Om folded his arms over his chest and shrugged. “I think Vimla get bite by the macajuel in the cane. But what she gone there for?” He was talking to himself now, trying to unravel the mystery aloud.
Chandani rolled her eyes. She emptied the grated cassava and pumpkin into a mixing bowl.
Om popped his head through the window. “You want some coconut for that, Chand? Gloria Ramnath does make she pone with grate coconut and that thing does taste sweet and nice.” He smacked his lips.
Chandani bristled. “Why you don’t go and live by Gloria Ramnath and eat she coconut pone whole day and night?”
Om reached his hand through the window and grabbed his wife’s chin playfully. “Don’t jealous, Chand!” he said.
Chandani slapped his hand away and reached for the sugar.
The crash of glass against concrete distracted Om. “Blackie! Scratch!” he yelled, turning away from the window. Chandani was grateful when he took off after his dogs. She knew they had barrelled into his pepper sauce jars sitting in the sun again. “You mother’s ass!” she heard Om holler, his slippers slapping across the ground. The dogs howled.
“Om!” she yelled. “Light the coals in the barrel for me, nuh!” She waited for him to grunt a response and then let her thoughts travel back to Vimla—they always came back to Vimla. Of course she hadn’t been bitten when she was seeing about the cow and bull. There were so many gaping holes in that story even Om had figured that out.
Chandani added a lump of butter, evaporated milk, cinnamon and vanilla extract to the cassava and pumpkin. She folded them all together until they were a sweet mess.
There was only one explanation for Vimla sneaking through the cane field alone and it sent a muddle of pain and fury bubbling in Chandani’s blood.
She tilted her mixing bowl over a baking pan and used the back of her spoon to evenly spread the batter.
Chandani had wanted to scream when she figured it out, to shake Vimla and demand why she would even attempt such a thing. But Vimla was barely lucid and Chandani found her rage quickly quelled by her daughter’s suffering. This only added to Chandani’s exasperation. She did not like having to control her anger. It meant that she had to go about her chores with all her curses and questions stuffed inside her soul. They couldn’t stay there long. It was only a matter of time.
Chandani took her pan outside to the metal barrel. She used the dishtowel slung over her shoulder to remove the hot lid. A haze of heat and coal smoke rose up to greet her from the bottom. Chandani lowered the pan onto a rack balanced in the middle of the barrel on two pipes. Then she returned the cover and lit the coals on the bottom with the book of matches Om had left her on the ground. She stepped away from the barrel, feeling uncomfortable now that her hands were idle, and sighed.
As the pone baked, Chandani cast her gaze across Om’s cane fields. The cane was tall, profuse with leaves. Someone who didn’t know the land could easily get lost in the heart of it all. Someone who did know the land could use it to shroud all sorts of clandestine adventures from the rest of the world. Chandani looked farther, squinting against the sun. Om’s last acre bordered Faizal Mohammed’s land, and just at the edge of their plots, a private road opened up and led right out of the district. She was sure the macajuel had bitten Vimla somewhere there and that she had headed in the direction of home immediately after. That explained how Faizal had discovered her.
What Chandani couldn’t fathom was why Vimla wanted to run away from home and where the ass she was planning to go.
Chalisa’s Maticoor
Friday August 30, 1974
ST. JOSEPH, TRINIDAD
Chalisa tiptoed outside, away from the bedee where the puja had taken place, leaving the smells of dahlias, incense and ghee behind. Nanny had told her to wait inside until they returned, but the house was stifling and lonesome without Avinash and Delores. She crept into the tent erected for her maticoor and took long, luxurious breaths. The tent trembled and snapped in the night air. She looked up and squinted at the dazzling lights one of Nanny’s minions had wired throughout the tent. Enormous moths fluttered under the canopy, their gossamer wings like windows. The sheets spread across the floorboards lay askew now, upset by the shifting of bottoms and traffic of excited feet as they’d hurried away. It occurred to her that she would never be alone again before the wedding. Now was the time to run.
