How to Escape From a Leper Colony (19 page)

He thought he would make art out of the wood his brother sent. He made boxes and painted them and thought they were very modern. They were splashed with every color to imitate the sunset. He thought they would be like little postmodern metaphors of the home. They opened only halfway or didn’t open at all or opened to reveal a wall of wood. He made them again and again trying to perfect his technique. It was not subconscious. He was very consciously thinking that he would take pictures and send those pictures to Usha’s gallery and then Usha would see them. And then she would call him and she would fly to St. Thomas and they would commence a lifelong love affair that her husband would never know about—or, if he dreamed bravely and wildly, maybe she would leave her husband and make a home with him.

And then one day Anexus sat down to a
National Geographic
and there were the coffins of the artisans of Ghana. Coffins shaped like the thing most reminiscent of the deceased. There were coffins like domes with the checkered black and white of a soccer ball. There were coffins painted with murals of the village where the deceased had been born. The custom-made coffin movement had spread to other West African countries. And he looked at his boxes and thought that he had been making coffins and never known.

But these artisan coffins were different. They were plain on the inside. They were not for the deceased. They were for those left behind. He understood this. He drew up a design for an urn and sent the sketches to a contractor in Accra. Three months later they sent back the heavy silver in the shape of a miniature Gasparee island. He ordered two coffins in the shape of houses and within a week they had been sold. He opened the International Shop of Coffins.

After he polishes the silver Gasparee urn with toothpaste and a firm-bristled toothbrush, he sits down at the breakfast table to begin his newest note to Usha. To the address of the gallery in Port of Spain now because he no longer wants her husband to find them. All these years she has never written back, but then again he is not sure she ever gets the notes. He begins it as he always has: “Dearest Usha. When I die I will have my ashes sent to you. You may scatter them over the shores of Gasparee.” But then he stops. Carefully, he tears that page from the pad and begins anew. “Dear Usha. Perhaps this will be my last letter. I only want to say, I have only ever wanted to say, that because of you I was raised from a kind of death …”

The children’s coffins are from West Africa. He imports them. They are in shapes that a child’s body would be happy to lie in—living or dead. One is shaped like a sneaker. It sits in the middle of the room as though a giant lost it in a stroll through the building. It is white and has a Nike swoop on the side. The laces are made of cloth, but the rest of it is made of wood. There is also a lollipop one, the candy part painted in blue and green and yellow swirls, the stick—where the child’s legs would go—painted an authentic bone white. Corban’s favorite is the baby treasure chest. It is mahogany and, in fact, it is a treasure chest in every way. Only that inside it is lined with satin and when it closes it is airtight.

The store is never crowded, so often when the proprietor, Anexus Corban, and his friend Father Simon Peter are there together they can talk as candidly as two men with pasts too illuminated for forgetting can talk. This day Simon Peter sits at the stool reserved for him and begins. “Do you have anything new in, Corban?” But before Anexus can respond with a mention of the glass windows he’s just installed, two girls in school uniforms walk in.

“School project,” the blond one says as she waves her notebook at Anexus. He knows they are lying. He knows that though he is running an honest and important business, for some his shop is just a curiosity. Like everyone, the girls are attracted to the children’s coffins, but the dark-haired one slinks away shyly to the Mexican coffins that are closer to the counter, where there is less light.

Corban comes from behind the counter, where he displays things like folded silk shrouds that look like nightgowns and tiny prayer books from every God-fearing religion he knows. He asks the girls if they need some help.

“We’re picking our coffins,” says the brown girl.

The other opens her eyes at her and interjects: “For a history project.”

The girls wear ties. They are seniors in secondary school. Private school, by the colors they’re wearing, but Corban can’t tell which one.

Father Simon is annoyed at them. He does not know them. They do not go to the Catholic school. They are an interruption from his favorite part of the day. He tries to overcome this. “What is the topic of the assignment?”

“Death,” the fair one says.

“The history of death?” asks Simon with what sounds like disbelief.

“The history of mourning,” the brown-skinned one interjects. She is thinking that this place is like a museum of death. No, no, a gallery of mourning. She sees the simple wooden coffin, the kind that the Baha’is get buried in because it is all pine. It’s all natural and will go back into the land without harm. The girl likes this idea in theory, but still to her the coffin looks very sad.

