The Ivory Swing (15 page)

24

“You know what it is,” Annie told Juliet, as they walked one, behind the other along the banks of packed mud threading the rice paddy. “It's standard manic-depressive behaviour. There's no other way to explain it. She's still in shock from the death of her husband.”

“I don't know, Annie. That sort of explanation doesn't seem to apply easily here. She says she misinterpreted the astrologer.”

“Oh come on, Juliet! So. We left on an inauspicious day, she went with the wrong person, to the wrong city, whatever. The magic failed. Her reaction is still neurotically extreme.”

They were baffled by Yashodas excessive guilt and capricious moods. For days she had indulged in an orgy of self-abasement, hiding in her house in the forest, refusing to see anyone, moaning that her wickedness and inauspiciousness would bring disasters to all of them.

“On the other hand, Annie, she may simply be far more conscious than we are of the seriousness of the penalties.”

“What penalties? What can they do? All that's happened is a temper tantrum from Shivaraman Nair, and she's forbidden to leave the estate. Which is where we started from anyway.”

“She's afraid they'll send her to Palghat. They've done it once already Before you arrived.”

“So? We prevent them. They can hardly drag her out from under our noses. Look, I know this is partly my fault. I didn't allow for the amount of stress … Too much all at once. Another little spell of hibernation right now is probably a good thing.”

They walked in silence for some time, the warm mud oozing up between their toes, their sandals flapping heavily and making sucking noises.

They had to negotiate their way around a toothless old woman who was squatting on the bank, resting her frail weight on the backs of her heels. She did not look up, but went on picking grass in handfuls from the levee, stuffing it into a sack hung around her neck.

“Why is she doing that?” whispered Annie.

“She is too old for harvest work. She will sell the grass to Shivaraman Nair for his cows. Probably a
paise
or two for a day's work.”

“God! One has to make deals with one's conscience all the time here, don't you find? Giving oneself permission to eat.”

“Yes.” And yet, she thought uneasily, she found it impossible to sustain outrage in India. The energy-sapping heat, perhaps. Or because the sheer quantity of poverty was so overwhelming that it seemed pointless to begin anywhere.

“Fortunately,” Annie said, as though reading her thoughts, “there are the Mother Theresas.”

“Yes. Even the Shivaraman Nairs. He doesn't
need
any grass for his cows. But he always buys from them. In his own way —”

Annie made a sound of contempt. “Considering his wealth and what he pays his own servants!”

“But that's the trouble, isn't it? Any gesture seems futile and hypocritical and wrong. Take us with Prabhakaran, for instance. We've probably made things worse for him.”

“Exactly why I'm not disposed to see Shivaraman Nair in any noble light.”

“Me neither, I guess. Yet I can't see him as pure villain either. It would be easier if I could .”

What could she do about anything? She had had her moment of moral indignation. (My manic phase, she thought.) She had taken her courage in both hands and confronted Shivaraman Nair. The
peon
, he had said coldly, had been sent on an errand to a nearby village. He would be away for several days. There was much important courier work for him to do. There would not be time for sweeping and bringing milk. Another servant would be sent.

“You are treating him unjustly.”

“For the courier work he is receiving more rupees.”

Foiled. Or simply in the wrong, perhaps. How could she object to Prabhakarans receiving a higher wage?

“Nevertheless, this has been done as punishment.”

“These things cannot be discussed with a woman,” he had said, the matter closed.

Nothing could be done about it. Nothing could be done about anything.

She felt she understood Yashoda, slumped in defeat. Such wilting was surely more logical than extreme. What could be done about rules that had not bent for millennia?

“India makes me shudder at the idea of eternity,” she said aloud. “Nothing changing. Ever. Not even the seasons. I wonder if that's why India has always dreamed of escape
from
endless rebirth while the West has been busy yearning for eternal life.”

“I can see it has strange effects if you stay here too long. I mean, you, for example. You're so erratic.”

