The Worlds Within Her (10 page)

Her mother sighed, moved over to the window. “The Americans,” she said, “have a way of simplifying things. They've changed a game for gentlemen into a pastime for boys. Is it your opinion that baseball, like cricket, shapes character, Mr. Summerhayes?”

“Baseball's more complex than it looks,” Jim said. “That's one of its beauties. In fact, I've always thought that cricket was deceptively complex and baseball deceptively simple.” He joined
her at the window, his gaze following hers down to the figures in white. A batsman was making his way off the field while another strode on to replace him. Two players and an umpire were tending to the broken stumps.

“Does the name Sir Learie Constantine mean anything to you, Mr. Summerhayes? He was a wonderful West Indian cricketer, a man of superb talents. He once ran at full speed to the edge of the field to make a catch. He caught the ball behind his back, with one hand. Behind his back with one hand, Mr. Summer-hayes! There was once hope for a people who could produce a man like that.”

“I saw Sir Garfield Sobers once,” Jim said. “He was pointed out to me in a nightclub in the Barbados —”

“Just ‘Barbados,' Mr. Summerhayes. It's a single island.”

Jim, Yasmin saw, remained unperturbed. “He seemed quite the local hero,” he continued. “Everyone treated him with great deference.”

“Not just a
local
hero, Mr. Summerhayes. And perhaps not deference but respect. He remains, I believe, although I may be mistaken, the only man to have hit six sixes off six balls. A wonderful achievement, even though it was only in a county game in England and not a test match. Has anyone ever come close to such a feat in your baseball, Mr. Summerhayes? Six home runs off six pitches?”

Jim smiled. He said, “Sobers played for Nottinghamshire, I believe?”

“Notts? Yes, perhaps. I honestly don't remember.”

But Yasmin, nibbling at a piece of
kurma
— fingers of dough fried crunchy and caked in sugar — did not miss the note of surprise in her mother's voice. She had never known her mother to be easily impressed.

“All these men,” her mother continued, “titled for their
sporting prowess. Bradman. Sir Stanley Matthews, the football player. They were heroes to us, you know. Our children learnt about them in schoolbooks. Do they still knight sportsmen, Mr. Summerhayes? I'm quite out of touch now, it's been so long.”

Jim didn't know. Canadians, no longer permitting the use of foreign honorifics, paid scant attention to news of the freshly anointed.

“Highly unlikely these days, I would think,” her mother said. “Sportsmen have become such hooligans. The very idea of sportsmanship has been lost, don't you agree?”

Jim nodded, but Yasmin saw that her mother took little notice.

“My husband didn't like them, you know, men like Constantine and Sobers.”

Yasmin's eyes fluttered up from the plates of sweets. She recognized the ever-so-slight shift in her mother's voice, as small talk was left behind.

“He couldn't help admiring their talents but he regretted their race. He felt that his people, our people, were hard done by. He felt that the Indian cricketers of the West Indies never got their due. This was how my husband saw things, Mr. Summerhayes. Through a racial prism. He didn't even like the name I chose for our daughter. Yasmin. It's a Muslim name, you see, and we are, traditionally at least, Hindus. But I liked the name. And he never objected to other family members being named Robert or David or Elizabeth. I always felt it held him back, this racial allegiance, although he saw it as inescapable. He was in political life, you see, and circumstances, I suppose …” Her mother's voice trailed off. She raised the binoculars to her eyes. After a moment, “Were you an aggressive batsman, Mr. Summerhayes?”

“Depended on the day,” Jim said, his discretion allowing her to set the agenda. “And on the bowler, of course.”

Yasmin reached for a nut of
kurma,
crunched it, licked the
sugar residue from her fingertips. The light from the window was encroaching on Jim and her mother, the brightness softening their contours, making their edges grow indistinct. Listening to their exchange of unfamiliar jargon, watching them lose their tensions in the light at the window, Yasmin had the sense that she was seeing the convergence of her past and her future, neither whole, each shapeless, both unseizable.

“By the way, Mr. Summerhayes,” she heard her mother say slyly, “what in the world were you doing in a nightclub in Barbados?”

Jim was taken aback for a moment. And then, with a smile, he said, “Recovering from the sun.”

In the elevator on the way down, Jim said, “I've never seen anyone eat toast with a knife and fork before.”

Yasmin thought of her mother's manner of eating the single slice of toast she had permitted herself at tea: the careful slicing of the toast into nine equal squares; the delicate spearing of each piece; its almost thoughtful consumption. “Do you find it weird?” she said.

“Say, eccentric.”

“Eccentric …” Yasmin repeated the word to herself, weighing its implications. Her mother had always eaten toast that way, and the habit had never struck Yasmin as extraordinary.

Jim said, “Don't misunderstand me, Yas. I like her —”

“She likes you, too, I can tell.”

“It's just that she isn't what I expected.”

“You expected a woman in a veil and sari, I suppose. Serving you hand and foot.”

He laughed sheepishly. “Hardly.”

She took his hand. “Don't underestimate my mom. When I was young she wouldn't let me eat an ice-cream cone in the
street. Once she said, ‘I approve of masturbation, Yasmin' — Can you imagine? — ‘but I wouldn't recommend its practice in public either.”

“She seems very … British,” he said.

“Early in his career my father spent time in London, some kind of attaché at the High Commission or whatever it was called back then. He hated it, she loved it. He became an anglophobe, she became an anglophile. She watches
Masterpiece Theatre
religiously.”

“That explains the tea,” he said. “But why'd she come here after your father died? Why not England?”

“They wouldn't have her. My father's reputation. Guess they didn't appreciate his calling them monsters.”

“Did he mean it?”

“I suppose. As much as any politician means anything.”

