Nothing Like Love (42 page)

Minty whirled on him. “Because somebody have to stay here and watch you, Faizal.” She smiled. “I go see you at the wedding later.” She flung his belongings into the frangipani tree and was gone.

R
ajesh ambled naked through the house, dripping water onto the floor. “Sangita, where my towel?” He followed the ring of her anklets and found her gliding around the sewing room in a plum nightgown as translucent as a jellyfish.

Sangita spun around, her damp hair following a millisecond after. “Look how you wetting up the floor!” The dreaminess faded from her slanted eyes. “Check the cupboard, Raj.”

He stayed rooted in the doorway. “I did. It ain’t there.”

The strap of Sangita’s nightgown slid off her shoulder and she restored it with an impatient flip of her thumb. “I find you up early this morning,” she said, crossing the room to the teak armoire in the corner.
Tink! Tink! Tink!
She yanked open the doors, bangles rattling at her wrists, and stopped.

“Raj?”

Rajesh wished he’d pulled on a pair of shorts at least. “Is a bunch of periwinkle flowers,” he said gruffly.

“Of course it is. I know that.” She tickled her nose with the miniature bouquet. “But in the cupboard?”

Rajesh tried to read the unusual set of Sangita’s lips. Was she angry? He puffed out his broad chest and crossed his arms over it, filling the entire doorway. “Is a surprise for you,” he said.

Sangita arched an eyebrow at him. “For me? A surprise for me, Raj?” She rose onto her toes so that she could look him in the eye. “In eighteen years, you never once surprise me.” She narrowed her cat eyes at him. “Not once. So—”

“What about that extra piece of land I buy in the back there?” Rajesh jutted his thumb over his shoulder. “You was real surprise to see how much crop bare on that land.”

“Crop?” Sangita turned the flowers round in her hands.

“And the pen for the cows. That pen didn’t build itself. I build it in the hot sun for you.”

“For me?”

“For your cows.”

“My cows?” She tapped her honey décolletage with a finger.

“Well
—we
cows.”

“Hmm.” Sangita peered closer into Rajesh’s face. “You up to something, Raj.”

The floorboards groaned under Rajesh’s shifting weight. He had played this scene over in his mind a dozen times through the night and a dozen more during this morning’s chilly shower, and in none of those versions did Sangita accuse him of being “up to something.” In fact, in one of his more
liberal imaginings, he and Sangita had ended up making love in the hammock amid a scattering of periwinkles.

“Are you blushing?” Sangita asked.

Rajesh did not blush; at least, he didn’t think so. “Sangita, throw me a towel, nuh! You don’t see I standing up here naked?”

She swished back to the armoire and Rajesh sighed. It was those damn eyes of hers. Startlingly tawny. Soul penetrating. Animal eyes. They undid him every time, made him play the ass when he wanted very much to show her how much he cherished her.

Perhaps the periwinkles had been a mistake. Perhaps—Rajesh darkened—the seer man was full of shit.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Rajesh glanced out the window. There was Faizal Mohammed’s kiss-me-ass parrot flapping his wings as he strutted along the fence. “The Love Boat!” the parrot squawked. Rajesh cringed. He wanted to wring its neck as much as he wanted to wring Faizal Mohammed’s, but that would only vex Sangita. She had quarrelled with him the day he’d cuffed Faizal, as if—what? She cared for him? Rajesh scowled just as a towel arced through the air and smacked him in the face.

“Surprise!” Sangita’s laughter was like the peal of bells.

Rajesh’s expression softened; a hesitant smile spread its way across his face. He wrapped the towel snugly around his waist and decided to try again.

“The flowers is like your sari,” Rajesh said, gesturing casually to the sari she’d pressed the night before. It was draped over a chair by the window. The intricate beadwork caught the early-morning sunshine and threw playful designs on the whitewashed wall. It was gold and periwinkle blue.

Sangita looked from the flowers in her hand to the sari and back again. She fingered the delicate petals of a single blossom one by one as if she’d never seen a periwinkle before.

“Ain’t it matching?” Raj lifted the sari off the chair and held it in the light pouring through the window. “Is the same blue, I think.” His forehead crinkled. “Deepa at Deepa Textiles say it is the same blue.”

Sangita’s lips just barely curved at the corners. “Deepa Textiles?”

Rajesh sucked his teeth to hide his embarrassment. “Never mind that!”

She hid her mouth behind the spray of flowers, but her eyes shimmered with amusement. “Deepa was right, Raj,” she said.

Rajesh cleared his throat. “Good. You’re welcome.” He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, not knowing where to look or what to do next, and so he said, “Where my shirt and pants for the wedding? Everything done press?” Although he could see his clothes hanging neatly from a hanger in the open closet. He noticed Sangita had embroidered his shirt collar and cuffs with gold threading, and replaced the plain white buttons with pearly fastens instead. She had been busy. Should he thank her?

Sangita laid her flowers next to her sewing machine and handed Rajesh his suit of clothes. “Raj?”

“What?” He sounded surly, but only because she had interrupted his thoughts.

“What you want me to do with the flowers? Hold them? Put them in a vase?”

Rajesh regarded her as if she’d asked him to sell all his land or, worse, take up house with that panty-man Faizal Mohammed. “Sangita, they for your hair, girl.”

She blinked her mysterious eyes at him.

He sucked his teeth again, flustered. “Never mind. Meet me in the garden when you done dress,” he said, striding out the door. “And bring the flowers with you. I going to finish my tea.”

“Tea!” Sangita dissolved into girlish giggles as he rounded the corner down the hallway. “Since when you does drink tea? Rajesh Gopalsingh, you wake up real crazy this morning!”

