The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (12 page)

‘But then why? Why? Mothers love their children. I don’t know any mother as cold as she is.’

‘Oh darling! Why d’you … look, she might be a bit harsh sometimes, but it’s not deliberate; not personal. She’s also been good to you lots of times. You’ve maybe forgotten. Remember the bicycle?’

Yes. Rika did. Christmas Day, when she was eight years old. Running down the stairs in excitement, and there, next to the tree, completely wrapped in bright red wrapping paper, her very first bicycle – the best present she had ever had. She had whooped with joy, throwing herself on Mum, who had responded with the rarest of smiles – almost a better present than the bike; and then given her a big warm hug. Christmas in general was a time when Mum seemed to soften and relax and be more – well, more like a real Mum. She couldn’t deny it.

‘Yes,’ Rika conceded. ‘That was nice. But it was the exception. Mostly …’

‘And the Pony Club? You know it was your mother who really supported that expense? Your father is so frugal and he didn’t know if it was worth it. Your mother insisted. She said it would be “a wonderful experience for you”. Her exact words.’

‘Oh!’ said Rika. She didn’t know that. She had been nine, and, inspired by her favourite book of all time,
My Friend Flicka
, she had developed a burning desire to be among horses and learn to ride. Yes – she recalled now that Mum had been in favour of that hobby. The one thing she and Mum shared was a love of animals; and Mum had even come out with her the first couple of times, walked with her through the stable, stroked the horses’ noses. The Pony Club had closed down a few years later for unknown reasons, leaving a vacuum in Rika’s life.

‘Still,’ said Rika now, ‘Mostly she’s just cold and mean. She really acts as if she hates me.’

‘Oh Rika. It’s awful that you feel that way. She has her reasons – it’s just, well, it might be too hard for you to understand, but I think she’s just afraid of love. Afraid of loving too much.’

‘But why? Why? Love is beautiful, Granny. There’s no such thing as loving too much. It’s just impossible!’

‘The thing is, once you love – really love, I mean – you’re vulnerable. You’re susceptible to getting hurt, to losing the one you love. And some people protect themselves by trying not to love. They built a shell around themselves so that the love doesn’t get out. But it’s there. Deep inside it’s still there.’

‘Did Mummy lose someone she loved?’

‘Yes, darling, she did. And one day I’ll tell you the story; it’s a long one and I’ve got to finish the cooking but I’ll tell you. Because I want you to know: you should never be afraid of love, or getting hurt. You have to understand that love doesn’t come with a guarantee certificate. Once you love you’re open to loss. It’s only when you’re prepared to take the risk of pain along with the joy of love that you truly understand what love is. That’s when you really become worthy of love, and truly strong: when you can take the pain and face it bravely, grow through it. Your mother, I’m afraid, has let her pain make her bitter. And withdrawn. And unjust. And it seems you feel it the most of all her children. But now – run along, I have to work. Think about what I said!’

She switched the radio back on. It was Nat King Cole singing ‘Mona Lisa’
.

Rika ran straight to Rajan. Granny would never have time to tell her the story; she had once promised to tell her own love story, the story of how she met Granddad; but like all other stories it had drifted into the background. Practical matters always took priority with Granny. ‘We can’t dwell in the past,’ Granny always said. Rajan, on the other hand, always had time for her; and Rajan had already dropped hints on this very matter.

R
ajan had not won
the coveted British Guiana Scholarship; but it was still his goal to study Medicine in England. On leaving school with top A Level results he got a desk job at the Bank of Baroda. His plan now was to work at the bank for two or three years, take on gardening jobs, sell as much produce as he could at the Market, save all his money, and apply for a part-scholarship at the University of London. Hopefully, this one he’d win. Rika was certain he would, but, on the other hand, then he’d leave her here, alone. The thought was terrifying. She was still as far from being
normal
as ever; possibly worse, due to this strange friendship with Rajan, and the ideas he put into her head. But what if she, too, went to England, to study Literature and become a Librarian? Then she would still have her best friend.

