Nothing Like Love (22 page)

T
hey sat on Dutchie’s porch, watching the orange ember burn its way round a mosquito coil until there was nothing. “The thing cheap,” Dutchie said. He sat on the floor, his back pressed against his red front door. But the mosquito coil wasn’t cheap. And it was the same kind of coil they sat around every night to keep the mosquitoes away. It just seemed to fail them now because Krishna was leaving and in some strange way the withering mosquito coil was an indication of time passing too quickly.

Auntie Kay curled herself up in the dark like a shrimp, her pink dress draped neatly over her legs. “You pack everything? You forget anything?”

Krishna smiled, nodded, then shook his head. He glanced at the suitcase abandoned in the sand at the bottom of the steps. It bulged in all the wrong places like a woman in an
ill-fitting dress. Even in the shadows they could make out the outline of scriptures and balled-up clothing stuffed across every square inch with equal neglect.

The seashell wind chime jangled in the moonlight. The white bougainvillea stirred in its pot and settled again. Below, rowdy waves flung themselves on top of one another like noisy schoolchildren at play. Bacolet Bay was the same tonight as it always had been, except it wasn’t. Krishna was leaving.

Dutchie hooked his arms around his knees and clasped his hands. “Man, you holding your head like you have worries,” he said.

But Krishna sensed he wasn’t the only apprehensive one. Nervous energy crackled between them and it troubled him to think that he had drawn the two most light-hearted people he knew into his torment. Yet he was touched that they cared enough to be emotionally invested, and that they felt they needed to hide it from him. Krishna raised his head from the cradle of his palms and asked the question gnawing at his mind: “What if the plan ain’t work?”

“How you mean? The plan go work, Pundit. Ain’t I help devise it?”

Krishna nodded.

Dutchie flashed a reassuring smile. “Right,” he said, as if his contribution to the plan guaranteed its success. And Krishna knew that in a very big way it did.

Dutchie narrowed his gaze at Krishna. “Stick to the plan, you hear? Don’t improvise. Don’t add frills. Don’t complicate it. The plan is not carnival. The plan is the plan. And the plan is simple.”

Krishna swallowed, nodded.

“Right. By tomorrow afternoon, the message go done deliver to Vimla. Allyuh go meet in she father cane field. You know the place, right?”

Of course Krishna knew the place. He could picture Vimla standing amid the tall stalks now, impatience and hope in her brown face.

“And when you meet she, you go apologize for being a jackass and deserting she. Fall on your knees and beg if you have to.” Dutchie’s eyes twinkled as he said this and Krishna knew he hoped Krishna would have to do just that. “Then tell she the plan.”

Krishna tried to imagine what Vimla would say when he told her he wouldn’t marry Chalisa, that he knew a way for Vimla and him to be together. He wondered if this would be the moment that rendered Vimla speechless.

“But what if—”

“Don’t worry yourself with anything else. Just do like I tell you and I go take care of the rest.” He grinned. “Everything fix up nice.”

Auntie Kay sighed and nuzzled into her crooked arm. “I had a husband once,” she said, her voice small. “His name was Bas.” She looked at Krishna. “Your father didn’t like him. He used to call him ‘Bas the Ass.’ ”

Krishna dropped his head back into his hands as if he were somehow responsible for his father’s insolence.

“What was wrong with Bas?” Dutchie asked.

Krishna held his breath. Auntie Kay had mentioned his name a few times since he’d been in Tobago, but always in
passing, never in a moment charged with so much tension.

“What
wasn’t
wrong with Bas?” Auntie Kay’s girlish voice danced between them. “For one, the man was too tall for me. Krishna’s father used to say I would break my neck trying to kiss his beef-eating mouth.”

“Beef-eating?” Krishna said.

“Bas was a Christian.”

“
Bas?
A Christian?”

“Sebastian was he correct name.”

“Oh.”

“So what happen to Bas, Auntie Kay?” Dutchie asked.

