A genuine smile! Vimla was relieved. She had suffered silently through the stages of her mother’s disappointment over the past weeks. There had been the days of withdrawal when Chandani spent hours on end in her bedroom mourning the loss of the Narines’ reputation. There had been the days of outrage when stinging reprisals spewed from her mouth and fell on Om’s and Vimla’s heads without mercy. And then there had been the quiet days, when Chandani had moved about the house in eerie silence, busying herself with the cooking and washing and tending to her fowl in deep thought. Now she was returning to her old self, Vimla thought: firm and dictatorial with a hint of humour. Vimla sighed. She had missed her mother.
As Chandani disappeared from view, Vimla noticed the two fat green barbadines dangling from a tree a few feet from the chicken coop. With a quick shuffle of her feet, she exchanged her below-the-house slippers for her outside-slippers and walked around to the rear of the house. She pulled the barbadines off their vine and cradled them in her arms back to the kitchen. She would make barbadine punch for her mother. That would keep her busy until Sookhoo came with Krishna’s message.
Vimla felt her spirits lift higher than they had in a long time. Her mother was happier, and if all went well, Vimla would see Krishna tonight. Krishna, after three weeks! Krishna. She turned the name over in her head, saw his smile in her mind’s eye. Her stomach flipped in anticipation.
Vimla sliced open the barbadines and extracted the seeds from the soft white flesh. Krishna would admit that he loved her, call off his wedding with Chalisa Shankar.
She whisked and mashed the barbadine fruit and watched the pulp become a lumpy liquid. Krishna would ask Om for Vimla’s hand in marriage.
She strained the lumpy liquid into an empty jug. Vimla and Krishna would have a grand wedding and all of Chance would be sorry for what they had said about her.
She poured a full can of condensed milk into the jug and stirred. Headmaster Roop G. Kapil would ask Vimla to teach at Saraswati Hindu School again.
She spooned sugar into the jug and stirred. Vimla’s reputation would be restored—improved, even—by her new teaching job—she added more sugar to the mixture—and marriage to Pundit Krishna Govind.
Vimla poured herself a glass of the barbadine punch and tasted the sweetness of her future. The creamy rich drink left a white froth on her upper lip like a lingering kiss and sent her taste buds dancing.
Sunshine dripped in through the window. Vimla fitted the jug into the icebox and reclined against the counter in a pool of warmth. She saw that two roosters were on the chicken coup now, parading over the dozens of ducks and chickens pecking their way through the dirt. Vimla closed her eyes and allowed one dangerous moment of peace to fill her soul.
The ducks sensed their peril the moment Om pulled on his tall rubber boots and began creeping toward them with long, deliberate strides. They flocked together, a sea of pure white, shuffling in one direction and then the next. At first their panic was quiet and contained, but as Om drew nearer and the dogs began to bark excitedly at his heels, the ducks’ anxiety increased. They honked and waddled faster, their wings brushing up against their neighbours’, until they found themselves driven straight into the duck pen. Om pulled the pen gate closed behind him, locking the ducks in and the dogs out. The dogs went wild, baying and leaping up on their hind legs, their hunting instincts roused. The ducks cowered in the farthest corner of the pen and watched Om with their terrified red eyes. Om reached his arms forward and lunged at one of the ducks that had the misfortune of being at the back of the flock going into the pen and was now at the front of the flock inside the pen. The duck darted away, chest first, white wings spanned wide. Then the other ducks began to break rank and shuffle in different directions. Om charged left and then right. He whirled then brought his hands down on a whoosh of air and a few lost feathers. He righted himself and tried again, cursing under his breath.
“Vimla!”
Vimla groaned inwardly from beneath the caimite tree where she stood beside Sookhoo, watching. She didn’t like helping her father catch ducks. She didn’t like the look in their eyes just before they were plunged into the darkness of the empty feed bag. It was always a mixture of dread and blame. And it was too quiet. The ducks’ fight—if they even bothered—was pitiful. They would tussle in the bag for a second and then retreat into shock, quietly resigned to their deaths. There was that, and she needed a minute to talk to Sookhoo. “Yes, Pa?” she asked, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice.
“Hold the dogs!” Om yelled over the barking.
