Valmiki's Daughter (5 page)

Another boy piped up, “Five times nought equals nought five times one is five five times two is ten five times three is . . . five times three is what? I forget.”

They cackled at this, and then the first boy continued, “Krishnu, tell we, na. You ever try talking to one of them school
books? You ever sit down and ol' talk, and have a good laugh with a science book, boy?”

Valmiki nodded thoughtfully and he even managed a small laugh, as if to say the boy had made a good point. He did not show his hurt.

Old samaan trees with verdant umbrella tops spread a cooling shade across the acres and acres of undulating land that had been in his father's family for seventy years. The sky, and the trees' foliage, and their trunks, took on a yellow tinge with the evening light and the treetops trembled with parakeets. The birds made a racket with their incessant twittering and the fluttering of their restless wings as they landed, each one hopping about urgently, searching out the right spot in which to pass the approaching night. In vain the boys combed the soft rich earth beneath for rocks with which to pelt the parakeets. They tried using fallen sticks and bits of branches that had dried, but these were too light and the boys did not have the power to launch them high enough. They pelted doodose mangoes and then used fallen bird-pecked ones to try to bring down others. They climbed into the generous cradle of the governor plum tree because it was low and easy to climb.

For a while Valmiki was pleased that his father's property could provide these boys with entertainment. But they became bored quickly enough, and picked up again and carried on mercilessly the theme of Valmiki's biscuits and tea. He said nothing, shamed that he had been gorging on his second helping of pudding. Being the son of the wealthiest man in the area was more of a strain than something to revel in. These boys, whose fathers were labourers on the sugar-cane estates or in the nearby sugar factory, and whose mothers were government-paid water carriers for the road works programs, had the ability to easily make him
feel inferior, powerless; they could tease him about his privileges, about his family's fancy ways, but he dared not say a word about their poverty or narrower future prospects. Suddenly, he realized that he had the power to be more benevolent than they, and he decided that he would exercise this power. He would offer them something more tangible and special than the chance to throw sticks uselessly at birds. So he led them through the pasture to one of the sheds where more than thirty cows were housed. He had heard it said that no one in the area kept cows anymore. His father, Mr. Krishnu, owner of the cattle estate, wouldn't allow it, others said. Whether this was true or not, reasoned Valmiki, the cows would be a novelty.

No one but employees and Valmiki's father and brothers were allowed inside the fetid barn with its miasma of cooped-up, hot cow bodies, the milky sweetness of newborn calves, bales of dry grass — some rotted and fermenting in the heat — spilled milk that had soured, and the stench from two brimming open-mouthed pits along the centre aisle into which dung, sometimes a loose slick, sometimes stubborn, matted straw and syrupy urine, were hosed twice a day. But Valmiki marched in confidently, doing his best to ignore the odours and completely ignoring, as if they weren't there, the same men who greeted him, and whom he greeted, mornings and afternoons as he left and returned with the chauffeur for school. The three boys with him, meanwhile, gagged at the stench. They shoved the toes of their school sneakers under the edge of the piles of grass stored in the aisle, dragging out strands onto the uneven concrete path. They made lewd gestures at the cows, which stared back with eyes bulging but unfazed while chewing their cuds and used their tails to lash at sultana-sized flies that crawled on and bit their bodies. The boys mooed, and when a cow mooed — either
back at them or simply because it did — they made a racket of mooing sounds.

Rakes and shovels leaned against a post, and one of the boys headed for these but Valmiki sharply told him not to touch them. To his surprise, the boy acquiesced immediately. Valmiki himself then lifted a large galvanized iron pail off a hook on another post, dragged it with a ruckus along the ground, and then slid with it under the slatted gate of one of the pens. He had to brace himself with one hand on the ground. The ground was wet. In the low light he could not see what he had put his hand in. He wanted to smell it, but he knew that if he did, and if it were cowexcrement, not only the smell but the idea of it would weaken his resolve in front of his friends. He wiped his hand on the side of his pants. One of the workers made his way over. The cows, hearing the metallic sounds made by the bucket, shifted their weight from side to side. Restless, their tails whipped about. When the other boys tried to follow Valmiki under the gate, Valmiki stopped them. He patted the cow on its side. It tamped the grass beneath its feet, moving its body closer to Valmiki as if to nestle against him. One of the boys managed to slip under the gate.

