by Z. P. Dala
She covered her face but kept two fingers slightly open, to watch the effect her drama evoked. She was a cosseted child, and one who calculated her actions by studying the reactions of the two women who surrounded her. But she was a child, after all. And sometimes something more interesting would catch her attention, and her sob performance would suffer.
A red centipede on the ground entranced her. The insect the local Zulu people called tshongololo crept with its many legs toward a hole in the ground. Spotting it, Bibi forgot to cry, and forgot to watch if anyone watched her, and she played the game all children play when they see centipedes. She stuck a toe toward it, and watched it curl up into a spiral. The closing in of the creature, its destination postponed, made her happy. She knew that if she crushed it with her heel it would never move again, and it would never reach that dark, cool hole in which it wanted to disappear for good. The strange idea made her happy. Crush the creature. Take away its life. Children can be cruel like that.
Bibi didn’t see Afroze approaching. Perhaps then she would have resumed her dry-crying, peppering her sobs with a healthy dose of head-holding and a stuck-out bottom lip. Afroze came to stand very silently next to the child, and watched her try to crush the centipede with a stampy heel.
“Don’t kill it, the poor thing,” Afroze said, startling the child. Bibi quickly resumed her stance, flat palms raised to her face. Her wailing resumed, their volume exaggerated by Afroze’s presence and the discovery of her guilty pleasure of crushing creatures. Within seconds a theater of chest-heaving sobs crumpled the girl’s body to the ground. But still, her eyes peeped from underneath lashes, between the tiny slit of two fingers.
“No, please . . . stop crying. I’m sorry. I’m not angry with you. Please stop.”
Afroze wondered whether she was imploring the child out of real feeling for the tearful girl or whether she wanted to quickly pacify her, silence her so that her mother would not hear the loud sobs. Again, she was disgusted with herself. Years had melted away in that pink chintz flower room, and now she was this child—playacting at crying at a fence hoping for comfort, sweets, love, a pat on the head. All the same at the end of it all.
Bibi was savvy. She wailed even louder, sensing Afroze’s despair, and perhaps testing a relationship that only a child could sense hung in the balance. The veil of all adult defenses does not extend to a child. A child can feel and see what hangs in the air, needing no words to name it.
Bibi took advantage. She glanced at a rustle at the window, and her crying became a volcano spewing lava that could bury Afroze. A trial by fire. Let us now see who this daughter is, and who has loyalty to her.
Halaima was fast and light, despite some bulk. She flew to the side of the daughter she had shoved away earlier. Again, a play-act. She grabbed her child to her chest, smoothing down braided hair, crooning little clicks and moos. Bibi curled like a cat in sunshine. She knew what drew her mother’s love.
“Now what have you done?” Halaima spat, looking up at Afroze with deep hurt in her eyes. The ridiculous situation was enough to make Afroze balk a little. Halaima missed nothing.
“You laugh? You are cruel. Doctor said you would be. What kind of woman laughs at the tears of a frightened baby? A childless one.”
“I am not laughing,” Afroze said, growing angry at this strange turn of events. Being blamed for making a child cry when it clearly was not her fault was one thing, but hearing hidden secrets spill out of a stranger’s mouth was yet another.
“Listen, I said nothing to the girl. I simply told her not to kill the centipede; that is all.”
Halaima stared at the empty ground. What centipede?
The one with a thousand-million legs had betrayed its savior and, with those thousand-million legs, had made a clean exit. Afroze sighed loudly, thinking that the centipede’s hidey-hole in the ground seemed a nice enough place now.
Afroze opened her mouth to defend herself, to carry on in a high-pitched voice she had not used for years that it was there, really it was, I saw it, I swear I saw it, don’t hate me, I was just trying to help, sorry sorry sorry.
She stopped herself. To steady her nerves, she looked upward into a relentlessly blue sky. An eagle or hawk sailed high above, scanning the arid aloes for hiding mice. As she looked around, jiggling the keys in her pocket as a reminder of retreat, she saw someone standing at the gate, regarding her car with deep interest.
