Valmiki's Daughter (33 page)

Minty knew it would be better for Nayan and Anick to be living on their own. They could move to Chayu. It was a little over an hour away, although admittedly deep in the central forest. Currently, there was a caretaker living there with his family, but he could easily be removed if Nayan and Anick wanted to go there. Minty ached to suggest it, if only because she remembered what it had been like when she had married Ram and lived with his parents in Chayu. How she had loved his parents, and they her. She had come from a devout Hindu family with Trinidad origins
in the canefields, and who later owned a dry goods and hardware store on the north coast of Trinidad. The Prakashs were Hindu, too, but they were more relaxed about it, and unlike her parents, they knew more about the whole of Trinidad, not just the place in which they lived. They took part in the lives of the workers on their estate, and in the life of the village, and had opinions about politics on the island. They knew of the French origins of Chayu and even spoke the patois of the area.

Ram had been an interesting young man, unlike the Indians she knew who were more insular, but his parents spoiled him, gave him anything and everything he wanted, and he seemed to dislike this about them. He was at odds with them, if only because he needed to find his own way in the world. There were quarrels between him and his father, and Minty had thought then that things could not be worse between a parent and a child. Ram's father had bought the land in Luminada, in San Fernando, as a gift. She and Ram had a house built and they moved out of Rio Claro. In San Fernando, Ram became a born-again Hindu, and Minty found herself trapped in the role of a Hindu wife that she thought she had fled in marrying into a cacao family. Nayan came late in their lives, and Ram changed yet again with Nayan's birth. The autocrat she had run from by leaving her own family behind bloomed before her, right there, in her very own house in Luminada.

And now, how much worse were things between parents and child? She could not have imagined such bitterness or the kinds of words spoken between her husband and her son. The time had come for Nayan to leave their house and to find his own way, too. But, as his mother, and under the current unpleasant circumstances, she dared not suggest this without it seeming as if she didn't want him and his wife living with her and Ram. And Ram
would have thought her mad, had she made such a suggestion. Thoughts of what her life might have been like had she married a professional man, or even a simpler man, a school principal perhaps, someone from her own background in the north, ran through her head frequently. That was where they stayed, too — in her head.

Meanwhile, communication between Nayan and Anick had been reduced to hissing, and Ram and Anick made sure not to be in the same room together. At meal times, all four scattered, eating separately. Nayan slept in the guest room while Anick, in her bed alone, cried a great deal.

Finally, Anick gave Nayan an ultimatum: either they begin to look for a house of their own or she would return to France. But Nayan was not ready to leave his parents' home. He feared that if he did, he would not be able to keep as strong a hold on Anick. He suggested alternative strategies for dealing with all that was going on in his parents' house — for instance, that Anick should go do something constructive with herself: join a fitness centre, or take a cooking class, or take up sewing, maybe start a fashion business with Shanti.

Minty tried to console Anick in broken English, which she thought might be better understood by her daughter-in-law, a French word remembered here and there from high school days tossed in. Her sense of self-preservation stopped her from trying to build any sort of bridge between her husband and daughter-in-law.

It was in the midst of all of this that Ram suffered a heart attack. It did not debilitate him, but after he recovered it was unanimously agreed that Nayan and his wife should move to Rio Claro, to Chayu, thirty miles away as the crow flies, an hour-plus by car.

The decision had the effect of washing a slight calm over Anick and Nayan, and even brought between them some tenderness. Anick could finally imagine an end to her claustrophobia. She would soon live in the very landscape Nayan had wooed her with. Furthermore, she welcomed the idea of living in a house that had French origins. The caretaker and his family would be removed. Anick was promised that they would be offered a decent place not lacking in basic amenities. She would restore Chayu — not to the way the Prakashs had kept it, but to its origins. There, not only out from under the thumb of Nayan's father but away from all the wanting and missing that had distracted Anick and caused rifts between her and her husband, she and Nayan would create a life for themselves, begin a family, get involved in the betterment of the community of Rio Claro. And she could make a home with some of herself in it, perhaps, and invite friends there. Not just for dinner or for Sunday lunch — which was most likely, given that Rio Claro was on no one's regular route, and several hours out of the way — but for overnight weekend stays. She would be able to resume her connection with Viveka Krishnu, perhaps invite her to visit. For her friends, there could be walks in the forest, tours that included watching pods being collected and transported out of the forest on baskets that hung on either side of the donkeys, viewings of the fermenting process, of the drying sheds and the roasters. Perhaps she could invite artists to come out and paint the cacao when it was in pod — the scarlet and the cadmium yellow pods, pendulous amidst forest greens and burnt umbers. Perhaps there was a chance for her, after all.

