We sat in the same pew that we usually did, with the same collection of aunties, some of the men separating from their wives, observing the custom from India, even though we were thousands of miles away in this unadorned church in a tiny hamlet. From the pew in front, a small child with patches of hair not obscuring a dry scalp stared at me, his nose running, until his mother pulled him to her and wiped it on the end of her chitenge. Across the aisle I saw Bobby and Aravind, but I felt nothing. I was not sure I would try to play with them again.
It was then that I felt a sensation of being both crushed and empty; my father’s absence was impossible to ignore. It was so peculiar not to have him at my side. It was he who would hold Danny, my brother hanging off him like a koala bear, and it was he who patted my knee at intervals as if trying to prod me awake. And it was he who made a show of attending Mass under sufferance of my mother’s wishes, ending the responses with a slightly ironic edge – and peace be with you – until he received a reprimand from my mother. Spending the homily with his eyes closed as if in reverent contemplation before emitting a soft snore, getting an elbow in the ribs from my bemused mother, and then making a show of blinking rapidly, staring at his environs with wonder, while I shook with silent laughter beside him. Quite the comedian, my father.
The sycophancy irritated him; the rituals and how they were followed amused him. Somewhere along the way my father had discarded the piety that dripped off the fronds of the coconut trees in Kerala, coursed through the veins of the people below. I would not say that my mother had a particularly strong faith, but she was more willing to abide by conventions and less inclined to question, to settle for an easy compliance in order to enjoy attendant benefits. My First Communion, which had taken place in Kothamangalam – we had returned to India in between contracts and had a protracted stay, my mother only just beginning to recover her strength – had been, I could see, rather than a celebration of my induction into the Church, an opportunity for my mother to showcase her good fortune. To order a tailor-made dress for me, to arrange a celebratory meal for after, to parade me in front of her family. A Kothamangalam girl done good, with husband and child in stock, a career in a foreign land. Yes, only one child and a girl at that – will she have more? Yes, it was Africa, but at least the remittances were generous. My father had spent that day, throughout the Mass, and all through the family gathering that followed, under strict instructions from my mother. He had behaved impeccably, crossing himself and kneeling and rising solemnly, never once catching my eye, and only disobeying right at the end, when he had come to say good night, with a pious expression, his hands pressed together, and my flowery veil perched like a doily on top of his head.
The memories rushed through me as we stood in the church, only three of us now, and when we returned to the campus, my mother was quiet. But, as if to compensate for corralling herself in her room the previous day, she strived to be cheerful: let’s weed all around the vegetables, we can make another banana-leaf tent for Danny, let’s plant the seeds Papa left us.
We spent the rest of the day outdoors, digging and clearing, the sun warm, but not summer-hot yet, and the fresh air and exercise meant that we were tired enough that night to fall into our beds and close our eyes and block our ears from the constant hum that my father’s absence brought.
Rahul took me to school, as arranged, for the first week. It was a detour, but he could drop me off before he delivered Aravind, Bobby and his older brother Benjy to Kabulonga High School. I was dwarfed by the boys in the car, in their uniforms of long trousers and blazers, their bursting schoolbags and kitbags. I sat unencumbered, with my cardigan, small satchel and juice bottle. Rahul and Benjy sat up front, communicating in monosyllabic grunts. I was sandwiched between Bobby and Aravind in the back seat, but they did not speak to me, or one another, each choosing to gaze out of their separate windows.
When we arrived at my school, I clambered over their legs, turning back to say thank you to Rahul and meeting his eyes. His smile managing to convey that he understood, he understood everything: the indignity of being the only girl, the precarious standing I had with my playmates. Who was that? the girls waiting outside the school asked as I tumbled from the car and waved goodbye; and all through the day, and the days that followed, they continued to ask, would gawp and giggle at the long-haired, handsome young man who drove me to the gates, and I would feel a glow, answering their queries with an indifference designed to make them even more curious. But by the second week, Rahul only drove me to the Coopers’; they had returned.
