Valmiki's Daughter (32 page)

Anick had rested her hand in the space between them, close to Viveka's knee, and Viveka could feel Anick's hand as if it were a flame as big and bright as one on the oil rigs in the gulf. She glanced down at it, so much wanting to pick it up as if it were a delicate leaf, turn it over, and examine it. She was distracted from conversation by this proximity, and felt a suffocating weight in her chest, heat coursing up and down her body. In the quiet that fell between her and Anick, Viveka's legs tensed. She wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. Anick turned to look at her. Viveka hoped more than anything that her face gave nothing away of these delightful and terrifying sensations. She glanced toward Anick, who was still watching her intently. Anick smiled and Viveka looked ahead again, now staring at the Pointe-à-Pierre jetty, watching every single building and light out there. She tried to count the lights.

There was an awkward moment, and then Anick said, “I feel something. Do you feel what I feel?”

Viveka felt as if she had been hit. Her body was drained of all previous sensations, as if a cold gust had come in from across the gulf and stunned her. She felt the need to blunt Anick's words, make a joke of them quickly, kill the strange and frightening thing that Anick was perhaps about to say.

“An earthquake?” Viveka had snapped over a chuckle of indignation, and just then Nayan's car had pulled up outside.

Anick looked as if her heart had stopped beating. She made a sound, somewhere between a wince and truncated gasp. Viveka didn't know if this was in response to her words or to Nayan's arrival. Their parting was awkward. Anick didn't seem to know if she should give the accustomed goodbye hug and kiss on the cheek. Viveka came toward her and pressed her cheek to Anick's. She took Anick's hand. It was no leaf. Anick squeezed hers back, lightly, but in that lightness was the weight of the evening.

Now Viveka relived the touch of cheek and hand, and each time without fail felt a rush of dizzying desire. It was weakness, daunting and wonderful, that began in her toes and washed quickly upwards, to land between her legs, gripping her there in ecstasy, and then it made its way back down again. Over and over. She put the back of the hand that had held Anick's to her mouth, and with her lips closed, brushed it. As if it had a mind of its own, her mouth opened and again brushed the skin of that hand. She came down hard now, her parted lips to that hand, teeth pressing into skin, and this made her cry out. The sound was thankfully muffled. She flicked the tip of her tongue, moistening the area, finally eating that part of her hand as if it were the fleshiest part of a ripe mango. She heard again her lame words, “An earthquake?” Surely Nayan would have responded differently if Anick had said those words to him. She tried to imagine how he might have replied, or what some chivalrous man would have said, and she was caught in a riptide of confusion and excitement. What if she had said something as simple as:
Yes. I, too, feel something
?

THE NEXT DAY, ANICK CALLED VIVEKA TO EXPRESS HER GRATITUDE
for one of the lovelier evenings spent so far in Trinidad. Still, it seemed that no immediate time or space could be found for
them to visit again. This was a small but painful relief to Viveka. Thoughts of Merle Bedi's fate played in her mind. Later that week, she took a trip down to the Harris Promenade to see if she might spot Merle, and was both grateful and sad that Merle was nowhere to be seen. She had no plan for what she might do or say had they come face to face.

As the next few days passed, Viveka oscillated between two poles. She decided one minute to still whatever thoughts and feelings Anick Prakash had stirred in her. Such thoughts and feelings were dangerous tricksters out to trip her up and land her, like Merle, out on her own, family-less. And Anick Prakash, being the root of such thought, was even more dangerous. A troublemaker. Brave. Stupid. Disrespectful of Trinidad, its people, its ways.

But there was always the other pole: the desire to see, speak with, touch Anick Prakash was like the pull of a tidal wave against which Viveka decidedly did
not
want any cautioning or power.

But Anick had withdrawn. There was that one phone call of thanks, and a few days later, one other phone conversation — so brief, it left Viveka feeling shunned. She had mustered the courage and called Anick just to say hello, perhaps for a little French conversation, but Anick was oddly formal and distant. For several days afterwards, Viveka spent most of her time in the study with her feet up on the desk, locked at the ankles, and a book on her lap. She would stare in the direction of her feet and wonder if Anick had ever really said, “I feel something. Do you feel what I feel?”

During this time, Viveka withdrew from Helen and lost interest in volleyball. She spent more time than usual sleeping. In bed, she would not kiss her hand nor touch herself while imagining kissing and touching Anick Prakash. She would rather clutch her pillow as she curled into the smallest ball she
could make of herself, and as fast as she could, she would fall into a heavy, sad sleep.

After a week or so of this, the reality of the larger situation dawned on Viveka and she was appalled at herself — appalled that she had not before been affronted by Anick's disloyalty to her husband, to Viveka's friendship with Nayan, to the Prakashs' closeness to the Krishnus. She didn't know who she felt more loathing for, herself or Anick.

Soon, it was nearing the year's end and the beginning of a school holiday. Viveka thought of Anick occasionally but with bitterness. Had Anick meant to provoke her, or simply to mock and expose something she thought she detected in her? Viveka felt twinges of what could only be termed hatred toward Anick for making her feel things that confused her and that could easily have got her into unimaginable trouble. Not so unimaginable, actually, for hadn't she seen how much her mother had suffered from her father's philandering? And Merle Bedi's fate was indeed very real.

