Valmiki's Daughter (14 page)

When Viveka was on her own at nights with the lights off, Vashti's breathing telling her that she had the privacy she needed, she would try to re-create that feeling she had experienced the first time she had had an orgasm with Elliot. She had had others with him since, but none were as surprising, as delightfully confusing as that first one. She tried imagining him touching her, but that left her more sore than excited. So she would imagine herself driving
a car, but she would also imagine that she was Elliot sitting in the passenger seat, and that she, Elliot, was riding his hands up her bare legs, inching up to her crotch, finally slipping her/his fingers inside the elastic of her panties, and that feeling, like the first time, would come to her again. It was a tingle that crept up her arms, down her legs, circled her hips, gripped her feet, her toes, and shook her with numerous explosive convulsions. She got to this place every time on her own, but never again with Elliot. Rather than let this worry her, she decided that since she was perfectly capable of arriving at this delight on her own, her reluctance with Elliot was because he was not the right man, and she was waiting for that man to come along. In magazines she browsed through at the hair salon, she had read that when the right man came along you knew it, you simply knew it. She was nagged, however, by an irrational conviction that the right man would never come along. Her father had a saying that all men were bastards, that he should know. She hated when he said that, but didn't doubt that he should know. Deep in her the memory was some long-ago family unpleasantness involving her father and a former neighbour, Pia Moretti. Viveka had an actual memory of the situation with Pia Moretti, but that memory was so bizarre she had often wondered if she had built pictures around bits of overheard fighting between her parents, and these imagined scenes had worked themselves into what she experienced as a memory.

Viveka suddenly realized that in the public space of the taxi she had been thinking about sex, and that if she were to call up that bizarre memory there would be even more sex sifting into the psychic space of the taxi. She wondered if any of the passengers was a mind-reader. Her face, she feared, might have given her away, for she had felt a burn in her cheeks thinking of Elliot and of Helen. She would stop all of this crazy-making thinking; Elliot often said
that she thought too much. By way of relaxing her brain, she tried to focus on the landscape through which the taxi travelled.

They were well past the swamp now, red-breasted blackbirds replaced by opportunistic corbeaux flying low overhead, their heavy heads angled downward as they ploughed the land with their red-ringed eyes for the swollen carcasses of animals that had drowned in the flood. The road here was raised, and the land on either side sat below. Although the roads were now dry, the water had still not drained from the low-lying fields. On the left were plots of coconut. There would normally be a delightful spread of crocuses at the foot of the tall trees, lime green fronds studded with brilliant orange tulip-like flowers, but the ground was completely submerged. In clearings were people's homes, one-room structures no bigger than Viveka's bedroom, made of mismatched planks of wood with roofs thatched from palm branches. Although these houses were on stilts, the water had risen up to the doorway of several of them. A man stood in the open doorway of one. The brown water was up to his ankles and Viveka imagined that the floor of his house was underwater. The driver of the car could be heard, “You woulda think they'da build up they house off the ground by now. Flooding in this area is not a new thing. Some people don't learn, I tell you.”

Viveka let her head fall lightly against the turned-up window, aware that a thousand other heads had likely greased that same spot before her. She guessed — hoped — that head lice didn't live on glass.

She liked thinking that the flood and the havoc it wreaked would not have made one iota of difference to the pace of travel along this route, whether she was in a private chauffeur-driven car or in this public taxi. But for the man standing in the doorway of his partially submerged house, having choices might have made
a difference, she mused. He probably couldn't afford, or didn't have the technical knowledge, to build any higher. She ought to have said this to the driver, should have been less shy, Viveka thought. The classroom at the university seemed to be the only place where she was not shy or demure, or where she thought her plain looks were not a disadvantage. Here in the car, her plainness contributed to her reluctance to speak up. She wanted to bet that if she had spoken up, no one would have heard her or someone would have begun to speak over her voice, blocking out whatever she was saying. Or the correctness of her grammar and the pronunciation of her words — in short, her accent, though a Trinidadian one — would have pegged her as a local but not one of the usual taxi- travelling clientele and therefore her contribution would either have been ignored, rebuffed, or experienced as a silencing of the others. Suddenly she was wishing she had worn lipstick — even just a faint colour, nothing like the dark purple worn by the Indian woman up front — or even a push-up bra, something her sartori-ally savvy and more well-endowed sister had suggested more than once.

