Damaged Negatives
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‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!’
The syllables surge from my mouth.
I take a breath.
‘Ba-ba-ba-b…..’
These are the only sounds my lips can curve around. These are the only noises that shiver against my throat.
When the sounds first came, I saw each of my five daughters shed water from their eyes, to cleanse away the visions of the mute mother they had seen. Holding my vacant hands, they urged for future responses such as these.
But now, five years later, they are still the only sounds I can make. The stroke stole my words and never gave them back.
‘Are they looking after you?’ my third daughter asks, wiping away my dribble with a scratchy paper towel. Though she knows I can’t tell her, asking feels like she’s making sure. Are they looking after you.
It is the same question Babaji, my husband asks me. Though he left us long ago, our conversations have never stopped flowing.
‘There,’ she says gently, propping the orni back over my head.
She is most like him out of all six daughters, even more so than our only son, who is carved out of his likeness.
I remember the time back in Fiji, when these same light brown eyes that scan me worryingly now, had looked at Babaji pleadingly at seventeen, asking to be sent to university. The fees were too high, and as a woman she must marry, he had replied. Upset she had run off with Sadhu, one of our two horses, galloping out of our fields. I had thought how like her father she had been at that moment also.
But he had stayed with his sugarcane, even when the gora from New Zealand had asked him to be their jockey, so good was he on a horse. A trait harvested from his Rajput grandfather who had been false promised work as a soldier and lured to Fiji.
And now, here we both are. In New Zealand without him.
‘ Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!’ I say to fill the silence.
‘Do you want some mango Nani?’, asks her daughter, mērī bēṭī, my grandchild.
This makes me giggle. I like that she wants to sate me with food. We did food well together her and I. After the first coup, once my daughter and her husband had gained me safe passage to Auckland, my granddaughter would come to stay with me. We would make popcorn on the stovetop and masala tea with too much sugar.
Though sometimes she could not understand me with my Hindi, or I with her English, we both understood popcorn and masala tea. Watching old Amitabh Bachan films we would wheezy laugh together, a symptom of my old age and her asthmatic lungs. And so I would massage Vicks Vapour Rub into her chest to soothe her, and she would rub Tiger Balm into my swollen legs.
‘Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba’, I say in remembrance of these things.
My daughter opens a plastic container filled with bright yellow squares of aam, mango, that she has cut to make easier for me to swallow. I have worn dentures for so long now, but I can still remember what it was like to bite into a ripened mango captured from the bountiful tree that marked our compound. The sunset coloured skin still warm from the sun’s breath that you would hold up to your cheek to feel.
But I want to save the sweet mango for last.
‘Ba-ba-ba ba-ba’, I say more fiercely, asking to move to the main dish.
‘Maybe Nani wants the karela first, Mum’, my granddaughter guesses right.
I smile at her knowing. A pandit in Fiji had once told me that all the women along my mother’s line had and will have strong intuition.
‘Like beads on a japa mala, each one of you will have the gift’ he had said.
I look at my granddaughter and say a silent prayer that throughout her life she will listen to this voice and let it guide her, however hard it may be.
I remember the evening the stroke had first come, when my third daughter’s and my divination had met. Though I was unconscious, I heard her telling her husband the dream she had before she woke to the phone call telling of my seizure. I had been crossing a wild river with difficulty, only to find my nephew, already in spirit, giving me his hand to take me across safely. I had decided not to take his hand, and had turned to the shore’s safety.
What she does not know, is that I too had this very same dream. Then, when I had awoke from my stupor, I could not feel the right side of my body.
The next lid of the tupperware has been removed and the spices diffuse, quelling the stagnant smell of janola and mashed potato. Though my legs no longer stir and my right arm is no longer vital, my nose can still recognise each separate spice in the masala the karela is bathed in.
Cumin to aid digestion. Turmeric to purify the blood. Chillies to fortify the heart….I hear my mother’s voice teaching me properties of the spices in her own kitchen.
‘The karela from our garden Aama’, my daughter says proudly.
