Valmiki's Daughter

by Shani Mootoo

  IF ALL YOU DO, HAVING JUST PLOPPED DOWN FROM THE SKY, IS STROLL down one of its streets, gawk at the buildings and monuments, and take cursory note of the local folk you pass and those who pass you by, a new place will reveal only so much of itself to you. A much better way — one might even say a more responsible way — to acquaint yourself so that you can truthfully proclaim: yes, I visited that place, I know it, is to move right into the homes, into the private and public dealings — into the minds, even — of some of its citizens.

  You’ve met Dr. Krishnu and one of his daughters, Vashti. We might as well stay with them, meet the rest of the family and some of their friends. In due course — no hurry; after all, you’re operating on Trinidad time now — we ought also to pay a visit to at least one other part of the island, for to know one corner alone is not at all to know a place that is so miraculously varied geographically, environmentally, socially, linguistically. It sounds like a hodge-podge of a place, but it’s more like a well-seasoned, long-simmering stew.

  For now, let’s just slip into the world of Dr. Valmiki Krishnu.

  Valmiki

  IT WAS THAT SEPTEMBER DAY, ONE YEAR EARLIER, WASN’T IT? THAT rainy September day — exactly. The door behind his last patient had barely closed, and Valmiki Krishnu, still seated in his swivel chair, exerted a tremendous effort simply to lean forward and prop his elbows on his desk. Rain hit the galvanized overhang that protected the louvred window of his office like a torrent from a fire marshal’s hose. He had not wanted to get out of bed that morning. He wished he had not.

  The address book on his desk was open to the page with Tony Almirez’s phone number in Goa. There was a nine-and-a-half-hour time difference between there and Trinidad. In Goa, it was midnight. Valmiki would awaken Tony if he were to telephone him — and Tony’s wife, too. But it was Tony alone in all the world with whom he wanted to speak. Two decades before, he and Tony had been medical students together in Scotland. That was a long time ago, and much had happened for both of them since, and still every minute of their time together was indelibly etched in Valmiki’s body and mind — even though they hadn’t seen each other in twenty-something years, and had spoken on the telephone not more than a dozen times or so, all the calls initiated by Valmiki, the last one a year ago. Still, whenever Valmiki felt as disoriented as he did just now, it was Tony, not his own wife or any of their friends on the island, he reached for.

  Valmiki’s palms made a tower, and he tapped together the tips of his first three fingers as his mind bloated with the previous night’s and that morning’s aggravations. If it wasn’t one thing with his wife, it was bound to be another with his daughter. His second daughter, Vashti, was as placid as the Gulf of Paria. But Viveka, the elder, had never been placid. At least, before going to university, she had been manageable. He opened his palms and let his head fall into his waiting hands.

  He would not call Tony, he decided. Even if it had been Tony’s midday instead of his midnight, he would not call him. That was how it had been for some time. The desperate lurching for Tony, the equally swift realization of the futility in that, and then Valmiki making do, turning to Saul. Saul, with his unreproachful, smiling eyes. Those long eyelashes. But Saul’s comfort was limited. He could not offer Valmiki more than the physical — a respite from home, certainly, but always a shortlived respite and always on the sly. No one could help him.

  THE TELEPHONE’S INTERCOM BUZZED. ON THE OTHER END, VALMIKI’S receptionist, Zoraida, expressed surprise at not spotting him at the door of his office. Valmiki normally saw a patient to the door, one hand light on the patient’s back, ushering him or her out with nothing more than a suggestive nudge onward and a brief parting sentence of encouragement that made that nudge feel more like a gentle launch into the world rather than an expulsion from his office. But an expulsion it was, as he usually had an overflowing roomful of hacking, restless, not-so-patient patients to see, several of whom would have to be turned back at the end of the day with promises they would be seen first thing the following morning.

  But today he had not even stood up as the man he had been treating exited. It was old-fashioned, he and his peers would agree, but most patients thought of their doctors as demi-gods able to make them well and whole just by poking and prodding the surface and orifices of their bodies. None of the doctors discouraged their patients from such thinking, but the load of being a healing god — the patients seldom did a single thing to heal themselves, the doctors would grumble — sometimes wore Valmiki down.

