EARLIER THAT SAME DAY, VIVEKA WALKED DOWN THE HILL FROM Luminada Heights and from there took a local taxi to the stand just outside of the San Fernando General Hospital. The umbrella she sheltered under did nothing to keep her feet dry. The legs of her jeans were damp and clung to her thighs, and her feet were wet and splotched with debris from the street. She stood in a huddle with several other people under the ample awning of the taxi stand. A doctor who knew her as Valmiki’s daughter drove through the gates of the hospital, spotted her, and pulled up his car. He drew down the window and greeted her. She knew he was bound to be wondering what she was doing waiting in the rain, outside of the gates of the hospital, for a taxi, but wouldn’t come right out and ask. She saved him the trouble with a harmless lie: “I am doing a project that involves public transportation.” The look on the doctor’s face brightened. After that she positioned herself a little behind another waiting passenger and made sure to duck down whenever a face she knew from her family’s world of friends passed by.
The wall behind her stank of urine, the odour like a vapour leached by the rain. The woman at Viveka’s side held a handkerchief to her nose. There didn’t seem to be any judgment in this; she just held the kerchief there as if it were the most natural thing to do. Viveka thought of doing the same, but felt that if she did she would certainly appear to be aloof and disdainful. The woman turned to her and said, “I don’t know why they don’t do something about the beggars sleeping under here, na. Is like every wall in this place is a public toilet.” Viveka smiled but remained quiet. From the way other passengers and passersby looked at her, some of them taking in her entire frame in a slow examination, she knew she seemed out of place at the taxi stand. She wondered which was easier — enduring all of this or just mustering up enough courage to sit behind the wheel herself and drive. Since getting her licence more than a year before, she had driven only a handful of times, and never unaccompanied by her mother or her father. Given the way people drove their cars —“as if they owned the streets,” people would say, and regardless of rules — and given the number of accidents and deaths caused by careless driving, she had no desire and even less courage to drive.
The waiting people chatted easily among themselves, even the ones who were clearly strangers at the stand, about the environment, the rain, the heat, the price of tomatoes, the morning’s newspaper headlines. Viveka felt unable to engage with them, and while the others watched her, no one but that woman had addressed her directly. Viveka looked across at the promenade to see if she might catch a glimpse of Merle Bedi. Cars passed between where she stood and the promenade, and she willed her vision to leap over the traffic, to zip through the rainfall all the way across the road, into and under bushes. She saw no one resembling her old high school friend and happily entertained the thought that Merle Bedi might have been taken back into her parents’ home.
The combination of rain and heat intensified the pollution caused by exhaust from the jam of cars. The hospital’s incinerators spewed their noxious gases into the sodden air. The nearer smells of urine, unwashed bodies, and too highly perfumed ones produced a dizzying cocktail that finally got the better of her. She was about to act as if she had just remembered something and quickly head inside the gates to one of the wards to which her father sometimes sent his patients and where she knew several of the nurses. She would call her father and tell him that the taxies were running late, and ask if he could, after all, send the chauffeur for her. Just then, the taxi that went from San Fernando to the stand in Curepe, near enough to the university, arrived.
Thank heaven for air-conditioning in the maxi-taxi in which she travelled. The low-lying land on either side of the road just outside of the city bobbed in a stew-like concoction of rain and the debris its flood waters had dredged.
As the taxi arrived in the central part of the island, the rain ceased, and the sun came out in a sudden burst for the first time in about ten days. The distant tree tops instantly glistened. The vehicle inched forward through a jam of traffic that stretched the length of the Sir Solomon Hochoy Highway, the island’s north-south corridor.
Viveka stroked the case that held her cd player and a new cd she had won in a late-night radio contest. The contest had been held almost six weeks before, but she had only days ago received the prize in the mail. The night of the contest the Krishnu house had been in darkness, Vashti asleep in her room, and Viveka’s parents in theirs some hours ago. Viveka was unable to sleep, as usual, and had her cd player tuned to Radio Antilles. She was plugged into it with earphones. The host had offered a cd of rock’s greatest hits to anyone who could identify the last five songs that had been played, in order. Contestants had to mail in their answers by a certain date. She had never entered contests before, but in one of her usual impetuous moves she decided to enter and was shocked to hear her name, and her region in Trinidad, called on the air in the middle of another night ten days later. She had listened to the cd only once before today, and was more thrilled at having won it — won anything — than with the music itself. Now she wanted to listen to it again, to give it a second chance, but she did not want to offend her fellow passengers by shutting out their congenial chatter.
The four rows of passengers — twelve in all, resigned to their cramped seats in what was essentially a mini-van — and the driver were used to travel delays. When they first saw the queue of traffic up ahead, before the car had slowed to a crawl, one of the passengers had sucked her teeth and whispered, “Man, if it ent one thing, is another.” The driver, by way of apologizing, but not accepting any fault for this delay, offered, “Years I driving, and every time it rain is the same thing. The swamp lands does flood and it does overflow onto the road. And nobody would do anything. They could make a levee or fix the drainage. And when the same road dry, if you see how it mash up because of all this flood. You could believe this island have a lake that bubbling pitch day and night?”
The woman just behind the driver sighed audibly. She was an Indian woman with skin the blue-brown colour of sapodilla seeds. She wore her oiled black hair tightly pinned into a bun at the back. She wore, too, a scent reminiscent of oleander that was so strong it was as if a vial of it had spilled in the vehicle and spoiled in the heat. She said, “Is only skylark in this place. The people who could fix this road don’t have to use it. They only fixing-fixing the airport. And who you see using the airport? Not me. Only in Trinidad, yes!” At the back a man raised his voice. “Fire the whole lot of them. Tout bagaille. Bring in fresh blood. This country good only for government officials and white people. Is they who does get everything, and people like we? Nothing, nothing, nothing.” Then, “But you know, don’t make a mistake about this: it don’t matter the colour of the skin of government — white, black, Indian — all of them, once they get in, would be the same damn thing.” An older black man with grey hair and a hoarse British-accented voice commiserated, “It’s all about power. Power corrupts. No one embarks with bad intentions, but it is the nature of power. Power corrupts, I tell you. What are you going to change anything for, then? You must, of course, know the saying: better to stay with an evil that you know rather than a devil that will surprise you.” There was a moment of silence after this man’s interjection. Viveka wondered if the people in the car had been caught out by his accent or his inflected sagaciousness. Then the rumblings in the car piped up again, with the Indian woman offering, “Well, at least the rain holding up. I glad for the sun, too bad. The roads go dry out by this evening, God willing. But all you, look how this island small, na. Look over to the Central Range. The sun shining here, and over there you could see the rain falling hard-hard still.”