Around this time, Viveka noticed that her face seemed to be getting more angular. She stood in front of the mirror and pulled her hair back so that its length disappeared. She was even more certain now that she looked like Anand would have, had he been alive. If he resembled their father in photographs taken at the same age, he would have been rather handsome. Viveka, too, looked like her father, but that only made her ugly, she thought, not handsome. She let her hair fall again and held a pair of earrings from a dish on the dresser up to her ears. Her heart sank. She actually looked more frightful with them. Should she, she wondered, dress more like a woman and look rather ungainly, ugly even, or dress the way she liked to dress, in her T-shirts, jeans, slippers, her long hair parted to one side and left hanging
down, no jewellery save perhaps for a single plain ring? Like this, she was almost invisible. She preferred it that way. It was as if she had slipped into a crack where there was no gender-name for what she was. It was feeble consolation to think that she was still developing. How long would that process take, she wondered, and what on earth would she evolve into? At least she had brains — something to fall back on. The ugliest people had a place — even in her mother's mind and, she had noticed, in many other people's minds, too — if they were smart enough.

She would use the holiday to take care of her friendships. She would resume contact with Helen who, like Viveka, on account of their family's financial stability, did not need to take on holiday employment. She would consider playing volleyball again.

She would study, too. She was refining her goal of becoming a literary critic, and was currently enjoying the notion of becoming a Naipaul scholar. She would embark on a study of early East Indian communal life in Trinidad, in the countryside, in the town and in the city, and she would theorize on the gulf between the cacao Indian and the sugar Indian. It would be one small step toward understanding Naipaul's work and Naipaul himself.

What she couldn't know was that the Prakash household was unravelling.

FROM SAN FERNANDO, THE JOURNEY DUE EAST BY CAR TO RIO CLARO
begins at the San Fernando Roundabout. Within seconds you're in Cocoyea Village. The road is high, and on either side the land slopes into deep valleys of gently billowing sugar cane. The air becomes increasingly thick and sweet at the back of your throat, announcing your proximity to the sugar-cane factory at Sainte Madeleine. The descendants of the Indians who worked these fields carry with them the stigma of impossibly hard manual work, for little pay, done under blazing sun amidst the threat of snakes and scorpions. You pass them, one of them immediately, a man, risking life and grey limbs by walking on the edge of the shoulderless, two-lane road he must share with vehicles — from bicyclists to buffalo-led water carts. The man you have just passed is serious, appears to be humourless; sweat trickles down the side of his face. He is gaunt, and you attribute all of this to the common idea that the Indian leads a harsh life mired in notions of the irrevocability of one's fated lot in life.

Continue to travel due east, on an instant incline that undulates toward and well past your destination, riding high above sea level, and if you haven't become nauseous from the winding roads and near misses of cars flying around blind bend after
blind bend, heading straight for your vehicle — or so it seems — you will be wide awake, fearfully watchful, expecting that if only you can spot the moment of impending impact your seeing it might aid in stopping it or allow you, at the very least, the opportunity to witness exactly how you were killed.

You pass wooden houses on either side of the road. They perch on stilts that reach far down the slopes, while a plank or two of wood connects the front of the house directly to the roadway. From the houses' eaves hang lush baskets of ornamental ferns. Some less precariously situated houses have banister staircases from the house down to the yard, and then from the yard back up to the road. These staircases are lined with red milk and paint tins containing anthuriums, ferns, philodendrons, and other plants that are lush and bursting with caring. Curtains billow in open windows and rocking chairs trembling in the wind on the modest verandas look as if they have only just been abandoned in favour of some quotidian chore.

You pass little hubs of activity — cars pulled up in the paved driveway of a small grocery store attached to a bar, a roti shop, and opposite, a tire repair shop and air-conditioned hair salon advertising that it rents and sells videos of the latest Indian movies. The traffic has eased, but the pace continues easily, if only to keep up now with the quiet and calm of the land so far from the big town, lifestyles away to the west.

Then, quite suddenly, you're in the centre of the island, high above sea level, in the low mountains of the Central Range. Citrus, banana, peewah grown in small plots are now offered for sale roadside, but to stop on such narrow roads and make a purchase is to endanger yourself, the seller, the cars behind and ahead. Still, the stalls dot the road here and there, and in between, tied to lamp posts and water-stands, are wreaths and Christian
crosses made of palm fronds, spent flowers tucked into them, topped with handwritten signs that say “R.I.P.”

A little farther on, brilliant flame-coloured pods begin to dot the forests, and in time, fields of cacao planted in neat straight rows begin at the road's edge and stretch deep into the forest. The road meanders now with the most dangerous U-turns.

An hour has passed since leaving San Fernando, and finally you arrive in the village of Rio Claro. The last three miles of road into Rio Claro boast no less than thirteen well-patronized rum shops, a Catholic Church, a Pentecostal Church, the Open Bible Church, and a mosque. Hindu temples and shrines are not visible, but Hindu homes stand out with their collections of jhandi flags filling one corner prominently. The edges of the red, saffron, and white cotton triangular pennants are frayed from billowing brightly in the breezes from the Atlantic Ocean on the eastern shore of the island, another forty-five minutes or so around the bend from here.

Just off the main road, still going east, you turn left at the first main road, and ask anyone — and they will jab their forefinger decidedly in the direction of Chayu.

ENOUGH WAS FINALLY ENOUGH WHEN RAM AND NAYAN HAD STOPPED
speaking with each other. Minty found unusual courage to speak her mind to Ram about his lack of respect for his son and his son's wife. Her stand produced no change in Ram's attitude toward his son and daughter-in-law but resulted, rather, in hours of silence smouldering between her and him. And Nayan couldn't make mention of his father to his mother without frothing curse words she didn't know he knew. She demanded in vain that Nayan have respect, if only when talking to her. She lost weight and slept little. Nayan, meanwhile, did not even come to eat supper, his mother's cooking, anymore. Morning and night there was the scent of beer on his body.