“Okay, fine. Look I’m sorry. Bibi . . . listen, I am sorry. Here, I’ll give some money to buy sweets.”
Both mother and daughter stood straight up. Halaima, with a quick flick of her sharp eyes, conveyed a secret message to her child. All the while, Afroze’s attention diverted to the man now walking around her car, kicking the tires and knocking the windshield.
“Here, take it. Bibi. Take this. Go and buy sweets.”
Afroze absently shoved a note she had hastily pulled out of her wallet into the child’s eager hand and bolted toward her car. She never really knew how much her guilt and fear had cost her. Silencing the child so the adults wouldn’t scold was a strange irony.
Bibi looked hard at the note. It was the first time she had touched a hundred rand. But not for long. Her mother whipped it away from her before she even felt the softness of the paper. A revisit to the wailing began to start up in Bibi’s chest. Her mother silenced her with a darting eye. This was no time for that. Bibi wandered closer to Afroze, who had started a conversation with the man at her car. She did not have to be told that hugging Afroze would be the best possible thing to do at that moment.
Afroze didn’t feel the child steal slowly up and hug her thigh lightly. Her attention was taken by the man. He hobbled around the car, occasionally pushing at it with his fancy cane. He did not look old enough to need a walking aid, but Afroze sensed that he wielded the polished wooden cane with its phallic head for dramatic effect. That he believed it added a distinguished air to his person. A tilted, rakish Panama hat, a deliberately crumpled cream-colored linen suit, and a—yes, unnecessary—cane did make him appear a gentleman.
“Stop. Don’t do that to my car,” Afroze said again, this time more loudly.
The man looked up myopically and blinked at her, seemingly confused at the order. He was not accustomed to being told what to do. Afroze tried to shake off the hugging Bibi and lunged forward as the man began to push down on the trunk, with more force than he seemed capable of possessing.
“Stop! Who are you? What are you doing? This is my car.”
He looked up again. A big smile, the flash of a perfect set of teeth. “Oh, pretty Bibi. Pretty little Bibi fairy. How is my baby girl?” he said.
Only then did Afroze notice Bibi flashing a beguiling smile at her admirer. Bibi relinquished Afroze’s trouser leg and sidled over to hug the fawn-colored linen leg of the old man. He patted her head and cupped her upturned chin in his hand. Once again Bibi curled up like a cossetted baby.
“She is rather lovely, isn’t she?” he looked at Afroze, regarding her for the first time. Again, it was Bibi’s presence that had validated Afroze.
“Yes. Lovely,” Afroze said absently.
“Good car you have here. What—a four-by?”
“What? Four-by? Oh . . . yes, it is a SUV. Four-by-four, you mean.”
“Well, that’s what I said, didn’t I?”
How useless to argue! Splitting hairs with a stranger over a vehicle name. Afroze let it slip.
“What? Toyota? Mercedes? What?” the old man continued. Done with petting Bibi, he circumambulated the car again, not at all bothered by its owner’s irritation.
“Hyundai.” Afroze replied. She felt the tension, anger, and strangeness of her day settling into her, turning her body to fatigue. This had all been too bizarre. And she had banished all thoughts of the mother she had come to see because the day was too much to bear just as it was. She knew that the moment would come again, that she would reenter that cloying bedroom and do what she had come here to do. Say goodbye. Stay a
night, drop a fat wad of fresh notes onto the table, absolving her of any arrangements that would inevitably need to be made. And leave. Swiftly, no emotion, just a clean, crisp farewell. Her mother, the doctor, would prefer it that way.
“Never heard of that model. You sure you didn’t steal it?”
“Steal it? That’s ridiculous. Look, it’s a rental,” she told the man, who was now being copied by Bibi in prodding the car.
“Of what relevance is that? Rental . . . Ren-till. Till what, my dear?” the old man said, pulling on the jutting mirror at the side.
“Please, don’t damage it. It’s a rental car,” Afroze said hastily. Looking closely at him for but a fraction, Afroze knew—with an intuition unlike her usual love for fact overfeeling—that this man’s talent for wordplay was just one in a string of talents. The type of talents that came with being a man who lived by the hustle.
