“Oh Annie! I never forgive anyone who makes me cry.” She threw her arms around her sister. “I am a mouthy bitch. I’m out of my mind with heat and isolation. Don’t you realize I’ve been jealous of you for years?”
“That’s a laugh! Of what? Of my trail of busted relationships? Of my solitary chain-smoking nights?”
“But you’ve always been free as a bird. You walk away with a shrug and a laugh, you can’t be touched. You’re unhurtable.” Like Jeremy. It was still a secret obsession: to find a chink in his armour. Not for revenge, not to cause chaos. Just to know if he had ever once tossed at night because of her.
Annie laughed. “We learn the skills for our own survival. I’ve learned to shrug and walk away with a smile. You think I’m going to wear my heart on my sleeve? I’m a walking armadillo, not a bird, but I’ll keep up a damn good flying act just the same. I do have pride, I’m a hell of an actress. And I will admit I’ve cultivated the art of the present moment. If you’ve got no future, that’s all there is. Seize and enjoy is my motto.”
“Mommy!” Jonathan interposed urgently. “Have you and Annie finished fighting now?”
“You see?” Juliet gestured with her hands remorsefully. “The perfect mother, traumatizing her children with verbal violence. Feel free to tell their grandmother, if it’ll make you feel better.” And, turning to her children: “I’m a little frayed at the edges these days. Sorry. Did I upset you?”
Jonathan’s face was flushed. “Someone is coming.”
It was Yashoda.
“Okay, Annie. Brace yourself for a more jaundiced view of the erotic and pristine East. This is the widow with bound feet and chastity belt.”
Yashoda approached Annie as though Annie were a manifestation of Lakshmi, goddess of good fortune. After introductions, she could not restrain herself.
“Oh Annie, you have come on a special day! You are auspicious. Your power is blazing as the sun when it falls into the ocean at Cape Comorin. You are bringing my freedom!”
Annie laughed, a little embarrassed. “Oh, that’s me, all right. Scattering liberation as I go.”
Auspicious people, Juliet thought sourly, seem to be a dime a dozen.
“Please,” Yashoda begged. “You must all come to my house now. We will have tea.”
“Wonderful,” Annie enthused. “And I’ll regale you with tales of high adventure and forbidden love in Delhi.”
“I hope you’ll make allowances for my sister, Yashoda. She likes to shock. Don’t be offended.”
“Oh I am not offended, no, no! For me it is very exciting listening to this talking.”
Yashoda is like a prisoner on day parole, Juliet thought. Every little thing gives pleasure.
On the way to Yashoda’s house the children, resident experts, gave a running commentary on the house, the lotus pond, the banana clump, the rice paddy. Only when they reached the forest did they fall silent. They had not been in it before. They moved along the track single file, Yashoda leading.
As they neared the clearing the sound of the flute reached them, pure and haunting. Prabhakaran was sitting at the edge of the pond, his feet idly dangling in the water, playing to the lotuses and the tall blue lilies that swayed with every breath of wind.
“How lovely!” whispered Annie. “He looks like Pan.”
Like Blake’s lamb, Juliet thought. Innocence before the Fall. Did he who made the cobra make thee?
“Like Krishna,” Yashoda said.
“Prabhakaran! Prabhakaran! ” the children called, and the image dissolved in laughter and splashing and chasing.
Inside the small house, Yashoda’s maidservant brought tea. Annie gazed around raptly.
“How marvellous to live alone like this in the forest! It makes me think of Thoreau and of Yeats’ isle of Innisfree. You know: And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow … And the small cabin and the lake water lapping. Even Yeats didn’t have lotuses though.”
Juliet partly listened to fragments of conversation, Yashoda’s voice drifting by like a dimly heard flute.
“Our fathers chose for us. I had met him only once before marriage. But I was content because he intended to go to the London School of Economics after graduation. And I wanted very much to go to London. After marriage we had affection for each other.
