Memories From the Spleen:
– ‘Spleen’ from Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
Waves – Auckland 2010
‘Where our ancestors come from resides in our genes,’ he told me.
In times of trouble, he would go to the beaches of Auckland’s west coast. There at their black shores, the surf’s rabidness would soothe him. Something he attributed to the fact his ancestors were Vikings.
I knew this to be true, because those waves roared within my bones too. They were the kind my own ancestors had traversed, though they came from a very different continent; one smothered in heat.
Palm Trees – Auckland 1988
As a young girl, unbaptised, I attended a Catholic primary school. It wasn’t a problem for my parents. They had gone to colonial English schools in Fiji, where they were taught by nuns and brothers in white habits. It was where they swore they got the best education. At one of the schools, my father had to change his Indian name, Satish, to that of a saint. There’s still a black-and-white school photograph in one of our family albums of him attending Marist Brothers High School. He’s wearing long white socks, and the name Francis locates him as the boy in the top left-hand corner.
Me being the resident heathen at St Joseph’s wasn’t a problem for the school. I would learn the religious teachings as part of the curriculum, just like the other students. But I would not be allowed to partake in the ceremonies.
In Standard One, when we were ripe to take the first Holy Communion, Miss Kemp, our nun/teacher, would take us through the ritual each day. Palms cupped, right under left. When the pretend wafer was dropped into our hands, we would pause, and then, with the index finger and thumb of our right hand, we would pop it into our mouths. But no chewing, no chewing! We had to let it dissolve onto our tongues.
In the playground, talk would be of the white lacy communion dresses the girls would wear and silver charm bracelets handed down from great-grandmothers. My friend had a treasure chest charm that you could open; a small amethyst lay inside.
I envied her jewels.
I asked my mother about our own heirlooms, but none went so far back. Our people came to Fiji with very little; their focus was on survival. But she took me to her secret safe. Once the code was unlocked, she placed her traditional wedding necklace around me. All gold filigree with turquoise, ruby, and emerald enamel in traditional Meenakumari style. It was what my father’s parents had given her, to mark her entrance into their family. But its mantle was too heavy on me.
So I tried to replicate their lighter jewels. When we visited Fiji, I bought a silver charm of a palm tree. It had a little man whose arms wrapped around the trunk and who could be moved up and down with the tip of your finger I carried him with me everywhere, but eventually I lost him, because I had no bracelet to link him to.
Tattoos – Melbourne 2012
It was a summer full of hot winds that pushed us into the parks for a cool reprieve. It was also the summer that would orient me towards Rajasthan, the heat of its own hot winds summoning me.
It began with the tattoos on my wrists.
At the time, I was far from my family in Auckland and missing fragments of my Indian culture. Growing up, I noticed that many of my parents’ family friends from Fiji, people I would call my uncles, had crude symbols of dark green inscribed on their hands. A language of their past etched into their skin. I too wanted to be marked with a symbol, something tangible to cement the unknowing of where in India our forefathers had come from. Some sort of homage to the people who sacrificed their land and came to a new one, before me.
Before I embarked to Melbourne, my father had handed me a book. It was a collection of short stories about Indians in Fiji, the only piece of literature on Fiji-Indians I had ever seen. One line from the book brought the images of my uncles’ hands before me. It said, ‘A triangle of dots was tattooed on his wrist around which he wore a heavy silver bracelet with fine engravings.’ The dots, small markings of barely nothing, resonated with me. Like what I knew of my ancestors, they were scratchings of almost nothing.
And so they became my symbol.
‘What’re you gonna do for your birthday tomorrow?’ he asked. He was my ex-boyfriend, what I called an Indian Indian, one who actually came from India, to differentiate him from people like me.
‘I’m gonna get tattoos.’
I wondered how he’d react. His family were steeped in Hindu tradition. Priests and his parents would use the stars to navigate who he was to marry. Astrological charts and family connections were lined up to arrange someone from his Rajput caste.
‘My mum has tattoos,’ he said before I could tell him of my intended ones.
‘What? What of?’
‘Three dots in the shape of a triangle. On her forehead, each of her temples, and her chin. They’re Rajasthani tribal tattoos.’
Tears – Calcutta 1888
When we are having them, we do not know which conversations may change the course of our lives. But some of them do. The one with the British official that made my great-great-grandfather pick up his family and travel 11,589 kilometres by sea to Fiji was one. A conversation not even in my lifetime that changed its course forever.
Although I did not know this then, my great-grandmother had boarded the sailing ship Hereford in Calcutta on St Valentine’s Day 1888, at the age of eight. She was born exactly 100 years before me. Her emigration pass only notes the accompaniment of her father, though her mother and other siblings would’ve been there too. She was passenger number 299 of 539 who had travelled to this port.
Between 1879 and 1916, a total of 87 voyages were made, carrying 60,533 of India’s indentured labourers from each of its disparate states to the shores of Fiji.
