Nothing Like Love (9 page)

Chandani eyed Om’s gut and then turned away again. He stood there for a while, waiting for her to say something, to move more than an inch this way or that, to scowl, even to sigh. She did nothing. This was not the woman he had married.

The next day Om lumbered up the stairs and found Chandani standing in the middle of the room, studying a photograph on the wall: Vimla as a baby. Chandani was dressed in black and this time her hair was knotted into a severe bun at her nape. Today she looked like she was attending someone else’s funeral. Om groaned loudly to announce his presence and then flopped onto the bed. It creaked under his weight, and continued to whimper as he sprawled his giant limbs into a starfish position across it.

Chandani studied Vimla’s laughing eyes in the picture.

“Chand, I wouldn’t ask you to cook anything today.” He rubbed his stomach luxuriously. “My belly full.”

Chandani traced Vimla’s lopsided smile with a finger.

“In fact,” he went on, “you don’t have to cook for me ever again. You could just sit up here and rest forever.”

Chandani didn’t move, but Om knew she was listening now.

“I went over to Sangita and Rajesh Gopalsinghs’ house for lunch and dinner. Sangita invite me when she see me buying doubles at the doubles stand today. It was a good thing—”

Chandani whirled on him then, her eyes ablaze.

Relief zipped through Om, but he wanted more. “A real good thing she see me buying street food and invite me over. I was getting tired of eating oily doubles every day.” He paused for a moment, just before the climax. “She send some food for you, too. She know you ain’t cooking much these days.”

Om noted the rise and fall of Chandani’s small chest with glee. She was breathing heavily now.

“You should ask Sangita how she does make she coconut chutney, Chand. It have a different kind of zing than yours,” he mused.

Chandani moved then, swiftly down the stairs and into the kitchen. She made a racket with her pots and spoons and all her stomping about. Om chuckled; the bed squeaked. The kitchen din went on for some time and Om wondered if Chandani was whipping up another dinner for him, something to top Sangita’s, he hoped. He licked his lips in anticipation.

Chandani returned minutes later with her dutiful
belna
in hand and a deep scowl on her lips. Om smiled. How beautiful she was. But when she charged toward him with the rolling pin raised high above her head, his smile faltered. He received
a solid blow to his belly before he managed to haul himself off the bed. When she raised the rolling pin to strike again, he caught it in his giant hand and the sharp sting of the slap quivered through his fingers. Om wrenched the belna from her grasp and stuck it gruffly in his back pocket and then hoisted Chandani over his shoulder, kicking and quarreling. Down the stairs they went, straight into the kitchen. Om set his wife down in front of the stove. He retrieved her belna from his back pocket and handed it to her, which she accepted.

Chandani began to make dough, mixing water into a small basin of flour as she raged on. How could Om have added to her humiliation? First Vimla was discovered gallivanting in Chance’s bush with Krishna Govind, then Vimla lost her teaching job at Saraswati Hindu School and now Om was taking meals cooked by the neighbours! She would die with the legacy of an unfit mother and wife, she declared, kneading and punching the dough.

Om looked on from the kitchen table, satisfied. He strummed his fat fingers on the red-and-white plastic tablecloth to the tune of his wife’s rage.

“You
coonoomoonoo!
It was Sangita who see Vimla that night!” Chandani said, stabbing the air with her belna as she cut Om down with her razor stare. When Om looked back at her blankly, Chandani attacked the dough with aggressive sweeps of the rolling pin. “Sangita go spread the news for all of Chance to hear: Chandani Narine have a jammette for a daughter and a greedy jackass for a husband.” She peeled the dough off its smooth surface, sprinkled some flour onto the counter and dropped the dough back with a slap. When it was made smooth and flat under her abuse,
Chandani expertly transferred it to the flat, cast-iron pan, a
tawa
, to cook.

Om was not bothered by the insults. In fact, he found himself aroused by the pairing of belligerence and culinary skills. When Chandani tilted the tawa at an angle off the stove burner so that the dough swelled into a delicious balloon, Om felt a similar hot rising and swelling in his body. Chandani quickly flipped the inflated roti over on the tawa and grimaced at him. Om smiled back at her adoringly. He had missed her.

