Nothing Like Love

by Sabrina Ramnanan

  He flinched. “No.” He shifted uncomfortably in the barrel. “What you want from me now?”

  “Vimla going away,” Minty said, tucking Faizal’s folded shorts beneath her arm.

  “Good. Where she going?”

  “Canada.” Minty folded the towel now, slow and precise.

  Faizal looked genuinely surprised. Curiosity softened his grimace. “For what? She mother sending she away? That stupid ass Krishna know?”

  Minty shook her head. “Faizal, you think I come here to stand up and talk to you in your barrel?” she said.

  Faizal’s ears reddened. “So what the hell you want from me, then? I can’t drive she Canada if that what you come here for.”

  “She need money for the plane ticket.”

  Faizal sucked his teeth. “Tell she ask she father.”

  Minty hugged Faizal’s shorts and towel to her chest, ignoring the suggestion altogether. “I see my mother give you back your chain.”

  He felt the rope at his neck and shrugged.

  “How much you think we could get for that chain and the pendant and the watch? Enough for a ticket?”

  Faizal’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You ain’t getting this chain back, girl. And don’t you dare sell my pendant and my watch. I want them back!”

  Minty shrugged. “Well then, buy Vimla a ticket then.”

  “I look like the bank to you?”

  Minty began to inch away. “Okay, Faizal.”

  “ ‘Okay, Faizal,’ ” he mocked, his lips an ugly twist. But then he realized she was walking away with his shorts and towel.

  “Eh! You t’ief! Where you going with that?”

  She kept her back turned to him, but he could hear the smile in her tone. “I going to put your shorts where my father could find them. He bedroom. Maybe inside he drawer. I think when he pull out these shorts he go know they ain’t his. Look how narrow the waist is.” She glanced over her shoulder at him and held them up for him to see. “What you think, Faizal?”

  Faizal’s fist splashed the water, soaking Sam in an unexpected shower. “Shut up! Shut up!” Sam cried.

  “Eh, girl. What happen to you? Don’t make joke.” Faizal gripped the sides of the barrel and leaned toward Minty. “Rajesh go break my ass in two!”

  Minty shrugged and made to leave again.

  “Okay. All right. I go give you the money for the damn ticket. The farther away Vimla go, the better for me. Why you don’t go and all?” he said.

  Minty whirled on him. “Because somebody have to stay here and watch you, Faizal.” She smiled. “I go see you at the wedding later.” She flung his belongings into the frangipani tree and was gone.

  The Power of Periwinkles

  Sunday September 1, 1974

  CHANCE, TRINIDAD

  Rajesh ambled naked through the house, dripping water onto the floor. “Sangita, where my towel?” He followed the ring of her anklets and found her gliding around the sewing room in a plum nightgown as translucent as a jellyfish.

  Sangita spun around, her damp hair following a millisecond after. “Look how you wetting up the floor!” The dreaminess faded from her slanted eyes. “Check the cupboard, Raj.”

  He stayed rooted in the doorway. “I did. It ain’t there.”

  The strap of Sangita’s nightgown slid off her shoulder and she restored it with an impatient flip of her thumb. “I find you up early this morning,” she said, crossing the room to the teak armoire in the corner. Tink! Tink! Tink! She yanked open the doors, bangles rattling at her wrists, and stopped.

  “Raj?”

  Rajesh wished he’d pulled on a pair of shorts at least. “Is a bunch of periwinkle flowers,” he said gruffly.

  “Of course it is. I know that.” She tickled her nose with the miniature bouquet. “But in the cupboard?”

  Rajesh tried to read the unusual set of Sangita’s lips. Was she angry? He puffed out his broad chest and crossed his arms over it, filling the entire doorway. “Is a surprise for you,” he said.

  Sangita arched an eyebrow at him. “For me? A surprise for me, Raj?” She rose onto her toes so that she could look him in the eye. “In eighteen years, you never once surprise me.” She narrowed her cat eyes at him. “Not once. So—”

  “What about that extra piece of land I buy in the back there?” Rajesh jutted his thumb over his shoulder. “You was real surprise to see how much crop bare on that land.”

  “Crop?” Sangita turned the flowers round in her hands.

  “And the pen for the cows. That pen didn’t build itself. I build it in the hot sun for you.”

  “For me?”

  “For your cows.”

  “My cows?” She tapped her honey décolletage with a finger.