Vimla left the shade of the caimite tree and managed to pull Blackie, Brownie and Scratch away from the duck pen. She ushered them toward their kennel, stamping menacingly in the dirt to show she meant business. Blackie and Scratch slunk to the kennel with their tails between their legs, but Brownie got away. He bounded past Vimla around the other side of the pen, nipping the ducks’ tail feathers through a gap in the wood. Brownie howled, frustrated and excited at once.
Sookhoo leaned against the caimite tree. “Fishing doesn’t be frantic so,” he told Vimla when she returned from locking the kennel door.
Vimla thought of the information Soohoo had for her. Her heart flip-flopped behind her rib cage like a captured tilapia and she knew that fishing was just as frantic. Tell me about Krishna! she wanted to scream.
“You blasted web-foot, ugly-mouth, white-backside, little—” Om’s mutterings stole Sookhoo’s attention. “You think you fast, ain’t?” Om turned to Vimla and Sookhoo holding a drake up by its wings, its orange feet piercing the air like arrows. “Vims, bring me a feed bag!” Sweat glistened on his brown face.
Vimla swiped an empty feed bag made of jute off the table and hurried to the pen. She held it open and turned her face away as Om lowered the drake inside. The bag felt heavier than she had expected. The weight of fear, she told herself.
Om nodded to Sookhoo beneath the caimite tree. “Is two drake you want?”
“Yeah. Give me a next fat one like that again.” Sookhoo pointed to the bulging bag in Vimla’s hands.
Vimla hoisted the bag high as Brownie came flying around the duck pen and barrelled into her leg. The dog sprang up and balanced his paws on Vimla’s belly, barking and scratching at the bag. “Down, Brownie!” she scolded. Brownie backed away and then trotted at Vimla’s heels again as she set the bag on the table that was pushed up against the back wall of the house.
Chandani came out of the kitchen and craned her skinny neck to see how Om was faring. “Vimla, why you don’t go and help your father.” It was a statement rather than a question.
Vimla hesitated. She glanced at the bag behind her, imagining the bird suffocating in its own feathers and fear. “Brownie go throw down this duck as soon as I leave it.”
Chandani sucked her teeth. “Brownie!” she said to the dog pacing back and forth at Vimla’s feet. “Get and go on! Move your tail from there!” The dog watched her, panting. Chandani slapped Brownie’s rump. “In the kennel,” she said. Brownie took off toward Om, who whistled for their attention: he was holding the second drake. Vimla wasn’t sure why it mattered, but it pleased her to see the drake flail in her father’s grip for a moment. She hoped that its courage would endure the dark unknowing of the feed bag and the glint of the cutlass before the weapon came swinging toward its neck later.
Chandani scooped the first bagged duck off the table and carried it like a fat baby in her arms to the scale. Reluctantly Vimla held another feed bag open for her father and conjured gladness. She thought of her sweet barbadine punch cooling in the icebox, of Krishna coming to profess his love. She thought of laughing with Minty in the cane fields, of Chalisa Shankar’s face disfigured and covered in pock marks. Vimla didn’t even realize when the drake sank to the bottom of the bag and her father took it from her hands. She watched, relieved, as Om clomped toward the scale in his rubber boots, now marred with duck excrement and mud.
Brownie trotted after Om, his tail wagging. Vimla was about to
call him back when an idea came to her. As Om and Chandani busied themselves weighing the first duck, Vimla slunk away and released the latch on the kennel door. In an instant Blackie and Scratch hurtled toward the scale and pounced on the drake in the bag.
Om and Chandani pushed the dogs away, but the animals could smell blood and longed to sink their teeth into warm flesh. The hullabaloo interrupted the weighing and caused enough distraction for Vimla and Sookhoo to exchange a few hurried words unheard. Vimla grabbed a coconut broom and dragged the bristles across the concrete at Sookhoo’s feet.
He smiled and the scar in his cheek stretched and shone across his dark skin. Then, instead of muttering the message, Sookhoo fished into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper, which he let fall from his fingers in front of Vimla’s broom before moving to join her parents. Vimla fell to her knees and plucked the note from the dust. Quickly she folded the scrap and tucked it into the breast pocket of her brown dress. She imagined she could feel the weight of Krishna’s words, like a captured drake in a jute bag, against her heart.