She snorted, not unlike Nanny, looking beyond the tent. The men hadn’t gone to the river with the women. They had slipped into the darkness, chatting idly with one another on the driveway and along the periphery of Nanny’s lime trees. Surely they would see Chalisa in her saffron sari tiptoeing through the shadows. And even if by some miracle they missed her, where would she go? Chalisa thought of Gavin. Had he heard that she would be married in just two days? Would he watch her on Mastana Bahar tonight and remember that her dream had cost him his job?
Her heart spasmed. Mastana Bahar. She turned the talent show’s name over and over in her mind like the name of a lost lover. Something had happened to her the day of the auditions. She had come alive, felt an energy raw and pure surge through her as she burst into song for the judges. It had been more than just adrenaline. It had been an awakening, a knowing that she had found her place in the world. A feeling that she belonged somewhere. Nanny couldn’t fathom how song and dance breathed life into that part of her that had perished with her parents. If she did, maybe she wouldn’t have ripped Chalisa’s dreams from her grasp the way she had.
Nanny’s punishment was an emotional flogging to her spirit. A knot formed in Chalisa’s stomach as she thought of people across the island who would watch her perform on Mastana Bahar while she sat captive on Nanny’s estate. To deny her the joy of seeing herself on television then to usher her into a marriage with a pundit’s son from the country was beyond callous. Chalisa willed breath into her lungs, brushing away an angry tear trapped in her lower lashes. She would not let Nanny wring more from her than she already had. She raised her chin and played the brave heroine, however fragile she felt inside.
Tonight Chalisa was dressed in the simplest sari from the collection Nanny had brought. Her hair was pulled into a bun stabbed with too many pins. Delores had draped the sari’s dupatha over her hair so that even the tiny kiss curls Chalisa had fashioned at her temples were hidden. Her wrists were bare of her favourite ruby bangles, her face scrubbed clean of kajal and blush. Nothing about Chalisa sparkled tonight; she was dismal from the inside out.
The drumming of the tassa group rolled in the distance. Despite her bitterness, Chalisa’s eyes lit up. The women were returning in a procession, having made homage to the earth for her fertility. They would spill into the tent dancing now, just for tonight losing themselves in a ritual that belonged solely to women. Chalisa crushed her right foot with her left to stop it from tapping, remembering Nanny’s warning. She rubbed her knuckles together, wrung her hands, fiddled with her dupatha, bit her nail. Anything to suppress her innate desire to move with the drums. The tassa grew faster, louder, as it neared the house. Chalisa squinted into the darkness that wrapped around the tent. No one was watching. She chewed her lip, jiggled her knees up and down, buried her head momentarily in her lap. The drumming stopped and she held her breath waiting for it to break into a livelier beat. When it did, desire triumphed over duty and Chalisa succumbed to the pulse.
The tassa pulsed through her body and pulled her off the peerha. Blood rushed through her numb legs. She hiked up her sari, discarding the manners of a demure bride, and dashed to the edge of the tent where the drumming was the loudest. Her heart pounded and she smiled knowing this was bold and reckless and all wrong. In an instant, her wrists twirled and her hips swayed. She was a starlet enraptured by her stolen freedom.
Somewhere a woman whooped and another cackled.
The tassa grew rowdier, the bass more insistent.
Chalisa pulled her dupatha free of her hair and spun so that it caught an air current and ballooned around her. She
fancied herself the sun ablaze in a night sky, singular in her beauty.
The drumming reverberated off the walls of the house. Chalisa forced herself to stop twirling, but the tent did not. It orbited around her, lights flashing in all directions as she wove back to the peerha. By the time she’d pinned her dupatha in place and assembled her sari pleats over her toes again, the women came barrelling into the yard cheering and laughing, their hands spiralling overhead. Chalisa peeked at their antics from beneath her lashes and caught Nanny eyeing her flushed cheeks with suspicion.
The women had grown boisterous since Pundit Panday had packed up his puja things and gone. Now they were eager for a long night of song and ceremony. Chalisa’s wedding celebrations were officially underway; it was a shame she would be only a spectator to all the exciting parts.
The tassa group was made up of four men with heavy drums hanging like yokes from their necks, a young boy with cymbals. The five stood in a circle, playing their instruments with impassive faces. Sweat dribbled down their temples as they shifted their weight into one foot and then the other. They switched the rhythm of their drumming in perfect unison without so much as a nod from the leader to indicate the change. In this way, they set the pace of the women’s hips and were an integral component to Chalisa’s maticoor night.