“How old were you? You remember anything about London?”

“Oh, I was born later. From what I gather, my father wasn't in any hurry to have kids. He had too much to do. For his people.”

“His people?”

At that moment the elevator doors opened. Yasmin hurried out. By the time they got to the car, she had changed the subject.

THE GROUND IS
hard and uneven, less lawn than mere land, cleared of wild grass. The upward grade is subtle, perceived in the distance ahead but only felt more immediately.

Cyril says, “For a long time people aroun' here call me the Manager. People still call me Manager, but is not a title anymore. Is just a name.” His is a gentle voice, and although he has spoken wistfully, as of something lost, his tone betrays no pain, no plea for consolation.

“What would you like me to call you?” Yasmin says.

He thinks for a moment. “You ask Penny the same question?”

She nods.

“And she say?”

“Penny.”

“Well, it'd be nice if you call me uncle, but I guess Cyril is probably the best idea. Or Manager.”

“I prefer Cyril.”

“Cyril, then.” He smiles shyly at her and runs his hand — a small, soft hand — along his bare pate, as if brushing flat his extinct hair. His eyes squint behind the thick lenses of his glasses, the right eyeball dancing briefly off-centre.

Yasmin returns the smile but looks away from the unsettling eyeball: to the back of the house and its large second-floor balcony supported by two concrete pillars; to the roof of galvanized iron, red with rust; to the iron pole rusted bronze that rises from one corner of the roof in support of a television antenna. To the land sloping away to the fence — the only thing with the gleam of newness — and beyond it the sudden ending of the land at water.

Yasmin says, “What are you manager of?”

“Was. The estate, when there was one. And Ram's campaigns.”

“And now?”

“Oh, I try to keep things together, make sure they don't fall apart too much.” He pauses, as if in thought. “Is not too much, really. You play the hand you're dealt. You know.”

Yasmin lets her gaze wander across the bay. “It's a lovely view.”

“It is?” He laughs quietly, as if in embarrassment. “Guess when you see something every day you stop seeing it for what it is.” His gaze follows Yasmin's, and after a moment he says, “Yes, is a lovely view. Shakti always liked it. Is too bad she never see it again. I was in two minds, you know, about you two leaving, back then.”

“Mom always said she chose to leave because it would have been dangerous for us to stay.”

“Some people thought so.”

“You didn't?”

“Was hard to tell. Maybe yes, maybe no. So I opt for prudence, nuh. The Canadians were very accommodating. More than the British. Hardly surprising. Things moved fast.”

“I've always wondered why my mom didn't seem to have much in the way of mementoes. Photos, stuff like that.”

“I think she jus' took a couple o' little things with her. Couldn' tell you what, though. After all, as you well know, it wasn' suppose to be forever.”

“What do you mean?”

“She didn' tell you? You were suppose to stay in Canada for a few months, till things settled down, nuh. Then come back quietly. But when it was time, Shakti said she wasn' ready, she needed a little more time, and a little more time. Always a little more time. And is only now she come back, with you.” He glances at her — in disbelief, in discomfort. “She never tell you any o' this?”

Yasmin shakes her head. “Not a word.” And the implication of possibility not chosen causes her heart to race in bewilderment.

After a moment, he takes her by the arm, a touch as light as air. “Come, chil',” he says. “Let's go inside. Penny must be ready.”

And it is only because of the gentleness of his manner that Yasmin allows herself to be led.

Penny is sitting in the porch when they return. She gestures Yasmin to an easy chair. “You enjoy your little walk?”

“It's a lovely place. So peaceful.”

On a round brass table, in the centre, is a silver platter heaped with Indian sweets both familiar and unfamiliar. Yasmin recognizes the
kurma,
the golden
jilebi
— which she has always thought of as honey-drenched pretzels — and the white rectangles of
laddoo.
But she doesn't know the large yellow balls, or the smaller fried ones.

Cyril, lowering himself into another easy chair, says, “She like the view, too.”

“Of course she like the view. What is have not to like?”

“I jus' mean —”

Penny turns towards the door. “They're here, Amie,” she calls. “You can bring the drinks now.”

Presently, the curtains at the door waft open and a short, elderly woman comes out with a platter on which are a coffee mug and two glasses of orange juice. She approaches Yasmin, holds the platter out. Yasmin helps herself to the coffee, whispers her thanks. Amie — in her sixties, and skeletal, with a face so pared it reveals the intimate contours of her skull — keeps her eyes lowered.

Next she serves Penny, who wordlessly takes her orange juice.

When she comes to Cyril, he shakes his head. “Amie,” he says, “is coffee I wanted.”

“But m'um say —”

“I ain't care what m'um say, I —”

“Thank you, Amie,” Penny says firmly.

Amie quickly withdraws into the house.

Cyril says, “Now look here, Penny —”

“Yasmin, dear,” Penny says, gesturing at the plate of sweets. “Help yourself.”

Cyril's jaw clenches, his chest heaves to the rhythm of his breathing, now audible. He clenches the glass in his hand until it trembles. But he says nothing.

Yasmin, embarrassed at the spectacle of Cyril's anger so easily routed, looks for a way to busy herself. But what is she to do? She feels inept, graceless. Finally, she reaches for a piece of
kurma
and, nibbling at it, remarks on its freshness. Immediately, she sees Penny's disappointment, realizes she has deprived her of a little victory.

Penny says, “You know
kurma?”

At the question, Cyril laughs out loud, and he takes a gulp of juice with a sudden and obvious relish.

Ignoring him, Penny says, “Well, wonders never cease.”

Yasmin hears
wandas nevacease:
for a brief moment she is distracted by the distorting effect Penny's accent has on her words.