She wanted to seize Yashoda and warn her: Don’t fight. It’s useless. You’ll destroy yourself and I can’t bear to watch.
“Mommy! You’re hurting me!” Miranda’s voice was full of alarm.
Juliet blinked, surfacing as from sleep. “Where are we?”
“Near the market, I think. It’s hard to see.” Jonathan, solicitous, touched her face. “Is your forehead all right?”
“My forehead?” She felt the swelling with her fingers and a spreading bruise gave back soft bleats of pain. “Jonathan, what happened?”
“You bumped it when the taxi stopped. Will they let us through, Mommy?”
Let us through?
She tried to focus, dazed, and saw that the taxi was stranded in a sea of demonstrators, red banners tossing above their heads, hundreds of faces pressed up against their frail lives like threats.
Dear god, she prayed urgently, cradling the children to herself, feeling the prickle of excitement and of fear.
“What do they want?” she asked the driver in Malayalam.
He turned, uneasy and said something she did not understand. It was, she supposed, meant to be reassuring, but she watched helplessly, caught in the slow awful sway of a nightmare, while he opened his door and got out and abandoned them to the crowd. Can this possibly be happening, she wondered, or am I still hallucinating?
Faces clustered at the open door and she stared back at them, impassive, paralyzed.
She stared into a face she remembered — from where? From an almost forgotten accident by the egg man’s stall — and said to it, as though repeating a catechism: “My children are beautiful as nutmeg plants, but the sweet sandalwood must also burn.”
She might have struck the young man with a whip. He leaped onto the running board of the old car, grabbed a megaphone from another marcher, barked orders at the crowd which fell back like a tide receding. He threw himself behind the wheel and drove until the red banners were far behind them, until there was only the normal tumult of bullock drivers and thousands of pedestrians and buses and auto-ricks and cows.
Beside the canal that meandered from the market down to the temple, he stopped and turned to face his passengers.
“Thank you,” Juliet said simply. “Oh thank you. Without you I wonder what might have … would anything bad have happened?”
“Who can say?”
He was watching her as though she were a map he was learning to read. “You remembered me,” he said. “You remembered my words.”
It seemed to astonish him, to suggest to him a hitherto inconceivable connection between them.
“One remembers insults,” she said evenly. “And moments of danger”
Instantly she regretted it, seeing his lips tighten.
“This is not a good time for you to be in Kerala.” He was harsh, flinging advice her way as he might throw crusts to a starving dog. “The clashes in Delhi — Mrs Gandhi, Desai. And many of us are wanting neither. Go back where you are coming from, rich lady. To where no one is crying for food. I am being too busy finding rice for my family to keep on saving yours.”
“You don’t even know who we are,” she cried, stung. “You don’t know anything about us.”
But he was gone.
In the oven of the driverless car they felt sick with heat and foreignness and dangers too closely brushed. The canal water and the mango trees beckoned.
By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept … The psalm came to Juliet suddenly from childhood, an echo of a devout grandmother’s recipe for solace. “The Psalms have never failed me, Juliet. An answer for every human sorrow.” And there was further comfort in the warm muddy water of the canal as it bathed their ankles. But how shall we sing in a strange land?
“What will we do?” Jonathan asked.
“We’ll sit here and rest. And think what to do.”
And think what to do. We need help, we need comfort, we need a friend.
But whom did she know in this city? She knew the egg man and the vegetable man and the woman who sold limes. There were a few dozen words she could exchange with them. She knew her landlord and his family with whom formalities must be kept. She knew a young widow who was forbidden to spend time with them, and an angry young man who appeared and disappeared in market-place commotions. And once at the beach she had met a courteous gentleman … yes, who had later sent a peon with a message to the Nair estate. They had been out when he came but had found the note.
