What You Call Winter Page 8

  Jude started to count, but seconds became minutes so slowly that he despaired. He could feel another day surging past him while he was trapped in a dim room. His chest reeked, a fly buzzed. The overhead fan did not become a propeller. Some days it gained speed until the whole roof lifted off and the bed hovered above the rest of the house, but today it was just a fan, dull and stupid, its blades sluggish as clock hands. His mother had closed the wooden window guards, but slivers of midday sun fell across the floor and one, wire-bright, reached the bed. Jude moved his toe idly in and out of it. He could hear Uncle Peter and Neil below him in their compound; their words were muffled, but their voices had the serious pitch of workmen deep in collaboration. Birds kept up a constant chatter and someone argued with a fruit vendor. Briefly Jude imagined it was a giant crow, dressed in his mother’s old coat but with Aunty Freddy’s red leather pocketbook. Then he heard the unmistakable creak of his own gate swinging open and the sharp clownish blast of a bicycle horn. Simon was off somewhere, free to do as he liked because he was fourteen. Jude kicked the folded coverlet at the foot of the bed.

  “How’s he coming?” Simon called from the road.

  “See for yourself!” Neil’s voice rose, triumphant. Progress must be brisk. Jude ached to think of all he had missed. He wished he was fourteen, he wished he had a crazy mother. He did not dare to speak either hope aloud, but he made the declarations firmly in his head, where God could read them if He chose. Jude didn’t care! Let God even see Jude, parting the curtains of netting and slipping through them, walking softly across the cool tile to the window.

  Two minutes later his name rang out like a clap of thunder. His mother’s face was like water with a fast wind moving over it: sudden sharp furrows and danger.

  “What is the meaning of this? You want to stay here all night and miss the party?”

  Jude clambered down from his perch by the window. He had never conceived of such a terrible punishment; he had been looking forward to the New Year’s party nearly as much as to Christmas itself—the tree and the gifts, Simon’s return from school, Jude’s solo in the children’s choir.

  “I was only looking …”

  “Looking, looking! You should be looking at the back of your eyes. Go and lie down, this instant.” She waited until Jude had climbed back through the netting. “Now. One more sound from you and you won’t be looking beyond this bed until the year is finished. Do you understand?”

  He nodded, his hair bristling against the rough pillow.

  She frowned—“One hour, one full hour, from this minute” — and left him.

  When he awoke, Jude was cold. Someone had been in to cover his legs and he pulled the cotton coverlet to his shoulders. The golden glow outside had faded and the cracks of light through the window were thin as milk. Crow calls sounded lonely, as though the sky had tipped and emptied itself of everything but birds. Jude felt stiff and out of sorts. He could not hear his mother or sister, could not hear any voices. But noises from the kitchen reassured him and he pushed aside the netting to get up. Only then did he remember the old man and go rushing to the window.

  The yard next door was quiet. Uncle Peter and Neil were no longer in sight, and although Jude could not see the old man, he knew it must be finished. Disappointment flushed through him like a swallow of something nasty—a sip from his father’s glass or a dose of the cod-liver oil his mother forced him to take each evening. He thought that nothing, not even setting the old man alight, could make up for this loss.

  In the kitchen he found Rosa rolling out dough. “Awake, baba!” She smiled but did not stop, her shoulders rocking. “Come and see.”

  Jude did not go to her. He was too angry to give in to anyone who conspired to let him sleep — even Rosa, who had been with the household since he was small and whose leaving he dreaded.

  “Ooh!” She wrinkled her forehead and pouted, an imitation of Jude that she could not maintain for long. She had a round face with small, dark eyes, as narrow as caraway seeds when she laughed at him. These days Rosa was always laughing. A match had been proposed for her, in a series of English letters that she kept beneath her blanket even though she had trouble reading them. “God knows I tried to teach you,” Jude’s mother had sighed over her when the last one had arrived. Then she turned to call Jude. “Come. You can both practice!”

