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

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.
    â€œ 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.
    â€œWhat 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 ifshe 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.