by Shani Mootoo
And now Viveka had burst into their dinnertime conversation, bringing up the subject again. “You know, the interesting thing about a community sports club is that it does allow for the intermingling of the different social classes and the many cultures our county is blessed with, don’t you agree, Dad?” Although Valmiki knew the question was rhetorical, he was about to grab the rein with some clever and diverting response, but Viveka didn’t wait for an answer. “I mean, after all, we are a small island, and rather than form cliques we should indeed be learning from and about one another, helping one another upward, you know what I am saying?” She looked from her father to Vashti and carried right on again. “As you yourself have said, Dad, strong individuals make for a strong nation, a strong country within and without.” If Viveka’s little sermon prevented her from hearing her mother’s sudden heavy breathing, Valmiki was aware of it, and this panicked him even more than whatever Viveka had up her sleeve. Devika bit her lower lip. She pushed her plate up the table. Valmiki couldn’t help himself. He had to smile. His daughter was bold. Bolder than he was. Vashti put down her fork, scrunched up her mouth and forehead, and looked at her sister in confusion.
But Devika was not about to play this game with her daughter. “Look, get to the point, Viveka. You are talking about joining that club again, aren’t you?”
“Well, Mom, Helen . . .”
Viveka’s tone immediately went from the pulpit one she had managed so calmly to a high-pitched one, but she got no further than the mention of her friend Helen’s name. Her mother lashed out, “Look, I don’t want to hear about Helen. Helen is not even Indian. At least, not properly Indian. Her father is white — which, let me remind you, not just you, but you and your father, does not mean that he is one bit better than us. Most of those foreign whites who leave their countries and come here are not from our class. They come here because they can’t do better for themselves in their own countries. They come behaving as if they are superior, lording it over us. They have no social graces whatsoever, and people like you and your father fall for all of their nonsense.”
Valmiki was irked. He gasped at the manner in which he was so suddenly insulted, but knowing better than to get trapped by either his wife or Viveka, he simply threw his hands up in mock defeat and shook his head.
“On top of that, Helen’s mother is a brassy Port of Spain Indian. Those Indians from the north like to think they are too different. They do whatever they please without thinking of what others might say. Mix that sort of attitude with a little whiteness and they have their children joining swim clubs and tennis clubs, prancing about like horses, and you hear about their children attending all kinds of parties they have no right being at, you hear things about them, things that I would be ashamed to repeat to your father. Those town Indians have no respect for their origins, they forget their place, they ooh and they aaah over curry as if they never had curry before, and they give their children names like Helen. You are not joining that club.”
Viveka opened her mouth but was cut off again.
“You tell me, are there any other Indian girls on that team? Go on. Tell me.” Devika asked this with a confidence in the answer that both annoyed her husband and inspired awe in him.
“Women,” Viveka corrected, albeit in a less confident tone now.
“As long as you’re living in my house I will call you what I like.”
Valmiki slid one of the Rimpty’s chocolates off the plate and his hand hovered in front of his mouth. He could smell the sugar in the candy. In a softer manner he tried to employ a different tactic: he and her mother didn’t think Viveka joining the team was a good idea because it might affect her studies, he said. Devika inhaled loud and long to let them both know that she thought this was pandering, and she did not approve of it.
Viveka sulked back that playing a sport did not mean her grades would suffer or that she would not qualify with a degree. Valmiki asked how long each evening’s session would last. Before Viveka could answer, her mother snapped: Time didn’t matter, what mattered was that club days were during the week. When neither Valmiki nor Viveka said anything, Devika added in her inimitable tone that weekdays were impossible.
The topic had first come up several weeks previously. At the time, Devika had expressed her worry to Valmiki that since Viveka already lacked a certain finesse one wanted in a girl, engaging in team sports and competition might only make her that much more ungainly, and whatever polish she, Devika, had tried so hard to impart would certainly be erased. But other things were on Valmiki’s mind, then and now. He could not imagine either of his daughters being at that park late into the evenings. Young men idled there, men of African origin in particular. But he knew better than to say this out loud, as Viveka would then have asked about his friendship with Saul, who was of African origin, and that would have derailed everything. She would certainly have jumped, too, on the racism and sexism implied. If she had used the word hypocritical he would have understood, but Devika would likely, in a single action, have stood up and flung her hand across Viveka’s face. In short, provoking Viveka further would only leave room for a litany of examples of how old-fashioned and everything-phobic he and Devika were (none of which Valmiki minded being), with the result that Viveka would end up looking like the noble, victimized member of the family.
Valmiki did worry that, in all innocence — for how could Viveka be anything but, as she had no experience of the world as he knew it — his daughter could be encouraged into an easy manner with unsavoury young men precisely because of all that so-called progressive university-nonsense she came home with, nonsense that always had terminology suffixed with the dreaded “ism”: sexism, feminism, paternalism, Marxism, racism, anti-racism, activism. Of course he had said none of this to Viveka, nor to Devika.
