COPYRIGHT © 2015 SABRINA RAMNANAN
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ramnanan, Sabrina, author
Nothing like love / Sabrina Ramnanan.
ISBN 978-0-385-68102-5 (bound).—ISBN 978-0-385-68103-2 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8635.A4634N68 2015 C813′.6 C2014-907431-X
C2014-907432-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover images: EVA105/Shutterstock.com, De-V/Shutterstock.com
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House company
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
Every page is for my dad,
hero,
kindred spirit,
storyteller.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Sacrilege
Chance Market
Jammette
Faizal Mohammed’s Barrel Bath
The Rude Awakening
A Pundit’s Plea
The Immoral
Headmaster Roop G. Kapil
Rum Shop Blues
Chandani’s Strike
The News
The Orange Orchard
The Reverie
Maracas Bay
Bhang!
Krishna Janamashtami
The Stormy Alliance
Bhang! II
The Race Home
Mastana Bahar
The Officious and Auspicious
Sunday School
Bacolet Bay
The Plan
A Message
Sookhoo’s Duck
Stitch by Stitch
Lal’s Surprise
Black Water River
The Last Acre
A Hero
Chalisa’s Bangles
All Fours
Chandani’s Pone
Chalisa’s Maticoor
Krishna’s Maticoor
Carrying News
Vimla’s Recovery
Headmaster’s Appeal
The Seer Man
Faisal’s Chain
Changing Winds
An Uncertain Future
Chandani’s Tirade
A Dream in a Cow Pen
The Suitcase
The Sweetness of Tobago
Eye for an Eye
The Power of Periwinkles
Unexpected Wedding Guests
The Wedding Barat
Dream Girl
A Bacchanal Wedding
Acknowledgements
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when Vimla Narine finally closed the enormous front door against the pelt of autumn rain and dragged her book bag up the splintered staircase to her rented room at the end of the corridor. She saw, in the dim lamplight, her silhouette slink hunched and weary along the paisley walls and vowed to spend tomorrow wandering the city instead of tucked away in a library cubicle, turning mouldy pages yet again. The hallway smelled of orange peels and cinnamon bark, and beneath those, the faintest hint of damp dog fur. She squinted through the haze and saw Tiberius sprawled like a black puddle in her path, and there, perched on a chair, curlers piled high on her head, Ms. Nelly, the landlady.
“A letter came for you today,” Ms. Nelly said. Her blue eyes sparkled in the gloom.
Vimla stopped short; her stomach fluttered with anticipation.
“From Trinidad,” Ms. Nelly said. She leaned in and whispered like she was sharing a secret. “Someone named Minty sent it.” Ms. Nelly clutched the letter to her chest. “Minty! What a flavourful name!” She shuffled ahead of Vimla into her room and flopped on the bed. “Are you going to open it now?”
It had been this way since Vimla had accepted the tiny room in Ms. Nelly’s two-storey home five blocks from the university. The landlady had taken one look at Vimla with her eyes full of stories and her brown skin stippled with gooseflesh and had hauled her out of the cold and into the foyer like a treasure from some faraway place. In the days that followed, Ms. Nelly made her rich lamb stews and casseroles, chocolate chip cookies and apple pies with the criss-crossed tops, in the hope that in turn Vimla would reveal how she had ended up in this city with a suitcase of ripe mangoes and a soul full of courage as her only possessions. But Vimla never spoke of her past, no matter how enticing Ms. Nelly’s cooking, so that now, in their second week together, Ms. Nelly was mad with curiosity.
“In the morning,” Vimla said. She extracted the letter from Ms. Nelly’s quivering fingers and slid the envelope beneath her pillow. “I real tired. I get lost today, you know.” She gathered up her toiletries and draped a towel over her shoulder. “I spent the morning running around the campus looking for the right lecture hall, and when I find it, the only vacant seat was quite in the front under the professor’s nose.” Vimla headed for the washroom. “And everybody watch me like they never see people before!” she said over her shoulder.
Ms. Nelly scurried after Vimla. “Well,” she said. “You do look different, Vimla. Like butterscotch.”
“Butterscotch?”
“Your skin.”
Vimla slid into the bathroom and closed the door, just missing Ms. Nelly’s fingers. “Good night.”
“I can’t sleep until I know,” Ms. Nelly said. She was pacing Vimla’s room, a harried look on her ashen face, when Vimla returned wearing pajamas. “Who is Minty, and why has she sent you these?”
Vimla’s gaze fell on the bed. Ms. Nelly had pried open the envelope and scattered the contents—a dozen scraps of beautiful cloth—across the patchwork quilt. She wanted to be furious with her landlady; only, she couldn’t, because there was such tenderness in Minty’s gesture Vimla was overcome with nostalgia instead. “No letter?” Vimla whispered. She climbed onto the bed.
Ms. Nelly strummed her fingers against her cheeks. “Nothing.” Her eyes were wide, probing.
Vimla smiled. Of course. There was no need for a letter; the fabrics were Minty’s message. Quickly, Vimla began to knot the pieces together, the weathered ones first, and then the new piece, a snippet of rich red silk from a wedding sari, until finally a multicoloured rope of a dozen different textures meandered across the bed.
