Valmiki's Daughter

by Shani Mootoo

  Her mother bristled again.

  In the den, Viveka waited until she heard the click of the phone before she spoke. Her breath seemed to have been snatched away and she could hardly talk. Neither could Anick, save to deliver, in a voice full of trepidation, an invitation to spend that very evening and night in Rio Claro. She had already planned everything out. Nayan would come for Viveka after his work. He had, she said, initiated the idea himself. He had plans of his own — to spend the evening with friends. He and some of his workers spent an evening a week “liming” and drinking. She was normally left alone, and it was a sore spot between them. He would come for Viveka and they would all eat together, and after that he would leave and be gone for most of the evening.

  Viveka knew in a burning instant that, regardless of what her parents might say to such an invitation, she was going to keep Anick’s company that night.

  When she hung up, she thought for a minute. It was better, she decided, to speak with her father first. She dialled his number at work.

  “But you were just there last night,” Valmiki protested. “You don’t want to make a nuisance of yourself, do you?”

  “But she called and asked me. I can do some research there and . . .”

  Her father interrupted. “Sorry, Vik, I can’t talk now, I have a patient waiting. Are you asking if you can go? I can’t come up with any reason why not.”

  “Well, I’m sure Mom will.”

  “God, why do you do this to me?” He paused long before saying, “I’ll speak with her. I want to tell you to behave yourself. But you’re a bit old for that, aren’t you?”

  Viveka’s heart thumped. She was indeed, that very night, going to keep Anick’s company.

  “Just remember whose daughter you are. Whose daughter are you?”

  “Well, I know I am Mom’s.” Viveka’s voice quavered, and she felt sure it had given away her immense gratitude.

  “So, I won’t see you when I get home, then,” Valmiki said at last. “Don’t do anything foolish, you hear, darling?”

  Viveka and Nayan

  “THE WAY SHE DRESSES, IN BED OR OUT OF BED, IT DOESN’T MAKE A difference. You see the kind of clothes she wears? Nothing ordinary. I pay through my nose, but I see people — they don’t know if to watch her face, her shoulders, her ass, or her clothes. Men and women. And it’s worth every penny of my hard-earned money to see the admiration, the desire, the envy.”

  It was already past rush hour. Traffic on the Naparima-Mayaro Road was light. A yellow evening light cast itself over the cane fields. It had not been a hot day and there was no need for the air-conditioning to be on in the car, but Nayan had it on high. A scent of flowery perfume seemed caught in the cooling unit.

  “Even inside the house or in the garden my wife doesn’t wear ‘old clothes,’ you know. And Vik, ey man, that woman doesn’t wear a stich of clothing, not one stitch, whether you could see it or not, that isn’t just plain beautiful. She really has taste and she knows how to keep even her husband — who sees her every single day — salivating.”

  Nayan irritated Viveka on the one hand, but on the other his words brought to mind the few times long ago when she had stolen into the drawer in her father’s cupboard. The centrefold photos. They were all more or less alike: a single pale woman sprawled across the two pages, her matching underwear in colours that accentuated the flawless paleness of her skin. The impossible length of her torso and limbs, the heft of breasts so translucent that Viveka could see greenish-blue veins in them — and knowing even then that images in magazines were airbrushed, she determined that the veins were intended to be left there. The women filled the two pages, edge to edge, and Viveka had had to hold the magazines at arm’s length to get the full effect of each woman’s pose.

  She thought of her mother readying herself for parties: she would rush back and forth, dressed only in bra and panties, between the bedroom and the dressing room she shared with Valmiki as she one minute chose accessories from the jewellery box, the next made her face, plucked a hair or two from her eyebrows or chin, pulled on pantyhose. Save for her shoes, her dress was the very last item she would put on. Viveka’s father, who never presented himself in front of his daughters without wearing at least full trousers, would be calmer as he dressed there, too, seemingly oblivious to his wife’s half nudity. Both daughters were often in the room during this routine, Vashti helping her mother choose and fasten this or that, Viveka looking on uncomfortably, making suggestions that were most often unhelpful and so ignored. Vashti would help their mother dress, but Viveka would sit in the plush armchair and busy herself with one of her father’s hunting magazines, somewhat embarrassed, feelings of guilt gnawing at her for having seen the photos she thought her mother tried poorly to emulate. She stayed in the bedroom during these times to watch her mother — in her peripheral vision, of course — taking mental notes of how she was herself supposed one day to be. She would leave the room conflicted, drawn to the strange womanliness she had seen in the magazines and nauseated by the fact that it was supposed to be desirable and attractive, while on her mother, she thought, it clearly was not.

