Valmiki's Daughter (22 page)

The next morning there was shouting from Viveka's parents' room. She opened their door, holding it not an inch ajar, and watched. Her mother was holding the white shirt her father's had worn the night before, gripping it by the collar and showing it to him. He wouldn't touch the shirt but stood very straight, speaking to her mother in a voice that, despite the smile on his face, had no laughter in it. In between his sentences he made sounds like guffaws of laughter, but there was no laughter. He was saying that there had been thirty-two women at the party, including Viveka's mother, and that the lipstick could have been from any one of them — including her, he added. He was, after all, the host and every woman there had hugged and kissed him at one time or another. Viveka's mother lurched at her father, hit
him on his chest with both hands balled into fists. She pounded and pounded, and he, laughing now, but it was a strange laughter, tried to block her punches. Finally he gripped her wrists and held them tight, and her mother screamed at him, saying, You're hurting me, let me go, you're hurting me! Viveka opened the door wider and her father saw her and let go of her mother's hands. By this time he was no longer laughing oddly, but had become darkly serious. He walked quickly past Viveka, touched her head with his hand lightly, and went out toward the kitchen. Viveka and her mother listened to his car start up, and then they didn't see him again for three whole days.

Those three days her mother had spent in bed, with her door locked most of the time. When the door was locked Viveka would press the mouth of a drinking glass to the door and her ear to the bottom of the glass — a trick she had learned from a children's spy thriller — and she would listen to her mother speak on the phone.

Now, although her mother was filling in details about Anand's death, had even said something about the timing of the party and something about her father and other women, the words remained indistinct. Viveka tried in vain to hear them against the necessary and unyielding confusion in her head.

THAT SAME MORNING, VALMIKI HAD ALREADY SEEN ABOUT
SIX
patients when his receptionist buzzed to inform him that Mrs. Prakash
was there, without an appointment. One of the benefits of close friendship with Valmiki
was that one could jump the queue and not have to wait in the hot room, breathing in
thick, germ-ridden air.

He and Devika had known Ram and Minty Prakash for almost as long as
Valmiki had been practising medicine. Ram Prakash had not finished high school, but had
done well enough in the chocolate-making business that was his family's since the
early 1900s. Ram and Minty had lived with his parents in the original estate house,
known as “Chayu,” deep in the central forested hills of Rio Claro until
their son, Nayan, was born. They had their own house built in Luminada Heights at about
the same time that Valmiki and Devika had had theirs built there, too. The Prakashs
needed their own independence, and also wanted their son to grow up in a big town with
access to a good primary school and high school. Although Ram and Minty were twenty
years older than Valmiki and Devika, the two families grew close.

Minty always had a beleaguered air about her, catering to her husband and
to Nayan, who had been born when she was in
her thirties, and who,
in retaliation against his father's heavy hand, insisted on the same kind of
treatment from her that he saw his father demand. Minty suffered with high blood
pressure and depression, and was one of the more regular visitors to Valmiki's
office.

So Valmiki was taken aback when the Mrs. Prakash who walked through his
door turned out not to be Minty, but Anick. He was struck by the particular fairness and
leanness of her face in the harsh light of his office. Devika's description,
“cultured-looking,” came to him. He thought now he understood what she had
meant, and hoped that, in the moment, he too was cultured-looking. In a deafening
instant he noticed the way Anick's flimsy spaghetti-strap dress clung to her
slight body and then hung off her hips. He weighed the advantages against the
disadvantages of being a friend of her in-laws, of being many years older than she was,
of being her doctor.

“What a lovely surprise,” he said. “You're well, I
hope. I would rather that this were not just a patient-doctor visit.”

Anick looked at him quizzically. She said nothing, and in the momentary
silence he reminded himself that the woman before him was Nayan's wife, Nayan who
was like a son to him. She was only a handful of years older than Viveka. He corrected
himself. “If I had known last night that you were coming to visit me today I could
have seen you right then in my office at home and spared you the trouble of coming
downtown.”

