"Children Of The Melange"
(Published in The Hart House Review, 1994, and in Sweet Like Saltwater, 1999)
by Raywat Deonandan

I wasn't there, but from the many subsequent re-tellings, I can now see it vividly when Millie's reckless boy Ravi found the corked bottle by the sea wall.

They say it glowed green like poison algae, or black like the Caribbean night sky. It bobbed along, seemingly tossed by the random ocean waves, but we all know it was guided to a specific place and time.

There are probably hundreds of such bottles, some older even than the little nations they orbit. In them, sometimes, are sealed the hopes of a family, letters to a lover, a drop of blood squeezed from a choking heart, and sometimes the shadows of wandering souls and lost travellers.

So when young Ravi stupidly uncorked the bottle, no one was truly surprised that he was taken by the ghost of the Dutchman.

His hard brown body had quaked then stiffened, bathed in the salty sea air that is now so missed by we ex-patriates. From the fissure of his cracked and trembling lips had slipped mystic gurglings and senseless vociferations, gibberish to the watching few.

If it were not for Lal Bharat, himself a wanderer from neighbouring Surinam, no one would have known that Ravi was actually pronouncing fluent archaic Dutch.

Lal Bharat had held him down on his knees while Long Baba, the old village India-man, grasped a handful of hair from the crown of Ravi's head.

"Let me go! Loose me!" he had pleaded in Dutch, English, Creole and, some observers of unquestionable candour had sworn, ancient Babylonian. Instead, Long Baba had torn those hairs from Ravi's scalp, stuffed them back into the wretched bottle, re-corked it, and tossed it back into the embracing sea.

From that moment on, Ravi had been sane and lucid again; a little balder for wear, but that was a small price to pay for the purity of his soul.

Sheila had been on a nearby hillock at the time. I know because I could see her from the adjacent rice field. She had been contorting herself, pensively, in the old India- man ways, like a yogic maharishi reborn in a young girl's body. While her half brother was being racked and held by the Dutchman, she was busy offering sun-salutations to a crescent moon.

That was the year Sheila had been sent away to boarding school in Georgetown, two years before I left Guyana.

I didn't see her again until we met years later at a puja in New York. It was odd that she was there since she was more Portuguese --Brazilian on her father's side-- than Indian. But I guess a little taste of the yogic trance had brought her back for more.

I took her to brunch the next day: scrambled eggs, toast and marmalade at Bregman's Eatery on 14th Street. That combination always took me back to Guyana, to the days of Empire and British propriety. With every mouthful of cholesterol poisoning came a gastronomic vision of Paddington station, chimeric regality, turban-clad soldiers and uncounted alien lands upon whose shores a thin layer of post-Cromwellian administration had been painted.

And were we not exemplary of such a thing, Sheila and I? The displaced Indian, perversely living vicariously through the blood of a pen, and through the lasting propaganda of a long-dead Empire; and the forgotten woman of mixed parentage and ghostly experiences: we were children of the melange.

We spoke of Back Home, of the crumbling sea wall that once was blinding in its white newness; of the sweet salt water, once clear like an albino baby's irises, now caked and clouded; and of the torrents of misshapen faces that had washed over us in youth. Old Millie, Sheila's mother, had moved to Toronto with the balding Ravi. Lal Bharat had wandered away, perhaps back to Surinam. And Long Baba had gone to join the disembodied spirit of the Dutchman.

Sheila's face was long and taut, chiselled like a man's. Her hair, like so many handfuls of black licorice, hung sourly by her pocked and brittle cheeks. She spoke sparingly, but, when she did, it was with deliberate purpose and intensity, as if her tongue had time only for the most important of vocalizations.

"I like to clean public washrooms," she said.

Another man, perhaps, would have been somewhat unnerved, maybe even amused. I just nodded, accepting it as yet another improper piece in a defective jigsaw puzzle.

"There's no better way to learn about a place," she continued, "than to snoop about its public toilets. The graffiti, the brand of soap. The stains."

I nodded, not caring to hear any more. All the girls back on 4th street, from which both Sheila and I had come, talked like that: full of sarcasm and erratic humour. But Sheila was a grown woman now, with much time spent in America. The certainty of her sarcasm left me.

