Nothing Like Love (41 page)

And certainly, Krishna thought, his home never held this much magic.

“Pundit!”

Krishna strode across the lawn and ducked under the trellis, where he found Dutchie stirring an enormous pot of soup. The soup bubbled and sent up the warm, rich aroma of broth that had cooked slowly, purposefully, for hours. “What kind of soup is it?”

“Provisions soup, my love.”

Krishna glanced up and there stood Dutchie’s mother in the doorway, holding a knife in one hand and a bowl of whole plantains in the other. She smiled at him and her eyes crinkled at the corners the way Dutchie’s did. Krishna looked for dreadlocks hidden somewhere beneath the green bandana tied around her head, but he found hair like soft silver wool instead.

“My name is Iris, my love, but everybody does call me The Soup Lady, or Auntie Soup Lady, or Mama.” She smiled, as if this last name was a particular favourite. “Welcome to my little Tobago haven.” Iris sat on a chair before the pot and began to cut fat chunks of plantain directly into the soup. Her hands
worked quickly, but her gaze remained trained on Krishna’s face. “Do you like soup, son?”

He didn’t really, but she glowed with such enthusiasm Krishna knew he’d be a fool to refuse anything Iris had to offer. “Yes.”

Iris reached for another plantain and held it for a moment over the soup. “Not as much as my little Dutchie, I gather.” The plantain tumbled into the soup and sank beneath the surface. “He does show up here every Sunday morning with the sun for the first bowl of the day.” She tugged a dreadlock loose from his knot. “Nothing does cure a hangover like my soup, ain’t, Dutchie?”

Dutchie threw his head back and laughed. “What you put in the soup so far, Mama? It nearly done cook?”

Iris took the long-handled spoon from Dutchie’s hand and stirred. Her whole body swayed with the movement. A soft breeze lifted and dropped the green triangle of her bandana. “Cassava, eddoes, green fig, carrots, ochroe, sweet potato—”

“Hello. Good morning, Ms. Soup Lady!”

Iris stopped mid-stir and glanced over her shoulder. There stood a man and his daughter in their Sunday church clothes, grinning at her.

Iris placed a hand on her doughy hip. “Well, good morning, Clyde, and good morning, Jillian.”

“The soup ready?” Clyde asked, craning his neck to peek into the pot.

“Almost. I ain’t make the dumplings as yet, Clyde. Pass by on your way back from church, nuh?”

Clyde averted his gaze. “We ain’t going to church today, Auntie Ms. Soup Lady!” Jillian exclaimed. The pink baubles
in her hair bounced with her. “Daddy say God go forgive we if we miss a day of church to eat ice cream.”

Iris smothered her laugh with a hand.

“And what your mommy say, Jillian?” Dutchie asked.

“Mommy ain’t say anything because Mommy in Trinidad visiting Auntie Pat.”

Clyde looked embarrassed. He lifted his daughter into his arms. “Jones in the back, Iris?”

“As usual,” Iris said with a wink. She inclined her head to Krishna then. “Your sweet Auntie Kay has been taste-testing for the past twenty minutes.”

Auntie Kay drifted back and forth on a swing suspended from a guava tree, a plastic spoon clamped in her mouth.

“What you think of my classic coconut, Kay?” Dutchie’s father, Jones, asked. He poured a milky mixture into the metal drum of his ice cream maker. “People from all over the island does come just for that.”

“Delicious, Jones,” Auntie Kay said, licking the spoon clean. “Better than the guava, not as good as the soursop, equal to the star fruit.”

Jones was packing the space between the drum and the outer barrel with ice. He stopped, brow furrowed. “True? The soursop better?” He poured salt overtop the ice to keep it from melting, deposited the cover and turned the ice cream maker’s handle round.

“And the mango?”

Kay looked at him wide eyed. “I forget how the mango taste!”

Jones chuckled. “Well, better taste it again, then.” He
nodded to the barrels lined up on a table covered with wet cloths. “Is the one in the centre.”

Kay slipped off the swing and hummed her way to the ice creams. She helped herself to an extra spoonful of each.

Jillian skipped through the grass with the goat, mimicking his bleating sounds and squealing with delight. “Mr. Uncle Jones, you have any chocolate ice cream for me and the goat?”

