A highlight of the evening came, however, when it was time to pay the bill. You see, this restaurant had the tradition of presenting foreigners with their bill accompanied by a miniature flag of what they assumed to be the guests’ country. Our bill arrived under the flag of India. My husband raised his eyebrows in amusement but said nothing, and interrupted a member of our party as he was about to protest. When the waiter left, my husband explained that if we were to tell them where we were from, it would just confuse the poor people. Then we’d have to explain not only where our island was, but also how we — evidently Indians — had ended up there. The history and geography lesson would hardly be worth the trouble. Besides, our flag wasn’t official yet, the restaurant could hardly be expected to have one on hand. So he took out his wallet, counted out the bills and placed them under the Indian flag.
As we left the restaurant in a driving rain, my husband remarked that the gesture wasn’t so inappropriate — which prompted a chorus of protests from the others. And that, Mrs. Livingston, was the first time I saw schism between my husband and those who thought the way he did.
23
SHE STEPPED ON the ant, then gingerly inspected the sole of her shoe. The ant was splayed, flattened. “Mommy,” she called exultantly. “I can kill! I can kill!”
Yasmin took a deep breath. So this is growing up, she thought, this celebration of newly realized power. How had her daughter acquired such knowledge, and why so young? But did it really matter? She would have acquired it anyway; it was, after all, part of growing up human.
“Mommy! I can kill!”
“Yes, dear.”
24
PHOTOGRAPH: NEWSPAPER PHOTO, EIGHT-BY-TEN. HER FATHER APPEARS TO BE DEEP IN CONVERSATION WITH ANOTHER MAN. HE IS LISTENING. THE MAN IS TALKING. HE IS SHORT, THIS OTHER MAN, AND BALDING, AND ALTHOUGH IT IS NIGHT HE SPORTS SUNGLASSES. THERE IS GREAT TENSION IN HER FATHER’S BODY. HE DOES NOT WANT TO BE STANDING HERE BESIDE THIS MAN, DOES NOT WANT TO BE LISTENING TO HIM. HIS HAND IS WRAPPED AROUND THE BOWL OF A COFFEE CUP, THE TENSION IN HIS FIST REVEALING HIS STRUGGLE TO CONTAIN HIMSELF. HERE AGAIN, A DIVISION OF ENERGY: THE EFFORT AT RESTRAINT AND WHAT SHE THINKS TO BE A MASCULINE DESIRE TO CRUSH — MASCULINE NOT IN ITS ORIGIN BUT IN ITS MANIFESTATION. IN NO OTHER PHOTOGRAPH SHE HAS SO FAR SEEN ARE HIS EMOTIONS SO EVIDENT AND SO RAW.
She smiles to herself in satisfaction: She has perceived in the photograph a grain of authenticity: what he reveals despite himself.
But then she wonders whether she is reading too much into the image. Jim has often accused the newscast of breathing life into stories that would otherwise expire after a few laboured gasps. She knows he is right. They show videotape of a twister lifting a barn but would not bother to mention it if they didn’t have the tape. You people, Jim says justly, see more in pictures than is there. He had tapped a fingernail at his photo of the Swiss mountainside: the triangle of darkness, the triangle of brilliance. “It’s not a statement,” he said. “It’s just a moment. Hardly newsworthy.”
So she wonders: Might her father’s reluctance to be there come from merely a headache or hunger — just a moment? Might the tension she detects arise from irritation with photographers or responsibilities awaiting him elsewhere?
She can never know the answers, must draw her own conclusions, must hope there is some truth in them. It is, she consoles herself, like writing a novel or researching a biography. She can enjoy no certainty greater than conjecture.
Cyril tells her this other man went on to become prime minister. He was her father’s great rival. He held Ram in great esteem, Cyril says, but esteem born of the fear and hatred one has for an equal who may yet spoil one’s own dreams. A clever man. He sent Ram to London to join the team negotiating for independence. Ram thought there was hope they could work together. What he didn’t understand, Cyril believes, was that this man’s greatest wish was that Ram would disappear — and, of course, he did.
