The Ivory Swing

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Annie undid his shirt buttons and ran her fingers lightly down his chest to the navel.

  “Your body is beautiful, Prem. Like a young god’s.”

  He closed his eyes to luxuriate in the delectable sensation of her touch. She slid his shirt off his shoulders and ran her hands playfully, caressingly, over his shoulders and back, his chest, through his hair. Her finger followed the outline of his eyebrows, his lashes, his lips, with the feathered lightness of a chakora bird following a moonbeam. He felt like laughing and crying he felt as safe and blissful as a baby in its mother’s arms.

  Tentatively he placed his hands under her loose smock and stroked the skin of her belly. It was as firm and smooth as the skin of just-ripened papayas. He slid his hands upwards, shyly as fluttering doves, until he felt the soft arcs of the underside of her breasts. His hands stayed there, cupped, brimming with softness, and he leaned forward, burying his face against the swelling cargo of his hands, overcome.

  Annie gently raised his face with her hands and kissed him on the lips and pulled her smock quietly and deftly over her head, tossing it onto the grass. Then he felt again the leaping in his blood, the crazy thumping and throbbing, the needling itch of ecstasy. He pulled her towards himself, cradling her in his left arm, fondling her breasts with his right hand.

  He ran the tip of his tongue around one nipple and laughed with pleasure at the way it stiffened and stood erect. He bit it gently and experimentally, nuzzling it with his teeth.

  He felt ravenous for the taste of her breasts, like a hungry infant. He sucked them, nibbled, ran his tongue greedily over and around them, buried his face in the soft valley between them.

  His right hand was spread across her belly. He pressed it hard against that smooth, firm surface and she moved into him somehow, curling one leg across his body, making little sighing sounds. It gave him an intoxicating sense of power and possessiveness.

  He realized that he could slide his hand down under the waistband of her jeans. He could feel the flimsy little undergarment that western women wore. He eased his fingers under the elastic line of resistance, felt the soft fuzz of hair. Further, further, while he sucked and sighed at the delicious yielding ripeness of breasts. Then he felt the swollen skin beyond the hair, warm as fire, soft as silk, wet and flowing as the flesh of a green coconut oozing milk.

  He began to tremble violently, fearing he would not find her in time before he exploded in his own excitement. He unzipped her jeans — he would not have believed he could be so confidently aggressive — and tugged at them with ragged energy. He pulled off the little underthing.

  But the fastenings of his own clothing were perversely clenched against him. His hands shook with frenzy, he was almost sobbing with frustration and anxiety.

  Annie sat up swiftly and pushed him gently back onto the mat. She knew it would have to be fast, this first time.

  “Whatever is done is right, Prem,” she murmured, leaning over him so that all her generous softness tumbled down on him like jasmine petals from a festival palanquin.

  She knew it would be fast and urgent as a waterfall this time, but she wanted him to give himself to his own tides, to sway with them, to trust them. Not to fear. She laid her cheek on his chest, stroking him, kissing him, calming him. She eased him from his clothing and rested her hand gently on his genitals. He quivered in delectable pain.

  She knelt between his legs, looking at him.

  “Ah Prem,” she said.

  It was always wonderful, always exhilarating and splendid as creation itself. She felt rich and fluid with love, peaceful as the earth at springtime.

  She cupped his testicles gently in her hands and played with her lips along the length of his penis, kissing and licking with teasing darting movements of her tongue.

  He jack-knifed upwards, spared one proud and startled glance for his own magnificence, and entered her as they rolled backwards, coupled in explosive joy.

  She cradled his seismic body against her own, stroking him, murmuring to him. She received his wild brevity as a tribute, as a mother receives the first jumbled rush of words from a child, with infinite tenderness, with loving pride, with faith in beginnings.

  There was an entire night for the discovery of procrastination and delay, die exquisite torment of lingering, the delights of dalliance.