With the energy of fresh optimism she rummaged in her canvas bag. Somewhere, somewhere, forgotten till now … There it was, an address and a phone number. But how would she call in a city of no public telephones? A city where only a handful of wealthy landowners and merchants were fortunate enough … “Mr Motilal’s emporium!” she exclaimed. “He cannot refuse me.”
And indeed Mr Motilal, purveyor of antiques, graciously consented.
And Mr Matthew Thomas, friend of wanderers, caused difficulties to vanish like morning mists. “You must be staying right there in Mr Motilal’s emporium where there is air-conditioning, isn’t it? And I am coming very swiftly. Most immediately.”
It was not, of course, so very immediate. But eventually he picked them up in his car and took them to the Simla Coffee House, an unsuspected island of serenity behind the Secretariat.
“I am very grateful,” Juliet said as the children sighed happily over mango-flavoured ice-cream. We were so shaken up. Is it really dangerous? Would the students attack us?”
“Huh!” With a wave of his hand, dismissing flies. “Kerala is always like this. It is nothing. Empty noise.”
“Is it really nothing? No danger at all?”
Her relief was evident.
Watching her, he thought of his daughter Kumari bewildered among snowstorms and the deadly unimaginable speeds of automobiles on highways.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m so glad we met!” Impulsively she clasped his hands and after a moment of shock at the impropriety, after a nervous glance around him to see if they were observed, he patted her arm in a fatherly way, willing solace upon his distant daughter.
Wistfully he asked: “Will there be someone for Kumari …? Someone to explain?”
Who can say? she thought, echoing the gruff young man who had saved and then abandoned them. Who could say? All over the world there were cruelties and thoughtlessness. And also instinctive acts of kindness.
“Oh I hope …” She saw the plea in his eyes, the way he willed her to promise happiness for his daughter. “I think … oh yes, surely there will be someone like you for Kumari.”
She had not realized what power she had to confer blessing.
16
Over the mosquito coils and oil lamps and the fug of curry and coconut oil, Juliet caught David’s eye.
“I met two fascinating men today. Actually I had met each of them once before.”
“Did we have to have fish again?” Jonathan whined.
“No. We could have had chicken but after today’s little adventure I couldn’t face playing daisy-chains with intestines.”
“It’s marvellous the way you attract men,” David said. “No matter where in the world you are. They materialize like churchgoers at Easter and Christmas.”
“Couldn’t we have some really profane imagery once in a while? How about: Like mongrels around a bitch in heat’? Or at least some local colouration: Tike temple urchins around a tourist’?”
He smiled at her, delighted.
(It’s that look again, she sighed inwardly treasuring it and chafing at it. The abbé with his statue of the Magdalene anointing Christ’s feet: A genuine fallen woman reclaimed! he thinks with racy reverence.)
“I want hamburger,” Jonathan said.
“Hamburger.” Miranda picked it up, a tearful plaint, old cravings and disorientations overwhelming her.
“Why can’t we?” Jonathan persisted.
“I’ve already told you why a thousand times. Because you can be sure that any beef the Muslim mer
chants sell in the market has been found dead on a roadside somewhere. Of tough old age or disease. You think any of them wants to get mobbed for killing a cow? Put some more yoghurt on your fish.”
“I’m sick of yoghurt, I’m sick of fish. I want some —”
“Remember the mango ice-cream?”
“Ice-cream!” Their eyes lit up. “Can we go again tomorrow?”
“Okay that’s a promise. Now eat —”
David raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Mango ice-cream?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you, if everyone would let me finish.”
“Ah. The men you picked up.”
“My! Your slang is getting quite risque! Actually one of them picked me up, more or less literally. And I suppose, in a manner of speaking, I made a pass at the other one. I did solicit his company And there was an exciting moment when hundreds of men mobbed me.”
“Could you transpose this into a quieter and more intelligible key?”
“Doesn’t it bother you, men massing around me like mosquitoes over the paddy?”
“It’s never bothered me. It flatters me. Gives me a sense of having outbid the rest of the world for a rare treasure at an art auction.”
