The Ivory Swing (18 page)

28

The tunnel seemed to be contracting, to be closing in on Juliet, suffocating her. She was crawling on her hands and knees towards a remote circle of light. With every yard she gained, the light receded further into the distance.

This tunnel is my life, she thought. I am trapped in it.

Furry things brushed her in the darkness and she shuddered. Sewer water, a warm slime of it, flowed around her, and cobwebs dangled like ropes. Not cobwebs. Creepers! Snakes! The tunnel was India and she would never get out alive. A mere pinprick now, the light was dwindling, dwindling. The creepers had sprouted hands that throttled, she could not breathe. The hands had grown arms and bodies. The bus rocked, lurched, went over. She screamed …

And was awake, trussed like a mummy in the bedsheet, sodden with equatorial dampness and sweat.

Alive, she remembered. We are all alive. And she bent to kiss David who tossed fretfully; she padded barefoot into the children's room. They were there. Sleeping. Safe. She touched them, she touched the window bars. She walked about the house, trailing her fingertips along walls, over wicker chairs. Everything was solid, in place, reassuring.

She came to the shrine niche and saw the flute player's delicate shards. Chill. The seasick pitch of nightmare. She leaned against the wall, queasy, and closed her eyes tightly against the crumpled bodies in the belly of the bus.

Take deep breaths, open the eyes on an ordinary casual mishap.

Her fingers hovered, touched the splintered edges: braille of a normal occurrence. And such an aromatic accident, the room rich as a temple with incense. A sanctuary. They were safe, they had escaped from the bus, it was all behind them now. It was not so different from witnessing a pile-up on the highway back home. One shivered a little, perhaps, but drove on by, forgetting everything within the mile.

She walked out into the wet, still air, and raised her arms towards the umbrella of the coconut grove that had never known change or harm. She was startled to see how high the sun was. Their drugged sleep had beached them on the shores of noon the drowsy air was silent of bird calls, the palm trees limp with the stupor of centuries.

It was not possible to believe in the cracked ribs of buses and history, not possible to believe that only seven kilometres and one night away, dread things had happened. Or that Annie, of white-water ways, might even now be sluicing through political rapids. No, it was not possible, any of that.

I am dreaming my own life, Juliet thought. It is as still as paddy water.

Into which, at that moment, the outside world cast a pebble. A taxi, bearing Annie and Prem, was easing itself between the trees. And from the direction of the forest, Yashoda approached in the full plumage of usefulness and defiant silks and jewels.

I would have preferred, Juliet thought, to keep the illusion of changeless peace a moment longer. But she hurried inside to drag her family from the country of oblivion into the ragged present.

Prem was noticeably ill at ease, Juliet saw. His angry eyes swept over the expanse of coconut grove and paddy. He took stock of the tiled roofs and marble floors.

He greeted her with some warmth, was polite with David, gentle and solicitous with the children, curt with Yashoda.

He asked about Prabhakaran. “Your other child,” he reminded Juliet. There was a note of sardonic challenge.

“Prabhakaran is a
peon,”
she said heavily. “He has been removed from our corrupting influence.” Last night, she explained, he had appeared miraculously out of the darkness. But he had been gone again when she woke. “Probably he is being punished for coming here again.”

“That is the way of the Nair landlords,” Prem said bitterly.

A moment of empathy, of shared anger, bound Prem and Juliet.

Only a moment.

“They are also punishing Yashoda.”

But that, he thought, with a hostile glance at the gold bangles and jewelled rings, is different.

Juliet saw the curl of his lip. Their eyes met again. Held. A moment of mutual distrust and annoyance bound them.

Prem turned abruptly and left the house.

Annie was clearly eager to get away again. It was obvious that she found the quiet isolation of the house anticlimactic and stifling, that she was restless to return to the chaotic and colourful hub of the city, to be at the pulse of things. She said goodbye and joined Prem in the waiting taxi.

As the car emerged from the grove Prem said: “I do not want you to think that I hate all Nairs. Or all Westerners. I like your sister. You also,” he added as an afterthought.

She grinned and rested her hand lightly on his, companionably. He withdrew his sharply and instantly regretted it. For one thing, it seemed to contradict what he had just said. For another her touch had given him pleasure. But the movement had been a panic reflex.

Annie sighed and looked out the window. This is hopeless, she thought impatiently. For Prem I can only be a sightseer of injustices. His angers and bridlings made sense but it was uncomfortable to stay within their prickling reach. She was not going to waste her time making endless futile apologies for being white and western and middle class.

As soon as I can do it graciously I will say goodbye, she decided.

But they spent a pleasant day together, full of lively discussion and free from further hostility.