Ms. Nelly watched, transfixed. “What does this symbolize?” she breathed. “Is this some sort of Trini-dade-ian custom?”
Vimla swept her hair to one side and divided it into three equal parts. “It’s a reminder, Ms. Nelly.” She held the rope of fabric against the middle part and began to weave it into her hair.
Ms. Nelly swallowed, nodded vigorously. Her curlers bobbed up and down. “A reminder to …” Her hand paddled the air.
“To keep going.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
Ms. Nelly looked disappointed. “How ambiguous!” She tried again: “And do you always wear your reminders in your hair?”
Vimla slipped beneath the warm quilt and felt the trials of her day melt away. She let her eyes shut. “Turn off the lights, nuh?” she m
umbled.
Ms. Nelly sighed. “Pancakes and sausages in the morning, Vimla,” she said as she closed the door behind her.
Vimla rolled onto her side and her fingers grazed a strand of satin entwined in her hair. As she tumbled into sleep, her feet stirred beneath the covers and her heart quickened. Before she knew it, she was running.
The Sacrilege
Friday August 2, 1974
CHANCE, TRINIDAD
Vimla Narine stole across the uneven stepping stones, the staccato ring of her silver anklets beating in time with her heart. Her mother’s gold wedding earrings swung against her flushed cheeks. The sequined phaloo of her new sea-green sari flashed in the early-morning sunlight, undulating over her shoulder like a wavelet chasing her home. Vimla shut her eyes, sprang through the air and imagined herself soaring. She landed with grace, her silky sari pleats whispering against her calves before she took flight again. A smile lit her face and made it pretty.
Vimla followed the stepping stones through the guava and coconut trees, around the duck pens and dog kennel. She darted past the bull and cow, a stray cat swollen with young and an old rooster scratching the earth. She barely noticed her fast breath and the beads of perspiration gathering at her hairline, but she could feel the rush of adrenaline through her body, propelling her forward until she tore through the tamarind trees and the back of her home came into full view.
As Vimla drew nearer to home, she reined in her wild energy and drove it back into her soul. She willed her legs to slow their pace and filled her lungs with long deep breaths until the thudding in her ears subsided. She adjusted her sari pleats, which had shifted to the left. She tried to flatten her hair, but it leaped through her fingers and flung itself in errant waves down her back anyway. Vimla shrugged, deciding to blame her dishevelment on the heat, on the dogs, on whatever else came to mind should she be questioned. She set about the wearisome task of focusing her mind on today’s responsibilities. She squared her shoulders, repeated the fourteenth times table to twenty until an almost-calm came over her, and then slowly permitted reality.
Of course she was late for the puja, prayer. She scolded herself for gambling with time this morning. It would be inappropriate to preface this ceremony by a quarrel with her mother. This wasn’t just any puja, after all; it was an offering of thanks to the deities for helping Vimla pass her A Level exams with such success. It was important to her mother.
Vimla looked up from the swish of fabric around her toes and noticed her father, Om, reclining against a house pillar, a brass lotah, water vessel, in one hand. Placidness softened his round, weathered face as he stared beyond his backyard across his five acres of sugar cane.
Vimla stopped in front of him. “Pa?” She tilted her head to one side, hunting for annoyance somewhere beneath his dreaminess.
Om grunted. “Where you went? The pundit reach. Your mother looking for you.” Then his frown gave way to an affectionate smile. “You looking like a fairymaid in that sari, Vims.”
Vimla smiled at her father, delighted. She remembered how he had rushed to the Indian bazaar the morning her name was printed first in the Guardian of all the students who had passed their A Levels. “One pretty sari to match my pretty daughter with the pretty smart brain,” he had said as he spread the paper open on the counter and pointed to Vimla’s name. Her mother, Chandani, had said the sari was too heavy with jewels, too expensive, too grown up for a seventeen-year-old girl, and yet she swallowed her protests when Vimla draped the fabric across her body and beamed back at her.
Om shoved the lotah into Vimla’s hands. “Take this. Fill it up with water from the standpipe. Pundit Anand almost finish setting up. Do fast before your mother cut your tail!”
Vimla hurried away with the lotah, grateful for a reasonable excuse for her tardiness. She was careful not to let the water slosh over the sides, more careful still to accentuate the sequined border of her sari pleats with delicate kicks as she walked toward the bedi assembled in the middle of the downstairs living area. Without a single spilled drop, she set the water vessel down and shone radiant in the sea-green drapes of her sari, a smile inviting compliments playing on her face.
But nobody was looking at her.
Pundit Anand, the village priest, busied himself taking inventory of the materials necessary to conduct a successful puja. Om regarded him with suspicion, searching as he always did for an oversight, while Chandani observed her husband’s irreverent behaviour, her lips pulled into a straight line of petulance.
Vimla sighed quietly and moved beside her mother in front of the bedi set on the ground. The bedi was a wooden box, twenty-four inches long on each side and four inches deep. It was packed firmly with earth and cow dung and smoothed to create a flat working surface. Pundit Anand had used rice grains to decorate the top with designs and holy symbols.
