Coconut Dreams

by Derek Mascarenhas

  When he answered, there was a dog barking in the background, and I struggled to hear him at first.

  “Aiden. Where are you?” Uncle Quinton’s soft voice reminded me of the voice of his daughter, Maria, the cousin I’d just left in Mumbai the night before.

  When I told him I’d reached Mapusa he was surprised. “So soon?”

  “The bus was early,” I said. “I only have one bar of battery left.”

  “You’re at the bar?”

  “No, no. My phone. It’s low on battery. I’m…next to the road, in front of a market.”

  He told me to stay put and he’d come.

  While I waited I looked at the market. Bright oranges, yellows, and pinks shone amid the dust. A light breeze carrying sweet and sour scents wove through stalls of bangles, electronics, and clothing, and women in saris sat on straw mats piled with fruit: bananas, guavas, pomegranates, and papayas as big as watermelons. A very old woman squatted beside a woven basket full of fish that looked like the minnows we used to catch in the creek back home. They were the same size and shape, but the morning sun lit their skin like silver coins. The fish glistened despite a small horde of flies, which dodged the fishmonger’s flapping, wrinkled hand.

  Voices spoke in Konkani, but I had only learned a few swear words. On the overnight bus, they had made the stop announcements in Hindi. Maria and her mother had warned me when I left Mumbai to be careful on the bus. Maria’s mother said, “Listen for the name of the city. And remember your bus number if you get off at a rest stop. They all look the same, and sometimes these drivers leave quick, and you will be stuck.” I only got off the bus once at night. I followed a line of men into a concrete bunker where the urinal was just a metal wall and a drain in the floor. Heat came off the metal like a radiator.

  The line for food was even longer. I was thankful my aunt Delilah, whom I’d met again in Mumbai after many years, had packed me cutlets in a foil package for the journey. “These places the drivers get paid to stop at, more oil than food you get,” she said. I ate in my seat and looked out the window at the night sky. I’d heard Venus and Jupiter would be visible, but I didn’t expect to see them above a crescent moon, making a smile in the night sky. I hoped the celestial sign meant I was headed in the right direction. Leaving university without a degree had left me uncertain of everything.

  “Canada, you want to buy a bracelet?” A boy held a sheet of cardboard with lines of woven string bracelets attached. He must have recognized the flag stitched onto my backpack.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Special price for you, Canada. Forty rupees.” The boy was barefoot but had tiny gold earrings the size of poppy seeds. “Boys or girls can wear. Buy one for your girlfriend.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “You know why you don’t have a girlfriend? Because you don’t have a bracelet!” The boy smiled with mischievous eyes.

  He reminded me of my neighbourhood friends—we were enterprising kids once, too, shovelling driveways after every snowfall for five dollars. We’d bring Ally and the younger kids, who carried mini-shovels with cartoon characters printed on them. Once the customers agreed and shut their doors, we’d signal a couple of the older kids to join us and do most of the actual shovelling.

  “Can’t argue with that,” I said, and pulled a few small bills from my pocket, not bothering to bargain down the price this time.

  I pointed to a yellow-and-white bracelet, and the boy said, “That’s a very good one. Will always keep you on the right path.” He flipped the cardboard over, released a knot, then tied the bracelet around my wrist with small hands that looked much older than they were.

  The boy said thank you and ran off, and I went back to looking up and down the road for my uncle. Scanning the faces that passed, I worried I wouldn’t be able to recognize him. Why hadn’t I asked him on the phone what he was wearing? I had only met my uncle as a young child and remembered little of that trip with my parents. I hoped I’d be able to identify him from photos, and my mom’s stories. “Quinton’s as tall as sugar cane. He’s gone thin with age, but he’s still got his strength. He has to, to live in that house alone.”

  My eyes darted from face to face. I checked my phone—no calls, the battery dying. I didn’t want to risk calling and have to go searching for a place to plug in. I hoped Uncle didn’t go to the bar looking for me.

  And then there he was, a familiar face making his way through a crowd of market shoppers. Uncle Quinton wore a faded cotton dress shirt and khaki slacks. His worried expression I would see often in the coming days.