“Thank you, this is very kind, but I decide this morning that I need
to come to see you.”

“What brings you here?” Anick reminded Valmiki of Pia Moretti,
but not in her looks. She was nothing like Pia, really — except that she was a
foreigner, white-skinned, and about the age of Pia when he had messed around with her
several years ago. More
than a decade ago, already! His eyes rested
on the wispy baby-like hairs that strayed off Anick's hairline at her temples and
clung to the tiny beads of perspiration on her skin. Pia's hair was dark and long,
and wavy too. He wanted to take the handkerchief from his pocket and wipe Anick's
brow. The smell of Pia's hot skin returned to him. He was thinking that these
foreigners had different rules and expectations than the local women, than even the
local white women. So much more was permissible and possible with them.

In answer to Valmiki's question, Anick Prakash told him, in what he
thought of as charming half-French, half-English, that she couldn't really say
what was wrong, but that she had little energy and felt like sleeping all the time.

Valmiki said, “Hmm, maybe you're about to start a
family?”

She shrugged her shoulders, smiled weakly, and said, “No, that is
not the problem. I — what you say? I bleed already.”

Foreign women were more ready and open with that sort of information
too.

“Are you homesick?”

“I am missing my mother and my father, is true, but homesick? No, I
don't think. This is a country very nice and a good people, no? I ask you pardon
for my English. Everybody laugh at me, and nobody take the time to talk, to know
me.”

“You're not happy here.”

Anick bit her lower lip. She turned her face away as tears pooled. Valmiki
came around to her side of his desk. He half-sat, half-leaned on his desk. Resisting the
urge to put his hand to her head, to stroke her hair, he folded his arms.

“I ashame myself. I do not think to be ungrateful.”

“Anick, I want you to know that everything that goes on in this room
is private and confidential. You can talk to me, and it will be between you and me. No
one else.”

“Merci, c'est gentil.”

“Non, c'est . . . c'est . . . de rien. Je veux . . . Oh,
I have forgotten the vocabulary. Je . . . Oh dear, that's as far as I can get,
I'm afraid. I studied French when I was in high school and quite liked it, but
then I had to drop it and study Latin as Latin was the requirement for medical college.
I must brush up on my French again. We must speak French sometime. Not now, though. You
tell me what's going on. What is making you so unhappy, Anick? Is everything okay
between you and Nayan? I have to say you both looked very happy last night. Are
you?”

“Is not Nayan. He is good. He treat me good. He give me everything.
His parents they give us everything. I do not know why I feel so selfish. I miss
everything in France. This sound bizarre, no? Or selfish. Mais — but I miss to go
out, I miss to go for coffee in the nice coffee shop, to go for walk instead of car,
car, car everywhere. Nayan talk so much about cacao and monkey and wild flower when we
first come together and now he do not take me to the estate. Is talk of forest and
chocolate how we come together, he and me. We like chocolate and nuts. He chocolate, I
nuts.”

She laughed, but her laughter was sad.

“He tell me how pretty the cacao look on the tree, and how pretty is
the forest with all the cacao tree, the orange tree when it have orange on it, the
flower, the bird, the people from the village. Is nature, must be pretty, no? But I
never go there. He say is dangerous. His father don't agree for me to go there. He
don't want the workers see me. Why everybody in this place so afraid of workers?
Everybody have workers but they afraid of them. And then, is bush, bush, bush. And
snake. Is like a prison living in this country. The doors and windows in your own house
— in your own house! — always lock, you cannot go outside in your own yard,
you cannot even go for a drive. Is crazy, this place. No?”

“Yes,” said Valmiki in a soothing tone,
“but my dear, there is so much crime in this place. I mean, just look at the
headlines of the papers every day. There is at least one murder every couple of days.
Walking on the streets is actually dangerous. But I understand what you're saying,
too. You're right; it's not like abroad where you crazy foreigners walk from
one place to the next. And the estate, well, it's just not safe out there in the
quiet country areas anymore. Because there are no outward signs of violence — like
when there is a war and people can be seen with guns, and bombs go off around you
— it's hard to believe that it's not safe. But you must know of the
state of things here, don't you?”

