Measures of Expatriation

by Vahni Capildeo

  The scission, when I finished losing my body, was in January. Christmas was just past and I was due to travel up to Scotland for Hogmanay, so it was still the Old Year, the turn of winter over the calendar, when the high fever set in. I was invited to come north anyway, and be looked after; but I was not strong enough to deposit my temperature on the train and carry my germs across the Border.

  I had been aware of greater tiredness than normal, but what is normal? Winter in Oxford was a scant pause for the trees that minded their own business and continued more or less strenuously to branch and bud. A layer of coconut frosting on the ground looked more like a birthday cake than serious weather, and disappeared faster.

  So, this winter was not normal. The tall nineteenth-century windows that let in light from the south and west were filled with blackness in between falling snow. The snow fell, and settled, and went on falling. The snow settled, and did not melt, and more snow fell. A small white dog could have been buried in the amounts that drifted up around the annexe door. Twigs were coated to several times their thickness. The roofs of the next door pub and its add-on buildings could have been any shape under their pitiless cover. At whatever hour that I looked out, there were the lines and monuments of this winter’s victory; and those were many hours.

  For my tiredness was not normal. Overnight the skin of my face blistered and began to peel off like paint on a badly neglected wall. I had no thermometer. Was this fever? Morning after morning my lips, stuck together with dryness, needed lotion rubbed in to them before they would open and I could drink water. They cracked deeply and widely at the corners, visible slits as if made by a letter-opener, and bled as I took the first sips. I dabbed with a tissue, and saw scarlet. The cracks blistered but would not fill up with flesh or cover over with scab. The reasons I did not immediately ring the doctor are not to be told here; suffice it to say that I was too accustomed to people who varied between unseeing and unseen.

  I creamed my lips and watched the winter. I became frightened only when the lead box installed itself in my rib cage: walking from the bedroom to the kitchen necessitated a stop on the sofa, and lifting a glass brought on hyperventilation.

  Let these procedures not be questioned.

  I visited the official website. The website diagnosed me with official swine flu. No tests would be done. I took the number I was issued, and knew it was pointless to call my doctor, for I could not get myself to that location. The official website informed me that everyone ill in Britain needed a ‘flu friend’, who would collect their medication. I rang a few acquaintances who might have stayed at home during the festive season. Their mobiles connected to differently pitched signals: international ones: before switching to answerphone. The woman in the flat above me had gone away. As usual, footsteps or creaky boards sounded in her empty flat; they were of no use. No post was being delivered through the snow, so there was no point looking for a pileup on the stairs that might tell me nobody had been in at all. I listened out. The great emptiness assured me that this house, divided into flats, was holding itself in during the snow. I was its breathing.

  The official website directed me to the so-called Primary Care Trust. Relieved to see they were located in my neighbourhood, I rang. Soon antibiotics would drop through the brass flap; I would wander germily down the stairs, making rest stops when the lead box was awkward, and wander back up to start waging internal war against the infection. The person who answered the phone had an audible conversation with his colleague. If she doesn’t have a number and she hasn’t spoken to her GP we don’t have to give her the Tamiflu. I gave the number several times, to two people, in the course of a few minutes. Each time, they seemed not to remember that I had consulted the website and given them an official number. I pushed back memories of Passport Control, and the memorable twenty minutes when I reiterate where I live or where I was born and the blandness of my desired voyaging… the classical music of the wrong origin; twenty minutes is long enough to perform some concertos. The Primary Care Trust would call me back.

  The woman on the other end of the phone raised her voice and began a patter like a fishmonger desperate to move on her rotting wares and raise enough money to cover her husband’s rum habit. I had to have family; friends; co-workers; neighbours…? You seem to have difficulty in understanding that someone might be alone at Christmas. There must be someone...! Only a friend, one of those truly dear friends who nonetheless are seen fewer than five times a year, in another village, expecting a second child, living with her toddler… exactly the Flu Friend to brave the House of Plague… Well, if she’s pregnant the child can’t be that small!... I realized that she had elicited a biography from me: of immigration, a broken relationship and unemployment: and an analysis, of how doors close on English houses during their holidays. The lead box was pressing closer to the surface of my chest. I raised my voice in turn and dehumanized the woman and rang off, and fell asleep with the effort of it. I woke to the doorbell. The reluctant health worker walked up a couple of stairs and extended her arm like a kindergarten flag waver at a national parade. I smiled infectiously at her and started down the stairs. With undisguised horror she thrust the tiny packet in its oversized envelope towards me, and fled.

  Let these procedures not be questioned.

  By this time I was not solid at all. I had the colours of Snow White: lips as red as blood (but in the wrong way); sky and hair black as ebony; and the slant of descending white to look at. What was inside, what was outside? I stopped trying to contact anyone, and found it would be two weeks or more before anyone would contact the childless, no-news nowherian. In those days something changed.

  This was the first spring of disconnection.