  “Well—we cows.”

  “Hmm.” Sangita peered closer into Rajesh’s face. “You up to something, Raj.”

  The floorboards groaned under Rajesh’s shifting weight. He had played this scene over in his mind a dozen times through the night and a dozen more during this morning’s chilly shower, and in none of those versions did Sangita accuse him of being “up to something.” In fact, in one of his more liberal imaginings, he and Sangita had ended up making love in the hammock amid a scattering of periwinkles.

  “Are you blushing?” Sangita asked.

  Rajesh did not blush; at least, he didn’t think so. “Sangita, throw me a towel, nuh! You don’t see I standing up here naked?”

  She swished back to the armoire and Rajesh sighed. It was those damn eyes of hers. Startlingly tawny. Soul penetrating. Animal eyes. They undid him every time, made him play the ass when he wanted very much to show her how much he cherished her.

  Perhaps the periwinkles had been a mistake. Perhaps—Rajesh darkened—the seer man was full of shit.

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  Rajesh glanced out the window. There was Faizal Mohammed’s kiss-me-ass parrot flapping his wings as he strutted along the fence. “The Love Boat!” the parrot squawked. Rajesh cringed. He wanted to wring its neck as much as he wanted to wring Faizal Mohammed’s, but that would only vex Sangita. She had quarrelled with him the day he’d cuffed Faizal, as if—what? She cared for him? Rajesh scowled just as a towel arced through the air and smacked him in the face.

  “Surprise!” Sangita’s laughter was like the peal of bells.

  Rajesh’s expression softened; a hesitant smile spread its way across his face. He wrapped the towel snugly around his waist and decided to try again.

  “The flowers is like your sari,” Rajesh said, gesturing casually to the sari she’d pressed the night before. It was draped over a chair by the window. The intricate beadwork caught the early-morning sunshine and threw playful designs on the whitewashed wall. It was gold and periwinkle blue.

  Sangita looked from the flowers in her hand to the sari and back again. She fingered the delicate petals of a single blossom one by one as if she’d never seen a periwinkle before.

  “Ain’t it matching?” Raj lifted the sari off the chair and held it in the light pouring through the window. “Is the same blue, I think.” His forehead crinkled. “Deepa at Deepa Textiles say it is the same blue.”

  Sangita’s lips just barely curved at the corners. “Deepa Textiles?”

  Rajesh sucked his teeth to hide his embarrassment. “Never mind that!”

  She hid her mouth behind the spray of flowers, but her eyes shimmered with amusement. “Deepa was right, Raj,” she said.

  Rajesh cleared his throat. “Good. You’re welcome.” He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, not knowing where to look or what to do next, and so he said, “Where my shirt and pants for the wedding? Everything done press?” Although he could see his clothes hanging neatly from a hanger in the open closet. He noticed Sangita had embroidered his shirt collar and cuffs with gold threading, and replaced the plain white buttons with pearly fastens instead. She had been busy. Should he thank her?

  Sangita laid her flowers next to her sewing machine and handed Rajesh his
suit of clothes. “Raj?”

  “What?” He sounded surly, but only because she had interrupted his thoughts.

  “What you want me to do with the flowers? Hold them? Put them in a vase?”

  Rajesh regarded her as if she’d asked him to sell all his land or, worse, take up house with that panty-man Faizal Mohammed. “Sangita, they for your hair, girl.”

  She blinked her mysterious eyes at him.

  He sucked his teeth again, flustered. “Never mind. Meet me in the garden when you done dress,” he said, striding out the door. “And bring the flowers with you. I going to finish my tea.”

  “Tea!” Sangita dissolved into girlish giggles as he rounded the corner down the hallway. “Since when you does drink tea? Rajesh Gopalsingh, you wake up real crazy this morning!”

  He shrugged. Maybe she was right, but he was certain Sangita hadn’t laughed that way with him in years.

  He waited for her under the shady mango tree, his back pressed against the steady trunk. A warm breeze whispered in the branches and set the leaves a-quiver. Rajesh inhaled the sweet scent of ripe mangoes and felt his nerves drift away.

  He checked to make sure he’d remembered everything. There was the stool for Sangita to sit on, and there, just next to it, a makeshift table of cardboard where her hairpins were laid out. Beside the pins, a cup of coffee with sugar and cream sat steaming in the already hot day.

