Valmiki's Daughter (20 page)

Viveka wanted to shout out,
No, it wasn't Anand's death, it was Dad's involvement with the woman up the hill
. But she had already learned her lesson regarding that one. So she gathered her courage and asked about the party, when it had been held.

“I was planning a party before Anand died,” Devika said. “Then, when that happened we, of course, shelved the idea. We didn't entertain until a good year later.”

A year later. What had happened between her brother's passing away and that party? Nothing came to Viveka's mind. An entire year of her life, a blank of time.

“That is the party that caused us all so much trouble, and you,” continued Devika, “I think you saw too much for your age. I don't know what got into your father at the party. But that was a long time ago, and he has changed. Besides, if I have forgiven him, why haven't you?”

Viveka slit the bake and buttered both sides. How was she now to separate the image of her father lying on Pia Moretti, and of the memories that quickly followed: playing the game of fish in the car with Anand, and of Vashti slapping Anand's hand during the game and then him crying, crying, crying, — the last memory she had of him — and of Mani Moretti in his painter overalls, and of the party? They had always collided in her memory,
playing out as if they had all occurred on one long and jumbled day.

Viveka cut slices of cheese and packed them inside of the bake. She bit off the tip of her sandwich. At that her mother pursed her lips, pleased.

VIVEKA WAS GOOD AT DETAILS. HER MEMORIES WERE FULL OF THEM.
But whether they were real details, or the results of an admittedly fertile imagination coupled with the need for all the dots to line up sensibly, she no longer knew.

She sat playing with the bake and cheese sandwich, staring at it as if there was knowledge to be had from it. And she watched her mother, already busy again with her list of this and that regarding the party. In this rare moment of truth-telling, of openness, should she ask another question? Dare she? She would have to admit to prying:

She had been about twelve. It was a Saturday. Her father had gone to Maraval with his friend Saul and her mother was at the hairdresser's. The house was quiet. Vashti was lying in bed reading a novel. The maid was in her room with the door closed. Viveka stole into her parents' bedroom. She looked at their bed, made up with a bedspread that had peacocks embroidered in a hundred shades of iridescent turquoise on it. She had tried to imagine her father lying on top of her mother there. But she could not. Whenever she tried, she would see instead her father and the Moretti woman. He would be relaxed and easy, even as he worked himself into a sweat. She couldn't imagine him like that with her mother. The ceiling of the house, lined in highly polished hardwood, squeaked and creaked as it expanded and contracted in the heat. Through the window of her parents' bedroom came a strong ocean breeze, the melodious sounds of blue
jay tanagers and semps in the coconut and Julie mango trees, and once in a while a car lumbering up the hill or descending carefully outside.

She stole in farther, into her parents' bathroom. The doors of the cupboards were always locked when Valmiki and Devika weren't at home — locked against the prying eyes and idle hands of their hired help. Viveka went to her mother's dressing table and in a bone china dish found a hairpin. She straightened the pin and stuck it in the lock of her father's cupboard door. She had done this many times before, to no avail, but this one time there was a surprising click and the door popped open. Her heart thumped. She hadn't really meant for it to unlock. How would she lock it back, she wondered, trying to hold the door shut and manipulate the key in its lock again. When she couldn't get it to relock she tiptoed hastily out of both rooms, taking the hairpin with her. Vashti had fallen asleep with her novel on her chest. The maid was now mopping the kitchen floor. Viveka slipped past her into the garden. She looked about to make sure no one saw what she was doing, and threw the pin over the fence at the back of their yard, into a section of the neighbour's yard that was overgrown with philodendrons. Then she ran back into the house, all the while hoping, imagining, trying to transmit brainwashing messages to her mother, that her mother would simply assume she had in her haste left her father's cupboard doors unlocked.