“Yes, yes. But plenty people walk in the streets and they are
safe.”

“Those people are not Ram Prakash's daughter-in-law.
Business-people and people with money have a hard time here.”

Valmiki could see that Anick understood him but did not have the
vocabulary to carry on this particular conversation. Instead, she said, “But is
not just there that Nayan do not take me. Is nowhere. He take me nowhere. no
WHERE
. Well, not nowhere, but he take me by his friend who I have
nothing in common with. He do not want me to make nice friend.”

There was quiet as Valmiki pondered the veracity and the graveness of
this.

Anick began again. “There is no opera, and he do not go to the
exposition, or the museum. Nayan say the art gallery have nothing in it. I say, What you
mean it have nothing? And he say, Well, it have art but not good art. So I say, But I
want to know for myself, but he say is time of waste. Nayan do not read. Nobody I meet
read book. The only book he read is the one he write, the business one — how much
this yield and how much that cost.”

Valmiki thought fleetingly of Viveka. She barely
closed a book and another was already begun. A chain-reader, he called her. He was quite
certain now that he could draw Anick into an affair with him. If he were to seduce her
into an affair that was not entirely clandestine — a hint of it discreetly leaked
to one or two of his friends — he would be afforded the credibility of manliness.
She was certainly desirable — not unlike, say, a car. A Jaguar. A piece of
jewellery, say a Cartier watch, or a nice pen, a Waterman or a Mont Blanc. That was what
Anick was to Nayan, Valmiki reflected, the perfect accessory. But he knew, too, that
that was also his own interest in her. And he suddenly felt old and tired. Even if he
were to pull her into a little something with him, he wasn't sure that he would
have the energy to deal with such a young woman. Being more or less alone in the
country, she would cling to him too much. She was green, one could see that. She likely
wouldn't understand the nature and rules of a good affair. She would be more of a
liability than a thrill. Valmiki's mind wandered to Tony. He sobered immediately
and turned his mind back to his professional task.

Well, she clearly wasn't meeting the right people. She needed
friends who saw her for who she was. Friends who weren't wolves like himself, and
so many other men he knew, when presented with such vulnerability and foreignness.
Devika was perceptive when she had said that Anick was probably used to a more
culturally rich lifestyle than she would find in the Prakash family. He had never known
the Prakashs to go to cultural events. He himself went to plays and launches, but mostly
because of Devika, who scanned the social section of the paper every Saturday to see
what was showing or playing. He wondered if there was something coming up soon that they
might invite Anick to. Or something that Viveka might ask Anick and Nayan
to see with her. He suddenly had the fierce urge to be the one to
make a connection between his daughter and Anick.

“He want I dress up,” Anick was saying, “and he want
take me to meet his friend. They drink, they talk nonsense. They laugh at the way I
speak, so I do not speak no more, or I speak to be funny. Why not?”

“Oh, I am sure they are not laughing at you. But your accent —
can I say it? — is rather lovely. I mean you have a way of phrasing things that is
charming. I am sure they don't mean to laugh at you. I would bet that they, in
fact, appreciate you trying out your English. Which, by the way, is entirely
comprehensible. Your vocabulary is very good.”

“Oh, you too. I tired of charming.”

“No, no. I don't mean it in any bad sort of way. I am just
very sorry that you are having such a difficult time.”

“Dr. Krishnu . . .”

“Call me Valmiki. Nayan calls me Uncle Valmiki, but you can't
call me Uncle, now can you? You are like family.” He instantly regretted saying
this last, as it meant he had just sealed his relationship with her. He took refuge
against resignation in the odd sensation that she must see in him the old man, not the
young one he still saw. He would definitely introduce her to his daughter and put a stop
to this sad lasciviousness.