What You Call Winter Page 2

  “Togo!” her father called, just before he came into view. Marian heard the dog’s chain rattling from the back garden, where he slept beneath the kitchen balcony, and then her father stepped past the trunk of the tree and froze. He’d been holding his pocket watch in one hand and dropped it at the sight of her. Even in the shade of the low-hanging branches, Marian felt her cheeks grow hot. She could see the light glinting off the glass face, hanging down from his belt by the golden chain.

  “Marian. Sit down.”

  His voice was the shape of a knife blade. She felt a tight coil of fear in the pit of her stomach, and her legs gave way before she thought of asking why. She dropped on all fours to the dusty ground, banging her knee against a root.

  “Now, keep your head down,” he said quietly. “Don’t stand up. And come slowly this way.”

  Marian crawled toward the gate with her head so low that her hair trailed in the sparse grass. Her father waited until she’d reached him. She could see the hems of his pant legs, coming loose, as she knelt beside him. Then he put his hand on her head.

  “Stay just where you are,” he told her. “Don’t turn around.”

  He moved past her slowly, taking sideways steps. Marian crouched on her knees. She might have stained the dress, or torn it—the idea struck her like the back of her mother’s hand. She hadn’t asked permission to wear it, it might be ruined forever, her mother would like the new daughters better—each new thought bent her double, like so many lashings. But she kept her back turned. From the corner of her eye, she saw her father take up the field-hockey stick she’d left propped on the porch. Togo came running around the house to greet him, stretching his lead to the limit, but her father snapped, “Sit down, sir!” and the dog flattened himself in the grass, whining.

  Old enough not to cry, she began to anyway. She couldn’t remember her Bible verses. She heard a great flurry behind her: branches snapping, leaves thrashing, Togo snarling and barking, straining at his lead. Then one final crack. Please, she thought. The shape of a prayer. At last her father’s voice, panting. “You can get up now, Marian.”

  She stayed huddled to the ground, rocking on her heels. Twigs fallen like the remnants of a ravished nest. Leaves scattered as if a monsoon wind had brought them down. At first when she looked up she didn’t see it. Her father stood beside the banana tree, the hockey stick still in his hands, and pointed to a bright green snake lying broken in the dust, its head crushed. Marian sprang from the grass.

  “I got it,” he told her, dropping the stick and walking slowly to Togo, who stood at attention, growling. He ruffled the fur of the dog’s neck and head, murmuring softly to him. Marian stared at the snake. It lay perfectly still, as if waiting to strike.

  “Don’t go near it,” her father warned, still facing Togo.

  “Daddy?”

  “It’s dead, but I don’t want you handling it. Hang on, let me just tie him up in back.” He took Togo by the collar.

  Marian couldn’t imagine wanting to touch the terrible bright skin of the snake. She’d never seen a snake like this before, only thin brown garden snakes, wisping away beneath a leaf or rock. Occasionally, near the carnival rides on the beach at Juhu, she and Simon saw cobras dancing from charmers’ baskets. Her mother always frowned and shook her head when Simon wanted to go closer.

  This snake wasn’t a cobra, wasn’t charmed. Marian stood, rooted to the spot. Sounds struck her like blows, ringing through her. A chicken cackling. A baby crying. She thought, If I died today, I would never see the twins. A channa-wallah on the corner, rattling nuts into paper cones. Her father’s footsteps.

  “Tree viper.” He picked up the snake by the neck, holding it far from his body. “Hanging down from a branch, just over your head.”

  Marian felt her insides begin to trickle away. Her father stood beside her, quiet and stern, and she did not know what to make of his expression. Her mother’s face was easily molded to rage or sorrow; every mood another mask she might, without warning, decide to wear. But her father was another matter. His forehead was high, his jaw set, the clean planes of his cheeks smooth, with none of her mother’s hollows and dimples. The only clue to his thinking was in his keen eyes, and frequently she found she could not meet his gaze for fear he would detect something lacking in her.

  But his eyes were fixed on the snake; she could watch him freely.

