“Ah. Vermont is very beautiful. If you visit her, you must go in the fall when the leaves change colour”
What astonishing things the woman said! If he were visiting his daughter!
“What is your daughter’s name?”
“Kumari. And I myself am being Mr Matthew Thomas, who is now humbly requesting the honour of knowing your name.”
“It’s Juliet,” she said, unable to match his quaint and charming verbal flourishes.
“I am very happy to be meeting you, Mrs Juliet.”
They walked on in silence. But it seemed a friendly companionable silence.
Mr Thomas marvelled. Who would have dreamed that he would be walking and talking like a kinsman with someone who knew of Burlingtonvermont. It was quite astonishing how simple it was to talk to a western woman.
“My daughter Kumari is going to have a baby,” he said.
“Ah. Your first grandchild?”
“No, no. I am having already seven grandchildren. But this will be my first American grandchild.”
She smiled. “Then you will be visiting them.”
He looked at her with amazement. “How could I do that?”
“It is so expensive,” she said contritely. “Perhaps it will be easier for her to visit you. If her husband is on an American salary.”
“It is not that,” he said. “I am having sufficient money.”
It was simply that he had never thought of it, and now he wondered why.
“You don’t wish to visit them?”
“I do not know,” he said uncertainly.
It was such a novel idea. He could not grasp it properly. His mind did not know how to hold it. It shivered about like quicksilver, tantalizing.
“And why,” he thought to ask, “are you living in this country? Your husband is doing something with the government?”
“No. With the university. He is writing a book.”
She looked at the sun falling into the sea, slow and smouldering, like a spent cannonball.
“I must go.”
“Where are you living?”
“At Krishnapuram. On the estates of Shivaraman Nair.”
“I will send an invitation. There are many things I am wishing to ask you about Burlingtonvermont. If you will graciously come to my house one day, perhaps we could speak of these things.”
“With pleasure.”
He regretted that he had given way to irritation at the Air India office. One needed only a little patience for auspicious purposes to reveal themselves.
9
The sound of the flute came keening into her sleep like a jewelled arrow. It had a bass accompaniment, a peculiar low throbbing sound that reverberated in the walls of the house. Her first thought was: it is the trumpeting of elephants.
She peered out through the ground mists and coconut trees. A gilded figure was tripping and dancing through the palms — Prabhakaran, clothed in sunrise and the music of boyhood abandon. Around and behind him six cows, moving soft and slow as velvet, gave their low vibrating responses to his melody. Exquisite as a page in an illuminated manuscript, she thought. The cowherd boy with his flute.
He was carrying the little vessel of milk in the crook of his arm, pressed against his body, to free both hands for the instrument. He is sure to spill some, she thought, watching him skip between the cattle with the exuberance of morning. She wondered why he was bringing the cows. They usually remained tethered in the courtyard behind Shivaraman Nair’s house. It was Prabhakaran’s task to feed them each day with the hay left after the rice threshing.
There was a pause in his fluting. A woman had appeared from the direction of the rice paddy, walking quickly and lightly. She had pulled the upper part of her sari over her head like a veil.
It must be Yashoda, Juliet thought. She had not seen Yashoda since the day of the stoning though she had twice tried to visit her. The first time, Jati, daughter of Shivaraman Nair, had come from the house to meet her.
“My cousin is ill,” she had said. “She is not able to receive any visitors.”
A few days later, Juliet had again entered the little forest beyond the rice paddy. The house had been deserted except for an elderly maidservant who told her that the mistress had gone to stay with her husbands family.
The woman now stopped to speak with Prabhakaran. After several minutes of conversation, Juliet saw the boy offer her the pot of milk. She held it high and tilted, a few inches from her lips to avoid pollution, and drank a little of the white stream which poured from it. She gave the vessel back to Prabhakaran and patted his head in an affectionate motherly way and stroked his face. Juliet saw the gleaming flash of the boy’s smile. She was puzzled because she was certain it was highly irregular for a high-caste woman to accept food from a low-caste servant, an act which would be considered a form of ritual pollution.