“Perhaps when Professor David and Juliet are returning to Canada …
“I am very much wanting to experience love.” Yashoda’s voice meandered dreamily on. “When I was studying for my BA, I have read Shakespeare. My favourite was Romeo and Juliet. Also I loved very much Wuthering Heights. That is the sort of love I would like to experience.”
As she talked she was idly playing with the gold chains around her neck. Her hand moved back and forth stroking her glowing coffee-coloured skin, and now, daydreaming, her fingers strayed lower so that she was lightly brushing the upper part of her breasts that swelled above the low-cut sari blouse. It was a totally unselfconscious gesture, solitary, absorbed. There was something infinitely sad and yearning about it, and Juliet and Annie watched her, mesmerized, full of pity.
“Surely there is something we can do,” Annie said.
“Oh I knew you would help me, Annie. If you will protect me, it is possible. Shivaraman Nair can do nothing to you. I do not want to be locked up! I love the noise of the market! I want to go there with you!”
“But Yashoda,” Juliet said nervously. “Shouldn’t we plan something more discreet? It would be very discourteous of us to offend Shivaraman Nair publicly —”
“Oh Juliet, for heavens sake! Politeness can be just another form of cowardice. In fact, I see no reason why you and I shouldn’t go on a trip together, Yashoda. Cape Comorin, why not?”
Yashoda clapped her hands with delight. But then, abruptly, she was frightened by this heady leap from daydream into possibility. The ebb and flow of her courage was tied to a perception of protective magic. “Ah, I cannot! Only today is auspicious. We must go today, or they will send me to Palghat.”
Annie raised one eyebrow. “Yashoda, I have been on trains and buses all day. I’m exhausted. We’ll be just as safe in a few days’ time. There’s nothing they can do to us.”
Annie was so certain, so confident, so invulnerable. What harm could possibly penetrate her aura of safety? Yashoda remembered her astrologers words: A fair woman, a figure of power. She took courage. She felt exhilarated.
“Oh Annie, Annie, thank you. This was a truly auspicious meeting.”
Juliet was silent. She was full of awe for Yashoda’s brave, if somewhat reckless, defiance of centuries of custom. And Annie’s response was no different from her own initial reactions. But she felt washed by a vague sense of dread, a foreboding. The dark hostility of Shivaraman Nair had gradually been seeping deeper into her consciousness, spreading like a contusion. When dharma is broken, everyone is suffering.
In her mind’s eye she saw it again: the bird of paradise mangled on the floor of its cage. Ridiculous, she told herself crossly,
Still, still, persisted the gnawing sense of unease in her gut, it is not that one believes in the custom itself. One is however aware of the power of the society that believes.
But Annie and Yashoda were talking animatedly, trading confidences and intimacies like old friends. Dinesh, the movie playboy in Delhi, was already married apparently, with a wife and children safely tucked into some Punjabi village, but was nevertheless so very available and dashing. Yashoda was listening wide-eyed.
Juliet watched them as from a great distance.
She felt very old, freighted with the knowledge of loss and the awareness of evil and the possibility of harm.
20
Juliet observed David’s startled reaction that evening.
It must have been a shock, she could concede to herself, to come home at dusk and find without warning the three women, animated, like a corona around the oil lamp. And who could blame him for staring at Yashoda, as though at Galatea taking on flesh, perha
ps, and then averting his eyes nervously and guiltily and refusing to look at her again?
She could not blame him. There was that other factor too — she understood it, she empathized. On which side of the line between dream and reality were they at any given moment? In the way he hugged Annie, in the way he held his children, in the way he put his hand tentatively against a wall and pressed it until his knuckles turned white — testing the solidity of things — in the way he kept not looking at Yashoda — as if saying: Is she really here this time? or in my mind? — she recognized an abiding malaise that she shared with him.
They were in the lotus land, the land of sunyasin and meditation, where old men lay on beds of nails; and ropes, so people said, uncoiled themselves upwards into air, where no one could keep track of what was temporal and what was eternal; where things which existed in the mind had more substance than the blurred mirage of the external world.
We drift in a waking sleep, Juliet thought.