  So why not you and I… a music-box dusting itself off as its ballerina figurine twirls… Some melody played itself in previous springs, as pollen blew and temperate colours reasserted themselves waxily, waterishly, pink and white; the external and internal flickered up again, always…

  This year I knew that had been youth. Spring would not come again with a sense of oneness. It was not in my future to soften and burgeon. The young kangaroo mothers and grim boyish lovers and ice-cream-on-a-stick screaming mess of children, the leafmeal and paper wrapper litter, swirled together, adhered to railings and bus stop signs, washed up again and toppled and proceeded to paint the city with an impression of life.

  The hearts of the roses outside the Botanic Garden were an embarrassment of potential. The depth, the disclosure… Out of rhythm with the natural process, I became gentler with old people and thought about soldiers, whether for them spring had elements of homecoming.

  The sun is so bright, the eye is a blackboard. The car approaching the crossroads slows down. Four walls of shimmering air are too much for the mind’s eye. It perceives and makes memories of what it sees as if sitting in a cool classroom. A woman in white is waiting to cross the East Oxford road. She flutters. Her silhouette, instantly recognizable, feels extra familiar; her clothing is old-fashioned North Indian.

  So much of cloth. An older woman’s voice whispers disapproval in my ear. Why so much of cloth, when dresses would not be frowned on by the guardians of good behaviour? My grandmother’s generation was already permitted to wear colonial-export challis cotton or georgette print, fastened with covered buttons like those on living room furniture. The knees would not quite be exposed. The uncovered legs might be sturdy, twentieth-century varicose originals of the limbs adored in bronze or sandstone by pre-Christian-era sculptors. The uncovered legs might be spindly, kin to those that bend again and again among the leaves of some labour-intensive crop on its way towards the airtight hold of a fragrant destiny. The partly razored legs might be sleek with cocoa butter or coconut oil, rubbed in by the hands of grandchildren who learn the mysteries of pain and age from the question-command, ‘Come and rub your Ajee’s legs!’

  If you see the pictures like Auntie Sati had – you remember the batik pictures? – we never covered ourselves up. Covering ours
elves up, that is a new thing. Maybe it is a Muslim thing, maybe it is a Western thing. Those women in the pictures, some of them are not even wearing a choli. They tie their sari across their bare chest. I do not know whether what the older voice says is true.

  Widow: the white drapery identifies the woman poised at the kerbside. White-is-the-colour-of-brides-black-is-the-colour-of-mourning: no. Dissonant and spectral associations have to be pushed away when I sit in a church whose stony atmosphere is fertilized by the overspilling of satin and orchids and tears of joy as the bride navigates the aisle. The strong florals are overlaid by those of a tropical night and the cool striking up under my feet seems to strike up more directly. Sitting in church in the afternoon, facing a crucifix, I am standing barefoot in a marble courtyard in the dark, the Dancing Siva at my back, the Kali shrine still to be built. A row of women assembles itself on foldup metal chairs. They are in white drapery and look so much alike, whited out in widowhood, that I embrace my great-aunt, taking her for my grandmother.

  Because I am superstitious, I am stringing a series of lights here once more.

  *

  ‘Black,’ my mother says darkly, ‘is a colour of joy.’ Kali is black. Black contains all the colours; it is ultimate colour.

  Can you see the flame in front of the bronze tiger?

  The wick has blackened and at the base of the flame is a note of steely blue. Reflections shine red-gold.

  Yesterday I walked again in the green space.

  This has been thought for you.

  Measures of Expatriation — II

  The Prolongation of the Spine and the Stretched Neck Approximate the French Philosopher Only to His Own, and Airy, Beast

  after Georges Bataille, ‘La Bouche’

  The mouth is planetary, circled by systematic tides. The molten core, the tongue-root; the microbial cities; the sirocco and austerities of breath.

  *

  The mouth is geographical to the extent that the body is terrain. The tiny life of flaking skin and self-mating thighs may exist and teem without language; the python inhabiting the buccal cavity may remain uninterpretable, too big to be perceived, by the atheistic dermal crowd.

  *

  The mouth is engineered by gender. In grief and anger, my sister’s mouth will twist into a trap, it will not drop to let out the paroxysmal bellow which would be permitted her in childbirth; however and alas, her mouth seals itself, even her lips turn in as her eyes widen and the sinews in her neck become unmusically, why not furiously, strung.

  *

  The mouth is an anemone. See, in the dark wood it flowered and, sensing something, your hair raised up; but the social occasion smoked over your possible paths into the dark wood that flowered with promise and that tussored over the sleeping area of snakes.

  *

  The mouth is half of a knot. With my lips I tie you; our bodies are boat and floating jetty, our cinched animality no doubt locatable by the anxious Frenchman, who is rendered anxious because we have unnerved the chapterhouse of his skull and outside his studious window, oh so suddenly, cry after cry unnerves the night, as we prolong the ground as sea beneath his feet, as we slip (mouths knotted) out from the erotic vessels of ourselves, careless of the power to hurt or to do none.