A moment later the woman hurried away through the trees and Prabhakaran came on towards the house with cows and milk and flute.
“Milk,” he smiled as he handed the vessel to Juliet.
“Pahl,” she replied. “Ubagaram. Was that Yashoda you met on the path?”
He looked troubled and did not answer.
“I am not going to tell Shivaraman Nair.”
He smiled gratefully.
“Yashoda,” he assented.
She took the milk to the kitchen and emptied it into her cooking pot. He had already followed her and begun sweeping around her feet. With a flicker of annoyance she thought: He is like a shadow.
“Why did you bring the cows?”
He answered at length and with enthusiasm, but she could understand very little of his dialect. She went to the door. The cows were wandering around the house, cropping the grass. She supposed he wanted them to have fresh greens as a change from threshing-hay. Or perhaps he merely wanted their company. He spent so much time with them each day, feeding them, murmuring to them, fondling them, that they must have seemed like siblings to him.
David and the children woke. They dressed. They had breakfast. While they dressed Prabhakaran swept the bathroom. While they washed he swept the bedroom. He wandered into private moments by mistake, but he was never embarrassed. He was not used to his presence having significance to anyone.
While they ate he swept around and between them and crawled under the table to sweep away crumbs. The palm-branch switches tickled their bare feet. When the children read or did their school work, he would stand silently watching for hours, distracting them, slowly twitching his broom to flick dust from the window bars — those ubiquitous rungs which guard all the openings in India, keeping beggars at bay, wooing infant breezes through their spaces as cobwebs lure flies.
They became used to Prabhakaran’s presence, but not in the way one is supposed to become used to servants. There were times when Juliet’s impulse was to treat him as she treated her own children in their maddening moments, to bestow a quick hug and say: Prabhakaran, I love you but you are driving me crazy! Just go outside and leave me alone for a while.
But India had made them hyperconscious of body movements and human touch as highly ritualized cultural phenomena.
Once she had asked Anand how to say: Please do not sweep in the house while the children are doing their school work.
For a start, Anand had explained, there was no equivalent for please. It all depended on the form of the verb. One verbal ending intimated a polite request. This would be used in conversation with equals. It would be quite improper to use this construction when speaking to a servant. The other verb form signified an order. Juliet could not bring herself to be peremptory with him, so Prabhakaran seemed always to be present.
Juliet was disoriented. On those occasions when he blundered into intimate moments, she no longer felt shock or outrage but a brooding unease. Individual privacy, she thought, is as western as television. We are unable to divest ourselves of the need for it. We are addicted to the luxury of choosing when we will be unobserved.
Perhaps one absorbed the pressur
es or spaces of population density at birth, by osmosis, in the air, in mother’s milk.
Servants do not make life simpler, she saw. They complicate. They encroach and invade and disrupt. Unless of course one could manage to ignore them completely, treat them as non-persons. That was a skill handed down through the high castes for centuries. Common to people of wealth and privilege all over the world, she supposed.
Once, on a day of steaming monsoon heat, with the sweat glistening all over his body, Prabhakaran had crumpled over his coconut-switch broom in the middle of the floor. He was still coiled up in the foetal position required by his method of sweeping. Juliet was in an anguish of remorse. She lifted him onto a wicker chair, turned on the ceiling fan, and wiped his face with a damp cloth. He leapt into consciousness.
“Venda! Venda!” he cried in alarm, grabbing his broom and sweeping with a frantic renewal of energy. “Venda!” You must not!
“Don’t be stupid,” she said crossly. “Sit! Rest!”
But he had only swept more furiously, muttering, “Venda, venda!”
The cows were still cropping grass by the front door and lowing in at the windows. David left for the day and Juliet sent the children and Prabhakaran to the rice paddy while she did the laundry.
It was heavy work, crouching over the low sink, scrubbing and pounding in cold water, a daily wrestling match with sheets and towels and clothing that could never be freed of the stink of excessively humid air. As futile a task as Lady Macbeth’s hand washing.
