The Ivory Swing (5 page)

Matthew Thomas stood patiently at the counter. It seemed that his request was a complicated one. It involved searches and gesticulations and a certain amount of argumentation. This was the way of things. More delays were promised.

Mr Matthew Thomas was not in the habit of letting life's little inconveniences upset him, but when he concluded his affairs with the desk clerk and left the Air India office at last, he was just in time to see the tourist woman leaving in a taxi.

She is leaving for Burlingtonvermont, he thought. He felt bereft, as though a miracle had come floating by like a wind-blown petal and he had failed to catch hold of it. He was not quite able to repress the thought that it had been an unkind day.

8

Along the rutted village roads that wound from the Nair estate to the beach, dark-eyed children massed to watch a passing wonder.

“
Sahibs! Sahibs!
” they chanted, running alongside, bare feet percussive on the red earth. Inside the lurching auto-rick Juliet and the children huddled close, hands raised to ward off the shower of pelted blossoms and stones.

Perhaps, Juliet thought, I am considered to have the Evil Eye. I must be simultaneously appeased and driven off.

“We should have brought Prabhakaran,” she gasped. To mediate.

It was a relief to emerge, like a chrysalis spreading sudden wings, from the child-crusted palm-canyoned roads into the white glare of the beach. Sand, coarse, terra-cotta in colour, embraced their sandalled feet like gritty fire. Directly overhead the sun slithered and smoked through a haze of water-heavy air.

Yet, strangely, what Juliet thought of as she slung her sandals over one shoulder and waded into the blood-warm surf, was Lake Ontario frozen. It was the remembered exultation, the same sense of awe at the margin of a vast body of water whose far shore cannot be seen. The Balboa syndrome, she supposed — whether silent on a peak above the Pacific, or alien between the coconut palms and the broiling Indian Ocean, or poised precariously between January and February on a wafer of ice beneath the bleak Canadian sky.

“Do you remember,” she asked the children, “walking out on the frozen lake? How it seems to go on forever and ever, as though we might reach the edge of the world?”

They looked at her curiously, not seeing a connection, and splashed themselves with water that leaped back from their clothes towards the sun in instant vaporous tongues. She wanted them to savour the mysterious incongruities of their lives.

“Don't you remember how excited you were when you realized you were walking on water?”

They nodded vaguely the surf frothing between their toes.

“Look!” she said, picking up the frayed husk of a coconut and tossing it as far as she could out over the waves. “It will wander through all the oceans of the world and one day someone on a ship from Montreal, sailing out of the St Lawrence estuary, will see it floating between the fishing boats.”

But the coconut came bobbing shoreward on the next wave and the children swam to meet it, competitive, awash in the present moment. Juliet sat on the sand beside their discarded cotton clothes and sandals, thinking of snowsuits and mukluks. And of that first of many winter odysseys in the small town beside Lake Ontario.

“It must be the oxygen!” David had shouted.

She knew what he meant although she couldn't really hear the words. The wind barrelling all the way from Lake Superior took words and whirled them in flakes of sound as far as Nova Scotia. She knew he meant the taut hum of ecstasy, the sense of being caught up in elemental and exalted matters remote from the dwindling town where dull people crawled between morning and night.

She laughed and put her thickly mittened hand clumsily into his and called back, sending a futile missile of language into the blither of snow: “Let's keep going to the edge of the world!”

And the children, Miranda scarcely able to walk yet, reeled about like padded balls buffeted by an unseen playmate. Only their eyes were visible, clownish behind ski-masks, huge with wonder and the stimulant of cold. Breathless, they brushed icicles from their lashes and hurled their bodies into the wind and rolled in the snow, making angels with muffled arms.

Sometimes they scooped away at the drifts until they had laid bare a black window into the lake's secrets: air bubbles caught like diamonds, and small fish shocked into silver stillness, their deaths preserved like jewels until the thaw.

Ah, Juliet had thought, drunk on insights and oxygen, there are ways to cheat change and decay.

And they had hugged each other and danced and known they were not like other families, but set apart, blessed. Fumbling with the impediment of winter clothing, Juliet and David had kissed and their kisses had frozen on their lips, the shimmering salted rime of an epiphany.

Yes.

Epiphany.

And she ran across the hot sand towards her children and began to dance at the foaming edge of the Indian Ocean.

