They Whisper in My Blood: A Portuguese-Indian family saga of love, lust, loss, and second chances.

By FRANCISKA SOARES

Perpetua Cabral, a Portuguese-Indian living in Queenstown, New Zealand has always found herself being pulled by emotions she doesn't quite understand. What starts off as a compulsion to delve into her family's past and look for answers emerges as an urgent need to transform her own jejune life as she find

• Language: English
• Publisher: CORNEST PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: Sep 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781991165459

FRANCISKA SOARES

Franciska Soares writes hauntingly poignant literary fiction featuring enigmatic histories, forgotten communities and spirited, unbowed women. The product of a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, she claims the characters who populate her books often give her a bit of a fright. That's because Franciska is a conformist and hates confrontation. In fact, her friends and family claim she's a Miss Goody-two-shoes and she doesn't mind that portrayal one bit as it rings true. Her characters on the other hand love to challenge the status quo and are not averse to pushing the boundaries, sexual or ethical. They are dimensional and flawed and that's what makes them human, memorable, Franciska alleges.When she isn't reading or writing poetry and fiction (the iambic pace of her prose oftentimes resounds like a drumbeat), Franciska is probably walking the picturesque Frankton Arm in Queenstown meditating on her writing and the snow-capped Remarkables that tower over Lake Wakatipu, container gardening, or watching edgy black comedy on Netflix.

Book preview

India 1892

Prologue

This here is a love story. . .

It was not even first light. The magic of the day had yet to unfold. Five men were about to break the law. A murder had been planned. . . at dawn.

Of the five only Thomas Cabral knew who would be dead before sunrise that Wednesday in August. Thomas wished he could kill all of them: Francisco, his wife Briana’s brother, Doctor Francisco Da Costa, a supercilious son of a bitch; Rodrigo and Miguel who were both in love with his wife; and his friend from the club who was party to all his dark secrets. Thomas was a killer already − of wild game − and was beginning to enjoy it. But what animal is more dangerous than man? he thought.

So, all save Thomas, wished they were anywhere else but on this little rusty red island − a small mass of laterite between two murky brown rivers − a no-man’s land, to blur jurisdictional responsibility if, and when, the authorities would become involved. Miguel and Francisco, family men who believed they would live to face the music, were as certain as every man has a mother, discomposed. They lumbered with a heavy measured tread back and forth, back, and forth, their black coats brushing up against their pantaloon-style trousers at the knees, cuffs flapping in the wind. The breath tore from their nostrils in drifts as they pulped the virgin grass with their heavy boots, leaving angry dark welts that bled into the air in vapours of fresh green, and added to the riparian overtones of sediment and silt. The waters of the swollen rivers boiled angry alongside, engorged by the monsoons, racked by opposing currents, dimpled by wild swirling whirlpools. There were wisdoms to be gleaned from the rivers if only the men were of such a mind. But that kind of reality – that of the living − was far from their consideration. Dying and murder– this was what consumed their imaginings to the exclusion of everything else, that Wednesday at dawn.

Do you know that the island of Pitcairn in the South Pacific, has not more than two mutton shunters? Francisco broke the silence as he mopped up a film of river spray from his face with the sleeve of his black coat, his white vest flashing high-necked in the darkness. His otherwise forceful voice was subdued. Worry sat around the corners of his mouth. And they are known to be encouraged by a small fine to look the other way if they received a complaint after a ding-dong such as this? All the while he thought: This bundobust could very well destroy me.

Miguel nodded, a noncommittal half nod as if he had strayed from an unfinished contemplation, restive eyes darting to Francisco and then back to the book he held open in his hands. But Francisco’s question was the rhetoric of a swivel-eyed man. His attention was already drawn to Rodrigo who swaggered, a trail of cigarette smoke in his wake, as he approached Thomas and his young friend from the club, more than a couple of feet away. Rodrigo’s blue coat and lavender pants with matching gloves marked him out as a dandy who followed the latest fashions for men. Francisco observed that the young man had peeled away and loitered out of earshot of Thomas and Rodrigo, kicking at pebbles on the riverbank. Turning back to Miguel, Francisco said, "And this is enough to make a stuffed bird laugh . . . there was a similar duel fought less than half a century ago by the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who, it was rumoured was party to more than twenty challenges."

I do declare! said Miguel, shaking his head, bedevilled.