That evening Om and Chandani ate and cussed, respectively, well into the night. A stranger might have found their relationship dysfunctional, even borderline abusive, but to Vimla, who lay listening in the hammock just outside the kitchen, they were a perfect picture of love. She pulled the sides of the flour bag hammock up around her body, the rough textile scratching against her exposed arms. But the makeshift cocoon didn’t ward off her loneliness; in fact, it only made her isolation more pronounced.

That evening the sun dissolved so quickly into the cobalt sky Vimla felt cheated. Now the only light escaped from the kitchen and cast itself in a scalene triangle on the dark concrete beneath the hammock, pointing accusingly at her. Everywhere else there was blackness. Amid the nighttime noises she heard the swish of the island breeze stirring some leaves awake, and from every direction the ceaseless cry of the cicada, competing unsuccessfully with Chandani’s tirade. Vimla let go the ends of the hammock. She dropped a long leg over the side and pushed off on the concrete with a bare toe.
She swung like that in the darkness for a while, surrounded by bush, suspended in thought until the last triangle of light vanished from the floor and Om and Chandani marched up the stairs to bed.

V
imla led her father’s cow and bull into the field by two fraying ropes. This was the best part of Vimla’s day. It didn’t matter that the sun beat down mercilessly on her, or that her only company was two sad-eyed animals that grew increasingly moody in her presence. Vimla could escape her mother’s reproving looks in the field and that was all that mattered.

Of course, that didn’t mean she was happy. She had lost her chance at happiness the moment she lost touch with Krishna. After that, life had become unbearable. Vimla knew she had disgraced her parents; that her name was on every gossip’s tongue in the village; that she would never teach at Saraswati Hindu School. But it was the absence of Krishna Govind from her world that shook her to the very core.

She sighed, absent-mindedly shooing a fly from the cow’s
ear. The cow moaned deep in her chest as if to say she, too, was above the company of Vimla Narine.

“Vimi!”

Vimla heard Minty’s voice before she saw her hiding at the edge of the sugar cane.

“Minty, what you doing here?” Vimla dropped the animals’ ropes and leaped through the savannah grass toward her friend, flinging her arms around Minty’s clammy neck.

Minty hugged Vimla quickly then pulled her to the ground.

“I sorry.” Minty rocked back and forth on her haunches, her meaty elbows resting on her knees. Her smooth, milky skin was pinched by adult-worry, and there were faint shadows beneath her black, almond-shaped eyes. She usually kept her sleek hair in a neat plait that wound down her back, but today her mane spread across her back like a veil.

“What you sorry for, Mints?”

The dimple in Minty’s chin quivered. “It was my mother who tell everybody about you and Krishna.” She wrung the hem of her dress.

Vimla sucked her teeth. “Gyul, I done find that out already. I can’t keep a secret from Trinidad, and Trinidad can’t keep a secret from me.” She smiled at Minty to show there were no hard feelings.

Minty’s shoulders sagged in relief, as if she’d been balancing the guilt across them for days, and her pinched expression slackened just enough to show the rosy glow of a young teenaged girl. Suddenly her eyes lit up. “So, how was it?”

Vimla brushed the back of her hand across her perspiring forehead. “How was what?”

“How was Mr. Pundit … in the bush?” Her lips twitched with mischief.

Vimla giggled. “You so fast, Minty.” She looked away. “We ain’t do nothing except talk.”

“Talk? What allyuh talk about?”

Vimla shrugged. How could she tell Minty that she and Krishna had spent hours planning their lives together? She shivered despite the heat; their plans hadn’t even made it through the night.

“Minty, suppose your mother catch you here? She go cut-cut your tail if she know you talking to me.”

Minty stared at Vimla, her mouth drooping at the corners. “I come to tell you something.”

Vimla caught the pity in her friend’s eyes. She swallowed hard. “So, he getting married.”

Minty nodded. “Soon.”

“To who?”

