The Ivory Swing (2 page)

3

Silken girls were carrying sherbet to Moghul emperors across glowing expanses of tapestry. Krishna, and Radha, vibrant batik figures, dallied in a tangled embrace that was aesthetically exquisite if physically improbable. On a swing of carved ivory, they sat demurely as satiated lovers. And Juliet, browser amidst the fabulous jetsam of maharajahs and nawabs, thought: My life is a surprise to me.

David moved across the room and stood behind her. He touched her long hair lightly and rested his hand on the nape of her neck. It might have meant: You are Radha to me. He was excited by the ivory carving, artistically and sexually. He knew its history, would want to explain its iconography and significance. He would point out contrasts with that painting on the far wall where Radha, on another swing, breathed solitary love sighs. And she would listen partly out of habit, partly because his intellectual energy was a source of wonder to her.

Marriage has given me a staggering amount of esoteric information, she thought wryly.

University people, Mr Motilal decided, whispering to his kohl-eyed assistant to bring mango juice. There were four kinds of Westerners: tourists, diplomats, hippies, and university people. He saw his position as that of an appraisal expert; the correct designation of Westerners was as important to success as the ability to know authentic antiques from fakes.

Not many Westerners found their way this far south, so close to the equator, but those who did were usually big spenders passing through on the way to Kovalam. They would flit in and out, spending only a few hours in Trivandrum but several weeks sequestered in the Kovalam Palace Hotel. Mr Motilal kept his rooms air-conditioned. It was an irresistible lure and ensured lengthy browsing.

He reluctantly decided that these people, with two children in tow, were not Kovalam people. They would not be able to afford the ivory swing. But as they were clearly connected with the university, he would emphasize the small bronzes, relating them to incidents in the
Mahabharata
and the
Ramayana.
This would be a fruitful approach.

The assistant brought mango juice in small glasses on a silver tray and with deft experience offered it to the children first.

“Oh no, please, you must not,” begged Juliet, hastily. But it was too late. Jonathan and Miranda were already drinking with delight.

“But yes, indeed, it is our pleasure,” murmured Mr Motilal with a bow.

Chairs were brought.

“Please,” insisted Mr Motilal. “You must sit and rest. It is so hot. Even for us it is hot outside, though so cool and pleasant in here”

Juliet sighed. They were used to this sort of performance and dreaded it. It had been a mistake to linger at the ivory swing. The only way to cut short an otherwise interminable ritual was to buy something quickly. Unfortunately almost everything, being genuine antique artwork and priced for foreign collectors, was well beyond their range.

But it would not be possible now — or at least, it would be highly unpleasant — to leave without buying.

“Such fine bronzes,” Mr Motilal was saying. “Many people are buying. In the magazines, the art critics are saying —”

“Oh look!” Miranda broke into the soft patter of sales talk, pointing to a delicate sandalwood figurine.

“That is Lord Krishna,” beamed Mr Motilal. “He is dancing on the lotus flower and playing his flute”

But all of them thought: It is Prabhakaran.

“We will buy it,” Juliet told Mr Motilal. “It is very beautiful.”

“Most beautiful, most beautiful,” he agreed.

David lamented in a whisper: “I wish we could afford the ivory swing.”

Juliet looked at it again, saw the daze in Radha's eyes as she swayed forever between poles, unable to stop, unable to get off. She glanced back at the batik where Radha was tangled with her consort, helplessly as ivy around a trellis. And Krishna, feeling the restive tremor in her limbs, would be thinking fondly of how she clung to him, how she needed him.

Mr Motilal offered the flute player, boxed and wrapped.

“I'll leave you then,” David said, as the outside heat swallowed them whole, “to tape those Brahmin priests I've been meeting with. Some fascinating oral variants.”

He kissed the children, brushed Juliet's cheek with his lips. “You'll manage?”

“I'll manage.”

He left with his tape recorder and she walked towards the market place with the children.

“One dozen hens' eggs,” she ordered in her carefully rehearsed Malayalam.

The egg man laughed because she could not master one of the several
l'
s, the one that had to be mysteriously rolled at the back of the mouth rather like a Scottish
r.

