Читать книгу Tales of the Metric System - Imraan Coovadia - Страница 10

1979 BOXING DAY

The arrival of the machines had destroyed the holidays. On the electric piano it was Neil Diamond. Boney m had released a Christmas album which used a drum machine at the bottom of the harps. The new Yamaha synthesizer took a star turn at the request of bands like the Carpenters and the Bee Gees, but it made the sound of a silicon chip. It didn’t count as real music.

From Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day, Yash was in pain. He couldn’t close his ears to ten thousand radios in Phoenix township. Someone in his wife’s family was sure to bring a radio-cassette player, neglect to ask permission, and set it up on the parapet, whereupon the old and the young, the toothless aunt and her thirteen-year-old niece, the grandfather in his sleeves and waistcoat, and the grandson in short pants, nodded along. It hurt him that his relatives didn’t ask to put on their Lata Mangeshkar or Carpenters tapes. They wouldn’t dream of listening to his recommendations. Yash was surrounded by the Naidoos and the Naickers, people who would sooner walk on burning coals than ask his permission. But that wasn’t the reason he wanted to die.

This Christmas there was a swan boat at Blue Lagoon that you could pedal around the basin. The funfair offered bumper cars on electric rails, operated by his cousin Logan. Non-Europeans couldn’t drive. For those who didn’t own a television there were replays of Taxi starring Red Kowalski on Radio Port Natal. Logan had cousins Australia side who had private copies of the entire history of Star Trek on Betamax cassettes. But you could never trust a cassette in terms of quality.

In the window of the record shop in Commercial Arcade, Yash had registered the presence of the new album by the Shadows. That one group didn’t need computers to make good music. If he wanted to possess their new record before the end of the year, he would have to face the annoyance of Kastoori and, no doubt, her mother and her father. But he couldn’t borrow any more from her parents. They were involved in everyone else’s money matters, particularly those of their daughter Kastoori and her husband, who had gone too deep into debt to be excused for his expensive record collection. They were just looking for a chance to make him sell it back to the shop at a steep discount.

The Naidoos were as stern with him as they would have been with another person’s difficult child. Yash was a performer. They looked at his existence as a kid’s performance. He played the guitar, read British music magazines on special order, associated with that Logan and his troublemaking friends, followed the adventures of Captain Kirk and certain comic books, and, in general, caused them nothing but pain and perplexity by his way of life. They saw it as the ultimate cheek.

For his part, Yash welcomed being caught out. He accepted that he was in the wrong from society’s point of view. Modern music itself was in the wrong. The Dutch Reformed Church wanted to prevent rock-and-rollers, like the Beatles, from entering the country.

The parade of visitors on Boxing Day would be worse than Diwali. They needed to be prepared. First of all Yash had to get Sanjay cleaned. It was still early.

Left to his own devices, the boy refused to bathe. He feared water like a cat. But he liked it when Yash scrubbed him and rubbed him dry, keeping his head in the towel like the women in the salon who sat under the perm machines. Sanjay enjoyed the close attention from his father. While his hair was dried, he would close his eyes and smile like a prince. On occasion, Sanjay would throw back his head, hold up his arms, and keep laughing until he had been buttoned into his good set of clothes, consisting of cream trousers and a tasselled top. The green flash of his eyes drew your attention to the unusual length of the boy’s eyelashes.

Yash went outside to get ready. He ran hot water into the plastic tub while through the open window Kastoori started to wring out and flay the sheets and curtains in the big basin, her elbows flying this way and that. They didn’t speak. She had started the preparations late.

He took no pleasure being out and about. There was no sunshine on the day after Christmas, only a layer of cloud and the feeling of warmth remaining in the ground. The ranks of green- and red-walled houses, tin roofs dull despite the morning, were arrayed on eroded hillsides. The vast Indian township, set behind two lines of hills from the ocean, could have been a hundred kilometres inland for all that you could dream of the water. But there was mother-of-pearl light painted on the shell of the sky. There was only a cement truck moving on the road. Its green funnel with yellow stripes rotated lazily, almost as if a child’s hand were turning around a toy.

Yash put the tap on, waited for the bath to fill, and heard, over the running water, the sounds of the houses around them starting to wake up. The firm voices of women were addressed to their African maids and then, alternately soft and scolding, to their children. The din of kettles and frying pans and outdoor taps and household dogs shaking themselves into rapid life and joyfully barking came over the cement walls.

