The Ivory Swing

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Prabhakaran giggled nervously.

  “He will not come. He will be afraid.”

  “Of a taxi?”

  “Of Mr Matthew Thomas.”

  “Oh nonsense. I will explain to Mr Thomas. You are coming with us too, Prabhakaran.”

  “But Mr Shivaraman Nair has forbidden —”

  “Leave Shivaraman Nair to me.”

  But the taxis were not at Shasta Junction and they had to walk under the punishing sun until a bus came by. At Palayam Market they bought oranges and sucked them to wash the rind of dust from their teeth, to pierce the scummy grit in their throats. Then, after the inevitable haggling with the drivers, they took an auto-rick to Mr Thomas’s house.

  His street was so steep and severely rutted that the driver was unwilling to risk his frail vehicle. Again they walked, Mr Thomas’s peon several paces behind. Though the road was in a condition of extreme neglect the houses along it were quite imposing, not much different from Shivaraman Nair’s house. Children began to cluster at gateposts, watching, chattering, giggling, poking.

  There was a break between the houses where a tongue of uncleared forest sprawled out to the road and a massive banyan tree, probably centuries old, stood like a sentinel between civilization and jungle. Its roots radiated out from the huge convoluted trunk like flying buttresses from a Gothic nave, and in the niches thus formed were a number of crude cobra shrines. Some had been carved into the rootwood itself, others were roughly shaped in stone. An old woman, sitting cross-legged in the dust of the road, was rubbing ointment — coconut oil from the smell of it — onto the five hoods and scaly neck of Anantha, the king cobra sacred to Vishnu. A keening chant, the sound of supplication itself, rose from the woman’s lips.

  She turns to the snake, Juliet thought, because there is power in venom. She is fleeing her powerlessness. Is it a sick grandchild she prays for? Or an erring son? Or an imperious daughter-in-law? Is she caged in a house where she does not feel at home?

  As though she heard the thought, the woman turned and looked at Juliet. Her eyes were direct, dark as a hawk’s, unnerving. The women held each other’s gaze.

  It seemed that all understanding passed between them, the knowledge of all women who braid their own years into shackles, who weave with love and resentment the silken cages of their lives.

  Then the woman shrugged. Her gesture said: We make whatever adjustments we can. We turn to whatever is available. And her fingers, glistening with ointment, caressed the cobra again.

  At the end of the street they came to a high wall with gates. Beyond was a coconut grove, three houses that could be seen, and doubtless more lands and buildings beyond the trees. An estate.

  Mr Matthew Thomas was sitting on the veranda of the closest house, shaded by vines. He saw them as they peered through his gates and came towards them beaming. He surprised and delighted Juliet by greeting her with a hug.

  It was not at all what she had come to expect of Indian salutations. Mr Thomas looked exuberant. Almost young.

  He does not seem old enough to be the grandfather of numerous children, she thought.

  He patted Jonathan and Miranda on the head, stroked their cheeks, then took them both by the hand and walked back to the house. He nodded to Prabhakaran to indicate that the boy might be permitted to sit under one of the trees, away from the house. He ignored his own peon entirely.

  Juliet bit her lip.

  It was getting harder to remember that Prabhakaran was not actually one of her children. He was almost always with them now, part of what school lessons they still did, part of the bedtime story routine. Part of their lives. Part of the family. She felt personally wounded.

  Should she challenge Mr Thomas’s assumption and offend him? Should she meekly accept traditions not her own? She stood irresolute beside Prabhakaran under the trees.

  “ Venda” he whispered to her. “You cannot take me into the house. Po, po!”

  But she could not walk away and leave him.

  She took his hand and they moved to the veranda. She sat with him on the wooden steps. Mr Matthew Thomas was confused and deeply embarrassed.

  “Please, please,” he begged, drawing up a wicker chair for her.

  She thanked him and accepted, leaving Prabhakaran on the steps. Mr Thomas looked uncertainly and uneasily at the boy. It was difficult to understand the ways of Westerners. Surely she could not expect him to offer a chair to a peon? He could not do it. It would be, as the Bible itself said, casting pearls before swine.

