because Myra was her employee, my mother-in-law chose her as the instrument of her strategy.

  I can still hear her voice calling me to the dining room that morning. Beti! Beti! …

  Beti? It means “daughter” in Hindi, I think. That’s what I was always told.

  In any case, the maid had already sorted the wash into various piles for Myra. My mother-in-law was standing among them. She pointed to one pile and said, “That’s yours.” A glance told me the clothes weren’t mine but before I could react she explained that she had decided to lighten Myra’s workload. From now on I was in charge of washing Cyril and Celia’s clothes.

  No, my dear, Myra would still do my husband’s and mine. That was her little twist, you see. She turned my concern for Myra against me — turned it into a humiliation by making me into my sister-in-law’s washerwoman.

  I said no, I would not do it, and walked away.

  Angry? No, that was not her way. Instead, she turned to steel.

  20

  PENNY, SLIGHTLY MOLLIFIED, says, “It was that Myra’s fault.”

  Cyril puts his glass on the floor beside him. Yasmin balances her coffee mug on her knees.

  “She was always complainin’, that woman. The work was always too much, the money was always too little. But Ma — you know what Ma was like — Ma wanted to help her out anyway. She was no spring chicken, Myra. So Ma thought Shakti could give her a hand, make things a little easier. But — no offence, dear —” she places her fingertips on Yasmin’s forearm “— but we all know what Shakti was like, she wasn’ about to take kindly to helpin’ out the washlady. Which is kind o’ understandable, you know — but you remember what she go an’ do, Manager? You remember? I mean, really! Ma had no choice, ehh? She had to put her out the house.”

  Cyril nods: he remembers. But his acknowledgement goes no further than this.

  Penny reaches for a kurma, pauses, reconsiders.

  Cyril, leaning forward, helps himself to several.

  Yasmin looks away, to the sky growing painful and the sunlit sea. Hold on, she wants to say, that’s my mother you’re talking about. But she does not know the facts, cannot know the facts. So she chooses to remain silent.

  Penny says, “Fact is, if it hadn’t been for that Myra —”

  21

  THE NEXT DAY the clothes were still there, in the living room. And the day after that, and after that, the pile growing larger with each passing day as more of Cyril and Celia’s clothes were added.

  She had chosen her moment well, my dear. My husband was away at the time, visiting political people in Trinidad and Guyana. I remember thinking, If only he were here …

  Celia avoided me. Cyril told me later that she had gone to our mother-in-law and offered to do the clothes herself. My mother-in-law had said that if she and Cyril were running low on clothes, they should buy themselves some more. She even offered to pay for them — and Celia knew then to keep her distance. I remember those days as among the loneliest of my life, my world somehow reduced to that ever-growing pile of clothes.

  And then one afternoon, I went to my bedroom for a nap and found the mountain of clothes sitting in the middle of my bed. Something within me went berserk. I stormed out of the bedroom and straight to my mother-in-law, who was sitting in the porch. I wanted to shout and scream at her, but the words would not come, no matter how hard I tried. It was as if my rage had eaten up speech. So I — and I am not proud of this, my dear — I spat at her. One gob, then another, and a third. Each finding a spot on her face.

  At that point I stopped, horrified at the level to which she had reduced me. My vision went blurry with tears. I felt her brush past me, heard the door slam shut. I heard the key rasp in the lock.

  Some time later, the maid brought me a message. I would not be allowed back inside until I had complied.

  I spent the night in the porch. The maid brought me something to eat, Celia brought me a pillow and blanket. Neither stayed for very long. That night a thunderstorm hit — as if nature itself were conspiring with my mother-in-law.

  Nothing awakens the irrational more than a wet night spent alone in a darkness relieved only by lightning creeping closer. I became convinced that my mother-in-law was orchestrating every gust of wind, every roll of thunder.

  The following morning, despite having been soaked through, despite sleeplessness, I set to work rubbing and scrubbing and wringing out the clothes. My hands quickly grew tired and sore, but I kept on, the labour fuelled by thoughts of revenge: Wait till he gets back, I kept thinking. Just wait till Ram gets back, he’ll be so furious …

  But of course, when he got back, he wasn’t. He was restless and distracted. There were other things on his mind, grander things. He was not indifferent, mind you, just incapable of … Moreover, of course, it was probably too late. We had already settled into a workable peace. I told him what had happened, and although his lack of indignation disappointed me at the time, later on I was relieved that he had simply let things be. I came to realize that fresh confrontation would have changed nothing. Change would have meant finding our own house to live in, and that was unthinkable, nothing short of a complete breaking up of the family.

  So this is what our confrontation was about, Mrs. Livingston. Power and control, respect and distance, about the apportioning of loyalties: the son’s to the mother, the husband’s to the wife, the wife’s to the husband, the daughter-in-law’s to the mother-in-law. She won, of course, but only because I knew I could not.

  Celia? No, she was never subject to such treatment. Many would suggest it was because she was white, and therefore intimidating to my mother-in-law, or perhaps even an object of secret veneration. I believe the explanation was simpler. I believe that, because she was not of our world, Celia in an im
portant way did not count. My mother-in-law expected nothing from her, whereas from me she expected everything. I was the one who had to acknowledge her power, just as she had had to acknowledge the power of her own mother-in-law and so on —

  Cruel? No. In fact, it is likely that, as a young bride, she had had to endure beatings — yes, physical beatings — from her own mother-in-law. Yet she never laid a finger on me. But cruelty is relative, isn’t it? After all, she did alter for good my friendship with Celia. Even though I had to wash Celia and Cyril’s clothes only a few more times — the point made, my mother-in-law lost interest — the fact was that neither Celia nor I could ever see each other in the same way. I had been obliged — and you must forgive me for being graphic, Mrs. Livingston — to scrub Celia’s panties clean of her menstrual discharge. After that we were never able to look each other in the eye with the same frankness as before. You see what I mean …

  And what about you, Mrs. Livingston? How did you and your …

  Oh, but I keep forgetting. Your husband’s mother died before you were married, didn’t she. Hmmm … How thoughtful of her.

  22

  PENNY, SEEKING TO change the subject, says, “Vernon use to think his cheeks were too fat, remember that, Cyril? When he was small, people was always pinching them. And as soon as somebody pointed a camera at him he use to suck them in, to give them a more sculptured look, he use to say.”

  Cyril says, “And his hair was very, very fine. Not like yours, Yasmin. Use to fall all over the place. So he started using Bryl-creem. And not just a little bit either —”