The Ivory Swing Read online

  “If it is the will of Lord Narayana,” he said, gazing across the market awnings at the towering gopuram of Shree Padmanabhaswamy temple.

  They left him and haggled with the drivers at the auto-rickshaw stand, who vied with one another to win the western family as passengers for their frail little motorized vehicles.

  Then the city was behind them, centuries dropping away by the second. Lurching along the ruts of the bullock carts, they were back in village time, changeless.

  4

  Juliet scrabbled at the entrails of a chicken and dreamed of home. The trees are turning red and gold, she thought; the air crisp. And whose body is Jeremy touching under a fall of leaves? Jeremy had begun to tear adrift from the past again and to float up into her dreams. Wistful lonely dreams. Last night she had been tangled in the vines beside the nutmeg field when she suddenly saw him walking towards her. She called out to him to pull her free. But just as their hands were about to touch he vanished.

  She tugged at the long glaucous ropes of intestines and set them aside for burial. She would have to do it herself. If she gave them to Prabhakaran he would place them at the foot of one of the coconut trees close to the house and cover them with dead palm branches. Then the night would be monstrous with the savage snarls and death struggles of the scavenger dogs.

  There were five unlaid eggs inside the chicken, in various stages of formation. The largest was a regular-sized yolk veined with a fine tracery of blood. The smallest was like a soft yellow marble.

  If I had stayed behind, she thought, and let David come here alone, I could be in an apartment in Montreal. There would be an office to go to, with book-lined walls and a stereo playing softly. Later the children would be outside riding their bicycles and we could have steak for supper. (O steak! Such thoughts were inadvisable.) Then I could call a sitter and go wherever I wanted. Or perhaps I would call Jeremy. Hello again, my past, I would say. I’m back already. Are you married at the moment, or otherwise engaged, or between arrangements?

  No. I would not call Jeremy.

  She liked to keep Jeremy in the small space between dream and reality. She did not like to see him too often, daily life being an abrasive affair.

  She went to the door and called up to the children.

  “Come and see the baby eggs!”

  Jonathan and Miranda were on the roof, a sort of elevated patio under a lacy canopy of palms whose shade was ineffectual. The red tiles steamed and broiled in the sun. Up there the children played long and secretive games, their imaginations flowering like rare jungle orchids. What would happen when they returned to public school and baseball and music lessons? If they ever returned. It was difficult to conceive of such a complicated project as departure, requiring planning and coordination and various kinds of vehicles that actually worked and had schedules and honoured timetables. She had a vision of ancient buses and obsolete twin-engined airplanes sinking into the mud beside the abandoned tractor in the rice paddy. We will all subside into the monsoonal swamp, she thought, and lotus flowers will grow over us in indifferent benediction.

  I didn’t have to come, she reminded herself. I could leave any time.

  “You don’t have to come,” David had offered.

  “You said that twelve years ago, about Winston,” she accused. “Anyway this time I want to go. You don’t think I’m going to turn down a prospect of excitement?”

  “Did I say that about Winston? Not quite like that surely.” His brow was creased in earnest recollection. “I just never thought you’d come. I was afraid to ask you, I was afraid even to mention I’d been offered the position.”

  “And then you said: ‘Just for a year.’ If I didn’t like it, we’d leave.”

  “Fortunately,” he said, lifting a strand of hair from her eyes, “you found you could live here, and then the children came and —”

  “David, I hate this place, you know I hate this place.”

  “So you keep saying. But I see your eyes when you walk on the lake in winter and when you read to the children at night and when you’re coaxing lilacs and poppies out of May.”

  She sighed in a kind of despair. “You only keep one kind of evidence.” But it was like trying to convince a gentle abbé at Reims Cathedral that the Virgin on the west porch — so serene, so folded into beatitude — had a heart of pocked and garishly painted plaster.

  “Hardly anyone else can grow poppies here,” David said. “It’s amazing. I love their brashness.”

