The Ivory Swing

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “Exactly why I’m not disposed to see Shivaraman Nair in any noble light.”

  “Me neither, I guess. Yet I can’t see him as pure villain either. It would be easier if I could .”

  What could she do about anything? She had had her moment of moral indignation. (My manic phase, she thought.) She had taken her courage in both hands and confronted Shivaraman Nair. The peon, he had said coldly, had been sent on an errand to a nearby village. He would be away for several days. There was much important courier work for him to do. There would not be time for sweeping and bringing milk. Another servant would be sent.

  “You are treating him unjustly.”

  “For the courier work he is receiving more rupees.”

  Foiled. Or simply in the wrong, perhaps. How could she object to Prabhakarans receiving a higher wage?

  “Nevertheless, this has been done as punishment.”

  “These things cannot be discussed with a woman,” he had said, the matter closed.

  Nothing could be done about it. Nothing could be done about anything.

  She felt she understood Yashoda, slumped in defeat. Such wilting was surely more logical than extreme. What could be done about rules that had not bent for millennia?

  “India makes me shudder at the idea of eternity,” she said aloud. “Nothing changing. Ever. Not even the seasons. I wonder if that’s why India has always dreamed of escape from endless rebirth while the West has been busy yearning for eternal life.”

  “I can see it has strange effects if you stay here too long. I mean, you, for example. You’re so erratic.”

  “I’ve always been erratic.”

  “Not like this. You practically snap my head off the day I arrive. And then you slide into some long hypnosis as though you’ve been drugged. That’s what you mean, I suppose? A sort of timeless drift sets in here. Warning: This country may be harmful to your personality.”

  “So can small provincial towns, of course. I do feel drugged. But then again I’ve been in some sort of timeless drift for more than a decade.”

  “You’ve been muttering that ever since you went to Winston. But you never leave and you never push David to leave.”

  “I’m always pushing David to leave. I am endlessly telling him how unhappy I am, how unbearable the parochialism is, how the blandness of the place is driving me slowly insane.”

  “So either he’s a tyrant who doesn’t care how you feel, or he simply doesn’t believe you. And I don’t believe you.”

  An echo. One remembered irritation out of many.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Juliet. It’s just that I can’t take you seriously, my dear.”

  She had been at a university party in Winston. There had been a cluster of men, a political discussion, and she had pitched in energetically. After her speech there had been a silence — in Winston, it was improper to express strong opinions, a breach of etiquette — and then had come the cheap and patronizing detraction.

  The speaker was an associate professor, not in David’s department. A conservative man, undistinguished but ambitious, the kind who gravitates to a small college town. The big fish in small pond syndrome. He was not even worth anger.

  Juliet had wandered into another room of the house, had stared out of mullioned windows, sipping scotch. This is a new Stone Age, she thought. A just-discovered colony of Neanderthal beings, perfectly preserved.

  She pressed her forehead against the leaded diamond panes. Caged! If I were Faustus, she thought, I would not ask for some male version of Helen, but for one genuine bout of intellectual debate, a sword-play of words and ideas, an opponent who would not quail or cheat.

  Abruptly she left the party, without waiting for David (an incident that was not to pass without comment in Winston) and gunned her car onto the highway. She would have left right then, eastwards or westwards, it didn’t matter, just to put hundreds of miles between herself and this smug mediocrity, fleeing towards her passionate and disputatious past. But then she remembered: there was the babysitter to be taken home. And the children, delicate as espaliered trees, to be nurtured into harvest. She kissed their translucent cheeks, warm with sleep and innocence. What could one do? By morning, when they came pell-mell to breakfast, golden with the day’s plans, she was as irresolute as ever.

  And David was solicitous and tender as always, understanding. And yet never understanding. We never debate, she realized suddenly. We only share — which is not always enough. He is a gentle pedant, a patient and fascinating instructor; he earnestly absorbs the flamboyant bits of knowledge I offer. He considers, he concurs, or he quietly disagrees.

  But I’d like a rapier in my hands again.