In the afternoons, where I would spend an hour or so before I was dropped back at Roma, I trod a well-worn route in the house from the kitchen to the bedrooms. And as I passed Mr Cooper’s study, I could spy him along with groups of men of varying builds, arranged in chairs and leaning against the wall, in serious discussion – about the plane, and the inevitable retribution. It’s only a matter of time, was the refrain. God knows what they’ll do, was another. I was a veteran eavesdropper, having acquired the skill of squirrelling away snatches of conversation to be collated later at leisure, for more coherent analysis. While I may not have understood exactly what was being referred to then, now I remember the conversations as if I had. Perhaps I have conflated what I read many years later, in the library in Washington Square, with what I heard. And in the same way, I cannot claim to know exactly what words were spoken to my mother a few days later; I have only pieced together what might have been said from what happened.
Another weekend without my father, another journey to church and back in Rahul’s car, after which he said quietly, without looking up: ‘Aunty, Amma wants to talk to you.’
I watched my mother as she walked down the road to the Devasias’s house. She held a bag of guavas from the tree in our garden as a present. Rahul’s mother was a biology teacher; his father taught mathematics. They were proud of their sons, hard-working people. But, not unlike many of their milieu, they were small-minded and petty, imbued with a strong conviction in their narrow ideals, and thus prey to a resentment towards anything which or anyone who strayed from convention. I can only imagine the scene when my mother arrived. Uncle lurking shamefacedly in the background, Aunty squaring up to my mother: why should my son have to pick up after your husband? It’s inappropriate for him, a young man, to be spending so much time with you.
Not long after going to the Devasias’s house I saw my mother returning. She was walking briskly, her back straight, but holding the palloo of her sari around her waist as if bandaging a wound. She looked as if she had been struck but was determined to carry herself erect. Only her face was composed, but that was what unnerved me most. She had no expression, no frown line between her eyebrows, her lips were closed and set, as if she were asleep. Even her eyes had a vacant aspect, as if she were sleepwalking. She did not look at me as she passed me on the veranda, as she moved to the bedroom. I heard drawers opening and closing, and then she re-emerged to ignore me again, to walk towards my father’s car: the green Toyota Datsun, an old model but one my father was extremely proud of, one which he lovingly washed and tended to. She opened the car and sat behind the wheel, closed the door so that I could not see her hands fiddling with the controls, or see her turn the key in the ignition. I only heard the rev of the engine.
On the road in front of the house, suddenly appearing at the top of the steps that led to the netball courts, I saw Jonah. When he spied me on the veranda he raised his hand in greeting. But I did not return it, only stood frozen as I turned my head and saw the car jerk forwards, stall, shudder, lurch again and then, at a terrifying speed, jump forwards. There was a flash of green as it shot down the drive like a predator suddenly spotting its prey, and then it crashed into the acacia tree, the bonnet of the car folding elegantly like an accordion.
Jonah was running now, and behind me I could hear doors opening, and people appearing, but the car did not stop. Instead it backed away from the tree, the metal groaning as it was separated from the bar
k, the wheels turning grudgingly, and the engine making a staccato sound as if overwhelmed by its efforts. It started slowly and then accelerated so that in an instant it had reversed the length of the drive into a mulberry bush, the fruit smearing the back windscreen with purple-red juice. And there was a matching red streak on my mother’s face, I could see. A delicate, spidery trail of red that sketched a line from just above her eyebrow to the start of her cheekbone. Otherwise, my mother looked ethereal, untouched.
At that moment, perhaps that car encapsulated all that my mother regretted. That we were captives on the campus with no means to leave, that she had all those years ago not made more of an effort to learn to drive despite my father’s attempts to teach her. He had then indulgently given up. What if she had persevered? If she had acquired her own way out, a freedom? I wonder now if that utter dependence she had allowed herself to impose on my father, even if unintentional, had weighed down on him, become a burden, a lodestone, so that if the need should arise for him to leave it could be no small decision, but a stark choice – her or them. Once he had shaken off that burden, perhaps it had then acquired an impossible allure – to be unattached, weightless like my mother had been that time, laughing over her shoulder, swimming away from him in the lake. By driving my father’s beloved car up and down without care, wounding it, I can see that my mother was unleashing her anger against my father. What we were witnessing was an act of violence; the metal body of the car had become my father’s dark cheek to slap and claw at.
