Valmiki

IT WAS THAT SEPTEMBER DAY, ONE YEAR EARLIER, WASN’T IT? THAT rainy September day — exactly. The door behind his last patient had barely closed, and Valmiki Krishnu, still seated in his swivel chair, exerted a tremendous effort simply to lean forward and prop his elbows on his desk. Rain hit the galvanized overhang that protected the louvred window of his office like a torrent from a fire marshal’s hose. He had not wanted to get out of bed that morning. He wished he had not.

The address book on his desk was open to the page with Tony Almirez’s phone number in Goa. There was a nine-and-a-half-hour time difference between there and Trinidad. In Goa, it was midnight. Valmiki would awaken Tony if he were to telephone him — and Tony’s wife, too. But it was Tony alone in all the world with whom he wanted to speak. Two decades before, he and Tony had been medical students together in Scotland. That was a long time ago, and much had happened for both of them since, and still every minute of their time together was indelibly etched in Valmiki’s body and mind — even though they hadn’t seen each other in twenty-something years, and had spoken on the telephone not more than a dozen times or so, all the calls initiated by Valmiki, the last one a year ago. Still, whenever Valmiki felt as disoriented as he did just now, it was Tony, not his own wife or any of their friends on the island, he reached for.

Valmiki’s palms made a tower, and he tapped together the tips of his first three fingers as his mind bloated with the previous night’s and that morning’s aggravations. If it wasn’t one thing with his wife, it was bound to be another with his daughter. His second daughter, Vashti, was as placid as the Gulf of Paria. But Viveka, the elder, had never been placid. At least, before going to university, she had been manageable. He opened his palms and let his head fall into his waiting hands.

He would not call Tony, he decided. Even if it had been Tony’s midday instead of his midnight, he would not call him. That was how it had been for some time. The desperate lurching for Tony, the equally swift realization of the futility in that, and then Valmiki making do, turning to Saul. Saul, with his unreproachful, smiling eyes. Those long eyelashes. But Saul’s comfort was limited. He could not offer Valmiki more than the physical — a respite from home, certainly, but always a shortlived respite and always on the sly. No one could help him.

THE TELEPHONE’S INTERCOM BUZZED. ON THE OTHER END, VALMIKI’S receptionist, Zoraida, expressed surprise at not spotting him at the door of his office. Valmiki normally saw a patient to the door, one hand light on the patient’s back, ushering him or her out with nothing more than a suggestive nudge onward and a brief parting sentence of encouragement that made that nudge feel more like a gentle launch into the world rather than an expulsion from his office. But an expulsion it was, as he usually had an overflowing roomful of hacking, restless, not-so-patient patients to see, several of whom would have to be turned back at the end of the day with promises they would be seen first thing the following morning.

But today he had not even stood up as the man he had been treating exited. It was old-fashioned, he and his peers would agree, but most patients thought of their doctors as demi-gods able to make them well and whole just by poking and prodding the surface and orifices of their bodies. None of the doctors discouraged their patients from such thinking, but the load of being a healing god — the patients seldom did a single thing to heal themselves, the doctors would grumble — sometimes wore Valmiki down.

It was that, but not only that, which provoked within him such resistance to being where he was and contributed to his feeling of being trapped. Nor was it merely the altercation with Viveka that morning, nor the one immediately afterwards with his wife. And nor was it the troublesome one the previous night with both Devika and Viveka. After all, not a day seemed to go by without some unpleasantness from one, if not both, of them.

No, it was the weight of pretense. The weight of responsibility in general.

Had Valmiki been at the door to let his patient out, he would have been privy to one of Zoraida’s coded gestures. Given the lack of reliable electricity and telephone service on the island, Dr. Krishnu and Zoraida had between them what Zoraida, who had been with him for twelve years now, liked to think of as a secret language. Her desk was angled for this very purpose, and the seating in the waiting room arranged so that Valmiki, his door, and a patient entering and exiting were out of sight of those awaiting their turn. A particular gesture from her would let him know that his wife had arrived and was in the waiting room. Another would indicate that certain individuals whom he might not want to keep waiting — family, old and dear friends, his bank manager, his solicitor, a number of people who not so coincidentally were white-skinned, and certain women acquaintances among that latter group — had arrived for their appointments or had shown up without appointments. Yet another gesture would inform him that both his wife and a queue-jumper were in the room. These gestures, flicks of the wrist, hair-arranging, specific numbers of fingers resting on her cheek, had been all initiated by Zoraida herself. She had even provided him with a de-coding chart. This initially amused him at her expense, but he came rather quickly to appreciate and rely on their system. More than once, her antics had saved him his marriage. Indeed, his attendance upon particularly privileged queue-jumpers had so often coincided with the unexpected arrival of Mrs. Krishnu that one might wonder if fate was complying with a subconscious wish of Valmiki’s that he be caught out. Zoraida, in those instances, had enjoyed her part in staving off the possibility of public fiascos. With the barest hint of something that resembled a knock, she would officiously barge into his office, part of which, behind a curtain, was also the examination room, to inform her boss of the situation. The woman in his room would immediately be turned out, led by a massively important Zoraida down a private corridor and into another room where she would render herself presentable. Valmiki would be given just enough time to make himself the same before Mrs. Krishnu, none the wiser, or so one thought (for no wife is that dumb), would be ushered in, also by Zoraida. It was an orchestration Zoraida relished.

But Valmiki was not at his door this time, and therefore Zoraida did not get to perform her antics to inform him of the unscheduled arrival of one of his newer lady acquaintances, Tilda Holden. In any case, that day he did not care. He just wanted to run out of his office and leave everything behind. Every single thing. For good.

One thing had simply led to another, and now he was at that point, random on the one hand and precise on the other, where he had had enough. He had been doctor, boss, lover, husband, father for twenty weighty years now, and even so, in regards to the latter two especially, he still felt as incompetent as the first day, and not too much more willing.

While Valmiki had been attending to that last patient, a Mr. Deoraj Deosaran, he had been up and about, taking the man’s pulse, rapping his knuckles on the man’s sallow back and bony front as he listened through his stethoscope above the thundering of the rain on the roof, depressing the man’s tongue with the palette stick and peering as far as he could down his windpipe, even hazarding a breath inhalation to see if his nose might pick up what his eyes, hands, and ears had not. He had, in other words, been attentive, absorbed even, until the end of the visit, an end that he had determined, there being nothing more to do, but an end that was still premature for the patient. Mr. Deosaran wanted to tell Dr. Krishnu the story of his life, as if Dr. Krishnu’s knowing this story would alter his prognosis and prescription. Accordingly, he had talked about when he was a licle-licle boy, so small’n’tin nobody ad a think he’d a make man, he so licle and walking two mile one way to reach he school barefoot in the heavy heavy rain, rain worse than that week’s rain, splashing up and duttying he clothes, and he holding his even licler brother by he hand — and the doctor’s mind floated out of the room. Mr. Deosaran must have sat there telling his story for another several minutes, but Dr. Krishnu had heard nothing of it.

Mr. Deosaran had watched Dr. Krishnu’s eyes grow dim and saw that he had withdrawn, but he noticed too that Dr. Krishnu had not risen, as he had in the past, to indicate that the visit was over. He spoke on some more, a little less certainly, but now it was to watch Dr. Krishnu. When he saw that he no longer held his audience, he dug his feet into the parquet tiling and shoved back the wooden chair in which he sat. The action made a sound like a car breaking a corner, but Dr. Krishnu seemed not to have heard that either. Mr. Deosaran lifted his khaki felt hat from his lap and rested it hesitantly on the desk in front of him. He leaned forward and his voice rose above the rain.

“Everything okay, Doc? You look like you seeing a dead.”

When he received no answer he became perplexed and rapped the table with his knuckles. “Doc!” he said, sharp enough to snap Dr. Krishnu out of his blankness but not so sharp as to disturb the balance of power between them.

Only then did Dr. Krishnu catch himself. “Sorry, Mr. Deosaran. You took me back to another time.”

A SIMPLER TIME, REALLY. VALMIKI MUST HAVE BEEN ABOUT TWELVE. For no reason other than to trouble him, his uncles, his father’s brothers, used to unleash their curled thumbs and middle fingers at his ears, flick the tips and make him run squealing. His own father was a soft but strict man, and had never hit Valmiki. So he couldn’t help but remember the first, albeit the last time, he got skinned by his father. Valmiki had been a fair and plump boy, with fat red cheeks and an insatiable taste for the desserts his mother, his aunts, and the servants made daily with milk from their own cows. He looked like the pampered child he was. His father was the area’s most affluent citizen, a man whose family had built up and passed down to Valmiki’s father and uncles a dairy business situated on the same property on which they lived, just south of the town of San Fernando. They were Brahmins, and so didn’t touch the cows themselves. They managed the business from an office in the main house and hired men from the village who did the manual work of feeding and milking the cows and cleaning the pens that were some distance from the house.

Valmiki was his parents’ only child, and seen as the one who would one day inherit a good portion of this thriving business. From the workers’ point of view, Valmiki, even though he was a child, was their boss too. So when he took the three boys (he shouldn’t really have thought of them as his friends, but he did — they were classmates who jeered at him for his plumpness yet relied on him to help them with their homework, as he was the brightest boy in his class and they the dimmest) into the barn, the workmen who knew that he should not be going in there were not confident enough of their position to stop him. He had already changed out of his school clothes and wore short pants and a yellow, red, and brown striped T-shirt that his father had brought for him on a trip to England. His friends, as he would call them, wore the white long-sleeved shirts and the grey long pants of the school uniform. None wore the grey-and-white striped ties that were also part of the uniform, having removed them once they were off the school grounds and bound their stack of school books with them. The boys had come around to the back entrance of the house, knowing better, as children of poor villagers, than to approach the house from the front, and had asked the servant for Valmiki. Valmiki heard her loud steupses. The servant, even though she too was from the same village as the boys, took offence to them coming to play with her employer’s child. Her disdain was clear. “He drinking his tea now. What you want him for? It is a school day, the middle of the week. Why you not home doing your homework? He have to study. He can’t come out to play; he have homework to do.”

