by Shani Mootoo
“Is time, you right about that. Is definitely time for you to be married. Now I know for a fact that Mavis interested in you. Mavis is a nice girl. I get on good with she and with she family. She like you too bad, long time now. If you want Mavis I will go and speak with her mother today self.” She could not have been more to the point, nor more wrong, Otoh thought. Although she had never contradicted him, this talk about marriage showed that his mother had more fully accepted him as a man than he had ever realized. Otoh was both thrilled and too shocked for words. He stared at her.
“Now I have to admit, I am just a little confused. She knows about you?” Elsie asked.
Again she caught him by surprise. This time she waited for his reply. “Knows what?” Otoh asked.
“What you mean, ‘knows what?’ You know what I am talking about!”
He remained silent and she barged on. “She know you don’t have anything between those two stick legs of yours? Don’t watch me so. You think because I never say anything that I forget what you are? You are my child, child. I just want to know if she know. She know?”
“Ma!” was all Otoh, thoroughly embarrassed, could utter.
“What you ma-ing me for? You think I am stupid or what? Now the fact of the matter is that you are not the first or the only one of your kind in this place. You grow up here and you don’t realize almost everybody in this place wish they could be somebody or something else? That is the story of life here in Lantanacamara. Look at you father. Why you think The Bird end up in that situation? Look at her own father. And the mother…”
So his mother knew something about The Bird. “Well, actually that is what I wanted to…” Otoh interjected.
“Yes but we not concerned with that now. I want to talk with you about your situation. Now as I was saying, every village in this place have a handful of people like you. And is not easy to tell who is who. How many people here know about you, eh? I does watch out over the banister and wonder if who I see is really what I see. Look here, what I want to ask you is, you sure Mavis is a woman? I not asking you to tell me your business, but I just want as a mother to advise you to make sure she is what you want. Is a woman you want? I don’t want to go and talk to her mother and then have to go back and retract. What you want? In a case like yours you just have to know, careful-careful, what you really want.”
Otoh was reeling with the astonishing discovery that his mother had thought about his situation in even greater depth than he had ever done before. He quickly assured her that he would take her advice and think carefully. He implored her, in the meantime, not to approach Mavis’ mother until he had time to decide.
THE DAY AMBROSE E. Mohanty rose from his wheelchair and became a regular man was the most upsetting day of Elsie Mohanty’s life. She had not realized the peace and quiet that his month-long sleeps had afforded her. Now he was always in her midst, messing up her house, leaving his clothes for her to fold and put away. She found herself tripping over his shoes, bumping into him, having to cook three meals a day and wash three sets of dishes and pots and pans, and, most tedious of all, having to listen when he talked to her. He cluttered the space she had come to regard unconsciously as her very own. And, besides, he was almost indistinguishable from the person she had married so many years ago—whereas she had changed and aged with the passing of time. Other than his body Ambrose had not changed at all. She wished he would go back to sleep. When it was clear that he wouldn’t she packed her things, hugged and kissed her son and made him promise he would visit her in the north of the island where she had friends. She wrote one line on a piece of paper, left the sheet on the kitchen table and, without discussing the matter with Ambrose, departed.
“You was simpler when you was sleeping.” When Ambrose found the note he shed a few tears, after which he took a red pen, made corrections to her grammar and saved the paper, just in case she were to return some day and he could explain the errors to her.
V
MISS RAMCHANDIN HAS had a most unexpected visitor. Judge Walter Bissey.
Unknown to Otoh and me, Mr. Mohanty had contacted his high school tormentor, requesting him to use his good office to locate Asha Ramchandin. It was difficult to weigh which was more wonderful: that Ambrose Mohanty had finally taken action or that some news of Asha Ramchandin had been uncovered.
Judge Bissey, no doubt tending to skeletons of his own, set his staff on a trail that ended on a dusty top shelf in a back room at the local post office. He came to the alms house bearing a shoe box with Mala Ramchandin’s name pencilled on top.
