The Worlds Within Her (50 page)

Eyes caught in unguarded moments. Partly lifeless, partly manic: the revelation of fatigue.

Slouched in his armchair, eyes shut, arms folded, as in a gesture of mortality.

The twist of a head, the seizing of a gaze: a smile unexpected and true, a quicksilver flash from beyond the boundaries of wariness.

SHE IS BLENDED
with the darkness.

Her hand held before her eyes remains invisible, and the few steps she takes are ethereal in their unworldliness.

The darkness has made her incorporeal.

She feels herself gliding through the night, each footfall a jolt of surprise, evidence of a substantiality beyond the reach of her other senses. All that remains to her is the jarring solidity of the earth, the constancy of the stars, and from somewhere off in the distance the sharp, rhythmic report of many drums.

The sound had startled her. It had emerged without warning from a distant darkness so profound it could only be sensed, cutting off the images flooding through her mind.

Drummers, sometimes one, sometimes many, their beats as crisp as the crack of rifle fire, rasping and melodious and so disquieting she is robbed of breath to the point of dizziness.

And now, down here, away from the house, spectral in the greater darkness, the sound seems to come from everywhere. For a moment she is confused, but she quickly steadies herself: returns in her mind to the porch and the direction from which the sound came to her. She knows she must walk away from the house and to the left, into the thickening trees.

The looming bulk of the house steadies her gaze, helps her pick out varying shades of black.

That tree: she knows it.

She wills herself past it. Wills herself to keep on going, towards that sound that fills the night.

Just past the hazy silhouette of the tree, the ground gives way beneath her — a depression in the earth, she realizes as she tumbles. She catches herself on her hands, the ground damp and mossy, but a little yelp escapes her as a stone bites into her knee.

She sits for a moment, rubbing the knee, resolution wavering. But her fingers find no blood and the pain passes quickly. She rises slowly to her feet and continues on.

At the trees, the sound of the drums grows muffled and ubiquitous. She hesitates, tells herself she will take ten more steps and if she seems no closer will turn back. She proceeds slowly, hands reaching out to tree trunks, feeling her way.

At twelve steps, the drumming louder now, a glimmer of light causes her heart to race. She makes her way with a heightened caution past the tree trunks that begin to acquire body and shape.

Twenty steps later — her mind automatically counting as she walks — the drumming becomes tumultuous and demanding, reverberating with a brutal edge. The tree trunks thin out, a bright and flickering light hardening them to silhouettes.

A few steps later — steps cautioned to surreptitiousness — she discerns a clearing and there, at its centre, the leaping flames of a bonfire.

Shadowed against the flames, circling them to the rhythmic delirium of the drums, men — only men — writhe and jump in ecstatic abandonment. They are costumed, painted, some shorn, some long-haired. Some brandish tridents, others staves.

And then, among them, she spots Ash. He is draped like the others in a saffron robe, his face patterned with white paint, arms and legs bare and glistening in the firelight. In one hand he holds his pellet gun, in the other an unsheathed sword.

Beyond the fire, five men are beating at drums hung around their necks. There eyes are closed, chests streaked with sweat, arms flailing.

Yasmin's body begins to tremble. Her mind swirls in incomprehension at the nocturnal frenzy that has no place in any world she knows.

She has made up her mind to turn back, to return to the safety of the house, when a hand seizes her shoulder from behind.

FUNNY THING ABOUT
regrets, Mrs. Livingston — we don't always regret having them …

Do you know what I mean?

I have never told Yasmin much about her father. Not much beyond anything she could find in the public record if she wanted to.

And what she knows — what she thinks I have told her — is
banal enough. That he always did his best for us. That he fought for his people. That he was killed for it.

She was curious about him for a while, in her early teens. But then she seemed to lose interest — whether because this is what adolescents do or because my portrait of him was sufficient to discourage her I do not know. But her interest waned, and she has never attempted to put flesh on his bones and blood in his veins. To my relief, let me say. It would be futile, after all. He would remain just a construction. I do not want Yasmin to have to live with that disappointment.

Among any parent's greatest regrets is what we have failed to teach our children, the knowledge we have failed to impart. We want such fullness for them! So I regret having given this barest of skeletons to Yasmin. But I do not regret having this regret …

Do you see what I mean?

This ignorance, you understand, my dear — it is also my gift to her.

THE DANCING AND
drumming stop abruptly as she is hauled into the firelight, the back of her neck seized by fingers viperous and unrelenting.

The men gather around, chests heaving, bodies glistening, faces etched with hostility, curiosity, confusion — and she sees that they are as unnerved as she.

Ash pushes his way through to the front. “What you think you doin'? You have no place here.”

