Valmiki's Daughter (45 page)

Viveka was embarrassed by the sudden attention. Still, in a way it felt
rather good.

HOW EASILY THEY LET HER USE THE CAR TO TAKE HIM
TO THE AIRPORT.

On either side of two sections of the highway, fields were ablaze. Ribbons
of glowing cane leaves spiraled upwards and
sailed through the air.
They floated back down as grey strands of ash. Although she had the air intake vents
closed off and cold-air blower turned on high, the sweet smell of the burning cane
fields, the heaviness of the smoke, managed to enter the vehicle. An unpleasant cold
draft was hitting her upper left arm. She fiddled with the louvres on the vent to
redirect it. Turned on low volume, the cello suite could barely be heard.

Curbside at the airport, Viveka left the car engine idling and remained
inside. She gripped the steering wheel. Trevor hesitated, stared ahead.

“I had a really good time, Viveka.”

She tapped the steering wheel with her fingers to the beat of the music,
and said, “Yeah. Me too.” There was no need to be effusive.

“But I've been thinking. You're an expensive
date!” Trevor was solemn. “I can't keep coming to see you like this,
you know. We have to do something.”

Viveka felt a sense of doom at Trevor's words. There immediately
arose inside of her that particular hunger she had only known in relation to Anick. It
was a hunger but it did not come from her belly. It was Merle Bedi's hunger. It
was bigger than she was, and would not easily be quelled; it would, rather, forever gnaw
at her. She knew this. But she was determined not to become Merle Bedi. Nor to become
Anick.

She
, rather, had to do something.

“Like what?” she said, but not waiting for an answer, she
quickly offered, “Get married?”

“That's what I was thinking,” Trevor replied jovially,
adding, “It's always a means to an end, isn't it. Would you like
to?”

She wondered why he would say such a thing.
It's always a means
to an end.
Did he know how true his words were? Perhaps
he, too, like everyone else it seemed, had his reasons. If he had, they
didn't interest her. “Where would we live?”

“Well, in Toronto, I suppose. We'd travel a lot, I think you
might like that. But we'd live in Toronto. That's where my work is. So, what
do you say?”

Viveka thought for a moment. Finally, as if agreeing that they should make
a left turn rather than a right at a fork, she shrugged and said, “Okay. I guess
so. Let's.”

Trevor chuckled. “I will have to speak with your parents, then.
Won't I? Don't say anything. I'll return in a few weeks and
we'll surprise them. What do you say?”

He held her face in his large hands and kissed her mouth. His skin smelled
like burning flesh.

ON THE WAY TO THE AIRPORT A MONTH LATER, VIVEKA HUMMED TO
the taped Bach cello suite she had long ago memorized well.

How happily her parents had let her take the car for this trip, too.

Waiting in the midst of a small and animated crowd, Viveka's eyes
were fixed on the guarded, tinted doors ahead. She could have stepped out of the crowd
and waited for Trevor closer to the doors, but she wanted to see him before he saw her.
The automatic sliding doors parted and he, tall and skinny, squinting into the late
afternoon glare, emerged from the air-conditioned Customs and Immigration Hall. He was
met by a blast of dull, suffocating heat. He scanned the crowd for her. She held back
for a brief second, shielding herself behind a woman with a mass of frizzy hair that
exuded an odor of petroleum jelly. Trevor spotted her nevertheless, and so she broke
into a broad smile as she shouldered her way through the crowd.

He came to her grinning and hugged her long. She returned the embrace,
noting a faint cologne rising off his shirt. She felt as if she were on an escalator
that was moving more swiftly than normal. Her greeting was a quick, nervous, embrace,
cooler than he — and even she — expected. A long lash of cane ash floated
down in front of him. He blew at it and it broke apart, some of it
catching in his hair and on his shirt.

Crossing the street to arrive at the parking lot she reached for his bag,
a black canvas knapsack so light he was able to sling it over one shoulder. He nudged
his shoulder upward, out of her reach, and said gaily, “Thank you, thank you. I
can carry it, my dear.” She hadn't looked at him, but could hear the grin in
his voice.

