“Yes, yes. It is very bad, very bad. It is not natural between monsoons, all this rain. But when dharma is not followed, everyone is suffering. Truth is broken. Nothing is keeping in correct bounds, people or monsoons.”
She was taken aback by the sudden darkness of his mood. And bewildered.
“How has dharma been broken?”
He did not answer but looked with hostility across at the forest beyond the paddy.
He means Yashoda, she realized uneasily. He must know about the market escapade. Did he see her with David the other morning? How long had they talked?
Shivaraman Nair clapped his hands sharply and called an order to one of his superintendents. The man in turn clapped his hands and relayed the order to the workers in the field, who began to assemble before the neatly stacked piles of cut rice on the levee.
The sun was high in the sky now, too savage for working under. Daily wages were to be meted out. Each worker received a small bundle of rice to carry home to her mud hut where she would thresh it and winnow it and cook it for her family. Obviously, Juliet thought, there is scant insurance against tomorrow’s hunger.
Although the workers and Shivaraman Nair were within hearing distance of each other, all queries were addressed to the superintendent who relayed the messages back to Shivaraman Nair. There was something comical about it, and it was silly and inefficient, a throwback, perhaps unconscious, to the days when Untouchables could be cut down with a naked sword for coming within ninety-six paces of a Brahmin or forty paces of a Nair.
Shivaraman Nair was unaware of Juliet now, intent on dispensing wages and decisions which he doubtless felt to be just and equitable.
She made her way carefully along the serpentine levees towards the forest beyond the paddy.
18
The forest was different. Juliet stepped outside of time altogether, even out of Indian time which drowsed along slipshod and haphazard from dawn to sunset. The forest was dank and dark and secret. The sun itself, that blatant strutting tyrant of the paddy, could only peep through its chinks like a voyeur.
Of course this was where the lovers of Shivaraman Nair’s movie would come, thought Juliet. Of course it was where all lovers would come. It was where Radha would wait for Krishna, perfumed and ornamented, pining on her bed of springy pond reeds, her kohl-lined eyes darting along the path, the little bells on the slender golden chain about her waist tinkling impatiently.
Juliet breathed in the damp pungent smell of vines and fungi, the fragrance of bushes which still flowered in bright splashes where the sun fingered them through gaps in the treetops. In front of her feet the decaying ground cover suddenly heaved and rustled. She froze and watched the undulation glide away under the trees. Snake!
She rallied herself: Yashoda walks here every day. She licked her dry lips and walked on again. At first she thought it must be her imagination but then she was sure she could hear laughter and splashing and now and then a few notes of a flute. She reached the edge of the clearing and stood hidden behind a screen of ferns, feeling like an intruder.
The house was small with large thatched eaves that kept it in shadow. It was of hand-made sun-dried brick, thickly whitewashed, humble and traditional, not like the newer more splendid houses on the estate. It was in fact one of the original houses of the old Nair tarawad, that social and political unit of the extended family which, like the estate itself, had been broken up considerably over the last fifty years.
Beside the house was the obligatory well and beside that a small pond, or lake, actually the original family tank used for ritual bathing before puja. Yashoda was swimming in it, or playing, only her head and shoulders visible, and Prabhakaran was standing at the edge doing little frolicking dance steps, intermittently playing a few bars on his flute, but interrupting himself with peals of laughter. He seemed to be teasing her, chanting something, advancing to the water’s edge, fluting, laughing, retreating. Every time he advanced, Yashoda would slap the surface of the water hard with both hands and splash him. She was laughing and scolding.
Juliet watched with amazement. She was certain that it was highly irregular for a Nair lady to flirt and play with a servant boy in this way. She could not translate what they were calling out to each other because they were speaking so rapidly in the shrieking high-pitched rhythms of excitement and merriment.
Then Yashoda lifted both arms high in order to splash Prabhakaran and Juliet’s eyes widened as she saw Yashoda’s breasts rise out of the water.
It was only for a moment.
