by Shani Mootoo
Rakes and shovels leaned against a post, and one of the boys headed for these but Valmiki sharply told him not to touch them. To his surprise, the boy acquiesced immediately. Valmiki himself then lifted a large galvanized iron pail off a hook on another post, dragged it with a ruckus along the ground, and then slid with it under the slatted gate of one of the pens. He had to brace himself with one hand on the ground. The ground was wet. In the low light he could not see what he had put his hand in. He wanted to smell it, but he knew that if he did, and if it were cowexcrement, not only the smell but the idea of it would weaken his resolve in front of his friends. He wiped his hand on the side of his pants. One of the workers made his way over. The cows, hearing the metallic sounds made by the bucket, shifted their weight from side to side. Restless, their tails whipped about. When the other boys tried to follow Valmiki under the gate, Valmiki stopped them. He patted the cow on its side. It tamped the grass beneath its feet, moving its body closer to Valmiki as if to nestle against him. One of the boys managed to slip under the gate.
“Bayta,” the worker mumbled, not enjoying contradicting the actions of his boss’s son, and more so in front of the boy’s playmates, “your pappy ent go like for you be in here. You go dutty up your clothes.”
Now, as an adult, Valmiki recalled the man wearing a white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and a white cloth tied around his head like a rough turban. In his memory the man wore grey trousers and he was barefoot. The man’s clothing, as far as he could recall, was spotless, but then he doubted his memory, for reason would suggest that anyone working in a cattle barn and dressed in white was bound to get the stain of grass-feed on his clothing, if nothing else. For an instant Valmiki wondered how much of his memory was reliable, how much of it he had invented or doctored. Hadn’t he felt his face go red with anger that the man would talk to him like that in front of those boys? Hadn’t he told the man sharply that his father didn’t know he was in there, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t bother him? He was able to hear, as clearly as if it were yesterday, one of the boys outside of the pen tease, “Let’s get out of here, man. This place stinking fuh so. Ey, Valmiki, you living by a stinking place, boy. Even the open drain in front my house don’t smell so bad.”
Valmiki remembered ignoring the boy and all that followed. “You want to taste some nice fresh milk?” he had persisted.
He slipped the pail beneath the cow. In response, the worker who had spoken with him before swung open the gate. The man was suddenly stern. And Valmiki remembers him now, his clothes in Valmiki’s memory now gleaming, and the man standing straight and tall. “Bayta, that cow give milk for the day. It need a rest now.”
Valmiki clenched his teeth and ignored the man. He knelt down beside the cow. The man sighed hard. Even if the boy was only twelve years old, this was the boss’s son. Valmiki grabbed hold of the teats and worked them one at a time, as he had seen done, and as if he had done it a thousand times before. He was determined. Fortunately, a forceful stream of white milk shot into the pail noisily, opaque bubbles rapidly forming. The other boys were finally impressed. They bent down to watch and whistled in awe. Valmiki, sweating, released the teats and stood up only when the pail was half full. The others wanted to try. Valmiki knew better than to let them. That would have been going much too far. He tried to lift the pail himself, but the milk sloshed from side to side. Some of it spilled, and the man rushed to take the pail from Valmiki. “What you want to do with this?” he asked, showing his anger and frustration by not addressing the boy with the usual affectionate Hindi word for son. Valmiki told him to empty the milk into three bottles. He sent each boy home with a bottle.
Valmiki was whipped that night on his raw backside with a guava switch for not staying in to do his homework, for going into the barn, for taking boys from the village there, for showing off, for getting cow dung on his hands and on his pants, for milking a cow, for milking a cow that had already been milked for the day, and for giving away milk to neighbours when those very ones, like all others, were accustomed to buying it.
Valmiki pleaded weakly, “It was just milk, Pappa. Just three bottles. I will pay you back from my allowance.”
