Does she, Yasmin wonders, hear her own echoes? Does she hear her own heart?
34
PHOTO: ONLY HER EYES ARE TURNED TOWARDS THE CAMERA, THE PUPILS DISTENDED AND UNFOCUSED, THE LIPS PURSED THIN AS IF APPREHENDED AT A MOMENT OF INDECISION. SHE HAS BEEN CAUGHT UNAWARES, IS UNHAPPY ABOUT IT. SOMETHING IN HER — THE NEATNESS WITH WHICH HER HAIR IS PULLED BACK PERHAPS, OR THE CARE WITH WHICH HER EYEBROWS HAVE BEEN PLUCKED AND GREASE-PENCILLED IN TELLS OF A WOMAN WHO LEAVES AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE TO CHANCE, WHICH ITSELF HINTS AT A FEAR OF CHANCE AND THE UNKNOWN IT ENTAILS. THE SET OF HER JAW SUGGESTS THAT IN THE SECONDS FOLLOWING THE FLASH — THE LIGHT GLARING OFF HER SKIN, CHAFING AWAY WHATEVER TAN SHE MIGHT HAVE ACQUIRED — SHE UTTERS A PROTEST.
“Actually,” Cyril says, “she gave me the finger. In the nices’ possible way of course.”
Penny laughs. “I don’t remember Celia ever sayin’ a bad word. Not once.” The cruel clarity of the fluorescent lighting gives an odd cast to her features — they appear thickened, less refined — so that her words, of fondness, of gentle praise, seem unmatched to her expression. “Of course, back then, we din’t. We use to say things like shite and shoot and jeezuwebs.”
“But Celia — Celia use to use sign language.”
Penny grows sombre. “That was Celia, all right. Signs. Givin’ them and lookin’ for them.”
Yasmin glances again at the photograph: at its preserved hysteria. “Did she enjoy living here?” Yasmin asks.
“It was her home,” Cyril replies. “We were her family.”
Penny says, “She wanted to be one of us.”
Cyril says, “She was one of us.”
Yasmin sees Penny’s lips part, then close; sees her body rock backwards ever so slightly. She was one of us. She knows that her question has not been answered; knows that there is no answer. The silence quickly fills with the shrill of the insect chorus from the darkness outside.
Cyril’s eyes glitter. He turns away, shuts them. Yasmin sees his Adam’s apple twitching through the stiffened muscles of his throat.
Penny reaches out and grasps his forearm. After a moment she says, “You mus’ understand, Yasmin. Is only yesterday we were chil’ren.”
Yasmin lets the photograph slip from her fingers, watches it tumble soundlessly back into the box.
Not long after, Cyril excuses himself.
Penny gives a thoughtful sigh. “You know, Yasmin, I don’ want you goin’ away thinking your father was like Manager. Vernon was so different, is as if they were hardly brothers.
“When Vernon was young, two or three years old, he was bouncing on the bed in his bedroom and somehow he fly out the window, fall two stories to the ground, pick himself up and run back in the house laughin’. That is how he was throughout his life. Strong and hardy, always bouncin’ back. He did feel things strong-strong. Once he tell me that when he thought of our people, this warmth flooded into his chest. He felt responsible for them, nuh, for all the little people. People like Amie, nuh.
“As for Manager, he always been the kind o’ man who sits down to pee. And if it only have a urinal, he’ll hold it.”
Yasmin holds back her grimace: There is nothing she can do with this image.
“Vernon, on the other hand, would use any tree if he had to go. There you have the whole difference between them. Is why Cyril live a life with nothing to show for it. Always holdin’ it in, nuh.”
Yes, Yasmin thinks, but Vernon died young, and as for Cyril — he holds in more water than you can possibly imagine …
It is only with effort that she respects Cyril’s wish to keep in confidence the other world in which he has involved himself, in which he seeks to shape redemption, for others and for himself.
35
DO YOU DREAM, dear? Are you dreaming now, or are you listening to me with greater forbearance than you have ever shown?
