Hiding in Plain Sight (11 page)

“Some women who hide in plain sight?” says Valerie.

“You reckon she is in the closet?” says Padmini.

Valerie says that she once asked Aar directly about his sister's love life. “He looked at me, amused. Then he said, ‘For crying out loud, she is my sister.'” That was Aar, proper in every way. And that was Bella, a mystery. “In all the years I've known her,” Valerie says, “I haven't detected any flicker of an intimation of what excites her.”

Padmini says, “Maybe, being Somali, she doesn't have it in her. Maybe they chopped hers off, all of it.”

Valerie laughs. “How about if we ask her?”

“At the first opportunity.”

Valerie says, “I wonder what circumcised female genitals look like.” She imagines something like the hollow cheeks of an elderly person, a cavern.

“In Uganda,” Padmini says, “they stretch the labia.”

“Ideal for self-stimulation, I hear,” Valerie jokes. She knows they are having fun at Bella's expense, but the two of them are roaring with laughter when the phone rings. They fall instantly silent, as if suddenly aware that someone has been listening in on their indiscretions. The ringing goes on and on, but neither dares to answer it. Finally it stops, but then it almost immediately resumes. “Maybe my children,” Valerie says. “Hello!”

It is Bella, inviting them to dinner.

“Give me a sec,” says Valerie. She consults with Padmini, who nods.

They settle on an Indian restaurant called Tandoori House at eight.
Bella says she has some things to take care of first and that she will meet them there. She doesn't elaborate. “The reception desk will tell you where it is,” she says.

After Valerie hangs up, she discovers that a new worry has crept into their conversation now that they are no longer saying terrible things about Bella's privates. Padmini says, “Why is she inviting both of us?”

“Maybe she wishes to take your measure,” says Valerie. “After all, you're the one who led me astray, made me into a lesbian.”

“You're too long in the tooth. She won't believe that.”

And suddenly there is joy on their faces as they prepare to go out. They resolve to ask Bella about her love life at dinner. They shower together and take their time dressing. Valerie chooses a multicolored silk sari that Padmini suggests. And Padmini, not feeling Indian with her shorn head, puts on a pair of jeans.

Bella, her stomach churning not so much with anger but with anxiety about what Valerie is about, packs the rest of her belongings and checks to make sure that she has her point-and-shoot in her shoulder bag. That camera, she thinks, will be adequate for what she has in mind. Bella has a plan that she thinks will work in her favor and that she hopes will take the edge off her interactions with Valerie. Into the same shoulder bag she also packs a few photographs she has brought along of the children soon after Valerie left—only the children, never ones with Aar or herself. She checks to make sure she has the car keys.

Just before she leaves the room, she grabs the book she is reading—Camus's
Lyrical and Critical Essays
—so that she will have something to read if Valerie and Padmini are late. She remembers that Valerie likes to make a point of her importance by a tardy arrival. More than once she has showed up for a flight after the gates had closed. What used to bother Aar was not so much her lateness but the gloating that came after. “Let them wait and let the world be damned,” she would say. For her part, Bella would get her sister-in-law's monkey up by spelling “Valerie” with a
y
.

Bella takes the lift down to the lobby, looking as if she has just stepped out of a bandbox.

The drive takes half an hour despite the short distance. The night is starry, the sky cloudless, the streets no longer crowded with peddlers but now teeming with pedestrians on their way home and fifteen-passenger
matatu
s—minibuses that stop wherever they please—being driven at reckless speeds. Bella knows that she is taking a more circuitous route to the restaurant than necessary, but this does not disturb her in the least. In fact, she needs to kill some time. She parks the car and walks around with her Polaroid, taking photos.

The waiter shows her to a table. As she waits for Valerie to arrive, she thinks back to the time when they had their one and only overt row. Bella, visiting the family while Aar was away on business, had gone to a supermarket with Valerie and the children in tow—for some reason the supermarket was a place where the children were especially prone to behaving abominably. At some point, the staff felt it necessary to summon the manager because Salif had turned an entire shelf of the chocolate row into disarray, dropping more than half its contents onto the floor and trampling on some of them. When the youth responsible for stocking the shelves pleaded with Valerie to make her son desist, she just shrugged her shoulders and, acting nonchalant, said, “Just tell me how much destruction he has caused and I'll pay it as part of my grocery bill.”

Bella had seen quickly what Salif was up to; in the process of creating mayhem, he was deftly removing the wrappings of the chocolate bars in such a way that the scanning machine would not have prices to read. That way he could slip a couple of bars into his satchel and get away with it. He undoubtedly knew Valerie wouldn't allow anyone to question or search him. And indeed, the young manager of the
supermarket chose to let them go rather than call the police, saying, “Just go, madam. These are black kids and I do not wish to give them a bad start in life by accusing them of theft. But I worry what will become of them if you do not do the proper thing by them.”

