Valmiki's Daughter

by Shani Mootoo

  Her father was holding the hand of a young woman, encouraging her onward.

  Viveka felt something she had never experienced before. It was as if she had been swiftly pushed high up on a swing and was coming back down ultra fast. Her body was suddenly light. She felt giddy. Anick was even more beautiful than anyone had said she was. Viveka found she couldn’t look her in the eyes.

  Nayan embraced Viveka warmly. They hadn’t seen each other in three years. “You’re keeping fit? Well?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she managed. “You look good too. Nice to see you.” She was aware that Anick was watching her intently, smiling all the while, but Viveka still could not return the gaze.

  After an awkward introduction and some chit chat, Nayan invited Viveka to have dinner with him and Anick in a few days.

  “Why not?” Anick urged. “I doing nothing but to stay by myself all day. I cook good. I admit I say myself, but is true. I cook you something from France. French food, you know, very mmm food. I good for something. Not everything, but something.” At this last, she winked. She had laughed nervously throughout her little speech, a self-conscious outpouring. An awkwardness fell over the group, but the moment was quickly saved when Nayan said, “She is good for at least a couple of things, and she is a very, very good cook.” He tapped the front of his shirt in the area of a slight paunch, unabashedly pushing out his belly for emphasis. “See what has happened since I married her?”

  Nayan made it clear that he was inviting Viveka alone. He really wanted Viveka and Anick to get to know each other, he said, with affection that pleased Viveka even as it made her uncomfortable. His parents would go abroad in the next couple of days and would be gone for a few weeks, his father on business. She should come when Ram and Minty were away so that his father wouldn’t put a strain on everyone with his demands and controlling manner.

  At this, Valmiki interrupted, “Oh, your dad doesn’t mean anything by all of that. He looks well. So does your mom. We’d better go on out, otherwise they will think the party has moved in here.”

  Viveka refused her father’s request that she rejoin the party, insisting she had too much work to do. Taking his cue, Nayan quickly finished his invitation, saying he would send his father’s driver to pick Viveka up and bring her to their house, a distance not three minutes by car but too unsafe to walk by one’s self once the sun had gone down. Alone again, Viveka felt unsettled. Neither Anick nor Nayan was any taller than she, but still she felt short and unrealized, almost childlike, in front of them. She had the near-paralyzing sense that her slippers were insubstantial, that the kurta she wore, and that not an hour before had made her feel different, exotic even, had suddenly become baggy on her. Its style, fabric, colours — in a flash, as if midnight in a fairy tale had arrived — had all turned dowdy. She felt that she did indeed look just so, as her mother had said.

  It was not lost on Viveka that if she were put shoulder to shoulder with other young women, particularly those in her family’s social circle, she simply could not match them in their realization of the ideal of what a beautiful girl or woman should be. But this difference itself had always been her pride. To be like any of those women was not her dream; to be unlike them had always been her distinction. She wanted to be able to present herself in that very kurta and get away with it. Standing next to Anick, however, had put the lie to this illusion. She suddenly felt her hair to be unstylishly cut, and much too short. “Different” or “distinct” was not what she felt, but unnatural. Her heart beat fast, and she was overcome by an odd sensation of grieving. She slumped into her chair and remained quite still, afraid to experience any more of these feelings of intense strangeness.

  Eventually, Viveka pulled from one of the shelves the volume of the encyclopedia that included France. She didn’t have anything in mind, really. What of France did she know? She knew words. The Louvre. The Mona Lisa. Notre Dame Cathedral. The Cathars. The Seine. Voltaire, Marie Antoinette, Rousseau, The French Enlightenment. They were proper nouns in a jumbled pool in her head, buzzwords acquired either through cursory reading of mandatory school assignments, or her own natural inclination to read everything, admittedly absorbing little more than a key word here or there. But although she could make no sense of a detailed map of Paris — could barely see the tiny place names on the thin paper of the encyclopedia — she felt as if a whole new world was about to open up for her. Her conversation with Nayan and Anick played in her mind. She realized she had said barely a handful of words. They must have thought her an imbecile.

