Valmiki's Daughter (3 page)

Just before moving onward, you will be hit with a strong, sweet whiff of
garlic, scallions, and ginger as they are sautéed, a street away, in peanut and
sesame oil. You will smell, but you won't see, The Victory Hotel, which houses The
Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant, the best hotel and the best restaurant this side of
the oil refinery. The hotel is mostly used by visitors to the island, but it is known to
be available on occasion to certain businessmen and professionals who are willing to pay
the daily double-room rate for the privacy of their illicit pleasures. The Golden Dragon
is where the aldermen, the mayor, and lawyers take their lunch, and where some of the
doctors take theirs too. On occasion you will find Dr. Krishnu there. He usually
requests one of several private dining suites at the back of the restaurant. He will, of
course, not be alone, but the staff is discreet.

Despite the distraction of the aroma from The Golden Dragon, know that
there is street food higher up, exceptional and unusual food, near the gates of the
girls' school. You will want to sample that, to buy it from the vendor there, so
have courage and steer the promenade tour onward.

Behind speaker's corner is a large, shallow, round pool, with a
fountain at its centre, a bronze mess of scaly fish entwined and with open mouths that
once spouted water. But the fountain has
not worked in years and its
pool is empty of water. The ceramic blue-tile floor is covered in a carpet of freshly
fallen orange petals. There are benches around the fountain, and these are occupied by
court-hearing attendees, office clerks, and idlers. Nut vendors walk up and down the
promenade, cream-coloured canvas bags slung from their shoulders. Their outstretched
hands show off small brown-paper packages of unshelled peanuts. It is nearly the
town's official lunchtime, and the air is fragrant with the scent of foods from
vendors' outdoor cooking and from the jeeps parked near the promenade's far
end, out of which hot dogs and hamburgers are already being barbecued and sold. The
scent of food rising up from all corners of the city is a blessing.

Huddled at the base of tall stately trees are people who have staked claim
on these meagre spots and will ward off anyone who trespasses with shrieks, curses, and
lunges, armed with frail fists and fearsome body odours. Even the police leave them
alone. If you look closely, you will see sleeping figures in the densest sections of
shrubbery planted by the town's gardeners. Past the fountain is a towering bronze
pedestal, on top of which is a disproportionately smaller, pigeon-blessed statue of
Mahatma Gandhi, dhoti-clad and stepping briskly forward. He seems about to step off his
base and into the air. Behind the Gandhi statue, in the centre of the tree-shaded
promenade, is the biggest statue of all, a full and highly detailed bronze of Queen
Victoria in ample skirt, every fold rendered, sporting crown and sceptre, also streaked
in dried-white pigeon droppings. Fading into the distance are more water features, none
of which function, and more statues of past governors, past mayors, and business
benefactors.

The high school attached to the convent has just recessed for lunch. The
electronic wrought-iron gate grates and rumbles as it slides open, and the girls, rowdy
and excited, spill out. They head
for the doubles vendor, whose
daily intake revolves around this very moment. When they cross the boundary line of the
gate that separates the world of commodities and desires from that, supposedly, of
learning and restraint, the girls seem, one by one, to take a vertiginous step, to
misstep, falter, and land a little off to the side, or illogically, too far forward. If
you were to videotape their exit/entrance, and play back the moment in slow motion, you
would discover the cause of that odd blip in the girls' appearance and gait: you
would see their hands grabbing the waistbands of their skirts, and smart flicks of the
wrist to turn the waistband under, once, twice, sometimes even three times, in order to
shorten the skirts to well above the knees, a movement studied and practised until it is
executed so swiftly that a casually watching eye sees a jump-cut in life. The collars of
the girls' white shirts are normally pinned tight at the neck with a brooch, but
by the time the girls reach the food vendor, house badges have been whipped off and
necks exposed.

