by Shani Mootoo
Nayan knew he was one of those Trinidadians born into money and a particular comfort but not into the understanding of an international sense of style. He had felt in France that while a notable few were born into fortune, the French, by dint of being just that — French — regardless of their class came into the world with a sense of style as part of their heritage. He didn’t know if this was true, but they certainly made you feel that they were the owners of all things cultural. And, of course, they were only encouraged in this when they were copied by others everywhere. High-society Trinidadians often left the island to purchase this international style. They went abroad to buy their home furnishings and clothing. And they didn’t go to Canada to shop but to Europe. To London, England, Italy, and France.
It had been easy in Canada. He had been able to get away with his small-country brand of princeliness; he knew that he was to the white Canadians he called friends an entertainment. They had accepted him, he knew, in good part because of how flush — and generous — he was even while he appeared to be what the mother of one of them had flirtatiously called “charmingly unpretentious.” Adrenalin flowed through him to show those Canadians, and all of France, to show the Trinidadians who were so enamoured of his French wife, to show every corner of the world, that he was not a small backward man, and that Trinidad was not a small backward island. Yes, he would start by revamping the family business. He thought about opening a department store that carried only designer and museum-quality items, and making Anick the “face” of it.
He excitedly spoke with her about this idea and she laughed out loud before becoming angry that he would use her in such a way when neither he nor she had expertise in this kind of buying and selling and she would only make a fool of herself. She was disdainful that he would think to procure these kinds of goods and then put them up for sale. It was her sense that anyone who owned such goods had never been without them. Things of monetary value were not bought but were inherited, and then passed on in an unbroken chain. She wanted Nayan to help her, rather, to pull together classical musicians from the various schools she had heard about across the country and to fund the making of a symphony.
It was his turn to laugh, and to point out how little she understood of business.
Anick tried to tell Nayan about businesses and family foundations that gave back to society through their patronage of the arts, and that this in itself was good business, but as usual when she felt belittled, angered, or frustrated by Nayan and by her present situation, she was unable to find a language they shared to express herself. She ended up sounding like a simpleton, and Nayan took perverse pleasure in pointing this out to her, imitating her particular pronunciation of English words, and the phrasing and construction of her sentences. She dared not complain about any of this to her parents for fear of worrying them and because she did not want to admit, or appear to have made, a very big mistake.
Meanwhile, Nayan knew better than to talk with his father about the luxury-car detailing business or the haberdashery shop he imagined, all under the umbrella of a new “Ramayan Enterprises” or perhaps “Ramnayan Enterprises” or “Ramnayana Enterprises.” He played with his and his father’s names, and even added his mother’s into the mix and he came up with Ramanayaminty Enterprises, which, despite its length, was his favourite. He obsessed over, under, around, and behind the pros and cons of buying up the entire strip of land that was Maracas Beach, and then about the design and details of the three hotels he imagined, each one rivalling the next with its extravagance and understanding of what five-star and pampering meant. He dreamt of wiping out whole neighbourhoods and replacing them with tropical residential architecture, homes whose interiors consisted of only the most exclusive sourced goods. He wanted to be known as the man who knew the finest, as a style-maker. He and Anick would travel far and wide to do all sourcing.
In the end, Nayan knew it was wisest to stick with and make the most of what was already in his hand. He would begin in his own backyard. They wouldn’t have to embark on an entirely new direction but rather could make significant changes replanting the entire estate — not all at once, but five acres or so at a time until the whole was updated with one of the more modern varieties of cacao developed in the Agricultural Department of the University. The Trinidad Selected Hybrid, he knew from his research, produced a heftier, denser yield of pods that were the source of that fine premium cacao so cherished abroad. His cacao would be of such a superior quality that it would surpass that of the Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Venezuela, Ecuador, and all other chocolate-producing countries to become the main ingredient in the world’s, and France’s, top-ranked chocolates. He would encourage his father, too, to use this same cacao in the production of a better, more refined chocolate that would be sold right here on the island to the ordinary Trinidadian on the street. There would be a true chocolate alternative to the generic milky-sweet thing that passed for chocolate now, the only thing available to the people of a country that gave to foreigners the best of what it had and kept the least for itself. He would educate the palates of Trinidadians so that no foreigner, no Frenchwoman and her family, could look askance at them.
NAYAN’S HUMBLER AMBITIONS, NOT TO MENTION THE LOFTY ONES, were ill-received by his father:
“You live abroad four years, and it was four years too long, boy. You go abroad and come back feeling as if you know more than an old man like me. You think because you are the first in this family to get a university degree that you know more than me? Your wife likes one kind of chocolate so I must make that kind of chocolate. I never hear more! Well, my wife likes jewellery, but not just any kind of jewellery. She likes diamonds. You think I picking up and moving to South Africa, or opening a diamond necklace and earring store?”
