Valmiki's Daughter (23 page)

“I want to say one more thing,” Anick continued. “Nayan
do not want me to go no place without him. He jealous. I want to run. I want to be free,
to run free like the lion, to be curious. Like the cat, no? But he tell me over and
over, so much time I sick of it, that is not safe for woman to go out alone.”

Valmiki frowned. He did not voice what ran through his mind: Frenchwoman,
even a lion is not free or safe in this place! They will capture the lion and put it in
a cage to gawk at it and to
say how beautiful it is, and then they
will skin it for its mane, which even in this hot weather they'd wear like a
shawl. And you know what curiosity did to the cat, don't you? He contented himself
with saying, “Your husband, I'm afraid, is right.”

“I tell him come with me, and he only laugh. He say, Why you want
run, we have car? He drive me everywhere.”

Valmiki managed a chuckle.

“Is funny, yes, but is not funny, too. I say I want to learn to
drive. He say, No, is not safe, and I say, But your mother she drive. He say is not safe
for foreign Frenchwoman who do not speak properly. Everything I hear is about pretty. I
wish to take a knife and cut my face.”

“Just a minute. You have no intentions of doing that, do
you?”

“No, no. I should not say that to a doctor because you take me too
serious. Of course not I do that.”

Valmiki straightened up and looked at Anick sternly for the first time.
“Do you want something to help with this low feeling? I mean, should I prescribe
you an antidepressant? Or if you'd like, I can refer to you someone you can talk
to more regularly.”

“Dr. Valmiki, I not crazy. I just not in my skin in this country. I
come in your office because I need to say these things to someone in confidence, but I
don't need that kind of medicine. I not crazy. Or maybe I am, to marry this man,
this family, to come to this country, to leave my own parents so far away. I need music,
not only steel pan and calypso. I like jump-up jump-up, and whine, whine, whine, but
that alone, all the time? Is
too
much. I need symphony, too. The Verdi, and the
Puccini, and to eat cotes du porc charcoutieres, but this country don't have that,
and we can't have no beef and no pork, not even thin ham slice, in his house.
Everything is roti-this, roti-that, Hindu-this, Hindu-that. Me, I like Hinduism very
much, but they too many rules in the
Prakash house. They
don't do ceremony or go to temple or pray. But still, all I hear about is Hindu,
Hindu, Hindu, and all these rules. I want to lie in the sun at the back of the house in
my bathing suit, and Nayan ask me if I crazy, I will offend his Hindu father. I thought
Hinduism was a tolerant religion but —”

Valmiki felt compelled to defend a religion that had been important to his
ancestors, although it was not one that he or his family practised nowadays.
“Hinduism, my dear,
is
a tolerant religion, but the people who practise
it are not themselves tolerant.”

He was rather pleased with the sageness of his statement, but Anick
brushed the air with her hand impatiently and carried on. “His mother, she want me
to make breakfast, lunch, dinner. They have washing machine, and they have servant, and
she want me to wash he and his father white shirts by hand in the tub downstairs. Nayan,
he don't try speaking French no more. He used to try in Canada. In Canada he doing
everything with me. But now he drinking almost everyday, I don't know what I come
to this place for. I am not a good wife. I think I can be good wife, but not the way
that he want, like his mother. I want to go out. I want to do things. He and me, we used
to do things before we come to here.”

Valmiki nodded as she spoke, thinking to himself that, indeed, she
wasn't crazy at all, but with these interests and desires she would certainly find
herself isolated and a bit of an oddity in Trinidad society. He felt sure that Anick
wasn't about to cut her face or hurt anyone. She might not last in Trinidad
— her and Nayan's marriage might not last here or anyplace else — but
pills wouldn't cure that either.

As attractive as Anick was, as vulnerable as she was, Valmiki, hearing
these things, also thought her too foreign. And with that
thought,
he realized he had changed. He had indeed grown older, had perhaps become more settled
than he had imagined before. He thought of Saul, and how there had come this time now
when, although he and Saul had sex less frequently than before — that was just the
nature of the beast — Saul's companionship, that hard body, his bitter smell
were all he wanted. But wasn't it just as likely, he asked himself, that he had
arrived at this place because — and he might as well congratulate himself on this
— he had so well managed his reputation as a womanizer? Clearly, the urge to fool
around with women — that cultivated urge — could still be triggered, but it
wasn't what he ultimately sought, and he no longer acted on that urge. That, and
not his ageing self or mere fatigue, was why, he patted himself, he could decide to
leave the office yesterday when Tilda Holden showed up to see him, and why today he
could leave Anick Prakash alone. Wouldn't it be just great, he mused, if he could
tell Devika how much he had changed?

As for Anick, he knew that what she needed was not medical intervention
but close friendships. He decided that such a well-groomed, feminine woman would do his
daughter a lot of good. They already shared a number of interests. It struck him that
Viveka and Anick would meet each other at the party at his house in just a couple of
weeks. So he told Anick about the event being planned. Was it possible to meet Viveka
before then, Anick asked, as she had a great deal of free time on her hands? Valmiki, in
front of Anick, made the flamboyant gesture of a call to his house.

But Viveka, on the other end of the phone, told her father she
couldn't afford the time just yet; she was writing an important paper. She asked
her father to tell Anick that once the paper was written she would give her a call.

It pleased Valmiki to report back to Anick the reason
Viveka was unable to meet at once. The way he said it made the literary paper and Viveka
sound important. Anick was visibly intrigued, grateful for the possibility of a friend
who would soon share ideas and interests with her.

And so, without having laid a hand on Anick's body or taken the hard
plastic head of a stethoscope to her chest, it was apparent to Valmiki that he had
already been of help. Such confirmation of the possibility of restraint and of
unconditioned goodness in him caused a warm shiver to course down his spine.