  Jude obeyed, slowly. He did not like the letters, nor the sessions they inspired: Jude and Rosa sitting at the table, the terrible pages spread before them and Jude’s mother standing over his shoulder to supervise the lesson. Jude could read printed words, but these had a rainy look to them, shaky and windswept like trees in the monsoon. Rosa peered at the letters from one angle and then another, as though by shifting her eyes she might dislodge their secrets, and Jude struggled through the handwriting with his mother sharply supplying the tails of words he sounded out too slowly.

  The last letter had come with snapshots. One was of the boy’s face and one was his whole body, taken as he stood in front of a closed door. This is his house, Rosa said. See, this is where I will live. She rapped her knuckle against a wooden stool as though to imagine someone knocking on her own door. You will visit, yes? No, Jude told her. He spoke in the reproachful tone his mother used when she wanted something changed, a voice Jude himself seldom dared to cross, but Rosa only caught him round the neck and knocked on his head until he fell across her lap.

  Now Rosa’s fist sank into another lump of dough and for a moment Jude was tempted to put aside thoughts of the old man and help her. But she took up her roller again and shooed him away. “Dirty, dirty! Go and clean your hands.”

  Jude forgot his campaign to be so good that Rosa would forget her pictures and stay. “My hands are clean,” he said and left her.

  He passed quickly into the bedroom again and found his slippers. Rosa was occupied in the kitchen, his mother was gone—probably to church with Marian and Simon. His father was safely asleep, having his evening nap. Jude could risk a quick peek into Neil’s yard to see the old man. Perhaps even now he could contrive some way to add on to him.

  The stairway ran along the outside of the house, on the side opposite Uncle Peter’s compound. Over the wall, Jude could see movement behind the piles of material left there by a builder whose permits had been held up in court. Some families had come to live in the lot. Every few months they were cleared away by the builder’s security men, but as soon as the site was unguarded they drifted back like flies. Jude’s mother complained that the squatters were making the road unsafe, and Jude was not allowed out on his own without permission. So he carried his slippers in his hands until he had reached the last step, then crossed the garden and opened the gate so slowly that it didn’t creak.

  He expected to feel free and powerful once he made it to the road—the way Simon seemed whenever he mounted his bicycle, standing high on the pedals and with a few easy pushes surging halfway down St. Hilary Road. Instead Jude looked nervously to the squatters’ lot and then past there to the large paved courtyard of St. Jerome’s, where his mother might at any moment appear. He hurried through Uncle Peter’s gate, forgetting to check the yard first. There, against the thick stucco wall that separated the Almeida brothers’ plots, leaned the old man. Bent over its straw chest was Aunty Freddy.

  She looked up, startled. For a moment Jude imagined her flying away like a bird, hunching her shoulders and flapping her printed cotton sleeves. But she only fixed her sharp eyes on him. “Well, what is it? Where’s Mummy?”

  Jude felt foolish. He made a faltering gesture toward the old man, then let his hand drop. “I came to see,” he said.

  “Speak properly, child! None of this mumbling.”

  “I came to see the old man,” Jude said again. He wished his cousin would come and supply a reason for his sudden appearance. He wondered if Aunty Freddy would scold him herself or call his mother. Her face was tight with something he thought must be anger.

  “Neil’s gone off with his father. They’re buy
ing firecrackers for the party. You should have come earlier.”

  The unfairness of such a remark and his disappointment at yet another missed outing — he could picture, so clearly, Neil choosing a rocket-size firecracker—nearly drove Jude wild. “Earlier I wanted to come, but Mummy said I had to sleep!”

  “Oh, yes, your mummy has her rules, doesn’t she? Always a right way and a wrong way.”

  Jude did not know what to say to this. Surely all the world was divided into right and wrong, not just by his mother but by priests and God and even by his own queasiness now, knowing he was where he should not be.

  Aunty Freddy looked at him. She had a narrow face with small, sharp features whose quick, flicking movements seemed restless.

  “Keeping your mouth shut. Very good. Just like the Almeida men, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, you’re not?” Aunty Freddy laughed, a rough sound.

