The Wild Wind

by Sheena Kalayil

  ‘And how is this little man?’ He bent down onto his haunches, held his hand out, and was rewarded with a smack on his palm by my delighted brother, who then pumped his tiny body up and down in the way that I knew meant he wanted to be picked up. I lifted Danny into my arms, and Jonah stood up at the same time so that he towered above me, looking down. There was nothing more to say. I raised my hand in a goodbye, and Jonah smiled as I turned away.

  When we reached the top of the steps, I looked back and saw they had resumed their previous positions, although now the cook’s hip was brushing against Jonah’s. I felt a wave of fatigue all of a sudden, and so I set Danny down on a patch of grass. My throat was aching again, and I felt thirsty. The sun felt very hot, and my head throbbed. A shadow fell over us; it was my father. He pulled me up to my feet without a word, and I clung to him as he bent down and, more clumsily than in years before – for I had grown in the last months – picked me up so I could lay my head on his shoulder. Reaching to the side, he grabbed Danny’s arm and swung him to his chest, and carried both of us back to the shade of the trees. Over his shoulder I saw Miss Munroe and Mr Lawrence sitting on the grass together, further away, watching us. The dancers were gathering, and after a few moments the drums started as, with a shout, the singing began.

  Then, he left. And because it was only days after the anniversary celebrations these coincide in my thoughts as his send-off, engineered to bring us all together so that I could wander from one group of actors to another as if they were troubadours, travelling jesters gathered for the inauguration. For, while I remember that day primarily as a succession of sensations – the ache of my throat, the warmth of the sun on my skin, the harmonics of the songs – I can still recall concrete details of what we wore and what we said and what we ate.

  And similarly, on the day of my father’s departure I remember I was wearing one of my least favourite outfits – a green dress which rubbed against my skin like a sack for the very last time, as if his leaving allowed me the license to discard it. And just as I had been staring out of the window when Ezekiel fell to the floor, I was in the same position that afternoon. It was a Saturday. The sky was its usual clear, light blue; the trail of ants marched as busily as ever along our windowsill. All was as it had always been. The door to my parents’ bedroom opened and he appeared, taking care to close it behind him quickly and noiselessly, without allowing me much of a view into the room, just as he had done those days – when I was younger, before Danny was born – when my mother was ill.

  ‘Be good, Sissy, and help Mama, okay?’

  He looked different: freshly-shaved, wearing his best shoes, with a suitcase in his hand, a jacket folded over his arm. Across the front yard I saw Miss Munroe in her car, behind the wheel, the engine running. Her demeanour was uncomfortable, strained, as if she were being forced to be party to something against her will. My father reached for the front-door handle, and then stopped as if remembering something. He came towards me, kissed me on the forehead, and stroked my cheek with his thumb. I felt the brush of his sideburns against my temple before he straightened up.

  ‘Papa, my ankle hurts.’

  A look of confusion passed over his features.

  ‘It’s been hurting since yesterday . . .’

  Now there was another expression, frustration or impatience. He reached down and gripped my ankle briefly, squeezed it. ‘It will be fine.’

  ‘No, it’s been hurting since . . .’

  ‘Sissy,’ now his tone was abrupt, ‘it’s nothing. Listen, be good and take care of Mama, okay?’

  I watched from the window as he walked down the path, opened the back door of Miss Munroe’s car to slide in his suitcase, then the front door to slide himself in. Miss Munroe seemed to wish to leave as quickly as possible; the tyres of her car screeched as, in a cloud of dust, they drove away. I stayed where I was, leaning against the back of the sofa for a long time, knowing, even then, that our farewell had been hasty and unsatisfying. When I finally moved away from the window I could see the pattern of the material of the sofa criss-crossing over my knees. There was a gulp, and I saw Danny shoving a wooden brick into his mouth. He was useless. I couldn’t talk to him; he couldn’t help me dampen the strange feeling rising inside my chest. Then he caught my eye, removed the brick, and gave me a wide toothless smile. I slid off the sofa and enfolded him in my arms. His head was damp and warm, his hands twisting into my plaits were sticky.