  That afternoon, she had called Jeremy and picked up the threads of a five-year-old argument about Marcuse. Therapy, full of sound and fury, signifying a need for battle. As she hung up, vital again, she made herself one promise: No more university parties that had nothing more to offer than scotch and sanitized conversation.

  “Annie,” she said, tossing a stone into the paddy water. “You’ve got to believe me. Winston is impossible. I don’t think I can bear to go back, I’m sure I can’t. Which means, I suppose, that I’m entertaining the idea of leaving David. I know,” she grimaced sheepishly, “that I’ve thought, and maybe said, this before. I know I think it every year.”

  Annie sat down on the bank, removed her sandals, and lowered her feet into the water of a harvested terrace. Green shoots of new rice, planted only a week or so earlier, came up between her toes. She leaned forward and examined her muddy reflection. There was a long silence.

  “Look,” she said finally. “I’ve got to admit I couldn’t live in a small place like that myself. I’m not dismissing it as a problem. But if you really found it as terrible as you claim, it would have poisoned everything, including your marriage, and you would have left long ago.”

  “That just doesn’t seem to be true. I shuttle between impossible situations. I can’t stand living in Winston, and I can’t stand the thought of living without David and the children. I’m shackled to a swing that I can’t get off.”

  “Whenever I’ve visited you there, I’ve felt sick with envy. You can’t fake that domestic contentment, so you’ll have to pardon my difficulty with believing in all this Sturm und Drang. And that lovely old house, and the lake —”

  “Oh yes, the house and the lake are consolations. And the family itself” (Why was she so insistent on her unhappiness, licking it over obsessively like an oyster: embroidering the grit of dissatisfaction as though it were her costliest treasure, her pearl of distress.) “It was the suddenness, I suppose. The total wrench from the track of my past, like a dislocation. I’ve led a sprained life.”

  “You chose that. Freely. And ecstatically ad nauseam, I recall. God, you drove the family crazy about David. It was embarrassingly, uninhibitedly romantic.”

  “I think I must simply be voracious. A glutton for living. I want to be you and me” (I want urban yeast but also family epiphanies on the empty frozen lake. I want David and Jeremy. Oh yes, I want Jeremy too, which is perverse and rapacious and irresponsible.) With her feet she sent tidal waves through the young shoots of rice. “So I play with other possibilities all the time, it’s a tranquillizing game. I could play it forever, I suppose.”

  “What about that guy you used to live with in Toronto?”

  “What?” The unnerving thing about siblings is that it is dangerous to think in proximity to them.

  “I can’t think of his name. The politico with charisma. What was it? Jim? Jeremy! That was it. Jeremy!”

  Oh Jeremy.

  This had happened a week ago: feeling desolate (Annie and Yashoda still away; David roaming the villages with his tape recorder), Juliet had conceived the radical idea of telephoning him.

  It had been delicious, sitting beside the rice paddy, to imagine the conversation. It had been like having a glass of wine in Place Jacques Cartier.

  “Juliet!” he would say.
“I thought you were still in India!”

  “I am in India. I’m slithering into a swamp. I’m about to be swallowed up by vines or ants.”

  “You sound so faint.”

  “Only my voice is left. I’ve dissolved in the monsoon, I’m dispersing into the elements.”

  “Listen!” he would say, conspiratorially urgent, sending western adrenalin along under-ocean cables. “I haven’t been able to sleep since I was with you in Montreal. I’ve accepted a position at McGill. I’ve taken an apartment there and it’s waiting for you to move in. Come back. Please come back.”

  She had tried very hard to get away with this script but reality always intruded. What he would actually say his voice puzzled and far away, would be: If you want to leave, then leave for heavens sake! I’ll meet you at the airport. But then I’m afraid I’ll have to drop you and run. The woman I’m living with at the moment …

  Nevertheless, with children in tow, she had even gone as far as asking Mr Motilal whether she might make an overseas call from his telephone at the emporium. He had been dumbfounded. She might have asked for his rocket-launching pad. His phone had never been used for such a purpose, he was certain it was not possible. He suggested she inquire at the post office. Which she did. Ahh, they had said, flustered. Such calls are very complicated, very complicated. This will take many weeks. You must make a reservation for your phone call. We will send a postcard at the appointed time.