In the car, Salif had boasted of what he had done, and Valerie had said, “How rascally clever of you!” Rather than blow her top right there and then, Bella had waited until she and Valerie were alone. Then they had an epic fight, in which she tried to insist that Valerie speak to Salif about the consequences of his behavior.

And Valerie went ballistic. Pumped up by rage, she seemed to grow an inch taller in her chair. Her voice took on a hoarse tone, and her gestures went operatic in their movements. “How dare you accuse my son of theft,” she shrieked.

Bella very calmly said, “Salif must know how to distinguish right from wrong. And now is the time to teach him, during these tender years.”

“And you'd call what he did a theft?”

“Is there another name for it?” Bella said.

“An eight-year-old boy having a bit of fun? Where is the harm in that? Just a bit of mischief making, that's all.”

“Is that what you call it, mischief making?”

“Salif is learning how the world works.”

“The world doesn't work that way, Valerie.”

Valerie said, “I encourage my children to learn how to get away with things. In my book, that is not theft. You call it theft, I call it being smart!”

Bella said, “There is an ancient wisdom, Italian, I believe, which purports that a mother can teach her child only the good morals by which she abides.”

Valerie said, “I find that offensive.”

“I don't mean to be offensive.”

“And anally moralistic, if I may say so.”

“I'd do anything for my nephew and niece,” said Bella.

Valerie hit back. “With none of your own, you have no more idea how to deal with children than you know how to live with anyone, man or woman.”

Bella refused to be diverted. “I don't want my nephew to steal from anyone at any time,” Bella retorted. “Theft is theft, not a bit of fun. Thieving small things is morally wrong because one may develop the habit of stealing bigger things. I won't condone it and neither would Aar, nor will any sensible person in any society anywhere.”

At the mention of Aar's name, Valerie cringed. Then she said, “Relax, my dear Bella. Relax.”

“How can I relax?”

“Salif will outgrow this childish habit. It's like having sex with other boys, something natural and not to be frowned at as long as nobody else finds out.”

Bella, who was brought up in a tradition in which in-laws did not discuss certain taboo topics, told herself that Valerie had no sense of actual shame or privacy. Uncertain how a talk about theft had led to one about sex, however, she said, “I don't want him to end up in a police station.”

“They are my children,” Valerie said.

“And I am their aunt.”

They faced off, on the brink, and then Bella decided to let things be. She decided not to speak of it to Aar. What would be the point? She wouldn't want to be accused of creating a rift between man and wife. A few days later, she took Salif for a movie and a treat—Dahaba had gone
with Valerie for a swim—and the two of them had a talk, Bella impressing on her nephew the importance of respecting others in the way you would like them to respect you.

She approached the topic in subsequent conversations, coming at it from different angles, until Salif promised never to do such a thing again. “Touch my heart, Auntie,” he said, “you can trust me.” And he seemed to mean it.

—

Bella makes no comment when Valerie and Padmini arrive forty-five minutes late and don't apologize. She is used to Valerie's ways and is certain that it won't help matters if she fusses about them. There are many other gauntlets to run in the coming days, after all. She'll save her ammunition for the battles worth fighting.

“Hello,” Valerie says, towering over Bella in her chair.

“Hi,” Bella says, the Camus dropping to the floor as she gets up to give Valerie a hug. “A bonus to see you for the second time in a single day.”

Padmini keeps her physical distance and greets her from the other end of the table, but Bella, out of exaggerated politeness, almost tips over the entire table reaching to shake her hand.

“I am glad you could join us,” Bella says.

“Delighted to be here.”

Even with Bella standing, Padmini towers over her. She is wearing a headscarf in the elegant way Somali women wear theirs, with the knot in the back.

Bella and Padmini have held each other in mistrust ever since they first met years ago on some simultaneous visit to Aar and Valerie's in Geneva.

“What book are you reading?” Padmini asks now, as Bella bends down to retrieve it, nearly knocking her head against the table in the process. Bella shows her the cover.

“Camus.” Padmini pronounces the
s
. “I used to love him as a student.”

Bella pushes a bottle of sparkling water toward them. Valerie fills her own glass and then Padmini's. Then the waiter comes and Valerie orders a gin and tonic, and Padmini orders a bottle of South African red, even though Bella insists she is happy with the fizzy water.

“Please accept my condolences,” says Padmini.

Bella nods and mumbles her thanks.

