The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

  Penny laughs. “He use to buy these big jars, scoop it out with two fingers and rub it in his hair. We had to tell him not to use so much, his hair was sticking flat-flat to his skull.”

  “He wasn’t able to see himself, you know,” Cyril says. “We had to make sure he dressed properly. And as for the hair —”

  “One day somebody tell him the way his hair was falling down across his fore’d —”

  Her pronunciation briefly startles Yasmin: It is so peculiar — and so familiar.

  “— he was looking like Hitler. Is then he got the Brylcreem and began slickin’ it back — and end up looking like a match-head instead.”

  “And for a short time he had a Stalin moustache. Is Shakti who shave that one off herself, not so, Penny?”

  “Yeah, right. Remember she said she wasn’t goin’ to sleep next to no man who had a scrub brush under his nose?”

  Hairstyles, moustaches: glimpses of vanity. Yasmin finds herself smiling.

  And yet the feeling persists: that she is among strangers with whom conversation does not come easily; with whom, in the uneasy game of picking from the storehouse of memory, the rules are not defined, the traps not marked. She feels herself defenceless before words whose weight she cannot gauge.

  23

  AS SHE AND her mother settled in at the table — unfolding the silk napkins, running approving eyes over the candle-lit dazzle of Jim’s place settings — Yasmin examined their reflection in the picture window. Against the darkness broken only by swatches of light from the expressway, she saw a painting as it might have been done by Titian or Rembrandt, a wealth of detail subtly focused by a rare sharpness of line, colours rich but unspectacular in the warm light. She saw serenity luminous against an intimation of mystery.

  Jim, having removed the soup bowls, returned from the kitchen and placed a plate before her mother. New potatoes with sprigs of parsley, asparagus lightly bathed in a raspberry coulis, petals of red pepper sautéed in olive oil and garlic, all arranged around a complete lobster steaming from the pot.

  Her mother said, “Oh, my, what a beautiful plate, Mr. Summer-hayes. You have a talent and I, happily, have no cholesterol problem.”

  Jim, grinning, winked at Yasmin and lit the burners under their butter bowls. “Yasmin told me you like seafood.”

  “Crustaceans, yes, but as for fish, only the freshwater variety.”

  It had been his idea to invite her mother to dinner. He’d said, “Maybe if she gets to know me better she’ll stop calling me Mr. Summerhayes.” The notion, as endearing as it was silly, had prompted gentle laughter from Yasmin.

  “Does it come naturally,” her mother continued, “or is it the result of your gourmet-cooking course? Don’t look so surprised, of course she’s told me.”

  “The course, I’m afraid. Plus eating in too many fancy restaurants.”

  Her mother raised her wineglass, only half filled at her insistence. “To your talents, Mr. Summerhayes.”

  The shells had been deftly cracked, the meat sliding out with ease.

  Her mother said, “Don’t you have a cat, Mr. Summerhayes?”

  “Yes, Anubis. She tends to get a little nervous when there are visitors. I slipped a little something into her food. She’ll sleep the night away.”

  They ate in silence for some minutes. When Yasmin complimented Jim on the choice of wine, he said, “It’s one of the wines we tried at the wine-tasting, don’t you remember?”

  “You kidding?” she said with a laugh.

  “Tell me, Mr. Summerhayes —”

  “Jim.”

  “— did you boil them alive, the lobsters?”

  He nodded. “It’s the best way to bring out all the flavour.”

  “And did they scream?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Did they cry out for mercy to Jehovah or Allah or some such fellow?”

  Jim was amused. “To the best of my knowledge, no. But they’d have been underwater, you see.”

  “Yes, indeed,” her mother said thoughtfully. “I suppose the plea would have been gurgled, wouldn’t it.”

  In the laughter that followed, Yasmin thought she had rarely seen her mother so relaxed. And in the vigour with which Jim broke open a claw, she saw the easing of his tension.

  Her mother, dipping her fork into the butter, said, “Would you describe yourself as a religious man, Mr. Summerhayes?”

