This is a strange and wonderful thing, he had thought. And now he understood why these two days of waiting had been ordained. Some auspicious purpose would surely be revealed.
He thought of Kumari, his youngest and favourite child. Kumari, who on her wedding day, shyly radiant, had looked so like her dead mother that Mr Matthew Thomas had had to turn away to hide his tears. What did she do in Burlingtonvermont? He tried to picture her now that she was in her confinement, her silk sari swelling slightly over his grandchild. A terrible thought suddenly presented itself to him. If she had no servants, who was marketing for her at this time when she should not leave the house? Surely she herself was not … No. His mind turned from the idea, yet the bothersome riddles accumulated.
She was in her third month now, so he knew from the four childbearings of his own wife that she would be craving for sweet mango pickle. He had written to say he would send a package of this delicacy. Dear Daddy, she had written back, please do not send the sweet pickle. I have no need of anything. I am perfectly happy.
How could this be? It was true that her parents-in-law lived only five kilometres distant in the same city, and her brother-in-law and his wife also lived close by, and of course they would do her marketing and bring her the foods she craved. Of course, they were her true family now that she was married. Even so, when a woman was in the family way, it was a time when she might return to the house of her father, when she would want to eat the delicacies of the house of her birth.
He could not complain of the marriage. He was very happy with the marriages of all four of his children. They had all made alliances with Christian families of high caste. He had been able to provide handsome dowries for his daughters, and the wives of his sons had brought both wealth and beauty with them. God had been good.
But it was four years since he had seen Kumari. The week after her wedding her husband and his family had returned to America, where they had been living for many years. Only to arrange the marriages of their sons had they come back to Kerala. The arrangements had been made through the mail. Mr Thomas had been content because the family was distantly related on his wife’s side and he had known them many years ago, before they had left for America. So they had come, the wedding had taken place, and they had gone.
For four years Mr Matthew Thomas had waited with increasing anxiety. What is a father to think when his daughter does not bear a child in all this time? Now, as God was merciful, a child was coming. Yet she had written: Dear Daddy, please do not send the sweet pickle. I am perfectly happy.
It had been the same when he had expressed his shock at her not having servants. Dear Daddy, she had written, you do not understand, Here we are not needing servants. The machines are doing everything. Your daughter and your son-in-law are very happy. Of course this was very reassuring, if only he could really believe it. He worried about the snow and the cold. How was it possible to live with such cold? He worried about the food. The food in America is terrible, some businessmen at the Secretariat had told him. It is having no flavour. In America, they are not using any chili peppers. And yet, even at such a time as this, she did not want the sweet pickle. Could it mean that she had changed, that she had become like a western woman?
He looked steadily and intently at the tourist woman. Certainly, he thought, my daughter will be one of the most beautiful women in America. White women were so unattractive. It was not just their wheat-coloured hair, which did indeed look strange, but they seemed to have no understanding of the proper methods of beauty. They let their hair fly as dry and fluffy as rice chaff at threshing time instead of combing it with coconut oil so that it hung wet and glossy.
The woman was wearing a sari. Certainly that was better than the other western women he had sometimes seen at the tourist hotel, although in fact one rarely saw Westerners in Trivandrum. The ones he had seen usually wore trousers like a man. It was amazing that American men allowed their women to appear so ugly. True, he had heard it said that women in the north of India wore trousers, but Mr Thomas did not believe it. An Indian woman would not do such a thing. Once he had seen a white woman in a short dress, of the kind worn by little girls, with half her legs brazenly showing. He had turned away in embarrassment.
Mr Thomas was pleased that the woman who might be from Burlingtonvermont was wearing a sari. Still, it did not look right with pale skin and pale hair. It is the best she can do, he concluded to himself. It is simply not possible for them to look beautiful, no matter what they do.
Then his name was called and he went to the counter.
Juliet thought: I will not tolerate this any longer, I will not. Yet if I simply give up and leave, how will I ever receive the parcel from home? Could I face this again on a different day? Never! But I cannot, I simply cannot sit here any longer. I will count to ten and then I will stand on this chair and scream.
On her count of eight, the door to an inner sanctum opened at one side of the room and a civil servant, by the mere hauteur of his eyebrows clearly superior to the desk clerk, surveyed the room for a moment and then withdrew, closing his door again. With the speed of impulse and exasperation, Juliet crossed the floor, knocked, and entered without waiting for a response.
The superior being was startled.
“Excuse me,’ Juliet said. “But I have been waiting over three hours for an opportunity to ask a very simple question. I know you’ll be embarrassed by this inefficiency. I know you’ll want to do something about it immediately.”
She held the post office card out to him.
“This is not the correct place,” he said, making no move to take it. “You must be waiting for the clerk at the desk in the other room.”
“I’m afraid I will not be waiting one more insufferable minute for the clerk in the other room.” Juliet spoke very quietly, looked the man squarely in the eyes, and fabricated with deadly intent: “My husband has powerful friends in the government, and there is going to be much trouble for somebody because of this delay.”
