The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

  And then she sees that Ash, too, understands this, and that her lack of fear is arousing his anger.

  He waves the barrel of the pellet gun before her eyes, lowers the mouth to her lips and presses it against them, the metal hard and warm.

  She turns her face away.

  He presses it to her temple.

  It’s only a pellet gun, she tells herself — but she cannot clear her mind of the lizard leaping around in its death throes in the grass.

  Then, from deep within, her own anger surges. She reaches up, grasps the barrel and pushes it away.

  Ash does not resist. Instead, he leans in close, so close she smells his acrid perspiration, feels his breath warm and moist on her cheek and ear. “Look here,” he says in an angry whisper. “What else you expec’ me to do? You going back to your nice peaceful country tomorrow — and I stuck here. No way out. You understandin’ me? No way out.”

  Her eyes meet his: desperation dark and glistening inches away. In silence, she watches the darkness swell with moisture, watches tears brim, break and scurry down his cheeks.

  And she feels for the first time beyond her fear of him: feels the depth of his despair.

  She raises a hand to his cheek, lets his tears dampen her fingertips.

  This dipping into tears, this unthinking attempt to soothe. She remembers the last time: a fall from a bicycle, a badly twisted ankle, her daughter writhing in pain.

  She begins to caress his cheek. His eyes close, his face relaxes into peacefulness.

  Yasmin feels herself melting.

  But it does not last. Without warning he pulls back and slaps her hand away. “Go on,” he spits. “Get out o’ here.” And to her captor behind, he says, “Take her back to the house.”

  Her arm is grasped in a firm hand. As she turns to go, she says quietly, “You can’t fool me anymore, Ash.”

  “You saw them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hellofasight, eh?”

  Cyril, sitting spectral in the darkness of the porch, speaks with discouragement. Through the gloom, Yasmin sees his face sagging as if the flesh has detached itself from his skull.

  He notices her limp. “They hurt you?” he says in alarm.

  “No, it’s all right, I fell. The knee’s just stiffening up a bit. It’ll be fine.”

  Cyril leans forward in his chair, elbows on his thighs, fingers interlacing. His chin sinks into his chest. “They does get together like this every month or so,” he says. “Whipping themselves up, going crazy. Prancing around like a bunch o’ bushmen.”

  Yasmin takes the chair across from his, stretches out her leg, rubs the knee.

  He sniffs contemptuously. “They’re Hindu warriors. Going to save us all from Muslims, blacks and anybody else who get in the way of the great Hindu renaissance.”

  “You take them seriously, but there’s hardly a dozen of them, Cyril.”

  “They’re not the only ones. There’s a whole movement. You does hear talk about hundreds, thousands, stockpiles of arms.”

  “I saw tridents and staves. Ash had his pellet gun, for God’s sake.”

  “The talk is money from abroad. From India, nuh, and from some o’ the rich businessmen here. And secret shipments of guns. Who knows if any of it true?”

  “Have you asked Ash?”

  “Once. And of course he say they’re just a religious group and what I have against people learning more about Hinduism? I let it drop.” He raises hooded eyes to her. “He say anything to you about the diaspora?”

  “The diaspora, yes.”

  “And the flying chariots that were really rockets, and the flaming arrows that were really nuclear missiles? They reading the scriptures in their own way, you see. And they finding evidence of a great Hindu civilization way back when. And is not great art and poetry, mind you. No, no. Is advanced technology. Jet planes and space travel, telepathic communication. A race of super beings.” His fingers unfold themselves and his hands bunch into fists. “Yasmin, there’s a whole world in that boy’s head, a whole other reality.”

  She has witnessed that other reality, and has stumbled onto yet another which Cyril, in his frustration, is incapable of seeing. “And Penny, what does she think of all this?”

  “Penny?” he scoffs. “Sometimes I think she waiting for his parents to come back. And in the meantime, the boy growing up. Penny want him to be something — a doctor, a lawyer — and sometimes she does think what he need is some good, hard licks. But she also think, deep in herself, nuh, that what he doing is important. Worse thing is, Penny think that if Ram were alive today he’d be with them, fighting for our people.”