Valmiki was annoyed that the servant had acted as if she were his parent. He heard the boys laugh, and mock back, “He drinking tea. And what he eating? He eating bread and jam, cookies and cream?” One of them asked the maid if he could have a biscuit, please, he was hungry. She asked him if he had no shame, begging so, and what his mother would say if she knew? Valmiki pushed his plate away and ran to the door. He pushed the maid aside. He and the boys both knew that he could not invite them inside his house or offer to bring them mugs of hot, sweet, milky tea or the semolina pudding, which he knew they were bound to love in spite of such teasing. But he was overcome with the desire to give these boys who ridiculed him so much, and yet came to his house looking for him, something of his that they themselves did not have. He pulled the hands of two of the boys along with him. He led them under the wood fence of the pasture where cows stood motionless except for their tails, whipping flies off their backsides. As they side-stepped heaps of cow dung the boys continued to tease Valmiki, asking what kind of tea he was drinking and why didn’t he bring a biscuit with nice cream in it for them. One of them asked him what he was studying so for. They didn’t have a test that week, and if there had been one, he would still pass it. The boy added, “You not dunce, but you dull, dull, dull. Dull, for so. What is better? To be a dunce, yet the kind of fellow everyone wants to spend time with, or to be bright and coming first all the time, and can’t talk to ordinary people because all your head is full up with is information?”

Another boy piped up, “Five times nought equals nought five times one is five five times two is ten five times three is . . . five times three is what? I forget.”

They cackled at this, and then the first boy continued, “Krishnu, tell we, na. You ever try talking to one of them school books? You ever sit down and ol’ talk, and have a good laugh with a science book, boy?”

Valmiki nodded thoughtfully and he even managed a small laugh, as if to say the boy had made a good point. He did not show his hurt.

Old samaan trees with verdant umbrella tops spread a cooling shade across the acres and acres of undulating land that had been in his father’s family for seventy years. The sky, and the trees’ foliage, and their trunks, took on a yellow tinge with the evening light and the treetops trembled with parakeets. The birds made a racket with their incessant twittering and the fluttering of their restless wings as they landed, each one hopping about urgently, searching out the right spot in which to pass the approaching night. In vain the boys combed the soft rich earth beneath for rocks with which to pelt the parakeets. They tried using fallen sticks and bits of branches that had dried, but these were too light and the boys did not have the power to launch them high enough. They pelted doodose mangoes and then used fallen bird-pecked ones to try to bring down others. They climbed into the generous cradle of the governor plum tree because it was low and easy to climb.

For a while Valmiki was pleased that his father’s property could provide these boys with entertainment. But they became bored quickly enough, and picked up again and carried on mercilessly the theme of Valmiki’s biscuits and tea. He said nothing, shamed that he had been gorging on his second helping of pudding. Being the son of the wealthiest man in the area was more of a strain than something to revel in. These boys, whose fathers were labourers on the sugar-cane estates or in the nearby sugar factory, and whose mothers were government-paid water carriers for the road works programs, had the ability to easily make him feel inferior, powerless; they could tease him about his privileges, about his family’s fancy ways, but he dared not say a word about their poverty or narrower future prospects. Suddenly, he realized that he had the power to be more benevolent than they, and he decided that he would exercise this power. He would offer them something more tangible and special than the chance to throw sticks uselessly at birds. So he led them through the pasture to one of the sheds where more than thirty cows were housed. He had heard it said that no one in the area kept cows anymore. His father, Mr. Krishnu, owner of the cattle estate, wouldn’t allow it, others said. Whether this was true or not, reasoned Valmiki, the cows would be a novelty.

No one but employees and Valmiki’s father and brothers were allowed inside the fetid barn with its miasma of cooped-up, hot cow bodies, the milky sweetness of newborn calves, bales of dry grass — some rotted and fermenting in the heat — spilled milk that had soured, and the stench from two brimming open-mouthed pits along the centre aisle into which dung, sometimes a loose slick, sometimes stubborn, matted straw and syrupy urine, were hosed twice a day. But Valmiki marched in confidently, doing his best to ignore the odours and completely ignoring, as if they weren’t there, the same men who greeted him, and whom he greeted, mornings and afternoons as he left and returned with the chauffeur for school. The three boys with him, meanwhile, gagged at the stench. They shoved the toes of their school sneakers under the edge of the piles of grass stored in the aisle, dragging out strands onto the uneven concrete path. They made lewd gestures at the cows, which stared back with eyes bulging but unfazed while chewing their cuds and used their tails to lash at sultana-sized flies that crawled on and bit their bodies. The boys mooed, and when a cow mooed — either back at them or simply because it did — they made a racket of mooing sounds.

Rakes and shovels leaned against a post, and one of the boys headed for these but Valmiki sharply told him not to touch them. To his surprise, the boy acquiesced immediately. Valmiki himself then lifted a large galvanized iron pail off a hook on another post, dragged it with a ruckus along the ground, and then slid with it under the slatted gate of one of the pens. He had to brace himself with one hand on the ground. The ground was wet. In the low light he could not see what he had put his hand in. He wanted to smell it, but he knew that if he did, and if it were cowexcrement, not only the smell but the idea of it would weaken his resolve in front of his friends. He wiped his hand on the side of his pants. One of the workers made his way over. The cows, hearing the metallic sounds made by the bucket, shifted their weight from side to side. Restless, their tails whipped about. When the other boys tried to follow Valmiki under the gate, Valmiki stopped them. He patted the cow on its side. It tamped the grass beneath its feet, moving its body closer to Valmiki as if to nestle against him. One of the boys managed to slip under the gate.

“Bayta,” the worker mumbled, not enjoying contradicting the actions of his boss’s son, and more so in front of the boy’s playmates, “your pappy ent go like for you be in here. You go dutty up your clothes.”

Now, as an adult, Valmiki recalled the man wearing a white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and a white cloth tied around his head like a rough turban. In his memory the man wore grey trousers and he was barefoot. The man’s clothing, as far as he could recall, was spotless, but then he doubted his memory, for reason would suggest that anyone working in a cattle barn and dressed in white was bound to get the stain of grass-feed on his clothing, if nothing else. For an instant Valmiki wondered how much of his memory was reliable, how much of it he had invented or doctored. Hadn’t he felt his face go red with anger that the man would talk to him like that in front of those boys? Hadn’t he told the man sharply that his father didn’t know he was in there, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t bother him? He was able to hear, as clearly as if it were yesterday, one of the boys outside of the pen tease, “Let’s get out of here, man. This place stinking fuh so. Ey, Valmiki, you living by a stinking place, boy. Even the open drain in front my house don’t smell so bad.”

Valmiki remembered ignoring the boy and all that followed. “You want to taste some nice fresh milk?” he had persisted.

He slipped the pail beneath the cow. In response, the worker who had spoken with him before swung open the gate. The man was suddenly stern. And Valmiki remembers him now, his clothes in Valmiki’s memory now gleaming, and the man standing straight and tall. “Bayta, that cow give milk for the day. It need a rest now.”

Valmiki clenched his teeth and ignored the man. He knelt down beside the cow. The man sighed hard. Even if the boy was only twelve years old, this was the boss’s son. Valmiki grabbed hold of the teats and worked them one at a time, as he had seen done, and as if he had done it a thousand times before. He was determined. Fortunately, a forceful stream of white milk shot into the pail noisily, opaque bubbles rapidly forming. The other boys were finally impressed. They bent down to watch and whistled in awe. Valmiki, sweating, released the teats and stood up only when the pail was half full. The others wanted to try. Valmiki knew better than to let them. That would have been going much too far. He tried to lift the pail himself, but the milk sloshed from side to side. Some of it spilled, and the man rushed to take the pail from Valmiki. “What you want to do with this?” he asked, showing his anger and frustration by not addressing the boy with the usual affectionate Hindi word for son. Valmiki told him to empty the milk into three bottles. He sent each boy home with a bottle.

Valmiki was whipped that night on his raw backside with a guava switch for not staying in to do his homework, for going into the barn, for taking boys from the village there, for showing off, for getting cow dung on his hands and on his pants, for milking a cow, for milking a cow that had already been milked for the day, and for giving away milk to neighbours when those very ones, like all others, were accustomed to buying it.

Valmiki pleaded weakly, “It was just milk, Pappa. Just three bottles. I will pay you back from my allowance.”

Valmiki’s father retorted with the violent calm of the one wielding the switch, which came down on his son seven more times: “You BETTER LEARN the VALUE of business FAST, you hear? And take THIS! For not being MAN enough to STAND UP to those boys, for LETTING OTHER children lead you into doing wrong.” His father, finished, pushed Valmiki away. Valmiki tried to pull up his underpants, but the bite and burn of his buttocks was too great. He put his hands on his backside to calm the pain, but the heat of them only made the fire burn more. Valmiki’s mother finally took him by his shoulders and ushered him toward his own room. His father’s voice grew loud again. “Let him go and live in the village for a day or two with those same people. He wouldn’t last a minute. You think I hit him good? They will beat his ass to a pulp.”

Valmiki’s mother rubbed aloe on his buttocks until his sobbing eventually subsided and he lay limp. The sheet about his face was wet from his crying, and about his body it was drenched in the sweat of humiliation and anger at his father. All the while his mother cooed, “Bayta, don’t mind your pappa. He have a temper. He love you, child, but he find you too soft. Mamma love you, too.” She held his face and turned him to face her. “Just so, just how you stay. Don’t mind Pappa beat you. He is not a bad man, he just want you to toughen up a little.” Valmiki was perplexed at the softness his parents saw in him, and from then on he pondered how he might fix that.

He hadn’t seen those boys, men they would be now, in more than thirty years. Trinidad wasn’t a big country, but still their paths wouldn’t readily have crossed. He only thought of them and this incident because of his patient’s story. He wondered where those three boys — men — were now. If he knew and called them up right that minute, could he have said to them, Let’s go find a cow to milk, or a bar to drink dry and catch up? And would they go? They might have continued the old teasing in a good-natured manner, and in a good-natured manner he would have accepted it because they would all see that he had changed and was no longer the boss’s too-soft, mamsy-pamsy son.