  Along Mahatma Gandhi Road, by Palayam Market and Chalai Bazaar, in front of the police barracks and the Secretariat and the post office, there were convulsions of violence throughout the night.

  Annie and Prem, oblivious to the tempo of history, moved to rhythms of their own till daybreak.

  29

  Retribution and grace.

  The words presented themselves to David as newly minted, newly imbued with meaning. He felt a deep, almost superstitious sense of the intricate connection between his fascination with Yashoda and his family’s brush with death.

  The wages of sin … When dharma is broken …

  One could relativize and rationalize. One could be a scholar, an observer of cultural differences. But one could not escape an age-old conviction of wrongdoing. And of retribution.

  Nevertheless there was also grace.

  They had survived. They were alive. They were together.

  He thought of beginnings and of innocence. He remembered Jonathan new born, a wonder, he and Juliet leaning over the crib in awe. Such tiny delicate fingers, such complexity in the whorl of his ear, in the blue vein under his cheek. He remembered how they had touched hands and had stood guardian for hours, amazed, keeping watch over the sweet fragile breathing. Can it be that we are responsible for this life, for this tiny perfect thing?

  In the evening, when the mosquito coils were lit, he sat with a child on each knee. And they — so conscious usually of the dignities and perquisites of growing older and bigger — did not object. He told them stories, stories they had not heard for years, stories his father had once told him, stories of his own childhood.

  “Tell us about the time you and Grandpa were riding your bicycles out in the country and the storm came …”

  “Tell us about the time you ate Grandmas raisin cake that she made for the party …”

  “Tell us about the time your dog Nip got lost …”

  In the morning he fished with the children in the irrigation ditches.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Juliet demurred. “There’s still hepatitis and malaria to worry about. I don’t think you should act as though we have charmed lives.”

  “Oh but we do!” he laughed, catching her in his arms and kissing her. “We do!”

  It was then that he saw, through the golden network of Juliet’s hair, Yashoda coming silkily through the trees towards them. An interior fluttering, some nerve-end recoiling like a snapped thread, disturbed him and he held Juliet fiercely to himself Yashoda paused, watching. Even when still she seemed to quiver. Like a hummingbird. Like a petal in the wind. It was her eyes that unnerved him. (I want love, Professor David …)

  Perhaps if like Odysseus he stopped his ears …?

  Then she turned and walked quickly back towards the forest.

  It should be easy for women to give themselves fully to the present moment, Juliet thought. They have had such lifetimes of practice.

  She scraped away at a coconut, strafing the soft white pith into shavings for the curry paste, glancing up occasionally to watch the children at their school work, to see David making notations on the manuscript of his book.

  And so they lived happily ever after, she sighed to herself. Returning eventually to the small provincial town of no opportunity for adventurous, educated women. She took up her stone roller and leaned over the granite slab. Piquant and greenly bleeding, the curry leaves snapped and shredded themselves beneath her pounding, darkening the coconut flesh, absorbing cloves and turmeric. Juliet leaned over the golden paste and was assailed by the pungent fragrance, a shock of pleasure. Dazed, she dipped her finger into the mix, and smeared a thin ochre line across her forehead
, an anointing of sorts.

  Nothing gold can stay, she reminded herself. Neither one’s gilded myths of the self, nor the luminous green-gold growing of one’s children, nor the sweet bruising of living things that bleed perfume and curry.

  Her gaze rested like a benediction on her family, and, remembering the abrasion of road grit and window bars against her cheek, she thought: It is a rich moment, the present one. I should be totally content.

  Perhaps she had been born at a fractious moment, when colliding stars competed for the same orbit. It was certainly perverse that she should feel a prickle of unrest like a congenital rash; that she should be yearning even now to transplant the family, so recently snatched from destruction, to city soil; that she should be dreaming of the ferment of a circle of argumentative friends; that she should feel, even, an urge to contact Jeremy — to note his quick alarm, to feed on his relief that she had won in a brief skirmish with death.

