Guanagaspar. Present day.
Heroman, Piyari’s brother, leads Harry from the airport terminal to the white Austin in the taxis-only zone. It is not yet ten o’clock in the morning, but the sun blasts its heat, reproachful to those who have stayed away from their homeland too long. On reaching the car, Harry is damp with perspiration.
Heroman throws the luggage on the backseat and hands his charge an envelope, a letter from Cassie Bihar. He leans back against the car and cleans his teeth with a reed pulled from a grass just off the road and watches Harry.
Dear Harry,
I hope you made the connection in Toronto smoothly and that both flights were tolerable. Heroman will take you to his house in Central to meet his sister Piyari right away. He will let me know where you are staying, and I will ring you. Please wait for me to ring. I will call you at eight o’clock tonight.
Sincerely,
CB
Harry is perplexed. Why has she not written word of her mother?
Getting in behind the wheel Heroman says, “My sister waiting for you. They feed you on the plane? She make food. She say her madam used to say how plane food bad for so, so she cook up a little something.”
The airport grounds give way to endless fields of sweet-smelling sugarcane. Abruptly the sugarcane fields end and the land spreads out in a prairielike flatness. The land on either side of the divided two-lane road forms a hatchwork of rectangular-shaped rice paddies. Lots of green fluorescence is interspersed with water-logged lots from which no rice grows, but where broad-leafed water lilies with waving pink flowers flourish. Workers are bent over in the paddies. Harry and Heroman pass communities of no more than four thatch-roofed bungalows that hug the land close to the road. A stubborn cow belonging to one of these communities stands glassy-eyed in the middle of the road un-perturbed by the vehicle and the horn’s staccato blasts, and Heroman must swerve off the road to avoid it. In a ditch, a buffalo—meager to the bone and covered in dried caking mud—stands statue-like.
They are driving in the middle of the island, at least an hour away from the ocean, yet the brilliant beckoning light, the stifling humidity, and a taste of salt in the air give Harry the keen sense that at any moment, upon rounding a corner or cresting a hill, they will be afforded a glimpse of the Caribbean Sea. The dark skin of the driver of the car in which he travels, of the people they pass, the lanky coconut trees arching here and there to the thin blue sky, the iridescent haze of heat trembling off the spongy asphalt of the road, all have the power of a moon over him, stroking and pulling at the blood in his veins. Now that he is here, there are stops, he decides impetuously that he will make. Once he has seen Rose, he will head straight for the ocean, the tropical ocean that his body is suddenly aching to be submerged in. He will visit Raleigh, too, to see what is left of the plot of land on which he and his mother lived, to see Uncle Mako and Tante Eugenie, and he will go to the house he and his mother lived in in Marion with Bhatt Persad.
The sea is still not visible, yet the air is saturated with its odors. He can smell, almost taste, its washed-up debris. Roadside pedestrians, some transporting pails of water on their head, people sitting in rockers on their front porches, and men riding bicycles, some of whom are barefoot, wave as the Austin passes. A tide of belonging washes over Harry. Elderberry Bay and all that he has accomplished in that part of the world seem in an instant like a dream, a good dream, but very far away.
Soon they arrive in the village where the Bihars’ servant, Piyari, and her taxi-driving brother live. A short, dilapidated billboard with a sun-faded painting of a worker wielding a cutlass above a stand of cane announces WELCOME TO THE HEARTLAND OF THE COUNTRY. DRIVE SAFELY.
A dark-skinned, wiry woman runs toward the car, waving. Heroman has barely brought the car to a halt before Piyari opens the passenger door and reaches a hand out to Harry. He gets out of the car. Overcome, she puts her face in her hands and lets out a sob. Heroman shakes his head as if in pity. Salty sweat runs off Harry’s furrowed forehead. He is noticeably confused and embarrassed, so Piyari catches herself and directs Heroman to park the car and warm the plate of food she had prepared. She leads Harry into the yard. The property—on which sits a small wooden house not unlike the one he lived in with his mother in Raleigh—is outlined by a hedge of the lush benediction plant. They round the house to the back, to a table and a low bench under a pomerac tree. Not a bird is in sight, not a whistle or chirp can be heard. Harry moves slowly in the heat.
Piyari turns to him. “Miss Cassie didn’t tell you nothing in the letter?”
He shakes his head.
“Madam gone, Mr. Harry. Madam ent here no more.” She began to cry. “You understand? She gone.”
He doesn’t understand. He shrugs and frowns. Seeing his confusion, she wrings her hands in frustration. She lets herself bawl. “Madam dead. She dead and gone.”
A cow at the far end of the yard stands motionless, a cattle egret perched on its back. A rooster crouches in the cool beneath the wooden stairs of the house. Piyari is telling him something about someone he doesn’t know, Harry is thinking. Cautiously he utters, all but inaudibly, “Madam? Who are you talking about?”
“My madam. Mrs. Bihar. He drown she in the sea.”
Heroman has brought out a clear glass plate with a triangle of roti and a serving of curried chataigne. Between his sister and the visitor from abroad is a coarse, stunned silence. Awkwardly he cuts through, apologizing for the heat, saying that they had bought an air-conditioning unit from a stranger who came to their door with it in his hand, but it worked for a day and then quit. Harry stares at Heroman, thinking, There has got to be some mistake. She can’t be dead. Why didn’t Cassie tell me this? I didn’t come all this way for that. What does she mean, “he drowned she”?