Now the water lapped her shoulders again and her black hair floated around her like a dark lily pad.
Juliet looked about, puzzled, and finally saw the sari fluttering like a streamer from high in a mango tree.
He has stolen her clothes, she realized. Prabhakaran has climbed the tree and put her sari out of reach. That is what the teasing and scolding is about.
Juliet had often seen women bathing in India, at public wells, in village streams, in temple tanks, in the ocean. They always did so fully clothed, their wet saris wrapping their bodies like an extra skin. Yashoda must surely have come to take for granted the isolation of her daily existence. Yet she did not seem to be offended by Prabhakaran’s presence. In fact she was clearly enjoying herself, flirtatious and excited as a schoolgirl.
Of course, Juliet reminded herself, Prabhakaran has seen me naked, and I was the only one disconcerted. Perhaps it meant nothing to Yashoda because he was just a servant. Or just a child. Perhaps for someone young and beautiful and sensual and condemned to widowhood, it was a safe sexual outlet.
She remembered their meeting on the path outside her house, one early morning when Prabhakaran had offered milk. There was certainly some bond of affection between them, that of an abandoned child and a young woman yearning for motherhood perhaps, or simply the kinship of two lost and lonely children. If society had already tossed Yashoda carelessly outside its barriers, perhaps the codes of class and caste no longer had any hold over her. A friend was a friend.
It seemed to Juliet, watching them, that they were two children, pure and undefiled, playing harmless games in a paradisal garden. She turned silently, like a guilty voyeur from a sacred scene, and made her way back through the forest, watching for snakes.
And with the dark swiftness of a snake the air ahead of her moved. Took shape, erect and swaying like a cobra. She felt the dizzying reverse jerk of her blood against the body’s momentum.
But it was Shivaraman Nair, equally startled, entering from the paddy. Looming with threat. She slid into a different fear, an anxiety to protect.
“You frightened me! I thought you were a snake,” she said, laughing a little, breathless.
He seemed more disoriented than she was. His eyes had not adjusted, she was still part of the shadows. And with the sun behind him like an excessively bright halo, he seemed to her simply a black portent, unreadable.
He recovered himself at last. “You have been visiting my kinswoman.”
“Yes.” She had to stall him. Lure him into conversation. “It is difficult for us … for me … for a western woman … to understand why … It seems to us very unfair, this isolation.”
He did not answer but nor did he make any attempt to continue on his way. He seemed as reluctant to move as she was. The long pause made her nervous.
“Your customs are so … puzzling to us. For example, this practice of confining young widows …” If he could just be tempted into lengthy explanation and defense.
But he was abrupt, irritated. “You are married, Mrs David Juliet. You are also a mother, yes, you are being a good mother. Even though you are having wrong habits of lacking in respect for men, you are a virtuous woman. Yes, yes, that is my opinion. Therefore you are not understanding the ways of such a woman as my kinswoman.”
“What do you mean?”
“A woman like that, so soon after the death of her husband, to show no respect. There is no goodness in her. Who can tell what such a
one will do? You are not understanding that sort of woman, Mrs David Juliet. Their thoughts wander after men, straying in all directions like the roots of the banyan tree. This rottenness will spread, everything will suffer.”
How unjust, she raged, shaking with suppressed anger. How primitively male! And yet, and yet, scandal will inevitably cling to Yashoda. She is too beautiful for her own safety. David is mesmerized. Even I am under her spell. Even Shivaraman Nair?
And he would stride on towards the pond, his crass suspicions glibly confirmed. “Have you come to take her away again?” she asked, playing for time.
“No, no! No, no!” His vehemence bewildered her. “You are quite wrong, Mrs David Juliet. I was not visiting my kinswoman. Not at all. I am inspecting the timber of my forest.”
“Oh.”
Why such energy of denial?
A disturbing thought presented itself, but she brushed it aside as improbable. Surely it was only her febrile imagination.
