Valmiki's Daughter

by Shani Mootoo

  When Nayan returned to London, he and Anick spoke on the phone two or three times a day. It was inevitable that they would begin to visit each other. They worked out a schedule: alternating months they would take turns, he going there, she coming to London or sometimes to a hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake or one in Toronto. He had to ask his father for an increase in his allowance, as he wanted to pay all the fares.

  Nayan really did try skiing after meeting Anick. He began listening to French radio, and he read a French phrase book every spare minute he had. For her part, Anick launched into a concerted effort to learn about Hinduism, the pre-history and later history of Trinidad and of the Caribs and Arawaks, the steel pan, tropical flora and fauna. It was from Anick, Nayan said to Viveka with pride, that he learned many new things about his own country.

  Nayan took time telling his story and it intrigued Viveka that he had so clearly become the kind of man who spoke on endlessly without encouraging conversation from anyone else. It continued to baffle her that Anick was party to this.

  He knew better than to tell his parents about Anick, Nayan said, because he would be sent for, his money monitored, and even a marriage back home hastily arranged for him with a girl from a known family. Anick, meanwhile, had told her parents about him, that he was brown-skinned, West Indian, wealthy, and owned a cacao plantation and chocolate-making factory. Apparently they were worried that he wasn’t French, didn’t speak any French, and that she was sounding much too serious about him. She had had other love interests before, but none they had seen her consider so seriously. If they had worried about her interests before, now they were even more so.

  At this juncture, Anick got up abruptly and busied herself in the kitchen. Viveka wanted to go with her and offer to help, but she didn’t want to appear insensitive to Nayan’s storytelling. She wondered who else Anick might have been interested in before, and if Nayan wasn’t jealous that he wasn’t her first interest. How restricting life was, she thought, here in Trinidad. The only interest Viveka had ever had was Elliot, and he wasn’t really all that interesting, at least not in that way, to her. If she lived abroad, perhaps she would have more freedom, the chance to discover what kind of person might truly interest her.

  Anick returned with a slice of chocolate cake for each of them just as Nayan was saying that he enjoyed telling Anick about the toucans and the leaping howler monkeys that one heard and saw while sitting on the porch of Chayu, the family house on the forest-like cacao estate. In moments of intimacy, he said to Viveka, leaning in close as if imparting a secret he was both shy about and that she had the distinction of being granted, he uttered to Anick the words agouti, lappe, anthurium, baliser, mapipire, chaconia. And Anick, Nayan said, was mesmerized. She had recognized words related to the forest and to the cacao trade as French, and then he had remembered that cacao was one of the principal products of the French colonizers who had come from other islands to Trinidad on the invitation of a Spanish King in the late eighteenth century.

  “Do you remember the history in our schoolbooks, Vik?”

  It was vague now to Viveka, but Nayan was delighted to oblige.

  Trinidad in those days had been a country that no one wanted to settle. The king, so the story goes, offered land and tax breaks to anyone who would inhabit it and help to make it a viable Spanish colony. So, even though Trinidad had been a Spanish colony, it was mainly Frenchmen who answered the call and first cultivated sugar and tobacco there. But cacao was what they were most known for cultivating. Nayan’s eyes were big as he said this, and Viveka understood him to be insinuating that cacao had once been in the hands of the French, and now he was bringing this Frenchwoman back to it.

  Nayan and Anick had been tickled by the notion of kinship in that early Indian-French history. Chocolate, he told Viveka, details and tales of the cacao estate, the remnants of its Frenchness, and all that a tropical island had to offer, were the method and madness of his courting.

  Even as Anick’s existence remained unknown to Nayan’s family, she and he announced their engagement to Anick’s parents. He told his parents he was going on a business apprenticeship program to France for a month, and Nayan and Anick went to Paris, to Chamonix, and to Anick’s hometown in the south, Perpignan. In Paris they walked everywhere — yes, along the Seine, and he went to the Louvre for her sake. He had known of the Mona Lisa and that it was the name of a painting. But even now he couldn’t remember who had painted it.