Her name is Gita Manachandi. That is what her parents named her and when they gave her that name they expected that it would stay put until she married and it would turn to her husband to rename her—last and first name both. A brand-new name for her rebirth into wifedom. But Gita did not stay put. She did not always go by Gita. She would not ever go by any husband-given name either. It was not that she did not like the name Gita. It was just that early on her best friend had begun calling her Pinky because … well, because of a mistake, as is the case with the birth of so many nicknames. Perhaps Gita too was a mistake. Pinky became Pinky in the second grade when her family moved from Bombay to the island and Leslie Dockers asked her her name and she said it but with shyness and Leslie thought she said Pinky and that was that. The teachers did not call her Pinky. Her parents did not call her Pinky. In the classroom and in her home (one was only an extension of the other) she was Gita. In the playground and in the street (one was only an extension of the other) she was Pinky. She and Leslie Dockers were a pair. Their mothers had approved of the friendship when the girls were young for the mistaken reason that each family felt the other would help with assimilation to island life. The Manachandis thought that Leslie’s family was Creole—the white French they had heard were native to some of the islands. The Dockers thought Gita was Trini—Indo-Caribbean from Trinidad. But neither family was from the islands and by the time each family began to question the need for this friendship, it was too late. The Manachandis were from Bombay. The Dockers were actually from Leeds.

The girls became island girls of their own accord and by the time the Dockers or the Manachandis realized that actually, they did not want their girl children to be islanders at all, it was too late. It was not that she was Gita-Pinky. She did not feel as though she lived on any hyphen or margin. She was both or either.

In the shop Pinky listens to the priest talk to Leslie about what mourning is like in Gambia and the Catholic Church. She doesn’t know what grief is like in India, though at her house it means loud phone calls to living family and quiet talks with the dead.

Leslie, who is not listening at all, stoops down to inspect the little car coffin. Pinky wanders over to the Guadeloupe one with her pen and notebook ready. The coffin is open to show the Virgin emblazoned on the inside. She leans into it as though wanting to feel the satin on her face. She is thinking of her mother. Father Simon, watching her, wants to pull her back. He is afraid that perhaps the lid will come crashing down. His body tenses with this feeling but he knows it is not his business to tell her what to do in Corban’s gallery. He stays quiet. Pinky peeks over at Corban but Corban is watching Leslie who is lying on her belly on the floor to better see into the coffin car.

“Damn,” Leslie says. “It’s got leather lining in this bad boy.”

Simon watches Pinky put her hand into the coffin and touch the inside. This is allowed but she does it as if she is afraid to be caught. Now Corban sees her. She is squeezing the cushioning. She looks up and pulls her hand out. “It’s luxurious,” she says. “You could sleep in it. How much does it cost?”

“A lot,” answers Corban suspiciously. But Pinky is bolder than she seems. She lingers as though she were a real customer. She asks questions like What kind of people buy these? Where did you get it? When people come in do they shop, do they bargain or do they just buy? Then she pulls out her fifty and buys some marigolds that are in a tiny clear box. They are fresh and soft. They are the same color as the Virgin coffin. Corban feels more warmly toward the girl then.

“It’s so beautiful,” she says, referring still to the coffin as Leslie pulls her to leave. “It’s like art.” The girls were on their way to a party.

Gita was pretty smart by all definitions, but no one thought there was anything so special about this. She was a hard worker. She studied with the ferocity of someone in love. And this
was
special. She was respected for this by teachers and sought out for guidance by students. Her parents, who imagined her growing up to be someone’s wife, approved because her study habits meant she would be a desirable catch—a woman who could bear smart and studious sons. Gita did not see it this way. She imagined that she was growing up to be an obstetrician-gynecologist. In her dreams she treated immigrant Indian women and slipped them birth control while their husbands waited in the lounge. Because she was darker than most of the other Indian girls who came straight from India, she was often mistaken even by her own for being Guyanese or Trinidadian. To be called Guyanese or Trini was thought to be an insult by some in the subcontinent community. But Pinky did not take it this way. Those island Indians had children who spoke loose and didn’t go to Hindu classes on Saturdays. The girls didn’t think twice before dating native boys. Pinky called herself black and no one who heard her objected—she never called herself this in front of her parents.