“How come nothing ever rattles you? Why can’t you have the decency to be nasty once in a while? Or suspicious? Or jealous?”
You know nothing, he thought, of the anxiety you have stirred up since you called out to someone in your sleep. Of how a voice I heard once on the telephone twelve years ago has begun to haunt me. Yet it was base of him to doubt her.
He said quietly: “Because you remind me of a cherub in Chartres Cathedral. Or is it Notre Dame? Anyway there’s one with a wicked glint in its eye and a faintly lecherous smile, but there it soars over the choir screen, pure as a hymn.”
No, she thought. You’ve got it the wrong way around. I have a misleadingly innocent face but a gypsy heart and wayward feet. Yet how could she convince him? And even Jeremy claimed: the illusion of risk, that’s all you want. Was she tamer or purer than she liked to think?
“Funny you should mention hymns. I thought of the Psalms today. Our lives were in danger, you know. We could have been killed.”
His eyes flicked towards her, wide with alarm, but wary, knowing her capacity for extravagance.
And immediately she regretted her instinct for melodrama, seeing an unnecessary fear somersault through the children’s thoughts.
“I’m just joking. We had an adventure. Hundreds of men stopped our taxi to wave at us and we felt like royalty in a carriage, didn’t we?”
“I didn’t like them,” Miranda said. “I was frightened.”
“Well, even the Queen probably doesn’t like it too much, you know. It’s part of the job. And then fortunately one of the men said, ‘Okay, gentlemen, thank you very much. They would like to leave now.’ And he drove us to the canal. And then the other man, who was the Matthew Thomas I told you about, that man I met at the beach, he came and picked us up in his car and took us to the Simla Coffee House and bought us mango icecream. And we had a wonderful day, right?”
Oh yes, the children agreed. The mango ice-cream was wonderful. And could they really go again tomorrow?
“Would you mind,” David said sombrely when the children were in bed, “telling me what really happened?”
“Just what I said. It was a Marxist demonstration, thats all. But not in the least dangerous. I have Matthew Thomas’s word for it. The three splinter groups are constantly demonstrating against each other. They go on all the time. Quite harmless.”
“That’s probably true,” he said slowly pondering it. “The really interesting thing is the way the caste structure has penetrated even the Maoist group. I’ve been analyzing some of their leaflets for Hindu symbolism and whats amazing —”
“Oh David, David!” She wound herself around his body, teasing him. “I’m sure you’re going to tell me every tedious detail.”
He grinned sheepishly.
“And are you going to tell me you weren’t scared? With a mob surrounding you?”
“Of course I wasn’t scared.”
“The Psalms just came to you naturally, as part of the general exuberance of the occasion.”
“Well. I may have been nervous for a few minutes, before I grasped the situation. But only on account of the children.”
“You’re such a magnificent liar,” he said, kissing her.
17
In the scant shade of a banana palm which hung over the granary wall, Juliet sat cross-legged, watching the children, watching the threshing, fanning herself with Annie’s postcard.
Slender Harijan women, delicately balancing vast bundles of fresh-cut rice on their heads, filed in from the paddy and dumped their loads onto the shiny earth of the granary — really a large courtyard with walls of sun-dried mud.
The women formed two lines facing one another across the spreading mountain of hay as though they were taking up positions for a minuet. The members of one line lifted their six-foot paddles high above and behind their heads in unison and crashed them down on the cut stalks. As they raised them again, the flails of the other line descended. Thwack-thwack-pause. Thwack-thwack-pause. Juliet found herself silently composing chants to the rhythm. Mon-soon time, mon-soon time. Tri-van-drum, Tri-van-drum, My mantra, she thought. I will drift helplessly into a transcendental stupor.
Contemplating the strong young bodies of the threshers, she thought: Blessed are those who are poor in Kerala. For their bodies are aesthetically superior to those of the overfed rich and they give great pleasure to the beholder.