"I met my last boyfriend while cleaning the men's room at Wen Chung's," she said. "He wasn't at all surprised to see me."

"What did you say to him?" I asked.

"I told him I'd been searching all my life for the man who could piss straight and blow his nose at the same time."

And..?

"And so he did," she said. Love at first sight, I thought.

She was so much like Ravi, Sheila was, so much the vulgar princess, intruder into the unknown. She, too, would have uncorked that bottle, knowing full well the potential dangers. I watched her bite into a succulent mango without cutting it or removing the skin: another demonstration of her attraction to the uncouth.

"The sour must be juxtaposed atop the sweet," she gurgled. Green juice crawled down her jaw like the postscript to a wild animal's feast. I was reminded of an Argentinean science-fiction film in which orgasmic alien women exuded blue fluids from their mouths. I remembered, too, Sheila's jagged contortions atop the hillock overlooking Ravi's possession scene: so much like an alien sex ritual, yet ironically more a part of my culture than of her own.

She wiped the green from her mouth, and took my arm. We left Bregman's and walked to the harbour, drawn by an ancestral memory, a neanderthalic instinct. Ports and port towns have always beckoned we Guyanese, as if that fishy salty air were a kind of spiritual nutrition.

I had been walking along the river that other night, too, shortly before Ravi's ghostly encounter, on my way to the rice field by the hillock. On my walk, I had seen old Bhaji teetering and mumbling as usual, his breath's ethanol scent mixing poorly with the river's more pungent odours.

He had thrown something small into the raging water, something fragile and sickly. He had then saluted the sinking package, and had burst into a drunken rendition of God Save The Queen.

It was an emaciated dog, I realized, as the package squirmed briefly. Bhaji had been paid in rum to do what the dog's owners were too cowardly to do themselves.

He had looked at me then, pausing in his awful song, and had called out to me clearly across the cooling wet air: "The sun always sets when there is fear of tigers!" It was an old Indian proverb, of course, connoting that bad things happen at once.

Soon followed the episode by the sea wall, and the eerie vision of stickly Sheila bent and twisted in the cleansing positions. Her poses had mirrored Ravi's racked posture, as if both siblings suffered the spectral possession together, linked by that psychic sub-ether that is never fully doubted in the lands of coconut trees and warm salt water.

I had been entranced by the sight of her, though I could not know of the drama played out beyond the hillock. Her sexless mannish body had bent backwards 90ø at the pelvis, a claymation puppet dangled from the stars, defying the very Newtonian force that imprisoned her alien form here within our gravity well.

I could almost feel the supreme ecstasy of her stretch: the separation of muscle fibres between her shoulder blades, the lengthening of connective tissues along her spine, and the distancing of vertebrae in her lower back. I was empathically drawn to her expressive relaxation, a release of pure chemical pleasure that brought me sexual attraction to a very unfeminine form.

And I had shuddered.

"I never had sex in a public washroom, if that's what you're thinking," Sheila said to me. I shuddered again, this time more against the cold of the Manhattan harbour. I wished she would stop.

She said nothing more. We stood there for some minutes, huddled against the icy breeze, leaning against the railing, and pushing our noses toward the Atlantic. Beneath us, bits of refuse floated by, buoyed by the density of sludge and sewage that masqueraded as Caribbean mud.

Sheila produced a bottle from inside her coat, then reached over and plucked a hair from the crown of my head. I winced and recoiled, my patience for her insanity dwindling by the minute. She placed the hair, with one of her own, inside the bottle, corked it, then tossed it into the water.

"After Long Baba threw the Dutchman's bottle over the sea wall," I said, "you fished it out and opened it. Right?" She nodded, but she could have been lying. It's a reasonable thing to do, I suppose, to blame one's derangement on demonic possession.

We stood there for a while, silent, and I watched her. She was lost in memory, perhaps recollecting that night atop the hillock, or countless bathroom encounters. Me, I was warmed by the digesting marmalade in my belly, and by the knowledge that I was far from a place where tigers are feared after sunset.

From the corner of Sheila's mouth, like a slash across her jugular or the slithering shade of a phantasmic influence, a line of green mango juice crawled down her throat.