BACK THEN, HE HADN’T WANTED TO BE WHERE HE WAS RIGHT NOW, that was for sure. If his own son were still alive, he couldn’t help but think — and he imagined a boy of five or so, not a youth of eighteen, which would make chronological sense — he would have that second got into his car and taken the boy out of school, driven with him to the foot of the San Fernando Hill or into the forested lands of the central hills, and taken him hunting, or at least to catch birds there. This, in spite of the fact that he had never actually taken his son anywhere, his son being a sickly boy from the day he was born until he died at age five. Instead, he had several times taken Viveka, older than her little brother by two years, to the forested lands, and walked her along a cutlassed path so that he could show her where he hunted. He used to be big in her eyes then, bigger than he was in anyone else’s, ever. How could a child, your own daughter, unsettle you so, without you knowing exactly why?

“Those were different days then, weren’t they?” Valmiki mumbled, returning to his patient, raising his eyebrows as if in surprise at himself.

Mr. Deosaran offered, in a quiet tone, “Sometimes the doctor might need to see a doctor too, not so, Doc?”

Valmiki rubbed his mouth with a circular hand motion. Finally he said, “You know, the truth is that the doctor can’t fix everything.”

Thinking that his advice was being solicited, the man grew bolder. “Well, I could take it if the doctor can’t fix heself. That make a kind of sense. But I hope the doc still good with his patients.”

At this, Dr. Krishnu snapped back fully. He looked Mr. Deosaran directly in the eyes, assured him that while everyone else was easy to care for, the doctor himself was typically the worst patient. He muttered, “Physician heal thyself,” to which the Mr. Deosaran said, “That is a good one, Doc. They should make that a saying. Is a good one.” The man picked up the umbrella he had left by the door, lifted his hat to his head, and tapped it into place. Then he backed out of the door.

And that was when Valmiki leaned toward the table, tipped the swivel chair forward, and dug his elbows into his desk. He brought his palms together as if to pray, although he was far from doing any such thing. He tapped together the tips of his first three fingers, opened his palms, and lowered his face into them just as Zoraida rang.

“Yes?” His voice was muffled because of the hand pressed against a portion of his lips. Still, his terseness with Zoraida in that one word was palpable. He resented having put himself in the position of needing her. She knew — not everything, but certainly a great deal about him, and he hardly anything of her. And he certainly didn’t want her thinking that because he had intimate dealings with more than one of the women who paid him visits in his office, she had any chance of falling in among them. It must have naturally crossed her mind — for what perks might come with that! — but she surely saw the similarity among the women he favoured. They were — the exception being his wife — foreign white women, all beautiful in the way that men commonly — or common men — liked their women. No doubt she knew better than to try to cross any more lines than she already had.

She did take liberties. For example, sometimes he sent her to buy his lunch at the doubles vendor on the promenade. One or two dollars in change should have been returned to him, but more often than not, they were not. Two dollars was nothing to him, but the boldness of her actions, and the fact that he felt he had no choice but to allow her this audacity, made him fume. If she put off doing a task, like letting office supplies run out entirely before reordering, he fumed then, too, but to himself. Occasionally he dared chastise her, but she would interrupt him almost kindly. “What you said, Dr. Krishnu? How you talking as if you not feeling good today?”

She also had her by-the-way reminders of his illicit acts and her indispensability. “Did you call back Mrs. Alexander? That was close yesterday, eh! She and Mrs. Krishnu almost met. But I got Mrs. Alexander out as soon as Mrs. Krishnu pull up in her car.”

Valmiki sometimes complained about her to his wife, Devika. Only certain things he told her, of course, but usually it was enough to make her take Zoraida’s insolences personally: “Who does she think she is? She is too familiar with you. She is behaving like your wife. Why do you let her get away with this behaviour? Let me have a chat with her, I will straighten her out so fast!”

Of course, he would allow no such thing. How he sometimes wished, though, that stories of his philandering would leak — no, rather explode — throughout the town, and cause such a scandal that his family would toss him out like a piece of used tissue or flush him from their lives, and he would be forced to leave the country. He would be freed. He revised his thought: perhaps he, forever concerned about appearances and doing the praiseworthy thing, would never really be free.

If philandering had been for him a sword, it was the double-edged kind. On the one hand, it was a suggestion of his more-than-okay status with the ladies (not one, but many) and so worked against suspicions of who and what he was at heart. A man was certainly admired by men and by women for a show of his virility, even by the ones he hurt. On the other hand, since philandering had never been a shame in Trinidad — a badge it was, rather — for a man who wanted to be caught, broken, and expelled, it was a problem.

These days, Saul was the object of Valmiki’s most powerful and basest desires, yet Saul could have come to Valmiki’s office every day and not even Zoraida would have had the tiniest somersault in her brain regarding that. But still, he wouldn’t let Saul visit him here. Saul and his friends — they had became Valmiki’s friends eventually — would get together on the occasional weekend. Saul and Valmiki usually started their visit on the Friday night. They would drive all the way up to Saul’s cousin’s house, a two-room wooden structure in the Maraval Hills. The cousin would leave, and Valmiki and Saul would spend the night there. In the early hours of Saturday morning Saul’s accepting male friends would come up and meet them, and they would all head deep into the northern range to hunt. Hardly anyone minded or wondered about that. In fact, the hunting itself, as unusual as it was for a man of Valmiki’s background, was seen as his little quirk and a recommendation of his widely admired viritilty. Even though the group hunted less frequently these days, there remained the perception in his social world that Valmiki was still quite a regular hunter. Valmiki and Saul now met at The Golden Dragon, and even at The Victory, once in a while.

“DOCTOR? HELLO, DOCTOR? BUT, EHEH, WHAT HAPPEN TO THE PHONE? Doctor, you there?”

Valmiki had been quiet for what must have seemed on the other end an unusual while. Then he spoke. “I heard you, Zoraida. I heard you. Give me a minute. I will call you when I am ready.”

But Zoraida was insistent. “No, Doctor, I didn’t see you let Mr. Deosaran out and now Mrs. . . .”

But Valmiki instinctively did not want to hear. He cut her short. “No. Look. Not now, I said. I don’t know what I am doing.” He spoke more sharply than usual.

“What do you mean you don’t . . .”

He snapped at her, “I said wait. Just wait.” He slammed down the receiver.

Had he listened, he would have found out that a woman he had met some days before, Tilda Holden, and had paid a great deal of attention to — an inordinate amount, he later admonished himself, at a doctors’ dinner, on an evening when Devika was not feeling well and so had not accompanied him — was in the waiting room. She had arrived without an appointment, complaining to Zoraida first of headaches, and then, kept waiting too long, of a pain in her chest. Had it been any other day, Valmiki would likely have seen the woman right away, and the rest of his scheduled patients in the waiting room might have been left a good half hour, fanning themselves, or steupsing with frustration over the long, long, long wait in that hot, airless, germ-filled room.

But today was different.

The night before, when Valmiki and his family had sat down to eat supper together, his eldest daughter, Viveka, had announced she planned to stay at home the following day to study in the library at the back of the house. The library had been built especially for the children when Viveka was eight and Vashti four, and although the intention was for Valmiki and Devika to remain in that house for the rest of their lives, and also to have the two girls attend university, this room they called the library — to instill in the children a sense of serious study — was built for a small child’s needs, with low shelves, not too many, and desks too light for spreading out university-weight texts. It was less than three years ago, when Viveka had entered the University of the West Indies, that they had replaced the two pint-sized desks with ones more sensible for the needs of young women, but this had reduced the already small space by half. Still, this more than any other place was where Viveka preferred to hole up. It was where she had learned to think beyond the words of a book, and where she sometimes leaned back in her chair, staring up at the ceiling in almost the exact manner that was her father’s unconscious habit.

Last evening, just before supper and not long after Valmiki and Devika had had another of their regular tiffs — tension still between them, and Valmiki worn out by now — Viveka had barged into the house in a flurry of excited huffs and puffs as if she had had a most noble and terribly long day at the university. As they sat down to eat, she had announced, as if it were a present she was giving the family, that she would not make the trip up to the university the following day. The family library, she glowed, was perfect, still perfect, even though one would have thought she and Vashti had by now outgrown it. Valmiki and Devika, in spite of the chill between them, had discreetly exchanged nervous glances at this touch of congeniality, but when nothing untoward immediately followed, they relaxed. The main part of the meal was eaten in an atmosphere of hesitant amicability.

Then, just as Devika finished serving out the cherry cheese-cake and placed on the table a saucer of Rimpty’s chocolates that their chocolate-making neighbours, the Prakashs, had sent over, the dreaded subject of extracurricular activities came up. And not just any extracurricular activity, but volleyball. That damned volleyball subject yet again! thought Valmiki, even as he tried to appear unfazed. But the subject hadn’t simply come up, of course. Viveka had introduced it in a contrived way. Throughout the meal Vashti had been talking to Viveka, and Valmiki, perhaps because he had been anticipating some unpleasantness, had noticed that Viveka seemed unduly irritated by Vashti’s chatter and appeared to be listening to the conversation going on between him and Devika. Valmiki had been telling Devika that the Medical Association was having their annual dinner and dance soon, and was wondering if he should secure tickets. Devika had responded that there was a clique of wives who were social climbers, using their husbands’ professions — professions that the husbands only had because education and scholarships were available to any and everybody in the country — to give them all kinds of licence they wouldn’t otherwise have, and that those women liked to gossip too much. Those women were smiling and paying you compliments one minute, and the moment you had your back to them they were prying into your life and crying you down, all to build themselves up. She really hated those dinners.

Just then, Viveka piped up. “There seems to be a general human need to form cliques and join clubs, doesn’t there?” Valmiki knew instantly where she wanted to go with that statement. Both he and Devika bristled. There was a local women-only sports club, not connected to the university but a local community club that met on Tuesdays and Thursdays for practice at the public park at the far end of the Harris Promenade, and a few weeks ago Viveka had expressed an interest in joining it. Devika had asked her if she was crazy, wanting to go and play a game in a club that was open to anybody and, of all places, in that part of the city. Whereupon Viveka had reminded them that Helen, daughter of their financial adviser, was on a team that played there. Devika had responded, “I don’t care if the Queen’s children play on that court, my children are not playing there. You should know better than asking.”

