Valmiki's Daughter (29 page)

Anick, for her part, hated the attention most of the time, but there were times when she enjoyed it just as much. She had joined a family with what seemed like a bottomless pool of cash at their disposal. She began to have her clothing designed especially for her by a well-known designer in the north of the island whose clients were often photographed by the local paparazzi for the society pages of the daily newspapers and for the Caribbean's glossy lifestyle magazines. She took Nayan to this designer, too, and they dressed him, and he and she soon became one of the most photographed couples in the Caribbean, although Nayan always looked a little lost and posed in those photos.

Anick pushed and pulled Nayan into a world of high living and society that he and his family, in spite of their business connections and wealth, had not previously easily participated in. He felt as if Anick were trying to reeducate him in her ways, to her liking. Rumours and gossip ran rampant in those circles about this one's wife sleeping with that one, and it was all taken
lightly, as if for granted. There was, to his mind, just too much freedom among these people, and Anick swam, goddamn her, like a fish in this company. There was talk of parties where only women congregated, and even ones where men — men who were married — met one another, and that was going too far for him. Much too far. Particularly because he knew his wife had particular tendencies to start with.

Nayan felt acutely that Anick was embarrassed by him and his family. And he, in turn, was embarrassed by his whole situation. He was no longer Ram Prakash's son. He was Anick's husband. If in public he appeared to relish this, it was because he could not do otherwise.

Before he had returned to Trinidad, Rimpty's cacao and chocolates were sold in grocery stores, mixed on the sweet shelf with Cadbury, Bentley's, Lilly's, and Nestle. But on his return, Nayan had managed to secure a stand for Rimpty's alone, with a banner that showed a man much like himself looking out at the buyer he was courting, grinning and holding a plump heart-shaped chocolate between his thumb and fingers, that hand hovering at the parted lips of a woman who was watching him with eyes that suggested that chocolate was a precursor to other pleasures. Nayan, the son of Ram, was becoming the face of, and synonymous with, Rimpty's Cacao and Rimpty's Chocolates.

Still, even though people were beginning to talk about his business acumen and in spite of his occasional unfortunate boasts of how much he was worth in dollars, Nayan felt as if he was worth not a damn cent. He drank more now than he had ever done. And he easily became quite inebriated on very few drinks.

His routine was to come home sober from work, but rigid with tension, the veins in his neck like large green worms pushing up under his skin. He would look for Anick and curtly tell
her he was going to see his mother, and then leave her to do whatever it was she had so clearly busied herself doing even though she knew it was the time he would be home. He would leave his shoes just off the rug in the living room in the meagre section of the house he and she had to themselves, and march directly to the kitchen in the main part of the house. From the fridge he would pull a beer, and he would hoist himself up on one of the counters, grunting his displeasure, words barely able to escape his gritted teeth. His mother would make him fresh roti and baigan choka or pumpkin, and while he waited for the food he would drink another, perhaps two more beers. Eventually he would get the words out, but now they would be slurred: His father had no respect for him or his ideas. His father was old-fashioned. He had been sent to university to do business, and now his father wouldn't listen to his ideas, wouldn't agree to cultivating quality beans for export or making a new chocolate. If only he could be given the chance to prove himself.

He would later retreat to the living room in his part of the house, fall asleep in front of the
TV
he had turned up loud, the unread newspaper folded on his belly. Eventually he would make his way to bed well before Anick. She would likely have hidden herself away on the outside patio, talking on the phone with her family and friends in France. He had the sense that she was bad-talking him or his country. Or she would be in the little room they called an office, writing letters — no doubt letters of complaint.

ALTHOUGH SHE ATTRACTED MUCH ATTENTION AND NO ONE THOUGHT
her shy, Anick guarded her privacy fiercely. She might have been in demand initially at the homes of neighbours and friends, but after a time it was noticeable to her parents-in-law and to Nayan that she kept a distance from these people. She seemed to give
more of herself to people she was unlikely to come in contact with too often. She more easily accepted the invitations that came to her and Nayan from acquaintances in the north, the capital. She would ask for the chauffeur for a day, and reluctantly Nayan would jeopardize that day's relationship with his father to secure the man, and Anick would take off for lunch with people they hardly knew. He couldn't understand why she wouldn't take to family friends closer to home. He sweated with worry about what, exactly, of herself she might have been giving, and to whom.