He sat cross-legged on a small wooden platform under an awning of coconut thatch. In front of him were two huge baskets. The eggs in one were about the size Juliet thought of as regular or medium. Those in the other basket were tiny, like large pigeon eggs. The old man made a cone with a sheet of newspaper, gently placed a dozen eggs in it, and tied it ingeniously with thin twine. He chose the tiny eggs but Juliet now knew better than to ask for the others. They were ducks' eggs, porous and likely to be impregnated with whatever impurities were on the ground where they had been laid. She had learned this from the doctor who treated them after they had eaten the wrong eggs. She tried not to think of all the other unknown depredations that were perhaps being made daily on their health.

“Six rupees,” said the egg man.

“Last week it was five.”

The egg man raised his eyes to heaven in a gesture of melancholy resignation.

“Life is difficult,” he sighed. “Like midday ground mists after monsoon rain, prices go only upwards.”

A young Indian woman of striking beauty was standing beside Juliet. She now said something to the egg man. The words were too rapid for Juliet to unravel, but the woman turned and spoke to her in unexpectedly good English.

“He is being shameful. Most wicked. He is doing it because you are a foreigner. The real price is four rupees. You must not pay him more than four. Also,” she added, “you must have a servant. The marketing is too difficult for you. Even Indian ladies are not doing it. It is a skill of the marketing servants. Then you will not be cheated.”

She smiled and moved away. Juliet was conscious of her gorgeous sari of Benares silk, of her lavish jewellery. A small stir of excitement, of stares and whispers, moved with the woman like an attendant breeze. Such splendor was rare at Palayam Market.

The egg man waited impassively. For Juliet and the children he had become a sort of friend, one of the fixed points in the slow equatorial week. He no longer stared at them rudely, he did not molest them by touching their fair hair and faces, he simply sold them eggs and made small conversation. They were deeply grateful for such fragments of normal interaction. It was well worth two rupees extra. Yet Juliet would lose standing and respect in the market if she showed herself stupid, unable to bargain. In the next little bower, the merchant of rice and
gram
stood watching and listening.

On the other hand, what were two rupees to a Westerner? It seemed only right to pay a little more. She did not wish to appear ungenerous. Nor too patronizing. These were complex and swift inner calculations.

“Each week I will pay you five rupees and fifty
paise
,” she said. “You must not ask for more.”

The egg man and the rice merchant smiled. The solution pleased them.

But then the eggs were lost. To an accompanying cacophony of megaphones, a gust of demonstrators erupted into the market and in the scuffle Juliet and the children were knocked back against the stalls. Juliet tripped in the open gutter that ran along the storefronts, sinking to the ankles in vegetable slops and excrement of various human and animal kinds, pitching the delicate cone of eggs to the ground. She stepped out gingerly leaving her sandals in the slime. A new pair could be bought for a few rupees from one of the cobblers in the market.

It was not a particularly significant or alarming incident, demonstrations of one kind or another being an almost daily event. She understood that the buffeting was an accidental side skirmish, that the main rout was heading up Mahatma Gandhi Road towards the tourist hotel and the Air India offices. Scores of red banners bearing a sickle crossed with a stalk of rice (instead of a hammer) fluttered over the marching chanting heads. There were other banners printed in Malayalam script, the swirls and scrolls of which were impenetrable to Juliet who had learned what she knew of the language by ear.

“What do the signs say?” Juliet asked the egg man.

He gazed at heaven and shrugged. He could not read.

“I don't suppose it's anything to worry about,” she told the children.

One of the side-tracked demonstrators who had been catapulted into the narrow market entrance was brushing the dust from Miranda. He was stroking her cheeks gently in a wondering way. On such occasions Miranda, actually acutely embarrassed, would smile back with a sort of translucent shyness that was probably mesmerizing. Juliet had learned that to wander around South India with children was like wearing a magic amulet of protection. A woman alone faced endless difficulties but the presence of children was safer than chanting a
mantra.

“It's all right. No harm done,” Juliet told the marcher. “Except for the eggs,” she added forlornly.

She offered another five rupees and fifty
paise
to the egg man. “Is the woman trying to cheat you?” the marcher asked sharply, turning from Miranda.

He used a coarse Malayalam word for woman, and Juliet flinched.

“She is not cheating me,” the egg man said simply.

“Why do you insult me?”

“Your children are beautiful as young nutmeg plants,” the marcher said. “They have never cried for rice.”

“That is true,” she acknowledged nervously. “But nor have the children of the Nairs or the Brahmins.”

“It is so. But you people, you want … what is it you are saying? You want to put the whole world inside your own pockets.”

“We people?”

“The imperialists.”

