The Worlds Within Her (6 page)

But this explains, Mrs. Livingston, why I know what humiliation feels like, and far worse. It is, my dear, why the colour of my skin is precious to me, even though it does not define me. You see, on our wedding day my husband reclaimed the dignity that had so long been denied us, and dignity opens up the world. After that day, how could I be ashamed — of anything?

Precious, precarious world, isn't it?

AFTER BREAKFAST IN
the lounge — dark panelling and wicker greedily absorbing the sunshine from the steel-barred windows — Yasmin smiles at the new desk clerk, nods at the new guard, and steps outside. She expects to be called back, cautioned. But daylight changes everything: they barely acknowledge her.

The morning air is cooler than she expects, the sun bright and splintery and gentle on the skin. Across the street, swallowed by the darkness of the evening before, effaced in the diminished view through her windows, is a large park: trees and lawns and paths, beds of tended flowers, sprays of shrubbery. Tacked to the tree trunks and rising above the flowers are the rectangular plates of botanical identification.

She feels herself lighten, feels a smile come to her lips.

Farther down the street, she sees a sight a
TV
story producer would film for “local colour.” A discouraged horse harnessed to a wooden cart, the tray heavy with a mound of fresh coconuts. A man in ragged shorts and a hat leans against the tray, sipping from a metal cup. He is shirtless, so thin that his chest appears concave. A producer would get him to wield his machete, to open up a nut:
local enterprise in the dying economy.

She thinks of Martinique, with Jim, two weeks in February a few years ago. A bus tour through the misty mountains of tropical rainforest, through the remnants of St. Pierre ruined at the turn of the century by volcanic eruption, past endless banana plantations. She remembers the tall coconut palms, with their clusters of green nuts high above. The woman in the seat ahead had pointed to them, asked her husband what they were. He didn't know.

“Coconuts,” Yasmin had offered.

“Coconuts?” The woman was doubtful.

“Fresh coconuts. That's how they grow.”

“You sure?” — the doubt in her voice hardening — “The only coconuts I've ever seen are brown.”

Yasmin had fallen silent at that. She saw the woman — wisps of grey revealed at the nape of her neck by the severe upsweep of too-brown hair — bridling at the possibility that the coconut could be other than she knew it to be. Like the many who tuned in to the newscast not to learn of the world but to confirm their views of it.

“Coconuts.” Jim, sitting beside her, had squeezed her hand. “Sure couldn't tell just by looking at them.”

“Helps to ask,” she replied. “Usually.”

“Penny Pradesh, please.”

“Who callin', please.”

“My name is Yasmin.”

“Jus' a moment, please.”

Penny Pradesh is her aunt, her father's sister. They have spoken only once before, when Yasmin called to give her aunt the news of her mother's death, and to ask her help in its aftermath.
Call Penny, if there's anything
her mother had said more than once.
Call Penny
… She had shown her where, in the little phone book, she could find Penny's number, one of the few written in ink. And Yasmin has always known the sole circumstance in which she would call Penny.

Through the phone, she hears a distant shuffling, the sounds of Penny approaching.

Penny. Her aunt. Her father's sister.

Yasmin has no belief in the romance of family ties. There is to her no point in comparing the thickness of blood and water: with time, with distance, with no network of shared experience,
blood might as well be water. Yasmin knows Charlotte's life to be more precious to her than Penny's.

“Hello. Yasmin?” Penny has a rich, warm voice. A voice of a timbre that would do well on radio.

“I'm here,” Yasmin says. “At the hotel.”

“And Shakti?”

“It went well.”

There is a silence, and Yasmin wonders if Penny is struggling with the same image that comes to her: of flames licking at her mother's face, enveloping her body.

“I coming pick you up,” Penny says. “Twenty minutes.”

YOU OFTEN SPEAK
, my dear, of the first apartment you lived in with your husband. You have spoken of it as such a glorious time. You were happy, weren't you? I was not so lucky, you know. This living on your own as a newly-wed couple — it simply wasn't done where I come from.

Instead, I moved into his family's house, to his room really. He made space for my clothes in his wardrobe and then, well, he was gone much of the time. He was a surveyor by profession, you see, in government employ, and his duties took him all over the island. He would leave home early and return late. This was how he actually began his political career, you see, by travelling around, meeting people. Surveying the populace as much as he surveyed the land.