  It was that, but not only that, which provoked within him such resistance to being where he was and contributed to his feeling of being trapped. Nor was it merely the altercation with Viveka that morning, nor the one immediately afterwards with his wife. And nor was it the troublesome one the previous night with both Devika and Viveka. After all, not a day seemed to go by without some unpleasantness from one, if not both, of them.

  No, it was the weight of pretense. The weight of responsibility in general.

  Had Valmiki been at the door to let his patient out, he would have been privy to one of Zoraida’s coded gestures. Given the lack of reliable electricity and telephone service on the island, Dr. Krishnu and Zoraida had between them what Zoraida, who had been with him for twelve years now, liked to think of as a secret language. Her desk was angled for this very purpose, and the seating in the waiting room arranged so that Valmiki, his door, and a patient entering and exiting were out of sight of those awaiting their turn. A particular gesture from her would let him know that his wife had arrived and was in the waiting room. Another would indicate that certain individuals whom he might not want to keep waiting — family, old and dear friends, his bank manager, his solicitor, a number of people who not so coincidentally were white-skinned, and certain women acquaintances among that latter group — had arrived for their appointments or had shown up without appointments. Yet another gesture would inform him that both his wife and a queue-jumper were in the room. These gestures, flicks of the wrist, hair-arranging, specific numbers of fingers resting on her cheek, had been all initiated by Zoraida herself. She had even provided him with a de-coding chart. This initially amused him at her expense, but he came rather quickly to appreciate and rely on their system. More than once, her antics had saved him his marriage. Indeed, his attendance upon particularly privileged queue-jumpers had so often coincided with the unexpected arrival of Mrs. Krishnu that one might wonder if fate was complying with a subconscious wish of Valmiki’s that he be caught out. Zoraida, in those instances, had enjoyed her part in staving off the possibility of public fiascos. With the barest hint of something that resembled a knock, she would officiously barge into his office, part of which, behind a curtain, was also the examination room, to inform her boss of the situation. The woman in his room would immediately be turned out, led by a massively important Zoraida down a private corridor and into another room where she would render herself presentable. Valmiki would be given just enough time to make himself the same before Mrs. Krishnu, none the wiser, or so one thought (for no wife is that dumb), would be ushered in, also by Zoraida. It was an orchestration Zoraida relished.

  But Valmiki was not at his door this time, and therefore Zoraida did not get to perform her antics to inform him of the unscheduled arrival of one of his newer lady acquaintances, Tilda Holden. In any case, that day he did not care. He just wanted to run out of his office and leave everything behind. Every single thing. For good.

  One thing had simply led to another, and now he was at that point, random on the one hand and precise on the other, where he had had enough. He had been doctor, boss, lover, husband, father for twenty weighty years now, and even so, in regards to the latter two especially, he still felt as incompetent as the first day, and not too much more willing.

  While Valmiki had been attending to that last patient, a Mr. Deoraj Deosaran, he had been up and about, taking the man’s pulse, rapping his knuckles on the man’s sallow back and bony front as he listened through his s
tethoscope above the thundering of the rain on the roof, depressing the man’s tongue with the palette stick and peering as far as he could down his windpipe, even hazarding a breath inhalation to see if his nose might pick up what his eyes, hands, and ears had not. He had, in other words, been attentive, absorbed even, until the end of the visit, an end that he had determined, there being nothing more to do, but an end that was still premature for the patient. Mr. Deosaran wanted to tell Dr. Krishnu the story of his life, as if Dr. Krishnu’s knowing this story would alter his prognosis and prescription. Accordingly, he had talked about when he was a licle-licle boy, so small’n’tin nobody ad a think he’d a make man, he so licle and walking two mile one way to reach he school barefoot in the heavy heavy rain, rain worse than that week’s rain, splashing up and duttying he clothes, and he holding his even licler brother by he hand — and the doctor’s mind floated out of the room. Mr. Deosaran must have sat there telling his story for another several minutes, but Dr. Krishnu had heard nothing of it.