"The last one, which proved fatal was to defend the honour of his beautiful wife, whom Georges d’Anthès, a French officer in the Russian Guard was in love with. Pushkin died of his injuries from a stomach wound, two days later. It was his second duel with D’Anthès." Francisco’s voice sounded alien, even to himself.

Under the cover of darkness, that’s when duels were arranged, to conceal the proceedings that were frowned upon by law; and there was enough time for sobering up if the challenge was prompted by intemperance brought on by too much drink.This duel though, was preplanned.

. . . that was how a dress sword came to be a part of a gentleman’s formal attire, Francisco thus concluded his disquisition on duels that had proceeded at sinuous length when the three friends: Rodrigo, Miguel and himself, had gathered in his study to strategize just last Monday. Both parties had agreed to use pistols, not swords which was the weapon of choice up until the end of the last century. If you can afford one, you can have a bespoke pistol made, Rodrigo, he had continued. As was his wont, he had been on a fact-finding mission about duels. The pistols he was referring to came in cases complete with The Twenty-six Commandments, the code book that laid down the methodus pugnandi, the same book that Miguel had now folded and shoved into his pocket, its pages soft like cloth from much handling– and the damp from the river-mist. Though he had studied the book through and through, Miguel was still unsure of their roles, his and Francisco’s, in this debauchery, as they shuffled around in the shadows cast by the incipient pre-dawn sun.

Rodrigo’s lusty voice carried in the humid air, musky, with an earthy rawness to it. "You base-court apple-john, it was one poxy dance. And if, in your uncommon imagination, you think I have crossed a line, why do you care, Cabral? Rodrigo’s eyes set deep under the overhang of his bony brow glinted cold as slate. You have never been the husband Briana deserves. Have you not worked it out thus far? – she got the morbs the day she married you. If you do love her as this act of self-sacrifice seems to suggest, you would know that to cage a free, open spirit such as hers is to confine the wind. Rodrigo’s hands, palms up, sliced through the hectic air – It cannot endure, it dies." He was breathless at the speed with which things had advanced to this irreversible showdown. Thomas was the swashbuckler, not he. And unlike Thomas, he, Rodrigo, had little fealty for tradition.

Parallels could be drawn between the masculine sport of hunting that Thomas was an aficionado of, and that of a duel when reduced in its moral essence− both demanded a singularity of purpose and a homicidal severity of temper.

The look Thomas shot him now was dead in its very glassiness and moveless sangfroid. A curtain had descended over what lay beyond his eyes as he walked away, wordless.

When the time came Rodrigo and Thomas stripped down to their waists, not because of the temperature – it was cold, unusual for an August morning − but as a nod to the codebook. The contrast between the two men was unmistakable. Thomas Cabral was pigeon-chested, his pale body on nodding acquaintance with the sun, crumpled over his cummerbund in colourless puckers of flesh. Swarthy and muscle-bound, Rodrigo Acharya was all angles, his burnished, dark velvety skin was taut and mantled with youthful vigour. He could have been a local, an Indian, like the villagers who lived on that small raft of an island, a mosquito speck by the churlish rivers, and who to the men’s good fortune, were still asleep. If any of them were awake, they, the people of the land, whose overriding concern was to prevail for another day, would have shaken their heads at this hatya, at the people involved, the privileged wealthy who played games such as these, where a malefactor’s blood would be shed for some titchy personal affront.

Prepare to meet your maker, you podsnapper! growled Rodrigo in a voice like falling rocks. His face was, every inch of it, composed now – if one misknew the tic which spasmed like a new muscle in his jaw, one would never have dare-said it. Standing half a head taller than Thomas, back-to-back, Rodrigo had the air of a stalwart Grecian warrior with his cropped black curls and long sideburns.

You wish, you dishonourable dandy, said Thomas in his distinctive powerful baritone, his steady finger familiar around the trigger of his pistol.

The shot that thundered at a signal from Miguel splintered the silent dawn and sent the koels erupting from a copse of trees nearby, roused from their wooden slumber, flittery, stupefied, their wings thrashing at the matinal air to gain leverage, leaving not a footprint, just some loose deplumed feathers, their brassy calls reverberating, to be heard by all save the dead.

Shot through the heart, the man subsided, crumpled like a discarded puppet, blood spurting out of his open wound like a secret spring newly born, denaturing the virgin morning dew on the blades of grass, flushing it red.

