What You Call Winter Read online

  For my father and mother

  Contents

  In the Garden

  What You Call Winter

  The Bold, the Beautiful

  The Crow and the Monkey

  Half the Story

  Home for a Short Time

  We Think of You Every Day

  Carrying

  This Is Your Home Also

  Now the whisper of trees is gravel under cars, a polluting pearl lies over the city across the bay, an innocence gone.

  It may return, as we have returned. Here lies a lesson we have lacked. Until the tide turns, footprints leading outwards on the beach point us the pathway back.

  —from “A letter completed from another time,” So Far

  GERSON DA CUNHA

  In the Garden

  Three days before her tenth birthday, Marian Almeida came home unexpectedly early. Usually her afternoons were spent at Uncle Neddie’s, who was no uncle of hers at all but the nearest neighbor with a piano for her practice. Of course, Uncle Neddie and his wife and his three unmusical children spent the drowsy stretch of hours before supper curled on narrow mattresses, napping through the merciless heat. The shops were closed, dogs panted under wiry trees, shadows darkly spotted the roads and yards. The servants sifted rice or ground spices; the dancing grains and elliptical rhythm of mortar and pestle lulled even the restless children to slumber. Marian, seated before the scarred wooden box of Uncle Neddie’s piano, touched her fingers to the yellowed keys so lightly that she did not make a sound. She practiced her fingering in silence while the household slept. “It shouldn’t make a difference, how hard you thump,” her mother had decided when she arranged for Marian’s practice sessions. “You can just learn the shapes of songs for now.” On lesson days, when Marian perched on the glossy black bench of St. Jerome’s piano, the noise of her own playing startled her.

  But Uncle Neddie’s wife, known to the neighborhood as Aunty Neddie although it was commonly believed that she must once have enjoyed a name of her own, met Marian at the door with the news that one of the children had fallen ill. “Go on, then.” She shooed the girl away. “Tell Mummy not another week, at least. We can’t have you carrying anything home.”

  Marian imagined carrying the germs of the sick Neddies in her belly. She thought of the careful way she would have to lower herself into chairs. Her own mother, she’d been told, was carrying twins.

  The afternoon spun before her, golden and dusty, suddenly free. Marian walked home with a mounting sense of excitement. She had two hours, at least, before her mother finished tutoring, perhaps longer if she stopped off to market. (Marian’s daily bouts at the piano lasted ninety minutes, with extra time, her mother reasoned, for imagining the sounds.) Usually, Marian had just enough time to change out of her school uniform skirt before her mother arrived and homework began. Sometimes, if she hurried to reach St. Hilary Road before six, she might run into her father, home from the university but on his way out again to meet his friends at the Santa Clara Gymkhana. Perhaps this was the day she could go with him, she thought. Some of his friends were Parsees, named for their jobs and not for saints like Marian and all the Indian Catholics. Her father’s name was Francis, but the Parsees called him “Frinkie,” which made him laugh in a way he never laughed at home.

  For a moment Marian thought of her brother, Simon, two years younger and still trapped at his desk, and she felt a pang of sympathy that threatened to spoil her own enjoyment. Twice a week Simon took special classes after school to prepare him for seminary, which both of them agreed was rotten luck. But every second day he was allowed to bowl for the cricket team, she reminded herself. Nobody had ever suggested he take up piano, Marian further realized, and found she could once again rejoice in her good fortune. The road flew beneath her feet in jerks and rushes as she began to skip—past the tall gates of St. Jerome’s Church, where families of beggars held out their hands to the Catholic ladies. One small girl, whose hair was thick and matted, the color of clay, looked sorrowfully as Marian sped by.

  “Wait, madam!” the child called in English, and Marian, shocked, stopped and turned to face her. Marian and her family and most of the middle-class Catholic families spoke English in their homes, but to many others — insurance salesmen, shopkeepers, servants, taxi drivers—they spoke Hindi or Marathi or some swirl of all three. Beggars almost never spoke English.

  The small girl glared at her, continuing in Hindi. “You could buy me an ice cream, at least.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  The child scowled.

