The Ivory Swing (22 page)

38

The little procession wound through narrow streets towards the banks of the backwater that meandered sluggishly through coconut groves to the Indian Ocean. Water dripped from the thatched roofs with soft gurgling sounds but the rain had stopped an hour ago.

Both the small bier and the larger one, rocking gently on the shoulders of the bearers, were massed with jasmine and lotus flowers. David and Juliet and the children had gathered them from the forest and the pond.

At the cremation grounds beside the backwater scattered fires smoked and smouldered. Keening figures sat hunched beside some of them, their heads cowled, watching. Others sifted through cold embers gathering bones and ashes in bronze vessels for scattering in sacred places. The air smelled acrid with death.

At an oval depression lined with coconut husks the bearers carefully lowered their burdens. Through the strands of flowers, the silk funeral bindings could be seen.

Shivaraman Nair sprinkled the shrouds with sacred water from the Ganges itself. For this much gold had been given to the temple priests. Shivaraman Nair had spared no expense for this funeral. The shrouds were of pure silk with a border of embroidered gold thread. He sought to bleach the dreadful stain of murder from his life. When he had seen the drowned blue face among the lilies, and the broken flute caught in the pond reeds, he had become secretly afraid that Vishnu had appeared to him in the form of the child Krishna, and he had failed to recognize the Lord of the Universe. He sought expiation. He had ensured that the culprits, violent fools, were all arrested. The sacred water, costly and redemptive, fell from his hands.

An old Kerala proverb came to his mind:
Though the bitter gourd be washed in the Ganges
,
it will not become sweet.
He trembled. I have caused this, he thought. Even my son turns from me. I have been guilty of wrong actions.

Yet he could not tell where his wrong actions had begun. It was surely unfair that he should find himself unexpectedly guilty of murder. He felt that events and intrusions had mysteriously conspired against him. He had been unwise to allow an unchaperoned widow to live on his estate, yet he had simply been responding with generosity to the request of his kinsman by marriage, her father. How could he be held accountable for her waywardness, for the interference of the Westerners? Should he have acted more harshly earlier? He envied his Palghat kinsmen their certainties.

And the woman herself — she was surely guilty. How could he forgive her when he had so cherished her beauty and purity, when he had been so moved by it, had known so well how it would tempt men to lust that he had sought only to preserve and protect her from being sullied. Even now when he looked at that man, at that Matthew Thomas whose very presence here angered him, he could taste the bitterness of his outrage, stinging as bile.

Yet he had not, certainly he had not, intended her death.

And still he was responsible.

More coconut husks had to be piled over the flowers, over the bodies. The men moved quietly, carrying, placing. It was sad work. Jonathan and Miranda were trembling, shivering as though it were cold. Their eyes were red and swollen.

Think of his smile, Juliet whispered to them. Think of his flute. She held their hands tightly.

The fibrous husks were piled in a low mound. The bodies and the flowers were no longer visible. Everything of the biers was hidden.

They all stood silently waiting for Shivaraman Nair to light the sandalwood flares.

Matthew Thomas swayed dizzily and leaned for support against Prem who stood beside him. I have caused terrible destruction, he thought. I have sinned against God and my family. I have caused even an innocent child to die. Yet I did not know what to do. Things happened so suddenly. I was not ready for so many changes. I am glad I will die before I can no longer recognize the world. Already it is difficult for me to recognize it. I am always bewildered.

Prem steadied the old man, supporting his arm. He knew now that there were other wrongs and other griefs besides hunger and poverty. He had not understood that a rich widow could be a victim too. And now Annie was going to leave him. So lightly. She would write, she said. Nothing seemed to fit within his scheme of things. His philosophy was not used to accommodating a private pain unrelated to land and class. He felt disoriented, alone, between all worlds.

I have to fly home, Annie thought urgently, marooned in remorse. I have to atone where I can atone, where I won't blunder into destruction when I'm trying to help.

By an effort of will, David kept his mind off the treadmill of unanswerable questions. He held his consciousness steadily on the image of Yashoda's face in the lamplight, on Prabhakaran arriving with milk, playing his flute. You failed to save them, the waiting funeral pyres accused him. You failed, you failed.