There were steps behind me and as the car jerked forward again I knew I had to run and save her. I did not want the people who were gathering to hurt her, or judge her. But a hand caught me by the elbow, and held me back, Jonah’s voice – no, Sissy – as I saw Miss Munroe draw up to me, her face pale and her eyes glistening, and behind her Mr Lawrence, who skirted around us to approach my mother. He strode towards the car just as it lunged forward again, but he did not jump back in fright. It stalled halfway down the drive with an ungraceful jolt and he jogged to its side, reached forward and opened the door. I had a glimpse of my mother’s sari again, a vivid orange.
‘Mrs Olikara, perhaps I can help you.’
My mother did not look at him, but stared straight ahead, so that for a moment we were all positioned as if for a still shot: a motley collection of actors and props, the arid ground showing between the blades of grass.
Only then did I see her face crumple, and she raised a hand to brush the spider’s line of red, so that it became a smudge. I saw Mr Lawrence shut the door, so she was again half-shielded from our eyes, to walk around the car to the other side and get into the passenger seat. For a moment I thought he would give her a driving lesson, teach her how to manipulate the pedals, change the gears, in our battered car, the bumper hanging off now and scraping the ground. But he simply sat with her until I saw my mother lean sideways to rest her head against the window. She looked broken, as if a faulty mannequin in a shop window.
‘Go inside, Sissy.’ Jonah’s voice behind me.
But I shook myself out of his grasp and ran to the car, laid my hand against the window so that I was holding my mother’s head up, holding her pieces together, against the glass.
‘Mama! Mama!’
She did not turn her head to look at me or acknowledge that she had heard my cries. And all I remember is the different shades of the tiny orange triangles on her sari, as again I felt Jonah’s hand on my arm as he pulled me away.
8
IWAS the fly in the ointment. If I had been old enough to attend Roma, then I would not have had to attend a primary school in the city and my mother would not have had to make these increasingly complicated arrangements to ferry me to and from the campus. Years later, I tried to calculate the distance between Roma and my school: eight miles. I worked out that if we took about half an hour for the journey, as my father had often recounted, but only ten or fifteen minutes to drive to the Coopers’, they must have lived only four miles or so from our bungalow.
Their house was located in a pleasant neighbourhood of large trees shading large houses, fenced lawns and post boxes nailed to the gates; the residents of this area enjoyed having their post delivered to them directly. One of Ally’s chores was to check their box every day, insert a little iron key into the keyhole, and reach inside to lift out a pile of envelopes. If opening an aerogramme had pleased me, then this task enthralled me even more.
The sound of sprinklers and lawnmowers and the splash from a swimming pool accompanied the birdsong, not unlike the American suburbs of my later life. The Coopers’ road was neat and clean, recently tarmacadamed, with a white painted kerb, leading to a small green roundabout at the end, the centre of which was decorated with topiary. We turned right onto a longer road which ran past a bottle store, now becoming dustier and patchier, pavements and kerbs falling away, past a small supermarket which had rows of empty shelves, to arrive at a steep hill. Here we turned, the spot marked by a tree that had been burned down but never been removed, its blackened branches pointing the way. Then, after skirting the cluster of small tin-roofed houses in the low valley to the right, where Grace lived, we were on the road that led directly into the campus. Up the hill, and curving round, we arrived at our bungalow.
