The Worlds Within Her (25 page)

So, angry? No. I will however admit to an ache in my chest and some thoughts, my dear, properly characterized as bitter. I had known for a while that, for my husband, political promises were like cotton candy — sweet on the tongue, but fleeting,
weightless, hardly worth a memory. Now I felt that his personal promises were the same.

No, he got in late, you see, after midnight. I wasn't about to wait around moping. I watched some television, had a bite to eat. Eventually, as evening came, I got into bed. I was still awake when he came in. He didn't apologize or anything. He took off his shoes and socks and sat on the bed squeezing his toes and massaging his soles —

It was a way of relaxing, it comforted him somehow.

And he said that he'd got into an interesting discussion with some people from the delegation — he didn't tell me what it was about, he assumed such things would not be of interest to me — and before he knew it hours had gone by, everyone was hungry and so they headed out to a restaurant, where the discussion continued. I remember him yawning and saying, by way of apology I think, You know how I like a good ol' talk, Shakti. And that was it. He put on his pyjamas, got into bed and was snoring within seconds —

Me? I was awake for most of the night —

Selfless? Hardly. The way I see it — and it was that night, lying there in the darkness, that I began to see — his political life fed him in a way that he could never allow his personal life to do. It was all-enveloping because he wished it to be. I understood that night that he thought only of himself because that was what his damned sense of mission demanded. The torch, my dear, burned hard and hot within him. It demanded submission.

So I resigned myself to it, and took to spending my time reading and taking taxis to museums — especially to the British Museum, which is a thieve's palace, but a palace all the same.

ON SUMMER WEEKENDS
, their suburb brought to mind a community in the aftermath of nuclear alert. The desertion was total save for the occasional cat wandering around in search of adventure, its people off at cottages or on sailboats or enjoying a weekend catching up on the New York shows.

Yasmin had come to view the neighbourhood as a place where people came mainly to sleep — alone, with their spouses, with other people's spouses — and was helplessly alert to its bedroom noises: snoring, snuffling, the stirrings of insomnia, the guttural whimpering of discreet orgasm.

They were downtown, out at dinner, their daughter at home with a sitter, when Jim first offered the observation that she was
somewhat
paranoid.

He had had a late meeting with a client and had met her at the studio after the broadcast. She saw from his skittishness that the meeting had gone well. Failure made him quiet; it absorbed his energies in introspection. But there was a celebratory air to him that evening. He had performed well, and wished to extend the mood. He took her to a restaurant where the brightest lights were directed at the paintings on the walls, the rest of the lighting sufficiently subdued that the food, elegantly displayed, acquired the surreptitious look of the avant-garde.

They began with a drink. Jim asked about the show. She said it had gone well, but his agitation would let him probe no further. He related his meeting as if reading from the minutes. She listened, nodding from time to time, murmuring sober encouragement. She knew him. As he spoke, his movements became
less abrupt, his words more considered, the retelling relieving him of his tensions; he was like a cat scratching at its post.

Their food arrived. Jim cast a cursory glance at his plate. He would not eat until he had talked himself out, and then he would eat with appetite.

Yasmin weighed her fork in her hand, waiting for a pause that would allow the tines to explore her salad without giving the impression of abandonment. When it came, she let her eyes fall to the plate — and saw what she thought to be a stirring among the lettuce leaves. She bent low over the plate.

What bothered her was not that some insect might have found refuge in her food — the movement, after all, was probably only a trick of too many shadows in too little light — but that Jim would not take her concern seriously. Seeing her attention diverted from his words, he went silent, watching her probe among the vegetables. At her explanation, he hesitated only slightly before saying, “Call the station. Get a crew over here fast.”

Her fork stabbed at the salad, rapping bluntly on the surface of the plate.

“It was a joke, Yas.”

“I know,” she said, without a smile. She ate — but with caution, wincing ever so slightly whenever her teeth crunched through the spine of a lettuce leaf.

Jim, forking linguine into his mouth between gulps of red wine, quickly concluded his story. The mood was lost, and an edge returned to him. It was at this moment, as he pinched the middle from a chunk of bread, that he made his observation.

Yasmin, watching him plaster butter on his bread, mulled over the word.
Paranoid.
She thought it a curious word for him to use, a word so distant from herself that she could not even take offence. Careful, cautious, prudent, perhaps even suspicious: but she had always thought this one of her better traits.