Jones stopped his cranking. “Chocolate ice cream?” He crouched in the grass. “Ms. Jillian, you ever know me to make chocolate ice cream?”

The girl shrugged. “You could start.”

“What about sapodilla?”

Krishna made a face behind Jones and Jillian copied it. Jones stood up and brushed the grass off his knees. “Dutchie!” He snapped his fingers at his son, who lay sprawled in the grass, staring at the sky. “Turn that ice cream there. I going to introduce the wonders of sapodilla ice cream to little Jillian.”

It turned out Dutchie could churn a pale of ice cream as well as his father did. He wound the handle round and round, until sweat gathered at his temples. Jones nodded approvingly and then took Jillian by the hand and led her to a tree laden with sapodillas. “Look here.” Jones plucked the brown fruit from a branch and turned it in his hands. “This ain’t good. It half ripe.” He pelted it at Dutchie, who ducked just in time, and Jillian laughed. “But you see this one?” Jones twisted another from the same branch. “This one get nice and full on the tree. This is a sweet sapodilla good enough for Uncle Jones’s ice cream.”

Jillian looked at Jones askance.

“Dutchie, scoop out some ice cream from that pail for me, boy.”

Dutchie lifted the cover off the barrel and shovelled a generous serving of ice cream into an enamel cup for Jillian. She flicked her tongue over the ice cream, pensive. “This is sapodilla?” she asked.

Jones nodded, his brow furrowed again. “What you think?”

“I think you pick force-ripe sapodillas for this batch, Uncle Jones.” The goat nosed her belly and she let him gobble her ice cream up. “Why you don’t try and make barbadine ice cream instead?”

Jones scratched his head. “Barbadine?” A far-off look crept into his eyes and Krishna knew he was tasting barbadine ice cream in his mind for the first time. “Now, there’s an idea, Jillian!” he said, and gathered her into his arms.

Vimla listened intently to Krishna’s account of his stay in Tobago. He heard the enthusiasm in his own voice, became aware of his gesturing to help give shape to this other life he’d lived with Dutchie and Auntie Kay. Vimla laughed and grew pensive in all the right places—she even looked like she might be imagining herself in Tobago with Krishna. But when he was finished, Vimla swung the end of her plait back and forth and asked, “But what Tobago have for me?”

Krishna stared, dumbfounded, as if Vimla hadn’t heard him at all. He thought of telling her another story—there were so many to tell. Perhaps he hadn’t described his experience in enough colour, or maybe he’d told the jokes wrong. Even if that were true, certainly Vimla could see how much joy
Tobago had brought him. Couldn’t she? “Me,” Krishna said. “You will be in Tobago with me.”

The silence that followed said everything. Vimla brushed a tear away, climbed to her feet and lifted the empty suitcase off the ground.

“I ain’t going without you,” Krishna said.

Vimla gave him a half-smile as if maybe she didn’t believe him. “Well, then I guess I go see you at the wedding in a few hours.” She backed away and pushed her weight against one of the gates and Krishna had no choice but to edge onto the road alone. They stared through the diamond pattern at one another—an eternity in a minute—until Vimla broke the spell, slipping a piece of paper to him without touching his fingers. Only after she’d turned away did Krishna read the note, climb back into his car and disappear.

F
aizal Mohammed threw a towel over one shoulder and set Sam on the other. “Allahu Akbar,” they exclaimed in unison. On his way to his rain barrel, Faizal whistled and tossed a new bar of soap in his hands. Sam whistled back, bobbing his head. “The wedding today, Sam,” Faizal said. “I telling you from now: you go have to stay home. Don’t let me come home in the evening and find you vexed.”

Sam whistled.

“Good parrot. Nice parrot.”

Faizal sauntered into his bathroom and checked the rain barrel for floating blossoms. A frown creased his brow. “Not one, Sam” he said gravely. “Something bad does always happen when the barrel have nothing.” He mumbled a prayer as he shuffled out of his slippers and flung his towel over the slab of corrugated iron that served as a wall. That’s when he heard the crash next door.

“Mangoes! Sam—you hear that?” Sam cocked his head in the direction of the Gopalsinghs’ residence. Faizal crept around the wall and squinted into the gloom.