In his spare time Rajan worked the garden and turned it into a lush paradise, a secret place hidden from the street by gigantic flowering hibiscus hedges lavishly spilling multi-coloured blossoms both within and without. Birds and butterflies made this garden their realm; Rajan, the ubiquitous cutlass as his sceptre, reigned over it with expertise and love. His subjects, the plants, thanked him with bright abundance; almost gaudy, the riot of colours bestowed by bougainvillea, frangipani and oleander. Other flowers – lilies, marigolds, roses, poinsettia – bowed low as if in adulation as he walked the sandy pathways of the front garden, digging up weeds with his cutlass tip or slashing away dead branches, sometimes even whispering to them with love as he bent to raise a bloom to peer into its depths, or to smell its fragrance.

The back yard, on the other hand, he had transformed into a farm. Banana and coconut palms lined the outskirts of the property, while citrus and local apple trees bestowed fruit in season: mammy-apple, golden-apple, custard-apple. There was a sapodilla tree and two mango trees and towering above them all, the genip tree. At the back of the property, Rajan had created his vegetable patch where he grew tomatoes, bora beans, and pumpkins, as well as herbs and spices: coriander, parsley, thyme and wiri-wiri pepper, and healing herbs whose secrets he had learnt from his farmer grandparents: arrowroot, aloe, sweetbroom, noni and more.

Now, Rika slipped through the palings into Rajan’s kingdom. She found him digging a hole, a young mango tree with its earthen root-ball lying on the ground beside him.

‘Hi,’ she said. He looked up and grinned.

‘Hi! What’s up?’

‘Umm – nothing.’

‘Liar! You’re just bursting with questions. What is it this time?’

‘You know me too well.’

‘No – it’s just that you’re so transparent. What is it? But make it quick – when I finish planting this tree I need to go to the market.’

She hesitated, and then jumped in feet first. ‘Well – you know I keep asking you to come over to my place and you keep saying no, you wouldn’t be welcome. And I asked Gran and she said she wouldn’t mind but Mummy would. And Gran says that Mummy had some kind of a tragic love-story. And you know that Mummy won’t visit her own parents. And you drop hints now and then about my Mum and your Dad – and – and … well, I just get the feeling there’s something there I need to know. A connection between all these things. Some story. Something people keep hiding from me. And I think you know it. And I want you to tell me.’

Rajan looked away, and stabbed the spade into the earth with violence.

‘I said make it quick, Rika, and that story would take all afternoon. Another time.’

‘Please!’

But Rajan stayed firm. It wasn’t often that he denied her anything. This was one of those times.

R
ajan’s garden
became a second home for Rika. No matter how hard he worked, he always had a moment’s time for her. Sometimes he would take a break; wash his hands and go into the house and return with a perfect golden mango, along with a plate and a knife. He’d cut the mango for her and they would eat it while he talked. Sometimes his mother Basmati prepared chow-chow for her, grated green mango with pepper-and-salt, brought out to her on a plate. Sometimes Rajan would hack a green coconut from the tree, toss it into the air while slashing off the top with three or four swift strokes; with a final flourish he’d cut away the top to create a hole in the nut. He’d stick a straw into the hole, and with a smile and a nod, hand it to Rika.

While she sat on the swing, she’d sip at the sweet clear coconut water while Rajan, sitting on the bare earth before her, would tell her stories of the backlands and the bush and the forest. He had spent his forgotten early years in Georgetown; after his father’s death, his mother had taken him and his siblings back to his grandparents’ farm on the Pomeroon River. There he had grown up, a happy barefoot boy who went to school by boat, never happier than with his hands in the earth. When he won a place at the prestigious Queen’s College, his mother brought him back to Georgetown and since then they had lived at the Waterloo Street house where Basmati had been given the job of carer for the ageing van Dams. A job, as it turned out, which had been found for her by Granny.

R
ajan brought
light into Rika’s life. Rajan
knew
her, he
saw
her. For him she was not strange; her being ‘different’ was not a source of derision for him. Most of all, he nourished her with books; and for the first time in her life, she devoured non-fiction.