I don’t dream very much, you know. At least, I don’t remember my dreams. But there was one, many years ago, that has remained with me with startling vividness. Shall I tell you about it?
Yasmin was very young at the time and I had taken her into bed with me for an afternoon nap. I quickly fell into a deep sleep, which was quite uncharacteristic, and found myself in a world best described as the physical manifestation of what is called white noise — by which I mean a world without sky, without ground, without horizon. There were no trees, no grass, no flowers and no sounds. It was like standing in the middle of a large and immobile cloud. And then I wasn’t alone. My husband was standing in front of me — only he had aged. He was haggard and white-haired and bent over, supporting himself with a walking stick. I became aware that Celia was standing beside me, and I said to her, You will take care of him, won’t you. And she replied that of course she would. The curious thing is that through all of this, I felt nothing — no surprise, no fear, no sadness, just a kind of relief when I knew he would be looked after.
Then I awoke, Yasmin in a deep sleep beside me. And from outside, through the open window, the sounds of commotion came to me.
36
PENNY SAYS, “APPENDICITIS. It came on fast. They had to take it out. And afterwards they gave it to him in a small bottle, pickled, nuh, in formaldehyde.
“You ever seen an appendix, Yasmin? Looks like a baby’s little finger. And sitting in a fridge, is one of the most ghoulish things you can imagine.
“But he was proud of it, your father. Don’t ask me to explain. Although I suppose I should be grateful — every time I opened the fridge, my appetite disappeared. Helped me keep my weight down, nuh.
“Funny thing — later. A few days after we cremated him, he came to me in a dream. And it was like that, you understand — I din’t dream him, he came to me. And he said, in a clear-clear voice, ‘Pen, you forget something. I need all of me. And my appendix still sitting in the fridge. I missing it, Pen, send it to me.’
“I tell you, I wake up in a col’ sweat. My first thought was, is too late. He was already cremated, the ashes were long cleared away and washed out to sea. I couldn’ exactly go and toss the thing into just any burning pyre. So I picked up the phone then and there and called the pundit. He wasn’ too-too happy to hear from me. It was three o’clock in the mornin’ after all, so I can’t say I blame him — and I could practically hear his hangover over the phone line. But still, Vernon sounded kind o’ desperate —
“He hear me out and said he’d call back in the morning. Which he did. And that afternoon he came over, lit a little fire in the backyard, did a little puja, and tossed the appendix into the middle o’ the flames. He said, ‘Just let it burn out and in the morning pick up the ashes and toss them into the river where the rest of the ashes went. It going to find the rest of him, and your brother going to be content.’ Then he hurry off the way pundits like to do if they not staying to eat — to make you think they busy-busy when everybody knows they headin’ straight for the racetrack or the rum shop.
“Anyway, the next morning me and Cyril went down with bucket and shovel to pick up the ashes — only to find that some animal, most likely a stray dog, had got there before us. Everything was scatter around, as if the animal had paw through to see what he could find — and I’ll tell you now I don’t even want to think about what he might o’ found, if you see what I mean. What to do? We pick up what was left — between you and me it wasn’ much — and drove it up to the river. At least Vernon never came back to me, so maybe, you know, the dog din’t … I mean, maybe it was there after all.”
Yasmin does not — cannot — react. She doesn’t know how. She gets up and leaves the room. She does not excuse herself.
And it is only a few minutes later, as she stands on the porch filling her lungs with the moist night air, fingertips pressed to the rusted railing, that she realizes she has abandoned Penny.
And then all at once she sees that this is the point — and the goal — of Penny’s story. It is, she understands at last, a tale of loneliness.
37
DEATH BREEDS M
YTHOLOGY. Success breeds contempt. My husband died. I was left to contend with what remained of the success.