He scared her then by a sudden roar of anger. She could not think what she had done, but she was not the object of his wrath. Her delaying tactic had been overly successful. Prabhakaran was behind her on the path, snap-frozen, suspended in flight like a statue of winged Mercury.
Shivaraman Nair spoke volubly raging as white water, spitting and foaming and unintelligible in Malayalam. Prabhakaran trembled visibly, a dark blush spread across his face and seemed to cover his bare torso like a rash. Shivaraman Nair reached the climax of his crescendo of fury, clapped his hands sharply, and Prabhakaran came to life again, fleeing.
“Who can tell what that woman will do!” stormed Shivaraman Nair. “Everything is breaking its bounds! With a peon! A peon! That boy is no good, Mrs David Juliet. He is lazy. There must be more work for him. There must be no more taxis. He is a peon. Please be remembering!”
He turned and strode back towards the paddy smashing ferns with his feet.
Barbarian! she fumed silently.
When Prabhakaran came with the evening milk she took him aside.
“Has there been trouble for you? What did Shivaraman Nair say to you?”
The blush spread over his body again and he trembled. He would not speak.
“Did he say you were lazy?”
He nodded.
“That is not true, Prabhakaran. You are a hard worker, a good worker. To us it seems that you work much too hard. Is that all he said?”
He shook his head.
“What else?”
Silence.
“I cannot tell you,” he said at last, miserably tearful.
He is a child, a child, she thought with anguish. And he has been accused of adult misbehaviour. He may not even understand. He has no one to talk to, no parent to offer refuge. She put her arm around his shoulders.
“Would you like to stay here tonight?”
“Venda, venda ” he replied nervously backing away, Adult. Distanced. With responsibilities of his own. “I must stay near the cows.”
Jonathan and Miranda were calling from the bedroom: Story time! Story time!
“Stay and hear a story before you go then.”
And he smiled and became a child again, joining the huddled circle on Jonathan’s bed, waiting for Jonathan’s translations and subtitles, eyes widening at the adventures of those children who found a magic door in the back of a closet and slipped through it into a secret and fabulous world.
19
Time smoked around Juliet like the vapours that followed the rains. What day of the week was it? What month of the year? Only the hours had their seasons and identities: the dawn of Prabhakaran’s arrival with milk; the morning’s agony of scrubbing with swollen knuckles; the recess of lime drinks and lowing cows; the school work; the long slow dance with paddy rice and coconuts to prepare the evening meal; the coolness of the grove at dusk; story time; the damp sleep of exhaustion.
Then begin again, begin again, begin again.
And the paths that snaked between the coconut palms radiated out to the rest of the city like tongues licking at fragments of events, before curling back in upon themselves, folding their garnered morsels into the blurred cave of Juliet’s heat-stunned memory. Down some of the paths Annie was coming towards her, forever in slow motion, never getting any closer. On others, braiding themselves around the market, the abrasive young student led chanting cohorts. Somewhere Mr Matthew Thomas beckoned graciously, promising coolness and safety. And always Yashoda flitted back and forth between the trees like a woman on an ivory swing — translucent, a trick of the light, an artist’s fantasy.
Was it real, that flash of silk under the areca fronds? There! Over there! Now darting, kingfisher blue, beside the paddy.
Or was it part of the dream? Of the soft-edged mirage of time passing?
The cows were real, that was certain. She had clothing with chewed-up sleeves to prove it. (There was always too much laundry for the coir rope on the roof, always something that had to be draped on the trees in the courtyard.) And Prabhakaran was real because the milk came each morning.
He had told her a strange story which was surely part of her dream. Though he had been insistent and voluble. Yashoda, he said, had asked him to bring her astrologer secretly to the house beyond the forest. Much money had been given and a horoscope had been cast.
It was difficult for Juliet — even with the mediation and translation of Jonathan and Miranda, who could communicate with Prabhakaran in that astonishing way of children — to piece together the prediction for which gold bracelets had been tendered.
It seemed that Yashoda had asked what would happen if she appeared in public again.