“Anand make we life together miserable. He used to come Tobago, sit down on my veranda and sing bhajans early in the morning to wake Bas up. For Christmas he send we a dry black cake and the Ramayana. On Easter he pretend he was dying to prevent we going to church.”

Krishna shook his head.

Dutchie smiled. “Allyuh didn’t find it funny? You have to laugh at people like that.”

“I did, but Bas didn’t. Anand used to quarrel with Bas. He would say he piece and then as soon as Bas open he mouth to argue, Anand would close he eyes and chant mantras loud-loud. It get so bad, one time Anand even ring he bell and blow he conch as soon as Bas walk into the room. That is when we marriage really start to fall apart.”

“So what happen?”

“Bas left me. He went Venezuela and pick up some young Spanish thing.” She tucked a lock of her short black hair behind her ear. “Anand was right. The man was really a ass, but Anand was the bigger ass out of the two.”

Dutchie snorted. “It sound so.”

Auntie Kay tittered in the darkness. “Bas’s Spanish girl used to send me letters threatening to come Tobago and take my house and land. After she done take my husband she want
my
house and land? Imagine that! I tell she try.”

Krishna sat up. “She ever try?” He saw worry flit across Dutchie’s face.

“Never.”

Krishna slapped at the mosquito on his leg. Auntie Kay looked so small, and for the first time vulnerable, lying curled up in the shadows that way. Krishna knew she was naïve to think that Bas and his Spanish girlfriend wouldn’t one day follow through on that threat. If the property truly belonged to Bas, then what would stop them from ousting Auntie Kay on a whim? And suddenly Krishna remembered Gloria Ramnath, sweating and gushing on about her loyalty to Anand and what? That the gossips claimed he’d been sending money to Venezuela? Krishna shook his head in wonderment. Could his father be—?

“You better off without him, Auntie,” Dutchie said.

“Probably.” Auntie Kay shrugged. “Your father is not a easy man, Krishna. I know that first-hand.” She gave him a weak smile and he realized how much it pained her to speak so openly of her past. “But you and you alone know who and what go make you happy.”

Krishna heaved a sigh. He knew what was going on: they thought he might desert the plan, that his nerves would not hold up when the time came to set his life right again. He could tell by the way Dutchie trivialized the enormity of Krishna’s undertaking, and by Auntie Kay’s timely sharing
of her unsuccessful marriage to Bas. It hurt that they still doubted his resolve even after the hours they’d spent spinning the minutest details of the plan together. But Krishna knew he couldn’t really blame them. They recognized—as he did—that he had never once stood in his truth.

He grumbled at his father’s heels after every long, smoky puja, feeling fatigued and fraudulent, but he had never once said, “Pa, this is not for me.” Instead he’d invited resentment to take up residence in his heart, nursed his anguish until it was bigger than his desire to begin something new. Krishna’s anger had been misdirected. All this time he should have blamed himself.

And then there was Vimla. His fight for her had been pitiable at best. What defence had he offered against his father’s slanders? Later he told himself he’d been distracted by his exile to Tobago, but the fact was Krishna hadn’t had the courage to challenge his father’s wishes. His exile had really been his escape.

Life in Tobago with Dutchie and Auntie Kay helped show him where he had gone wrong. Now, after basking in their light for nearly two weeks, Krishna knew what it meant to love and laugh without apology, to leap into a day with the greatest expectations and have them all fulfilled. Auntie Kay and Dutchie had taught him how to live life with integrity and he wanted to prove to them—as much as he did to himself and Vimla—that he could cut his own path in the world despite anyone else’s misgivings.

As he thought this, Krishna’s mood lightened. He felt the mellow glow of hope in his belly burgeon into optimism.

“Eh.” Dutchie’s velvet voice filled the silence. “Let we make a move. Allyuh ready?”

Auntie Kay straightened. “Aye-aye, Captain,” she said. Her eyes were wide with excitement.

