The Wild Wind

by Sheena Kalayil

  ‘Has Jonah been coming?’ I asked.

  She glanced at me, carried on pulling the stray hairs out of my brush, then nodded.

  ‘Are you still helping him?’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled at me. ‘He does the shopping also. He always asks how you are.’

  I stared at my toes.

  ‘Are you enjoying at the Coopers’, Sissy?’ Now her voice was soft. ‘Isn’t it nice to have some company?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. Where could I begin? That I was anxious about putting the clothes that needed washing in the wrong basket, they had so many. One for white clothes and one for colours, another for woollens, one for hand wash. That I found the food dispiriting, my least favourite being something they called ‘meatloaf’ but which tasted like sawdust. That I was awkward with a knife and fork, that I was terrified my table manners fell short of theirs. That I missed hearing Malayalam.

  She didn’t press me, as if worried I would voice these exact concerns, but bade me lean back again so that she could wash out the oil and then wrapped my head in the light cotton towel, the thorth, we had brought back with us from Kothamangalam. In the evening we played cards, and when I had yawned five times in succession, my mother smiled and asked me whether I didn’t think it was time to go to sleep, and if I did, would I like to join her. I slept on my father’s side, and once during the night I saw her get up and adjust the blanket in Danny’s cot, then move to the window, holding the curtain slightly open. She stood there for many minutes before she turned away and climbed back into the bed, lying on her side, facing away from me.

  Back to the Coopers’ house for Monday evening, back to a stilted evening and a bedtime much earlier than my own, which left me lying in bed, wide awake, wondering at the Cooper girls who seemed capable of oblivion when sleeping, unlike me. Eventually, I got out of bed, admitting defeat, switched on my light, and after reading for some time, decided to visit the bathroom for a final visit before trying to fall asleep again. Returning to my bedroom, shuffling down the hall, I could hear Mr Cooper on the phone in his study and as I passed his door, I could hear his intonation drop, low and sombre. His door was ajar, but I could not see him, only his feet crossed at the ankles, in red socks with blue toes. I remembered how he had leant against my father’s green car, that day when I had seen them both talking about Ezekiel, and I remembered how he had always seemed to enjoy my father’s company, even though he was not short of people to talk to. Perhaps they had found a commonality, both visitors to this land, both family men. Now I saw Mr Cooper’s foot curl around the door, and he started opening it a little more, before he seemed to change his mind and kicked it shut. Perhaps he knew I was standing outside; my heart thudded guiltily. I moved on, grateful that he had not seen me, but I found that my feet still shuffled reluctantly, as if they knew sleep did not await me on my return to the bedroom.

  The house had a surreal air, like I was walking through a dream landscape. It was quiet and dim, with its warren of corridors and closed doors. But as I approached my bedroom, which was at the front of the house near the entrance, I saw a light coming from the living room. I had not noticed it earlier. Perhaps the door had been closed; perhaps Mr Cooper had forgotten about the lamp when he had gone to answer the phone. I had been taught the economics of saving electricity and so I pushed the door open, thinking to turn off the lights. The room was bathed in a warm golden hue; there were three lamps positioned around the room. The curtains, thick and long, were closed, and added to the snug, intimate air. There was no one inside and I moved to the desk, which held a messy stack of paper, one of which remained in the typewriter. I drew closer and read the heading: Spiritual Healers: Accusations, Target Groups and Development. I was leaning closer to read more when Mr Lawrence walked in.

  ‘Sissy,’ he said, swapping the drink in his hand, a golden liquid filling the bottom half of his square tumbler, from one hand to the other. ‘Hey there. How are you doing?’

  I stared, unsure what to do, and he drew closer. ‘Can’t get to sleep?’

  I shook my head, and then glanced involuntarily back at the typewriter.

  His eyes followed mine. ‘What do you think?’ He smiled. ‘An eye-catching title?’

  But before I could respond, he continued: ‘It’s my research. This project I’m working on. Why I am here.’ He raised his hands, gesturing to the world around us and spilling a few drops of his drink in the process.

