Valmiki's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

nor was it the troublesome one the previous night with both Devika and Viveka. After all, not a day seemed to go by without some unpleasantness from one, if not both, of them.
    No, it was the weight of pretense. The weight of responsibility in general.
    Had Valmiki been at the door to let his patient out, he would have been privy to one of Zoraida’s coded gestures. Given the lack of reliable electricity and telephone service on the island, Dr. Krishnu and Zoraida had between them what Zoraida, who had been with him for twelve years now, liked to think of as a secret language. Her desk was angled for this very purpose, and the seating in the waiting room arranged so that Valmiki, his door, and a patient entering and exiting were out of sight of those awaiting their turn. A particular gesture from her would let him know that his wife had arrived and was in the waiting room. Another would indicate that certain individuals whom he mightnot want to keep waiting — family, old and dear friends, his bank manager, his solicitor, a number of people who not so coincidentally were white-skinned, and certain women acquaintances among that latter group — had arrived for their appointments or had shown up without appointments. Yet another gesture would inform him that both his wife and a queue-jumper were in the room. These gestures, flicks of the wrist, hair-arranging, specific numbers of fingers resting on her cheek, had been all initiated by Zoraida herself. She had even provided him with a de-coding chart. This initially amused him at her expense, but he came rather quickly to appreciate and rely on their system. More than once, her antics had saved him his marriage. Indeed, his attendance upon particularly privileged queue-jumpers had so often coincided with the unexpected arrival of Mrs. Krishnu that one might wonder if fate was complying with a subconscious wish of Valmiki’s that he be caught out. Zoraida, in those instances, had enjoyed her part in staving off the possibility of public fiascos. With the barest hint of something that resembled a knock, she would officiously barge into his office, part of which, behind a curtain, was also the examination room, to inform her boss of the situation. The woman in his room would immediately be turned out, led by a massively important Zoraida down a private corridor and into another room where she would render herself presentable. Valmiki would be given just enough time to make himself the same before Mrs. Krishnu, none the wiser, or so one thought (for no wife is that dumb), would be ushered in, also by Zoraida. It was an orchestration Zoraida relished.
    But Valmiki was not at his door this time, and therefore Zoraida did not get to perform her antics to inform him of the unscheduled arrival of one of his newer lady acquaintances, Tilda Holden. In any case, that day he did not care. He justwanted to run out of his office and leave everything behind. Every single thing. For good.
    One thing had simply led to another, and now he was at that point, random on the one hand and precise on the other, where he had had enough. He had been doctor, boss, lover, husband, father for twenty weighty years now, and even so, in regards to the latter two especially, he still felt as incompetent as the first day, and not too much more willing.
    While Valmiki had been attending to that last patient, a Mr. Deoraj Deosaran, he had been up and about, taking the man’s pulse, rapping his knuckles on the man’s sallow back and bony front as he listened through his stethoscope above the thundering of the rain on the roof, depressing the man’s tongue with the palette stick and peering as far as he could down his windpipe, even hazarding a breath inhalation to see if his nose might pick up what his eyes, hands, and ears had not. He had, in other words, been attentive, absorbed even, until the end of the visit, an end that he had determined, there being nothing more to do, but an end