Valmiki's Daughter (12 page)

Miss Russell gave tennis lessons and coached netball and throwing the javelin and discus. She had a boyfriend, a local white man who the students, through their mysterious and sometimes questionable methods, found out was an oilfield worker. He would come and pick her up after school on his big growling motor bike, and the instant she saw him, it was abundantly noted, Miss Russell lost all of her physical-education teacher ways and became like any of the other women on the staff — save for the nuns. Suddenly her gait changed and she was all smiles. She would loosen the bun on her head, pull on the helmet, and hop on the bike with more grace than when she was walking the school grounds. She would slide in tight behind her boyfriend, throwing her long sharp arms around him to hug him first and then sliding her hands to his sides, where they came to rest as he took off with such a jolt forward that the sixth-form girls knew he was aware of their eyes on him. With that helmet on, leaning tight against her boyfriend, Miss Russell was everything most other girls wanted to be. Not Viveka, though. She found herself angry with Miss Russell for being so intimate with her boyfriend in public, in front of her students, and knew even as she felt this that she was being silly. Still, she felt what she felt. She and her
friend Merle Bedi thought the other students shallow for gawking at Miss Russell's boyfriend the way they did. Viveka also watched him intently, but she knew that her watching was different. She wondered what it was that Miss Russell found alluring about him. She compulsively imagined the motorcycle rider, the oilfield worker, and Miss Russell in a hot bedroom, a red and blue afghan rug on the floor, these two lying on top of the rug, he on top of her —
perched
was the word that always came to her — his mouth on hers, his body pecking away at hers mercilessly.

There were two Miss Russells. The teacher who paid Viveka every attention, who laughed with her and showed her how to do things right; and then that other one — an entirely different person as far as Viveka was concerned — who, once she exited the gates of the school, became as common as everyone else. Viveka wished she could save that Miss Russell from the fate of ordinariness. Miss Russell coached one of the older students who, outside of school life, took part in track competitions and won them. Viveka wanted to be coached in track, too, but Miss Russell, after putting Viveka through certain trials, had dissuaded her, saying that her body type suggested she would not be a good candidate for track but would do better in field — at throwing the discus and the javelin. This was certainly one way of saying that she was chunky, boxy, Viveka had thought, but no one else had been picked for the discus and javelin, and so she also felt special. She imagined the discus in her clutch, spinning it-spinning it-spinning it until she was giddy with untold power and strength, then releasing and launching it far out across the field with an enormous force, all of this with Miss Russell's eyes on her. Viveka's eyes were almost always on Miss Russell.

For a time, Viveka's life revolved around a measly eighty minutes per week of physical training. During school hours she
found herself looking out of the classroom window to see if Miss Russell was anywhere in sight. If she did see Miss Russell, she would suddenly be overcome by a tickling feeling throughout her body and dizziness, and she would want to burst into a run, longer and much faster than she was capable of in reality. She knew then, in spite of what Miss Russell had told her, that such power was pent up inside of her. When Miss Russell put together a school team to compete in intra-school sports, Viveka tried out for the discus and javelin to see if she was ready for competition. She did strength, endurance, power, and jump tests. Viveka was weak in the endurance tests, yet she could jump higher than most of the students, and this surprised Viveka herself because of her boxiness. And she tested better than anyone else in power and strength. She went home and boasted to her parents and sister. Her mother showed no interest, but Vashti said, “You would jump to the moon for Miss Russell. If Miss Hollis or Sister Veronica were our PE teacher you would be sick for every class.”

In the end, Viveka was chosen to be on the school's sports team, but her parents absolutely refused to allow her to take the time after school and on weekends to train. And Miss Russell lost interest in Viveka after meeting with Devika and Valmiki to try to persuade them to let Viveka train and compete. Viveka's parents had informed Miss Russell that there was no future in that sort of thing, and that Viveka, being weak in math and in French, would be taking after-class lessons in those subjects, starting immediately. Soon after that, Viveka heard that Miss Russell and her boyfriend were getting married, and a terrible acne broke out on Viveka's face.