“I've always been erratic.”

“Not like this. You practically snap my head off the day I arrive. And then you slide into some long hypnosis as though you've been drugged. That's what you mean, I suppose? A sort of timeless drift sets in here. Warning: This country may be harmful to your personality.”

“So can small provincial towns, of course. I
do
feel drugged. But then again I've been in some sort of timeless drift for more than a decade.”

“You've been muttering that ever since you went to Winston. But you never leave and you never push David to leave.”

“I'm
always
pushing David to leave. I am endlessly telling him how unhappy I am, how unbearable the parochialism is, how the
blandness
of the place is driving me slowly insane.”

“So either he's a tyrant who doesn't care how you feel, or he simply doesn't believe you. And
I
don't believe you.”

An echo. One remembered irritation out of many.

“It's not that I don't believe you, Juliet. It's just that I can't take you seriously, my dear.”

She had been at a university party in Winston. There had been a cluster of men, a political discussion, and she had pitched in energetically. After her speech there had been a silence — in Winston, it was improper to express strong opinions, a breach of etiquette — and then had come the cheap and patronizing detraction.

The speaker was an associate professor, not in David's department. A conservative man, undistinguished but ambitious, the kind who gravitates to a small college town. The big fish in small pond syndrome. He was not even worth anger.

Juliet had wandered into another room of the house, had stared out of mullioned windows, sipping scotch. This is a new Stone Age, she thought. A just-discovered colony of Neanderthal beings, perfectly preserved.

She pressed her forehead against the leaded diamond panes. Caged! If I were Faustus, she thought, I would not ask for some male version of Helen, but for one genuine bout of intellectual debate, a sword-play of words and ideas, an opponent who would not quail or cheat.

Abruptly she left the party, without waiting for David (an incident that was not to pass without comment in Winston) and gunned her car onto the highway. She would have left right then, eastwards or westwards, it didn't matter, just to put hundreds of miles between herself and this smug mediocrity, fleeing towards her passionate and disputatious past. But then she remembered: there was the babysitter to be taken home. And the children, delicate as espaliered trees, to be nurtured into harvest. She kissed their translucent cheeks, warm with sleep and innocence. What could one do? By morning, when they came pell-mell to breakfast, golden with the day's plans, she was as irresolute as ever.

And David was solicitous and tender as always, understanding. And yet never understanding. We never debate, she realized suddenly. We only share — which is not always enough. He is a gentle pedant, a patient and fascinating instructor; he earnestly absorbs the flamboyant bits of knowledge I offer. He considers, he concurs, or he quietly disagrees.

But I'd like a rapier in my hands again.

That afternoon, she had called Jeremy and picked up the threads of a five-year-old argument about Marcuse. Therapy, full of sound and fury, signifying a need for battle. As she hung up, vital again, she made herself one promise: No more university parties that had nothing more to offer than scotch and sanitized conversation.

“Annie,” she said, tossing a stone into the paddy water. “You've got to believe me. Winston is impossible. I don't think I can bear to go back, I'm sure I can't. Which means, I suppose, that I'm entertaining the idea of leaving David. I know,” she grimaced sheepishly, “that I've thought, and maybe said, this before. I know I think it every year.”

Annie sat down on the bank, removed her sandals, and lowered her feet into the water of a harvested terrace. Green shoots of new rice, planted only a week or so earlier, came up between her toes. She leaned forward and examined her muddy reflection. There was a long silence.

“Look,” she said finally. “I've got to admit I couldn't live in a small place like that myself. I'm not dismissing it as a problem. But if
you
really found it as terrible as you claim, it would have poisoned everything, including your marriage, and you would have left long ago.”

“That just doesn't seem to be true. I shuttle between impossible situations. I can't stand living in Winston, and I can't stand the thought of living without David and the children. I'm shackled to a swing that I can't get off.”

