The Ivory Swing
Authors: Janette Turner Hospital
THE IVORY SWING
âA truly magnificent literary achievement.'
Booklist
, USA
âThe story is worked out with extraordinary delicacy and precision ⦠An elegant and moving demonstration of the paradoxes of liberty and imprisonment.'
Times Literary Supplement
âHer prose has a vividness and clarity ⦠you can feel the energy surging through the novel. Its world of suffering and isolation is redeemed, not by a transcendent rhetoric (like E. M. Forster's
A Passage to India),
but by a furious compassion.
The Ivory Swing
is a mature work, rich and subtle.'
Toronto Star
âA class act right from the start, with prose and plot line as strong and sinuous as a jungle vine.'
Kate Veitch,
Sydney Morning Herald
â
A disturbing meditation on the clash of cultures and the rebellion and feminine rage in each ⦠A world of indolent beauty undercut by terror ⦠A novel of unusual delicacy and power.
The Washington Post Book World
âThe steamy, subtle, utterly impenetrable mysteries of India ⦠a work both emotionally and stylistically deft.'
Thomas Keneally
âTurner Hospital's yarn weaves an intricate pattern of crossed-purposes, yearning for love and understanding and deep sadness for things that cannot be; and she doesn't drop a stitch.'
Ian McDougall,
The Sun
âIndia is finely evoked ⦠an impressive debut, important and revealing.'
Financial Review
âA haunting, delicately written book, full of brooding passion and eroticism.'
Jane Stephens,
Australian Bookseller and Publisher
THE IVORY SWING
Janette Turner Hospital
was born in Melbourne in 1942, but her family moved to Brisbane when she was seven years old. She has taught in Queensland high schools, and in universities in Australia, Canada, USA, England, and Europe. Her short stories and her novels have won a number of international awards, and she is published in ten languages.
The Ivory Swing
won Canada's prestigious Seal Award in 1982. In 1999, she was invited by the University of South Carolina to be the successor to the late James Dickey, and she now holds a permanent position there as Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence.
Other books by
Janette Turner Hospital
Novels
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit
Borderline
Charades
The Last Magician
Oyster
Due Preparations for the Plague
Short Stories
Dislocations
Isobars
Collected Stories
North of Nowhere, South of Loss
For Clifford, Geoffrey and Cressida
A chapter of this novel, in slightly different form, was published in
The Atlantic Monthly
, as the short story “Waiting”. It received an “Atlantic First” citation in March 1978.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harvard University's
Center for the Study of World Religions
, a fondly remembered home and the source of my family's longstanding preoccupation with India.
Also to the
Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute
which sponsored our sabbatical year in India in 1977â78.
I am forever blessed!
For I am his own breath, within his flute!
And if that breath is used up, in one song,
I shall not mourn.
The joy of all the worlds is in his flute,
and I his breath!
Let my song be good or evil,
let it be played with joy or sorrow,
I will sound it in the morning,
and in the evening it will sound,
and I will play it, softly muffled, in the night
.
I will play it in the spring,
I will play it in the fall,
and when his breath is used up, in his song,
I shall not mourn.
My song will be the loveliest of songs.
CONTENTS
1
They did not quite know what to make of each other, Juliet and the boy. They were very strange to each other.
Every morning just before sunrise the sound of his flute would sift like birdsong through the coconut palms. She would be startled from a sleep teeming with a confusion of remembered faces in unfamiliar settings, her past jolting by on buffalo carts, green mould and jungle vines sprouting from the eyes of old lovers, jackfruit and mangoes pressing against the windows of the house with snow on its roof. She would stumble to the storm door ⦠No. Not that house, not that door. Not a door at all really. She would stumble to the front grille and unlock it, blinking out into the coconut grove already alive with the tending activities of Shivaraman Nair's servants.
The boy would offer the little vessel.
“Milk,” he would say proudly in the English learned from her children.
“Pahl
” she would confirm, taking it to the kitchen. “
Ubagaram
”
“Thank you,” he would repeat.