  The idea surprises Yasmin. “Would he?”

  Cyril looks away into the night. “I think Ram would mourn to see where his dream for his people ending up. He used to say, if we don’t make this work, this place going back to the jungle. He was half right. Way I see it, the jungle coming to us.”

  His words are a relief and a comfort. That her father was a man of realistic vision, sensitive to limits, susceptible to despair, offers Yasmin an unexpected satisfaction. Like the glimpses of vanity, it is something she can take away with her.

  Out in the darkness the drumming resumes, a line of rhythmic explosions.

  “But, you know,” Cyril continues, “one thing I can’t get away from — Ash and his friends are like Ram’s chil’ren. His spiritual chil’ren, I mean. He gave our generation dreams, but we couldn’ make them come true. Not without him.” He cocks his head towards the sound of the drums. “You see, Yasmin, that is what does happen to dreams that remain just dreams too long. And is what does happen to frustrated romantics. It ain’t have nobody more dangerous. They end up blaming the world for their own foolishness.”

  Then he sits back, eyes closed, lips pursed, like a man meditating on the unanswerable reeling in at him out of the night.

  42

  THE KNOCK AT the bedroom door is like a whisper, and she assumes that Cyril, like her, is unable to sleep, that he has seen her light and seeks insomniac companionship. She whispers back her permission to enter.

  The door opens slowly and she is slightly taken aback to see Amie standing timidly in the doorway.

  “Everything all right, miss?”

  “Everything’s fine, Amie. I’m just having a little trouble sleeping.”

  “If is the knee, miss, maybe I could help.”

  Yasmin sees that her sandalled feet fit together as neatly, as perfectly, as the paws of a cat at ease.

  “You know about my knee?”

  “Mister Cyril, miss. He’s a little worried, nuh, he ask me to check up on you.”

  “There’s really no need, Amie. It’ll be fine in the morning.”

  Amie holds up a bottle. It is filled with a liquid the colour of dull gold. “A little bit o’ coconut oil, miss. It good for making the swelling go down.”

  “It’s not very swollen.” But she sees Amie’s disappointment, is perplexed by it. Relents. “Okay, then. Can’t hurt, I guess.”

  Amie nods, glides into the room. In the manner, Yasmin thinks, of a nun.

  Amie, sitting on the edge of the bed, works in silence at her knee, palms gentle on the tender cap.

  The scent of the oil — sweet and rancid, unrefined — thickens the air. Yasmin feels its warmth working its way down into her bone.

  Amie works patiently, fingers circling and smoothing, the heel of her palm pressing in on the sides of the kneecap.

  Yasmin watches her fingers as they work. Slender, bony fingers, with nails cut so short they appear sunken into the flesh.

  And she watches her face, her averted eyes, enigmatic with restraint. At moments her lips assume the vaguest suggestion of surfacing humour, but the moments are brief, their source unshared and indecipherable.

  There are parts of her, Yasmin knows, that can never be unearthed, thoughts that can never be divined. She likes Amie, but she would be unable, if asked, to explain why. If pressed, she would have to say: Because
she is unknowable.

  Still, she would like to smooth the silence with an easy conversation, but the only words that occur to her — a comment about the heat, about the stillness of the night — seem banal and contemptible. What she would really like to ask Amie is whether she is happy; about the life she has led, and the lives she would have liked to lead. Questions made for late at night, when confidentiality is assumed and trust remains unspoken. Questions she could not possibly put to Amie, sitting there rubbing at her knee.

  And then a question occurs to her that she can ask. “Amie,” she says, searching for her eyes.

  “Yes, miss.” But Amie does not look up.

  “Would you tell me about my parents?”

  Amie dribbles more oil into her cupped palm. “They was nice people, miss, especially Miss Shakti.”

  “Miss Shakti — Mom — used to say the word nice doesn’t mean much.”

  “Is how I remember them, miss. Nice people.” She rubs her palms together, coating them in oil.

  “And what do you remember about me, Amie? Was I nice, too?”