Viveka looked toward the Central Range. It was where her father and his friends hunted. What a weird man he was, she thought, killing things for sport. He was sort of brave, she supposed, going into the forest as he did. She had met his friend Saul, and of all her parents’ friends she was most drawn to him. Well, he wasn’t her mother’s friend. Why her father didn’t bring him around to the house she couldn’t understand. She could only put it down to the facts of Saul’s race and class. Saul seemed so unassuming, so unlike most of the men in their more regular social circles. Her father really was weird. Brave on one hand, a coward on the other.
THE SOUND OF THE OTHER PASSENGERS’ CHATTER LULLED VIVEKA. She felt no draw to contribute, but still a thrill to be in this closed-in space, privy to ideas and ways of speaking and being that were not part of her family’s everyday. She slipped the cd player between her thighs, rectitude washing over her, intent on being part of the travel experience. This feeling drew the morning’s quarrel with her parents to her mind, and without realizing it, she soon left the passengers behind with their chatter. That morning, after storming out of her parents’ room, she had gone into Vashti’s and plunked herself down on the bed as Vashti dressed for school. Vashti tried to placate her. “Last night Mom and Dad said that playing volleyball would just make you rougher than you already are.” At this, Viveka was on the verge of bursting with anger again, but she knew that if she controlled herself Vashti would tell her more. She feigned calmness and said, “Rougher?”
“Well, face it, Vik, you’re not like other girls. You walk so fast, and you don’t stay still, and you don’t dress up or wear makeup. You don’t even talk about boys. Are you still friends with that boy, Elliot?”
“Yes, and Elliot is just a friend. Why is it that every time a girl has a boy friend, I mean a friend who just happens to be a boy, everyone gets so excited or concerned? You haven’t said anything about him to Mom and Dad, have you?”
“No. You told me not to.”
“So you think I am rough, too?”
“Well, not really. A little, I suppose. It’s just that you wear the same ‘uniform’ day in and day out.”
Vashti was sounding like their mother, but Viveka still needed to hear more, so she held the volatile responses accumulating in her head.
“When we have to go to a party or to dinner,” continued Vashti, “it’s always a major harassment because you only have one dress that you will wear and it’s not even dressy. Everyone else enjoys deciding what to wear, what will match with what, but you end up sulking and . . .”
Viveka listened. It was good, in one way, to know what they all thought. For the length of a sigh she wished she were more like Vashti. Then she answered, “They will see. I will be successful regardless of what I wear or look like. I will be strong, not flabby like Mom ...”
“Mom is not flabby,” an indignant Vashti flashed back.
“Well, she is not strong — I mean independent — either.”
“Mom said playing sports will make you muscular.”
“What did Dad say?”
“He agreed with her.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I was just listening. Nobody ever asks my opinion.”
“Well, I am asking for it.”
This made Vashti smile. “Okay, Vik, just stand in front of the mirror.”
“So?”
“So, look at the way you stand.”
“I’m looking. What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Well, look at how you push out your chest, and how your arms stick out from your side.”
“What! Well, so what? This is how I am.” That boxiness, as she thought of it, had served her well in her physical training classes in high school.
“But you look like one of those body builders in those weird competitions on tv. We females don’t stick our arms out so much. And walk with our chests so high in the air. Drop your chest a little.”
Viveka did so, and Vashti followed with, “Now, tuck your arms closer to your sides.”
Viveka didn’t dare say it, but it flattered her that Vashti thought she looked like a body builder. She sucked her teeth and relaxed her body; her chest rose and her arms sprung out again. “Vashti, what does this have to do with anything? It doesn’t feel natural for me.”
“Okay, you do look kind of tough for a female.”
“Christ! Say girl or woman, but not female. That makes it sound as if you’re talking about a cat or some other animal.”
“Whatever. I am trying to say that you have a tendency to be muscular. I mean, really: do you want big calves and harder arms — which you will get if you play sports? That’s so ugly on a . . . whatever. It makes us look mannish. Mom says you’re sort of mannish.”
That was enough. The word mannish was unacceptable. Not wanting her parents to hear them, Viveka kept her outburst as low as she could. “Well, I just don’t want to have someone carry two bags of groceries from the cashier to my car, like every other woman we know does. It’s not just about strength. It’s about exploiting others. And about not realizing one’s full potential. It’s not like we’re incapable, you know. Do you see those women walking on the side of the highway with bundles on their heads and heavy bags in either hand? They can’t pay others to do it for them, but they are women, and have no choice but to be strong. Tell me they are mannish! All this dependence we are taught is not natural, it is class related. I don’t know why it is admirable in our little claustrophobic world to be pretty, weak and so dependent.”
Vashti looked perplexed. She said, “Vik, sometimes you sound like you’re not really talking to anyone in particular, just lecturing.”
Viveka said nothing, but she was still chewing over the word mannish.
“Look, it’s getting late, I have to hurry. Please let me dress now,” Vashti pleaded. “Should I wear these earrings or these?”
Viveka pointed to one pair and said, “In my day”— at which they both smiled —“we couldn’t wear any jewellery to school. Now look at you, with eyeliner. I hope you study as well as you look.”
But just as Viveka got to the door, Vashti said, “I saw Merle Bedi yesterday.” Viveka stopped. This information, immediately following a conversation about mannishness, made her feel ill.
“So?”
“She asked me for money.”
Viveka yearned to know more, for the state of her old friend distressed her. But she couldn’t bear the thought of being judged unfairly through association. “Where did you see her?” she asked casually, as if barely interested.
“On the promenade. At lunchtime.”
“What were you doing on the promenade?” asked Viveka harshly. She tried to suppress the memory of Merle confiding her love for their science teacher, Miss Seukeran. When they were in fourth form, Viveka had had a long conversation with Merle, trying to make her understand that what she felt was admiration, the desire to be whatever Miss Seukeran was. But Merle had eventually told Viveka that sometimes she felt like she wanted to hold Miss Seukeran in her arms, and kiss her lips, and that these thoughts made her whole body tingle and shake. Viveka’s heart had pounded. She didn’t know if this was from anger and embarrassment at being party to the knowledge of such a thing or from the fear that she knew something of what Merle felt.
