Free Nothing Like Love by Sabrina Ramnanan Page B

Vimla so much she thought her heart would stop beating right there in the field.
    “Are you sure? How you know?”
    “Auntie Maya tell my mother so.” Minty lowered her gaze. “She rather Mammy be she friend than she enemy—Mammy know too much about you and Krishna, you see.”
    Vimla understood. She could still hear Sangita Gopalsingh’s shrill voice in the dead of the night calling her a jammette for all the neighbours to hear. Vimla shuddered.
    “But so fast, Minty?”
    Chalisa nodded. “Chalisa’s parents dead in a car crash two years ago. They tumble off a cliff and the car burst into flames.”
    Vimla’s eyes widened.
    “She old nanny does mind she now and want a marriage fix for Chalisa before she and all dead. They was looking for a good Hindu boy from a good Hindu family. When they meet Krishna, they arrange everything one-time.”
    Vimla scowled. She picked idly at the grass. “What else?”
    “Chalisa and she small brother have plenty money. They inherit big-big orange estates after they parents dead. Mammy say they more rich than Nanny self!”
    “Oh.” Vimla brushed her mop of unruly hair over her shoulder. “Chalisa Shankar. She pretty?”
    Minty looked her square in the face. “She like a old crapaud.”
    Vimla burst into tears. Krishna was too vain to marry someone who looked like a frog; Minty was the worst liar she knew.
    Chandani looked like she’d been chewing a sour green mango when Vimla returned thirty minutes later. She rounded on Vimla the moment her slippers slapped against the concrete of the house. “People is laughing at we!” Her spittle rained down like missiles.
    Vimla stared back at her dumbly. She was still digesting the news of Krishna’s marriage.
    “That pork-
chamar
Pundit Anand is marrying he duncy-head son to a next little jammette from St. Joseph!”
    Vimla should have been appalled by her mother’s foul ejaculations, but by now they were as commonplace as the kiskadees’ evening song. She wasn’t surprised Pundit Anand had been reduced to a blasphemous pork-eating fiend, that Krishna’s future wife had acquired the same slack status as herself; her mother saw good in no one these days. Vimla manoeuvred around Chandani to the standpipe for a cup of water, but Chandani trailed behind her, the veins in her wild-turkey neck throbbing with every livid heartbeat.
    “Those kiss-me-ass people invite the whole island to the wedding
—except we!
” Chandani stomped her skinny foot, scattering a knot of pecking hens that had wandered boldly into the house.
    Vimla, hot and pitifully heartbroken, downed the cool water in her peeling enamel cup and dropped it with a clatter to the floor. “I go stop that wedding, Ma!”
    Chandani recoiled as if she’d been cuffed. Then she removed her slipper and lunged madly at her daughter. “Blasted—ungrateful—little—wretch!”
    Vimla took off around the house, sweating and crying. She had never seen her mother move so quickly in all her life, never seen her so determined to injure. She considered sprinting into the street in the hope a neighbour would come to her aid, but the truth was, Chandani’s invective would faster draw cheers and applause than sympathy from the district. She circled the house another time, hoping to tire her mother out instead.
    “You ain’t embarrass me and your father enough? Keepyour ass home, you hear me?” Chandani launched her old slipper into the air like a discus and hit Vimla square in the backside.
    It was two days and two nights before the entire district caught word that Krishna Govind was going to marry a pretty girl named Chalisa Shankar from St. Joseph. Chance began to vibrate with a special kind of energy; people anticipated this wedding like no other. Many thought this would be the biggest wedding the district had ever seen, since pundits tended to marry their children with even greater ceremony than the average Hindu family. Others felt honoured that Chance was hosting the likes