  “You can’t see it until it’s already dangling down. It hides right on the rib of the leaf.” He flung the snake over the garden wall to the empty lot next door, and its body curled through the air in a slender green arc. The shape of a scream. Marian stared at the wall, vine-covered pink stucco that stood taller than her father. Thick green cords twisted in and out of the tilework that laced the top. She imagined the snake twitching to life in the rubbish heap on the other side, twining back through the openings.

  “Is it poisonous?”

  “Quite poisonous.” Her father still faced the garden wall. “It strikes on the ear or the top of the head.” The afternoon haze had pleated into golden rays. “Yes, very poisonous. How this thing came here, to our tree …” He seemed to be speaking to himself, but suddenly he turned, rubbing the back of his neck. “But it’s nothing to go upsetting yourself about. This fellow must have been lost. They don’t like the city, and see, the city is right on top of us.”

  He nodded toward the lot next door, empty for as long as Marian could remember, but now there was talk of a large new school going up. Different families of beggars sifted in and out of rubble piles there, making shelters. Marian wondered where the snake had landed. She and Simon weren’t allowed in the yard, but they could see over the wall from the stairway landing.

  Her father glanced quickly in her direction, then down at the hockey stick. “Better brush your hair properly before Mummy gets home. I’ll be back in time for supper. Bring Togo upstairs with you and leave the hockey stick—tell Simon he’s not to go near it.”

  “What if there are more?”

  “There aren’t,” he said. Marian looked again at the debris at the base of the trunk, and her father gripped her shoulder so tightly that for a moment she could imagine him lifting her off the ground. She wanted to stay just like that, the bruising pressure of his fingers on her arm, until her mother and Simon and Martha were home. Until the twins were born and the new school built and all the snakes in the world shriveled to skins. She could not imagine a time when she would want to leave the safety of his grasp.

  But before she could lean against him and ask him to stay, he relaxed his hold. “Go on, clean up now. I’m running late.” He bent quickly to kiss her forehead, and she smelled his odor of damp white shirts, chikoo juice, and aftershave. She saw, for the first time, the glass face of his pocket watch, dangling down on its chain and flashing as it caught the light. A tiny crescent reflection danced in a jerky orbit around him, glancing off the packed-dirt path, prickling over grass blades. And then he was striding away from her, the watch bumping unnoticed against his trouser leg. The gate creaked, open and shut, the scrape of his slippers blended into the din. Marian watched, thinking, Now he will notice. His back was to her, his arms at his side, he reached the corner and swiftly turned. A wife calling a husband. Girls’ laughter. Bird cries cluttering the cloudless skies.

  It wasn’t until Marian stepped out of the dress that she realized something had happened. She saw the stains, like iron, on the inside of the skirt; she turned the dress frantically over in her hands and saw the spots had bled through, and her first thought was that the snake had spit at her. Her thighs were sticky; she felt sticky between the legs. She touched her underclothes. In a spasm of shame, she realized she’d wet herself and ran to the bathroom. When she discovered the blood, her face drained of color. She held a rag to herself, thinking, I’ve cut myself, I’ve only cut myself, but the wound kept flowing. She rocked back and forth on the lip of the toilet, shivering in the heat. Forgive us our trespasses. She should never have taken the dress from the wardrobe.
She knew that God was punishing her.

  Marian never told anyone. She jumbled the dress into a ball, deep in the corner of her wardrobe. She washed her scraped knee and scrubbed her hands clean. She folded a rag inside her pants and changed into an old plaid dress. She watched for her family through the upstairs front window. Yellow breezes touched her cheeks, and without thinking, she began to braid her hair. Her mother arrived just as a pack of boys in blue shorts swarmed along St. Hilary Road, playing a cricket match in the street. They were shouting and laughing, as they did every evening, as if Marian herself was just now walking home from the Neddies’, head ringing with the shapes of songs. Instead, she watched her mother push right through the center of the game, the belly of twins thrust before her like a shield. She looked up to the window with a quick, glad smile, and Marian waved back, another part of her heart sinking. It might have been a happy night.

