The Ivory Swing (4 page)

7

The Indian civil service and the Indian climate, Juliet thought, were engaged in a conspiracy to induce as many people as possible to opt for a life of contemplative withdrawal. It was the only way to cope. She tried pressing her fingertips together and inwardly reciting a
mantra
, the most calming she could think of:
subways
,
airports
,
intersections
;
subways
,
airports
,
intersections
.

She was sitting in the Trivandrum office of Air India. The room was crowded, the fan was not turning, the ferment of body odours was more pungent than curry, and the clerk at the desk — the sole clerk assigned to this roomful of inquiries — might have been engaged in the tranquil and delicate art of calligraphy. His movements were languid and precise, he leafed lovingly through schedules and timetables, he bestowed upon them his earnest attention, dignifying a select few with a rubber stamp. In passive deference, a man stood on the other side of the desk awaiting enlightenment. Could he, he had wished to know, get a flight to Delhi via Bangalore, instead of via Madras?

The clerk had looked at him with mournful scholarly eyes. The look had implied: Many books, possibly the Vedas themselves, will have to be consulted.

Hurricanes!
Juliet screamed silently, invoking motion.
Dancers. Ants.
One had to ward off the lassitude that lay across India like a shroud, one had to protect oneself from the sinister voraciousness of transcendental tranquillity.
Hurricanes
,
dancers
,
ants
.
Hurricanes
,
dancers
,
ants
. She beamed the incantation at the clerk's forehead but he continued with the delicate brushstrokes of his calling, impervious.

Three hours! she thought. I have been sitting here for three hours! I will truly go mad.

She was glad she had left the children to play at the house with Prabhakaran. (If only they would remember not to fish with bare hands in that polluted paddy water!) She turned over and over like worry-beads the post office card that had been delivered the preceding day. “Package from Canada. Please collect from Air India office.”

Two hours ago, the limits of her small western patience already reached, she had gone to the desk, had butted in between the current supplicant and his approaching beatitude, and had demanded politely: “I wonder if you could just tell me if I am waiting in the correct place for a parcel pick-up?”

With the sweet slow grace of a swimmer, the clerk had raised his head and contemplated her.

Is it possible, Juliet had wondered, that we are all actually under water and I alone don't realize it?

“When your name is being called,” the clerk had said reproachfully, “you may be coming to the desk and your questions are being answered, isn't it?”

Should I throw a tantrum? she wondered, surveying the quietly watching roomful of eyes. Why do they stare so incessantly, so rudely? As though I were a fish in a tank.

She had succumbed to the oppressive inaction and had sat down again, pleating the post office card between angry fingers. In the chair opposite, a gentleman in late middle age was looking at her with the kind of fixity he might give to assessing the ripeness of his jackfruit. Outraged, she stared back at him, determined to shame him into lowering his eyes.

But he gazed steadfastly on, untouched and unselfconscious.

Mr Matthew Thomas, who sat opposite Juliet, owed his name and faith, as well as his lands, to those ancestors of lowly caste whose eyes had seen the salvation of the Lord as offered by Saint Thomas the Apostle. And by later waves of Portuguese Jesuits, Dutch Protestants, and British missionaries.

Now, heir of both East and West, he sat quietly in one of the chairs at the crowded Air India office, waiting for his turn. It was necessary to make inquiries on behalf of a cousin of his wife, and although his wife had died ten years ago, these family obligations continued. The cousin, whose son was to be sent overseas for a brief period of foreign education, lived in the village of Parassala and could not get down to Trivandrum now that the rice harvest was imminent. Mr Matthew Thomas did not mind. He had much to think about on the subject of sons and daughters and foreign travel, and he was glad of this opportunity for quiet contemplation away from the noisy happiness of his son's house.

It is true that he had been waiting since 9:00 that morning and it was now 3:30 in the afternoon. It is also true that things would have been more pleasant if the ceiling fan were turning, for it was that steamy season when the monsoon is petering out, and the air hangs as still and hot and heavy as a mosquito net over a sickbed. But the fan had limped to a halt over an hour ago, stricken by the almost daily power failure, and one simply accepted such little inconveniences.

Besides, Mr Thomas could look from the comfortable vantage point of today back towards yesterday, which had also been spent at the Air India office, but since he had arrived too late to find a chair it had been necessary to stand all day. At the end of the day, someone had told him that he was supposed to sign his name in the book at the desk and that he would be called when his turn came. Wiser now, he had arrived early in the morning, signed his name, and found a chair. He was confident that his turn would come today, and until it did he could sit and think in comfort.

The problem which demanded attention, and which Mr Thomas turned over and over in his mind, peacefully and appraisingly as he might examine one of his coconuts, concerned both his married daughter in Burlington, Vermont, and the western woman waiting in the chair across from him.

Burlingtonvermont. Burlingtonvermont. What a strange word it was. This was how his son-in-law had pronounced it. His daughter had explained in a letter that it was like saying Trivandrum, Kerala. But who would ever say Trivandrum, Kerala? Why would they say it? He had been deeply startled yesterday morning to hear the word suddenly spoken aloud, just when he was thinking of his daughter. Burlingtonvermont. Some American businessman had said it to the clerk at the counter, and there had been shouting and gesticulation in that peculiar manner of Westerners, and then the man had left in a taxi. And today there was a woman, pale as snow, who might have floated in from Burlingtonvermont itself.

This is a strange and wonderful thing, he had thought. And now he understood why these two days of waiting had been ordained. Some auspicious purpose would surely be revealed.