Anick still felt that old loss whenever Nayan touched her body and she his. But it was tolerable. It was only now, after all the time she'd been on the island, that she felt any closeness to him. How he had finally brightened, and how much!

The change in Nayan, on the verge of becoming the man of his own house, came about almost instantly. As soon as the caretaker and his wife had been given notice and plans were underway for the move, Nayan began coming home early, his drinking lessened, and he was respectful to his father and to Anick, too. At last he could see his dream materializing of an estate that produced fine premium cacao. His father wouldn't be coming to the estate too often now except as his visitor, so he would be able to uproot the old plants — even as few as a row at a time — and replace them. He would one day export high-quality beans and chocolates, and import luxury items to the island. This he would have to do without Anick's knowledge, but it could be done, as she would have no dealings in the business side of things. And he would be the head of a family that was solid, unthreatened, and entirely his. It could all happen out of Chayu, in Rio Claro. He would become a big man in the village and eventually help turn it from a village into a town, and one day into a small city. Sooner than that, however, there would be a Rio Claro chocolate line, called “Chayu,” and that line would be available for purchase in specialty stores internationally.

Everything would, after all, turn out just fine.

THE ROMANCE OF LIVING DEEP IN THE CENTRAL HILLS WITH TROPICAL
forest all around, in an original French plantation house, initially caused Anick to tingle with a feverish excitement and even the condition in which she found the house, one of almost total disrepair, did nothing to quell this enthusiasm.

The house was off the main Naparima-Mayaro Road. One had to negotiate roads that were not wide enough for two cars to pass each other. They were pocked with holes, some large enough to cut the already meagre width by half. It amazed Anick to know that there was in Trinidad an unfathomable asphalt lake with pitch enough to pave a good portion of all the roads of the world, yet most roads in Trinidad were deplorable. Hours after the long drive to Rio Claro and then the bumpy one into Chayu, her bones felt jarred and trembling, and her stomach continued to churn. But the sight of the once-great house, soon to be her and Nayan's home, set upon a mound of lawn with the dark forest behind and the brilliant deep-green cacao fields running down into little valleys at the sides, made her want to weep with a childlike joy. It didn't matter that even from the road, before one began the rough drive up an uneven gravel pathway, one could see that the house had not been cared for recently. Only a
metre here and a metre there of the cast-iron cresting on the ridge of the roof remained intact, and the cast-iron and timber finials were either bent or the tips broken off. The dormer windows had lost their louvres, leaving the interior open to the elements, and the once elaborate timber fretwork that had decorated the eaves, gables, and the wraparound gallery wall was reduced to a chip here and a chip there. Most of the paint on the wood structure had been shaved right off by rain, or flaked up by the sun's heat, leaving barely a trace of its former turquoise.

Chayu had been a working estate house from the days of its French origins, its attic a drying platform for the cacao beans. The attic was still being used today for that purpose, and the sweet, earthy odour of beans infected the air inside the entire house.

Inside, the house was spacious but plain. The kitchen and eating area were large enough to accommodate the feeding of workers. In the kitchen was a window with an awning and a deep sill into which was set a single enamel sink. There were shelves, but no pantry or cupboards. The floor, covered in a chipped, once lemon-coloured linoleum, sagged and rose and sagged again.

