Even in the modern and bustling town of Marion, where certain Guanagasparians of Hindu Indian descent migrated when they left estates in the interior of the island, the day may well have begun with a washing of the body and a pooja. From the moment Mrs. Sangha awoke, however, before she applied the copper-handled hibiscus twig dipped in baking soda to her teeth, she went into the living room and switched on the Zenith radio her husband had brought home the week after they married. The radio remained on until last thing at night. To whomever else was in the house, it might have been little more than an audible backdrop to the cleaning and cooking going on. But not to her.
Sometimes she awoke early, after a fitful night of bad dreams and spurts of sitting up with worry caused by some aspect of the previous night’s news; the dire direction in which the world seemed to be careening filled her with concern for all humankind and for the future of her daughter and herself.
She would be up so early that when she turned on the radio, prerecorded music played as the station workers were still miles away, only just getting into buses and taxis heading for the station house in the capital. While she awaited the first live broadcast of the day, she would open a tin of New Brunswick sardines and mash the contents with half a tomato and a hard-boiled egg.
Bringing her plate and cup of sweet Ceylon tea with her, she would draw a chair close to the big radio box in the drawing room, and there she would sit listening until her daughter awoke. She would be in time to hear the anthem “God Save the Queen,” followed by Guanagaspar’s anthem. For these, the official opening of the day, she would stand at attention, one hand lightly touching the edge of the piece of furniture through which the music flowed, the other palm flat upon her breast.
Early morning and then again last thing in the evening, the BBC delivered to the island, via the airwaves, its ten-minute program of news and views of the world. Although the local news might have remained the same throughout the day, Mrs. Sangha would not, as long as she was in the house, miss its hourly broadcast.
At ten A.M. on the dot, an appalling dirge threw the house into moments of mourning. Mrs. Sangha would stand in the doorway demanding silence as she listened to the announcement of the previous day’s deaths throughout the island. With one hand pressed to her lips, she grieved immediately for the deceased and shook her head in sympathy for the list of bereaved: beloved wife of so-and-so, father of so-and-so, and so-and-so. Brother of this one, uncle of that one. Friend of so-and-so.
She listened to radio plays, comedy programs, and even the sports news, to the cricket scores at twenty after noon, and to commentary on the test matches played in the Caribbean, South Africa, India, and in the British Isles. She forever spoke of the excitement she felt as she sat all by herself and listened to live commentary as Augustus Martin ran for Guanagaspar in the Berlin Olympics. He had been expected to outrace all other contenders, so his name and the fact that he was from the island of Guanagaspar were invoked on the air time and again. She had the feeling, whenever she heard his and the island’s name, that she had become a relevant part of the big world. She held herself proudly on those occasions, as she had the feeling that the world had overnight come to know of her personally. Even though Augustus Martin did not finish the race, having pulled a muscle mere seconds into it, she felt that he had won for the island something bigger than a medal: a place for them on the map of the world.
Her little daughter would, on the other hand, sleep through any radio program, including the one with the audience that cackled loud and long every few minutes on Saturday mornings. Even her mother’s laughter at the ventriloquist and his sassy dummy would not awaken her.
But the sound of Dolly and her son’s voices, the moment they arrived, was enough to get her up.
The girl waddled sleepily, thumb in mouth, to the kitchen.
“How much times I tell you don’t come out here barefoot, child. You want to catch cold? You see how this child like to play? Soon as she hear you come, she wake up.” Her mother lifted her off the cool linoleum floor and wrapped her arms around her tightly. The girl rested her head on her mother’s shoulder, her face in her mother’s neck. The boy, in blue shirt tucked inside khaki short pants, the typical schoolboy’s attire that Mrs. Sangha had acquired secondhand from a neighbor for him, leaned against his mother and concentrated on picking at the scab of a sand-fly bite on his knuckles.
“Trouble abroad again, girl. Bad, bad trouble. I can’t believe what I hear on the Zenith this morning,” Mrs. Sangha addressed Dolly grimly. Every week Mrs. Sangha gave Dolly a highlight or two of the events going on in some country or the other, some country previously unknown to her and always too far away for Dolly to be interested in. These last few weeks, “abroad” was always a place called Europe—too big, too far away, and too everything for Dolly to even have a picture of it in her mind. And these days it was too full of turmoil. The recent news troubled Mrs. Sangha deeply, but all Dolly knew of Europe was that it was a too-distant land full of people who were supposed to be very important but who they were and why they were so important, she had never understood.
“BBC play right on the air, for the whole world to hear, what they call ‘live broadcast.’ A reporter was in a farmhouse in Spain, and you could hear bombs—yes, you could hear them falling as if you were there yourself. They were falling while the commentator was shouting above it for the whole world to hear.”
“Eh-eh. But why he so stupid? He wasn’t ’fraid one fall on his head?”
“He is a news reporter. That is what they do. And thank God for people like him, otherwise we wouldn’t know what-so going on in these places. God spare his life, yes.”
“So what the bombs was about?”
“Is that stupid man again. The one from Germany. Chancellor, they call him. He self had a hand in ordering aeroplanes to fly over a little village in Spain, not much bigger than Marion, you know, and bomb down the village flat-flat. The man is uncivilized, I tell you.”
Mrs. Sangha cupped her face in her hands. Dolly saw that she had been crying and was afraid she might start up again. “He pick a market day when it had plenty-plenty people in the village. Man sick, in truth, yes, Dolly. To just go and kill people so? They better watch out over there, yes, before that madman get too big for his britches. And you know they say he is a small man, short-short and ugly. Anyway, I glad too bad we living on an island unto ourselves, yes.”