  Viveka made her way to her bedroom and took a long look at herself in the mirror. Her torso wasn’t flabby at all. It was firm, rather. It was just shapeless. It was a barrel of a torso she had. More like her father’s than her mother’s. She muttered a dry, “Thanks, Dad.” Playing volleyball wasn’t enough. Perhaps there was some exercise she could do. Perhaps she would ask Elliot. He liked doing abdominal crunches in front of her, getting her to count out loud for him. Perhaps she might start going to the gym with him. She wouldn’t do any resistance training, but lots of cardio so that she could get less barrel-like, less muscular. Perhaps when Elliot had said to her, as he had numerous times, that she might want to try an aerobics class, he had been commenting in a sly way on her hard unfeminine body. She suddenly wanted to be more shapely. She switched off the light and threw herself on her bed.

  “I cook good, I say myself but is true . . . French food, you know, very mmm food. I good for something. Not everything, but something.” Anick’s voice, her words, looped in Viveka’s head. She tried to say them out loud, imitating the accent and tone.

  Mosquitoes buzzed around her head. She wondered again if Nayan had told Anick that he had once shoved that bloody big tongue of his down her throat. Worse, that she just let him do it. And worst of all, that she hadn’t had a clue how to respond.

  Viveka and Nayan and Anick

  THE TABLE HAD BEEN SET QUITE SIMPLY. VIVEKA WAS HOPING TO SEE evidence of Anick’s French culture in the setting, but she saw nothing remarkable: a homey, white cotton cloth with a simple red border and everyday stoneware. It might have been a dinner to which no guests were invited, quite the same as at Viveka’s house — except for the setting of the cutlery: the tines of the dinner and salad forks, oddly, faced downward. Viveka repositioned hers, correctly — she thought — tines up. If a guest were to eat at the Krishnu house, a little more ceremony would be had. She was on the verge of being peeved about the lack thereof when it occurred to her that this was perhaps a kind of compliment — a signal that she was “special.”

  Dinner was a one pot dish served with bread, and a salad of sliced tomatoes sitting on top of lettuce dressed with nothing but salt and black pepper. The maid had baked the bread, and the smell of it competed with the heavy, dark one of Anick’s beef stew, the name of which, after several times not getting it right, Viveka stopped trying to pronounce. Nayan rather quickly acknowledged what was already well known to Viveka, that his parents exercised religion in the most meagre of ways, food being the main one. Anick had decided, therefore, to take advantage of the fact that his parents were out of the country and cook a beef dish. Nayan, you see, had come to know beef, Grade AAA no less, in Canada, and not getting anything close to that in taste or quality in the restaurants here, he missed it sorely. This beef was imported. Very, very high quality. Granted, it was a stew, not a roast or a filet mignon, but it was an authentic French dish and Anick made it so well — there was a whole bottle of quality red wine in it! — that it satisfied him fully. There was even a bit of bacon in it. Nayan said all of this as Anick brought out the dish from the kitchen then went back in and returned with the bread and a slab of butter on a bread board. His words seemed not to touch her. She made no appearance of being flattered. Viveka wondered if perhaps her English was so poor that she had not understood him.

  Anick had to make do, improvise a little, with the ingredients she could find locally. So she had cooked the chunks of Grade AAA chuck
with the expected local seasonings, Spanish thyme, local bay leaf, and parsley — all very different varieties than were available in France. But there were, too, mushrooms, canned of course, and of all things, pearl onions. Viveka knew these tiny white onions only as a pickled mouth-puckering ingredient in a common party appetizer. They were usually arranged, along with a half-inch cube of cheddar cheese, on a toothpick, a good number of these jewelled spears impaling a whole unpeeled, uncut grapefruit. She wasn’t looking forward to eating an entire meal with such tanginess in it, but she wouldn’t be uncouth, either. She held one of the little pearls between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, quite ready to discreetly douse its acidity with a drink of water or the wine Nayan made a show of pouring her, or a chunk of that fresh bread. She pressed down timidly, and the juices of the dish leaked out of the onion and spilled over her tongue. The onions had been rendered, on the contrary, sweet and aromatic.

