The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

  49

  CYRIL SAYS, “HE wasn’ what you’d call a delicate man.”

  Penny frowns but says nothing.

  His words cause Yasmin to reflect that delicate is an adjective that would do justice to Cyril himself, to his gentle fragility — his fault lines concealed, but barely.

  “Give him a san’wich or a roti and he’d take it in the palm of his hand, really hold it. No dainty-dainty tea-an’-crumpets little-finger-in-the-air for him.”

  She imagines large hands, thick-fingered, with broad nails trimmed close. She senses a physical strength rarely employed — but when called upon, displayed with ferocity.

  “Once I saw him take an orange in his hand an’ squeeze an’ squeeze until the thing just kind o’ exploded.”

  Cyril spreads his palm, then snaps the fingers into a clench. She sees a small hand, plump-fingered, with nails of painful transparence. Senses the possibility of a vexed impotence. Imagines, yet, the orange collapsing into a pulpy mass.

  “And when he et, he et. Big bites. In fact, when he et, he always brought to mind a teacher I had in primary school. I remember a class when he was teachin’ us how to et. ‘Masticate properly. Masticate every mouthful thirty-two times.’ Not chew. Masticate. That’s what Ram did.”

  She imagines the working of his jaws, his wet lips, his relish.

  Penny says, “Masticate thirty-two times?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “You supposed to count or what?”

  Cyril nods. “He asked who masticated thirty-two times and guess which fool put up his hand. He said I was lying. And he was right.”

  “Why’d you do it?” Yasmin asks.

  Before he can answer, Penny says, “Habit.”

  50

  IT WAS HARD on me, you know, Mrs. Livingston, harder on me than on my husband. A brutal experience, watching him get bloodied in battle. I felt his pain more acutely than he himself did — or perhaps more than he could afford to let himself. I remember thinking that my fears for him appeared greater than his fears for himself. He was certain he would prevail, after all.

  One of the hacks — and there was a quick gathering of hacks around my husband — one of them said, admiringly, that he had the skin of an elephant. And then he added that these attacks — which to me appeared so vicious, for they went after the man and not after his ideas — that these attacks were like blunt arrows, glancing off my husband’s hide. I remember his words: It would take an elephant gun to bring down a man like that. The admiration was palpable in the words, and I knew I should take pride and comfort in them but I could not, for it seemed to me that even blunt arrows must hurt — even though my husband never winced, not once, not even to me in private.

  I remember overhearing a conversation he had with Cyril not long after our return. They were having breakfast together — fried bread with scrambled eggs swimming in melted butter, strong coffee — not the instant powder but beans freshly roasted, ground and boiled and sweetened with streams of condensed milk.

  You know, this was the one thing my husband pined over during our time in England: this breakfast. I tried making it for him two or three times. Now, cooking was never my forte, nor one of my ambitions — it fulfilled nothing in me — but I tried hard, for him. Not once did I succeed. He complained each and every time. His tongue, he said, recognized nothing. The bread was too light, the butter wasn’t salty enough, even the eggs made him grimace — he dubbed them too English, by which he meant wan and flavourless. So after we got back, he indulged himself — and continued doing so until renewed familiarity dulled the appetite …

  As for me, there was one thing. You won’t know it, though. It was a fruit. We called it pomerac. It had the shape and consistency of a firm pear, was red as an apple on the outside and as white as cotton on the inside. Of course, I would occasionally hunger for the taste of a mango or sour plums or — another fruit you wouldn’t know — chennet. But those were tastes fairly easily satisfied, what with all the coming and going delegation members did between the island and London. Pomerac, though, was the one thing no one ever managed, possibly because it was not widely available …

  No, it was not difficult! My dear, you underestimate me. Pomerac was the most easily obtained from a tree in one’s own backyard, you see, and I was quite aware I had exchanged backyards — as I did a second time years later, when I moved to this country. One must be realistic, mustn’t one? This obsession with one’s own appetite that has become part of the modern age — I don’t think it’s a terribly healthy thing. Metaphorically speaking, too many people exchange backyards and seem to think it perfectly acceptable that they spend their time pining for pomeracs, if you see what I mean.

  But how in the world have I ended up talking about an obscure fruit? Ah, yes. My husband’s breakfast, with Cyril.

  That morning, I overheard my husband say to his brother that he was quite aware some people accused him of opportunism — working for one side, then the other, then back again. And he acknowledged that they were right.

  Cyril, being Cyril, demurred.

  Don’t try to hide from it, my husband said, let’s figure out how we can use it.

  I understood my husband enough at this point to see what he meant. His goal, you see — his goal beyond the personal — was the betterment of our people …

  Our people? Hah! That, my dear, is one of those mischievous questions. We — those of us who belong by birth — have always instinctively known who our people were, we have never had to define …

  Unlettered, I would say, by the tens of thousands. And physically wasted, by all that badly compensated labour in the sugar-cane fields and rice paddies. Bound together by alienness and religion — and defined, yes, by race and a shared, if false, notion of a larger belonging, for we believed ourselves to be still of India — unlike those with whom we shared the island, those whom slavery had severed from their homeland. A grand illusion on our part, but it was what shaped this idea of Us and of our people. It was what gave power to my husband and those who worked with him. It was this sense of our people — a people bereft — that gave my husband his dream, and his sense of mission. Political power. Economic power. Social status. These were not empty words to my husband, nor were they vague concepts. He used to say that cane-cutters had to give birth to doctors, and that we had to go from milking cows to milking the economy.