The gasp of the four onlookers, the groan of the slain man, his death rattle, the kuku ri koo of the first rooster from the village, the dying notes of a gunshot− all these sounds that profaned the hushed morning, were petrified for all time. Their echoes would speak forever of a life that had grappled with the living of it and lost.

As if the sun was with some duress awoken from its slumber as well, a splinter of radiance had appeared on the horizon like a light spilling through a doorway. Lamps flickered in some of the windows in the village, smoke curled from some woodfires − people making a start on their miniature lives.

While one life had just ended, not a few feet away.

Queenstown,

New Zealand 2020

Chapter ONE

Perpetua (Pippa to her friends) Cabral cast an analytical eye around the room and marvelled once again at the coherence of design and style, at how Charlotte had melded three distinct functional areas, all the while maintaining visual excitement. It was the clever repetitions, Pippa decided, mirrored in the patterned accessories, and the single wall colour, a slate blue. In the soft light of the setting sun, she discovered that the colour metamorphosed into variants of that single shade, vivid in places that caught the direct rays and subdued elsewhere. Chromatic, despite being monochromatic− so not boring, she thought.

Eve, Emma, and Pippa often met at Charlotte’s modern mansion on lake Wakatipu, of an evening which was meant to affirm the good that was happening in their lives, on a diet of giggles, some Bridge, and good wine. Positivity was the bandwidth to which they were tuned, and all things negative were barred entry. They were seated around the kitchen bench. Because the foursome adored the melodic sound of Māori words, once in a spirit of clubbable craziness Emma had dubbed them the Awheawhe. The name stuck. It is a Māori term for workshop. Not that they did any work − unless you could call killing two bottles of Sam Neill’s Two Paddock’s best (The Fusilier, a 2015 Pinot Noir), work. Oscar, Charlotte’s husband had cellared the two bottles and it’d been well worth the wait. The red cherries, boysenberries, blueberries amid a swathe of sappy forest and bracken notes (as one critic had commented) had done a first- class job Pippa deemed, swirling the liquid around her mouth with her tongue.

The bid was four hearts. They had twenty-five points and a ten-card suit between the two of them. It would be an easy ten tricks– at least. Pippa was dummy, so she left her bridge partner Charlotte to finish the hand and sauntered with her wine over to the grey-cushioned Macrocarpa rough-timber bench built in the recess of a large bay window. The fingers of her free hand toyed with the glass pendant she always wore. She gazed at the lake, just meters away. Drenched in flame, the early moon hung almost pallid, bleached in the resplendence of sunset. A mountain spring nearby, batted down by quotidian sounds of daytime, sang pure-voiced now. Her breath stopped in her throat from the beauty of it. What a far cry from the little patch of green − the sorry crumb of nature − she’d had to struggle to catch a glimpse of, on her daily pendular train journey all those years ago, in Bombay, India, Pippa thought to herself with a sigh.

Her eyes clouded over. Memories flooded in . . .

She’d made it! She’d gained a foothold. Pippa, just shy of her sixteenth birthday she was, had leapt. . . one more time . . . onto the rapidly decelerating train, she was taking to college, as it bore down the station at Borivali. She’d juked some of the crowd poised and at the ready to herd into the vacant compartments. You take your life and limbs in your hands to pull off this caper, she’d often thought. Especially if you’re in a sari. She’d seen women towed along the platform pinioned by their saris, snarled in some moving part. That was why she avoided saris. That sartorial equivalent of a graceful swan had its place: In an elegant restaurant, for instance. But on a railway platform, in the tug and pull of a surging crowd at peak hour– not on your life! She favoured the clean lines of the salwar kameez.

"Why don’t you wear a dress?" her mother would often ask.

She was Portuguese and had never worn Indian garb. I like to blend in, mom.

Pippa took umbrage when she was tarred time and time again by the same Anglo-Indian brush used to ghettoize any fair- skinned European-looking girl. In her black and orange A-line kameez fanning out over a pair of tight drain-pipe black salwar pants ruched around her ankles, she could have passed off as Indian, if one were to overlook her bright, amber eyes, that is.

She’d commenced her journey going backwards to Borivali – just two stops away from Malad where she lived – and so boarded a train going north instead of south to the city where she was headed, because she’d quickly figured out since she’d started commuting a few weeks ago for college, that north-bound trains were not as crowded at that time of the day. At Borivali, which is a major terminus, the possibility of catching an empty train to Churchgate, instead of an already packed one at Malad, was more achievable.