He took the key from her and opened the trunk. The white car had turned a
dusty grey from the ash that had settled on it in the short time it had been parked
there. He dropped his bag in and handed the key back to her.

Trevor dozed in the car, snoring so heavily that Viveka felt he could have
been anywhere, and not necessarily in her presence. She took her eyes off the road to
look at him. His head was tilted back on the headrest. He wore a black polyester/cotton
shirt with tiny green palm trees printed on it, along with yellow martini glasses and
pink flamingoes. His head was thrown back on the head rest, and his lower jaw had
dropped. His breathing rattled in both directions against his epiglottis.

In the hope that Trevor would be awakened by it, Viveka turned on the
CD
player. The Bach cello suites. Viveka's lungs felt suddenly
bereft of air; insatiable desire mixed with regret rose in her chest. She hit the button
to turn off the
CD
player with more force than was necessary.

A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, VIVEKA AND TREVOR SET OUT
FOR THE
beach. In the village of Maracas, on the only road that serviced the
north's most popular beach and the fishing villages that dotted this coast,
traffic alternated between crawling no more than a car length or two ahead, and standing
still. Cars coming from both directions met at the entrance to the beach's parking
lot,
and formed a loosely linked chain of thrumming metal. The air
inches above them shimmered in the heat.

Drivers wilted inside their infernos, each awaiting a hard-to-come-by
vacancy in the sole, over-full lot. Their passengers had abandoned them along the
crawl-route to the lot. Loaded with beach paraphernalia retrieved from the trunks, these
escapees joined ragged groups that ambled on the road. The road had turned into a hot,
noisy playground. The air just above the softened asphalt danced in waves. A slow parade
of people in bathing suites, some wrapped in sarongs, some with towels around their
waists, strained under the weight of Styrofoam coolers or boxes and baskets that
contained food. Their rubber slippers slapped at the asphalt as they toted canvas bags,
rolled-up grass mats, bright towels slung over their shoulders, and hoisted impatient,
excited toddlers in their arms. Those without footwear bounced swiftly across the road,
lifting their legs high after each protracted step, and blowing as if they felt the heat
of the asphalt on their tongues. There were shrieks at children to watch left, watch
right before crossing. And there was a constant shuffle of young women — high
school girls, really — with movie-star-thin bodies and swimwear intended to
fulfill only legal requirements, and strutting in their wake young hairless boys,
surfboards like trophies clutched under their arms. All of this, and more —
children armed with spades and buckets, heedless of the fact that they were on a
roadway, a couple of sombrero-wearing men with guitars, a cacophony of car horns, and
the boom-boom-booms from “sooped-up” car stereo systems — contributed
to the impression that the state of the roadway was part of the general beach outing,
and no one was in any hurry.

Those who remained inside their cars did so knowing well that they could
be trapped there for what would seem like hours.
The air floating
into the cars was thick, and as the cars limped on, it reeked in turn of carbon
monoxide, of pee in the bushes, of coconut-flavoured sunscreen lotions, and nearer the
vendor stalls, of oil used in the frying of bakes, shark and king fish. By the river,
the stench of stagnant water repulsed, and then suddenly, on each cooling and
heaven-sent breeze, was washed away by the salty scent of sea water.

In the driver's seat Trevor had angled himself, partially resting
his back against the door, his eyes closed. His exaggerated breathing conveyed ire. As
the car had idled in the same spot for too long, the fan had gone into high gear with a
sudden and frightening soprano-like whir, and so he had switched off the engine.
Viveka's door was ajar, and all the windows were rolled down, but still it felt as
if an electric heater was on at full power. Breezes from the sea were infrequent and
when they did ripple in they were disappointingly warm. Trevor dangled one arm out of
the window, down the length of the door, and leaned his head against the door frame.
With his fingers he tapped the hot outside metal of the door in time to the beat of a
calypso wailing out of the car behind. His other arm extended across the interior, and
he rested his hand loosely on Viveka's leg. He jerked his head slightly in time to
the music. Even so, there was an air of impatience about him.

