Valmiki's Daughter (41 page)

“You what! That was pretty bold of you!” The oddness of the
note from her mother now made sense.

“It was, wasn't it! Your mother said she was going out, but
that if you wanted to see me, it was alright with her.”

“I thought you said you spoke with my father. You spoke with them
both? I'm sorry that you did so before asking me!”

“Yes, but I know what it's like here. My own father was an
old-fashioned Indian man through and through when it came to his daughters. I imagined
yours to be no different. Your father
put me on hold — he
said he had to check with the boss. I could hear your parents talking. I had to wait for
about three minutes. No kidding. I thought he had forgotten about me. Then your mother
came on the phone and asked if I knew where we were going for dinner, and she made some
suggestions. So if you can't come up with a place I have a list from her. Are you
free tonight?”

Viveka was livid. In her best tone of civility she said, “Ah, so
finally I have a say in this. But I am not free tonight.”

Trevor made a show of having correctly anticipated her response, one of
disappointment, and ended with a promise to call again.

When they returned home, Viveka's parents had an air of controlled
excitement about them. They hovered about her, trying to make conversation with her, but
didn't bring up Trevor and neither did Viveka.

And later, as Valmiki, Devika and Vashti napped, heat sapping
everyone's energy, Viveka and Anick clung to each other's voices and stories
via the telephone, their painful words to each other at the volleyball game earlier that
week forgotten.

IN DEVIKA'S EYES, VIVEKA HAD BEGUN TO DRESS EXACTLY LIKE
THE
person she kept hoping her daughter would not turn into. With no
discussion, let alone permission, Viveka cut her hair short. Her parents were irked, yet
curious in spite of themselves. Now Devika, too, saw the ghost of Anand in their
daughter.

Anick Prakash visited Viveka at the Krishnu house often these days, but
usually when Valmiki was at work and Devika out at a luncheon or appointment. Devika
bristled the few times she saw them together on the patio, or down by the garden
railing, leaning against it, oddly close to one another, a quiet between them that made
them seem closer than was to her mind and good taste natural. She watched, horrified and
at the same time mesmerized. They were an odd pair indeed, these two young women,
listening to classical music, engaged by talk of novels, ideas, and theories Devika had
no interest in, speaking unabashedly like ten-year-olds in their ridiculous gibberish of
French and English.

Viveka also went twice, sometimes three times, a week to Rio Claro. One
morning, Devika could contain her disapproval no longer. She called Valmiki at his
office to complain that Viveka had yet again asked her at breakfast if it was alright to
take the car and go out with Anick, this time to a lecture on the calypso
as a socio-political medium. At this last, Devika shouted,
“What the hell do you all think I am? A fool?”

Valmiki ignored the question and simply asked what she had said to Viveka.
Devika replied: I told Viveka that she was going out too often. That Anick was a married
woman. That their friendship was strange. It was unnatural. That if she wasn't
careful, didn't put a stop to this nonsense right away, there would be a scandal.
Single women should not have married women as friends. Marriages broke up because of
that sort of thing. And the single woman was always blamed. Devika began to cry on the
phone. “It is you who is to blame. You know damn well that you are the one who has
brought this on us.”

The words “What the hell do you mean by that?” sprang
instinctively to Valmiki's mind, but he knew better than to ask: he did not want
an answer. Neither of them would have had the vocabulary for the ensuing
conversation.

“You and your daughter are going to ruin us,” Devika carried
on. “How dare you do this to me? You should not have returned here after you
finished medical school. You knew even then, didn't you, you knew that you were .
. .” But she couldn't finish.

Valmiki wanted to retort, “You knew about me too, and you stayed
with me.” But that one ill-advised comeback would have led to verbalized
confessions and regretted accusations and a conversation he imagined only too well: So,
what are you saying? Devika would ask. That I shouldn't have? And he: You knew who
and what I was, but it served you well to stay, you have not wanted for anything
materially. And then she: I didn't know when I let you touch me before we were
married. And I didn't know when I married you, but you did. You knew very well
what you were doing. And you lied when you didn't tell me . . . I wanted a man to
love me, a real man.