A pallor, like the blanching of cashew nuts left out in the sun, passed across the man’s face.
“There has been some mistake, dear lady. We are being most distressful, most distressful. You are having our fullest attention.” He took the card from her and snapped his fingers so that a servant girl appeared from behind a screen. “Please be bringing mango juice!” he ordered her. He examined the card carefully. “I am giving this my most immediate attention. Most immediate!”
Then he left the room and Juliet sipped iced juice.
Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Here we go again, she thought.
And then he reappeared, the quintessence of regret. “I am making very thorough investigations, very thorough, I assure you. There is absolutely no parcel for you at Air India office, Mrs Professor. But I am making a racket, I promise you. Jolly bad show! I am telephoning the post office and discussing. It is their silly fault, all their fault. It is all a mistake. There was no parcel, no, absolutely never. They are assuring me. Jolly bad show, all this waiting. I am begging you to forgive.”
Juliet stood as in a dream. Am I awake? Will peacocks swoop from the desk drawers?
She had to struggle against some demon of hysterical laughter that cavorted deep in her throat. “I am forgiving you,” she spluttered. “I am absolutely forgiving you. Isn’t it?”
Matthew Thomas stood patiently at the counter. It seemed that his request was a complicated one. It involved searches and gesticulations and a certain amount of argumentation. This was the way of things. More delays were promised.
Mr Matthew Thomas was not in the habit of letting life’s little inconveniences upset him, but when he concluded his affairs with the desk clerk and left the Air India office at last, he was just in time to see the tourist woman leaving in a taxi.
She is leaving for Burlingtonvermont, he thought. He felt bereft, as though a miracle had come floating by like a wind-blown petal and he had failed to catch hold of it. He was not quite able to repress the thought
that it had been an unkind day.
8
Along the rutted village roads that wound from the Nair estate to the beach, dark-eyed children massed to watch a passing wonder.
“Sahibs! Sahibs!” they chanted, running alongside, bare feet percussive on the red earth. Inside the lurching auto-rick Juliet and the children huddled close, hands raised to ward off the shower of pelted blossoms and stones.
Perhaps, Juliet thought, I am considered to have the Evil Eye. I must be simultaneously appeased and driven off.
“We should have brought Prabhakaran,” she gasped. To mediate.
It was a relief to emerge, like a chrysalis spreading sudden wings, from the child-crusted palm-canyoned roads into the white glare of the beach. Sand, coarse, terra-cotta in colour, embraced their sandalled feet like gritty fire. Directly overhead the sun slithered and smoked through a haze of water-heavy air.
Yet, strangely, what Juliet thought of as she slung her sandals over one shoulder and waded into the blood-warm surf, was Lake Ontario frozen. It was the remembered exultation, the same sense of awe at the margin of a vast body of water whose far shore cannot be seen. The Balboa syndrome, she supposed — whether silent on a peak above the Pacific, or alien between the coconut palms and the broiling Indian Ocean, or poised precariously between January and February on a wafer of ice beneath the bleak Canadian sky.
“Do you remember,” she asked the children, “walking out on the frozen lake? How it seems to go on forever and ever, as though we might reach the edge of the world?”
They looked at her curiously, not seeing a connection, and splashed themselves with water that leaped back from their clothes towards the sun in instant vaporous tongues. She wanted them to savour the mysterious incongruities of their lives.
“Don’t you remember how excited you were when you realized you were walking on water?”
They nodded vaguely the surf frothing between their toes.
“Look!” she said, picking up the frayed husk of a coconut and tossing it as far as she could out over the waves. “It will wander through all the oceans of the world and one day someone on a ship from Montreal, sailing out of the St Lawrence estuary, will see it floating between the fishing boats.”
But the coconut came bobbing shoreward on the next wave and the children swam to meet it, competitive, awash in the present moment. Juliet sat on the sand beside their discarded cotton clothes and sandals, thinking of snowsuits and mukluks. And of that first of many winter odysseys in the small town beside Lake Ontario.
“It must be the oxygen!” David had shouted.
She knew what he meant although she couldn’t really hear the words. The wind barrelling all the way from Lake Superior took words and whirled them in flakes of sound as far as Nova Scotia. She knew he meant the taut hum of ecstasy, the sense of being caught up in elemental and exalted matters remote from the dwindling town where dull people crawled between morning and night.
She laughed and put her thickly mittened hand clumsily into his and called back, sending a futile missile of language into the blither of snow: “Let’s keep going to the edge of the world!”
And the children, Miranda scarcely able to walk yet, reeled about like padded balls buffeted by an unseen playmate. Only their eyes were visible, clownish behind ski-masks, huge with wonder and the stimulant of cold. Breathless, they brushed icicles from their lashes and hurled their bodies into the wind and rolled in the snow, making angels with muffled arms.
Sometimes they scooped away at the drifts until they had laid bare a black window into the lake’s secrets: air bubbles caught like diamonds, and small fish shocked into silver stillness, their deaths preserved like jewels until the thaw.
Ah, Juliet had thought, drunk on insights and oxygen, there are ways to cheat change and decay.
