Nothing Like Love (5 page)

“Praise Allah! Praise Allah!” Sam puffed his blue-and-gold body up. “Praise Allah!”

Faizal glanced at his parrot over the side of the barrel and then up at the sky through the canopy of frangipani branches. The ashy grey heavens had turned a faint mauve. “Mangoes!” he exclaimed. His hands flew to his dry hair. After filling his small chest with air, Faizal pinched his nose and plunged into the barrel, soaking Sam. He stayed submerged for thirty seconds, drowning out Sam’s frenzied shrieks, and then burst into the balmy morning air with another splash. Sam scurried away, flapping his drenched wings and screeching.

Once Faizal had dried himself and smoothed coconut oil into his puffy hair, he slipped into a fresh white kurtha pajama, grabbed one of seven prayer mats around his tiny house and darted to his garden. “Come, Sam!” he called over his shoulder.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Sam hollered back as he scurried after Faizal into the back garden.

Faizal unrolled his prayer mat in the savannah grass between two young hibiscus trees, their peach and white blossoms still beaded with morning dew. He pressed the curling edges of the mat tenderly down. It was green, covered in specks of gold. For a split second he admired the thread work, and remembered the soft hands that had embroidered it.

Sam scurried onto the prayer mat with the blue-green feathers on his head raised in angry spikes. When Faizal
stooped to stroke his ruffled plumage, Sam tipped his head back and nipped Faizal’s finger hard with his black beak. Shrugging, Faizal turned to Mecca, opened his hands before him like a book and sped through his prayers. This morning Sam refused to join in, but as Faizal lowered his forehead to the mat reverently, Sam mirrored him. Then the bird strutted off, muttering.

When Faizal Mohammed rose from his last prostration and opened his eyes, he found himself staring into a luscious bosom the colour of rich caramel.

“Good morning, Faizal. I hope I ain’t interrupt your prayers.”

“Sangita.” Faizal got to his feet, gathered his prayer mat off the ground and rolled it up. Just behind Sangita, ribbons of coral were stretching across the sky and a dazzling amber sun was casting its first rays onto Chance’s silver roofs. Faizal allowed himself a smile; she had timed her arrival carefully. He noticed a notebook tucked beneath her arm, and a piece of red thread clinging to a shapely hip. “Working early, I see.” He gestured to the kitchen, which backed onto his garden. “Come. Let we have some coffee.”

Sangita glanced at the thin gold watch on her wrist and then over the fence at her house. She bit her lip and blinked her black slanted eyes at Faizal, letting her gaze trail quite obviously over his lean body. “A quick coffee while we discuss. Half a cup.” Her pink lips turned up at the corners. “Just a sip.” She sashayed past him to the kitchen. Her cream skirt swished at her calves.

Faizal put a pot of water on the stove and set two blue enamel cups on the small counter, watching out of the corner
of his eye as Sangita crossed and uncrossed her legs. He cleared his throat and she looked up at him.

“Faizal,” she began, flipping open her notebook. She retrieved the pencil from her hair, letting it tumble like soft silk down her back. Faizal swallowed. “Did the money for the burgundy-and-red prayer mats come in as yet?”

He poured the steamy coffee into the cups and brought them to the table, accidentally brushing Sangita’s ankle with his toe. “Sorry—and no, because I ain’t take them to my store as yet. The mats are scheduled to be picked up today. I go have your payment for the embroidery by tonight.”

Sangita scribbled this information into her notebook as if Faizal hadn’t told her this a week ago.

“Your designs was real nice, Sangita. They getting popular. Everybody who sees one of my mats with your needlework does put in an order.”

Sangita puckered her lips and blew the steam from her coffee before taking a sip. Faizal noticed the top two buttons of her cream-and-powder-blue blouse were still undone. His eyes lingered there until she placed her cup down and shut her notebook abruptly, snapping his attention back to her exquisite face. A sheen of perspiration glowed on her skin and the hairs around her high cheekbones curled in the warm kitchen. Faizal sat back in his chair and waited.

“Faiz-al”—she sang his name—“tell me what happened last night.”

He knew she hadn’t really come about the prayer mats. “Last night?” He feigned confusion.

Sangita swatted his hairy arm with her soft fingertips. “Faizal Mohammed, don’t play stupid!”

He moved to throw open the tiny windows, distracting himself from the burn of her touch on his skin. Taking a deep breath as a rush of dewy airy blew into the kitchen, he said, “Didn’t Mr. Rajesh Gopalsingh share all the details with his pretty wife last night?”

Sangita arched an eyebrow at him.

Faizal knew he was being petty, but he couldn’t help it. She had been teasing him for years. They had been teasing each other for years.

“I was sleeping when he come home.” She lowered her gaze and Faizal knew she was lying.

“Hmm. Well, maybe later, nuh?” He pretended to be interested in two birds flitting after each other in a tree outside the window. “When I get back from the shop tonight, I go tell you.”

She stared at him. “I can’t come back here
tonight
!”

Faizal pushed his chair back. “Come to the shop.”

“In Port of Spain?
How?
” She rose, too, but still she had to look up to meet his eyes. “Just tell me if you see them kiss. What were Krishna and Vimla
doing
by the ravine?” She gathered her heavy hair on top of her head and slid the pencil from the table back in its place.

Faizal grabbed Sangita’s narrow waist and pulled her close while she fiddled with her hair. She gasped, letting her hands fall to his chest but never pushing. “Faizal—”

“I found them like this.” He lowered his face close to hers, deliberately, until he could feel her warm breath. She parted her lips and leaned into him as he drew her nearer, until their mouths were only half an inch apart. Then he released her, suddenly, and stepped away. “Just like that. That is what I see.”