That sort of conversation he needed to avoid. How
would he and Devika carry on after that? He could never leave his two daughters. The
scandal would ruin all four.

To avoid all of this he remained silent, a profound silence which, to
Devika's mind, was an admission of all she herself had no language for.

But admission, silent or explicit, was not what Devika wanted. The
impossible — a reversal of time, a whole other life — is what she so deeply,
deeply wanted. How clichéd to wish to close one's eyes, and on opening them
again find that the life before had only been a bad dream. But it was all she had, such
clichéd wishing. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she snapped, “Why
the hell don't you take responsibility and talk to your god-damned
daughter?”

He didn't know how to talk to her anymore, Valmiki muttered, and
Devika was about to begin again — Valmiki detected the beginnings of another
controlled explosion. He wanted to tell Devika that he couldn't have this
conversation right now; he had patients waiting to see him. But she just carried on and
he was overcome by the familiar weariness that welled up in him at the onset of quarrels
with Devika. She had a tone that made him want to slam the receiver down, the door shut,
his fist on the table, but he never did any of those.

It had always, always, always been left to her — now she was . . .
what was that tone . . .
screeching
— to discipline the children because
he
didn't want to alienate them and
he
always had to be the
good one, and she was left to be the nasty parent. Or so she would accuse him.

Valmiki had stopped listening.

Really, he asked himself, what the hell
was
Viveka doing? He
hated the question, for he knew the answer. She was beginning
to
live the life he had made choices to avoid. It was his doing. His fault. But how dare
she? How dare she think only of herself. Had she no good sense after all? No sense of
loyalty — if not loyalty, then responsibility — to her family, to society?
To him? And why wouldn't she have loyalty? They, he and she, had their
differences, but those differences were their thing, their special thing they shared
with each other to bond. There was no small love between them. Had she no
discretion?

Defeated, Valmiki whispered into the phone, I have patients waiting, I
can't do this anymore. Devika was answering back,
Can't do what anymore?
Are you threatening me?
as he quietly rested the phone back on the cradle.

IN MID-JUNE, MINTY CALLED TO SPEAK WITH DEVIKA. IN A WEEK'S
time, she and Ram were hosting an anniversary celebration luncheon for Anick and Nayan. It was late notice, she apologized, but those two couldn't make up their minds, as usual, about anything. The party would be held at Chayu and the entire Krishnu family was invited.

It was almost midnight when Viveka was finally alone and could telephone Anick. She knew that if Nayan were at home he would be asleep by now, and he slept so soundly that the ring of the telephone would not awaken him. She quickly let Anick know that she was perplexed to hear there would be a celebration of the marriage, and that Anick dared to allow her in-laws to invite her, Viveka, to witness such an event.

Anick insisted that it had been Ram's and Minty's idea. She had begged Nayan not to allow it, but he wanted the party. He and she had fought over it, but winning an argument with her had become more important to him than the party itself, and he won. He won because she couldn't fight him in a language that was not her own, in a country where she herself had no one but him — and Viveka, she quickly added.

Numerous times in the past Viveka had asked Anick why, if she really didn't like being with Nayan, she continued to stay in that marriage. And each time, Viveka had received a slightly different answer from the time before, as if Anick herself were trying to figure out the answer. She had offered once that she had always been an accessory for anyone who loved her. Everyone — men or women — fell in love not with her, but with what they called her “beauty.” They wanted to be seen with her. They were in love with themselves, Anick theorized. With Nayan it was different. His foreignness and the differences between them were a gulf she felt would never be bridged, and because of this, she might be able to maintain her independence. She did not have a profession and barely spoke English, and so she felt insecure. And because she was on her own and naive, and Nayan wanted so much to give her everything, she just, she had to admit, betrayed herself.