  And so of course Jeremy had receded to his usual status: a tantalizing mirage, remote as snow, forever just out of reach.

  Reality was always intruding.

  “Wasn’t that his name?” Annie persisted. “Jeremy? Did you ever keep track of him?”

  “For god’s sake, Annie! Twelve years ago. What on earth made you think of him? Can you remember the name of whatever man you were fooling around with twelve years ago?”

  Annie said nothing, but stood suddenly and waded out into the paddy, sinking rapidly to the knees. Paddy mud, shifting, uncertain, pungent with decay crawled up her legs.

  She thinks I am implying flightiness and promiscuity, Juliet sensed suddenly. When I am only defending myself.

  She got to her feet unsteadily and slid into the paddy water, lurching towards her sister. She pushed through the warm stinking water and the sucking mud like an ice-breaker smashing a ferry channel in the St Lawrence River.

  “Annie, I didn’t mean anything by that!”

  “It’s okay. It’s nothing. I’m jealous of all the permanence in your life.”

  “That’s crazy, you know, when you think of how I get into a rage about the lion’s share of freedom you have.”

  They waded to the edge of the paddy, getting on with the normal business of envying each other’s life.

  25

  “Couldn’t we take a taxi?” the children pleaded.

  But the taxis were not at Shasta junction and they stood waiting for the bus for nearly an hour in the mid-afternoon heat, without benefit of shade. Consequently they missed Anand who had gone to their house with the news that had come over his father’s radio.

  It is not a good day to be entering the city, he thought when he found their house empty. No. The time is most inauspicious.

  The bus ride was overcrowded and uncomfortable, not unlike any of the others. But something was different about the arrival. The streets were full of movement and chanting, of marchers and banners. That in itself was not unusual, demonstrations being as common as buffalo carts. But it was as though the entire city was involved, seething and clustering in rival factions.

  As people dropped from the sides of the bus, Juliet could see out the window. Stores were boarded up, some had been smashed and looted. Carts laden with plantains and coconuts and obviously destined for the market were standing abandoned and at the mercy of pilferers.

  People in the bus were calling to people in the street. The passengers broke into agitated high-pitched jabbering. A message was flying from mouth to mouth with ripples of shock and excitement.

  “What is it? What is it?” Annie asked everyone at large.

  Someone eventually answered her in English: “Mrs Gandhi has been arrested. Janata groups are celebrating. And Congress groups are protesting. They are fighting each other.”

  Anxiety closed in on Juliet’s heart like a cramp. She and Annie were sharing a seat close to the back on the far side from the door, the children on their laps. David was out of sight somewhere at the front in the men’s section.

  “We’ve got to get off,” Juliet said urgently.

  But of course it was impossible until the terminus was reached. Or until the same desire was felt by the mass of bodies between their seat and the door.

  Annie seemed lit by inner excitement. “Think of it!” she bubbled. “We’re right in the fist of history.”

  Juliet was thinking that it was not, after all, so pleasant to be caught in the clutches of history, that she would prefer to be watching it, abstract and detached, on a television screen somewhere in the suburbs of another world, where the children were safe from harm. Or to have been marooned in the vegetable safety of her rice paddy, oblivious to large events.

  The bus was creeping slowly forward as a sea of demonstrators massed around it Juliet looked out the window again, and promptly covered Miranda’s eyes.

  A man was lying writhing in the middle of the road, bleeding profusely. The crowd stood around him in a circle, watching. No one came closer to him than about six feet. They just stood there, staring, staring.

  Monstrous, Juliet thought, sick with horror. Inhuman! She pressed her head against the bars of the window and screamed to the man: I’ll help you! But no sound came out of her throat. A jab of realization came to her: A dying body must not be touched. The Hindu prohibitions against pollution.