“Oh! That's not how I see myself.”

“Nevertheless you are one of them. And when the forest burns, the sweet sandalwood falls also with the ancient jack tree that has already rotted.”

“Exactly. That is the trouble with forest fires. Doesn't it bother you, this indiscriminate destruction?”

He did not like to have his image turned around. He spat on the ground.

“Are we in danger then?” she asked.

“Who can say?”

She felt, at that moment, more angry than frightened.

“I am hoping perhaps you are not,” he added gruffly, moving away to rejoin the demonstration.

“Have your children ever cried for rice?” Juliet asked the egg man.

“In the bad years they have cried, and some have died,” he said. “But there have been good monsoons for many years, praise be to Lord Narayana.”

“Do you believe that the Marxists can find rice for everyone when the monsoon fails?”

“If it is the will of Lord Narayana,” he said, gazing across the market awnings at the towering
gopuram
of Shree Padmanabhaswamy temple.

They left him and haggled with the drivers at the auto-rickshaw stand, who vied with one another to win the western family as passengers for their frail little motorized vehicles.

Then the city was behind them, centuries dropping away by the second. Lurching along the ruts of the bullock carts, they were back in village time, changeless.

4

Juliet scrabbled at the entrails of a chicken and dreamed of home. The trees are turning red and gold, she thought; the air crisp. And whose body is Jeremy touching under a fall of leaves? Jeremy had begun to tear adrift from the past again and to float up into her dreams. Wistful lonely dreams. Last night she had been tangled in the vines beside the nutmeg field when she suddenly saw him walking towards her. She called out to him to pull her free. But just as their hands were about to touch he vanished.

She tugged at the long glaucous ropes of intestines and set them aside for burial. She would have to do it herself. If she gave them to Prabhakaran he would place them at the foot of one of the coconut trees close to the house and cover them with dead palm branches. Then the night would be monstrous with the savage snarls and death struggles of the scavenger dogs.

There were five unlaid eggs inside the chicken, in various stages of formation. The largest was a regular-sized yolk veined with a fine tracery of blood. The smallest was like a soft yellow marble.

If I had stayed behind, she thought, and let David come here alone, I could be in an apartment in Montreal. There would be an office to go to, with book-lined walls and a stereo playing softly. Later the children would be outside riding their bicycles and we could have steak for supper. (O steak! Such thoughts were inadvisable.) Then I could call a sitter and go wherever I wanted. Or perhaps I would call Jeremy. Hello again, my past, I would say. I'm back already. Are you married at the moment, or otherwise engaged, or between arrangements?

No. I would not call Jeremy.

She liked to keep Jeremy in the small space between dream and reality. She did not like to see him too often, daily life being an abrasive affair.

She went to the door and called up to the children.

“Come and see the baby eggs!”

Jonathan and Miranda were on the roof, a sort of elevated patio under a lacy canopy of palms whose shade was ineffectual. The red tiles steamed and broiled in the sun. Up there the children played long and secretive games, their imaginations flowering like rare jungle orchids. What would happen when they returned to public school and baseball and music lessons? If they ever returned. It was difficult to conceive of such a complicated project as departure, requiring planning and coordination and various kinds of vehicles that actually worked and had schedules and honoured timetables. She had a vision of ancient buses and obsolete twin-engined airplanes sinking into the mud beside the abandoned tractor in the rice paddy. We will all subside into the monsoonal swamp, she thought, and lotus flowers will grow over us in indifferent benediction.

I didn't have to come, she reminded herself. I could leave any time.

“You don't have to come,” David had offered.

“You said that twelve years ago, about Winston,” she accused. “Anyway this time I want to go. You don't think I'm going to turn down a prospect of excitement?”

“Did I say that about Winston? Not quite like that surely.” His brow was creased in earnest recollection. “I just never thought you'd come. I was afraid to ask you, I was afraid even to mention I'd been offered the position.”

“And then you said: ‘Just for a year.' If I didn't like it, we'd leave.”

“Fortunately,” he said, lifting a strand of hair from her eyes, “you found you could live here, and then the children came and —”

“David, I hate this place, you know I hate this place.”

“So you keep saying. But I see your eyes when you walk on the lake in winter and when you read to the children at night and when you're coaxing lilacs and poppies out of May.”

She sighed in a kind of despair. “You only keep one kind of evidence.” But it was like trying to convince a gentle
abbé
at Reims Cathedral that the Virgin on the west porch — so serene, so folded into beatitude — had a heart of pocked and garishly painted plaster.