Chalisa looked on with envy as the women made their way back into the tent. Some were as old as Nanny. They did the typical grandmother dance: bobbing on their toes and clapping. The other women were the age Chalisa’s mother would have been had she lived to see this day. There was mischief in their movements, which were at times deliciously obscene as they illustrated Chalisa’s carnal duties after marriage. Then there were the young girls who giggled at their mothers behind their hands and twirled in their dresses until they grew dizzy and fell to the tent floor. Chalisa spotted Avinash in the mix. He was jumping up and down like a monkey, having lost his seriousness in the revelry, too. She smiled fondly at him and he waved at her.
A circle formed around Nanny for the finale. She put one hand in the air and one hand on her hip and began to wine like a woman whose bones didn’t ache for Bengay at night. A cheer went up and dissolved into laughter. The drumming stopped and Nanny bowed. Chalisa darkened at the injustice.
The tassa players wiped their sweat with the backs of their hands and retreated into the darkness. Chalisa knew they would find the husbands and fathers of these women and share a shot or two of rum to end the night. How easy to be a man, she mused, shifting on her seat again.
The women greeted Chalisa with smiles before they arranged themselves on the tent floor in a circle. Nanny brought Auntie Dotty a dholak and Auntie Kamala an empty bottle with two spoons. That’s when Auntie Ahaliya, Nanny’s closest friend, began to sing. She had the voice of an old soul and she crooned wedding songs their ancestors had stowed away in their hearts on journeys here from India. Nanny’s eyes grew misty and Chalisa dropped her gaze. What was Nanny remembering? Her son’s marriage, her own?
Fortunately Chalisa’s attention was stolen by some new activity. Delores was gathering five young girls around Chalisa and giving them instruction on the next ritual. The girls were to pinch rice grains and doop grass in their little hands and touch Chalisa at her toes, knees and shoulders before sweeping the materials over her head and then dropping them at her feet again. Each girl did this five times and then dipped her fingers into a bowl of haldi and smeared it on Chalisa’s face and arms. Chalisa scrunched her face up the first time, startled by how cold the yellow paste was.
Delores tutted. “Chalisa! Sit still. This go make your skin glow Sunday. You go be the prettiest bride in Trinidad.” She smudged a dot of haldi onto Chalisa’s cheek and kissed her forhead.
Chalisa looked doubtful. “What this paste make with?”
Delores steered the next girl in line toward Chalisa, who flashed Chalisa a toothy grin before she began. “Coconut oil and turmeric.” Delores nodded her approval as the girl completed her task without error. “The coconut oil go make your skin smooth and soft. The turmeric go make it glow.”
“True?” Chalisa eyed the bowl of haldi, wondering why she hadn’t been introduced to this beauty aid before.
Delores straightened Chalisa’s crooked dupatha. “You go look like a real goddess at Krishna’s side, Chalisa,” she murmured, letting her fingers trail over the soft material and then fall into her lap.
Chalisa’s heart sank at the sound of his name. Somewhere in Chance, Krishna was being coated in haldi, too. She wondered fleetingly if, unlike her, he had friends to bolster his spirits tonight.
Nanny joined them, her knees cracking as she crouched at Chalisa’s feet. “Ah. This haldi.” She picked up the bowl with the remaining mixture. “I does use it every night on my skin and see how smooth my face looking!” Nanny grinned at the little girls and the wrinkles in her face quadrupled. She scraped the rest of the haldi into her palm. “Come, my pretty little Miss Mastana Bahar!” Nanny said, coating every inch of Chalisa’s exposed skin with it. She massaged it gently on her face and vigorously on her arms and feet, dropping globs on Chalisa’s sari as she worked.
Chalisa’s mouth fell open.
“No, no, Chalisa.” Nanny wagged her finger at her granddaughter. “This is not to eat.”
The little girls erupted into giggles, hopping up and down and asking for another turn.