  I waved my arm and called out, “Uncle!”

  “Aiden, you made it!” He came over and pulled me in for a hug, but my backpack prevented him from getting his arms around me. “How was the journey?”

  “Good. I didn’t get much sleep on the bus, but when the sun came up I enjoyed seeing all the green hills and villages. I’m ready to explore Goa now.”

  “There’ll be time for that. You must be tired. Come, we’ll go home.” He led me to a line of scooters just off the road. They all looked identical, but he stopped at one, turned the key to lift up the seat, and pulled out a helmet. He put the helmet on, closed the seat, and sat down.

  “You only have one helmet?” I asked.

  “By law only the driver needs a helmet. Come, sit.”

  That didn’t make me feel at ease, but with my backpack on, I awkwardly straddled the scooter and sat down behind him.

  Uncle Quinton started the engine and manoeuvred us toward the main road. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to hold on to and thought I should ask before I just looped my arms around his chest. But I didn’t get the chance. My uncle pulled onto the road and hit the gas, and the weight of my backpack pulled me backwards. I tried to grab the back of his shirt but it slipped from my grasp and I fell off the scooter, landing on my left arm. Vehicles swerving around me madly honked their horns, but I didn’t move until I felt a hand helping me up and off the road.

  “You okay, Canada?” The boy with the bracelets loomed over me.

  “Yes, thank you.” But I felt a pain in my arm and held it up—next to my bracelet a pink scrape began to bleed. “I thought this thing was supposed to keep me on the right path.”

  “Right path can be bumpy,” the boy said, with a subtle wobble of this head.

  My uncle had circled back. “Aiden, are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Just a small cut.”

  “Arrey, you have to hold on at the back. I think that backpack is too big.” He helped me take my pack off, laid it on the scooter floor, and rested his legs on top. He took a bill out of his front shirt pocket and slipped it to the boy. When I got back on, I held the metal bar behind the seat as tight as I could, and we were off once again.

  “Molly! Enough!” Uncle shouted.

  The dog had amber fur and a lean build; she was running and barking on the other side of a waist-high stone wall that surrounded his house. The weathered stone had a diamond pattern chiselled into it.

  I let Molly sniff my hand through the gate while Uncle parked the scooter beside the house. Some of the orange clay tiles on the roof were darkened or discoloured, and sheets of corrugated metal slanted down over the two front windows, like eyelashes over dark eyes.

  “This is the house my mother grew up in?”

  Uncle nodded, and I felt a strong connection to the place, like I was staring at my own personal museum. I wanted to know everything.

  Uncle led me through the gate and unlocked the front door with a key. Molly brushed past my leg and raced in.

  Stepping inside felt like going down into a basement on a hot summer day. The front room had a small television in one corner, a radio with cassette tapes piled on top, two chairs in the centre, and an altar on the wall with framed pictures of Jesus and Mary, crosses, candles, and crucifixes. Molly ran a
round sniffing my pants and bag, before lying down by the chairs.

  Uncle placed the palm of his hand flat against the wall, which was the same colour as the outside of the house: light yellow, like the inside of a banana. “Blocks of iron ore stone, covered with limestone plaster. Over a century old.”

  I touched the wall, too—cool and chalky. I tried to imagine how such massive stone blocks were moved back then, and pictured the houses in The Flintstones.

  “And the floor.” He stomped his sandal on the hard, smooth surface. “Cow dung.”

  I stared at the brown, cement-like floor and sniffed the air for a scent I had failed to detect.

  My cell phone vibrated in my pocket.

  “Hi, Aiden, Maria speaking. Did you reach?” My cousin’s slow and soft voice was comforting to hear again.

  “Yes, thank you, Maria. I literally just walked in the door.” I was worried my phone would die and dug for my charger in my backpack.

  “Good, I prayed you’d be safe on your journey.”

  I held up the charger to Uncle, and he directed me to an outlet. “How did your prayer meeting go?” I asked Maria, but when Uncle Quinton’s face turn to disappointment, I regretted asking this in front of him.