In her mind somersaulted partial phrases. “When the right man comes along.” “All men are bastards.” “Some people don't learn, I tell you.” She glanced discreetly at the faces of the other passengers to see if there were any mind-readers in her midst. If she could change one thing about herself it would be how demure she became outside of her parents' house.

SHE HADN'T ALWAYS FELT DEMURE. SHE USED TO THINK OF HERSELF
as a blond-haired boy who was strong, powerful, peaceful, and could do anything and everything. He had a horse he could ride. He didn't speak much. He was kind. His name was Vince, short for “invincible.” He was not in the least the bastard her father
said all men were. Vince loved being outdoors. There was that time when she, or rather Vince, had been out in the yard. There was a butterfly net. He had been waving it at a butterfly.

But whenever this particular memory came to her, this last confused her: the boy she had imagined herself to be wasn't the type who would capture any living thing for sport. Memory and imagination collided. Was she seven years old then, or was it five, or was she eleven? Was Anand alive then? If he was, she would have a clue with which to work out her age when this incident took place. She tried to remember something in school or something about how and why she had got the net — if there was, in fact, ever a net in their house. If there had been one, it had long ago been discarded. How she wished she could anchor the events in this particular memory, more than in any other, and separate out what had actually happened from her propensity to bridge the gaps in logic with invention. Asked about a net, her mother had one day vaguely remembered there being one once, but then on a different day long after had said, no, she didn't remember any such net. In any case, the memory went like this.

Vince was barefoot
.
He skipped about the yard following a rather large morpho, the biggest he had ever seen
,
the size of a small child's head, of Anand's head. It was sapphire one minute like the tropical sky at night, as silver and turquoise as the waters of coral reefs the next, and the beauty of the thing lured her boy-self through the front gate of his parents' house and up the road past several houses until he found himself standing at the gate of a neighbour's yard. The low gate was unlatched, and slightly ajar. The butterfly alighted on a sign on the gate:
Manetto Moretti, Painter and Contractor, Residential and Commercial.
When it took off again, up the high wide red-painted concrete stairs of the Moretti's shrub-and flower-surrounded bungalow, the boy followed it. There, on the
terrazzo-tiled veranda, the blond and heroic boy was suddenly breathless. He perched on the railing of a wrought-iron balcony.

In her mind's eye, sitting in the taxi, Viveka saw the house up the road from her own, and there was currently no stairway with a railing on it. Ah! That was the tear in her memory. The incident couldn't have happened because there was no balcony and no railing on that house now. But the memory, like a piece of music, marched onward relentlessly.

Perched on that wrought-iron railing that surrounded the open balcony, Vince stretched out his arm, the net agape, and he reached even farther for the flying thing, such a perfect thing, bigger than a newborn baby's head
— impossible, Viveka thought, but the memory was compelling, persistent.
The butterfly flew lithely over the railing and was caught in a swirling current of air. It flapped its wings, and gaining control, rose above the yard, above the clotheslines on which billowed colourful dresses belonging to Pia Moretti, and several pairs of Mani's white-but-paint-flecked overalls. The morpho winged higher and higher until it was above the rooftops of the neighbourhood, and then it ceased to flap and merely glided.

No matter how often Viveka had replayed this mind-tape, when she came to this part her heart beat faster and she felt the excitement of the almost-ness of a moment, and she was pleased, even as she questioned the reliability of her mind, that she had the good sense not to try to follow the butterfly-bird over the railing.