  “I’m going now,” Marian told her.

  A boy came to stand beside the girl, jostling her shoulder. “Why do you bother with schoolgirls?” Marian heard him scolding.

  Her father’s house, squatting in the sun behind a black iron gate, seemed transformed with nobody filling its rooms. Marian couldn’t remember the last time she’d been home alone. Only Togo, napping in a patch of shade at the foot of the porch steps, lifted his head for a moment and whined before dropping to sleep again on the cool tile. Marian had to use her key to open the door at the head of the stairs. Inside, silence settled, thick and swampy, on stacks of books, the radio, the teapot and stained spoons left out from lunch. The hands of the clock drifted slowly toward evening, as if through water. Marian moved quietly in the shadowy green light, checking bedrooms, the kitchen, the back balcony, where washing hung on slack lengths of line. She felt she’d entered a private world, interrupted only by the low whir of fans. Even Martha was gone.

  Marian’s mother gave all her servants the same Christian name. Several Marthas had come to Bombay from the villages near Mangalore to live with Marian’s family. Easter Almeida, attentive to their equal need for literacy and the Lord, had launched the careers of every girl with the instructive tale of their common namesake, a friend of Jesus’s “cumbered about much serving.” Marian could remember listening to three such beginnings, leaning against the doorframe, twining a strand of hair around her finger. “What are you doing, hanging about?” her mother snapped at her the last time. “You gawk like a hawk.” Thou art troubled about many things, Marian thought, staring at the stout braid of her mother’s hair before she slipped away without a word. The shapes of retorts were enough for Marian. That was nearly two years ago, just after she won St. Jerome’s Sunday school prize for reciting Bible verses.

  Marian untied the red ribbons from the ends of her braids and peeled herself a sweet lime before she wandered through the living room. Threads of light needled through the woven shades and fell across the tile floor in a golden mesh. She stepped past the print of the Virgin, whose eyes followed her onto the front balcony: a bank of windows over a balustrade with wooden doors that could be closed in the monsoon season. Now they were latched open. Marian hoisted up the shade just enough to see a single bright stripe of lawn below, then higher and higher, revealing the guava tree, the gate, the street gutter, the road. An Ambassador taxi buzzed slowly past like a fat summer fly, and she could hear the lazy calls of crows. She tried to imagine what every member of her family might be doing at that precise instant. Her father, on a train; her mother, in a classroom; her brother, bent over the book on his desk. Martha, sent to market, with just enough coins in her drawstring sack. She glanced again at the road. A stream of bullocks trickled ahead of a boy with a stick. Marian listened to the thin ringing of their bells, broken into pieces by the rise and fall of each bony shoulder, and thought that even the shape of the cattle’s song turned drowsy in the afternoon. Her stomach had begun to ache, and she thought she might curl up on her bunk and read.

  But she didn’t want to waste her free time sleeping. Instead, she began to rummage through the wardrobe her parents shared. She pushed past t
he skirts and blouses her mother used for everyday wear and began to run her fingers along the silken folds of her mother’s saris. Most of the Catholic women of Santa Clara wore their good Indian outfits only for church or weddings or parties — and of course to go to the city, a forty-minute ride on the commuter train. The girls wore uniform jumpers to school and frilly dresses or kameez and churidar at parties. Only when Marian was fully grown would she have her own saris and blouses. But she was searching for an old cotton sari, which she had once been permitted to try on.

  Her mother had had to help her tuck it, nearly doubled at the waist, and three paces across the room the fabric slipped from Marian’s waist and shoulders. You’re too small, her mother had protested, but she had been smiling. Finally Marian tensed the muscles of her arms and legs into marionette stiffness and made it across the length of the living room. Her mother clapped her hands and called her a little rani. Her father bowed and asked for a dance, and Simon clowned about like a footman behind her, lifting a trailing edge of cloth.