His eyes remained closed as he said in a voice low with weariness,
“I will never stop loving this country. Too bad it's run by a bunch of
disingenuous incompetents.”

“They say people like you should return,” Viveka offered.
“Not for a holiday, but permanently. To try to make things better.”

Trevor opened his right eye and looked at her. “This heat, and . .
.” He sat up and pulled his hand from her lap, balled it tight and with his thumb
rigid he pointed to the back, pumping his fist
at the row of cars
behind. The sharp parson's nose of his fist alternated accusing jabs at the
endless row snaking ahead, and he continued, “This kind of inanity would kill me.
You would think they'd have cleared that land over there and created another lot,
or better yet, they'd ferry people in by public transport and alleviate the area
of this kind of congestion, and . . .” he waved his hand in a circle in the air,
his index finger now stiff, pointing toward the roof of the car, “. . . all this
fucking pollution.” He closed his eye and leaned his head back again. Viveka
suppressed a smile at his use of the word
inanity
. The way, too, he stressed
it, i
nan
ity. The same rigid hand came back down, rigid but now studiously
weightless as a feather, to rest on her thigh again.

Inanity and fucking in the same sentence. How easily “fucking”
slipped out of his mouth lately.

With his eyes still closed, Trevor spoke in such a low voice that all she
heard was
short hair
, and several seconds passed before all the words of his
question materialized in her consciousness.

“Have you always had such short hair?” is what he had said,
she realized.

When she finally answered, she sounded terse without intending it.
“Only most of my life.”

Viveka had never said
fuck
, had not even whispered it when no one
was around to hear, which is not to say that she hadn't tried it out in her head.
It was a word scrawled on public walls, heard shouted angrily in the streets by people
she would not have known. It was not a word used by people she knew, except, she
imagined, in the privacy of their own heads, too. It is true that Trevor said it only
when they were alone, but more often now than when they first met.

He opened the left eye now, leaned his head forward again and squinted at
her. “You like that boyish look, don't you?”

“I don't think it is boyish.”

“No, no, you're right. It isn't boyish.”

As if out of nowhere, Trevor then asked how she and Helen had met.
“What about the two of you?” he added.

“What do you mean? What kind of a question is that?”

“Well, even though you still won't tell me just how close you
are, I know you're close to Anick. And you're not like girls from here.
It's why I am attracted to you. You're not the kind of woman Trinidadian men
like. Women like women like you. You've never actually told me, you know. What
about you and Anick?”

“Oh, come on, Trevor. How would you like it if I began questioning
you?”

“I don't mind at all. Ask me anything you like, as long as you
don't mind getting an answer.”

Viveka blushed so much that Trevor began laughing and said, “So, how
does she feel about us getting married?”

Viveka turned her face away. Trevor persisted.

“Does Nayan know about you two?”

“Know what? I never said anything about us.”

“You don't have to . . .”

Trevor waited for Viveka to respond, and when she didn't, he said,
“How long have you been lovers?”

“We
were
. We're not anymore.”

He shut his eye, rested his head back, and drew lines with the tip of his
baby finger, back and forth, on the soft skin of her thigh. She looked down. She had had
her legs waxed the day he arrived, before meeting him at the airport. They glistened
because she had rubbed them first with baby oil, and then with sunscreen lotion.

Last evening they had been sipping rum and Cokes, reading the newspapers
quietly on the patio at her parents' house. Trevor had looked up from his paper
abruptly and asked Viveka if she
was going to keep her last name
once they were married. She noticed that he didn't ask if she was going to take
his
name, but if she was going to keep her own. She had said, simply,
“Yes.” He picked up his paper again, leaving her staring into the sliver of
sea visible on the horizon.

Now the large splay of his pale pink hand with prominent green veins, like
vines under his skin, rested on her leg, his fingers curled loosely. The tips of them
fell against her inner thigh. The first time he had taken her hand in his, several long
weeks ago now, she had felt as if she were cheating. A nervous quiver had spread through
her stomach then, and she had withdrawn her hand altogether.