by Shani Mootoo
TLIP-TLAP TLIP-TLAP TLIP-TLAP. With every step Otoh’s rubber thongs slapped the road. Cars went by, each driver slowing to look at him, curious as to why in a town the size of theirs they had not heard about the event that would warrant the wearing of a suit. One car pulled over, keeping pace with him. The driver, an out-of-towner who regularly visited for some unknown reason, leaned out of the window and chatted him up. He had admired Otoh from afar. Seeing him today dressed so beautifully, sauntering up the road with unsurpassed grace in spite of the hot sun, an untidy load in his arms, the stranger had a reason to accost him.
“Psssst! Young man, where you going? You want a ride?”
“Not far,” said Otoh, “but thank you all the same.”
But his voice, unusually silky for a man’s, intrigued the out-of-towner more. Shaded by the brim of his fedora, Otoh’s black eyes and long, full eyelashes made the man even more desirous. Flattered by the attention, Otoh was both amused and bewildered at how much the man assumed.
“Don’t be so shy, na. I might be going your way. As a matter of fact, I will even go out of my way—for you—and take you right where you going. But, look at that load you carrying in the hot sun, na. It must be heavy for so. What you say?”
Otoh grinned. “No. Really. Thank you. I going to see a friend and is better I take my time and walk there.”
“Who is this lucky friend you dress up nice-nice so, goin’ to see? Tell me, na? Why she—is a she you going to see or is a he? don’t mind me asking, you know. Why she so lucky and not me? A nice fella like you need a friend to show you the ropes. Let me give you a ride, na? Is a gramophone you have there? You like to dance?”
“But you does ask a lot of questions,” laughed Otoh. “Really, I don’t need a ride, thank you kindly. I don’t have far to go. And is a lady friend I going to visit.”
“Oh. Well, let me take you by she. You could make your visit and I go wait for you. Then you could come back with me. You didn’t answer. You like dancing? Because I—”
“No, thank you again. I spending the morning with she.”
“Okay, spend the morning and I’ll come and meet you back by noon. Then we could set up the gramophone. What you say?”
The proposition amused Otoh. He enjoyed the flirtation and was reluctant to end it. But since there was no point in carrying on in this vein, he dribbled water on the desires of the amorous out-of-towner.
“You are very kind, but I am not sure how long this will take. You see, you could say that I am courting her.”
“Oh, you courting her. You? You courting a woman! I see. Is a lady you courting, eh. Uhuh. Well, I better not keep you back, because I have to go and meet my wife to take she to matinee. And my children coming with us too. What I was asking you was to come to the pictures with my family. You understand, na.”
The man drove off, his brick-red face sweaty. Otoh smiled and picked up his pace.
He had decided that his delivery that day would be made at the front gate. On arrival he used the top of the biscuit tin to check his hair and scarf. He pushed the gate, expecting it to open. Instead the entire fence made one long creak, like the sound of a misplayed violin, and lethargically tilted backward. Otoh almost lost his balance and the goods. He looked around. He felt foolish to have damaged the fence when his intention had been to project the epitome of debonair. He would return later or first thing tomorrow and repair it, he promised himself. The only way to enter the front yard now was to hop over the fence.
The yard did not seem cared for. He studied the terrain searching for an easy route to the front door. He spotted a clearing among the brambles and carefully bent over the fence depositing his goods and the gramophone on the other side. Holding the record album, whose sleeve was damp from sweat, he retreated several paces. Sizing up the fence, he took wide strides toward it and leapt over. He landed in the midst of row upon row of shells, some whole but mostly all shattered and partially buried in the hard-packed earth. He tiptoed around the brittle pieces.
On this side of the fence, the world seemed quieter, as though time had slowed down. The soil smelled damp and rich with earthworms. He gathered up his armful of offerings and headed through the break in the brambles. As Otoh went further into the yard, sounds that he took for granted—the pounding of hammers, the swish of cars and barking of dogs—receded. Rather there was the buzzing of insects, the flutter of wings and the sounds of a breeze circulating earthy odours.