  She runs both hands up Yasmin’s shins, fingertips pressing into the flesh beside the bone. “You still like the clouds, miss?” And for the first time her eyes rise to meet Yasmin’s.

  “The clouds?”

  Amie takes her hands away, crosses them on her lap. “You forget?” She gives a little laugh, as if at her own foolishness, and her voice changes. A warmth comes to it: a voice bereft of tension, edges rounded.

  Yasmin feels enveloped.

  “Everything was behind the clouds for you. Bird behind the clouds. Plane behind the clouds. You use to like the sky, always starin’ up at it as if you looking for something, or as if it had pictures up there.

  “And I remember one day you say, Papa behind the clouds. Because he was always gone, nuh, he did leave early-early, before you wake up, and come back late-late, after you was in bed. Papa behind the clouds. People use to say your head was always in the clouds.”

  Yasmin smiles. The clouds, the sky. The affinity explained. No, not explained, she thinks after a moment. Given a history — and her father given a title. She says, “I used to call him Papa. I didn’t know that.”

  “And Miss Shakti was Mama.”

  Mama: Mom, Mummy, Mother. So those other words came later, with the new life.

  “You grown up nice, miss. Very nice.” Her eyes hold Yasmin’s gaze. “But you ain’t change, eh? Not deep inside. You was a quiet little girl. Like you had a sadness deep-deep inside you. And it still there. Deep-deep inside you. As if you knowed things you shouldn’t know.”

  Yasmin is at a loss for words. She feels exposed, as if Amie has peeled her open and read her entrails.

  Amie turns away, embarrassed. She pours more oil into her palm, reaches for Yasmin’s foot and begins squeezing and caressing it.

  Yasmin feels herself stiffen. A guardedness comes to her, and a growing acuteness of unease. The mood, the sense of connection, evaporates. Amie’s touch now feels alien on her foot, as if the attention that was there before has retreated: as if the mind and the hand are no longer dedicated to the same purpose. She does not protest, though. She does not want Amie to go.

  Not yet.

  43

  YASMIN WAS A solitary child, you know. From the very first, she seemed to prefer her own company. She used to love playing with her fingers and toes, pulling on them, tickling them, making herself laugh. On her face there was amazement — the kind of glazed amazement which, in an older person, would indicate idiocy. Sometimes she would tug a foot right up to her nose and peer at her toes with all the fascination of discovery. Or she would spend a great deal of time examining her hands, as if trying to puzzle out how they worked.

  One day, watching her play, my husband said, “Look at her. It’s almost as if she doesn’t believe she exists.”

  And I felt then that he had put his finger on it.

  44

  AMIE RUNS HER thumb hard up Yasmin’s sole. “Mr. Vernon did have this trick, miss. He take a razor blade and slice through the skin of a orange from eye to eye, five or six times. The cuts was fine-fine, finer than t’read, you couldn’t see them. An’ he’d hide it till he needed it — then he’d take it out and squeeze it till it crush. Everybody was always amaze. Of course, he did need strength to do it, but he couldn’t really do it without cheatin’ a little. I ain’t never been able to decide if he was dishones’ or if he was smart.”

  “Did Cyril know about this trick?”

  “No, but Miss Penny … She always keep his secret.”

  Even now, Yasmin thinks. She ponders the extraordinary loyalty, and after a moment has a thought that unsettles her. Even now, Penny will let Cyril tell a lie in the name of glory.

  “For some people,” Amie adds, “the dead more important than the livin’.” It is as if she has divined Yasmin’s thoughts.

  The pressure of her fingers tenses onto Yasmin’s arch. The tips press into the flesh and they release a sudden electricity that sizzles along her sole into her ankle and toes.

  Yasmin yelps.

  The pressure ceases. “Sorry, Beti,” Amie says.

  45

  THERE WERE — THERE still are — moments when I would look at Yasmin and think, What does the future hold in store for you? I would try to imagine her at various ages, at ages still to come. To imagine her at my age, and older. To imagine her having lived a life such as we all live: full of joys and pain. I have imagined my daughter an aged woman dying gently …

  But this is fantasy, for my question has no answer. Circumstance shapes a possibility every day. Still, I come back to it — I want to be reassured that my daughter will have a happy and fulfilling life — and I ache at the impossibility of knowing.

