The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

  Her daughter said nothing. She burrowed her head into her embrace.

  Yasmin closed her eyes, felt the world simplify into warmth and softness and the brush of her daughter’s breath.

  This love of her daughter: it was immeasurable. It was, she knew, her only knowledge of the infinite.

  44

  MANY A TIME, my dear, you have remarked on the peculiarity of my speech, as has Yasmin, as has, I am certain, my son-in-law. I am enamoured of linguistic precision. Do you know that my husband is the one responsible for making language precious to me? All those years of living with a man to whom words were weightless have made me picky. This is why I grow impatient whenever you say absurdities such as “It’s raining out,” as if it could ever rain elsewhere. Or “I thought to myself” — who else would you think to, unless you’re psychic?

  My husband, you see, believed firmly that nothing said in the heat of an election campaign should be taken seriously. And so he felt free to promise the world — independence, he said once, would be like a magic potion, it would solve all our problems — and he was genuinely surprised and offended when he saw that people expected him to deliver the world. He was astounded that there were those who truly expected independence to provide perfection, astounded even though he was the first to say it. It was as if part of him believed that people should be swayed by politicians, but without taking them seriously.

  So, my dear, I have grown picky over the years. One learns, as you well know, how to survive.

  There was a kind of genius, you know, in the way he managed through language and theatre to reverse his fortunes after we returned to the island. It was simple, but daring. He broke with the government on what he claimed to be a point of principle. Dramatically, of course — a press conference, a show of suppressed outrage. Anything else would have been useless. The first minister, he said, was manoeuvring to marginalize our people in the post-independence world. Realizing this had made it impossible for him to continue at the London delegation. It was a matter of consequence.

  The hacks latched on to this. The next morning every headline read “A Matter of Conscience.” And within twenty-four hours my husband was a hero among our people. The cable was forgotten, the bribery accusation was forgotten, and my husband assumed, with relish, the mantle of protector of his people.

  The other side called him a traitor, of course. They said he had betrayed the first minister —

  What do you expect me to say, my dear? That my husband was a crook? I cannot say that. I will say this. He managed his money prudently, and it is undeniable that we returned to the island with a great deal more money than when we left. But he had mentioned his investments to me, you see, so I was hardly surprised. He was a shrewd man. I have never seen any reason to doubt his word.

  It is how I live today, you know. His investments continue to ensure I want for nothing. There are people, you see, professionals, who look after things. Every month a substantial amount of money is credited to my account. I am occasionally asked to sign documents, which I am happy to do. They may be robbing me blind for all I know, these gentlemen in their well-tailored suits, but at least they aren’t robbing me into the poorhouse.

  My husband was a clever man, you know, he was shrewd, and he was prudent. A man of vision, as they used to say. God alone knows where I would be today were it not for his vision.

  But it was that vision, too, that took us back to the island, and to the games and intrigues that would eventually lead to the events that brought Yasmin and me to this country.

  45

  ASH, A TALL glass of ice water in his hand, pulls up a chair and slouches into it in a manner that suggests utter self-possession. The tendons in his neck stir and palpitate as he takes a long draught from the glass. Yasmin thinks him a young man absorbed by physicality.

  “Holdin’ on to yourself must be hard up there,” he says, his conversational tone belying the sharpness of the gaze he levels at her.

  “Pardon?”

  He rubs his eyes. “I mean, you don’t find it a little bit unnatural?”

  “What are you talking about?” Yasmin makes no attempt to hide her irritation. She wishes now for silence: Penny and Cyril have presented her with so many images to sort through, so many visions to sift. Neither of them, though, appears to mind the interruption, reminding her of something her mother had once said: that back there, on the island, silence belonged to no one; it was communal property, to be sliced into at will.

  “I ain’t know if I could do it.”

  “What?”

  “You know. Livin’ in a white man’s country.”

  She weighs his words, wondering from which vision they have issued. “From the sound of it, you aren’t exactly thrilled about living in a black man’s country either.”

  Penny laughs, but the nature of her laugh — which side she comes down on — remains enigmatic.

  Yasmin watches his features freeze, his eyes deaden; sees him struggle with her remark.

  “Look here, Ash, I belong to where I live —”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Citizen o’ Canada, the world, the whole fockin’ universe.”

  Cyril says, “Ash, watch the adjectives.”

  His vehemence startles her — and she understands that what she perceives to be the narrowness of his world is to him the core of his essence: the core that comforts him and makes him radical in its definition and its defence, the core that would suffocate her with its airlessness. She feels like patting him on the head.

  “You foolin’ yourself, you know,” he continues. “Nobody makin’ place for you, maybe they let you sit at the table a little bit, maybe they smile sugary-sugary and toss you a few scraps. But you better behave. You act up, and is strap to your ass and out the door.”

  “You’ve been to Canada?”

  “No. But almos’ every plane that land here bringing back somebody they deport. Besides, is not the point. Point is, I know where I belong, I know my people, I know my history. Our history. All the years of oppression.”

  “The oppression. You feel oppressed, Ash.”

  She has merely reflected his words back at him — an old trick — but he takes the reflection for understanding. His features hint at a softening.

