The Worlds Within Her (55 page)

Cyril shakes his head. “Poor Shakti.”

Penny says, “An' her friend? Mrs. Livingstone?”

“Livingston.” Yasmin shrugs, feigning indifference to the scene as she imagines it: a still life too still. “No change. She's still there in her coma. Jim and I went to visit her but, you know, there's not much point.”

“What about her son?”

“My mom told me that, as far as he's concerned, she's already dead.”

“He does visit her?”

Yasmin shrugs again. “I suppose.” She looks up at the tree, laden with its fruit.

“I wonder what Shakti did all that time, sittin' by her friend's bedside,” Penny says. “If I know her, she probably just sat there doing nothing, keeping an eye out. You and I both know — eh, Yasmin? — Shakti wasn't the talkative kind.”

Cyril and Yasmin share a glance, Cyril sealing their silence by saying, “Want a guava?”

“Guava. So that's what it is.”

Cyril reaches up, plucks a large yellow one. He rubs it on his shirt and hands it to her.

The fruit is warm in Yasmin's palm but she barely notices it. She is still thinking about how Cyril has pronounced the word. Not
gwava
but
gawva.
His speech is sown with her mother's voice.

IT WAS AS
if the apartment itself knew that the irrevocable had occurred.

Only hours — but already a musty neutrality suffused the air, as if the walls were divesting themselves of her mother's unfathomable residue in preparation for the assumption of the next tenant's personality. The objects with which she had surrounded herself — the chairs, tables, lamps, the things on the walls — all appeared displaced, the possessions now of no one.

Yasmin stood at the window and raised the binoculars to her eyes. Sky, cloud, bits of trees and buildings. She lowered her gaze, and the playing field closed in: the crisp greenery, the long and narrow rectangle of denuded earth: sights her mother had seen countless times, sights she would no longer see. And the realization that next Sunday afternoon men in whites would bowl and bat and run and catch struck her as obscene, disrespectful. She could not prevent her hands from trembling as she replaced the binoculars on the windowsill and took a step backwards, away from the sense of indecency she knew to be absurd but before which she felt helpless.

She wandered slowly through the apartment, footsteps loud in this place where she no longer belonged. The bathroom, small and neat, devoid of clutter. The hall closet in which hung only two coats, one tan for spring and fall, the other a winter grey she had considered too sombre for her mother. She paused at the bedroom door, steeling herself for the silence she feared would be overwhelming in this room of greatest intimacy.

She had always thought the bedroom small, but her mother had found it adequate to her needs. She organized herself better in an insufficiency of space. It sharpened the mind, she felt, it
pared sentimentality, so that objects found their contexts and disorder was stemmed. Her mother's idea of luxury was precise and severe: it made no concession to baubles.

One Christmas, Mrs. Livingston had given her an elaborate porcelain ashtray in the form of a female hand cupping a seashell. Her mother neither smoked nor knew anyone who did — the source of her friend's inspiration mystified her — and she could not bring herself to admire it. She suffered its presence on the coffee table for several weeks — and then one day it wasn't there. Yasmin asked where it was and her mother, with all the innocence she could command, said, “An accident, dear. I was dusting it. It slipped. Terribly sad. It broke into a million pieces.” And then she smiled.

Yasmin proceeded warily into the room, her shoes stealthy on the shining parquet floor, and sat on the edge of the bed. She saw that it had been made up with her mother's customary neatness, and she was grateful for that: mussed sheets, signs of the last awakening, would have been unbearable. A curious comfort, this — and suddenly she wished she could believe in something: a higher power, a place beyond, an idea of warmth in the aftermath of life.

Her mother's belief had been private, shorn of ostentation. Among the perfumes and powders on the dressing table were two objects which had been in her mother's possession for as long as she could remember and which she vaguely understood to be objects of reverence. There was a
deeah,
a small prayer lamp of unglazed red clay that had never been used and which Yasmin, as a child, had enjoyed caressing with her fingertips, the bowl hard and powdery. Behind it stood the Hindu deity Shiva, a brass figurine of curiously indeterminate gender standing on one foot, the other kicking out, his four arms upheld in an elegant gesture of dance; around him was what appeared
to be a ring of fire. Religious implements, then — but Yasmin had never known her mother to pray, and so she had come to think of them as objects of sentiment, icons of another life. Mementos. If they had held a value beyond this, her mother had kept it to herself.

Her mother had once said to Jim that she considered herself a Hindu because she could be nothing else. Hinduism, she said, was less her religion than her way of life. She would not eat beef, but could not subscribe to bovine divinity, either: that was an idea that was sensible only in another time and place; in her context, she had said, the logic would mean conferring divinity on her local supermarket. She had an open mind on reincarnation despite the doubt sown in her mind by a grandfather who warned, when she was young, that failure to improve her behaviour would lead to a future life as a stone. “For a long time,” Yasmin remembered her mother saying, “I treated gravel with the utmost reverence. I was worried about treading on some incorrigible ancestor.” She had, too, a horror of cemeteries, the idea of internment repellent to her. The manners of the religion, she explained, had shaped her, and she had never felt the need to reach beyond its peculiarities, had never felt herself limited by them.