He thought of Kumari, his youngest and favourite child. Kumari, who on her wedding day, shyly radiant, had looked so like her dead mother that Mr Matthew Thomas had had to turn away to hide his tears. What did she do in Burlingtonvermont? He tried to picture her now that she was in her confinement, her silk sari swelling slightly over his grandchild. A terrible thought suddenly presented itself to him. If she had no servants, who was marketing for her at this time when she should not leave the house? Surely she herself was not … No. His mind turned from the idea, yet the bothersome riddles accumulated.

She was in her third month now, so he knew from the four childbearings of his own wife that she would be craving for sweet mango pickle. He had written to say he would send a package of this delicacy.
Dear Daddy
, she had written back,
please do not send the sweet pickle. I have no need of anything. I am perfectly happy.

How could this be? It was true that her parents-in-law lived only five kilometres distant in the same city, and her brother-in-law and his wife also lived close by, and of course they would do her marketing and bring her the foods she craved. Of course, they were her true family now that she was married. Even so, when a woman was in the family way, it was a time when she might return to the house of her father, when she would want to eat the delicacies of the house of her birth.

He could not complain of the marriage. He was very happy with the marriages of all four of his children. They had all made alliances with Christian families of high caste. He had been able to provide handsome dowries for his daughters, and the wives of his sons had brought both wealth and beauty with them. God had been good.

But it was four years since he had seen Kumari. The week after her wedding her husband and his family had returned to America, where they had been living for many years. Only to arrange the marriages of their sons had they come back to Kerala. The arrangements had been made through the mail. Mr Thomas had been content because the family was distantly related on his wife's side and he had known them many years ago, before they had left for America. So they had come, the wedding had taken place, and they had gone.

For four years Mr Matthew Thomas had waited with increasing anxiety. What is a father to think when his daughter does not bear a child in all this time? Now, as God was merciful, a child was coming. Yet she had written:
Dear Daddy
,
please do not send the sweet pickle. I am perfectly happy.

It had been the same when he had expressed his shock at her not having servants.
Dear Daddy
, she had written,
you do not understand
,
Here we are not needing servants. The machines are doing everything. Your daughter and your son-in-law are very happy.
Of course this was very reassuring, if only he could really believe it. He worried about the snow and the cold. How was it possible to live with such cold? He worried about the food. The food in America is terrible, some businessmen at the Secretariat had told him. It is having no flavour. In America, they are not using any chili peppers. And yet, even at such a time as this, she did not want the sweet pickle. Could it mean that she had changed, that she had become like a western woman?

He looked steadily and intently at the tourist woman. Certainly, he thought, my daughter will be one of the most beautiful women in America. White women were so unattractive. It was not just their wheat-coloured hair, which did indeed look strange, but they seemed to have no understanding of the proper methods of beauty. They let their hair fly as dry and fluffy as rice chaff at threshing time instead of combing it with coconut oil so that it hung wet and glossy.

The woman was wearing a sari. Certainly that was better than the other western women he had sometimes seen at the tourist hotel, although in fact one rarely saw Westerners in Trivandrum. The ones he had seen usually wore trousers like a man. It was amazing that American men allowed their women to appear so ugly. True, he had heard it said that women in the north of India wore trousers, but Mr Thomas did not believe it. An Indian woman would not do such a thing. Once he had seen a white woman in a short dress, of the kind worn by little girls, with half her legs brazenly showing. He had turned away in embarrassment.

Mr Thomas was pleased that the woman who might be from Burlingtonvermont was wearing a sari. Still, it did not look right with pale skin and pale hair. It is the best she can do, he concluded to himself. It is simply not possible for them to look beautiful, no matter what they do.

Then his name was called and he went to the counter.

Juliet thought: I will not tolerate this any longer, I will not. Yet if I simply give up and leave, how will I ever receive the parcel from home? Could I face this again on a different day? Never! But I cannot, I simply cannot sit here any longer. I will count to ten and then I will stand on this chair and scream.

On her count of eight, the door to an inner sanctum opened at one side of the room and a civil servant, by the mere hauteur of his eyebrows clearly superior to the desk clerk, surveyed the room for a moment and then withdrew, closing his door again. With the speed of impulse and exasperation, Juliet crossed the floor, knocked, and entered without waiting for a response.

The superior being was startled.

“Excuse me,' Juliet said. “But I have been waiting over three hours for an opportunity to ask a very simple question. I know you'll be embarrassed by this inefficiency. I know you'll want to do something about it immediately.”

She held the post office card out to him.

“This is not the correct place,” he said, making no move to take it. “You must be waiting for the clerk at the desk in the other room.”

“I'm afraid I will not be waiting one more insufferable minute for the clerk in the other room.” Juliet spoke very quietly, looked the man squarely in the eyes, and fabricated with deadly intent: “My husband has powerful friends in the government, and there is going to be much trouble for somebody because of this delay.”

A pallor, like the blanching of cashew nuts left out in the sun, passed across the man's face.

“There has been some mistake, dear lady. We are being most distressful, most distressful. You are having our fullest attention.” He took the card from her and snapped his fingers so that a servant girl appeared from behind a screen. “Please be bringing mango juice!” he ordered her. He examined the card carefully. “I am giving this my most immediate attention. Most immediate!”

Then he left the room and Juliet sipped iced juice.

Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Here we go again, she thought.

And then he reappeared, the quintessence of regret. “I am making very thorough investigations, very thorough, I assure you. There is absolutely no parcel for you at Air India office, Mrs Professor. But I am making a racket, I promise you. Jolly bad show! I am telephoning the post office and discussing. It is their silly fault, all their fault. It is all a mistake. There was no parcel, no, absolutely never. They are assuring me. Jolly bad show, all this waiting. I am begging you to forgive.”

Juliet stood as in a dream. Am I awake? Will peacocks swoop from the desk drawers?

She had to struggle against some demon of hysterical laughter that cavorted deep in her throat. “I am forgiving you,” she spluttered. “I am absolutely forgiving you. Isn't it?”