At first there were no men to be heard. But by the time the bath was slopping, Yash saw the usual procession of older men moving along the sanded road below the property in the direction of Govindsamy’s private bus. They were familiar, although he didn’t know their names. Some wore black waistcoats and hats, bound for service in Umbilo car dealerships and the bookkeeping sections of Pinetown factories and the manifold departments of the Durban Corporation.

It wasn’t exceptional for an Indian to rise to the clerical level, to manage books or inventory, although an African was beyond the pale. Yash was ineligible for advancement because, at the age of fifteen, he had failed his standard-grade mathematics paper, a fact his wife and her family held against him and would continue to do so until they returned from having him cremated. Then they would take turns accusing his ashes.

He had brought bad luck on them after all. He didn’t defend himself. Yash had been preceded in Kastoori’s affections by a boy whose family had a share in a petrol station. The boy in question had been ill with asthma, had dropped out of government school for the year, and thereafter out of Kastoori’s affections. But he remained in her heart as a possibility whenever they passed the Shell garage, and maybe any garage. As her husband, Yash didn’t grudge Kastoori her dissatisfactions. There was something impersonal in her numerous complaints. They happened to be against him. They could have been against anyone. These dissatisfactions filled her soul, occupying her passing attention like so many motes moving in a column of sunshine.

He found Kastoori again in the bedroom. She was noiselessly and angrily washing her face, making her wiry black hair into a bun, and pinning back the clean pair of nylon curtains to let in the air. It wasn’t unusual for Kastoori to ignore him for twenty-four hours if she had consented to intercourse the night before. In the dark, she wound her cold bony legs around him and talked her nonsensical heart into his ears. She turned her narrow back to him so that he felt the curve of her side and the pulse in her arm. After ten minutes she withdrew and continued to behave as if Yash had injured her dignity. He couldn’t help thinking that it injured her and the other Naidoos that a man without money should penetrate Kastoori.

You got used to certain facts about a person if she happened to be your wife, just as you became accustomed to a flat, collected, never altogether beautiful face, and a small, stocky, chocolate-brown body which was tense with pride. He had never seen her moved by any piece of music except for Christmas pop. She didn’t subside, didn’t relax her hold, and therefore occupied more space in the room than size suggested. To others Kastoori was imperceptible, a slip of a thing who was exhausted by her roles as mother and wife and daughter, sister and sister-in-law, cousin and aunt, pious burner of incense in the temple. There was nobody else who could believe that, in Kastoori’s shape, there was something dangerous to his life.

—What you wasting time for, Yash? I thought Sanjay would be finished with the bath already. I must do the next load of washing in the bath. The sink is full up.

—I am about to get him out of bed.

—You can go straight ahead. Go straight ahead.

Nevertheless, he stood there, unwilling to move at Kastoori’s instruction. Having opened the house to the outside she retreated to the counters in the kitchen, where she was in the middle of sifting brown rice into a blue-and-white Dutch biscuit tin. She emptied the sieve after each cup of rice, straining her eyes with the effort of watching for tiny insects.

Yash was excited by his wife’s nearness to him, by her indifference. Something from the previous night had carried over into the morning, some kind of current that flowed between them. It didn’t matter that she repudiated him at any opportunity and that her heart was like a corporation air-conditioner. She was plain. Yet, in this minute, Kastoori exerted the same power as a beautiful woman.

—Electricity does not come for free. By the time you finish standing there, the water will already be cold, Yash. Any minute your family might turn up at the door. Since you don’t have shame about the state of the house, why should I? Let them see how things really are.

—We have the whole day.

—Don’t you have to pay a visit to your European friends?

—Yes, as you know, I have to collect the money saved for a number of performances. They promised it to me from before Christmas.

—I know that you can put on a performance for your European friends. You should put on a show for your son. He wants you to take him to Logan’s house to watch Star Trek on the video, assuming that Logan didn’t already record over it.

—Star Trek is not for children, Kastoori.

They weren’t arguing, only pretending, as if neither wanted to touch the shadow of the other person. If Kastoori suddenly forgot about the bath and the brown rice and the Hong-Kong-factory curtains pushed strictly to the side of the window, and sat between the two speakers that Logan had organised for him to listen to his Pink Floyd records properly, then, Yash reckoned, his life could be made worthwhile. But she didn’t make the effort.

