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

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 ofthat 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