Chandini, my mother says, oh Gawd gyul, how yuh does even wipe yuh ass wid dem claws? Yuh doh cut yuhself? I felt satisfied hearing my mother laugh this insult into a joke. Chandini joined her in laughing. Oh my goodness Arya, where do you get this stuff from, girl?
When I was done, I joined my sister in the living room, where she was watching television. My aunt called after me, Please don’t forget to wash your hands before sitting on the couch. Colette rolled her eyes with me. Meh do it ahready mahn, I called back, and said only to Colette, Right een front yuh big ass. Colette picked her nose and rubbed it on the cushion. How’s that for washing hands? she said to me, and we laughed. At twelve, my sister already had a mean streak; even I steered clear.
There was a computer downstairs, and we wanted to play games on it. As a teenager, I could work my way around any electronics. But my aunt, from her hawk’s perch, followed our every movement.
Auntie Chandini, I said ever so sweetly, do you mind if Colette and I play a game on your computer downstairs? Her spiel began: how to set it up, how to use it—and behind her back, we rolled our eyes.
My father and Matthew sat on the other side of the basement, and we heard them shuffle the chairs around the bar when they left to go outside for a smoke. No one called us upstairs for dinner, so we didn’t budge. Angry voices erupted. Our parents were fighting. It was a familiar sound by now. I was not surprised Chandini and Matthew had caused them to start again. The back door slammed.
Did Mom leave? Colette asked.
I listened at the top of the stairs, but all I heard was the whirring of the vent above the stove in the kitchen. Then I heard their heated voices outside and joined them in the backyard. My parents were standing a few feet apart from one another. Muscles and cords rippled on their necks and arms. I was trying to hear why they were fighting, but Chandini stepped in front of me.
Come sweetie, Chandini said, let’s take you inside. You don’t need to hear this. I looked around her. She tried to put her fleshy arms around my shoulders, and I sidestepped her. My parents were fighting right next to the pool; the water was still and black.
My mother flung herself to the ground and snatched two of the decorative stones that formed a path around the pool. She placed her engagement ring on one. The gold and diamonds caught the faint porch light and gleamed for a second before vanishing. Holding the other stone high above her head, she brought it down with all her might and smashed the ring between them. Her ring jumped and skittered across the path. She scrambled after it and brought it back to the stone. It seemed untouched.
My father started to clench and unclench his fists. My mother looked at him. He said, Arya, yuh is ah ass oh someting? Dotish awah? Stop dis nonsense right now.
Calling her an imbecile gave her the strength to dent the part with diamonds and flatten the band. It was a grotesque sight. I was afraid she would regret this later, but then I saw the fierceness in the glittering coals of her eyes. I knew she would never regret this. Never had I seen such power in a woman, and I didn’t want to stop it.
The wedding band was not spared either. My mother pounded and ground while we all stood aside and watched. Sweat cascaded down her face. She stopped. Her rings were reduced to lumps of shimmering dust that glowed white in the night. My father turned and strode through the back gate, leaving the wooden door flapping wildly, like laundry forgotten in a hurricane.
Back in the kitchen, my mother and her sister sat at the glass kitchen table sipping drinks. Their words fell like rain around me.
E eh know whey e goin, my mother said. Meh worried.
I imagined my father walking briskly up and down a grid of streets, fists stuffed into his pocket, his face untamed fury. Then my mother muttered, E goh kill eself.
The father I knew had only cried twice in front of me—at his mother’s funeral and when we left him behind. But the words kill eself washed over me again, and I was reminded of my father’s suicide attempt during their courtship.
As the wait around the kitchen table continued, I hoped my father would return soon. All the talk of suicide around the kitchen table was starting to scare me, and I imagined him floating facedown in the still, black water of my aunt’s pool. When the adults weren’t paying attention, I slipped outside via the cellar doors in the basement and checked the pool for my father’s body, just in case. Relieved that I didn’t find him there, I unlatched the gate and looked up and down the quiet street, but there was no movement, not past twelve at night.