And now Viveka had burst into their dinnertime conversation, bringing up the subject again. “You know, the interesting thing about a community sports club is that it does allow for the intermingling of the different social classes and the many cultures our county is blessed with, don’t you agree, Dad?” Although Valmiki knew the question was rhetorical, he was about to grab the rein with some clever and diverting response, but Viveka didn’t wait for an answer. “I mean, after all, we are a small island, and rather than form cliques we should indeed be learning from and about one another, helping one another upward, you know what I am saying?” She looked from her father to Vashti and carried right on again. “As you yourself have said, Dad, strong individuals make for a strong nation, a strong country within and without.” If Viveka’s little sermon prevented her from hearing her mother’s sudden heavy breathing, Valmiki was aware of it, and this panicked him even more than whatever Viveka had up her sleeve. Devika bit her lower lip. She pushed her plate up the table. Valmiki couldn’t help himself. He had to smile. His daughter was bold. Bolder than he was. Vashti put down her fork, scrunched up her mouth and forehead, and looked at her sister in confusion.

But Devika was not about to play this game with her daughter. “Look, get to the point, Viveka. You are talking about joining that club again, aren’t you?”

“Well, Mom, Helen . . .”

Viveka’s tone immediately went from the pulpit one she had managed so calmly to a high-pitched one, but she got no further than the mention of her friend Helen’s name. Her mother lashed out, “Look, I don’t want to hear about Helen. Helen is not even Indian. At least, not properly Indian. Her father is white — which, let me remind you, not just you, but you and your father, does not mean that he is one bit better than us. Most of those foreign whites who leave their countries and come here are not from our class. They come here because they can’t do better for themselves in their own countries. They come behaving as if they are superior, lording it over us. They have no social graces whatsoever, and people like you and your father fall for all of their nonsense.”

Valmiki was irked. He gasped at the manner in which he was so suddenly insulted, but knowing better than to get trapped by either his wife or Viveka, he simply threw his hands up in mock defeat and shook his head.

“On top of that, Helen’s mother is a brassy Port of Spain Indian. Those Indians from the north like to think they are too different. They do whatever they please without thinking of what others might say. Mix that sort of attitude with a little whiteness and they have their children joining swim clubs and tennis clubs, prancing about like horses, and you hear about their children attending all kinds of parties they have no right being at, you hear things about them, things that I would be ashamed to repeat to your father. Those town Indians have no respect for their origins, they forget their place, they ooh and they aaah over curry as if they never had curry before, and they give their children names like Helen. You are not joining that club.”

Viveka opened her mouth but was cut off again.

“You tell me, are there any other Indian girls on that team? Go on. Tell me.” Devika asked this with a confidence in the answer that both annoyed her husband and inspired awe in him.

“Women,” Viveka corrected, albeit in a less confident tone now.

“As long as you’re living in my house I will call you what I like.”

Valmiki slid one of the Rimpty’s chocolates off the plate and his hand hovered in front of his mouth. He could smell the sugar in the candy. In a softer manner he tried to employ a different tactic: he and her mother didn’t think Viveka joining the team was a good idea because it might affect her studies, he said. Devika inhaled loud and long to let them both know that she thought this was pandering, and she did not approve of it.

Viveka sulked back that playing a sport did not mean her grades would suffer or that she would not qualify with a degree. Valmiki asked how long each evening’s session would last. Before Viveka could answer, her mother snapped: Time didn’t matter, what mattered was that club days were during the week. When neither Valmiki nor Viveka said anything, Devika added in her inimitable tone that weekdays were impossible.

The topic had first come up several weeks previously. At the time, Devika had expressed her worry to Valmiki that since Viveka already lacked a certain finesse one wanted in a girl, engaging in team sports and competition might only make her that much more ungainly, and whatever polish she, Devika, had tried so hard to impart would certainly be erased. But other things were on Valmiki’s mind, then and now. He could not imagine either of his daughters being at that park late into the evenings. Young men idled there, men of African origin in particular. But he knew better than to say this out loud, as Viveka would then have asked about his friendship with Saul, who was of African origin, and that would have derailed everything. She would certainly have jumped, too, on the racism and sexism implied. If she had used the word hypocritical he would have understood, but Devika would likely, in a single action, have stood up and flung her hand across Viveka’s face. In short, provoking Viveka further would only leave room for a litany of examples of how old-fashioned and everything-phobic he and Devika were (none of which Valmiki minded being), with the result that Viveka would end up looking like the noble, victimized member of the family.

Valmiki did worry that, in all innocence — for how could Viveka be anything but, as she had no experience of the world as he knew it — his daughter could be encouraged into an easy manner with unsavoury young men precisely because of all that so-called progressive university-nonsense she came home with, nonsense that always had terminology suffixed with the dreaded “ism”: sexism, feminism, paternalism, Marxism, racism, anti-racism, activism. Of course he had said none of this to Viveka, nor to Devika.

But something more had nagged at Valmiki last evening at dinner, and now continued on into his office hours — the knowledge that while team sports involved various kinds of camaraderie and, yes-yes, all that important exercise, it had the potential to involve something else: complicated kinds of physical contact. He knew something of this; he had played soccer with boys from his high school and, later, soccer and cricket at university. And even as he sensed the foolishiness and futility of trying to protect her, he couldn’t bear to give his daughter, this one in particular, permission to enter an arena that could stir within her, like it had in him, a confusion she would absolutley have to keep to herself. He wasn’t entirely sure that this would happen, but it nagged at him that it could.

Valmiki had not been overly enthusiastic about sports when he was in high school, but on the soccer field during mandatory physical education period he proved himself to have a special talent for sliding by the other players, seemingly out of nowhere, and scoring goals. Several older students — brash, loud fellows who played soccer every chance they got, during the lunch break and after classes — noticed his talent. Among themselves they carried on a kind of roughousing that included a good bit of deliberate touching-up, which at first he thought was strange for boys who teased one another so much. He noticed that they would fall into spontaneous, out-of-control wrestling bouts, and that the physical education teacher would come out and shamelessly land himself in their midst. They shoved and pushed one another, grabbing onto one another’s privates, shrieking, cackling, getting hoarse, almost choking on their fun as they made one another hard by the sheer act of this kind of play. They all, every one of them, seemed to enjoy it, and fell into it over and again — even though, once off the field, none of that sort of touching continued, or was even made mention of. In the change rooms where they showered, two boys to a concrete stall with a half door on it, the boys only half-naked — their underpants remained on — there was the strictest hands-off protocol.

But Valmiki was taken under the wing of a self-appointed guardian, an older student who, when they were in their shower stall together, would insist on giving Valmiki’s growing limbs a good rub down “to help keep that kick nice and strong,” as the older boy would say. The torrential flow of water out of the shower head hit their bodies hard and felt good to them both. Valmiki liked what the older boy did to his body, soaping his hair, massaging his scalp, riding his thumbs under Valmiki’s meagre scapular and up and down either side of his spine. Across his chest, his buttocks, hard down his thighs — his “quads,” the boy would say. His calves. And even his feet, one foot held in the boy’s hands as Valmiki leaned his shoulders back against the mossy concrete wall of the stall so as not to slip in the soapy pool collecting about them. One toe at a time the boy soaped and pulled, and Valmiki would laugh and kick and pull back his foot, doing a sort of dance to balance himself that made them laugh to the point of tears. “How a lil fellow like you could kick so big and hard and direct, boy?” the older boy would ask, and Valmiki would feel as if he had been lifted high into the air.

But then one day the boy, while soaping Valmiki’s back, slipped his hand inside of the waistband of Valmiki’s under-pants, a soapy finger sliding into the crease of his bottom. Valmiki spun around fast and backed away from the boy, who, grinning widely, put his forefinger to his lips. The boy reached into the front of his own pants and pulled out his hardened penis. Valmiki stood still and stared. The older boy stepped toward Valmiki and put his free hand on Valmiki’s shoulder as he pulled at himself until his penis spluttered its semolina-like fluid. Valmiki’s face burned with a sudden terror, but his body trembled with excitement. His own penis had hardened, but the older boy only patted him on the face and laughed. He turned his back to Valmiki and washed his face rapidly with soap, breathing out noisily against his hands and the onslaught of water from the shower head. Valmiki’s curiosity had been piqued. Even as he knew better than to make his interest obvious, he began to keep the older boy in sight, to shift his body this way or that in an attempt to catch the boy’s attention. But the boy had changed. He kept a distance now, even during the physical education period. Come shower time, he would make a show of entering a shower stall alone. Valmiki watched the older boy as he stood with groups of other students chatting and laughing among themselves. He felt scorned, and shame blossomed soon enough into anger when he imagined the boys were watching him, as if they knew.

One day, when there was no physical education class, not minutes after the bell rang to announce the start of the long lunchtime period, Valmiki buckled his courage and with a studied calm walked across the field, far away from the school building, to the edge where the unfenced property was marked by the neighbouring one, an unkempt stretch of overgrown razor grass and guava trees. Valmiki knew the boy would see him go to the bushes. He looked back, caught the boy’s eye, and then carried on. He could only hope, and sure enough, the boy waited until Valmiki had entered onto a narrow path and disappeared into the grasses that closed in behind him. He crossed the field, entered the same path, and caught up with Valmiki, who had stopped among the guavas to wait for him. They held hands as naturally and as easily as if they had done it before and Valmiki led the older boy as he ducked in and about the trees. Suddenly, the older boy pulled Valmiki to a stop and suggested they take their long-sleeved white school shirts off so they would not easily be seen. Shirt and tie off, they drew each other farther along to a spot where they could, through the foliage, still see bits of the school building, but where they were sure they themselves could not be seen. Even now, decades later, Valmiki could conjure up the cloying perfume of that guava orchard, and remembered how the cuts from the razor grass there stung his legs, his bare back, and his chest. The memory of this concoction made him feel at once ill and nostalgic.

Their tongues had hesitantly touched.