That night, under the sluggish fan, David took Juliet with a wildness that was disturbing, almost frightening.
“I love you,” he murmured. Convincing himself. Reciting a protective charm. Whispering a mantra.
When they made love it was as though they were trying to hold a lost civilization between their damp slippery bodies.
Afterwards she asked him: “Will Annie really carry out that mad scheme, do you think? Taking Yashoda with her on a trip? And should we assent?”
The questions seemed to anchor him for a moment in reality.
“Ahh,” he said awkwardly. “They did discuss that, didn’t they? I was only half following … I missed the gist of things.”
“Should we allow it?”
He looked at her blankly, and then rubbed his eyes, trying to summon misplaced critical faculties. He asked uncertainly: “Is it our concern?” Oh but it was, he knew. It was so much and so intensely and so primitively his concern that he was unable to say a word. Yashoda drifted through his mind like a yakshi on a swing, back and forth, mesmeric, a hypnotist’s trick.
“We should discuss it in the morning,” Juliet offered. “When we’re not so drowsy.”
But each morning put on its own fresh vagueness. Only Annie, when she moved, carried the faint echo of energy and decisiveness with her. Her denim jeans smelled faintly of cities and subways, her eyes were unclouded, not bothered as yet by monsoonal fogs. There were moments when she could even, briefly, jolt David and Juliet into debate and disagreement. And then she would skewer them on the rapier of her western certainties: Your judgment is impaired by heat and isolation. You are not being objective.
And perhaps she was right.
Annie and Yashoda went to Cape Comorin for a few days. They hiked through the back of the estate to the Kottayam Road so no one would see them leave. But it was inevitable that Yashoda’s absence would be noted. It was only a matter of time.
I think this is a major mistake, David told himself. The sort of thing that makes the world accuse us of cultural arrogance. But if I had made a serious effort to prevent their going, Yashoda might have misinterpreted me, might have thought I’d changed my mind and wanted … On the other hand she might have felt persecuted, all avenues of escape blocked.
In his heart of hearts he pondered a different, more elemental question. Why did she turn so quickly to someone else? He felt bereft. Jealous. And therefore distrusted all his motives and had done nothing.
And Juliet thought: Of course, Annie is right to pitch in on the rebel side. Women of the world unite, et cetera. I’m afraid of complications myself, and yet I’m glad of someone else’s brash confidence. But she could not escape the conviction: We ought not to be interfering. We are on quicksand. Besides, it is selfish of Annie to flit off so carelessly when I need some time to myself, someone to help with the work and the children.
Her mind wandered to David’s impending temple visit. The long awaited permission had come through, the temple astrologers had calculated the auspicious day and hour. It was to be a momentous occasion, a rare privilege, since the State of Kerala strictly prohibited non-Hindus from entering its shrines.
“Shivaraman Nair is coming,” Jonathan called from the roof.
“I feel so improper with a belt around my dhoti,” David said nervously “Even if it can’t be seen.”
Juliet was busy with camera and light meter, taking readings in the doorway as Shivaraman Nair reached the house.
“Namaskaram,” she said.
“Namaskaram, namaskaram. Mrs David Juliet, you are not going to the temple. Absolutely not possible. It is only Professor David I am taking.”
“I understand.” She fumed silently: Your views on women have already been made quite explicit. “I only want to take a photograph of you and my husband in your dhotis before you leave.”
“Very good, very good,” he boomed, delighted. “Yes, yes, it is auspicious day, auspicious visit. There must be photograph. You will send me a copy, isn’t it?”
“Certainly. Could you stand here, please?”
“Have you taken your bath as I prescribed it, Professor David?”
“Yes, I have done everything you told me.”
“You are looking very fine, very fine, in a dhoti, Professor David.”
“Actually,” David faltered, “I haven’t been able to wear it properly. You see …” lifting back the flap and revealing the illicit belt.
“Ahh! No, no, no! This is not the way. I will do it.”
And Shivaraman Nair swiftly ripped off the offending western item, wrapped, pleated, tucked, stood back.