  Yasmin glanced at Jim to gauge his reaction to the question, but his face betrayed nothing.

  “Religious? No. I’ve always felt that was one more thing Marx didn’t get right. Religion isn’t an opiate. It’s a placebo for a chronic condition. Like alcohol or tobacco or recreational drugs. One of the ways we survive our fragile moments. We need it, don’t we? This belief in something larger than ourselves, and eternal.”

  Her mother thought about this for a moment. Then she said, “Very eloquently put, Mr. Summerhayes, but you haven’t really answered my question, have you. What about you? What do you believe in?”

  “I believe in light,” Jim said without hesitation.

  “Light.” Her mother repeated the word, considering it, turning it over in her mind. “What in the world do you mean?”

  “I mean that, for me, light is a living entity that, in turn, creates life. I enjoy playing with light, discovering its properties, looking for ways to mould it. We would die without light.”

  “The same is true of air, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but imagine finding yourself alive in a world of perpetual darkness. Hardly seems worth it.”

  “The blind might not agree with you.”

  “Ah, but the blind can feel the light. Its warmth, even its movement. They know it’s there. Even the blind need light.”

  Yasmin said, “He dreams of designing buildings just for the light, Mom, buildings that would appear to be practically made of light.”

  Her mother, nodding slowly to herself, turned the concept over in her mind. “Good,” she declared finally. “The human belief in divinity — it’s a weakness, you know. Merely a way of diminishing the sheer wonder of humanity.”

  Later, after dessert, when her mother had gone off to “use the facilities,” Jim said to Yasmin, “You don’t expect that kind of thinking from someone her age. That kind of courage. Or is it arrogance?”

  “I’ll tell you something about my mother,” Yasmin said. “If she finds out that anything exists beyond this life, anything at all, she’ll be utterly unconsolable. That’s been her strength. There’s nothing after this life, so she takes what this one brings her and does her best with it.”

  Jim shared the last of the wine between himself and Yasmin. “I envy her,” he said.

  24

  THROUGH DOUBLE DOORS thrown open to the balcony, Yasmin confronts a midday sunshine sufficiently harsh to wash sharpness of line and colour from the distant greenery; sufficiently harsh to suggest that it alone has seared the concrete balcony floor clean of the green paint that still fringes the edges like dried spills.

  She has been offered the chair at the head of the table, facing those open doors. On her left sits Penny, on her right Cyril. And across from her, at the far end of the lengthy table, sits Ash: silhouetted against the light of the doors, shadowed and silent, only peripherally part of the passing of dishes, the clink of cutlery, the serving of food.

  Amie’s rubber slippers flop softly on the polished wooden floors as she brings another dish to the table.

  Cyril says, “Amie, I have to say — you gone and outdone yourself for our guest.”

  Yasmin, taking the cue, says, “Thank you so much, Amie. All this food. Must’ve taken you all morning.”

  Amie pauses, gazes at her with disquieted eyes.

  Oh, God, Yasmin thinks, she’s not accustomed to being thanked.

  Then Amie gives an almost imperceptible nod, turns away and vanishes into the kitchen.

  Cyril says, “So, tell us about this husband of yours. Jimsummer-hayes, notso?”

  �
��Jim,” Yasmin says, as Amie returns with glasses of ice water. “Well, what can I tell you …”

  “Everything,” Cyril says mischievously.

  She picks up her knife and her fork, steeples them over her place, tines to knife tip, her hands resting still on the table. Jim: she rapidly sifts and edits memory, wondering where she should start, deciding what she should and should not say. Wondering what her mother has already said.

  Amie puts a glass of water beside her plate and as she takes her hand away, her fingers lightly brush the back of Yasmin’s hand.

  Yasmin is startled: not by the touch itself but by its energy. An energy that is frank and straightforward and pulsing with calculation. Startled — but she contains herself. “Jim,” she says finally, “used to be passionate about photography.”

  Cyril says, “Ahhh.”