  So you see, he would have worked with anyone who would help him achieve his ends. He was an opportunist. Political ideology, party loyalty and such things motivated him very little. The kind of success he dreamed of could have come to him only with the success of our people …

  What kind of success did he dream of? I’m not sure he could have put it into words — but, as I understand it, he dreamed of exercising an immense personal power, despite which our people would one day wish to erect statues of him. He wanted to be able to hurl thunderbolts — and still be loved.

  What Cyril failed to appreciate was that my husband had the ability to see himself through his enemies’ eyes. And he was at ease, though a man of ego, accepting even a poisoned view of himself with a kind of dispassion — that elephant hide of his. It gave him great strength, you know — for he knew not only his enemy but also, in this game at least, himself too.

  How often, though, those arrows ricocheted off him and found me.

  51

  “HI, HOW WAS your day?”

  “Fine. Yours?”

  “Did you watch?”

  “You were fine, as usual. Eyeshadow a little on the heavy side, though.”

  Or: “Sh edule. Sk edule’s American. But on the whole, fine. Just fine.”

  Fine: the word set her teeth on edge. Like nice, a nonsense word, emptied of all weight but the dismissive.

  52

  MY HUSBAND’S REHABILITATION was his own creation, and the hacks were his handmaidens. Material was spun everywhere for them, even within the family. There was this particular story — the way they told it, my dear, they m
ade it sound as if he could fly.

  They said: When he was just a little boy he fell out of a mango tree.

  They said: He should have broken his arm or his leg or even his neck.

  But he fell softly, they said. He came down light and easy, like a leaf or a bird, or a cat expending a life.

  Sometimes they said he had fallen from the top of a coconut tree. But always there was height, and lightness, and a miracle of invulnerability. No one ever explained how a little boy could have managed to climb to the top of a coconut tree — but hagiography makes no concession to practicality.

  My husband had no memory of this event, and knew it might be apocryphal. But he liked it, appreciated its usefulness. Once he said, with a kind of wonder, “How much we lose of our own lives … ” Convincing himself, you see, that it could have been so, making it part of himself the way some actors absorb the details of their characters.

  Do you know that I actually got to the point where I decided I would ask my mother-in-law about the incident. Had anything remotely like it occurred? But my mother-in-law had a way of frustrating my plans.

  A month to the day after our return from England, my husband and I were awoken before dawn by a tapping at our bedroom door. My husband got up while I turned in the bed and tried to fall back asleep. I was certain this was about yet another of his political matters — little fires that had to be extinguished at the most inconvenient hours. But the quality of the knock at the door had alerted something in my subconscious and, contrary to my habit, I found myself listening — with greater alertness when in the whispered exchange I recognized the maid’s voice.

  My husband said to me, Go wake Cyril, then he hurried out wearing only his pyjama pants and undershirt.

  A few minutes later, Cyril, Celia and I found my husband and the maid in my mother-in-law’s room. They were standing beside the bed, looking down at her. A single glance told me what had happened. Her face was more serene than I had ever seen.

  53

  SHE THREW HERSELF backwards onto the snowbank and swept her arms up until her mittens met above her head. Then she leapt to her feet and, ignoring the snow that clung to the back of her head, her coat, her legs, examined the result with a critical eye. “Look, Mom,” she said. “An angel in the snow.”

  “Yes, you are,” Yasmin said.

  “Not me, Mom.” Her daughter was peeved. “Look. In the snow. I made an angel.”

  One of millions, but to her daughter an achievement. Yasmin made a show of admiring it.

  “Make one, Mom.”

  “Now? Here?”

  “Pleeease, Mom?”

  Yasmin could not tell her daughter that she had never made an angel in the snow. She did not wish to tell her that public displays of exuberance had been offensive to her mother’s sense of propriety, and that her age of rebellion, such as it was, had come too late. She had by then grown into the reserve that would temper outburst. Such an obedient girl, her mother would sometimes remark with a wounding satisfaction. Yasmin had always been careful not to damage that pride in her reserve — the reserve some would take for gentleness.

  “Mummy! Make one!” Her daughter was becoming impatient.

  “But you already have, honey. And such a beautiful one, too.” But as she heard herself speak, as she detected the deceit in her voice, Yasmin knew that her daughter, had she been old enough to be familiar with the expression, could justly have accused her of making excuses — excuses for an acquired inadequacy.

  “Mo-om …”

  And suddenly the plea — its tone curious with elements of request and of permission — was irresistible. Yasmin spun around, let herself fall back onto the snowbank.

  Ariana squealed in delight.

  She drew her arms upwards as her daughter had done and then rolled forward, getting to her feet with a futile effort at elegance.

  Her daughter was thrilled.