We are implicated, Juliet thought, hearing again the first haunting notes Prabhakaran had offered her as a gift long ago when the coconut grove was Eden to them, when the world was young and innocent, when good and evil were distinguishable, never as sharply as day from night, but discernible as twilight is from darkness. We are not innocent of these deaths. We are implicated.

If she could only formulate the indictment. The questions (Had they interfered too much or too little? Were they culturally arrogant or excessively hesitant?) were already settling into a litany, an end in themselves. As though she had been granted a moratorium on answers. Even partial answers. But the basic dilemma still needled her.

Where had indictable actions begun?

Yashoda had looked to them for help; how could they not have responded?

Prabhakaran was lovable; they had been unable to treat him as a
peon.

That was the given impasse: intractable.

That could never have been otherwise.

She would start there.

Her hands that had become callused, that were forgetting the motions of Canada (the wiping of frost from a windowpane, the closing of an oven door, the small precise movements across typewriter keys) were impatient for the heavy comfort of her stone pestle. She would sit on the floor of her kitchen, the granite mortar full of rice between her knees.

She would not leave the questions alone. She would pound away at them until she had ground out answers.

Shivaraman Nair put his torch to the pyre.

39

Somewhere all the world's waters met.

Juliet sat low in the catamaran dipping the bamboo paddle from side to side, alone in the Indian Ocean. (The fisherman had demurred but when she paid him well he had allowed his scruples to subside. What could be done, after all, about the peculiar impulses of western women?)

Seething in between the lashed and buoyant balsam logs, the blood-warm waves lapped her thighs like birth fluid. And then, she thought, watching them foam and gurgle back out of the boat, they will curl themselves into the womb of earth again. They will whisper and return, exploring by trial and error, advancing and retreating. Somewhere, some time, yearning after the moon, they will slip below southern landfalls and sidle up to the great Atlantic currents. They will shiver and head north and foam around Nova Scotia and mingle with waters that have flowed past Montreal.

And some time soon, she thought, I'll follow them. After the rituals of grief and atonement seem complete.

She felt she would know when it was time.

Just as Annie had known, by the private clock of her emotions, when it was time for her to leave. Which had been immediately, of course.

“I think,” she had said to Juliet, “that I might possibly be cured of rash impulse. All these years I have started and ended relationships at whim, I have dallied with other people's happiness, I have begun and then abandoned courses, I have backpacked around the world, stayed on the move, dropped in and out of my life. Now I'm making my bid for responsibility and permanence.”

“And you'll start,” Juliet had been gentle but sardonic, “by leaving India on instant rash impulse.”

“You're not taking me seriously. I'm going to stop bitching about the mysterious lack of stability in my life and I'm going to work at creating it. I'm going back to finish law school. I'm going to call the man I walked out on in Toronto and ask him if he will let me back in the door.”

“You'll call him from the airport.”

“Why not? This time I'm making a committed effort.”

How oddly, Juliet had thought, embracing her sister in farewell, how oddly we diagnose our own flaws, how predictably we prescribe for ourselves. How wistfully well-intentioned is the pendulum-path of our resolve.

As Annie's plane had disappeared beyond the last green quaver of coconut palms, Juliet had seen in its sky-trail the long arc of a swing that would never be still. We both want to be both of us, she thought.

And here I am still — the Indian Ocean was caressing her thighs like a lover she could not leave — here I float in the juice of earth, my body seeping into the elements, my blood flowing slow as the ocean's pulse — and a small part of me, cerebral and perverse, skitters enviously along the trajectory of Annie's life. (What is happening in the cities that will receive her en route to her future and past, what is happening in London and New York and Toronto?)

Jonathan and Miranda waved from the sand and she paddled shorewards. The other child, the missing one, was part of the element surrounding her. His ashes had been scattered in the ocean to return to those beginnings from which he would be reborn.

She was not ready to leave him yet.

Each day she sat on her stone floor and hugged the mortar with her knees. The dull thud of the pestle, the soft, resonant throb of granite against granite, sounded oddly Gregorian. Low in her throat she hummed a lament to its accompaniment, her requiem for a lost child.
Let light perpetual shine upon him
… Even there, where he flows in the veins of Vishnu.

In the still evenings she found herself listening for the sound of a flute.