Valmiki’s father retorted with the violent calm of the one wielding the switch, which came down on his son seven more times: “You BETTER LEARN the VALUE of business FAST, you hear? And take THIS! For not being MAN enough to STAND UP to those boys, for LETTING OTHER children lead you into doing wrong.” His father, finished, pushed Valmiki away. Valmiki tried to pull up his underpants, but the bite and burn of his buttocks was too great. He put his hands on his backside to calm the pain, but the heat of them only made the fire burn more. Valmiki’s mother finally took him by his shoulders and ushered him toward his own room. His father’s voice grew loud again. “Let him go and live in the village for a day or two with those same people. He wouldn’t last a minute. You think I hit him good? They will beat his ass to a pulp.”
Valmiki’s mother rubbed aloe on his buttocks until his sobbing eventually subsided and he lay limp. The sheet about his face was wet from his crying, and about his body it was drenched in the sweat of humiliation and anger at his father. All the while his mother cooed, “Bayta, don’t mind your pappa. He have a temper. He love you, child, but he find you too soft. Mamma love you, too.” She held his face and turned him to face her. “Just so, just how you stay. Don’t mind Pappa beat you. He is not a bad man, he just want you to toughen up a little.” Valmiki was perplexed at the softness his parents saw in him, and from then on he pondered how he might fix that.
He hadn’t seen those boys, men they would be now, in more than thirty years. Trinidad wasn’t a big country, but still their paths wouldn’t readily have crossed. He only thought of them and this incident because of his patient’s story. He wondered where those three boys — men — were now. If he knew and called them up right that minute, could he have said to them, Let’s go find a cow to milk, or a bar to drink dry and catch up? And would they go? They might have continued the old teasing in a good-natured manner, and in a good-natured manner he would have accepted it because they would all see that he had changed and was no longer the boss’s too-soft, mamsy-pamsy son.
BACK THEN, HE HADN’T WANTED TO BE WHERE HE WAS RIGHT NOW, that was for sure. If his own son were still alive, he couldn’t help but think — and he imagined a boy of five or so, not a youth of eighteen, which would make chronological sense — he would have that second got into his car and taken the boy out of school, driven with him to the foot of the San Fernando Hill or into the forested lands of the central hills, and taken him hunting, or at least to catch birds there. This, in spite of the fact that he had never actually taken his son anywhere, his son being a sickly boy from the day he was born until he died at age five. Instead, he had several times taken Viveka, older than her little brother by two years, to the forested lands, and walked her along a cutlassed path so that he could show her where he hunted. He used to be big in her eyes then, bigger than he was in anyone else’s, ever. How could a child, your own daughter, unsettle you so, without you knowing exactly why?
“Those were different days then, weren’t they?” Valmiki mumbled, returning to his patient, raising his eyebrows as if in surprise at himself.
Mr. Deosaran offered, in a quiet tone, “Sometimes the doctor might need to see a doctor too, not so, Doc?”
Valmiki rubbed his mouth with a circular hand motion. Finally he said, “You know, the truth is that the doctor can’t fix everything.”
Thinking that his advice was being solicited, the man grew bolder. “Well, I could take it if the doctor can’t fix heself. That make a kind of sense. But I hope the doc still good with his patients.”
At this, Dr. Krishnu snapped back fully. He looked Mr. Deosaran directly in the eyes, assured him that while everyone else was easy to care for, the doctor himself was typically the worst patient. He muttered, “Physician heal thyself,” to which the Mr. Deosaran said, “That is a
good one, Doc. They should make that a saying. Is a good one.” The man picked up the umbrella he had left by the door, lifted his hat to his head, and tapped it into place. Then he backed out of the door.
And that was when Valmiki leaned toward the table, tipped the swivel chair forward, and dug his elbows into his desk. He brought his palms together as if to pray, although he was far from doing any such thing. He tapped together the tips of his first three fingers, opened his palms, and lowered his face into them just as Zoraida rang.
“Yes?” His voice was muffled because of the hand pressed against a portion of his lips. Still, his terseness with Zoraida in that one word was palpable. He resented having put himself in the position of needing her. She knew — not everything, but certainly a great deal about him, and he hardly anything of her. And he certainly didn’t want her thinking that because he had intimate dealings with more than one of the women who paid him visits in his office, she had any chance of falling in among them. It must have naturally crossed her mind — for what perks might come with that! — but she surely saw the similarity among the women he favoured. They were — the exception being his wife — foreign white women, all beautiful in the way that men commonly — or common men — liked their women. No doubt she knew better than to try to cross any more lines than she already had.