  Coming back to the present, Viveka leaned her head back on her seat’s headrest. They were farther into the countryside now. The light had faded and twilight gathered at the foot of the forested land. But twilight lingered long here. She closed her eyes.

  “The road is too winding for you, eh? Only another fifteen minutes. You want to stop for a few minutes?”

  “No, let’s just drive on. I’ll be okay.” She was sharper than she had meant to be, but Nayan didn’t seem to notice. He continued talking, now saying something about the differences between Canadian girls, and Trinidadian girls, and French girls, who were not girls but women-in-the-making from the time they were born.

  She couldn’t get her father’s old magazine centrefolds out of her mind, and now more images came to her, as if her memory had suddenly come alive. An unsolicited image of Merle Bedi interrupted the glossy images and her heart seemed, just as suddenly, to stop beating.

  Viveka sat up. In an effort to rid herself of these unpleasant thoughts, she strained to keep her attention on Nayan.

  “You can’t play around with a Trinidadian girl, you know,” he was saying. “Her family would expect you to marry her just because you looked at her. Man, let me tell you! They are not as innocent as their parents think, you know. I could tell you the names of three different girls right here that I had before I was even finished high school.”

  Viveka felt herself redden, even as she knew that this was how men talked of women. Did a tongue-kiss mean she had been “had”? He wasn’t so rude or stupid, she wondered, as to include her among those three, was he? She could hear her mother or Vashti, her aunts, or even women at the university who called themselves feminists. They would say: He thinks he is God’s gift to woman or what? Why men so full of themselves? Anyway, in the end they don’t mean anything by it, you know, they only full of mouth. Poor things. And these women would begin a defense of the men. Perhaps she should fall in line, lest she ended up on the Promenade, too, Viveka thought. But she had had enough, and before she could stop herself she was saying, as gently as she could, the gentleness delivered through her uncharacteristic use of colloquialisms, “Nayan, like you eat a parrot and a lion for lunch today, boy. How you talking about your wife and other women so? You making me shy with all these details.”

  The smile on Nayan’s face twisted and his jaw hardened. He fell quiet for an uncomfortable and long moment. The air between them stiffened. On the way to his house, and in his own car, Viveka had offended him. She found herself thinking of conciliatory things to say aloud, like, Well, you did well, you got yourself quite a woman, and, Well, you really broke a lot of hearts when we heard that you were married, you know.

  But he spoke before she could muster up a voice. He was now serious and thoughtful. “Listen, Vik, I find myself ready to tell you all kinds of things. I mean, as if you are a confidante
or a sister who I could trust. That’s not because I disrespect you, you understand. On the contrary. You’re not like other people. This is why Anick likes you. Me? I know you wouldn’t judge me. I just know that deep in my heart. Well, I hope you wouldn’t. But you are smart. You understand all kinds of complicated things. The funny thing is, it is why, too, I would never have been able to marry a girl like you. I could never hide in front of you. You would see right through me, through and through. You would see how small I really am. What a weak man I am.”

  Viveka felt uncomfortably grateful, flattered even. “And even though I know you wouldn’t judge me, I don’t want to be small in front of the woman I have to take care of. You know, Vik, I will tell you something: living abroad, being in Canada and travelling to France, really woke me up, you know. It’s like I woke up, but to a kind of nightmare. When I was at the University of Western Ontario I could have settled into a little nest of other Trinidadians and other West Indians, or even Indians from the various parts of the globe. I could have found a kind of safety and comfort among these people, a haven from the cold — not the weather, but the cold of seeing ourselves suddenly naked, without our families, without our cultures, without the spirit and sense of self that back-home could have given us. But I chose to go to the hard places, those very cold places, and mix with people who would make me have to prove myself.”