  Jude shook his head. His father took the train to Church-gate Station every morning and walked across the Oval Maidan to his office in the Rajabai clock tower, at the university where Jude would go someday, his mother told him, if he only kept reading. Jude was not sure he wanted to go with his father, swallowed up into a crowded train each morning and expected to read and read. He guessed that was what made his father so quiet, a life of words that need never be spoken aloud. (His mother’s hand on Jude’s shoulder — Don’t move your lips, son.) Behind the clock face and its great churning hands, Jude imagined that papers flew like swallows, sweeping upward with creased beaks and pages fanned like tail feathers, circling in a windy rush, some diving sharply and some fluttering down with rustling coos until they settled, at last, on his father’s desk. His father, Jude realized, was always reading: letters, reports, notes from meetings, books with no pictures. At night, as soon as he had eaten his supper, he tucked the Times of India under his arm and went to the Santa Clara Gymkhana to meet his friends, where Jude supposed they all sat in foursomes and read together. There were contests, Jude knew, and his mother scolded his father when he lost.

  Jude was not so interested in reading, though he did not tell Aunty Freddy this in case she shared his mother’s views. Nor did he want to be in business, which was Uncle Peter’s job.

  “When I grow up I’ll be a captain. Or a pilot.” He had not decided yet. But it was clear to him that he would not be like other Almeida men, none of whom had captained anything.

  Aunty Freddy snorted. “Good for you. Get on your boat or your plane and go far from here.” She turned toward the old man, still muttering. Her hair had recently been cut short and looked ruffled in the back. The cotton dress she wore was large and wildly patterned with black and red, reaching nearly to her ankles. Jude’s mother had a similar robe for home, but when she went outdoors she wore skirts and blouses like most of the Catholic ladies of Santa Clara. Jude wondered if Aunty Freddy had been napping, if she too had missed the chance to help make the old man.

  “Is it finished?”

  “Come and look,” she said, her voice less impatient than it had been.

  Jude stepped closer. The old man was slumped on his side, the way Jude had often seen beggars sleep across the doorways of closed shops on Hill Road. His stuffed-pillowcase head was cinched at the neck like a balloon, and an old brown hat was jammed on top. He wore a waistcoat over a cotton shirt with bristles poking out from between the buttons and bunchy drawstring pajama pants. His hands were just thatches of straw, rough as twigs, and his feet lumpy sockfuls. One flopped out from the leg like a dying fish, and Jude wished he could nudge it back into place.

  “Well. What do you think?”

  “He’s big.” Jude looked ruefully at the bundled thighs he’d had no hand in making. “He’s fat at the bottom.”

  A quick appreciative bark from Aunty Freddy encouraged him. “But you see what it’s missing?”

  Jude’s eye fell again to the feet. “Shoes?”

  “Shoes! That would smell to high heaven when he burns. No, he needs a face, doesn’t he? I should give him one.”

  Jude felt his hopes rising. “I could help.”

  “Yes, yes, of course he needs a face …”

  Jude spoke more loudly. “Aunty, can I help?”

  She turned, surprised. “Help?” She looked at him as if he had just that moment arrived in her garden. “You’re my godson, did you know that?”

  He nodded. He did not tell her what his mother always said: if there had not been such a rush to baptize Jude, she would never have agreed to Aunty Freddy. Blame your father, she insisted. Jude’s father, when questioned, shook his head and frowned. Tcha, how can I remember all these ins and outs? Jude’s mother had encouraged him to think of one of her own cousins as a more suitable choice. This can be your godmother in spirit, she told him, and the spirit godmother sent five rupees on Jude’s birthday, which Aunty Freddy had never done.

  “And I’m godmother to your sister as well.”

  “Not Marian,” Jude said. He knew Marian’s godparents. Aunty Freddy meant the other, the twin his mother and father never mentioned. Jude knew the name because Simon had told him. Theresa.

  “No, no, not Marian. I wasn’t married when Marian was born. I hadn’t come here to live. I used to live in a beautiful house in the south. I had a room all to myself and my father gave me paints. I painted flowers all along the walls, and birds in trees, and a monkey swinging from my window.” Her voice sounded far away, as though the garden she’d painted was real and the one where she and Jude stood was a dream. Then abruptly she returned. “I was very good with my paints.”

