Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (6 page)

I could recount any number of blissful days during that month, but one stands out. It was late when we left Zain and Angus’s house, around five or so in the evening. The sun was dropping fast, and she and I were headed into the Tucker Valley. It was frightfully liberating, the two of us driving on that road alone, through pastures and fields, at that time of evening. But we weren’t alone; we were together, and when Zain and I were together we were, or so we imagined, invincible, carefree, daring. Not daring of ourselves, but of others.
Just you dare; you won’t know what hit you!
We drove into the valley slowly, taking in the incredible beauty of the wide-canopied samaan trees on either side of the roadway. Rosettes of bromeliads and delicate orchids clustered around the trunks and branches of the trees, and Spanish moss clumped and hung like wet lace curtains. As the passenger, I could gaze at all of this, and at Zain too, her hair so beautifully coiffed, her makeup and her nails shorthand for how she was to be treated.

Ours was the only car on the road for a good distance into the valley. Then we rounded a bend to see that a hundred yards ahead a small white car had stopped in our lane, and another car, also white, had halted in the oncoming lane. Together, the two effectively blocked the road. Zain was telling me about Cynthia, her maid. Long ago,
Cynthia had answered an advertisement for employment that Zain had placed in the paper, and when Cynthia saw the house, when she met Zain and the two children, she’d simply announced, “I am taking this job. I will start right away. Show me my room.” Zain was saying that by the time we got back, Cynthia would have made coconut bake and salt fish. Cynthia was a really good cook, and she was black, Zain said, so of course she didn’t make bake like an Indian. Cynthia’s bake was black bake, she added impishly. “Hers isn’t limp and bland like a thick
sada
roti. This is bake in which you can actually taste the coconut. A wedge of it between your thumb and forefinger is firm; when you hold it up to your mouth, Sid, it meets you like a man.”

I heard her laugh, but my focus was on the two cars, their disturbing configuration: we couldn’t get by on either the left or the right of them; the road was edged by tall bush on both sides, and a couple of feet beyond this edging were ravines too deep and narrow for a car to manoeuvre. We would have no choice but to stop. I was thinking of how my father, and so many others, had repeatedly warned me that if you’re the only one on a Trinidad road and someone tries to stop you, if they hit your car, or even if you hit someone on the road, you mustn’t stop, for God’s sake don’t stop, just drive straight to the police station. And I was thinking that the police station was behind us and that there was no easy way to turn the car around. I was noticing that the sun had already gone down behind the hills. The dense greenery was swiftly losing its lushness and definition. There were
fer-de-lance, bushmasters and coral snakes in the forest, I thought, and people weren’t just mugged in this country, but they were raped, they were kidnapped and they were murdered. We were two women, alone, on a quiet road in the country. Above my panic I heard Zain say, “But you wouldn’t know what I am talking about, would you. Don’t tell me you like flaccid bake?” Although I kept peering ahead, curious that the situation didn’t seem to unduly perturb Zain—she had continued driving, a little slower, but without any sense of trepidation—I shook my head in feigned irritation, for the slyness of the smile she wore indicated that she was anticipating my reaction. I strained to see if the drivers of the two cars were communicating with each other.

Aware now of my distraction, Zain paid attention. She said, “But what these people think they are doing? They can’t just stand up like that in the middle of the road. How do they expect me to pass? They are going to have to move.” And just as she said that, as if they had heard, the cars began to move, the one in our lane carrying on now abruptly and swiftly, the one approaching us moving more slowly, the driver peering into the field to his left even as he was rolling forward. Zain remarked that they must have seen some animal or other. She touched my shoulder and said, “Sid, don’t believe everything you hear about how much crime there is in this place. Relax a little. There is crime everywhere, but you have to live, don’t you?”

The two cars picked up speed and I exhaled. I asked Zain to turn off the air conditioning so that we could open
the windows and listen to the sounds of the birds and smell the lush greenness. Ahead, a flat field of low uncultivated grasses, patches of bhaji and of pigeon peas extended well back to a middle ground of broad-leaved trees like teak, papaya, breadfruit, soursop. And rising quite suddenly now in front of us was the Northern Range. A small sign, posted so low we could have missed it, informed us that we were entering the park of Macqueripe Beach. Zain looked at her watch and said, “It’s still early. Cynthia won’t have dinner ready yet.” The sky was by this time yellowish silver.

