Valmiki's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

WASN’T IT? THAT rainy September day — exactly. The door behind his last patient had barely closed, and Valmiki Krishnu, still seated in his swivel chair, exerted a tremendous effort simply to lean forward and prop his elbows on his desk. Rain hit the galvanized overhang that protected the louvred window of his office like a torrent from a fire marshal’s hose. He had not wanted to get out of bed that morning. He wished he had not.
    The address book on his desk was open to the page with Tony Almirez’s phone number in Goa. There was a nine-and-a-half-hour time difference between there and Trinidad. In Goa, it was midnight. Valmiki would awaken Tony if he were to telephone him — and Tony’s wife, too. But it was Tony alone in all the world with whom he wanted to speak. Two decades before, he and Tony had been medical students together in Scotland. That was a long time ago, and much had happened for both of them since, and still every minute of their time together was indelibly etched in Valmiki’s body and mind — even though they hadn’t seen each other in twenty-something years, and had spoken on the telephone not more than a dozen times or so, all the callsinitiated by Valmiki, the last one a year ago. Still, whenever Valmiki felt as disoriented as he did just now, it was Tony, not his own wife or any of their friends on the island, he reached for.
    Valmiki’s palms made a tower, and he tapped together the tips of his first three fingers as his mind bloated with the previous night’s and that morning’s aggravations. If it wasn’t one thing with his wife, it was bound to be another with his daughter. His second daughter, Vashti, was as placid as the Gulf of Paria. But Viveka, the elder, had never been placid. At least, before going to university, she had been manageable. He opened his palms and let his head fall into his waiting hands.
    He would not call Tony, he decided. Even if it had been Tony’s midday instead of his midnight, he would not call him. That was how it had been for some time. The desperate lurching for Tony, the equally swift realization of the futility in that, and then Valmiki making do, turning to Saul. Saul, with his unreproachful, smiling eyes. Those long eyelashes. But Saul’s comfort was limited. He could not offer Valmiki more than the physical — a respite from home, certainly, but always a shortlived respite and always on the sly. No one could help him.
    THE TELEPHONE’S INTERCOM BUZZED. ON THE OTHER END, VALMIKI’S receptionist, Zoraida, expressed surprise at not spotting him at the door of his office. Valmiki normally saw a patient to the door, one hand light on the patient’s back, ushering him or her out with nothing more than a suggestive nudge onward and a brief parting sentence of encouragement that made that nudge feel more like a gentle launch into the world rather than an expulsion from his office. But an expulsion it was, as he usually had an overflowing roomful of hacking, restless, not-so-patient patientsto see, several of whom would have to be turned back at the end of the day with promises they would be seen first thing the following morning.
    But today he had not even stood up as the man he had been treating exited. It was old-fashioned, he and his peers would agree, but most patients thought of their doctors as demi-gods able to make them well and whole just by poking and prodding the surface and orifices of their bodies. None of the doctors discouraged their patients from such thinking, but the load of being a healing god — the patients seldom did a single thing to heal themselves, the doctors would grumble — sometimes wore Valmiki down.
    It was that, but not only that, which provoked within him such resistance to being where he was and contributed to his feeling of being trapped. Nor was it merely the altercation with Viveka that morning, nor the one immediately afterwards with his wife. And