But at dawn, and sometimes during the day, the alluring hum of Montreal began to disturb her trance. A jazz beat, seductive.

From Yashoda's desecration and death, her mind still shied away.

David left the grove early each day and sat for hours in the university library staring unseeing at ancient texts.

He turned the frail pages of illuminated manuscripts where Radha, in gold leaf and lapis lazuli, moved languidly on her ivory swing, trailing beauty through the air. Yashoda, reproachfully, gazed at him from those almond eyes.

I am everywhere, she said. I am the idea of perfection and of flawed endeavour. I am unattainable beauty. I am the moment of opportunity forever lost.

She came to him ceaselessly in image, in poetry, in idea. He found he could not recall the actual feel of her hair, the silk of her skin. He found he had difficulty sustaining a belief in her death. Her ashes were part of the air around him, he could smell rebirth in the forest's decay. He was hemmed in by five hundred million people for whom dying was a brief journey between lives.

But something ugly had happened, he reminded himself. A dread and final thing for which he was partly responsible. By a sin of omission at the very least. Yet when he placed the grotesque event penitentially before his consciousness, when he tried to hold it there like a
memento mori
, like the maggoty skull with which Saint Jerome kept his morbid sense of mortality kindled, then its jagged and horrid edges became fluid and wonderful to look at. Something transfigured and transcendent emerged, a thing of art.

There is something monstrous about me, he decided. There is something defective about me. I cannot take tragedy or unhappiness or death seriously. I see them as occasions for art, for transformation, for the enduring triumph of the human spirit. I do not feel the mother's anguish, I see the
Pièta.

You only keep one kind of evidence
. It was something Juliet had said often enough — with affection, he had thought; with despair, he saw now. And what had he done to her, wilfully blind all these years to her distress? Like the emperor with his nightingale, he had kept her in the jewelled cage of his version of their life together, in the prison of a small stultifying town. She could no longer sing.

There is about my life, he thought, a dreadful passivity. I am a scholarly and detached observer rather than a participator in events. My faculties for sifting all the evidence, for postponing decisions, are over-refined.

His convoluted caution had cost Yashoda her life. He had been engrossed in the inner debate of what he could or should do; it might have absorbed him forever — but there had not been time.

No time.

He felt all at once the gut panic that a dreamer feels on being wrenched from deep sleep by a fire alarm: I will lose Juliet. This was what hindsight, what Yashoda's death, showed him: small signs accumulate like pollen in springtime, each easily ignored or repressed; then harvest comes in an irreversible rush, and after that the fall.

It seemed to him that Juliet was charged with the high-pitched stillness of a fledgling eagle on the lip of an abyss. At any moment she would marshal sufficient reserves of will and daring to spread her wings and soar. While he watched with the helpless molas-ses-slow muscles of sleep, she would vanish from his world as irrevocably as Yashoda had done.

There must be something, there had to be something he could do to prevent this disaster. But what? He seemed to have lost, long ago, the knack of action, of initiating events. He would have to learn to intrude on the course of his individual history as a stroke victim relearns speech.

Would he, could he, uproot his own life? Could he hurl himself into the jangle and burl of cities, which he had always disliked? Would that avert calamity? (But this was not a simple solution: there were complicated matters of tenure, and of post-sabbatical obligations to his own university.) If he should urge her to go to Montreal now, with his blessing, and beg her to wait until …?

But he feared bereavement and change. Bleak visions came to him: of soaring falcons never returning to the falconer; of the gaunt bronze dancer from the second millennium BC escaping — or being stolen — from her glass case, being lost to the eyes of art lovers and history forever.

There was no guarantee, should he make an incorrect move, that Juliet would ever come back. Perhaps it would be simpler to do nothing.

No. This once he required of himself an act of intervention. Even if he bungled it. It stunned him, the sharp pain of impending loss, but it felt redemptive, bitter as atonement. Nevertheless as he walked towards Juliet through the grove of his penitence, hugging his act of contrition to himself like a millstone, it began to take on a stark and aesthetically pleasing outline.

He took his wife in his arms. We will move to Montreal, he said. Had planned to say. Had rehearsed saying. Nobly and sacrificially. Of course you will have to live there without me for a while; it will be at least a couple of years before I can …

Oh but she would never be lonely in Montreal. The afterglow of that city had always come back with her like an aura. She would go there without a backward glance. And to whom?

