Open-air electric-blue laid out in an oblong, and Vikram dives into it. Speed and perfectibility — the white sky shattering announces his departure from the air with a thousand gongs. Bubbles tumble. Deep in the water, Vikram turns with strength. He reemerges all brightness.
That girl he married does not know when she’s lucky. Like she doesn’t remember she married a man she could talk to. You should see Vikram at a family get-together. You know the way women stand about in groups by themselves? Well, he will go over and talk to the women. He can talk about anything — scandal, international politics, people living abroad. And he will tell the women that looking pale doesn’t mean looking good, that they should not be afraid of getting a little suntan or putting on a little weight, that the most beautiful women in the world are from this country. He offers to top up their whiskey if they are the kind of educated women who drink because they still feel they have something to prove. Vikram is a bit of a radical since he got back from Away, a little bohemian. He knows how to debate, in dialect and in formal English, and he knows how to respect a woman’s intelligence. Whenever Cheryl or Ambika is at one of these dos, he will talk with them ’specially now and then during the evening. You should hear the kinds of things they discuss. Legalizing abortion! Turning a blind eye to homosexuality! But you know, he can be very nice to the children. Even when they grow up and go away, they will always remember him for the little books and things he used to bring back for them when he was studying. It’s so nice when you see that happen in a family.
When Vikram has dived, he is alone. Maureen should be there to watch him. Even six months ago, before she started drinking and getting ideas, she would have been there on a deckchair, wearing sunglasses and one of those dresses that make her look like Miss Brazil. She has a sense of style, though she went to live with her aunt in England and then to Art College, which is why she hardly knows Trinidad at all.
Vikram loves Maureen too-too bad. He dwells on the nice figure she had when they met. Maybe it fooled Vikram up, how Maureen tossed her hair and shoulders and giggled, wriggling string-bean legs. Poor Vikram is a boy, after all. Despite her veneer of intellectualism, he must have seen what she had in common with the girls at home, the most beautiful girls in the world.
Maureen and Vikram have been living apart for all of three days. What is there for her to do alone in that house on the hill? Hog it all to herself and her third, barely-there, pregnant bump? She and her days’ worth of dirty plates on the floor, waiting for her husband to return and fetch and carry and pick up after her, as if he had nothing better to do? And like any nice boy, isn’t her husband hard to convince that he has nothing better to do? Three days’ worth of convincing has not convinced him back up the hill.
You should see how patient he is. It must be twenty times in the last three days that he has had this conversation:
“So how come you are the one to move out?”
He shrugs. “She threaten me with lawyers, police, all kind of thing, I don’t know. Sometimes I’m afraid she hasn’t... adjusted... so well. But if this is how she feels for the moment, this is how she feels. She is my princess and she must have her space.”
Who could believe ingratitude like Maureen’s? It’s true she did not throw his clothes out on the lawn, or pull a gun on him, or change all the locks. If she’d wanted an excuse, she had one after the thing with the maid that they both tried to hush up. But it’s ungrateful of her to allow him to just leave voluntarily. If Vikram was intent on leaving for her sake, and Maureen loved him, why didn’t she lock up the house and abandon it and follow? How could she be so ready to abandon her born children and let their grandmother take them away?
Why is she not there as she used to be — with that naughty-but-nice English-girl look, not straightforward — waiting to offer him a cool drink, pink and green in a rock crystal tumbler, a nip of something else in it. And his clean-cut refusal.
“It’s only temporary. She needs her space.” Vikram speaks in his American voice, a voice that conveys hurt, together with the smile where the eyebrows quirk up in the middle while the corners of the eyelids droop — a good face set against a bad fate.
“You mean she let you leave? What a bloody selfish cow!” shouts Ambika, who spent a year at the English college with Maureen.
“Maureen looks so quiety-quiety, but you can never tell,” Auntie Kirti mourns, frowning at Ambika’s strong language. “Your wife really string you along, boy. She is ungrateful. Neemakharam. A taker. What space she need so? Maureen should be minding her family. She even have a place to live here if it wasn’t for you? But what you worrying about her for? I can see you worrying. Here, you want something else to eat? Take something nah, take something and eat nah, you need your strength for your studies. For your job.”
“You stupid or what?” Petal the Matriarch scorns her mealy-mouthed sister. “The bitch good, yes. She eh play she lucky! She lucky for true! My son leaving she with the marital home while he traipse back long-face and tail between he legs to his mother’s house? And I minding she children since I don’t know when and I don’t know for how long! But what kind of blasted arseness is this? You stay here as long as you want, Son. Your welcome will never wear out here. I went to college in England too, for well longer than she, but I know I come back home for Independence, I not going to talk like she. She have house and land and children and husband, and now she have she space.”
Women of the generation of Petal the Matriarch can use bad words without shocking anybody. They started doing so forty years ago, after their marriages, when they acquired their own homes. But Petal makes “space” sound so deeply obscene that everyone is quiet for three seconds.
“He get thin, eh? How you looking so thin? How she have you so? Like she bewitch you! Look how thin he get! But what happen, like Maureen never used to feed you? Come and eat, boy, sit down and relax, sit down and eat.”
“He’s not any thinner than he wants to be, Auntie Kirti,” Ambika drawls. “He’s always down the gym, watching his figure.” She taps her cigarette into a red-and-black plastic ashtray on an ivory inlaid table. The Matriarch looks outraged.
“I have a little paunch,” interjects Cheryl. She places her glittering hands on either side of the concavity around which she has strung a belt. “You see? I am getting a little paunch.”
“How much do you weigh?” asks Ambika, with interest.
“One hundred and twelve pounds. You know, eight stone.”
“And you are how tall? What, five-foot-four? You shouldn’t weigh more than a hundred and four pounds. That is your ideal weight.”
Anyone can see how Vikram misses Maureen — misses her enough to get vexed. But he won’t say anything. He won’t do anything. He is a gentle man.
“You don’t worry, Beta,” says Auntie Kirti. “What that girl did was totally out of order. But you don’t worry about her. I have told my maid to get a taxi and go up there and spend two hours a day every morning until that girl is up and about again.”
“People don’t expect a young lady to get into those sorts of state, do they?”
“Mind your own business, Ambika. I am concerned for the girl,” croons Cheryl. “It seem to me she has not adjusted well. Maybe she will need to go away for a little while until she feels better.”