Valmiki's Daughter

Shani Mootoo

Copyright © 2008 Shani
Mootoo

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This edition published in 2010 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina
Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto,
ON
,
M
5
V
2
K
4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN
PUBLICATION
Mootoo, Shani, 1957–
Valmiki's daughter / Shani
Mootoo.
e
ISBN
: 978-0-88784-898-8
I. Title.
PS
8572.
O
622
V
35 2008    
C
813'.54
    
C
2008-902023-5

Cover design: Ingrid Paulson

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing
program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the
Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For SJD

SHE IS SEATED ON THE BED IN A SEA OF
BRILLIANTLY WRAPPED PRESENTS.

He watches her, grinning, and he makes silly comments as if he fully
agrees with all that is happening. The grinning hurts, but if he doesn't grin he
will cry. He'd rather switch off the light in the room, throw a net over her, wrap
her tightly in his grip, and flee with her. Take her deep into one of the forests
hunting with him. Just the two of them. Never to return. Instead he stands still, jokes
about the presents. What he wishes he would or could do and what he actually does are
related only by being perfect opposites.

Once, she doted on him. Then, suddenly it seems, she sees right through
him. He is sure of it.

Suddenly. Everything has happened so suddenly.

His wife certainly saw through him long ago. But he credits Devika with a
vision larger than that of his daughter. Devika's vision encompassed her own
long-term welfare as well as that of his two girls, their girls — young women,
rather. Devika's vision, too, held dear nothing but respect, the utmost, for how
things are expected to be. He and Devika have these values, if nothing else, in
common.

Of course, it isn't really so “suddenly” that his
daughter reared up and threatened to undo them all. What is sudden is him seeing
her for who she is, as if for the first time. Even so, he has done
not a damn thing to help her, he taunts himself, and now she is on the verge of leaving.
He knows this is good for them all, or at least for those who will remain behind. He has
no idea if it will be good for his daughter. If only he could take her away. Tell her
his own story so that she might create a different one.

He can only hope. Such a frail thing, hope.

He needs, for his own sanity, to point to the moment, to the specific
sliver of time when his eyes began, finally, to open, when he might have done something
— or everything — differently. The point on which he might hang regret.

Regret is so much more palpable than hope.

Was it just that day, that rainy September day — a year ago now
— that had begun with his daughter barging, even before he had fully awakened,
into his and Devika's bedroom, insisting on having her own way? He should have
stood up, not to her, but to his wife. He should have let his daughter do all that she
wanted, be all that she was. But in a place like San Fernando, that was impossible.

IF YOU STAND ON ONE OF THE TRIANGULAR TRAFFIC ISLANDS AT
THE
top of Chancery Lane just in front of the San Fernando General Hospital
(where the southern arm of the lane becomes Broadway Avenue, and Harris Promenade, with
its official and public buildings, and commemorative statues, shoots eastward), you
would get the best, most all-encompassing views of the town. You would see that narrower
secondary streets emanate from the central hub. Not one is ever straight for long. They
angle, curve this way then that, dip or rise, and off them shoot a maze of smaller side
streets.

There is, at that Chancery Lane intersection, a flow of traffic around the
white-painted triangular concrete islands that involves some nudging, constant car-horn
blaring, frantic bicycle-bell ringing, face-reddening expletives, and curses of
one's forefathers and progeny. Streams of cars jerk forward, halt too suddenly,
and then as if by magic, flow forward effortlessly, traffic lights and wardens
momentarily rendered unnecessary.

Imagine you are a tourist let down from the sky, blindfolded, in the
middle of a weekday, onto one of those traffic islands. Your senses would be bombarded
at once. You would descend into a cacophony of sound, and a cacophony, yes, of smell.
Car horns
would hoot and toot in varying lengths and tones, sounding,
with a little imagination, like a modernist noise symphony that would include outbursts
of the nut seller's arcing melody, “Nuuuuhts, nuts, nuts, nuts, nuuuuhts,
fiiiif-ty cents a baaahg.” You'd hear theatrical steupses, and people
hawking unabashedly, dredging the recesses of their craniums before spitting —
should you open your eyes prematurely — amphibian-like yellowish or greenish globs
hard onto the sidewalk. You might be lucky enough, if you arrive at the right time of
the day, to hear rounds of clarion bells on a descending partial scale. The
church's organ would no sooner soar upward than the choir would be heard in
practice: short bursts of a phrase repeated, repeated, repeated until it is mastered,
then longer sections practised until the entire hymn is finally belted upward ever more.
Outside the church, people would be hurling greetings at one another. Some would be
hailing taxis, and at least once a day there is bound to be the theatre of a spurned
lovers' quarrel, all the better when not two but three are involved. The taxi
drivers at the several stands in the area, and the nut sellers perched like ground-bound
gargoyles at every intersection, could probably intervene as witnesses or judges, for
from their positions they might well have seen the affair unfold from beginning to end.
But in the interest of business as well as their own longevity they stay out of the
fracas, which sometimes involves knives or cutlasses that make the proximity of the
emergency ward useful. From many sources you will hear radio commentary on a cricket
match. Sailing in on a breeze from one of the side streets, the faint music of a
steel-pan orchestra might also be discerned. Human-like cries overhead might startle you
at first, but you would soon easily distinguish the sounds of greedy competitive
seagulls from those of agony and despair emanating night and day from the various wards
at the hospital.

Despite the aural melee, what might well overwhelm you
are this intersection's odours. Before you remove the blindfold and see the blue
haze caused by the exhaust fumes of cars, scooters, and trucks, your nostrils will have
stung from it, and your skin will have tingled and turned greasy. The aroma of roasting
peanuts, of corn boiling in garlic-infused water, of over-used vegetable oils in which
split-pea fritters with cumin seeds have been fried, of the cheery, spicy foreignness of
the apples and grapes being sold in the open-air counter on the corner, would activate
your taste-buds, and in spite of the surrounding unpleasantness, even if you had eaten
not long ago your stomach would argue that it was ready and able again. A person might
pass near enough for you to be assailed by his or her too-long unwashed body. And you
might well be assaulted by the equally offensive fragrance of another passerby's
underarm deodorant, which, having been called upon to do its duty, swelled
uncontrollably in the heat. The stink of urine would, of course, be there, and
surprisingly, that of human excrement, rising high on crests of wind and then thankfully
subsiding. And sailing in, all the way up to this high point, on a breeze from the Gulf
not too far away, would be the odours of oil-coated seaweed, dried-out barnacles that
cover fishing vessels beached at the wharf below, and scents from foreign ports. If this
olfactory mélange were audible, it would indeed be cacophonous, made more so by the
terrible nostril-piercing stench of incinerated medical wastes and bed linens,
intermittent effluxes from two tall chimney stacks set at the rear of the hospital. Your
stomach, opened up moments before in greedy receptivity, might feel as if it had been
tricked and dealt a dirty blow. Then again, it might be the season when the long,
dangling pods of the samaan tree (the unofficial tree of the city, planted and
self-sprouted everywhere), which resemble a caricature-witch's misshapen
fingers, split — and the entire town is drenched in an odour
akin to that of a thousand pairs of off-shore oil workers' unwashed socks, an
odour as bad as, but more widely distributed than, the effluvia from the medical waste
incinerator.