  Yashoda and I, she thought, we want everything. We swing between worlds, always in conflict, always looking for impossible resolutions, destined to uncertainty and dissatisfaction. She bent over the curry paste again and closed her eyes, imagining herself and Yashoda side by side on the ivory swing, their vacillations preserved as art. There would be a kind of immortality to it — the immortality of the bronze dancer in the museum case. As long as one did not mind an eternity of going nowhere.

  David leafed through chapters and months of research. And Yashoda moved back and forth across the pages like a pendulum. Like a maharani — or a yakshi — on an ivory swing, trailing silk and temptation. He closed his eyes, only seeing her face the more clearly. He opened them and read determinedly, making notes.

  He glanced at his wife, who was absorbed in the making of curry. She had paused, she was bending over the stone roller, she had that abstracted, excluding air. She was distant from him, moving on a private path.

  He looked out the window at the green maze of palms and recalled Yashoda standing there, her eyes luminous with want.

  What you are obsessed with, he told himself sardonically and analytically, is a perception of omnipotence. There was a moment when you tasted a kind of power you had never experienced before. You are drunk with the memory of it, intoxicated with its possibilities. You cannot bear to lose it. You want to convince yourself that it is still there for your taking although you choose — nobly, of course — not to exercise it.

  Yes, that was it. Simply that. Nothing unnatural, not even very unusual, just an ordinary human weakness. And if he were to talk to her again, simply talk and comfort and explain — as an ordinary sympathetic benefactor — then this false tension, this arbitrary and guilt-induced intensity, would dissipate. He was, after all, just as cunning and wise as Odysseus, secure in the ship of family, safely lashed to the mast of rationality.

  He would come home unscathed.

  He looked at Juliet again. She was now moving the stone roller back and forth with a snap of her wrists, fragrance rising around her like a fog. The hint of a smile played about her lips. She is contented, he thought. And so self-sufficient. We are in no danger at all. He would come back to her without mishap.

  “Don’t you think,” he asked Juliet, “that you and the children would enjoy the beach?”

  She flicked her eyes towards him in surprise and considered it.

  “They’re bothering you. You should have gone to the university.”

  “No, no. I just thought you might like …”

  She remembered the red sand and the lush green line of palms and the fishing boats with prows like curled ferns. She thought of the way a shoreline pried a country open so that it flew out in a rush to the universe, sibilant as waves.

  “Yes, it’s a wonderful idea.”

  And they set off, Juliet and the children, to hail an auto-rick on the main road.

  Beyond the paddy the forest seemed full of shadow and murky intent. There was a sweet heavy smell of decay. David, buoyed by centuries of leaf mould and probity, rehearsed both sides of a conversation.

  Yashoda did not see him immediately. She was sitting on the grass beside the pond, bending towards him, her tilted face halfhidden behind the black waterfall of her hair. And languid as the slow-swaying lotuses, she combed it with an ivory comb. The deliberate strokes descended like costly jetsam sliding down a cataract and she sang softly and rocked backwards and forwards to the rhythm of her music and her combing.

  Once she paused and tossed the long hair away from her face as though it were a mane and then she saw him. She startled like some animal that is wild and skittish and vulnerable.

  David made a gesture of reassurance, of benefaction. There was so much he was going to say to her with avuncular gentleness but when she continued to sit there staring at him, when she simply offered him her comb, he could remember none of it. Nevertheless, he thought, the most delicate gestures are wordless, and solace has more faces than one would dream of.

  He took her proffered comb and it moved through her thick black hair like a frail dove in his hand. He did not know how long he sat there combing while Yashoda sang, but when she turned to face him, when she held her hands out to him like a princess begging, he heard again that wild high note of absolute power, felt himself to be straining against the bonds of his entire life and culture.

  “No,” he whispered, kissing her hands. “I cannot.” He stood up, feeling as self-disciplined and as foolish and as life-denying as a monk.

