It was a small bar, with seating for no more than twelve men at a time. Plastered against the Caribbean-blue walls were Carib and Stag Lager posters, and just behind the bar Lal had tacked dozens of bikini-clad beauties and a miniature photo of Lord Shiva offering blessings to Lal’s drinkers. A silver radio—Lal’s most prized possession—played the latest chutney song and drowned out the incessant drone of circling flies.
“Om!” Puncheon slid off his rickety brown stool and wobbled to his friend. “Hari Om! Fatty-Om!” he sang. His shirt was crumpled and buttoned askew, the front tucked neatly in his pants and the back hanging, pathetic pink coattails, over his rear.
Om offered Puncheon a weak smile and heaved himself onto a stool. “A bottle of Old Oak and two glasses, Lal.”
Lal nodded, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. He plucked a bottle of rum off a shelf and slid it across the bar toward Om. “Enjoy, Boss,” he said.
“Eh, Om, that extra glass for me, boy?” Puncheon slapped his hand on Om’s back, climbing up next to him. He reeked of a lifetime of drink.
Om poured a shot and a half of rum into each glass and handed one to Puncheon, who grasped it, red faced. He downed his drink in a single gulp and held out the glass for a refill. “You is a good friend, Hari-Om-Fatty-Om. So what happened to you, boy? Why you ain’t picking ochroe today?”
Om snorted, his shoulders slumped. “You mean, you ain’t hear?”
Puncheon twirled his coaster and it spun off the bar onto the floor. “Hear what? About Vims and Krish? Yeah, man! Of course I hear. But what that have to do with picking ochroe?”
Om finished off his drink. “Who you hear from, Punch? Is only eleven o’clock in the morning.”
“Lal tell me.”
Om glanced at Lal, who had the courtesy to look shamefaced. “Where you hear, Lal?”
Lal began wiping down his bar. “I hear from Bulldog, who hear from Kapil, who hear from Dr. Mohan, who hear from Sangita Gopalsingh.”
Om nodded. “Sangita Gopalsingh,” he muttered.
“Eh, man, that woman real beautiful, ain’t?” Puncheon grinned. “Every time I see she, I does want to hug she up and kiss she up and rub she up and love she up. But she always looking so sour-sour like she suck a pound of lime. She need some good Puncheon in she life. That is what she need.”
Lal shook his head. “One of these days, Punch, Rajesh go carve you up with he cutlass and scatter you across Trinidad.”
Puncheon shrugged. “One of these days, I go get sober. One of these days, Om go get thin.”
Om and Lal laughed.
“So what you going to do, Boss?” Lal leaned on the counter, his eyes sincere. “Talk to the Govinds? Ask them for Krishna to marry Vimla?”
Om shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Chandani don’t think they go take Vimla.”
Lal poured Puncheon and Om another drink and added a splash of Coke this time. “How you mean? Vimla real smart, I hear. She real pretty, too. You and Chand is good people. Why the Govinds wouldn’t consider a match?”
Puncheon jumped to his feet and threw his hands in the air. “Hold up! Hold up! You say Vimla smart, Lal?”
“You ain’t see the paper?” Lal had saved himself a copy. He slid it across the bar to Puncheon.
“If Vimla so smart, why she sneak right in front she mother house to meet she boyfriend? She sound like a real stupidee to me.”
Om shot Puncheon a warning look and Puncheon climbed back onto his stool.
Om decided to change the subject. “Boy, Chandani ain’t cooking.”
Puncheon gasped. “What happened to Chand—she two hand break?” He glanced upward. “Lawd, Father!” Then he tapped his empty glass on the bar. “Pour me a next drink, Lal. This is real tragic news I hearing!”
“No, Puncheon, she hand ain’t break.”
“Then how come she ain’t in the kitchen? She two foot break?”
“No, she gone on strike, you jackass!”
“On strike?” Puncheon dropped his head into his hands. “Man, what I hearing? You let your wife go on strike? What the ass kind of thing is that?” He whacked the bar with his hand. “I getting stressed out, man. You driving me to drink.”