He shrugged. Maybe she was right, but he was certain Sangita hadn’t laughed that way with him in years.

He waited for her under the shady mango tree, his back pressed against the steady trunk. A warm breeze whispered in the branches and set the leaves a-quiver. Rajesh inhaled the sweet scent of ripe mangoes and felt his nerves drift away.

He checked to make sure he’d remembered everything. There was the stool for Sangita to sit on, and there, just next to it, a makeshift table of cardboard where her hairpins were laid out. Beside the pins, a cup of coffee with sugar and cream sat steaming in the already hot day.

Rajesh inclined his head to the ringing of Sangita’s footfalls, accompanied this time by a song. He closed his eyes and listened. It was an old wedding song, and not just any: it was his, or rather,
theirs
. Buoyed, Rajesh welcomed Sangita under the mango tree with an uncharacteristic flourish of his arm.

Her sari was lovely, yes, but it was her body curving beneath the drapes and folds of the ethereal fabric, and the flecks of light dancing through her curious eyes that made Sangita so achingly beautiful in that moment. Her very movements made music: bells at her feet, bangles at her wrists, gold hangers
jingling from her lobes. When had Rajesh stopped noticing this? She cast him a coy look and something stirred deep in his heart.

“Sit,” he said, guiding her toward the stool.

She obliged but swivelled to face him, the flowers in her lap. “I just waiting for my hair to dry before I plait it and weave the periwinkles through,” she said.

Rajesh laughed. “A plait? No.” He circled the stool so that he stood behind Sangita again and in one motion swept the heavy mass of her inky hair off her neck.

“Rajesh! What you—?”

“Wait, nuh, girl!” Rajesh began to coil Sangita’s hair, twisting the long rope of it again and again against the back of her head until he’d fashioned a bun.

“Rajesh Gopalsingh, you gone mad. You really gone mad!”

“Sangita, you want your bun to come out loose and lopsided? You want to look like a one-horned ram goat? Wait!”

Rajesh fumbled with the dainty hairpins. Some were lost in the grass, others contorted under the pressure of his thick fingers. But the pins he salvaged he jammed in and around Sangita’s bun to secure it in place.

“Rajesh, those hairpins chooking like nails!” Sangita winced.

“Sorry, sorry!”

“Hear, boy: you could cut cane, and you could mind animal, and you could own plenty land, but you is no hairdresser!”

Rajesh could hear her smiling. He reached over her shoulder and extracted the bouquet from her fingers. And then, with the hands that so capably wielded a cutlass in the cane field, Rajesh pinned each periwinkle flower into Sangita’s bun until the entire twist was covered in blue blossoms.

“Miss Lady,” he teased, “maybe I look like a big dotish ass, but I had eight sisters, and if is one thing I could do, is dress a woman’s bun with flowers.”

Sangita tilted her head back and laughed, and seeing this as his chance, Rajesh placed his big hands on either side of her face, leaned forward and kissed his wife.

From next door, Rajesh heard the unmistakable
thwack
of a coconut broom pelted against the fence. “Motherfucking mangoes, Sam. You see that?”

Rajesh closed his eyes and smiled into the soft peaks of Sangita’s lips.

“O
h Bhagwan, give me strength.” Anand staggered backward in a haze of sandalwood smoke. Maya extracted the incense sticks from his fingers and Krishna lowered him gently into a chair on the veranda. “Kaywattie pick up a creole man in Tobago and bring him
here
?
Now?
” he said.

Maya’s eyes were round with panic. “Don’t watch, Anand,” she pleaded. “You go send up your pressure.” She smoothed the hair back around her face, but it only sprang up again.

Krishna saw his father grip the sides of his chair, noted the tremor in his loose, fleshy jowls and knew it was too late for that. “She couldn’t put on something better than that for the wedding?” he said. “Short-short hair, short-short skirt! And
don’t talk about that dreadlock fella with the captain’s hat.” He hid his hands in his face and groaned.

Krishna shuffled uncomfortably at Anand’s side. Auntie Kay and Dutchie hadn’t come to Trinidad for a wedding; they had come to whisk Vimla and Krishna away to Tobago on the
The Reverie
. But early that morning, when Krishna had arrived at the designated meeting spot behind Lal’s Rum Shop, alone and heartbroken, he had set their plans terribly awry.

“What you mean, she ain’t want to live in Tobago?” Dutchie had asked, incredulous.

“Oh, dahlin.” Auntie Kay had stroked the side of Krishna’s drawn face, her own eyes gleaming with tears. “Let we set sail for home.”

But Krishna wouldn’t go. If Vimla refused to run away to Tobago with him, then he would stay in Trinidad, marry Chalisa Shankar, do right by his father and …

“Anand, you see how your sister behaving like she ain’t have morals?” Maya said, jarring Krishna from his thoughts.

“I thought you tell me don’t watch!” Anand snapped, although Krishna could see his father peeking through splayed fingers at the spectacle below.

Auntie Kay turned here and there, rising onto her toes and throwing herself into various open arms. She wore every colour on her dress in a print both mesmerizing and maddening to the eyes. The twirl of her skirt was like peering through a kaleidoscope and each person she smiled at lit up like a diya. Dutchie followed close behind. He doffed his white captain’s hat at everyone who enveloped Auntie Kay and bowed gallantly to the children who scampered after him to touch his red-brown dreadlocks. In a matter of minutes Auntie Kay and
Dutchie were at the very heart of the wedding chaos and everyone rotated around them as if they were twin suns.