The memory now caused a lurch in Valmiki, from his waist down to his toes. The older boy had undone the zipper of Valmiki’s short khaki trousers and taken Valmiki in his hand. He and the boy continued to stick their tongues out of their mouths so that only the tips touched as the boy fondled Valmiki until Valmiki’s penis grew long, thick, and harder than he himself had ever managed to make it on his own. He trembled and the boy bent his head and put his mouth on it. Valmiki came in the boy’s mouth instantly, and a horror overtook him. Revolted, he kneed the boy under his chin so hard that the boy accidentally clamped his jaws shut on his own tongue and blood spewed out of his mouth. The boy stood there holding both hands to his mouth, tears blurring his vision, and Valmiki ran, pulling on his shirt, buttoning it and tucking it back into his pants. He ran, tears of anger and horror in his eyes, until he was right out of the school gates. He made his way home, ducking into the tall grasses that lined the roads whenever a car passed by. He slipped into his house unnoticed, and went immediately to the shower. He was in a rage, crying as he bathed himself, scrubbing his entire body — although he was barely able to bring himself to touch his penis — until his brown skin was raw, pinprick-size beads of blood reddening the surface of his skin. He spat and spat, and rubbed the soap against the tip of his tongue as he attempted to erase the taste and feel of the other boy’s tongue from his mouth. He couldn’t have hated that boy any more, and he hated himself in equal measure.

For weeks he was terrified that word of what he and the boy had done in the bushes would spread and he would be beaten up, kicked off the soccer team, perhaps pulled into the bushes by other boys and the same done to him by one or a group of them, older, stronger than he. But what he was most afraid of was that word would reach his parents. Then he would surely kill himself. He had planned how he would do it, and waited day and night for the indication that his dreadful, unnatural activity had been made public. But until this day, no word of it had ever been spoken. The boy left school at the end of that term. No teacher had offered a reason, and no one seemed interested in finding out why. Valmiki had always assumed that it might have had something to do with — not so much what the two of them had done that day in the bush, but with whatever it was that had made him do that kind of thing in the first place. Even as he fondled himself in his nighttime bedroom, his heart racing full tilt as he imagined the same boy bent into his lap, and he experienced the same uncontrollable shudder at the memory of the boy’s mouth on him, how it felt as if his mind were about to be blown apart and his body to shoot right into outer space, he didn’t mind never seeing the boy again. These fantasy moments usually ended with Valmiki suddenly shoving the boy off him, giving him a solid undercut with his fist, a knee under the already bloody chin, and a shove into a wire fence where he imagined the boy holding on, crying and begging forgiveness. How Valmiki hated that boy and what they had done together.

He practised bouncing a soccer ball on his head and on his knee. He made a point of engaging in disparaging jokes about women and “faggots.” He developed the affectation of spitting, velocity and distance becoming markers of his manhood. He launched, too, into a display, at school and in front of his parents, of noticing girls, commenting almost to the point of excess, sometimes with a lewdness that did not suit him.

Intimacies, albeit of a lesser degree, he came to see were something sporting fellows never outgrew; at medical college abroad he played soccer and cricket, and there the men gave one another stout congratulatory hugs, pats on the shoulders, playful but harder slaps on their backsides, pats on the face that sometimes felt as nuanced an exchange as one might expect in an engagement between a man and a woman. He watched closely for signs that might have exposed secrets between the men, but he saw nothing that resembled his much-regretted exchange with the boy in his high school. He was careful, regardless of how he felt, not to touch or respond to any teammate in a manner that might provoke that teammate to lash out at him the way he himself had done to the boy in high school.

Then along came Tony, the student from Goa who was to tutor him in a course he had failed twice. Tony: not athletic, but muscular. He was short, one might even say stocky, and brown like Valmiki himself. Tony had grey eyes, unusual for an Indian, and he had short curly hair. He reminded Valmiki of sculptures of Grecian young men he had seen in the museums.

Valmiki didn’t know if “feeling each other up” during games was strictly a guy-thing, but he suspected and worried that girls and women might get on with their own version of that sort of thing, too. He wanted Viveka spared the horror, the confusion of the kind of experience he had had but never revealed to anyone.

In adulthood Valmiki might have played golf, as did several of his colleagues and other men from his social world, but he took up, instead, hunting. It started with an invitation from Saul, one of his patients, an electrician who lived on a fringe of the city and who could not have entered Valmiki’s social circles. The pupils of Saul’s eyes were a yellowish brown and light always seemed to emit from them. They reminded him of Tony’s grey eyes. Saul would look directly at Valmiki with those eyes as if he could see through Valmiki. He was not like other men, not afraid of long, insistent eye contact. Saul Joseph was lean, ruggedly muscular. It was precisely the fact that he was partly of African origin that heightened the unlikeliness of there being a bond between the two men, and that drew Valmiki to accept Saul’s invitation. No one would pay any attention. Valmiki went with Saul one Saturday into the forested central hills, awkwardly toting a rifle the man had spared him for the day.

By the time darkness had fallen on the hills that first day, Valmiki was sold on the particular camaraderie that went with that sport. That week, accompanied by Saul, who had in a sweet instant risen from status of patient to peer-of-sorts, Valmiki bought a shotgun and a box of ammunition from a villager, a cacao farmer who moonlighted smuggling these and other contraband onto the island.

The hunting circle was elastic. One week it might include just the two of them, and another there might be four men altogether, but rarely was there ever more than that, and never was there anyone among them who would have known Valmiki in his other life of city doctor, San Fernando professional, and socialite. None of these men Devika liked or wished to entertain in her house. She bristled when Valmiki brought them onto her patio. If he offered them drinks, Devika made sure they were served — and certainly not by herself — in tumblers that only the maid and various other workers were supposed to use. These men looked to her more like security guards, or house builders, people who would work for them rather than visit with them. When Valmiki talked to her of going hunting with “Saul,” Devika said, “So, what now? He calls you Valmiki?”

Valmiki could truthfully answer, “As a matter of fact, he and the others call me Doc.” Why he went with these men Devika could not fathom, and although Valmiki had a practice of cajoling her in almost every way, giving up this particular pastime or his communion with these men he would not do. With them he knew an affinity he simply did not share with her. It was a world of few words, more silence, and hard, immediate, and sure handling of one another that was as loaded, as sprung, as the guns they carried. The act of looking out for one another in the most primal way gripped him. It was not just him looking out for them, but them looking out for him too. An equal caring. With gun in hand, and knowing there was a wild cat or a startled diamond-back mapipire in the canopied darkness of an evening forest, every man had to look out for himself as well as his friends. When you reached a hand out against your friend’s chest to hold him back, that touch was like a lightning rod of information, intent, opinion transferred. Such camaraderie made Valmiki bristle with life in a way that not even the practice of surgery had ever done for him. In the forest with the men he might have been duty bound, but he was not weighed down by it. He was no one’s father, husband, employer, or healer. He was one with them. They were one with each other.

Valmiki was not a gifted hunter, though. That is why Saul taught him how to set the bird cages with pieces of banana or a coating of laglee on the parallel rods, so that at the end of the day there was still the possibility they would return to where the cages hung in the bushes and he would find a peekoplat, a semp, or a banana quit in the cage. He would have something to take home, to show for his day away. Still, at the end of a hunt, over drinks by the open trunk of his car, the other men clapped his back and said, “Next time, Doc, next time,” desiring nothing more from him than he go with them soon again. How they admired him, if only because the town doctor left the comfort of his tamer world, of his social network, and went deep into the dark dank forest with them. They would spot the agouti, or the deer, or the lap, and point it out to him. They invariably let him take the first shot. He would watch it through his binoculars, then nestle the rifle’s butt into his shoulder and lift its long barrel, catching the animal in the target sight. Aim. Shoot. Nothing. Yet the clean, clear animal rawness he felt with these men friends, his sporting friends, enlivened him. It wasn’t for his correct or effective aim, for those were sorely lacking, that they called him “a real man,” but rather for his trust in them, for his courage to go with them time and again and then to sit with them, either right there in a clearing or on the roadside by the car, or in the dusty clay yard of one of the men over a hand-built fire as they cooked an animal someone had shot.

If they were at Saul’s house in Fellowship Lands in Marabella, there would suddenly be a platter heaped with lengths of limp sugary plantain that glistened in a slick of the oil in which they had been deep fried until they looked, but were not, burnt. The others knew Valmiki liked the candy-like fruit, and someone would excitedly race like a person with a holy mission, not the day before, but the instant they arrived, and hack off a hand of fresh ripened-on-the-tree plantains, which Saul’s wife would then fry especially for Valmiki. She would leave after cooking and go to a relative’s house for the night. The other men ate with their hands, but they always gave Valmiki a thin, light spoon that bent with the slightest pressure, or a fork, each of its tines making off in a different direction, and a knife. But he would use his hands, and then he would lick his fingers, one at a time, each one deep in his mouth, down to the knuckle almost, pulled out slow, his teeth gripping and scraping off the very last tastes, with an indiscreet pop. Saul would bring out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label that he had bought and kept under lock and key especially for Valmiki. Or if they were at the home of one of the others, Valmiki might be served home-brewed puncheon rum or pineapple babash. His eyes had filled with water, tears of shock, when he had first tasted the babash. But then he got used to it and looked forward to the bite of the fermented fruit singeing the length of his esophagus.

He sometimes drank babash or scotch enough that by the time he got home, after driving very slowly to remain steady on the dangerous pot-holed road back into the city, Devika would be either asleep or disgusted by his drunkenness, the searing odour of wood fire in his hair, the smell of wild meat, and the testosterone-enriched sweat on his sticky body, a combination that might have appealed to a different woman but certainly not to her, and she would not want him near her — just as he had hoped, as he did not want to contaminate the thrill of an excursion where his friends all reeked similarly, as if this were the mark of an unusual affinity.

SO IT WAS THAT AT THE TABLE THE NIGHT BEFORE, THE TENSION caused by Viveka’s relentless desire to play volleyball was at an all-time high. Still, there might have been more discussion, but Viveka had given that laugh of incredulity, one she had been honing for months now and that she knew would irk Devika and himself. Devika shoved her chair backwards, and the screech might as well have come from within her. With that, Valmiki knew she intended to bring an end to the subject. Viveka began to say something, but barely had sound come out of her mouth when Devika shouted, “NO! I don’t want to hear another word. I said no. Don’t you understand? NO!”

Valmiki and his younger daughter, Vashti, shared a weakness for cherry cheesecake, particularly Miss Myrtle and Miss Mary’s. The sticky yet tart topping of carmine-coloured Bing cherries. The deep middle section of sweetened Philadelphia cream cheese that had a consistency right on the nameless line of texture between velvety and a cheese that had been baked. And then there was the shell with its contrasting texture — the scratchiness of buttery, sugary, graham crackers crumbled fine. No part was complete without the other. Valmiki and Vashti would usually make a show of their enjoyment of this particular dessert that would delight Devika and irritate Viveka.