Lal laughed at Puncheon’s theatrics. “You full of shit, Punch.”
“But really,” Puncheon continued, turning to Om, “you need to go home and beat some sense into Chandani, and when you done that, beat some shame into Vimla, and when you done that, come back here and buy a next bottle of rum for we to celebrate with.”
Om gulped his drink. His limbs felt loose and light now, and suddenly the chaos unravelling in his life seemed less important. He looked at Puncheon, who was dancing in his chair to a song on the radio, arms in the air, eyes closed. It was in moments like these that Om understood why Puncheon went through life intoxicated. He thought fleetingly about his ochroe drying in the sun; he thought about his daughter, who had betrayed his trust; he thought about his wife, who had abandoned him for her grief. “Bullshit,” he slurred.
Puncheon opened his eyes. “Yes, man, real bullshit. Fatty-Om, you want me to go and beat Chandani for you?” He slipped off his stool and staggered to the door. “But allyuh don’t wait for me.” He looked over his shoulder with a wicked grin. “Because when I done deal with Chandani, I going to visit my sweet little Julie mango, Sangita.” Puncheon laced his fingers behind his head and thrust his pelvis back and forth.
He made it to the main road before he collapsed in the heat and had to be carried back into the shop.
Chandani’s Strike
Thursday August 8, 1974
CHANCE, TRINIDAD
Chandani’s strike stretched on for days. She stopped greeting the sun in the mornings; she no longer offered flowers to her little brass murtis. She refused to wash the wares or tend to her fowl, neglected the laundry and her coconut broom. She spoke to no one except herself, and even then her words were mumbled and indecipherable to Om, who eavesdropped from the other side of the bedroom door.
Om coped with Chandani’s neglect the only way he knew how: he delegated her tasks to Vimla. But on the third evening Chandani shut herself up in their bedroom, Om roused her gently from beneath the coverlet. “Chand, I working real hard all day, and three days I come home to Vimla’s burn-up roti. Get up, nuh, Chand, and cook something nice for me.” He rubbed his massive belly with a callused hand.
Chandani had drawn the curtains, but the relentless tropical sun shone through in faint beams of watercolour yellow, a spotlight for dancing dust particles and buzzing flies. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, her hands folded neatly over her stomach. Her long hair, usually oiled and shining, spread across Om’s pillow in dry, lifeless tangles. She looked like she was waiting to be lowered into the earth and this worried Om. He hovered over her, waiting for a response, pressing the weight of his belly into her small frame. Her gaze remained fixed on the ceiling beams until Om retreated down the stairs, miserably massaging his rumbling belly.
The following day Om found Chandani sitting on the only chair in their bedroom, staring out the window onto their acres of cane. He moved beside her and laid his large hand on a sagging shoulder. “Chand, you cooking today? I tired eating doubles. I wasting away here.”
Chandani eyed Om’s gut and then turned away again. He stood there for a while, waiting for her to say something, to move more than an inch this way or that, to scowl, even to sigh. She did nothing. This was not the woman he had married.
The next day Om lumbered up the stairs and found Chandani standing in the middle of the room, studying a photograph on the wall: Vimla as a baby. Chandani was dressed in black and this time her hair was knotted into a severe bun at her nape. Today she looked like she was attending someone else’s funeral. Om groaned loudly to announce his presence and then flopped onto the bed. It creaked under his weight, and continued to whimper as he sprawled his giant limbs into a starfish position across it.
Chandani studied Vimla’s laughing eyes in the picture.
“Chand, I wouldn’t ask you to cook anything today.” He rubbed his stomach luxuriously. “My belly full.”
Chandani traced Vimla’s lopsided smile with a finger.
“In fact,” he went on, “you don’t have to cook for me ever again. You could just sit up here and rest forever.”
Chandani didn’t move, but Om knew she was listening now.
“I went over to Sangita and Rajesh Gopalsinghs’ house for lunch and dinner. Sangita invite me when she see me buying doubles at the doubles stand today. It was a good thing—”
Chandani whirled on him then, her eyes ablaze.