With a vessel full and heavy on her hip, she climbed to the roof and hung the washing over a coir rope strung between bamboo poles. There were no pegs and the rope stained the clothes but it was the best she could do. She ran out of space so she climbed down again and draped the rest of the sheets over the branches of a low mango tree in the back courtyard.
Then she gathered all the sandals not being worn that day and took them up to the roof to bake on the tile under the sun. If she neglected to do this, green mould would sprout from the leather and die shoes would look like living things, bewitched forest creatures.
The three children came running back from the rice paddy with scummy water and aquatic life in their cupped hands to show Juliet their treasures.
“Drop it! Scrub your hands!” she said, exasperated. “How many times must I tell you that water is polluted! The sewer water from all the houses drains into the paddy. It is chock full of god knows what diseases.”
Jonathan and Miranda exchanged a resigned look and settled in to their correspondence lessons and Prabhakaran dusted the window bars. Or stood looking over Jonathan’s shoulder, dazzled by the speed at which he filled a page with hieroglyphs, until Jonathan gave him a pencil and showed him how to write.
“House. This is a house. H-o-u-s-e.”
“Vitu, vitu,” Prabhakaran said, as he laboriously made an H. But he could not demonstrate how to write vitu in Malayalam script. Much giggling and whispering.
And Juliet, abstracted teacher, smiled on them and tried to write letters.
Dear Jeremy, she wrote. You were right. I am pining for books and snow and most of all for rationality. It isn’t quite the lively adventure I was hoping for. I have been absorbed into the growth cycle, smothered by vines. I seem to be headed for imminent harvest and decay.
She tore up the letter.
Dear Annie, she wrote. Upon reflection, I think your coming is an excellent idea. I definitely need adult company. (David is so busy, away at the university, touring the villages, etc.) I seem to be slipping inside the children somehow. We are never apart, all the old rhythms shattered. I am losing all sense of separateness.
I look like — I am — a drudge, growing mould and changing shape like the shoes. Really, nonentity is contagious here. Even the massive trees are swallowed up by creepers.
I sometimes fear I will disappear just like that. Yesterday there was a large dead toad on the bathroom floor. From nowhere, battalions of ants appeared. It was all over in about an hour. No vestige of that huge squashed creature, not a single stray ant in sight, Do you see what I mean? No wonder that extreme forms of meditation and withdrawal flourish here. The days are drugged; memory is one more mirage. Are you really coming or did I dream it? Yours faintly, Juliet.
Dear David, she wrote. Is there any point to this? I thought of India as a place of risk and dazzle, a place where I could feel at home for once and still be with you. It’s more like a coma.
You seem dazed with heat and research and have forgotten I hoped for elephants and bazaars. Memory, like everything else, is so tiring here. (Not that you’ve ever remembered my complaints of deprivation. You believe in Original Goodness, you believe contentment runs in everyone’s veins, you remember only epiphanies, you are not an impartial scorekeeper.)
I’m not blaming you but I need to get away, away from all this domestic lassitude, here or in Winston, what’s the difference? I need a rest, I need some peace, I need the frenzied hub of a city.
I’m not blaming you, it’s entirely my own fault. I should never have come, I should never have gone to Winston, you were absolutely right about that twelve years ago, that day on the subway. Remember?
Anyway, I quit. I concede defeat. I am unregenerately urban, I pine for those places that inspire editorial laments in newspapers: the derelict overcrowded arteries of sprawling cities that heave untidily with history and event and garbage strikes and miraculous chance encounters.
I will grieve for you of course, I will grieve for the shattered unity of the four of us, Just as unremittingly as I now grieve for metropolitan ferment. I’ll write every day, I’ll send telegrams, I’ll entice you to Montreal. But just the same, I swear I’ll go. I’m really going to leave. Yours regretfully …
She put Annie’s letter into an envelope and tore up the one to David. She thought of Mary Magdalene shutting her ears to the tavern music. She thought of Radha hopelessly knotted into Krishna, going nowhere on her ivory swing, forever vacillating between untenable poles. She thought of that long-gone day on the Toronto subway that day of momentous choice …
It was the rush-hour embrace and collision of bodies on the Yonge Street line, the hour of armpits and strap-hanging and suffocation. Loving it, Juliet let the sway of the carriage press her against David’s body, wondering wickedly: Is it possible to disconcert him physically? Or is he pure as a choirboy, impervious?
