The Ivory Swing

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “I’m Juliet. My children are Jonathan and Miranda. And Prabhakaran.”

  “My name is Prem.”

  She was preoccupied. What, she wanted to know without preamble, was the policy of Indian Marxists towards young widows? She told him about Yashoda.

  “Does she suffer hunger?” he asked. “Does she have to work in the fields or carry rocks with bare hands to obtain food?”

  “No,” Juliet sighed.

  “Does she have to sell her body in order to obtain shelter from the rains?”

  “No.”

  “It is not a major problem then.”

  “It is a major problem. It’s a matter of basic freedom. She is kept a prisoner. She is forbidden to wear jewellery …”

  “Oh! It is a question of jewellery!” He spat on the floor.

  “Forget the jewellery,” she said angrily. “It’s not a man’s problem, is it? Whether he’s rich or poor, Nair or Untouchable, nobody keeps him prisoner in that way. It’s a question of basic rights and of freedom.”

  “It is a question of the boredom of a wealthy lady of leisure. It is a question of female vanity. It is a question of jewellery.”

  “If I chewed betel nut, Prem,” Juliet told him wearily, “I would spit the red juice on the floor beside you.”

  And she stared moodily out of the window, noting the curling green line of trees that indicated the canal. Somewhere, just out of sight, it lapped the bank where Prem had abandoned her in a taxi. And beyond that it wound muddily south to the temple tank where David would be, with Shivaraman Nair and Anand and flocks of scholarly priests who would listen to David’s opinions.

  In the world of authority and exploration and freedom.

  The world of men.

  21

  On the stone steps of the temple tank, old men and old women sunned themselves, their purified bodies and laundered garments sending up individual foggy convection currents. In the tank itself more bodies, hidden by the murky water from the waist down, washed their sole garments while taking their ritual baths. Streamers of cotton cloth from unravelled dhotis and lungis floated on the water, their wearers pounding and scrubbing them inch by inch. Then, in the privacy of the opaque tank water, they wrapped themselves again in the garments and came out onto the steps to dry in the sun.

  “Do we need to bathe here also?” David asked.

  “No, no!” Shivaraman Nair was offended. “This is for people not having family tanks or modern bathroom in house.”

  They continued past the tank, past the booths of the trinket sellers and flower sellers, towards the towering gopuram of the main east gates of Shree Padmanabhaswamy temple. Shree Padmanabha: He with the Lotus Navel. Vishnu.

  Anand was waiting for them at the top of the steps. As they ascended towards him, two temple guards advanced and barred David’s way with crossed axes of the curved and hooked medieval variety. Their eyes were hostile and the sharp silvered edges of their weapons looked deadly. Shivaraman Nair produced a document, a lengthy legal-looking affair entirely in Malayalam script except for David’s signature. The guards, however, could not read, and much argument and gesticulation followed. Eventually the guards withdrew.

  Sandals and shirts were removed and left at the gates. David, flanked by his two hosts, passed beneath the tumultuously carved figures that cavorted in tier upon tier of the gopuram.

  His first impression was of endless space. From outside the high carved walls, the temple had appeared to be one immense sprawling mega-monument. But now they stood in a vast courtyard with the shrines themselves in a separate structure in the centre of the yard. Light and spaciousness overwhelmed him as presences, part of the mystery, his eyes vaulting up above the pointing gopuram to the domed roof of the sky, the soaring carvings seeming to curve like Gothic struts towards their central ornamented boss, the sun, that blazing eye of Shiva himself.

  Hundreds of voluptuous maidens, their full breasts uncovered, jewelled chains at their rounded hips, drapes parting around their thighs, watched David silently. Their stone hands proffered little oil lamps like gifts. Each maiden was a pillar supporting a sort of cloister that ran around the outer edge of the courtyard. It seemed to him — a trick, no doubt, of the blinding sunlight — that Juliet and Susan and Yashoda, endlessly multiplying themselves, were leaning towards him, offering delights. But as his eyes adjusted to the light he saw that they could not be western women, they were all Yashoda, who surrounded him like an aura. You cannot escape me, she whispered. I am everywhere.