As Vashti watched her family spar, she was, Valmiki could see, aware of the growing possibility of a dessert-curtailing blow-up ahead. And so she quickly ushered into her mouth one spoonful after another, cut from the top through to the bottom of the pie, mushing all three layers at once, intending to finish up the wide wedge she had cut for herself before the meal was destroyed, as it was bound to be, by Viveka. Valmiki, on the other hand, didn’t even bother to cut himself a piece. He leaned back in his chair and held his breath because a snickering laugh from his elder daughter told him that Viveka had no intention of leaving the matter alone, regardless of Devika’s outburst.

Viveka, they all knew, had her strategies. The next round would surely come. Valmiki wasn’t sure when, and it exhausted him, the thought of waiting, of not knowing what would happen next. When Viveka and Devika quarrelled the air went out of the house. Vashti would watch as if taking lessons, and her father only hoped it was in how not to behave. He would usually make his way to the bedroom if the fight had not already travelled there, and turn on the air-conditioning, which blocked out the shouting and the pleading and the crying and the harsh words flung so carelessly between two people he loved — one because she was his own flesh and blood; the other because he had first grown used to her, then to appreciate all she had done to run the house and keep the family, and then, finally, to love, at least like one might love one’s sister — but neither of whom he understood. If the altercation had travelled to the bedroom, he would find a chore somewhere in another part of the large and sprawling house, and retreat there.

In spite of the evening’s unpleasantness, that morning when Valmiki stirred in half wakefulness he had not at first remembered the quarrel. He had been awakened by the distant rumble of thunder, thinking of Tony. No, not thinking of him, but with a feeling of him in his belly, in the muscles of his thighs, and an ache in his early-morning sleep-hardened penis. It had been twenty plus years since he had last seen Tony, and still this. So often, still this. He opened and shut his eyes. The light through the windows of the room was a fast fading pink. The birds in the mango trees at the back of the house were well into their usual morning bickering session, louder in anticipation of rain. With a sudden conviction that he could go into the study, use the phone there, and call Tony in Goa, just to say hello, he came completely awake. And awakening so fully, he felt the heat under the blankets of another human being. Devika. He closed his eyes, turned on his side, and scuttled closer to her. The ache in his body dulled, his penis limped. There was, instead, a more tolerable numbness. He brought a hand up to rest on Devika’s shoulder. Her shoulder, however, was not heavy with the weight of sleep. He opened his eyes again. Devika was already well awake, and he was immediately aware that she bore the brunt of last evening’s quarrel still. He could hear sounds outside of their door.

“You okay?” he whispered hoarsely. Devika did not answer, but her breathing sharpened.

He said, “What is it? Is it still Viveka? Are you still on about her?”

“Listen to her. She is storming about outside. She is the one who is not finished. I don’t want to start my morning like this. Why did you leave me to deal with her alone last night? She is as own-way as you are. You are the one she takes after.”

He pulled his hand away and returned to his favourite sleeping position, flat on his back, his face to the ceiling, fingertips resting on pelvic bones, and he shut his eyes again. In an instant the door to their bedroom was opened, the attempt to do so quietly clearly halfhearted. Seeing both her parents awake, Viveka charged in to say that she was leaving for the day, that she had changed her mind from last night and although she had no classes she would spend the day studying at the university library.

Valmiki’s heart lurched. He could see that if his son Anand had lived, these two children, particularly because of Viveka’s angular facial features, her lankiness, and her short hair, would have been unmistakable as siblings. He wished Viveka would grow her hair longer like all the other attractive young ladies he and Devika knew, at least to her shoulders.

Viveka’s aggression first thing in the morning wore him down instantly, and he had not even got out of bed as yet. Valmiki asked her only how she was going to get to the university. She grumbled that she would take a taxi. There was a long silence while each waited for the other to respond. Finally, Valmiki asked Devika if she needed her car. Devika pursed her lips tight. He tried again. “Didn’t you say you don’t have anything to do outside of the house today?”

“So I have to report to you everything I am doing now?”

Viveka groaned audibly. She said, “Forget it. I am not driving on the highway in any case.”

“Listen, it looks like it’s going to rain again. Why don’t you take my car and your mother can drop me to work in hers?” Valmiki offered.

Devika immediately protested. “But Viveka just told you she doesn’t want to drive on the highway. She isn’t confident to drive on the highway and you are going to give her your car. You don’t see how ridiculous you can be? Why can’t you stand up to her just once?”

At this Viveka looked as if she was trying to shout, but a whisper came out. “I said I will take a taxi. I don’t want to drive.”

Valmiki shook his head in feigned disbelief, but making sure to employ a smile he told Viveka that if she waited half an hour he would get the chauffeur to take her. Viveka replied that practically everyone got to the university by taxi, even the professors. Valmiki winked in an attempt to cajole his daughter and said, “But do they all have access to a chauffeur? It’s no trouble, sweetheart, I don’t need him today.” He turned to Devika. “Do you?” His wife was sitting up now, propped against the pillows, and she looked at her hands clasped on her lap. A terse “No” came from her, like a cleaver falling onto a dry board.

But Valmiki ignored this and went back to Viveka, who had not ignored it. Before he could say more, she snapped, louder, “I will take a taxi.”

Her father pleaded, “In the rain?”

“It’s not a big deal. I won’t melt. You should try taking a taxi sometime. I’ll get a ride home with Helen. I’ll probably be late.” She marched out of the room.

Devika snapped again at Valmiki, “Why are you always trying to please her?”

Valmiki hadn’t ever expected this kind of relationship to develop between Viveka and himself. She used to be a real tomboy, full of curiosity and adventurousness, but not argumentative like this. Lately, she elicited the kind of emotion from him that he was more familiar with in his dealings with Devika.

And just as Devika had expected, Viveka was not finished with them for the morning. Devika had braced herself, waiting, and sure enough, Viveka returned, with less haste in her manner. She set herself down at the foot of their bed, pinning the blanket so that the toes of one of Valmiki’s feet were forced forward and those of the other backwards, strapped immovably there. Viveka asked in a softer tone if they had reconsidered allowing her to play volleyball. She baffled her father with such boldness, such obstinance. In lighter moments he would have seen potential in the boldness, but at the moment it infuriated him. He let Devika field this request.

Devika said, calmly, “We told you it is not the kind of thing girls from families like ours do — wearing those kinds of skirts in public, prancing about like that. That kind of thing might be all right for other people’s daughters, but not for ours. Besides, look at you. Playing sports is just going to make you even more unladylike than you already are. The time for you to have grown up, Viveka, has long past.”

Viveka breathed in so deeply that Valmiki thought she was going to implode. It was a relief, almost, when she burst out, “You know, I don’t understand you all. You’re both supposed to be so enlightened. And Dad, you above all people should know that playing sports is good for your health. I can’t help how I look, okay?”

She clearly had more to say, but was unable, stuttering instead with hurt and fury. Devika snapped back, much too loudly for first thing in the morning, that when Viveka got her degree and was her own woman she could do whatever she wished, and until then, her parents said no, and that required no explanation.

Viveka stormed out of the room, lashing out behind her, “You are so old-fashioned. This is ridiculous. I can’t believe you’re criticizing me. I mean, I am twenty years old. I shouldn’t have to ask . . .”

She was interrupted by her mother shouting, “As long as you live in this house you are a child, and you will do as we tell you.” Then, when she was certain that Viveka had left the house, Devika turned to Valmiki. “This is ridiculous, in truth. You are behaving like a country boukie with her.”

“Look, neither of us agrees with her playing volleyball. We have different reasons, but in the end, neither of us wants it. All kinds of things go on at that park,” Valmiki said quietly. “What if, next thing, she wants later to go to one of the islands to play in some competition or the other? One thing will just lead to another and this whole thing could get out of control. I don’t care if I am old-fashioned or a country boukie. I am not letting her play.”

“You’re not letting her? You don’t even say a word to her. You leave it up to me, and that is causing a lot of coldness between her and me. You can’t even stand up to your own daughter?”

Valmiki said to his wife, feebly, that it was not his job to discipline the children, that he had a job already and couldn’t take on another battle. It was in these moments that he just wished he could pull the covers up over his ears, shut out the light of the day, and go back to sleep. Or get up and go with his rifle and his buddies into the forest.

AND SO, LATER IN HIS OFFICE, HE WAS STILL HARASSED BY IT ALL. Viveka had become like a stranger to him. She offhandedly interrupted and contradicted him, sometimes laughed in overly dramatic disbelief at something he said, and he felt silly, for he seldom understood what it was that she was getting at. She diminished him. That was how he felt in front of her. What had happened? If he were a young man just meeting her he would find her, he hated to admit, uninteresting, a little too smart for her own good. She wasn’t charming. She wasn’t willing to flatter, to let someone else’s faults or ill-conceived notions go unmentioned. Who on this earth would marry her if she continued like that? On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine a man who would indeed be good enough for her, for either of his daughters. He was as infuriated as he was proud that he had fathered a girl more strong-willed than he ever had been.

Valmiki had never indulged in the hope for a child of a particular sex. When he was at medical college, he had known that his particular bond with Tony would have to end. He had known that upon qualifying he would return home — to Trinidad, that is — and marry. He had known that was what he had to do, but he had not been able to formulate an image of himself as husband or father. He tried to picture himself with a woman, he and she walking side by side, she pushing a pram with a baby in it. There was no face to this woman and the baby was always substituted — his mind insisted on the joke — with a dachshund pup in a baby bonnet. It was not the kind of joke that made him laugh, but cringe.

No matter how much he and Tony suited and cared for each other, Valmiki had been determined to return home and to fall into whatever role was expected of him, or at least to adopt some form of numbing complacency. People talked, and he had heard of others, men he knew, who lived a double life. He didn’t want to be talked of in such a manner.

In his office now, feeling a flash of fear, he thought of calling Zoraida back and asking which of his women friends was out there, telling her to send the woman in. But he had no heart, or mind, and certainly no body, for that kind of thing right now.