My father finally returned but refused to enter the house when my uncle unlocked the door for him. My mother told Chandini and Matthew she’d take it from here, but they wouldn’t excuse themselves; they sat at the table with their hands clasped around their glasses, intrusive as always, as though they had staked a claim on my parents’ marriage when Chandini told my mother Dharmendra was cheating on her.
Chandini said to me, Krystal, why don’t you go and lie down with your sister? The litany of curses that sandstormed in my head was one that continued against her for years.
No, I said to her and walked out the door to my father. When he was angry like that, the only person he talked to was me, and I enjoyed this special privilege. Much like Shiva, my father was very much a product of our twin isles, and though they were different men, they sometimes seemed like the same person, and both saw something in me. I seemed to carry the essence of an old world, one they wanted me to take and carry for them.
Lewwe goh, he said. I gathered my sister and her things and pulled her out the back door. On our way to the car, I had only to tug at my mother’s hand for her to follow us. Our parents taught us to thank our hosts and hostesses for their hospitality, for the food and drinks, and for an all-around good time, but since none of those things transpired that night, Colette and I didn’t even glance back.
Though my parents ended up staying together, their fingers remained devoid of rings.
—E di take care ah me when ah had nutten, no questions ax, my mother says, and now een dis country whey we hah to fend for we-self, it was my tun.
MEMORIES
I THINK OF MY GRANDPARENTS as one coiling length of rope—she the rope unfurling for infinity, and he all the kinks and knots.
After my grandfather is deposited into the reluctant hands of my grandmother at the end of summer in 2007, about eight months after his brain surgeries, my mother and I visit often. I watch as she brushes his teeth, cuts his hair, clips and files his fingernails and toenails, and even gives him sponge baths but stops short of his crotch, saying to my grandmother, Ma yuh goh do dey, boh do rough im up eh.
Having been on the side of the siblings who insisted on his surgery, my mother can’t stop blaming herself for how he ended up and so continues to devote all of her time to him. She and her father mirror one another, both ending up as echoes of their former, vibrant selves.
On the day I stumbled upon him in the bed, covers off, hands clawing at his uncovered crotch, his birthmark swimming before my tearful eyes, I ran away. The wild and crazy look I saw had never been there before, and so each time I saw him powerless, it destroyed a part of me. The man I knew as Shiva Singh was tall, silent, and powerful. He commanded every room he walked into, and the people in it. I admired that. I admired him. Admired how he could instill fear in others. Could that man ever return? After all the stories, did I really want him to?
The violent stories surface only after my grandfather is incapacitated. It is almost as though these two women need him to be debilitated before they can part their lips and tell. But with my grandmother taking care of Shiva, I need to tread delicately when asking questions, bearing witness to her as she conjures memories long quelled. These stories are of a past these women strove to forget, to raze. Now they surface in a new home, far removed from who they once were.
As these long-suppressed memories simmer to the surface, I overhear my grandmother saying to my mother one day, It een de drawer, Arya. De knife juss cahlin meh. Ah could juss do it.
She wants to kill him after everything I’ve made her remember.
—We take she back toh ah bhad place, Krys, my mother says to me, and we hah toh be rheal careful.
We must all be careful.
We take it slowly.
FUNERAL
MY MOTHER, POOJA, AND GITA help my grandmother make a will for my grandfather. In it, Rebecca retains power of attorney and Arya continues to be his legal executor. They wait until Shiva has enough strength to sit up by himself, though he still can’t hold a pen and sign his own name. We think a thumbprint may suffice, but don’t know for certain if it will.
—E was suppose toh be een e right frame ah min, my mother says, boh ah dunno how dis lawyer see im fit so. By some act ah Gawd de lawyer ax im ah string ah questions an Pappy move e head up and dung yes for each and every one, Krys. Meh wouldn’tah believe it if ah wasn’t dey mehself.
The new will shares everything equally among his children and Rebecca. With this document, my grandmother has security and all other wills are rendered useless against it. My mother helps her sell a piece of his land in Trinidad for close to one million Trinidadian dollars; my grandmother splits the money evenly among her children. Among many other stipulations, Rebecca includes savings for her and Shiva’s burials and medical bills.
