Women were so very unavailable in India. Even at the university, where one could meet young unchaperoned female students, the girls stayed together in nervous giggling clusters. They would not risk being hurled from the family circle in disgrace, permanently debarred from marriage. Occasionally there would be a celebrated scandal and two students would marry secretly without the consent of their parents. The repercussions were always disastrous, the couple either reduced to utter poverty by withdrawal of all family monies, or taking their chances as hopeful emigrants to England or America. Provided they could survive the long wait for visas.
There were prostitutes of course, low-caste women, Untouchables, driven to desperate measures to feed their children, or to support parents who cursed those very daughters if the source of the money was ever discovered. Many, perhaps most of the students, had slept with such women. But Prem considered them to be of his own kind, his own people, the poor, the spurned, the wretched. He would never exploit them for sexual pleasure.
He imposed on himself a rigid political ethic. And he understood the intricate international web of forces that made it possible for a young Canadian woman to take a vacation for pleasure in India, while his mother and brothers and sisters — at least, until he had been able to provide some money from his university scholarship — were sometimes kept alive only by the water in which his father’s rice had been cooked. That was standard on Prem’s street in the desperate weeks before the rice harvest. The men ate what meager grain was available, the women and children drank the cooking water. Meanwhile Canadian women daily threw out scraps that would feed his family for a week. And the servants of Nair landlords, given food scraps to bury under trees, came home with what prizes they could — bones, intestines, the clawed feet of chickens on which the children sucked and chewed.
And now Prem was facing the enemy who leaned towards him with parted lips and golden hair, beautiful as Radha. He was in a chaos of contempt and desire, anger and hatred and yearning. She was woman. He had gone to sleep holding her hand. Last night he had thought of her as a fellow struggler against Congress Party hooliganism. This morning she was a Westerner. He was in anguish.
“I have upset you, Prem,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
In some subtle way, though she barely moved, she withdrew physically. She extinguished the luminous sexual aura that had surrounded her.
As soon as she did that he cursed himself for not having responded. His blood flowed cowed and dejected back into its habitual channels. He felt arid and miserable and infinitely lonely. But what could he have done? What should he have done? He simply did not know.
“Come,” he said gruffly. “I will show you where we bathe.”
He led her down to a muddy canal that flowed behind the row of huts. It linked two reaches of the vast network of Kerala backwaters. Children were frolicking in it. Buffaloes were being swabbed down by their drivers. Prem walked into the water and sluiced it vigorously over his face and body, through his hair. Annie hesitated a moment, recalling all the dire warnings about polluted water, about hepatitis and malaria.
Prem noticed her reluctance.
“We do not have bathrooms,” he called back savagely.
A silly jingle occurred to Annie, and she found herself singing it silently, mindlessly, to cover her hurt. This is the way we wash ourselves, wash ourselves, wash ourselves. She entered the water quickly and began to swim in order to wet herself totally without having to think about it. She stood up and filled her cupped hands with water and splashed it over her face.
Prem was dazzled. The thin muslin smock clung wetly to her breasts, her hair licked her face and shoulders like tendrils of pond weed, her cupped hands were full of sunlight. He thought of the carved stone maidens who held out their oil lamps in the temple courtyard and he was ready to worship her. He felt again that involuntary rush of blood, felt himself swelling and pulsing under merciful cover of the muddy water, felt himself climax suddenly and helplessly and uncontrollably. He dived shallowly and swam violently away from her, churning the water to disguise the sobbing and spluttering of his humiliation.
Annie became conscious of the staring of the children and the buffalo cart drivers. They pointed and giggled among themselves.
She felt as though she were naked.
It was one of those moments when she sensed the knife edge of doubt and uncertainty, when she knew afresh that life was not entirely pliable to her touch. She swam sadly and slowly after Prem, joining him downstream on the far bank where a small grove of coconuts and areca palms and mango trees began.
“This is the way we clean our teeth,” Prem said, not looking at her. He snapped a green twig from a mango tree and frayed one end of it with his thumbnail. He used the bristled end on his teeth like a whisk. Annie copied him. They sat on the grass in the sun, the dampness steaming and eddying upwards from their clothes and bodies. Prem was very thorough and absorbed with his twig. Cleaning teeth in this fashion was clearly something more than simple hygiene. It had perhaps the function of morning coffee or a morning pipe or reading the morning newspapers.
Gradually, it seemed to Annie, the strain and hostility seeped away into the mist that rose from their bodies. When Prem stood to leave, her shirt was dry but she knew it would be several hours before the heavy denim of her jeans dried completely. They felt weighted and soggy and rather uncomfortable. Did one catch cold from staying in wet clothes, or was that an old wives’ tale? She had the unadventurous desire to take a taxi to Krishnapuram and change into something clean and dry, but instead she followed Prem.
