The Ivory Swing

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “Is it really so awful?”

  “Oh well, you know, on and off. I survive. After a fashion.”

  “When I picture you there,” he said, “I think of a Roman candle on an ice floe. I would imagine you take the town by storm.”

  “It’s not a place that approves of storms. Storms don’t have the proper sense of decorum.”

  “There must be compensations. Clean air, no traffic jams?”

  “Give me a gritty subway and freedom any time.”

  “Then why for god’s sake, India?’

  “Well, because India … Are you going to tell me you’ve never dreamed of the fabled East? Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama. Surely everyone, I thought everyone …” But she was embarrassed to admit to the jejune lure of travellers’ antique and brocaded tales — of tigers, elephants, sandalwood and ivory, the whole exotic paraphernalia. “I thought you’d envy me.”

  “You must be crazy. Even your thought processes will turn rancid. My idea of a year’s escape is an apartment in Paris with some Left Bank ferment and the libraries of the Sorbonne close by. Or, failing that, a London flat close to the British Museum with ale and politics in the local pub. But to move from sub-arctic isolation to equatorial isolation — I can’t see the point of that.”

  “Isolation! In a country of over five hundred million? With that kind of crowding, anything could happen. Anything! That’s what grabs me — after a near fatal absence of risk for the last twelve years.”

  “Poor caged bird who’s forgotten how to fly. Done in by a surfeit of security.”

  “Not funny. You don’t know what it’s like, living in a place that’s lethally safe.”

  Their hands had gradually moved so that their fingertips touched, an unnerving sensation.

  “Well,” he said. “If it’s risk-taking you want, here we are. Alone in Montreal.”

  He laced his fingers through hers and it was like the pull of a current swirling her back to her own element, her own life that had slithered away from her. But then her heart snagged on something else, the hook of children, of those innocent sleeping faces damp against their pillows. (She would stand in their rooms at night and think helplessly: I would die for them. I would even go on living here in Winston, Ontario, for them.) And then there was David, she was caught on that hook too, she would never get him out of her flesh.

  Jeremy lifted her hand to his mouth and ran his tongue across her fingertips.

  Shall we? his eyes asked with an unwavering intensity.

  No! hers replied, alarmed, hypnotized. Think of the chaos! That wasn’t what I meant. (Was it?)

  “Enjoy India!” he said lightly, withdrawing his hand.

  “Think of me with jasmine in my hair.”

  “I’ll think of you wilting from heat and humidity and covered with mosquito bites,” he said unobligingly.

  “You are cruel.”

  “No.” He looked directly at her. “You are cruel.”

  There was some clouding — irritation? hurt? — in his eyes, but she could not — or was afraid to — read it. I have never known what he wants, she thought. Or what he really thinks of me.

  “I wish you knew what you wanted,” he said.

  She was startled, and blurted without thinking: “I want to maintain my balancing act.”

  The hazardous, arduous balancing act of someone born on the cusp between eras. A mutant form on the Tree of Woman. She had evolved wings her mother never had, but not the free flight patterns of her younger sister, Annie.

  Jeremy raised a sardonic eyebrow. “The illusion of risk,” he said. “That’s all you want, the illusion of risk.”

  Stung, she flared at him: “That’s not true!” Oh, but maybe it was. Independence smouldered like sulphur in her gut, but domestic commitment was in her genes, heavy as lead. “Some things are too valuable to risk losing. It’s pathetically simple, what I want. I wish we would move back to a city.”

  “We.” He said it without inflection, as though a point had at last been clarified in some interminable negotiation. “And if you plural should continue for another decade to vegetate in Winston, what do you singular intend to do?”

  “Another decade?” she echoed weakly. It seemed to her that a terminal diagnosis had been made. She would not look at his eyes. “I suppose,” her voice faltered, “I suppose I’ll try to keep juggling.”

  “Juggling what? Your virtue and your sanity? Or your male pawns, your nice little chessboard toys?”