In spite of opposition, the astrologer had said, her future was looking most auspicious. There was a certain conjunction of stars in her sign, indicating both the coming of love and some great upheaval over which she would no doubt triumph. A fair woman and a messenger boy were indicated. (Myself and Prabhakaran, Juliet thought instinctively. And then, shaking the heat from her brain with irritable cynicism: How transparent those astrologers are. They don’t even need to be unusually observant.)
An older man was also indicated, Prabhakaran reported. All these would be figures of power. (Is she weaving a net for David? Juliet wondered wryly. Or is it Shivaraman Nair?)
There was an area of darkness, a death — here Prabhakaran had shivered and spat, but Juliet thought: It is the death of her husband; it is already in the past; oh cunning astrologer!
At the appropriate time — and this, Prabhakaran said, had been calculated for an additional fee — Yashoda should again venture out to the public road. Although her kinsman would be angry he would be unable to harm her on that particular day because of an auspicious meeting with one of the figures of power.
(Will she waylay David in the grove again? Juliet asked herself. Or will I be the one who is expected to perform miracles?)
But it was Annie who arrived on the day designated by the astrologer, Annie who burst like a trajectory of reality into the haze of Juliet’s dreamtime. Jonathan and Miranda saw her from the roof top where they were playing.
“It’s Annie!” they shrieked, pelting down the stairs. “Annie’s here!”
Juliet peered through the grove. How lightly Annie moves, she thought with envy. No baggage. No encumbrances. A new breed, by the luck of birth year.
Annie, who was disgustingly exuberant, scooped up the children and bear-hugged them, swirled Juliet into a dance of excessive high spirits. “Oh, isn’t this country gorgeous? I never want to leave. You must be practically delirious with happiness living in the middle of these coconut trees.”
Imagine, Juliet thought, at my age, tasting the vinegar of sibling rivalry. There I am: my younger self, my road not taken. How unfairly radiant. How immoderately certain that the world is a lucky charm dangling from her wrist.
“Yes,” she said sardonically. “Delirium is a daily hazard.”
“It’s so … so pristine! No western ugliness or cultural clutter or inhibitions! So
… untrammelled!”
Juliet thought: Surely I was never quite so embarrassingly glib about everything non-western and non-middle class? “Untrammelled! Perhaps you should take your blinkers off.”
Annie’s eyebrows pleated themselves in bewilderment. “Is something bothering you?”
“It’s just that your euphoria is based on a degree of ignorance you should be ashamed of.” Juliet had a barely conscious awareness of pitching about like a kite in storm winds, but careened blindly on. “It’s slightly sickening.”
Annie stared. “What on earth is the matter with you?”
Embarrassed, Juliet would, at this point, have shaken off the prickly-heat of irritability if Annie had not touched a certain nerve with a sister’s deadly aim.
“The Winston dowager herself! God, you’re stuffy sometimes. And a middle-aged bore.”
Reeling, Juliet thought: Can it be horribly true? Am I smeared with Winston as with birdlime? Will I break out in white gloves?
“Look!” she countered angrily. “Within blowing distance of your hot air, there are serfs and a widow who may as well have her feet bound. Come and be introduced to reality.”
“Maybe I’ll just take the train right back to the ashram in Pondicherry.”
“Oh perfect. Do that. Go live it up with a bunch of affluent western drifters getting high on meditation and self-indulgence and sex. That’s more your style, Annie. I wouldn’t want to confuse you with a few harsh truths.”
“God, you’re a mouthy bitch! And to think all my life I’ve lived in your shadow. To think I’ve envied you. To think I’ve wasted years feeling a failure because of you!”
“You’ve what?”
“Years of Mother saying: ‘When are you going to settle down like Juliet?’ ‘When are you going to give us grandchildren?’ ‘When are you going to become responsible like Juliet?’ ‘When are you going to realize that you can combine commitment with career (with a moderate career, placed in the right perspective!) like Juliet?’ When are you going to become goddam bloody perfect like Juliet?”
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