  ‘Oh shit . . . Oh sorry.’ He was bending down, rubbing the whisky on the rug with the end of his sleeve. Then he straightened up and laughed. ‘Excuse my language.’ And as I made to leave, he said, ‘Don’t go. Come and sit here for a bit.’

  He moved a pile of books off the sofa and he settled down next to me. He gestured first to his drink – ‘I can’t offer you this, I’m afraid’ – and then to the coffee table in front of him. ‘I was looking at these. It’s something I like doing.’

  I saw the table was covered in a pile of maps, and underneath them was a large hardback atlas. I recognised the topmost map immediately, a single political map of Africa, and I identified Zambia easily, coloured in pink.

  ‘So we’re here,’ he said, following my eyes and placing his finger on Lusaka, ‘and my hometown is all the way over here,’ and he dragged his finger across to the left, off the table and further on, his arm stretched out wide. And then he paused, and I saw a look of uncertainty flit over his face as if he was thinking: now she will place her finger and drag it to the right, saying, and my father is somewhere over there. He cleared his throat, and his apprehension made me relax.

  ‘Where is your hometown?’ I asked.

  ‘Tannersville, New York State. Up in the Catskills,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Have you heard of it?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Not many have,’ he said. ‘Let’s look at what we have here . . .’ He sifted through his papers and drew out another large map. ‘Now what are we looking at, Sissy?’

  I perused the large rectangle; this was a more complex diagram of the physical features. I saw shaded areas and thousands of delicate blue lines, triangles and squares; hundreds of names written in tiny italics, and a series of red dots spotting the area. It was a magnified area of the nexus of the three countries – Zambia, Rhodesia and Mozambique – tied together by the river which fed them all. I let my finger trace the Zambezi and he looked impressed.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘And just a few days ago I was here.’ He pointed to a dot, and I squinted at it – Tete. ‘And Ally and Mary-Anne’s dad was here.’ He pointed to another: Lourenço Marques. ‘Although,’ he grabbed a pen from the table, ‘I’ve been meaning to do this for ages.’ He crossed out the two words with a line and wrote above it: Maputo. ‘The name’s changed.’

  His words had an unforeseeable resonance: names change. Just as mine would a year later, just as another country’s name would change, another city’s. A man picks up a pen and draws a line and writes another name. A child watches as her mother signs a paper on her behalf so that a name disappears. Now I watched as Mr Lawrence regarded his handiwork, no doubt wondering what the next suitable conversational move would be.

  ‘What are the red dots?’ I asked, pointing at one adjacent to Tete.

  ‘These are the wells that Sam Cooper’s agency have dug. You know, some people, mostly women, have to walk miles to get water from the nearest river. But if you dig down deep enough, you’ll hit the water table. And now they can get the water from the well, right in their village.’

  He spoke as if he thought I knew nothing of wells, and I wanted then to tell him of the back yard of my mother’s family home in Kothamangalam. How I could conjure up easily a picture of the well with its mossy surround, and of how once, when I was drawing water, my foot had slipped, and I had for a second feared I would plunge into the dark hole. But I felt shy, sitting next to him, barefoot, in my powder-pink pyjamas – my mother’s sartorial tastes for my wardrobe did not always coincide with my own – so I said n
othing.

  ‘Do you like drawing?’ he asked suddenly. ‘I have these with me.’ And reaching down to the side of the sofa, he retrieved a pile of coloured papers, the type to be found in a stationery shop, and a half-filled flat tin of pencils. My eyes must have lit up at the sight of the rainbow of colours in the sheaf – green, purple, yellow – because he smiled with some relief.

  ‘Here, you have them.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I put them on my lap, willing myself not to act too enraptured. I was, I knew, too old to be so taken by the gift.

  ‘No problem.’

  Then, as we both must have been scratching inside our heads for the next topic, he asked, ‘What do you like drawing?’

  ‘Well,’ I hesitated. I did not consider myself talented in any way. ‘Boats.’

  ‘Boats?’

  ‘Papa takes me to see the boat races when we go back.’

