Valmiki's Daughter (7 page)

Valmiki did worry that, in all innocence — for how could Viveka be anything but, as she had no experience of the world as he knew it — his daughter could be encouraged into an easy manner with unsavoury young men precisely because of all that so-called progressive university-nonsense she came home with, nonsense that always had terminology suffixed with the dreaded “ism”: sexism, feminism, paternalism, Marxism, racism, anti-racism, activism. Of course he had said none of this to Viveka, nor to Devika.

But something more had nagged at Valmiki last evening at dinner, and now continued on into his office hours — the knowledge that while team sports involved various kinds of camaraderie and, yes-yes, all that important exercise, it had the potential to involve something else: complicated kinds of physical contact. He knew something of this; he had played soccer with boys from his high school and, later, soccer and cricket at university. And even as he sensed the foolishiness and futility of trying to protect her, he couldn't bear to give his daughter, this one in particular, permission to enter an arena that could stir within her, like it had in him, a confusion she would absolutley have to keep to herself. He wasn't entirely sure that this would happen, but it nagged at him that it could.

Valmiki had not been overly enthusiastic about sports when he was in high school, but on the soccer field during mandatory physical education period he proved himself to have a special talent for sliding by the other players, seemingly out of nowhere, and scoring goals. Several older students — brash, loud fellows who played soccer every chance they got, during the lunch break and after classes — noticed his talent. Among themselves they carried on a kind of roughousing that included a good bit of deliberate touching-up, which at first he thought was strange for boys who teased one another so much. He noticed that they would fall into spontaneous, out-of-control wrestling bouts, and that the physical education teacher would come out and shamelessly land himself in their midst. They shoved and pushed one another, grabbing onto one another's privates, shrieking, cackling, getting hoarse, almost choking on their fun as they made one another hard by the sheer act of this kind of play. They all, every one of them, seemed to enjoy it, and fell into it over and again — even though, once off the field, none of that sort of
touching continued, or was even made mention of. In the change rooms where they showered, two boys to a concrete stall with a half door on it, the boys only half-naked — their underpants remained on — there was the strictest hands-off protocol.

But Valmiki was taken under the wing of a self-appointed guardian, an older student who, when they were in their shower stall together, would insist on giving Valmiki's growing limbs a good rub down “to help keep that kick nice and strong,” as the older boy would say. The torrential flow of water out of the shower head hit their bodies hard and felt good to them both. Valmiki liked what the older boy did to his body, soaping his hair, massaging his scalp, riding his thumbs under Valmiki's meagre scapular and up and down either side of his spine. Across his chest, his buttocks, hard down his thighs — his “quads,” the boy would say. His calves. And even his feet, one foot held in the boy's hands as Valmiki leaned his shoulders back against the mossy concrete wall of the stall so as not to slip in the soapy pool collecting about them. One toe at a time the boy soaped and pulled, and Valmiki would laugh and kick and pull back his foot, doing a sort of dance to balance himself that made them laugh to the point of tears. “How a lil fellow like you could kick so big and hard and direct, boy?” the older boy would ask, and Valmiki would feel as if he had been lifted high into the air.

But then one day the boy, while soaping Valmiki's back, slipped his hand inside of the waistband of Valmiki's under-pants, a soapy finger sliding into the crease of his bottom. Valmiki spun around fast and backed away from the boy, who, grinning widely, put his forefinger to his lips. The boy reached into the front of his own pants and pulled out his hardened penis. Valmiki stood still and stared. The older boy stepped toward Valmiki and put his free hand on Valmiki's shoulder as
he pulled at himself until his penis spluttered its semolina-like fluid. Valmiki's face burned with a sudden terror, but his body trembled with excitement. His own penis had hardened, but the older boy only patted him on the face and laughed. He turned his back to Valmiki and washed his face rapidly with soap, breathing out noisily against his hands and the onslaught of water from the shower head. Valmiki's curiosity had been piqued. Even as he knew better than to make his interest obvious, he began to keep the older boy in sight, to shift his body this way or that in an attempt to catch the boy's attention. But the boy had changed. He kept a distance now, even during the physical education period. Come shower time, he would make a show of entering a shower stall alone. Valmiki watched the older boy as he stood with groups of other students chatting and laughing among themselves. He felt scorned, and shame blossomed soon enough into anger when he imagined the boys were watching him, as if they knew.

