The Worlds Within Her (45 page)

Cyril snatches a handful of earth from the cliff wall, rubs it onto the rock, then brushes it away with delicate sweeps of his palm.

Now she sees it. Or them. Two letters, each about three inches high. Brown on grey. Not letters, she corrects herself. Initials: VR.

Cyril says, “He broke his favourite knife doing this.”

Yasmin goes weak at the knees. A sudden vertigo: She lowers herself to the ground.

Cyril says: “This is as close to him as I can bring you, Yasmin.”

She touches the rock: traces the letters with her knuckles; brushes the earth from them, exposing them.

She reads the gouges with her fingertips.

Her ears detect the bite of steel on rock — and for a moment the letters come as clear to her as the day they were cut.

Only when she feels herself overwhelmed by the need to clasp them, to make them material in her palm, do they dissolve.

Only then, her sight suddenly misty, does she lose them.

And only then does she let herself heave in Cyril's arms.

THE SEA IS
held back by a braid of boulders, large, grey rocks intricately veined in white. Cyril has drawn her attention to them with the remark that, were they to return to this spot
in a hundred years, they would find the boulders reduced to pebbles. “That,” he says, “is history.”

Their precarious solidity is, however, fitting, for here — a narrow strip of gravelled earth poured and battened down between the boulders and the roadway — seems a precarious perch for a village. If the island were to shrug, Yasmin thinks, it would all tumble into the sea.

They had stopped at what Cyril refers to as a “parlour,” a roadside convenience store. It is no more than a small wooden room with large, open front doors, the planks painted pink; the window shutters, propped open with sticks, green; and the galvanized-iron roof its natural zinc. Despite the bright sunlight, a bare bulb hangs burning from a long cord.

“Mornin', mammy,” Cyril says heartily to the aged woman seated behind the counter.

She nods in response, too preoccupied with her own thoughts to respond to Cyril's friendly greeting.

He claps his hands as if in anticipation of a feast and orders lunch. “Two aloo roti, please, mammy. One hot-hot and one —” he glances at Yasmin, a look that is partly in assessment, partly in challenge “— and one medium.”

Yasmin accepts the challenge. “Make it hot-hot,” she says, the words strange on her tongue, like an expression from an unfamiliar language.

Cyril frowns. “You know what you doing?”

“I've never met a pepper I couldn't eat, Cyril.”

“Must run in the family. You sure?”

Yasmin shakes her head. “I can't exactly back out now, eh? And by the way, since you're probably wondering — yes, I know what aloo roti is. Curried potato rolled in a kind of pita bread.”

“Now look, Yasmin.” He places his palm on his heart. “If
you going to tell me that Shakti used to make it, you going to give me a heart attack. Some things just not in the realm of possibility, you know?”

“No, no. It's just that back home you can get everything, just about every kind of food imaginable. Including aloo roti. Nothing's really exotic anymore.”

The old woman places their meal on the counter, the sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. As Cyril pays, Yasmin finds two words echoing in her mind:
back home.
She hears the words shaped by her mother's voice, she hears them shaped by her own, and she is struck for the first time at the difference in implication: the same words signifying different worlds.

DO YOU KNOW
, my dear Mrs. Livingston, how some faces suggest the past?

From the photographs she has sent to me over the years, I see that my sister-in-law Penny has grown into a handsome woman, with that edge of severity so many handsome women seem to acquire. And yet, in her face you still see the essential features of the child I never knew and of the young woman who became a close friend. I believe, Mrs. Livingston, that no matter what experience life brings us, the person we were meant to be never disappears. The essential personality, I mean. I believe it has been so with Penny. She is a woman who has endured, despite everything.

No, her life has not been particularly harsh. She has always lived in a certain comfort. But one aspect has always been —
how shall I put this?
Problematic
should just about cover it. You see, Penny was treated by men with a level of deference not accorded the other single women in our circles. I mean, they were always polite, but with the other unmarried women there was often an undertone of flirtation, a suggestion of naughtiness, if you will. With Penny, however, this was never, ever, in evidence, and was the cause of some pain to her. She was not an unattractive young woman, with all of the normal yearnings of her age, but men, I imagine, found the proximity to my husband intimidating. Smacks of cowardice, doesn't it? Harsh, I know, but I remember too well Penny's frustrations, her bitterness even, to understand and forgive. Simply put, I do not
wish
to understand and forgive.

What I remember with great sadness was the regularity, and a certain indiscrimination, with which Penny would develop crushes. She would convince herself of the attractiveness of one available man after another, often men with whom she had little in common. These crushes never led anywhere, of course, and I was the one she would come to, once the failure was clear, to conduct a cleansing post-mortem. All the virtues she had perceived would be turned around, remade into flaws. The men would suddenly be sickly or untrustworthy. The dazzling smile a leer, a shy helpfulness, effeminacy.

