by Shani Mootoo
“Constable, a body in that condition? They could do autopsy on a body in that condition?”
The chief constable glared.
“All right, all right,” said the officer, “but I can tell you right now that Dr. Datt gone away for the weekend. He take Mrs. Datt and the children for seaside holidays. I could try and get in touch with Dr. Ottley but he wouldn’t be able to make this place today.”
The chief constable pondered the situation. “Well, that body ent going no place. One more day wouldn’t hurt it.”
He looked over at Mala. She was on the verandah gripping the banister railing and gibbering excitedly.
“See how that child could run? Look how she running, boy!” The officers mocked her. One of them shouted out, pointing to nothing in particular. “Look! She gone over the fence. Behind the tree…where she? Lord! She is lightning in truth—”
“They coming after you, run, run!” Mala shouted to the child who, in her imagination, had already escaped the yard’s confines. Her mind filled with sounds of voices and footsteps following Pohpoh. “Yes, Pohpoh, you take off and fly, child, fly!”
One of the police thoroughly enjoying egging Mala on, grinned and said to the chief constable, who was finally somewhat bemused, “Wha de ass! She flying or what! Constable, she leap over dat fence—even the dogs can’t do that, sir!”
At the top of the hill Pohpoh bent her body forward and, as though doing a breast stroke, began to part the air with her arms. Each stroke took her higher until she no longer touched the ground. She soon found herself above even the tallest trees. High enough, calmed, she glided, dipping to the left, angling to the right. She made a wide circle trying to make out familiar gardens, to pinpoint the cricket pitch and the yard with the rabbits’ hutch. Before long her village was swallowed up in an unfamiliar coagulation of green, brown and yellow. She did three more breast strokes and soared higher before gliding again, basking in the cloudless sky. She practised making perfect, broad circles, like a frigate bird splayed out against the sky in an elegant V. Down below, her island was soon lost among others, all as shapeless as specks of dust adrift on a vast turquoise sea.
* * *
—
The crowd gathered outside saw the officers wrestle with the wriggling old lady. One grappled with her arms and the other with her feet. The onlookers fell silent as a member of the force opened the back door of the police car. They watched as she was deposited in the care of an armed officer. Word spread fast that she was a murderer and had killed a man. From one officer, who was eager to reveal what he knew, it was determined that old lady Mala Ramchandin was being taken in for questioning about the death of her father. On hearing the gossip Ambrose sat down in the road, buried his face in his knees and cried.
Even before the crowd had dispersed Otoh, still smarting and stunned from the baton blow, saw a band of men with bird cages, four each, approaching the back fence. Following them were three men with saws.
As the bird catchers passed he heard them talk. “In a pinch ten birds could live for about two, three days in one cage.”
“You know how much one peekoplat fetching these days?”
“Divide up, a third each, a mudra that size would make each one of us a rich man. I myself putting in a bid for the lower third of the base.”
Otoh squatted down next to his father.
“Pappy, if they decide that she kill him, what would happen to she?”
Ambrose shook his head in disbelief. “Impossible. Impossible.”
“Tomorrow they going to inspect the scene.”
Still his father said nothing.
“Pappy, say something! Why you don’t say something? Why you don’t do something? You just going to let them take she so?”
Then out of the blue he asked his father, “You have any matches on you?”
* * *
—
That night, after the rasping sawing of timber had stopped, Ambrose stood on his darkened verandah and leaned on the banister railing. In the darkness he watched men carrying piles of the heavy timber from Hill Side to Government Alley. They struggled several paces with one load, rested in the middle of the road, ran back for another, and so they inched their treasure along. There was more to come from the house on Hill Side.
Otoh was nowhere in sight. Elsie Mohanty, feeling tired for the first time in decades, had finally dozed off. Ambrose had not the slightest need of sleep. He stared blankly toward the house on Hill Side, grimly contemplating his life-long inability to act decisively. He stared morosely, wondering what was to become of the woman whom he had loved since he was a little boy, wondering if there was something that he could do, something that would spring to mind if only he meditated long enough, something that he dared to do. He could think of nothing, really.