Up until the first two weeks of her senior year Pinky’s routine was the same.

“Gita! Get up my love. Gita!” She was the only child and much was made of her. The maid, Mrs. Delroy, would tickle her toes with the straw of the broom until Gita pulled her feet away and bolted upright. She would go to the shower. Which was her shower alone. As she got older her showers became longer and by the second week of being a senior in high school she was taking forty-five minutes—something of a crime on an island where rainwater was stored under the house like treasure. She liked the water hot, despite the heat of the island. She liked it scalding hot. Her mother would come and knock on the door. “Too much heat! You’re going to wrinkle young!” Then Gita would blast on the cold water and squeal, turning circles under the shower so that she could erase the wrinkling. For many years she stepped out of the shower and reached for her towel without even glancing at herself in the bathroom mirror that covered an entire wall. But since becoming a senior and since Leslie had lost her virginity last year, Gita has become more interested in her own body, and more bold with it.

Now she would step out of the shower and dry herself off with the delicate pats her mother had taught her would not dry out the skin. When the steam evaporated Gita would hang up the towel and walk slowly to the mirror. She looked at herself as she brushed her teeth and arranged her hair. Sometimes, if she was thinking of Mateo Parone, she would look serious and sexy like she imagined Leslie might when she was doing it with Ben Jamison. Then she would blow a kiss to her reflection but this would be too much and she would collapse into giggles. Her uniform would be laid out on the newly made bed when she emerged.

At the breakfast table her mother and Mrs. Delroy would lay out jelly and tea and tofu eggs. The two women would be quarreling with each other in the way master and servant have quarreled for centuries. Neither one really able to understand the other even after sixteen years making breakfast together in the same kitchen. Mrs. Delroy had a thick Kittitian accent, while Mrs. Manachandi had never lost her northern Indian lilt. This is not to say that the Manachandis treated Mrs. Delroy as though she was less. They called her Mrs. Delroy. They gave her that respect. The other new Indian families called their maids by their first names and talked badly about them at Indian-only functions. When Mrs. Delroy and Mrs. Manachandi stood in the kitchen together they seemed as though they were two halves of the same person.

Mr. Manachandi would also be at the table, reading yesterday’s paper. He wished that the island had a paper delivery system so he could read that morning’s paper at the breakfast table as businessmen did in England, but it was not so. Mr. Manachandi had never lived in the U.K., coming directly from Bombay, so he would never have the paper delivered to him in time for that morning’s breakfast. He always read the news a day late.

Gita and her father ate breakfast together. He quizzed her on yesterday’s news, which she had read yesterday before she arrived at her father’s store to deliver the paper. He imagined that she would marry the son of one of his fellow jewelry store owners in Tortola or St. Thomas. As each son returned from the U.S. or the U.K. with his business degree Mr. Manachandi would scrutinize him. But either the young man would marry someone already out of secondary school, or there would be a scandal with a native girl and the boy would be sent to St. Vincent to recover. Mr. Manachandi wasn’t sure which shop heir Gita would marry but he knew that she would have to be witty and up on local politics to win the best mate. She would also have to know math quite well and the value of different bits of gold. So often at the breakfast table he would test her with problems of centimeters and karats. He might present her with a pair of heart-in-hand gold earrings with diamond studs. “How much do you think I bought this for?” She would smile over her tea. “Seventy dollars a bag.” “How much should I sell it for?” She stirred her tea. “Is it Christmas or regular season?” “Christmas.” “Is your customer a tourist or a local?” “A local.” She tapped her fingers on the tablecloth. They made a thudding but musical sound. “Two hundred dollars at first. Bring it down to one-fifty. If they don’t take it wait until they come back the next day. Say something like
Yes, I remember you. And now this is the last pair.
One-twenty is the lowest.” “Too high.” her father would say. “You’ll never sell anything. People will think you’re cheating them.” But later that day someone would come into his store and he would say, “Look at the diamonds. They’re real. These are eighteen-karat gold. Handmade, each one. One-twenty is the lowest I can go. I’ll give it to you for one-twenty.” Secretly he wished Gita would never have to marry. That she would come to the shop and work with him like a son.