Mr Matthew Thomas was so astonished by the sight that he forgot to look under the thatched cabin of the fishing boat drawn up on the sand beside him. At first he thought it was the Burlingtonvermont woman from the Air India office. It was so difficult to tell one Westerner from another. They all looked alike, especially the women. But then he realized that the two children frolicking at the edge of the waves belonged to her, so he was sure it was someone different. How extraordinary Twice in one week! It must be because he was thinking so often of Kumari. Perhaps God sent these messengers. It was auspicious that she was with children. It must surely mean that Kumari would have a safe birthing.

The woman looked like a sprite from the sea with wind and salt spray whipping her long golden hair about her face. Little waves frothed and foamed about her bare ankles, wetting the edges of her cotton skirt, which wrapped itself damply about her thighs in a way that was disturbing to him. She seemed to be dancing in and out of the shallows as were her two children. It was certainly an extraordinary way for a grown woman to behave. Behind her a small crowd of Indian children followed at a slight distance, mimicking her with much merriment, but she seemed unaware of them. Or else chose to ignore them. He felt embarrassed for her.

Could it be the same for Kumari, he wondered with sudden pain. He had a vision of his daughter walking through the snows of Burlingtonvermont in her sari with a mocking group of American children chanting strange things after her. What was it like to walk through snow? Kumari had written that it was soft and powdery. Like sand, he supposed. Like sand that inexplicably froze the feet.

The woman and her two children and their retinue of pranksters had moved on along the beach, so he continued to look among the long snake boats for the family of Ouseph. The fisher people spent their entire lives on the beach. They did not even leave it to market their own fish, since this was the task of another sub-caste of the fishing community. Any of the scant wants that the sea and shoreline did not provide — such as rice, cooking pots, cloth — they bartered from the men and women who sold their fish. They went out to sea by day, and by night slept under coconut thatch awnings hung over their simple boats which were drawn up high on the sand.

Since they were of the lowest castes it would not have been fitting for them to visit Mr Thomas at his house, even if they were ever to leave the beach, nor would it be proper for him to eat with them. But as they were of his faith, he was concerned whenever word reached him that a family was in particular distress. On this occasion he was bringing both food and money to Ouseph and his wife and young children. Ouseph himself had been ill for some time and their eldest son, who was still only a boy, had been taking out the boat each day because the livelihood of the family depended on the daily catch. A week ago the boat had not returned at evening and then a few days later had been washed ashore empty. Mr Thomas went to offer what little comfort he could.

After a time he found them leaning against the simple lashed logs of their boat, gazing out to sea. Mariya, the wife, was weeping silently. The children were nowhere to be seen, probably capering along the beach in the wake of the day's wonder. Ouseph stared at him unseeing. He offered his gifts simply and sat a little way apart in silent sympathy. What could be done about the will of God? His ways were inscrutable.

When he felt that a suitable length of time had elapsed he bowed to the sorrowing couple and withdrew. He walked southwards along the beach watching the ocean rolling all the way down the blue distances to where Cape Comorin stood sentinel against the non-Indian world.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, he thought. From this sea had come Christ's own apostle, St Thomas, with salvation. Missionaries from Europe had used boats as pulpits, preaching to the fisher people. And daily the ocean took back their converts to the bosom of God himself.

Then again he saw the vision coming to him from the sea, fair and strange as the Blessed Virgin.

“Hello,” she said, smiling. She had a vague sense of having seen him somewhere before, but could think of no context.

He had not expected to be addressed and could think of nothing to say. He simply stared at her.

She bit her lip and looked away and he felt a rush of dismay and sympathy.

It is hard for them in a strange land, he thought. This is the way it would be for Kumari.

“Is it lonely?” he asked without thinking. “Away from your native country?”

“Yes.” She was surprised. “Sometimes it is very lonely.”

She looked directly into his eyes, her own wide and blue-green like the sea.

It was disconcerting to be looked at by a woman in that way. Improper. He lowered his own eyes nervously. Did Kumari gaze at other men in that way now?

The fisher children swarmed like flies, pressing against her, touching her, chanting. Mr Thomas clapped his hands sharply and shouted an order. Immediately the children fell silent and backed away, scampering off to their boats.

“Thank you,” said the woman in evident relief.

They began to walk along the beach together, her two children darting in and out of the water like dragonflies, laughing and calling to each other. He was relieved that the woman herself was now walking sedately beside him. He did not know what he would do if she began to dance again. Perhaps she had only been doing it because she thought no one but the children could see her.

He said: “I am having a daughter in America.”

“Really?”

He looked at her sharply. Of course really. Was she accusing him of lying?

“She is living in Burlingtonvermont.”

“Ah. Vermont is very beautiful. If you visit her, you must go in the fall when the leaves change colour”

What astonishing things the woman said! If he were visiting his daughter!