For Viveka, it was Miss Russell. Miss Sally Russell. But the feeling hadn’t lasted. Miss Russell had been her and Merle’s physical education teacher two years earlier. She had just arrived from England. She was tall, very thin, and angular for a woman. She had longish hair that was parted on one side. It was mostly kept back in a bun, but strands would hang down over her face and cover one eye, and she was always having to push them back behind her ear. Sometimes when she was lost in thought she would take some hair between her fingers and, as if she had made a paint brush, she would swipe, softly, back and forth along her lips. Viveka had studiously tried to make a habit of that very action, but for one thing, her hair wasn’t long enough. The other students used to try to describe the colour of Miss Russell’s hair to each other. It was auburn; no, it was blonde; no, it was honey-coloured. It was more like hay. As if they knew the colour of hay. Actually, it was golden. Rays of sunshine itself. And Miss Russell, her face was the sun. Everyone was taken aback by her eyes, which were a kind of blue, a shimmer to them like the iridescent blue side of the wings of a morpho butterfly. Her leanness was envied, yet no one would really have wanted to be so thin for fear of being called meagre or sick. It looked good on Miss Russell, though. And the way she moved about — swiftly, mannishly, they said, quickly adding that, regardless, she was more feminine than most of the other teachers on the staff. The other teachers in comparison were motherly and grandmotherly. Girls came to school with their hair piled on their heads just like Miss Russell’s, and wearing long dangling earrings like hers, and even Miss Russell was obliged to tell them to remove those earrings as jewellery was not part of the school uniform. Girls brought a salad to school for their lunch and ate that instead of doubles and rotis, hoping that they might lose a little of their roundness. But emulation peaked there. Miss Russell confused everyone. They all agreed that she was unusually glamorous for a teacher, but in the next breath she was criticized for being too strong, too serious, for walking the grounds too fast, even during lunchtime and recess when everyone slowed right down. And there were days when her leanness was questioned. “What it have on her for a man to hold?” they asked.
Miss Russell gave tennis lessons and coached netball and throwing the javelin and discus. She had a boyfriend, a local white man who the students, through their mysterious and sometimes questionable methods, found out was an oilfield worker. He would come and pick her up after school on his big growling motor bike, and the instant she saw him, it was abundantly noted, Miss Russell lost all of her physical-education teacher ways and became like any of the other women on the staff — save for the nuns. Suddenly her gait changed and she was all smiles. She would loosen the bun on her head, pull on the helmet, and hop on the bike with more grace than when she was walking the school grounds. She would slide in tight behind her boyfriend, throwing her long sharp arms around him to hug him first and then sliding her hands to his sides, where they came to rest as he took off with such a jolt forward that the sixth-form girls knew he was aware of their eyes on him. With that helmet on, leaning tight against her boyfriend, Miss Russell was everything most other girls wanted to be. Not Viveka, though. She found herself angry with Miss Russell for being so intimate with her boyfriend in public, in front of her students, and knew even as she felt this that she was being silly. Still, she felt what she felt. She and her friend Merle Bedi thought the other students shallow for gawking at Miss Russell’s boyfriend the way they did. Viveka also watched him intently, but she knew that her watching was different. She wondered what it was that Miss Russell found alluring about him. She compulsively imagined the motorcycle rider, the oilfield worker, and Miss Russell in a hot bedroom, a red and blue afghan rug on the floor, these two lying on top of the rug, he on top of her — perched was the word that always came to her — his mouth on hers, his body pecking away at hers mercilessly.
There were two Miss Russells. The teacher who paid Viveka every attention, who laughed with her and showed her how to do things right; and then that other one — an entirely different person as far as Viveka was concerned — who, once she exited the gates of the school, became as common as everyone else. Viveka wished she could save that Miss Russell from the fate of ordinariness. Miss Russell coached one of the older students who, outside of school life, took part in track competitions and won them. Viveka wanted to be coached in track, too, but Miss Russell, after putting Viveka through certain trials, had dissuaded her, saying that her body type suggested she would not be a good candidate for track but would do better in field — at throwing the discus and the javelin. This was certainly one way of saying that she was chunky, boxy, Viveka had thought, but no one else had been picked for the discus and javelin, and so she also felt special. She imagined the discus in her clutch, spinning it-spinning it-spinning it until she was giddy with untold power and strength, then releasing and launching it far out across the field with an enormous force, all of this with Miss Russell’s eyes on her. Viveka’s eyes were almost always on Miss Russell.
For a time, Viveka’s life revolved around a measly eighty minutes per week of physical training. During school hours she found herself looking out of the classroom window to see if Miss Russell was anywhere in sight. If she did see Miss Russell, she would suddenly be overcome by a tickling feeling throughout her body and dizziness, and she would want to burst into a run, longer and much faster than she was capable of in reality. She knew then, in spite of what Miss Russell had told her, that such power was pent up inside of her. When Miss Russell put together a school team to compete in intra-school sports, Viveka tried out for the discus and javelin to see if she was ready for competition. She did strength, endurance, power, and jump tests. Viveka was weak in the endurance tests, yet she could jump higher than most of the students, and this surprised Viveka herself because of her boxiness. And she tested better than anyone else in power and strength. She went home and boasted to her parents and sister. Her mother showed no interest, but Vashti said, “You would jump to the moon for Miss Russell. If Miss Hollis or Sister Veronica were our PE teacher you would be sick for every class.”
In the end, Viveka was chosen to be on the school’s sports team, but her parents absolutely refused to allow her to take the time after school and on weekends to train. And Miss Russell lost interest in Viveka after meeting with Devika and Valmiki to try to persuade them to let Viveka train and compete. Viveka’s parents had informed Miss Russell that there was no future in that sort of thing, and that Viveka, being weak in math and in French, would be taking after-class lessons in those subjects, starting immediately. Soon after that, Viveka heard that Miss Russell and her boyfriend were getting married, and a terrible acne broke out on Viveka’s face.
It was two years later when Merle Bedi told Viveka about wanting to kiss Miss Seukeran. Saying these words out loud was craziness. But Viveka understood something of it. That kind of talk, she felt, could get them both in trouble. A clash of thoughts, incomplete ones, incomplete-able ones, resounded in her head. She would be implicated in Merle’s craziness: there was Viveka’s very public and close association with Merle, Viveka’s well-known affinity for sports and things mannish. And there was Miss Russell — Miss Russell leaving, Miss Russell engaged, Viveka’s coinciding acne problem, and in the instant of Merle Bedi saying she wanted to kiss Miss Seukeran, Viveka knew that she, too, had wanted to throw the discus and javelin because it was her way of kissing Miss Russell.