  In three days, Marian would be ten years old. Old enough to help with the babies when they came, her mother told her. Old enough to play the piano in a recital, old enough to listen without talking back, old enough to write letters to Aunty Trudy in Bangalore, who answered them in envelopes addressed to Miss Marian Almeida. Old enough not to fuss when Simon called her Miss Marian, Marian, Quite Contrarian. (Suffer it to be so now, thought Marian, armed with her Bible verses, whenever he annoyed her.) Old enough, she was certain, to put the sari on herself. She would surprise the whole family when they came home. She would set them all laughing. Her mother might let her choose a bindi for her forehead. Simon would lose the pinched face he wore whenever he came home from school. Martha would look on from the kitchen and flash her broad grin, putting one finger over her mouth where a tooth had rotted away. Hushing the shape of her smile. Even Marian’s father would stay home from the gym, and when he’d had his cup of tea, he would find the red cushion and stand on his head. He would stay upside down until all the old stories of when he was a boy came rushing back from wherever they’d been lost. They fell into his feet and couldn’t find his mouth, he used to tell Marian, or they wiggled through his arms to the tips of his fingers, or they hid in his stomach with last night’s fish. “They’ve gone down to my bottom this time,” he exclaimed when her mother was out of the room, and he’d smack the back of his pants to get them moving again. Marian was old enough not to believe him, of course, but still she missed the game. Usually he came home just in time for supper, then spent the evening at his desk, rubbing the back of his neck. Marian used to cover her head with her pillow when her parents argued, but now they fought only in small bites and jabs. She fell asleep most nights, listening to ice cubes in her father’s glass, her mother’s pen scratching across the page. The shapes of shouting, she thought, even in the quiet. She wondered if the twins could hear what her mother was thinking.

  Marian picked through toppled piles of shirts, sagging against one another on the crowded shelves. She flicked past her mother’s kameez tops to reach the saris, her fingers lingering over the soft squares of cotton, and then she strained to reach farther back. Hangers poked into her shoulder and she could hardly see through the thicket of clothes to the fabric she was touching. She struggled to untangle herself, but two saris slithered to the ground from the hangers, one on top of the other, like twin snakes. Discouraged, Marian hopped backward, out of the cupboard. The ache in her stomach began throbbing again. She bent slowly to pick up the first sari, suddenly near tears though she knew she was old enough not to cry, and there, hanging behind her mother’s good silks, Marian found the dress.

  Before she’d even touched it, she knew it was meant for her. Before she’d held it carefully to her chest, mindful of the satin bow, before she loosened the top button, in the shape of a flower, to slide the hanger from its shoulders, she’d abandoned the idea of the sari. She laid the dress out on her mother’s bed and the skirt stood up stiffly from the mattress. Her school pinafores were flat and limp as rags. Marian loved the way the dress held the shape of a ten-year-old girl, as if hoping for her to climb inside. She thought of her mother kissing both her cheeks, the grown-up way, for her birthday. She imagined Simon, too impressed to tease. Martha would gasp and forget to cover her mouth. Her father would teach her to dance properly: on the floor, not balanced on his feet.

  Marian hurriedly replaced her mother’s saris, listening for the sounds of evening. She had forty minutes at least, she gauged, before anyone else arrived home —time enough, surely, to try on the dress. She couldn’t wait a whole three days and nights. “Come now, my girl, you’ve got to be patient,” her mother told her when she wondered about the twins, boys or girls. Whole weeks passed before any of her piano pieces had any sound to them at all, and then never as she imagined. She’d grown tired of waiting; she wanted a taste of this dress. Just a peek at herself in the glass, looking different than she’d ever been, and then back into the closet without anyone knowing. She didn’t want anything setting her mother off, or the evening could shatter like glass.

  Fear, longing, excitement pierced her sharply, throbbing in her belly, the way she used to feel when her father told stories of tiger hunts. Only this time she felt as if she were the one walking into the jungle, with a pounding heart and slow, careful steps. I mustn’t dirty it, she thought.