Over the course of eight years Asha had written Mala enough letters to fill the box. The majority were sent from Upnorth in the far end of Lantanacamara. Several were mailed from the Shivering Northern Wetlands and one card was sent from Canada. After the first six years the frequency of correspondence had diminished. None of Asha’s letters were ever delivered because the righteous postman, deeming the Ramchandin house to be a place of sin and moral corruption, refused to go up there.
Judge Bissey inquired after her health yet seemed unable to look directly at Miss Ramchandin’s face. He didn’t stay long, quietly promising as he left to look into the matter of the undelivered mail.
My dearest sister Pohpoh,
I didn’t get ten minutes away from the house before I wanted to run back and make you come with me. I am not sorry that I left, only that you didn’t come with me. That is my biggest worry now. Pohpoh, I hope we will see each other very soon. We must. I don’t understand why you worry so much about Papa. He hurt us so much and still you think of him. The day after I got up here I got a job helping out a nice woman, and going to do market for her, and a little cooking. She said I can’t cook so she will teach me how. You can write me at the above address. That is not where I am staying but I go there to collect my letters, because I don’t want Papa to come looking for me. I am going to send money for you to come and meet me. I am not coming back…
My one and only dearest sister,
Did you get my letter? Please write me back. Don’t be angry with me. I think of you every day and night. I love you and miss you. I send you enough money in the same envelope as this letter (I hope and pray you get it) so that you could take the train and come and meet me. It simple. When Papa go out in the morning, put a dress and some underwear in a brown bag. Don’t forget the picture of Mammy and Aunt Lavinia. You don’t need anything more. We will manage. Then go to the train station. A train leaves Paradise for Upnorth Junction every day at ten o’clock in the morning. That is a good one to take. I can get time off any day to come and meet you. I told the lady I work for about you. She is a nice woman, she said you could come and stay here until you get work. She might even get you a job. She knows a lot of people. I am waiting to hear from you, so write and tell me when you coming. Give the letter about ten days to arrive. Just don’t tell anybody your plan. Pohpoh, I can’t wait to see you. I really want to go and look for Mammy. I have a feeling like I can do anything I want now. I can even make my way to the Shivering Northern Wetlands to look for her. Let us go together. I am waiting…
Dear Pohpoh,
It is a month now and I still didn’t get a letter from you. Please don’t be angry with me. I think of you all the time…I am saving all my money so that we could go abroad and find Mammy. Please write me. I am so sad that I didn’t hear from you…
From the Shivering Northern Wetlands Asha first wrote:
Darling Sister,
I found work here. I will send money for you every month. It is cold here. I never imagined that cold could be so cold. I thought it would be easy to find Mammy here. But the city here is bigger than even Lantanacamara.
How are you? I am too stubborn to ask how Papa is, but I do wonder about him. I hope you are all right. I don’t understand why you don’t write me…You always protected me, Pohpoh, and I was hoping I could do that for you now, but since yo
u don’t even write me I feel as if instead of protecting you I left you. I am beginning to understand why Mammy left. I hope that one day you will understand why I left…
Other letters reported on Asha’s work, which I am happy to say was nursing, in the Shivering Northern Wetlands. None of them suggested she had made any inroads in contacting her mother or her mother’s lover. Some letters contained Wetlandish currency. The last one from the Wetlands said:
Pohpoh, my dearest sister,
Long ago I left one country and now am leaving this one too. I am crossing the ocean and going to Canada. I don’t even know if my letters are reaching you. I fear the worst. I will write you again when I get over there and settle down. What are you doing with your life? I still think all the time of you and love you. I am sure that is how Mammy must feel about us, wherever she is. I won’t give up hope of seeing you. Just tell me that you want to come, even for holidays, and I will send you the passage…
Finally, there was a card from Canada:
Dearest Pohpoh,
Think of you every day. If you get this card please write me back.
I want to see you. I miss you. I am well and happy—except that I wish I knew how you were.