Suddenly, emanating from exactly where he estimated Mala’s house to be, a flare of brilliant red and yellow light shot into the sky. Within seconds the hissing and spitting of a fire could be heard. Flames leapt up and licked the heavens. Ambrose’s heart raced. He stood on tiptoe, as though doing so would help him to see better. For the second time in twenty-four hours, excited neighbours filed into the street. The fire truck arrived but the firefighters’ efforts to get to Hill Side were hampered by the piles of mudra blocking the street. As they worked to clear a passage, a brilliant display of embers spit up into the sky as old, dry timber went up in flames. The intoxicating fragrance of burning mudra wafted through the air. The fiery sky swarmed with crazed bats and moths. Fwoop. Fwoop. Fwoop.
Otoh appeared. Behind his back he clutched clippings from a cereus plant. He stood beside his father and, buoyed by the scent in the air, they watched the luminous sky until dawn. In the early hours of morning the flames and the scent subsided.
For almost a week, however, until a day or so after the presiding judge had reached his decision, the house and the trees and shrubs and every bit of live and dead matter that had thrived on the Hill Side property remained floating through the town in an irritating dust, suspended in a thick, black cloud above the town and blocking out the light of the sun.
III
THERE WAS A time when Ambrose E. Mohanty was not in the least interested in sleep. He used to laugh and say that he would sleep well enough and long enough when he was dead. These were the days when he and Mala hoped and dreamed together, the days well before he had married Elsie.
Ambrose had spent several years studying in the Shivering Northern Wetlands. He returned a natty, foreign-accented bachelor full of dreams. Mala heard that he was returning. She went to buy salt fish and ground provisions from Pilai’s Dry Goods and Pilai dropped the news on her. He waited until they were alone in the store.
“Ey, Pohpoh-beti, how you doing? What you come for today?”
“I am good, thanks, Mr. Pilai. I come for cassava, yam, green fig and plantain.”
“I have plenty. Take a basket.” And then he came closer to her. “So, Pohpoh, you hear news, girl?” he said in an excited whisper.
“Mr. Pilai, please, you keep forgetting, please don’t call me Pohpoh. I am no longer a child. What news, Mr. Pilai?”
“You know I don’t mean you no harm. I know you since you a child, and I call you that name so long now that it does be hard to remember. Mala does sound so strange. So, you mean you ent hear news? Well, I breaking news again!”
Mala liked Mr. Pilai well enough. She kept her eyes on the ground provisions as she picked through his tray of eddoes and cassava. He followed her closely.
“Ambrose…” Pilai was pleased to see the twitch in her body. His news would indeed be of certain import to her. He was all the more excited to be its bearer. “Ambrose, you remember Ambrose? Boyie, na. He coming home tonight.”
Mala gasped and instantly regretted it. If he gossiped to her certainly he must do so to others, and she had no wish to be the subject of gossip. She had learned e
arly the emotional bruising that came from whispered jeers and ice-cold stares. But still, the news that Ambrose, the closest friend she ever had, was returning to town was too thrilling to be elegantly contained.
“Ambrose Moha…?”
“Yes, yes, yes, him self,” said Pilai. “What other Ambrose I would tell you about? His mammy was in here not ten minutes before you come. You just miss she. She buy up all me good cassava. Look.” He rummaged through the tray showing her that the ones left were a little bruised. “She take all me good provisions. She say to make big cook-up for him. Is like Christmas in Paradise Estate.”
Mala allowed herself some curiosity. “His mammy must be real happy. Holidays? Holidays he come for, Mr. Pilai?”