“Bayta,” the worker mumbled, not enjoying contradicting the actions of his boss's son, and more so in front of the boy's playmates, “your pappy ent go like for you be in here. You go dutty up your clothes.”

Now, as an adult, Valmiki recalled the man wearing a white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and a white cloth tied around his head like a rough turban. In his memory the man wore grey trousers and he was barefoot. The man's clothing, as far as he could recall, was spotless, but then he doubted his memory, for reason would suggest that anyone working in a cattle barn and dressed in white was bound to get
the stain of grass-feed on his clothing, if nothing else. For an instant Valmiki wondered how much of his memory was reliable, how much of it he had invented or doctored. Hadn't he felt his face go red with anger that the man would talk to him like that in front of those boys? Hadn't he told the man sharply that his father didn't know he was in there, and what he didn't know wouldn't bother him? He was able to hear, as clearly as if it were yesterday, one of the boys outside of the pen tease, “Let's get out of here, man. This place stinking fuh so. Ey, Valmiki, you living by a stinking place, boy. Even the open drain in front my house don't smell so bad.”

Valmiki remembered ignoring the boy and all that followed. “You want to taste some nice fresh milk?” he had persisted.

He slipped the pail beneath the cow. In response, the worker who had spoken with him before swung open the gate. The man was suddenly stern. And Valmiki remembers him now, his clothes in Valmiki's memory now gleaming, and the man standing straight and tall. “Bayta, that cow give milk for the day. It need a rest now.”

Valmiki clenched his teeth and ignored the man. He knelt down beside the cow. The man sighed hard. Even if the boy was only twelve years old, this was the boss's son. Valmiki grabbed hold of the teats and worked them one at a time, as he had seen done, and as if he had done it a thousand times before. He was determined. Fortunately, a forceful stream of white milk shot into the pail noisily, opaque bubbles rapidly forming. The other boys were finally impressed. They bent down to watch and whistled in awe. Valmiki, sweating, released the teats and stood up only when the pail was half full. The others wanted to try. Valmiki knew better than to let them. That would have been going much too far. He tried to lift the pail himself, but the milk
sloshed from side to side. Some of it spilled, and the man rushed to take the pail from Valmiki. “What you want to do with this?” he asked, showing his anger and frustration by not addressing the boy with the usual affectionate Hindi word for son. Valmiki told him to empty the milk into three bottles. He sent each boy home with a bottle.

Valmiki was whipped that night on his raw backside with a guava switch for not staying in to do his homework, for going into the barn, for taking boys from the village there, for showing off, for getting cow dung on his hands and on his pants, for milking a cow, for milking a cow that had already been milked for the day, and for giving away milk to neighbours when those very ones, like all others, were accustomed to buying it.

Valmiki pleaded weakly, “It was just milk, Pappa. Just three bottles. I will pay you back from my allowance.”

Valmiki's father retorted with the violent calm of the one wielding the switch, which came down on his son seven more times: “You BETTER LEARN the VALUE of business FAST, you hear? And take THIS! For not being MAN enough to STAND UP to those boys, for LETTING OTHER children lead you into doing wrong.” His father, finished, pushed Valmiki away. Valmiki tried to pull up his underpants, but the bite and burn of his buttocks was too great. He put his hands on his backside to calm the pain, but the heat of them only made the fire burn more. Valmiki's mother finally took him by his shoulders and ushered him toward his own room. His father's voice grew loud again. “Let him go and live in the village for a day or two with those same people. He wouldn't last a minute. You think I hit him good? They will beat his ass to a pulp.”