“Whenever I've visited you there, I've felt sick with envy. You can't fake that domestic contentment, so you'll have to pardon my difficulty with believing in all this Sturm und Drang. And that lovely old house, and the lake —”

“Oh yes, the house and the lake are consolations. And the family itself” (Why was she so insistent on her unhappiness, licking it over obsessively like an oyster: embroidering the grit of dissatisfaction as though it were her costliest treasure, her pearl of distress.) “It was the suddenness, I suppose. The total wrench from the track of my past, like a dislocation. I've led a sprained life.”

“You
chose
that. Freely. And ecstatically ad nauseam, I recall. God, you drove the family crazy about David. It was embarrassingly, uninhibitedly romantic.”

“I think I must simply be voracious. A glutton for living. I want to be you
and
me” (I want urban yeast but also family epiphanies on the empty frozen lake. I want David
and
Jeremy. Oh yes, I want Jeremy too, which is perverse and rapacious and irresponsible.) With her feet she sent tidal waves through the young shoots of rice. “So I play with other possibilities all the time, it's a tranquillizing game. I could play it forever, I suppose.”

“What about that guy you used to live with in Toronto?”

“
What
?” The unnerving thing about siblings is that it is dangerous to think in proximity to them.

“I can't think of his name. The politico with charisma. What was it? Jim? Jeremy! That was it. Jeremy!”

Oh Jeremy.

This had happened a week ago: feeling desolate (Annie and Yashoda still away; David roaming the villages with his tape recorder), Juliet had conceived the radical idea of telephoning him.

It had been delicious, sitting beside the rice paddy, to imagine the conversation. It had been like having a glass of wine in Place Jacques Cartier.

“Juliet!” he would say. “I thought you were still in India!”

“I am in India. I'm slithering into a swamp. I'm about to be swallowed up by vines or ants.”

“You sound so faint.”

“Only my voice is left. I've dissolved in the monsoon, I'm dispersing into the elements.”

“Listen!” he would say, conspiratorially urgent, sending western adrenalin along under-ocean cables. “I haven't been able to sleep since I was with you in Montreal. I've accepted a position at McGill. I've taken an apartment there and it's waiting for you to move in. Come back. Please come back.”

She had tried very hard to get away with this script but reality always intruded. What he would actually say his voice puzzled and far away, would be: If you want to leave, then leave for heavens sake! I'll meet you at the airport. But then I'm afraid I'll have to drop you and run. The woman I'm living with at the moment …

Nevertheless, with children in tow, she had even gone as far as asking Mr Motilal whether she might make an overseas call from his telephone at the emporium. He had been dumbfounded. She might have asked for his rocket-launching pad. His phone had never been used for such a purpose, he was certain it was not possible. He suggested she inquire at the post office. Which she did. Ahh, they had said, flustered. Such calls are very complicated, very complicated. This will take many weeks. You must make a reservation for your phone call. We will send a postcard at the appointed time.

And so of course Jeremy had receded to his usual status: a tantalizing mirage, remote as snow, forever just out of reach.

Reality was always intruding.

“Wasn't that his name?” Annie persisted. “Jeremy? Did you ever keep track of him?”

“For god's sake, Annie! Twelve years ago. What on earth made you think of him? Can you remember the name of whatever man
you
were fooling around with twelve years ago?”

Annie said nothing, but stood suddenly and waded out into the paddy, sinking rapidly to the knees. Paddy mud, shifting, uncertain, pungent with decay crawled up her legs.

She thinks I am implying flightiness and promiscuity, Juliet sensed suddenly. When I am only defending myself.

She got to her feet unsteadily and slid into the paddy water, lurching towards her sister. She pushed through the warm stinking water and the sucking mud like an ice-breaker smashing a ferry channel in the St Lawrence River.

“Annie, I didn't mean anything by that!”

“It's okay. It's nothing. I'm jealous of all the permanence in your life.”

“That's crazy, you know, when you think of how I get into a rage about the lion's share of freedom you have.”