Yasmin ran her palm along the comforter, feeling the silky keenness of its surface. Listening to her mother, she had come to understand that the simplicity of her mother's spiritual notions had been the votive anchor of her life. They were notions unconcerned with a hereafter, or a godhead; they neither held out promise nor threatened disappointment. Hinduism, her mother had said to Jim, was not a religion of proselytizers. Conversion was not possible. One was simply born to the life — or not.

“And despite Yasmin's being born to that life, events changed everything.” Her mother did not even glance in her direction.
“This is why I foisted on her none of the strictures I accepted for myself.” Those were ways of being, ways of seeing the world, which would have been of use only in other, more alien circumstances. The strengths they offered would have been illusory, their implicit fatalism inhibiting in a society of competition and promise. The tenor of her own life had already been decided, she said, and she had made the best of it. But the world to which she had brought Yasmin was a vastly different place, with new imperatives requiring new responses. She would have to seek out her possibilities unhindered by the limitations of her mother's time and place. “This is the reason, you see, Mr. Summerhayes, that I learnt to make hamburgers and to cook steaks. For her.”

This, too, was the reason, she went on, that Westerners who turned east in search of wisdom — like the young men with shaven heads and saffron robes who rhythmically proclaimed the glories of Krishna to passersby on downtown streets — were always a source of great amusement to her. They were, she felt, devotees of self-deception — and India, like everywhere else, was full of people willing to fleece those who wished to be fleeced.

Yasmin had never told her mother that those people she found so amusing were, to her, a source of embarrassment. Walking past their public displays of devotion, she could feel their eyes on her, seeking acknowledgement of a kinship they thought they saw in her race. But she had laughed uneasily the day that Charlotte, eyeing a group clanging and chanting on the street, had said, “Boy, what a bunch of cults!”

The light flooding into the bedroom through the undraped window took on a deeper hue. She watched the dressing table and the wall behind it turn lemony, and she remembered something else — so many words once offered in passing, now precious — that her mother had once said to her. “Be glad that
your great-grandparents chose to leave India. Would you want to be born into that mess of humanity?”

The light in the bedroom turned the colour of molten gold. She felt its warmth on her shoulders, a warmth that made her aware of a chill proceeding from deep within herself. So much left unsaid, so much left unknown. And yet she began to see that what her mother had given her was best thought of as a kind of freedom. The only question that remained was, freedom from what?

Jim came in, his footsteps soundless on the floor. “Yas? You okay?”

She nodded, accepted the tissue he offered. The tears bewildered her. She had been unaware of them, but they were sufficient to have trailed down her chin and dotted her lap.

Jim stood before the dressing table. He reached for the brass deity. “Ah,” he said. “Shiva. He who destroys to reconstruct. Your mother always was full of surprises.” He held it for a moment, thoughtful, then he put it back down. “Come, let's go home.”

Yasmin crumpled the tissue in her hand, paused for a moment before the dressing table gilded still by the light: the perfumes, the powders, the dancing god.

She picked up the
deeah
and clasping it to her breast allowed Jim to lead her from the apartment.

THE DAY IS
overcast, the sky not so much cloudy as veiled, colours muted in the filtered sunlight.

The cremation ground, a field of packed earth that falls off at the far end at a placid sea, is deserted. As they walk in silence towards the water's edge, she is glad she refused Cyril's offer of a pundit to say a prayer. In the heavy air, the silence will remain holy only if unbroken.

She is touched that Cyril and Penny have both dressed for the occasion; that Cyril has insisted on carrying the urn which he holds before him in both hands; that Penny has brought a garland of roses, which will accompany the ashes into the water.

At the water's edge, she stands looking out: at the painful sky, at the glassy, silvered sea, at the distant horizon where they meet. There is, out there, a faint haze, a suggestion of immense evaporation, and for a brief and terrifying moment she harbours the certainty that she finds herself standing on the last fringe of land before the end of the earth. She goes light-headed, and her body sways. She is grateful when Cyril takes her elbow.

Steadied, she takes the urn from him, removed the bag, passes the container back to him. Opens the bag wide and, without hesitation, hurls the ashes out high into the heavy air. They scatter and spread lazily, expanding and floating, a cloud of showering grey.

Suddenly, Amie's words —
her
words — ring in her mind:
Papa behind the clouds.

And she finds herself jolted into a new watchfulness as she looks out through the falling ash and beyond it.

Looking for the small thing: a hint of movement, a ripening of shadow, a glint of sun.

Looks out even though there is nothing to be seen.

Looks out because you never know.

The ash settles on the water and merges with it.

Penny hands her the garland. With a swift swing of her arm,
she throws it into the air, watches it glide red and elegant against the sky.

It is still in the air, spinning in its descent, when she turns away and begins striding back to the car.