About to head back down the stairs, Vince, her invincible boy-self, noticed that the wall-length sliding doors that led into the Morettis' house were drawn invitingly wide apart, yet no one seemed to be about. “Mr. Moretti?” the boy whispered with neighbourly concern from the balcony. There was no answer, so the boy raised his voice and called again. “Hello, Mrs. Moretti? Mr. Moretti? Anyone here?” He, or anyone else so inclined, could have
been a lucky thief that day. On tiptoe still
— and now, in the taxi to the university, Viveka's heart raced again, this time because she really wanted the scenes to miraculously change and to remember something entirely different —
Vince entered the house. He could feel the coarse sponginess of the high-pile blue-redtaupe Afghan carpet
— this is the detail that had always made her think there must be truth to the wretched memory, for it was not likely that her child-self would otherwise have seen an Afghan carpet, there being on the tropical island no need for such an item —
and he stepped over a leather belt that had been dropped on the carpet along with a hammer, a pair of pliers, a wire clipper, a screwdriver, and a wrench, and then walked down a corridor that ended at a closed door through which low sounds wafted —
Viveka pressed her ear to the glass of the taxi, but in the memory she pressed her ear to the door —
and he heard a groan. Not an urgent or ugly groan, but still, a groan. The blond boy called again, “Hello?” The groaning persisted and he, if he could have been heard, was ignored. He turned the door's handle, waited, and called again. Then, unnoticed, he stepped into the room and immediately bolted out again. He held his breath and pressed his face to the crack between the door and the wall to which it was hinged. Through the crack he studied his father, his cacao-coloured skin. The arc of his back. Vince watched Pia Moretti beneath his father. Her eyes were shut tight, a frown on her face. Pia stretched and arched her pelvis upward, and Viveka's father's pelvis flicked at her. Suddenly his father's body collapsed in exhaustion on top of Pia.
Viveka's heart pounded, resounding in her ears.

She had no actual memory of what might have followed, but Viveka always imagined actions that would have made sense, would have knitted the memory, if that is what it was, into a logical, sensible whole. Doing so calmed her: she, or rather blond
Vince, did not go straight home, but ran around and around the neighbourhood until, dripping with sweat, he limped, feet swollen, blistered, and bleeding, through the front gates of his parents' house.

How could she have made any of it up, she wondered, when there were bits and pieces, like the heaving and the humping, that she would not otherwise, at that age, have been enlightened about, and so could not have imagined them? And how else to explain the coldness that had followed between her parents?

IN THE LIMBO OF TAXI TRAVEL THE DREADED WORD CAME TO HER
again.
Mannish
. An onomatopoeic word that sounded as disgusting as what it suggested. It occurred to Viveka that her father was mannish, and she meant that in the derogatory sense — hunting helpless creatures on weekends and almost flaunting those affairs he had with women. When he and her mother quarrelled about his affairs, it was as if they did so in private, yet it seemed as if her parents were in fact making sure that Vashti and Viveka overheard them. It confused and irritated Viveka that her parents were both simultaneously secret and public about the subject.

Viveka sat up suddenly with a little jolt that startled the passenger next to her. She, her boy-self Vince lingering inside of her, had a sudden, compelling desire to know where Pia Moretti was. She had a vague notion that Pia and her husband were no longer on the island, but she wasn't sure if this was actually so. She looked at the cars crawling down the other side of the highway to see if anyone resembling an aged Pia Moretti might be in one of them. She was oddly compelled to know that Pia Moretti was safe. Safe from her own beauty, and certainly safe from men. Men like her father. She wanted to keep her mother safe, too. Safe from Pia Moretti. But if loyalties regarding her mother
tugged at her one minute, in the next they repelled her. “Serves her right,” Viveka thought, “for putting up with all those affairs. How could any woman be so accepting? I can't stand what Dad did and probably, for all I know, still does to her. Still, I'd rather be like him any day, than helpless and accepting as Mom is.”

Her taxi-musing now circled back to the altercation about volleyball. She would find a way to play volleyball, she decided, even if it caused an ungulfable rift between her parents and herself. Volleyball, after all, meant more than volleyball.