He said, “You always seem to be looking for the worst in things. But that's journalism for you, I guess.” His fork gestured at her plate. “A delicious meal — it is delicious, isn't it? — and you spend ten minutes looking for an insect.”

She reminded him that at university she had spent two winters working part-time in a restaurant. “I've seen the kitchens, I've seen the way they handle food.” She had never quite lost her distrust of what went on behind the scenes.

“Call it what you want,” he said. “You worry too much.”

“Can we just say I'm skeptical?”

“It'll do.”

She returned to her salad. Although she was no longer hungry, she cleared her plate of the last morsel, a sliver of carrot she swallowed whole.

CYRIL, TOO, HAS
showered. He has regained his neatness, smells of fresh talcum powder. A light perspiration glints on his forehead, but his eyes still sparkle. He asks how her shower was and when she assures him that it was fine, says, “Good. Is exhausting sometimes, you know. Having to run from drop to drop.”

He slides his hands into his pockets and with a certain solemnity asks her to bring Ram's box — as if it had been his possession and not merely his reliquary — to the dining room.

And it is with a suggestion of ceremony — that sense of relish with which people perform ritual they know to be gilded by immemorial repetition — that he places it on the table, invites
her to take a seat and seats himself.

Then he takes a breath that he appears to hold and reaches, blind, into the box.

He places the object on her palm. It is of silver, in the shape of a horseshoe, with a flattened middle tapered to rounded ends. A bracelet of some kind, she thinks — but the wrist required to secure it would have to be massive. A charm or a fetish, then.

Cyril, amused, says, “You don't know what that is, eh?” When she shakes her head, he says, “You probably going to find this kind o' disgusting. It called a tongue-scraper. An' is for doing just that.”

“Ah.” With hardly a pause she flips her palm and lets the object fall back into the box.

Cyril laughs. “Back then, brushin' your teeth wasn't enough. We had very Indian ideas of cleanliness. But I won't go into the details.”

Yasmin's palm stirs above the open box. Her face — and then her open palm held upwards — registers interrogation.

After Ram died, Cyril explains, Penny simply threw in whatever came to hand. “It wasn't a time for siftin'.” Then he pauses, leans forward, elbows on thighs, palms flush together. “Then I pass by and toss in the tongue-scraper.”

She sees his fingers interlace, sees a tension wrap them tight.

“You know, Yasmin, that tongue-scraper might be the mos' important thing in there, for me. Tell you why. Is because is the last picture I have of him in my head. Nothing heroic, nuh. Nothing … ”

He goes still. And then in a voice not of the present, he says, “It was that morning. His last. He was at the sink, the one in the back, nuh. Bending over. I still see him as if it was this morning. Hair wet. Slick back. Head bent low over the sink. Mouth
open, tongue hanging out. The scraper. Somehow it seemed more important than all the speeches he ever give. Probably because he always use to say that the one thing politicians must guard against is the unguarded. And I remember him sayin' he never felt clean until he'd scraped his tongue, that it never seemed to work right until … ” He pauses, passes a finger across his lips. “So that seemed more real to me than anything else. More important.” He gestures towards the box. “So there you have it. The tongue scraper. Scrapin' away all those old words, all the old promises and the threats, makin' room for more.”

SHE SCREAMED INTO
the night with all the clarity of her young voice — a scream, at eighteen months, mindful of terror.

Yasmin felt the scream lift her from the bed, felt it impel her with irresistible force to her daughter's room. The child screamed again as she gathered her up in her arms: the body trembling, the tiny hands grasping with blind desperation at the folds of her nightgown.

Yasmin held her close, caressing her back, softly calling her name.
Ariana. Ariana.

She cried out: Ernie! Bert! Her favourite stuffed toys, but — was she seeking their security, or were they haunting her dreams?

Her eyes opened and Yasmin saw the confusion of an incomplete transition from one world to the other, the world of dreams as real as the world of her mother's arms.

Then, quickly, the eyes shaped a plaintive and puzzled accusation: Why are you punishing me? they asked.

Unexpectedly the child pressed her tear-stained face to Yasmin's, then, with deliberation, her lips to her cheek.

Yasmin was startled — and moved.

The kiss was not affection; it was a plea from the depths of nightmare, a gesture that said, You are punishing me but I love you still.

Yasmin felt herself crack.

She said her daughter's name again, wiped perspiration from the hot forehead, and her touch proved soothing. The trembling stopped. Recognition softened the child's eyes. Mommy, she said, curling herself more tightly into Yasmin's tightening embrace.