The man stood up tall. Suddenly she could see he was not that old after all. Or perhaps he was deft and fastidious in the care of a face and body that he knew were his calling cards. He leaned on his cane, staring at Afroze for a long, uncomfortable time. He deftly removed his hat, revealing a wonderfully styled head of thick, silver hair and an angular, strong jaw, fleshy lips and deep eyes. Afroze almost smiled at him. He seemed to know the effect he was having and enjoyed it.
“You don’t look at all like her, you know. Your mother, she was a fiery Diana. My dear, you are rather insipid.”
Afroze felt strongly insulted, although she knew she shouldn’t be. Yes, a fiery Diana her mother had been, and clearly still was, but Afroze prided herself on being just the opposite. She had worked to maintain a levelheaded ambivalence to her difficult past, and had tremulously guarded this brittle air of nonchalance over the years. It was perhaps this cold detachment to her past and the people of Brighton that made Afroze appear insipid, rather than displaying the actual boiling feelings inside her.
She wanted to be the anti. Yet, in the gaze of this man, she wished for words that did not brandish her blandness. The shameful secret of women is that, though they protest otherwise, when there is mutual attraction, a man’s compliments are always welcome, and his rebuff always stings. No matter the woman. No matter the man.
“Who are you?” Afroze ventured, gathering up herself and her composure.
The old man laughed. First a little chuckle, which brought a parody chuckle from Bibi, then a raucous boom that made Bibi double over with child laughter. Afroze felt that she was being mocked.
“Who I am is who I am? And who I am is not a mystery at all.”
Afroze was weary. Tired of manipulative little girls who cried with one eye open, of intimidating women in African skirts, of a mother’s almost bald head peeping out from pink satin. She had had enough. Why was it that this town harbored people with such eccentricities?
“Please, enough!” She raised her voice. “Enough now. Just be plain. Who are you? Clearly you know who I am. And would you please leave the car alone.”
The old man cuddled Bibi for a second before extracting a sweet from his pocket and popping it in the waiting mouth of the child. Bibi ran off toward the chicken coop.
“I am your mother’s lover. Sathie,” he said casually.
Afroze almost doubled over in shock. Lover! At seventy-one, her mother kept a lover? Afroze had fallen down a hole filled with absent rabbits. She had drunk of a brew that made her small-tiny. She had eaten a poisoned apple. The world was askew.
“You do appear shocked. This and such and such would shock your type. But Sylvie and I have been lovers for years. And as such and such, we shall remain. Did you not hear that Abraham impregnated Sarah at the age of eighty? Are you not schooled, daughter of the flaming Sylvie?”
Sathie spoke beautifully, his voice a velvet amalgam of training, an embodied intonation that arose from deep inside his chest. His words arrived into the world as studied, resonant things of beauty.
Lost, Afroze stared at the man. Not an old man, not a young man. A man who had run the gamut of life, and wore his being like his own crown. He stood with an even more debonair pose now that his status had been spoken out loud.
Looking at the tall, straight-backed man leaning on his cane, Afroze somehow ignored her factual mind, and allowed her heart and body to see. And she saw a man who could have once been one of the great lovers. Looking beyond his body, she glimpsed a handsome man whose attraction lay within and also beyond his form. She shook off the feeling, pulling her rationality away from this whimsy that had taken over her emotions lately.
Sathie knew women better than they knew themselves. He noticed imperceptible things. He noticed a woman suddenly noticing him. And he began to stir inside. Interesting events.
Afroze, despite her attempt at aloofness, found herself blushing and didn’t even know why.
When she was five years old, sitting for hours on the steps of the cottage, she saw many of her mother’s lovers come and go. The ice in their glasses would keep time with the gramophone, the Indian violin music her mother so adored. They would arrive on Fridays, handing out little presents to Sylvie’s little girl, and leave on Mondays at dawn, straightening their ties and jackets, leaving Afroze to silently watch her mother play the melancholic violin records and sit languorously, dreaming on her lounger in the beautiful veranda until her first patients began making their appearances. Sylvie would not speak to the little Afroze. She would only sigh occasionally, smoking her fragrant cigarettes, and perhaps once or twice say words to the morning air. Words a daughter should not hear.
