Valmiki's Daughter (2 page)

The air temperature would be high, as befits an equatorial midday. If you
remained standing on that exposed traffic island too long, your skin would redden and
become prickly in no time, as if it had been rubbed with bird-pepper paste.

SO, TAKE THE BLINDFOLD OFF. OPEN AN UMBRELLA AGAINST THE
SUN
and have a look around. But where to begin your visual introduction? The
long view in any direction seems better than the one before, especially if you ignore
the closest — that of a row of beggars sitting on their haunches on the sidewalk,
with arms outstretched, reaching for, but not touching, the clothing of the passersby.
Those beggars attempt to hook pedestrians' eyes with their own, muttering their
plaintive invocations: “God bless, God bless.”

You might or might not have noticed, depending on where you have dropped
from, that the people on the streets are mostly of Indian and of African origin. Indian
or black. You'd likely notice that most of the beggars are Indian. But you might
not.

You will realize that some of the teeth-sucking you've been hearing
came from pedestrians on the hospital side of the intersection forced to cross over the
sleeping body of a homeless man, or having come upon the pee-sodden body of a young and
out-cold drunk woman.

Well, perhaps it's not all that difficult to know where to begin
your introduction. If you can lift your head up, away from the beggars, the homeless,
and the drunk on the sidewalks and take in the six-storey buildings of the General
Hospital, you will see
that they form an imposing and eerily
beautiful backdrop to one side. Painted stark colonial white, the hospital rises higher
than any other building in view, yet each section is capped with the traditional
V-shaped roof of a simple family house, a shape meant to quell its simultaneous grandeur
and foreboding.

Outlining the edges of the hospital property is a low white concrete fence
topped with tall silver-painted iron spurs, V-ed like the blades of an overly long
sword. There is a formal entrance, with a sentry's concrete hut dividing entry and
exit lanes. The sentry box is often empty, and cars and pedestrians usually come and go
at will. But the sentry is there today. He is outside of the box, dressed in his uniform
of starched and pressed khakis, with a khaki cap pulled low on his forehead. He leans
— only his shoulders touch — against the side of the box, his sole focus the
young woman in front of him, with whom he chats through pursed lips. Only she can hear
what he utters. One of his legs is raised back, its foot bracing against the wall. His
arms are folded high on his chest. If his eyes were fingers the young woman before him
would be at his knees. Cars still come and go at will.

At this entrance, also, is a group of men huddled over a radio. It is from
here you heard the cricket commentary, and the men who listen seem, from their clothing
and demeanour, to have nothing in common but their interest in cricket.

Because you can still hear it, you look around trying to spot where the
sound of the steel-pan band comes from. The music seems to come from one side of the
town one minute and then, whipped away on a breeze, from another direction. You try to
hold on to the mellifluous sounds, but they float in and out quickly. Behind the entry
and fencing, well-tended lawns spread out and surround the hospital, and lush islands of
Calla lily — reds, yellows, purples — direct the flow of pedestrian traffic.
The
driveway that cuts through the hospital grounds is bordered by a
single row of palm trees whose trunks, from the ground to a height of about six feet,
are washed in the same white paint as the fence and the buildings, a holdover from
colonial days when paint was thought to deter destructive bugs. Some concrete benches in
a semicircle, painted that white again, are set on the lawns under the spreading shade
of flamboyant trees whose trunks were not spared the whitening either. The benches were
originally meant for use by patients and their visitors, but serve more often, day and
night, as beds for the homeless and the uncared-for insane. Across each and every one
lies a spectre of a figure, a body bound in rags that reek, knees pulled up to chest,
one arm pillowing the head against unyielding concrete.

The regulars at the hospital, in addition to some long-term-care patients
who won't be going anywhere in a hurry, or ever, include nurses, and Drs. Peters,
Rajkumar, Krishnu (who also has a private practice in the town centre), Tsang, Chu, and
Mahabir. Turn around now and face the north. Your perch, after a spread of some ten
yards or so, drops down a steep road, Chancery Lane. The slope is like the long handle
of a ladle. To one side at the bottom, the ladle's bowl, is the hospital's
and shopping district's principal parking lot. On the other side is a descending
row of colonial-style buildings, the offices of lawyers and notary publics. The
commercial main street begins at the base. There, just before the main street turns and
disappears, you can see a gas station, its red-and-white Texaco sign spinning, The Chase
Manhattan Bank, Khan's Clothing and Household, Bisessar's Furniture and Rug
Emporium, and part of Samuel's Sporting Goods Store. Then the street curves away
and disappears around a bend. If you were to continue around that bend you would find a
supermarket, a building of doctors' private offices — Dr. Krishnu has his
there,
and a hairdressing salon is on another floor — Maraj
and Son's Jewellers, and the city's only bookstore.