The phone was ringing as Viveka entered the house. The maid answered and Viveka heard her say, “I don't know, Madam. They was in they room, reading. The house quiet-quiet. I mopping the floor. What time you coming back home, Madam? I have to call and tell my son when to come and meet me.” Viveka stayed still. “So, I could tell him come for me by three o'clock so?” Viveka could see a clock from where she crouched. It was 1:25.
Her mother would obviously be away for some time yet. Even if she were to immediately leave the salon on the far side of downtown she would not make it back for at least half an hour. Viveka's heart beat harder with a new idea. She had time, now that the cupboard was unlocked, and now that she had convinced herself that her mother would think she herself had left it unlocked, to have a look inside.

She listened for the mop's handle hitting the metal of the pail, the swish of water in which it was washed. She eased open the top drawer in her father's cupboard. It was full of white socks and underwear. She waited and listened again. The drag of the mop along the floor could be heard by one intent on hearing it. She was afraid to touch her father's underpants but slipped her fingers under the socks. She felt the smooth cool bottom of the drawer. She shut that one and opened another: black and brown socks, and white vests. She reached into its back corners. In one corner there was an oily-feeling bottle and an almost empty tube of ointment. She tried to read the tube's label, but it was too mangled from use. Under the clothing she found a folded-up piece of paper. She pried under the clothing to see exactly where and how that paper was angled and she removed it. She opened it carefully. It was lined, and torn on one of its sides. It held four numbers written in fading blue ink. They were underlined in a swift, off-hand manner, the line slightly arched. Nothing more. The writing was not her father's. It could have been her mother's, for the letters slanted in the way her mother's writing did. But there was a boldness to them that made Viveka think otherwise. The numbers meant nothing to her. She smelled the paper. It smelled of the wood of the cupboard. She folded it back and placed it as she had found it. There was something remarkably empowering about knowing that in her father's drawer was a
piece of paper on which four underlined numbers were written, and that her father did not know that she knew of it.

She opened another drawer. Leaning against one wall of it, hemmed in by neatly folded pyjama tops and bottoms, was an envelope containing about a dozen black and white photographs, all so old that they were more in shades of yellows than blacks and whites. They were photos of her father's family. Her mother had once shown them to her and Vashti. It didn't matter to Viveka why they were now in his drawer. Next to that envelope was another with a receipt from a company called Rahamut's Co. Ltd. What it was for had been filled in by an illegible hand. She could only make out the price of the item, $1,178.

Although she was looking for nothing in particular Viveka was disappointed. She closed that drawer and with some difficulty opened the last one. It was crammed tight with T-shirts, and underneath the piles were magazines. She withdrew one. It had colourful photos on the cover of women with their breasts bared. The breasts were strangely bulbous and the way the women sat made their chests protrude. They wore panties that looked like triangular patches on strings. She turned the pages carefully, her body perspiring, her heart racing. She felt odd sensations, like those one had swinging high up, or plunging fast down on a garden swing. There were men in the photos in what must have been a man's version of a panty, skimpy and black. The bulges inside of the men's underpants were large and there were little points in them. She opened the sock drawer and took out a sock. She rolled it tight and shoved it in her pants, then looked at the outcome in the mirror of the nearby dressing table. She compared it to one of the photos of the men, rearranged it a bit and compared again. She pulled out the sock, wiped it on her pant leg, and replaced it.

There was also in the final drawer a calendar, an old one, from about four years ago. It was of naked men. She looked at two of the pages, and although she did find the men's private parts curious, in general she found the calendar of little interest. The magazine had been much more interesting, the one with the women, showing how the men held the women, where their hands rested on the women's bodies and the women's hands rested on theirs. It occurred to Viveka that she would have to pay another visit to this cupboard. She would not linger too much longer, only see what else was there for the future.