  Mr. Deosaran had watched Dr. Krishnu’s eyes grow dim and saw that he had withdrawn, but he noticed too that Dr. Krishnu had not risen, as he had in the past, to indicate that the visit was over. He spoke on some more, a little less certainly, but now it was to watch Dr. Krishnu. When he saw that he no longer held his audience, he dug his feet into the parquet tiling and shoved back the wooden chair in which he sat. The action made a sound like a car breaking a corner, but Dr. Krishnu seemed not to have heard that either. Mr. Deosaran lifted his khaki felt hat from his lap and rested it hesitantly on the desk in front of him. He leaned forward and his voice rose above the rain.

  “Everything okay, Doc? You look like you seeing a dead.”

  When he received no answer he became perplexed and rapped the table with his knuckles. “Doc!” he said, sharp enough to snap Dr. Krishnu out of his blankness but not so sharp as to disturb the balance of power between them.

  Only then did Dr. Krishnu catch himself. “Sorry, Mr. Deosaran. You took me back to another time.”

  A SIMPLER TIME, REALLY. VALMIKI MUST HAVE BEEN ABOUT TWELVE. For no reason other than to trouble him, his uncles, his father’s brothers, used to unleash their curled thumbs and middle fingers at his ears, flick the tips and make him run squealing. His own father was a soft but strict man, and had never hit Valmiki. So he couldn’t help but remember the first, albeit the last time, he got skinned by his father. Valmiki had been a fair and plump boy, with fat red cheeks and an insatiable taste for the desserts his mother, his aunts, and the servants made daily with milk from their own cows. He looked like the pampered child he was. His father was the area’s most affluent citizen, a man whose family had built up and passed down to Valmiki’s father and uncles a dairy business situated on the same property on which they lived, just south of the town of San Fernando. They were Brahmins, and so didn’t touch the cows themselves. They managed the business from an office in the main house and hired men from the village who did the manual work of feeding and milking the cows and cleaning the pens that were some distance from the house.

  Valmiki was his parents’ only child, and seen as the one who would one day inherit a good portion of this thriving business. From the workers’ point of view, Valmiki, even though he was a child, was their boss too. So when he took the three boys (he shouldn’t really have thought of them as his friends, but he did — they were classmates who jeered at him for his plumpness yet relied on him to help them with their homework, as he was the brightest boy in his class and they the dimmest) into the barn, the workmen who knew that he should not be going in there were not confident enough of their position to stop him. He had already changed out of his school clothes and wore short pants and a yellow, red, and brown striped T-shirt that his father had brought for him on a trip to England. His friends, as he would call them, wore the white long-sleeved shirts and the grey long pants of the school uniform. None wore the grey-and-white striped ties that were also part of the uniform, having removed them once they were off the school grounds and bound their stack of school books with them. The boys had come around to the back entrance of the house, knowing better, as children of poor villagers, than to approach the house from the front, and had asked the servant for Valmiki. Valmiki heard her loud steupses. The servant, even though she too was from the same village as the boys, took offence to them coming to play with her employer’s child. Her disdain was clear. “He drinking his tea now. What you want him for? It is a school day, the middle of the week. Why you not home doing your homework? He have to study. He can’t come out to play; he have homework to do.”

  Valmiki was annoyed that the servant had acted as if she were his parent. He heard the boys laugh, and mock back, “He drinking tea. And what he eating? He eating bread and jam, cookies and cream?” One of them asked the maid if he could have a biscuit, please, he was hungry. She asked him if he had no shame, begging so, and what his mother would say if she knew? Valmiki pushed his plate away and ran to the door. He pushed the maid aside. He and the boys both knew that he could not invite them inside his house or offer to bring them mugs of hot, sweet, milky tea or the semolina pudding, which he knew they were bound to love in spite of such teasing. But he was overcome with the desire to give these boys who ridiculed him so much, and yet came to his house looking for him, something of his that they themselves did not have. He pulled the hands of two of the boys along with him. He led them under the wood fence of the pasture where cows stood motionless except for their tails, whipping flies off their backsides. As they side-stepped heaps of cow dung the boys continued to tease Valmiki, asking what kind of tea he was drinking and why didn’t he bring a biscuit with nice cream in it for them. One of them asked him what he was studying so for. They didn’t have a test that week, and if there had been one, he would still pass it. The boy added, “You not dunce, but you dull, dull, dull. Dull, for so. What is better? To be a dunce, yet the kind of fellow everyone wants to spend time with, or to be bright and coming first all the time, and can’t talk to ordinary people because all your head is full up with is information?”