Trains at peak hour bulged at the seams, literally, with almost two people per square foot hanging out of doors intentionally left open to accommodate the five thousand passengers on nine coaches built to hold a third that number. Some daring, desperate? – young men even rode on the roof inches away from high-voltage wires.

It was well worth the extra half an hour, Pippa thought, just so she could sit instead of stand, for the entire, long, schlep to Churchgate. But there was another reason . . .

That first day of her commute a pleasant feeling of one- upmanship hung around for all of the two stations between Malad and Borivali – Pippa’d been told she was a good lateral thinker – and she thought her plan was brilliant! Imagine her consternation when she found how wrong she’d been; when she found that she still had a war to wage with a battle-scarred army of straphangers who, by means of the same strategy, had negotiated this minefield every morning of their commuting lives. Clenching her handbag and dupatta close to her body with one hand − I don’t want to die of strangulation-by-scarf like Isadora Duncan! she thought − and manoeuvring to get a grip on the vertical rail at the door of the compartment with her other hand, she planted one mojari-clad foot on the footboard of the still-moving coach that people were already jumping into. With her second leg windmilling in its attempt to follow the first, she flew acrobatically for a while, until she was thwack! flung against the unyielding metal wall of the compartment, as the train came to a swift halt, couplings rattling, brake blocks screeching against wheels. Adrenalin-filled, the blood thrummed in her ears. She tried to quell the judder in her arms with a firm grip on her forearms and drew them tight against her torso. That was brutal, she thought to herself rubbing the sore spot. I’ll have some bruises to show for it later. But at least she’d managed to gain access to the rapidly-filling ladies’ first-class compartment. Now she had to scramble, as quick as thought, for a window seat before it was taken, the window seat, on the side where the only patch of green lay, ten minutes into her otherwise long grey journey. She didn’t want to miss it– a field of green vegetables. It brought a quality of optimism to her day, that hit of nature that she yearned for.

The land had probably been leased by the Railways to one of its employees, under the ‘Grow More Food’ program. This particular verdigris green acre, one of eight thousand acres along other railway tracks, appeared to be well cared for– or perhaps it owed its robustness to the filthy stream touching it, a stream fed by faeces and liquid waste from the toilets of the small slum-like village that bustled not a few meters away from it.

Pippa checked her watch. At least another forty minutes to go. She smiled at her train companion across from her, their knees almost touching, and said, Hi. A yellow lunchbox lay open on her lap, atop a white plastic bag that had kept it leakproof, but now served as a tablemat. Hemlatta Garments said the bold red letters on the bag. The woman was shovelling spoonsful of upma into her mouth. Not some twenty minutes ago, she had without malice or design, elbowed Pippa in a mad rush to find a window seat herself. Now she fished out another spoon from her fake-leather handbag and smiled broadly. Bobbing her tilted jet-black oiled head like a question, her cheeks puffed out with unchewed upma, her film-star kohl eyes capturing the scudding light, she offered it to Pippa. Thank you no, said Pippa in Hindi and looked back out of the window to give her some privacy. Above the small barred grimy window, a fluorescent tube that had never resolved into steady light winked wildly.

One could lose oneself in the press of women in that congested compartment, most of whom were at various stages of cross-clique, animated conversations, vying to be heard above the chur of the round ceiling fans – dusty cobwebs of rusted metal that tried to futilely stir the pongy air in listless swivels – and the din and grind of metal wheels on metal tracks clicketyclack clicketyclack clicketyclack, a soundtrack as monotonous as the shanties that whizzed past, some deserted, most graffiti-vandalized, with tarpaulin sheets, vivid blue or dirty-grey thrashing about in the hazy polluted morning air. It was all strangely soporific.

Pippa could not help but think about the risk they had both taken, she and the woman with the upma. A verse from her favourite collection of poems – Patrick Overton’s The Leaning Tree – echoed in her head. You had to believe, it said, that if your feet didn’t find solid ground when you stepped into the darkness of the unknown, you would learn to fly.

All she’d wanted was the comfort of an assured seat on the train to behold a glimpse of green . . .

. . . with the wind in her face,

away from the huddled suffocating masses of the

commuting crowd

bartering uninvited intimacies

for stale air and sweat.