She wandered out into the paddy where elderly women moved through the sucking mud with little hand sickles, painstakingly cutting stalk by stalk. Poverty and age had shrivelled them; they were gaunt, their faces weathered as the rocks at Cape Comorin.
The threshers wore close-fitting midriff blouses with their brightly batiked lungis, but the reapers were bare-breasted, old enough to have been raised in the days when it was improper for low-caste women to wear an upper garment. Their trailing earlobes, once punctured by heavy dowry jewellery long since sold for food, swung to and fro like slack ropes.
Shivaraman Nair appeared suddenly from the granary gates, businesslike in his white shirt and dhoti, stark and aloof as a god among his gaudy underlings.
“Good morning, Mrs David Juliet!” he thundered in boisterous good spirits. “Are you enjoying watching my rice harvest?”
“Very much,” she replied, saluting him with hands together and inclined head. “The paddy is so beautiful with its ring of tall trees — like a green jewel that someone has dropped down between the coconut palms.”
It was simplest to be slightly excessive in conversation with Shivaraman Nair.
“Yes, yes! Correct, correct!” he said, delighted. “That is exactly what my paddy is being. You are putting it very correctly, Mrs David Juliet. You are appreciating Indian beauty. Oh, I am so wishing that you could see the movie which was made on my estate. All this paddy and my house — my house that you are living in — are looking so beautiful in the film. It is in colour. Very excellently made. All over India they are showing this film, in Hindi cinemas and Tamil cinemas, with translation. Everyone is seeing my estates and loving. In this paddy the lovers are meeting and they are going over there into the little forest. But their love is forbidden and the family is punishing the girl. Then the young man kills himself from sorrow. Very beautiful. So sad and tragic.”
“Is the movie based on a true story? Was there a tragic love affair here on your estates?”
He was taken off guard.
“No, no! You are not understanding, Mrs David Juliet. Sadness is in poetry. Art is being tragic, only art. Life itself is not sad. These things are not happening in real life because the parents are choosing wisely. That is why our marriages in India are always very good. We are not having divorce in India. In the West your marriages are very bad because young people are choosing for themselves, isn’t it
? This is very foolish proceeding, very foolish. Young people cannot make such deep decisions wisely. It is very terrible, these thousands of divorces in the West. I am reading in the newspapers. Our way is much better. It can be seen in the marriages.”
“Perhaps you are right,” she said politely.
If she were to ask him: But are Indian marriages happier? they would not be any closer to understanding one another. They would disagree so totally on the interpretation of happiness and on whether it was in any way germane to marriage. He might well ask her: Do marriages in the West allow husband and wife to fulfill their dharma correctly?
“I hope that when your children are marrying, Mrs David Juliet, you will be remembering the better ways you have learned in India, and you and Professor David will choose for your children.”
“I hope that when my children are grown and considering marriage, Mr Shivaraman Nair, they will remember what they know of families in India and in our own country. I hope this will help them to choose wisely for themselves.”
“Ayyo, ayyo!” he said wonderingly, shaking his head and gesturing with his hands to indicate despair and amusement. “How would a father buy a husband for such a woman? How is Professor David living with this arguing? Such lack of respect for authority would have to be sweetened with a very large dowry, Mrs David Juliet”
“But surely,” she said demurely, “with your beautiful house as the bridal gift there would be no problem. Your son-in-law would be happy to marry a yakshi if he could live with her in that house.”
“Yes, yes,” he said delighted. “Very true, very true, Mrs David Juliet! Again you are putting things very correctly!”
He clapped his hands with pleasure like a child who has watched the balloon man at the fair release all his strings at once.
“Now I must speak to these Harijan peoples,” he said abruptly, having suddenly remembered that he was a prince of the land who had come to the paddy on business.
“I have heard that all the rain is affecting the harvest. Is this true?”
The Ivory Swing Page 11