She did take liberties. For example, sometimes he sent her to buy his lunch at the doubles vendor on the promenade. One or two dollars in change should have been returned to him, but more often than not, they were not. Two dollars was nothing to him, but the boldness of her actions, and the fact that he felt he had no choice but to allow her this audacity, made him fume. If she put off doing a task, like letting office supplies run out entirely before reordering, he fumed then, too, but to himself. Occasionally he dared chastise her, but she would interrupt him almost kindly. “What you said, Dr. Krishnu? How you talking as if you not feeling good today?”
She also had her by-the-way reminders of his illicit acts and her indispensability. “Did you call back Mrs. Alexander? That was close yesterday, eh! She and Mrs. Krishnu almost met. But I got Mrs. Alexander out as soon as Mrs. Krishnu pull up in her car.”
Valmiki sometimes complained about her to his wife, Devika. Only certain things he told her, of course, but usually it was enough to make her take Zoraida’s insolences personally: “Who does she think she is? She is too familiar with you. She is behaving like your wife. Why do you let her get away with this behaviour? Let me have a chat with her, I will straighten her out so fast!”
Of course, he would allow no such thing. How he sometimes wished, though, that stories of his philandering would leak — no, rather explode — throughout the town, and cause such a scandal that his family would toss him out like a piece of used tissue or flush him from their lives, and he would be forced to leave the country. He would be freed. He revised his thought: perhaps he, forever concerned about appearances and doing the praiseworthy thing, would never really be free.
If philandering had been for him a sword, it was the double-edged kind. On the one hand, it was a suggestion of his more-than-okay status with the ladies (not one, but many) and so worked against suspicions of who and what he was at heart. A man was certainly admired by men and by women for a show of his virility, even by the ones he hurt. On the other hand, since philandering had never been a shame in Trinidad — a badge it was, rather — for a man who wanted to be caught, broken, and expelled, it was a problem.
These days, Saul was the object of Valmiki’s most powerful and basest desires, yet Saul could have come to Valmiki’s office every day and not even Zoraida would have had the tiniest somersault in her brain regarding that. But still, he wouldn’t let Saul visit him here. Saul and his friends — they had became Valmiki’s friends eventually — would get together on the occasional weekend. Saul and Valmiki usually started their visit on the Friday night. They would drive all the way up to Saul’s cousin’s house, a two-room wooden structure in the Maraval Hills. The cousin would leave, and Valmiki and Saul would spend the night there. In the early hours of Saturday morning Saul’s accepting male friends would come up and meet them, and they would all head deep into the northern range to hunt. Hardly anyone minded or wondered about that. In fact, the hunting itself, as unusual as it was for a man of Valmiki’s background, was seen as his little quirk and a recommendation of his widely admired viritilty. Even though the group hunted less frequently these days, there remained the perception in his social world that Valmiki was still quite a regular hunter. Valmiki and Saul now met at The Golden Dragon, and even at The Victory, once in a while.
“DOCTOR? HELLO, DOCTOR? BUT, EHEH, WHAT HAPPEN TO THE PHONE? Doctor, you there?”
Valmiki had been quiet for what must have seemed on the other end an unusual while. Then he spoke. “I heard you, Zoraida. I heard you. Give me a minute. I will call you when I am ready.”
But Zoraida was insistent. “No, Doctor, I didn’t see you let Mr. Deosaran out and now Mrs. . . .”
But Valmiki instinctively did not want to hear. He cut her short. “No. Look. Not now, I said. I don’t know what I am doing.” He spoke more sharply than usual.
“What do you mean you don’t . . .”
He snapped at her, “I said wait. Just wait.” He slammed down the receiver.
