Krishna tried to imagine what Vimla would say when he told her he wouldn’t marry Chalisa, that he knew a way for Vimla and him to be together. He wondered if this would be the moment that rendered Vimla speechless.
“But what if—”
“Don’t worry yourself with anything else. Just do like I tell you and I go take care of the rest.” He grinned. “Everything fix up nice.”
Auntie Kay sighed and nuzzled into her crooked arm. “I had a husband once,” she said, her voice small. “His name was Bas.” She looked at Krishna. “Your father didn’t like him. He used to call him ‘Bas the Ass.’ ”
Krishna dropped his head back into his hands as if he were somehow responsible for his father’s insolence.
“What was wrong with Bas?” Dutchie asked.
Krishna held his breath. Auntie Kay had mentioned his name a few times since he’d been in Tobago, but always in passing, never in a moment charged with so much tension.
“What wasn’t wrong with Bas?” Auntie Kay’s girlish voice danced between them. “For one, the man was too tall for me. Krishna’s father used to say I would break my neck trying to kiss his beef-eating mouth.”
“Beef-eating?” Krishna said.
“Bas was a Christian.”
“Bas? A Christian?”
“Sebastian was he correct name.”
“Oh.”
“So what happen to Bas, Auntie Kay?” Dutchie asked.
“Anand make we life together miserable. He used to come Tobago, sit down on my veranda and sing bhajans early in the morning to wake Bas up. For Christmas he send we a dry black cake and the Ramayana. On Easter he pretend he was dying to prevent we going to church.”
Krishna shook his head.
Dutchie smiled. “Allyuh didn’t find it funny? You have to laugh at people like that.”
“I did, but Bas didn’t. Anand used to quarrel with Bas. He would say he piece and then as soon as Bas open he mouth to argue, Anand would close he eyes and chant mantras loud-loud. It get so bad, one time Anand even ring he bell and blow he conch as soon as Bas walk into the room. That is when we marriage really start to fall apart.”
“So what happen?”
“Bas left me. He went Venezuela and pick up some young Spanish thing.” She tucked a lock of her short black hair behind her ear. “Anand was right. The man was really a ass, but Anand was the bigger ass out of the two.”
Dutchie snorted. “It sound so.”
Auntie Kay tittered in the darkness. “Bas’s Spanish girl used to send me letters threatening to come Tobago and take my house and land. After she done take my husband she want my house and land? Imagine that! I tell she try.”
Krishna sat up. “She ever try?” He saw worry flit across Dutchie’s face.
“Never.”
Krishna slapped at the mosquito on his leg. Auntie Kay looked so small, and for the first time vulnerable, lying curled up in the shadows that way. Krishna knew she was naïve to think that Bas and his Spanish girlfriend wouldn’t one day follow through on that threat. If the property truly belonged to Bas, then what would stop them from ousting Auntie Kay on a whim? And suddenly Krishna remembered Gloria Ramnath, sweating and gushing on about her loyalty to Anand and what? That the gossips claimed he’d been sending money to Venezuela? Krishna shook his head in wonderment. Could his father be—?
“You better off without him, Auntie,” Dutchie said.
“Probably.” Auntie Kay shrugged. “Your father is not a easy man, Krishna. I know that first-hand.” She gave him a weak smile and he realized how much it pained her to speak so openly of her past. “But you and you alone know who and what go make you happy.”
Krishna heaved a sigh. He knew what was going on: they thought he might desert the plan, that his nerves would not hold up when the time came to set his life right again. He could tell by the way Dutchie trivialized the enormity of Krishna’s undertaking, and by Auntie Kay’s timely sharing of her unsuccessful marriage to Bas. It hurt that they still doubted his resolve even after the hours they’d spent spinning the minutest details of the plan together. But Krishna knew he couldn’t really blame them. They recognized—as he did—that he had never once stood in his truth.
He grumbled at his father’s heels after every long, smoky puja, feeling fatigued and fraudulent, but he had never once said, “Pa, this is not for me.” Instead he’d invited resentment to take up residence in his heart, nursed his anguish until it was bigger than his desire to begin something new. Krishna’s anger had been misdirected. All this time he should have blamed himself.
