The Worlds Within Her (34 page)

No, it was not difficult! My dear, you underestimate me. Pomerac was the most easily obtained from a tree in one's own backyard, you see, and I was quite aware I had exchanged backyards — as I did a second time years later, when I moved to this country. One must be realistic, mustn't one? This obsession with one's own appetite that has become part of the modern age — I don't think it's a terribly healthy thing. Metaphorically speaking, too many people exchange backyards and seem to think it perfectly acceptable that they spend their time pining for pomeracs, if you see what I mean.

But how in the world have I ended up talking about an obscure fruit? Ah, yes. My husband's breakfast, with Cyril.

That morning, I overheard my husband say to his brother that he was quite aware some people accused him of opportunism — working for one side, then the other, then back again. And he acknowledged that they were right.

Cyril, being Cyril, demurred.

Don't try to hide from it, my husband said, let's figure out how we can use it.

I understood my husband enough at this point to see what he meant. His goal, you see — his goal beyond the personal — was the betterment of our people …

Our people? Hah! That, my dear, is one of those mischievous questions. We — those of us who belong by birth — have always instinctively known who our people were, we have never had to define …

Unlettered, I would say, by the tens of thousands. And physically wasted, by all that badly compensated labour in the sugar-cane fields and rice paddies. Bound together by alienness and religion — and defined, yes, by race and a shared, if false, notion of a larger belonging, for we believed ourselves to be still of India — unlike those with whom we shared the island, those whom slavery had severed from their homeland. A grand illusion on our part, but it was what shaped this idea of Us and of our people. It was what gave power to my husband and those who worked with him. It was this sense of our people — a people bereft — that gave my husband his dream, and his sense of mission. Political power. Economic power. Social status. These were not empty words to my husband, nor were they vague concepts. He used to say that cane-cutters had to give birth to doctors, and that we had to go from milking cows to milking the economy.

So you see, he would have worked with anyone who would help him achieve his ends. He
was
an opportunist. Political
ideology, party loyalty and such things motivated him very little. The kind of success he dreamed of could have come to him only with the success of our people …

What kind of success did he dream of? I'm not sure he could have put it into words — but, as I understand it, he dreamed of exercising an immense personal power, despite which our people would one day wish to erect statues of him. He wanted to be able to hurl thunderbolts — and still be loved.

What Cyril failed to appreciate was that my husband had the ability to see himself through his enemies' eyes. And he was at ease, though a man of ego, accepting even a poisoned view of himself with a kind of dispassion — that elephant hide of his. It gave him great strength, you know — for he knew not only his enemy but also, in this game at least, himself too.

How often, though, those arrows ricocheted off him and found me.

“HI, HOW WAS
your day?”

“Fine. Yours?”

“Did you watch?”

“You were fine, as usual. Eyeshadow a little on the heavy side, though.”

Or: “
Sh
edule.
Sk
edule's American. But on the whole, fine. Just fine.”

Fine:
the word set her teeth on edge. Like
nice,
a nonsense word, emptied of all weight but the dismissive.

MY HUSBAND'S REHABILITATION
was his own creation, and the hacks were his handmaidens. Material was spun everywhere for them, even within the family. There was this particular story — the way they told it, my dear, they made it sound as if he could fly.

They said: When he was just a little boy he fell out of a mango tree.

They said: He should have broken his arm or his leg or even his neck.

But he fell softly, they said. He came down light and easy, like a leaf or a bird, or a cat expending a life.

Sometimes they said he had fallen from the top of a coconut tree. But always there was height, and lightness, and a miracle of invulnerability. No one ever explained how a little boy could have managed to climb to the top of a coconut tree — but hagiography makes no concession to practicality.

My husband had no memory of this event, and knew it might be apocryphal. But he liked it, appreciated its usefulness. Once he said, with a kind of wonder, “How much we lose of our own lives … ” Convincing himself, you see, that it could have been so, making it part of himself the way some actors absorb the details of their characters.