Sookhoo slapped some bills into Om’s palm in a handshake and swung the two bags over his shoulder and out of the dogs’ reaches. Chandani and Om walked Sookhoo to the front gate with the dogs at their heels.
“I going back Tobago for a week, but I go see allyuh for the wedding,” Sookhoo said.
Vimla drew near, turning the paper round and round in her pocket with her fingers. She waited for her parents to make some excuse for not attending the wedding, or to brush the comment away. Instead Om said, “We go lash out a bottle of Puncheon that day, boy! Tell the old lady I say hello.”
And then Sookhoo was gone.
The barbadine punch was cool now. Chandani sat with her back erect and the sharp points of her elbows digging into the table, her hand wrapped around a tall glass. “What you swell up for now? Every time I turn around, your mouth swell up for something else. What happen? I starving you here? Your father does give you licks?” She sipped the punch. “Children these days too blasted ungrateful. Nothing good enough. Sometimes I does feel to just slap that look out your face, Vimla,” Chandani said. A stiff smile appeared and vanished again.
Vimla ignored her mother’s attempt at humour. “Allyuh get invitation to the wedding?” Her voice trembled; the tilapia convulsed.
“How you mean? Of course we get invitation, Vimla!” Chandani exclaimed, as if there had ever been a doubt. “The Govinds live over the road! How they wouldn’t invite we?”
“Ma!” She glared at her mother, recalling Chandani’s recent temper over the matter. “So allyuh going to the wedding?”
Chandani straightened the straight tablecloth. “How it go look if we ain’t go?”
Vimla clenched her hands. “How it go look if allyuh go?”
“If people ain’t see we, they go wonder why. Then they go remember my daughter decide to take up man. Then they go remember which man she decide to take up. Then they go remember Krishna. And they go see how Krishna marrying a nice girl and left you in Chance to milk cow. And then you know what go happen?”
Vimla sighed.
“They go laugh. Everybody go laugh at we again.” Chandani took a swallow of her punch. “You think I keep a clean house and cook for my husband and mind child to the best of my abilities for people to laugh at me?”
For a moment, Vimla regarded Chandani, with the ring of white froth around her mouth. Then she pushed her chair back and headed for the door.
“Vimla, it only have one woman and one man living in this house and that is me and your father,” Chandani said to her back. “If you feel you too big for we, pack your bags and go, nuh?”
Vimla had heard this line all her life, but this time, as she stomped up the stairs to her bedroom with the sickening feeling of betrayal in her stomach, she considered the suggestion.
Stitch by Stitch
Thursday August 22, 1974
CHANCE, TRINIDAD
Sangita leaned on the windowpane in her sewing room and stared out at the cricketers gathering across the road. There was not a better view in Chance, she thought with a secret smile. Joe, the young man Om hired to cut his cane in cane season, stood to the side working on his batting form. Sangita imagined his back muscles contracting and releasing beneath his shirt. She knew every sinew and ripple, had committed them to memory during last cane season as Joe swung his cutlass bareback in the fields.
Often she had thought how nice it would be to bring him a cup of water, but she didn’t dare, not while he toiled in the neighbours’ field. She shook her head and laughed, her earrings springing against her neck. What silliness! Joe was but a child. No more than twenty, surely. She was lonely; that was all.
Sangita spotted the giant of a man Rajesh had hired to work in their fields, as the fellow was strapping on shin pads. He was ridiculously powerful and always remained a quarter of an acre ahead of Joe, but his gut was generous and hair sprang from the dark recesses of his ears. Sangita found him appalling, even more so when he bared his rotting teeth to smile. She wished Rajesh had hired Joe instead. At least then she would have had something—someone—to please her during the day, even if from afar.
Faizal Mohammed strode onto the field then, as if to remind her who really owned her heart. He balanced a new bat on his shoulder, looking sharp in startling white clothes, while the other men wore grungy shirts and shorts meant for the mud. Sangita tapped her lips with her fingers. Faizal was a superb batsman and was delicious in his success. Her stomach fluttered whenever he hit a six and it took all her self-control not to cheer him on from the window. That would be dangerous, especially since Rajesh played with the men, too.