It was two years later when Merle Bedi told Viveka about wanting to kiss Miss Seukeran. Saying these words out loud was
craziness. But Viveka understood something of it. That kind of talk, she felt, could get them both in trouble. A clash of thoughts, incomplete ones, incomplete-able ones, resounded in her head. She would be implicated in Merle's craziness: there was Viveka's very public and close association with Merle, Viveka's well-known affinity for sports and things
mannish
. And there was Miss Russell — Miss Russell leaving, Miss Russell engaged, Viveka's coinciding acne problem, and in the instant of Merle Bedi saying she wanted to kiss Miss Seukeran, Viveka knew that she, too, had wanted to throw the discus and javelin because it was her way of kissing Miss Russell.

She stood up, looked down at Merle, and snapped, “I wouldn't go around announcing that if I were you.”

Merle's eyes were bright, as if she was seeing some kind of saving truth. “I want to tell her. I need to tell her. It's so real and so good. I feel like a kite, Vik. It's unbelievable. I can't study or think of anything else.
She makes me feel that way. She does it
. She
must
feel it. Come on, Viveka, can't you see how she pays attention to me, more than to anyone else?”

“Merle, I really think you should keep those feelings and all of that kind of thinking to yourself. I don't want to carry on this conversation. Don't say those kinds of things. Not even to me.”

But Merle was beside herself, composing music for Miss Seukeran, writing Miss Seukeran cards in flowery language expressing her admiration. Even if she had not actually expressed her dirty thinking, Viveka thought, it would have been obvious to a moron. Saying those words out loud was a kind of suicide. And indeed, there had been some camaraderie between the teacher and Merle, but it was shortlived. Suddenly Miss Seukeran stopped noticing Merle, no longer stopped on her walks down the hallways to say hello to her, and seemed
almost to shun her. Viveka wondered if Merle had told Miss Seukeran how she wished to kiss her.

THAT MORNING, VIVEKA RECALLED, VASHTI HAD SULKED AT VIVEKA'S
unwelcome authoritarian manner, a manner oddly prompted by the mention of Merle Bedi.

“I got a doubles for lunch. What does it matter to you?”

“But why are you eating doubles for lunch?” Viveka persisted. “You should know better than that. They are so greasy. You'll get pimples. Why don't you take a proper lunch to school? You don't even have to make it. Get Pinky to make you a sandwich and a salad.”

“I am trying to tell you about Merle Bedi, and you're going on about my lunch. In any case, you used to buy doubles too. How come you can eat it but I can't? Why do you have to disagree with everything and make others feel like they're wrong or stupid? You are so contrary.”

“Contrary!” That was not a word that Vashti would use on her own, Viveka reflected. Her suspicion was confirmed when Vashti sheepishly responded: “Mom says you're contrary and I just happen to agree.”

Merle had clearly suffered from Miss Seukeran's rejection more than from the hush-hush gossip that eventually ensued. By the last year of high school, she withdrew even from Viveka. From the time she had begun high school, Merle had been the top student in her particular stream. Suddenly she was failing every subject, and grinning about it as if that was an achievement. By the time Viveka had entered university, Merle had started living on the street. It was said by some people that her parents put her out, and by others that she left home, on her own, this act being part of the same craziness that had her loving within her own sex.

“Christ, Vashti. You're like a clone of Mom. Why can't you just think for yourself? Well, perhaps you
do
think I am contrary, you just have to have the vocabulary fed to you.”

With that, Viveka slammed shut Vashti's door. The loudness of it brought her father from his bedroom. He glared at her, but said nothing. She glared back at him, thinking, “You're such a coward, Dad.” Instead of trying to bribe and cajole her with the offer of the chauffeur, why couldn't he have spoken his true mind to her mother, or to her, or to both of them. How could the two of them be her parents, she their child? She felt betrayed in myriad ways.

