Two weeks after Mrs. Sangha’s funeral, Harry went down to the coop with a small basin. He reached in and offered his knuckles to the birds, none of which could take the place of the old cock which had long ago died. He filled the basin with twelve of their large brown eggs and returned to the house.
In the kitchen he washed each one free of feather bits, traces of afterbirth, and dried bird feces. His mother said nothing, but her tightly folded arms, intermittent forced expulsions of breath, and intent gaze spoke loudly. Harry ignored her.
When he was leaving the house, she shoved a wet washcloth at him and gruffly said, “Here. Wipe the bird shit off your shoes before you go making double donkey of yourself, child.” Harry looked toward the ceiling and, trying not to smile, shook his head with feigned disbelief. She said, “Eh-eh! What? What is that? Shaking your head? Harry, she is a married woman, you hear? You better study your head good before you bring down yourself—and me—you hear? A married woman! You playing with fire, child. Fire. Hm! I don’t know what nonsense is this.”
It would be the first time that he would pay a visit to the Bihar house. Years after her marriage, he still called her—in his mind—Rose Sangha.
They had married three months after Rose’s graduation from high school. Shem was already attending university abroad, and had returned home especially, the gossip section of Guanagaspar’s only newspaper reported, to be married. Dolly and Harry had received an invitation to the wedding.
The day before the wedding, leaving home before dawn, returning after dark, Dolly went to the Sangha house, albeit purse-lipped and stoic. She showed up among those who would help with the preparations, that is, the poorer friends and unfashionable family members from the outlying country areas. She and these people helped with the inch-by-inch cleaning of the house and yard and with the outdoor coal-fire cookery of food in large vats.
But on the day of the wedding, which she knew her son had no intention of attending, Dolly asked Harry to drive her to Raleigh to see Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako.
Once there, a sea bath, a cleansing in salt water, seemed to Harry an antidote to an insalubrious day. But Dolly caught a fit as he headed in his bathing trunks toward the water. She bawled fiercely that it was in that hour, and that hour exactly, of his deep despair at Rose’s marriage, when, if it were his fate—like it had been his father’s—to die by drowning, the sea was bound to snatch him from her. She didn’t have to plead with him. The day had already worn him weak. He went and lay on his back on the hot sand, with a newspaper covering his face.
A photo of them, Shem in an embroidered kurta, a bejeweled turban on his head, and Rose in a sari, the two of them smiling at each other as awkwardly as newlyweds, appeared on the front page of the following day’s paper. The day after that, a photo of them was in the section titled “Talk of the Town.” He wore a suit, she a blouse, a narrow skirt, and a pillbox hat. They were heading that day, the paper said, back to the U.K. so that Shem could finish his studies. He would graduate with a bachelor of law degree in less than three years, at which time he would be called to the bar. The paper predicted that with his good looks and breeding, he might have a future in politics, like his great-grandfather had had as minister of transport.
Once the couple had returned from abroad, the daily papers were never, to this date, without a photograph of Shem, and often of them both at some official or private function.
Harry’s thoughts of and feelings toward Rose, given their futility, had over the course of years gradually slipped—not away entirely but to the back of his mind. The news on the radio of Mrs. Sangha’s death was a poker that stoked old embers. Then seeing her. Every minute since was spent, once more, thinking of her: the way she had all but embraced him, and so publicly. The memory of the sensation of that sudden dampness on his shirt spread fire through his body.
It was no doubt the basin of eggs he held as he stood outside the gate. The young girl jumping rope on the concrete paving of the garage could have been Rose as a child. A boy, with the forward-facing, flared ears of his father and the chubbiness that Indian families admire in boy children, looked from around a doorway that entered onto the garage. He said, “Just now,” and disappeared again. Harry heard him shout, “Mummy, a man selling eggs by the back gate.”
Harry waited, watching the girl. She seemed oblivious. After about five minutes, Harry called out and asked her name. Not looking at him, she said, “My name is Cassie. You selling eggs?”
Harry asked her to run inside and tell her mother Harry had come. She went to the door, but without entering the house, she shouted, “Mummy.” She did not wait for an answer. She shouted again, this time louder, “Mummy!” And yet again. She doubled over as if to expel the most forceful voice she had and she screamed, “Muhhhmy!” This time he heard a voice from inside the house but could not make out the words. Cassie shouted out, “Well, I was calling you, and you wouldn’t answer.” He heard Rose ask, “Well, what is it?” Cassie said, “It’s the Eggman. His name is Harry. Mummy, can I have something to eat?”