That was the full extent of his English vocabulary, but since he was illiterate in his own tongue, proportionately he was doing better than she. Still she would think with wonder: here I am in a South Indian village conversing in an obscure dialect at an hour when I would prefer to be in deep sleep.
She would take the milk to the kitchen, transfer it to a cooking vessel, light a fire in the small clay pit, and balance the pot over it. After the milk boiled she would skim the clotted cream off the top, set aside the portion for the day's yoghurt, and pour the remainder into an earthern pitcher on a cool stone slab. While she boiled the water for coffee the boy would begin his sweeping. She would go back to the bedroom to dress and to wake her husband.
The first time it happened she was outraged. The boy quietly opened the door and began to sweep. She was standing naked, too astonished to move. He watched her as he swept, neither embarrassed nor interested.
“
Po!
” she said angrily “
Po! Po!”
Go away!
He left, puzzled.
There were constant misunderstandings. That they had a “boy” at all was one of them. On the first day, Mr Shivaraman Nair had shown them over the house. It looked cool and gracious as a palace under its umbrella of coconut palms.
“It is fit for a maharani!” Juliet had exclaimed.
Mr Shivaraman Nair had asked: “How many servants are you needing?”
“None”. She was blithe about it, being preoccupied with the exquisite tilework, sensuously conscious of the marbled floor cool under her bare feet. She did not understand that the kitchen was of a different order, that it was intended only for servants with skills more ancient than her own, that it came equipped with a knee-high sink, a stone mortar and pestle, and a cooking pit.
“I don't need any servants.”
Mr Shivaraman Nair sniffed with contempt. She had lost face and caste. All Westerners were wealthy, and wealthy people should behave as befits wealth. Just as Nairs should behave as befits the superior status of the Nair caste. The quality of his tenants reflected on his family.
“Then I will send only the sweeper each day,” he said coldly.
“A sweeper! I can do my own sweeping. It is nothing.”
This was because she thought she knew what a broom was. She had not yet seen the little hand-held tuft of palm leaves. She had also been taken aback by his anger.
“It is your affair that you are being yourself your own cook-bearer. It is my affair who is being sweeper on my estates. This is the task of servant peoples. No other persons are sweeping on my properties. And so we are only awaiting the auspicious time for you to commence living in my house.”
“Auspicious time? But we have already rented the house for this month. We were expecting to move in today.”
“No, no, this is not possible. The astrologer has been consulted. The auspicious day for visitors to move into my house is next Tuesday, in four more days. On that day, I will send the boy to the hotel to communicate the auspicious hour.”
So it was settled. On the auspicious day at the auspicious hour they took up residence. And the boy brought the milk each morning and swept floors and courtyard. He was called simply “the boy” by Shivaraman Nair, or sometimes “the
peon
' or “my
peon
'.
In the first week, when he arrived with milk and morning mists, Juliet had spoken to him in Malayalam. “What is your name?”
He was thrown into utter confusion. It was not a question he was used to being asked. He blushed and stammered. Eventually he managed to say. “Ptabliakaran.”
How old was he? she asked. He did not know.
“You cannot be more than twelve,” she said. “I think you are twelve. Just a little older than my son.”
He nodded rapidly, smiling, happy to accept her judgment.
“Jonathan is ten,” she explained. “And Miranda is eight.”
You are all only children, she almost added. And yet the boy was a full-time labourer, a bonded servant of Shivaraman Nair.
“Jonathan, Miranda,
minna
?” he asked.
She knew the word.
Already he had taught her children to fish for
minna
with cupped hands in the irrigation ditches between the coconut palms and in the muddy water of the flooded rice paddy. She was afraid of malaria â there had been an outbreak at Cochin, not far north â and of hepatitis.
“Later,” she said. “After the school lessons.”
He smiled and nodded again. They continued to look at each other, anxious to please, willing to be friends, not knowing what to say.
Then, sombrely, he produced the little wooden flute that he wore tucked into the waist of his
dhoti
. He played a short strange song, alien to her western ears, bittersweet. She perceived it as some sort of gift, and brought her hands together in front of her face in the traditional way of thanks.