Otoh arrived at what were once the front steps. Before him, obscured by overgrowth, were the remnants of an old-fashioned gentility that was unapparent from the roadway. Leading up to the verandah was a wide, flagstone stairway, from whose many cracks pepper and orange trees protruded. The verandah’s banister was of simple wooden posts, many missing or about to fall. Looking up, he saw stranglers growing out of the roof, their thick roots clutching the sides of the house.
Otoh wanted to be polite and present himself by knocking at the front door but after negotiating the first, treacherous steps he realized the stairway stood precariously alone, separated several feet from the house. He stepped down and stood awkwardly in the centre of the walkway, wondering whether to advance or retreat. Disappointed but undeterred, Otoh resigned himself to a more pedestrian entrance around the back of the house.
* * *
—
Mala had not had a human visitor in at least a decade. The last ones to enter her yard were not even visitors but vandalizing youngsters who tormented her and her plants so callously she was obliged to chase them out. One time she saw blood spurt from a boy’s head when she angrily threw back at him the leather-bound cricket ball that had missed the mango tree he was pelting and had broken her window instead. The last of that kind of problem took place a very long time ago and it no longer occurred to her to watch for trespassers or visitors. It was difficult to remember who her last visitor had been, probably Ambrose, just after he returned from the Shivering Northern Wetlands.
With Otoh so close but unknown to her, Mala returned to her memory…
* * *
—
Finally feeling in control of the night’s possibilities, and having relieved herself, Pohpoh relaxed. Even though her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, they were of little use. To negotiate her way Pohpoh had to experience her surroundings, become one with the trees, shrubs, weeds, fences, thorns, water and mossy ground. She stood in the ditch and lifted her hands into the blackness before her, meditatively feeling the shape of the moist air, inspecting and greeting the space. Her heart drummed with excitement.
She was ready for the sprint up the ditch. Her legs spread apart, Pohpoh took a long, slow breath and then, like a soldier running for dear life, bolted up the slope. On either side of the ditch, overhanging foliage and slimy fronds slapped against her body, sending ripples of fear and excitement through her limbs. In seconds she had reached the top and stood among several houses. Her clothes were dew-damp and her teeth shivered, but her mission was of such importance that she could not allow it to be thwarted by mere physical discomfort.
The yard on the left had neither fence nor hedge, just a few unmanageable clumps of razor grass. This yard, she decided, was no challenge for her. All through the bushes a discordant chorus of bullfrogs belted territorial warnings. At such a late hour she was surprised to see a light in a bedroom window of the house. A man passed in front of the window and then back again. She crouched lower, just in case. On the other side of the ditch was a hedge of boundary shrubs, easy to get through but too close to the insomniac.
At the top of the incline lay another backyard as familiar to her as though she had planted it herself and watched it unfold leaf by leaf, insect by insect. Pohpoh felt an uncanny communion with the fruit trees that had sprung up from thoughtlessly spat-out seeds: lime, pomerac, cherry, dongs, orange, two common prickly-mango trees and a fat nutmeg, all conspiring to make the night even darker than i
t already was. In the pomerac tree slept several fowl. Pohpoh was aware of them yet their snores and ruffles sounded to her as though someone else was also in the yard. She became even more alert. The acidic smell of bird droppings contrasted with a stronger, very sweet odour. Among the bushes was a single cereus plant. Pohpoh saw its large white and crimson flowers, gleaming like stars. With the force that comes from a broken fire hydrant, the cereus blossoms spewed heavy perfume in the air, luring the thousands of moths and flies whizzing by, colliding and humming so loudly that an ominous drone hovered in the air around Pohpoh’s face. The air was full of floating moth powder. The scent of the cereus with its two edges—one a vanilla-like sweetness, the other a curdling—so permeated the air that she could taste it on her tongue as though she were lapping it from a bowl.
OTOH AVOIDED BEING clawed by the patch of stinging nettles. He walked toward the back and through the thick grey-blue mudra stilts that propped up the front of the house, and then around a room, positioned like his bedroom, underneath the house. He noticed that, unlike his room in Government Alley, this one had no doorway and would only have been accessible from the top floor of the house. What was once a window was now completely boarded up and covered by a thick plant.