  “Oh, come on, Nayan. La Joconde, you know who is the artist,” Anick snapped.

  “Da Vinci,” Viveka theatrically whispered to Nayan. Anick’s face lit up. “You know! You know it? But how? You never go to France before!”

  “No, no. I’ve never seen it. I mean, in real life. But it’s famous. Who wouldn’t know of it?”

  Anick put one hand over her mouth and with the other she pointed to Nayan. “You see, Nayan?” she said. “Why she know and you do not know?”

  Viveka quickly saved Nayan with an apology. “Well, that sort of thing interests me. But I am a little odd, everyone says.”

  “You not odd. You normal. I do not understand how he do not take some interest in this kinds of thing. You know is not how this peinture is called? Is name is Portrait de Lisa Gherardini, épouse de Francesco del Giocondo. That is the name. Not this Mona Lisa everybody like to call it.”

  Nayan still couldn’t understand how such a little painting, such a pale and ordinary face, such a gloomy background, had ever caused a stir.

  Viveka sheepishly said, “I wish I could see it someday. I mean, I have seen so many reproductions of it. You’re lucky!”

  Anick answered, “Yes, he is lucky.” But she was looking at Viveka with sudden aliveness.

  Nayan beamed. He told Viveka that he was impressed with himself that he had visited the museum whose name he had certainly heard before, but what truly pleased him was the fact that he, a brown-skinned fellow from a smallish town in Trinidad, was walking through the famous institution, in Paris, with a beautiful Frenchwoman, repeating after her French words whose meanings he cared less about than that she was exaggeratedly forming them with her lips, showing him the position of her tongue, touching her throat, as she tried to explain to him how to make a sound or pronounce a phrase.

  Anick’s face fell. She frowned and muttered, “You so superficial. C’est suffi, Nayan, c’est suffi, maintenant.”

  Viveka could only imagine what she had said in French, but it seemed that Nayan understood. He said, “No, no, no. Viveka is not just any friend. We can tell her anything. I am proud of how I met you. Let me tell my story my way.”

  Anick began to stir the remains in the serving dish, pushing, somewhat noisily, everything that had stuck to the sides toward a mound in the centre. She cleared off the spoon by hitting it hard several times against the edge of the dish. Nayan chuckled.

  Viveka willed herself to seem ignorant. Her suspicion was confirmed that Nayan simply wanted to hear out loud, in front of an audience, his version of how he and Anick had met. (An audience of one was perhaps better than none at all, reckoned Viveka, and one who would not interrupt or ridicule, at least out loud, was likely best of all.) She wished she could be valiant, a kind of knight, able to whisk Anick away to some less one-sided and exposing situation. But she ended up being, rather, an ear for Nayan’s story, a shoulder for his slights and hurts. She was certainly behaving with some success like every other woman she knew. She took consolation that other women — including her mother, and including, she would bet, her feminist cohort Helen — would all have done just as she was doing under these same circumstances.

  She wished, too, that she could reach over and kindly, gently, stop Nayan, explain to him what he was doing to Anick, to her, with these intimate revelations. She felt as if she didn’t know Nayan at all and realized that were it not for the old family connections, were she suddenly given a new opportunity, he was not the kind of person she would befriend.

  In Perpignan, Nayan related, An
ick’s parents, Armand and Mimi Thiebert, had asked him about his family, their origins. He did not want to introduce himself as the descendant of indentured field workers, so he said simply that his ancestors had immigrated to Trinidad less than a century ago, from northern India. To which Armand had asked: Did they immigrate? I would have thought they went as indentured labourers after the abolishment of slavery, not so, to replace the slave work force? Nayan was forced to correct himself, and was puzzled that a Frenchman living in a town he had not heard of before meeting Anick would know this detail. He talked to them of his family’s cacao estate and Nayan felt like a dark prince, owner of land, of an estate, of a chocolate-making empire, until Armand asked about the origins of the estate itself. Nayan told them it had been in the family for three generations, bought from a French planter in the 1930s. Armand had seemed suddenly quite aroused. He became serious and fidgety, and then he said, So on your land, the very land you now have, there would have been slavery, and all the ravages that went with that, then Indian indentureship, and then what was typical of the time — the Indian workers bought the estates from their bosses when the market declined. Nayan now admitted to Viveka that he hadn’t actually thought of any of this before, and was pleased when Armand had showed enormous interest in this aspect of his story.