“Hardly anyone else can grow poppies here,” David said. “It's amazing. I love their brashness.”

(You see, the
abbé
at Reims might say with furtive pride, we have gargoyles too. Over here on the left, in our panel of the Last Judgment.)

It's impossible, she thought. It's really impossible. Why don't I have the sense to break loose? This is the obvious logical year to do it. Gradually. Easily. Almost unnoticeably. No one asking awkward questions. A legitimate year apart. Her imagination leaped towards Montreal like a snow goose returning to summer. Why was she fighting it? Why the panic? The act of severing was such hard work. Like trying to separate the roots of two plants that have become pot-bound in the same container.

“I don't want you to live anywhere against your will,” he said, pulling her gently to himself and stroking her cheek with his hand.

You would think, she told herself sardonically, that the body would decently settle down after twelve years of marriage and two children, that it would learn decorum and mellowness, that it would not feel this animal leap of desire for a man it had slept beside for an epoch.
For at your age the heyday in the blood is tame
… Alas, poor ignorant Hamlet.

“Against my will!” She laughed. “You put a hex on my will. Every single damn day of my life, my will does gymnastics for you.”

Sometimes she thought of Mary Magdalene with her wayward flaming hair sitting at the feet of Christ, her head resting on his goodness. The sounds of a party reach her, the sounds of bawdy revelry and political ferment, the whispered daring of the Zealots and the gypsy whirl of harlots at the tavern down the street. Beneath her penitent's robe her foot begins to keep time, tapping with the urge to dance; her thoughts quiver with the delicious danger of subversion. I have to go, she thinks. Just for an hour. I have to escape. And she turns to tell him. Really, she explains, we're quite unsuited. I'm not at all worthy of you, I'd like a little invigorating dip in the errant and imperfect.

I would never prevent you, say his huge brown eyes — his compassionate all-forgiving eyes. You must do as you think best.

And of course she cannot move. She is bound by a silken leash to a kind of gentleness more rare and beautiful than a unicorn.

“I can't seem to do anything about Winston,” Juliet said. “I go on and on living here against my will. It's a life-sentence probably. But I know I want to go to India. I would like us to camp in the middle of a bazaar.”

“It won't be like that,” he said apprehensively “Not where we'll be. It's very isolated, and I'll have to be away on field work a lot.”

“Perhaps you're right, then. More isolation I can do without. I'll get an apartment in Montreal.”

“But then,” he said quickly, “we could probably do a lot of the travelling together. And just think of the children, what an experience like that —”

“Yes. I ought to be thinking of the children.”

If she was contemplating splitting the children's world in two, if she was really about to smash things up like the unregenerate bitch she was then this was the best time, the kindest way.

“There are risks for the children,” he concluded. “Loneliness. And disease. That's a major anxiety. Perhaps, after all, it would be better … I'd be much freer … to get the research done, I mean.”

“You would rather go alone then?”

Alone, he thought fearfully. Suppose when she went to Montreal (on parole as she put it) it was not just the city she lusted after? Suppose she saw someone …? He looked down the rest of his years as down a cheerless cave tunnelling into dark nothingness. Yet there were people willing to add warmth and little tapestries of comfort. (Susan, for instance, would be waiting for him, lying in wait, though he must not think of that. It was shameful the way he could not always predict when she would cavort across his thoughts like a will-o'-the-wisp.)

“You would really rather stay? In Montreal?” he asked.

“I can't decide.” She was afraid of loss. Afraid of the irreversible.

“As you wish.” He was carefully neutral, he would never coerce.

He had always thought of himself as someone who would stay married to one woman for life. Especially when she had once crackled into his field of vision vibrantly as a lick of sunlight through a turning prism. He had not anticipated this slow fading, the light dwindling like a dream of waking.

India presented itself as Time Out. A space — empty, and yet busy with difference. If she were going to leave him he would have time to prepare. He could simply lose himself in work, produce a book within the year. He saw its covers edged with black, as on a bereavement card.

“I suppose I would get used to being alone,” he conceded.

She tasted the permanent absence of David as something sharp and sudden and bitter.

“But really,” she said urgently, “I think I
should
go. The children … it's not right they should miss out on such a —”

“I agree,” he said, folding her into his arms. “I couldn't bear it if you didn't come.”

The children were hurtling down the cement stairway from the roof.