  She scrubbed her hands and face, wishing she had time to run a bath. Instead, she splashed a bucket of water over her dusty feet and rubbed her arms and legs with a cold damp cloth. She shucked off her jumper and blouse and hung them quickly on a peg, making sure to leave the bathroom tidy. The dress, a delicate leafy green, waited on the bed. Marian’s dreams had spread through the neighborhood. She would walk into church in a pale green cloud and float up the aisle. Who is that marvelous girl? people would wonder, and when she turned into the Almeida pew and everyone recognized her, her parents would beam. She would practice piano with the skirt billowing over her rickety stool, and even the little unmusical Neddies would rise from their sickbeds to hear the shapes of her songs. They would beg her to give concerts, as softly as she liked.

  The day began to rouse itself, flushed and warm, from the afternoon sleep, and the noise from the street grew louder. Marian heard motorcars, the chatter of women, the wailing calls of merchants. She knew her father would soon be home.

  She held her breath as she stepped into the dress. The fabric was smooth and cool as fresh sheets. Marian waited until she had zipped up the back, twisting one arm behind her waist and the other one over her shoulder. She fastened three regular white buttons and the top one with its silver petals before she slid her feet into her good white slippers and walked slowly to the mirror.

  Marian was not especially tall for a ten-year-old. For most of her life she’d been much smaller than her classmates. She wouldn’t get her height until she turned thirteen, according to her mother, which was when all the women of her family got their height. (It did not occur to Essie Almeida to consider when the women of her husband’s family might begin to grow.) Marian’s arms and legs were slender, and her feet were so narrow that the mochi (who made shoes) had to use a special pattern for her slippers. But in the past year she had shot up. She could stand back-to-back with her friends, and her right hand on the piano could stretch over six keys. Her chest had begun pressing against her thin school blouses, and she was glad her uniform jumper covered her fully.

  But in the leafy green dress, Marian felt just the right size. The skirt brushed past her knees, the sleeves puffed lightly over her shoulders, and a panel of white lace veiled her chest. The single flower button gleamed like a jewel at the base of her throat. Sing unto the Lord a new song, thought Marian. She paced back and forth to hear the skirts rustle—the shape of grown-up whispers — and smiled shyly at her reflection. Suddenly she stopped, cocked her head, and undid her braids, combing her fingers through the long, dark waves until her hair rippled down and touched th
e hem of the dress. Marian gazed at herself as if at a stranger, wondering if she looked like her mother or her father. Wondering if the twins would be girls and whether they would look like her. She pinched color into her cheeks, then through the window she heard the shouts of schoolboys, out of their sports clubs. Her father would arrive any minute.

  It was only her mother who would mind, she realized. Her father would like it, she was sure. She wanted someone to see her before this new Marian disappeared again and the old one returned, patient and ordinary, sitting down to her prep work. She watched the girl in the glass before her. One person, to see her just this way, with her hair down even though she knew that on her birthday her mother would insist on braids. You’ll tangle in two minutes, she’d say. I’ll need a pair of shears. Worse, she might laugh or call Marian vain. Her father would only be proud, Marian decided, slipping quietly down the outdoor stairs. She would hide in the garden and surprise him.

  The grass tickled her ankles as she ran to crouch behind the banana tree. The branches spread into a thick green canopy, just over her head, and from time to time she leaned past the trunk to check the street. Nothing but black bars, where the gate threw its cage of shadows. Noises began and grew louder and faded away again, and she tried to pass the time by guessing the shapes of the sounds. A bullock cart, an autorick. Marian wished she had a watch. Her father had a pocket watch that he carried every day to the university where he was the registrar. He tucked it into his vest pocket, keeping it very snug so it couldn’t fall out, and attached the free end of the chain to his belt loop so a small bit of it always hung in view. (In those days, despite the heat, he wore a vest to work each day. People must feel they could look up to him, he told Marian. It was fitting for a man of his position.) She shifted from one leg to the other. A woman calling her daughter. A chicken clucking. Some servants speaking Marathi. Her back felt tired from standing so stiffly, and the waiting seemed to grip the muscles of her stomach. She tried to think of the martyrs. A motorcycle hummed past in fits and starts. Finally, she heard the jangle of the latch and the gate creaking open. She smoothed her skirt and took care not to slouch.