  (You see, the abbé at Reims might say with furtive pride, we have gargoyles too. Over here on the left, in our panel of the Last Judgment.)

  It’s impossible, she thought. It’s really impossible. Why don’t I have the sense to break loose? This is the obvious logical year to do it. Gradually. Easily. Almost unnoticeably. No one asking awkward questions. A legitimate year apart. Her imagination leaped towards Montreal like a snow goose returning to summer. Why was she fighting it? Why the panic? The act of severing was such hard work. Like trying to separate the roots of two plants that have become pot-bound in the same container.

  “I don’t want you to live anywhere against your will,” he said, pulling her gently to himself and stroking her cheek with his hand.

  You would think, she told herself sardonically, that the body would decently settle down after twelve years of marriage and two children, that it would learn decorum and mellowness, that it would not feel this animal leap of desire for a man it had slept beside for an epoch. For at your age the heyday in the blood is tame … Alas, poor ignorant Hamlet.

  “Against my will!” She laughed. “You put a hex on my will. Every single damn day of my life, my will does gymnastics for you.”

  Sometimes she thought of Mary Magdalene with her wayward flaming hair sitting at the feet of Christ, her head resting on his goodness. The sounds of a party reach her, the sounds of bawdy revelry and political ferment, the whispered daring of the Zealots and the gypsy whirl of harlots at the tavern down the street. Beneath her penitent’s robe her foot begins to keep time, tapping with the urge to dance; her thoughts quiver with the delicious danger of subversion. I have to go, she thinks. Just for an hour. I have to escape. And she turns to tell him. Really, she explains, we’re quite unsuited. I’m not at all worthy of you, I’d like a little invigorating dip in the errant and imperfect.

  I would never prevent you, say his huge brown eyes — his compassionate all-forgiving eyes. You must do as you think best.

  And of course she cannot move. She is bound by a silken leash to a kind of gentleness more rare and beautiful than a unicorn.

  “I can’t seem to do anything about Winston,” Juliet said. “I go on and on living here against my will. It’s a life-sentence probably. But I know I want to go to India. I would like us to camp in the middle of a bazaar.”

  “It won’t be like that,” he said apprehensively “Not where we’ll be. It’s very isolated, and I’ll have to be away on field work a lot.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, then. More isolation I can do without. I’ll get an apartment in Montreal.”

  “But then,” he said quickly, “we could probably do a lot of the travelling together. And just think of the children, what an experience like that —”

  “Yes. I ought to be thinking of the children.”

  If she was contemplating splitting the children’s world in two, if she was really about to smash things up like the unregenerate bitch she was then this was the best time, the kindest way.

  “There are risks for the children,” he concluded. “Loneliness. And disease. That’s a major anxiety. Perhaps, after all, it would be better … I’d be much freer … to get the research done, I mean.”

  “You would rather go alone then?”

  Alone, he thought fearfully. Suppose when she went to Montreal (on parole as she put it) it was not just the city she lusted after? Suppose she saw someone …? He looked down the rest of his years as down a cheerless cave tunnelling into dark nothingness. Yet there were pe
ople willing to add warmth and little tapestries of comfort. (Susan, for instance, would be waiting for him, lying in wait, though he must not think of that. It was shameful the way he could not always predict when she would cavort across his thoughts like a will-o’-the-wisp.)

  “You would really rather stay? In Montreal?” he asked.

  “I can’t decide.” She was afraid of loss. Afraid of the irreversible.

  “As you wish.” He was carefully neutral, he would never coerce.

  He had always thought of himself as someone who would stay married to one woman for life. Especially when she had once crackled into his field of vision vibrantly as a lick of sunlight through a turning prism. He had not anticipated this slow fading, the light dwindling like a dream of waking.

  India presented itself as Time Out. A space — empty, and yet busy with difference. If she were going to leave him he would have time to prepare. He could simply lose himself in work, produce a book within the year. He saw its covers edged with black, as on a bereavement card.