  ‘Does he?’

  I was warming up. ‘And birds.’

  ‘Birds?’

  ‘Mama’s family live in a nature reserve. A bird sanctuary.’

  ‘Really?’ Then, perhaps because I had introduced my parents into our conversation myself, so he felt he could pursue the topic without upsetting me, he sifted through his piles, retrieved the atlas. ‘Can you find it for me? Where in India?’

  I scanned the map and placed my finger easily on Kerala, and the dot – Cochin – and then I trailed my finger a little way to the right, to the Western Ghats. ‘Somewhere here.’

  He leant forward so that he was inspecting the image, showing an unselfconscious interest I did not associate with grown-ups. His hair fell over his ears, and covered the back of his neck, and I could smell the faint tang of the whisky, either from his glass or his breath.

  ‘What else do you do when you go there?’

  ‘There’s a river and a lake, so we swim.’ I added, ‘Mama’s a very good swimmer.’

  ‘Is she now?’ He was smiling as he picked up his glass.

  We sat for a few moments in a silence that was now comfortable. I glanced at him and back at his typewriter on the desk across from us.

  ‘Do you know about Ezekiel?’ I blurted out.

  He looked at me blankly. ‘Who’s Ezekiel?’

  ‘Grace’s son. Ezekiel.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Yeah, right.’

  ‘I heard Mr Cooper and my father talking about him one day.’

  ‘Did you?’

  I flushed, hoping I would not have to furnish the details of my lingering behind the car in shameless, unedifying eavesdropping. ‘They said he was always getting ill.’

  ‘He doesn’t look in great shape, that’s true.’

  ‘And Mr Cooper mentioned something about a witchdoctor.’

  ‘Oh right.’ He nodded, kept nodding, said, ‘Well, yes,’ as if I would understand what he meant. Then he began: ‘We all need something to believe in, right? You know how you and your family go to church?’ He waited for me to nod before continuing. ‘Well, some people believe that there are people who live among them, you know in the same village maybe, with special . . . powers. You know, people who can heal you if you’re sick . . .’

  ‘Witchdoctors?’

  He made a face. ‘I’m not very fond of the term myself. You know, tag on the word “witch” to make it sound really crazy . . .’

  ‘So you think they do have powers?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head, smiling. ‘I didn’t say that, Sissy. Listen . . .’ He faced me more fully. ‘When bad things happen, people need to find an explanation, you know, or even a scapegoat. So, take the Greeks. There would be a storm, and they believed there was a god who controlled the wind and rain, and that god was angry with someone, angry with what they’d done. And over here, in some places, something bad happens, like . . .’

  Then he stopped. I could see him struggling to find an example he believed would be an appropriate illustration for the young girl sitting at his side. I opened my mouth – like a man falls to the floor because his girlfriend is troubling him and loses his job, like my father leaves us, like a plane is shot down and people die – just as the door was pushed open.

  Mr Cooper stood there, and did not query what I was doing, sitting in my pink pyjamas near midnight, in front of a pile of maps with Mr Lawrence, only said, ‘That fax has come through, Charlie. Do you want to take a look?’

  Mr Lawrence stood up and Mr Cooper continued: ‘I think you should go to bed now, Sissy.’ He opened the door wider for me to pass by him. I feared he was angry with me but as I scuttled past him I felt his hand briefly touch my head. ‘Good night, honey.’

  I had forgotten that I had already tried to get to sleep, so I was surprised to see the bed already open and the sheets pulled back, as if someone in my absence had readied the room, turned off the lights and shut the curtains. I clambered into the bed, my heart racing, playing over the conversation I had just had. I had enjoyed talking with him, but I had not told Mr Lawrence everything. Just as I had not revealed that I had my own knowledge and experience of wells, I did not tell him about those years back when my mother was ill, those days when she lifted herself out of bed to greet me from school, then retired again until my father persuaded her to join us at the dinner table, to pick at my father’s best efforts of an evening meal. I had not told him that Grace had once arrived at our house, late at night, when she must have believed that I was fast asleep.