“Let’s go,” I concurred.

We drew near to a guard’s hut on the side of the road, with a gate that could be raised and lowered, and a sign that warned of a 6 p.m. closing, at which time all persons must have vacated the park. It was quarter to six. There was no one in the hut. Zain asked, “You think they mean it?” From behind us came a car. As it overtook ours Zain put her hand out to stop the driver. “The sign says the park closes at six. You know if they serious?” she shouted. The woman in the passenger seat laughed. The man driving said, “No, it don’t have nobody that does come and check.” The woman added, “I coming here plenty and I never yet see nobody in that hut.” They drove on, the man shouting back, “Doh ’fraid, follow us, we going for a swim.”

And so we drove on and the field ended. Suddenly the forest was right up against us. Dark trees met the road now. Out of the blue, Zain asked, “What about Jonathan? Are you in touch with him?”

“Jonathan?” I asked, surprised.

“The little boy—well, he’d be a young man now, I suppose—the child you were bringing up with that English woman. Was her name India?”

“She and I haven’t spoken in some years,” I said. “India did not want him and me to have contact.”

“Yes, you told me that in one of your letters long ago. But that is still so? It must be so hard on you. But he’s no longer a child, so what does it matter now?”

She was, of course, right. I shrugged and said with finality, “I guess it’s complicated.”

She let the matter rest and we carried forward in silence, but an unease washed over me; I felt suddenly ungainly, my body ill-formed. As if she sensed this, Zain put her hand out and rubbed my knee.

Thankfully, the road soon ended and we were at a parking area. A few men, women and children milled about. Before us, beyond the paved area, was the perpendicular rise of the mountain. Stepping out of the car, I looked up to see the mountain’s top and almost lost my balance. The face of the mountain, I saw, was embroidered with an infinite variety of textured shapes and shades of dark green vegetal tentacles waving out from the face of the wall, linked together by nets of wild philodendron vines. It was frightening, to be so suddenly and unexpectedly halted by the forest of the Northern Range, and this added to the sense of danger I felt about Zain and me, two women from “nice” families, being out here on our own, so late in the
evening. On the other side of the parking lot, through a row of cedar trees, was a narrow view to the sea. The light on the open water was startling. It was still bright light—daylight—out there.

We found a stairway and made our way down—Zain in her low heels, and I in my runners, feeling as usual like some deformed-yet-loved thing in her presence. People were hurrying past us. “Come on,” she said, picking up speed, skipping down the steep stairs. We arrived at a bay where small waves formed tightly and then broke. The man and the woman who had spoken to us from their car were already standing in the water, the woman in a dress, the skirt of which she had tightly gathered around and knotted in front of her, the man in navy blue pants that reached his knees, the hem of the pants wet from the leaping water.

We stood close enough that the man called out, “You make it in time to see the sun.”

Zain answered back in her usual quick fashion, “Yes, you know how to give directions.”

His wife had been grinning, but at Zain’s retort her lips tightened.

The man said, “Well, it was a straight road, no turn-offs, you can’t get lost even if you tried.”

Zain answered, “You know how long I trying to get lost, and I just can’t get lost? Is a good while I trying, man.”

The woman turned away, and the man, his smile forced now, looked quizzically at Zain. He glanced at me, he looked back at Zain, and then turned his back to us.

Out ahead, Peninsula de Paria, a flirtatious finger of neighbouring Venezuela, pointed directly at beautiful Macqueripe Bay, sprawled across much of the horizon save for a slip into which the sun would soon drop on an open horizon line. Several people had cameras at the ready. Neither Zain nor I had carried a camera. No photographs of us together, come to think of it, had ever been taken. She and I stood side by side watching. We didn’t speak. As Zain gazed out at the horizon, I wondered what the moment meant to her. It occurred to me that I could think of it as magical, and make a promise, a wish, a commitment, but I turned instead to watch a woman and two children, their backs to the drama of the sky unfolding, being photographed by a man. The children’s antics escalated as they waited for the man, likely their father, to take the picture. He was admonishing them to behave, to be still. Then he became animated and said, “Now!” The camera clicked.