  It was difficult to believe a child could be permitted to paint on walls. In his house, even small drawings on paper were considered a luxury; tablets were expensive and intended for writing. “What’s on your walls here?” he asked. He had seen the insides of his cousins’ rooms, of course, and it was a point of envy that Neil and Angela each had a cushion in the shape of an animal, but he could not recall having been in the bedroom Aunty Freddy and Uncle Peter shared.

  “Here! When would I paint here? You think there’s a minute to spare? And who the hell would look at it? Not your uncle!”

  Jude stepped back, alarmed by this outburst and the mention of hell.

  “I tell you, if my father had known the kind of life he was sending me into …” Aunty Freddy kept talking—the way other people shouted, though not as loudly as that. She no longer seemed to notice Jude but bent over the old man, her hands moving as quickly as her tongue. She propped him up so that he was sitting against the wall, shoulders drooping, legs splayed. Jude watched, transfixed, he did not know for how long. Aunty Freddy’s voice had a low, screeching sound to it, like a bird gone hoarse. She was talking about her mother and father, who had died only a few months apart, when Marian’s voice rang out, calling Jude’s name, and both he and Aunty Freddy turned to see her coming in the gate. She was still wearing her church clothes, a blouse and a pleated skirt.

  “Jude! Why did you run off like that? Mummy’s worried!” She took Jude’s hand. “Hello, Aunty. Sorry about all this.”

  “All what? He’s perfectly safe with me, whatever your mother thinks.”

  “Oh, no, no, Aunty, it’s not that! But he didn’t say anything to Rosa or Dad—we had no idea where he’d gone.”

  “It was for a minute only, just to see, and then Aunty said we can make the face. Everything else is finished, that’s all that’s left!” Jude tugged his sister’s hand, trying to communicate the urgency of this last chance. Now that she had come and Aunty Freddy had stopped her ramblings, the old man’s allure had returned.

  “No, we have to go,” Marian said firmly. “We’ll be back soon for the party.”

  “Is that what you’re wearing tonight?” Aunty Freddy’s eyebrows rose. “Well, stay far from your uncle. He has an eye for all the pretty girls.”

  Marian flushed and led Jude away. He turned back once to say good-bye, but Aunty Freddy was already leaning over the old man and Ma
rian jerked his arm to hurry him.

  “Not so fast!” Jude complained, but Marian did not say sorry or anything at all until they’d reached their own gate.

  “Don’t repeat what she said,” she told Jude.

  “What?” Upstairs, he knew, his mother waited, displeased and ready to punish him. The world seemed full of scoldings and rules and stupid directions, a web from which he could not tear free. He pulled his hand from Marian’s. “What thing she said?”

  “Never mind. Nothing.”

  “Anyway, you don’t know everything yourself,” he said, thinking of the monkey Aunty Freddy had painted on her walls and that at last, like Marian and Simon and all the grown-ups he knew, he had a secret. He hoped she would beg him to tell, but she only called him crosspatch and told him to run upstairs before Mummy shouted at them both.

  Until the last minute, Jude didn’t know if he would be permitted to go to the party. After a first hail of scoldings, his mother had said, “We’ll see” and “Don’t pester” for most of the evening. At last she called him, her face so stern that Jude knew to fear the worst.

  When she had elicited a wavering apology, she shook her head. “See how badly you’ve disappointed us all. I asked Rosa to make kulkuls to surprise you and instead you ran off.”

  This was a blow. Kulkuls were Jude’s favorite sweet, small curls of dough, pressed against a clean comb to give them ridges. Jude loved to help with the comb and to roll the golden nuggets in powdered sugar when they had been fried. His eyes felt hot and full.

  “Just let the boy come, Essie,” his father said impatiently. Jude looked up in surprise, but his father appeared to be struggling with his necktie.

  “What does this have to do with you? He disobeyed me! You want him running all over the city on his own? You want him kidnapped?”

  “Tcha!”

  “You want to help, you can go and speak to someone about these vagrants next door. They’re turning this road into a wilderness!”

  She waited until his father had gone back to the balcony, where he looked out over the railing at the activity on the street. Even from the bedroom Jude could hear enough voices to form a parade, the parade of lucky people who could go to a party. His mother considered him with an expression so hard and searching that he could not guess what she would decide.