  ‘Want a snack?’ I whispered.

  He hit me on the side of the head with his brick, a gentle bump, before replacing it between his gums. I walked into the kitchen and glanced at the small clock that we had never put on the wall but leant up against the fridge. It was only three o’clock in the afternoon.

  And at that moment I felt as if I was learning about time. How there were endless minutes, hours in a day that stretched ahead of us before we arrived at the darkness when we could legitimately lie in our beds and close our eyes. Having spent so much time on my own, I was used to this. I knew my mother was less so. Aside from Miss Munroe, who occupied herself assiduously, perhaps to stem these exact same feelings, my mother had no one to talk to, no one to confide in. The Malayalee ladies were older than her and limited in their conversation. The Malayalee men enjoyed her company, and I knew they entertained her with their bravado, but their wives regarded these performances jealously. There was nothing around us, nothing to do, other than walk down to the bottom of our garden and up again, tend to the plants at the back, pick fruit off our trees.

  I was surprised to have a vision flash before me of the street we always walked along in Kothamangalam, the street she will have walked along while she was growing up, with its stalls on either side, the large sari shop at the end, and the myriad opportunities to buy a snack, a coffee, clothes, books, plastic trinkets, gold ornaments, whenever we wanted. The air thick with the smell of fried snacks, jasmine, hair oil and talcum powder. The shouts in Malayalam, the persistent rickshaw drivers calling, the devotional songs from the temples, the namaz from the mosques, the chanting from the church. Here, there was nothing. It was a desert in comparison, and I felt something I would not recognise until much later: a sympathy for my mother, who rarely left the campus, and even then, only to go a few miles down the hill to the small church.

  An hour later, my parents’ bedroom door opened and my mother emerged for the first time that afternoon. She might have been crying, but I thought that she looked as if she had been sleeping; her face had that soft, just-awake look. She was dressed only in her sari blouse and underskirt; I spied her sari spilling off the end of the bed. She came into the living room, walking as if she was casually entering a stranger’s house, giving me and Danny a distracted smile as if we were those strangers. I thought she might come and sit with us, or even go into the kitchen and make some decisions for dinner later, but she walked to the side-table on which our record-player, the type that played vinyl LPs, sat. I watched as she unplugged the player from the wall and, carrying it under her arm, gave me another small smile as she walked back into the bedroom and closed the door.

  As I waited with bated breath, Danny beside me also staring at the door with open mouth, I heard the first notes of a song coming from behind the door, a record we had brought back from India the last time we were there.

  Now I know what she would have been doing: observing the time-honoured tradition of playing sad songs to soothe your broken heart. She would have laid down on the bed again, tears streaked across her cheeks, her hands wrapped around her belly as her heart ached and her blood raged, wallowing in the songs and their aphorisms of love and life, wondering how my father could have left her as he did. For she will have already in those minutes missed him deeply. Not only for his helping hand and his strength – lifting the bucket of water from the barrel if the pump did not work, carrying Danny on his arm when my brother grew heavy with resistance, driving the car to and from the small grocery shop or into the city. She will have missed the man who wa
s her first love and her first lover.

  It is not easy for a child to imagine her parents as lovers, and I wonder why it was so easy for me. Perhaps because I was so young, and because of the way they were with each other; it was so innocent and unsullied, a natural extension of themselves. Perhaps I had witnessed something as a younger child when I shared their bedroom like Danny did now; something tender and loving, that did not perturb me but that had imprinted itself on my memory. An image of my mother lying next to my father, his hands on her form, which became a comforting assurance of the feelings they had for each other. I had heard them whispering late in the night, thinking I could not hear them. And I could hear sounds from their bedroom as they made love. My father’s voice – muffled, as if buried in her hair – and the gentle, yielding responses that came from deep in my mother’s throat. The footsteps after as my mother used the bathroom quietly, then to return to the bedroom where their voices intersected again. Their love, all aspects of it, was what cemented us together: when that was fractured, so were we.