The sun had hit the water. Zain’s eyes were fiercely set on it. She seemed calm and, for the first time that evening, serious. A minute or so later, we turned our attention to the scene around us. With our backs to the horizon, the trees were now softly lit and in sharp focus. What a surprise, a gift it was, to realize that the hills on either side of the bay were splashed generously with chaconia, which had been obliterated earlier by the harsh light, sweeping arms of redness reaching outward as if to fan the bay. And the sky directly above was the most translucent and yet luminous shade of phthalo blue I’d ever seen. We stood staring up and
Zain gripped my arm, pointed to the sky over the parking lot, and said, “How strange. So blue in this direction after sunset. And what a strange shade of blue. Almost green.”

Even as I saw what she saw, and marvelled, I was watching to make sure that her touching my arm had gone unnoticed by the strangers around us. I stepped forward, moving slightly out of her reach, and said, “It’s the colour of the Barbados sea as seen from the air.”

She asked, “Do you know what makes the sky blue?”

I opened my eyes wide in a gesture of invitation, and she obliged, laughing, because she knew I was making fun of her, and as she wove in words the tale of oxygen and nitrogen and argon gas and dust particles and light waves and electromagnetic fields and colour wavelengths and frequencies, I thought, you are the mother of two adult children, the wife of a businessman, you are a Trinidadian woman, you are an Indian woman, a Muslim woman, you live here in this country, but who are you, really?

Zain said, “You’re not listening to a thing I am telling you, are you?”

“I heard every word,” I lied. “Now, tell me what makes thunder.”

Her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. She tried to smile, but it was as if her face had broken. I wanted to put my hand on her cheek, but I dared not. I wanted to take her hand and pull her to me, but that would have been foolish. Any other two women on this beach could have interacted so, and others would have seen one woman comforting
another. But I didn’t look like other women. I indicated with my head that Zain should follow me and I walked as casually as I could, toward the stairs, back to where the car was parked.

It was when we were climbing back up the stairs that we saw the men with the snakes. The stairs were poorly made, angled downwards, and as you ascended you had to not only step up, but also grip the rusting railing tight and
pull
yourself along so that you didn’t slide off. And those stairs were wet, too, made slippery from bathers returning to their cars. We were concentrating, and we weren’t looking ahead. Zain was ahead of me, and immediately behind me were three young women chatting loudly—I don’t remember about what, but I do remember their high-pitched voices, their raucous, daring laughter. They were a new, different breed, I remember thinking. Zain and I had never been like them. I thought they were a bit too loud, and at the same time admired them for it. Zain was making her way up at a good pace. One of the laughing young women snapped suddenly, in an arresting voice, “All yuh!” and her companions went momentarily silent. Zain and I were instantly alert. I looked up to see what was happening, and in that moment Zain cried out and twisted her body back almost to face me, blocking the view with her hand. The women now uttered various shrill sounds of fear and displeasure. I looked back at them and they, too, had their views blocked with their hands, and so I wasn’t sure where to look. But I could see the face of the one who had called out: it was stone serious,
and she was staring up ahead. And now I turned and could see, coming down the stairs towards us, four men. They were young and of Indian origin, all with short squarely cut hair that stood stiffly in the most traditional way, and two of them wore long fat snakes about their necks and chests. The young woman shrieked, “Move aside!” The men looked at her. They were bounding down the stairway lithely, as if the snakes were beach towels. “Move aside, get to the side,” she shouted at them, more authoritatively than before. They finally obliged, stepping now to the far edge of the stairway to make more room for us to continue quickly past them.

“I ’fraid them things. Don’t make joke with me around them things, you hear!” the young woman said as she passed them, the voice that had been so high-pitched and bright some seconds before now dark and thick. As I had passed, I’d turned to get a good look at the snakes—an unusual thing for me, as I am one of those people who can’t even bear to look at the image of a snake, much less the real thing. They were so thick that the outline of their scales was quite visible inside patches of cream demarcated by black, and brown patches also outlined in black, and ochre patches of irregular shape, and yellow and black spots. The snakes had the full roundness of motorcycle tires, and did not seem to be limply resting, but rather to be quite alert; the pointed head of one was angled towards the beach front. Their underbellies could be seen in parts and here they were white, the scales less smooth. The eye that I saw in swift passing had
a light brown glassiness. Although I am terrified of snakes, when I saw that Zain had hunched her shoulders and turned her back to the men, utter disgust on her face, I wanted to embrace and comfort her. But of course I did not dare to do so, not even around this new and liberated brand of young women. I feared that I, and not the snakes, would become the centre of attraction.