One day, when there was no physical education class, not minutes after the bell rang to announce the start of the long lunchtime period, Valmiki buckled his courage and with a studied calm walked across the field, far away from the school building, to the edge where the unfenced property was marked by the neighbouring one, an unkempt stretch of overgrown razor grass and guava trees. Valmiki knew the boy would see him go to the bushes. He looked back, caught the boy's eye, and then carried on. He could only hope, and sure enough, the boy waited until Valmiki had entered onto a narrow path and disappeared into the grasses that closed in behind him. He crossed the field, entered the same path, and caught up with Valmiki, who had stopped among the guavas to wait for him. They held hands as naturally and as easily as if they had done it before and
Valmiki led the older boy as he ducked in and about the trees. Suddenly, the older boy pulled Valmiki to a stop and suggested they take their long-sleeved white school shirts off so they would not easily be seen. Shirt and tie off, they drew each other farther along to a spot where they could, through the foliage, still see bits of the school building, but where they were sure they themselves could not be seen. Even now, decades later, Valmiki could conjure up the cloying perfume of that guava orchard, and remembered how the cuts from the razor grass there stung his legs, his bare back, and his chest. The memory of this concoction made him feel at once ill and nostalgic.

Their tongues had hesitantly touched.

The memory now caused a lurch in Valmiki, from his waist down to his toes. The older boy had undone the zipper of Valmiki's short khaki trousers and taken Valmiki in his hand. He and the boy continued to stick their tongues out of their mouths so that only the tips touched as the boy fondled Valmiki until Valmiki's penis grew long, thick, and harder than he himself had ever managed to make it on his own. He trembled and the boy bent his head and put his mouth on it. Valmiki came in the boy's mouth instantly, and a horror overtook him. Revolted, he kneed the boy under his chin so hard that the boy accidentally clamped his jaws shut on his own tongue and blood spewed out of his mouth. The boy stood there holding both hands to his mouth, tears blurring his vision, and Valmiki ran, pulling on his shirt, buttoning it and tucking it back into his pants. He ran, tears of anger and horror in his eyes, until he was right out of the school gates. He made his way home, ducking into the tall grasses that lined the roads whenever a car passed by. He slipped into his house unnoticed, and went immediately to the shower. He was in a rage, crying as he bathed himself, scrubbing his
entire body — although he was barely able to bring himself to touch his penis — until his brown skin was raw, pinprick-size beads of blood reddening the surface of his skin. He spat and spat, and rubbed the soap against the tip of his tongue as he attempted to erase the taste and feel of the other boy's tongue from his mouth. He couldn't have hated that boy any more, and he hated himself in equal measure.

For weeks he was terrified that word of what he and the boy had done in the bushes would spread and he would be beaten up, kicked off the soccer team, perhaps pulled into the bushes by other boys and the same done to him by one or a group of them, older, stronger than he. But what he was most afraid of was that word would reach his parents. Then he would surely kill himself. He had planned how he would do it, and waited day and night for the indication that his dreadful, unnatural activity had been made public. But until this day, no word of it had ever been spoken. The boy left school at the end of that term. No teacher had offered a reason, and no one seemed interested in finding out why. Valmiki had always assumed that it might have had something to do with — not so much what the two of them had done that day in the bush, but with whatever it was that had made him do that kind of thing in the first place. Even as he fondled himself in his nighttime bedroom, his heart racing full tilt as he imagined the same boy bent into his lap, and he experienced the same uncontrollable shudder at the memory of the boy's mouth on him, how it felt as if his mind were about to be blown apart and his body to shoot right into outer space, he didn't mind never seeing the boy again. These fantasy moments usually ended with Valmiki suddenly shoving the boy off him, giving him a solid undercut with his fist, a knee under the already bloody chin, and a shove into a wire fence where he imagined the boy
holding on, crying and begging forgiveness. How Valmiki hated that boy and what they had done together.