Sent by British colonial rulers to work on sugarcane plantations, these mostly rural people with few prospects were cajoled into crossing the seas for a brighter future. But it was a future that confined them to backbreaking labour and a life caught between the Fijians, who rightly resented them being there, and the English, who had transplanted them for their own commercial gain.
For my great-grandparents, the voyage would take 70 days. Many would not make it. And for those who did, crossing the kala pani, or black water, meant losing your caste and never being able to return home. For Indians, being Indian is intricately tied to the land we call Mother. Everyone has an ancestral village to call their own that locates them in a territory of over a billion people.
I know, therefore, some of my ancestors’ tears would’ve added to the multitude of drops in the ocean they crossed, shed in fear of what they had done and were about to do. And yet why are tears shaped like seeds, a recurring motif in Indian art? It’s as if those fertile tears spoke of a promise they would never see. Like me being here, writing this.
Sometimes I imagine the dots on my wrists as their tears. But mostly I imagine them as seeds; DNA encoded with information.
Spleen – Auckland 2010
‘They all looked like tumar Nana,’ my Mother said, speaking in our bastardised Fijian-Hindi/English of her recent travels to Rajasthan. ‘His aki, and nose.’ I thought about my grandfather’s eyes. Light hazel. Eyes that had skipped five of my mum’s sisters but had landed on her and her only brother, caused by the amount of P protein, produced by the gene located on chromosome 15, that marked them as their father’s children.
‘They’re warriors there. Hunters,’ she said.
I thought of the forbidden cupboard in my uncle’s house in Auckland. Always padlocked and rarely opened, only to unleash his various hunting rifles. The hunting was a legacy from his father, my nana.
‘You know, New Zealand asked your grandfather to be a jockey for them? He never went.’
I had heard this before. There were few stories to hand down that became our family law, snatched fragments of narratives that we rounded out with our own tongues. This was all I really knew of my nana.
These snapshots of memories handed down from my mother were told over and over again. But it was important for me to hear them, no matter how many times, in case they one day faded, like damaged negatives, the images dissolving into silence.
But where does our memory reside? Scientists have tried to locate our memories in the brain, but they could not pinpoint a particular place. When they dissected parts of mice’s brains to see if the animals could remember how to run through a maze, they still could, no matter which part was dissected. Their offspring knew how to run the maze too, despite never being taught it.
Was the Viking man right? Is memory from our ancestors stored in our DNA, each cell encoding it within us? Or was Baudelaire onto something, hinting that the spleen is a site of memory? For it is this organ that “remembers” every inoculation and illness we have had throughout our lives. ‘It’s in our blood,’ we say about inherited traits we own, and it is the spleen that filters what is in our blood. Ancient Chinese medicine and the Greeks therefore saw the spleen as pivotal to treating any illness but believed it was damaged by overthinking or worry. To them, it would become knotted or stuck with an obsessive preoccupation of a concept or subject.
Finding out where my ancestors came from began to knot my spleen.
Y chromosome – Melbourne 2012
After getting the tattoos on my wrists, the nomads followed me everywhere. Even in the community library of Carlton North, they found me. There, caught by the image of an Indian woman dancing on its cover in a ghagra choli, I rented the DVD Latcho Drom. Directed by Tony Gatlif, a Frenchman of Algerian Gypsy heritage, the movie follows one of the two migratory patterns of the Romani people. The movie begins with the twirling ghagras of Rajasthan and ends with the unfurling fingers of flamenco dancers in Spain.
All Gypsies can be traced to the north-west regions of the Indian subcontinent, where Rajasthan lies. It was between the 6th and 11th centuries that these people began to migrate. Some say they went to find work and entertain in the Middle Eastern courts, fleeing the invading Mughal’s persecution. Others say they were forced to work and were sent away as slaves. But move they did, with the first tribes travelling west through Afghanistan and Persia. At the crossroads of Palestine, some went north, eventually making their way into Europe; others went into Egypt and North Africa, where the Berbers reside.
Without any real written history, the Romani people’s stories are passed down through music and dance, and this is what Latcho Drom depicts, the narrative thread of these people’s movement through different countries, seen through the variations of their voices and footwork, different charms on the bracelet that links them together. Although some scholars dispute the Indian origins of the Romani, linguistic genealogy traces their language back to Sanskrit, and DNA testing has found their men to possess a Y chromosome rarely found outside South Asia.
But on first watching the documentary, I did not know any of this. All I knew was that in the opening sequence of the movie, as a Rajasthani Romani father tracks his family and belongings on goats through the dust of the Thar Desert, it wasn’t as foreign to me as it should’ve been. ‘Paanee Peene?’ he asks his child, stroking his head in the exact way my mother would when I was sick, asking, like this father was, if I wanted water. Although any child of Indian descent could lay claim to that being their parent’s gesture too, I couldn’t shrug the familiarity off. The intonations of his voice resonated something deeper than that memory within me. And although in the beginning it was my mother’s family that would direct me to Rajasthan, in the end it would be my father’s that would lead me there.