By dusk Mahatma Gandhi Road was ominously quiet. The market stalls were empty, the shops boarded up. Crows, black and huge and grotesque as death, wheeled above an overturned cart of ripe plantains. Every few minutes they swooped down to rip at the soft fruit with their vicious beaks, their vast wings flapping slowly and arrogantly. Rice had spilled onto the road from the burst sacks of another cart and rats could be seen heaving and burrowing through the mounds of grain.

To those who owned radios, word had come that Mrs Gandhi had been released and the news was spreading by word of mouth with the speed of the southwest monsoons rolling in off the Arabian Sea. The factions were gathering for the second day in a row, but this time the roles were reversed. Congress Party supporters were celebrating, Janata supporters were massing in angry protest.

“It will be even more violent tonight, I think,” Prem said.

“I should leave now,” Annie said.

“Where will you go?”

“To Krishnapuram. I should be with them.”

“Yes,” he agreed miserably. “It is best.”

“Goodbye, Prem. I am glad to have met you.”

“Please, Annie …” he entreated.

“Yes?”

“Don't go. Stay with me.”

She smiled, radiant as sunlight.

The tumult could barely be heard, the merest whispering echo, inside the clump of banana palms down the green funnel of which the moon poured its white light.

Prem felt as nervous as a boy on his first day of school. Terror and excitement washed over him in chaotic alternation. His skin tingled with burning flashes of anticipation and chilled in the cold sweat of his fear of failure. But she is gentle, I like her, I can trust her, he reassured himself.

They were sitting facing one another on the sleeping mats.

“Annie,” he said in the voice of a child, in the voice of an acolyte waiting to be inducted into the mysteries, “I have never slept with a woman.”

He did not need to ask if she had known other men. Western women lived differently from the rest of the world's women. They were unrestricted, they engaged in insatiable and notorious sexual adventures. It could be seen in the movies. It was well known. He waited trustfully for the key to the great secrets, for her to endow him with miraculous potency and knowledge.

She took his hands in hers and smiled, the high priestess of fertility, the mother goddess.

“It's like breathing, Prem,” she said gently, easily, companionably. “It is like waking up in the morning and seeing the sun. There is not a wrong way to do it. You do whatever you want to do and it is always right and beautiful.”

He could not move. He sat waiting expectantly like a child. Not even the morning's hammering turbulence of drunken blood came to his rescue to spur him to blind and instinctual action.

Annie undid his shirt buttons and ran her fingers lightly down his chest to the navel.

“Your body is beautiful, Prem. Like a young god's.”

He closed his eyes to luxuriate in the delectable sensation of her touch. She slid his shirt off his shoulders and ran her hands playfully, caressingly, over his shoulders and back, his chest, through his hair. Her finger followed the outline of his eyebrows, his lashes, his lips, with the feathered lightness of a
chakora
bird following a moonbeam. He felt like laughing and crying he felt as safe and blissful as a baby in its mother's arms.

Tentatively he placed his hands under her loose smock and stroked the skin of her belly. It was as firm and smooth as the skin of just-ripened papayas. He slid his hands upwards, shyly as fluttering doves, until he felt the soft arcs of the underside of her breasts. His hands stayed there, cupped, brimming with softness, and he leaned forward, burying his face against the swelling cargo of his hands, overcome.

Annie gently raised his face with her hands and kissed him on the lips and pulled her smock quietly and deftly over her head, tossing it onto the grass. Then he felt again the leaping in his blood, the crazy thumping and throbbing, the needling itch of ecstasy. He pulled her towards himself, cradling her in his left arm, fondling her breasts with his right hand.

He ran the tip of his tongue around one nipple and laughed with pleasure at the way it stiffened and stood erect. He bit it gently and experimentally, nuzzling it with his teeth.

He felt ravenous for the taste of her breasts, like a hungry infant. He sucked them, nibbled, ran his tongue greedily over and around them, buried his face in the soft valley between them.

His right hand was spread across her belly. He pressed it hard against that smooth, firm surface and she moved into him somehow, curling one leg across his body, making little sighing sounds. It gave him an intoxicating sense of power and possessiveness.

He realized that he could slide his hand down under the waistband of her jeans. He could feel the flimsy little undergarment that western women wore. He eased his fingers under the elastic line of resistance, felt the soft fuzz of hair. Further, further, while he sucked and sighed at the delicious yielding ripeness of breasts. Then he felt the swollen skin beyond the hair, warm as fire, soft as silk, wet and flowing as the flesh of a green coconut oozing milk.

He began to tremble violently, fearing he would not find her in time before he exploded in his own excitement. He unzipped her jeans — he would not have believed he could be so confidently aggressive — and tugged at them with ragged energy. He pulled off the little underthing.

But the fastenings of his own clothing were perversely clenched against him. His hands shook with frenzy, he was almost sobbing with frustration and anxiety.

Annie sat up swiftly and pushed him gently back onto the mat. She knew it would have to be fast, this first time.