The only people in the south Anick did not shy away from were the members of the Krishnu family. She and Viveka were making small steps, Nayan noticed with a little happiness, toward becoming friends. Viveka was one of the people Anick would speak with on the phone, and apparently Viveka had begun to brush up on her high school French. Informal French conversations on the telephone with Viveka, in fact, had become a pleasurable project for Anick, and this made her just a little more pleasant for Nayan to be around. It occupied her, and separated them from each other with some calm for at least a hour in an evening — although Nayan did sit in front of the
TV
more than once and wonder what on earth the two of them might have in common. He hoped his wife wasn't making a fool of herself with an old family friend. In the meantime, in the peace and quiet of his living room, he would dull himself with one ice cold beer after another.

By the time Anick got into bed, Nayan was an immovable snoring weight, unaware of her presence. He awoke before she did and left the house for work, already entirely consumed by strategies for making his autocratic old-fashioned father understand the direction in which Rimpty's, by hook or by crook, must head.

Anick's parents sent her packages of goods unavailable in Trinidad, things that they knew she missed. There were regular treks to the post office at the wharf at the foot of Luminada Heights to pick up jars of Dijon mustard, champagne mustard, coarse honey mustard, slabs of nougat, marzipan, jars of Beluga caviar, and for Nayan, chocolates they collected for him, among them always one or two that had been made with fine premium from Trinidad. From the first, Nayan was peeved that Anick's parents felt they had to furnish her with these items, as if he and Trinidad could not offer her things that would adequately satisfy her demanding tastes. He was, too, irked by their gifts of chocolate. He interpreted these as her family trying to show him what quality chocolate was — and he was now well aware that his family's estate grew a strain of cacao that produced a bean French chocolatiers wouldn't have considered worthy of an exhalation. Even as Anick helped Nayan develop a presence in Trinidad society, and even as Anick was afforded luxuries she could only, before her marriage, have dreamed of, in private the two of them were growing apart.

The quality of Rimpty's chocolates eventually became a source of contention between Nayan and his father, but it was only one of many quarrels brewing in the Prakash house. Ram Prakash could not warm to his French daughter-in-law, even though he was pleased that his son was doing the kind of socializing he had never before had the skill for. Ram saw this as purposeful. It was, to his mind, work. Whenever Nayan and Anick returned from a party he would call Nayan into his home office and sit him down. He would close the door, take out his date book, and ask Nayan who he had met that might be of use to their business, if he had made any appointments to meet with these men, if he had opened — or even better, closed — any deals.
He often held his hand out to Nayan and said: Come, shake your father's hand. Let me see how strong and firm that handshake is. You could close a deal with a handshake, you know, boy, even before you state what it is you have to sell. When you meet a person — you haven't even told them what you want, but you have shaken their hand. That is the beginning or the end. Right there. That handshake. And let me see your face when you do it. Look right in my eyes. The eyes and the hand. Let them do the first talking.

How Nayan wished he could wrench himself away, jab his father in his chest with the butt of his elbow.

As Nayan flirted, eventually only on occasion, with the cream of the country's businessmen and their wives, he came to see more than his insular father could have: He, Nayan, needed to transform more than his dress, and to rely on more than his wife. He and his father needed to diversify Rimpty and Son. He would pay attention to how he lived his life — not just in the service of making more and more money, but also by paying attention to “quality of life.” He would blend sound business practice with personal interest and passion. Nayan would begin importing — but not just anything. He would furnish the country with the variety and quality of goods, luxuries, conveniences, and services he had observed in France. He would instill in Trinidadians a pride in themselves while creating something Trinidadian that was synonymous in the outside world with quality. A Frenchman, he had noticed, took it for granted that pen and mountain had the same name, but was too close to the source to know that the rest of the world held the pen in high regard but might not know of the mountain. What if the name of the Prakash business, and the name of the produce of that business — Rimpty's — was changed to the name of the area where they had their estate and
where cacao was grown in abundance: Rio Claro? And what if that product and place name became known in major international centres, synonymous with the highest quality cacao and chocolate in the entire world? What might that little piece of intervention on his and his father's part do for the spirit of the Trinidadian? What would it do for Nayan's own sense of self?