  Rajesh inclined his head to the ringing of Sangita’s footfalls, accompanied this time by a song. He closed his eyes and listened. It was an old wedding song, and not just any: it was his, or rather, theirs. Buoyed, Rajesh welcomed Sangita under the mango tree with an uncharacteristic flourish of his arm.

  Her sari was lovely, yes, but it was her body curving beneath the drapes and folds of the ethereal fabric, and the flecks of light dancing through her curious eyes that made Sangita so achingly beautiful in that moment. Her very movements made music: bells at her feet, bangles at her wrists, gold hangers jingling from her lobes. When had Rajesh stopped noticing this? She cast him a coy look and something stirred deep in his heart.

  “Sit,” he said, guiding her toward the stool.

  She obliged but swivelled to face him, the flowers in her lap. “I just waiting for my hair to dry before I plait it and weave the periwinkles through,” she said.

  Rajesh laughed. “A plait? No.” He circled the stool so that he stood behind Sangita again and in one motion swept the heavy mass of her inky hair off her neck.

  “Rajesh! What you—?”

  “Wait, nuh, girl!” Rajesh began to coil Sangita’s hair, twisting the long rope of it again and again against the back of her head until he’d fashioned a bun.

  “Rajesh Gopalsingh, you gone mad. You really gone mad!”

  “Sangita, you want your bun to come out loose and lopsided? You want to look like a one-horned ram goat? Wait!”

  Rajesh fumbled with the dainty hairpins. Some were lost in the grass, others contorted under the pressure of his thick fingers. But the pins he salvaged he jammed in and around Sangita’s bun to secure it in place.

  “Rajesh, those hairpins chooking like nails!” Sangita winced.

  “Sorry, sorry!”

  “Hear, boy: you could cut cane, and you could mind animal, and you could own plenty land, but you is no hairdresser!”

  Rajesh could hear her smiling. He reached over her shoulder and extracted the bouquet from her fingers. And then, with the hands that so capably wielded a cutlass in the cane field, Rajesh pinned each periwinkle flower into Sangita’s bun until the entire twist was covered in blue blossoms.

  “Miss Lady,” he teased, “maybe I look like a big dotish ass, but I had eight sisters, and if is one thing I could do, is dress a woman’s bun with flowers.”

  Sangita tilted her head back and laughed, and seeing this as his chance, Rajesh placed his big hands on either side of her face, leaned forward and kissed his wife.

  From next door, Rajesh heard the unmistakable thwack of a coconut broom pelted against the fence. “Motherfucking mangoes, Sam. You see that?”

  Rajesh closed his eyes and smiled into the soft peaks of Sangita’s lips.

  Unexpected Wedding Guests

  Sunday September 1, 1974

  CHANCE, TRINIDAD

  “Oh Bhagwan, give me strength.” Anand staggered backward in a haze of sandalwood smoke. Maya extracted the incense sticks from his fingers and Krishna lowered him gently into a chair on the veranda. “Kaywattie pick up a creole man in Tobago and bring him here? Now?” he said.

  Maya’s eyes were round with panic. “Don’t watch, Anand,” she pleaded. “You go send up your pressure.” She smoothed the hair back around her face, but it only sprang up again.

  Krishna saw his father grip the sides of his chair, noted the tremor in his loose, fleshy jowls and knew it was too late for that. “She couldn’t put on something better than that for the wedding?” he said. “Short-short hair, short-short skirt! And don’t talk about that dreadlock fella with the captain’s hat.” He hid his hands in his face and groaned.

  Krishna shuffled uncomfortably at Anand’s side. Auntie Kay and Dutchie hadn’t come to Trinidad for a wedding; they had come to whisk Vimla and Krishna away to Tobago on the The Reverie. But early that morning, when Krishna had arrived at the designated meeting spot behind Lal’s Rum Shop, alone and heartbroken, he had set their plans terribly awry.

  “What you mean, she ain’t want to live in Tobago?” Dutchie had asked, incredulous.

  “Oh, dahlin.” Auntie Kay had stroked the side of Krishna’s drawn face, her own eyes gleaming with tears. “Let we set sail for home.”

  But Krishna wouldn’t go. If Vimla refused to run away to Tobago with him, then he would stay in Trinidad, marry Chalisa Shankar, do right by his father and …

  “Anand, you see how your sister behaving like she ain’t have morals?” Maya said, jarring Krishna from his thoughts.

