How to Escape From a Leper Colony

by Tiphanie Yanique

  That night they took the poor people’s barge over to Trinidad to see a movie. It was the first time they had been in Trinidad, on the big island, for something other than a gallery opening or a private artist reception. The movie was a love story and Usha cried all through it. He held her but she kept crying. Not just tears but a heaving that made people stare at them as the theater emptied out. “Why are you crying so hard? What is it?” And she shook her head. But still he felt brave. “This isn’t a game, Usha. I’m for real.”

  He didn’t follow her to the plane when she left two weeks later. It happened so quickly that he knew she had been planning it for longer than she had let on. But she gave him her new address in New York and he took this as a kind of concession. When she left he went to their Gasparee home and lay on the bed. “She is gone,” he said to himself. “You will follow.”

  The day after Usha left he bribed Patrique, the ceramist, for her parents’ address. He was surprised to find out that it was deep in rural San Fernando—a part of the island he had never been to. He went racing down by car. And then he had to go slow. And then he had to ask people, because the directions, he realized, were not specific. But no one wanted to help him. And he had to beg and get out of the car and give money and finally he found the house and the parents were there at the door as if they had been expecting him. And it dawned on him that after all the questions and turnings around that someone had probably run to warn them that a white man was asking about for the parents of Usha Persaud. At the door they asked him, “What have we done?”

  “I am a friend of Usha’s,” he said. They invited him in.

  “She never mention you, sir,” said the father as they all sat in the tight living area.

  “Are you Mr. Persaud?”

  “Yes, sir. And this my wife.” The wife did not move to fetch him tea or water. She stared at him as though he were something exotic.

  “I just …” And Jean looked around. It was a small wood house. This entire living and dining room no bigger than the bedroom in the humble bungalow he and Usha had shared. But on the walls were little paintings of windows. Miniatures. “I know her work. Her paintings.”

  The father did not look impressed but the mother smiled and leaned forward. A young girl child with thick black hair cut short around her face shied in and sat next to the older woman. Jean stared at her. “I bought one of her paintings,” he finished but did not move his eyes away from the child. The parents looked at each other and then back at him.

  “We ain seen her in almost three months. She does send money. But that’s all.”

  “Do you know where she is?” he said with a sudden panic.

  “She’s in the U.K.”

  “Pardon me? I didn’t hear …”

  “Our Usha. She is in London. In the U.K.”

  Jean went to New York University that year. And he did not look for her. She had lied to him. It was a game after all. Perhaps by now she had sold his engagement ring. But then that would make his heart go soft because he had given her an engagement ring that was small and plain and way below his means. And yet while he was in the city he was filled with that feeling that she was there. That she was close. That if he just walked faster around a corner. If he just got to a bakery a little earlier. If he just went to one art opening instead of another, that she would be there and they could start over. They had only known each other for three months.

  He studied for a degree in art history, which his father wrote to him was flippant but okay if it included estate management and museum curatory. It did not. After graduation he did not move home. He thought he would travel. He would study art all over the Caribbean. He thought he would start with the smaller islands, and the Virgin Islands were interesting because half was British and the other half American and he liked being able to visit America by just taking a boat from the British Tortola where he stayed. But he found that much of the art in the galleries of the V.I. was by European and American expatriates and covered Carnival and beaches, but not much else. The native painters there worked humble jobs as carpenters or fishermen and kept their masterpieces on their own walls—afraid of the corruption from the outside world that would settle like a film on their work. They were like superheroes. They taught secondary school English by day and then flashed paint around by night. It was hard for Jean Monroe to study them. It was hard to learn. Whenever he went to a gallery the docents or the owner would take him to look at their new acquisitions. When he asked for native painters, they would shake their heads as though scolding. “No, we don’t have that. Everyone asks, but we don’t have it. Sorry, Mr. Monroe.”

  He lived like this for three years. On Tortola, where the art world was very small, only four or five full galleries on the whole rock, he was known and thought to be a kind of eccentric genius. He never bought paintings but he could talk about them for hours over a cigarette and a glass of wine. The expat women flirted with him, but he insisted that he was married and a faithful man. They giggled and never believed him. He survived by writing letters to his mother and father, who thought he had gone mad but sent him money anyway. And then he began to write Usha. He wrote to her again and again, mailing the letters to the rough address in San Fernando. He started them all the same way: “Dearest Usha. If I should die first I will have my ashes sent to you …”

  And then a letter came from his mother that there had been a fire on Gasparee. That everything had burned down. All the buildings. Everything. The letter stayed in his fist for five hours. First he sat in his small room and tried to imagine the island of his best youth black with soot. Then he went out into the streets where there were bars frequented by tourists and newcomers and he drank Trinidadian rum and told everyone in a loud voice that this is what his wife’s crotch tasted like. Then he staggered back to his apartment and lay face down on the bed not knowing what to do, until he fell asleep and the letter slowly unfurled out of his palm.