The sunglasses? A medical condition, says Cyril, although precisely what remains unknown to this day, years after the man’s death. It was said that light — all light — was painful to him, that it prevented him from seeing. And then there was, of course, the mystique sunglasses conferred: the sense that they were to protect not his vision but his thoughts.
25
“WHAT IS SHE doing?” Ariana was scandalized. Yasmin followed the pointing finger to a swimsuited woman stretched out on a towel on the grass, a straw hat covering her face. “She’s sunbathing, dear.”
“That’s silly.”
“Why?”
“She needs water to get clean.”
“She doesn’t want to get clean, dear. She wants to get brown.”
“Like me?”
“Like you.”
Her daughter pondered this for some moments. Then she said, “Mummy, if I do that, will I get white?”
“It doesn’t work that way, dear. You’d get browner.”
Her daughter thought about that, too, and then said, “I’d like to be white some day.”
Yasmin caught her breath. Her daughter had reached into the tree of forbidden wishes and plucked poison. Yasmin, driven by a prickling shame, wanted to protest. Wait a minute, she wanted to say, Hold on, what’s wrong with …? Where did you get …? But she stopped herself. Her daughter had spoken innocently: the shame was not hers. The shame, she understood, arose from her own fear of the reaction of others: What in the world, they would wonder, had Yasmin been teaching her daughter?
And seeing her daughter safe from the peril, she began to see things as her daughter did — and understood that at the heart of her own reaction lay a grand hypocrisy: Why was it acceptable for that woman to dream of being brown, but not so for her daughter to dream of being white? And she wondered which was more dangerous: for her daughter to speculate on the impossible or for that woman to expose herself to the ravages of the sun? And yet it was, she knew, the mere beginning of a moral thread her daughter would be unravelling for the rest of her life.
Yasmin said, “Would you want Daddy to be brown?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to be white, like him?”
“Daddy’s not white, silly.”
“He’s not?”
“No. He’s kind of … peach.”
26
WHY IS IT, do you imagine, Mrs. Livingston, that so many young people are given to bemoaning the loss of olden days they see as good? Is it simply, do you think, that time is the biggest fence, and so offers a vision of the greenest grass? It’s such poppycock!
Take my son-in-law, for instance. Once, at tea, Mr. Summerhayes was mourning the loss of the art of letter writing. Letter writing, of all things — in an age when communication has become instantaneous. He had an idea that the old way — hours spent composing a letter by hand, a mail system that took weeks to deliver that letter — was somehow superior. Like so many young people, and a few older ones seeking to take advantage of their gullibility, he has varnished the past. I think he felt he was demonstrating his sense of history, the poor fellow.
May I confess something to you about Mr. Summerhayes, my dear? I do not totally trust his passions. He has them, he has passion for Yasmin, none of it is simulated — but I do not believe he trusts them himself. I do not believe that he believes in them. You see what I mean …
In any case, my dear, Mr. Summerhayes seemed to feel that not only were people in the good old days — that’s us, my dear — more articulate, but we proved it in lengthy missives to one another. Some did, I suppose. I’ve never forgotten that lovely story you told me about your husband’s love letters. Even that thrill eventually turned to unease, though, didn’t it? I’m still not certain that your son would have been startled by those glimpses of the naughtiness of his father’s mind, you know. Children aren’t that naive.
Understand, my dear, I’m not saying you were wrong. We all have the right to prune our worlds, and those aspects of our lives that will survive us. And, yes, it was a lovely gesture, bury
ing them with him. But still, I did detect a hint in your voice of a certain sense of loss, didn’t I?
I’ve written few letters in my life, you know. At home there was no reason to. And in the year we spent in England my husband took care of the correspondence. I wrote no letters home — at least not on paper. I did compose letters in my head, elaborate descriptions of what I was seeing, reflections on the life we, or rather I, was living. But I wrote none of it down. You see — and not even Yasmin knows this — writing for me is a laborious process from which I derive no pleasure. I know many words, my dear, and they come to my tongue with a certain ease, but the moment I try to order them on paper — putting the letters and then the words themselves into systematic and harmonious form — now, that is another matter altogether …
There was, I will tell you, one letter I composed that I do wish I had written down. It was neither long nor elaborate, but it spoke from the heart, and it was addressed to the one person instinct told me would understand what I was trying to say.
