“So you were an undercover, huh?”
“And still am.”
“And the tape recorder?”
“Play it.” Redman leaned back in his chair, a smile curling the corner of his mouth.
Is this all part of his extended torture? Kwae wondered. If it is, I’ll have to give the local boys credit for going so far. He reached out and pressed play.
It was a conversation between Redman and his mother. She was crying and going on about how she had to find a way to keep Kwae out of trouble so he would not end up in jail. He needed a strong lesson to make him quit his life of crime.
Kwae stopped the tape. “So why did you decide to help my mother?” he asked softly.
“You see, kid,” Redman’s voice boomed, “I realized that you were different. I thought since your mother knew what you were into, she coulda talk you out of it. But she’s a smart woman, and she knew you would not change your ways just through her talking to you.”
“So you all decided to shake me up a bit, huh?”
“Yup. And your boyfriend was pretty keen on being the one to declare you guilty. He was upset at being drenched in your lies.”
“So what now?”
“You’re free to go.” Redman got up and left.
Kwae sat, the words free to go resounding in his head. He still felt as though something was weighing him down. Two new mixed recruits appeared and escorted him to the showers.
While the refreshing water sprayed over him, he thought that maybe working with his brother wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe I could even get a car of my own and join the Indo boys on the track. Yeah. His weight was washing down the drain with the dirt from his body. And as for Vish, well, I hope he can forgive me. We’ll just have to find a new lovers’ retreat and stay away from the swamp. Who knows? Maybe we could explore Asa Wright—after all, they have caves and lots of birds up there in the forests of the Northern Range.
Kwae dressed and gathered his belongings. He walked across the building and passed through the moss-green iron gate of the prison. Outside he took a deep breath—Ah, the fishy smell of canal water! And in the car park across from the jail, he heard the putt-putting of a car engine. It definitely needed a new transmission.
NOWARIAN BLUES
BY RAMABAI ESPINET
Santa Cruz
I was at a midlife crisis, though I had only just hit thirty—a fool, a failed musician/songwriter—and my question those days was always the same, Where to live? A migrant’s question, the first uprooting all it takes to turn you into a rolling stone forever. The song in my head had a title, “Migration Blues.” It had two or three unfinished lyrics too, what I thought of as the bluesy half-tones of my own makeshift life: Moving south / ocean waves / a backyard / mango trees, plum, and zaboca / ackee trees in sunlight / the sea at my back / would I still cry / I, and I and I / would I be happy / would I be sad / moving south again . . .
I had not been a successful migrant. This I will admit freely. Not that too many migrants make it anyway by dint of their own resource, especially taking into account the color scheme of these northern climes. No, it takes backative to make it: the sale of family land back home, the hitching of your wagon to a well-established husband, of the appropriate hue, maybe, a disconnected act of whoring or kissing ass, growing a thick hide where once there was skin.
Sometimes the need for a change of gears overpowered me, although at the time I was working in relative comfort and autonomy for a modest worker’s wage as a counselor in a shelter for battered women. I took offense one day when a lunchroom argument erupted about rough sex, which was fine, they all agreed, as long as the controls, put in place beforehand, remained intact. This got me irate. “How can anyone guarantee this?”
“Well,” and they spoke as one, their patronizing, indulgent tone setting me off further, “we discuss it before, agree on the limits, and then proceed. We are reasonable people and besides, who would risk a relationship for some excessive pleasure?” A relationship. The very word put my teeth on edge. A roughness that was smooth, smooth.
I couldn’t stop myself: “But how allyuh could program everything so? Yuh discuss everything beforehand? Sex too? Next thing dey go be setting up guidelines for ‘managing dangerous sexual adventures’ or some stupidness like dat . . .”
One of them spoke. Her voice was dangerously kind as she murmured, “And what would you know about it, you? Sexual adventures? Come on, now . . .”