The times over the past twenty years when he had spoken from Trinidad with Tony on the telephone, Tony had been aloof. He spoke as if with just any old acquaintance, filling in a few well-chosen blanks, no real details. He spoke little of his practice or anything related to medicine that might create camaraderie between him and Valmiki. What he dwelt on was his children, how well they were doing at school, how they were like members of his family or like his wife and her family. Valmiki and Tony’s past together had been erased by Tony. There was no overture, not even nuanced acknowledgement of how close they had been, and Valmiki sensed better than to insert himself. No one would have guessed that Tony was once willing to risk a rather hefty inheritance, his family’s highly respected name in Goa, and his life to be with Valmiki. Valmiki had had much less to lose, his family being well enough off, but with not nearly so much nor such a public presence as Tony’s. But in a place as small as Trinidad, Valmiki was much less ready to risk any of it, and most of all he was not willing to raise the ire of his father or (as he thought he might do with such revelations about himself) kill his mother.

Once, when student examinations had ended and a two-week break was to start, Valmiki’s father had asked him to return home. Tony asked him, rather, not to go to Trinidad, but to go with him to Tony’s family’s house in Goa. Tony was going to tell his older sister there about their relationship, and get her support. He was going to tell his sister that he had met the person he wanted to spend his life with, break it to her that it was a man, this man from Trinidad, whom he had fallen in love with. It was the true kind of love, Tony wanted to tell her, the kind they had seen in the movies and were brought up to believe was possible. He and she used to come home from a movie and act out the dancing, and they would wish for each other love that was full of passion, integrity, and the will to endure regardless of all obstacles. Tony would tell her, as he always told Valmiki, that he had found it.

With Tony’s request, Valmiki was faced with the reality of breaking such news to his parents, the seriousness of this thing he was doing with another man, and he began to withdraw from Tony. He told Tony he would think about the request to go to India, but as the holiday drew nearer he began to treat Tony’s persistence like pestering. A fracture, inexplicable and devastating to Tony, began to form between them. Valmiki not only went directly back to Trinidad for those two weeks, he got in touch with Devika Sankarsingh, the pretty daughter of a good family known to his parents. Mr. Sankarsingh was a businessman who gave liberally to charities and wasn’t afraid to spend his money on himself and his family. Valmiki, the doctor-in-the-making, made overtures to Devika and her family, got pleasantly teased by his own extended family, and was treated with the admiration and respect of a boy who was about to embark on the natural journey of a man.

Left alone one evening with Devika, he did what he had done with no one else but Tony. He had sex with her, cementing, in case of a dip in his courage, his determination to marry her. He meant only to have sex with her. That would have been enough to bind them. He hadn’t expected that one round of it, the first time he had had sex with a woman, would be sufficient for a pregnancy to ensue. It was not until he learned of Devika’s pregnancy that he understood what he had done to himself. All of a sudden, he was to be a married man, a regular man with the usual ordinary expectations imposed on him. He was to be a father. To have a clockwork life. There would be no hard body to butt against. No shared knowledge of a particular touch or wanting. He thought of middle-aged men back home, and saw himself destined to develop a paunch, even shrinking in height as if from a burden on his shoulders, and certainly from one in his heart. He would turn into a man who was dead in spirit but whose physical body was trapped in everyday Trinidadian limbo.

But in the end, Valmiki felt quite pleased with himself for what he hoped the fact of pregnancy publicly confirmed about him. He ended his relationship with Tony, left the apartment one day when Tony was not there, and even when he heard that Tony had tried to kill himself, he felt there was nothing he could have done differently. In the deepest recesses of his heart and mind he congratulated himself again and again on his astuteness in making sure that he had had sex with that girl back home.

Six and a half months into married life, the child was born. He had delivered mothers of their babies, and held the minutes-old wriggling things in his arms, but suddenly, in the delivery room as a father rather than a doctor, he was paralyzed. He stood back, transfixed and terrified, staring dumbly at the wrinkled baby covered in a film of grey waxy vernix, eyes scrunched tight as if to refuse final entry into such a situation. Devika’s mother tersely ordered him to touch his child. He awkwardly worked his pinkie into one of her minute fists and she immediately clenched that fist so tight, as if to lock his finger to her — by will or natural reflex it didn’t matter — that she hooked him. He stood there contemplating the strangeness of touching something that was independent of him, yet carried in it, in her, his history, his essence.

Stubborn and wilful she was from the very first day, his wife complained. But this in itself was enough to further endear this girl to Valmiki. Devika’s mother, in a show of wilfulness of her own, and without consulting the family’s pundit, had named the child Viveka, the union of his and Devika’s names.

Valmiki never fell in love with Devika, but from the start he was entranced by this daughter.

Time was the ointment he, Devika, and even Tony far away in Goa, needed. Over time, Valmiki grew to feel something akin to possessiveness — a form of responsibility — for his wife. He thought of this as an aspect of love, the kind that develops in arranged marriages and that enduring marital unions and family life could be made of. Would he say that he loved Devika? He loved his children. Therefore, how could he not love their mother and want the best for her?

Devika seemed content with the respectability and comfort of being Dr. Valmiki Krishnu’s wife. She and he slept in the same bed, shared children, a bedroom, a house, a life. She was not an unfeeling woman, and she was not unaware. But Valmiki felt her resentment slowly set in. For years, words had remained necessarily unspoken. Finally, with the arrogance of Valmiki’s friendship with this man Saul from “the back of nowhere,” words came to her. At least — she said to him once in the midst of one of their frequent fights — he had the decency to make a public ass of himself fooling around with women. He did not ask her to explain what she meant. And thank God, she continued, he had the good sense to run around with women who were not from their world, their backgrounds, their culture. The potential damage was, to an extent, contained.

Valmiki felt only the smallest amount of remorse or pity for Devika, as he had realized long ago that he and she used each other to advantage. Wasn’t it the way of the world? People stayed in seemingly unsavoury situations, not because they were trapped there but because they in fact were getting something they needed. It was an exchange.

And whenever Devika felt the threat that Valmiki’s oddities would become fodder for public ridicule, she threw a party at their house. Let the world come in and see for themselves that she was not suffering, that she had more than most people had. Valmiki didn’t blame her for taking whatever she needed.

There wasn’t a woman Valmiki had been with who could have satisfied him. He had well-drawn parameters. A married woman was, of course, safest of all, as there were built-in hindrances to continuation for them both. And the married foreigner, the white foreigner who had no ties to Trinidad, to whom their Trinidadian and Indian communities had no loyalties, was best of all. Such women served Devika well, they served him well; and he, no ordinary local — a doctor to boot — served them just as well.

Still, Valmiki did dream. He imagined a time when the two girls would be married off — hopefully not to a man like him. He would not leave Devika. But he imagined coming and going as he wished. Falling in love even. Maintaining his obligation to Devika — there was no question about that, he would do that for her — but loving someone, a man, a man from his own world with whom he would share another life. In Valmiki’s mind, this man had something of a face and a shape — much like Tony’s — but he was always in shadow. There was enough of him, though — the thickness of a man’s body, the muscular hardness, the resistance to Valmiki’s push, something to shove against, a force that could bear a weight. Valmiki just wanted the chance one day to feel something more than obligation. He dreamt of that day, a day he knew would never come.

As it was, in the present he settled for meaningless flings, his Friday nights here and there with Saul, the occasional Saturday hunting, wrestling a shot animal to the dusty or damp forest ground, he and his Saturday friends blood-stained and sweaty, their hearts thundering in the forests, showing off their manliness to one another — and a night here and there with Saul who was, in the end, not from his world.

What he wished he could do right now was leave his office and go out with Saul and those fellows and hunt down an animal. Something as big and as small as himself.

VALMIKI SLUMPED BACK IN HIS WOODEN CHAIR. THE CHAIR CAM-bered back and swung a little. He steadied it. He laced his hands behind his head and tilted to face the ceiling. He closed his eyes.

Suddenly, Valmiki jumped up from his chair. He rushed to the louvred windows and opened them. It was still raining. That didn’t matter. A soaking wasn’t going to hurt him. It might even help. A cleansing of sorts. He’d never gone into the forest by himself before. He’d make a detour into Fellowship Lands where Saul lived and look for him, but if Saul were at work — a colossal courage washed over him — he knew the paths well enough. With the haste of a doctor in an emergency, he snatched up his car keys, yanked open the door to his office, and, before Zoraida had time to turn her head in his direction, made his way hastily down his private corridor, out the back door of the building, and down the flight of stairs to the underground parking.

Breathless, Valmiki opened the trunk of the car. The .22 rifle, a pair of binoculars, and the safety-locked metal box that contained, among other paraphernalia, a knife, a coiled length of rope, flashlight, gloves, batteries, and a box of ammunition were there. Neatly folded in a canvas bag was a change of clothing so he could return home not covered in dirt and wildness after a day in the forest. There, too, was a jacket — a plaid long-sleeved flannel one — that was entirely unwearable in Trinidadian weather, but that Vashti had seen in a magazine, and because it looked to her like real hunting gear, mail-ordered from a clearing house in Houston, Texas, for a birthday present. His black rubber boots were also there, and a bird cage, and, just in case, there was a tarp to keep the trunk clean. He got in the driver’s seat and headed directly to Marabella, to Fellowship Lands. He intended this time to shoot and kill something.

When he reached Saul’s house, Valmiki remained in the car with the window rolled down only a few inches so that he could call out through it. He saw a window closed against the rain at the front of the concrete two-storey house. The curtain parted slightly, but he could not see who was behind it. It fell closed again. He expected Saul, but it was Saul’s wife who came through the front door. Valmiki knew that she was aware of the nature of his relationship with her husband. He wanted to drive off but she had by this time looked over from the veranda at him and tilted up her chin in acknowledgement. She held a thick wad of newspaper over her head and made for the stairway at the side of the house. It was too late to escape.

He put the window down an inch farther. The rain came in so he leaned away, but in vain.

“Saul not here. He leave for work six o’clock,” Saul’s wife said. A pause followed. Valmiki shrank from it. She continued, “He working by Mr. Kowlessar new house. They putting in the electrical now. You know where Mr. Kowlessar new house situated?”

Valmiki wondered if indeed she knew of his and Saul’s relationship. She showed no animosity toward him. And he knew that he couldn’t go to Malcolm Kowlessar’s house. He dared not be seen going there to meet a tradesman, pulling this worker out to go and fritter away a day with him. People would talk. They would wonder if he had lost his mind.