She stood up, looked down at Merle, and snapped, “I wouldn’t go around announcing that if I were you.”
Merle’s eyes were bright, as if she was seeing some kind of saving truth. “I want to tell her. I need to tell her. It’s so real and so good. I feel like a kite, Vik. It’s unbelievable. I can’t study or think of anything else. She makes me feel that way. She does it. She must feel it. Come on, Viveka, can’t you see how she pays attention to me, more than to anyone else?”
“Merle, I really think you should keep those feelings and all of that kind of thinking to yourself. I don’t want to carry on this conversation. Don’t say those kinds of things. Not even to me.”
But Merle was beside herself, composing music for Miss Seukeran, writing Miss Seukeran cards in flowery language expressing her admiration. Even if she had not actually expressed her dirty thinking, Viveka thought, it would have been obvious to a moron. Saying those words out loud was a kind of suicide. And indeed, there had been some camaraderie between the teacher and Merle, but it was shortlived. Suddenly Miss Seukeran stopped noticing Merle, no longer stopped on her walks down the hallways to say hello to her, and seemed almost to shun her. Viveka wondered if Merle had told Miss Seukeran how she wished to kiss her.
THAT MORNING, VIVEKA RECALLED, VASHTI HAD SULKED AT VIVEKA’S unwelcome authoritarian manner, a manner oddly prompted by the mention of Merle Bedi.
“I got a doubles for lunch. What does it matter to you?”
“But why are you eating doubles for lunch?” Viveka persisted. “You should know better than that. They are so greasy. You’ll get pimples. Why don’t you take a proper lunch to school? You don’t even have to make it. Get Pinky to make you a sandwich and a salad.”
“I am trying to tell you about Merle Bedi, and you’re going on about my lunch. In any case, you used to buy doubles too. How come you can eat it but I can’t? Why do you have to disagree with everything and make others feel like they’re wrong or stupid? You are so contrary.”
“Contrary!” That was not a word that Vashti would use on her own, Viveka reflected. Her suspicion was confirmed when Vashti sheepishly responded: “Mom says you’re contrary and I just happen to agree.”
Merle had clearly suffered from Miss Seukeran’s rejection more than from the hush-hush gossip that eventually ensued. By the last year of high school, she withdrew even from Viveka. From the time she had begun high school, Merle had been the top student in her particular stream. Suddenly she was failing every subject, and grinning about it as if that was an achievement. By the time Viveka had entered university, Merle had started living on the street. It was said by some people that her parents put her out, and by others that she left home, on her own, this act being part of the same craziness that had her loving within her own sex.
“Christ, Vashti. You’re like a clone of Mom. Why can’t you just think for yourself? Well, perhaps you do think I am contrary, you just have to have the vocabulary fed to you.”
With that, Viveka slammed shut Vashti’s door. The loudness of it brought her father from his bedroom. He glared at her, but said nothing. She glared back at him, thinking, “You’re such a coward, Dad.” Instead of trying to bribe and cajole her with the offer of the chauffeur, why couldn’t he have spoken his true mind to her mother, or to her, or to both of them. How could the two of them be her parents, she their child? She felt betrayed in myriad ways.
If the altercation with her parents had made Viveka wish she were not part of her own family, this one with Vashti had left her feeling a little frightened, but she wasn’t sure of what, exactly. As she was dressing for her trip to the campus she had tried on a skirt her mother had long ago bought for her, but which she had not yet worn, and a pair of black low-heeled, open-toed shoes. In the mirror she saw a stranger. The waist of the skirt, and the way her shirt fell over it, brought notice, she felt, to her already shapeless torso. She considered the thick, naturally muscled legs before her. Her legs were dry and needed shaving. All she had to do was to pull on a pair of flesh-tone stockings and, despite her age, she would have passed for a dowdy high school teacher. She flinched.
She left the house feeling more comfortable, but a little graceless, in her uniform of button-down collared shirt, blue jeans, and Indian-style leather slippers.
SCABBY LOOKING STUMPS OF BRUSH STUCK OUT OF THE WATER IN THE swamp fields closest to the road. Red-breasted blackbirds, their black feathers bright and shiny as if polished by the rain, did their mating dance, hopping directly into the air as if bounding up from a trampoline and floating down again to land on the same few inches of visible, bare scrub top. They looked to Viveka as if they had alighted on something that either burned them or pricked them and so they flew up in utter surprise and a-flutter, only to alight on the same spot again and to have the same effect occur. Over and over. Such pretty birds and so silly, she would normally think, but today her mind was elsewhere, and the dance of the birds was nothing more than that, an animal dance.
With such slow progress along the highway Viveka was thankful that she didn’t have a class to attend this morning. She hadn’t really wanted to go to the university campus, but it was better than staying at home in the presence of her mother. This way, she didn’t have to make the choice of prolonging their disagreement or giving it up, either out of wariness or real defeat. By travelling to the university in this public manner, without the aid of the family’s chauffeur, she hoped her mother would in her absence have the time and chance to come to the understanding that she was wrong and Viveka right. Besides, travelling like this she felt apart from her family, able to take part in the ordinary life of her country, something her mother knew nothing of, and something her father liked to think he understood because he had patients from all walks of life. Yes, it was true that he hunted with a few black men who were skilled labourers. If any of the other passengers had been watching Viveka they would have seen her shake her head, and curl her lips as she thought scornfully, “But if we were to have a party at our house there is no way he would invite them, his so-called buddies. What did I do to be born into this hypocritical mess? I can’t, I just can’t allow myself to become them.”
Sometimes Viveka had the sensation that her arms were tightly bound to her body with yards and yards of clear Scotch tape. When she felt this, as she did now, she imagined trying to locate with her eyes one of the ends, her eyes darting, blurring, concentrating on the silvery-clear mess that bound her, and on locating a faint line that indicated an edge of the tape, tilting her head and attempting to reach it with her mouth, stretching her lower jaw until the sides of her mouth ached, down to her shoulder, and raising her shoulder up to it as much as she could, and using her teeth to pry up a tiny piece. Then, she imagined, she would hook it and yank it up without tearing it off. There in the taxi, her neck taut and her temples aching with the mere thought of this exercise, she could taste and feel uneven bits of tape. She almost gagged, imagining spitting out those stubborn flecks of tape on her tongue.