The Trini in me was crazy, my anger too alien and damn ignorant altogether in that charnel house of political correctness. My rage let them off the hook. It left me sitting there perplexed and wondering about my own freakish take on everything. I would, if I wanted rough sex, have plunged into a maelstrom with my lover, his every move and mine unpredictable, dangerous, taking both of us into uncharted territory—or else why bother?
It hit me that I had to leave this city soon. I had worked at Carrie’s Place for two years, and its vibe was now claustrophobic. I was bred in such an ordered space—missionary zeal, appropriate codes of conduct, common sense—and the demon inside me busted off its fragile tapia roof as soon as it could. I left home alone, estranged from my family who migrated after I did and settled out west. I ended up here, in Toronto—one more immigrant, a visible minority worker counseling battered women and children. Their fright in the face of life’s blows, the cavernous wasteland of despair my job revealed, pushed my own unease into the background and helped in postponing my own reckoning.
I felt useful there. And I liked feeling useful. But I was lonely, no lover, no real friend except Ella from back home, she who had migrated too and married instantly and well to a prof in the university where she first landed a clerical job. Now she was the manager of the institution’s Office for Racial Equity, almost an ombudsman’s (-woman’s) position, she would brag, poking fun at my own lean and hungry ways.
“You need a good professional man who adores you and who you can grow to love, sweetie.” She would chuck my chin and threaten to introduce me to yet another engineering type from her husband’s department. “They come in all stripes these days, sweetie,” she would go on, until I collapsed, giggling at the thought of a procession of would-be suitors inspected by her, surreptitiously or otherwise, and all for my benefit, though a couple of times she did let slip that a meeting had gone on too long or a setup for me had, alas, boomeranged in her direction.
Ella would cheer me up but it would not last, the doom of the years ahead slamming into my lone wolf ruminations. It wasn’t another person so much as another beat that I yearned for, one not overcome by the ease of propriety, one with a cussed, impossible sense of style. It was Trinidad that I longed for—that crazy, maverick place, the strange logic of its illogic, its contradictions, that walk and talk that haunted me day and night, which would not, could not, leave me alone.
In this mood I telephoned Micah, not my lover really, although we had been lovers and friends for the last two years in what we saw as a thoroughly modern, noncommittal sort of way, separated by the wide Atlantic. I wailed and ranted about my sorry lot and in the end accepted an invitation to stay at his house while I sorted out the misery of my untidy life.
Flying low over the Northern Range, picking out the Rasta huts in small clearings, wondering who lived there and how they managed for everyday things—no road, no waterway even, just a hut, a vegetable patch maybe and then deep forest, the symmetry of valleys and mountains undisturbed for centuries. I could hardly contain my anticipation as the contours of my early island home defined itself, its odd shape, its forest, swampland, and undulating plains set out in such clear geographical alignment that surely, only a deliberate hand, the hand of an ancient god, could have achieved it.
Arriving at Piarco airport, the air washed clean after the rain, my heartbeat quickened as I spotted Micah waiting, exuding his usual restraint, looking older than our meeting last year, his beard now beginning to gray slightly. I felt tender toward him, his unconcerned elegance
, his long tapering fingers, his deep sincerity. This is a man I could love, I thought, unlike Ella’s fix-ups. Micah held me close, his warmth a welcome relief from emptiness, and I thought how fine it would be to have a shoulder like his to lean on. The talk was light on the way to his house—the latest scandals in the country, corruption, crime, calypso, the IMF and World Bank antics, the dependency of the so-called Third World. I asked about his own assiduous grassroots work.
“The revolution ent happen yet?” I said it as a joke and he grinned wryly.
“Well, no,” he joined my mood, “but we still trying. It go happen soon, don’t fool yuh fat about that.”