  She stared at him, fascinated by new revelations. And he, alarmed at his own indiscretion, blundered further into rage. “What is he, some sort of rabid contemplative? Is he anchored to the place? What the hell is the matter with him …?”

  But he had to stop. It was against their rules, a violent breach of etiquette.

  And she could not bear to have David attacked.

  “It isn’t like that. You don’t understand.”

  “No. I don’t understand.” Irritably he signalled the waitress, impatient to be rid of the tedium of Juliet’s ambivalence. “But your lack of honesty disgusts me. It’s something you’ve acquired in Winston. You’re ashamed of loving that safe little bourgeois cage so you keep up a pretence of wanting to get out.”

  “God, you’re brutal! Is simple friendship such a costly thing for you to give?”

  “Simple friendship.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Let’s not be disingenuous. If you wanted to leave Winston, you’d leave. And whatever it is we’ve had between us all these years, let’s not pretend that simple friendship is the right word for it.”

  “It’s my word for it.”

  “As I’ve just pointed out, your provincial little town is a hotbed of hypocrisy.”

  “If it’s hypocrisy we’re speaking of, why pretend you give a damn where I spend the rest of my life? You — the original free-wheeler. A life littered with discarded women.” This was unpardonably against the rules, she thought; it was beyond the forgivable. “Oh god, I didn’t mean … but damn it, I’m going to miss you, actually miss you …” A tremor had crept into her voice and she crushed it beneath the heel of her will as though it were a poisonous spider. “And you won’t even remember I’ve left this continent.” (If I begin to cry, she told herself furiously, I will never forgive myself.) “But I expect I can be spartan about it.”

  “Oh I don’t doubt it. If it should cross your mind to send a postcard, I’ll pin it over my desk. I daresay I’ll recall where you are every time it catches my eye.”

  “Oh I daresay. A hunting trophy among many. Forlorn notes from women I have known.”

  “Juliet,Juliet!” He gestured in mock despair and laughed. “You should be burned at a stake.” He leaned across the table suddenly and kissed her on the lips. “Now get the hell out of my life and I hope you rot in India.”

  3

  Silken girls were carrying sherbet to Moghul emperors across glowing expanses of tapestry. Krishna, and Radha, vibrant batik figures, dallied in a tangled embrace that was aesthetically exquisite if physically improbable. On a swing of carved ivory, they sat demurely as satiated lovers. And Juliet, browser amidst the fabulous jetsam of maharajahs and nawabs, thought: My life is a surprise to me.

  David moved across the room and stood behind her. He touched her long hair lightly and rested his hand on the nape of her neck. It might have meant: You are Radha to me. He was excited by the ivory carving, artistically and sexually. He knew its history, would want to explain its iconography and significance. He would point out contrasts with that painting on the far wall where Radha, on another swing, breathed solitary love sighs. And she would listen partly out of habit, partly because his intellectual energy was a source of wonder to her.

  Marriage has given me a staggering amount of esoteric information, she thought wryly.

  University people, Mr Motilal decided, whispering to his kohl-eyed assistant to bring mango juice. There were four kinds of Westerners: tourists, diplomats, hippies, and university people. He saw his position as that of
an appraisal expert; the correct designation of Westerners was as important to success as the ability to know authentic antiques from fakes.

  Not many Westerners found their way this far south, so close to the equator, but those who did were usually big spenders passing through on the way to Kovalam. They would flit in and out, spending only a few hours in Trivandrum but several weeks sequestered in the Kovalam Palace Hotel. Mr Motilal kept his rooms air-conditioned. It was an irresistible lure and ensured lengthy browsing.

  He reluctantly decided that these people, with two children in tow, were not Kovalam people. They would not be able to afford the ivory swing. But as they were clearly connected with the university, he would emphasize the small bronzes, relating them to incidents in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. This would be a fruitful approach.

  The assistant brought mango juice in small glasses on a silver tray and with deft experience offered it to the children first.