The comfort of life as lived in her parents’ home bred in Viveka certain aspirations, aspirations she was beginning to suspect were naïve and unrealistic, among them to be an internationally heralded literary critic whose emphasis was on Caribbean writing. As a student majoring in English literature, she was making her way through aspects of the usual canon, but she was barely able to satisfy an elephantine thirst for Caribbean literature. The writings of Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, and Earl Lovelace provoked her to want to experience a Caribbean-ness, and a Trinidadian-ness more specifically, that was antithetical to her mother’s tie to all things Indian and Hindu. At times Viveka felt like an alien presence in her parents’ house. Her mother was not impressed that she was attending university. Devika, in typical old-fashioned Indian manner, found Viveka ambitious — not too ambitious, but ambitious — a quality that was not to be cultivated, and was not generally admired by people of Devika’s generation. Viveka’s aspiration to be a literary critic, tantamount to pompousness and arrogance, fell under her suspicion. She asked Viveka again and again what made her think that she had the ability to be such a critic. Her refrain — levelled at Valmiki as well — was “Ambition will be your downfall.”
Valmiki, on the other hand, encouraged Viveka’s interests — even though his encouragement often felt misguided. Viveka knew he didn’t understand how or why one would study subjects based on what he saw as opinion rather than proven fact. But Viveka also knew she had a special place in his heart, and that he would support her. He had said to her more than once “Get a degree — law, medicine, whatever you want.” (He never mentioned what she was actually doing.) “Because if anything happens at least you have something to fall back on.” Devika had once interrupted his benevolent speechifying and answered back, “Something? What you mean something? And in any case, she doesn’t even have the subjects for medicine. You really do talk foolishness sometimes, Valmiki. And what on earth could she do with a law degree? I don’t want my daughters practising law. Standing up like that in front of a bunch of men, making spectacles of themselves.”
Valmiki knew to ignore Devika. “A pretty girl like you, you’re bound to get married, but suppose something happened to your husband and you were left to fend for yourself. In any case, even if you don’t get married — because you’re too smart for most men — having a good degree is a good thing for a girl. We won’t be around to look after you forever. Get your degree, and no one will be able to take advantage of you.”
Devika’s family’s financial comfort, and that provided since marriage by Valmiki, afforded Devika the choice to work or not to work, but she had no use for the choice: she had no imagination for work outside of the house, nor for study, and thought little of educated women. Educated women, she said, were aggressive, unladylike. The only professions she could imagine for either of her daughters in an age, she conceded, when women were demanding to spend time outside of the home, were catering, flower arranging (both of which, incidentally, could be done in the home), and teaching. The latter for Devika meant at a primary school or high school moulding young minds, not at a university. To her mind, even outside of the lecture hall female professors carried themselves like lawyers. They were grim and lacked social graces and didn’t pay attention to fashions, and were a threat to the comfort of men with all their serious thinking and interruptions to correct and beggings to differ. What she understood was preparing oneself for marriage. But marriage had never interested Viveka.
Looking around the taxi, Viveka mused how her friend Elliot, who was at university with her and studying English too, was a bit like these people she travelled with. Well, not exactly like them. A bit, though. She watched the passengers, listened a little more to their conversation, and tried to think how Elliot was different from them. He might come from a similar class, she decided, but he was a university student. His concerns and aspirations were different than these peoples’. He was already living a marginally different kind of life from them, and in time that margin would widen. But at least, she thought, he would have a hands-on experience of this more real world.
What if she were to marry Elliot? Their children would be part Indian, that part from her, and from him they would inherit his black, white, and Carib ancestry. That would teach her parents a thing or two. She snorted, imagining her mother bouncing a little mixed-race boy on her knee, having naturally fallen in love with him despite herself. But this was merely one of her many subversive fantasies. She wasn’t that interested in Elliot.
Of course, if her parents were to meet Elliot, they would not approve. Her mother would come straight out and voice her disapproval in the most unequivocal way. Her father, on the other hand, would not want to offend or upset Viveka. He would not commit to an opinion one way or the other, but he would joke, cajole, placate, tell her how terrific she was, mention that her friend, that Elliot-young-man, seemed like a nice-enough fellow, and as if the conversation were unrelated, state that no one, absolutely no one she had yet met was her match. He would say that he had his eye out for a nice Indian boy who could give a dowry of at least one cow, et cetera. Vashti would jump in then and correct her father and say, “It’s the girl’s family who gives the dowry, Dad.” And her father would be only too pleased to be handed the opportunity to retort, “Not in this family. Anybody who wants one of my girls has to pay me handsomely . . .”
Viveka would have loved to have this battle with her parents, for their true colours would show then, and could only shame them. But she really felt so little for Elliot that she was not prepared to take on this battle and risk winning it. Her parents, therefore, were unaware of his existence.
Elliot had seemed recently to have only one goal in mind. Given the slightest opportunity, his hands found their way underneath Viveka’s shirt. He would inch them this way, then that, his fingertips circling the small of her back in non-threatening playfulness. In time, and that time could be as long as it took for him to feel that Viveka had relaxed and would not resist him, his fingertips would dance along the waistband of her pants.
Viveka wasn’t as unaware as Elliot imagined. She knew that if she allowed him too many inches in the vicinity surely he would expect (and what if he were to demand?) the whole mile. The instant those fingers entered her waistband, she would start talking of something she felt might arrest his attention. She would take hold of his arms and in a casual, non-confrontational manner, move them. On one occasion recently, he had waited for her to do this, and then locked his arms around her, pinning hers to her sides. He walked her — a graceless, almost frightening backward stumble — to the wall. There, he pressed his body to hers, trapping her against the cool wall, and he brought his lips to her ear. She giggled nervously and tried to push him back, but he was intent, and did not laugh with her. She tried to raise her arms, but he had them well caught. She said, “Oh Elliot, come on.” And he said back seriously, “No, you come on. What’s this? I mean, what are we to each other? I spend all my time with you. You spend all your free time here in my apartment with me. What do you expect? Isn’t this what you want, too? Tell me it isn’t. Go on, tell me.”