  Viveka remembered that Nayan had said on a previous occasion that he had mixed with white Canadians of the same class background as he. It wasn’t the first time she had noticed how a personal story — a story that justified one’s actions — became nuanced to suit the context of its telling, even if the audience remained constant.

  “And what I saw of myself was that by dint of being Indian — a race whose skin colour shouts that a man is amenable to bending this way or that to please anyone he perceives to have an ounce of power more than he has — in those eyes, I was their servant. Among Trinis and other black- and brown-skinned fellows up there it was easy to be a big fish in a small pond. But it was as if I would get a fever, a delirium, that would only quiet down if I could be big and respected in the biggest pond of all. How to do that? Well, for one, I found I had to pull out my credit cards to get noticed and respect. To get a foot in. You buy a round of drinks in a pub, and you get asked back. You might have to do this a few times, but once you’re in you start to show that despite your colour you are just like they are, perhaps you even have better manners and nicer ways. They take you home, their parents like you because there is something vaguely old-fashioned about you, something reminiscent of themselves, and before you know it, you’re in.

  “When I returned here I watched my friends and saw — I still see it — how they all think that because they are men — just because of that single fact — that they are special. Little do they know that among other men of the world, we are practically not visible. Not just in the white world, you know. Look, I have met men from African countries, from Kuwait, from India, and if only you could see how they treat us — or don’t treat us, because in their eyes, too, we — the sugar-cane and cacao Indians, those of us from Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji — we don’t exist. With the Indians from India we can bond over cricket, but other than that they — even they, who share our ancestors — dismiss us. As if we are poor, poor, poor copies of an original that no longer exists. They see how we run to them for accessories like cushion covers, tablecloths, like pictures to hang up, bangles to wear on your hand. We have nothing of our own making — no style, no art or culture — to show for ourselves. So many years after leaving India, after losing the language, after watering down the culture, the religion, we’re groping, still shy of becoming Trinidadian. Abroad, we exude no confidence in the way we move about. How can we? We are not properly Indian, and don’t know how to be Trinidadian. We are nothing.”

  This was not the same Nayan, it seemed, who Viveka knew. She turned and faced him, interested for the first time.

  “I am not foolish, you know, Vik. Being in France troubled me. I could see how little experience and knowledge of the world I had. It is a hard thing to realize that you know so little, have experienced so little. Before I went away I bought the best clothing from the fanciest stores here, the most expensive clothing we could find in Trinidad, and when I was among my white friends in Canada, and when I was with Anick’s family and their friends in France, that same clothing looked cheap, the cloth itself inferior. It is not as if we have traditional clothes so that, no matter what quality cloth it is made from, it is intrinsically ours. Like the kinds of things the Africans, the Arabs, the Indians, wear. We gave up what was ours a long time ago and are trying too late to replace it with the same things. Too much has happened to us, we can’t go back, but we don’t know how to go ahead. Between being ashamed of our Indianness and the new born-again Indianness you see people practicing here, men like me fell off the radar. And the only place we can be big and confident is in the ponds we create for ourselves.”

  Viveka was excited by this unexpected turn in the conversation. “Wait a minute, Nayan, who do you mean by ‘we’?”

  Nayan looked at her as if she hadn’t been listening. “Indian men.”

  “Yes, yes, I know, but which Indian men?” “Are you testing me, Vik? I know what I am talking about. Indian men here in Trinidad. The ones from our class.”

  “Oh, I thought you meant all Trinidadian Indian men.”

  “No,” Nayan said impatiently. “Of course not the ones like Mr. Lal and the men who live all around here. I mean men from our class. What gets us acknowledgement — or what we think gets us acknowledgement — is not what black people have that makes them Trinidadian (they have culture, we have money — which is better?) but a profession, wealth, children to carry on our names, and friendships with the whites. I know that people envy me because of Anick, you know.”

  Viveka surprised herself when she blurted out, “Well, she isn’t just white.”

  Nayan grinned as if a compliment had been paid to him.

  Viveka added quickly, “She is really quite a nice person.”

