The Worlds Within Her (11 page)

“I mean, Shakti wasn' really one for cookin'.”

“Oh, she didn't make them, she bought them. And all kinds of other stuff, too.”

“You eat spicy?”

“Depends on what you mean by spicy.”

“You know how your gran'mother use to eat? With her hands, of course, always with her hands — and not because she didn't know how to use knife and fork, min' you. But that was a lady who liked spicy. Always had next to her plate a bunch of what we call bird peppers — small-small and hot-hot — or a pepper as big as your finger —”

“Like a big chili, nuh,” Cyril adds.

“And she'd put some food in her mouth and toss in a bird pepper or take a bite out of the big one. I mean, she use to eat peppers the way people eat —” her hands dance in front of her, as if waiting for the simile to alight on her palms, “— peanuts.”

“Taste the mango chutney,” Cyril says, pointing to a bowl sitting beside the fried balls. “Jus' dip a
pulowri
in.”

Yasmin complies. The fried balls — the
pulowri
— are greasy to the touch, and the chutney, when she tastes it, has less bite than the one her mother used to buy. But she plays along — “Oh, that
is
hot.” — for the sake of the family legend.

Penny smiles.

Cyril says, “And that was nothing for Ma. Nothing!”
Nutten'.
“She was one tough old lady.”

Penny, seeing Yasmin's greasy fingertips, calls to Amie to bring some napkins.

Cyril, with merriment, suggests a fingerbowl instead.

His comment elicits a laugh from Penny. “Shakti ever tell you the fingerbowl story?”

Yasmin shakes her head, waits for the story.

“When Vern was with the delegation in London — You know he was a member of the team negotiating independence, eh? — the Queen had a big dinner for some Commonwealth bigwig. When the dinner finish, they brought out the finger-bowls and Vern watch in amazement as Mr. Bigwig — who was sittin' right next to the Queen, mind you — pick up his bowl and sip the water. Everybody went quiet-quiet.”

The curtains part as Amie — so slight as to be almost insubstantial — returns with paper napkins, and then glides back inside without so much as a whisper.

“And then, to help him out, nuh, Vern pick up his own bowl and take a sip. And right away her Majesty pick up her
bowl and take a sip herself, imagine. Everybody breathe a sigh of relief, everybody take a sip from their fingerbowls, and everything was fine. Vern always say that is the day he learn what a real lady is, because she could o' leave the two o' them hanging there like two fools.” Penny sits back straight in her chair, nods primly.

Yasmin, without thinking, says, “I've heard that story before.”

“Really.”

“Only it wasn't about my father or the Queen of England. It was about some African head of state visiting the Netherlands. And the queen was Juliana. Same fingerbowl, though.” Hardly are the words out of her mouth than she realizes they are unwelcome. She forces a laugh, to make light of it. “Do you think maybe royals all over the world retell the same stories about how wonderful they are?”

Penny, back stiffening further, says, “Yes, well … Vern was there, you know. He saw it.”

Did he tell you the story himself? Yasmin wants to ask. Did anyone else see it happen? And how do you explain Queen Juliana … But the story, she realizes, is not about the Queen. It is about her father, about solidarity, about subtle shifts in allegiance. The story, true or not, is their offering to her, an offering she has managed to soil. She feels their annoyance, their embarrassment, regrets her own thoughtlessness. She realizes too, though, that anything she says to make amends will sound patronizing, so she says nothing.

Cyril sits up in his chair with summoned alacrity. “Tea was Shakti's drink, not so?” he says.

Yasmin, uneasy, nods: she is fearful now of despoiling the sacred.

“Did you know it was my Celia that taught her to like tea?”

“No, I didn't.” She is neither hungry nor particularly taken with the
pulowri,
yet she reaches for another: her own offering to Penny.

Cyril says, “Ey, take it easy, girl. Don't eat too much now, it still have lunch to come.”

“Lunch,” Yasmin says without enthusiasm. She is looking forward to returning to the hotel, to sequestering herself in the silence of the room. “But I wasn't planning —”

Cyril will not hear of it. “Nonsense. Of course you staying for lunch.” He turns towards his sister. “Not so, Penny?”

Penny gives a warm smile. “What Manager wants,” she says, “Manager does get.”

TEA? REALLY? BUT
the box says it contains flowers. I enjoy flowers in a garden or a vase, my dear — but in my teacup?

Healthy? Oh, I see. You're still worried about the Moroccan tea and all that sugar, aren't you? Well, I thank you, my dear, for your concern, but it truly isn't necessary …

But listen to me, will you? I must sound terribly ungrateful. Lack of practice, I imagine. So thank you for this rather unusual gift. Drinking flower-tea is not so bizarre, when you think about it. The human palate is a rather flexible organ, after all. Why should we count fish eggs a delicacy but look aghast at those who relish chicken feet? My mother-in-law, you know, had a particular taste for fried goat's blood heavily spiced, accompanied by whole hot peppers.

Tell me, my dear Mrs. Livingston, have you ever seen a battleaxe, at the museum perhaps? A curious implement, don't you think? Honed and hardened, sharp-edged, designed for ease of use yet, if handled carelessly, capable of severing a member of the one wielding it. A kind of forbidding beauty, masculine, if you will. Battleaxe. It was with that term that people referred to my mother-in-law, you know, in whispers only, of course. It was meant to demean, but it was an appropriate term for her, peril and beauty finely balanced.