I listened, I agreed, I helped her move on. I believed, you see, that the right one would come along in his own good time. That the virtues would remain virtues and Penny would find happiness.

Then one day, it happened.

She and I were walking in the yard after lunch, watching the clouds build up on the horizon, when she suddenly blurted out that she had met a man.

EVEN IN THE
great heat of early afternoon, the rocks are cool to the touch, the white veins as if embossed on the grey stone.

They sit beside each other, Cyril facing the sea, Yasmin facing the coast along which they have driven. The boulders closer to the water, she sees, are cracked and worn, littered with pebbles torn from themselves.

Cyril says, “He probably caused you a lot o' tears over the years, eh?”

Yasmin fills her mouth with a bite of the roti. In this way she is better able to treat his question as rhetorical. The truth, she knows, would hurt him: She has no memory of ever having cried for, or because of, her father.

“Well, never mind,” Cyril continues. “Ram never worried much about causing anybody tears. He had a ferocious temper when he was young, you know. Is only when he got old enough to realize his tantrums weren't impressing anybody that he learn how to control it — and to turn it to his advantage. He din't lose his temper too often when he grew up, but it was there and he let it explode when he thought it would help. Kind o' like a volcano with a control button, nuh.”

Behind him, a young man steps gingerly across the rocks to the edge, where he sits, legs dangling above the gently-lapping water.

Cyril says, “The roti not too hot?”

Yasmin shakes her head. “Told you.”

The young man she estimates to be in his early twenties. He is tall and thin, and views the world through a continuous squint. The tail of his shirt is untucked, the long sleeves rolled past the elbow; the hem of his trousers is slightly flared, and he
is barefoot. He sits there on the boulder as if in contemplation, bony shoulders hunched towards the sea.

“Although, knowing Ram the way I did,” Cyril continues, “I pretty sure things would've been different with you.”

Yasmin resists the temptation to ask why this should have been so. She knows Cyril's message is of intention; it is meant to be comforting — but intention projected into a future that never came to be is to her futile, a feather too loosely anchored to provide lift. She no longer allows herself to dream of the shape her daughter's life might have acquired.

“I remember once he used you to weed out a sycophant. Now, he din't mind sycophants, but the mindless ones he couldn' stomach. He knew this fella'd just had a baby, so he showed you to him and said, ‘You ever see a prettier baby than this one? I bet even yours not as pretty.' And the fella said, ‘I have to admit, Mr. Ramessar, your baby prettier than mine.' That was the end o' him.”

“Glad to know I was useful,” Yasmin says, tearing an end of the wax paper back from the bread.

“With you he'd've been different,” Cyril repeats.

Yasmin sees that Cyril has not taken his story beyond its details — to him it is just a tale to tell, one of her father's quirks — and a sadness comes to her.

But Cyril does not notice. “You were his daughter,” he says. “His ‘daughts.' The apple of his eye. I can't say he spent hours playing with you, he din't have time for that kind o' thing. But he gave you a special attention. If you were around, he always knew where you were and what you were doing. Even if he had a meeting —”

“I distracted him?” And even though she does not intend it to be so, the question emerges with a bitter edge.

The young man behind Cyril reaches absent-mindedly for a
pebble, tosses it into the sea. Then another and another. He is, Yasmin thinks, like a man fondling worry beads, the action automatic, divorced from his consciousness.

“Yes. In a good way. We used to have a swing hanging from a mango tree. One day, you were out there with Amie, I think, swinging away —”

White on blue up and down spinning around and around and around faster and faster

White on blue glimpses of green white on blue up and down faster and faster white white white

“— and somehow you slip off the seat —”

Hold on tight!
Faster and faster green white blue
Don't let go! Don't —

“— and practically flew through the air —”

A cascade of green brown blue white
Umpg!
Green. And brown. And white on blue

“— and landed hard on your head. I think it almost knock you out.”

And darkness crowding in at the edges
A gathering up in hands
The shadow of a face against the blue

“Man, Ram was out there in a flash making sure you were all right. I never seen him so scared. He start shouting at Amie as if … I mean, I was afraid he was going to hit her.”

“Hit her?” But her attention is divided, engaged still in wrapping the context newly revealed around images that have drifted forever in her mind.

“In a manner o' speaking. He wasn' that type o' fella. Truth is, Ram wasn' easy on the people he loved, but you wouldn' believe how far he was ready to go for them.”