Had he listened, he would have found out that a woman he had met some days before, Tilda Holden, and had paid a great deal of attention to — an inordinate amount, he later admonished himself, at a doctors’ dinner, on an evening when Devika was not feeling well and so had not accompanied him — was in the waiting room. She had arrived without an appointment, complaining to Zoraida first of headaches, and then, kept waiting too long, of a pain in her chest. Had it been any other day, Valmiki would likely have seen the woman right away, and the rest of his scheduled patients in the waiting room might have been left a good half hour, fanning themselves, or steupsing with frustration over the long, long, long wait in that hot, airless, germ-filled room.
But today was different.
The night before, when Valmiki and his family had sat down to eat supper together, his eldest daughter, Viveka, had announced she planned to stay at home the following day to study in the library at the back of the house. The library had been built especially for the children when Viveka was eight and Vashti four, and although the intention was for Valmiki and Devika to remain in that house for the rest of their lives, and also to have the two girls attend university, this room they called the library — to instill in the children a sense of serious study — was built for a small child’s needs, with low shelves, not too many, and desks too light for spreading out university-weight texts. It was less than three years ago, when Viveka had entered the University of the West Indies, that they had replaced the two pint-sized desks with ones more sensible for the needs of young women, but this had reduced the already small space by half. Still, this more than any other place was where Viveka preferred to hole up. It was where she had learned to think beyond the words of a book, and where she sometimes leaned back in her chair, staring up at the ceiling in almost the exact manner that was her father’s unconscious habit.
Last evening, just before supper and not long after Valmiki and Devika had had another of their regular tiffs — tension still between them, and Valmiki worn out by now — Viveka had barged into the house in a flurry of excited huffs and puffs as if she had had a most noble and terribly long day at the university. As they sat down to eat, she had announced, as if it were a present she was giving the family, that she would not make the trip up to the university the following day. The family library, she glowed, was perfect, still perfect, even though one would have thought she and Vashti had by now outgrown it. Valmiki and Devika, in spite of the chill between them, had discreetly exchanged nervous glances at this touch of congeniality, but when nothing untoward immediately followed, they relaxed. The main part of the meal was eaten in an atmosphere of hesitant amicability.
Then, just as Devika finish
ed serving out the cherry cheese-cake and placed on the table a saucer of Rimpty’s chocolates that their chocolate-making neighbours, the Prakashs, had sent over, the dreaded subject of extracurricular activities came up. And not just any extracurricular activity, but volleyball. That damned volleyball subject yet again! thought Valmiki, even as he tried to appear unfazed. But the subject hadn’t simply come up, of course. Viveka had introduced it in a contrived way. Throughout the meal Vashti had been talking to Viveka, and Valmiki, perhaps because he had been anticipating some unpleasantness, had noticed that Viveka seemed unduly irritated by Vashti’s chatter and appeared to be listening to the conversation going on between him and Devika. Valmiki had been telling Devika that the Medical Association was having their annual dinner and dance soon, and was wondering if he should secure tickets. Devika had responded that there was a clique of wives who were social climbers, using their husbands’ professions — professions that the husbands only had because education and scholarships were available to any and everybody in the country — to give them all kinds of licence they wouldn’t otherwise have, and that those women liked to gossip too much. Those women were smiling and paying you compliments one minute, and the moment you had your back to them they were prying into your life and crying you down, all to build themselves up. She really hated those dinners.
Just then, Viveka piped up. “There seems to be a general human need to form cliques and join clubs, doesn’t there?” Valmiki knew instantly where she wanted to go with that statement. Both he and Devika bristled. There was a local women-only sports club, not connected to the university but a local community club that met on Tuesdays and Thursdays for practice at the public park at the far end of the Harris Promenade, and a few weeks ago Viveka had expressed an interest in joining it. Devika had asked her if she was crazy, wanting to go and play a game in a club that was open to anybody and, of all places, in that part of the city. Whereupon Viveka had reminded them that Helen, daughter of their financial adviser, was on a team that played there. Devika had responded, “I don’t care if the Queen’s children play on that court, my children are not playing there. You should know better than asking.”