Krishna rose, stretched his arms and arched his back. “Is about time. I thought allyuh sleep away,” he said. He galloped down the steps. “I was going to sail out on
The Reverie
without you!” He grabbed hold of his suitcase and lugged it onto the beach, the music of Dutchie and Auntie Kay’s cheering drifting behind him.

Krishna breathed in the sea and catapulted himself into the air with a whoop. He wouldn’t let Vimla down again. This time he would get it right.

V
imla whisked her tumultuous mane into one hand and threaded it through a wide elastic band held in the other. She wound the elastic band around her ponytail once, twice, three times, until it could stretch no more. Vimla paused. Three times? She wrapped her fist around the base of her ponytail and found that her thumb overlapped the rest of her fingers by more than an inch. Slowly she slid her grasp down her hair. It was coarse with whorls and waves as usual, but it felt lighter, thinner somehow.

She flew to the oval mirror hanging on the wall, tugged the elastic from her hair, and shook out her mane so that it flowed over her shoulders and down her back. With frantic fingers Vimla divided her hair on either side of her head and brought her face close to the mirror. The part gleamed back at her like a fat, jagged scar cutting through her scalp. Gasping, Vimla
looked away and noticed the discarded elastic band lying on the floor, strangling in her thick black hairs. When had this happened? She shoved her laundry aside and fell across her bed, feeling the familiar dig of the old springs in her ribs. Rolling onto one side, Vimla gathered her knees to her chest and stared, unseeing, at the yellow gauze curtains fluttering at her window.

Pitch Lake at La Brea. That’s where Krishna had taken her the first Sunday he had picked her up when her parents were at Chaguanas Market. She had never been curious about the Pitch Lake, but she would have followed Krishna anywhere then. And if the Pitch Lake didn’t excite her, the danger of their furtive meeting did. She remembered staring at the gold
aum
swinging like a pendulum from the rear-view mirror as the car rattled over the rutted road leading to the Pitch Lake. The car belonged, of course, to Pundit Anand, and she had wondered how he might react if he saw her and Krishna there together, holding hands in his car.

They left their slippers behind and crept hand in hand across the baking asphalt that stretched on for a hundred acres. It was dull and desolate grey lingering on forever until it collided with the blue sky on the horizon where the oil refinery stood. Bountiful green guava, breadfruit and palm trees bordered the jagged periphery of the Pitch Lake like a fetching frame for a plain picture. Vimla stopped walking and stared at the vast emptiness.

“So what you think?” Krishna squinted against the dazzling sun.

“I think it real ugly.”

Krishna nodded as if he’d been expecting that. “Well, let we explore this ugly place, nuh? Come on.”

Vimla looked down at her toes and wriggled them against the warm tar. “Krishna, I sinking!” She skipped away from the spot in which she had been standing and peered, agape, at the faint imprints she’d left behind.

Krishna smiled and tugged at her hand. “When the pitch get warm, it does shift. Is alive.” Vimla allowed herself to be guided away from her footprints. She and Krishna padded over the furrowed pitch until their path was unexpectedly severed by a watercourse. From there they could see arteries of water, broad and narrow, cutting through the expansive Pitch Lake for acres. Some opened up into pools of clear water; others led to marshy ponds overflowing with sky-reaching reeds and pink and purple water lilies gazing into the sun. Vimla pressed her toes into the pitch again. “I never see anything like this before,” she murmured, admiring the layers of velvety pink petals.

“The flower?”

Vimla inched forward so that her toes lined up with the asphalt’s edge. “The flower in the middle of this wasteland.” She gestured to their surroundings. “I never would have expect to find something so beautiful growing in a place like this.”

Krishna watched a black corbeau circling slowly overhead. “That is why I bring you here. If I did bring you to the botanical gardens in Port of Spain, you would have get bored, you would have tell me your father have the same flowers growing in he garden. Only unusual things does interest you.” He followed the corbeau as it looped its way in wide circles down to the Pitch Lake and thrust its beak into a nearby puddle.

Vimla smiled. “Are you unusual?”

“I must be if you spending so much time with me.” He nodded toward the shallow pool. “Go on, dip your toe in.”