  Prabhakaran fidgeted, rubbing his bare feet on the steps, tense and unhappy, caught between the strange expectations of Mrs David Juliet and the understandable annoyance of Matthew Thomas.

  “Prabhakaran,” Juliet said, trapped, conceding herself to be out of depth, “do you wish to play under the trees?”

  “Shari, shari,” he said with relief, and ran off, the tension broken.

  Matthew Thomas called an order back into the house. After a short time his daughter-in-law appeared with tea and cups on a tray. She and Juliet were not introduced.

  “I saw an old lady at the cobra shrine down the hill a little,” Juliet told him.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “This land is sacred to Anantha. My grandfather cleared it after the missionaries helped him to buy it. Before the missionaries, my grandfather was a peon on a great Nair estate.”

  Why then, wondered Juliet, when his own family history was one of upward mobility, did he insist on caste distinctions with Prabhakaran? Were there moral blind spots of her own that seemed just as glaring to Matthew Thomas?

  “Did your grandfather choose this land, or did the missionaries? Didn’t it seem odd for Christians to build in a grove sacred to the cobra?”

  “No, no. For Christians it is safe. When my grandfather cleared this land, he did not find one single snake. But further down the hill there was also a Hindu family building a house. And on the very first night they slept in it, the father was bitten by a cobra and in the morning he was dead. That is why mostly Christians are living in this area. For us only it is safe. But come! I will show you my properties.”

  And he gave them a tour of his lands, Christian and free of cobras, but in other respects organized and farmed on the same hierarchical principles as Shivaraman Nair’s estate.

  23

  The days crawled by like exhausted sun-stricken travellers who have lost their way. When Juliet climbed listlessly up to the roof with the sandals, she inspected her own hands for mould. She knew she was in decay, a mutant form adjusting to the steamy heat. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of flying home, but she had trouble remembering how such intricate things as airplane bookings and customs clearance were managed. Now when she thought of cities and subways a kind of panic gripped her and she would have to wander around the rice paddy until it subsided.

  Occasionally, in a burst of guilty energy, she would organize the three children for school work. Prabhakaran was learning English. He could write his name. Jonathan and Miranda could calculate fractions. For what forgotten reasons? The spasm of discipline would peter out. The children would play on the roof or in the paddy.

  A postcard had arrived from Annie. She and Yashoda were going on to Madurai. Another postcard had arrived from Madras. They were going to stay near the fabulous seaside temple of Mahabalipuram for a few days. Would be back eventually.

  She heard nothing from the Nair house about the absence of Yashoda. If only they would react, Juliet thought, I would feel less uneasy.

  The days crawled by.

  News of far events filtered through, weeks late.

  “Your Mr Trudeau has had a scandal,” Shivaraman Nair told them. “It is the mistakenness of western marriage. If his parents had chosen wisely …”

  In Delhi, Desai was marshalling the courts to proceed against Mrs Gandhi. There were outbursts of violence around the country. In Bombay. In Madras. In Madurai also, Shivaraman Nair told them. It was getting closer. Something was also happening in Angola, he sai
d.

  The days crawled by.

  Annie and Yashoda returned. Yashoda, flushed with freedom, looked magnificent in a sari and jewellery bought in Madras. Shivaraman Nair had watched them come through his gates in a taxi. Nothing had happened. Nothing had been said. It was apparent to Yashoda that Annie’s presence was better than a sacred amulet. Nothing could harm her.

  David, coming home from the university saw Yashoda drifting through the grove in the murky evening light. She flitted into his senses like a shimmering bird of paradise, insubstantial, graceful as a fantasy.

  “Oh Professor David,” she murmured, running to meet him. And her eyes were real, her cinnamon-scented breath was real, the hands that he clasped were real. “Oh I am so happy, so free. With Annie it has been as though I were a western woman. I have escaped and yet I am safe. I am being very grateful.”

  She laughed — it was the sound of Radha’s golden anklets — and floated away from him again to join Annie.

