by Shani Mootoo
The following morning he is awakened, again early, from a fretful sleep. It is Cassie. She is calling from Guanagaspar. There is much static on the phone. He can barely hear her. She seems reluctant to speak loudly, her words guarded.
“I wanted to catch you before you headed off to work. Have you heard from my mother?”
He is perplexed. “I haven’t, Cassie. Aren’t you there with her now? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I can’t talk long. Can you come? Just say you will.”
A surge of rage engulfs him, and as quickly as it came, it subsides. He is on the verge of asking why, without the courtesy of an explanation, should he? Instead, resigned to the pull of a Bihar, he says, yes, he will come if it is necessary, he will come right away. Instantly Cassie retorts, “I have to go now, but I will arrange for you to be picked up at the airport. Just call to let me know when your flight is arriving.”
THE BIRDS
When Kay and Harry talk on the telephone later that day, she tells him that she wishes she had accepted his offer to spend the night at his house. He understands that this is not because she should not have driven impaired. He finds himself answering, in response to her admission, that there has been an emergency back home on the island, requiring him to return for a few days. As if her confession entitles her, she wants to know the details of the emergency. He mumbles that an old friend is gravely ill, says that the family has asked him to return. Although he has already arranged with a worker to care for the birds, Kay insists on keeping them herself and on driving him to the airport.
On the way Kay is silent, her face draining of color as Harry is obliged to explain further his relationship to this friend, the woman who had visited him in the summer, and to whose side he is so suddenly rushing. Harry suspects that Kay is congratulating herself on her astuteness in refusing his offer to spend the night at his house.
Curbside on the departure level, he can think of nothing appropriate to say. He leans his body toward her and embraces her briefly, but Kay holds herself stiffly. No words pass between them. He busies himself arranging his luggage on his shoulder, taking his ticket from his jacket’s inner pocket. Picking up his other bag, he turns and walks slowly toward the terminal.
II
A STORY
Guanagaspar. Long ago.
Once a week, the central plains of Guanagaspar, commonly known as Central, used to be supplied with fresh seafood by an old fellow of African origin. Mako the fisherman sold from the back of a pickup truck. After doing this work for over twenty years, Old Man Mako’s body began to wear out. Although he continued to fish, he passed his selling route to a young man named Seudath, who was of the Indian race. This fellow, as unlikely as it might have seemed, had, from the time he was a child, been like a son to the old black fisherman.
This Indian named Seudath, carrying a lidded wooden crate half filled with ice, half filled with carite, snapper, and shrimp, topped off with a weigh scale and a once-white canvas bag of weights, got a ride, his bicycle strapped atop, in a public transport jitney into Central. On the outskirts he would disembark, untie the bicycle, strap the crate to the handlebar, and bump his way along the winding dirt roads of the Central plains. Once the first of the line of barrack houses came into sight, he would begin squeezing the spongy salmon-colored rubber ball of his well-polished brass horn. Riding on a dirt road built up high, rice paddies on either side and cane fields on the outskirts, he hooted that horn as if clearing a path through chaotic traffic. In truth, all that darted off to make way for him were swarms of lazy dragonflies and stands, thick as Central’s ajoupa mud walls, of hovering mosquitoes. He would honk all the way, a thin sound like a donkey wheezing from the brass horn. He would take his hand off the rubber ball and grasp the handlebars intermittently in order to balance himself, fishy-smelling meltwater dripping the entire way. So doing, he gave the residents of Central enough time to fetch a plate, basin, sheets of paper, and to run outside to catch him and his fish before he passed them by. Central was good business for him. The only fish available to the people were the tilapia and the cascadura, which proliferated in the freshwater dams used to flood the rice fields in the dry season. Tilapia and cascadura were good-tasting but, in comparison to the robustness of fish from the sea, seemed bland.