But something more had nagged at Valmiki last evening at dinner, and now continued on into his office hours — the knowledge that while team sports involved various kinds of camaraderie and, yes-yes, all that important exercise, it had the potential to involve something else: complicated kinds of physical contact. He knew something of this; he had played soccer with boys from his high school and, later, soccer and cricket at university. And even as he sensed the foolishiness and futility of trying to protect her, he couldn’t bear to give his daughter, this one in particular, permission to enter an arena that could stir within her, like it had in him, a confusion she would absolutley have to keep to herself. He wasn’t entirely sure that this would happen, but it nagged at him that it could.
Valmiki had not been overly enthusiastic about sports when he was in high school, but on the soccer field during mandatory physical education period he proved himself to have a special talent for sliding by the other players, seemingly out of nowhere, and scoring goals. Several older students — brash, loud fellows who played soccer every chance they got, during the lunch break and after classes — noticed his talent. Among themselves they carried on a kind of roughousing that included a good bit of deliberate touching-up, which at first he thought was strange for boys who teased one another so much. He noticed that they would fall into spontaneous, out-of-control wrestling bouts, and that the physical education teacher would come out and shamelessly land himself in their midst. They shoved and pushed one another, grabbing onto one another’s privates, shrieking, cackling, getting hoarse, almost choking on their fun as they made one another hard by the sheer act of this kind of play. They all, every one of them, seemed to enjoy it, and fell into it over and again — even though, once off the field, none of that sort of touching continued, or was even made mention of. In the change rooms where they showered, two boys to a concrete stall with a half door on it, the boys only half-naked — their underpants remained on — there was the strictest hands-off protocol.
But Valmiki was taken under the wing of a self-appointed guardian, an older student who, when they were in their shower stall together, would insist on giving Valmiki’s growing limbs a good rub down “to help keep that kick n
ice and strong,” as the older boy would say. The torrential flow of water out of the shower head hit their bodies hard and felt good to them both. Valmiki liked what the older boy did to his body, soaping his hair, massaging his scalp, riding his thumbs under Valmiki’s meagre scapular and up and down either side of his spine. Across his chest, his buttocks, hard down his thighs — his “quads,” the boy would say. His calves. And even his feet, one foot held in the boy’s hands as Valmiki leaned his shoulders back against the mossy concrete wall of the stall so as not to slip in the soapy pool collecting about them. One toe at a time the boy soaped and pulled, and Valmiki would laugh and kick and pull back his foot, doing a sort of dance to balance himself that made them laugh to the point of tears. “How a lil fellow like you could kick so big and hard and direct, boy?” the older boy would ask, and Valmiki would feel as if he had been lifted high into the air.
But then one day the boy, while soaping Valmiki’s back, slipped his hand inside of the waistband of Valmiki’s under-pants, a soapy finger sliding into the crease of his bottom. Valmiki spun around fast and backed away from the boy, who, grinning widely, put his forefinger to his lips. The boy reached into the front of his own pants and pulled out his hardened penis. Valmiki stood still and stared. The older boy stepped toward Valmiki and put his free hand on Valmiki’s shoulder as he pulled at himself until his penis spluttered its semolina-like fluid. Valmiki’s face burned with a sudden terror, but his body trembled with excitement. His own penis had hardened, but the older boy only patted him on the face and laughed. He turned his back to Valmiki and washed his face rapidly with soap, breathing out noisily against his hands and the onslaught of water from the shower head. Valmiki’s curiosity had been piqued. Even as he knew better than to make his interest obvious, he began to keep the older boy in sight, to shift his body this way or that in an attempt to catch the boy’s attention. But the boy had changed. He kept a distance now, even during the physical education period. Come shower time, he would make a show of entering a shower stall alone. Valmiki watched the older boy as he stood with groups of other students chatting and laughing among themselves. He felt scorned, and shame blossomed soon enough into anger when he imagined the boys were watching him, as if they knew.
One day, when there was no physical education class, not minutes after the bell rang to announce the start of the long lunchtime period, Valmiki buckled his courage and with a studied calm walked across the field, far away from the school building, to the edge where the unfenced property was marked by the neighbouring one, an unkempt stretch of overgrown razor grass and guava trees. Valmiki knew the boy would see him go to the bushes. He looked back, caught the boy’s eye, and then carried on. He could only hope, and sure enough, the boy waited until Valmiki had entered onto a narrow path and disappeared into the grasses that closed in behind him. He crossed the field, entered the same path, and caught up with Valmiki, who had stopped among the guavas to wait for him. They held hands as naturally and as easily as if they had done it before and Valmiki led the older boy as he ducked in and about the trees. Suddenly, the older boy pulled Valmiki to a stop and suggested they take their long-sleeved white school shirts off so they would not easily be seen. Shirt and tie off, they drew each other farther along to a spot where they could, through the foliage, still see bits of the school building, but where they were sure they themselves could not be seen. Even now, decades later, Valmiki could conjure up the cloying perfume of that guava orchard, and remembered how the cuts from the razor grass there stung his legs, his bare back, and his chest. The memory of this concoction made him feel at once ill and nostalgic.
Their tongues had hesitantly touched.