  I heard her talking with my father in the same place as years later I saw my father and mother face each other: behind the house, near the vegetable patch. There was my father in a mundu and a shirt open over his chest, for he must have been ready to go to bed; there was Grace in her knitted hat, cardigan and dress, white canvas shoes on her feet; and there was someone else. A small wiry man, who wore spectacles fixed with tape, a fur-trimmed hat, a leather waistcoat over his bare torso showing off his muscled arms, and khaki knee-length shorts. I remember staring at him because, despite his shambolic, inelegant attire, he emanated a charisma; his posture was arresting, his expression haughty and this made him fearsome. Looking at him, protected by the distance of some metres and a glass window, I felt scared. And as if he could feel my fear, he turned at that moment and his eyes found mine. For a long time – seconds, minutes, even an hour – his gaze froze me, and I could not breathe. Then he turned his head, releasing me from his spell, to face Grace and my father once again, and I ducked down beneath the windowsill where I remained, hand clamped to my mouth, heart pounding.

  My father re-entered the house some time later, on his own, and I opened my bedroom door a crack. He was sitting motionless on the sofa, the television set turned on but turned to silent. In those days, before the power lines were cut and the water pipes severed because of spiteful wars in neighbouring countries, we had little worry of power or water cuts. As I stepped into the room, he turned to look at me, and said, much as Mr Lawrence did all those years later, ‘Can’t sleep, mol? Come and sit with me for a little bit.’

  I curled onto his lap, leant against his chest and watched the pictures on the television with him – a boxing match.

  ‘Who did Grace bring?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘You saw?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Someone she thinks can help Mama feel better,’ he said, and his voice was so tired I felt my stomach contract.

  When he did not continue I whispered, ‘And do you think he can help Mama?’

  He smiled and stroked my hair, shook his head.

  We stayed like this for some time and I must have fallen asleep because when I woke again, it was dark and I was back in my bed.

  9

  THERE was a subdued feel to the following days and nights, as if we were all waiting for the next instalment, knowing that we could not fall back into the unchallenging routine of old. On the Friday, after Mrs Cooper dropped me off back at our house – Laila, she’s such a delight – my mother took my hand, Danny in her arms.

  ‘Come, Sissy. Papa is phoning.’


  As we reached the steps leading to the netball courts, I saw the figures of Bobby and Aravind. I had hardly seen them in the last few weeks, and the days I had spent with them, all those afternoons, felt as if they belonged to a previous life. There was someone walking across to them, one of Bobby’s brothers; perhaps the boys had grown up enough to appeal to the older brothers’ company. We walked down the steps, across the netball courts and along the road that led to the convent building. The convent was surrounded by a low wall enclosing a verdant garden, at that minute being tended to by a novice, complete with white headscarf, who greeted us with a shy smile. At the door, we rang the bell and then waited as we heard footsteps tapping across the floor. The entrance hall was large and wide and airy, with tall stained-glass windows along each side, and smelled of wax polish and candles.

  Other than the nun who opened the door, there was no one else in sight. In their rooms above us, I imagined the nuns, gathered together around a table, playing cards, their veils discarded, a crate of beer at their feet and cigarettes between their lips, aping all the Malayalee men at our gatherings. I must have been daydreaming for my mother poked my side and we were led into an office, lined with filing cabinets and in the centre of which stood a desk. On the middle of this was placed a telephone, reverentially, on its very own crocheted mat, so precious was this rare instrument on the campus.

  The nun left us and my mother said: ‘Sit, we’ll wait.’ It was clear that my parents had arranged a time and, sure enough, only five minutes elapsed before the phone rang, a shrill tone which startled all of us in the silence. My mother picked up the receiver just as Danny bumped his head on the side of the desk and began to wail. She spoke into the phone, her voice curt, while simultaneously leaning forward to grab the back of Danny’s T-shirt, dragging him along the floor to where she was. A few more words and then she passed the receiver to me.

  I took it and held it to my ear. I said nothing, only listened to the background noises: voices, a rhythmic swoosh, most probably a ceiling fan.