And that was how the Indian named Seudath and Dolly’s worlds collided. When they first saw each other, Dolly wasn’t yet fourteen. She thought him to be unlike any Indian she knew. He wasn’t like her brother, who was serious and officious. He didn’t possess the pious calm or dignity of her father. He was brazen more like black people, she would tell her son with delight and pride; he was brazen, for so, the way he looked you straight in your face, in your eyes when he was talking to you. Brazenness was a sign, she had always heard, of craziness or don’t-careness, and an attribute of black people, not of Indian people, who were more careful about how they appeared to others. The unusual Indian fellow rode his bicycle with studied recklessness, swerving it from side to side, his legs splayed wide, honking that brass horn and grinning like a grouper. He was unabashed, asking people—people too withdrawn and suspicious of outsiders to answer—how life was treating them, how they were planning to cook his fish, to recommend a bush cure for this or that ailment. He had the ability to get them to stand up in the hot sun and chat long after they had bought his fish. He laughed and joked forthrightly with women, who came to like him once they put to rest their initial suspicion that he was after more than their fish money. His shirt, unbuttoned to his waist, exposed a remarkably muscled chest and gave the older women something to whisper and joke about lewdly among themselves.
He could not have been more unlike the Indian men of Central. Central men worked either in the rice fields or on sugarcane plantations or with the roadworks department of the government, cutlass-brushing the edges of the dirt roads and keeping bush around drains cropped to lower the risk of malaria. With the low wages they were paid—and they were paid by the task—they had to work as hard as the water buffalo they kept in mud ponds behind their barracks houses. They were serious, quiet men who became brazen, or laughed and raised their voices, only at the end of the workday, when they headed straight for the rum shop or congregated under someone’s house, where they drank pineapple babash to excess. Then more than a few of them could be counted on to exhibit everything from their bare bellies to their frightening belligerence. The same ones often became violent, ready to stick-fight with real or imaginary foes, or to fistfight in the privacy of their thin-walled homes.
But this Seudath fellow seemed different.
On hearing the hooting of the fisherman’s horn, Dolly’s mother, busy dropping chickpea flour balls into a pot of bubbling oil in the kitchen shed at the back of their house, handed her the big enamel basin and sent her out to buy four slices of snapper and a fish head. Dolly was not in the habit of looking directly into the eyes of a man, not even her father’s or her brother’s, but once she caught a glimpse of the fisherman’s eyes—the ocean deep and wide with foreign shores swimming in them—she couldn’t help but stare. She became uncomfortable when he asked her name. If a decent man wanted to know, he wouldn’t have been so crazy or rude as to directly ask a young woman her name. He would have sent someone of the same standing as her parents, perhaps the pundit’s wife, to inquire it of them—if he was good and decent, that is, and only, too, if he had some intentions. She thought and thought and concluded that perhaps she should ignore him. But she was also not in the habit of being insolent—to anyone, regardless of station. She chose to mumble, “Dolly,” but he heard it. Uncomfortable that she had responded, she didn’t look at him again but kept her eyes on the wheels of his bicycle. He gave her the snapper slices and the head. As she walked away without looking back, he rearranged the box of scales, weights, fish, and ice, climbed on, and rode off. He got about ten yards away, turned, and called out, “I name Seudath.” He saw her lose her balance on the two steps to the house, and he grinned. When he r
eturned to his seaside village of Raleigh, he immediately set out to look for a good piece of land. When he found what he was looking for, he began clearing it of the hardy old guava trees that grew wild. He brushcut a path he named Timbano Trace and began constructing a one-room dwelling.
Dolly not-yet-St. George was living in her parents’ portion of the barracks that once housed the workers for the sugar estate not far away in Central Guanagaspar. There was no moon.
She waited until she heard the deep unconscious breathing of every person in the house: her parents, sister, brother, and that of the families who lived on either side of their boxlike homes. She waited longer, until not even the snorting and braying of the quarrelsome mule and the water buffalo leashed behind the barracks line stirred. Then she crept out of the box and, once outside, traveled stooped along a bed of bitter-smelling marigolds. She looked back at the barracks. No lamps in any of the long line of side-by-side dwellings were being lit. She reached the end of the line and pelted down a slope in the direction of the tamarind tree, not considering that mapipire or coral snakes might be underfoot. She stopped by the tree. He was there; she could smell him. He had a particular scent. This Indian who was coming to meet her by the tamarind tree almost every other night smelled of sea salt, wet sand, seaside smoke, and ash from the incineration of discarded newspapers and fish parts. For a young girl who had never seen the sea, such a smell, such a man, was excitement.
One particular night when the air was still and humid and yellow, flamelike flashes of fireflies darting about in patterns that seemed choreographed, Seudath, her seaside Indian with a Christian last name, St. George, who came twice a week to see her, touched her in ways that made her body quiver, her heart quicken.