They sat in a little restaurant near Palayam eating masala dosai and drinking strong black coffee. Prem was reading the Malayalam newspapers, Annie the Indian Express. It was the Madras edition that Annie had, so the headlines concerned Tamil Nadu. INDIRA ARRESTED. DESAI BUNGLES. RIOTS, DEATHS IN MADRAS AND MADURAI. The Kerala news was in the lower right quadrant of the front page. Its headline was in smaller type: ARSON AND STABBING IN STATE CAPITAL. STUDENTS AND POLICE CLASH IN COCHIN. Thirteen dead in Trivandrum, nine in Cochin. She showed Prem.
“Malayalam papers are saying twenty dead here in Trivandrum,” he told her. “We can conclude in reality thirty to forty dead.”
“I personally saw eleven dead,” she said, thinking of the man bleeding on the road (the stabbing of the headline?) and the corpses in the bus. She winced, squeezing her eyes shut against the memory, her stomach queasily rebelling against breakfast.
They had both been shying away from the thought of those bodies crushed between seats and window bars. Prem reached across the table and touched her hand.
“If we had not been there, there would be many more deaths.”
She smiled wanly.
He smiled back, seeing again his partner in the rescue work. She had been so magnificent. She was so beautiful. It was so pleasant to work with her, to have breakfast with her, to talk with her as an equal and a friend. Not to think of her as a woman and a Westerner.
“Annie,” he said suddenly. “The other western woman and her children …?.”
“She is my sister. How did you come to be there when the bus tipped over?”
He smiled sourly. “I was already a victim of Congress Party hoodlums. We would not close the Marxist Book Store to please them. They smashed our windows and threw our books in the street and beat us with lathis. But I escaped into the market. And then I saw the bus.”
“Thank god you were there! So you are on the Janata side, celebrating the arrest?”
“I am happy with the arrest, yes. But I am not with Janata. Desai is really no better than Mrs Gandhi. He also is an elitist. He is wealthy and corrupt. He speaks much of the evils of casteism but he is doing nothing.” He tore angrily at his thin rice pancake and scooped up the fragrant curry in agitated jerky motions. “So what is different?” he asked bitterly. “For the poor, nothing is different. Our families will still go hungry and the rich imperialists will still take pleasure trips to India.”
“Prem,” she said shakily. “I care about these things. You should not hate me because I am Canadian.”
His quick anger was punctured. He lowered his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice, “but still, Annie, this is making a very great difference between us.”
“Yes,” she said humbly. “I understand that, Prem.”
But she felt glib, guilty of cheap sympathy. She would have liked to tell him that she was a law student, to have pleaded, in extenuation of her affluence, her idealistic hopes, her storefront lawyer plans. But it would have sounded shallow and self-congratulatory. Instead she said abruptly: “I have to go now and see if my sister and the children are all right. They’ll be worried about me.”
“I’d like to come with you. To see the little girl. I have met your sister and the children before.”
“Really? You didn’t show any sign last night. But then, I guess we were all in shock …”
The waiter came and left their check.
“Please, Prem,” begged Annie. “Let me pay.”
He was instantly furious with her again, caught between male pride and political justice.
“This is hopeless,” she told him ruefully. “You might as well go ahead and hate me. But I’m doing it for your family, for those children I saw sleeping in your house last night. It’s a fair exchange for your concern about Miranda.”
She cared about his pride, however, and passed him five rupee notes under the table.
He took them, resenting her.
28
The tunnel seemed to be contracting, to be closing in on Juliet, suffocating her. She was crawling on her hands and knees towards a remote circle of light. With every yard she gained, the light receded further into the distance.
This tunnel is my life, she thought. I am trapped in it.
Furry things brushed her in the darkness and she shuddered. Sewer water, a warm slime of it, flowed around her, and cobwebs dangled like ropes. Not cobwebs. Creepers! Snakes! The tunnel was India and she would never get out alive. A mere pinprick now, the light was dwindling, dwindling. The creepers had sprouted hands that throttled, she could not breathe. The hands had grown arms and bodies. The bus rocked, lurched, went over. She screamed …
And was awake, trussed like a mummy in the bedsheet, sodden with equatorial dampness and sweat.
Alive, she remembered. We are all alive. And she bent to kiss David who tossed fretfully; she padded barefoot into the children’s room. They were there. Sleeping. Safe. She touched them, she touched the window bars. She walked about the house, trailing her fingertips along walls, over wicker chairs. Everything was solid, in place, reassuring.
She came to the shrine niche and saw the flute player’s delicate shards. Chill. The seasick pitch of nightmare. She leaned against the wall, queasy, and closed her eyes tightly against the crumpled bodies in the belly of the bus.
Take deep breaths, open the eyes on an ordinary casual mishap.
Her fingers hovered, touched the splintered edges: braille of a normal occurrence. And such an aromatic accident, the room rich as a temple with incense. A sanctuary. They were safe, they had escaped from the bus, it was all behind them now. It was not so different from witnessing a pile-up on the highway back home. One shivered a little, perhaps, but drove on by, forgetting everything within the mile.
She walked out into the wet, still air, and raised her arms towards the umbrella of the coconut grove that had never known change or harm. She was startled to see how high the sun was. Their drugged sleep had beached them on the shores of noon the drowsy air was silent of bird calls, the palm trees limp with the stupor of centuries.