Do you know that I actually got to the point where I decided I would ask my mother-in-law about the incident. Had anything remotely like it occurred? But my mother-in-law had a way of frustrating my plans.

A month to the day after our return from England, my husband and I were awoken before dawn by a tapping at our bedroom door. My husband got up while I turned in the bed and tried to
fall back asleep. I was certain this was about yet another of his political matters — little fires that had to be extinguished at the most inconvenient hours. But the quality of the knock at the door had alerted something in my subconscious and, contrary to my habit, I found myself listening — with greater alertness when in the whispered exchange I recognized the maid's voice.

My husband said to me, Go wake Cyril, then he hurried out wearing only his pyjama pants and undershirt.

A few minutes later, Cyril, Celia and I found my husband and the maid in my mother-in-law's room. They were standing beside the bed, looking down at her. A single glance told me what had happened. Her face was more serene than I had ever seen.

SHE THREW HERSELF
backwards onto the snowbank and swept her arms up until her mittens met above her head. Then she leapt to her feet and, ignoring the snow that clung to the back of her head, her coat, her legs, examined the result with a critical eye. “Look, Mom,” she said. “An angel in the snow.”

“Yes, you are,” Yasmin said.

“Not me, Mom.” Her daughter was peeved. “Look. In the snow. I made an angel.”

One of millions, but to her daughter an achievement. Yasmin made a show of admiring it.

“Make one, Mom.”

“Now? Here?”

“Pleeease, Mom?”

Yasmin could not tell her daughter that she had never made an angel in the snow. She did not wish to tell her that public displays of exuberance had been offensive to her mother's sense of propriety, and that her age of rebellion, such as it was, had come too late. She had by then grown into the reserve that would temper outburst.
Such an obedient girl,
her mother would sometimes remark with a wounding satisfaction. Yasmin had always been careful not to damage that pride in her reserve — the reserve some would take for gentleness.

“Mummy! Make one!” Her daughter was becoming impatient.

“But you already have, honey. And such a beautiful one, too.” But as she heard herself speak, as she detected the deceit in her voice, Yasmin knew that her daughter, had she been old enough to be familiar with the expression, could justly have accused her of making excuses — excuses for an acquired inadequacy.

“Mo-om …”

And suddenly the plea — its tone curious with elements of request and of permission — was irresistible. Yasmin spun around, let herself fall back onto the snowbank.

Ariana squealed in delight.

She drew her arms upwards as her daughter had done and then rolled forward, getting to her feet with a futile effort at elegance.

Her daughter was thrilled.

They stood together for several minutes gazing at the figures they had made, the large angel beside the small: a fresco, Yasmin saw, of protectiveness, the one keeping watch over the other.

SHE SEIZES A
handful of his photos, lays them out on the table before her, shuffling them into a picture gallery of the passing years.

The eyes: almond-shaped in youth, frankness leavened only by the shadow of a deeper wariness; in later years, the outer edges foundering, as if burdened by gravity, the shadow having risen overwhelmingly.

The mouth, shaped in the early photos into an unprompted smile, later on follows the line of the eyes, as if weighted down at the corners by despondency or disappointment — or merely the sadness of a man who understands too much.

His hair is always full and neatly combed, parted on the left side and brushed back from the forehead. But as its early blackness acquires thin streaks of grey, the mass loses body, appears to sit more heavily on his head.

She sees then how his flesh thickened, skin darkening, acquiring the texture of old, soft leather.

These changes: the years made manifest. She feels suddenly that she is seeing the wordless minutiae of him, peering at a road map to shapeless darknesses within his soul.

Her hands grow moist. Her heart pounds. These changes: They are more graphic than she can stand. They offer a closeness of encounter she is unprepared for.

With a sweep of a hand she banishes them from sight.

Cyril blinks at her, puzzled. Then he knuckles his eyes.

Penny yawns.

“Let's take a break,” Cyril says. “Is hard on the eyesight, looking so much into the past.”