27
SHE SQUATTED ON Jim’s lap, facing him, her little fingers — their shade and shape irrefutable proof that she was her parents’ daughter — tenderly exploring the contours of his face. She looked to Yasmin like someone sightless moulding a mental image: she ran her fingertips up his temples and along his hairline, down across his forehead to his eyes and nose and smiling lips. She tickled him under the chin and made him laugh. Then she leaned in close and cupped her palms around his ear.
Jim listened. Then he said, “Well, uh, I don’t know. Maybe.”
She whispered again.
Jim’s eyes flashed with amusement at Yasmin. He said, “I’m not sure. Why don’t we see what your mom thinks?”
She grew shy, clambered off his lap and ran off to her room.
Yasmin looked expectantly at Jim.
He leaned towards her and spoke in a quiet voice: “First, she wanted to know if — when she grows up — if she’ll have big breasts just like Mom’s.”
“Oh, God.”
“Then she wanted to know if they’ll go flippy-flop too, just like yours.” He let his smile show.
“Flippy-flop.”
“Flippy-flop. Can you believe it? I could hardly contain myself —”
“You should’ve just answered her question, Jim, instead of bringing me into it. You embarrassed her. Why do you think she asked you and not me?”
“Yas, the whole thing was funny, I thought —”
“Jim, the next time she wants to talk to you, talk to her.”
“It was funny, Yas.”
“Yeah. Until you embarrassed her. She’s your daughter, Jim. Start taking her seriously.”
“Look, I do take her —”
“Mummy, I want a drink of water.”
“I do take her seriously, Yas, but —”
“Mummy! I’m thirsty!”
Yasmin stood up. “Watch that tone, young lady.” Then she went off to the kitchen to get her daughter some water.
28
DEAR CELIA:
It will come as no surprise to you that it is raining as I write these words. You are always the most homesick during our rainy season, as if yours were a land of perpetual wetness. Do you remember how the sound of water dripping, from the roof, from trees, would mesmerize you and turn your eyes red and moist? I remember that about you — that, and the silence that came to you. You were inaccessible at those moments, your soul in flight.
We are spending a weekend in the country, in a little town that is all honey-coloured stone. Nearby is a quiet river lined with rushes and weeping willows. The innkeeper tells us that, in fine weather, the water is crowded with rowboats — but the weather, as I’ve said, is not fine, and there’ll be no rowing for us.
Right now we are sitting at a window table in the local pub. We are alone, save for the barman polishing mugs. Through the rain-streaked windowpanes I can see the drops exploding onto the cobblestones, and the dampness causes me to pull my coat more tightly around my shoulders. Ram sits across from me, a mug of beer in front of him. He is absorbed, probably thinking about his work, the papers he has brought along, but which he has left behind at the inn. I sip my tea. Watch him. Watch the rain.
Unexpectedly, he reaches for my hand, enfolds it lightly in his. We do not speak. His touch alone tells me of his awareness. It is enough. And for those long minutes of rain, my dear, here in your land, my pores gasp, my nerves unfold, my soul takes flight.
I have been shown, Celia, what it is to shatter deliciously.
Love,
Shakti
29
FOR LUNCH, AMIE brings sandwiches, egg salad, chicken salad, in white bread trimmed of its crust.
She places the platter on a space Cyril clears of the scattered photographs, dozens in black and white and faded colour — but so few take her beyond their stilled moments.
As she eats, Yasmin shuffles through them: her parents at the Coliseum; her father sitting, weary, at the Acropolis; her mother wrapped in coat and shawl beside a river; Buckingham Palace; the Alhambra; her mother in that same coat and shawl — the same day, perhaps, rainy — smiling at the door of a pub, the Beggar’s Alms.