They both made
namaskaram
, bowing slightly towards each other. It was not, Juliet knew, the way one was supposed to greet a servant.
2
“India!” Jeremy had said slightingly and incredulously. “It makes me think of dust and mosquitoes and bananas gone overripe and rancid.”
She was crushed. She had expected him to be envious and excited. She had expected that she would be sustained under the equatorial sun by her fantasies of his fantasy of a nut-brown Juliet smelling of the tantalizing tropics with a hibiscus in her hair.
“You must be crazy!” he said. “For a whole year! It's like being buried in a swamp. You'll be pining for snow and books and rationality, whatever the wanton tropical inclinations of your body.”
It was a slip, a forbidden word. Her body One of the unspoken rules of the complicated game they played was that they never alluded to the fact that they had once been lovers.
They both looked silently at the table between them. The fingers of Jeremy's left hand drummed a light rhythm. Juliet studied, mesmerized, the distance between her right hand, resting lightly beside her glass, and Jeremy's fingers.
“I suspect you're not admitting to yourself your real reasons for going,” he said.
Another error. Another impasse. He thinks I'm going because David requires it, Juliet decided. She was annoyed and defensive. What would Jeremy â with no children and two divorces behind him â know of the complex adjustments of marriage and family life? It was another rule that they never spoke of their marital states or living arrangements or current partners.
She was irritated with herself for having called him. These things happened occasionally. There was a blurred borderline crossed by accident at certain moments. Randomly. Sometimes events were safely pliant in her mind. Sometimes Jeremy was actually there, tangible, disruptive, in the precarious terrain of slithering reality.
“Hello,” he had answered.
“Hello. Jeremy?”
“Juliet!” She heard the note of pleasure. And caution.
“I'm going to India for a year. Just calling to say goodbye.”
Ridiculous thing to say since she hadn't seen him or spoken to him for about a year anyway.
“Good god! India! Why India?”
“For David's sabbatical.”
“India,” he said again. There was a pause. “Can you get here for a day before you leave?”
Typical, she thought. Now he feels safe. When acceptance will be difficult or impossible, Jeremy issues invitations. “Here” was Boston, and she would love to have said simply and lightly: “Sorry. Not a hope.” She would love to have been the kind of woman who could say that with casual regret and then shrug and hang up.
Instead she held onto the receiver like a drowning woman clutching at a life-line. They were pulling her to safety now: Jeremy's voice, the background sounds of a city.
But is it really Jeremy I crave? she asked herself. Or is it just the vibrant echo of youth? And the lure of a city, any city, any real metropolis, gritty and boisterous: tidal waves of unknown people, of anonymity, of excitement; the huge ebb and flow of life lived avidly. Any crust would do, any reminder, any testament to that other lost self. (Once I soared, once my career was marked “fast track,” once a small world turned on my opinions. Once Jeremy, reckless with desire, brought lilacs ⦠And then David, his star rising, obliterated everything else, threw a shimmer over the future. His and mine. Our glittering life together.)
Oh how young and arrogant and intoxicated with my own life I was, thought Juliet, dizzy with loss. Before this. The plummeting. This wingless limping around the cage of a small college town musty with propriety and smugness and myopia.
“Hello?” Jeremy said. “Hello? Juliet, are you still there?”
Don't go, she pleaded mutely, waiting for her voice to return from the golden muddle of the past. Don't leave me stranded here.
“Juliet?”
“Yes. Sorry.” She could barely hear herself speak. “Bad connection”
“Can I see you before you go?”
The question flowed into her like Benzedrine. His eyes, as always, would give back that mislaid image of a woman lively with confidence, professionally significant, dazzling. She would be able to feed on the illusion that that other Juliet still existed since he could have no inkling of the slow seepage, the loss of vital fluids, that occurred in small provincial places.
“Juliet, is something â?”
“No, it's just ⦠I'm thinking ⦠Boston is impossible. The time, the children ⦠it's truly impossible.” Her voice pitched about like a kite caught in the cables that linked them, veered erratically away from intensity, alighted on the flippantly suggestive. “But somewhere in between? Montreal? Can you get to Montreal?”