“Who the hell put this bicycle here?” a voice growled.

Faizal darkened. Rajesh Gopalsingh. He felt cheated that Rajesh should sully his sacred bathing time with his wakefulness. Why was he up so early? This was Faizal’s hour!

Faizal heard the distinct twist of a pipe and the fall of water in a bucket. His ears burned.

“Sam, what the hell Rajesh think he doing?” He folded his arms and stood for the duration of Rajesh’s shamelessly short bath, relishing his groans of displeasure under the cascade of chilly water. When he was sure Rajesh had gone, Faizal stomped barefoot into his washroom and let Sam waddle off his finger onto the floor. He muttered while he stripped off his shorts and hoisted himself into the massive rain barrel. As the water rose to his chest and then his chin, Faizal let some of his irascible mood dissolve. But only some.

He vigorously lathered until clouds of silver-blue bubbles shimmered and rolled over the barrel’s edge, all the while hating Rajesh for stealing Sangita Gopalsingh and his bath hour, too. Sam strutted about with importance, catching lathers on his outstretched wings.

“Hello. Good morning, Faizal Mohammed.”

Faizal froze with the bar of soap in his armpit hair as Minty Gopalsingh rounded the corner into his bathroom. “Mangoes!” He dropped the soap into the water with a
plunk
and sank as low as he could into his barrel.

Minty took in the corrugated-iron walls, the large rain barrel, the soap holder, the frangipani awning, Sam waddling in
the wet. And when her eyes fell on Faizal’s shorts and towel, she took them down one at a time. Faizal folded his arms in the bubbles and scowled so deeply his face hurt with the effort. “What the ass you doing here?”

Minty raised an eyebrow, not unlike Sangita. “Visiting.”

Faizal’s eyes bulged at her flippant air. “You are not welcome here. At this hour.
In my bathroom!
” he hissed.

“Is my mother?” Minty draped the towel over her shoulder and folded Faizal’s shorts into a neat rectangle, then again, into a square.

He flinched. “No.” He shifted uncomfortably in the barrel. “What you want from me now?”

“Vimla going away,” Minty said, tucking Faizal’s folded shorts beneath her arm.

“Good. Where she going?”

“Canada.” Minty folded the towel now, slow and precise.

Faizal looked genuinely surprised. Curiosity softened his grimace. “For what? She mother sending she away? That stupid ass Krishna know?”

Minty shook her head. “Faizal, you think I come here to stand up and talk to you in your barrel?” she said.

Faizal’s ears reddened. “So what the hell you want from me, then? I can’t drive she Canada if that what you come here for.”

“She need money for the plane ticket.”

Faizal sucked his teeth. “Tell she ask she father.”

Minty hugged Faizal’s shorts and towel to her chest, ignoring the suggestion altogether. “I see my mother give you back your chain.”

He felt the rope at his neck and shrugged.

“How much you think we could get for that chain and the pendant and the watch? Enough for a ticket?”

Faizal’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You ain’t getting this chain back, girl. And don’t you dare sell my pendant and my watch. I want them back!”

Minty shrugged. “Well then, buy Vimla a ticket then.”

“I look like the bank to you?”

Minty began to inch away. “Okay, Faizal.”

“ ‘Okay, Faizal,’ ” he mocked, his lips an ugly twist. But then he realized she was walking away with his shorts and towel.

“Eh! You t’ief! Where you going with that?”

She kept her back turned to him, but he could hear the smile in her tone. “I going to put your shorts where my father could find them. He bedroom. Maybe inside he drawer. I think when he pull out these shorts he go know they ain’t his. Look how narrow the waist is.” She glanced over her shoulder at him and held them up for him to see. “What you think, Faizal?”

Faizal’s fist splashed the water, soaking Sam in an unexpected shower. “Shut up! Shut up!” Sam cried.

“Eh, girl. What happen to you? Don’t make joke.” Faizal gripped the sides of the barrel and leaned toward Minty. “Rajesh go break my ass in two!”

Minty shrugged and made to leave again.

“Okay. All right. I go give you the money for the damn ticket. The farther away Vimla go, the better for me. Why you don’t go and all?” he said.