It was not possible to believe in the cracked ribs of buses and history, not possible to believe that only seven kilometres and one night away, dread things had happened. Or that Annie, of white-water ways, might even now be sluicing through political rapids. No, it was not possible, any of that.
I am dreaming my own life, Juliet thought. It is as still as paddy water.
Into which, at that moment, the outside world cast a pebble. A taxi, bearing Annie and Prem, was easing itself between the trees. And from the direction of the forest, Yashoda approached in the full plumage of usefulness and defiant silks and jewels.
I would have preferred, Juliet thought, to keep the illusion of changeless peace a moment longer. But she hurried inside to drag her family from the country of oblivion into the ragged present.
Prem was noticeably ill at ease, Juliet saw. His angry eyes swept over the expanse of coconut grove and paddy. He took stock of the tiled roofs and marble floors.
He greeted her with some warmth, was polite with David, gentle and solicitous with the children, curt with Yashoda.
He asked about Prabhakaran. “Your other child,” he reminded Juliet. There was a note of sardonic challenge.
“Prabhakaran is a peon,” she said heavily. “He has been removed from our corrupting influence.” Last night, she explained, he had appeared miraculously out of the darkness. But he had been gone again when she woke. “Probably he is being punished for coming here again.”
“That is the way of the Nair landlords,” Prem said bitterly.
A moment of empathy, of shared anger, bound Prem and Juliet.
Only a moment.
“They are also punishing Yashoda.”
But that, he thought, with a hostile glance at the gold bangles and jewelled rings, is different.
Juliet saw the curl of his lip. Their eyes met again. Held. A moment of mutual distrust and annoyance bound them.
Prem turned abruptly and left the house.
Annie was clearly eager to get away again. It was obvious that she found the quiet isolation of the house anticlimactic and stifling, that she was restless to return to the chaotic and colourful hub of the city, to be at the pulse of things. She said goodbye and joined Prem in the waiting taxi.
As the car emerged from the grove Prem said: “I do not want you to think that I hate all Nairs. Or all Westerners. I like your sister. You also,” he added as an afterthought.
She grinned and rested her hand lightly on his, companionably. He withdrew his sharply and instantly regretted it. For one thing, it seemed to contradict what he had just said. For another her touch had given him pleasure. But the movement had been a panic reflex.
Annie sighed and looked out the window. This is hopeless, she thought impatiently. For Prem I can only be a sightseer of injustices. His angers and bridlings made sense but it was uncomfortable to stay within their prickling reach. She was not going to waste her time making endless futile apologies for being white and western and middle class.
As soon as I can do it graciously I will say goodbye, she decided.
But they spent a pleasant day together, full of lively discussion and free from further hostility.
By dusk Mahatma Gandhi Road was ominously quiet. The market stalls were empty, the shops boarded up. Crows, black and huge and grotesque as death, wheeled above an overturned cart of ripe plantains. Every few minutes they swooped down to rip at the soft fruit with their vicious beaks, their vast wings flapping slowly and arrogantly. Rice had spilled onto the road from the burst sacks of another cart and rats could be seen heaving and burrowing through the mounds of grain.
To those who owned radios, word had come that Mrs Gandhi had been released and the news was spreading by word of mouth with the speed of the southwest monsoons rolling in off the Arabian Sea. The factions were gathering for the second day in a row, but this time the roles were reversed. Congress Party supporters were celebrating, Janata supporters were massing in angry protest.
“It will be even more violent tonight, I think,” Prem said.
“I should leave now,” Annie said.
“Where will you go?”
“To Krishnapuram. I should be with them.�
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“Yes,” he agreed miserably. “It is best.”
“Goodbye, Prem. I am glad to have met you.”
“Please, Annie …” he entreated.
“Yes?”
“Don’t go. Stay with me.”
She smiled, radiant as sunlight.
The tumult could barely be heard, the merest whispering echo, inside the clump of banana palms down the green funnel of which the moon poured its white light.
Prem felt as nervous as a boy on his first day of school. Terror and excitement washed over him in chaotic alternation. His skin tingled with burning flashes of anticipation and chilled in the cold sweat of his fear of failure. But she is gentle, I like her, I can trust her, he reassured himself.
They were sitting facing one another on the sleeping mats.
“Annie,” he said in the voice of a child, in the voice of an acolyte waiting to be inducted into the mysteries, “I have never slept with a woman.”
He did not need to ask if she had known other men. Western women lived differently from the rest of the world’s women. They were unrestricted, they engaged in insatiable and notorious sexual adventures. It could be seen in the movies. It was well known. He waited trustfully for the key to the great secrets, for her to endow him with miraculous potency and knowledge.
She took his hands in hers and smiled, the high priestess of fertility, the mother goddess.
“It’s like breathing, Prem,” she said gently, easily, companionably. “It is like waking up in the morning and seeing the sun. There is not a wrong way to do it. You do whatever you want to do and it is always right and beautiful.”
He could not move. He sat waiting expectantly like a child. Not even the morning’s hammering turbulence of drunken blood came to his rescue to spur him to blind and instinctual action.
The Ivory Swing Page 18