Many players. One fate− if the game was not played right. A game that promised a taste of terror, that set the heart a-racing and the body aquiver. Everyday. Morning and evening. And sandwiched in between– a whole eight hours of other challenges. Comparative drudgery: meeting deadlines, jockeying for promotions, pleasing the boss, holding down a job. The morning-evening roulette on the trains now, they came with deathly consequences, literally, for those who couldn’t beat the odds. Some didn’t. Especially the rubber-slipper wearers who lost their foothold – their hard-won toe space on the footboard at the compartment door – and plunged to the rails, mangled by metal and heat. Pippa had seen once too often the white sheets that covered the mess on the tracks.

Another window– half a world away.

Pippa breathed deep, the pure alpine air that floated on the cool evening breeze. A wedge of light from the sun, low in the sky now, briefly shafted into the large room and ignited the gold off a pair of brass candlesticks on a table flanking the bench she was seated on. The past, barely a few decades old, could have been another planet, where Pippa’s existence wore little if any, make-up. Once again, she realized how starved she’d been when she counted on that evanescent patch of green outside the train window for a modest taste of nature. With her appetite for colour, New Zealand, beautiful-in-any-season New Zealand, fed her hungry soul.

What’re you talking about? Pippa said seating herself at the card table.

"Eve was telling us about the time the Jews were being rounded up in Paris – during the war – and how a mother was forced to relinquish care of her daughter to a brave non-Jewish neighbour who’d raced into their apartment right past the soldiers, and past the door that’d just been axed down, to claim the daughter as her own. Charlotte’s pocket-sized voice was raspy and sultry, like her cat, Makareta’s tongue. The mother had to make a life-altering decision – in the briefest ticking-over of a second – to let her daughter go. How does one make that choice?" She shuddered.

Pippa knew the answer to that one. She thought: These snap decisions – they come about because they’ve been honed – unknown to us in the unlit, wordless depths of our psyche, over and over. When the time comes, we leap blindly, yet strangely surefooted, into what seems like a rehearsed dance. She knew this . . . because she had chosen to sacrifice a loved one. Once.

Chapter TWO

Surely God is a choreographer, Pippa thought, and loves things native, naked.

When Eve called a few mornings after the bridge meet, Pippa was on her first cup of Earl Grey, watching from her balcony the wordless beauty of a primitive ballet uninfluenced by human technology, production or design. To a soundtrack of the dawn chorus, the flirtatious rays of a rising sun were teasing the statuesque rock face of The Remarkables; tantalizingly stripping it of the diaphanous mist and clouds that clothed it; coquettishly revealing its tectonic décolletage where steep, steely streams were getting down to business.

Not so flirtatious and romantic were the hands that had stripped her, that first time. His hands − Josh, her ex-husband’s − were possessive, rough, insensitive. It struck Pippa that even at his tenderest, all that came across was his entitlement, his imperiousness. He stole all the warmth from their mating – she could not bring herself to call it making love − and often she found her mind abandoning her body along with the littered promises of her girlish fantasies that had centred around a partner who loved her enough to care about her needs. . . Shyam.

Josh had appeared on her rebound a few months past her twenty-first birthday. He’d known all the rules, having cut his teeth on several failed relationships (that she was to learn about later) before he finally unleashed his whole repertoire of lovey- dovey tricks on her; and she’d taken the bait, as he anticipated she would. He’d groomed her right from the start, crowding in so close to her face that she couldn’t see round his edges. But it wasn’t just her, her parents as well − his glibness muffled their parental sirens and alarms. Or perhaps her parents were just relieved that he was Catholic and a suitable husband.

After Shyam.

Ah, Shyam! The love of her life. They’d planned to immigrate to New Zealand together. The land where all the beauty is, Shyam had said in his typical eloquent way. Shyam the bard . . . her Byron, tall and dark . . . and spirited in the pursuit of justice over authority.

Just keeping you informed − we’re instructed to have medical staff meet all direct flights landing from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand, Eve said on the phone to Pippa. She worked at the Queenstown airport.

And she added, there are new restrictions on people travelling from Iran, where I believe our first COVID case originated− a man in his sixties.

"Do you know, on my visit to the supermarket last week, there was no bread and canned beans to be had? A lot of shelves were bare!" Pippa said, recalling the disquiet