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

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 hisentire 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 boyholding 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