Pink crept into Sangita’s cheeks. She puffed at a tendril of hair that had fallen free of her careless upsweep and took a step back from Faizal. After buttoning her blouse hurriedly, Sangita snatched her notebook off the table and brushed past him. “You can leave the money with my husband when you get it,” she called over her shoulder. Faizal knew her words were meant to sting, but the breathlessness in her voice pleased him. He smiled after her, watching as she weaved through his frangipani trees with their great white-and-yellow blossoms and slipped, soundless, into her own yard.

V
imla opened her eyes and rolled onto her side. She listened to the kiskadee morning call and watched the flutters of black and yellow in the guava and tamarind trees at her bedroom window. They trilled and rustled in the treetops, cocking their heads at impossible angles and announcing their presence to the world:
kis-kis-kiskadee!

Vimla blinked at the blue sky from her bed until slowly a feeling of foreboding stirred awake and spread thick and oily over her heart. Memories of last night burst in her mind in dreadful detail. She covered her face with her hands and curled into a tight ball as the image of her father hovering over her and Krishna with a torchlight held high flashed through her mind. Vimla groaned from her soul. He had looked so injured.

She reached under the pillow beside her and retrieved the conch shell Krishna had left for her in the market on Saturday.
It was the length of her hand, a glossy shell of peach and ivory swirls. She ran her fingers over the ridges and sharp points and inside the shell where it was as smooth and cool as marble. She held it to her ear the way Krishna had shown her and heard the ocean rise up and crash against an invisible shore. Vimla had seen conches a hundred times before—during prayers pundits blew into the shells like trumpets—but she hadn’t known that the sound of the ocean lived inside them, too.

“What you hear?” Krishna had asked when he’d given it to her.

“Water. Energy. Something powerful,” Vimla said. She put the shell to his ear. “What you hear?”

“The ocean. Freedom.
You
.”

Vimla still wasn’t sure what Krishna had meant by that, but it made her feel special and cherish the conch that much more. She took it away from her ear and tucked it back under the pillow.

“Wake she up, Om! Wake she up so I can kill she!”

Startled, Vimla scrambled to her window and peered behind the house, where Chandani was untying the goats from their stall. The kids bleated and pranced about the moody ram goat and he lowered his head and butted one away.

Om took the ropes from his wife’s hands and led the goats toward the field to graze. “Vimla!” he bellowed as he walked away. “Get up so your mother can kill you!”

Vimla leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. How many Saturdays had she pretended to go to Port of Spain for exam preparation classes, only to steal away with Krishna when she arrived? How many times had she and Krishna hidden in
her father’s sugar cane to exchange a quick word, a nervous kiss? Vimla groaned. She had become careless in the past few weeks under Krishna’s self-assured care, taking bigger risks, meeting him at ungodly hours closer and closer to home. She let the back of her head rap against the wall as she sank to the floor. What would she do now?

The stairs creaked and Vimla froze. She heard footsteps draw nearer then stop outside her bedroom door. She held her breath as the door was thrown open with a crash. Chandani stood four foot ten and frightening in the doorway. Her eyes, red and puffy—presumably from a night of crying—bulged from her small face in fury now. She breathed in through her nose and out heavily through her mouth. Gripping the sides of the door frame with her tiny hands, Chandani leaned forward and peered down at Vimla cowering on the floor. “What the ass is wrong with you?”

Vimla’s heart struck irregularly against her chest. “Ma—”

“You want to get married?” Chandani shot across the room and stood over her daughter. “Hmm? That is what you want? Well, why you didn’t tell me that, Vimla? I go find somebody for you to marry!”

Vimla stared up at her mother, wide eyed. “I done pick Krishna, Ma.”

Chandani gasped and swiped at Vimla, who threw herself across the floor to avoid the blow. “Pick? Pick!” Chandani looked mortified. “You feel Krishna is a sweet sapodilla you could just
pick
from a tree?”

Vimla winced. As bright as she was, she often expressed her thoughts unfiltered. This was one of those times Vimla wished she’d kept her opinions private. “Ma. I sorry.”

Chandani sat on Vimla’s bed. “You sorry, Vimla? Tell me what you sorry for.”

Vimla swallowed. This was a trap. There was no way to win an argument with her mother, and in truth, she wasn’t sure what she was sorry for yet. So Vimla waited for her mother to continue, which inevitably she did.

“No more walking about for you, you hear? Concentrate on university applications. Unless it have Krishna and tra-la-la-ing with man in the bush on your syllabus, you better not study that again!”

Vimla’s mouth dropped open.

Chandani made for the door. “And while you waiting to hear back from schools, you go cook and clean and wash, mind the goats and the cow and the bull and the fowl.” She counted these tasks off on her childlike fingers. “In the meantime, Vimla, I go work hard, too. I go search high and low, upside down, round and round, to find a boy as dotish as you for you to marry.” She brushed her hands against each other. “I done talk,” she said, and walked away.

Vimla followed her out of the room. “What about Krishna? To marry.”

Chandani halted mid-step and her back went rigid. Vimla began to edge away even before her mother spun around and pounced at her like a vicious cat. “Krishna? Vimla Narine, what the ass make you think Krishna go marry you now?”

“He love me.”

Chandani flinched. “It ain’t have nothing like love here!” She gestured to the sunlit hallway. Vimla wasn’t sure if her mother meant this house or Trinidad, but she didn’t dare ask. “Your
reputation ruined, girl. The Govind family ain’t go want Krishna to marry you now.”

Vimla stared, dumbstruck, at her mother, who sucked her teeth, stomped into her bedroom and slammed the door.