It was decided that I would stay with the Coopers during the week, from Monday after school, to be dropped back at the campus on Friday afternoons. Mr Lawrence was instrumental in this arrangement; he will have recounted to them the incident with my father’s car, and everyone will have agreed that my journey to school had become another stress on my mother’s energies. Taking care of Danny and the house, especially with the water supply becoming increasingly erratic, all the while trying to keep up with her marking and lesson preparation, would not be as onerous for my mother if I were removed. The Coopers had a spare bedroom and the girls would enjoy my company. But I feared that in actuality they didn’t; the household was less bright, less convivial than it had been before their visit to Virginia. It was not that the practicalities had altered in any way. The constant stream of visitors continued unabated, and in the mornings, I would meet a series of men in various states of dishevelment, in the living room, rolling up a sleeping bag. I was now the occupant of the guest room. The room I slept in was as comfortable and cosy as I could have wished; the meals as regular. But with an acute sensibility that I was destined to develop, I realised something had changed. Mrs Cooper was brittle, the girls were sullen; perhaps they had not wished to return after the reminder of their homeland. Certainly, my aptitude as raconteur, which the Cooper girls had once enjoyed, was now obsolete. Ally seemed more inclined to retreat to her bedroom, door closed after school; Mary-Anne and I kept company but half-heartedly. Mrs Cooper no longer volunteered at the adult education centre in town; the number of students had dwindled to a handful. Too difficult to travel when the public transport was unreliable and the street lighting scant, with rumours spreading of thugs and vandals prowling the streets when darkness fell. When Mr Cooper arrived from work, he appeared inordinately cheerful, as if to bolster Mrs Cooper’s spirits, and once she had snapped at his breezy ‘hello, ladies’ with ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, Sam. It makes us sound like a harem.’ There was a plague of flies and mosquitoes which made playing in the garden unpleasant. We stayed indoors, and even the Coopers’ spacious house began to feel confined. Grace made a point of complimenting me on something nearly every day – ah, beautiful plaits, Sissy, look at how you are growing – as if she knew how discomfited I felt. Perhaps I, too, had changed.
My first weekend back in the small pink bungalow, I scoured my mother’s face for signs that she had missed me, but she only appeared tired, even a little thinner. Her only question was: did you eat well, mol? But on the Saturday afternoon she offered to wash my hair whereas previously she had castigated me for whining about having to do it on my own, an indication that she was aware I might be feeling displaced. While Danny was having his nap, we set up in the bathroom. I sat on a stool
and leant back over the tub as my mother poured the hot water over my head. My hair was long, as was common for Indian girls of my age – as my mother’s had been, she often told me. It reached my waist nearly, and while it was manageable when in two plaits, I often begged to have it cut shorter, at least to shoulder-length. But my mother prevaricated; perhaps that was a rite of passage she wished to delay until she could no longer enforce her wishes on me. But that afternoon, I was grateful for her attention, and while I am sure my mother did not notice, I had a lump in my throat as she wet my head and massaged in the shampoo. I missed her dreadfully, I missed my father, even Danny in his uselessness. She might have thought that the creature comforts the Coopers’ house offered would have compensated for much, even enchanted me, but she little knew that I felt strange and alien in their household.
‘Papa phoned earlier this week,’ she said suddenly.
I knew this meant my father would have called the convent. None of the houses had telephones, a fact that I had heard Miss Munroe complain about to Mr Lawrence: I mean, do we have to be quite so godforsaken? Why can’t we have a phone to ourselves?
I said nothing, only waited for my mother to continue.
She chucked me under the chin. ‘Not asking?’ She was smiling. ‘Did you hear? Papa called.’
‘How is he?’ I asked, feeling a reluctance as I spoke which made the words sound slow and heavy. I realised, suddenly, that I was angry with him.
‘Fine. And he sends his love. Next time, he’ll call on a Friday when you are back. I told him you are staying with the Coopers.’
I studied my fingernails as my mother combed the coconut oil through my hair. Then she handed me the comb, plaited my hair. She had always said, count to two hundred, Sissy, at least, before you wash it out. I had never had the patience to last beyond twenty. Now she put a towel around my shoulders so I would not get cold, and we waited together.
The Wild Wind Page 8