Valmiki remained silent, and the woman’s manner softened as she continued. “Well, he leave real early to beat the traffic, so he might come home any time now.”

Having unintentionally involved Saul’s wife in his impudence, Valmiki now lost the feeling of needing to see Saul. Saul might have offered the reassurance and sort of stillness that usually calmed Valmiki. But ultimately, Saul could not really help Valmiki, and Valmiki knew this too well.

If going into the forest is what he wanted to do, Valmiki could accomplish this by himself. He would drive off immediately.

But Saul’s wife was saying, “I know about him and you, you know, Doc. I know he real take to you.”

Valmiki’s face flushed. He stared forward, put his fingers on the key in the ignition. Mrs. Joseph spoke quickly now, undeterred by the rain. “Even though he and me married since we young, and living that long together, we used to be like neighbours to each other. But that was before he and you.”

A sweat broke over Valmiki’s entire body. Before he and I what? He wanted and didn’t want, at the same time, to know what she was saying. He bit the side of his gum like a child who had no explanation.

“It used to be that he minding he own business, me minding mine. But he come like a brother to me since.”

Since. Since what? But Valmiki was glad that she had not said more on this.

“We don’t have relations, but I have to say what we have is better than that.”

The rain wetting her dress seemed immaterial to Saul’s wife. Valmiki reached for the ignition, and she put her hands on the glass of the window, hooked the fingers of both hands on its edge. “No, Doc. I did want a chance to tell you I don’t have no bad feelings. Nobody can expect me to feel good as a woman, but I don’t have bad feelings either.” She pointed to the house and quickly returned her hand to grip the window. “You see this? He work hard and with his hard-earned money he buy the house.”

Valmiki turned and looked at her directly, but when she spoke on he looked away again. “Saul does sleep in one room. I in the next. Why I wouldn’t be a little sorry for myself? But he treat me all right. Doc, we are not rich people. I can’t get up and leave just so. Leave and go where? I have to stay and make do. Saul happy, and I happy for him. It might be a strange thing, but I will say it, I happy for him because he happy and he is my husband. Is only strange if you not in the situation yourself and you watching-judging from outside.”

There might be some queer openness between Saul and his wife, Valmiki noted, yet not so great a one that Saul would reveal that it was Valmiki who had bought that house. Rather awkwardly he mumbled that it was a slow day in the office, and he had just taken a chance that he might see Saul to talk about some electrical work he had for him. But, he apologized between gritted teeth, he had better get back; he was expecting a full office later in the afternoon.

He wondered if he should put a stop to this thing with Saul immediately.

VALMIKI HAD LEFT THE HIGHWAY AND PASSED SEVERAL SMALL SETTLE-ments along the way to the western edges of the Central Range. He arrived in an area of forest he had visited in the past with Saul. Here, the road conditions changed. He pondered all that Mrs. Joseph had just said to him, and wondered too, in his embarrassment, who was the wiser in the degree of their discretion, his wife or this woman? He went along a narrow two-way road that was thinly paved with a mix heavy in gravel and light in asphalt. If a car were to come from the opposite direction, he or the other driver would have to pull off the pavement, exercising caution not to slip too far down the gully that ran along either side. Arriving alongside a cutlassed path into the forest, Valmiki brought the car to rest on a well-padded section of knot-grass that was usually kept low by hunters for this very purpose. He shut the engine off. A path of dirty grey skylight mirrored the roadway. In an instant, the windows fogged up. He switched back on the ignition and lowered the windows a fraction all around. The glass cleared, but he saw nothing save for a blur of shivering greens and the darkness of the forest magnified.

The rain tapped relentlessly off the car’s metal and glass, on the asphalt and gravel, off the leaves. The ground was coursed by muddied vein-like rivulets. Even while it rained, birds could be heard chirping in the trees. Caws and squawks in call-and-answer patterns came from all directions. Through the incessant and loud ringing of innumerable cicadas he heard the occasional grunts of howler monkeys. No human sounds could be heard. He mumbled nonsensical sounds just to hear himself.

This forest was dense and dark enough that at any time of day it offered good hunting opportunities. In the rain the animals would have hunkered down beside the wide trunks of trees, on the inside of one of the wall-like roots of a balata tree, or under the umbrellas of wide-leafed trees. They would be easy prey like that.

Valmiki hesitated at the rain and mud. Then, with a jolt of determination, he opened the car door, got out, and stood in the rain until he was thoroughly soaked. He went to the trunk and opened it. He unfurled the rifle from its pouch. He licked the trickles on his lips. His own salt had already begun to break through, in spite of the rain washing over him. A grin set on his face.

It did not last long, though. Once the car and roadway were no longer visible he tensed and moved one deliberate step at a time. By himself, without someone to watch his back, he had the sense that anything could fall out of the trees onto him, or that he could be pounced on from behind. He tiptoed, even though the falling rain drowned the sound of his presence.

He hadn’t gone out or used the rifle in the rain before, and wasn’t sure how he and it would fare. And, he remembered, snakes got washed out in this kind of weather. In spite of the tall heavy rubber boots he wore, he felt that he could be bitten and die right there. In the forest. Alone. Like a man. Devika and the girls would live the rest of their lives wondering what on earth had made him leave his office and go into the forest by himself. His heart raced.

He walked a hundred or so yards into the forest. Suddenly, he stood still. He could hear something. Fear caused a thundering pulsing in his head. He did his best to listen beyond the sound of his own fear. He watched with the painful acuity of one whose life depended on it. Soon he could hear a steady, fast-paced panting. A whimper. He bent down and looked through the binoculars that hung around his neck. Rain covered the lenses and the forest was an undecipherable mess of fractured shades of green. Again, there was that sound, a wince or a whimper. He looked with his eyes, the water globbing on his eyelashes almost blinding him. About ten yards or so away, he could just see something that seemed out of place. A honey-coloured shape, huddled in the stalks of a stand of baliser. He couldn’t see its face, but judging from the shape, the heaving body, and the paler hanging folds of skin knobbed with rows of teats, he knew it must be a dog that had been recently nursing. Rabies came to mind. He watched for a while, until the dog ducked its head under and out from the heavy dripping fronds of the baliser. He aimed the rifle. In its hooded target lines, he could see the dog’s face. Its eyes were soft, its face soft — almost timid. The dog shivered. He lowered the rifle and looked around. The dog seemed to be alone. No pups, no sign of a person nearby or a squatter’s lean-to or shed. He lifted the barrel again, and let the scope’s target lines roam the face of the dog. He let it run down the dog’s body. Its neck. Its visible hind leg. He lifted it toward the chest. There. Between its ribcage. He steadied himself and cocked the rifle.

Suddenly, above the patter of rain falling he heard what could be nothing other than the clearing of a man’s throat. He was so startled that he made a fast turn, slipped on the slimy floor of rotting leaves, and fell over. He quickly righted himself and looked about. About the same distance away as the dog, but off to its side now, the glow of a cigarette revealed a man whose face was obscured by a straw hat with a brim wide enough to permit him to smoke in the rain. The man was stooped in the root system of a balata tree.

It horrified Valmiki to think he had not seen that glow. The man remained on his haunches, as still as if he were a bird asleep on one leg. But the lit cigarette gave away the fact that he was watching, and his well-timed throat-clearing said that he disapproved, and intended to interrupt whatever it was that Valmiki had been contemplating. Valmiki wondered if the man was alone. If he hadn’t seen this man, he wondered, what else was he missing? The man did not look like someone Valmiki had met in the village while travelling there with Saul, and made no sign of rising, or wanting to talk, or even to quarrel. Valmiki, still hunkered on the ground, was terrified that the man might also carry a gun. His temples throbbed. He suffered an acute shame, like a schoolboy caught in the act of doing something wrong. He had the real, albeit fleeting thought, of turning the gun on himself, if only to handle his self-inflicted humiliation. The barrel of the rifle would have been much too long to accomplish even this, and he imagined himself further mortified by yet another incompetence.

Hastily, he stumbled backwards, keeping an eye on where the man stood, wary that a bullet from the gun the man might carry might be racing in a crippling hurry toward his spine. Finally, he turned and ran forward, arriving back at his car his only desire now. He sweated, and was drenched in a way that no rainfall could have matched.

WHEN VALMIKI FINALLY REACHED HIS CAR, HE SPUN IT AROUND AND got out of there — not caring about the bumpy road — out of the village, out onto the main road, and made his way back into San Fernando faster than was legal or safe. All the way he shook his head, as if trying to dispel the act and the knowledge that he might have, that he could have, that he almost pulled the trigger on a sitting, nursing, shivering dog. He didn’t know which was worse, to have been so close to doing this or to have been caught in the act. He had also to find a plausible, acceptable reason for running out of his office in the middle of the day without telling his staff, and with a room full of waiting patients.

Back in town, he went to The Victory Hotel first, where the staff knew him well. They were not surprised to see him on a workday — but to find him drenched, his clothing mud-splattered, his shoes caked, him looking like a fugitive and without a woman? They gave him a room, no questions asked, expecting that a woman was bound to arrive looking for him. However, in record time, the staff noted, he had changed — not into his usual work attire but into the clothing that was kept in the trunk of his car: khaki slacks and a white golf jersey — and was out of there. He was a handsome man, the staff, both the men and the women, agreed, and so gentle, they said, adding: no wonder all those women he comes with here like him so much.

Valmiki arrived at an excuse that involved him making a stop at Maraj and Son Jewellers. Under the guidance of the owner, Sunil Maraj, he would buy Devika, Viveka, and Vashti a piece of jewellery each. The explanation would be partially true: having just seen a patient who had the effect on him of making him think of his family, he was overcome with appreciation for each one of them, and wished to express this, so he had left the office early in search of the perfect gifts. He would buy them the best there was, and perhaps they would ask no more questions. The bonus, he thought, would be that Devika might be placated, at least for a short while, and Viveka, through some heaven-sent generosity, might settle down and behave herself.

Viveka wasn’t home when he returned. He handed Devika and Vashti the presents. They were surprised, speechless, and made a gaggle of sounds that were lost on him. His mind was on something else: his relief that he hadn’t had time to pull the trigger.