Several months before they had met by chance in a gallery of fine arts. Juliet had been pacing from room to room, unseeing, because it was a day following one of those nights when Jeremy had not returned to the apartment, not even for breakfast. Not that this was something she had any right to be upset about. It was not a question of infidelity. They were not — as Jeremy put it — trying for permanence. They were merely celebrants of the present moment, they were open and free, and these things (these absences for which no one was accountable) were of no consequence. Except that in their wake Juliet suffered from something like vertigo, some sickening loss of balance, something anachronistic and primitive and shameful that one would no more admit to than announce a belief in the Flat Earth Society.
On her sixth circuit of the gallery — filling in the abyss of a lunch hour with movement so that she would not call Jeremy at his office — she saw that the absorbed young man in the Indus Valley Artefacts room was still standing as though in a trance before one of the glass cases. The man himself, she thought, was certainly the room’s most interesting objet d’art. Rodin’s Thinker standing up, perhaps. No. A far more striking blend of the ascetic and the sensual, something from the Quattrocento in Florence: St John in the wilderness, stuffing himself with wild honey; or St Sebastian waiting passionately for the arrows as for lovers.
It’s his stillness that attracts, she thought, tilting her head to one side in appraisal. And his eyes: intense as lasers, liquid as dark honey. Yes, she had seen his kind on the walls of the Uffizi: all those Portraits of a Young Man, by Gozzoli and Fra Lippi.
He must ha
ve sensed her scrutiny because he turned, embarrassed, and murmured apologetically: “I’m sorry. I’m blocking your view. Selfish of me.”
“No, please! Not at all.”
But she was curious to know what had held him in such absorption. It was a bronze figurine of a dancing girl, less than six inches high, her body gaunt as spring twigs, her breasts like not-yet-ripened crab apples.
“What is so special about her?” Juliet asked. “I mean, she’s graceful, but a trifle anorexic, don’t you think?”
The man who had floated down from an Uffizi canvas winced.
“She was cast in bronze early in the second millennium BC,” he said reverently. “Close to four thousand years between the artist and us, and here we stand inches away from her. I call that” — he searched for a word — “a sacrament of history.”
She raised her eyebrows in wry amazement. Is he real? she wondered.
“Look at her face,” he said.
She looked and hazarded: “It’s sort of Negroid. Flanged nostrils and lips. And she certainly doesn’t approve of being stared at.”
“Pre-Dravidian. And after her there was nothing for fifteen hundred years. Think of it. Not a single artefact for all that time! And then suddenly a carnal explosion at Mathura and Sanchi — all those bountiful breasts and buttocks that crowd the stupas and temples. It’s a different iconography entirely. This one’s so exquisitely non-voluptuous. She was probably a sacred prostitute,”
“Really?” Juliet looked at the miniature, at the naked boyish figure, with fresh interest.
“Yes. We deduce it from the bracelets and their ritual arrangement. And the stylized pose.”
The dancer’s matchstick left arm was sheathed from shoulder to wrist in bangles. An armour against what? Suddenly the awe of the gentle pedant beside her settled on Juliet like a mist of light. She was drawn into the magic.
Who was the woman, the actual flesh-and-blood woman, who four thousand years ago had tossed her head back with that look of disdain? For what priests or lesser men did she dance clad in nothing but bracelets? And what was she thinking when she jutted out her pelvis like that, its cleft visible and taunting? Did she despise the watching male eyes? Did she dream of enticement or of smashing, with her jewel-mailed arm and her fist clenched like a boxing glove?
The Ivory Swing Page 6