Relief zipped through Om, but he wanted more. “A real good thing she see me buying street food and invite me over. I was getting tired of eating oily doubles every day.” He paused for a moment, just before the climax. “She send some food for you, too. She know you ain’t cooking much these days.”
Om noted the rise and fall of Chandani’s small chest with glee. She was breathing heavily now.
“You should ask Sangita how she does make she coconut chutney, Chand. It have a different kind of zing than yours,” he mused.
Chandani moved then, swiftly down the stairs and into the kitchen. She made a racket with her pots and spoons and all her stomping about. Om chuckled; the bed squeaked. The kitchen din went on for some time and Om wondered if Chandani was whipping up another dinner for him, something to top Sangita’s, he hoped. He licked his lips in anticipation.
Chandani returned minutes later with her dutiful belna in hand and a deep scowl on her lips. Om smiled. How beautiful she was. But when she charged toward him with the rolling pin raised high above her head, his smile faltered. He received a solid blow to his belly before he managed to haul himself off the bed. When she raised the rolling pin to strike again, he caught it in his giant hand and the sharp sting of the slap quivered through his fingers. Om wrenched the belna from her grasp and stuck it gruffly in his back pocket and then hoisted Chandani over his shoulder, kicking and quarreling. Down the stairs they went, straight into the kitchen. Om set his wife down in front of the stove. He retrieved her belna from his back pocket and handed it to her, which she accepted.
Chandani began to make dough, mixing water into a small basin of flour as she raged on. How could Om have added to her humiliation? First Vimla was discovered gallivanting in Chance’s bush with Krishna Govind, then Vimla lost her teaching job at Saraswati Hindu School and now Om was taking meals cooked by the neighbours! She would die with the legacy of an unfit mother and wife, she declared, kneading and punching the dough.
Om looked on from the kitchen table, satisfied. He strummed his fat fingers on the red-and-white plastic tablecloth to the tune of his wife’s rage.
“You coonoomoonoo! It was Sangita who see Vimla that night!” Chandani said, stabbing the air with her belna as she cut Om down with her razor stare. When Om looked back at her blankly, Chandani attacked the dough with aggressive sweeps of the rolling pin. “Sangita go spread the news for all of Chance to hear: Chandani Narine have a jammette for a daughter and a greedy jackass for a husband.” She peeled the dough off its smooth surface, sprinkled some flour onto the counter and dropped the dough back with a slap. When it was made smooth and flat under her abuse, Chandani expertly transferred it to the flat, cast-iron pan, a tawa, to cook.
Om was not bothered by the insults. In fact, he found himself aroused by the pairing of belligerence and culinary skills. When Chandani tilted the tawa at an angle off the stove burner so that the dough swelled into a delicious balloon, Om felt a similar hot rising and swelling in his body. Chandani quickly flipped the inflated roti over on the tawa and grimaced at him. Om smiled back at her adoringly. He had missed her.
That evening Om and Chandani ate and cussed, respectively, well into the night. A stranger might have found their relationship dysfunctional, even borderline abusive, but to Vimla, who lay listening in the hammock just outside the kitchen, they were a perfect picture of love. She pulled the sides of the flour bag hammock up around her body, the rough textile scratching against her exposed arms. But the makeshift cocoon didn’t ward off her loneliness; in fact, it only made her isolation more pronounced.
That evening the sun dissolved so quickly into the cobalt sky Vimla felt cheated. Now the only light escaped from the kitchen and cast itself in a scalene triangle on the dark concrete beneath the hammock, pointing accusingly at her. Everywhere else there was blackness. Amid the nighttime noises she heard the swish of the island breeze stirring some leaves awake, and from every direction the ceaseless cry of the cicada, competing unsuccessfully with Chandani’s tirade. Vimla let go the ends of the hammock. She dropped a long leg over the side and pushed off on the concrete with a bare toe. She swung like that in the darkness for a while, surrounded by bush, suspended in thought until the last triangle of light vanished from the floor and Om and Chandani marched up the stairs to bed.