Under the magazines was a large manila envelope. Perhaps, she thought, full of boring bills or photos, or — and this thought made her ticklish again — perhaps another magazine of women with men. She pulled it out. But there were only documents in it: her parents' passports, old passport photos, her and Vashti's birth certificates. She had seen these before. But there was another paper she had not seen before. It was her parents' marriage certificate. Her parents' friends held wedding anniversary celebrations, but her parents never did. The children, peeved, wanting to celebrate their parents' anniversary too, had asked more than once about the date. They were always given the same hesitant and faltering answers, each parent giving a different date, even. Now here was the certificate, with the date — the day, the month, and the year. Her heart pounded, for how would she be able to tell her parents that she knew the exact date, inform them of it, remind them of it, when this was how she had found out — by snooping? Then, suddenly, it was as if she had been hit in her stomach. The year on the certificate was the same one in which she had been born. She tapped out months on her fingers, in almost the exact way her mother had whenever Viveka and Vashti had asked about the marriage date. She counted it out
again, taking their marriage and her birth date into consideration. She did it a third time. And she concluded that her mother must have been pregnant for four months before the date on the certificate. No wonder.

Trembling, Viveka could barely hold the document in her hand to replace it. She had no recollection whatsoever of the order in which she had found it, nor could she remember how the envelope had lain on the drawer bottom. There was pounding in her ears, in her brain. Her eyes brimmed fast with tears. She fumbled the drawer shut and the cupboard closed, and ran to the washroom. She had instantly tried to think of herself as special, as the vital cause from which a family flowed, but she sensed the meaning of the forgotten and fumbled date. She shut herself in the bathroom for a good hour, her tears endless, and she pinched the soft flesh of her inner forearm until cherry-like spots blossomed there. After that she never brought up the question of her parents' anniversary again.

Viveka glanced over at her mother. Devika was on the telephone to the caterer again, still making changes to the menu.

Although Viveka understood her own talent for filling in blanks in her memory, making sense of what didn't easily add up in her mind, she was sure, too, that she had made up none of that memory. Every detail was real. It was the one memory she could recall in perfect sequence: the sound of the birds through the bathroom window, the ping of the mop against the pail, the water splashing on to the floor, the maid's journey from the far part of the terrazzo floor to the part nearest the carpeted bedroom section. She remembered the moment of discovering the marriage certificate and then the moment of understanding, of wanting it to mean that she was special, and how her body had trembled after.

No, she would not ask her mother about any of that. Theirs was a house of secrets, and she would keep it like that. Her mother was finally sounding content; the decision about the menu had been made. There would be mini pastels, crab-backs, sweet-and-sour shrimp on toothpicks for starters. At least, thought Viveka, her mother knew how to pull together a menu. Devika now spoke to the caterer with a new excited authority. The colour of the napkins, the pattern of the cutlery, were the current issues.

Her mother safely occupied, Viveka continued to think about her memories, about the time just before and after Anand's death. She certainly had not forgotten asking her father why he had been lying on top of the groaning Mrs. Moretti. She thought of that moment at the dinner table with embarrassment, not for her father and what he had done (or whatever it was she imagined him doing), but at herself for asking a question she instinctively knew, even then, would cause a stir. It was the events that had followed upon that question that her fertile mind seemed entirely incapable of arranging satisfactorily.

After Viveka had posed her unfortunate question, her mother had become anxious and watchful. She seemed to cry incessantly. Perhaps, Viveka thought now, it had to do with Anand's death, and she had confused the chronology of events. But she remembered asking her mother at the time why she was crying so much. In a burst of sobbing her mother replied that she was suffering with a cold. Yet, Viveka noted, her father didn't rub her mother's head, or bring her a cup of tea or aspirin, and he slept in the guest room. The two girls were told that this was because Valmiki didn't want to catch that cold. Sometimes Viveka's mother and father spoke, but it was as if they didn't know each other. How Viveka wished to become a big strong boy who took care of his mother, made her happy. Perhaps, she used to think,
if she were a boy, a brave blond-haired boy who could walk on rocks barefoot and shoot an arrow straight and far, her mother would have been kinder to her.

She remembered a day when there was some calm. They had all got into the car and her father took them for a drive to the San Fernando Wharf. On that trip he spoke to her mother tenderly. He parked against the retaining wall that acted also as a long bench on which people sat to watch the oil tankers in the Gulf, to see the sun set, and to eat corn from the vendors who set up their bike-carts there.