  “The statues are magnificent,” he said to Shivaraman Nair, disciplining himself, asserting scholarly faculties. “It must be spectacular at night when all those oil lamps arc lit.”

  “Yes, yes, very beautiful! But now we do not use oil lamps, except for special festivals. Now,” his host gave a proud flourish of his hand, “we are having electricity for evening pujas.”

  “Except also when the power is failing,” added Anand, realist.

  David grimaced. He would have retained the use of oil lamps at all times. He felt the same disappointment that the sight of loudspeakers on the minarets of the mosque at Palayam had caused him. The muezzin call was a broadcast recording!

  In some ways, he thought, I am more resistant to change than they are. Yet if they can run electric cables through these stone cloisters, why should they be surprised that a young widow rebels against ancient laws?

  David would have liked to linger among the lamp-bearing maidens a little longer, but he followed his guides into the stone hallway that led to the central shrines. Coming out of the brilliant courtyard he found it difficult to see anything in the soft gloom for several minutes.

  As his eyes adjusted to the twilight, he realized that he had become the central attraction for a flock of young assistant priests, all chattering with excitement over the rarity of the occasion, each anxious to be the authoritative guide to the temple’s treasures and history. He also became aware that the hallway was a veritable gallery of superb life-size sculptures. His pulse quickened, the blood pounded in his veins, every synapse of his scholar’s brain prickled with a current of excitement. He felt like Balboa on his peak in Darien. The first Westerner to see them, his entry permissible under the dubious rubric: “Hindu by professional research .”

  The sculptures were chiselled from a very dark granite, the forms massive yet graceful. He knew they had been done late by the standards of Indian temple art, mid-eighteenth century, but recognized them as infinitely superior to anything else he had seen in Kerala. And he felt they were the equal of many more ancient and more classical pieces he had seen in North India.

  He was rudely buffeted out of his rapture. Arms seemed to be clutching from all directions, pushing, pulling. This way, this way, this way, voices were saying. He moved forward in bewilderment. The cloud of priests had closed in on him like a fog, obscuring vision. They had become impatient with his long stillness in front of the statues, he had not been listening to their accounts of famous miracles, they wanted to show him one of the temple marvels.

  He was led to the musical pillars, a cluster of stone pipes of varying thicknesses, running from floor to ceiling like cave stalagmites. Someone gently manipulated his head so that his ear was pressed against the columns. Someone else beat the pillars at random with bare hands so that a series of haphazard notes, low and sustained, dinned in his ears. His hosts waited inquiringly for his opinion. There was a glaze of high anticipation on their faces, a sort of breathless waiting for the inevitable accolade. He felt like a captive before the Inquisition, so many expectant faces looming close and watchful in the darkness.

  “It is very interesting,” he said awkwardly. “Most remarkable.”

  “Ahhh!” There was a communal release of breath.

  “Yes, yes!’’affirmed a multitude of voices, proud and delighted. “Remarkable, most remarkable!”

  And they insisted that he again have the pleasure of listening. And again. Over and over. He was frantic to escape from
the humming in his ears and head.

  A young priest, anxious to show other wonders, finally rescued him, pointing out carved scenes from the life of Krishna. His guide launched into an account of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda and of Lord Krishna’s sport with the gopis, of the allegorical meaning of all those cowherd women leaving their husbands and children at the first sound of the flute. The women were, said the priest, a symbol of the soul’s yearning after God, its readiness to abandon earthly concerns in the search for salvation, the desire for union with the Supreme Lord.

  David was thoroughly familiar with the poetic and interpretive traditions being expounded, and his thoughts wandered naturally from the gopis to Yashoda. Beautiful reckless women. Risking everything to get what they wanted. Did Indian tradition after all sanction Yashoda’s actions just as it had always forgiven the gopis for their tempestuous indiscretions?