Raise your eyes; keep looking out into the distance to where the yellow
and silver waters of the Gulf of Paria are studded with red-and-black oil tankers
awaiting their turn at the refinery's docks. Between that high horizon and the
town at the bottom, you see a sea of green — the fronds of palm and coconut trees
mixed with sampan, flamboyant, Pride of Barbados, mango trees — dotted with a
confetti of colourful roofs — reds, greens, silvers, blues. These mark the
residential neighbourhood of Luminada Heights. It is here you find the residences of the
city's more prosperous citizens, including Dr. Krishnu — who, with his wife
and their two children, lives in an architect-designed house — and the Prakashs.
When the Prakashs bought land here several years ago — their son, Nayan, had just
become a teenager — they built a mansion Ram Prakash had sketched out on a
foolscap sheet one sleepless night: four bedrooms for his family of three, and three
baths. The Morettis (not rich, but white) still own a house in Luminada Heights even
though they long ago returned to wherever it was they sprang from in search of paradise
and independence. Their house, just up the way from the Krishnus, is leased now to an
off-shore drilling company, and in it lives a single American man who makes good money
working in the Gulf on one of the rigs he can see from the patio of the house.

Look behind you, to the south, down Broadway Avenue. The avenue is wide,
divided by a high island of tended grass, down which runs an uninterrupted row of Pride
of Barbados trees. On the left and the right sides you will see two-storey concrete
houses, all set behind concrete walls whose paint has long washed, or been peeled, away.
The shoemaker, some of the hospital's nurses and workers, clerks in the law courts
nearby, some taxi
drivers, teachers, servants, an ironer, the piano
teacher who has her “school” in the living room of the top floor of the
house she rents, an ageless man who lives by himself and wears dresses (he had ambitions
to be a fashion designer and dressmaker but was unable to find clients and sews only for
himself now), and a midwife are among those who live on Broadway. As that avenue curves
off and disappears, taking with it an old, once-prosperous neighbourhood, your eyes are
naturally carried eastward toward a narrow band of more private houses and more trees.
The lushness and the randomness of vegetation suggest that much has sprung up of its own
accord, without discouragement. Behind and between are snippets of yet more houses, but
you are unable to see clearly the shape and nature of all that lies there, so you
gravitate right back to the busyness of your intersection. All around you, cars, mostly
simple compacts, some held together, it seems, by duct tape, slide around the islands,
near accidents only just avoided by the long, hard, loud engagement of horns.

Unexplored as yet is Harris Promenade. You have to step off the island and
make your way very, very quickly, across the street, making sure to catch the eyes of
the drivers as you do so. The sun, however, almost directly overhead, reflects and
glints wickedly off the cars' windshields. If the tinted windshields and windows
— purple is the fashion here — ward off glare and heat for those inside the
cars, they make it doubly difficult for a pedestrian to see if she or he has caught the
eyes of the drivers. So take extra care in crossing.

Even as you cross, you will notice off to your right, which is also to the
right of the promenade, several policemen, and you will wonder why none directs traffic.
The police mill about the mouth of the police station, which yawns wider as you approach
the promenade proper. Groups of them seem to be waiting for
something, anything, to happen, and so to be called for an assignment, but they do
not act unless ordered by their superiors.

The promenade is a remarkably wide thoroughfare that shoots off the
intersection in a relatively straight line toward the east, and is flanked on either
side by churches — first, on one side, the Anglican Church with its modern bell
tower; then the fire station; followed by the Town Hall, a long, three-storey building
that houses the offices of aldermen and the local offices of the Ministry of Health (the
main offices are in the capital of the country). There are some other government
buildings in the colonial style, but these are not open to the public, and no one knows
what really goes on inside them. Past these are St. Patrick's Catholic Church and
a colonial-style house that is the administrative home of the diocese, a home for the
local officiating priest, and the Catholic Church library, and past this, a building
that houses several government licence-granting offices: hunting, fisheries, vehicles,
vending, births, deaths, marriages. Here, just after the Woolworth Store, the promenade
ends. Traffic follows this course in one direction. An island as wide as a three-lane
city street divides the flow.

