Originally published in Pagitica Magazine. All international copyrights are retained by the author. c.2003 Raywat Deonandan
A Memory of Flowers and Coconut
It was the flash of scalp that caught my attention. The afternoon sun, tinted orange as its rays were squeezed between the sky and horizon, had reflected dully against the man’s leathery skin, its pores winking to me in mock recognition. He had kneeled then, in obeisance to the pandit who had dabbed the red tika upon his forehead, accepting the petals of rose, jasmine and hyacinth that now littered the floor of the mandir like autumn leaves or crumpled papers upon the ground.
I had already received my blessing, had already returned to my place on the tiled and flowered floor to partake of the closing moments of the puja ceremony, hands piously clasped together in silent reverence, a temple of flesh formed from bony fingers and wrinkled skin. But the flash of scalp had drawn my eyes upward. The bald man looked to me then, as his face raised anew from the pandit’s benedictions, his eyes meeting mine in curious semi-recognition. I knew this man. In another life, another continent, decades past. There had been flowers then, too.
----
"A-how dis ting happen to you foot, bhai?" The scent of jasmine choked me, not altogether unpleasantly, cemented into my sinuses by the pressing, familiar humidity. A man had once told me that in the engine of our brains, the box called "smell" had the shortest wire connecting it to the box called "memory." The odour of jasmine, to me, was forever linked with the memory of my mother, of all mothers, and of women who resembled mothers.
"One drum been fall on m’ foot," I told this motherlike woman, careful not to take my attention from the task at hand. It is difficult now, with so many years having filled the gap of experience, literacy and education, to seamlessly bring together the colourful Guyanese world of my memory with the present haze of halcyon dreaming. Yet, back then, we did speak in the creole of the land, that chimeric blend of English, Hindi, Dutch, French and Senegalese which characterized both the tongues and histories of the three Guyanas. When last I spoke thus, I was but a teenager unaware of the grand world beyond the fatuous vegetable markets of Georgetown and New Amsterdam, and the polished wooden boatwares of Berbice and Vreedenhoop towns. Memory of that sing-gong speech is to me bonded to recollections of a physically harder life, but a life spiced with sharp sensory delights that were made more so by the wet Caribbean heat, by the genuineness of our warm and fanciful people who seemed to feel things more potently and quixotically than do folk today, and by the blinding whiteness of the South American sun, so godlike in its tethered perch high above our menial mortal demesnes.
"You na go to one doctah?" she asked, busily daubing the "bottomhouse", the shaded underfloor of the stilted bleached domicile, with a pungent mixture of cow dung and mud.
"Yes, me been go," I said. Salim squirmed in the chair then, almost causing me to snip his ear with the scissors. "Doctah can’t do nuttin’." The foot injury had no effect on my ability to walk, run or work. But it had left a gruesome scar that showed through the gaps in my rubber sandal, like some leathery eel squirming for purchase and release from beneath the sandal’s constricting straps. It was good for a topic of conversation, gave me something to blabber on about while I cut someone’s hair.
Salim couldn’t take his eyes off my foot. I would brusquely take his chin and force it back up so I could focus on his crown, but his face would fall again moments later. When he did it the third time, I smacked him lightly on the back of the head. "Sit up, bhai!" I said to him sharply, perhaps cruelly.
"Yes, bhai, you wan’ fuh look like one dem orphan picnee?" His mother barked up at him. "Sit up, na!"
Salim sniffed back a tear and I regretted having hit him. But it wasn’t a hard hit, and he was old enough not to cry. He was also old enough, though, to warrant a decent haircut, I should think. "Yuh see," I said, brushing some oily snipped hairs from his shoulder, "is almost done. You like it?" I stood him up and grinned broadly, holding for him the hand mirror we had snatched from his older sister’s cache of toiletry items. The haircut was not a masterpiece. After all, no boy as ugly as Salim could hope to look like a Bombay filmi star, not with his fat jaw, weak shoulders and rolly-polly neck. But at least he no longer resembled a girl.
Salim took one look at himself in the hand mirror and broke into tears, running up the stairs into the house before I could oil and comb his hair properly.
"Nevah mind de bhai," his mother said, rising from her task with a huff, and wiping her hands with her apron. "He got he chores fuh do, anyhow." She reached into her ample dress pockets and dribbled a few mud-stained shillings into my palm. The clank of coin and against coin was a sweet sound akin to steel drums and full-belly hummingbirds.