  The letter had not invited him but he still caught a plane that went through Puerto Rico and then directly to Port of Spain. He checked himself into a bed-and-breakfast and for two days he did not call his parents to announce that he had arrived in Trinidad. He went to galleries. On the second afternoon he walked into one and there on the wall was a huge painting with four big windows all open to the sun and shadow. No people in it at all. He stared at it. “Can I help you?” asked the docent and Jean jumped. There was a red dot on the painting that marked it sold.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes.” But then he could not say anything else.

  “She’s a native Trini artist,” the lady said, looking him over now and wondering if he could afford anything so nice. She offered him a book of Usha Persaud’s paintings. It was a hardcover book. He opened it. The woman continued. “We represent her work and her husband’s.” He dropped the book and then fumbled to pick it up. He was twenty-five years old. In Tortola he had told everyone that his wife was a painter named Usha Persaud.

  “Does she have a card? Is there a way that I can get in touch with her?”

  “We sell her work. You can talk to me.”

  “No, no.” He considered saying we are old friends. Or we were lovers once. Or I am her husband. “I would like to tell her that I am moved by her work.”

  The woman reluctantly passed him a card. “Usha Persaud.” There were two addresses. One in London and one in New York. He walked out into the quiet street of Cascade. And walked until his legs gave way. “London,” he said out loud. “London and New York.” He sat down on the side of the road and began to weep.

  Now Anexus Corban awoke in his condo and saw that it was still dark. He stretched, ignoring the painting as he did in the morning, and went for his shower. At the breakfast table he drank coffee and ate a large bowl of Cream of Wheat, both heaped with sugar.

  The first apartment he lived in when he moved from the British Tortola to the U.S. St. Thomas had been in the back rooms of what was now the International Shop of Coffins. His shop. It had been i
n a place on island where it was cheap to live and when he’d leased it from the owners they had been happy. It was a hundred-year lease. Now the land that the shop sat on was worth enough for a man to retire on and live out his years in comfort. But he would not allow the owners to break the lease and the owners were a big family who could never decide what would be done with the land even if Corban did let it go. He was not often bothered.

  When he returned from Trinidad with Usha’s painting under his arm, he had thought he would settle in Tortola and open a wood shop there. He would receive the initial wood free from his father’s company—now run by his brother. But when he returned to Tortola he had introduced himself as Anexus Corban and the people who knew him laughed and continued to call him Monroe. “Jean Monroe is dead,” he said. Some tried because they could see he was serious. The secretive native artists called him Anexus because they understood the need to live more than one life. But the gallery owners and art patrons did not take the Trinidadian seriously. So he left. And when he moved to St. Thomas he wrote Anexus Corban on his lease. He was given a driver’s license and he made business cards for himself. Soon the only thing that revealed the existence of Jean Corban Monroe was his Trinidadian passport.

  He thought he would make art out of the wood his brother sent. He made boxes and painted them and thought they were very modern. They were splashed with every color to imitate the sunset. He thought they would be like little postmodern metaphors of the home. They opened only halfway or didn’t open at all or opened to reveal a wall of wood. He made them again and again trying to perfect his technique. It was not subconscious. He was very consciously thinking that he would take pictures and send those pictures to Usha’s gallery and then Usha would see them. And then she would call him and she would fly to St. Thomas and they would commence a lifelong love affair that her husband would never know about—or, if he dreamed bravely and wildly, maybe she would leave her husband and make a home with him.

  And then one day Anexus sat down to a National Geographic and there were the coffins of the artisans of Ghana. Coffins shaped like the thing most reminiscent of the deceased. There were coffins like domes with the checkered black and white of a soccer ball. There were coffins painted with murals of the village where the deceased had been born. The custom-made coffin movement had spread to other West African countries. And he looked at his boxes and thought that he had been making coffins and never known.

  But these artisan coffins were different. They were plain on the inside. They were not for the deceased. They were for those left behind. He understood this. He drew up a design for an urn and sent the sketches to a contractor in Accra. Three months later they sent back the heavy silver in the shape of a miniature Gasparee island. He ordered two coffins in the shape of houses and within a week they had been sold. He opened the International Shop of Coffins.

  After he polishes the silver Gasparee urn with toothpaste and a firm-bristled toothbrush, he sits down at the breakfast table to begin his newest note to Usha. To the address of the gallery in Port of Spain now because he no longer wants her husband to find them. All these years she has never written back, but then again he is not sure she ever gets the notes. He begins it as he always has: “Dearest Usha. When I die I will have my ashes sent to you. You may scatter them over the shores of Gasparee.” But then he stops. Carefully, he tears that page from the pad and begins anew. “Dear Usha. Perhaps this will be my last letter. I only want to say, I have only ever wanted to say, that because of you I was raised from a kind of death …”

  III. Gita “Pinky” Manachandi

  The children’s coffins are from West Africa. He imports them. They are in shapes that a child’s body would be happy to lie in—living or dead. One is shaped like a sneaker. It sits in the middle of the room as though a giant lost it in a stroll through the building. It is white and has a Nike swoop on the side. The laces are made of cloth, but the rest of it is made of wood. There is also a lollipop one, the candy part painted in blue and green and yellow swirls, the stick—where the child’s legs would go—painted an authentic bone white. Corban’s favorite is the baby treasure chest. It is mahogany and, in fact, it is a treasure chest in every way. Only that inside it is lined with satin and when it closes it is airtight.