  He had to lean against a tree, his hands trembling.

  She doesn’t need me any longer, he thought. And he knew that this was a good thing. Yet he felt as though he had thrown away something of inestimable value. As though for a moment something priceless had been given into his hands and he had fumbled with it carelessly and let it fall through his fingers.

  To have her look at him again in that helplessly vulnerable way! Professor David, only you can help me … I want love, Professor David …

  He felt a cold irritation with Annie for her interference and was barely able to be civil to her over dinner. He did not listen to their plans and anecdotes, he fixed his attention elsewhere.

  On the second evening after their return, Annie and Yashoda walked together past the Nair house, out of the estate, along the public road to the Junction. They took a taxi in to the Chalai Bazaar, a grotto of colour and excitement not far from Palayam Market.

  This evening, Juliet thought, they are courting disaster.

  “Shivaraman Nair can afford to overlook a trip outside the city,” she had said to Annie. “Don’t force his hand. If you cause him public embarrassment here in Trivandrum …”

  “Of course he’ll be angry,” Annie had shrugged. “But why should Yashoda submit to that nonsense? And what can he do?”

  They had gone, glowing with their own temerity.

  Shivaraman Nair sent a note to the house with the evening milk. It was not brought by Prabhakaran, but by a servant they had never seen before. Professor David, it said, please come immediately for discussion of weighty matters.

  “Sounds as threatening as that sign at the railway station,” David joked nervously.

  It had been one of their private amusements, the large sign in Indian English between the ticket window and the platform entrance: WARNING! TICKET-LESS TRAVELLER! HEAVY PENALTY AWAITS!

  “Don’t treat it lightly.”

  “I’m not treating it lightly. I’m worried sick. Though I think … since we were together in the temple, there has been between us … I think we have enough mutual respect … And she’s just a girl really. Surely he realizes —”

  “It’s very odd that Prabhakaran didn’t come.”

  David left, and Juliet waited apprehensively.

  She lit the mosquito coils and read to the children. It seemed strange without Prabhakaran. He had become part of the bedtime story routine. But he would never stay overnight. He had to be near his cows.

  The children slept and Juliet sat in the darkness lit only by the glowing red points of the mosquito coils. The palm branches swayed and murmured in the nightwind off the sea, whispering warnings. Heavy penalty awaits! Heavy penalty awaits!

  A dead branch fell with a dull boom and Juliet felt the seismic tremors of its landing in the soles of her bare feet. It was astonishing how heavy those lacy-looking coconut fronds were! Tomorrow it would be recycled into thatch and baskets by elderly Harijan women who would sit under the trees, fingers flying, toothless mouths chattering. They would earn a few paise from Shivaraman Nair. And die denuded spine of the palm branch would become a threshing flail or the corner post of a servant’s hut.

  Everything dovetails, Juliet thought. Every tiny thing. There was a link between the vibrations under her feet and tomorrow’s dinner — a little rice and tapioca root — for the Untouchable women. A link between the falling branch and the threshing. An endless chain. To disrupt the sequence was disastrous. When dharma is broken, everyone is suffering.

  “It is not just Yashoda,” David said, shaken. “It is Prabhakaran too.v”

  Shivaraman Nair, he said, had been extremely hostile. He had accused the foreigners of abusing his hospitality, of being partly responsible for the bad harvest, of causing disasters which would yet come as surely as planting follows reaping, as inevitably as flooding follows the rains.

  “And Prabhakaran?”

  “We have corrupted the boy, he says. We have made him unfit to be a servant. He is to be kept up at their house, and a new servant will do our sweeping.”

  “He can’t do that! He can’t just treat Prabhakaran like a … like a pawn in a chess game, to be disposed of at his whim!”

  “That’s exactly what Prabhakaran is. A peon. A pawn. It’s the same word.”

  “I won’t allow it. It’s immoral.”

  “To us it’s immoral. To him the peon’s moral obligation is to be a good peon. The trouble is,” he rubbed his fingers jerkily back and forth across his forehead, behind which the intractable dilemma had settled as a clenched knot of pain, “the trouble is I can feel the validity of his point of view. I can see us from a perspective where we look brash and arrogant and meddling and self-righteous.”

