Caribbean Moon, Indian Bride--Part Eleven

 Click here for Beginning of Story
Continued from Part Ten

When Arkah heard Morris’s story about Savita, softness and sympathy clouded his eyes. He said to Morris, “Can I help her in any way, like giving her some money?”

Morris bared his teeth like an enraged jaguar. “What? What is the matter with you, Ark?”

Arkah threw back his arms on the sofa. “We had nice times, you know. She was the woman who had given me the first taste of life. . . ” He trailed out into silence, memories inundating him. The day when Bansi had asked him to go to Redeemer Corner to buy a second-hand Ferguson tractor came back to him, Redeemer Corner a village on the Essequibo Coast. Eager to accomplish Bansi’s request, he crossed to Rika and boarded the steamer, Toucan, choosing a seat at the stern on the second storey.

When the steamer blew its signal for departure, a teenage girl in a pink dress came and perched on a stool six yards away from him. She seemed to be immersed in her own world, her face sombre yet beautiful with bright eyes. Arkah wondered whether she was Portuguese but her thick black hair, neat cheek bones, and full lips made her a facsimile of the Sindhi actress Sadhana. Yet, her body, slim and lithe, would say she had a yearn to be like Aubrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.

She looked prettier when the wind dispersed her hair. Arkah wanted to say something to start a conversation, but when he saw the cross look in her eyes, he averted his eyes and pretended study of the aftermath streams, swirls, and ruffles of the vessel’s propellers. He loved to sit here and watch the steamer moving between the islands of the Essequibo River, leaping waves yielding to placid streams, mud-coloured water becoming coffee-hued, sun-capped furrows melting to gleaming fleeces.

Soon the sun disappeared, the steamer lights came on, and the wind blew harder. The Sadhana-like girl took out her make-up kit from her handbag and powered her face, brightened her lipstick, and darkened her eyelash. Arkah watched her with covert eyes through the gaps of his fingers. She was a beauty any man would want to gaze at.

The ship made a sudden swerve and rendered its stern to a squall that had been developing, blowing up the hem of the girl’s dress. Trying to cover her legs back, her handbag fell out of her hand, papers and notes flying out of it. Anguish, distress, and desperation seized face when she saw twenty-dollar notes fluttering out of her bag and whirling and zooming toward the bars of the rail to seek freedom in the river. She could not go after them since her hands had to stay on her dress.

Seeing her plight, Arkah rose and scrambled for the notes. He retrieved all except one that had flown over his head and wheeled into the sky like a kite losing its twine.

He led her to the cabin, where the wind could not assail them. Torn between relief and affliction, she stared at him speechless, her eyes and throat rolling. He put the notes back in her bag and dropped himself on a stool. She, too, flung herself on a stool, glowed in silence for a while, and said, “You save all the money me work foh three month.”

His forehead furrowed. “You earn a lot. What work you do?”

            “A floral designer.”

           

            “Then you’re a celebrity.”

            “Me is not a celebrity. A celebrity not going to work hard like me foh the little me get.”

            “The little you get?”

She smiled wryly. You think me has a golden spoon in me mouth, eh?’

            “You have more than a golden spoon. You have diamond stars in your eyes.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Me accustom to sweet talk like that, you know.”

            “I can see that.”

            “You belong to Essequibo Coast?”

            “No. Hoogenheim Island.”

Excitement twinkled in her eyes. “Me hear than down there have plenty ah flowers.”

He shook with reproach. “Flowers? The only good thing you can see in my island is flowers?”

She sucked her teeth and shot him a look of equal reproach. “Why does many men always jumps back when they hears woman talking about flowers?”

            “But Hoogenheim has better things than flowers to ask about.”

She clasped her lips in assertiveness. “Me is a floral designer, you know.”

            “Oh,” he said, sinking into conjecture. Perhaps, he thought, that the flying twenty-dollar notes had a connection to her floral design sales. And though he had no interest in her work, only a yearning to hear her speak, he asked her about the things she made. Her eyes luminous with pride, her fingers fluttering, she embarked on a dense lecture on vertical, crescent, and oval arrangements. Then, after explaining how she would make her designs with foam, glue, pins and sprays, she sank into a gloomy exposition of bouquets, boutonnieres, corsages, and centre pieces.

Arkah restrained a yawn, feigned enthusiasm, waiting his moment to drop anchor and fish in her beauty.

            “What village you live?” she asked.