In the rice paddies all around them, frogs belted out rasping swamp songs. Seudath bent his head and smelled at the back of her neck the aromatic wood fire and incense from her family’s evening prayers. He touched her ears with his lips and uttered one word, “Tonight,” which in his excitement was rendered thick and coarse like a frog’s gasp. He cleared his throat and repeated it more clearly, adding, “Let me take you tonight, nuh?”
She said nothing.
He continued, “I will make you my dulahin if anything happen. I promise. Let me do it, nuh? I want to take you tonight.”
It didn’t take her mother a month to know. Her mother hit her over the head with a pot spoon, screamed, pulled her own hair and Dolly’s in rage. Dolly’s brother ran out of the house on hearing what shame had befallen the family, and from the yard, in front of neighbors he ripped up a prayer flagpole with which he threatened to beat his sister. When Dolly’s mother threw herself in a screaming frenzy on the hard clay ground in front of him, pleading with him not to hit his sister, and held on to his trouser legs so that he was able to make only small steps as he either dragged her along with him or was tripped by her, he dropped the stick, and in a voice hoarse from screaming, he threatened to douse Dolly later that same day with kerosene for the scandal that would be a handle to the family name forever. After a shower, a meal, and an offering to one of his gods, he decided instead of the dousing to oversee banishing her forever from Central. He sent a message to the fisherman from Raleigh to come and fetch the girl he had destroyed, but not to show his face near the house.
On the day of the banishment, a handful of people congregated near, but not in front of, the house on the pretense of merely going for a stroll. They watched Dolly walk away empty-handed from her parents’ house, looking back at her brother, who was the only one standing like a bull ready to charge, and she pleaded in vain with her eyes. The strange more-African-than-Indian Indian in the jitney was waiting at the far end of the line down which he usually rode his bicycle. When they saw him alight and run toward Dolly, everyone started shouting obscenities at him. They all picked up rocks and ran toward Seudath and Dolly, pelting them.
Tante Eugenie, wife of Raleigh’s most elderly fisherman, the African Mako, lived down by the coconut tree whose trunk was shaped like a Z. She knew everything and everybody, and everybody knew her, and she had taken care of Seudath St. George from the day he was found, a little child abandoned in the fishing village. He hadn’t been at the one-room dwelling with Dolly twenty minutes when Tante Eugenie came shouting out to him, telling him to bring his woman out into the sunshine to meet Tante Eugenie. She didn’t come with her arms swinging. She carried her pipe in one hand and in the other a basket woven from vetiver, filled with live crabs whose claws were tied with reeds, edoes, plantain, and green bananas gathered from the land around her house a few minutes’ walk away. She settled herself onto the lower board of the front steps, shoving her bare foot into the hot dry sand and wriggling her toes about, sifting the sand through them. She put an arm around Dolly’s shoulders and took some long quiet drags on her pipe. She felt the fear and aloneness, the sadness, of the young girl who was likely not going to see her family again. Ahead, the sea sprawled on endlessly. There was no horizon that day, just a haze where sea and sky became one.
Tante Eugenie told Dolly things about Seudath. He was the only Indian in all the fishing village of Raleigh. He grew up there with everybody, but mainly Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako, taking care of him.
Tante Eugenie told Dolly that when Seudath was found, they asked him his name. He stopped crying long enough to say in between heaving sobs, “I name Seudath.”
Some weeks later, Dolly and her Indian from by the sea were married in a seaside church in Raleigh, in the western parish of St. George.
One of the first things Tante Eugenie warned Dolly was that the wife of a fisherman and the wife of a policeman had much in common, the worst of which was that once their husbands left for work, nobody knew if they would be seen again. Dolly took that warning to heart and cherished her Seudath day and night, dreading the day she was sure her sweet and strange Indian wouldn’t return.