  “By … “ Her palms flutter open in interrogation.

  “You know who by. They always tryin’, you know.” His lips hint at a smile. “But is not jus’ today. Is yesterday, too. All that humiliatin’ history. We have to get rid of it, you know. We still in chains” — his fingers jab at his chest — “even if we ain’t know it. Even if we think we made it big somehow. Here” — his gaze sharpens at her — “or in other people land.”

  “But as I understand it Indians were never slaves.” She glances at Cyril — her knowledge is patchy and superficial — and he nods in confirmation.

  “Slaves. Indentured labourers. Is jus’ a name, man. Our people had contracts, eh, but that contract was jus’ a form o’ ball an’ chain, to take us away from the homeland and keep us there. That contract make all of us weaker. It steal the lifeblood from Mother India, and it turn us into little people.” His vehemence thins his voice into that of an angry boy. “Little people.”

  Cyril says, “Cool your blood, Ash. You not going to convert nobody here.”

  “No, go on,” Yasmin says. “I want to understand what you’re saying.”

  “I sayin’ that you ain’t know it, but you ain’t as special as you think. Maybe you’re some kind o’ TV star up there in Canada but it really have no big difference between you, me and all them people breakin’ their back in the cane fields jus’ like our great-great-grandparents did.”

  “No, Ash,” she says after a moment. “Listen to yourself. What you’re really saying is, if I’m not with you, I’m against you.”

  “Exactly,” he replies, pouring a little of the cold water into his palm and spreading it on his face. “Is a battle for survival. Is black, is white, there ain’t no room for grey.”

&nbs
p; If he is lucky, she thinks, the look in his eyes — that sparkle of youthful aggression — will turn baleful with age. If he is unlucky, this manner that appears only partially cultivated will remain untempered, and he will risk being consumed by his anger. Which is all right, she reflects, except that anger aflame is unselfish, and indiscriminate in its hunger. “That’s simplistic,” she says. And sad, too, she wants to add, but does not. She senses him to be a young man who will easily dismiss being dismissed — he will fall back on his dreams of an ultimate revenge — but who will not take kindly to pity, against which she suspects he has no defence.

  His gaze moves away from her to the glass in his hand: back into the trees and the shadows. “Suit yourself. This ain’t your home anyway.”

  “Is it yours?”

  When he leaves a few minutes later, his presence remains behind, a force felt but unseen, and it seems a very long time before Cyril, speaking into the chaotic silence, says, “Is best to let him go on. Let him have his say. Sometimes is the only way to deal with lonely people.”

  46

  “MUMMY, WHAT AM I?” The question was posed with great seriousness.

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  “I mean, where am I from?”

  “You mean what place?”

  “Well, Gino’s Italian, and Eduardo’s from South America, and Nadia’s from Egypt.”

  “Who are Gino and Eduardo and Nadia?”

  “They’re friends in my class.”

  “I see. Well, you were born in Canada, so you’re from Canada.”

  “Mo-om, they were born here too. That’s not what I mean.”

  “Okay. What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what am I really?”

  Yasmin gathered her daughter’s hair into her palm. It was long and thick, as lustrous as a clear midnight sky. And the words that came to her as she pondered her daughter’s question were the inadequate words of a mother: You are yourself, she wanted to say, a child unique to this world, born to parents united by history and geography and myriad migrations. You are a child whose existence could not be predicted, a child whose future waits to be discovered. Let no one limit you with imposed notions of the self.

  But all this, she knew, was too grand. Its complexity would defeat the directness of the question. Gino was Italian, Nadia was Egyptian: such were the simplicities her daughter was seeking. But she could not bring herself to offer the comfort of a facile answer. And yet when the response came to her it sounded plaintive and evasive: “Isn’t it enough to be Canadian?” she said.

  Her daughter shrugged. “I guess.”

  Yasmin released the spray of hair, watched it fan across her daughter’s slender back — watched the light shimmer as if alive through its darkness.

  47

  PENNY EXCUSES HERSELF. Cyril, seizing on her absence, says, “You know that story about when Ram imitate Amie’s snoring? Well, is Amie’s eyes I remember. Tired eyes that turn hard-hard when he put on his little performance. And I don’t remember her laughing, not for a second. Oh, she break two, three plates, all right, but not from an excess of joy, I tell you.”

  “Are you saying he was a cruel man, Cyril?”

  “No, no. Cruelty wasn’ part of his makeup. Not what you might call intestinal cruelty, nuh. He had to work at it. And sometimes this did make it hard to distinguish between his kindness and his — well, cruelty, harshness, call it what you want. On top o’ that, as Penny rightly say, he had a wild sense o’ humour. Like all of us, nuh.”

  And he tells of a young man, an admirer of her father’s, who used to hang around the campaign, helping out, doing whatever needed to be done.