The memory now caused a lurch in Valmiki, from his waist down to his toes. The older boy had undone the zipper of Valmiki’s short khaki trousers and taken Valmiki in his hand. He and the boy continued to stick their tongues out of their mouths so that only the tips touched as the boy fondled Valmiki until Valmiki’s penis grew long, thick, and harder than he himself had ever managed to make it on his own. He trembled and the boy bent his head and put his mouth on it. Valmiki came in the boy’s mouth instantly, and a horror overtook him. Revolted, he kneed the boy under his chin so hard that the boy accidentally clamped his jaws shut on his own tongue and blood spewed out of his mouth. The boy stood there holding both hands to his mouth, tears blurring his vision, and Valmiki ran, pulling on his shirt, buttoning it and tucking it back into his pants. He ran, tears of anger and horror in his eyes, until he was right out of the school gates. He made his way home, ducking into the tall grasses that lined the roads whenever a car passed by. He slipped into his house unnoticed, and went immediately to the shower. He was in a rage, crying as he bathed himself, scrubbing his entire body — although he was barely able to bring himself to touch his penis — until his brown skin was raw, pinprick-size beads of blood reddening the surface of his skin. He spat and spat, and rubbed the soap against the tip of his tongue as he attempted to erase the taste and feel of the other boy’s tongue from his mouth. He couldn’t have hated that boy any more, and he hated himself in equal measure.
For weeks he was terrified that word of what he and the boy had done in the bushes would spread and he would be beaten up, kicked off the soccer team, perhaps pulled into the bushes by other boys and the same done to him by one or a group of them, older, stronger than he. But what he was most afraid of was that word would reach his parents. Then he would surely kill himself. He had planned how he would do it, and waited day and night for the indication that his dreadful, unnatural activity had been made public. But until this day, no word of it had ever been spoken. The boy left school at the end of that term. No teacher had offered a reason, and no one seemed interested in finding out why. Valmiki had always assumed that it might have had something to do with — not so much what the two of them had done that day in the bush, but with whatever it was that had made him do that kind of thing in the first place. Even as he fondled himself in his nighttime bedroom, his heart racing full tilt as he imagined the same boy bent into his lap, and he experienced the same uncontrollable shudder at the memory of the boy’s mouth on him, how it felt as if his mind were about to be blown apart and his body to shoot right into outer space, he didn’t mind never seeing the boy again. These fantasy moments usually ended with Valmiki suddenly shoving the boy off him, giving him a solid undercut with his fist, a knee under the already bloody chin, and a shove into a wire fence where he imagined the boy holding on, crying and begging forgiveness. How Valmiki hated that boy and what they had done together.
He practised bouncing a soccer ball on his head and on his knee. He made a point of engaging in disparaging jokes about women and “faggots.” He developed the affectation of spitting, velocity and distance becoming markers of his manhood. He launched, too, into a display, at school and in front of his parents, of noticing girls, commenting almost to the point of excess, sometimes with a lewdness that did not suit him.
Intimacies, albeit of a lesser degree, he came to see were something sporting fellows never outgrew; at medical college abroad he played soccer and cricket, and there the men gave one another stout congratulatory hugs, pats on the shoulders, playful but harder slaps on their backsides, pats on the face that sometimes felt as nuanced an exchange as one might expect in an engagement between a man and a woman. He watched closely for signs that might have exposed secrets between the men, but he saw nothing that resembled his much-regretted exchange with the boy in his high school. He was careful, regardless of how he felt, not to touch or respond to any teammate in a manner that might provoke that teammate to lash out at him the way he himself had done to the boy in high school.
Then along came Tony, the student from Goa who was to tutor him in a course he had failed twice. Tony: not athletic, but muscular. He was short, one might even say stocky, and brown like Valmiki himself. Tony had grey eyes, unusual for an Indian, and he had short curly hair. He reminded Valmiki of sculptures of Grecian young men he had se
en in the museums.
Valmiki didn’t know if “feeling each other up” during games was strictly a guy-thing, but he suspected and worried that girls and women might get on with their own version of that sort of thing, too. He wanted Viveka spared the horror, the confusion of the kind of experience he had had but never revealed to anyone.
In adulthood Valmiki might have played golf, as did several of his colleagues and other men from his social world, but he took up, instead, hunting. It started with an invitation from Saul, one of his patients, an electrician who lived on a fringe of the city and who could not have entered Valmiki’s social circles. The pupils of Saul’s eyes were a yellowish brown and light always seemed to emit from them. They reminded him of Tony’s grey eyes. Saul would look directly at Valmiki with those eyes as if he could see through Valmiki. He was not like other men, not afraid of long, insistent eye contact. Saul Joseph was lean, ruggedly muscular. It was precisely the fact that he was partly of African origin that heightened the unlikeliness of there being a bond between the two men, and that drew Valmiki to accept Saul’s invitation. No one would pay any attention. Valmiki went with Saul one Saturday into the forested central hills, awkwardly toting a rifle the man had spared him for the day.
By the time darkness had fallen on the hills that first day, Valmiki was sold on the particular camaraderie that went with that sport. That week, accompanied by Saul, who had in a sweet instant risen from status of patient to peer-of-sorts, Valmiki bought a shotgun and a box of ammunition from a villager, a cacao farmer who moonlighted smuggling these and other contraband onto the island.