So Kastoori closed her ears. Yash enjoyed a measure of freedom. He hadn’t ever sold a record, had never worked a day in his life in the back room of a petrol station, refused to act the dogsbody for one of the richer Naidoos or Naickers, who preferred to hire a family member rather than plucking somebody out of the phonebook. Yash hadn’t gone into business with Ashok, Kastoori’s brother, the one person in her family who could stick him. Ashok was already driving a Mercedes and had taken Sanjay and the other children in the family on expeditions to Stanger and further afield. But Ashok would never be able to impress you with his knowledge of music.

It was also true that Kastoori could wait ten years before disclosing her views on any particular topic. She held her breath, preserved the grievance. The fact disconcerted many stronger persons. Much older women and men, grandmothers and great-aunts and other luminaries, stood in a tentative relation to her. On the one hand she was insignificant, nobody you would look at. On the other hand her insignificance allowed her to burrow further into life and under their feet.

Today, in turn, Yash was underneath the feet of Kastoori. He had burrowed beneath her. He was prepared to die, therefore he was in the stronger position. She was ironing the previous night’s linen so furiously as he continued to stand in the kitchen that the sheets would never again be crooked and the pillow cases would never rise and yet he felt excitement. He wanted to kiss his wife’s puckered peppermint mouth and take her breath. But he would never do it. It was something illegal.

Yash entered the bedroom and stood above the unvarnished wooden-legged child’s bed. It was hot in here as well, still heated from the blaze of the previous day when, for Christmas, the sun had made the earth burn in its joy like a woman in a bed.

Sanjay pretended to be asleep. He had moved both his arms above his head and was trying to stop his hands trembling with joy. When persuaded to start being awake he would be deliriously happy, running into the cupboards and in and out of the small house.

Yash bent over to speak in the boy’s ear.

—It’s Boxing Day, Sanjay. This is a day to enjoy properly, one more day of holiday. The weather report promises the full day’s worth of sunshine. Maybe we can make it to the beach once my work is finished. Get up now. Otherwise your mother will be cross with me.

There was no reply, although Sanjay drew the sheet tighter over his shoulders. At ten years old the boy was more of a slip than his mother. You could imagine one of the rough, tough, backhanded and black-faced women in Kastoori’s family shaking out the pitch-pine bed and throwing Sanjay onto the floor without noticing.

—I will be late for my appointment with Mr Robertson. He is the most important booking agent in this whole town here. Enjoy your bath while the water is hot.

Still no answer. He was talking to himself. For Yash, the summer’s sunshine, an endless tide of gold-white light, was darker than night. He couldn’t stand another such burning hour, whereas once Sanjay started on his feet no force on earth could stop him declaring himself like a rooster. It wasn’t clear where such a tremendous quantity of joy originated. The Naidoos, and even the Naickers on his side, were fatalists, pessimists, cynics who distrusted other people and would slander and betray them. The only answer was that Sanjay came from the void whence the greatest tunes came.

Finally Yash picked him out of the cot. He held the boy close to his shoulder and felt that Sanjay wanted to escape from pretending. His heart strained at its line, one of the space-age balloons sold at the beachfront and filled with helium until it snapped into the air. In a township dominated by such Naidoos and Naickers, by the million-armed Govenders and the incense-burning Govindsamys who knew everybody’s business and the Singhs who controlled a fleet of trucks, it was only the hot and soft touch of his son’s nape that produced this sensation in Yash’s soul. He had been surrounded and crowded, nagged and harassed to the point of exhaustion, until he wanted to kill himself in protest.

Yash carried his son out of the house and put him down beside the tub. Sanjay unbuttoned his top. He left it on the cement steps and washed his face in hot water without opening his eyes. He submerged himself in the tub, blew out bubbles, came up to rest on his elbows, stayed up and examined his skin.

If you let him stay there, Sanjay would look at his thin chicken-brown body for fifteen minutes at a stretch, show it off on one side and then the other, display his body to his mother with the utmost confidence. His girlish looks weren’t the same as either of his parents’. The boy was a foundling. It occurred to Yash that his son had the manners of an imperiously beautiful woman, one drawn in the lavish colour of a Hindi film poster.