He felt dizzy with fear.

He held her and was unable to speak.

In Juliet's dream, the swing was moving faster and faster, the arcs growing wilder. She and Yashoda clung desperately to each other and to the ivory ropes.

“Don't look down!” she gasped.

Below them, infinitely distant, were rock-strewn crevasses. They careened lightly as air, fast as light, suspended from nothing, nothingness below.

“I can't hang on,” Yashoda cried. “I'm failing!”

Juliet felt the savage pull of a plummeting body, the damp slippage of hand from clasped hand. Alone, vertiginous, doomed. As the sickening sensation of free-falling entered her own body, she saw, rushing to meet her eyes, the bird of paradise mangled on the rocks.

Then impact. A ballet of fragments, pieces of her own body her own life, floated before her eyes like atoms in space. She clutched at them, frantic to prevent the dispersal, as her muscles and nerve ends, reflexive, twitched and danced and braided themselves with the damp bedding.

How many days had passed, how many weeks? From the shaggy length of the children's hair, from the calluses on her hands, Juliet measured time. Between her blistered palms, the stone pestle drummed out tentative decisions, overruled them, reformulated them.

It was, ultimately, fatal to careen between worlds. She knew that now. Her life was as segmented as an orange, her fragments held together by the mere rind of her will. It was dangerous to go on brutally pruning back the irrepressible green shoots of her desire for more fertile soil: urban, intellectual, and political. But they had grown together for so long now, she and David. It would be a savage act, separating their tangled roots. The question was — and she
would
pound out a final answer — which cluster of losses was the more death-dealing?

By bicycle one morning an arbiter of sorts — an official-looking one, dignified by pith helmet and khaki uniform — came wending down through the coconut grove, and the mailman handed Juliet a letter. It was Jeremy's handwriting and the postmark was not Boston, but Montreal.

She stared at it as though it had come from another universe. Or from a civilization so distant, so buried under layers of cataclysm, that the archaeologist is baffled, unable to hypothesize a meaning for the found object.

She walked out to the paddy with it and where the lowest terrace trickled into the canal that wound through numberless estates to the ocean, she placed it gently on the brackish water, address upwards, and watched it begin its long journey Soon the inked runes of her name and past would bleed into the fluids of the earth and mingle with the ashes of Prabhakaran.

David sensed the irresolute weather of Juliet's emotions as a massing of rain clouds. Tonight, he thought urgently, before it is too late, I will speak.

When the children were asleep they stood together in the cool night air beneath the palms.

“About Winston,” he said. “Pulling up roots … it isn't easy for me. It will take time.” And then quickly: “Suppose you were to live in Montreal, I could come every weekend, and as soon as it's possible …” He spoke sadly, as though he were a doctor intimating a prognosis that was sombre though perhaps not terminal.

She said with a guilty eagerness, as though a great weight of decision-making had been taken off her shoulders: “Yes. Perhaps that would work.” Then, warming to the suggestion: “I could leave in a week or so, with the children.”

So soon. Instinctively he reached out to clasp her, to prevent her, but dropped his hand uncertainly. “I won't be able to stay here,” he said. “The place will be too full of ghosts. Perhaps I'll go to Madras for a few weeks.”

“Yes.” She nodded sagely. She might have been agreeing to the merits of an experimental cure — an elixir of herbs or a taking of the waters. “We'll rent an apartment in Montreal for the time being.”

For the time being.

“Do you think …?” He took both her hands in his. “Do you think you will …?”

He did not need to say “wait” or “reassess”. It was understood.

We are like trapeze artists who swing away from each other, she thought. It is a delicate act, full of balance and hazard. For such a long time we have been skilful, never falling though never certain. Will we touch on the next inward arc? Or will we miss?

“Do you think …?” he asked again.

How can I know? she wondered. All we have between us is more shared years than I can remember, two children, a tragedy, an aching sense of the terrible limits of knowledge and understanding, and this vast tenderness. Just these few things.

“How can I know?” she murmured.

They held each other, frail beneath the moon and the palms, and kissed timidly, as frightened children do.