He told her, his mind severed from his words, his thoughts wandering into a realm of topaz feelings; and she, a crystal galaxy, raining down on him, a medley of splendours. Her face, hands, tresses, lips, the heavenly lakes in her eyes, the angel swans swimming in them, lulled him into a world of India and more than India. She charmed him into a garden where the film world of Bombay transcended squalor, poverty and disease to express ecstasies caressing fairies of Indra’s celestial raaj. From their lyrics, music, poise, colours, and dances, mortals like Madhubala, Nimmi, Nargis, Waheeda Rehman, Sadhana, Saira Banu, Mala Sinha, Meena Kumari, Geeta Bali and Viyanthimala would shed their frailties, platitudes, and blemishes to blossom into immortals like Urvasi, Sabz Pari, Menaka, Rambha, Tilottama, and Laal Pari. Beneath the histories, lamentations, and tyrannies of India, the earth would quake and open to spout founts of iridescence to adorn constellations with imageries in Vedic, Puranic, Persian, and modern poems. The movie world, then, would create parallel heavens of Krishna dancing with Radha in peacock gardens, of Shiva sitting in trance on cloud-kissed mountains, of chandani-bedecked Sita blushing before Shri Raam, of Shah Jahan pouring love to Mumtaz Mahal. For Arkah and the islanders, movies like Aan, Arzoo, Sangam, Guide, and Milan would drop upon them like soft rain then harden into permanent jewels that would never crumble into transitory dreams. In their sundering from India, whatever beauty or symphony they drank from the silver screen would become the corpuscles of their real world to combat miseries of rice fields, cow pastures, and the sudden blow of fate. Now the Sadhana-like woman had awakened in Arkah the golden spirit of India created by writers, lyricists, actors, musicians, and directors.

            “Me name Savita,” she told him.

            “Oh,” he said, and told her his name.

She dropped her eyelids and put a hand to her chin. “Does the place you live get plenty flowers?”

Ruffled by her question, he swallowed a lump of air. Then trying to find something to say, he said, “Yes.”

            “Which part?”

He felt his stomach gurgling, his mind blank. Then something occurred to him. “Oh, we have a place called Kumbha Pasture.”

She stared at him, questions simmering in her eyes. “Kumbha Pasture?”

He nodded and told her that Kumbha Pasture was a ten-acre plot of land taken up by ponds, trees, and clusters of wild flowers. When Mohan and Sunaina, Arkah’s great grandparents, died, Murli, Arkah’s grandfather, buried them on the bank of a pond overhung by bamboo trees. To keep a connection with India, he engraved the word “Kumbha” in Devanagari script around the tombs then planted marigold flowers on the lines to define the letter. Later, when Murli and his wife Soorsati died, Bansi buried them on the bank of another pond and planted oleander flowers around their tombs to shape the words “Prayag,” “Haridwar,” “Ujjain,” and “Nashik.” Bansi added more to this when Rajni his wife died. He buried her under a gular tree, planted flamboyant, frangipani and poui trees around the grave, then had constructed a mausoleum of statuettes telling the story of Kumbha Mela, a story of the danavas and devtas churning the mythological ocean of milk for nectar. When they finished the churning, they put the nectar in a kumbha, a pot. To defeat the danavas, the devtas stole the pot and hid it in four places—Prayag, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nashik. Whatever Bansi had in mind to connect this place with the sanctity of the Puranas and the festivities of India did not manifest as he had wanted. Fishermen would go there at night to catch fish in the ponds; hunters to trap their best iguanas; lovers to have their best times; boys to plunder the fruit trees. To protect the place from sacrilege, he built a troolie-thatched green heart house near the place and put a man Whisker and his wife Sussil to live in it to keep watch. After a year, Sussil told Whisker she could live there no longer because she was hearing strange voices in the trees. So they left, and Bansi gave up the idea of fulfilling a dream of grandiloquence to celebrate good over evil and the celestials’ gift of nectar to humans.

Savita put her palms to her mouth. “My God! What a place is that! The house is still there, nah?”

Arkah nodded. “In very good condition.”

When the steamer reached Adventure stelling, they exchanged addresses, promising to write each other. Arkah stared at her, a string humming inside him, as she boarded a bus. Seeing the look of loss in his face, she kissed her palm and fluttered her fingers. The string hummed louder inside him, and he felt that his destiny had made a turn.

He waited for two weeks then wrote her a long letter describing flowers in Kumbha Pasture and thanking her for igniting his interest in floral design. He told her that he had even started making corsages. She wrote back and said that she would love to come to Bundarie Square to collect flowers and teach him the finer techniques in her work. After an exchange of ten letters, she had made up her mind to come and live in the Whisker’s abandoned house. Excited, Arkah employed carpenters to repair the house then furnished it with things to make her comfortable.

