Valmiki's Daughter (21 page)

The entire family got out of the car and made their way to a vendor. Her father bought three steaming corns in their husks, one for him, one for her mother, and one that was broken into thirds, to be shared among the three children. They had found themselves a place on the sea wall that was free of seagull droppings, but not minutes later they were driven back into the car by the sandflies and there they ate their corn. Her parents turned around, one at a time, to make sure that they weren't getting corn kernels or juice on the seat of the car. They both smiled, wearily, at the children. Anand, seated between Viveka and Vashti, stood up at one point, and reached his little hand out to his mother in the front seat, and when she turned to face him he brushed her hair off her forehead, and even though his hand had flecks of sticky corn on it and they had gotten on her hair, everyone said to him that it was such a sweet thing to do. Viveka saw her father's arm move then; it seemed as if he were sliding it toward her mother's arm, but she couldn't tell from where she sat, low in the back seat. But then she saw her mother's hand move toward his, and Viveka grinned so hard that Vashti asked her what was so funny, and her father glanced at her in the mirror. Then her father asked if her mother still wanted to have the
party. They discussed it, and who would be on the guest list, and Viveka listened.

In those days, she loved how busy the house was just before a party, and all the food smells, and the smell of floor polish, and on the day of the party itself she enjoyed the commotion of servers milling about and the very serious bartender wiping glasses, making them squeak with his big white towel, and closer to the hour of the party the musicians trying out their different microphone levels and saying, “Testing, testing, one two three.” Her parents talked of the party, Viveka tried to listen, and Vashti and Anand played fish. Anand hit Vashti's prayer-hands too hard, and before she could cry he began to wail as if he had broken a bone or something, and it seemed to Viveka that he never stopped crying after that, and not long after (was it the next day, or the day after that?), he disappeared.

But before that fish-slap — or was it after, while Anand was wailing? — Viveka heard her mother say, “I can't believe you want to invite them. Why should I have that woman in my house?” Her father put his hand to his head, closed his eyes, and asked her mother to please not make such a big thing out of nothing. She heard her mother again: “Don't you have any respect for me or for your children? I refuse to invite them. I can't believe you would even ask me to do that.” Anand continued to scream but her parents didn't seem to hear him. They just carried on a conversation that had turned once more to hisses.

And was it that same day, or was it a different day, that they were in the car, the five of them — she, Anand, and Vashti in the back seat, her parents in the front — and Viveka turned her window down and head-first launched herself, to waist height, through it? She scanned the ocean, looking for oil tankers waiting to dock at the refinery's pier, which in the dusky evening was
beginning to shimmer with its pinpoints of lights outlining every detail of the little city that it was. She re-entered the car — Anand was not screaming, he was whimpering — just as her mother turned to face the back seat. Tears were streaming down her mother's crumpled face. Viveka remembered one minute having the urge to hold her mother's face in her hands and stare into her eyes, and the next to open the car door and extricate herself from the claustrophobia of this bubble she felt would burst at any moment. Instead she made her way across the back seat, past the whimpering Anand, past Vashti who was busy pulling at the cuticle of one of her fingers, to the other window, to search for scarlet ibis or hanging snakes in the mangrove trees on the far side of the roadway.

It was then that Viveka spotted a man in white painter's overalls, fast and purposefully approaching the car. The man brandished a scythe and his white overalls were soaked in dark burgundy, the colour of wet blood. Viveka frantically drew back inside and wound up that window, and then shoved her way swiftly across the seat to close the other. “Go! Go, Dad,” she shrieked. “That man, look! Look! He has a knife. There is blood on his clothes. Drive, Dad. Hurry, please.”

But her parents continued their throaty bickering, and even though Viveka was shouting and pounding on the backrest of her father's seat, neither he nor her mother heard nor seemed to see what so appalled her. The man in the painter's overalls circled the car, and Valmiki and Devika paid no attention when he hopped on the bonnet and crawled up to the windshield and splayed himself across it, smearing a thick blood-red colour. Even though he bared his teeth and banged the handle of his scythe on the windshield, Viveka's parents did not see him. In time, the man in the once-white, now-red painter's overalls slid
off the windshield and seemed to fall in front of the car, and disappeared. No one in the car, not even Viveka, had noticed that the tide was now at its highest and the highway, which ran for a picturesque half mile directly alongside the sea, had flooded. Waves were rolling in, slapping and shattering against the concrete wall. There was a stream of traffic, the cars slowed by the flooding road. The hissing inside the car ceased. Viveka's father turned the car, very carefully. Once headed back, he flashed his lights to alert approaching drivers that the creek had flooded.