Elliot’s unusual seriousness and sudden focus on this matter had surprised her. She did not want to offend or disappoint him, and did not quite know how to answer without doing either. He carried on, “This is what I want.” More quietly, more gently, he added, “Come on, I need this from you.” That he needed this disheartened her, but that he needed this from her tamed her resistance. He lowered his crotch to hers. Hard as a stump of guava wood there, he pressed into her pubic area. She felt a tingle in her lower back, and her pelvis, as if it suddenly had a mind and agenda quite apart from her, lurched forward to meet him. It felt horribly good. An uncontrollable desire and the dregs of her reserve co-mingled. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, intending to brace herself and engage her brain in decision-making, but he took advantage of that split second to spread her legs with his knee. He was saying something in her ear, but she was unable to make out the guttural sounds. The weight of his whole body against her, and the insistence of him between her legs, was stifling. She placed her hands on his waist intending to push him away, to quell the rising quake of his body against hers, to put an end to an unintentional desire swelling in her and betraying her, but the moment she touched his waist he began to breathe more heavily, gasping hot wet air into her ear. Her ear was unpleasantly drenched in heat and spittle, and the desire between her legs instantly numbed. Suddenly, his body convulsed, he was rigid for a few seconds, and then he slumped slowly down onto her, heat rising from his body as if from asphalt at midday. He stayed there for some moments like a wholesale-size sack of flour on her chest. Her body tensed against the weight. She breathed shallowly. She wanted to push him off, but was pinned not just by his weight, but also by a confusion of emotions. She had experienced in her breasts and pubic area an awakening that in moments made her want to lose her mind in pleasure, yet now it was as if a bulldozer had run over and crushed a part of her.
When Elliot released her, Viveka fixed herself and left without any words. But in class the next day Elliot sat next to her, and they resumed their friendship as if nothing had come between them. His advances had left her cool, and now she had drawn an imaginary line that she would not let him cross: She decided that as long as he didn’t try to remove her clothing, she would not try to stop him.
THE NEXT TIME THEY WERE ALONE TOGETHER, ELLIOT LEANED AGAINST the counter of his student apartment, again strapping her arms against her body. She was nervous and rambled on about one of the Trinidadian authors she’d been reading. He slipped one hand under her shirt. That hand was splayed, and she leaned back on it as if it were a wall. “He makes Indians out to be ugly, stupid, concerned only with their narrow knife-edged slice of life. He’s criticizing his ancestors, but these are my ancestors too, and by implication he is criticizing me. And yet, I keep wanting to read on. He gets it right, but so what? Does he have to write it at all? I don’t think he really hates us so much as he is gravely disappointed in what we have not become.”
“And what is that?” Elliot’s voice was distant.
“I don’t know. White? Brighter, whiter than the conqueror himself?”
“Conqueror?” asked Elliot distractedly.
“Well, the British, who else? Oh, come on, Elliot. Stop it. Pay attention to me.”
“But I am. See?” Elliot unfastened her bra with one hand. She pushed him hard. He laughed, but the laughter was chalky, choppy. His eyes had narrowed and his pale skin had turned a drunk-man’s red. He walked some paces away from her, and in the midst of her rambling on about this author he cut her short and said he was tired and still had a paper to work on. The simultaneous feelings of relief and of being rejected left her dazed. All the feminist rhetoric she was able to spew easily and brightly in discussions or could write for A-grade papers burrowed into the farthest recesses of her mind. It was her father who came to her mind — the sense that while Valmiki might have disapproved of Elliot, her lack of desire would have disappointed him. It was as if she had just betrayed her father, and it was that feeling, rather than whatever it was that had gone on between her and Elliot, that distressed her. She must try to do better next time, be more like her affair-crazy father, she scolded herself.
Next time, she let Elliot pull the top of her bra down far enough to reach the nipple of her breast. Something like a small animal taking refuge in her underwear suddenly bolted up. Elliot felt this excitement in her too, and he took the opportunity to lift off her shirt before she had time to stop him. He pushed her still-clasped bra upwards to release her breasts. He held one breast with one hand, and put his mouth to it. He put his other hand between her legs. She gasped with the suddenness of the whole thing, at his strength, and with unexpected pleasure. He began to undress her, not everything, he said to her hesitation, just her shirt and bra. He said in a light tone, No penetration, I promise, and she knew instantly that she didn’t want him this close to her. He pointed out that Helen and Wayne were doing it, and nothing had happened to them. No one even knew they were doing it, he said. But that was not what she was worried about. Hard as she tried, she really didn’t feel connected to Elliot. She wished it were different, but it simply wasn’t.
Later that same week, Viveka and Helen had studied late at the library. As they drove home afterwards, an accident on the highway had created a traffic jam that moved a car length every ten to fifteen minutes. When they reached the entrance to the mall at Valsayn, they decided to stop there to eat dinner and wait until the traffic had cleared somewhat. At the Indian restaurant she and Helen talked about books, authors, volleyball, and family affairs, but neither of them brought up Wayne, Elliot, or boyfriends or marriage or their futures. On the drive home, they were quiet. Every so often Helen hummed a tune that was unrecognizable, perhaps made up. She was driving and in a world of her own.
Viveka had leaned her head on her seat’s headrest and kept her eyes on the darkness ahead. She thought of Elliot wanting her and him to be naked, and of how she had felt when he had touched her nipple and put his hands between her legs. She shifted her eyes, but not her head, and glanced at Helen’s legs. Helen had pulled the flounce of her long Indian-style skirt up above her knees, and her legs were pale in the darkness of the car. She imagined Helen was her, and she was Elliot watching Helen’s bare legs — or her own legs as she saw them in her imagination — and she felt that same heat, that same jostle inside her underwear and the rush of wetness there. When they arrived at Viveka’s house, Viveka turned away from Helen as she opened the door to get out, but Helen put her hand on Viveka’s back and stopped her. As Viveka turned to face Helen, Helen moved forward to give her the usual goodbye peck on a cheek but in a confused moment, their lips met. It was quick, the barest brush, but they were both startled. They laughed, and in their laughter was a show of indignation. Viveka blew air out of her pursed lips and hurriedly mumbled, “Oh my god. That was weird. Too weird.” And they laughed again, soft rattled laughs.