I stepped from the haven of bottomhouse shade into the torrent of light and heat, slinging my pack of things over my shoulder, and sauntering down the dirt road toward the canal where things would be cooler. The plan was to look for occasional work to tide me until the fishing boats left port again down the Esequibo. As I recall that time now, it was charged paradoxically with both fretful economic desperation and a comfortable simplicity, though I suspect the latter is a function of my discontentment with modern North American life. The engines of our brains, I must remind myself, are wired to minimize the trauma of memory, to re-paint old pictures in softer tones. We recall the warmth of the sun and the joy of children, but not the ache of our empty bellies and overtaxed backs. We lazily recollect days of idle village chit-chat, but rarely hear tell of the scores of neighbours who died of curable maladies. And we cling to morphed images of sylvan bliss, yet have somehow forgotten the gaunt dirtied faces of orphaned and disabled children who sometimes watched wide-eyed from the roadside.
The memories are thus dulled, unsharpened for our own protection. Yet I know that my old Caribbean homeland conferred a vividness of perception. Back then, back there, food tasted more sharply, colours leapt at the eye, and sounds pierced the ear. The glory of rest, as it was such a rare commodity, was especially well perceived, clung to for every stretched moment.
I would rest by the canal, I decided, savouring every minute before the fishing boats recalled their crews and I was compelled to return to the jungle rivers to earn my keep. No more hair-cutting today.
These were the days before pavement, back when the cows and oxen were free to roam the avenues with impunity, at least in the Indian neighbourhoods. It was not a time of carelessness or pastoral simplicity --as much as us old people would like to remember it so. A young man not from the city would have to make his lean fortune in the cane fields, the bauxite mines or on the fishing boats. The city boys had desk jobs: clerks, officials, officers. Of course, we heard rumour of the great war in Europe, of one group of white men having attacked another group of white men, Germany having invaded France. But it had little effect on our day-to-day lives, at least for those of us in the countryside. I suppose that in the city the fuel prices were rising, and the distraught white folks in their manors were trumpeting to the newspapers their anxieties about their besieged European motherlands.
Such things could not be known to me at the time, of course. Foremost on my mind was the coolness of the breeze that would sometimes roll from the surface of the brown-water canal, a welcome though putrid breath of relief. The waters were still, used only for the transport of small boats from one river system to the next, and not for the encouragement of fish or bird life. Yet its banks were a preferred destination for the idle. The play of sunlight against the water’s darkness was a delightful companion to the orchestra of odours that arose from the tufts of wildflowers, the usual parade of people and animals, and from the questionable hints of decay yards beneath the water’s stillness.
I sat by the edge of the canal, letting a team of oxen trudge past me and trample the ground and ubiquitous wild flowers into an odoriferous and colourful dust cloud. There were some other young people lingering by the water: a teenaged couple trying hard to appear to be ignoring each other, their fingers occasionally brushing together shamelessly; several additional teams of oxen pulling punts of wood and produce along the canal; and another young man about my age, though with thinning hair, squatting with his eyes to the water, a cracked coconut cradled in his palms and occasionally brought to his mouth.
I found myself gaping longingly at the stream of coconut milk pouring into the young man’s mouth, the sunlight reflecting off of it like one of the holy Himalayan rivers of which the pandits sometimes speak. I smacked my lips and wondered if I could afford to buy my own coconut, or whether this fellow would part with a sip or two from his own.
On the other side of the canal, at some distance, another team of oxen approached, towing a waterborne punt. This time, unless my eyes deceived me, the cargo was fruit, among them ripe coconuts and some mangoes. It was a glorious sight, one of which I never bored, though it was quite commonplace in those days. The rhythmic precision of two bonded oxen, yoked lovingly with hand-carved wooden devices, drawn by the practised hand of a child dissimilarly yoked by the unwanted chore, spoke to me of the naturalness of husbandry, of the finely tuned partnership between animals and men. It was a scene that appealed to my Hindu blood, particularly for its employment of animals related to cows, and for its Arcadian plainness. The muscle of the oxen, the brain of a human, the wealth of the produce and the fluidity of the canal came together to transport natural goodness from one place to another, all within a colourful context flavoured by the pervading scents of the springtime flower blooms. The small figure leading this particular team, lazily holding the reigns of the lead ox, was a distracted boy whose gaze was fixed to the sky, his fresh-cut hair the only masculine clue to his otherwise girlish demeanour. I smiled for the coincidence that had brought a sullen-faced Salim back to me.