Silence. As cold as the Canadian Shield that stretched endlessly northwards away from her. Jeremy was not in the habit of making large incautious gestures.
In her mind she rehearsed saying: Just kidding.
In her mind she said airily: I'll call you in thirteen months or so, when I get back.
She pictured herself hanging up and walking away. Shrugging. She pictured it so vividly she thought perhaps she had already done it.
“Montreal,” he said. “What day?”
Panic.
How did I think I could arrange � At such short notice! What on earth shall I �
“I have to be there,” she invented shakily, “next Wednesday. The McGill library. I need to look up a few references.”
“Wednesday? Yes, that's possible. Next Wednesday then.”
In Montreal their drinks were garnished with the light that fell like a blessing on Place Jacques Cartier.
“I don't know why it is,” she said, noticing that the distance between their hands was diminishing slightly, “why I always feel this ridiculous compulsion to let you know my current whereabouts. At least roughly. It makes me nervous if you don't. As though some essential reference point had vanished”
“I know.” He gestured with his hand and it came to rest a little closer to the centre of the table. “We've preserved this image of perfection, the unblemished view of the lover.” He used the word sardonically, deprecatingly, in a generic way. “We never contaminate it with reality”
“Such a relentless debunker of mysteries!”
She wondered whether he was married again or was merely living with the woman who had answered her first long-distance call. She did not wish to intrude on his arrangements, however temporary. She had hung up and called him again at his office.
Now they watched an old flower seller heft huge wooden tubs of begonias across the cobblestones, massing magentas and corals in front of his trestle tables.
“I know a few people teaching at McGill. Dropped in on them while I was waiting for you. They're looking for someone in my field.” Jeremy leaned back and examined the light through his wine. “It's a marvellous city. I could live here.”
“Yes. So could I. In fact I toy with the idea constantly.” Then she felt embarrassed, as though she had made a proposition, and added quickly: “But any city would do. My sustaining escape fantasy. Any place big enough to offer me a position I'm not seriously overqualified for. Any place big enough for me to go to a concert without seeing my dentist and my gynaecologist and my kids' schoolteachers and the candlestick maker.”
“Is it really so awful?”
“Oh well, you know, on and off. I survive. After a fashion.”
“When I picture you there,” he said, “I think of a Roman candle on an ice floe. I would imagine you take the town by storm.”
“It's not a place that approves of storms. Storms don't have the proper sense of decorum.”
“There must be compensations. Clean air, no traffic jams?”
“Give me a gritty subway and freedom any time.”
“Then why for god's sake,
India?'
“Well, because India ⦠Are you going to tell me you've never dreamed of the fabled East? Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama. Surely everyone, I thought everyone ⦔ But she was embarrassed to admit to the jejune lure of travellers' antique and brocaded tales â of tigers, elephants, sandalwood and ivory, the whole exotic paraphernalia. “I thought you'd envy me.”
“You must be crazy. Even your thought processes will turn rancid.
My
idea of a year's escape is an apartment in Paris with some Left Bank ferment and the libraries of the Sorbonne close by. Or, failing that, a London flat close to the British Museum with ale and politics in the local pub. But to move from sub-arctic isolation to equatorial isolation â I can't see the point of that.”
“Isolation! In a country of over five hundred million? With that kind of crowding, anything could happen. Anything! That's what grabs me â after a near fatal absence of risk for the last twelve years.”
“Poor caged bird who's forgotten how to fly. Done in by a surfeit of security.”
“Not funny. You don't know what it's like, living in a place that's lethally safe.”
Their hands had gradually moved so that their fingertips touched, an unnerving sensation.
“Well,” he said. “If it's risk-taking you want, here we are. Alone in Montreal.”
He laced his fingers through hers and it was like the pull of a current swirling her back to her own element, her own life that had slithered away from her. But then her heart snagged on something else, the hook of children, of those innocent sleeping faces damp against their pillows. (She would stand in their rooms at night and think helplessly: I would die for them. I would even go on living here in Winston, Ontario, for them.) And then there was David, she was caught on that hook too, she would never get him out of her flesh.