Although she had done nothing that required great exertion, Viveka slept soundly through the night that followed. She awoke to find Jess the maid sitting on the edge of her bed, staring at her with what looked like pity. Her parents had already gone out, and they had taken Anand with them. She and Vashti didn't know whether to be upset that they hadn't been taken too or to be pleased that they had been left home, as if they were old enough to take care of themselves.

Her parents returned late that day — or was it night, or was it another day? — without Anand. And when hour after hour, meal after meal, day after day, Viveka and Vashti asked where he was, both parents took turns attempting an answer. One would try, while the other would suddenly begin to weep. And whenever they were about to answer the query, Viveka would suddenly become so distracted that she could never hear what they eventually said. Soon, everyone seemed to accept that Anand would no longer — not ever — be in the house with them again. Some days Viveka felt that it had something to do with the painter in the blood-covered once-white overalls who had been attacking their car with a scythe; on the other days she felt it was because of the fish-slap; and then sometimes she wondered if it was because her father had been lying on top of a woman other than
her mother. The nagging sense Viveka carried with her was that it was her fault. She hadn't been able to save or to protect anyone when it had been necessary.

Once, several months later, Viveka asked her mother why the man had blood on his overalls, why he carried a scythe, and why he had thrown himself on the bonnet of the car. Her mother looked at her as if she had gone mad. The more Viveka tried to give details, the more she confused her mother, who asked her what on earth she was talking about and if she was unwell. But it had all been so real to Viveka, and so many years later, it still was.

VIVEKA HAD NEVER BEEN ABLE TO LINE UP CORRECTLY THE CHRONOL-
ogy that included the time she saw her father on top of Pia Moretti, Anand's crying in the car, the painter crawling on the car's bonnet, Anand's sudden disappearance, and the party that followed. That goddamned party. And, now, finally, her mother had for the first time told her when Anand had died in relation to when the party had taken place. And already she had mixed up the chronology again.

She remembered clearly, though, that she and Vashti had worn to the party white, frilly, cotton dresses studded with red velvet polkadots, and underneath the skirt part they had to wear crinolines. Vashti enjoyed the full, flared look of her skirt, but the crinoline's stiff fabric scratched Viveka's skin and she tugged at and twisted it. She hated how she looked and wanted to cry, but the blond-haired boy, ever-present just on the other side of her skin, would not let her. Her scalp hurt, too, her midnight-black waist-length hair having been brushed smooth into a ponytail, bound with a red velvet-covered elastic band. She raised her eyebrows and wiggled her ears in an attempt to weaken the grip.

Seven o'clock promptly the guests had begun arriving. Viveka and Vashti had been brought out onto the patio and into the garden at a quarter after seven to meet the guests. Out of the tops of bamboo poles set along the fence danced fat tall flames of fire. Some of the neighbours were there, aunts and uncles all. Actual relatives were there, too. And her father's banker and his wife. Uncle Ram and Aunty Minty. And other doctors Viveka recognized from going with her mother to meet her father at the hospital. She and Vashti stayed out long enough for their growth to be remarked upon, their likenesses assigned to their mother or father, and the cute divulging of what they wanted to be when they grew up. Viveka had answered “a magician,” but quickly changed her mind in the face of raised eyebrows — no, no, she meant she really wanted to be a doctor. Vashti said, “I don't know. A teacher?” They were quickly taken back inside.

They had been permitted that night to lie on their parents' bed to watch television until a much later hour than usual.