The routine asserted itself. While Sanjay balanced in the tub, Yash swiftly dried him from head to toe.

—You promised we could sleep late today.

—Did I say that?

—You promised.

—I might have. Sometimes a promise is what you hope will happen.

Yash hung the towel on the side of the tub. He pulled the shirt over his son’s head in stages. He held up the trousers for Sanjay to put his legs into, and buckled the rhinestone-speckled white vinyl belt which had been his Christmas present.

—Your mother changed the plan. She needs to prepare for tonight. Do you know all who are coming? Your grandparents will be here, your cousins, and Verachia, who should live right next door before he emigrated to Australia. We are going to be in town so long. Don’t forget how lucky you are.

—I’m not lucky. Last year I was the only one in school to have chickenpox.

—That’s not enough to take away from your good fortune.

Sanjay had been kept out of school for fear that the other children would contract chickenpox and had lost the year. Since then the boy had started to complain that he had been left out of something important. He thought that something could happen when he wasn’t around to enjoy it. Whereas, for Yash, nothing in Durban promised genuine adventure, neither the swan boat nor the bumper cars, hardly the Star Trek on Betamax which people brought through customs. He had guitar heroes, like Yngwie Malmsteen and Keith Richards, but they were far away. Their pale imitators played in Durban’s surf-and-turf restaurants, policeman pubs, and motorcycle steakhouses. And Yash was even beneath the imitators.

Sanjay was his last true pleasure. Sometimes Yash thought that there was a piece of dry ice in his chest, smoking in its own coldness beneath the layers of flesh and blood. He wanted to tear it out, see it smoking in front of him. He needed to go and see Christiaan Barnard, the international heart surgeon.

Yash had been planning to kill himself for almost a year. He dated the decision to the Diwali before last, soon after the start of television, when his cousin Logan bought a dozen boxes of fireworks from Singapore Retailers. They had orange fuses and flaking green paper sides, smelled of the bitter black pepper of gunpowder when you held them in your hand, and shone with an alien light in the sky above that Logan’s uncle’s house. There had been a Catherine wheel turning back and forth like a hosepipe full of sparks and yet its brilliant white revolutions struck him as unendurably sad. Yash had been unable to stop his eyes filling with tears.

On the same evening, the Pioneer sound system had been stolen out of Logan’s car while the guests were in the yard. Although Logan’s uncle had immediately identified the thief, who lived across the road and subsequently played his own music on the stolen speakers, it was impossible to have his cousin’s property returned because the miscreant was the nineteen-year-old, ne’er-do-well son of a sergeant in the police force. He and his father could make life difficult for Logan and his uncle, teachers in the same government school, if they went to lay a complaint.

Logan wasn’t the type to forget an injury. Under the proper conditions he was prepared to take action. When the school boycotts came here to Phoenix, Logan had promised to march up to the sergeant’s door, ring the buzzer until they were forced to let him in, and take back his speakers and graphic equaliser.

Yash thought that he wouldn’t live to see the day this Logan put his speakers back in the sockets in the doors of his car. In the meantime, they remained empty to remind Logan of the theft, also because he couldn’t afford to replace the system on his junior teacher’s salary. Yash had an idea that Logan was one person who was capable of bringing about a revolution.

In a way none of them were good for him. Logan and Sanjay and even this Kastoori made claims on life far stronger than his own. Could they know that this difference in their intensities, the sum of their wills to survive subtracted from his own, reduced him to thoughts of suicide? He was at less than zero.

Kastoori waited to talk to him until Sanjay had eaten and gone to the neighbour’s boy. She was unsympathetic to the change in his fortunes and his state of mind. Nevertheless, she was careful concerning certain points of etiquette. In public, for example, she didn’t instigate.

—Yashwin, did I hear you correctly? Didn’t you play last week this time with your European friends when we stayed for the night by Sea Cow Lake? Was it that Richard and Jeff I hear so much about? I am not starting with you, but I want to know which one still has to pay you out.

—You have it wrong. Colin collects the money. Peter is the leader of the band. Jeff is his brother. Sometimes, like last week, Jeff comes with the bass guitar and also a vibraharp. It sounds a lot like a xylophone. People are going mad for it.