  At one stage in my life, a particularly bitter phase, I thought: she let it happen, she let him leave. Why does anyone let something happen if not because they wanted it to happen? But even in those moments, I could never cast her in so cold a light as to presume that my mother did not yearn for my father, miss him utterly, when I had seen all through my life until then how she melted at my father’s touch or look; how her features became softer, as if in anticipation of when night would fall, and Danny and I would be tucked away.

  That afternoon, her door remained closed, and through it we could hear only the plaintive, mawkish tones of the Malayalam love song as the light began to fade and the air became cool enough to close the windows. By then, Danny and I had exhausted each other’s company; but somehow my baby brother had known not to test me, and he had been particularly pliant and good-natured. When it was dark enough to turn on the light in the living room and draw the curtains, I did so, then stood outside my mother’s door. Again, all I could hear were the notes of the song. She must have played the same record four times by then. No other sound: of sobs, or cries of anger. Only when I had moved to the kitchen and opened the fridge to see with relief some eggs that I could boil for our supper and some vegetables to chop up for a salad, only after I had set a pan to boil and had found as well that we had two loaves of bread and a basket of fruit that my father must have bought in advance of his departure, did I see that Jonah was outside the window.

  He was rolling the barrel that held the gallon of water we always stored in case of a water cut; rolling it a few feet to one side, then a few feet to the other, so that he zigzagged the barrel from where it stood at the edge of our plot to a spot just outside the back door. It was only a distance of a few metres, but it meant that we could reach for the water easily from the back step. I opened the door. He was wiping the barrel down, cleaning it as if it were a child. The music from my mother’s bedroom wafted outside and I saw him glance quickly in that direction before he smiled at me. ‘This will be easier for you. I will just fill it to the top in case. Get me the bucket, Sissy.’

  I knew what he meant, and ran inside, found the metal pail under the kitchen sink and handed it to him, watched as he walked to the central tap between the houses at the rear, filled the vessel, then lifted it onto his shoulder and walked back, some water slurping out. After he had poured the water into the barrel, I held out the small towel I had retrieved for him.

  ‘No, I don’t need, Sissy,’ he said, then, ‘Are you well?’

  He smiled again, but I noticed how his eyes held mine for a second longer than necessary, a shadow passing through them, before they glanced around me to the door of my mother’s bedroom. As he turned to leave, I bleated a thankyou, then, after closing the door, rushed to the window to see him glide away on his bicycle. He would never have come if my father were here. He knew my father took note of how much water we stored, filled the barrel himself, although – I thought, my heart squeezing against my ribs with a flash of something, anger perhaps – without the effortless grace that Jonah had shown. So, they must know that my father had left this afternoon: Jonah and Moses and Grace. Ezekiel, too. Everyone knew.

  At that moment my mother’s bedroom door opened. She walked over to the back door, opened it and saw the barrel. She stared for some moments at it, or something else that I was not aware of, then stepped back inside, closed the door and locked it. She stood still for several moments, then glanced into the kitchen and saw the eggs I had removed from the fridge, the loaf of bread.

  ‘French toast?’ she said to me, and I nodded eagerly.

  By the time we sat down, the three of us, to eat, it was past eight o’clock at night, and the meal was even more enjoyable for being so incongruous, a breakfast snack taken at dinner time. She did not ask after my feelings that evening for she knew I would not be able to express them yet, and she did not share hers. We did not speak; we were simply companions. We had survived the first five hours without my father; we would survive the many, many years hence.