  Armand had actually said, “The history of your estate, your piece of land, is the history of your island, and of the international politics and commerce of the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century. It is part of the story of the rise and decline of empire.” Nayan was provoked to find out more. The French connection to his family, he had since learned, and now laid out to Viveka proudly, was as old as history. He knew his grandfather, Deudnath Prakash, had come to Trinidad from India, but he hadn’t paid attention as to why exactly, and no one spoke of it until his return with Anick, when he asked very specific questions. His father told him the details. Deudnath had come to work as an indentured labourer. Many of the people who travelled on the same boat with him were sent to sugar-cane estates, but he was sent to Rio Claro, to work on that very cacao estate when it had been in the hands of its French owner. When his indentureship contract ended he stayed on at Chayu, and in time he became one of the Hindi-speaking managers of the estate. He was lucky that he hadn’t gone to a sugar cane estate, not only because the work there was brutal in comparison, but because by the time the 1930s came around there was a devastating slump in the international cacao market, and owners all over the island began to sell off their estates relatively cheaply. Sugar would not be hard hit for some time yet, and the blessing in disguise was that it took longer for the Indians who had ended up in the cane fields to get out of them.

  Viveka knew that her own family on both parents’ sides were, a long time ago, cane workers. They were among the fortunate few who had managed to get out early, and had obviously achieved great successes ever since, but as Nayan told his story she felt the sting of that difference between them. She didn’t mind, not too much, being an audience for him, but didn’t want to be made to feel any less grand around him and Anick than she already felt.

  The lore of the Prakash family was that Deudnath bought Chayu — the entire forty-five-acre estate — with cash, his savings from employment there, handed over to the French owner in the very cacao sacks in which he had been saving the money. And, well, look at them today, Nayan said — evidence in truth of the decline of Empire and the rise of the Indian. He laughed at his cleverness. But now he knew what Armand had meant. At the time he had had no idea, and had felt a bit stunned by how little he knew, and by the fact that his family’s business had indeed been a nugget in the history of a larger world.

  In Perpignan he was eager to tell Anick’s parents of more common, touristy things, but the instant he said the word calypso Mimi interrupted him to sing a few lines of a Mighty Sparrow composition, her hands slightly raised in the air, waving, her accent causing him to almost roll on the floor with laughter. He liked Mimi — she was bold and opinionated for a woman, but still very indulgent of him. Armand seemed to know something about everything, and this put him and Nayan slightly at odds with one another — but still, Armand was a really likeable chap. Both Armand and Mimi knew of the steel pan and spoke of having heard a Beethoven symphony played “rather curiously, if not convincingly” on it. Nayan admitted that while he did know of its use back home in the local symphony — which made its appearance like a comet: once, briefly, every few years — and had indeed heard well-known classical works played on it, he was not himself familiar with that kind of music, had paid it scant attention, and quite frankly preferred the pan as an instrument of the carnival season. Anick’s parents seemed to already know whatever Nayan might have been able to tell them about Trinidad, and he wondered to Viveka now if this was because they were inherently inquisitive, simply well-informed, or if they had only recently done a fair bit of research — upon learning of his place in their daughter’s life, perhaps.

  At this comment, Anick retorted, “What you mean they do research before you come? These are things they know. They just know it. I do not know why you can not understand this. They not cretins, you know. They know of the world. They smart. They read. They talk. They think. Not to impress you, but all the time.”

  Nayan made a face at Viveka, as if to suggest, “See? This is what I have to put up with.”

  Viveka didn’t want Nayan to think her rude by changing the subject, even if she knew how to do it kindly, but she also so wanted to spare Anick these stories about the arrogance of her parents and the naivete of her husband. She wondered what it was that Anick had seen in Nayan to have married him. “Hmm. You know,” she said pensively, “I am still thinking about the French-Indian thing. I’ve been curious about the differences between ‘cacao Indians’ and ‘sugar-cane Indians.’ I bet the French influence would have something to do with their differences.”