"Salim!" I shouted at him, hoping to sweet-talk a coconut from the wretch. "Salim!" But he was too far away, his attentions focused upward into the flawless blue heavens. Following his gaze, I noticed the speck of discontinuity that seemed so inconsistent with the natural ancientness of the Caribbean sky. A zeppelin, an airship.
Twice before, in that same year, I had seen zeppelins floating north from Brazil, and had heard talk of many others. Some of the ignorant folk supposed that the ships were snatching young men to be taken to fight in the war. But that was madness. There were plenty white English soldiers for that job, plenty enough to have taken and held our mother India, they say; plenty enough to fight the Germans all by themselves, I should think.
At first, the airship was a black grain of rice held at a forearm’s length, tracing a silent line from the south. In minutes, it grew to the size of two ginnip seeds, large enough to see words on its side. I could not read the words. I assumed then it was because my education was poor at the time. But I know now that I did not understand that particular language.
We watched the zeppelin turn lazily, its skin seeming to ripple against hard winds so high up. It was of a different world, another philosophy, completely and conveniently beyond my reach. I extended my hand and pretended to snatch it, to bring it down from the perfect sky. It was my wish, I suppose, to hold that token of foreignness, to imprison its metallic hide in the weaker flesh of my hand But it was too slippery, and escaped my grip, briefly occluding the sun god from my sky. Its engines were too far to be heard, but I imagined them straining to escape my fingers, dragging both me and my country across the ocean toward the war. I quickly pulled my hand back, then pretended to flick the airship from the sky with my thumb and forefinger.
Salim, too, had paused in his task to gaze heavenward in puzzlement. In his distraction, the oxen team had drawn to a halt, while the floating punt had continued forward, slamming into the side of the canal, toppling silently into the water, its heavy cargo sinking rapidly toward the bottom.
"Salim!" I shouted at him. "Loose dem ox! Cut line!" The young man with the thinning hair leapt to his feet and dropped his coconut, startled by this development. The halved coconut rolled toward me, assailing my nostrils with that delicious smell of sweet goodness. But my thoughts were no longer of quenching my thirst. Salim either could not hear me, or was paralysed by fright. Had he cut the ropes then, had freed the oxen, the horror that ensued would have been avoided.
The ropes connecting the animals to the sinking punt took up their slack and strained taught. The lagging ox grunted loudly as its footing began to fail, its head being pulled down toward the canal’s water. In seconds, its forelegs were in the water, its body sliding along the wet bank. Moments later, with a sickening glub-glub noise, both oxen were in the water, spiralling in orbit about an invisible centre beneath which the heavy punt was still sinking.
It was too late to do anything, we all knew. To swim out to the beasts, to cut them free, would welcome personal drowning. The heavy sinking animals would suck us under the water. This was especially true for me and my bad foot. The three of us –I, Salim and the coconut man– stood there on the banks, wide-eyed and stupefied, as the oxen wailed that terrible sound. One of the beasts submerged with little fight, its neck broken by the yoke’s torque. The other was pulled into a slow, agonizing drowning death, its caterwauls scratching against our eardrums, approaching a shrill tonality unheard of from animals as large and as powerful as these. His face was too distant for me to see clearly, but I imagined that Salim’s tears flowed in torrents.
----
Today, Salim’s is a casual parlour tale I tell in modern comfort. But it had no doubt been a life-changing catastrophe for him and his family. The boy’s fate is unknown to me, as I had soon tired of the scene and continued my trek to the docks where the fishing boats were collecting new workers. Decades have filled the chasm between that memorable day and the present; the years having been busied with emigrations, maturation, education and a failing battle against old age.
As certain floral scents take me to pleasant times of maternal bliss and village congeniality, so the smell and taste of coconut milk and trampled wildflowers draw me to that afternoon by the muddy canal, when a potent image of my country’s rural life was supplanted and destroyed by the intrusion of a foreign machine. That I would, in later years, be carried by such machines to alien lands where my way of speech, my sense of humour, my understanding of history and of the natural world would be massaged and re-formed, brings me a certain thoughtfulness akin to sadness. Memories of anger or despair, if they were ever felt, have long since been buried beneath the years, untethered from the record for their foreignness against the sylvan temperance of my motherland.
That is why, when I recognized the coconut man so many years later at a puja in Toronto, his thinning hair replaced with a leathery bald scalp that caused me to squint in its reflected brightness, I neither cried nor reared in surprise, but simply smiled knowingly, warmed by a welcome link to a past long lost.