My life sounds lonely to you? Does it really? I see what you mean. I suppose there were moments, yes. But I managed to
keep busy, you know. I spent my days at the house, working at my own duties, which were essentially to help the maid. Yes, my dear Mrs. Livingston, believe it or not, to help the maid. She was a young woman of approximately my own age. Amina. A mouse of a girl with little education, but certainly pleasant in every way. And embarrassed, I think, by having to share her work with me. But we managed, and grew as fond of one another as our stations would permit. She called me “mistress,” you see. I was the one to sweep the floors, but she was the one to wash them. We both knew that my duties were really like a game for my mother-in-law's benefit. And that one day, in one way or another, the game would end for me —

A spill? Where? That? Oh, don't bother your head, my dear, it's only a few drops of tea. We'll tend to it later. We are in no hurry, are we? At our age, time does not seem long, but it certainly does seem to sprawl, if you know what I mean. All this free time … I've always enjoyed companionship in my free time, you know.

Like those free afternoons once my chores were done. I would spend them with my sister-in-law, Penny. She was the youngest in the family, a bit younger than I, my husband being the eldest, followed by his brother, Cyril, who was away in England at the time, reading for a law degree. Their father — the man who had started it all, who had bought the land and built the house — had died accidentally some years before. He had just boarded an inner-island schooner for a visit to Trinidad, where he had relatives, when he realized he had forgotten his bag of religious implements on the dock. He was a pundit, you see, a holy man. He called out for it as the schooner was casting off and someone — the story never made it clear who precisely — flung it up towards him. The old man reached out for it desperately, missed it by a good foot or two and lost his
balance. It was said that he and the bag hit the water at exactly the same moment, though which sank faster no one could say with any accuracy.

Mrs. Livingston! Well I never! Laughing! Don't you realize this is a sad story? Well, I can't say I blame you. It took me some time to realize it too. Whenever they trotted the story out, they mistook the water in my eyes for tears of sadness. They had sanctified the old man and his death, you see. But should I feel guilty that the image of this man in turban, kurta and dhoti plunging after his bag has always given me an acute case of the giggles?

In any case, Penny and I would while away the afternoons. Walking in the fields, or rocking the time away in hammocks strung up between the pillars that supported the house. It sat on a hill, and afforded a truly spectacular view of the bay. Often you would see ships heading into port from the open sea, and sometimes you could see storms blowing in. My husband claimed that, as a boy during the war, he once watched a cargo ship go down after being torpedoed. Penny and I were comfortable there, under the house. It was shaded and cool, and the floor of poured concrete tickled the soles of the feet in the most pleasant way …

My dear, will you please leave that spill alone? I've told you, it can wait. I do declare, sometimes it is like speaking to the Berlin Wall! Thank you …

One day, about a year later, I imagine, my husband received a letter from his brother announcing his imminent return from London. The letter said only that he was not well; that the doctors had prescribed a lengthy period of rest; that he had no choice but to postpone his final year of study until he was recovered. He and his wife — an English woman no one in the
family had yet met — had already booked passage and would be arriving in a few weeks …

Oxford or Cambridge? I couldn't really say, my dear. It was a British university, that's all I remember. In any case, it hardly matters, does it now?

My husband's first thought, as a practical man, was that there was not enough space in the house. Cyril and Celia could have Amina's room — but where would we put Amina? In no time at all, he had that wonderful open space bricked in and divided up into storage and wash areas, and a bedroom for Amina. Oh, it was a loss but it couldn't be avoided. That's how I viewed it at the time. But you know, Mrs. Livingston, I resent it still today. The attitude, I mean. Practicality above all else. It makes for efficient ugliness.

The night before they arrived we were all up late, watching for their ship. And we saw it gliding in through the darkness just after midnight. My husband said, “That's them.” My mother-in-law sighed. I couldn't read my husband's feelings just then. He wasn't happy or sad or angry or apprehensive, or maybe he was all of those things. But there was a quality to the night — the silence, the stars, the lights of the ship — that made me, maybe all of us, uneasy. Then he took me by the arm — something he rarely did, this easy touching — and led Penny and me back inside. He said the ship would be hours docking, and it would be mid-morning before they disembarked. I remember sensing, at that moment, that he was almost turning his back on the night.

The next morning we met them at the docks. Cyril was very different from my husband, his physical opposite. More like their mother. He was short and round and his hair was already thinning. He wore thick glasses. His right eye was hidden behind a large bandage —

I'm coming to that, my dear. A little patience.

Celia was a little taller, thinner. She was already tanned, and had hair so fine — rather like yours, I should think — that I'm sure I wasn't the only one to wonder how much hairspray she needed to give it shape. She greeted us with a smile that was so earnest it seemed forced. A smile that revealed how uneasy she was. I felt for her, and I wondered how we looked to her eyes. Oh, we had all seen white people before, but what made her seem alien was that she was a member of the family. And it occurred to me that we must have looked even more alien to her. Her smile was one of hysteria. We shook hands when my husband introduced us, and she held my hand a touch longer than she'd held the others, as if taking a little refuge. I felt then that she recognized me — a sister-in-law married into the family — as a fellow alien …

Oh, if you must! There's a rag in the kitchen. At the sink. No, not that one, the blue one. There, are you happy now?