“And I just hear, too, that creek flooding now-now. All you come in time, girl. Not even a Bihar car can pass on it now.” Mrs. Sangha laughed halfheartedly at her own joke and pressed her daughter’s head against her shoulder, rubbing the little child’s back. Dolly was glad for the change of topic.
“You want to pee-pee, baby? Come change clothes and brush teeth. Mammy will make cocoa for the two of you, and then you can play all you want. That is all the two of you good for is play, play, play. You mustn’t come out barefoot again, you hear? Dolly, Boss bring some shirts for you to wash. Starch them good, eh?”
Dolly nodded. She didn’t, of course, say what was on her mind: why the woman he shack up with don’t wash and iron his shirts for him? Why you does send food for him lunchtime and wash clothes for him? She sleeping with him, why she don’t look after him? You might as well tell him to bring her clothes and all her children clothes for you—well, not for you, but for me—to wash, too.
Alone in the kitchen with her son, a children’s choir on the radio performing “On Yonder Shivering Hills the Holly and the Snow” concealed Dolly’s voice as she admonished him, “Sit right here. Don’t go in behind them, you hear. Nobody invite you, so you stay right where you is and wait for me. I going to change mih clothes. And don’t forget yuh manners. What you say if somebody ask you if you want something?”
“Yes, please.”
“And if you don’t want what they have to give you?”
“No, please.”
“No, thanks. And if and when they give you something?”
“Thanks, please.”
“Thanks. Thanks, Mrs. Sangha. You hear? And you don’t have to take any and everything she offer you, you hear? Behave yourself proper till I come back.”
The girl and the boy who was her age sat next to each other on the couch—at least they were on the easier-to-clean pink vinyl and chrome couch and not on the more formal red velvet one—in the drawing room. The girl had learned to read simple words and numbers at the elementary school she attended on weekday mornings. One of several of her large picture books, some with a few words, several with torn pages, lay on the couch between them. They looked at the pictures and invented stories. The girl fingered a word, uttered it one syllable at a time. He concentrated, tried to remember its length, shape, and sound. The girl glanced about the room. No one else was with them. She tore the page slowly, so as not to make a noise. She was attempting to tear out a single letter from the words grouped on the page, but she did not yet have the dexterity required for so specific a task. She tried another page. This time she succeeded in tearing out the letter H for the word “he.” She placed it on the couch between them. She tore another. The letter E. She tried to wrap the two letters into a neat package, but the paper was too small, her fingers unskilled. She told the boy to open his mouth. To stick out his tongue. She placed the two letters on his tongue and ordered him to swallow. He tried, but the paper had stuck to his tongue. He removed the two wet letters, rolled them between his fingers, put them back in his mouth, and quickly swallowed hard, his eyes closed tightly. She handed him a cup half full of orange juice. He drank and gulped as if taking a tablet that would teach him to read.
Dolly, uncomfortable with her son’s ease in that big house, left the washing to come up and find him sitting on the couch. But his feet—never mind they were bare—were marked up, unsightly, they had purple patches from insect bites. Her jaw tightened as she quarreled to herself: What he have them drawn up so, right on top the seat for? Is vinyl couch he sitting on, is true, but if he don’t know better, I do. She would rather he didn’t even sit on the couch, vinyl or no vinyl.
To her mind, he had no right to even enter the drawing room at all. She herself didn’t like going farther into the house than the kitchen. She hastened over to him, admonished him in a low urgent voice, pulled his feet off, rearranged his body as if it had no will of its own, his feet sticking over the edge into the air.
Mrs. Sangha came into the drawing room. “Dolly, leave the boy alone, na. Big events unfolding in the world, and you have time to worry about manners? He is only a child. He have more than enough time later for behaving himself.”
Dolly’s face stung with the contradiction. How would the children know that Mrs. Sangha was only joking with her? But she stood back, expressionless, wondering what events outside of Guanagaspar could be more important than bringing up her son properly. The boy, wide-eyed and made self-conscious, drew his feet up again, grabbed the toes of one foot, and pulled at the scab of a healing sore. Dolly yanked his feet back out. Mrs. Sangha sighed dramatically and said, “Dolly, girl, he is just a child, and that is just a couch.”
Back downstairs, Dolly scrubbed the clothes against the corrugated concrete harder than necessary and fretted: That child of mine getting to be too easy in this house, and Mrs. Sangha too indulgent; is not right that she contradicting me so in front of children.
Sweating from her inexpressible anger and frustration, Dolly scrubbed harder and faster.
A thumping came from upstairs. She remained still and listened. A tinny, quivering note on the shiny black upright piano in the drawing room was being continuously thumped. She rushed up the stairs, her hands and arms wet, a clump of soapsuds dangling off an elbow. Thank God he was sitting on the floor, making scribbles that only he could decipher on a pad of blank paper. The girl was kneeling on the piano stool. She had added several notes, using the flat of her palm pressed down hard, one hand holding down the other. When she saw Dolly, she lifted her hands and banged discordantly. “I making music.”
She sat down on the stool as part of her motion to slide off it. She ran to Dolly and, taking her by the hand, led her to the kitchen. “I want juice. Give me some juice, please.”
Dolly eyed a jug of water in the refrigerator. A glass of it would cool her down good. With one or two ice cubes crackling and splitting in it. But her child was comfortable enough for the two of them in that house. She was not about to take liberties. She would satisfy herself with water from the stand pipe in the backyard, though she could taste its metal flavor just thinking about it.