  And as she speaks of Jim’s photography, as she attempts, to their polite puzzlement, to explain his obsession with light, other images come to her of an evening when a placid obscurity began to sparkle.

  25

  HE TOLD HER that he had not been feeling well the evening they met, that he had almost gone straight home from the office instead of to the wine bar.

  So why hadn’t he?

  She looked away through the picture window at the dusk, at the light that evoked for her the scents of fresh-cut grass and earth. The sky, farther up, thickening into night. She looked for stars. There were no stars. But the apartment was high enough that there was no earth either.

  He followed her gaze, as if searching the sky for the answer.

  Luck, he said finally, with a little smile.

  From his table, he had noticed her come in with Charlotte, had seen in her face her wish to leave. Why hadn’t she?

  Luck, she said. Charlotte. Her persistence was my luck.

  She ran a finger down his chest, along the hairless path to his navel, the hair thick and neat to either side, as if combed. Had he intended to call Charlotte, too?

  No. Why?

  So why had he asked for her number.

  Politeness. And besides: “I don’t like being too obvious.”

  “Most men can’t help that. Being too obvious.” But she was flattered.

  “I’m not most men.”

  “They all say that.”

  “Would you be here now if I were?”

  A dangerous question, she thought, too much so to offer him the comfort of an answer.

  He said, “Actually, it was your hands that first attracted me. They were …” Again he searched the sky, and after a moment said, “They move like butterfly wings.”

  There’s something untrustworthy about that simile, Yasmin thought.

  Night thickened quickly outside the window, its approach as inexorable as a total eclipse of the moon.

  “And you?” he said.

  “Me?” Then she saw it, a pulse of white light strengthening by the second. The evening star. How many times had she heard her mother, finger pointing upwards, say: Always been there, always will be there. Once she had asked, Why not the sun? Why not the moon? And her mother had said, But they’re so obvious, so certain, you can never be quite sure with the evening star.

  Finally, Yasmin said, “It was a ribbon. A red and yellow ribbon swirling above you.”

  He looked quizzically at her.

  She saw that her answer made no sense to him. And she saw, too, that he was prepared to accept it without question, this answer that revealed nothing. She took his hand, pressed it to her cheek, smelled the drying musk of her excitement on his fingers.

  She had the knowledge now: of his hands, of his flesh. She knew him to be a man of sensitivities and of passion savagely edged. This knowledge was, she knew, the stirring of an entire world within her.

  26

  CYRIL SAYS, “YOU have a picture of him?”

  Yasmin shakes her head.

  “Not even in your wallet?”

  “No room,” Yasmin says. “Technology. Too many pieces of plastic.” But the joke is not taken up, is greeted with hesitant nods.

  Penny says, “You like the food? It different, eh? From the Indian food up in Canada.”

  “Delicious.” Yasmin resumes chewing.

  “This food we eating,” Cyril says, “is not really Indian food. Is West-Indian Indian food. So far from India, the people couldn’ always get the same spices, they had to make do. Is history, is change, this food.”

  Across the table, Ash, who till now has concentrated silently on his food, lets his cutlery clatter onto his plate. With only partial vision because of the dazzle behind him, Yasmin sees his young face sculpted tight by slivers of light, and she wonders what it is that has prompted his anger.

  “Careful, Manager,” Ash says. “You comin’ close to sayin’ we not really Indian.”

  “I’m talking about the food. Racially, yes —”

  “So what else matter?”

  “Everything?”

  Ash’s eyes glitter at her. “And what about you?” he says. “You and this photographer husband of yours —”

  “He’s an architect.”

  “Whatever. You have chil’ren?”

  “Ash,” Penny says, her eyes staring him into silence. Then, unexpectedly, she places her hand on Yasmin’s. “Sorry, dear, he don’t —”

  “It’s all right.” She takes a sip of water. “We had a daughter, Ash. She died.”

  “Recently?”

  He is unperturbed. And although she doesn’t know whether his equanimity arises from cold-heartedness or youthful curiosity, she finds it refreshing: no one ever asks about her dead child; it is as if she never lived.