Burden is the word my grandmother uses when she is done writing the will. Meh eh wantah be ah burden on anybody wid dese tings.
I WAS WITH MY GRANDFATHER when I saw death for the first time. He was standing in a pressed white shirt and khaki pants starched till the folds formed tents along the front of his legs. Behind him the familiar pomegranate tree bloomed on a little mound with ruby orbs ready to be snapped from their branches. My grandfather’s long hair was slicked back; the black strands shone beneath the midday sun. When he entered the car the sweet smell of coconut oil came with him. He displaced my mother from the front seat, and she was shoved in the back to sit with my sister and me while my father continued to drive, already Shiva’s chauffeur.
We were taking him to the airport for his trip to America, one of many as he planned his transition from the Caribbean to the States. We snaked our way off the property by way of the only road that led in, gravel grinding beneath the rolling tires. In the midst of a heated battle of hair-tugging with my sister, there was the rumpled sound of a crash. Through the windshield, we saw, not far in front of us on the main road, a body floating into the air, above the trees, and hovering momentarily before drifting back down, past our line of vision. It seemed serene within the humming of the car, windows up, crunching gravel, the stillness of our breaths, the only movement my mother’s clamping her fingers over my sister’s eyes.
We drove past. A man lay facedown on the roadside. There was a fissure where his face had once been, blood pouring onto the asphalt, the contrast of red and black striking under the sun. His body was deflated, the inside of skin touching skin, no organs left to fill the space. His insides gushed from a gaping hole in his hip.
Drive nah, Dharmendra, drive! my mother hissed, worried that my sister and I had seen.
My grandfather was unperturbed by it all, looked amused, a smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. He expressed no concern, displayed no other reaction, and made no move to cover his mouth.
My grandfather. The uncontested patriarch of our family. Did I see the true glimpses of who he was and, like everyone else, choose to pretend it didn’t happen? I wrestle with two images of this man, wanting to know more, needing to discover as much as I can to make sense of him, of us all, for allowing him to dominate our lives.
FOR FOUR YEARS AFTER HIS SURGERIES, our family struggles with Shiva’s life. Finally, pumped full of morphine, my grandfather passes. I don’t cry. His death is expected; we know what the procedure is like in hospice; we are warned more than once. I come to think my family held on four years too long. I stop visiting. He recognizes no one, though they say otherwise. Meh see ah spak in Pappy eye when e see meh. Pappy, yuh know is me? Shake yuh head yes, Pappy. They choose to ignore his constant bellowing of No-No-No-No-NO-NO-NO! unable to bring themselves to listen to the doctors when they say he can’t come back from this, that the damage is irreversible.
The first time I cajole him into looking at me, I am sure his answer will be different. I am sure he will stop flinging his head left and right, his eyeballs sliding in all directions. I am certain he will arch his gray-and-black-speckled brows in concentration like he used to, turn to me, and though he can’t talk, he will nod. I have that surge of power running through me whenever I am around him, an electric spark I feel that happens only in connection to him.
We are in my grandparents’ apartment. Aunts, uncles, and cousins are littered throughout, but they all look at me when I go up to him, place a hand on either arm of his chair, bring my face close to his whipping head, and say loudly, Grampa? Grampa. Yuh recognize meh? His response to me has to be different from the response he gives the others. Instead he swings his head to and fro and belts out his seven NOs. I hear someone snicker and know it has to be one of my cousins. It stings. I don’t ask again, can’t bear to. My grandfather is no longer mine, hasn’t been for a long time, and now everyone knows it.
I am waiting for his death. Only twenty-two years old, I already know I don’t want to be present when it happens, probably can’t be with school and work and a new married life myself.
My mother can’t control herself when she calls to tell me he is gone, can barely get the words out of her mouth. Ah know, I interrupt, saving her from having to utter them. Shhhh, meh sure e gone een peace. Doubt starts its seep, and I am not sure I believe this. She is with him until his final breath shudders his body in ripples, until the pronouncement of his death, until the machines are turned off, until they cover his black body in a white sheet from head to toe.