Sangita found Rajesh. He was setting up the wickets, bawling orders to the others, picking men for his team. He wouldn’t choose Faizal Mohammed, no matter how strong a batsman he was. He never did. Sangita wondered just how deep Rajesh’s suspicions ran.
“Mammy?”
Sangita jumped, drew the curtains across the window.
“What you watching?” Minty eyed her as she picked across the fabric-strewn floor.
“Your father. He playing cricket.”
It was partially true, but Minty’s eyes filled with doubt anyway. Sangita brushed past her and returned to the unfinished pillowcase pinned beneath her sewing machine’s needle. She tapped the pedal under the table and the machine whirred to life. “You studying or you looking for something to do?” Sangita eased the fabric away from her, the bangles at her wrists tinkling, and watched the needle bob. She never lifted her eyes from her work.
Minty sighed the sigh of a woman fatigued. She cleared the wooden bench of fabrics and sat. “I tired studying calculus.”
Sangita lifted her foot off the pedal and let her hands fall into her lap. “Well, pick up the geography book then!” she said.
Minty pouted, and the dimple in her chin deepened. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Sangita saw the shadows, like crescent moons turned on their bellies, beneath her daughter’s eyes. Her milky skin was splotched with red, a sure sign that she was worried.
“If you tired, Mints, go and take a rest. I go wake you in a hour.”
Minty picked up the roll of white lace Sangita used for Gloria Ramnath’s curtains. She draped it over her blue dress and glimpsed her reflection in the mirror. “Mammy,” she began, “I go try my best, but I wouldn’t make as high as Vimla.”
Sangita examined her stitch—although she knew it was flawless—so she wouldn’t glimpse the defeat in Minty’s face. “How you mean? You have one more year again, Minty! It ain’t have a girl brighter than you.” She held up the pillowcase cover. It was the vibrant shade of a scarlet ibis. “You like this?”
Minty dropped the lace. “Vimla brighter than me, Mammy.” It was a simple statement, untarnished by even the faintest hint of jealousy. “I wouldn’t score as high as she.”
Sangita wished Minty had more fire in her soul. Competition was healthy—necessary these days. “Vimla Nar
ine?” She rose from her seat and moved to the iron she’d heated with coals earlier. “Minty, it seem to me Miss Vimla have she head everywhere except on she future these days. Maybe she pass all she subjects, but she’s a duncy-head in my books. Better she stay home and learn to cook a proper roti. A soft roti that swells. Not that burn-up thing she feed she father when Chandani gone on strike.” Sangita laughed.
Minty looked hurt on her friend’s behalf. Sangita shook out the pillowcase and smoothed it on the table with her hand. “Mints, don’t study Vimla. You have your own future to make.”
Minty looked away. She discovered a scrap of pink satin and brushed it against her cheek. “I could sew like you.”
Pride lit Sangita’s face for a moment. She cleaned the iron of soot with an old rag, turned the pillowcase inside out and pressed it with the iron. “Yes, but what about university?”
Minty looked doubtful and Sangita knew what she was thinking. It was almost impossible to get into university. It took brilliance and good fortune. Was Vimla even going? Sangita flipped the pillowcase over and pressed the crinkles out on that side. “You know, in the meantime, after you sit for the A Levels, you could teach at Saraswati Hindu School.” She was pleased with how casual she sounded.
Minty gasped. “Vimla’s position?”
Sangita huffed. “No.” She set the iron down with a clunk and forced patience into her voice. “Pundit Anand and Headmaster Roop G. Kapil done take that job away from Vimla, Mints. You know that. Vimla ain’t right for the school. It does take more than a little smarts to teach primary school.”
Minty’s face crumpled in worry and Sangita felt herself flinch. “Ma, I don’t want to teach at that school. I don’t want to teach anywhere. I want to sew,” Minty said.
Sangita flicked her wrist at her daughter. “Humph! Minty, is an honour to teach—especially for Saraswati Hindu School! Teachers well respected. Is the right thing for you to do.”
“Seamstresses important, too,” Minty said.
Nothing Like Love Page 17