And then there was Vimla. His fight for her had been pitiable at best. What defence had he offered against his father’s slanders? Later he told himself he’d been distracted by his exile to Tobago, but the fact was Krishna hadn’t had the courage to challenge his father’s wishes. His exile had really been his escape.
Life in Tobago with Dutchie and Auntie Kay helped show him where he had gone wrong. Now, after basking in their light for nearly two weeks, Krishna knew what it meant to love and laugh without apology, to leap into a day with the greatest expectations and have them all fulfilled. Auntie Kay and Dutchie had taught him how to live life with integrity and he wanted to prove to them—as much as he did to himself and Vimla—that he could cut his own path in the world despite anyone else’s misgivings.
As he thought this, Krishna’s mood lightened. He felt the mellow glow of hope in his belly burgeon into optimism.
“Eh.” Dutchie’s velvet voice filled the silence. “Let we make a move. Allyuh ready?”
Auntie Kay straightened. “Aye-aye, Captain,” she said. Her eyes were wide with excitement.
Krishna rose, stretched his arms and arched his back. “Is about time. I thought allyuh sleep away,” he said. He galloped down the steps. “I was going to sail out on The Reverie without you!” He grabbed hold of his suitcase and lugged it onto the beach, the music of Dutchie and Auntie Kay’s cheering drifting behind him.
Krishna breathed in the sea and catapulted himself into the air with a whoop. He wouldn’t let Vimla down again. This time he would get it right.
A Message
Thursday August 22, 1974
CHANCE, TRINIDAD
Vimla whisked her tumultuous mane into one hand and threaded it through a wide elastic band held in the other. She wound the elastic band around her ponytail once, twice, three times, until it could stretch no more. Vimla paused. Three times? She wrapped her fist around the base of her ponytail and found that her thumb overlapped the rest of her fingers by more than an inch. Slowly she slid her grasp down her hair. It was coarse with whorls and waves as usual, but it felt lighter, thinner somehow.
She flew to the oval mirror hanging on the wall, tugged the elastic from her hair, and shook out her mane so that it flowed over her shoulders and down her back. With frantic fingers Vimla divided her hair on either side of her head and brought her face close to the mirror. The part gleamed back at her like a fat, jagged scar cutting through her scalp. Gasping, Vimla looked away and noticed the discarded elastic band lying on the floor, strangling in her thick black hairs. When had this happened? She shoved her laundry aside and fell across her bed, feeling the familiar dig of the old springs in her ribs. Rolling onto one side, Vimla gathered her knees to her chest and stared, unseeing, at the yellow gauze curtains fluttering at her window.
Pitch Lake at La Brea. That’s where Krishna had taken her the first Sunday he had picked her up when her parents were at Chaguanas Market. She had never been curious about the Pitch Lake, but she would have followed Krishna anywhere then. And if the Pitch Lake didn’t excite her, the danger of their furtive meeting did. She remembered staring at the gold aum swinging like a pendulum from the rear-view mirror as the car rattled over the rutted road leading to the Pitch Lake. The car belonged, of course, to Pundit Anand, and she had wondered how he might react if he saw her and Krishna there together, holding hands in his car.
They left their slippers behind and crept hand in
hand across the baking asphalt that stretched on for a hundred acres. It was dull and desolate grey lingering on forever until it collided with the blue sky on the horizon where the oil refinery stood. Bountiful green guava, breadfruit and palm trees bordered the jagged periphery of the Pitch Lake like a fetching frame for a plain picture. Vimla stopped walking and stared at the vast emptiness.
“So what you think?” Krishna squinted against the dazzling sun.
“I think it real ugly.”
Krishna nodded as if he’d been expecting that. “Well, let we explore this ugly place, nuh? Come on.”
Vimla looked down at her toes and wriggled them against the warm tar. “Krishna, I sinking!” She skipped away from the spot in which she had been standing and peered, agape, at the faint imprints she’d left behind.