Quarrels between the outdated autocrat (as Nayan thought of his father) and pie-in-the-sky entrepreneur (as Ram thought of his son) erupted every day. But business strategies, cacao, chocolate, citrus, modern methods and style were not the only, or even the real, issue between the two.
Curse words punctuated the mumbled rambles Nayan aimed at his father, who would invariably be out of earshot. Ram, for his part, alternately slighted Nayan and Anick, and hurled abuse at Nayan, and Minty was in tears over it all. Anick, her skin cold and clammy in the heat, her hair forever wet about her forehead and neck, sought refuge from the strife in letters written and read and in phone calls made from the little office, now unused by Nayan, that she was able to make her own.
Nayan dared not do outright battle with his father. He fought Anick instead. With her, he began to sound like Ram, who, having caught her lying on the lawn on a beach towel in her bathing suit, had called Nayan into his bedroom, shut the door, and shouted, “What is she doing parading half-naked like that in my yard for all the neighbours to see? This is a Hindu house and we have Hindu values in this house. This is not a country club. What kind of slackness is this? She and you making my blood pressure sky rocket. I don’t care if it is the back of the house. How many times I have to say this? Sunning, my arse. An Indian girl would know better.”
Nayan attempted to respond, but his words were an unfortunate mix of apology and incredulity at his father’s old-fashioned intolerance. Ram cut him short and lashed back, “What? You correcting my English, my comprehension, now? You crazy? Don’t back chat with me, child. I don’t care that she is lying on a beach towel. My backyard is no beach. Standing up, lying down, sitting in a chair, as long as she is wearing that damn skimpy thing you call a bathing suit, she is parading herself as far as I am concerned. You don’t understand my English, or what? You want me to start speaking that damn nonsense the two of you can’t even manage between you? What is wrong with you that you can’t keep you wife in check, boy? Even inside my house that dress she is always wearing — a dress with no sleeves, only string to hold it up, all her back exposed like she is at the beach. I call that nakedness and parading.”
It wasn’t long before Nayan himself began to criticize Anick for th
ese very things.
On another occasion, Ram watched Anick eat roti and curried goat with a knife and fork. That night, Nayan approached the television room on his parents’ side of the house to overhear his father snapping, “I am not eating at the same table with a woman who is eating roti with a knife and fork, making me feel like a country-bookie in my own house because I eat my food with my hands like I and all my ancestors and every Indian worth a grain of salt have done since time immemorial. He is teaching her all kinds of things — he can’t teach her to use her hands, or is she just too highfalutin for our ways?”
Nayan soon became embarrassed by the ethnic French foods Anick cooked at home for his parents, who had no interest in adventure with food. He tired, too, of her French accent, which not only showed itself for company who would be moved by its novelty or in moments when it might have aroused him, but existed every single time she opened her mouth. The constant fumbling for the right word, the inversion of sentences, the accents placed on the wrong syllables, the substitution of whole French words for English ones or a French pronunciation for an English one. These idiosyncrasies that had once charmed him now angered him, and never went away.
Still, once out in public Nayan paraded Anick like she was a trophy. He no longer, however, took lightly the harmless flirtations with other men he had once encouraged, and neither did he find the men’s attentions to Anick provocative.
EVENTUALLY, NAYAN BEGAN TO STAY AWAY FROM HOME FOR AS LONG as possible, coming in late, too inebriated to converse with anyone. Anick continued to complain about being left alone with his mother with nothing to do all day, no one to speak with, unable to invite friends to visit her at home. She complained about not being taken to movies or concerts or art galleries, and about not being able to move about the city or island with any freedom. In response, Nayan began to pick her up after work and deposit her at the house of one of his friends, Baldwin Kissoon, a man whose family owned a grocery store, a tire shop, and a garage that outfitted cars with stereo systems. Bally, as he was called, was married to a quiet woman named Shanti. They had three small children and lived on narrow but busy Rushworth Street above the garage.
Nayan would leave Anick upstairs with Shanti and the children, and he and Bally would go down to the road-level garage where cars to be serviced were haphazardly parked, tightly packed, on the asphalt driveway, the pedestrian sidewalk, and the road in front of the house. In Bally’s office at the back of the garage there was a glass window that looked out onto the shop. The door and walls of that office were thick enough to dull the sounds of the audio tests, the voomp voomp voomp of the base in particular. Here, Bally would show Nayan small items he had snuck into the country from Miami, Florida, under the radar of Customs — radar detectors, CD players, global navigation systems. After a little while, Nayan and Bally would go to the Red Stallion, a bar that was little more than a rum and roti shop, a short way down the road. The owners, two brothers, were generous with the size and flow of the drinks they served, and the four men together would occupy a special, reserved table. They would fantasize about importing and exporting together and Nayan would talk about wanting to enter into business ventures on his own, without his father. Still, he would never reveal the details of his real ambitions. He didn’t want to give his ideas away, and he also knew that these three friends would not understand creating and selling the particular lifestyle that haunted Nayan.