LET US SAY THAT, HAVING SEEN THE PROMENADE, YOU'RE
INTRIGUED.
Say you want to see at least one neighbourhood that will tell you
something more about town and country. There are many neighbourhoods you might venture
into, but a drive through Luminada Heights is a social lesson in itself. Besides, that
is where the Vishnus and Prakashs live.

To get there, take a taxi from the San Fernando General Hospital.
Don't walk — the hills are steep, the roads narrow, and traffic dangerously
swift. Go down Chancery Lane, to the bottom where the land is flat for all of a hundred
yards or so, and then begin your climb upwards again. Even a car, especially those used
as taxis, protests its journey into Luminada Heights. You rise above the red galvanized
roofs of the post office, the bus terminal, the Ministry of Works, and other government
offices. You round a bend, and Fisherman's Wharf disappears. The road turns and
you're hemmed in by tiny one-room houses and smaller shops on either side of a
road that looks as if no more than one and a half cars ought to fit on it. You're
ascending and realize that you're on a precipice to which the houses on the drop
side cling precariously. In some places a stout yet mangled yellow-and-black iron
railing makes a mockery of the safety it had originally been
intended to provide.

Not soon enough, the land is more forgiving. The precipice blunts into
rolling hills. Just ignore, if you can, the barefoot wiry man in the red merino vest and
torn trousers meandering dangerously in a drugged stupor down the middle of the road,
his unkempt wiry hair making him look that much more fearful. And the bent, bodi-thin
woman sweeping the step of her one-room shack that opens directly onto the winding
uphill road. Look, instead, beyond the orderless smattering of gutted houses and shacks,
away from the clotheslines, chicken coops, outdoor latrines and shower stalls. Look
through the avocado and mango and plum and dongs trees that thrive in spite of having
been haphazardly chopped away to make room for one thing or another, and there it is
again — the roti-flat, silvery Gulf of Paria. An excellent view of it is commanded
by this prime hillside location: you'll see rigs topped by gushing orange flames,
red-and-black oil tankers, flat-bottomed barges, and the refinery's pier that
lights up like a string of diamonds at night. You can even see the faint pier of Point
Lisas sticking out like a peninsula, while the steel factory and ammonia plant emit
cloud-like plumes into the air. On the western horizon of the Gulf is a sliver of the
mountainous Venezuelan coastline, a northerly spur of the Andes that sinks into the Gulf
then rises again in the northern hills of Trinidad. At sunset, with some little
imagination, it resembles a golden tiara.

Slowly, perhaps, but surely, these lands with exceptional views, on which
squatters live in huts and shacks with no running water or electricity, will give way to
the kinds of homes that are built just a little farther on — the ones with gardens
designed for entertaining, all angled just so, to take advantage of the view of the
gulf.

A short history of Luminada Heights as it is today
begins with a family of French origin, the Rochards, who in the late 1950s — with
independence from Britain imminent — sold their colonially taken and inherited
hillside land on the eve of their emigration. The Rochards were cattle- and
horse-breeders and Luminada was a pasture. It had always been shaded magnificently by a
profusion of generous samaan trees, host to birds, iguanas, bromeliads, and
philodendrons, their umbrella tops intricate as lace handkerchiefs. The Palmiste palm
grew there too in abundance. Several stands of them remain, interspersed among the
houses that eventually emerged. A consortium of bright young San Fernando brothers, all
Indian in origin, pooled the money they had, borrowed the rest, and bought the land.
They added “Heights” to the name and divided up the pasture into lots. To
this day they have held on to double and triple parcels for themselves, passed on to
their children now. But they, of course, made fortunes selling off the rest in smaller
lots. Thankfully, they and those who bought from them were in awe of the samaan's
grandeur and stamina, and the trees were, for the great part, left alone and built
around.

The winding road with its gentle inclines and declines opens before you
and suddenly begins a climb in earnest, offering now a chronology of affluence: just
past the ground-bound shacks — homes of the fisherman, the knife sharpener, and
the nut seller — you find the homes of the doubles vendor and the roti man. These,
only a little bigger than the shacks just passed, stand proudly on stilts. As the road
winds and rises, each tier makes its own definitive statement to rival the one below it.
Each level out-designs and out-builds the one before. The modest wood house gives way to
larger wood houses, and these sport wrap-around verandas, and multiple doorways and
windows that open onto
those verandas. These are the homes of the
elementary school teachers, store clerks, and book-keepers. Baskets of lush ferns hang
from their eaves, and low concrete fences brace themselves against the possibility of
being rammed by out-of-control vehicles, some of which have made their threats more
palpable by leaving paint streaks across the fences. These houses beget, on the tier
above, low concrete structures in which the high school teachers, car and insurance
salesmen, and self-employed petty businessmen such as electricians and painters live.
Their houses show off terrazzo-paved patios with wrap-around wrought-iron fences and
wrought-iron patio furniture, paved and covered garages, and clipped hibiscus hedges
instead of concrete fences.

Now come the multi-layered, multi-roofed concrete homes with partial walls
of cut and polished stone, the enclosed two-car garages, portals over the front door,
the rare museander shrub punctuating a military-crisp lawn, and the relief of a hybrid
bougainvillea spilling over concrete and wrought-iron fences — the concrete to
discourage trespassers; the wrought iron to allow the public a view of the grandeur
inside. The store managers and accountants, a couple of hairdressers, the town's
printer, and the denture maker are among those who live here. These beget on a yet
higher tier other similar houses, but with uncovered, paved patios, sprawling lawns, and
large picture windows to take in the view of mangrove hugging the coast and the
Pointe-à-Pierre jetty jutting into the gulf. Here you'll find everyone from
engineers and stockbrokers to small business owners, people who work in the oil fields,
and a good number of moneyed white people.