Afroze was happiest when the men came to visit her mother, to stay the night. It was probably because her mother was happy at those rare times, but it was also that the men seemed to feel the need to spoil and indulge Afroze with little gifts of toys and sweets.
She leaned against the car for a minute, the hot sun making her feel nostalgic. She heard the Carnatic violin music drift in from a breeze that did not blow. It was all inside her memories.
“Ahhh, Uncle Logan, throw me up into the air. Come on, throw me up, I want to fly,” her child voice rang in the air, and she felt her mother’s lover’s strong arms hold her tiny waist and swing her off her feet.
“So, you want to fly, do you, Rosie girl,” he said and held her by the tummy, sailing her through the air, her arms open wide. She felt like a beautiful and free bird. A swallow. No, a hawk. A hawk.
“Logan, leave the kid. You’re just going to make her throw up all those chocolates you gave her.” Sylvie appeared, ruining what had been Afroze’s only joy.
“Sylvie, you’re so hard on this kid,” he said and continued to sail her around the rose garden, dodging thorny bushes.
“Leave her, I said leave her,” Sylvie’s voice, now growing gruff with chain smoking, rang out.
“No, Uncle Logan, don’t leave me. I love to play. I love you.”
An imperceptible look passed between the two lovers. He stopped flying Afroze through the air; her hair, which had been flying like raven wings, fell flat onto her face.
Sylvie leaned against the wooden post of the porch and lifted a sharp eyebrow. She clinked the ice in her glass of Scotch and walked up to her lover, staring him straight in the face.
“See, I told you. I don’t want the child getting attached. What’s the point, seeing that you will never get attached to us?”
“Sylvie, stop it. I told you. You know my complications.”
He placed Afroze on the ground, and she stood like a mistake between the two adults who were glaring at each other.
“Psssh! Get out of here, Logan. Take your complications and get out!” Sylvie growled.
“Sylv . . . baby. Come on, I’ve just arrived. Let’s have this weekend. Forget about all this nonsense now. I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful, I promise. She’s so sweet, looks so lost, your little girl. I just forgot myself for a moment.”
Afroze looked up at her mother. She could clearly see the sadness etched into a face that had grown so accustomed
to hard lines. She almost believed that she saw eyes glittering with tears.
Sylvie took a long gulp of the straight Scotch. She glared at her lover, handsome and tall with his rakish, long hair and his perfectly shaped beard. Although Afroze could never recognize it, she felt it. She felt things she could not understand emanate like waves from her mother. It felt like a mixture of love and longing, and possible fragments of regret.
“Yes. You and I knew the deal when we got into this. So leave the mollycoddling of my kid alone. Let’s go in. I have a new LP with some beautiful ragas delivered to me yesterday. You would love them, Logan. Beautiful sitar and karnatic violin. Come.”
Sylvie stared into his eyes, and Afroze saw the things she could not understand pass between them. Logan forgot the tiny girl and placed his hand on the naked flesh between the blouse and skirt of Sylvie’s pale blue sari. He licked his lips and smiled. Sylvie smiled too, but maybe Afroze imagined that her mother’s eyes were hard. Hard or sad. Both.
They walked away into the house, and Beatrice, the woman who had come to live with them to care for Afroze, came scuttling.
“Baby Rosie, come, I will take you for a walk to the temple grounds. Someone told me they have brought a cow and her calf there. Let us go see it.”
Afroze looked up to the window, covered by the flimsiest of lace. She saw her mother with her head on Uncle Logan’s shoulder, holding him tightly. He smoothed her long plait and they danced together to the mournful raga. There was sadness in the air. Afroze knew Uncle Logan would be gone tomorrow. Without a goodbye.
Her mother would remain in the darkest of moods for days, doing only her nightly dance with the strange sounds in the khaya, and then suddenly, after holing herself up in a dark room, smoking and refusing to see patients, she would emerge in a fresh sari, loudly proclaiming that it was his damn loss.