  The store is never crowded, so often when the proprietor, Anexus Corban, and his friend Father Simon Peter are there together they can talk as candidly as two men with pasts too illuminated for forgetting can talk. This day Simon Peter sits at the stool reserved for him and begins. “Do you have anything new in, Corban?” But before Anexus can respond with a mention of the glass windows he’s just installed, two girls in school uniforms walk in.

  “School project,” the blond one says as she waves her notebook at Anexus. He knows they are lying. He knows that though he is running an honest and important business, for some his shop is just a curiosity. Like everyone, the girls are attracted to the children’s coffins, but the dark-haired one slinks away shyly to the Mexican coffins that are closer to the counter, where there is less light.

  Corban comes from behind the counter, where he displays things like folded silk shrouds that look like nightgowns and tiny prayer books from every God-fearing religion he knows. He asks the girls if they need some help.

  “We’re picking our coffins,” says the brown girl.

  The other opens her eyes at her and interjects: “For a history project.”

  The girls wear ties. They are seniors in secondary school. Private school, by the colors they’re wearing, but Corban can’t tell which one.

  Father Simon is annoyed at them. He does not know them. They do not go to the Catholic school. They are an interruption from his favorite part of the day. He tries to overcome this. “What is the topic of the assignment?”

  “Death,” the fair one says.

  “The history of death?” asks Simon with what sounds like disbelief.

  “The history of mourning,” the brown-skinned one interjects. She is thinking that this place is like a museum of death. No, no, a gallery of mourning. She sees the simple wooden coffin, the kind that the Baha’is get buried in because it is all pine. It’s all natural and will go back into the land without harm. The girl likes this idea in theory, but still to her the coffin looks very sad.

  Her name is Gita Manachandi. That is what her parents named her and when they gave her that name they expected that it would stay put until she married and it would turn to her husband to rename her—last and first name both. A brand-new name for her rebirth into wifedom. But Gita did not stay put. She did not always go by Gita. She would not ever go by any husband-given name either. It was not that she did not like the name Gita. It was just that early on her best friend had begun calling her Pinky because … well, because of a mistake, as is the case with the birth of so many nicknames. Perhaps Gita too was a mistake. Pinky became Pinky in the second grade when her family moved from Bombay to the island and Leslie Dockers asked her her name and she said it but with shyness and Leslie thought she said Pinky and that was that. The teachers did not call her Pinky. Her parents did not call her Pinky. In the classroom and in her home (one was only an extension of the other) she was Gita. In the playground and in the street (one was only an extension of the other) she was Pinky. She and Leslie Dockers were a pair. Their mothers had approved of the friendship when the girls were young for the mistaken reason that each family felt the other would help with assimilation to island life. The Manachandis thought that Leslie’s family was Creole—the white French they had heard were native to some of the islands. The Dockers thought Gita was Trini—Indo-Caribbean from Trinidad. But neither family was from the islands and by the time each family began to question the need for this friendship, it was too late. The Manachandis were from Bombay. The Dockers were actually from Leeds.

  The girls became island girls of their own accord and by the time the Dockers or the Manachandis realized that actually, they did not want their girl children to be islanders at all, it was t
oo late. It was not that she was Gita-Pinky. She did not feel as though she lived on any hyphen or margin. She was both or either.

  In the shop Pinky listens to the priest talk to Leslie about what mourning is like in Gambia and the Catholic Church. She doesn’t know what grief is like in India, though at her house it means loud phone calls to living family and quiet talks with the dead.

  Leslie, who is not listening at all, stoops down to inspect the little car coffin. Pinky wanders over to the Guadeloupe one with her pen and notebook ready. The coffin is open to show the Virgin emblazoned on the inside. She leans into it as though wanting to feel the satin on her face. She is thinking of her mother. Father Simon, watching her, wants to pull her back. He is afraid that perhaps the lid will come crashing down. His body tenses with this feeling but he knows it is not his business to tell her what to do in Corban’s gallery. He stays quiet. Pinky peeks over at Corban but Corban is watching Leslie who is lying on her belly on the floor to better see into the coffin car.

  “Damn,” Leslie says. “It’s got leather lining in this bad boy.”

  Simon watches Pinky put her hand into the coffin and touch the inside. This is allowed but she does it as if she is afraid to be caught. Now Corban sees her. She is squeezing the cushioning. She looks up and pulls her hand out. “It’s luxurious,” she says. “You could sleep in it. How much does it cost?”

  “A lot,” answers Corban suspiciously. But Pinky is bolder than she seems. She lingers as though she were a real customer. She asks questions like What kind of people buy these? Where did you get it? When people come in do they shop, do they bargain or do they just buy? Then she pulls out her fifty and buys some marigolds that are in a tiny clear box. They are fresh and soft. They are the same color as the Virgin coffin. Corban feels more warmly toward the girl then.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she says, referring still to the coffin as Leslie pulls her to leave. “It’s like art.” The girls were on their way to a party.