Her mother looked around from the doorway. Seeing Harry, she laughed and said, “And I was wondering who is the Eggman!” She apologized for not coming out sooner, said she had been speaking on the telephone with her husband. His work took him daily to the capital, Gloria. He worked such long hours, and so hard, she said. He was busy with a case against a group of black students from the University of the West Indies, the Guanagaspar campus, who had burned down the university chancellor’s house. The chancellor was a white-skinned man from the U.K., and they felt that the position should belong to a man born on the island who happened to be black-skinned and had many more letters of learning after his name than had the U.K. chancellor. Harry was well aware of the incident. It had been much publicized in the daily paper, but it was not the only eruption on the island. There was, in general, noticeable discontent brewing in pockets in the north of the island. The Indian population had halted their lavish displays of wealth, no longer allowing photographs of them at private or public functions. The people of African heritage had begun to hold public forums and street-corner meetings where they preached and ranted to ever-increasing crowds about slavery days being over, about a back-to-Africa movement, and about not replacing one form of oppression with another—the new one being an Indian-run government. Perhaps, thought Harry, Uncle Mako wasn’t as idle-minded as he and his mother thought. But the north was the north and the south was the south, and in the south, far from the seat of government, life was sleepier, as usual. It was a delicate situation for Shem, Rose told Harry.
But Harry had become distracted; he had imagined them sitting in her living room or on the porch, her offering him a cup of tea, a glass of water, a piece of sponge cake, and he kept expecting they would move from the gate to the inside of the house.
She folded her hands on top of the gate’s wide ledge, leaned against it. She said few people her age had known her mother as well or as long as he had. She said her mother always thought highly of him and wondered aloud not long before she died why his marriage hadn’t worked out and if he would marry again. She thanked him for the eggs and told him he should come again when she had more time to chat, but she didn’t indicate when that might be.
Harry visited her—not more than once every few months in the years since her mother died—bearing the basin full of eggs each time. Shem was publicly hailed, and by the Indian business and religious communities in particular, for putting behind bars several of the dissidents and two high-profile trade union leaders, all of whom were black, and whom he managed to convict for inciting social disobedience. Every day Shem was mentioned and quoted in the newspapers or on the television news hour. They said it was because of him that the country was settling back into its peaceful ways. Harry’s mother said, “If they don’t kill him first, he will run for prime minister one day, mark my word.”
Much public attention was paid to Rose as well. She was written about often in the women’s section of the paper as the prime example for all women of the Caribbean. The food and leisure editor interviewed her about housekeeping. The article included recipes of dishes it was said she cooked herself, even though the family employed a cook. It said that in spite of her money and her position as the A.G.’s wife, she was down-to-earth and wore no airs, traits most noticeable in her casual and gentle manner of speaking. On the occasion of being named woman of the year, it was written that other women should strive to be like her: a mother whose children came first and who stood behind her husband, no matter what. That article joked that Caribbean husbands were not the easiest men for wives to put up with, even when that husband was the attorney general, yet Rose Bihar had never been heard to contradict, even in jest, her husband. The paper said that there were two arenas where she upstaged him: those of beauty and charm, and that if she were to run for the symbolic office of president, she would win solely on those two counts.
Harry, on a visit to her, mentioned the articles. She said she didn’t care for the publicity and everybody knowing her every move, but Shem liked that kind of thing, and he liked it when the papers paid her all that attention. She said, “When you are in the public eye, you can’t stop people from writing all kinds of things. Even when they say it is about you, you don’t recognize yourself in their stories.”
Over the course of the time during which Harry visited Shem Bihar’s outstanding wife, improvements noticeable from the outside had been done to the house. When Rose got a car of her own, the garage was widened to include it. The hedge around the house was pulled up, and a high stone fence that blocked the view of the house was erected. Then a section of the fence came down to make way for the construction of a swimming pool, Shem’s birthday present to her—an extravagance, she said to Harry, apologetically, for she was the only one in the family who would make use of it. The mere mention of her birthday had Harry wondering if she had ever found out about his attempt to get invited to her sixteenth birthday party.