  “One evenin’ out o’ the blue Ram start teasin’ the fella. Jus’ blowing off steam, but mercilessly. You see, the fella was all skin an’ bones — in fact, more bones than skin. Ram start saying things like, every time the fella jump, you does hear him rattle. Or, when he needed pants, all he had to do was boil a couple piece o’ macaroni and slip them on. And soon everybody join in. Lots o’ jokes about boners — not having one but being one. And before you know it, the fella burst into tears an’ run out. Never came back. Couple of us felt bad, went looking for him, couldn’ find him. But Ram — Ram said, ‘No big deal, he have to learn how to take a joke or he’ll never do anything in life.’ An’ in a way he was right. That’s the way we were. You had to learn to take the fatigue.”

  “Fatigue?”

  “Teasing, nuh. Is how we say it.”

  Yasmin says, “It’s the same everywhere. I had to put up with teasing at school.”

  Cyril leans forward, palms rubbing dry against each other. “I know what you sayin’. And you right. To a point. But there was, to my mind, something shameless in the way we … ”

  She notices the sudden narrowing of his eyes.

  “You see we din’t believe that people like that fella, or like Amie — people who work for us, people who below us — we din’t believe they had feelings. Or at leas’, they did, but their feelings din’t count.”

  His right eyeball wanders as his gaze drifts sightless past her.

  “For some of us, they still don’t.”

  48

  THE THING ABOUT my husband is this: he believed in the torch Celia saw in his tea leaves. He believed that in holding up that torch for his people — our people — he was also holding up a torch for us, his family. He believed that in loving them, he was also loving us. It was part of his self-delusion.

  And I thought that his dreams, which went well beyond the possibilities we had been brought up to expect, could accommodate the big We and the little we. What I didn’t realize was that the big We would prove to be a demanding mistress. She fed his appetite and in so doing made it larger, to the point where he could never be satisfied. He would spend long days at his desk, keeping himself sharp with coffee, whisky, almonds and sugar cubes.

  Yes, my dear. Almonds and sugar cubes. He kept a jar of each on his desk. He’d crack the almonds open with a judge’s gavel and pop the nut into his mouth along with a sugar cube.

  His quiet moments at home — and they were not many — were spent dreaming of his next encounter with her. He began hungering after her.

  Jealous, Mrs. Livingston? Is that how I sound? But I suppose … Yes, of course I was. Your word is appropriate. Wouldn’t you have been? It was the hardest thing, you see — understanding that my husband’s attentions had been seduced away from me so totally, and in a manner that left me no room to manoeuvre. I am still surprised, you know, when successful politicians willingly surrender their power. To lose in the polls is one thing, but to retire, to give it up for no compelling reason, is quite another. It still strikes me as extraordinary.

  I remember the first political rally I attended. I remember it because it was also my last. There was a stage with chairs on it and flaming torches — flambeaux, as we called them — at each corner. There was a microphone and crackling speakers. Somewhere off to the side a tassa band was drumming out its rhythms …

  Ah yes, it’s an East Indian drum band. Its rhythms can be quite infectious. I’ve seen many fellows — fuelled too, it must be said, by the island rum — surrender to its joyous demons. Why, I too have felt —

  No, no, Mrs. Livingston, not in the least like voodoo. Oh my, the very thought!

  Anyway, I was asked to sit in the front row beside my husband, but I chose to take a seat in the second row behind him. From there I could see everything, you see, without selfimplication. Tongues of flame from oil drums defining the perimeter of the square, hundreds of faces shimmering up towards us in the flickering darkness. Not ironical or cynical, but rapt with anticipation.

  Sometimes there were hecklers, too, and they were the voices that stayed with my husband afterwards, the ones he brought home with him. He would vent anger at them for hours, while Cyril — dear, foolish Cyril who liked to call himself my husband’s campaign manager — poured him torrents of whisky and tried to calm him. It often took hours. Cyril on
ce confided to me that he thought my husband expected to be loved by everyone, even his political enemies. He thought he had gained an insight into his brother. Poor deluded Cyril. He took himself so seriously. No one else did, you know.

  Then the speeches began, but I remember not a word, not a promise, not an idea. What I do remember is this: those faces animated by the words, solemn one moment and ecstatic the next. And when it was my husband’s turn several warmup speakers later, the sweat that broke out on the back of his neck, and the way his spine — it was a deep spine, like a crevasse down the middle of his back — the way his spine defined itself through the soaked fabric of his shirt. I remember the stiffness of his left arm — it was with that hand that he gripped the stem of the microphone — and the gesticulations of his right. Gesticulations of caution and exhortation, the pumping fists of the passion that is, let me be blunt, a kind of masturbation …

  Mrs. Livingston: Are you all right?

  My language? Scarlet? My dear, what in the world do you mean?

  Masturbation? It’s a perfectly good word. It describes a physical action, like spitting or vomiting — only masturbation is surely more pleasurable. Besides, I thought I was being rather poetic — the pumping fists of passion and all that.

  No, I’ll grant you, it’s not Wordsworth — but that’s a recommendation, isn’t it …

  The point is that all of that effort, some of it natural, some of it contrived to simulate naturalness, had its effect. My husband conducted the crowd and I saw what Cyril meant when he said he had the touch of a master. It was quite unsettling, actually. This quality, which others admired in him, had quite the opposite effect on me. How could the little we compete with the adulation of crowds? I left that rally deflated, and promised myself I would never attend another. It was a promise that I kept.