You know that there are people who laugh at me, Mrs. Livingston? They find me contemptible. They are people who fail to realize just how clearly I see myself. How clearly I see this persona I have built — everything from the hair so perfectly moulded to the words that I use to the cadences of my speech: They do not realize that I know how unlikely all this makes me, how absurd. The Englishwoman, they call me behind my back. Nor do they realize that this shaping of the self was the only one available to people of my generation rising out of that backward colonial society. Some of us, it is true, surrendered ourselves whole, but every struggle has its casualties. I have struggled not to be a casualty.
Those who have followed me, though, have redefined themselves. They are proud of their singsong accents, their imperfect English, their idioms that are meaningless elsewhere. Their music has travelled the world. They have developed a tribal sense and so have become a new people.
I glimpse these new people, Mrs. Livingston, and part of me envies them. This pride they have acquired in themselves just as they are! Even if it too is absurd — but then, all pride in the self can appear absurd from outside, can it not? And if they have gone beyond the absurdity they see in me to something new, it is because I existed, because I and my husband and our contemporaries made a way out when there was none. It is no fault of our own that the world has outstripped us.
My husband and his people built schools, you see. Dozens of schools throughout the rural areas to educate the children of the cane workers and the field labourers and the rice farmers. This was the way out: sitting at those desks, writing on those chalk slates, rhyming out the multiplication tables until they became a part of you. Education, especially in the large sense, teaches us to ask questions. And questions confirm that we exist. This was my husband’s gift to our people. He made us aware of ourselves.
He was honoured for that. He was given a gold medallion on a chain — and ironically it was the only time his words failed him. He could not make a speech, but managed to promise that he would always wear it around his neck, a promise he kept. And that medallion, as I’ve told you, saved his life. My husband knew who he was, Mrs. Livingston, and he felt that these schools — no longer Presbyterian schools teaching Christian principles but Hindu schools teaching Hindu ideas — would help these children to discover who they were.
We inhabit a world that has made a fetish of identity, Mrs. Livingston. We are who we are, individualized creatures of history, society and family. To listen to your heart, to accept its complexity, is to know yourself. It is to recognize your identity in all its glorious absurdity.
And this in the end, my dear, is my husband’s legacy, but one few are willing to see — one, I daresay, that he himself would not have recognized. It is also my husband’s monument, and a monument, as we both know, casts a shadow. Half the story is in that shadow, but who ever pays any attention to it?
38
SHE STANDS ALONE on the porch engulfed in darkness.
It is late, well past eleven. The sky, cleared, is swollen with stars, the air still and fragrant with earth and flourishing vegetation. All around, insects raise a collective night whistle.
Sleep will not come, her mind too full of Jim, but in the unfocused way of image without thought, as if the shards of this world are summoning shredded memories of the other, whole yet so distant.
He comes to her as a name and, rapidly, as a series of domestic gestures.
Pouring pasta into a pot. Spooning coffee into a filter. Smoothing the spine of a newspaper. Cracking the spine of a paperback.
Then, unexpectedly, as gestures of intimacy.
Arms, bare, reaching up. Finger moist with wine caressing her lips. Hand at her breast, tongue at her toes.
Then:
Eyes caught in unguarded moments. Partly lifeless, partly manic: the revelation of fatigue.
Slouched in his armchair, eyes shut, arms folded, as in a gesture of mortality.
The twist of a head, the seizing of a gaze: a smile unexpected and true, a quicksilver flash from beyond the boundaries of wariness.
39
SHE IS BLENDED with the darkness.
Her hand held before her eyes remains invisible, and the few steps she takes are ethereal in their unworldliness.
The darkness has made her incorporeal.
She feels herself gliding through the night, each footfall a jolt of surprise, evidence of a substantiality beyond the reach of her other senses. All that remains to her is the jarring solidity of the earth, the constancy of the stars, and from somewhere off in the distance the sharp, rhythmic report of many drums.
The sound had startled her. It had emerged without warning from a distant darkness so profound it could only be sensed, cutting off the images flooding through her mind.
Drummers, sometimes one, sometimes many, their beats as crisp as the crack of rifle fire, rasping and melodious and so disquieting she is robbed of breath to the point of dizziness.