“What is your daughter's name?”

“Kumari. And I myself am being Mr Matthew Thomas, who is now humbly requesting the honour of knowing your name.”

“It's Juliet,” she said, unable to match his quaint and charming verbal flourishes.

“I am very happy to be meeting you, Mrs Juliet.”

They walked on in silence. But it seemed a friendly companionable silence.

Mr Thomas marvelled. Who would have dreamed that he would be walking and talking like a kinsman with someone who knew of Burlingtonvermont. It was quite astonishing how simple it was to talk to a western woman.

“My daughter Kumari is going to have a baby,” he said.

“Ah. Your first grandchild?”

“No, no. I am having already seven grandchildren. But this will be my first American grandchild.”

She smiled. “Then you will be visiting them.”

He looked at her with amazement. “How could I do that?”

“It is so expensive,” she said contritely. “Perhaps it will be easier for her to visit you. If her husband is on an American salary.”

“It is not that,” he said. “I am having sufficient money.”

It was simply that he had never thought of it, and now he wondered why.

“You don't wish to visit them?”

“I do not know,” he said uncertainly.

It was such a novel idea. He could not grasp it properly. His mind did not know how to hold it. It shivered about like quicksilver, tantalizing.

“And why,” he thought to ask, “are you living in this country? Your husband is doing something with the government?”

“No. With the university. He is writing a book.”

She looked at the sun falling into the sea, slow and smouldering, like a spent cannonball.

“I must go.”

“Where are you living?”

“At Krishnapuram. On the estates of Shivaraman Nair.”

“I will send an invitation. There are many things I am wishing to ask you about Burlingtonvermont. If you will graciously come to my house one day, perhaps we could speak of these things.”

“With pleasure.”

He regretted that he had given way to irritation at the Air India office. One needed only a little patience for auspicious purposes to reveal themselves.

9

The sound of the flute came keening into her sleep like a jewelled arrow. It had a bass accompaniment, a peculiar low throbbing sound that reverberated in the walls of the house. Her first thought was: it is the trumpeting of elephants.

She peered out through the ground mists and coconut trees. A gilded figure was tripping and dancing through the palms — Prabhakaran, clothed in sunrise and the music of boyhood abandon. Around and behind him six cows, moving soft and slow as velvet, gave their low vibrating responses to his melody. Exquisite as a page in an illuminated manuscript, she thought. The cowherd boy with his flute.

He was carrying the little vessel of milk in the crook of his arm, pressed against his body, to free both hands for the instrument. He is sure to spill some, she thought, watching him skip between the cattle with the exuberance of morning. She wondered why he was bringing the cows. They usually remained tethered in the courtyard behind Shivaraman Nair's house. It was Prabhakaran's task to feed them each day with the hay left after the rice threshing.

There was a pause in his fluting. A woman had appeared from the direction of the rice paddy, walking quickly and lightly. She had pulled the upper part of her sari over her head like a veil.

It must be Yashoda, Juliet thought. She had not seen Yashoda since the day of the stoning though she had twice tried to visit her. The first time, Jati, daughter of Shivaraman Nair, had come from the house to meet her.

“My cousin is ill,” she had said. “She is not able to receive any visitors.”

A few days later, Juliet had again entered the little forest beyond the rice paddy. The house had been deserted except for an elderly maidservant who told her that the mistress had gone to stay with her husbands family.

The woman now stopped to speak with Prabhakaran. After several minutes of conversation, Juliet saw the boy offer her the pot of milk. She held it high and tilted, a few inches from her lips to avoid pollution, and drank a little of the white stream which poured from it. She gave the vessel back to Prabhakaran and patted his head in an affectionate motherly way and stroked his face. Juliet saw the gleaming flash of the boy's smile. She was puzzled because she was certain it was highly irregular for a high-caste woman to accept food from a low-caste servant, an act which would be considered a form of ritual pollution.

A moment later the woman hurried away through the trees and Prabhakaran came on towards the house with cows and milk and flute.

“Milk,” he smiled as he handed the vessel to Juliet.

“
Pahl
,” she replied. “
Ubagaram
. Was that Yashoda you met on the path?”

He looked troubled and did not answer.

“I am not going to tell Shivaraman Nair.”

He smiled gratefully.

“Yashoda,” he assented.

She took the milk to the kitchen and emptied it into her cooking pot. He had already followed her and begun sweeping around her feet. With a flicker of annoyance she thought: He is like a shadow.

“Why did you bring the cows?”