  Another boy piped up, “Five times nought equals nought five times one is five five times two is ten five times three is . . . five times three is what? I forget.”

  They cackled at this, and then the first boy continued, “Krishnu, tell we, na. You ever try talking to one of them school books? You ever sit down and ol’ talk, and have a good laugh with a science book, boy?”

  Valmiki nodded thoughtfully and he even managed a small laugh, as if to say the boy had made a good point. He did not show his hurt.

  Old samaan trees with verdant umbrella tops spread a cooling shade across the acres and acres of undulating land that had been in his father’s family for seventy years. The sky, and the trees’ foliage, and their trunks, took on a yellow tinge with the evening light and the treetops trembled with parakeets. The birds made a racket with their incessant twittering and the fluttering of their restless wings as they landed, each one hopping about urgently, searching out the right spot in which to pass the approaching night. In vain the boys combed the soft rich earth beneath for rocks with which to pelt the parakeets. They tried using fallen sticks and bits of branches that had dried, but these were too light and the boys did not have the power to launch them high enough. They pelted doodose mangoes and then used fallen bird-pecked ones to try to bring down others. They climbed into the generous cradle of the governor plum tree because it was low and easy to climb.

  For a while Valmiki was pleased that his father’s property could provide these boys with entertainment. But they became bored quickly enough, and picked up again and carried on mercilessly the theme of Valmiki’s biscuits and tea. He said nothing, shamed that he had been gorging on his second helping of pudding. Being the son of the wealthiest man in the area was more of a strain than something to revel in. These boys, whose fathers were labourers on the sugar-cane estates or in the nearby sugar factory, and whose mothers were government-paid water carriers for the
road works programs, had the ability to easily make him feel inferior, powerless; they could tease him about his privileges, about his family’s fancy ways, but he dared not say a word about their poverty or narrower future prospects. Suddenly, he realized that he had the power to be more benevolent than they, and he decided that he would exercise this power. He would offer them something more tangible and special than the chance to throw sticks uselessly at birds. So he led them through the pasture to one of the sheds where more than thirty cows were housed. He had heard it said that no one in the area kept cows anymore. His father, Mr. Krishnu, owner of the cattle estate, wouldn’t allow it, others said. Whether this was true or not, reasoned Valmiki, the cows would be a novelty.

  No one but employees and Valmiki’s father and brothers were allowed inside the fetid barn with its miasma of cooped-up, hot cow bodies, the milky sweetness of newborn calves, bales of dry grass — some rotted and fermenting in the heat — spilled milk that had soured, and the stench from two brimming open-mouthed pits along the centre aisle into which dung, sometimes a loose slick, sometimes stubborn, matted straw and syrupy urine, were hosed twice a day. But Valmiki marched in confidently, doing his best to ignore the odours and completely ignoring, as if they weren’t there, the same men who greeted him, and whom he greeted, mornings and afternoons as he left and returned with the chauffeur for school. The three boys with him, meanwhile, gagged at the stench. They shoved the toes of their school sneakers under the edge of the piles of grass stored in the aisle, dragging out strands onto the uneven concrete path. They made lewd gestures at the cows, which stared back with eyes bulging but unfazed while chewing their cuds and used their tails to lash at sultana-sized flies that crawled on and bit their bodies. The boys mooed, and when a cow mooed — either back at them or simply because it did — they made a racket of mooing sounds.