And they had hugged each other and danced and known they were not like other families, but set apart, blessed. Fumbling with the impediment of winter clothing, Juliet and David had kissed and their kisses had frozen on their lips, the shimmering salted rime of an epiphany.
Yes.
Epiphany.
And she ran across the hot sand towards her children and began to dance at the foaming edge of the Indian Ocean.
Mr Matthew Thomas was so astonished by the sight that he forgot to look under the thatched cabin of the fishing boat drawn up on the sand beside him. At first he thought it was the Burlingtonvermont woman from the Air India office. It was so difficult to tell one Westerner from another. They all looked alike, especially the women. But then he realized that the two children frolicking at the edge of the waves belonged to her, so he was sure it was someone different. How extraordinary Twice in one week! It must be because he was thinking so often of Kumari. Perhaps God sent these messengers. It was auspicious that she was with children. It must surely mean that Kumari would have a safe birthing.
The woman looked like a sprite from the sea with wind and salt spray whipping her long golden hair about her face. Little waves frothed and foamed about her bare ankles, wetting the edges of her cotton skirt, which wrapped itself damply about her thighs in a way that was disturbing to him. She seemed to be dancing in and out of the shallows as were her two children. It was certainly an extraordinary way for a grown woman to behave. Behind her a small crowd of Indian children followed at a slight distance, mimicking her with much merriment, but she seemed unaware of them. Or else chose to ignore them. He felt embarrassed for her.
Could it be the same for Kumari, he wondered with sudden pain. He had a vision of his daughter walking through the snows of Burlingtonvermont in her sari with a mocking group of American children chanting strange things after her. What was it like to walk through snow? Kumari had written that it was soft and powdery. Like sand, he supposed. Like sand that inexplicably froze the feet.
The woman and her two children and their retinue of pranksters had moved on along the beach, so he continued to look among the long snake boats for the family of Ouseph. The fisher people spent their entire lives on the beach. They did not even leave it to market their own fish, since this was the task of another sub-caste of the fishing community. Any of the scant wants that the sea and shoreline did not provide — such as rice, cooking pots, cloth — they bartered from the men and women who sold their fish. They went out to sea by day, and by night slept under coconut thatch awnings hung over their simple boats which were drawn up high on the sand.
Since they were of the lowest castes it would not have been fitting for them to visit Mr Thomas at his house, even if they were ever to leave the beach, nor would it be proper for him to eat with them. But as they were of his faith, he was concerned whenever word reached him that a family was in particular distress. On this occasion he was bringing both food and money to Ouseph and his wife and young children. Ouseph himself had been ill for some time and their eldest son, who was still only a boy, had been taking out the boat each day because the livelihood of the family depended on the daily catch. A week ago the boat had not returned at evening and then a few days later had been washed ashore empty. Mr Thomas went to offer what little comfort he could.
After a time he found them leaning against the simple lashed logs of their boat, gazing out to sea. Mariya, the wife, was weeping silently. The children were nowhere to be seen, probably capering along the beach in the wake of the day’s wonder. Ouseph stared at him unseeing. He offered his gifts simply and sat a little way apart in silent sympathy. What could be done about the will of God? His ways were inscrutable.
When he felt that a suitable length of time had elapsed he bowed to the sorrowing couple and withdrew. He walked southwards along the beach watching the ocean rolling all the way down the blue distances to where Cape Comorin stood sentinel against the non-Indian world.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, he thought. From this sea had come Christ’s own apostle, St Thomas, with salvation. Missionaries from Europe had used boats as pulpits, preaching to the fisher people. And daily the ocean took back
their converts to the bosom of God himself.
Then again he saw the vision coming to him from the sea, fair and strange as the Blessed Virgin.
“Hello,” she said, smiling. She had a vague sense of having seen him somewhere before, but could think of no context.
He had not expected to be addressed and could think of nothing to say. He simply stared at her.
She bit her lip and looked away and he felt a rush of dismay and sympathy.
It is hard for them in a strange land, he thought. This is the way it would be for Kumari.
“Is it lonely?” he asked without thinking. “Away from your native country?”
“Yes.” She was surprised. “Sometimes it is very lonely.”
She looked directly into his eyes, her own wide and blue-green like the sea.
It was disconcerting to be looked at by a woman in that way. Improper. He lowered his own eyes nervously. Did Kumari gaze at other men in that way now?
The fisher children swarmed like flies, pressing against her, touching her, chanting. Mr Thomas clapped his hands sharply and shouted an order. Immediately the children fell silent and backed away, scampering off to their boats.
“Thank you,” said the woman in evident relief.
They began to walk along the beach together, her two children darting in and out of the water like dragonflies, laughing and calling to each other. He was relieved that the woman herself was now walking sedately beside him. He did not know what he would do if she began to dance again. Perhaps she had only been doing it because she thought no one but the children could see her.
He said: “I am having a daughter in America.”
“Really?”
He looked at her sharply. Of course really. Was she accusing him of lying?
“She is living in Burlingtonvermont.”
The Ivory Swing Page 5