Early one morning before the sun was up, mere weeks before their child was born, Seudath went out in a pirogue with two other men. Dolly didn’t go out with him that morning like she usually did, carrying a salt-fish-and-bake breakfast and a bottle of tea in a cloth sack for him. She was in her last month of pregnancy. She hadn’t slept that night. Her feet were swollen, her back hurt, she was unbearably big, heavy, and hot, so hot she couldn’t breathe all night long. Come morning Seudath could see her discomfort. He told her not to come, and when she didn’t protest, he knew she really couldn’t. He kissed her bulging belly, and even though he had work to get to, he took the time, all of a couple of minutes, to make the gesture of squeezing one of her swollen feet and assuring her that it wasn’t going to be long before she had her body back to herself again. He remained quiet until she had drifted off to sleep. She didn’t even hear when he opened the door, or when he pushed it back in behind him.
The wife of one of the men had gone down to the water carrying salt-fish cakes and tea she had made for them that morning. She remembers the sun just breaking the horizon. She recalls watching the three men set the net out quietly and neatly over the sand, unfolding and unknotting, and she watched them walk into the water, leap out over the first small waves, grabbing the side of the pirogue and hoisting themselves in. She knew it was Dolly’s husband, by his distinguishing red jersey, who was pulling the cord on the engine many times before it would catch and hold, its slow chug, an emission of blue smoke trailing behind them. But a few minutes later, while she could still see them, and though they were still in hearing distance, the sound of the engine seemed to have died out. She heard it start up and die out several times, then it took again and was steady, and so she walked back up the beach slowly, listening as long as she could hear.
It took three sets of wave patterns—first two or three small waves coming blithely ashore, rolling back out to accumulate as the next larger one, then a lull as they all gathered in a swell towering high over the horizon line, blocking any view she might have had of the boat, then tumbling and breaking with a thunderous crash, a hard, swi
ft roll high up the beach, spreading out so unexpectedly warm all around her feet that it startled her—before she heard that familiar slow chug, the sound of the engine at work. It became gradually faster until it was a full, steady drone taking a good half hour, perhaps more, she said, to fade into the distance. Only after they were but a speck seen in between the rise and fall of the ocean’s waves did she go back into her house. That was the last of them.
A few hours later, sky and sea turned shades of gray, and in moments, some parts even black. It was full of tides, lines of ripples, the language of the ocean that fishermen and their families know. The sea chopped and boomed. Waves formed far, far out, and at their fullest, they stretched up like ravenous mouths opening wide. They brutally dissected one another, ran against one another. Ones racing backward slammed into others that were pelting forward, and each wave that shattered rolled high up the beach, scattering chip-chip, pebbles, sea cockroaches, and starfish, spitting fringes of dense, ocher-colored froth laced with seaweed, tangled lengths of fishing lines, bits of old net, and cork floaters. Air that blew in from across the ocean was heavy with the scent of things from the ocean’s bed ripped up and churned. Tante Eugenie had sniffed that particular odor early and came immediately to keep a silent watch with Dolly. They went down by the water’s edge and watched. Dolly, cradling her belly, rubbing the top as if to soothe the baby growing inside her, stared, her eyes wide and blank. The baby in her belly reached and grabbed some part of her inner anatomy, and she thought then that if she herself were to step into the water, it might pull them both far, far in. She retreated up the beach some paces. A strong wind rolled in from the ocean, bringing with it that smell again. That night the sea calmed. For three days Dolly, accompanied by Tante Eugenie, kept watch on the beach. The sea remained tranquil, barely a wave forming, the water’s surface undulating like a sheet of clear cellophane in a light wind. Nights there was the usual soft, benevolent drizzle of rain. Days the sky was cyan in parts, cerulean and sapphire elsewhere, but always shades of blue, and the sun yellowing the sand didn’t leave anything alone. The beach glistened. The water close to the shore was clearer than glass; pebbles, shells, fine sand magnified and danced, and farther out to the horizon, it was virtuous. Whitecaps like rows of white roses, bunches of white chrysanthemums, burst, showed off, then frayed, blending into the ocean again. The air had the guileless scent of sun and salt. Coconut trees, brilliant yellow, their trunks white like the sand, fanned the beach, and the fishing pirogues lined up, posing as if nothing had happened, as if awaiting the arrival anytime soon of a photographer from town, or abroad, or an oil painter. It would have been inconceivable to someone passing by on the main road, watching the picturesque seaside village, the ground under the coconut trees covered in orange crocuses waving at them, inviting them even, that tragedy had befallen Raleigh. On the evening of the third day, the sea still close-lipped and innocent-looking, Dolly reluctantly made her way back into her house and wrapped herself in white.