Vashti had fallen asleep in front of a program, but Viveka was restless. She crept into Anand's room. Although she knew better, she slid open a drawer in his dresser. His clothing was freshly, neatly arranged. She lifted out what had been his favourite pyjamas. She buried her face in them. She slipped off her blue-and-white pyjamas and forced herself into Anand's. The pants had an opening in the front. She stuck one finger out of the opening and was satisfied that she did indeed look like her little brother. She held it with her other hand and pointed it as if into a toilet. She tiptoed and arched her back for proper aim. That felt real enough and good. The shirt was short for her, and the thin cotton strained against her body. Dressed like this, she made her way in the shadows of the house's interior down to the front and into the noisy living room. The three-tiered crystal chandelier
that hung from the high ceiling cast prisms of colour that danced in time to the music on the wood floor. The air was heavy with a festive confusion of food, alcohol, perfumes, colognes, after-shave lotions, deodorants, and sweat. The room had been vacated of almost all furniture except for some chairs pulled up against a wall. Helped by the dim lighting, Viveka slid behind a
monstera delisiosa
philodendron that had dwarfed its tall blue and white ceramic pot. She crouched and was well hidden.

Dinner had already been served, the food and dishes cleared, and the dancing and drinking in earnest were just beginning. Her mother was moving about the room, chatting a minute here and another there, all the while catching the eyes of servers who seemed to need only a nod from her to know what it was that she wanted. Men congregated near the bar, each trying to outdo the other with humour. Her father stood with a group of men there, and beside him was one woman. She was tall and slim and had white skin. She wore a black dress that was strapless. Her father had his arm around this woman's waist and she had her hand on his back. Her hair was dark brown and long and wavy. Her father was hugging her, it seemed. His fingertips rested on her hip bone.

Viveka imagined her father perched on this woman. She looked away immediately, toward her mother who was outside on the patio, chatting with three women. But her mother was looking from the patio, across the almost empty living room (straight past the philodendron plant) to the spot where her father and most of the men had gathered. Viveka's mother glanced a few times at Viveka's father, always with a smile on her face, then back again to laugh at something someone in her little group had said, and then over at Viveka's father again. Viveka fixed herself so that she was taller in her hiding place, and could
see better. She wanted to run out and to get her mother to play catch with her, but she knew this wouldn't happen, that she would more likely be sharply pulled inside and scolded.

She watched her father again. His fingers were still on the slim woman's hip bone. He was tapping her hip with his fingers, in time to the music. He suddenly moved away from the woman and went to speak to the deejay. In response the deejay turned in his swivel chair to reach a pile of record albums. He showed them to her father and her father nodded. The music changed from “You Keep Me Hanging On” to the most popular calypso, “When ah call yuh, answer fast.” In an instant, all the guests, recognizing the tune, began to move their bodies to the beat. In sudden haste, the men and women from both sides came together into the centre of the room. Viveka's mother crossed the room, passed just in front of the philodendron, and went farther inside the house, to the kitchen, Viveka presumed. The room had filled up so fast and with so many people that it darkened. Still, her father danced his way to the light switch on the wall and dimmed the chandelier so much that Viveka could have stood up yet not have been spotted. The men were beginning, one by one, to loosen their ties and to undo the top buttons of their shirts.

Viveka watched Valmiki step onto the dance floor, bringing the woman with the strapless black dress and the long wavy hair. He kept his tie fastened and did not dance like the other men in a “break-away,” but with one hand he held one of the woman's, while the other hovered at her waist. He seemed to push and pull her with that hand. Her father and the woman grinned at each other. Viveka's mother suddenly appeared, walking past her father and this woman. Her father let go of the woman, of her hand and her waist, and pulled her mother to dance with them. Her mother seemed to be smiling yet she was biting her lower lip.
She pointed to something on the patio, and Viveka's father shook his head and seemed to insist that she stay and dance. Her mother turned away and Viveka couldn't see what was happening without herself being seen. A second later, her mother turned and with some haste headed back into the house. Her father grabbed the woman's waist and pulled her close to him. One of the other men shimmied up to Viveka's father and the woman, and the man thrust his arms in the air and his pelvis toward the woman's pelvis. Viveka's father grinned, stepped back to allow the man his turn, and spun around on one heel to arrive again next to the woman. The man said something to Viveka's father, and her father lifted his face to the chandelier and had a full laugh. He shook his head as if to say, “You know!” Her father and the woman put their arms around each other, and they danced side by side. The woman put her lips to Viveka's father's ear and said something. He did not look at her but nodded. He let go of her, slipped away from her, and spun around again. Viveka's mother did not return.