She is a minute in finding her voice, and when she does it betrays rupture. “Ash. All this. I didn't mean —” But speech robs her of breath and, gasping, she realized — in the new slyness that comes to them, easing their tension — that they must think her afraid.

But she is not. Not now. No longer. Of that she is absolutely certain.

And then she sees that Ash, too, understands this, and that her lack of fear is arousing his anger.

He waves the barrel of the pellet gun before her eyes, lowers the mouth to her lips and presses it against them, the metal hard and warm.

She turns her face away.

He presses it to her temple.

It's only a pellet gun, she tells herself — but she cannot clear her mind of the lizard leaping around in its death throes in the grass.

Then, from deep within, her own anger surges. She reaches up, grasps the barrel and pushes it away.

Ash does not resist. Instead, he leans in close, so close she smells his acrid perspiration, feels his breath warm and moist on her cheek and ear. “Look here,” he says in an angry whisper. “What else you expec' me to do? You going back to your nice peaceful country tomorrow — and I stuck here. No way out. You understandin' me? No way out.”

Her eyes meet his: desperation dark and glistening inches away. In silence, she watches the darkness swell with moisture, watches tears brim, break and scurry down his cheeks.

And she feels for the first time beyond her fear of him: feels the depth of his despair.

She raises a hand to his cheek, lets his tears dampen her fingertips.

This dipping into tears, this unthinking attempt to soothe. She remembers the last time: a fall from a bicycle, a badly twisted ankle, her daughter writhing in pain.

She begins to caress his cheek. His eyes close, his face relaxes into peacefulness.

Yasmin feels herself melting.

But it does not last. Without warning he pulls back and slaps her hand away. “Go on,” he spits. “Get out o' here.” And to her captor behind, he says, “Take her back to the house.”

Her arm is grasped in a firm hand. As she turns to go, she says quietly, “You can't fool me anymore, Ash.”

“You saw them?”

“Yes.”

“Hellofasight, eh?”

Cyril, sitting spectral in the darkness of the porch, speaks with discouragement. Through the gloom, Yasmin sees his face sagging as if the flesh has detached itself from his skull.

He notices her limp. “They hurt you?” he says in alarm.

“No, it's all right, I fell. The knee's just stiffening up a bit. It'll be fine.”

Cyril leans forward in his chair, elbows on his thighs, fingers interlacing. His chin sinks into his chest. “They does get together like this every month or so,” he says. “Whipping themselves up, going crazy. Prancing around like a bunch o' bushmen.”

Yasmin takes the chair across from his, stretches out her leg, rubs the knee.

He sniffs contemptuously. “They're Hindu warriors. Going to save us all from Muslims, blacks and anybody else who get in the way of the great Hindu renaissance.”

“You take them seriously, but there's hardly a dozen of them, Cyril.”

“They're not the only ones. There's a whole movement. You does hear talk about hundreds, thousands, stockpiles of arms.”

“I saw tridents and staves. Ash had his pellet gun, for God's sake.”

“The talk is money from abroad. From India, nuh, and from some o' the rich businessmen here. And secret shipments of guns. Who knows if any of it true?”

“Have you asked Ash?”

“Once. And of course he say they're just a religious group and what I have against people learning more about Hinduism? I let it drop.” He raises hooded eyes to her. “He say anything to you about the diaspora?”

“The diaspora, yes.”

“And the flying chariots that were really rockets, and the flaming arrows that were really nuclear missiles? They reading the scriptures in their own way, you see. And they finding evidence of a great Hindu civilization way back when. And is not great art and poetry, mind you. No, no. Is advanced technology. Jet planes and space travel, telepathic communication. A race of super beings.” His fingers unfold themselves and his hands bunch into fists. “Yasmin, there's a whole world in that boy's head, a whole other reality.”

She has witnessed that other reality, and has stumbled onto yet another which Cyril, in his frustration, is incapable of seeing. “And Penny, what does she think of all this?”

“Penny?” he scoffs. “Sometimes I think she waiting for his parents to come back. And in the meantime, the boy growing up. Penny want him to be something — a doctor, a lawyer — and sometimes she does think what he need is some good, hard licks. But she also think, deep in herself, nuh, that what he doing is important. Worse thing is, Penny think that if Ram were alive today he'd be with them, fighting for our people.”

The idea surprises Yasmin. “Would he?”

Cyril looks away into the night. “I think Ram would mourn to see where his dream for his people ending up. He used to say, if we don't make this work, this place going back to the jungle. He was half right. Way I see it, the jungle coming to us.”

His words are a relief and a comfort. That her father was a man of realistic vision, sensitive to limits, susceptible to despair, offers Yasmin an unexpected satisfaction. Like the glimpses of vanity, it is something she can take away with her.