She discovered René Guénon, and others of his ilk. Being is divine, she read; Divine Being is the essence of the human soul! That was the essential teaching of all religions, proclaimed openly, as in the Eastern religions, or veiled and secret as in Christianity and Islam. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you!
Within you,
quite literally! To be
experienced
, here and now! All religions are unanimous in their essence, and though incompatible and contradictory in their external applications, doctrine, theology, and rituals, that was their final teaching, their final truth: that God is the Self of our self, waiting for us at the core of our being. Her heart soared. This was IT, the nourishment she had hungered for.

She read books with arcane titles:
The Cloud of Unknowing
and the
Book of Mirdad
and
The Way of a Pilgrim
; scriptures of the old traditions, the
Tao te King
and the
Vedas
. She learnt of the Christian Mystics and the Sufis and the great sages of India, Shankara and Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi. She drank it all in, and talked it all through with Rajan. But
The Book of Mirdad
remained the best, her Bible, her source of wisdom and joy; whatever she found hard to understand she discussed with Raj, her friend, her mentor.

But in spite of all the comfort and confidence this friendship and mentoring gave her, still a part of her yearned for normality, yearned to be just one of the others. It seemed an impossible dream. Jen Goveia and her cronies lived in a universe light years away from her own. The sense of rejection – by her mother, by her peers – ran deep, and could not easily be dissolved by the newfound light. It was as if she were split in two: at home with Rajan and the secret kingdom of books, and leaning out, grasping, aching for a foothold in real life, in the real world.

She wanted so much to belong, to be just like other girls her age; to fit in. She tried to keep up with her own generation by a subscription to the American
Teen
Magazine – a birthday present from Uncle Matt – but it was all theory; in practice, she failed at every level. She lived in two worlds, one foot in each: the ethereal world of the spirit, where she felt at home, light-footed and true, and the very physical world of people and things, where she continued to be a misfit, an outsider, bumbling as ever before, and yearning to fit in. How could she ever bridge the gap between these two planes of existence? Was it even possible? And Jen, the lost friend of her childhood, remained the epitome of this longing. Perfect, lovely Jen.

A
nd then
, all of a sudden Jen had a boyfriend; a real live boyfriend like the ones in
Teen
. His name was Donald deSouza, and he was Portuguese, like Jen (who was half-Portuguese) and he went to Saint Stanislaus but he was
old
– probably in Sixth Form already. He was one of those boys who hung around at Bookers’ Snack Bar eyeing up girls in uniform, whistling at them and calling out compliments.

Though she couldn’t identify most of the boys by name, she did know Don, because who could miss him? He was the handsomest of the lot –
evil,
the girls all said – with chiselled cheekbones, Elvis sideburns (she couldn’t imagine how he was allowed those at Saint; usually they were forbidden, just as girls were forbidden hair decorations and short skirts at St Rose’s) and a long lanky frame. He was loud and cocky and very popular; he had a motorbike – the very zenith of coolness – a red Yamaha, and a really
evil
nickname.

All the boys had nicknames, she knew that much, and Don’s nickname was ‘The Jaguar’ – ‘Jag’ for short. Jen, having snapped up the most popular boy in town, now soared into the upper echelons of teenage society, invited to all the fetes and courted even by older girls, Sixth Form girls. Jen had
made it
; Jen
belonged.

Rika had never actually
seen
Jag and Jen together (what an evil combination of names!) – it was strictly forbidden to talk to boys while in school uniform, and Rika and Jen hadn’t been anywhere together out of uniform for years – but Rika was had always been a listener; and she picked up all the gossip at school, before classes, in the corridors, at the bicycle stand, during break. She listened in because otherwise how was she ever to learn about real life? You had to learn about life to become a novelist.

T
hen came
the day that everything changed. Rika had gone to the library after school to return some books and borrow new ones, after which she popped over to Bookers to get a new pair of tennis shoes; she’d had a growth spurt recently and everything was too small or too tight or too short; her feet, her blouses, her skirts. School skirts could be let down – this she did herself – and Granny had had her measured for new white blouses – this time with darts! For a growing bust! – but shoes would have to be new. She wheeled her bike across Main Street and parked it outside the eastern entrance to Bookers. She locked it and walked into the store and through to the shoe department. Shoes tried on and bought, she wandered over to the book department to see if they’d brought in any new books since last week – they hadn’t – after which she decided to have a milkshake at the snack bar. She made her way over there, and stopped.