She liked the house, moreover its location on the rim of Kumbha Pasture, the tall trees around her, birds singing, fragrance from flowers, and the wind trilling in the leaves. At night Arkah would keep her company until she was ready to go to bed. They talked about many things, about movies they saw, about books they read, about their families.

            “You know,” she told him. “You must be wondering what kind ah loose parents me have, to let me come here all by meself.”

            “I don’t care.”

She smiled and tapped his chin with a finger. “You only say so, man. But let me tell you the truth.” Then she told him her story: that she did not know her real parents. A fisherman’s wife, Beena, found her when she was a two-month old baby, swaddled with a jute bag, on the Essequibo beach. She picked her up, took her to her husband Dennis, and having no children, she adopted her as her daughter. At age sixteen, disaster crept into her life. One night, Dennis getting into a fight in a rum shop, his adversary broke a bottle, stabbed him with the fangs and killed him. A month later Beena died of a heart attack. To survive, Savita attended a floral-design class, graduated, and started making floral pieces.

On a Makar Sankranti day, when the sun and moon had entered Capricorn, Jupiter in Aries, and the moon now half a disc in the middle of the dark fortnight, Bansi told Arkah that the auspicious day of Kumbha Mela had arrived. The villagers fasted on fruits and sweetmeats, bathed in the river, sang bhajans and offered prayers. Bansi performed a puja in Kumbha Pasture, fed his guests kheer, and gave monetary gifts to the poor. At this time of the year in January, the monsoonal rain of the Amazon would rage through the hinterland, abate when it reached the Essequibo islands, and fall in soft intermittent showers between clouds, sun, and moon; canals and ponds shimmering with pure water; rice fields green and happy as ever; trees celebrating their best moments.

Arkah and Savita, too, fasted, bathed in the river, and celebrated. When night arrived and the moon came out challenging clouds and drizzles, they decided to tour Kumbha Pasture for Sankranti blessings. Always in this place at night the call of bird or the thrumming of a salempenter would come as a pleasing sound. They visited the tombs and lay wreaths on them, adorned the mausoleum statuettes with garlands, and threw coins in the ponds and made wishes. To pronounce the sanctity of the night, they had taken off their shoes and walked on the wet grass and leaves as if they place was a mandir. Then, reaching the bank of a pond smothered with sumooto vines, they sat on a batseed log and watched fishes making eddies on the sky-mirrored water.

Savita dug her toes in the mud. “This is a night me will always remember.”

Arkah snapped a twig and hurled it into the pond. “We’ve had many nights like this, but tonight you make it special.”

She blushed. “What really in you heart?”

            “Pure feelings like the nectar churned from the milky ocean.”

            “Can feelings be so pure?”

            “Yes, because real love is pure.”

She laughed and rose to her feet. “Let we go home.”

Weeks passed and Phagwah came with its spring flowers, kiskadees, songs, sweatmeats, and colours. Arkah and Savita, smeared with abeer, attar, and Talcum powder, went to the sumootoo pond again. The wind now made billows on the pond, distorting the image of a sun in a blue sky.

Savita threw leaves into the pond, nudged Arkah with her elbow, and said, “Let we throw coin in the water and make a wish.”

Arkah shrugged. “That would be nice on a day like this.”

They threw twenty-five-cent pieces in the water and watched the aftermath of ripples.

Savita studied Arkah, a finger to her lips. “What you wish for?”

            “The very first thing came to my mind when I saw you in the steamer.”

            “What that?’”

            “To make you my wife.”

She flung herself into him, gripped his shoulder, and breathed heavily. “It all happen so nice. So many time me want to tell you how me feel. So many time me want you to tell me what in you heart. Never never me need so much for someone to touch me.”

            “Do you want me touch you?”

            “Yes.”

            “Then, let us go and garland each other with oleanders and pray before the Lakshmi moorti that we become man and wife.”

They made oleander garlands and dropped on their knees before a large Lakshmi image near the mausoleum, closed their eyes, muttered words, then garlanded each other.

Now Arkah told Morris, “That day we became man and wife before the great Goddess, before the hilarity of robins and hummingbirds, in the witness of bright sunshine and green leaves, thinking that our love was divine. But on our new moon wedding day it seemed as if the danavas had found the kumbha of nectar the devtas had hidden.”

Morris laughed. “Sometimes snakes live quietly in diamond-studded temples.”