  No. He thought not. There was too big a gap between divine allegory and social practice. Yet Indian poets and artists had always found Radha and the gopis irresistible. That vibrant spark of rebellion. The world well lost for love. For David also it was intoxicating. Juliet careening after him, heedless and totally unselfconscious through subway crowds. Susan climbing into his office window. Yashoda tilting her jewelled nose at convention, pummelling his caution with her fists and her need for love.

  And if he were to give in? If he were to go one evening to her house beyond the forest — because of her deprivation, because he was only human — what man would blame him?

  Perhaps he was not even capable of refusing. Vicarious risk-taking, he thought, that is what attracts me. I seem powerless to resist it. I am a connoisseur of daring women, of dangerous lives. They delight me as works of art delight me. I collect them.

  A sudden insight: he had never pursued or pined for Juliet or Susan, never needed to. Miraculously, they had fallen into his life like meteors, offering themselves. And he had been amazed, disbelieving; had made token efforts of moral restraint; had accepted them (Yashoda too?) as quickly and easily as a museum accepts art endowments: as gifts, graces.

  Perhaps, like comets, their presence in his life would be transitory. Within a day within an hour, Yashoda might look elsewhere for love. How simple that would be, the removal of temptation. How desolating: like an eclipse of the sun; like the theft of an art treasure.

  Perhaps even Juliet would leave his days as swiftly and nonchalantly as she had entered them, a brilliant migratory bird, plumed with splendour and regrets. And he would be powerless to do anything about it. As though he had had a premonition, as though the vibrations of the musical pillars had shaken loose intuitions and repressed realizations, he felt a chill. No doubt it was merely the subterranean breath of the temple vaults.

  He leaned against the stone pandemonium of the gopis who cavorted about Krishna, and closed his eyes, evoking the green spring shoots of his marriage; Juliet at rush hour running towards him. But the subway branched perversely with areca palms and his wife was the jasmine-haired woman of his uneasy recent dream: I thought you were someone else, she said, turning away floating on by.

  In nights of equatorial drift and panic, she called to someone else in her sleep. Pinioned in a small town or in a dusty Indian village, loyal, she nevertheless sneaked away from her husband in dreams. And perhaps m thought? And perhaps in future intention?

  A thousand tiny memories and innuendos of malaise assaulted him:just that morning, the leap of fire in her eyes when Shivaraman Nair had said: You are not permitted, Mrs David Juliet … And then, when David had turned back to see her forlorn and solitary in the doorway, the burned-out look, the look of quiet ash as it falls grayly through a grate. He had seen it before, that look. Back in Winston sometimes: she would stand staring from the window of their house like a woman behind bars, like a woman absorbed in a dream of somewhere else, someone other. (But it was such a fleeting mood. Surely he was right to discount it.) And what of the occasional unexplained long-distance phone calls? (But he would never inquire. It would be base to be suspicious.)

  Sometimes, when she went alone to Montreal — for library research on a flagging book — his thoughts took on a brief muddiness, reptilian. What did she do when she was alone? When she was free. Despising the thought, a malignant thing crawling from Pandora’s box, he would ram it quickly below consciousness.

  She would return with a glow that disturbed him, although it always faded quickly in Winston, transplanted, seemingly, from its natural earth. His anxiety would flare briefly.

  My falcon, he would think. Wild and dangerously beautiful. I never expected to catch or tame her, but she bound herself to me willingly. One day she will not return to my wrist.

  But then he would scoff at his own alarm, at his overly fertile imagination. I take metaphors too literally, he would think. I trace them like arabesques, I follow improbable trails convoluted as the acanthus borders of ancient manuscripts.

  Nevertheless … nevertheless … she was someone who could leave him. Someone who could easily live alone. She was a self-generating giver-off of sparks. She had never been, never would be, dependent on him. He had never wanted her to be. And yet it was an alluring temptation, contemptible, but potent: to be needed desperately. As Yashoda would always need someone. Yashoda was vulnerability itself, stirred to rebellion only by her fear of the more absolute vulnerability of widowhood and solitary aging.