And now, down here, away from the house, spectral in the greater darkness, the sound seems to come from everywhere. For a moment she is confused, but she quickly steadies herself: returns in her mind to the porch and the direction from which the sound came to her. She knows she must walk away from the house and to the left, into the thickening trees.
The looming bulk of the house steadies her gaze, helps her pick out varying shades of black.
That tree: she knows it.
She wills herself past it. Wills herself to keep on going, towards that sound that fills the night.
Just past the hazy silhouette of the tree, the ground gives way beneath her — a depression in the earth, she realizes as she tumbles. She catches herself on her hands, the ground damp and mossy, but a little yelp escapes her as a stone bites into her knee.
She sits for a moment, rubbing the knee, resolution wavering. But her fingers find no blood and the pain passes quickly. She rises slowly to her feet and continues on.
At the trees, the sound of the drums grows muffled and ubiquitous. She hesitates, tells herself she will take ten more steps and if she seems no closer will turn back. She proceeds slowly, hands reaching out to tree trunks, feeling her way.
At twelve steps, the drumming louder now, a glimmer of light causes her heart to race. She makes her way with a heightened caution past the tree trunks that begin to acquire body and shape.
Twenty steps later — her mind automatically counting as she walks — the drumming becomes tumultuous and demanding, reverberating with a brutal edge. The tree trunks thin out, a bright and flickering light hardening them to silhouettes.
A few steps later — steps cautioned to surreptitiousness — she discerns a clearing and there, at its centre, the leaping flames of a bonfire.
Shadowed against the flames, circling them to the rhythmic delirium of the drums, men — only men — writhe and jump in ecstatic abandonment. They are costumed, painted, some shorn, some long-haired. Some brandish tridents, others staves.
And then, among them, she spots Ash. He is draped like the others in a saffron robe, his face patterned with white paint, arms and legs bare and glistening in the firelight. In one hand he holds his pellet gun, in the other an unsheathed sword.
Beyond the fire, five men are beating at drums hung around their necks. There eyes are closed, chests streaked with sweat, arms flailing.
Yasmin’s body begins to tremble. Her mind swirls in incomprehension at the nocturnal frenzy that has no place in any world she knows.
She has made up her mind to turn back, to return to the safety of the house, when a hand seizes her shoulder from behind.
40
FUNNY THING ABOUT regrets, Mrs. Livingston — we don’t always regret having them …
Do you know what I mean?
I have never told Yasmin much about her father. Not much beyond anything she could find in the public record if she wanted to.
And what she knows — what she thinks I have told her — is banal enough. That he always did his best for us. That he fought for his people. That he was killed for it.
She was curious about him for a while, in her early teens. But then she seemed to lose interest — whether because this is what adolescents do or because my portrait of him was sufficient to discourage her I do not know. But her interest waned, and she has never attempted to put flesh on his bones and blood in his veins. To my relief, let me say. It would be futile, after all. He would remain just a construction. I do not want Yasmin to have to live with that disappointment.
Among any parent’s greatest regrets is what we have failed to teach our children, the knowledge we have failed to impart. We want such fullness for them! So I regret having given this barest of skeletons to Yasmin. But I do not regret having this regret …
Do you see what I mean?
This ignorance, you understand, my dear — it is also my gift to her.
41
THE DANCING AND drumming stop abruptly as she is hauled into the firelight, the back of her neck seized by fingers viperous and unrelenting.
The men gather around, chests heaving, bodies glistening, faces etched with hostility, curiosity, confusion — and she sees that they are as unnerved as she.
Ash pushes his way through to the front. “What you think you doin’? You have no place here.”
She is a minute in finding her voice, and when she does it betrays rupture. “Ash. All this. I didn’t mean —” But speech robs her of breath and, gasping, she realized — in the new slyness that comes to them, easing their tension — that they must think her afraid.
But she is not. Not now. No longer. Of that she is absolutely certain.
The Worlds Within Her Page 30