The mood of the singing was changing. Chalisa peeked around the girls, who had closed in around her to witness Nanny’s shenanigans. Auntie Ahaliya was singing something more uptempo. Auntie Dotty had her eyes closed and her lips puckered as she beat the dholak with surprising rhythm. Auntie Kamala had given a spoon to her neighbour and they each tapped one side of the bottle. The other women beat time on their knees and swayed so that their shoulders touched and fell away from one another’s. Although the Bhojpuri was lost on Chalisa, she could almost read the meaning on Auntie Ahaliya’s face. A blush spread across her cheeks and Chalisa was grateful the haldi masked her embarrassment.
Nanny wiped her hands on a towel and piloted Delores into the circle. Delores tried to wiggle out of Nanny’s bony grip, but the ladies clapped, encouraging her to dance, and she was caught. For a moment Delores stood still, but when Avinash tapped her from behind and broke into a comical gyration of his little hips, she shuffled her feet to the beat, too.
Chalisa laughed and the drying haldi cracked around her mouth. For the first time since the women had returned, she stopped hoping the tent would come tumbling down on them all. She would miss Avinash when she was married.
Krishna’s Maticoor
Friday August 30, 1974
CHANCE, TRINIDAD
“The only man missing here tonight is Gloria Ramnath!” Puncheon observed, swivelling in his stool so he could survey the rum shop.
A placid smile stretched slow and deliberate across Lal’s face. Word had spread about his black-and-white television. Now people were showing up in droves to follow the adventures of Ben Cartwright and his sons over a flash of rum and a plate of cutters. Om was glad for all the activity. It helped take his mind off Vimla and Chandani.
“It have more people here tonight than last Friday,” Lal said to himself. He was watching, amused, as Bulldog stole curious glances at Teen Dance Party and shuffled a deck of cards.
Om withdrew the Broadway tucked behind his ear. “Is Krishna’s maticoor night,” he said. Rajesh scratched a match against its book and Om leaned into the flame with the cigarette between his lips now. He took a luxurious puff and exhaled through his nostrils. “All the ladies gone to the wedding house, so all the men break away tonight.”
All the women except Chandani, that is, Om thought. She had stayed behind to look after Vimla, scowling after Sangita as she flounced by the gates on her way to the Govinds’. Poor Chandani. Vimla’s accident had shaken her. When he left for Lal’s, she had been polishing Vimla’s photographs with a cloth, round and round across her face as if she could clean the smut from Vimla’s dubious
reputation. Om wondered if Chandani suspected Vimla had been in the cane when she was bitten, as he did. Chandani hadn’t agreed with his theory, but neither had she disagreed. Instead, she’d kept her head down and grated the cassava furiously, as if everything depended on the perfection of her pone.
Rajesh sipped his White Oak. “It have people here I never see in the rum shop before. Lal—” Rajesh tipped his chin at a man with a string of beads around his neck and a shock of white hair down his centre part. The man was staring, glassy eyed, at the flaking blue paint. “You know he?”
Lal studied Rajesh for a moment. He opened his mouth to answer and then closed it again.
Rajesh arched an eyebrow. “Eh. Like you have friends too good for we, or what?” He sipped his drink and observed the man, intrigued now more than ever.
Puncheon slapped Rajesh on the back. “Who is ‘we’? You have mice in your pocket?” He pulled his sagging shorts up and pushed his shoulders back. “I know that man.”
Rajesh dismissed the claim with a wave of his hand, sending ribbons of smoke curling into Puncheon’s face. “Puncheon, you ain’t know anybody I ain’t know.” He tapped the ash from his cigarette into an ashtray.
Puncheon coughed and blinked his smarting eyes, flapping the smoke away with his hands. When he recovered, he tucked his T-shirt into his shorts, smoothed his salt-and-pepper hair down and swaggered toward the stranger. Puncheon touched the stranger’s shoulder and the distant look in the man’s eyes dissolved into warmth. Puncheon pumped the stranger’s hand with too much vigour. He smiled wider than usual. He tilted his head back and held his belly when he laughed. He made sweeping gestures with his hands. He nodded and widened his eyes when it was the stranger’s turn to talk. Then, when Puncheon had put on a grand enough show for his audience, he clasped the stranger in an embrace, throwing Rajesh a smug smile before he let go and swaggered back to the bar.
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