  Perhaps he should simply seize the moment. (If he were to be abandoned, what could he do? What did he know of the wiles of hanging on?) Perhaps when Yashoda came to him again, the wings of her caged desire beating in panic, perhaps he should simply …

  This is my fatal weakness, he thought. My Achilles’ heel. In the core of my scholarly soul, I seem helplessly susceptible to a certain blend of vulnerability and rashness. I cannot predict what I will do, I cannot tell when the pterodactyl will swoop out from the fen of my libido.

  It unnerved him, this possible loss of moral control, and with a sense of urgency he pulled objectivity and probity around himself like a knight girding on chain mail for impending jousts. He cast about for cerebral anchors, and was relieved that it was time for the midday puja. The flock of priests bore him forward to the great shrine of Vishnu.

  The image was behind a screen, its doors as yet closed. About a hundred devotees began to gather for the ceremony Men, women, and children, families, mothers holding babies, Brahmins and Nairs, beggars and shopkeepers, students and field labourers.

  Music began to echo through the cavernous vaults of the shrine room. Drums, gongs, conch shells, flutes. The temple seemed to throb with music, barbaric, splendid, primitive. David felt his blood pound to the rhythm of the drums, a wild exaltation overpowering him.

  Vedic hymns and prayers were being intoned by the priests against the backdrop of the music. The sonorous chant of the Sanskrit shlokas mesmerized, the clouds of incense drifting around the devotees contributed to a heady sense of free-floating. The priests raised the fruit and flowers and payasam to be offered to the god as his midday meal. Faster and faster beat the drums. David soared to the heart of the mystery, his pulse hammering. As the music raced to an almost unbearable, almost orgasmic climax, there was a final roll of drums and the doors of the shrine were flung open. David bowed his head in the presence of a great wonder.

  Analyze this euphoria, analyze, begged some faint scholarly memory, some trained faculty for criticism and skepticism. Later, later, he told it.

  Physical sensation returned to him at the touch of the chief priest’s thumb print. David’s forehead was smeared with sandal-wood-paste in the ritual Vaishnavite marks. The devotees all held their cupped hands in front of them like communicants at an altar. The assistants to the chief priest placed a section of plantain leaf on each pair of hands. They carried baskets of the sacramental flowers and food that had been given to Lord Vishnu, and were now to be distributed to the faithful as prasadam, visible grace.

  Shivaraman Nair turned and offered David a portion of his
own payasam, the sweet and delicious sacred gruel. Neither seemed able to speak. They ate together, and David thought with amazement: We have grown fond of each other. He is a man of sensitivity and integrity. He will not harm Yashoda.

  Outside Shivaraman Nair said: “There are one hundred thousand gods yet only One. We are in agreement, yes?”

  David said carefully: “You do understand that I am not Hindu? That I study Hinduism as a scholar only?” He knew his academic interest bewildered them, he was never quite sure how they interpreted it. “But I will never forget the moment of darshana and the moment of sharing payasam.”

  Shivaraman Nair laughed.

  “Please, Professor David,” he said reassuringly. “You must not be minding because you are a Christian. I am not minding. I am certain that in your next incarnation you will be fortunate enough to be born Hindu.”

  22

  In steamy mid-morning a tired peon arrived at Juliet’s door with an invitation to visit Matthew Thomas’s house.

  “Did you come all the way on foot?” she asked with concern as he leaned against the front wall of the house.

  “I have run,” he said, between deep breaths.

  Insane, she thought. Seven kilometres in this heat!

  “Come inside. I will get you a drink.”

  “Venda! Venda!” He shook his head, embarrassed and startled. He moved away from her door and sat on the ground, his head between his knees, relaxed.

  “Perhaps if the mem sahib is so kind as to send her servant with water,” he said.

  She gave Prabhakaran the pitcher of lemonade and a cup. Matthew Thomas’s peon did not use her cup — his touch would pollute it — but he slurped the lemonade gratefully from his cupped hands.

  They have a way, Juliet thought uneasily, of making my democratic instincts seem gauche and clumsy. In bad taste.

  “Tell him,” she informed Prabhakaran, “that we will take him back to Matthew Thomas’s house with us in the taxi.”