  “Oh no, please, you must not,” begged Juliet, hastily. But it was too late. Jonathan and Miranda were already drinking with delight.

  “But yes, indeed, it is our pleasure,” murmured Mr Motilal with a bow.

  Chairs were brought.

  “Please,” insisted Mr Motilal. “You must sit and rest. It is so hot. Even for us it is hot outside, though so cool and pleasant in here”

  Juliet sighed. They were used to this sort of performance and dreaded it. It had been a mistake to linger at the ivory swing. The only way to cut short an otherwise interminable ritual was to buy something quickly. Unfortunately almost everything, being genuine antique artwork and priced for foreign collectors, was well beyond their range.

  But it would not be possible now — or at least, it would be highly unpleasant — to leave without buying.

  “Such fine bronzes,” Mr Motilal was saying. “Many people are buying. In the magazines, the art critics are saying —”

  “Oh look!” Miranda broke into the soft patter of sales talk, pointing to a delicate sandalwood figurine.

  “That is Lord Krishna,” beamed Mr Motilal. “He is dancing on the lotus flower and playing his flute”

  But all of them thought: It is Prabhakaran.

  “We will buy it,” Juliet told Mr Motilal. “It is very beautiful.”

  “Most beautiful, most beautiful,” he agreed.

  David lamented in a whisper: “I wish we could afford the ivory swing.”

  Juliet looked at it again, saw the daze in Radha’s eyes as she swayed forever between poles, unable to stop, unable to get off. She glanced back at the batik where Radha was tangled with her consort, helplessly as ivy around a trellis. And Krishna, feeling the restive tremor in her limbs, would be thinking fondly of how she clung to him, how she needed him.

  Mr Motilal offered the flute player, boxed and wrapped.

  “I’ll leave you then,” David said, as the outside heat swallowed them whole, “to tape those Brahmin priests I’ve been meeting with. Some fascinating oral variants.”

  He kissed the children, brushed Juliet’s cheek with his lips. “You’ll manage?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  He left with his tape recorder and she walked towards the market place with the children.

  “One dozen hens’ eggs,” she ordered in her carefully rehearsed Malayalam.

  The egg man laughed because she could not master one of the several l’s, the one that had to be mysteriously rolled at the back of the mouth rather like a Scottish r.

  He sat cross-legged on a small wooden platform under an awning of coconut thatch. In front of him were two huge baskets. The eggs in one were about the size Juliet thought of as regular or medium. Those in the other basket were tiny, like large pigeon eggs. The old man made a cone with a sheet of newspaper, gently placed a dozen eggs in it, and tied it ingeniously with thin twine. He chose the tiny eggs but Juliet now knew better than to ask for the others. They were ducks’ eggs, porous and likely to be impregnated with whatever impurities were on the ground where they had been laid. She had learned this from the doctor who treated them after they had eaten the wrong eggs. She tried not to think of all the other unknown depredations that were perhaps being made daily on their health.

  “Six rupees,” said the egg man.

  “Last week it was five.”

  The egg man raised his eyes to heaven in a gesture of melancholy resignation.

  “Life is difficult,” he sighed. “Like midday ground mists after monsoon rain, prices go only upwards.”

  A young Indian woman of striking beauty was standing beside Juliet. She now said something to the egg man. The words were too rapid for Juliet to unravel, but the woman turned and spoke to her in unexpectedly good English.

  “He is being shameful. Most wicked. He is doing it because you are a foreigner. The real price is four rupees. You must not pay him more than four. Also,” she added, “you must have a servant. The marketing is too difficult for you. Even Indian ladies are not doing it. It is a skill of the marketing servants. Then you will not be cheated.”

  She smiled and moved away. Juliet was conscious of her gorgeous sari of Benares silk, of her lavish jewellery. A small stir of excitement, of stares and whispers, moved with the woman like an attendant breeze. Such splendor was rare at Palayam Market.

