Valmiki's Daughter by Shani Mootoo Page B

his friendship with Saul, who was of African origin, and that would have derailed everything. She would certainly have jumped, too, on the racism and sexism implied. If she had used the word
hypocritical
he would have understood, but Devika would likely, in a single action, have stood up and flung her hand across Viveka’s face. In short, provoking Viveka further would only leave room for a litany of examples of how old-fashioned and everything-phobic he and Devika were (none of which Valmiki minded being), with the result that Viveka would end up looking like the noble, victimized member of the family.
    Valmiki did worry that, in all innocence — for how could Viveka be anything but, as she had no experience of the world as he knew it — his daughter could be encouraged into an easy manner with unsavoury young men precisely because of all that so-called progressive university-nonsense she came home with, nonsense that always had terminology suffixed with the dreaded “ism”: sexism, feminism, paternalism, Marxism, racism, anti-racism, activism. Of course he had said none of this to Viveka, nor to Devika.
    But something more had nagged at Valmiki last evening at dinner, and now continued on into his office hours — the knowledge that while team sports involved various kinds of camaraderie and, yes-yes, all that important exercise, it had the potential to involve something else: complicated kinds of physical contact. He knew something of this; he had played soccer with boys from his high school and, later, soccer and cricket at university. And even as he sensed the foolishiness and futility of trying to protect her, he couldn’t bear to give his daughter, this one in particular, permission to enter an arena that could stir within her, like it had in him, a confusion she would absolutley have to keep to herself. He wasn’t entirely sure that this would happen, but it nagged at him that it could.
    Valmiki had not been overly enthusiastic about sports when he was in high school, but on the soccer field during mandatory physical education period he proved himself to have a special talent for sliding by the other players, seemingly out of nowhere, and scoring goals. Several older students — brash, loud fellows who played soccer every chance they got, during the lunch break and after classes — noticed his talent. Among themselves they carried on a kind of roughousing that included a good bit of deliberate touching-up, which at first he thought was strange for boys who teased one another so much. He noticed that they would fall into spontaneous, out-of-control wrestling bouts, and that the physical education teacher would come out and shamelessly land himself in their midst. They shoved and pushed one another, grabbing onto one another’s privates, shrieking, cackling, getting hoarse, almost choking on their fun as they made one another hard by the sheer act of this kind of play. They all, every one of them, seemed to enjoy it, and fell into it over and again — even though, once off the field, none of that sort oftouching continued, or was even made mention of. In the change rooms where they showered, two boys to a concrete stall with a half door on it, the boys only half-naked — their underpants remained on — there was the strictest hands-off protocol.
    But Valmiki was taken under the wing of a self-appointed guardian, an older student who, when they were in their shower stall together, would insist on giving Valmiki’s growing limbs a good rub down “to help keep that kick nice and strong,” as the older boy would say. The torrential flow of water out of the shower head hit their bodies hard and felt good to them both. Valmiki liked what the older boy did to his body, soaping his hair, massaging his scalp, riding his thumbs under Valmiki’s meagre scapular and up and down either side of his spine. Across his chest, his buttocks, hard down his thighs —