  The dress, crumpled in its corner, could not be scrubbed clean. Marian spent two more afternoons of sick Neddies, crying over a bucket and sponge. At last, she bundled it into a market sack and emptied it into the rubbish heap on Linking Road. The one near St. Jerome’s was too close to home, and she didn’t want the beggar children finding it. She had dreamt of a small girl with clay-covered hair wearing her dress — so long that it fell to her ankles — and the dark stain magically gone. In the dream, Marian’s father turned and stared at the girl, at the leafy green bow. His eyes widened with sudden pride. Wait, madam, he called after her.

  Marian kept the silver button, the shape of a flower, hidden deep in her pocket. On the morning of her tenth birthday, she pretended to be ill herself. Her mother didn’t discover the dress was lost until just before supper, and Marian heard her berating Martha. Martha wept, protested, her mother stamped her foot and screamed. Marian closed her eyes so tightly that shots of color seared the darkness. The shape of her mother, crying when her father came home. “We have nothing to give her, Frank.” Marian, silent, bled.

  The next afternoon, Marian was given her grandmother’s ruby ring. “My finger’s gone too fat for it,” Essie told her, pressing it into the girl’s hand. “It won’t fit you yet, but you’re past ten now. Old enough to have it.”

  Martha returned to her village two weeks later. Her face was swollen and tired, lips closed over her smile, as if she had a toothache. Marian wanted to give her something, but had nothing of value that her mother wouldn’t miss. In the end, she tied a string through the silver flower button and stuffed it into Martha’s bundle. A new girl came the following week, a Catholic girl. Marian’s mother let her keep her name, Lila.

  For three days and three nights, Marian prayed, but her wound didn’t heal until four days had gone by. Even then, it revisited every few weeks. God, she knew, had not forgotten. Five months later, when it came upon her during a visit to Bangalore, Aunty Trudy hugged her and laughed. “You’re a woman now, beta! Hasn’t your mother told you anything?” But even when she learned the truth, Marian knew there were things she would always carry with her, in hair, finger, and knee, in body and blood.

  As for the snake, its tale grew like a vine through a pink stucco wall. Soon Simon was certain he’d glimpsed its mate; soon Essie had witnessed the scene from the window. Marian must have been wearing her uniform. The snake was two meters or three. Her father sliced it in half with the field hockey stick. Even Marian, eventually, was not sure what she believed. Whatever actually happened to the Almeida family never seemed quite as real as the stories they told. Unless one of them worked to remember the facts, the truth of the matter might fall off to the side, like a shadow cast from a tree. And if no one took care to hold each memory and guard it well, the darkening years would swallow the shadow, and only the story would be left standing.

  What You Call Winter

  The first hint of trouble came when Roddy D’Souza saw his father floating past on a bicycle outside the gates of the house. It was January, the sky gritty blue through the haze. The guardsman, a sullen young man who always disappeared to the back to enjoy his forbidden cigarettes, came shuffling up the drive. “Namaste,” he said. Roddy paid no attention. Through the wrought-iron bars of the gate he saw his father, coppery in the sunlight and wearing a brown suit. His feet, in the leather slippers Roddy still remembered, rose and fell evenly with the motion of the pedals. The bicycle was too small for him, but he sat up perfectly straight. He cycled past without turning to face his son, and then he was gone.

  Roddy stared down the length of St. Hilary Road, to where a circus of activity obscured his view. The intersection was jammed with cars and autoricks, all dropping off schoolchildren. A bus rattled into their midst, disgorging more students. Roddy pressed his hand to his forehead, pinching the bridge of his nose. When he opened his eyes again, the street was clear of ghosts.

  “What’s wrong with you, always running off?” he said absently to the guardsman. The fellow was either nowhere to be found or right at his elbow, smelling of smoke.