We drove along the Eastern Main Road, ducking into the drive-thru market at the Croisee in San Juan, then continuing on the Saddle Road running deep into the Santa Cruz Valley, to his house secreted inside the mountains. The forested peaks lay serene, unmoved by the suburban elements cutting into their sides, the poor people at the bottom, still scrabbling in the dirt, the professionals at the top, their homes cut into terraced rock faces, the whole purple mountain range tumbling behind these architectural wonders perched on rocky promontories like wary gabilans, their claws and beaks at the ready, waiting to swoop down on prey as the opportunity arose. I shuddered at the thought and Micah put a protective arm around my shoulders. A kind man, a good man, but a gabilan all the same, poised for swooping.
We arrived at his house. And the preceding months gave way to a deep and eloquent exhaustion. I slept at once. Whenever I awoke he was there, teasing and playful. My love, I thought hazily, through our meandering bouts of lovemaking and sleeping. Home. I was lying deep in a mountain crevasse, in a pitch-black night, no moon, no stars, only smooth touches from his hands, the air thick as velvet, cool as velvet, wet and dry in turn, the nightbirds’ great wings holding the darkness intact, pedaling the night air into an early dawn, a dawn full of rosy promise, promises as vast as the distant savannah rolling out from the edges of these northern hills. Dawns and sunsets merged into the steady rhythm of insects, birds, and frogs—cigales and flying crapauds, cocks crowing and dogs barking—old noises that settled me back into that time when the world began.
Then I awoke. I discovered that it was three days after my arrival. The house was washed over with the last late gold of daylight, that hour just before a sinking feeling of tasks left undone overpowers you and night flattens the land. On the bank at the top of the hill, adjacent to the driveway, Micah had planted an herb garden and the fragrance of thyme, chives, parsley, and tulsi bushes rounded out the evening air. I was touched by this; it had been my suggestion on a flying visit two years ago when I first saw the house with its unused stretch of paragrass running wild, a clean sweep from top to bottom.
I walked slowly back into the vast room with the bed, a great flat throne, in the middle of it. Night was falling now, and fast; I had forgotten how rapidly twilight turned into darkness here. The bed floated serenely in space, the undefined room lapping at its vulnerable edges. A wide veranda surrounded the room, forming an L-shape, ornamented with intricately carved wrought-iron fretwork. The sliding glass doors on both angles of the “L” were open but protected from mosquitoes by screen doors and barricaded against the night with burglar bars. I sat on the bed staring through these bars. The night had turned again, whispering and sighing and heaving great petticoats to hide or show women’s wares, shifting itself onto the flattened marriage pallet. I had no responsibilities, nothing to live up to. Yet the ominous sense of things left undone weighed heavily on me, that and the unrelieved darkness of the outside.
I got up, moving further inside the vastness of the room. Off the main area there lay an open dressing room leading into a bathroom, both immensely spacious. In the bathroom the toilet and bath faced each other squarely. The dressing room was lavish. Cupboards everywhere, mirrors, folding doors, sock drawers, shoe racks, suit closets, shorter blouse-hanging areas. An elaborately crafted his-and-hers affair. His into hers, his everywhere, hers intertwined into his.
The next morning I struggled through the open doorway to the bathroom. He was already there and called cheerfully to me from the shower. The smell of my offal mixed unhappily with the steam from his bath. The steam was oppressive, and anyhow, I didn’t like sharing my bowels so early in the morning. No coffee yet or anything. He remained cheerful, not the least bit bothered by the smell. He soaped and sang, loud and off-key, and came out toweling himself, his workmanlike attitude readying his body for the day.
I left the bathroom in his wake. In the large his-and-hers, he was now dressing. I had flung my makeup case and moisturizer on the dressing table the night before. In the few minutes between the end of his bath and my lingering moments in the toilet, alone, he had given it its appointed place on the left side, cutting the surface into two uneven divisions. His joke was lame. “One-third for female paraphernalia, two-thirds for male needs.” My hurried flight to the kitchen on the other side of the house, groping for coffee, did not miss the reality behind the joke nor the inexplicable sense of desperation that descended upon me.