  He pressed the upper bones of his eye sockets with his fingers, kneaded the skin above his eyebrows. “But I can also see … well, Prabhakaran … It’s happened imperceptibly, hasn’t it? He seems like part of the family, doesn’t he?”

  Our moral sense against Shivaraman Nair’s, Juliet thought. Absolute against absolute.

  “What will we do? And what is he going to do about Yashoda?”

  Yashoda. How could he speak of Yashoda? It was no longer a question of simply wanting to protect her. It was an obsession to hold, to caress, to recapture a lost moment of power.

  “Yashoda,” Juliet insisted. “What is he going to do?”

  David sighed heavily. “He wants Annie sent away. He does not find it intelligible that I don’t have a dictator’s powers over her. I tried to explain but he just said contemptuously: ‘Is she not the younger sister of your wife? I explained that Yashoda might possibly go back to Canada with us for a visit and I gave him my word that … I said I would take responsibility for her. I promised she would not leave the estate again.”

  He rubbed his forehead uneasily.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to tell her that. And I don’t suppose that she’ll agree to it. But I don’t see what else … It’s the only possible compromise.”

  “I won’t let them keep Prabhakaran away from us,” Juliet vowed.

  Somewhere in the grove another branch fell, another earth tremor quivered across their nerve ends, another cycle was begun.

  24

  “You know what it is,” Annie told Juliet, as they walked one, behind the other along the banks of packed mud threading the rice paddy. “It’s standard manic-depressive behaviour. There’s no other way to explain it. She’s still in shock from the death of her husband.”

  “I don’t know, Annie. That sort of explanation doesn’t seem to apply easily here. She says she misinterpreted the astrologer.”

  “Oh come on, Juliet! So. We left on an inauspicious day, she went with the wrong person, to the wrong city, whatever. The magic failed. Her reaction is still neurotically extreme.”

  They were baffled by Yashodas excessive guilt and capricious moods. For days she had indulged in an orgy of self-abasement, hiding in her house in the forest, refusing to see anyone, moaning that her wickedness and inauspiciousness would bring d
isasters to all of them.

  “On the other hand, Annie, she may simply be far more conscious than we are of the seriousness of the penalties.”

  “What penalties? What can they do? All that’s happened is a temper tantrum from Shivaraman Nair, and she’s forbidden to leave the estate. Which is where we started from anyway.”

  “She’s afraid they’ll send her to Palghat. They’ve done it once already Before you arrived.”

  “So? We prevent them. They can hardly drag her out from under our noses. Look, I know this is partly my fault. I didn’t allow for the amount of stress … Too much all at once. Another little spell of hibernation right now is probably a good thing.”

  They walked in silence for some time, the warm mud oozing up between their toes, their sandals flapping heavily and making sucking noises.

  They had to negotiate their way around a toothless old woman who was squatting on the bank, resting her frail weight on the backs of her heels. She did not look up, but went on picking grass in handfuls from the levee, stuffing it into a sack hung around her neck.

  “Why is she doing that?” whispered Annie.

  “She is too old for harvest work. She will sell the grass to Shivaraman Nair for his cows. Probably a paise or two for a day’s work.”

  “God! One has to make deals with one’s conscience all the time here, don’t you find? Giving oneself permission to eat.”

  “Yes.” And yet, she thought uneasily, she found it impossible to sustain outrage in India. The energy-sapping heat, perhaps. Or because the sheer quantity of poverty was so overwhelming that it seemed pointless to begin anywhere.

  “Fortunately,” Annie said, as though reading her thoughts, “there are the Mother Theresas.”

  “Yes. Even the Shivaraman Nairs. He doesn’t need any grass for his cows. But he always buys from them. In his own way —”

  Annie made a sound of contempt. “Considering his wealth and what he pays his own servants!”

  “But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Any gesture seems futile and hypocritical and wrong. Take us with Prabhakaran, for instance. We’ve probably made things worse for him.”