  The guardsman didn’t answer but made a great show of ushering Roddy through the gate and closing it behind him. Roddy ignored him. Down the street, children were shouting as they pressed into the school yard. Boys frisked at the edge of the crowd. The blank-eyed sun stared down. Nothing had been altered. Roddy set off in the opposite direction.

  It had been sixty-five years since he’d seen his father, who died of a heart attack when Roddy was twelve. Dominic D’Souza had been sitting in the back of the Santa Clara Talkies theater on Linking Road on a Sunday afternoon. There had been several showings that day, lush Hindi films with song and dance numbers. Roddy never knew what flickering image had been his father’s last. He and his brother, Eddie, had been forbidden to see films. “It’s bad for young boys. Softens the brains,” his father told them. The year he died, Roddy spent every Sunday during Lent in the darkness of the Santa Clara Talkies. He lied to his mother, who burst into tears at the mention of films and could hardly bear the trip to town for all the poster bills. He told her he was training for a footrace. For Easter she gave him a new pair of running shoes, and Roddy stopped going to the Talkies for good.

  Roddy still remembered those Sundays. He went straight from Mass and sat in the last row, where he could see the backs of everyone’s heads. The theater was warm and close, smelling of spicy nuts and hair oil. Babies fussed in their mothers’ laps. All through the film there were coughs and cheers. The loud bursts of laughter felt like an assault. At intermission Roddy sank down in his seat and waited for the lights to dim again. He felt exposed beneath their glare and repulsed by the sight of those around him. How grotesque they seemed in the yellow wash of lights—their flashing teeth, the pores of their skin. He averted his eyes, as though the whole audience had been stripped bare before him and did not have the sense to hide their own nakedness.

  He did not like the films. He watched them avidly, searching for what he could not name. A message, a lesson, a clue to his father’s life or death? He saw mustachioed heroes and soft, pale girls. There were battles, love scenes, earthquakes, tigers. Dancing girls curved around pillars, trees, unyielding warriors. Roddy tried not to think of the dancing girls. When they twirled and beckoned he felt a kind of stirring that shamed him. He did not want his father to know about it, and he felt his father there, in the breathing all around him.

  But he remained in the last row of the theater, waiting for a sign to send him home. Days passed, and nothing. Films rattled by, ghostly light, tinny music. Roddy waited, certain and then less certain that his father was still watching.

  Every morning, Roddy walked three blocks to the Santa Clara Gymkhana, where he played cards with two other Catholic men and a Parsee. Rummy was their game. All four arrived just as the gymkhana opened, so they could secure their favorite table.

  Roddy had worked in the Finance and Accounts Office of the University of Bombay. In 1978, in the prime of his career, he reached the age of mandatory retirement. It had happened so quickly. He had been serving on a number of boards
at the time—the Unfair Means Committee, the Expert Consultative Group for the National Service Scheme, and the Banking Recruitment Association. His days had been full of politicians, luminaries, admiring students, seminars, ceremonies, and university dinners. Endless appointments. Every hour had its own heft, its own muscle. He was borne forward by their force.

  Now time pooled around him, slack and stagnant. Some of his old friends at the university had remained involved in that life. They’d called from time to time, urging him along to this meeting or that. Roddy often intended to go. “Yes, yes, I’ll try to come,” he told them, smiling to think of his welcome. It was a scene he often imagined — arriving a few minutes late, perhaps, interrupting the learned speaker and slipping modestly into his seat while all his colleagues jumped up to greet him. He could picture it so clearly that it felt like a memory.

  But the journey from Santa Clara to town had begun to seem so long. An autorick to the station, the crowded platform, the train. The whole rigmarole back again, when whatever it was had ended. Roddy could hardly remember how he had done it every day, up at six in the morning and never back before dark. Now it seemed pointless to travel so far. The heat would be terrible, then the bother of finding a taxi. There was a cricket game on television, or his friends were waiting at the gym. One of them, Francis, had worked at the university also; Roddy found it more pleasant to remember such days with someone from his own generation, who worked as he had, in the old style, before the government and a new generation had changed everything. Eventually the phone calls stopped coming.