  When he looked back from the edge of the forest she was still sitting there, staring after him. He walked on through the forest and the paddy and the grove, seeing nothing. The empty house surrounded him like a hair shirt. He paced it erratically, entering the bedrooms, the kitchen, the porch, the kitchen again.

  In the great mortar anchored to the floor, the rice waited to be ground into a mush for cakes. He seized the heavy pestle and began pounding, astonished at the energy it required, at its single-minded thought-numbing demands.

  How simple it must be for women to hammer out their own tranquillity!

  That night he made love to Juliet with a guilty passion of transposed desire.

  30

  Shivaraman Nair stood moodily in his courtyard watching Prabhakaran feed rice mush to the two new calves. The animals were still unsteady on their feet, their velvety flanks trembled, and periodically they would pitch forward onto their knees. Prabhakaran crooned to them and fondled them, coaxing handfuls of mush onto their pink tongues. And they looked up at him out of their huge luminous eyes and licked his hand and sometimes his face. His low laugh of pleasure filled the courtyard.

  For some unaccountable reason, Shivaraman Nair found himself growing sexually excited and angry at the same time. Ever since he had seen the boy, eyes dilated as a calf’s with excitement, come flitting through the forest from Yashoda’s house, he had been tormented by his own imagination. What had happened between the two?

  He was unable to block out a vision of his kinswoman, warm and liquid-eyed and vulnerable as a newborn calf, trembling at the touch of the peon. The boy would have bewitched her with his flute, of course, and since women are mere petals blown on a wind of passion, since widows in particular are known to be unappeasable in their hunger for a man, she … she would have … It was unthinkable, what she might have done.

  He gave a sudden bellow of rage, strode across the courtyard, and savagely kicked the calf from Prabhakaran’s arms.

  “Go to your work, lazy boy! You waste time. You are too slow with the calves.”

  The boy had quailed back in shock and instinctively raised an arm to ward off blows, but his horrified eyes were on the animal.

  Mrs Shivaraman Nair and Jati came running into the courtyard in alarm.

  Shivaraman Nair’s rage mounted. The peon had caused him to be guilty of rash and terrible action. He had injured a cow. Never before had he done such a thing. The peon was responsible. And that woman, that temptress.

  His wife ran to him, whimpering and solicitous. Tho
ugh she was a good woman and he was fond of her, the sight of her tears trickling through the folds of chin, the heaving of her ponderous body, served only to exacerbate the sense of unbearable wrongs having been done to him. He turned from her in disgust and stalked furiously out through his coconut grove.

  The peaceful green of his paddy calmed him. His lands always comforted and sustained him. They reminded him of his power and of his responsibility to direct in proper paths the lives of those who, by the natural ordering of the universe, were subject to his command. Before he had really noticed where he was going he found himself drawn across the terraces towards the tranquil seclusion of his forest.

  The shadowy fungus-perfumed retreat seemed imbued with the presence of his kinswoman. He thought of the cascade of her hair, her almond-shaped eyes, the way she walked, the way the taut brown skin of her midriff (she wore her sari scandalously low on her hips) always made him want to brush against her in passing.

  It was undeniable that she flaunted her beauty shamelessly. She was indifferent to family honour. And yet after all, she was woman. What could one expect? Can a tiger change its stripes or its hungers? Such a widow drew scandal to herself as inevitably as ivory drew thieves and honeysuckle lured bees. But he would be, as it were, the aristocratic bee, who would keep the honey of her youth pure and free from contamination. He would offer himself to her in a gesture of noblesse oblige, for the sake of her need and the honour of the family name.

  He came to the clearing and heard the sound of voices. Western voices. Always that family interfering, he thought with anger. He remembered that Mrs Juliet had been present on the occasion when the peon … And there was the younger one, her sister, who knew nothing of moral behaviour. Such women told one another their secrets, wove together their carnal nets.

  He backed into the cover of the trees and vines, but his thighs were burning with frustration and he was in physical pain. He leaned against a tree, trembling.

  It is the fault of the peon and of the foreigners, he told himself. I will not forgive them.