He sniffed, trying to ferret out the scent that had captivated him last night. The sun never shone under here. He came upon dank pools, thick layers of rotten water that had seeped into crevices and settled under thin slabs of broken concrete. A pungent stagnancy rose up in bursts. Otoh held his goods close to his chest and tiptoed, afraid to disturb whatever thrived there.
A handful of steps farther and another perplexing odour washed over Otoh. He gasped on the crest of each wave delivered by the innocent morning breezes wending amid the mudra posts. It appeared to be the full-bodied foulness of an overflowed latrine. From the back fence, far away from the house itself, where he had made deliveries on mornings past, nothing prepared him for such sensory assaults. Certainly his dreams of meeting Mala had been filled with the scent of frilly herbs and potions, potpourri and balms, and nothing so oppressive as what choked him now.
Otoh forgot for a moment his reasons for entering the yard. So appalling was the odour—and thick, like a miasma he had to wade through—he expected to see some kind of spillage. Yet as much as he was repulsed he was again overcome by curiosity. He was also prompted by memories of a similar smell—the memory of an outdoor latrine far behind his grandmother’s house, down by the edge of the cane field. He used to think of it as a hut, a hut big enough for only one person at a time.
The putridity under Mala’s house, Otoh noticed, was strongest close to the downstairs sewing room. He walked with a measured pace, absorbing every detail of the outer wall of the room before him: decades of dust; clumps of matted cobwebs; old cavities eaten away by wood lice; lazy, unperturbed daddy-longlegs clinging to the siding, motionless; stout cloud-white moths polkadotting the wood; remains of snake eggs, lizard eggs, hatchlings lurking, squirming squishily as they sought the warm sunlight. An old glass aquarium lay on its side.
He made his way from underneath the house. His eyes felt fragile in the sudden brilliance. Warming shivers rippled up and down his arms, and he started to perspire. He lifted an arm and wiped his damp brow and upper lip on his shoulder. Nothing in the yard stirred in the claustrophobic morning heat. There was still no sign of Mala.
Probing farther around the back of the house he gasped when he came upon the wall of cereus blossoms, every one of them completely wilted. He had forgotten about the flowers. Their blooms, brown-splotched by the stinging sun, hung limp. Even so Otoh was amazed at their size. The heads were larger than any flower he had ever seen before, much too heavy for the small, stunted stems from which they dangled. A ghost of scent hovered close to the blossoms, remnants of last night’s fullness now souring in the heat. Replacing the perfume was an even more startling one that seemed to emanate from the wall behind the blossoms. The smell, like those under the house, quickly grew nauseating. Within seconds the contents of his stomach rebelled, rising, twisting and turning. The combination of odours and the heat made him dizzy. The stench made him want to drop his package, gramophone and all, clasp his stomach, hold his breath and run as fast as he could back out of the yard. But he was determined not to give up. Otoh scurried like a distressed mouse noisily past the wall. In his haste he raced past Mala, who was sitting under the mudra tree.
And she, totally entranced by her day-dreaming escapade, didn’t hear the bees buzzing around her ears or feel them slurping the salty sweat trickling down her neck. Neither did she hear the peekoplats in the mudra tree when they suddenly stopped trying to out-whistle each other and joined forces to warn of Otoh’s approach.
He turned to look for the birds. They fluttered and squawked in the uppermost branches of the old mudra tree. Otoh marvelled at the sight of the magnificent mudra, knowing that such a specimen might be seen only in the heart of an old-growth forest on the other side of the island. With its yard-long, bean-like purple pods, the mudra had taken over the side of the yard, completely blocking out the road beyond and glimpses of the town. It took generations for a mudra tree to grow so large. The peekoplats hopped to the edges of the branches and their whistling subsided as though in curious and worried anticipation. Otoh noticed the quiet and looked up to see the tree covered in sleek, brown-grey birds. Never before had he seen this kind of bird in the open. They were usually associated with money, with gambling and singing competitions. Men from Paradise often went into the deep forest and returned with cages crammed with rare peekoplats. A single bird of that species would fetch a large sum of money, an investment paid out willingly in the hopes of higher earnings and prestige in singing competitions. Otoh was astonished that in his own neighbourhood, unknown to catchers and gamblers, there existed a tree laden with hundreds of peekoplats. He suddenly felt himself a trespasser, an awkward voyeur. Surprised that in all his deliveries he had never seen the huge tree, he looked around, trying to locate the back fence.
