The Worlds Within Her (37 page)

So that everything conspired to make Ariana unrecognizable. Yasmin did not know whether to be grateful or outraged, and so let herself be tossed back and forth between the two along a continuum of numbness.

Time collapsed.

Comings, goings.

Garth, Charlotte: hand in hand, a couple now. There had been no fanfare, merely the hiring of moving vans. Charlotte hugs her, says she must call when she is up to it. Lunch, just the two of them. Like in the old days.

Producers, reporters, people from Jim's firm.

Words whispered and meaningless, embraces of helplessness.

And then, a trick of the light: her attention drawn to her daughter's hands resting one on the other, the fingers small and plump and still full of the promise of grace. It was with a shock that Yasmin recognized those fingers: knew them with a wrenching intimacy. She felt her blood engorge her veins: those fingers wrapping themselves around hers, exploring her neck, her arm, pressing in gentle curiosity at her vaccination scar.

She saw those fingers moving, felt the warmth they gave and the warmth they took.

Then she heard her daughter's voice.

She heard herself cry out:
Ariana!

And then she shattered.

MY DAUGHTER?

Yasmin. Yes. She is a calm child, isn't she? “A ship becalmed in a storm.” That's what her uncle Cyril used to say about her. When things were bad, he had only to look at her, to observe her playing or sleeping, and he would feel better.

She was born during a storm, you know, in a house at the beach. The contractions had begun the night before, and by early afternoon of the following day had grown ferocious. Clouds began piling up above the horizon, as they often did — or do — at that time of day, layer upon layer billowing out of nowhere, white at first but quickly growing darker, grey at the edges with centres ripped from a starless midnight …

Dramatic, my dear? Of course it was dramatic. A child being born, a storm building. What more could you want? And of course I stared out at the sky. There was a window, there were people all around, and life was about to change forever. Of course I stared out that window, at that sky, at those clouds! What else was I to do?

Now, where was …? Ah, yes. Those clouds, and the steely sea ending suddenly at a rigid horizon. All this greyed immensity, holding its breath. You could see it coming to life, you know, far off in the middle distance. Lightning crackling from cloud to water, a distant, attractive spectacle, all action and no sound, like a silent movie …

You enjoy storms, Mrs. Livingston? So do I, you know. Quite apart from their sheer beauty — lightning is the most strident of natural phenomena, don't you think? — I enjoy the helplessness they impose. All one can do with a storm is wait it out. It lifts all responsibility from you, doesn't it — temporarily, of
course, which is why it's enjoyable. Rather like getting into an airplane. For this brief time, you have no choice but to abandon yourself to your fate — a very Hindu experience. Or perhaps, if you will, a brief glimpse back at the helplessness of childhood. And then once it has passed, one's arrogance of taking responsibility and seeking control must return — this is what makes us human, I know, but it can be so tiring at times, don't you agree?

In any case, you could see the storm gathering force, whipping itself into life. Then, quite unexpectedly, the wind fell off. The whitecaps diminished, the breakers were gentled. You could see far off the rain falling into the sea, a grey chimera obliterating depth and focus, ripples of light preceding its passage towards land — towards us. And in the sudden silence, the rain whispered in. It was faint at first, a fine machined sound, but as it reached the beach it gathered the ferocity of a roar. You could see the drops pockmarking the sand. And as they pounded a din on the iron roof, Yasmin was born, emerging whole and perfect and as silent as a carp …

Yes, my dear, a carp. And that has been her strength all her life.

THE LIGHT OUTSIDE
has progressed in a steady metamorphosis towards evening: from rugged afternoon yellow to thinned whiteness to a golden wash enriched by the midnight blue materializing behind it.

Penny warns that she should not wander too far from the house. “It does get dark-dark fast-fast,” she says. “And you never know.”

Cyril, stretching, sucks his teeth. “Don' worry, girl,” he says. “Go take your walk. Nothing going to happen. And if you get los', just follow the stars.”

At the bottom of the stairs, a dim light beneath the porch catches her eye. Cautioned, she pauses in the shadows.

In the light, circumspect in its feebleness, Ash sits shirtless astride his exercise bench, a dumbbell grasped in each hand. His skin, deep brown and flawless, appears plasticized with perspiration, the muscles finely sculpted, as if by a classical hand.

Suddenly he looks up, directly at her. “Help you?”

She steps into the light. “Just taking a little stroll before dinner. I didn't mean to disturb you.”

“Is all right, no problem.” Then, in the conversational tone he affects when issuing a challenge, he says, “You know India have the nuclear bomb, eh?”

“Pardon?” The incongruity of his question causes Yasmin to doubt she has heard him accurately.

“I said, you know that India have the nuclear bomb.”

“Yes,” she replies, with a tentative curiosity.