“Ugh!” cried Jonathan. “Mommy! That stuff stinks!”

Her hands and arms were raddled with sticky remnants of intestine and flecked with wisps of feather and fluff from the plucking.

“Where are the baby eggs?” Miranda asked.

“Here.”

Jonathan looked troubled.

“This largest one was almost ready to be a baby chick,” he said somberly. “I can tell by the blood in it. It's been killed before it even had a chance to be born.”

“Oh Jonathan, please! Things are complicated enough”

She gathered up the maze of intestines, towards which a phalanx of ants was already swarming across the polished stone bench, and set out on the path through the coconut trees to the rice paddy. The light underbrush growing on both sides of the track sprawled across its edges. She fought to keep her fear of snakes under control, ramming it down in her mind to a tight little knot of alertness, her eyes darting back and forth across the ground. This was probably why she did not notice the young woman coming towards her.

“Again we are meeting,” said a voice as lilting and strange as Prabhakaran's flute.

Juliet was startled. It might have been Radha waiting secretly in the forest for her divine lover Krishna, so sudden and mysterious and beautiful was the apparition. The woman smiled and Juliet recognized her. It was the woman she had met in the market earlier in the day, the woman who had spoken about the price of eggs.

“Forgive me.” Juliet was embarrassed by the pungent loops trailing from her hands. “I am just going to bury these.”

“You must not do this work. You must have servants.”

“Oh no, really. I do have a boy, in fact … It's just that … Why were you at Palayam Market? Do you not have a servant yourself?”

“Oh yes. I have a servant. Once I had many servants. I do not myself buy in the market.”

“But you knew the prices.”

“A good mistress always inquires of her servant the cost. It is necessary for the sound running of the household.”

“Then why were you in the market place?”

“It is a special day for me. An auspicious day.”

“Who are you? Why have I never seen you before today?”

“For many weeks I have not left my house. But now I shall be walking again in public.”

As she spoke she kept glancing along the path as though either expecting or dreading company.

“But I thought …” Juliet murmured. “This is not a public path. I mean I don't understand. Did you know that these are the estates of Shivaraman Nair? I thought only —”

“He is my kinsman. I also live on these estates.”

“Oh!”

The woman was like a gazelle, light as air, beautiful as lotus flowers. Though her voice was soft and melodious, there was a sense of urgency about her, a kind of nervousness poised for defense or flight. Her silk sari fluttered like restive wings. There was gold at her wrists and ankles, a spectacular diamond and emerald ring on one finger, a nose jewel and earrings. It occurred to Juliet that she had never before seen a high-caste woman walking alone. In fact she had rarely seen one in public at all. They never seemed to leave their houses except as passengers in their black Ambassador cars, chauffeured by their husbands or the driver servant. Certainly she had never seen one at Palayam Market before.

“Who are you?” she asked again.

“I am Yashoda.”

“And I am Juliet.”

“I know. My kinfolk have spoken about your family. You must please visit me.”

“Thank you. I would love to. Where is your house?”

“Over there.” She pointed behind her to the forested area beyond the rice paddy.

“I will certainly come. And you must visit us too.”

“That is more difficult,” she said sadly. “Now I am going. This meeting with you is auspicious. Twice is most auspicious. Thank you.

“Wait! Why is it auspicious? What do you mean?”

“Today is my birthday. I have consulted a very skilled astrologer to cast my horoscope. He told me that on this day I should take courage and appear again in public. He said I would meet a person of destiny who would bring me a great gift. I thank you for this.”

“Oh, I don't think
I
could be … wait …!”

But she made
namaskaram
and was gone like a blown petal along the path.

Juliet buried her scraps in the warm mud beside the rice paddy. Amused and disturbed. Wondering.

Everything was so unreal. People appeared and disappeared swiftly and insubstantially as illusions. No letters came. No radio, no news, no proof of anything existing beyond the fluttering horizon of coconut palms. The rice grew into dreams, the paddy mud silted up memory.

She had a panicky sensation of free-falling through oblivion, a sudden radical doubt about her own continuity. She rubbed her muddy and gut-flecked hands in the grass and watched the ants, like undulations of brown velvet, mysteriously appear. For perhaps a full minute she kept quite still, her wrists and fingers brocaded with disciplined activity, brushed with a sensation feathery as the flickering of eyelashes. Then the ants were gone. Vanished. Her hands picked clean as bleached bones.