Renesha Dhanraj
Mami has five sisters and two brothers. She had a sixth sister who died from belly pain as a baby. My uncles never stood a chance with all those girls. I think we forgot about the brothers until it was Christmastime. Our house didn’t have an oven. I took pans ladened with batter for fruit cake, sponge cake, and black cake, to the village bakeshop where the owner baked our cakes. Mami sent me with change that I inevitably ended up spending on a bag pholourie and sour since the owner refused my money. I liked sitting on the floor in front of the ovens and watching the cakes poof up, then come back down to earth.
My aunts were better at staying in touch. Even after all of them married and moved out of Ma’s house in Mahaicony, everyone remained within walking distance or a short minibus ride from each other. We went over in the evening to deliver bowls of chow mein and fried rice, or they came to us for afternoon tea and gossip. Dadi has four brothers who he used to travel the country with searching for work. Sometimes he panned for gold in the Amazon, mined bauxite in Linden, or delivered those blue plastic barrels from overseas.
I liked taking walks around the village. My birthday was May 10. It was early April, and I was on the verge of teenagehood. The world felt like it was on the cusp of a transformation that would keep retreating from my grasp if I didn’t stay on top of things. It used to rain so hard the electricity would shut off. Walking was impossible. We couldn’t afford a generator, so we lit diyas and waited for the squall to pass. We kept matches in a shoebox by the front door. If we were in a talkative mood, we told each other riddles that began with, Parable Parable…Sometimes the sound of the rain hitting the zinc was too enticing and we took siesta, even if we’d already taken one for the day.
We didn’t have a television set so looking out the window at the drenched land afforded a special kind of entertainment. Sometimes whole uprooted trees and cows with their legs sticking in the air passed by in the flood. Your heart went out to them, but there was nothing you could do because if you went out you would be swept away too and what good would that do?
When the weather was nice, my favorite area to stroll was the stretch of dirt road before the stelling, from where you can see the giant Hanuman statue. There was a row of crumbling and crappo-infested houses that mad people and street urchins lived in. The occupants knew me so well that sometimes they’d come out to play tag or fly torn kites. When I passed by in the evenings and tapped on the windows of these houses, a chorus of waving shadows guided me back home.
When Aunty Sharda flew away, we met everyone at KFC for lunch. At the time, there was a KFC not too far from Cheddi Jagan International Airport. Airports and airplanes were new inventions. In the way inventions always remain new to poor people. None of us had ever flown in a plane. We woke up too early because we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Dadi was fishing for shrimp at sea, so Mami had to drive the green minibus. I knew she would drive too slowly and make many wrong turns. They hadn’t paved the roads in our village yet. We washed our hair and put on fresh clothes. My hair touched the top of my backside then. Mami had to help me shampoo and wring the water out. After, she blew in my ear so I wouldn’t get headache. When my hair grew so long that plaiting it became the reason for me being tardy to school, Dadi spread my black locks across the table and chopped with the cutlass. There was a woman in the village who used to cut her daughter’s hair with a piece of broken mirror. No one believed her until she invited everyone over for a jhandi and demonstrated in front of the pandit.
I couldn’t tell the sisters apart when they sat down in a row, hunched over baskets of fried chicken. I remember thinking I mustn’t know Mami well if she could blend in so easily, and I suddenly felt anxious. I didn’t eat my kids’ meal chicken sandwich. Uncle kept touching Aunty, and this made me so uncomfortable I never took my eye off the old cricket match playing on a fuzzy screen above our heads.
A white man saw Aunty in the marketplace. He wanted her to be his kids’ nanny in some place called Long Island. He liked the way she was a little girl in a big woman’s body.
So they say.
Uncle surprised us by letting her go, but he didn’t let her go easy. He took her to Monkeyman. Monkeyman runs a barbershop that turns into tattoo shop and rum shop after closing time. Five. Then Monkeyman did it while Aunty was staring at an assortment of dye on the wall, and even when she realized Monkeyman was doing it, she didn’t watch. She couldn’t bring herself to learn how the purple lop-sided heart, containing Uncle’s name curling into infinity, ended up top of her left breast.
So they say.
Well, that part wasn’t a surprise. And what they say is: You a cow to be branded, Sharda? You a cow? When I walked by the crumbling houses, the old ladies asked me if I didn’t have shame. I’d never seen the tattoo, so I didn’t have shame. They complained about crying coming from Aunty’s veranda all hours of the day, rain and shine. Aunty had a lot to cry about. She had three girls around my age, wild like fire. In my childhood, Aunty was synonymous with crying. Any time something upsetting happened to me, a picture of her bloodless, leaky face flashed up in my mind before I could process the trauma for myself. Adult crying is different from pickney crying. Adult crying is sadder. Harder to listen to.