Beginning on the hospital end again, on the other side now, are more
buildings that harken back to the town's colonial past. On the corner, there is a
row of lawyers' offices. Clerks and clients mill about the narrow doorways of the
two-room offices built in the late 1800s, structures that are falling apart —
their filigree woodwork broken and dangling in places — and are not being
modernized. Yes, there is still no running water, and the lawyers and their modest staff
are obliged to walk to the updated law courts to use the public facilities there.
Farther along is the police station. The scene before you, of three prisoners handcuffed
together, being led barefoot along the scorching asphalt
by eight
police officers carrying guns, is not uncommon. These men have likely just been arrested
and are being taken to the short-term cells next door. Pedestrians, hecklers, and
concerned citizens alike, among them relatives of the prisoners or of their victims,
line the street and watch the spectacle with a mix of awe and fear. Past the short-term
gaol is the police barracks, followed by the law courts building (with public toilet
facilities), more lawyers' offices, and then, stretching for a good distance, the
lands of the Sisters of The Immaculate Conception, which includes one of the
town's major secondary girls' schools, and finally the Convent of the
Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. The convent itself shares a wall, but only that,
with an Indian movie theatre. The movie theatre is at the end of the promenade, directly
opposite the town's public library.

The promenade itself is a pedestrian-only island. Its asphalt paving is
brilliant orange, carpeted with newly fallen flowers from the trees planted along its
length. Walking in the shade of the trees, on this hushing carpet of bright colour, one
encounters first a raised, roofed bandstand, with ample room around it for an audience.
A railing runs around the platform, which is accessed by a wide staircase that faces the
Town Hall opposite. A police officer stands on the platform of the bandstand. He wields
a baton in one hand. The baton is aimed at a body prostrate, and in deep sleep, on the
ground. The young officer, a thin man of African origin, seems unsure of what to do. The
person on the ground is clearly homeless, but there is a “no trespassing”
sign on the railing of the stairway. The policeman walks around the body, and his gait,
if you were to force a reading on it, seems to say, “Let the man sleep, na. But,
then again, this is the only work I might get. Also, if anyone is looking on, getting
the man to move might look as if I were doing my job well. On the other hand, if I wake
the man up, who knows what might happen. If he is mad, it might
cause a bigger problem than there is now. If he is just sleeping and I awaken him, where
is he to go?” The policeman turns his back to the man and walks, baton still
gripped, to the railing. He leans on it and looks out toward the busy intersection.

Beyond the bandstand is a paved area. A bronze box, like an overturned
orange crate, is anchored in the centre of this area, known as speaker's corner. A
tall thin man, of Indian origin but with pale yellowish skin, circles the box. He walks
with his head bent, as if looking at the reddish clay tiles of the area, his hands
clasped behind his back. He is balding. And he appears to be talking to himself. He is
not like the other people who make Harris Promenade their home, but he is often found
here. He travels by taxi from his house in a nearby town to spend the day walking around
the speaker's box. He arrives at the square at 8:30 a.m. sharp, and leaves by taxi
again at three in the afternoon — the hours of the school at which he once taught.
He had been a bright young English literature teacher who wrote what some people called
poetry — two of his acquaintances who also wrote what looked like poetry called
his writing this — and, indeed, a foreign magazine had published some lines of his
writing, and paid him, too. The editor of the magazine had contacted him later and
requested more of these poems, and had suggested he think about submitting a manuscript
for publication. He put his mind to the task of producing such a thing and the other
teachers at his school ridiculed him, his family teased him, and his students lost
respect for him. They joked behind his back that he was a mamsy-pamsy writer of flowery
lines. He wrote and wrote and wrote, never satisfied with what he had written, and the
editor of the foreign magazine eventually changed, and no one from that magazine was
ever in touch with him again. He remained
unpublished thereafter,
and the staff and students of his school, and his own family, who had worried about
their welfare had he decided to turn writing poems into a career, were pleased about
this. The man, however, left his job to polish lines such as “
River, oh river
rise, and quell the fields of bellies emptied.
” His family gasped,
snickered, and then left him. But that was more than twenty years ago. No one in the
square remembers his name, but he looks up and then quickly turns away if he is called
“Sir,” which is how his students once addressed him.