If the altercation with her parents had made Viveka wish she were not part of her own family, this one with Vashti had left her feeling a little frightened, but she wasn't sure of what, exactly. As she was dressing for her trip to the campus she had tried on a skirt her mother had long ago bought for her, but which she had not yet worn, and a pair of black low-heeled, open-toed shoes. In the mirror she saw a stranger. The waist of the skirt, and the way her shirt fell over it, brought notice, she felt, to her already shapeless torso. She considered the thick, naturally muscled legs before her. Her legs were dry and needed shaving. All she had to do was to pull on a pair of flesh-tone stockings and, despite her age, she would have passed for a dowdy high school teacher. She flinched.

She left the house feeling more comfortable, but a little graceless, in her uniform of button-down collared shirt, blue jeans, and Indian-style leather slippers.

SCABBY LOOKING STUMPS OF BRUSH STUCK OUT OF THE WATER IN THE
swamp fields closest to the road. Red-breasted blackbirds, their black feathers bright and shiny as if polished by the rain, did their mating dance, hopping directly into the air as if bounding up
from a trampoline and floating down again to land on the same few inches of visible, bare scrub top. They looked to Viveka as if they had alighted on something that either burned them or pricked them and so they flew up in utter surprise and a-flutter, only to alight on the same spot again and to have the same effect occur. Over and over. Such pretty birds and so silly, she would normally think, but today her mind was elsewhere, and the dance of the birds was nothing more than that, an animal dance.

With such slow progress along the highway Viveka was thankful that she didn't have a class to attend this morning. She hadn't really wanted to go to the university campus, but it was better than staying at home in the presence of her mother. This way, she didn't have to make the choice of prolonging their disagreement or giving it up, either out of wariness or real defeat. By travelling to the university in this public manner, without the aid of the family's chauffeur, she hoped her mother would in her absence have the time and chance to come to the understanding that she was wrong and Viveka right. Besides, travelling like this she felt apart from her family, able to take part in the ordinary life of her country, something her mother knew nothing of, and something her father liked to think he understood because he had patients from all walks of life. Yes, it was true that he hunted with a few black men who were skilled labourers. If any of the other passengers had been watching Viveka they would have seen her shake her head, and curl her lips as she thought scornfully, “But if we were to have a party at our house there is no way he would invite them, his so-called buddies. What did I do to be born into this hypocritical mess? I can't, I just
can't
allow myself to become them.”

Sometimes Viveka had the sensation that her arms were tightly bound to her body with yards and yards of clear Scotch
tape. When she felt this, as she did now, she imagined trying to locate with her eyes one of the ends, her eyes darting, blurring, concentrating on the silvery-clear mess that bound her, and on locating a faint line that indicated an edge of the tape, tilting her head and attempting to reach it with her mouth, stretching her lower jaw until the sides of her mouth ached, down to her shoulder, and raising her shoulder up to it as much as she could, and using her teeth to pry up a tiny piece. Then, she imagined, she would hook it and yank it up without tearing it off. There in the taxi, her neck taut and her temples aching with the mere thought of this exercise, she could taste and feel uneven bits of tape. She almost gagged, imagining spitting out those stubborn flecks of tape on her tongue.

The comfort of life as lived in her parents' home bred in Viveka certain aspirations, aspirations she was beginning to suspect were naïve and unrealistic, among them to be an internationally heralded literary critic whose emphasis was on Caribbean writing. As a student majoring in English literature, she was making her way through aspects of the usual canon, but she was barely able to satisfy an elephantine thirst for Caribbean literature. The writings of Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, and Earl Lovelace provoked her to want to experience a Caribbean-ness, and a Trinidadian-ness more specifically, that was antithetical to her mother's tie to all things Indian and Hindu. At times Viveka felt like an alien presence in her parents' house. Her mother was not impressed that she was attending university. Devika, in typical old-fashioned Indian manner, found Viveka ambitious — not
too
ambitious, but ambitious — a quality that was not to be cultivated, and was not generally admired by people of Devika's generation. Viveka's aspiration to be a literary critic, tantamount to pompousness and arrogance,
fell under her suspicion. She asked Viveka again and again what made her think that she had the ability to be such a critic. Her refrain — levelled at Valmiki as well — was “Ambition will be your downfall.”