Uncle said, Three months’ too long for a man to go without woman. Everyone stopped chewing. Then nodded. Anything to pacify Uncle. The restaurant was full. No one wanted a scene. Our waitress, a teenage girl wearing tight leather pants, looked questioningly in our direction. Aunty was already black and blue from the day—all the days—before, and he sat next to her, pinching her, making her bluer.
One of us, I can’t remember who, asked a stranger to take our picture standing beneath the blocky red sign at the airport entrance. Us lined up with our forced half-smiles and looks of bewilderment made the day feel even sadder. We put on a brave face but every time a plane took off, we flinched and pretended we hadn’t. Once, Mami dropped to the ground and covered her head like they were bombing us. In the picture, which I have up to now, a lame bull has wandered into the background, looking as clueless as we are. I’m standing in the middle of the sisters, wearing baggy jeans and a yellow t-shirt, and Aunty’s nails are digging into my shoulders. Mami’s clutching Aunty’s dress and Uncle’s pulling Aunty’s hair, and between the two of them, it’s a wonder that Aunty gets away at all. When she hugs me goodbye, I kiss her cheek.
***
Mami stopped talking. That wasn’t a surprise. Each day she was talking less and less. It was only a matter of time before she ran out of words. If we found ourselves in a room together, she stood to attention and ran into the adjoining room as if someone had called her name. She ate standing at the kitchen sink, above which hung a curtained window she was in the habit of looking suspiciously out of, as though expecting to see an airplane land in our yard. I ate in the living room, eyeing her because once I caught her trying to climb out the window. We ate canned sardines fried in tomato paste and salty omelets with rice. These were the only dishes I knew how to make.
After dinner it was customary for me to have a cup of hot milk. Dadi believed milk could prevent any sickness. Whenever he returned home from work, he would spend days sitting on his sofa drinking hot milk. He read the newspaper, even if it was weeks old, anything to secure his place in the world again. We had a miniature chess set. He absentmindedly tapped on the pieces while drinking and reading, shifting them around. I would creep up beside him and nudge one then another, until a game was in full swing without him noticing.
I nestled in his sofa when he was gone and looked through our family album. Sometimes school friends visited with oranges. We forced ourselves to drink unsweetened black tea. I was close and not close to these friends. We looked at the strange boys and girls trapped behind the yellowed album pages. One appeared climbing a tree, another modeling an Easter basket carrying felt chicks, another sitting coquettishly in a red toy car, and another and another—hours passed this way, all of us pretending to drink steaming tea until it was time for my friends to go home. Alone, the strange boys and girls climbed out from behind the sticky white film and pranced around the living room. They were still prancing after I tucked Mami into bed and walked into my room for the night.
At school my teacher beat us if we didn’t bring in our sums or spoke above him. He gave a lighter beating for incorrect answers given in class. It didn’t take us long to figure out that the best course was to stay silent and never raise your hand for anything. He enjoyed this new unchallenged power immensely. We were in the tail end of Grade 6 and studying for the exam that would place us in Secondary School. Many of the children stopped skipping rope and playing marbles during recess. In the schoolyard they sat down in groups, noses buried in a book or working out a sheet of sums on the grass. I tried to study. I considered myself smart. A dragonfly buzzed near me. A dog howled in the distance. I tried again, looking around at my classmates to harness the collective energy which would propel me into my future.
Aunty Sharada flew back. Mami looked up from her eggs and said, She has a birthday present for you. Mami and Dadi could only eat food doused in pepper sauce. This made the ends of their mouths pucker and sent them running to the outhouse next morning. The day was as tranquil as that other one with the fried chicken and the airplanes and I wondered if the world always operates like that. People re-enter your life the same way they left it.
When we arrived in the north side of Parika, night had fallen. A faint glow emanated from the small apartment attached to the back of Aunty’s shop. Aunty started as a snackette owner in Stabroek Market. People liked her food so much that she got a real shop. Uncle found her in the market and followed her to the shop. Things were good, then bad. Then the three girls happened and things were worse. The shop’s dusty grills were rolled down to keep out thief. Mami was afraid of the glow, a glow we’d seen many times before. She doubled over and wouldn’t move. I really didn’t know what to make of her moods. We’d come too far to turn back. I used one arm to steady her shaking frame and with the other, dragged her to the old door expecting us. Uncle had etched onto its face with a knife:
MONEY SHOULD BE USED AS AN INVESTMENT!!!