“No, girl. He finish study. He get degree and thing. He back in truth. Coming home tonight, to sweet Lantanacamara by steamer. When we own fellas gone away to a place like the Shivering Northern Wetlands, they does hardly come back, you know. They does stay up there and marry foreign and forget about we. But Ambrose is a real Lantanacamara man. And Pohpoh-beti, how about you? You happy?” He asked the question with such real concern that Mala could not correct him again.
“I’m happy for his mammy. She must be cooking and cleaning all day for him.”
Pilai gauged her response to his news not so much from anything Mala said, for she hardly spoke, but from the sudden shift in her purchasing manner. She got busier, buying flour, baking powder, eggs and dry chocolate. She even bought an ounce of the new colourful icing beads that he had got in only that week.
Even as she bought the baking ingredients, Mala wondered if Ambrose was returning alone or if he had found himself an exciting and educated foreign wife. Would he have children, would he even remember Mala? When they were in school together they had been inseparable, and he was the only one of the male species—besides Chandin Ramchandin, her father—who had ever touched her body, kissed her mouth. But they were children then and she had let him, not because she felt any love for him but because she wanted the ticklish feeling and moments of escape the act gave her. On her way home she thought only of Ambrose, of how he was before he left. Everyone in the town had been excited that he had won the one and only scholarship given out by the Bible Mission to go to the Shivering Northern Wetlands and study theology. He had been worried to be away for such a long time, afraid that anything could happen to his mother without his knowing. And now he was coming home to a healthy mother, older certainly, but well and happy. She wondered if in the Shivering Northern Wetlands he had ever seen her mother. Or Asha, who had run away from home when she was in her late teens, a deed Mala understood even though she cried for months when she realized Asha would be true to the penned word left for her on her bed. She would never return home again. She wondered daily what had become of her, if she had perhaps gone to the Wetlands in search of their mother. If, that is, the Shivering Northern Wetlands were where Mama and Aunt Lavinia had gone. She herself could hardly remember what any of them looked like, except in the photograph she had saved from a fire once. Asha was not in that photograph and sadly, there were none of her to be found. Mala wished that Ambrose would arrive on her doorstep with news of all three.
She went home and baked. Her father came late that evening. He had already been drinking and paid no attention to the smell of fresh roasted bread and angel cake. He was intoxicated enough not to notice the house was tidied up and cleaner than he’d ever seen it. With the kitchen floor and wood furniture all polished, the place looked and smelled like the early hours of Christmas morning. He was oblivious to it all.
That night Mala complied with Chandin Ramchandin’s expectation that she lie down with him. She let him more easily than ordinarily lay his coarse hands on her belly, for she was in possession of a joy and hope that allowed her to block the whole thing out. She thought of Ambrose sitting with his mother in their house at the edge of the cane fields. She had heard that he sent money home regularly and that his mother had added two rooms with doors that could be locked. One for her and one for him. Mala wondered what Ambrose thought of the additions. She imagined him coming to say hello just as he had come to say good-bye years ago. She imagined herself in the kitchen when he knocked at the door. She changed the image and put herself in the garden. He would come around the back of the house to catch her tilling the soil around the rose bushes—or better yet, plucking wax-shiny yellow fruit from the passion fruit vine or collecting a basket of frangipani. Once, when they were in high school, he came to visit her. Realizing that her tyrannical father was home, he left a note of his visit in the form of a stolen stalk of frangipani shoved into the earth by the back fence, inside the yard. Her heart leapt with joy when she remembered the frangipani was in unusually full bloom these days. It must have been an omen.
When she was sure her father had succumbed completely to the sleep of his cheap alcohol, she removed his thick hand from her belly and slipped out of the bed. Mala ran to the window and looked out. Even in the dark night she could see the brightness of the frangipani blossoms by the fence. Her anxiousness to see Ambrose surprised her.
Next morning Mala was much less certain that the foreign-educated Ambrose would visit her. She busied herself around the kitchen, watching her father as he got ready to leave for the day.