Krishna smiled and tugged at her hand. “When the pitch get warm, it does shift. Is alive.” Vimla allowed herself to be guided away from her footprints. She and Krishna padded over the furrowed pitch until their path was unexpectedly severed by a watercourse. From there they could see arteries of water, broad and narrow, cutting through the expansive Pitch Lake for acres. Some opened up into pools of clear water; others led to marshy ponds overflowing with sky-reaching reeds and pink and purple water lilies gazing into the sun. Vimla pressed her toes into the pitch again. “I never see anything like this before,” she murmured, admiring the layers of velvety pink petals.
“The flower?”
Vimla inched forward so that her toes lined up with the asphalt’s edge. “The flower in the middle of this wasteland.” She gestured to their surroundings. “I never would have expect to find something so beautiful growing in a place like this.”
Krishna watched a black corbeau circling slowly overhead. “That is why I bring you here. If I did bring you to the botanical gardens in Port of Spain, you would have get bored, you would have tell me your father have the same flowers growing in he garden. Only unusual things does interest you.” He followed the corbeau as it looped its way in wide circles down to the Pitch Lake and thrust its beak into a nearby puddle.
Vimla smiled. “Are you unusual?”
“I must be if you spending so much time with me.” He nodded toward the shallow pool. “Go on, dip your toe in.”
Vimla took in the vast emptiness of the place again, trying to ignore the corbeau, which had her fixed in its black, glassy gaze now. “In that water?”
“How you mean? This is the clearest, cleanest water in Trinidad, girl.” Krishna crouched down and grazed the quiet pond with his fingertips then sat back on his haunches to watch the ripples. “People does say it have healing properties. Is good for your hair and your skin.” He rolled up his pant legs and stepped into the water, nudging the lily pads with his knees.
Vimla studied him for a moment. There was something about Krishna that made her trust him. It was in the way he stood with his hands in the pockets of his trousers and his head just tilted to the side when he looked at her, as if he was discovering her for the first time all over again. It was his smile, too. Each one seemed to start in his soul and make its way to his eyes before lighting up his face. His smiles were warm and sincere, and he lavished her with them. He dispelled the loneliness of the place with his presence, filled Vimla with a hope and devotion she’d never before known.
She gripped Krishna’s shoulders and skipped into the shallow water with a splash. The water was warm, and when she peered between the lily pads, she could see her toes overlapping his through the clear water. Vimla closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky as Krishna fished a lily out of the water and threaded it into her hair. Droplets trickled down the back of her neck and the length of her spine. She quivered at the gentle thrill.
Vimla rolled over and squeezed her eyes closed, damming her tears behind wrinkled eyelids. Now, with Krishna gone, her heart was a grey landscape of emptiness; nothing to discover except loss and maybe regret. She hadn’t decided yet.
“Fish make a nice dish! Fish make a sweet dish!”
Vimla sat up. A bedspring pierced her tailbone. It was Sookhoo, the fish man, and he was on Kiskadee Trace! Vimla shoved her feet in her slippers and dashed down the stairs just as Sookhoo’s white pickup truck rolled toward the house. The speakers mounted on the truck’s roof blared, “Want fresh kingfish, red snapper and cascadoo? Come to the truck and buy from Big Sookhoo!”
Sookhoo saw Vimla coming and put his truck into park. “Vimla, how you going?” He had faded brown eyes, purple smoker’s lips and weathered skin the colour of old coffee grounds. When he smiled at her, the scar on his cheek stretched into the salt-and-pepper stubble at his chin. His cropped hair was hidden behind a white cap worn backward.
“The red snapper fresh?”
“You ever know me not to have fresh fish, girl?” He sucked his teeth, but his question was good-natured. “See for yourself and tell me if I lie.”
Vimla followed him to the back of the pickup, where five large Styrofoam coolers were lined up. Sookhoo took the lid off the second cooler and Vimla rose on her tiptoes to peek inside at the dozens of bright-red fish lying on beds of ice. The smell of the sea filled her lungs.
“What I tell you, Vimla? Ain’t the fish looking fresh to you?” He scooped one up and held it in his palm for her to inspect. Fishy droplets seeped between his fingers and onto the road.
Vimla nodded. “Give me three red snapper.”
Sookhoo grabbed a clear bag. “Take four, nuh?”