He came to an abrupt halt. Right there, directly in front of him, was the reason he had come. Mala Ramchandin. She sat in a rocking chair beside the tree, her eyes closed. Her figure was all but lost in the blueness of the mudra’s trunk. She wore a petticoat, greens and browns and light blues, that blended into the background of leaves and gnarled, twisted limbs. Otoh’s face burned. He stood and stared. He was seeing the woman for whom his father awakened. She was no bird, he thought. She was thin, indeed, but her height, dwarfing the rocker, surprised him.
Without taking his eyes off her Otoh squatted and deposited his load on the dusty clay ground. He moved slowly. He could so easily have missed her, mistaken her for a shrub. He was again aware that he was trespassing on this woman’s land.
She was unlike any woman he had ever seen. It was as though he had stumbled unexpectedly on a lost jungle, and except for the odours he would have sworn he was in a paradise. Making sure the gramophone was safely settled on the ground, he untied his bandanna and wiped his face and neck.
Dankness hung heavily. The air close to the ground bristled with the natural fragrance released in the blackest period of night. The aroma of grapefruit, lime and orange trees lay like a fringe on the edge of the darkness. Pohpoh began to tingle with a sensation of delirious omnipotence—she was able to find her way, to survive in the dark, to name plants and insects with only their scent or a brush against them as her clues. She sprang out of the ditch, landing elegantly in a crouch. Inching her way along the narrow bank of overgrown razor grass, she gravitated toward a ragged opening in the wire. Like a moth, she breezed through the hole and out the other side without a scratch.
Crickets and tree frogs sang out among the trees. She listened for dogs. Hearing nothing, she decided that if there were any in the yard she would have by now smelled the evidence of their presence.
Darting across the lawn Pohpoh arrived under the skirt of a citrus tree. With fewer bushes to
conceal her, she exercised care, peering out at the large two-storey house in the centre of the grounds. The ground floor of the house was washed in dull yellow light from garden lanterns planted in a bed of thick, low shrubbery and flowering plants.
This would be her target tonight. Pohpoh cupped her ears and aimed them at the house. She heard nothing. She imagined bedrooms with a happy family, a fairy-tale family in which the father was a benevolent king. There would be a fairy queen for a mother, and enough little cherub siblings to fill a very large shoe or pumpkin carriage, their fat, pink faces smiling even as they slept. In the wash of garden lanterns she could see curtains on the ground floor drawn behind ornately wrought-iron bars. High up on the second floor she saw curtains pulled back, windows open and no bars.
The old samaan tree around the back wasn’t hard to climb. Near the tree’s top, a branch extended like the palm of a hand to an open window. Pohpoh had seen four-foot-long iguanas crawling along the branches of other samaan trees, and she decided to descend to the window slithering on her belly. Midway down the branch she stopped. Pohpoh swung her head from side to side looking down at the yard and up into the branches that crisscrossed the star-laden sky. Closer to the window she waited for the wind swishing through the branches to cover the sliding sound of her body.
There was a light on in the hallway just outside the room she entered. She perched like a gargoyle on the window sill, her eyes still unused to the light. Pohpoh imagined herself invisible, sitting there and thwarting monsters and demons who tried to lay a finger on the little baby in whose room she found herself.
A baby’s room is a good clue to how near the parents are, Pohpoh thought. Imagination could cost too much. She put herself back on track, shaking her finger sternly at herself. She pinched her eyes tightly shut, squeezing out the friendly gargoyle, iguana, monkey and fairy, and returning to the concentration of a night prowler at work.