  Nayan chuckled and said that it was too bad that Armand wasn’t at the table with them, as he might be able to expound on the differences between the two.

  Anick got up and slipped away from the table. Nayan watched her leave, then continued regaling Viveka with stories of his visit to France. Knowing that he and Anick had met in a skiing village, her parents took them to Chamonix in the French Alps, to a chalet in which they had shares. They had planned a trip to take him to see France’s largest glacier, La Mer de Glace, but he didn’t want them to learn how incompetent and fearful he would have been on such terrain. “Can you imagine,” he said to Viveka, “traipsing about on a mountain of ice with big gaping cracks in it, so big you could fall in and that would be the end of you? What for? What kind of an end would that be for a boy from the tropics?” Anick’s parents didn’t hide their disappointment, and he and Anick were on edge with each other because of it. But what was a holiday without a little drama? Anyway, if he had been searching for some soupçon — Anick’s word, he added — of familiarity with Anick’s world, he found it in the brand name of the pen that certain Trinidadians brandished. Nayan winked at Viveka as he pronounced, “Mont Blanc.” Unlike those people who liked to whip the pens out of their pockets to lend to you the instant you started patting your shirt pocket for a writing instrument, he now knew, he boasted, that it was not simply the brand name of a pen, but the name of a mountain in the French Alps. And he had actually seen that mountain. Being able to make the connection between pen and place had given him a momentary thrill of worldliness. But he made the mistake, he told Viveka, of asking Mimi if there was any relationship between the two. His question provoked unexpected hostility from Mimi: of course it is named after our mountain, and that diamond logo represents the snow-cap, but the pen company was originally German. This, she tartly said, was clearly an appropriation, and as if Nayan had been accusatory she added, “But there is nothing anyone can do about that.”

  Although Anick’s parents attempted to be good-natured about it, Nayan could tell that his timidity to go on the glacier had tainted their impr
ession of him. They stayed in the village of Chamonix and he witnessed a bristling camaraderie between Anick and her parents. He envied it. He had never done such holidaying with his parents, nor had he ever had that kind of easy back and forth with them.

  As Nayan talked, Viveka’s mind trailed after Anick again, and again she wished she could get up and go to her. She wouldn’t know what to say to Anick, though, if it was the two of them alone. Perhaps there wouldn’t be any need to talk. Perhaps, after all that listening, Anick would welcome some silence. Viveka could have offered her silence. It was strange. She had never felt so drawn to anyone, nor so protective before. It was strange because she didn’t think she was capable of protecting anything. And although she had just finished a meal, a delicious, filling one, she felt as if she hadn’t eaten in a long time.

  It was there in the mountains, Nayan was saying, more than in Perpignan or Paris, that he had felt like an outsider. He was aware that, because of him, Anick’s family had tempered their enthusiasm for the mountains and ski resort they so loved. Back in Perpignan they showed him the coastal towns. They went on day trips to Collioure, to Banyuls, and wherever they went there was an abundance of food and drink. And always they played classical music in the house on Impasse Drancourt. Mimi plied him with local sheep’s milk cheeses, with sheep’s milk yogourt, and bread she sent him down the road to get fresh from the bakers. He told Viveka how he had to ask for a bag to put the baguettes in, as the bakers had expected him to just carry it in his hand with only a little piece of greaseproof paper wrapped around the centre of it. Mimi made local dishes such as the one with anchovies, eggs, olives, and a Banyuls vinegar, and it was in fact very good, and with everything they ate there was wine from the area. They took him to restaurants that served the local Catalan food, sausages and a rice dish that resembled a pelau but was full of shellfish, mussels, crayfish, scallops, squid, everything a bright orangy-yellowy colour because they had put saffron in it. He sometimes felt that a little jeera would have made it that much better, and he wanted to try that dish back here, adding jeera and a dash of curry powder.