  “I suppose I would get used to being alone,” he conceded.

  She tasted the permanent absence of David as something sharp and sudden and bitter.

  “But really,” she said urgently, “I think I should go. The children … it’s not right they should miss out on such a —”

  “I agree,” he said, folding her into his arms. “I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t come.”

  The children were hurtling down the cement stairway from the roof.

  “Ugh!” cried Jonathan. “Mommy! That stuff stinks!”

  Her hands and arms were raddled with sticky remnants of intestine and flecked with wisps of feather and fluff from the plucking.

  “Where are the baby eggs?” Miranda asked.

  “Here.”

  Jonathan looked troubled.

  “This largest one was almost ready to be a baby chick,” he said somberly. “I can tell by the blood in it. It’s been killed before it even had a chance to be born.”

  “Oh Jonathan, please! Things are complicated enough”

  She gathered up the maze of intestines, towards which a phalanx of ants was already swarming across the polished stone bench, and set out on the path through the coconut trees to the rice paddy. The light underbrush growing on both sides of the track sprawled across its edges. She fought to keep her fear of snakes under control, ramming it down in her mind to a tight little knot of alertness, her eyes darting back and forth across the ground. This was probably why she did not notice the young woman coming towards her.

  “Again we are meeting,” said a voice as lilting and strange as Prabhakaran’s flute.

  Juliet was startled. It might have been Radha waiting secretly in the forest for her divine lover Krishna, so sudden and mysterious and beautiful was the apparition. The woman smiled and Juliet recognized her. It was the woman she had met in the market earlier in the day, the woman who had spoken about the price of eggs.

  “Forgive me.” Juliet was embarrassed by the pungent loops trailing from her hands. “I am just going to bury these.”

  “You must not do this work. You must have servants.”

  “Oh no, really. I do have a boy, in fact … It’s just that … Why were you at Palayam Market? Do you not have a servant yourself?”

  “Oh yes. I have a servant. Once I had many servants. I do not myself buy in the market.”

  “But you knew the prices.”

  “A good mistress always inquires of her servant the cost. It is necessary for the sound running of the household.”

  “Then why were you in the market place?”

  “It is a special day for me. An auspicious day.”

  “Who are you? Why have I never seen you before today?”

  “For many weeks I have not left my house. But now I shall be walking again in public.”

  As she spoke she kept glancing along the path as though either expecting or dreading company.

  “But I thought …” Juliet murmured. “This is not a public path. I mean I don’t understand. Did you know that these are the estates of Shivaraman Nair? I thought only —”

  “He is my kinsman. I also live on these estates.”

  “Oh!”

  The woman was like a gazelle, light as air, beautiful as lotus flowers. Though her voice was soft and melodious, there was a sense of urgency about her, a kind of nervousness poised for defense or flight. Her silk sari fluttered like restive wings. There was gold at her wrists and ankles, a spectacular diamond and emerald ring on one finger, a nose jewel and earrings. It occurred to Juliet that she had never before seen a high-caste woman walking alone. In fact she had rarely seen one in public at all. They never seemed to leave their houses except as passengers in their black Ambassador cars, chauffeured by their husbands or the driver servant. Certainly she had never seen one at Palayam Market before.

  “Who are you?” she asked again.

  “I am Yashoda.”

  “And I am Juliet.”

  “I know. My kinfolk have spoken about your family. You must please visit me.”

  “Thank you. I would love to. Where is your house?”

  “Over there.” She pointed behind her to the forested area beyond the rice paddy.

  “I will certainly come. And you must visit us too.”

  “That is more difficult,” she said sadly. “Now I am going. This meeting with you is auspicious. Twice is most auspicious. Thank you.

  “Wait! Why is it auspicious? What do you mean?”

  “Today is my birthday. I have consulted a very skilled astrologer to cast my horoscope. He told me that on this day I should take courage and appear again in public. He said I would meet a person of destiny who would bring me a great gift. I thank you for this.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I could be … wait …!”