“Whatever is done is right, Prem,” she murmured, leaning over him so that all her generous softness tumbled down on him like jasmine petals from a festival palanquin.

She knew it would be fast and urgent as a waterfall this time, but she wanted him to give himself to his own tides, to sway with them, to trust them. Not to fear. She laid her cheek on his chest, stroking him, kissing him, calming him. She eased him from his clothing and rested her hand gently on his genitals. He quivered in delectable pain.

She knelt between his legs, looking at him.

“Ah Prem,” she said.

It was always wonderful, always exhilarating and splendid as creation itself. She felt rich and fluid with love, peaceful as the earth at springtime.

She cupped his testicles gently in her hands and played with her lips along the length of his penis, kissing and licking with teasing darting movements of her tongue.

He jack-knifed upwards, spared one proud and startled glance for his own magnificence, and entered her as they rolled backwards, coupled in explosive joy.

She cradled his seismic body against her own, stroking him, murmuring to him. She received his wild brevity as a tribute, as a mother receives the first jumbled rush of words from a child, with infinite tenderness, with loving pride, with faith in beginnings.

There was an entire night for the discovery of procrastination and delay, die exquisite torment of lingering, the delights of dalliance.

Along Mahatma Gandhi Road, by Palayam Market and Chalai Bazaar, in front of the police barracks and the Secretariat and the post office, there were convulsions of violence throughout the night.

Annie and Prem, oblivious to the tempo of history, moved to rhythms of their own till daybreak.

29

Retribution and grace.

The words presented themselves to David as newly minted, newly imbued with meaning. He felt a deep, almost superstitious sense of the intricate connection between his fascination with Yashoda and his family's brush with death.

The wages of sin …
When dharma is broken
…

One could relativize and rationalize. One could be a scholar, an observer of cultural differences. But one could not escape an age-old conviction of wrongdoing. And of retribution.

Nevertheless there was also grace.

They had survived. They were alive. They were together.

He thought of beginnings and of innocence. He remembered Jonathan new born, a wonder, he and Juliet leaning over the crib in awe. Such tiny delicate fingers, such complexity in the whorl of his ear, in the blue vein under his cheek. He remembered how they had touched hands and had stood guardian for hours, amazed, keeping watch over the sweet fragile breathing. Can it be that we are responsible for this life, for this tiny perfect thing?

In the evening, when the mosquito coils were lit, he sat with a child on each knee. And they — so conscious usually of the dignities and perquisites of growing older and bigger — did not object. He told them stories, stories they had not heard for years, stories his father had once told him, stories of his own childhood.

“Tell us about the time you and Grandpa were riding your bicycles out in the country and the storm came …”

“Tell us about the time you ate Grandmas raisin cake that she made for the party …”

“Tell us about the time your dog Nip got lost …”

In the morning he fished with the children in the irrigation ditches.

“I wish you wouldn't,” Juliet demurred. “There's still hepatitis and malaria to worry about. I don't think you should act as though we have charmed lives.”

“Oh but we do!” he laughed, catching her in his arms and kissing her. “We do!”

It was then that he saw, through the golden network of Juliet's hair, Yashoda coming silkily through the trees towards them. An interior fluttering, some nerve-end recoiling like a snapped thread, disturbed him and he held Juliet fiercely to himself Yashoda paused, watching. Even when still she seemed to quiver. Like a hummingbird. Like a petal in the wind. It was her eyes that unnerved him.
(I want love, Professor David
…)

Perhaps if like Odysseus he stopped his ears …?

Then she turned and walked quickly back towards the forest.

It should be easy for women to give themselves fully to the present moment, Juliet thought. They have had such lifetimes of practice.

She scraped away at a coconut, strafing the soft white pith into shavings for the curry paste, glancing up occasionally to watch the children at their school work, to see David making notations on the manuscript of his book.

And so they lived happily ever after, she sighed to herself. Returning eventually to the small provincial town of no opportunity for adventurous, educated women. She took up her stone roller and leaned over the granite slab. Piquant and greenly bleeding, the curry leaves snapped and shredded themselves beneath her pounding, darkening the coconut flesh, absorbing cloves and turmeric. Juliet leaned over the golden paste and was assailed by the pungent fragrance, a shock of pleasure. Dazed, she dipped her finger into the mix, and smeared a thin ochre line across her forehead, an anointing of sorts.

Nothing gold can stay,
she reminded herself. Neither one's gilded myths of the self, nor the luminous green-gold growing of one's children, nor the sweet bruising of living things that bleed perfume and curry.

Her gaze rested like a benediction on her family, and, remembering the abrasion of road grit and window bars against her cheek, she thought: It is a rich moment, the present one. I should be totally content.