  The egg man waited impassively. For Juliet and the children he had become a sort of friend, one of the fixed points in the slow equatorial week. He no longer stared at them rudely, he did not molest them by touching their fair hair and faces, he simply sold them eggs and made small conversation. They were deeply grateful for such fragments of normal interaction. It was well worth two rupees extra. Yet Juliet would lose standing and respect in the market if she showed herself stupid, unable to bargain. In the next little bower, the merchant of rice and gram stood watching and listening.

  On the other hand, what were two rupees to a Westerner? It seemed only right to pay a little more. She did not wish to appear ungenerous. Nor too patronizing. These were complex and swift inner calculations.

  “Each week I will pay you five rupees and fifty paise,” she said. “You must not ask for more.”

  The egg man and the rice merchant smiled. The solution pleased them.

  But then the eggs were lost. To an accompanying cacophony of megaphones, a gust of demonstrators erupted into the market and in the scuffle Juliet and the children were knocked back against the stalls. Juliet tripped in the open gutter that ran along the storefronts, sinking to the ankles in vegetable slops and excrement of various human and animal kinds, pitching the delicate cone of eggs to the ground. She stepped out gingerly leaving her sandals in the slime. A new pair could be bought for a few rupees from one of the cobblers in the market.

  It was not a particularly significant or alarming incident, demonstrations of one kind or another being an almost daily event. She understood that the buffeting was an accidental side skirmish, that the main rout was heading up Mahatma Gandhi Road towards the tourist hotel and the Air India offices. Scores of red banners bearing a sickle crossed with a stalk of rice (instead of a hammer) fluttered over the marching chanting heads. There were other banners printed in Malayalam script, the swirls and scrolls of which were impenetrable to Juliet who had learned what she knew of the language by ear.

  “What do the signs say?” Juliet asked the egg man.

  He gazed at heaven and shrugged. He could not read.

  “I don’t suppose it’s anything to worry about,” she told the children.

  One of the side-tracked demonstrators who had been catapulted into the narrow market entrance was brushing the dust from Miranda. He was stroking her cheeks gently in a wondering way. On such occasions Miranda, actually acutely embarrassed, would smile back with a sort of translucent shyness that was probably mesmerizing. Juliet had learned that to wander around South India with children was like wearing a magic amulet of protection. A woman alone faced endless difficulties but the presence of children was safer than chanting a mantra.

  “
It’s all right. No harm done,” Juliet told the marcher. “Except for the eggs,” she added forlornly.

  She offered another five rupees and fifty paise to the egg man. “Is the woman trying to cheat you?” the marcher asked sharply, turning from Miranda.

  He used a coarse Malayalam word for woman, and Juliet flinched.

  “She is not cheating me,” the egg man said simply.

  “Why do you insult me?”

  “Your children are beautiful as young nutmeg plants,” the marcher said. “They have never cried for rice.”

  “That is true,” she acknowledged nervously. “But nor have the children of the Nairs or the Brahmins.”

  “It is so. But you people, you want … what is it you are saying? You want to put the whole world inside your own pockets.”

  “We people?”

  “The imperialists.”

  “Oh! That’s not how I see myself.”

  “Nevertheless you are one of them. And when the forest burns, the sweet sandalwood falls also with the ancient jack tree that has already rotted.”

  “Exactly. That is the trouble with forest fires. Doesn’t it bother you, this indiscriminate destruction?”

  He did not like to have his image turned around. He spat on the ground.

  “Are we in danger then?” she asked.

  “Who can say?”

  She felt, at that moment, more angry than frightened.

  “I am hoping perhaps you are not,” he added gruffly, moving away to rejoin the demonstration.

  “Have your children ever cried for rice?” Juliet asked the egg man.

  “In the bad years they have cried, and some have died,” he said. “But there have been good monsoons for many years, praise be to Lord Narayana.”

  “Do you believe that the Marxists can find rice for everyone when the monsoon fails?”