Stumbled upon by the merest of chances, my connection with Micah had moved from astonishingly large bedroom antics during our occasional trysts, into this more domestic visit. Until now, I had let it drift, no problem, but my coming here for a longer stay meant that maybe I too was wondering about the possibility of permanence. He, I was beginning to understand, had always had it in mind, partly because of a mad desire to hold onto passion, to go to sleep with it and wake up with it, but also, his needs ran to more careful arrangements which included assets, earning power, social status, and housewifery. What he called desire also held the underpinnings of marriage, all of the parts finding their appropriate places. I knew the signs; I had run out of an earlier life that contained all of these expectations. But my discomfort was hard to explain, even to myself, and muddled was what I ended up feeling.
Micah was a mixture of several different races, too many to count, he would say. He was hard to pin down, and easy in his careless nowarian identity. In Canada, where these mixings are now being taken so seriously and theorized upon at length, he would be indisputably mixed-race, biracial, or simply black. He cared nothing for these labels, though, he moved through a world unimpeded by these divides, embodying all of them, as it were. Micah—a man to long for, coppery skin, greenish-brown eyes, curling hair and eyelashes, his body taut, his step light, his voice constantly teasing.
In Canada I am South Asian, the name Geeta signaling my arrival long before I appear, circumscribed by every element of that detail. I marveled at Micah’s indifference to race. I also wondered if I really liked him so much mostly because he was not part of my fixed prescription for existence. But I shrugged off these prying questions and relaxed with him over the extravagant dinner of home-grown blackstick cassava and stewed red fish, shrimp, and pumpkin that he had cooked, becoming more mellow after the old-fashioned rum cocktails, the c’est quittes he made with such finesse.
That first week after I awoke, I tried to find my space inside his big, quaintly designed house. Micah had made himself a cozy office in an antechamber just outside the bedroom. He had thought too about my needs. In one corner of the bedroom he had placed a small desk for me, where it was open and airy. But alas, from every direction my back was exposed—to a door, a doorless doorway, and the open grillwork of the burglar bars with the veranda running alongside the entire perimeter of the bedroom. There was no clutter on the desk, only a small lamp and a small bookshelf above it. No computers, printers, faxes, no buzz. A clean space, well-intentioned but so exposed.
The first night that I sat at the desk with my notebook, though, I was in heaven. I had found ways of blocking myself off from the elements by draping a shawl over the chair, and another over my shoulders. Tropical nights get cool in the later months of the year, especially up in the Santa Cruz hills. I put my hands under my chin and stared at the wall, happy, quiet at last, simple.
He came in, stole up to m
y chair, pulled back the shawl, and kissed, then licked the nape of my neck, “Geeta,” he murmured, “Geeta, my love.” I closed my eyes, enjoying the hardness of his body, his smell of musk and a promise of sex. Then, unexpectedly, he said, “Oh God, I really like it when we work together like this.” He slipped into his office, left the door open, and began to work noisily, shuffling papers and announcing his activity: “Right! Now this one is for tomorrow, ay ay, how Sonnylal file get left back here, hmm . . . Tomorrow ah should try and meet him, and Sheila de day after, uh hmm . . . They need the appointment with the Housing Authority soon, the development in Matura filling up fast fast . . .”
He was happy, humming as he shifted paper or filed this and that, opening and closing the file drawers.
“Aha!” he exclaimed, ruffling through a pile of newspaper clippings. “Hear nah.” (Throughout this he was obviously assuming that my listening was a settled part of his sorting and whiffling through the paper pile.) “Listen to this joke. A letter to the editor:
Dear Sir:
If a Tobagonian is prime minister this time around, can we, as an enlightened population, entertain the possibility that next time around it can as easily be a man from Debe or Penal? An Indian prime minister, if you please! Can we entertain the possibility that it might equally be a woman from the Indian heartland—from Caroni or Chaguanas? Can every creed and race find an equal place here? What is equality?
“Question, mih dear, question!” He chuckled dryly, waiting for a response, and when there was none, continuing his chatter nonetheless, failing to notice when I stole out to sit in the sunken living room, deep inside one of the big couches.
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