All morning the vendor has been preparing for this lunch-time crush by
frying on the spot batches of split-pea flour patties, and heating up a large vat of
curried channa she carted from her home. Buzzing around the vendor already are
sixth-form students from the boys' college three streets away. They have come for
the girls first, and the doubles as a kind of side order. And now the girls have
arrived. Vashti Krishnu is here. Her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Krishnu, who consider
themselves to be of high-calibre Indian ancestry, prefer not to know that their two
daughters buy and eat street food. They know it is fashionable. The food section of the
daily paper often praises the inventiveness and culturally hybrid taste of Trinidadian
street food — the doubles, aloo pies, tamarind balls, pone, sugar cake —
hailing it to be among the tastiest in the world. But still Dr. and Mrs. Krishnu
can't bring
themselves to eat food prepared by people whose
sanitary habits are unknown, food served in the germ-filled and fly-infested outdoors.
Pria Castano, whose father's law office is at the top of the promenade, is here,
too. And so is Felicia Clark, whose mother works as a clerk in the police station. Lloyd
Gobin is also here. His mother teaches at the convent and his father is the manager of
the furniture and rug store in the town centre. Being a more open-minded kind of Indian,
Lloyd's father would see nothing wrong with his son being here but would not
contradict his wife's judgment.

Prefects from the girls' school have been stationed to make sure the
girls do not stray. The rendezvous between students from the two schools, orchestrated
to look like little more than coincidental line-ups of boys and girls who happen to find
themselves elbow to elbow, lasts no more than ten minutes, that being too long even so
for buying this quickly prepared street food, which the girls must take back behind the
gates to consume. Boys and girls take care not to be caught chatting or directly facing
each other or acting as if these meetings have been planned. But those ten minutes will
be the stuff that keeps them from hearing anything that goes on in class that afternoon,
and the stuff, too, of that evening's, that night's, confused and excited
longings.

The vendor's helper — a girl, perhaps the vendor's
daughter — takes care not to look into the eyes of the students, many of whom are
older than she is.

Vashti Krishnu knows better than to stand out here too long or to get
caught chatting with the boys, so she orders her doubles — the vendor pulls a
yellow chickpea-flour flap from a pile in a tea towel, readies a little square of
greaseproof brown paper in the palm of the other hand, places the bara flat on top of
that, then
slaps its centre with a tamarind paste, and in the cup
she has made with the back of the paste's spoon she slaps on top a heaping
tablespoon of curried channa and then pulls another flap over that, and folds the lot in
two, and with a twist and flick of the paper's ends she has created one order in
less than fifteen seconds — and Vashti pays the daughter and heads back to the
gate. She is about to cross the street that separates the promenade from the school when
a bedraggled woman who had been hidden in some shrubs nearby hobbles with surprising
speed toward her. Vashti hears her name. She spins around, and when she sees the woman
her heart thunders. The woman appears to be old and haggard, but Vashti knows she is
only a handful of years older than she is. The woman is, in fact, the exact age of
Viveka, Vashti's sister. The woman is thin, with the depleted meagreness of the
alcoholic. Her long black hair is oily and clumped. She wears what was once a white
shirt, a school shirt from not too long ago, but it is yellowed and soiled, and the
trousers she wears, men's trousers, are covered in dirt, dust, urine. They are
several sizes too big for her, held high above her waist with a belt and, as if that
were not enough, a length of heavy rope. She is barefoot.

Vashti wants to pretend she can't see who has called her. She wants
to pick up her pace and hurry across the street and back through the gates. And as much
as she wants to do these things, she also wants to go to this woman, stand with her and
ask if she can do anything for her. But she does not want her friends, anyone on the
promenade, even people who are strangers, to see that she knows this woman about whom
rumours have spread far and wide. People have driven their cars here on a Sunday to see
if they could spot this woman. She is said to give her body to men, right here on the
promenade, behind statues at night and in the bushes in the day, in exchange for a
cigarette or money to buy a flask of rum. It
is much discussed.
Vashti hears the talk, and in this moment, as she lets her eyes meet the woman's,
it is as if she, too, is saying these things: “But if she is doing this sort of
thing, what they say about her can't be true then. It can't be so that she
is a buller. If is woman she like, how come she doing it with man? Well, maybe is not a
bad thing, then. That might cure her. And from such a family, too. It is killing her
parents. No wonder they put she out the house.”