  “She is white. She is nice. And, you can say it, you know — she is beautiful. You don’t think so?”

  Viveka wanted to pretend that she hadn’t noticed. But she took courage and said as congenially as she could, “Of course she is.”

  What Nayan had said made Viveka think of her father. She thought of her own attraction to the white French woman only minutes away, and the words “Yes, but I am different: I am not a man,” consoled her, but only a little.

  “I am not a handsome man,” continued Nayan. “I mean, not a truly handsome man — looks are one thing, but style and manners, those are what make a good-looking man handsome. And I know that marrying Anick, or rather, Anick marrying me is an indication of my worth. Indian fellows from here go abroad to study because they have brains and their families can afford to send them away. They are lonely, and what happens when the first white woman comes along and flashes a big open smile at them? They fall in love. Not with her, but with the way she, a white person, is taken with them. I mean, look at how many of our men go abroad and come back with white women. And usually they are not good-looking women at all, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are white. Neither of them could have done better. She nets herself a professional, or at least a man with a degree, and he returns to his family, his village, to the country, with a white woman on his arm. He returns the conqueror!”

  With this, Nayan fell quiet.

  Viveka thought how she had, as yet, no experience of the world outside of Trinidad. Perhaps, she mused, despite the fact that she was studying at university, the quality and magnitude of her thoughts would be compromised by her lack of world travel, her limited knowledge of others and other places. She wasn’t in the category Nayan was referring to, that of the Indian man, but perhaps Anick would see, in any case, how green, unaware, parochial she was. She so wanted to be grand — not “in between” like Nayan or her fathe
r.

  “But you have to wonder who really conquered who,” Nayan suddenly piped up. “Those white women got themselves men for sure, but men who are lesser beings in those women’s eyes, lesser than men from their own societies, and much less than the women themselves. This is the only way a white woman can gain a hand over a man.”

  Viveka marvelled at Nayan’s thinking, as bitter as it was, and wondered why, if he was capable of such analysis, he made himself generally so boorish. Although, she conceded, these weren’t the kinds of thoughts that would win him friends.

  “You see, it was a little different with me,” Nayan continued. “I got bamboozled. Because Anick wasn’t just any white woman. She wasn’t only a white woman. She had class, she was sexy, she was beautiful, she was like a movie star. It’s like — a woman like her, who could have just about anybody, chose me. There was something in me that she wanted. I don’t mean to brag . . .” Nayan seemed suddenly to change his mind about what he was about to say. “You know,” he said, taking his eyes off the road to look squarely and long at Viveka, “to tell the truth, I don’t feel very secure in this marriage I made. There are things about Anick — I can’t tell you everything, but there are things I know, things really private, that make me feel that as much as I might have used her,” he looked back at the road again, “and I am saying might have, in the sense that one does these things subconsciously — well, in the same way I might have used her, she has used me too.” He paused as if to reflect on his own words, and Viveka wondered what secrets Anick had, besides the one she knew — that “French girls like both.” She wondered if this was the very thing that Nayan knew and now hinted at.

  “But isn’t that always the way it is, Nayan?” Viveka’s voice quavered. “Everything comes with a price. People often only give something if they stand to gain.”

  “It just makes me want to do all kinds of things, Vik, from being a big man in my own house, my own pond, to showing Anick who wears the pants, showing everybody. It makes me want to create the biggest cacao estate in the world, producing the best and most desired beans, and make chocolate that would put French and Belgian chocolate to shame. You see us drinking, dancing, joking, laughing, jumping up like there is no tomorrow, bathing in the sea? People abroad think of us as the jump-up jump-up people, you know, the good time people. But an angry man must, and will, lash out sooner or later. We have to lash out somewhere, after all, but the sad thing is that we lash out at the ones we love — in private, of course. The only place we have any balls is in our little kingdoms, our homes, right here in this country. This small, small place. Lord, Vik, I am tired of being a small man. I thought in my own home I would be my own boss, but I am living with a Frenchwoman who thinks she knows the right way, the best way to do everything. And the odd thing is that as much as that makes me feel small, it is also what drives me forward, and keeps me wanting to surpass her every expectation.”