During his short visit to France, Nayan had experienced again and again how small the rest of the world saw him to be. In the streets he had come face to face with what appeared to be an almost official reproach for his colour. He was not unaware of these slights but had no stomach to speak of them to Anick. His money — rather, his father's money — which he had doled out in France with the generosity of one who came by it easily, could not buy French respect. The shade of his skin stained every transaction. The more scorned Nayan felt the more money he spent, and the grander the restaurants he took Anick to, and the more extravagant the presents he bought her, her parents, himself.

In France he had watched, albeit sideways, the lives of non-white immigrants. He walked in the Maghrebi neighbourhood of Perpignan and scrutinized the Moroccans, Algerians, and Gypsies when he thought neither they nor his wife was looking. He found himself ashamed of these people — the few blacks, notably Haitians and West Africans, and the Indians and Pakistanis he saw there — and yet, he was equally in awe of them and their communities. From the distance of the outsider he detected in them an understanding of the world, its ways with them, and how to navigate, slide past, or use those ways to their advantage. It was a sense and knowledge vaster than his, a useful one, and in this — even though he was the son of Ram Prakash — he saw his own inexperience and ignorance. If being Ram Prakash's son was of no consequence to anyone in France, at
least that fact gave him the temerity to transform his loathing into ambition. He would to show the world that he and his fellow countrymen knew what quality was, enjoyed good service, and indulged in the finest luxury items. He would one day show all this to Anick's parents. He would show white France, and the immigrant populations there. He would show Canadians. He would show other Trinidadians. He would show Anick.

Now, from the privacy of his home office, and certainly without his father's knowledge, he wrote to companies in Europe and had their catalogues and sales pitches sent to him, and taught himself what European standards of quality and class looked like, what items created the impression of being in the know and having expectations. The Trinidadians his wife was attracting regularly left Trinidad and went abroad to spoil themselves, and he had it in his mind to provide them — and not only them, but people who were more like himself — with some of this.

Although he had been at school in Canada for four years, Canada hadn't drilled a gaping hole in his sense of self like his short visit to France had. Canada had offered him before-unknown experiences, too, but not experiences that his wife and the kinds of Trinidadians with whom she enjoyed socializing relished and hungered after. For one thing, there was too much blending of all the races and classes on the streets of Toronto. It seemed as if almost anybody — with hard work or a good dose of luck — could make leaps in economic status. This meant that people who worked in Trinidad as store clerks or as servants or as unskilled labourers went to Canada, worked for a while, and returned to Trinidad, having come to expect a standard of commodities and services that only the wealthier Trinidadians had access to. This irked the Trinidadians who had been born into
ready-made comfort. It was their workers who acquired fancier tastes, expectations, manners, and a sense of self-worth in Canada, things that made these workers feel as if, even after they returned to Trinidad, they were entitled.

Nayan knew he was one of those Trinidadians born into money and a particular comfort but not into the understanding of an international sense of style. He had felt in France that while a notable few were born into fortune, the French, by dint of being just that — French — regardless of their class came into the world with a sense of style as part of their heritage. He didn't know if this was true, but they certainly made you feel that they were the owners of all things cultural. And, of course, they were only encouraged in this when they were copied by others everywhere. High-society Trinidadians often left the island to purchase this international style. They went abroad to buy their home furnishings and clothing. And they didn't go to Canada to shop but to Europe. To London, England, Italy, and France.