He answered at length and with enthusiasm, but she could understand very little of his dialect. She went to the door. The cows were wandering around the house, cropping the grass. She supposed he wanted them to have fresh greens as a change from threshing-hay. Or perhaps he merely wanted their company. He spent so much time with them each day, feeding them, murmuring to them, fondling them, that they must have seemed like siblings to him.

David and the children woke. They dressed. They had breakfast. While they dressed Prabhakaran swept the bathroom. While they washed he swept the bedroom. He wandered into private moments by mistake, but he was never embarrassed. He was not used to his presence having significance to anyone.

While they ate he swept around and between them and crawled under the table to sweep away crumbs. The palm-branch switches tickled their bare feet. When the children read or did their school work, he would stand silently watching for hours, distracting them, slowly twitching his broom to flick dust from the window bars — those ubiquitous rungs which guard all the openings in India, keeping beggars at bay, wooing infant breezes through their spaces as cobwebs lure flies.

They became used to Prabhakaran's presence, but not in the way one is supposed to become used to servants. There were times when Juliet's impulse was to treat him as she treated her own children in their maddening moments, to bestow a quick hug and say: Prabhakaran, I love you but you are driving me crazy! Just go outside and leave me alone for a while.

But India had made them hyperconscious of body movements and human touch as highly ritualized cultural phenomena.

Once she had asked Anand how to say: Please do not sweep in the house while the children are doing their school work.

For a start, Anand had explained, there was no equivalent for
please
. It all depended on the form of the verb. One verbal ending intimated a polite request. This would be used in conversation with equals. It would be quite improper to use this construction when speaking to a servant. The other verb form signified an order. Juliet could not bring herself to be peremptory with him, so Prabhakaran seemed always to be present.

Juliet was disoriented. On those occasions when he blundered into intimate moments, she no longer felt shock or outrage but a brooding unease. Individual privacy, she thought, is as western as television. We are unable to divest ourselves of the need for it. We are addicted to the luxury of choosing when we will be unobserved.

Perhaps one absorbed the pressures or spaces of population density at birth, by osmosis, in the air, in mother's milk.

Servants do not make life simpler, she saw. They complicate. They encroach and invade and disrupt. Unless of course one could manage to ignore them completely, treat them as non-persons. That was a skill handed down through the high castes for centuries. Common to people of wealth and privilege all over the world, she supposed.

Once, on a day of steaming monsoon heat, with the sweat glistening all over his body, Prabhakaran had crumpled over his coconut-switch broom in the middle of the floor. He was still coiled up in the foetal position required by his method of sweeping. Juliet was in an anguish of remorse. She lifted him onto a wicker chair, turned on the ceiling fan, and wiped his face with a damp cloth. He leapt into consciousness.

“
Venda! Venda!
” he cried in alarm, grabbing his broom and sweeping with a frantic renewal of energy.
“Venda!”
You must not!

“Don't be stupid,” she said crossly. “Sit! Rest!”

But he had only swept more furiously, muttering,
“Venda, venda!”

The cows were still cropping grass by the front door and lowing in at the windows. David left for the day and Juliet sent the children and Prabhakaran to the rice paddy while she did the laundry.

It was heavy work, crouching over the low sink, scrubbing and pounding in cold water, a daily wrestling match with sheets and towels and clothing that could never be freed of the stink of excessively humid air. As futile a task as Lady Macbeth's hand washing.

With a vessel full and heavy on her hip, she climbed to the roof and hung the washing over a coir rope strung between bamboo poles. There were no pegs and the rope stained the clothes but it was the best she could do. She ran out of space so she climbed down again and draped the rest of the sheets over the branches of a low mango tree in the back courtyard.

Then she gathered all the sandals not being worn that day and took them up to the roof to bake on the tile under the sun. If she neglected to do this, green mould would sprout from the leather and die shoes would look like living things, bewitched forest creatures.

The three children came running back from the rice paddy with scummy water and aquatic life in their cupped hands to show Juliet their treasures.

“Drop it! Scrub your hands!” she said, exasperated. “How many times must I tell you that water is polluted! The sewer water from all the houses drains into the paddy. It is chock full of god knows what diseases.”

Jonathan and Miranda exchanged a resigned look and settled in to their correspondence lessons and Prabhakaran dusted the window bars. Or stood looking over Jonathan's shoulder, dazzled by the speed at which he filled a page with hieroglyphs, until Jonathan gave him a pencil and showed him how to write.

“House. This is a
house. H-o-u-s-e
.”

“
Vitu
,
vitu,”
Prabhakaran said, as he laboriously made an
H.
But he could not demonstrate how to write
vitu
in Malayalam script. Much giggling and whispering.