When Nayan, made brazen and shameless as the evening wore on, complained to Bally, Bally would remind him that children tamed a woman. A child, a boy in particular, would please Nayan’s father and mother, and might even tame them too, while the gift would also warm them to Anick. Nayan felt, though, as if he were holding on to his marriage by a tether too frayed to take the huge and binding leap into fatherhood. When he said this to Bally, Bally advised that children were also the glue that kept marriages together, something that he considered important in a small place like Trinidad. He gave his opinions freely. One should marry only for the right reasons, and love was the least of them.
“You married for love, not so, boy?”
Nayan nodded.
Bally laughed and sucked his teeth at the same time. “Thought so. You have more money than brains, boy. You know why I marry Shanti?”
Nayan, as crude as he allowed himself to be when he socialized with Bally, was not keen to know.
“You don’t see them hips, boy? Don’t get me wrong. She is a good girl. I know she isn’t a beauty queen, but she born to be a mother. When I tell you — she is a real good girl in the house. A man can’t ask for more. And what you do outside of the house have nothing to do with what you doing inside. That is the beauty of the thing. Inside. Outside. Two different things. You get what I saying?” He advised Nayan, “Have two or three children, and do it quick. Don’t waste time in that department. It will occupy your wife. Then provide for her and the children, so not one complaint along those lines could be made about you, and then you live your life as you please. As you please, boy!”
Nayan did wonder if he had more money than brains. Whatever had existed between him and Anick when they had first got together in Whistler and later in London, Ontario, and then in France, had ended within weeks of their arrival in Trinidad. And now Anick recoiled when he came to her. She shrugged off his romantic overtures, and faced with his urgent desires she found a thousand things that needed her own urgent attentions or she started a serious and effectively dulling discussion. She no longer touched him, no longer let her fingers linger and trace his body as he remembered her doing in a manner that had once driven him dizzy with every form of desire, from a primordial pining for the touch and love between two human beings, any two humans, through a range of feeling with her as its specific object, from unabashed lasciviousness to the readiness to hand over his present and his future to no one else but this person within whose body, when he entered it, that desire was diffused and his intention to keep her for himself made clear. He had wanted her to become pregnant in those days, had wanted her to publicly carry his child, a child who would be half her and half him. But now a child could come, with such coolness between them, only by force, and into a relationship that he was quite unsure of wanting.
The thought that others wondered just what it was that he had — besides money — that could have attracted to him a woman like Anick preyed on his mind and emotions. Nayan wondered what these others would think of him for marrying a woman who, before marriage, had lived in a way that was so contrary to everything he had been taught was proper in a woman and a wife. What if they knew of her past affairs with other women? What would they think of him then? Even though it was well in the past, this was a major aspect of what drove him apart from Anick now.
For a time, Bally thought that Nayan was an idiot for complaining about his wife when he, Bally, would give anything to have a woman like Anick bring up his children, cook his food, lie with him in his bed. In time, he realized that Anick was not the type of woman who would consent to live above a store on a busy road, nor to stay at home to look after him, the house, and children. Bally wanted to help his friend, and offered his wife’s company. Shanti could show Anick, by example, how to keep an Indian man’s home, while Anick might inspire Shanti to be less shy, to lose some weight, dress a little less conservatively — in short, inspire in him the kind of chivalry and desire he felt, without speaking of it to Nayan of course, for Anick.
But what happened was that one of the children came to look forward to Anick’s visits and waited up for her arrival. Anick was obliged to read stories to him, change him into his pyjamas, and tuck him into bed. At first it was sweet, cute, funny, but although Shanti tried to show her best face, resentment coloured her cheeks. Bally treated Anick as if she were the child’s surrogate mother, and this irritated both women. It was not Anick’s favourite way to spend an evening. Still, Shanti sewed well, and there was much looking at magazines and talk of what would look good on Shanti, what would look good on Anick,
and what of these Shanti might make. The women even went out on their own in the daytime, with a chauffeur provided by Nayan, to the fabric store down the road. But Anick could only do so much of this kind of socializing, and no more.
Meanwhile, Anick was not unaware of Bally’s attentions and fielded his underhanded advances, not daring to tell Nayan. Neither Nayan nor Shanti knew that Bally phoned Anick at home, and that she as often entertained his calls as she chided him for them. In the end, though, she couldn’t understand why Nayan chose to have such a close friendship with a man who was not as educated as he, and whose background was so different from his. In France it would not have mattered to Anick that a man like Bally did not know his father. Nor would it have mattered in France that Bally, having not inherited anything, had to rely on himself for a future. His fortitude and acumen, viewed through one of that culture’s lenses, might well have been lauded. But within the Trinidadian culture Anick was slipping into unconsciously (even as, at other times, she rebuffed it consciously), Bally was sorely lacking. His heritage could not be determined, and his longevity in business had no precedence.