Yasmin has been to many of these places, seen many of these monuments. She too has snapshots of similar decomposition — Jim’s word — that reveal as little as do these, too hasty, too shorn of personal context to be repositories of memory. They have remained unviewed for years in the albums to which they have been consigned. She looks again at the photo of her mother at the pub door, thinks: Where we had a drink.
Amie returns with bowls of strawberry ice cream.
Penny says, “I love straw-breeze. Can’ get them here any more, though. Only frozen, and is not the same thing, eh?”
For the first time since her return just before lunch, Penny speaks without an edge. She had come in, looked unhappily at Cyril and Yasmin sitting at the table, at the box and the revealed photographs. Her frown had spoken of betrayal: all that they had done and said untrimmed, unembroidered.
Cyril had said, “Din’t know when you were coming back, Penny. Thought we’d start without you.”
Now, though, after long moments of uncomfortable silence: straw-breeze. The regret in her voice unfeigned. The hurt — distrust? — has been swallowed.
The power, Yasmin thinks, of the unsaid.
Her parents grin before the Eiffel Tower and, perhaps moments later, offer obligatory smiles to a busker’s camera as they enter a bateau-mouche.
Cyril says, “You know why they call it a bateau-mouche? Is not fly-boat as you might think if you studied French in school. Is because they make them in a town called Mouche. Is Shakti who tell me that, you know. Her head was full o’ that stuff.”
Yasmin nods. “I grew up with her, remember? Mom liked to impress people.”
“And make them feel a little foolish too, I think,” Penny says.
Cyril purses his lips. “Yes. Maybe. But not in a bad way, eh? Just in fun.”
“Yes,” Penny says, unconvinced. “Perhaps jus’ in fun.”
“Or,” Yasmin says, “maybe not.”
Amie collects the bowls and returns immediately with tea.
Yasmin, insisting that she has already eaten far too much, refuses to join Cyril in a slice of his cake. She seeks to placate him with a smile but he chooses not to reciprocate. And neither, she sees, does Amie.
30
THEY COMPROMISED ON the Christmas cards. She would write to her friends, he would write to his, and they would divide equally those they had in common.
Hers were done quickly in characteristic scrawl, envelopes addressed, stamps affixed. Greeting cards were not communications she lingered over. Then she sat back and watched Jim. He sat upright at the dining table, working assiduously at the task, fountain pen shaping his cursive script. And it was peering at that script, watching the lustrous black ink dry quickly on the card, that she saw he had written his name first, hers second, their daughter’s last
. She told herself it was a minor matter, but she knew there had been a time when, writing both their names, he’d instinctively written hers before his.
She turned away, picked up her stack, squared and parted them into a neat pile. She told herself she was being oversensitive, paranoid, but she could not forget the importance of little things which, together, lent significance to the inconsequential.
Jim looked up. “Done already?”
She shrugged.
“Got any stamps?”
She pushed them over to him. “But you’ll have to lick them yourself.”
31
CYRIL EXCUSES HIMSELF: a quick errand. Penny, preoccupied, goes to freshen up.
Yasmin steps out onto the porch, the sun burning down rugged and unhindered with a heat that causes her to shiver.
Ash is standing at the railing awash in sunlight. In his hand he balances a pellet gun. At her approach, his index finger stiffens at his lips, sustaining a silence already established, then swiftly directs her attention to a tree down below.
She sees branches and midday shadows between the leaves. He alone sees prey. “What are you hunting?” she whispers.
“Blackbirds,” he whispers back. “The blacker the better.”
He raises the stock of the pellet gun to his shoulder, levels the barrel into the support of his left hand. Holds his breath, willing himself to stillness, index finger curling around the trigger. Then the gun cracks like a door snapping shut. From the trees a crow flaps unhappily away.
“Are they pests?”
“They all over the place. Some o’ the ugliest birds you ever see.” He breaks the barrel, inserts another pellet.
The Worlds Within Her Page 17