They—my mother, grandmother, and aunts—sit outside the room on the hard plastic chairs, unable to pull themselves away from this place. Rebecca fills out paperwork, signs in multiple places, and when she is done, she is ready to go.
My mother notices the sudden lightness in the way Rebecca moves her body and the happiness that touches the corners of her eyes and edges of her mouth. It angers her that her mother has discovered joy at her father’s death, and she pushes from her mind all she’s witnessed, the burden her father has been these last four long years, the tyrant he’s always been. Arya lashes out at her mother, her tongue like a blade just sharpened on a stone. Ma, wah appen toh yuh? Yuh eh hah no shame? Yuh could geh up so and twiss and tun like e eh just dead? Dah is true hahtlessness. Rebecca has just breathed the crisp air of freedom, an openness she comes to only at the end of her life, at seventy-three years old, and as Shiva’s daughter, with her father’s death fresh in her mind, my mother can’t bring herself to understand this.
Rebecca stands once again frozen before her children. She watches them bind together as they’d done throughout his sickness, and their impregnable accusations make a wall around her. Defeated, she closes in on herself once again and waits until they are no longer present so she she can embrace a life without Shiva Singh.
I ATTEND THE WAKE WITH MY FAMILY. At the door of the funeral home, my father somberly greets one of my uncles. In a hushed voice, my uncle tells my father there is a bar up the street, and my father says he doesn’t need to be told twice. This, they agree, is what men do in times like these.
We’d been to this funeral home already, knew the family who ran the place—both times for the deaths of my cousins, one a stillborn baby and the other a twenty-year-old. The lighting is dim and yellow, its softness fit for grieving. Everyone is meticulously dressed, hair coiffed, nails lacquered, make-up pristine. Our heels puncture the plush carpet as we walk around greeting one another. There are two rooms, one with the body that hasn’t been opened yet and one without. The chairs are gold with cream pouf tops; I sink slowly into one. People weave their way in and around us, stopping to offer their condolences, first to my mother and then to me.<
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The walk to any dead body is always long, endless almost, and once I am upon it, I can’t escape fast enough. But with so many eyes on me, I can’t scramble away for fear of what the tongues will cluck. I stare down at the body of the third of my grandparents to die, and it hits me that only my grandmother is left. I will cherish this woman, I say to myself.
The powder on my grandfather’s face is too light, his hair is combed to the wrong side, and he is beginning to thaw, beads of water forming on his face. His hands rest on his chest, his fingers overlapping; they should be in fists at his side. I can stay no longer because I don’t even want to be there to begin with, but also because my mourning time with his body has expired; I feel people pressing behind me, waiting their turn, agitated at others who take too long, this grotesque queue now winding down the aisle.
Wakes in Trinidad are done differently, collectively. We do not gather in halls with soft lighting where people, primped and proper, stroll around politely tipping their heads. We flock to the home of the deceased to help their families. We do not visit nail salons before a wake or take the time to apply meticulous make-up so that someone will stop to say how pretty we look. We show up, whole families after work or school if it is a weekday, or first thing on a weekend morning. We place our brown bags next to those the neighbors and other family members have already started to unpack. We see the tears in mourners’ eyes, the pain in their forced smiles, their cumbersome footsteps, and we do not pretend phrases like Please accept our condolences or I’m so sorry or Let me know if there’s anything I can do will suffice. We lead the bereaved to their bedroom and say, Ress. Take ah sleep dey nah. Bade or juss relax, doh worry we goh take care ah everyting before people staht toh show. And we do. People band together and work seamlessly in the house—a kitchen team preparing food for later that night, a cleaning crew straightening and dusting every corner and crevice, and the organizers who call the family pundit to make sure he is coming and arrange flowers, thaalis, havaan cone, conch shell, and offerings for the prayers. By the time they emerge from their rooms, somewhat rested and clean, their house sparkles, food is prepared, and meals for the week sit prepped in the fridge. No thank-yous are necessary, for we know when the time comes, they will do the same for us.
Secrets We Kept Page 27