The next time, they were more careful. And for a time Viveka was more tolerant of Elliot’s desires. He was able to touch her breasts again, and knead her nipples with twirling fingers and with a tongue that flicked with the speed of a hummingbird’s wings. No matter how painful her nipples became under his kneading, she would say nothing, and Elliot’s quiet, his fatigue and spaciness after, was almost worth it. In turn, Elliot grew more patient with her. No doubt he thought that since he had come this far, if he continued to be a little more patient, in time she would consent to touching him.
When Viveka was on her own at nights with the lights off, Vashti’s breathing telling her that she had the privacy she needed, she would try to re-create that feeling she had experienced the first time she had had an orgasm with Elliot. She had had others with him since, but none were as surprising, as delightfully confusing as that first one. She tried imagining him touching her, but that left her more sore than excited. So she would imagine herself driving a car, but she would also imagine that she was Elliot sitting in the passenger seat, and that she, Elliot, was riding his hands up her bare legs, inching up to her crotch, finally slipping her/his fingers inside the elastic of her panties, and that feeling, like the first time, would come to her again. It was a tingle that crept up her arms, down her legs, circled her hips, gripped her feet, her toes, and shook her with numerous explosive convulsions. She got to this place every time on her own, but never again with Elliot. Rather than let this worry her, she decided that since she was perfectly capable of arriving at this delight on her own, her reluctance with Elliot was because he was not the right man, and she was waiting for that man to come along. In magazines she browsed through at the hair salon, she had read that when the right man came along you knew it, you simply knew it. She was nagged, however, by an irrational conviction that the right man would never come along. Her father had a saying that all men were bastards, that he should know. She hated when he said that, but didn’t doubt that he should know. Deep in her the memory was some long-ago family unpleasantness involving her father and a former neighbour, Pia Moretti. Viveka had an actual memory of the situation with Pia Moretti, but that memory was so bizarre she had often wondered if she had built pictures around bits of overheard fighting between her parents, and these imagined scenes had worked themselves into what she experienced as a memory.
Viveka suddenly realized that in the public space of the taxi she had been thinking about sex, and that if she were to call up that bizarre memory there would be even more sex sifting into the psychic space of the taxi. She wondered if any of the passengers was a mind-reader. Her face, she feared, might have given her away, for she had felt a burn in her cheeks thinking of Elliot and of Helen. She would stop all of this crazy-making thinking; Elliot often said that she thought too much. By way of relaxing her brain, she tried to focus on the landscape through which the taxi travelled.
They were well past the swamp now, red-breasted blackbirds replaced by opportunistic corbeaux flying low overhead, their heavy heads angled downward as they ploughed the land with their red-ringed eyes for the swollen carcasses of animals that had drowned in the flood. The road here was raised, and the land on either side sat below. Although the roads were now dry, the water had still not drained from the low-lying fields. On the left were plots of coconut. There would normally be a delightful spread of crocuses at the foot of the tall trees, lime green fronds studded with brilliant orange tulip-like flowers, but the ground was completely submerged. In clearings were people’s homes, one-room structures no bigger than Viveka’s bedroom, made of mismatched planks of wood with roofs thatched from palm branches. Although these houses were on stilts, the water had risen up to the doorway of several of them. A man stood in the open doorway of one. The brown water was up to his ankles and Viveka imagined that the floor of his house was underwater. The driver of the car could be heard, “You woulda think they’da build up they house off the ground by now. Flooding in this area is not a new thing. Some people don’t learn, I tell you.”
Viveka let her head fall lightly against the turned-up window, aware that a thousand other heads had likely greased that same spot before her. She guessed — hoped — that head lice didn’t live on glass.
She liked thinking that the flood and the havoc it wreaked would not have made one iota of difference to the pace of travel along this route, whether she was in a private chauffeur-driven car or in this public taxi. But for the man standing in the doorway of his partially submerged house, having choices might have made a difference, she mused. He probably couldn’t afford, or didn’t have the technical knowledge, to build any higher. She ought to have said this to the driver, should have been less shy, Viveka thought. The classroom at the university seemed to be the only place where she was not shy or demure, or where she thought her plain looks were not a disadvantage. Here in the car, her plainness contributed to her reluctance to speak up. She wanted to bet that if she had spoken up, no one would have heard her or someone would have begun to speak over her voice, blocking out whatever she was saying. Or the correctness of her grammar and the pronunciation of her words — in short, her accent, though a Trinidadian one — would have pegged her as a local but not one of the usual taxi- travelling clientele and therefore her contribution would either have been ignored, rebuffed, or experienced as a silencing of the others. Suddenly she was wishing she had worn lipstick — even just a faint colour, nothing like the dark purple worn by the Indian woman up front — or even a push-up bra, something her sartori-ally savvy and more well-endowed sister had suggested more than once.
In her mind somersaulted partial phrases. “When the right man comes along.” “All men are bastards.” “Some people don’t learn, I tell you.” She glanced discreetly at the faces of the other passengers to see if there were any mind-readers in her midst. If she could change one thing about herself it would be how demure she became outside of her parents’ house.
SHE HADN’T ALWAYS FELT DEMURE. SHE USED TO THINK OF HERSELF as a blond-haired boy who was strong, powerful, peaceful, and could do anything and everything. He had a horse he could ride. He didn’t speak much. He was kind. His name was Vince, short for “invincible.” He was not in the least the bastard her father said all men were. Vince loved being outdoors. There was that time when she, or rather Vince, had been out in the yard. There was a butterfly net. He had been waving it at a butterfly.
But whenever this particular memory came to her, this last confused her: the boy she had imagined herself to be wasn’t the type who would capture any living thing for sport. Memory and imagination collided. Was she seven years old then, or was it five, or was she eleven? Was Anand alive then? If he was, she would have a clue with which to work out her age when this incident took place. She tried to remember something in school or something about how and why she had got the net — if there was, in fact, ever a net in their house. If there had been one, it had long ago been discarded. How she wished she could anchor the events in this particular memory, more than in any other, and separate out what had actually happened from her propensity to bridge the gaps in logic with invention. Asked about a net, her mother had one day vaguely remembered there being one once, but then on a different day long after had said, no, she didn’t remember any such net. In any case, the memory went like this.