Valmiki's mother rubbed aloe on his buttocks until his sobbing eventually subsided and he lay limp. The sheet about his
face was wet from his crying, and about his body it was drenched in the sweat of humiliation and anger at his father. All the while his mother cooed, “Bayta, don't mind your pappa. He have a temper. He love you, child, but he find you too soft. Mamma love you, too.” She held his face and turned him to face her. “Just so, just how you stay. Don't mind Pappa beat you. He is not a bad man, he just want you to toughen up a little.” Valmiki was perplexed at the softness his parents saw in him, and from then on he pondered how he might fix that.

He hadn't seen those boys, men they would be now, in more than thirty years. Trinidad wasn't a big country, but still their paths wouldn't readily have crossed. He only thought of them and this incident because of his patient's story. He wondered where those three boys — men — were now. If he knew and called them up right that minute, could he have said to them, Let's go find a cow to milk, or a bar to drink dry and catch up? And would they go? They might have continued the old teasing in a good-natured manner, and in a good-natured manner he would have accepted it because they would all see that he had changed and was no longer the boss's too-soft, mamsy-pamsy son.

BACK THEN, HE HADN'T WANTED TO BE WHERE HE WAS RIGHT NOW,
that was for sure. If his own son were still alive, he couldn't help but think — and he imagined a boy of five or so, not a youth of eighteen, which would make chronological sense — he would have that second got into his car and taken the boy out of school, driven with him to the foot of the San Fernando Hill or into the forested lands of the central hills, and taken him hunting, or at least to catch birds there. This, in spite of the fact that he had never actually taken his son anywhere, his son being a sickly boy from the day he was born until he died at age five. Instead, he
had several times taken Viveka, older than her little brother by two years, to the forested lands, and walked her along a cutlassed path so that he could show her where he hunted. He used to be big in her eyes then, bigger than he was in anyone else's, ever. How could a child, your own daughter, unsettle you so, without you knowing exactly why?

“Those were different days then, weren't they?” Valmiki mumbled, returning to his patient, raising his eyebrows as if in surprise at himself.

Mr. Deosaran offered, in a quiet tone, “Sometimes the doctor might need to see a doctor too, not so, Doc?”

Valmiki rubbed his mouth with a circular hand motion. Finally he said, “You know, the truth is that the doctor can't fix everything.”

Thinking that his advice was being solicited, the man grew bolder. “Well, I could take it if the doctor can't fix heself. That make a kind of sense. But I hope the doc still good with his patients.”

At this, Dr. Krishnu snapped back fully. He looked Mr. Deosaran directly in the eyes, assured him that while everyone else was easy to care for, the doctor himself was typically the worst patient. He muttered, “Physician heal thyself,” to which the Mr. Deosaran said, “That is a good one, Doc. They should make that a saying. Is a good one.” The man picked up the umbrella he had left by the door, lifted his hat to his head, and tapped it into place. Then he backed out of the door.

And that was when Valmiki leaned toward the table, tipped the swivel chair forward, and dug his elbows into his desk. He brought his palms together as if to pray, although he was far from doing any such thing. He tapped together the tips of his first three fingers, opened his palms, and lowered his face into them just as Zoraida rang.

“Yes?” His voice was muffled because of the hand pressed against a portion of his lips. Still, his terseness with Zoraida in that one word was palpable. He resented having put himself in the position of needing her. She knew — not everything, but certainly a great deal about him, and he hardly anything of her. And he certainly didn't want her thinking that because he had intimate dealings with more than one of the women who paid him visits in his office, she had any chance of falling in among them. It must have naturally crossed her mind — for what perks might come with that! — but she surely saw the similarity among the women he favoured. They were — the exception being his wife — foreign white women, all beautiful in the way that men commonly — or common men — liked their women. No doubt she knew better than to try to cross any more lines than she already had.

She
did
take liberties. For example, sometimes he sent her to buy his lunch at the doubles vendor on the promenade. One or two dollars in change should have been returned to him, but more often than not, they were not. Two dollars was nothing to him, but the boldness of her actions, and the fact that he felt he had no choice but to allow her this audacity, made him fume. If she put off doing a task, like letting office supplies run out entirely before reordering, he fumed then, too, but to himself. Occasionally he dared chastise her, but she would interrupt him almost kindly. “What you said, Dr. Krishnu? How you talking as if you not feeling good today?”