IMAGINATION AND REALITY IS TWO DIFFERENT THING.
ME CHEST IS NOT A BERRIN’ GROUND.
We found ourselves in an alleyway leading to a storage room containing items like plait bread and lilac soap. From here we passed into the apartment’s kitchen. Aunty and her daughters were seated in a semicircle on the floor. The smell of dhal, rice, and saltfish, wafted from unwashed plates in the sink. A pot of vamazelli, my favorite, was boiling on the stove. Mami softened with relief in my hand. Except for the dust, all was as it should be.
Kennedy is bigger than Cheddi Jagan, said Aunty. Two, no, three Cheddi’s can fit inside. I’d collected my suitcase from the carousel and was standing in a line for no reason other than someone in a uniform had told me to stand there. The announcements called names of countries they didn’t teach us in school, so I was passing time by repeating the funny names to myself when someone said, Miss? I turned to see two policemen. They told me their names, but I had already deemed them Mr. Beautiful and Mr. Ugly and, besides, I couldn’t focus on anything other than the fact that everyone on the line to nowhere was turning, turning to watch me. I swear someone said the word dog. I listened for barking. The policemen led me to a separate room and the whole time my head was dropping, until all I could see was the white floor, pristine even with all those feet from god knows where tramping up and down, and that was the painful part, the shame.
Too slowly and waving his arms like he going to flap away, Mr. Ugly said, We have to check your suitcase. Before I could respond—not that I could have, I was still processing my embarrassment—they tore into my suitcase, poking and pinching anything that looked new to them, which was everything. Black cake, thyme, hassa, mango sour. You remember the night before I left, we wrapped everything in newspaper, then in clothes, and when the policemen finished, all was useless. They spent a long time sniffing one jar. If they’d asked me, I would have explained what achar is and eaten some for them, but they didn’t ask. They dropped the jar on the floor.
Only when they placed some items on the table, done with the flapping and without looking at me, I realized what sort of situation I was in. I’d been handcuffed to the table at some point. My crime confronted me in the form of fresh thyme and bird pepper. The same peppers I’d picked that morning off the neighbor’s tree, were rolling off the table and staining that white tile. Newspaper scraps fluttered into my mouth because a machine on the wall kept blasting cold air at me on their command.
I start beg. If you want me to clean, I’ll clean. Give me a pinta broom and mop, just let me keep my food, half my food, please momma. I said things like that. This food become my life. I surprised myself. The only time I felt so powerful was pushing out three pickney in Georgetown Public Hospital. I measured the steps it would take me to reach the door. I wear eight shoesize. I’m fast. I only look so. I won all the races in primary school. Never mind that they were two men, and I was one woman. I was going to beat up the policemen and get my food and bust out of there. What would happen after I reached the door? It would take time to make it past the mob, to find the exit and the car waiting to take me to Long Island. What if the car come and left?
I remembered the job, this blasted job paying me what was pocket change for them policemen, and I remembered my girls left to fend for themselves at home, and I laughed. A small laugh at first, then a loud one. A part of me was scared people outside the room were going to hear—I was sure everyone in the airport was at that moment pressed against the door and listening to everything going on inside—but I keep laughing like laughing was the only thing I knew how to do. My chest start burn and my eye start water, and when I stopped for air, even though I didn’t want to stop, I wanted to laugh forever but I had to stop because I was on fire, Beautiful undid my handcuff and pushed me out the door. I was free.
Cook the peppers next time, he said, said Aunty. His words pounded inside my head everywhere I went that first week—the supermarket, the playground, the washroom. Aunty got up abruptly to stir the vamazelli. The suitcase lay limp in the middle of our circle, excavated of talking dolls and chocolates wrapped in gold foil. The children were asleep on the cheap sunflower-print plastic acting as a carpet.
I waited.
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Renesha Dhanraj is an Indo-Guyanese writer and a graduate of the MFA Program at Brooklyn College. Her stories have been published in The North Meridian Review, performed at Liars’ League London, and awarded Pushcart nominations. She has stories forthcoming in EPOCH, The Minnesota Review, Pigeon Pages, and with the UNESCO-OBMICA Creative Caribbean Project. She lives in NYC.