Each time he visited, he was announced by the servant or one or both of the children, who seemed to grow in huge spurts, as the Eggman. Each time but the last, Rose and he stood, like that first time, at the gate. Her strange combination of distance and warmth remained the same. Sometimes they were out there for half an hour, and once for almost an hour. Although he never asked, she told him each time about her father. He had been moved to an apartment in a costly private-care facility for older infirm people. It had become fashionable, if not altogether acceptable, for society Indians to leave the care of their infirm parents to strangers in private-care homes. Rose told Harry that “they” had sold the house on the corner of Beau Moreau and Ashton streets. The family had recently started going to the Bihar beach house on the east coast regularly. She still enjoyed swimming, enjoyed that more than anything, and as neither Shem nor the children much liked being in the water, it was time she had to herself. She showed surprise and even disappointment, Harry liked to think, that he, born by the sea, had never learned to swim. She told him inconsequential things about the children, things they did that made her laugh, things about them that caused her worry. How the boy was not as bright as she would have hoped. That he didn’t show an interest in anything worthwhile as far as they could see. Not science or reading or even sports. That the girl was just like her father, strong-willed and bright, maybe even too much so for a girl. There were, too, many long silences between them out by the gate. At first they were awkward, but soon enough the quiet was full and calming.
On his last visit, several years since Mrs. Sangha had died, he did make it beyond the gate. It was just past the lunch hour, and her children, now in the final stages of secondary schooling, were at school. Shem was at his office in Gloria. Her live-in servant had the day off. Harry called at the gate, cradling in his hands a brown bag of eggs. Rose opened the back door a crack. Seeing him, she went out and drew open the heavy gate, inviting him into the kitchen. Although she had not been expecting any visitor that day, her lips were colored with shiny burnt-orange lipstick, and her eyes were outlined in black kohl. Harry sat at the table and watched her bustle about the kitchen. He had, come to think of it, never seen her, as an adult, without lipstick or eyeliner, even when he arrived unexpectedly and she came to meet him outside at the gate. At the stove, she set the kettle on a burner, turned on the ignition switch, and bent to see if the flame had come up. She took a round coconut bake out of the oven, where it was stored in a bright yellow kitchen cloth, cut a wedge from the bake, sliced it, and, using her fingers, packed it with layers of already cut cheese. She did all of this quietly. She knew he was watching. He could tell from the way she moved—everything she did, she angled herself so that he saw her face. He was not shy to watch keenly, for each minuscule motion she made seemed considered and significant. He relished being in this interior world of hers.
She set a place mat before him, stopped close enough and long enough beside him to arrange the knife and fork on the mat. He had to stop himself from reaching around her waist, standing up, and holding her against him. Such closeness and attention on that single and particular occasion when, inviting him into her privacy, no one else around—surely she, too, had hoped that he would hold her. But he did not. In that moment of possibility, he had glimpsed his own dignity and was satisfied to have been finally afforded a recognition.
They sat across from each other. She poured them both cups of tea, and they sat in silence, except for when he told her the bake was delicious. She didn’t respond. He sipped his tea slowly, and when it was finished, with more confidence than he had previously known, he slid his chair back. It grazed, a screeching sound against the terrazzo floor that underscored the complicity of their time together. She remained seated, her eyes set on the plate from which he had just eaten. He wiped his mouth on the napkin and got up. He moved toward the door that led to the garage. She did not get up or look at him. He turned sharply to face her, a question brimming in his mouth. He opened his mouth, ready to demand an answer of her, and just as urgently as it came, it evaporated. It began with “why,” but no words would follow. The question burned like a fire in his chest. Even if he could have framed it, there would have been, and he knew it well, no answer to the question. He wanted to beg it of her, but in truth, it was a question for Narine Sangha. For Mrs. Sangha. For his mother. None of whom, in any case, would have had the answer. He uttered with a marked note of uncertainty that he’d come again, and he left.
Compelled by the same urgency as the question that would not form, he did return, three days later, at the same time. But the servant came to the door. She said, “Oh, you is the Eggman! Just now.” She went back into the house and returned to say that Madam was sleeping. She held her hands out for the eggs, but he had brought none.