“And you know that Canada ain't even have a nuclear hatpin.”

She nods, amused now.

“So if India and Canada come to blows, you know who going to win?”

“I don't think too many Canadians lie awake at night worrying about that, Ash,” she says with a smile.

He releases the dumbbells. They thud to the ground with a metallic clatter. “Tell me, nuh, all journalists as literal as you? Or as stuck-up?”

“Stuck-up?”

“Look at you.” His open palm slices diagonally at her. “You standin' there thinkin', ‘The stupid boy actually think India and
Canada might go to war one day.' Not so? Is what you think in', eh?”

“I can't say I thought of the word ‘stupid.'”

“Whatever. But you standin' there feeling all high and mighty in front o' this ridiculous idea. Is not that I think India and Canada going to war, I not stupid, you know. Is the idea of power. One have the nuclear bomb, the other one don't. One does twitch, and the neighbours take notice. The other one does twitch and, who cares?”

“And you want people to notice when you twitch.”

He smiles at her, eyes narrowing. His thumb presses to his chin, his index finger crosses his lips.

A pose, Yasmin thinks, the gesture of an older, more calculating man. But his theatre is convincing only to himself. He appears at this moment so very, very young. She turns to go.

“You know,” he drawls, “you have no idea what I talkin' about.”

“Don't be too sure, Ash.” She begins a slow walk away across the moist, hardened earth.

“I know who my people are. Do you?”

She stops, peers over her shoulder at him. “Just who
are
your people, Ash?”

“I belong to the diaspora,” he says. “We are millions.” He bends down, picks up the dumbbells and curls them to his shoulders, biceps labouring. Veins swell on his arms, sinew tightens and seethes across his chest. “And we understand now that all power flows from the centre.”

The centre. But he speaks easily of places of which he has no real knowledge. “Have you been to India?”

“Have you?”

“It wasn't a challenge, Ash. Just a question.”

“Never been to the sun either, but I know is hot.”

“But do you know why it's hot?”

“Don't need to, and if I did, the library full of books and magazines.”

“But if you're going to worship the sun, wouldn't you want to know everything about it?”

“You believe in God?”

“I suppose.”

“You know everything about him? To believe, all you need to know is enough. Is like Auntie Penny and your father. She always telling that story about him, you know, about how he fall off a garage roof when he was a baby and hardly get a scratch. She never explain how a baby manage to get up on a garage roof in the first place but it hardly matter. Vernon the perfect. Vernon the god. They ain't shoot him, they crucify him. As far as Auntie Penny concerned, he was never just a man. And it ain't have nothing wrong with that. Is like me and India. Is not just a country, is a soul. And I have it inside of me, in my flesh, in the blood running through my veins. I ain't know the details o' the chemistry but it there, true and alive, and more important than any so-called facts.”

His words chill Yasmin. They are so contrary to everything she believes in. They strike her as a denial of the mind, a return to the belief of the illogical. Ash is vehement in seizing a world made wholly of magic and mystery — and even though she knows it to be often necessary, the only people she fears are those with no wish to know how little they know. She knows now that she fears Ash, and that she fears for him.

She steps out of the light, glances up at the sky. There are no stars to be seen, there is nothing more to be said. So she turns away and, to the clanking of metal, returns up the stairs, to the dining room and its world rampant with shadow and image.

Silence reigns at the dinner table, cutlery clattering muted on china.

It is, Yasmin reflects, as if each of them has retreated into unvoiced thoughts after all the talk. And yet she finds that she herself has no thoughts worthy of the name: that her mind is too congested with shards of image and incomplete sensation to shape coherence.

Cyril, when he is done, pushes his chair away from the table, presses a fist to his lips, and belches gently. He says, “You should see the posters the boy have up in his room. All these fellas dress up in saffron robes, jumping up in the streets with forks and swords. Is not so much different from the carnival, nuh, excep' that these fellas taking themselves very seriously.”

Penny says, “The boy always goin' on about being oppressed. How? Look around at this land! So we not as rich as before — who is? Ash could do anything he want to, study anything he want. Lawyer, doctor. But this
jhunjut
is his choice. Is not easy, that's for sure. And I not sure that he's wrong. Still, he can talk oppression all he want, but if he turn out to be a not'ing in this life is his own decision.”

“His karma, you mean,” Cyril laughs. Then he turns, soberfaced, to Yasmin. “All it really mean as far as Ash concerned is that the boy don't know what to do with his life and these people he involved with giving him some easy answers. They giving him something to be passionate about. Is why I give up arguing with him. He have his colours, nuh, and he holding on to them tight-tight.”

Penny says, “Oppressed, eh? Sometimes I think somebody should o' oppress his ass a long time ago.”

“But Penny,” Cyril says, “who — if not you?”