“Three good. Thanks.”
Sookhoo turned his face away and busied himself with scooping the fish from the cooler and dropping them into the bag. “Take four and I go give you a message from Krishna.” His voice was low when he spoke. He wrapped a dark hand around the belly of a particularly big red snapper and waited.
“And how I know you ain’t lying to make a sale?”
Sookhoo frowned. “If you think I lying, don’t buy the fish.” He made to drop the red snapper. “And I wouldn’t tell you the message.”
Vimla studied his face. “How I know you ain’t going straight to the rum shop after you take my money and tell everybody that Krishna send a message for me?”
Sookhoo fitted the lid back on the cooler. “You see me? I is a big man. I don’t have time for this love-story shit, and I not in the business of selling gossip.” He pointed to the side of his truck. “What that say? BIG SOOKHOO’S FISH.” He jabbed his broad chest with his thumb. “That’s me. Big Sookhoo. The fish man. I sell fish, and on the occasion, I deliver a message or two—if I like the message. If you ain’t want to know the message, that’s fine. And if you want to know, well, that’s finer.”
Vimla studied Sookhoo, who wore the look of a slighted child on his weathered face. His frown reduced his scar to the size of a baby smelt. “Okay, give me a next fish and tell me the message.”
Sookhoo removed the cooler lid and plucked the fish by the tail in one smooth motion, his spirits lifted again. “Your lovah-boy coming back Chance for the wedding. He want to see you before.”
Vimla felt sick. She put a hand over her face to block out the fishy smell and hide her trembling chin. “When is the wedding?”
“September first.”
Vimla gasped. “When he coming to see me?”
“Tonight self.” Sookhoo placed the bag of four fish on his scale, which was nestled between two of the coolers.
She gave him the crumpled bills, moist from her hand. “When Krishna tell you that?”
Sookhoo climbed back into his truck and peered down at her through the open space that should have been a window. “I was liming in Tobago with my partner, Dutchie, yesterday. Krishna does work with he now.” Sookhoo shifted into drive and brought his megaphone to his lips again. “Get fresh fish from Big Sookhoo—shrimps, kingfish and tilapia, too!” The truck inched forward.
“Wait!” Vimla trotted alongside the window, her heart hammering. “Where to meet him? What time?”
Sookhoo winked at her. “Relax, nuh, gi
rl! Tell your father I coming back this afternoon to buy two drake. I go give you the details then.”
Panic swept through her. What if he didn’t come back? “Tell me now, Sookhoo. Please.” Her voice cracked, but she was too frightened to be embarrassed.
Sookhoo shook his head. “Krishna write you a note with details and thing in it. I left it home, but I go bring it later.” He took up the megaphone again. “Tell your father is two fat drake I want. I coming back half two.”
He waved to Vimla and was gone.
Sookhoo’s Duck
Thursday August 22, 1974
CHANCE, TRINIDAD
Vimla stood at the kitchen sink washing wares for the third time that day. She rinsed the soapy suds off a pot with her gaze fixed out the window. A rooster darted by and she smiled despite herself. She had grown up with these fowls, seen them every day of her life, and still a running rooster amused her. She could appreciate their pompous strut around the backyard as if they owned it, the clamour of their talons on the rooftops and their incessant crowing throughout the day; it was the springiness of their run she found comical. Another, bigger, rooster took off after the first, green chest thrust forward, brown plumy tail dancing behind him as he skipped through the dirt. She heard the cry and she knew: a cockfight. But before Vimla could finish wiping her hands dry on a dishtowel, Chandani was zipping past the window with a stick in her hand. “Allyuh want to fight?”
Vimla giggled and she was startled by the foreignness of the sound.
The smaller rooster flapped its way onto the galvanized-steel roofing of the chicken coup and turned his back on his pursuer and Chandani as if they were no more significant than sandflies.
Chandani stood with her fists on her straight hips, looking around the backyard, daring one of the four roosters to pick a fight under her watch. The roosters scratched and pecked at the earth as if she wasn’t there, and she smiled a triumphant smile. “I thought so.”
Nothing Like Love Page 16