He practised bouncing a soccer ball on his head and on his knee. He made a point of engaging in disparaging jokes about women and “faggots.” He developed the affectation of spitting, velocity and distance becoming markers of his manhood. He launched, too, into a display, at school and in front of his parents, of noticing girls, commenting almost to the point of excess, sometimes with a lewdness that did not suit him.

Intimacies, albeit of a lesser degree, he came to see were something sporting fellows never outgrew; at medical college abroad he played soccer and cricket, and there the men gave one another stout congratulatory hugs, pats on the shoulders, playful but harder slaps on their backsides, pats on the face that sometimes felt as nuanced an exchange as one might expect in an engagement between a man and a woman. He watched closely for signs that might have exposed secrets between the men, but he saw nothing that resembled his much-regretted exchange with the boy in his high school. He was careful, regardless of how he felt, not to touch or respond to any teammate in a manner that might provoke that teammate to lash out at him the way he himself had done to the boy in high school.

Then along came Tony, the student from Goa who was to tutor him in a course he had failed twice. Tony: not athletic, but muscular. He was short, one might even say stocky, and brown like Valmiki himself. Tony had grey eyes, unusual for an Indian, and he had short curly hair. He reminded Valmiki of sculptures of Grecian young men he had seen in the museums.

Valmiki didn't know if “feeling each other up” during games was strictly a guy-thing, but he suspected and worried that girls and women might get on with their own version of
that sort of thing, too. He wanted Viveka spared the horror, the confusion of the kind of experience he had had but never revealed to anyone.

In adulthood Valmiki might have played golf, as did several of his colleagues and other men from his social world, but he took up, instead, hunting. It started with an invitation from Saul, one of his patients, an electrician who lived on a fringe of the city and who could not have entered Valmiki's social circles. The pupils of Saul's eyes were a yellowish brown and light always seemed to emit from them. They reminded him of Tony's grey eyes. Saul would look directly at Valmiki with those eyes as if he could see through Valmiki. He was not like other men, not afraid of long, insistent eye contact. Saul Joseph was lean, ruggedly muscular. It was precisely the fact that he was partly of African origin that heightened the unlikeliness of there being a bond between the two men, and that drew Valmiki to accept Saul's invitation. No one would pay any attention. Valmiki went with Saul one Saturday into the forested central hills, awkwardly toting a rifle the man had spared him for the day.

By the time darkness had fallen on the hills that first day, Valmiki was sold on the particular camaraderie that went with that sport. That week, accompanied by Saul, who had in a sweet instant risen from status of patient to peer-of-sorts, Valmiki bought a shotgun and a box of ammunition from a villager, a cacao farmer who moonlighted smuggling these and other contraband onto the island.

The hunting circle was elastic. One week it might include just the two of them, and another there might be four men altogether, but rarely was there ever more than that, and never was there anyone among them who would have known Valmiki in his other life of city doctor, San Fernando professional, and socialite.
None of these men Devika liked or wished to entertain in her house. She bristled when Valmiki brought them onto her patio. If he offered them drinks, Devika made sure they were served — and certainly not by herself — in tumblers that only the maid and various other workers were supposed to use. These men looked to her more like security guards, or house builders, people who would work for them rather than visit with them. When Valmiki talked to her of going hunting with “Saul,” Devika said, “So, what now? He calls you Valmiki?”

Valmiki could truthfully answer, “As a matter of fact, he and the others call me Doc.” Why he went with these men Devika could not fathom, and although Valmiki had a practice of cajoling her in almost every way, giving up this particular pastime or his communion with these men he would not do. With them he knew an affinity he simply did not share with her. It was a world of few words, more silence, and hard, immediate, and sure handling of one another that was as loaded, as sprung, as the guns they carried. The act of looking out for one another in the most primal way gripped him. It was not just him looking out for them, but them looking out for him too. An equal caring. With gun in hand, and knowing there was a wild cat or a startled diamond-back mapipire in the canopied darkness of an evening forest, every man had to look out for himself as well as his friends. When you reached a hand out against your friend's chest to hold him back, that touch was like a lightning rod of information, intent, opinion transferred. Such camaraderie made Valmiki bristle with life in a way that not even the practice of surgery had ever done for him. In the forest with the men he might have been duty bound, but he was not weighed down by it. He was no one's father, husband, employer, or healer. He was one with them. They were one with each other.