  A smile threatened to break over her face, but she contained it. She stared down hard at her plate and stroked a chunk of the tender beef with the tip of her fork. She thought with some mischievous delight that the onion’s transformation could not simply have been a function of its association with the other ingredients, or had anything to do with cooking techniques and methods, but was rather a result of its close association with Anick herself. She reached for another onion and made sure not to meet Anick’s eyes.

  Nayan dominated the table as he told Viveka —pushing out his chin at Anick in a teasing way, he said that with his wife’s brand of English it would take forever for her to tell the story herself — about how Anick got to Canada, how he and she had met, and how he had gone to France to meet Anick’s parents. Yes, he had indeed been to France!

  Anick seemed mildly bored as Nayan spoke. Perhaps, Viveka thought, this was because she had heard the story told ad nauseam, or perhaps she really didn’t understand enough English to remain fully engaged. She tried her best not to stare at Anick’s prominent clavicle or her lean shoulders, her spaghetti strap dress revealing a mix of bone and steady muscle that made Viveka want to jump up and say, “See? See? She has defined muscle and is enormously feminine.”

  “Anick is an only child. Like me. Spoilt rotten,” Nayan said. “But in her case, who has to pick up where her parents left off? Me, not so?”

  “He think I spoilt,” Anick piped up at last. “Not like I see some children in this country. Children here, the parents they have money and they give it to they children to spend like is air free to breathe, no? Not you, Nayan. Of course you spoilt, but is natural. You are an only child too, but you, you work hard. I can complain about other thing, but not that. You work hard. Like your father. He work hard too, no?”

  Viveka imagined her parents at this same table with them. Had her parents been guests here, one of them, if not both, would have picked up on Anick’s sly comments and might well have playfully said something like, “Wait-wait, not so fast. How is Nayan spoilt? Come on, tell us everything.” But she could never bring herself to be so bold, although she could see clearly that a little boldness might make her a better guest.

  Anick had wanted her parents, unusually protective for French parents — Nayan was saying this with the benevolent authority of one who owned the information — to let her travel farther afield.

  Anick shrugged and muttered, “But of course, is normal. You have how many children in your family, Viveka?’

  Before Viveka could answer, Nayan said, “You know. There are two of them.” He seemed mildly irritated that she would ask a question she knew the answer to.

  Anick, Viveka imagined, was trying to turn Nayan’s monologue into a conversation. Pleased to have been addressed by Anick she said, “I have a sister. Vashti. She is younger.”

  “But two is one more than one. You see . . .” Nayan countered, and with that, he took the conversation away again, carrying right on with his story.

  As he talked, Viveka wondered what Anick’s version of this story might be. That was the story she really wanted to know.

  Anick’s parents wouldn’t let her go just anywhere, Nayan said, especially outside of western Europe. She had a cousin, Jacqueline, who had married a Canadian, Robbie, who had been taking a cooking course in France. “O-tel man-age-ment,” Anick corrected, pronouncing each syllable as if to someone whose first language was not English.

  “That’s right, Robbie did cooking and restaurant management. He is a pretty good chef.”

  “What you mean pretty good? Of course he know to cook. He learn to cook in France, after all. We French, we know about food. You can cook, Viveka?”

  Viveka felt pulled in two directions. Perhaps Anick was trying to open up the conversation again, but Viveka didn’t want to offend Nayan. All Anick got from Viveka, therefore, was an ambiguous response that included a half nod and a hint of a shoulder shrug that could have meant, yes, not really, or sometimes. She wondered if Anick understood that Trinidadian women — even the ones who understood and agreed with feminist principles — wouldn’t try to curtail (which was tantamount to “disciplining”) their men, particularly in public.

  When Robbie had finished his courses in France, continued Nayan, he and Jacqueline went to Canada, to British Columbia, and bought a restaurant in Whistler. They wrote to Anick, inviting her to visit them and to work in their restaurant for a season. Her parents had to be won over, especially to allow her to cross the Atlantic, but they finally relented and off Anick went to Canada.

  Most mornings Anick skied, which she was good at, her family having owned a chalet in the French Alps, and four evenings a week she worked in the restaurant’s pub. She was less good at waitressing, but every male customer wanted her at his table. At this comment from Nayan, Anick curled her lips in a show of tedium.