I imagine her cutting the vegetable as I used to, adding spices from the stainless steel partitions. I remember the day I had won three of these bitter gourds from our neighbour after winning a hand at cards. Sitting around the kitchen table, deep into the black Fijian nights, we would play our card games, after the children had gone to bed, smoking bidis and drinking a little kava - just enough to numb our tongues to make them fluid with talk.
On some nights when the winds would lash so the palms would roar, speaking of future hurricanes out at sea, we would tell the ghost stories of our ancestors whose blood had spilled on the island.
There is a palm here at the rest home, outside my room that gives me comfort. When the wind strikes up at night, it whips against my window, and the sounds of my home come back to me.
Sometimes the winds are quieter, and frayed fronds rasp at the glass. Sometimes the window is open. But usually the night nurse comes in to close it.
‘We have to keep you warm’, he will say, closing it. All I understand is ‘warm’.
‘Ba ba ba ba’, I always say, wanting the cold wind to slap my face. But even if I could say these words to him, my Hindi would fall to ears that aren’t able to take meaning from the sounds.
I am fed a mouthful of karela and roti by hand, the way our food is meant to be eaten. Taste buds that take no notice of the boiled carrot and cabbage fed by cold cutlery say aura jyādā dō - give me more.
I translate this to my daughter - ‘Ba-ba-ba’.
‘Aja hai Sharad Purnima,’ my daughter says, reminding me of the significance of tonight’s full moon. She likes to keep me up to date with our festivals. Sharad Purnima - the night spent appeasing the goddess Laxmi, goddess of abundance. When the moon and earth are said to be so close, that the moon rays have certain healing properties of nourishing the body and the soul. On this night, creamy liquids are left out to absorb the auspicious moon’s nectar, to be drunk and imbibed.
I want to ask if they have bought me any milk to drink. But I am overtaken. There is a rebellion at the door.
A naked Mr Trew a resident of the next room, rushes past yelling as if to invoke an uprising. The night nurse follows closely behind holding a hovering robe, calling his name.
The commotion subsided, my daughter and granddaughter turn to me with flushed cheeks after witnessing my neighbour unconcealed.
I want to tell them it’s Ok, don’t worry, Mr Trew does this often. His mind is unable to cope with the present, he must relive past horrors of war, to purge them so he can try to be at peace.
But I too remember the first time I saw his naked flesh, parched and wilted. It had brought colour to my cheeks too. It reminded me of the time I had first seen a white man’s flesh like that.
I had been washing my saris in the Sigatoka river, when an English official who had been surveying the river for his government report, not noticing me, had stopped off to cool himself - his shirt and braces off. My curiosity had distanced my decorum, and I remember being stunned by how pink his skin had been. So pink, I wanted to protect it from the sun.
It was then it made sense to me why they had chosen our people to work on their fields. Our skin, our blood, our bodies, could handle that labour in the heat.
But here at the home, it is the white people who service me. They bathe me, they change me, they feed me, they encourage me. I look at their pink hands on my brown skin, never imagining they would get so close.
And yet my very own Aama had been half gōrā. Her father, a married English colonel of the Raj had impregnated my unmarried grandmother. She escaped to Fiji for new life, and had met my Indian grandfather on board Leonidas. And so it was a man I never knew that gave my third daughter her pale skin, and the O negative blood that ran through her veins.
I wonder if my daughter knows of our heritage. I never spoke of it, but perhaps she detects? No photos were ever taken, and the story of my mother’s true father had always been hushed.
Memories over the years themselves become damaged negatives, eroding truths.
My daughter stands up to signal it is time for them to go. Their soft lips give me kisses on each of my sagging cheeks.
‘We will come back next week, achaa Aama’.
I wonder what rush of memories they will bring with them then.
After they leave, I look up and notice the full harvest moon through the skylight. It sends a cloak of its light through the window that lands on the formica table in front of me. Sitting there is a glass of milk, they had bought with them; forgotten.
A single tear seeps out of my left eye, full of salt. A tear of determination.
I wonder how I’m going to tell the night nurse to feed me the milk.