Living had become a matter of habit for Chandin Ramchandin. He began his day as usual walking from house to house calling out, “Madam! Madam! Boss! You need help today?” He had learned to avoid some houses. Their inhabitants would come out wielding a broom, shouting to him to get away, that they did not want the likes of him around their children. While many shunned him there were those who took pity, for he was once the much respected teacher of the Gospel, and such a man would take to the bottle and to his own child, they reasoned, only if he suffered some madness. And, they further reasoned, what man would not suffer a rage akin to insanity if his own wife, with a devilish mind of her own, left her husband and children. Whether they disliked him or tolerated his existence, to everyone Chandin was Sir. He was often paid a goodwill shilling and pennies to weed a yard, sweep their drains, pick coconuts, kill a chicken or goat, or sharpen knives. When Chandin had enough coins he would quit work and head for the rum shop where he stayed until hunger gnawed at his belly.
Her father had hardly left the house for the day and Mala had only begun to straighten his smelly bed when she heard the soft voice, like cool, clear honey, cooing her name from the back porch. She straightened her hair, adjusted her dress and tried to calm her breathing.
“Pohpoh?”
She could find no voice to answer. She walked out to the back porch grinning.
“I hear you were coming back home, in truth, yes!” She could feel the blush on her face.
“Ah. How quickly news travels in a small town. I was hoping to surprise you.”
“Well, I already knew. I was just wondering when I would see you. Yesterday I was in Pilai store, you remember Mr. Pilai? It was he who tell me that you was coming home. So Mammy must be too happy, eh? Pilai tell me your mammy was making big cook-up?”
He had put on a little weight but he never looked so fine. The fedora he removed with the fluency of a gentleman lent him an air of grandness. Ambrose E. Mohanty stood like a man, filling the porch with an elegant scent of cloves, cardamom and bay leaves. For the first time in her life Mala felt like a woman, a feeling both thrilling and frightening. She lifted her shoulders upright and her small breasts quietly announced themselves.
“Mammy is well, Pohpoh. And you? How are you? How have you been?”
“I good, yes,” she said, suddenly afraid to know how he was, to know if he had married, if he were really back to stay. He had turned into an extraordinarily handsome man. Ambrose was more dapper than even the Wetlandish Reverends and white plantation owners who had not visited their home countries in many years. Except for his skin colour he looked like a man in a foreign magazine, and with a little twis
t of her imagination she could picture him fair skinned.
“Come in, na. Pappy isn’t home. He left for the day already.” Mala avoided his eyes.
“I know. I was outside for a good while, waiting for him to leave.” Ambrose picked up a parcel he had set on the verandah floor and followed her into the kitchen.
“Pappy didn’t changed much, na. You remember him?” How little could she tell him, she wondered, and still expect him to catch her meaning? She could never bring herself to graphically reveal her situation yet she desperately hoped that he, of all people, might understand the things she couldn’t say. She wasn’t really sure why she trusted he might understand. Several years had passed since she had last seen Ambrose, since he had last seen her. But in those years he had clearly outgrown the chubby, greasy Boyie she used to collect snails with in the schoolyard. Her father was still a menace and tyrant. Everyone knew that. She wondered if Ambrose had ever figured out that her father pretended she was the wife who had many years ago run out on him.
“So you come back to stay or you leaving again?” She busied herself getting out a plate and knife, the fresh bread and some butter and guava jelly. She couldn’t bear to look at him. She wondered if the package he carried was for her.
“I have no plans to leave. I finished my studies and I am now back to stay.” He lowered the parcel onto the kitchen table. “This is for you. Forgive my forwardness, Pohpoh, but I brought this novelty back home with me and I thought that it might be of some interest to you. May I offer it to you?”
“Well, that is kind of you. But I don’t know what it is. You don’t have to bring no gifts for me, you know. What is in the box, Mr. Mohanty?”
He had never heard her say his last name before and was amused by her formality. “Pohpoh, you must call me Ambrose. I am the same person you have known since we were children. Please accept my present.”