  But she made namaskaram and was gone like a blown petal along the path.

  Juliet buried her scraps in the warm mud beside the rice paddy. Amused and disturbed. Wondering.

  Everything was so unreal. People appeared and disappeared swiftly and insubstantially as illusions. No letters came. No radio, no news, no proof of anything existing beyond the fluttering horizon of coconut palms. The rice grew into dreams, the paddy mud silted up memory.

  She had a panicky sensation of free-falling through oblivion, a sudden radical doubt about her own continuity. She rubbed her muddy and gut-flecked hands in the grass and watched the ants, like undulations of brown velvet, mysteriously appear. For perhaps a full minute she kept quite still, her wrists and fingers brocaded with disciplined activity, brushed with a sensation feathery as the flickering of eyelashes. Then the ants were gone. Vanished. Her hands picked clean as bleached bones.

  Thank god that Annie was coming soon, a brisk inrush of evidence that everything beyond the paddy had not utterly extinguished itself in the secret way of ants.

  And I will write to Jeremy, she thought urgently. Bring him out of the dream-space. Weave a spell with tales of sandalwood and peacocks, lure him to reply. A letter would be something to hold, a talisman.

  But would a letter ever reach him? And would he bother to reply? And would a reply ever find the unnamed road among the backwaters of Kerala, backwater of the world?

  More practical perhaps to cable Annie, Simply: When? Please hurry.

  Annie had called long-distance when plans were still shape-shifting.

  “What have you decided?” she asked.

  “I’m going.”

  “Well thank goodness. You’d be crazy not to. And I would have been furious.”

  “You furious? Why? What’s it got to do with you?”

  “In the first place, husbands and wives shouldn’t be apart for so long. Too risky. In the second place I’m thinking of dropping out of law school for a while and bumming around Asia. Naturally I’ve been hoping for a free billet in South India.”

  “ ‘Husbands and wives shouldn’t be apart’! What kind of reactionary talk is that for an academic woman
of this decade? And which lover are you up to now? I’ve lost count!’

  “As a matter of sad fact, I’m between lovers. That’s not the point. You are my link with stability and the middle class. What else is an older sister for? You and David are my living proof that perfection and permanence are attainable.”

  “Oh David is perfect, of course. I just add milk every morning for instant happy marriage.”

  “He’s damn well very close to perfect. You can take my word for it, based on extensive and disappointing experience. I’m serious though. If you and David ever split up it would really unhinge me. Please keep that in mind when you’re making any major decisions.”

  “You’re a great comfort to me, Annie.”

  “Oh well. Ever your admiring sister. Listen, I can’t afford to prolong this call. I’m so glad you’ll be in the south. I already have friends I can stay with in Delhi and Pondicherry. I’ll send a postcard when I’m coming. I won’t be any bother. Have sleeping bag, will arrive. Love to David and the kids.”

  I will write to both of them, Juliet decided. To Annie and to Jeremy. I need to catch hold of my own life before it slithers into the underbrush.

  She would visit the woman who lived in the forest beyond the paddy. She asked herself uncertainly: She was real, wasn’t she?

  5

  Back at the house Miranda was scraping out the flesh of a coconut and Jonathan was shaking rice across the mesh pannier the way fossickers sift river silt for gold. Patiently he picked out grit and pebbles and dead insects.

  Juliet made the curry paste, grinding leaves and berries and shredded coconut between the stone roller and stone slab. Over the fire the chicken was bubbling fragrantly in coconut milk and spices when Jonathan called: “Someone coming! Shivaraman Nair and some other men.”

  They peered out through the grille. Four men were visible in the distance, their crisp white dhotis and shirts flashing against the early evening shadows as they followed the winding path through the coconut trees. They all carried black umbrellas and the effect was rather comic; like a small congregation of somewhat portly penguins coming to the door.