  To me this is the only mystery that resonates, my dear Mrs. Livingston. Not God, not the afterlife. But the unimaginability of tomorrow itself for those I love.

  46

  IT COMES TO her like a sudden anger, chill and irrational. She pulls her feet away from Amie’s grasp, tucks them under her.

  Amie looks up in surprise, her eyes wrenched back from another world.

  Through the thumping of her heart, Yasmin says, “There’s more. What aren’t you telling me?”

  Amie goes still. Her chin trembles, eyes grow watery. Her face acquires years. “How much you want to know, Beti?” she says softly.

  “Everything.”

  Her back stiffens, eyes wandering away to the shuttered window.

  Yasmin waits, her sigh riveted on Amie’s profile. She does not even blink.

  “Mister Vernon was a saga-boy. You know what a saga-boy is? He did like the ladies, nuh. And even after he got married with your mother … Everybody did know it. Miss Shakti included. She use to wait up nights for him, till all hours. I can’ tell you how much they use to fight. She was smellin’ the other women on him. Even your grandmother try talkin’ to him but …

  “Then one day they stop quarrellin’. Jus’ like that. Miss Shakti din’t wait up for him no more. Is not that he change. A saga-boy born a saga-boy. She kind o’ give up, you know? She swallow everyt’ing.

  “Is aroun’ then she start paintin’. Every week, she change the colour o’ the room. Pink, then blue, then green. Is a kind o’ madness that come over her on the weekends. Monday mornin’, out did come the paint brushes, poor Miss Shakti doin’ the work sheself, in here all day, not eatin’ or drinkin’. The smell o’ paint was always heavy-heavy, it did give me a headache sometimes. I ain’t know how she stand it. Swallowin’, swallowin’.

  “As for Mr. Vernon, he continue on as usual. The paint smell did bother him sometimes. A couple o’ times, he sleep in the livin’ room. But I ain’t think he ever really understand how much he t’row at your mother. And Beti, he t’row a lot, and not all of it was paisa. It have people like that, eh? Money is everyt’ing, and if they t’row enough at you, everyt’ing all right.

  “But he, Mister Vernon, did t’row and t’row
and t’row — and not only at Miss Shakti. He hit a lot o’ people, Beti.”

  Yasmin says, “You?”

  “Me.” And she turns away from the window, away from Yasmin, lowering her head so that when the words come again they come from a woman huddling herself into an ellipse of strange and feminine beauty.

  47

  FUNNY THING ABOUT children, isn’t it, Mrs. Livingston?

  At first we know everything about them. They hold no secrets because they have none.

  Then, as they get older, the less and less we know, the more we must intuit — or, if we are honest with ourselves, guess — based on what we have learnt in the early years.

  By the time they’ve attained adulthood, they have grown distant from us, become strangers in ways difficult to grasp because of their familiarity.

  It’s almost as if growing up entails, in part at least, the hoarding of secrets — as if the self needs a spot that is accessible to no one else. Ever. I’m not so romantic as to claim that in this place is the true self, but I am realistic enough to know that it may be essential to it, in the way that soil is essential to a plant.

  This standing apart. So inevitable. So necessary.

  And yet …

  And yet, so terribly, terribly sad.

  48

  ’I WASN’ PLANNING on being a servant girl all my life, you know. When I start this job — I was young, just a girl, nuh — my parents had already fix me up with a fella. We was plannin’ on gettin’ married in a couple o’ years. He was workin’ in the cane fields, and wanted the time to save some money. And when this job come along, I decide to take it, to save some money too. Is how I end up here, workin’ for your grandmother.

  “I remember the day Mr. Vernon marry Miss Shakti, I remember the day she come here. And I remember dreamin’ that one day soon it goin’ to be my turn to put on the red sari and sit in front o’ the pundit and become the wife of a good man.