All my love, Asha.
Miss Ramchandin sat in her rocker, stroking the cat on her lap, while I read the letters out loud, one by one. By the time I finished, she appeared to be asleep. Her cheeks were stained with tears.
* * *
—
Lately restraint and I have been hostile strangers to one another. I find myself defying caution. To hell with Toby. I have powdered my nose on days that were not visiting days. To gentler hell with Sister and the nurses. I must, as a matter of life and death, wear scent in the crock of my elbows. I am readier than ever to present myself like a peacock in heat.
Otty—things have progressed so that he calls me Ty, I call him Otty—Otty’s deportment has changed too. I recognize and appreciate the studied swagger of the lone bushwhacker he has cultivated since we met. In light of his manly inability to bare his heart, I consider these eloquent declarations.
Otty and his charming father still visit the Paradise Alms House often. Mr. Mohanty treats the occasion as an opportunity to wear his swallow-tail jacket—regardless of the weather—a bow tie far too oversized for his small body, and a bowler that Otty recently purchased for him.
On visiting days Miss Ramchandin and I practically hover above the ground with excitement. She puts aside her mutterings and I put away my book and pencil. Before our visitors arrive I wash her, mildly rubbing her skin with frangipani petals from Mr. Hector’s hedge and pay special attention in dressing her. She sits on a stool while I pin her hair up into a waterfall, or braid and set it off with a little ribbon or flowers. She giggles and twitches her feet. On visiting days she wears a garland of snail shells about her neck or a crown of wreaths that we wove with feathers and the wings of expired insects. Hours before the visitors arrive she and I, I more discreetly than she, are decked out and waiting.
* * *
—
The time inevitably arrived. I decided to unabashedly declare myself, as it were.
And so, last visit, I wore lip colour more thickly than usual, shades brighter than my dark lips. With powder I blotted the shine that tends to develop on my nose and cheeks on hot days. I tied a flower-patterned scarf around my neck, and on my temples I daubed enough scent to make a Puritan cross his legs and swoon. Miss Mala grinned and clapped her hands when I entered her room. She squealed when I pulled the nurse’s uniform from behind her dresser and put it on.
They arrived. I could hardly look him in the eyes, suddenly thinking I was about to cross his line. I held Miss Mala by an elbow and Mr. Ambrose took the other arm. Otty, subtly attired in loose, off-white trousers and a shirt of such delicate white cotton that he might as well have been bare-chested, supported his father’s free arm.
We walked slowly to a bench. I could see the nurses had come to a halt and were watching us. I held my head high. The gossip mill began to rumble but I listened instead to the leaves in the trees. Otty took my arm and we walked off, leaving our companions to a private visit. We headed for the residents’ garden. Mr. Hector was working and seeing us, he dropped his tools and stared.
“Well, I never! If I didn’t know better…I wish my brother could meet you two. Christ where he is, I wonder? Where my brother? By any chance, you know my brother?”
From the cereus hung pink buds on the ends of long stems. Otty kneeled down in the garden with no regard for his white trousers and proceeded to pack the soil around its base. He patted it with his bare, slender hands not because it needed work but rather to show it some attention and, I imagine, to honour its place in Miss Ramchandin’s life. When he stood up I reached over to brush the soil off the knees of his pants. I felt the form of his shapely leg and when he braced himself, I heard him catch his breath. He too was stirring. I got up, my legs unstable, and walked as best I could throughout the garden, picking a bouquet of shrimp bush, lilac, rose bay and flame ixora. I presented the arrangement to Otty. He deliberately cupped my hands and held them to his chest. With practised elegance I moistened my lips and continued to stare at him.
“The cereus will bloom in just another few nights. Can you wait?” I whispered to him.
“Yes, yes. Just barely, but I will wait.”
Mr. Mohanty and Miss Ramchandin were still seated next to each other when we arrived back at the bench. He was staring at his surroundings, shaking his head in a gesture of approval and saying, “No time to waste, not a moment to be wasted.”