And Juliet, abstracted teacher, smiled on them and tried to write letters.

Dear Jeremy,
she wrote.
You were right. I am pining for books and snow and most of all for rationality. It isn't quite the lively adventure I was hoping for. I have been absorbed into the growth cycle, smothered by vines. I seem to be headed for imminent harvest and decay.

She tore up the letter.

Dear Annie
, she wrote.
Upon reflection, I think your coming is an excellent idea. I definitely need adult company. (David is so busy, away at the university, touring the villages, etc.) I seem to be slipping inside the children somehow. We are never apart, all the old rhythms shattered. I am losing all sense of separateness.

I look like
—
I am
—
a drudge, growing mould and changing shape like the shoes. Really, nonentity is contagious here. Even the massive trees are swallowed up by creepers.

I sometimes fear I will disappear just like that. Yesterday there was a large dead toad on the bathroom floor. From nowhere, battalions of ants appeared. It was all over in about an hour. No vestige of that huge squashed creature, not a single stray ant in sight, Do you see what I mean? No wonder that extreme forms of meditation and withdrawal flourish here. The days are drugged; memory is one more mirage. Are you really coming or did I dream it? Yours faintly, Juliet.

Dear David
, she wrote.
Is there any point to this? I thought of India as a place of risk and dazzle, a place where I could feel at home for once and still be with you. It's more like a coma.

You seem dazed with heat and research and have forgotten I hoped for elephants and bazaars. Memory, like everything else, is so tiring here. (Not that you've ever remembered my complaints of deprivation. You believe in Original Goodness, you believe contentment runs in everyone's veins, you remember only epiphanies, you are not an impartial scorekeeper.)

I'm not blaming you but I need to get away
,
away from all this domestic lassitude, here or in Winston, what's the difference? I need a rest, I need some peace, I need the frenzied hub of a city.

I'm not blaming you, it's entirely my own fault. I should never have come, I should never have gone to Winston, you were absolutely right about that twelve years ago, that day on the subway. Remember?

Anyway, I quit
.
I concede defeat. I am unregenerately urban, I pine for those places that inspire editorial laments in newspapers: the derelict overcrowded arteries of sprawling cities that heave untidily with history and event and garbage strikes and miraculous chance encounters.

I will grieve for you of course, I will grieve for the shattered unity of the four of us, Just as unremittingly as I now grieve for metropolitan ferment. I'll write every day, I'll send telegrams, I'll entice you to Montreal. But just the same, I swear I'll go. I'm really going to leave. Yours regretfully
…

She put Annie's letter into an envelope and tore up the one to David. She thought of Mary Magdalene shutting her ears to the tavern music. She thought of Radha hopelessly knotted into Krishna, going nowhere on her ivory swing, forever vacillating between untenable poles. She thought of that long-gone day on the Toronto subway that day of momentous choice …

It was the rush-hour embrace and collision of bodies on the Yonge Street line, the hour of armpits and strap-hanging and suffocation. Loving it, Juliet let the sway of the carriage press her against David's body, wondering wickedly: Is it possible to disconcert him physically? Or is he pure as a choirboy, impervious?

Several months before they had met by chance in a gallery of fine arts. Juliet had been pacing from room to room, unseeing, because it was a day following one of those nights when Jeremy had not returned to the apartment, not even for breakfast. Not that this was something she had any right to be upset about. It was not a question of infidelity. They were not — as Jeremy put it — trying for permanence. They were merely celebrants of the present moment, they were open and free, and these things (these absences for which no one was accountable) were of no consequence. Except that in their wake Juliet suffered from something like vertigo, some sickening loss of balance, something anachronistic and primitive and shameful that one would no more admit to than announce a belief in the Flat Earth Society.

On her sixth circuit of the gallery — filling in the abyss of a lunch hour with movement so that she would not call Jeremy at his office — she saw that the absorbed young man in the Indus Valley Artefacts room was still standing as though in a trance before one of the glass cases. The man himself, she thought, was certainly the room's most interesting
objet d'art.
Rodin's
Thinker
standing up, perhaps. No. A far more striking blend of the ascetic and the sensual, something from the Quattrocento in Florence: St John in the wilderness, stuffing himself with wild honey; or St Sebastian waiting passionately for the arrows as for lovers.

It's his stillness that attracts, she thought, tilting her head to one side in appraisal. And his eyes: intense as lasers, liquid as dark honey. Yes, she had seen his kind on the walls of the Uffizi: all those
Portraits of a Young Man
, by Gozzoli and Fra Lippi.