Padmini looks around, her eyes following the waiters. “I bet there aren't many Indian restaurants in Italy,” she says.

Valerie asks, “What makes you say that?”

“Indian, Chinese, and even Ethiopian restaurants do well in countries where the cuisines are by their nature less sophisticated,” Padmini says. “In Italy or France, there are sufficient excellent regional varieties of cuisine, and the locals have no time for foreign cuisine.”

“In England, we have regional varieties and we also have plenty of Indian and Chinese restaurants,” Valerie says.

Padmini continues, “It is no wonder too that in Holland, where the cuisine is as awful as it is in England, there are many Indonesian and Malay restaurants.”

Bella contributes to the debate. “It is for the same reason that I doubt there are many Italian or French restaurants in India.”

Valerie is visibly annoyed. “Remember how you used to love fish and chips, Padmini?”

“Because I was young and I had more than I could take of Indian food, cooked by my sister every single day of the week,” Padmini says.

“That's not how I recall it,” Valerie says.

Bella thinks that Padmini and Valerie are behaving like long-term partners edgily exchanging put-downs, and she stays out of it. She changes the subject. She asks, “Are South African wines readily available for your restaurant?”

Padmini says, “I loved what we sampled in Cape Town when we went there for the Gay Pride parade last March. Loved Cape Town too, for that matter. Everyone who is anyone goes to Cape Town for that event! It is like Sydney's or San Francisco's.”

“What do you know?” Bella says neutrally.

The waiter brings Valerie's drink and the wine bottle. He has difficulty uncorking it, and Padmini takes it from him and uncorks it with professional ease. She pours out glasses for the three of them, and they raise a glass together without uttering a toast. When the waiter returns, they let Padmini do the ordering. When the food arrives, they tuck into it.

“You haven't aged at all,” Padmini says to Bella.

“Nor have you,” Bella says.

Valerie says that she is not sure she could pick Bella out from a lineup with absolute certainty. She adds, “I am good with voices, not with people's faces.”

Bella knows that not all women age alike. African women make less of an effort as the years go by. Women elsewhere spend more time and money consciously grooming their bodies, taking pills and applying antiaging creams.

“What was Kampala like?” Bella asks Padmini. It is time to get a little more serious.

“Not likely to return there ever.”

“Why?” Bella asks.

“Obviously, we made a mistake.”

“In what way did you make a mistake?”

“We thought that with Amin dead and gone the new guy would be different. You see, I went to repossess our family property. But once they discovered that we were gay in a country where it is a criminal offense to be gay, the man we were in litigation with hired goons and spies to amass sufficient forensic evidence to have us put behind bars. At first we did not even have the possibility of bail. Fools that we were, we hired a lawyer, who unbeknownst to us was also on a retainer from the very man I was in dispute with.”

Bella pretends she is hearing all this for the first time and asks, “Then what?”

“We spent two nights in a lockup smelling of years-old urine and a rotten history of sodomy and rape.” Valerie steps in to explain. “On the next day, our photographs were in some yellow rag and our story made it onto YouTube. Then our lawyer, without consulting us, came with papers she drew up not as our advocate but as though she were a mediator, playing one side against the other, all the while she was taking our money.”

“How humiliating!” Bella exclaims.

Padmini says, “The deal on the table was that we should sign the legal documents she prepared, giving him all the rights to the property, in exchange for our freedom.”

“Was that what you did?”

Padmini says, “Wouldn't you?”

The dark rings around Padmini's eyes have become more prominent, and Valerie holds her head between her hands. Bella decides to withhold judgment until she has the whole story from Gunilla.

They eat in silence. A waiter inquires how they are doing. They nod their heads and, still not speaking, they eat some more.

“And you, Bella, how have you been?”

“I am well, considering. If it wasn't for what happened to Aar, I
would say I am happy in my job, on the road a lot, excellent friends everywhere I go. What else can one ask for?”

Padmini says, “Sex, good sex.”

She says this so loudly they can feel the shock waves hitting the next table, and the waiter, who has moved on, turns and stares.

Bella says, “Who says I don't have good sex!”

“Do you?” Valerie asks.

Padmini says, “Who gives it to you?”

“What do you mean, who gives it to me?”

“A man or a woman?”

Bella remembers the last time she made love, that day with Humboldt, the day Aar died. She can't believe she is being asked about this twice in one day. But she only says, “I view sex as a private matter.”

But Valerie has her blood up, and she isn't done. She says, “Ask her about the other thing.”

The waiter is whispering something to one of the other waiters behind the counter, and the two begin to laugh.

Padmini says, “Do you enjoy sex?”