Valmiki's Daughter by Shani Mootoo Read Free Book Online Page A

Zoraida rang.
    â€œYes?” 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 wasenough 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 cousinwould leave, and Valmiki and Saul would spend the night there. In the early hours of