  She could feel panic, hysteria, coming upon her like a tidal wave. She held it back with the wall of her will. One thought staccatoed across her nerve ends: Get the children to safety.

  And then came a sudden lurching sensation of seasickness. The bus rocked from side to side and its cargo erupted into a conflagration of screaming. So this is death, Juliet thought, as the road rushed up to her eyes.

  And what she felt was not fear, but rage, a rage so vast and violent that she knew, for an instant before the blackness swallowed her, that she would be able to tear the bus apart like tinfoil to get them out.

  Her head hurt abominably and there was an enormous crushing weight on her body. She could hardly breathe. Where am I, where am I? she wondered frantically, feeling panicky, claustrophobic. A coffin, she thought. Buried alive. And she passed out momentarily again from the horror of it.

  When she came to she could smell her own blood and felt it wet and sticky on her face. Then she realized that Miranda’s hair was in her mouth, that Miranda was packed tight into her arms like a leaden doll. And everything came back like the dark sudden swoop of a crow. Her mind tensed and coiled like a cobra about to defend itself.

  The door must be above us, thank god, got to heave off the weights, climb out, thank god we’re at the back, door almost directly above.

  “Annie!” she bellowed, the cry muffled by Miranda’s hair, the road and the bars against her cheek.

  Got to heave off those bodies like a whale surfacing, got to climb out, the door, lift out the children, and all the people one by one until I find David. She sobbed and heaved.

  “Juliet!”

  “Mommy!”

  She heard them both muffled above her.

  “Jonathan!” She shouted and wept and laughed, “Oh Annie, can you move? Climb on me! Get to the door!”

  “I’m trying, I’m pushing, it’s giving, it’s beginning to move.”

  “Stand on me!”

  “I’m trying!”

  She was being pummelled by layers of bodies gyrating, pushing, kicking. She could take it, she could take anything, a belting, a kick in the teeth, thank god for movement. She felt the stab of a heel on her spine, Annie’s,
please god.

  Then an easing. Jonathan somehow standing on the window bars beside her head, bending over her, crying and stroking her sticky face, murmuring Mommy, over and over. Miranda still leaden and silent in her arms.

  “Juliet!” A shriek of triumph. “I’ve done it!”

  She looked up. She was in a canyon, bodies banked up on either side, Annie’s feet swung wildly above her. Thank god for brash cultural indifference, Juliet thought. Thank god for jeans. Annie’s hands were curled round the bars of the window above. She hefted her body along, monkey-walking hand over hand along the bars.

  “I’m there!”

  Her legs swung back and forth, up. Missed. A backward lurch. Up, up, a foothold. The silhouette of Annie against the sky. Someone else, a man, joined her from outside. The two sat astride the step, their legs hooked around it, and reached down inside.

  Arms, arms, arms, stretched up to them. They lifted, hoisted, a body rose. Then another. Another. They were passing people out. Ten bodies. Then Jonathan. He stood on the edge of the seat reaching up across the aisle. They leaned down to him. Juliet kissed the calves of his legs.

  “Hang on tight, darling!”

  He arced up, poised in the doorway, was over.

  “Juliet!” Annie was screaming over the rolling waves of moaning and wailing that filled the bus. “Juliet! Hand up Miranda!”

  Miranda was a dead weight. Juliet heaved, pushed, she thought her blood vessels would burst. She was sitting at last, cradling Miranda, seeing her face for the first time. It was covered with a network of red rivulets spiralling out from a gash on her right temple. Her skin was white, her lips bluish.

  “Oh god,” Juliet whimpered, kissing the blue lips, the white cheeks, with a life-giving frenzy. Miranda’s eyelids flickered, gently as a funeral shroud stirs in the flames. And Juliet sobbed and laughed and goaded her aching body to further action. She slung Miranda across her shoulder, stood on the seat edge, reached for the seat above her across the aisle. Her arms threatened to buckle.

  Annie descended, agile and divine as Hanuman the monkey god, took Miranda, passed her up to the man in the doorway. Miranda disappeared over the step, handed down to the magical outside, to life.