The old bathroom and the toilet from the earliest days of the estate were outdoors, some paces from the house, but a bathroom had since been added inside by Nayan's grandparents. It was unused, though, as the plumbing had rusted out and never been repaired. The bathroom's wall tiles were broken, and black mold sprouted on the sloped floor of the long-unused bathing square.

Anick hired an architect, who put together a team that included an historian and restoration contractors, and together they came up with a plan to restore Chayu to its colonial origins while modernizing it for daily residential living. Such a project cost Nayan about as much as having an entirely new house built in the city, and Ram and Minty were appalled. They could not
understand why the old house could not have been simply made functional, the amenities brought up to date slowly, and blamed the fancy wife for making her husband, their son, spend his father's money so frivolously.

The renovation took almost three months to complete, with the work stopped intermittently by inclement weather, by material shortages, by the seizure and contestation of imported materials at customs, and by sick or slack workers. During this time, Anick and Nayan lived in a rented house in Chaguanas, a bustling town in the centre of the island, about a forty-minute drive from Rio Claro. Anick paid for English-language lessons from a neighbour, a young woman who had finished Advanced Level examinations in French and was awaiting results. The young woman was studious, religious, and serious. She did not find Anick's accent amusing, and had little patience with literal translations from French into English. Anick was inspired, and somewhat shamed, into improving her English at a rate that won her quiet respect from Nayan.

It was a ten-minute drive, twenty in rush hour, from their temporary house to the chocolate-making factory. Nayan's days were spent at the factory doing the work his father had done when he'd been in better health. Late afternoons, Nayan raced from there to Rio Claro, trying to arrive before dark. Once there, he haggled with the various contractors, who seemed to find daily that they had under-priced materials and miscalculated to such an extent that they simply could not carry on the work without an advance or assurances that he would meet the regrettable increase in their quoted price. At home, Nayan was exhausted and quiet much of the time.

Anick had wanted to be involved in overseeing every nail that was hammered, every new set of louvres or fretwork crafted
and installed. She had gone to Chayu with Nayan a few times, but her presence disrupted the workers. With more English words in her head and on the tip of her tongue, she was inclined to ask questions incessantly, give opinions, make comments, all in an accent, however much slighter now, that took contractors and workers valuable time to decipher and raised Nayan's ire. He started going to Rio Claro on his own, the excuse being that he was leaving to go there from some other work-related location that made it inconvenient for him to come all the way back to Chaguanas to fetch her. In response, Anick asked for a driver to take her there in the daytime when Nayan was unable to be present. The idea appalled him. If she went to Chayu without him, she would be walking among construction workers who had no loyalty to him. She would be tying up a driver that the company would likely need. She would be in the way of the architects and the contractors. She would make him feel small, as if his wife were in control, and among men like these, this would not be understood. He took her, instead, on weekends when there were no workers around except for a watchman. He took note of her suggestions, likes and dislikes, and on his week-day visits he passed on the ones he felt had merit.

On the days when Nayan did spare a driver, Anick did not go to Luminada where she would have been obliged to stop in on her in-laws, but to Port of Spain to housewares shops and boutiques, looking for items with which to furnish her new home. And she took the opportunity to lunch with a friend or two, the ones she saw little of nowadays.

Three months in a rented house in the hot, humid and busy centre of the island might as well have been a year, but eventually Anick and Nayan were able to move to “Chaillou.” One of the restorers had found that time and weather had rubbed almost
smooth an incised text on the gable of the pavilion-like entrance to the house. A wax rubbing revealed the words
Le Ciel de Chaillou
. When Anick told her father of the discovery of the plaque, and of the French words on it, he immediately replied, “But of course, Chaillou must refer to David Chaillou, France's first official chocolatier, appointed to the court of the chocoholic Queen Marie Therese.” The original French owners of the estate obviously knew the history of chocolate in France and had named it in honour of David Chaillou —“Chaillou's Heaven.” It was a pleasant irony to Anick that she had ended up living in this particular estate, this particular house. The discovery of the name of the house was, to her mind, like unearthing an umbilical cord to France. It gave her a humorous sense of “right of presence.”