  Investigation of Past Shoes

  INSIDE THE GATEWAY: 1970S RED CLOGS WITH SIDE BUCKLE

  The forever shoe, which points homewards, belongs to my mother. When our house was being built, she stepped onto the driveway while the tarmac was still wet, still setting. Ever since that step, the driveway, which slants upwards, bears an imprint of her 1971 footwear. Her footprint says, Climb! Come with me. Whoever steps into that impression becomes, for a moment, the leggy wearer of a fire-red clog with a piratical silver buckle on the side.

  OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE: GOLD AND SILVER SANDALS

  The sandals which will make a female of me belong to many women. The front of the temple entrance hides itself behind shoe-racks. Visitors enter barefooted, leaving behind the dung, dried frogs, spilled petrol and ketchup traces of the streets. Hundreds of pairs of gold and silver sandals wait here for the women who will re-emerge from the vigil with the taste of basil leaf and sugar in their deep-breathing mouths and carpet fibres between their toes. The sandals, gold and silver, seem all alike. How can the women tell them apart? They do tell them apart. It is as if each pair sings an intimate mantra to its owner, audible only to her. One day I too shall return to expectant slippers that stack up like the moon and the stars outside a marble building; one day I shall not have to wear child’s shoes.

  SUNDAY BEFORE SCHOOL: WHITE SNEAKERS

  Seven years of these shoes are a chemical memory. The Convent ruled that pupils’ shoes must be white: absolutely white. Who can imagine a 1980s shoe that was absolutely white, without any logo, with no swoosh, not a single slogan? Sunday evenings, before the school week, I crouched down on the pink bathroom tiles and painted my shoes into the absolute of whiteness; like the Alice in Wonderland gardeners repainting roses. This task was performed with a toothbrush and with special paste that annihilated so many design features. Purity was attained by the application of a whitener that stank of scientific polysyllables. Convent-girl identity. Tabula rasa. Toxicity and intoxication: with good intentions, getting high on paste.

  BAD MARRIAGE SHOES: SILVER BALLET SLIPPERS

  When I met my ex, I was already committed to heels: black ankle boots with four-inch stacks for walking through snow; French cream curved suède stilettos for scaling fire-escape ladders on to rooftops to admire the winter sky; even after I left him, scarlet satin bedroom-only spiky mules to amuse myself. Early on, my ex said that the way women walk in heels looks ugly. And my nails made unnatural social appearances: emerald lacquer; cobalt; incarnadine. Sign of a bad marriage: I began to wear flats. The penitential mermaid shoes, worn once and once only, were a Gabor creation: distressed silver ballet slippers with netted and criss-cross side details which would make the material seem to swish with the changes of light on feet that go walking. Cool as moonlight on a tourist coastline. But the inner stitching hooked the softness of my skin, which has always been too soft; but I could not turn back, for we had tickets to an evening of Mozart; but the paper tissues that I stuffed into my shoes failed to act as a protective lining. Paper tissue snowflecks teardropped with crimson blood created a trail behind me as I ascended the many tiers of the wedding-cake concert hall.

  BAREFOOT: PEARL PINK POLISH

  Sitting next to someone can make my feet curl: shy, self-destructive and oyster-like, they want to shuck their cases, to present themselves, little undersea pinks; their skin still is too soft, their toes still too long, their ankles still too slender, for a modern fit. But he is not modern; he sits like stone, and my bare feet are cool, they will not have to bleed.

  ‘I Love You’

  for Geraldine Monk

  ‘I love you,’ he wouldn’t say: it was against his philosophy; I-love-you didn’t mean what it meant, plus the verray construction of the phrase caused bad-old-concrete-lawman-vandal-verbal-mildew-upon-the-grape-harvest-and-war-for-rare-minerals-required-to-manufacture-communications-devices damage; saying I-love-you damaged love, subject and object; plus he could prove this in two dense and delphic languages suitable for philosophy, opera, cursing, and racking the nerves of artificial intelligence machines that perhaps could love but would be hard-wired giammai to dare say so. So what moved him to not-say I-love-you? What wake-up-and-spoil-the-coffee ashtray-licking djinn? I have to start to agree. The verbness of it impropriety (eyes glob up the syringe when you’re giving blood: semisolid spiralling); perhaps too active… I-love-you, I sand you, I drill you, I honey and set you for wasps, crimson you like a stolen toga, add value applying dye, fight ownership, I cite you to justify skilled outrage, put your name as guarantor on an astronomical mortgage, I admit desertification comes as a relief, from I to O, O my oasis, O my mirage. Maybe the verb is a tending-towards? A tightrope? A tropism? A station? But that’s me
eting him on his own ground; plus I can’t disprove entire languages; plus those three little words aren’t meant as saying. An icy drink in stormlight. A looked-at leaf left to transpire its own way until… And sans I-love-you the centuried moon rose above dinnermint stone; many men continued talking; a woman lifted her sarsenet skirt, peed on green lilies and, utterly gracious, walked through the archway to join the mixed group delighting in – word! believe it! – fresh air.

  Chloe on the Jubilee

  for Shivanee Ramlochan

  The staring heterosexuals disembark,

  having stared, openly, having picked the direction

  for their stares: a few cubic inches,

  mostly compacted of woman; staring