Vince was barefoot. He skipped about the yard following a rather large morpho, the biggest he had ever seen, the size of a small child’s head, of Anand’s head. It was sapphire one minute like the tropical sky at night, as silver and turquoise as the waters of coral reefs the next, and the beauty of the thing lured her boy-self through the front gate of his parents’ house and up the road past several houses until he found himself standing at the gate of a neighbour’s yard. The low gate was unlatched, and slightly ajar. The butterfly alighted on a sign on the gate: Manetto Moretti, Painter and Contractor, Residential and Commercial. When it took off again, up the high wide red-painted concrete stairs of the Moretti’s shrub-and flower-surrounded bungalow, the boy followed it. There, on the terrazzo-tiled veranda, the blond and heroic boy was suddenly breathless. He perched on the railing of a wrought-iron balcony.
In her mind’s eye, sitting in the taxi, Viveka saw the house up the road from her own, and there was currently no stairway with a railing on it. Ah! That was the tear in her memory. The incident couldn’t have happened because there was no balcony and no railing on that house now. But the memory, like a piece of music, marched onward relentlessly.
Perched on that wrought-iron railing that surrounded the open balcony, Vince stretched out his arm, the net agape, and he reached even farther for the flying thing, such a perfect thing, bigger than a newborn baby’s head — impossible, Viveka thought, but the memory was compelling, persistent. The butterfly flew lithely over the railing and was caught in a swirling current of air. It flapped its wings, and gaining control, rose above the yard, above the clotheslines on which billowed colourful dresses belonging to Pia Moretti, and several pairs of Mani’s white-but-paint-flecked overalls. The morpho winged higher and higher until it was above the rooftops of the neighbourhood, and then it ceased to flap and merely glided.
No matter how often Viveka had replayed this mind-tape, when she came to this part her heart beat faster and she felt the excitement of the almost-ness of a moment, and she was pleased, even as she questioned the reliability of her mind, that she had the good sense not to try to follow the butterfly-bird over the railing.
About to head back down the stairs, Vince, her invincible boy-self, noticed that the wall-length sliding doors that led into the Morettis’ house were drawn invitingly wide apart, yet no one seemed to be about. “Mr. Moretti?” the boy whispered with neighbourly concern from the balcony. There was no answer, so the boy raised his voice and called again. “Hello, Mrs. Moretti? Mr. Moretti? Anyone here?” He, or anyone else so inclined, could have been a lucky thief that day. On tiptoe still— and now, in the taxi to the university, Viveka’s heart raced again, this time because she really wanted the scenes to miraculously change and to remember something entirely different — Vince entered the house. He could feel the coarse sponginess of the high-pile blue-redtaupe Afghan carpet — this is the detail that had always made her think there must be truth to the wretched memory, for it was not likely that her child-self would otherwise have seen an Afghan carpet, there being on the tropical island no need for such an item — and he stepped over a leather belt that had been dropped on the carpet along with a hammer, a pair of pliers, a wire clipper, a screwdriver, and a wrench, and then walked down a corridor that ended at a closed door through which low sounds wafted — Viveka pressed her ear to the glass of the taxi, but in the memory she pressed her ear to the door — and he heard a groan. Not an urgent or ugly groan, but still, a groan. The blond boy called again, “Hello?” The groaning persisted and he, if he could have been heard, was ignored. He turned the door’s handle, waited, and called again. Then, unnoticed, he stepped into the room and immediately bolted out again. He held his breath and pressed his face to the crack between the door and the wall to which it was hinged. Through the crack he studied his father, his cacao-coloured skin. The arc of his back. Vince watched Pia Moretti beneath his father. Her eyes were shut tight, a frown on her face. Pia stretched and arched her pelvis upward, and Viveka’s father’s pelvis flicked at her. Suddenly his father’s body collapsed in exhaustion on top of Pia. Viveka’s heart pounded, resounding in her ears.
She had no actual memory of what might have followed, but Viveka always imagined actions that would have made sense, would have knitted the memory, if that is what it was, into a logical, sensible whole. Doing so calmed her: she, or rather blond Vince, did not go straight home, but ran around and around the neighbourhood until, dripping with sweat, he limped, feet swollen, blistered, and bleeding, through the front gates of his parents’ house.
How could she have made any of it up, she wondered, when there were bits and pieces, like the heaving and the humping, that she would not otherwise, at that age, have been enlightened about, and so could not have imagined them? And how else to explain the coldness that had followed between her parents?
IN THE LIMBO OF TAXI TRAVEL THE DREADED WORD CAME TO HER again. Mannish. An onomatopoeic word that sounded as disgusting as what it suggested. It occurred to Viveka that her father was mannish, and she meant that in the derogatory sense — hunting helpless creatures on weekends and almost flaunting those affairs he had with women. When he and her mother quarrelled about his affairs, it was as if they did so in private, yet it seemed as if her parents were in fact making sure that Vashti and Viveka overheard them. It confused and irritated Viveka that her parents were both simultaneously secret and public about the subject.
Viveka sat up suddenly with a little jolt that startled the passenger next to her. She, her boy-self Vince lingering inside of her, had a sudden, compelling desire to know where Pia Moretti was. She had a vague notion that Pia and her husband were no longer on the island, but she wasn’t sure if this was actually so. She looked at the cars crawling down the other side of the highway to see if anyone resembling an aged Pia Moretti might be in one of them. She was oddly compelled to know that Pia Moretti was safe. Safe from her own beauty, and certainly safe from men. Men like her father. She wanted to keep her mother safe, too. Safe from Pia Moretti. But if loyalties regarding her mother tugged at her one minute, in the next they repelled her. “Serves her right,” Viveka thought, “for putting up with all those affairs. How could any woman be so accepting? I can’t stand what Dad did and probably, for all I know, still does to her. Still, I’d rather be like him any day, than helpless and accepting as Mom is.”
Her taxi-musing now circled back to the altercation about volleyball. She would find a way to play volleyball, she decided, even if it caused an ungulfable rift between her parents and herself. Volleyball, after all, meant more than volleyball.
Travelling on dry roads much farther inland now, the taxi was to arrive at Viveka’s stop in front of the university library in less than five minutes. The sky had already set up. It wouldn’t be long before the rain began again. She would meet Helen there, and she and Helen would study for part of the day. She would meet Elliot, too. He would, no doubt, want to go to his apartment with her, and once there he would, again no doubt, want to lie on his bed with her. Today she was determined not to go near his apartment. She would, rather, suggest seeing an exhibition of paintings at the Cipriani-Butler Gallery on campus, and in the evening, if the rain had stopped early enough and the courts were dry, she and Helen would play volleyball in the park at the foot of Harris Promenade, exactly as she had done the previous week. And she would hope again that her parents did not find out about either Elliot or the volleyball.