“A girl called Chalisa Shankar from St. Joseph.”

Vimla’s stomach lurched. She had known this would happen, but she hadn’t expected it so soon. She’d lain awake night after night wondering if Krishna would be picky about his bride, if he’d try resisting the marriage altogether, if he’d suddenly miss her and come for her in the night. But the fact that Krishna hadn’t put up a fight, had resigned himself to a loveless marriage, hurt Vimla so much she thought her heart would stop beating right there in the field.

“Are you sure? How you know?”

“Auntie Maya tell my mother so.” Minty lowered her gaze. “She rather Mammy be she friend than she enemy—Mammy know too much about you and Krishna, you see.”

Vimla understood. She could still hear Sangita Gopalsingh’s shrill voice in the dead of the night calling her a jammette for all the neighbours to hear. Vimla shuddered.

“But so fast, Minty?”

Chalisa nodded. “Chalisa’s parents dead in a car crash two years ago. They tumble off a cliff and the car burst into flames.”

Vimla’s eyes widened.

“She old nanny does mind she now and want a marriage fix for Chalisa before she and all dead. They was looking for a good Hindu boy from a good Hindu family. When they meet Krishna, they arrange everything one-time.”

Vimla scowled. She picked idly at the grass. “What else?”

“Chalisa and she small brother have plenty money. They inherit big-big orange estates after they parents dead. Mammy say they more rich than Nanny self!”

“Oh.” Vimla brushed her mop of unruly hair over her shoulder. “Chalisa Shankar. She pretty?”

Minty looked her square in the face. “She like a old crapaud.”

Vimla burst into tears. Krishna was too vain to marry someone who looked like a frog; Minty was the worst liar she knew.

Chandani looked like she’d been chewing a sour green mango when Vimla returned thirty minutes later. She rounded on Vimla the moment her slippers slapped against the concrete of the house. “People is laughing at we!” Her spittle rained down like missiles.

Vimla stared back at her dumbly. She was still digesting the news of Krishna’s marriage.

“That pork-
chamar
Pundit Anand is marrying he duncy-head son to a next little jammette from St. Joseph!”

Vimla should have been appalled by her mother’s foul ejaculations, but by now they were as commonplace as the kiskadees’ evening song. She wasn’t surprised Pundit Anand had been reduced to a blasphemous pork-eating fiend, that Krishna’s future wife had acquired the same slack status as herself; her mother saw good in no one these days. Vimla manoeuvred around Chandani to the standpipe for a cup of water, but Chandani trailed behind her, the veins in her wild-turkey neck throbbing with every livid heartbeat.

“Those kiss-me-ass people invite the whole island to the wedding
—except we!
” Chandani stomped her skinny foot, scattering a knot of pecking hens that had wandered boldly into the house.

Vimla, hot and pitifully heartbroken, downed the cool water in her peeling enamel cup and dropped it with a clatter to the floor. “I go stop that wedding, Ma!”

Chandani recoiled as if she’d been cuffed. Then she removed her slipper and lunged madly at her daughter. “Blasted—ungrateful—little—wretch!”

Vimla took off around the house, sweating and crying. She had never seen her mother move so quickly in all her life, never seen her so determined to injure. She considered sprinting into the street in the hope a neighbour would come to her aid, but the truth was, Chandani’s invective would faster draw cheers and applause than sympathy from the district. She circled the house another time, hoping to tire her mother out instead.

“You ain’t embarrass me and your father enough? Keep
your ass home, you hear me?” Chandani launched her old slipper into the air like a discus and hit Vimla square in the backside.

It was two days and two nights before the entire district caught word that Krishna Govind was going to marry a pretty girl named Chalisa Shankar from St. Joseph. Chance began to vibrate with a special kind of energy; people anticipated this wedding like no other. Many thought this would be the biggest wedding the district had ever seen, since pundits tended to marry their children with even greater ceremony than the average Hindu family. Others felt honoured that Chance was hosting the likes of Chalisa Shankar. But most people were excited because they knew the sensational scandal that was the catalyst for this hasty wedding.