Miss Ramchandin bounced on the bench. She pointed up into the sky and traced a distant flight pattern that she alone could see. She laughed as her eyes followed what her finger described, and waved to whatever it was she saw. She trembled with joy. In a tiny whispering voice, she uttered her first public words: “Poh, Pohpohpoh, Poh, Poh, Poh.”
* * *
—
The cereus will surely bloom within days—an excitement diminished only by the fact that there is still no word from Asha Ramchandin. Judge Walter Bissey has contacted a colleague in Canada, who promises to use all legal means to determine if an Asha Ramchandin still resides in that cold country.
Asha, if these words have already found your eyes, for the sake of your sister who worships your memory please return and pay her a visit: Paradise Alms House, Paradise, Lantanacamara. If for some reason you are physically unable to come here, please write, send a message, a photograph. I will respond immediately with the same. And if you were indeed reunited with your mother, Sarah, and with Lavinia Thoroughly, in the Wetlands or in Canada, please tell us how they fared. Not a day passes that you are not foremost in our minds. We await a letter, and better yet, your arrival. She expects you any day soon. You are, to her, the promise of a cereus-scented breeze on a Paradise night.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
IT IS OFTEN assumed that writing is a solitary occupation, a one-person show. Yet if it weren’t for a number of people who encouraged and supported—and even distracted—me, Cereus would still be inside me, wrestling to be released.
From as far away as England and Trinidad I could feel my parents and four siblings awaiting this book, almost drawing it out of me with their ardent curiosity. My friends—and I am happy to say they still permit me to refer to them as friends—generously listened each time I excitedly changed or added sometimes no more than a word or a sentence. Their unflagging interest spurred me on, and often I felt as though I were writing for each of them. When my grant money was depleted before I had wrapped up the manuscript they brought me bags of groceries, took me out to eat—at great restaurants, no less—and bought my paintings so that I could continue to write without worrying too much. When they could see I was buried too deeply in the story and beginning to disappear under reams of paper, or on the verge of becoming obnox
iously boring, they dragged me away and took me for great coffee, or went hiking, bicycling, canoeing and kayaking with me. I eventually found that it was while “playing” that snags and cobwebs in my story and my mind got unravelled.
My parents, siblings and good friends Persimmon Blackbridge, Lorna Boschman, Cyndia Cole, Monika Kin Gagnon, Angie Joyce, Larissa Lai, Shannon McFarlane, Zaphura Mohamed, Hidemi Nishibata, Shelina Velji and Zara Velji are my true fortune.
It was a real gift and honour to have Larissa Lai share with me, through reading and discussing my manuscript, her experiences writing and editing her novel When Fox Is a Thousand.
I greatly appreciate the active support of Cynthia Flood who, by twice inviting me to read from the work-in-progress to her class at Langara College, helped to fuel my confidence and desire to continue.
Inventing the story, chasing and being chased by the characters has been one of the most enjoyable creative journeys I have undertaken. It was not, however, until Jennifer Glossop and Nancy Pollak started editing the manuscript that the true, mesmerizing magic of this kind of writing began to be revealed to me. I want now to shower them with a piñata of compliments and gratitude but I hesitate because I imagine them editing out and whittling away all but one or two of the adjectives I might use. In a nutshell, by making the editing process a vital and significant experience, Jennifer and Nancy have stoked my desire to write.
As an admirer of Val Speidel’s design work it is a privilege to have my book designed by her.
Della McCreary and Barbara Kuhne of Press Gang Publishers maintained a warm, caring closeness, even when in private they might well have been tearing their hair out wondering if I would ever finish the manuscript.
The last person to be mentioned in a thank-you list tends, more often than not, to be the one you wanted to mention from the very first. Kathy High was there in my dark moments of doubting, ready to shine her light of enthusiasm and belief in my abilities. She indulged me by discussing and celebrating each of my changes without expressing any tedium. I am happily indebted to her.