She was not a tall woman — she was several inches shorter than I, and I, as you yourself have delighted in pointing out, have the physical stature of a turkey in a roomful of ostriches — but she appeared tall because she wore her authority well. She draped herself in it, if you see what I mean. It was part of her finery, like the gold jewellery she wore.

She had the most extraordinary face. Like many women of her generation who grew from childhood poverty to the kind of ease that passed for wealth in those days, she acquired few wrinkles, so that her face reflected a kind of serenity, except when she was angry or upset — and then all you saw were two lines emerging to bracket her lips.

Funny thing — it was delightful watching her eat. She was quite at ease with cutlery, but usually insisted on using her fingers in the traditional Indian manner, gathering the food into a shred of roti …

A kind of bread, my dear …

Like this, you see, with little swirls and circles. She would scoop up a small amount of rice and curried vegetables and eat it with the deliberation of ritual. Then she would select a fresh hot pepper from a saucer beside her and take a bite out of it — and that, believe you me, was always a remarkable sight.
Understand what I'm saying, now. A whiff of these peppers was enough to bring tears to your eyes. A pinch seemed to sear the skin from your tongue. But she ate them as if they were dill pickles. It wasn't so much that she took an evident pleasure in every mouthful. No. It was more that she seemed to take no mouthful for granted. And, you know, she did at times appear to be praying or meditating or, at the very least, lost in deep thought.

She brought this deliberation to her life in general, and that was lost on no one. Her religion — the conversion to Christianity exerted no hold, you see, beyond a social usefulness — left her with no belief in accident. Everything had a reason, an explanation. Nothing ever simply happened. Blame, or perhaps, to be fair, explanation, could always be apportioned — and this gave her great strength. She could rarely be anticipated. I remember my brother-in-law Cyril saying that it was at mealtimes that his mother plotted her life, which prompted my husband to remark that it was at mealtimes that she plotted other people's lives.

I'm not certain that she actually tried to shape other people's lives. I think she worried about her family in her own way, and tried to spare them heartache by perceiving, reflecting, understanding, nudging. I once said this to my husband, and his response was, You didn't grow up with her. Cyril, who never felt he had his mother's support for his law studies in England, believed it was because she didn't want to let him out of her grasp, but I wonder whether there wasn't some other reason, a reason a mother could see, considering how things turned out for him, I mean …

We mothers are rather curious creatures at times, don't you think, Mrs. Livingston? We gauge the risks we would have our children take by the intuitive understanding we have of them —
and so we can never fully explain why we advise against a particular action. Here you are weak, we would have to say, or, Your interest in this field is unmatched by your talent — and how wounding that would be, how brutal. So we wound them instead with our silence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I have attempted to avoid doing this with Yasmin — not always successfully, I might add — but on the whole I have not withheld my blessing even when I knew that, because of the world or because of her, I would one day have to soothe the hurt. So my mother-in-law was not a neglectful mother — and let me add right here and now that she treated her daughter no differently from Cyril and my husband, although I dare say Penny would probably see things differently. I suppose everyone was battle-axed in his or her own way …

Yes, my dear, that goes for yours truly, too. Now shush? You know me by now. I'll get there yet in my marshalling-yard sort of way.

You see, for my mother-in-law, everything and everyone had its proper place in the world, and she was never quite sure that my place was in marriage to her elder son. Be that as it may, we established from early on a cordial and safely reticent relationship. We said our good-mornings and our thank-yous. I fulfilled my duties, such as they were. Bought the birthday and Christmas gifts. Helped with the
deyas
at Divali. Spent my meals admiring my mother-in-law's manner, my afternoons talking and reading with Penny or Celia, my evenings with my husband and the rest of the family. All in all a rather leisurely life, come to think of it.

And then one day, for reasons of her own, my mother-in-law decided to change all that.

CYRIL LEANS FORWARD
in his chair, fingers interlacing. “So we hear you're a famous lady up there in Canada.”

“That's overstating the case a bit,” Yasmin laughs. “I get recognized sometimes, but that's incidental, really. All I do is read well.”

“No,” Cyril says with dissatisfaction. “What you doin' is important. You helping people find out what happened in their world. You helping them remember — and forgetting is a terrible thing.”

“No,” Yasmin insists. “All I do is read well.”

Her secret for reading the news is simple: She reads not in her own voice but in her mother's. When she mouths the words that roll at a steady pace up the teleprompter screen, she hears her mother's tones shaping them, coating them in appropriate drama: tones leavened by instinctive notions of human reaction. Her success is not hers alone.

Occasionally, Yasmin has been asked to conduct an on-air interview, and her mother has always advised her to use moderation with the confrontational ones. “Weave the rope,” she once said. “Present them with the noose. You can even help them put it on. But let them tighten it themselves. Let them commit suicide, if you see what I mean — otherwise you'll be seen as an executioner. And Yasmin, dear, very important: remember — yours is not the outrage. Outrage belongs to the viewer.”

The technique exasperates Jim. “Why didn't you move in for the kill?” he would ask. “Why didn't you crush him?” Her reply — “Listen to what he says. He hangs himself” — arouses a snort of derision. She has learnt not to allow Jim's reactions to influence her, although she wishes he would take the time to
understand the subtleties of her craft: to see how she plays with the lights of her profession.