But Vashti knows this woman. Merle Bedi. She used to come home to visit
Vashti's sister, Viveka, and Vashti and Viveka would sit in the living room and
listen to this woman play Beethoven on the piano. And Debussy. “Clair de
lune.” Their favourite. And when she played, she forgot the world around her. It
was as if some unearthly understanding of the meaning of every note she played arched
through her body, filled her lungs, and weakened her. Watching her made you breathless.
Her fingertips touched each key, and the keys gave themselves up to her, as if they too
had been waiting for her. Vashti and Viveka knew that Merle would be a great pianist one
day. That is what Merle had wanted. But her parents insisted that the piano came too
easily to her, and for that reason it should be her passion, not her job. They insisted
that, since she did well also in the sciences, she was to study medicine. If only,
Vashti finds her self wishing now, if only the other students, and the people staring as
she walks slowly toward Merle, could know how brilliant and talented she is, and that
playing the piano is her calling. Or was.

“Vashti, can you spare some money?” Merle asks.

Vashti is taken aback. She thinks Merle might have asked how she is. She
instinctively holds out her brown-paper package of doubles. “No, but you can have
this.”

Now that she has stopped and faced Merle, she wants to ask her something,
to say something more, but her mind goes
suddenly blank. Merle does
not reach for the doubles but says, “You don't have any money? I need some
money.”

Vashti says, “I don't have more on me,” in such a soft,
scared voice that Merle does not hear and comes closer.

“Vashti, listen, can you carry a message for me? Take a message from
me to Miss Seukeran, please.”

Vashti steps back in horror.

“Wait, Vashti, wait. Do this for me, please. I need you to tell Miss
Seukeran something for me.”

Vashti shakes her head emphatically and hurries across the street, tears
welling in her eyes. At the gate, before going through, she turns, but Merle has already
disappeared.

The convent, oddly, shares a wall with the cinema next door and if you
listen just now, you will hear the lunchtime programming begin. The cinema's walls
are not soundproof, and in every direction the soundtrack of movie trailers can be heard
above traffic sounds, and the laughter and chatter of students, vendors, and
passersby.

Across the road, a half-minute walk down the promenade, is the last of the
official and once-grand buildings along this strip. This point is known as Library
Corner. It is here that the promenade's glory peters out. It ends at a ragged
intersection whose many converging streets and lack of traffic lights, and whose
apparent system of blind trust, mirrors its more glorious front end. On either side of
you now are private commercial structures that were built not to impress or to
contribute culturally to the community in which they exist, but with materials and
design meant purely to maximize the money-making potential of every square inch. A
narrow roadway lined with dilapidated buildings leads to a public park that includes a
football field, a running and cycling track, and several netball, volleyball, and
basketball
courts. Bleachers encircle the park. Behind them is the
foot of the San Fernando Hill, a once-magnificent natural promontory and wildlife
paradise in the heart of the town, a forest of bamboo, silk cotton, poui, and
flamboyant, a bird watchers' haven, a reptile sanctuary, a nature lover's
refuge, disfigured now with treeless trails that ensnare it, tractors and trucks
crawling up and down its raw bruised sides, moving whole cubic acres of its yellow and
white bedrock daily, its most perfect beauty pulverized for a most singular profit.

IF ALL YOU DO, HAVING JUST PLOPPED DOWN FROM THE SKY, IS
STROLL
down one of its streets, gawk at the buildings and monuments, and
take cursory note of the local folk you pass and those who pass you by, a new place will
reveal only so much of itself to you. A much better way — one might even say a
more responsible way — to acquaint yourself so that you can truthfully proclaim:
yes, I visited that place, I know it, is to move right into the homes, into the private
and public dealings — into the minds, even — of some of its citizens.