Vimla watched as Pundit Anand’s eyes swept approvingly over the brass taria, rubbed gold for the occasion. The first plate overflowed with fresh neem, tulsi and mango leaves. The second contained a myriad of fragrant articles like cloves, camphor and sandalwood incense. The third was arranged with materials Vimla thought would feel nice against the skin: a mound of soft cotton balls, an orb of red and yellow string, a dusting of vermilion powder. Fresh fruit, hibiscus, marigold and jasmine flowers filled the other trays. The fruit would be offered to the little brass murtis, statues of the gods, the flowers to adorn them.
Pundit Anand inhaled the burning incense deeply and pretended to close his eyes. Vimla knew he was trying to avoid meeting her father’s distrustful scowl and she could see that he was peeking beneath his half-closed lids at her mother’s now reverent expression with an opportunist’s beam. It was common knowledge in the district that Vimla’s success would bring greater academic opportunities, and that unlike many of her peers, she had the potential to truly excel. But according to Pundit Anand, if Vimla was to be successful, she needed her planets completely realigned, all the holy deities appeased and all the evil spirits dispelled from her home. He had warned Om and Chandani that such services did not come cheap these days. Vimla saw Pundit Anand’s mouth turn up in a half-smile and then vanish.
She rolled her brown eyes. She would succeed in life because she was bright, not because she offered a jasmine flower at the feet of Saraswati Devi. In the nights leading up to the exams, when Vimla had studied by the light of an oil lamp, she hadn’t had time to pray. There had been too many formulas to memorize, too many practice compositions to write, to dither in front of the altar with expansive supplications. She had read until her eyes burned and then read some more, until there wasn’t anything that could surprise her on the exams.
Pundit Anand gestured for the Narines to sit before the bedi. He fixed his lips into a puckered O and summoned the holiest aum he had in his belly. It vibrated through his body and out the tunnel of his lips. His eyes twinkled at the effect, and the half-smile appeared again, barely peeking out from beneath his silvery-grey moustache. Then Pundit Anand fell into a jumble of Sanskrit mantras that had travelled a treacherous journey over time and dark waters in fragments from India to Trinidad.
Vimla wondered vaguely if broken prayers worked.
While her parents and Pundit Anand prayed, Vimla fidgeted with the sequin border at the hem of her sari, turning it inside out and flipping it back over again. She twisted the sequins on their gold thread until they became loose. She trailed her finger along the hem softly, thinking how much the sequins looked like green fish scales. When she grew tired of this, Vimla plucked a jasmine blossom idly from the brass plate of flowers and threaded it into her dark wavy hair, wishing she had a mirror to glimpse her reflection in.
Vimla heard a chuckle beneath the drone of chanting beside her. She dropped her hands into her lap and looked up to find Krishna Govind, Pundit Anand Govind’s son, padding across the concrete on bare feet toward the bedi. He had entered through the iron gates, left open by her father, and removed his slippers so as not to disturb the puja. Kris
hna was dressed in a simple white cotton kurtha pajama, a shirt that fell to his knees, and a pair of matching, loose-fitting pants. Tucked beneath his arm was a bundle of wood, five inches long and wrapped in yellow cloth. He set this bundle and his slippers down and then seated himself across the bedi from Vimla on a piece of white fabric spread earlier for him by Chandani.
Vimla glanced at her parents, then at Pundit Anand, but they were still chanting mantras with their eyes closed and their palms pressed together. She shrugged at Krishna, slipped another jasmine blossom into her hair and smiled.
Krishna shook his head, smiling back at her as he loosened the knot that held the wood together. He began to place the pieces of wood in the family’s havana kunda, a metal container used for fire rituals. While he worked, his gaze travelled the embroidery and sequins that roved the curves of Vimla’s body. He lingered longer on the soft sliver of flesh Vimla’s sari blouse exposed at her midriff as she reached to slide a third jasmine flower into her hair. And when she looked at him with her cocoa eyes, fringed with thick dark lashes and full of mischief, Krishna blew her a kiss across the bedi.
Pundit Anand, Chandani and Om bowed their heads in unison then, opened their eyes and placed the wilted petals between their sweaty palms at the feet of a brass deity sitting on the bedi. Vimla snatched the jasmines hurriedly out of her hair and did the same, her face burning as Pundit Anand shot her a sidelong glance.
Pundit Anand took a deep breath and launched into a fresh string of mantras, rocking back and forth as the prayers tumbled out. He swept his hand over the havana kunda, nodding to Krishna to set the wood inside ablaze. Then he gestured for Om and Chandani to drop melted ghee, clarified butter like molten gold, from a spoon into the flames as he called upon the deities one by one to accept the offerings made to them in the fire.
Vimla and Krishna watched each other through the dancing flames and the black, choking smoke uncurling into the space between them; they exchanged brazen smiles under the noses of their parents and over the heads of the miniature brass gods on the bedi.
Nothing Like Love Page 1