  Viveka offered a chuckle of acknowledgement on both sides. But it sounded as hollow as she felt. She was uncomfortable. It was as if silt from the bottom of what had appeared to be a brilliant pool was slowly being stirred, and a shadowy cloud of it hovered just below the water’s surface. Nayan’s eyes were almost always on Anick, and throughout his storytelling a grin remained on his face. Anick’s mouth was pursed and her lips puckered, as if her feelings and opinions were concentrated there. Her neck was long, her skin glistened with sweat. Her dark brown hair was piled in an unruly bun on her head. Light loose strands fell, and on the nape of her damp neck, short curled ones clung. Viveka prayed that Anick had no knowledge of the spin-the-bottle kiss with Nayan.

  Nayan had been in the third year of a four-year program at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. He had fallen in with students, white ones, born and raised in Canada, fellows from families with means, and for whom he, the rich brown boy from the islands, was a novelty. Unbeknownst to his parents, he took the living allowance he received monthly from them and, with a show of playboy-like bravado, went for the spring break to Whistler with these friends.

  He immediately noticed the beautiful French woman working in the bar — after all, who wouldn’t have? — and he preened himself for her eyes. He went to one of the ski shops in the Village and bought himself a white, streamlined ski jacket and wraparound silver-framed sunglasses that hid his eyes, and he wore these indoors so that, undetected, he could watch Anick’s every move. In the wood-fire warmth of the pub he would remove the jacket to expose a well-worked chest under a white turtleneck — he used to work out regularly in the student fitness centre at the university, and was much fitter then than he was now, he informed Viveka — and he perched the sunglasses on the top of his head, as he had seen some of the well-put-together men do. He and his friends took turns buying rounds of drinks, and he paid and tipped as unflinchingly as they did. Of course, he didn’t know how to ski, and had not ever really intended to do such a thing.

  Viveka noticed that Nayan was now telling her two stories — in addition to the tale of how he and Anick had met, he was revealing his self-consciousness and discomfort with those very friends he had fallen in with.
Viveka’s inclination, on the one hand, was to sympathize with him, but she went with the other, and merely nodded as if studiously interested in the phenomenon of this cross-cultural dynamic.

  The fellows had placed bets about who would get into bed with Anick first. At this revelation, Anick pushed her plate away and hit her hand on the table. “Ah, Nayan. You too crude. You have to say this?” He stretched out his hand to grab her face, and she slapped his hand away. It was not a violent slap, or one that indicated singular offence, but more the gesture of someone firmly brushing away a fly that had come too close. It certainly seemed now that this back and forth, and the digs Anick and Nayan took at each other, was a performance between them. Still, Viveka’s face burned, and the smile she had been uncomfortably wearing strained even more.

  “I didn’t do it. You know I didn’t put any money on the table. I wanted you too much to play that kind of game. I was stupid, I could have won a lot of money.”

  Anick had slapped the hand of one of Nayan’s friends who had patted her bum — Viveka wondered if it had been the same kind of half-slap she had just given Nayan — as she set a drink on the table in front of him, and that brought her cousin Robbie out from the kitchen to have a friendly chat with them. Employing the business-savvy gesture of camaraderie, he advised them of Anick’s lack of humour. This only caused them to become even more playful and challenging with her. One tried his rough French out on her, but she refused to speak French with any of them. Still, they imitated her attempts at English, thinking all the while that they were flirting.

  Nayan, on the other hand, attempted to distinguish himself by not showing up at the usual time with his friends, but rather some hours later, sporting his newly purchased ski outfit. He would show up with poles in hand, ski toque on his head, up-to-the-minute ski goggles resting on his toque. Once, in the foyer of the pub, he tried to catch the attractive Frenchwoman’s attention. Anick’s response was, “This do not suit you. You do not look too good. You know to ski? I think you and your friend only know to drink. You cannot bring these to the inside.” She pointed to the poles. He couldn’t help but smile at her astuteness and her version of English, but he knew better than to bring notice to that. He expressed worry that the poles would be mistakenly taken away by another patron. She took them, examined them, and then placed them in a spot she had determined was safe. He expressed effusive gratitude and asked her to go out with him that evening. To his surprise, she accepted.