Anick never answered that she had married Nayan because she loved him.

Viveka muttered the same questions again tonight, but, exasperated, she meant them rhetorically, asked of the heavens rather than of Anick. “Why on earth would a person leave the town and go to live so very far away? If you were closer, at least . . . Well, maybe we could have talked about all of this face to face rather than whispering on the telephone at midnight.” Her questions met with quiet, and so Viveka continued repeating herself. “I don't understand why, in such a hopeless marriage, you would leave the town and go to live in such a remote village? And above all, I don't understand why you remain in this marriage. To tell the truth, I don't understand why you married a man in the first place.”

At last Anick had new, albeit partial, answers. She said, “Everybody think the French, they so enlightened. They think
French and enlightenment go together. But that is so simple, no? The French, especially outside of the city, they like everybody else. My parents, they are the same. French does not equal enlightenment, Vik. It does not mean freedom. Get that into your head. It would be easier for my parents if I marry a man from Morocco, Algeria, or from Senegal or Trinidad, than if I choose to live with a woman.”

The people in town she had met, she continued, Nayan's friends, most of the people in Luminada Heights, were too conservative. You had to conform to old-fashioned ways and attitudes so as not to make them uncomfortable. She felt as if she were an exotic animal in a cage, her every action watched and commented on all the time. And there was that constant, petty competitiveness among Nayan's and Ram's and Minty's friends. People were always struggling to match up, trying to impress. The place had strangled her and therefore was more dangerous for her than the forest. Even so, she had come to love the land of the island, the food, aspects of the culture, the climate of Trinidad. She didn't know how to begin the process of leaving the Prakash family. And if she were to leave, how would she manage? Where would she go?

There were answers to these last, Viveka knew, but she also knew that she herself could not help Anick to leave Nayan or San Fernando or Trinidad. If she did, neither of them would be able to find anyone in their regular circles who would help them. It would cause a public scandal, and there would be the very real threat of physical harm being done to both of them. It would be the scandal of the century. She had to stop asking these questions of Anick.

“Your English isn't that bad, Anick. You can win an argument if you want.”

“When I talk with you is not bad. But I can't even think when Nayan start to argue with me. Vik, you know if he find out . . .”

Viveka didn't need to hear the end of that unfinished sentence.

In any case, the anniversary luncheon would happen.

RAM AND MINTY HAD THE FOOD CATERED. THERE WERE MINI DOUBLES
for appetizers, pholourie balls and sahinas with mango anchar dips and tamarind. They hired a barman who was kept busy mixing rum drinks, and gin and vodka martinis. Champagne and red and white wine were served.

It was as if everyone of note in the upper echelons of San Fernando society had moved themselves, intact, to Rio Claro for the day. It was an older crowd, full of Ram's and Minty's friends. Even Nayan's close friend Bally and his wife Shanti had not been invited. Nasser and Cynthia Khan, who owned Khan's Clothing and Household, were there. And Tessa and Sam Bisessar, who owned Imperial Furniture and Rug Emporium. Several other business acquaintances from San Fernando were there, and some of the Prakashs' Luminada neighbours. They all brought to the country, to the forest's edge, their town finery. Gold dangled from the ears and necks of the meagre women, and their wrists held bangles, the jewellery studded not so discreetly with diamonds and sapphires and rubies. Talk of karats and sizes, hands held up and fingers splayed to display all, was had and got out of the way early. There were dresses in fine linen, and pant-suits in silk. And all the women wore open-toed, high-heeled, patent leather sandals. The men were more casually dressed. Several wore light slacks and all wore white shirts, as if in uniform, and very shiny dress shoes. Their large gold Rolexes and Pateks glistened against their dark, hairy wrists, and strong scents of the latest, most expensive colognes did good battle with
the catered food and with the cacao roasting in neighbouring properties.