Perhaps she had been born at a fractious moment, when colliding stars competed for the same orbit. It was certainly perverse that she should feel a prickle of unrest like a congenital rash; that she should be yearning even now to transplant the family, so recently snatched from destruction, to city soil; that she should be dreaming of the ferment of a circle of argumentative friends; that she should feel, even, an urge to contact Jeremy — to note his quick alarm, to feed on his relief that she had won in a brief skirmish with death.

Yashoda and I, she thought, we want everything. We swing between worlds, always in conflict, always looking for impossible resolutions, destined to uncertainty and dissatisfaction. She bent over the curry paste again and closed her eyes, imagining herself and Yashoda side by side on the ivory swing, their vacillations preserved as art. There would be a kind of immortality to it — the immortality of the bronze dancer in the museum case. As long as one did not mind an eternity of going nowhere.

David leafed through chapters and months of research. And Yashoda moved back and forth across the pages like a pendulum. Like a maharani — or a
yakshi
— on an ivory swing, trailing silk and temptation. He closed his eyes, only seeing her face the more clearly. He opened them and read determinedly, making notes.

He glanced at his wife, who was absorbed in the making of curry. She had paused, she was bending over the stone roller, she had that abstracted, excluding air. She was distant from him, moving on a private path.

He looked out the window at the green maze of palms and recalled Yashoda standing there, her eyes luminous with want.

What you are obsessed with, he told himself sardonically and analytically, is a perception of omnipotence. There was a moment when you tasted a kind of power you had never experienced before. You are drunk with the memory of it, intoxicated with its possibilities. You cannot bear to lose it. You want to convince yourself that it is still there for your taking although you choose — nobly, of course — not to exercise it.

Yes, that was it. Simply that. Nothing unnatural, not even very unusual, just an ordinary human weakness. And if he were to talk to her again, simply talk and comfort and explain — as an ordinary sympathetic benefactor — then this false tension, this arbitrary and guilt-induced intensity, would dissipate. He was, after all, just as cunning and wise as Odysseus, secure in the ship of family, safely lashed to the mast of rationality.

He would come home unscathed.

He looked at Juliet again. She was now moving the stone roller back and forth with a snap of her wrists, fragrance rising around her like a fog. The hint of a smile played about her lips. She is contented, he thought. And so self-sufficient. We are in no danger at all. He would come back to her without mishap.

“Don't you think,” he asked Juliet, “that you and the children would enjoy the beach?”

She flicked her eyes towards him in surprise and considered it.

“They're bothering you. You should have gone to the university.”

“No, no. I just thought you might like …”

She remembered the red sand and the lush green line of palms and the fishing boats with prows like curled ferns. She thought of the way a shoreline pried a country open so that it flew out in a rush to the universe, sibilant as waves.

“Yes, it's a wonderful idea.”

And they set off, Juliet and the children, to hail an auto-rick on the main road.

Beyond the paddy the forest seemed full of shadow and murky intent. There was a sweet heavy smell of decay. David, buoyed by centuries of leaf mould and probity, rehearsed both sides of a conversation.

Yashoda did not see him immediately. She was sitting on the grass beside the pond, bending towards him, her tilted face halfhidden behind the black waterfall of her hair. And languid as the slow-swaying lotuses, she combed it with an ivory comb. The deliberate strokes descended like costly jetsam sliding down a cataract and she sang softly and rocked backwards and forwards to the rhythm of her music and her combing.

Once she paused and tossed the long hair away from her face as though it were a mane and then she saw him. She startled like some animal that is wild and skittish and vulnerable.

David made a gesture of reassurance, of benefaction. There was so much he was going to say to her with avuncular gentleness but when she continued to sit there staring at him, when she simply offered him her comb, he could remember none of it. Nevertheless, he thought, the most delicate gestures are wordless, and solace has more faces than one would dream of.

He took her proffered comb and it moved through her thick black hair like a frail dove in his hand. He did not know how long he sat there combing while Yashoda sang, but when she turned to face him, when she held her hands out to him like a princess begging, he heard again that wild high note of absolute power, felt himself to be straining against the bonds of his entire life and culture.

“No,” he whispered, kissing her hands. “I cannot.” He stood up, feeling as self-disciplined and as foolish and as life-denying as a monk.

When he looked back from the edge of the forest she was still sitting there, staring after him. He walked on through the forest and the paddy and the grove, seeing nothing. The empty house surrounded him like a hair shirt. He paced it erratically, entering the bedrooms, the kitchen, the porch, the kitchen again.

In the great mortar anchored to the floor, the rice waited to be ground into a mush for cakes. He seized the heavy pestle and began pounding, astonished at the energy it required, at its single-minded thought-numbing demands.

How simple it must be for women to hammer out their own tranquillity!

That night he made love to Juliet with a guilty passion of transposed desire.