The News
Thursday August 8, 1974
CHANCE, TRINIDAD
Vimla led her father’s cow and bull into the field by two fraying ropes. This was the best part of Vimla’s day. It didn’t matter that the sun beat down mercilessly on her, or that her only company was two sad-eyed animals that grew increasingly moody in her presence. Vimla could escape her mother’s reproving looks in the field and that was all that mattered.
Of course, that didn’t mean she was happy. She had lost her chance at happiness the moment she lost touch with Krishna. After that, life had become unbearable. Vimla knew she had disgraced her parents; that her name was on every gossip’s tongue in the village; that she would never teach at Saraswati Hindu School. But it was the absence of Krishna Govind from her world that shook her to the very core.
She sighed, absent-mindedly shooing a fly from the cow’s ear. The cow moaned deep in her chest as if to say she, too, was above the company of Vimla Narine.
“Vimi!”
Vimla heard Minty’s voice before she saw her hiding at the edge of the sugar cane.
“Minty, what you doing here?” Vimla dropped the animals’ ropes and leaped through the savannah grass toward her friend, flinging her arms around Minty’s clammy neck.
Minty hugged Vimla quickly then pulled her to the ground.
“I sorry.” Minty rocked back and forth on her haunches, her meaty elbows resting on her knees. Her smooth, milky skin was pinched by adult-worry, and there were faint shadows beneath her black, almond-shaped eyes. She usually kept her sleek hair in a neat plait that wound down her back, but today her mane spread across her back like a veil.
“What you sorry for, Mints?”
The dimple in Minty’s chin quivered. “It was my mother who tell everybody about you and Krishna.” She wrung the hem of her dress.
Vimla sucked her teeth. “Gyul, I done find that out already. I can’t keep a secret from Trinidad, and Trinidad can’t keep a secret from me.” She smiled at Minty to show there were no hard feelings.
Minty’s shoulders sagged in relief, as if she’d been balancing the guilt across them for days, and her pinched expression slackened just enough to show the rosy glow of a young teenaged girl. Suddenly her eyes lit up. “So, how was it?”
Vimla brushed the back of her hand across her perspiring forehead. “How was what?”
“How was Mr. Pundit … in the bush?” Her lips twitched with mischief.
Vimla giggled. “You so fast, Minty.” She looked away. “We ain’t do nothing except talk.”
“Talk? What allyuh talk about?”
Vimla shrugged. How could she tell Minty that she and Krishna had spent hours planning their lives together? She shivered despite the heat; their plans hadn’t even made it through the night.
“Minty, suppose your mother catch you here? She go cut-cut your tail if she know you talking to me.”
Minty stared at Vimla, her mouth drooping at the corners. “I come to tell you something.”
Vimla caught the pity in her friend’s eyes. She swallowed hard.
“So, he getting married.”
Minty nodded. “Soon.”
“To who?”
“A girl called Chalisa Shankar from St. Joseph.”
Vimla’s stomach lurched. She had known this would happen, but she hadn’t expected it so soon. She’d lain awake night after night wondering if Krishna would be picky about his bride, if he’d try resisting the marriage altogether, if he’d suddenly miss her and come for her in the night. But the fact that Krishna hadn’t put up a fight, had resigned himself to a loveless marriage, hurt Vimla so much she thought her heart would stop beating right there in the field.
“Are you sure? How you know?”
“Auntie Maya tell my mother so.” Minty lowered her gaze. “She rather Mammy be she friend than she enemy—Mammy know too much about you and Krishna, you see.”
Vimla understood. She could still hear Sangita Gopalsingh’s shrill voice in the dead of the night calling her a jammette for all the neighbours to hear. Vimla shuddered.
“But so fast, Minty?”
Chalisa nodded. “Chalisa’s parents dead in a car crash two years ago. They tumble off a cliff and the car burst into flames.”
Vimla’s eyes widened.
“She old nanny does mind she now and want a marriage fix for Chalisa before she and all dead. They was looking for a good Hindu boy from a good Hindu family. When they meet Krishna, they arrange everything one-time.”
Nothing Like Love Page 6