  “I thought you tell me don’t watch!” Anand snapped, although Krishna could see his father peeking through splayed fingers at the spectacle below.

  Auntie Kay turned here and there, rising onto her toes and throwing herself into various open arms. She wore every colour on her dress in a print both mesmerizing and maddening to the eyes. The twirl of her skirt was like peering through a kaleidoscope and each person she smiled at lit up like a diya. Dutchie followed close behind. He doffed his white captain’s hat at everyone who enveloped Auntie Kay and bowed gallantly to the children who scampered after him to touch his red-brown dreadlocks. In a matter of minutes Auntie Kay and Dutchie were at the very heart of the wedding chaos and everyone rotated around them as if they were twin suns.

  Auntie Kay capered through the churn of activity as if life were like this every day. She nodded to the Hummingbird Tassa Group heating their drums by the fireside and the men stirring enormous, bubbling pots on firecrackers. Carefully she picked her way around the guests bent over fresh, green sohari leaves brimming with mounds of food, and the revellers who rolled their waists to music booming from a speaker box in the kitchen. As she mounted the first step to the veranda, Bulldog, drinking respectfully outside the Govind gates on Kiskadee Trace, called, “Kay, you coming back Trinidad to live?”

  She waved at him. “Not likely, dahlin.”

  He raised his cup to her. “We miss you, that is all.”

  “You too sweet, Bulldog,” Auntie Kay said, but she didn’t say she missed them back. “And where is the good pundit?” Her eyes twinkled with mischief.

  Bulldog nodded at the second storey and Auntie Kay trotted up the staircase, with Dutchie taking two steps at a time by her side.

  Anand was already abusing the air with angry gestures when Auntie Kay planted her small, slippered feet on the veranda. “Of all the days, Kaywattie!” he exclaimed.

  Auntie Kay rolled her eyes, one hand resting on her slender hip.

  “Sita-Ram, Pundit-ji. The name is Captain Dutchie.” Dutchie clasped his hands and bowed.

  A
nand stopped waving and winced. “A Hindu creole?” he mumbled.

  Dutchie tossed his dreadlocks back and laughed from deep in his belly. “Not really. My church is in my heart.”

  Anand scowled at him. “Stupidness.”

  Krishna sighed. “Dutchie is a good friend, Pa.”

  Anand glanced at Krishna, who was standing behind him in no shirt and a pair of old pants. “I didn’t send you Tobago to make friends,” he shot back. “Go and dress for the wedding.”

  But Krishna lingered. Auntie Kay had perched on the edge of a chair adjacent to Anand and now she said, “I hear you marrieding your son to a stranger.”

  The very frankness of her remark made Anand’s eyes bulge red and veiny from his face. Like a mean fish, Krishna thought.

  “And so you come Trinidad to see?” Anand spat. “Well, if I knew a wedding would bring you home, I would have find Krishna a bride sooner! How long I ain’t see you?” He stroked his moustache. “Ten, twelve years?”

  Auntie Kay folded her arms and narrowed her eyes at her brother. “Four,” she said.

  Anand shrugged. “Four. Excuse me. I miscount.”

  She laughed in his brooding face. “Anand, you never miscount a thing in your life. Counting is your expertise.” She turned to Krishna. “Did you know your father had his own currency using rocks when he was a child?” She giggled despite herself. “He would collect he dollar rocks, count them throughout the day and then bury them under the guava tree in the back every evening.”

  Anand stood up, the lovely silk drapes of his cream dhoti billowing in the breeze. “Excuse me, Kaywattie …”

  The smile vanished from her face.

  “I have guests to greet, Krishna have to dress and we leaving for St. Joseph very soon. Is there something I can do for you and your friend?”

  Krishna found himself wondering the same thing. He hadn’t expected to see Auntie Kay and Dutchie again for some time, let alone on the morning of his wedding in the presence of his deeply indignant father. But still, he was glad to share this small square of space with them, if only for a few minutes before Anand sent them away. Auntie Kay and Dutchie radiated the very qualities Krishna did not have, hope and courage, and most of all the two of them were vivacious in all they did. While he did not believe that Auntie Kay and Dutchie could sail into the Govind residence and successfully reason his wedding to Chalisa away, he admired their moxie and the very romance of their endeavour.