Jeremy lifted her hand to his mouth and ran his tongue across her fingertips.
Shall we? his eyes asked with an unwavering intensity.
No! hers replied, alarmed, hypnotized. Think of the chaos! That wasn't what I meant. (Was it?)
“Enjoy India!” he said lightly, withdrawing his hand.
“Think of me with jasmine in my hair.”
“I'll think of you wilting from heat and humidity and covered with mosquito bites,” he said unobligingly.
“You are cruel.”
“No.” He looked directly at her. “You are cruel.”
There was some clouding â irritation? hurt? â in his eyes, but she could not â or was afraid to â read it. I have never known what he wants, she thought. Or what he really thinks of me.
“I wish you knew what you wanted,” he said.
She was startled, and blurted without thinking: “I want to maintain my balancing act.”
The hazardous, arduous balancing act of someone born on the cusp between eras. A mutant form on the Tree of Woman. She had evolved wings her mother never had, but not the free flight patterns of her younger sister, Annie.
Jeremy raised a sardonic eyebrow. “The illusion of risk,” he said. “That's all you want, the
illusion
of risk.”
Stung, she flared at him: “That's not true!” Oh, but maybe it was. Independence smouldered like sulphur in her gut, but domestic commitment was in her genes, heavy as lead. “Some things are too valuable to risk losing. It's pathetically simple, what I want. I wish we would move back to a city.”
“We.” He said it without inflection, as though a point had at last been clarified in some interminable negotiation. “And if you plural should continue for another decade to vegetate in Winston, what do you singular intend to do?”
“Another decade?” she echoed weakly. It seemed to her that a terminal diagnosis had been made. She would not look at his eyes. “I suppose,” her voice faltered, “I suppose I'll try to keep juggling.”
“Juggling what? Your virtue and your sanity? Or your male pawns, your nice little chessboard toys?”
She stared at him, fascinated by new revelations. And he, alarmed at his own indiscretion, blundered further into rage. “What is he, some sort of rabid contemplative? Is he
anchored
to the place? What the hell is the matter with him â¦?”
But he had to stop. It was against their rules, a violent breach of etiquette.
And she could not bear to have David attacked.
“It isn't like that. You don't understand.”
“No. I don't understand.” Irritably he signalled the waitress, impatient to be rid of the tedium of Juliet's ambivalence. “But your lack of honesty disgusts me. It's something you've acquired in Winston. You're ashamed of loving that safe little bourgeois cage so you keep up a pretence of wanting to get out.”
“God, you're brutal! Is simple friendship such a costly thing for you to give?”
“Simple friendship.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Let's not be disingenuous. If you wanted to leave Winston, you'd leave. And whatever it is we've had between us all these years, let's not pretend that simple friendship is the right word for it.”
“It's
my
word for it.”
“As I've just pointed out, your provincial little town is a hotbed of hypocrisy.”
“If it's hypocrisy we're speaking of, why pretend you give a damn where I spend the rest of my life? You â the original free-wheeler. A life littered with discarded women.” This was unpardonably against the rules, she thought; it was beyond the forgivable. “Oh god, I didn't mean ⦠but damn it, I'm going to miss you, actually miss you ⦔ A tremor had crept into her voice and she crushed it beneath the heel of her will as though it were a poisonous spider. “And you won't even remember I've left this continent.” (If I begin to cry, she told herself furiously, I will never forgive myself.) “But I expect I can be spartan about it.”
“Oh I don't doubt it. If it should cross your mind to send a postcard, I'll pin it over my desk. I daresay I'll recall where you are every time it catches my eye.”
“Oh I daresay. A hunting trophy among many. Forlorn notes from women I have known.”
“Juliet,Juliet!” He gestured in mock despair and laughed. “You should be burned at a stake.” He leaned across the table suddenly and kissed her on the lips. “Now get the hell out of my life and I hope you rot in India.”