Juliet readied her camera. And Shivaraman Nair, who was perpetually smiling or storming or guffawing, immediately composed his face into a blank stare. He believed it to be the only suitable expression for something as permanent and momentous and auspicious as a photograph.
Alone again, Juliet thought when they had gone. The men march off to action. Annie and Yashoda are light-years away, And the children and I … the children and I …
She sighed wearily, forgetting how to be annoyed. Soon her ankles would spread roots, she would be knotted into the ravenous earth that sucked at the underside of trees, her hair would bloom extravagantly with jasmine. Perhaps she would smell like sandalwood. Like the sandalwood Krishna who played forever on his silent flute, ceaselessly consoling them for the ivory swing in whose stead he had been purchased.
She took the small carving from its dining-room niche, from the recess where a Nair family shrine would otherwise be, and thought longingly of the air-conditioning in Mr Motilal’s emporium. Radha would still be there, too costly for stray tourists, dizzy on her swing since the days of the Raj, but fanned by the soft breezes of twentieth-century technology.
Juliet scraped the fluting Krishna lightly with her fingernail and the sharp sandalwood fragrance rose thickly and suddenly, a stimulant, invigorating as a breath of city air. She pressed the statue against her cheek and inhaled its spicy essence as though it were a relic of the lost power to make decisions, as though it might impart energy.
Can’t we do something? the children pleaded. Something different? The market or the bazaar or that ice-cream place where Mr Matthew Thomas took us? You promised, you promised.
Yes, do something, that was the answer.
The market, yes …
Only one death, Juliet saw with relief. That’s something.
She was standing with her children and Prabhakaran at the mouth of Palayam Market, the air jagged with screaming. On Mahatma Gandhi Road a bus had plowed into a buffalo cart laden with grain. The blood of the cart driver made red tributaries in the waterfalls of rice that sluiced into the market. She hastily despatched the children to the flower seller’s with some money. She did not want them to see the mashed body when the splintered cart was swept away.
They had watched the bus tipple and rock like a rowboat on the lip of a cataract. But it had stayed upright and the screaming faces pressed against the window bars were now surging out of the na
rrow rear door.
A young man was helping the frailer and more elderly people to disembark. He seemed to sense her scrutiny on the back of his neck. He turned and stared insolently back.
God, she thought, dismayed, wrenching her eyes away. I’m part of the climate. I stare as rudely as everyone stares at me.
“Come on!” she called to the children. “Let’s visit the egg man.” But the young man’s face? It kept turning up like a market-place refrain.
“I see you are having a servant. These are the ways of imperialists. And of the friends of the Nairs.”
It was their abrasive and impetuous rescuer, who had abandoned them in a taxi. Juliet was balancing a cone of eggs. She had a sense of déjà vu.
“Ahh, the Marxist.” She eyed him coldly and directly. “Last time we talked you made me feel guilty and apologetic. Now I don’t feel so accountable for all the suffering of South India. As it happens, I would think I disapprove of Nair arrogance and abuse of power as much as you do. And Prabhakaran here is like one of my children. More or less.”
He bit his lips uncertainly, sheepishly.
“Western women,” he said, “are most … most” — he searched for a word — “most … unexpected.”
She felt obscurely flattered. Conciliatory.
“Would you like an ice-cream?” she asked.
“An ice-cream?”
“There is an amazing little place behind the Secretariat, you know, called the Simla Coffee House. They actually serve ice-cream and it’s very good.”
He hated to be patronized. He had some high-caste professors, western educated, who treated him like that. The token Untouchable, tame. She smelled of imperialism. He spat on the ground.
“Suit yourself,” she shrugged. “I’m taking the children. Do you think Prabhakaran will die of capitalist poisoning if he eats ice-cream? Shivaraman Nair certainly wouldn’t approve. You and he are in agreement on that point.”
He stared at her, baffled.
She stared back.
“I will come,” he said.
They fenced warily over small dishes of mango-flavoured icecream.
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