  “About eight years ago. She’d have been just a little younger than you now.”

  “And you ain’t have any more?”

  “All right, Ash, that’s enough,” Penny says. “Can we talk about something more pleasant, please.”

  Without missing a beat, Ash says, “So you’re a journalist.” His tone is one of challenge.

  She doesn’t bother to explain that she’s a news anchor. “You don’t like journalists,” she says instead.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, that’s all right,” she says smiling. “Neither do I. Particularly.”

  27

  HER MOTHER NEVER failed to pass along comments from Mrs. Livingston and the other neighbours. Yasmin was good yesterday. She reads the news so well. That was a lovely dress she was wearing. Green’s her colour. Or red. Or black. Tell her to smile more. Tell her to smile less.

  Their view of her was somehow proprietorial, as if in knowing her mother they all had a stake in what they saw as her success. She could hear pride and anxiety in her mother’s voice, and for this reason kept her own dissatisfactions to herself.

  She used to believe that the dissemination of news was an honourable undertaking in a world that made sense. The packaging of detail, the wrapping in context, the attempt to suggest design: it was a way of making the world safe while contemplating its horrors. Like a roller-coaster ride: hanging out over the edge of extinction, surging at the sky and flirting with the earth, tossed for a thrill secure in the knowledge that, ultimately, the danger was an illusion.

  And yet she came over time to view the world as capricious. Accidental violence and terror were indiscriminate. And although political terror chose carefully where and when to strike, and even telephoned warnings, the obstinacy of flying metal made a farce of its scruples.

  The damage, which she viewed at an intimate remove, engendered a gentle insecurity, hardly more virulent than distaste: a hunger for friends, family, home. She acquired the knowledge that certain parts of the world — often lands of great beauty crackling with tensions explicit but unknowable — were best avoided.

  Only later did she see as a turning point the day a magazine asked her to travel to Sri Lanka, to experience its sectarian brutalities and report back on them. She knew nothing of the place save from news reports of the civil war. She had no special ex
pertise. Her sole qualifications were her race and — in one of those twists that convince editors of their own cleverness — possibly her gender. Charlotte was aghast at her refusal of the assignment — it was a chance to work “in the field;” the magazine was of a stature that made reputations — but Yasmin was not hungry enough to offer her flesh to the capriciousness of terrorism, nor desperate enough to accept gain from suspect editorial views. She suggested Charlotte for the assignment. She never heard back from the magazine.

  And so when the opportunity was offered, she opted for the chair, the teleprompter, the certainties of local celebrity.

  The newscast was devoted in the main to local cautionary tales — fires and accidents, rapes, murders and robberies — stories, she often thought, that offered viewers the relief of having themselves survived another day unscathed. She could take little comfort from Charlotte’s admonition that she stop looking for significance in everything. As a story producer, Charlotte saw her job as simply telling the tale well, with brevity and accuracy. Yasmin’s job in introducing the stories, she said, was to seduce viewers into watching — which had once prompted Jim to comment: “So you’re like her pimp.”

  Rare was the broadcast that did not end with a lighthearted moment. Only a tragedy of profound emotional dimension could exert sufficient solemnity beyond its two or three minutes to merit a sober ending. The laugh she was required to muster for the end of every show provided Yasmin with her greatest challenge. Often the best she could manage was a wry smile, leaving it to the jocularities of the weatherman and the sports-caster to provide the guffaws. Leave ’em laughing, so they’ll be back tomorrow for more tastefully leavened tragedy.

  When the all-clear was called and the lights snapped off; when the laughter died at the cut to commercial, she would remove her earphone, gather up her script and — feeling a little saddened, a little untrue to herself — go to remove her makeup. The task absorbed her enough that she could distance the thought that despite the sincerity that ruled in the newsroom, despite the intense labour of getting the story and making the deadline, it was not news of the world they offered but simple sketches of it. Notes. Momentary shivers.