  Part Two

  6

  I WAS offered a place at Penn State, to major in Italian Studies. I longed to see the country and I did, spending two semesters in Rome, falling in love with the city. After I graduated, desperate to go to another big city, lose myself in its crowds, and of a mind to study further, I arrived in New York where I rented a room in an apartment on Nostrand Avenue, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. My landlady was a proud Brooklynite, who ran a cleaning service for the occupants of the grander brownstones in the more genteel Prospect Park. Her staff were all women, predominantly Haitian, and she operated her business more like a social development project, advising, or rather coercing, her ‘ladies’ to invest part of their earnings in English courses and book-keeping classes, with the intention of securing better jobs. You don’t want to be cleaning houses in Bed-Stuy five years from now, was her refrain. She was an inspiration, and incredibly generous. It was through her that I added ‘dog-walker’ for her clients to my list of part-time jobs, which included proofreading for academic essays and tending a bar at weekends. The latter I applied for only on encouragement from my landlady, who upbraided me for my shyness: you got to face your fears, Sissy, put yourself out there and hold your head high. And after I did indeed face my fears, I admit I enjoyed the repartee and vibe of a late-night bar. Every other spare moment I spent buried in the library on Washington Square, reading through piles of journals and manuscripts.

  During my final year on my degree I had explored the translations into Italian of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels in English. I had discovered, by chance, a rivalry that had grown between two Italians: Rossi and Montale. Both were commissioned later in the twentieth century to translate a short poem by James Joyce, and the differing receptions to their translations – the debate over whether maintaining the metrical verse or translating into free verse produced the most effective interpretation – echoed discussions on whether the translator’s voice could ever mirror the author’s voice, or whether translation into another language produced as different an artefact as adapting a novel into a film. All debates which were particularly germane to poetry. This, I felt, was my doctoral thesis in the making; still an embryonic idea, and needing further investigation. So that, by the time my proposal, a collection of sketchy arguments, was received and accepted, I had already spent many months in my hermetic routine of work and study, spending most nights with papers scattered around me in my room, my landlady occasionally banging on my door: Sissy, you still alive in there, baby?

  By a twist of luck, three months later, my supervisor put my name forward to a writer who she knew and who had asked her to recommend a translator. His latest novel was to be published in Italy. It was a ruthlessly bare portrayal of a hapless and childless marriage between two unlikeable writers, a wry and cynical depiction of sexual desire and malice, which in his narrative were depicted as the same endeavour. I devoured his book over a day a
nd night of non-stop reading, after which I mentioned to my supervisor that I was unsure whether I was the right person to undertake the translation. Wasn’t I too young at only twenty-three? And – I had never translated a complete novel before – wasn’t I too inexperienced? Neither would be a problem, she assured me. What counts is that you have an excellent feel for writing. But did I have the right temperament to work with the writer? I persisted. He might prefer a man, or someone whose life trajectory matched his more closely. To which she declared that I was exactly the right person because I was, in her words, so utterly removed from his world. She laughed at my anxieties. He doesn’t bite, you know, although – she laughed again – he might try!

  He lived in Brooklyn, too, in Clinton Hill, only a few blocks away from me, in one of the brownstones I walked past several times en route to my dog-walking assignations in Prospect Park, and we arranged to meet there, for our preliminary discussions.

  He had brooding good looks, was bristling with confidence and unashamedly self-regarding. He was young, thirty-five years old – I knew that from his biography – but already considered a literary heavyweight. His latest novel was the first to undergo a translation into Italian, and this fact only magnified my trepidation. He was exactly the sort of man I found intimidating on account of finding him terribly attractive, and he made no effort to put me at ease, but stared at me with intensity, examining me closely, all of me, from head to toe. He was, in short, exactly the kind of writer I might have imagined writing the work I had just read, and it was only this thought that allowed me to have a laugh to myself, at his expense, and present myself with more assurance.

  He made us coffee, we sat across from each other on bar stools at his breakfast bar. I had come unprepared, I realised too late, with only his novel and my research notes in my bag, and I cursed myself for not having a notepad and pen and a list of pertinent questions to hand. But I didn’t, and so we made desultory conversation, until he began to probe into my doctorate. I delved into my bag, drew out the two translations of ‘Needleboats’, nervously pointing out my ground-breaking discovery of metric versus free verse, of how Rossi had chosen the words ‘il vento gagliardo’ whereas Montale had insisted on ‘il vento ribelle’, when he interrupted me, saying, read it out. I want to hear it in Italian.