  They stood together for several minutes gazing at the figures they had made, the large angel beside the small: a fresco, Yasmin saw, of protectiveness, the one keeping watch over the other.

  54

  SHE SEIZES A handful of his photos, lays them out on the table before her, shuffling them into a picture gallery of the passing years.

  The eyes: almond-shaped in youth, frankness leavened only by the shadow of a deeper wariness; in later years, the outer edges foundering, as if burdened by gravity, the shadow having risen overwhelmingly.

  The mouth, shaped in the early photos into an unprompted smile, later on follows the line of the eyes, as if weighted down at the corners by despondency or disappointment — or merely the sadness of a man who understands too much.

  His hair is always full and neatly combed, parted on the left side and brushed back from the forehead. But as its early blackness acquires thin streaks of grey, the mass loses body, appears to sit more heavily on his head.

  She sees then how his flesh thickened, skin darkening, acquiring the texture of old, soft leather.

  These changes: the years made manifest. She feels suddenly that she is seeing the wordless minutiae of him, peering at a road map to shapeless darknesses within his soul.

  Her hands grow moist. Her heart pounds. These changes: They are more graphic than she can stand. They offer a closeness of encounter she is unprepared for.

  With a sweep of a hand she banishes them from sight.

  Cyril blinks at her, puzzled. Then he knuckles his eyes.

  Penny yawns.

  “Let’s take a break,” Cyril says. “Is hard on the eyesight, looking so much into the past.”

  55

  SHE RESISTED PLACING blame on her daughter. What blame there was surely belonged only to her and Jim.

  How many little exchanges, the inconsequentia of daily life, had gone half-spoken or unshared during those years of interruption? How many threads left unspun? Was that when the silences began settling in, like little holes appearing in the web that bound them — with all the conversations that began Guess what I read or heard or saw today only to peter out into Tell you later — a later that never came?

  From the soothing silences of nothing to be said to the sullen silences of words left unsaid: When had they exchanged one kind of silence for the other?

  He did not call her. Instead he drove home, ashen, from the hospital.

  And at home, he told in a voice gone insensible how he had driven up to the schoolyard, parked across the street.

  How the teachers hadn’t seen her.

  How he hadn’t seen her.

  But how she had seen him. He told of the blur of her clothes catching his eye, and the sudden fear that came to him. That caused, perhaps, the seat belt to jam, his fingers beating useless at its mechanism.

  How his attention was diverted by the seat belt. How he heard the squeal of brakes.

  And looked up.

  And up.

  To see: “She was flying, Yas. Her coat open. Like wings. Flying, like a bird. Her face — startled. No more than that. Startled. As if in wonder at this sudden flight.”

  She drove as if crazed. She was not stopped. Had she been stopped, she did not know if she would have been able to make the policeman understand: that her daughter was at the hospital; that she had flown like a bird from the bumper of a car; that she had come down on her head, remaining miraculously unmarked except for a bruise where the neck had snapped.

  That she had to cradle Ariana in her arms.

  To comfort her for the last time.

  Forever.

  As her husband had not done.

  56

  CYRIL, WHO WAS far better at such things than my husband, arranged the funeral. He did have a certain managerial ability, you know, but for the smaller things; politics was too large a sphere for him, he found it unmanageable. Two days later, under the direction of a pundit, they both performed the cremation ceremony.

  I wish I could say that it had all the dignity befitting the circumstance. But I cannot. Someone — not Cyril or my husband, I a
m sure; most likely one of the hacks or hangers-on — arranged to get some political mileage out of it. Reporters and photographers clustered around the pyre like flies around excrement. Even family members were elbowed out of the way.

  And afterwards, at a reception back at the house, the flashbulbs kept on popping as my husband — and only my husband — received condolences. Poor Cyril, who had arranged all of this, was off in the kitchen being consoled by Celia. I caught him at one point, you know — peering out at my husband standing there like a one-man receiving line. And watching him — watching the mixture of disbelief and resentment that marked his face — was for me, as strange as it may seem, the saddest moment of those sad days. That, I think, was when I learnt to be careful about underestimating Cyril.

  When the newspapers ran photos in the coming days, you’d swear that it was only my husband who had lost his mother, and that everything — all the sadness, all the mourning, all the arrangements — had fallen on his shoulders alone.

  Also, an almost imperceptible change came to my husband — near impossible to describe, in fact. Many words come to mind, none of them accurate in itself. But if one were to take a pinch of one, a smidgen of the other, and a whiff of the next … You see what I mean? A new dignity, a new strength, a heightened remoteness. An imperiousness you saw only swiftly, when his gaze shifted right or left. A sense of a heavy stillness that had lodged at the very centre of his being. My husband was never impetuous in action, and something — perhaps just an immeasurable lengthening of the pause before he spoke — told me that he was now no longer impetuous in thought either.

  A few days later he put his hand on my shoulder and said with great seriousness, “I’m not afraid of death anymore.”

  And you know, my dear, I wished he hadn’t told me that. His words depressed me. For death, it seems to me, is something that should be feared. Not to fear it is to diminish life itself.