  “Oh, it was good. I won’t talk long, just wanted to see you made it. And I forgot to ask what time you’ll be coming back on the twenty-fourth?”

  “One sec, let me get my ticket from my bag. Do you want to talk to your dad?”

  There was a slight hesitation before she said, “Okay.”

  I handed the phone to her father and looked for my journal, which had the ticket inside.

  “Hi, Maria… I’m good. Yes, he recognized me. But you know, he happened upon an accident. Fell right off the scooter and cut his arm… Yes, I’ll put ghaneddem on it.”

  Being reminded of the cut on my arm made it sting as I unzipped one of the side pockets of my bag and found my journal, as well as the novel I was reading, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. A pouch in the back of the journal held my train ticket along with pictures from home. I handed the ticket to Uncle, pointing to the time.

  “Arrives at VT Station at 10 p.m.,” Uncle said. I couldn’t hear what Maria said to him next, but he glanced at the altar, then said, “Okay then, take care. Tell your mother I will call her later. Okay, bye.”

  I felt guilty then that I’d be leaving Uncle Quinton alone here for Christmas, and I’d be in Mumbai with Maria, her mother, and Aunt Delilah.

  Uncle handed back the phone but held on to the ticket.

  “Seven hundred rupees you paid? Upper class. When I go to Mumbai, it costs me forty rupees.”

  “The regular-class seats were all booked.”

  He passed the ticket back with a humph, and I couldn’t help feeling like he thought I was spoiled.

  “Come, let’s take care of that cut.” He led me down the hallway, past a room with two single beds, past the kitchen to the right, and out the door to the backyard.

  Ten feet away was an outhouse with the same walls and roof as the house. Maria had warned me when I was in Mumbai that there was only an outhouse here: “Dad put a door on it a while back. Before that, you had to sing when you were using the toilet, so no one would come in. And when I was young, some people had a piggy toilet. The waste would go down and be cleared by the pigs. The gross thing was that some people would then eat those same pigs.”

  “Be careful of the well.” Uncle pointed to an open hole below the kitchen window about half the size of the outhouse. “It’s a lot of effort to get someone out.” The well had a pulley and rope with a copper pot tied to one end to fetch the water through the window. I peeked over the edge at the water far below and took a step back. Why hadn’t he put a railing around the hole?

  Molly followed us outside, trotted past the well, and lay down in a spot in the shade.

  Uncle’s eyes were on the ground as he casually walked around the well, past the outhouse and toward one of the stone walls separating his backyard from the neighbours’. These walls were made from round rocks stacked one on top of the other and enclosed a few towering trees in the yard before being taken over by jungle farther back.

  “Is that a mango tree?” I recognized the leaves from a small potted one my mom grew back home.

  “Yes, but it’s not the season. In summer that tree is full of mangoes. Hundreds.” His eyes remained on the ground, like he was looking for a four-leaf clover.

  “Do you eat them?”

  “Of course. The neighbours come also. We pick some early, but by the time they get ripe we’re eating mangoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  Uncle stopped, bent down, and tore off the leaves of what looked like a weed.

  “Come,” he said, placing the leaves on the stone wall.

  As I approached, I heard a voice from the other side of the wall. “Uncle, have you seen my cock-a-doodle-do? I can’t find him.” The speaker was a little girl in a ponytail and pink T-shirt.

  “No, I haven’t seen that rooster of yours,” Uncle said. “Probably out gallivanting.”

  “He’s a naughty fellow,” she said, then pointed at me. “Who’s that?”

  “Priscilla, this is Aiden. Clara Auntie’s son, from Canada.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Very far away. By plane you have to go.”

  Priscilla smiled; her two front teeth were missing. There was a world map in my journal I wanted to show her, but she was pointing to the leaves Uncle had picked. “You got hurt?”

  “Not too bad.”

  “He fell right off the back of the scooter,” Uncle said.

  Priscilla stared at me like she’d never heard of anyone doing such a thing.

  “I’ve never ridden on a scooter before. I didn’t know you were supposed to hold on at the back.” I turned to Uncle. “You’re not going to tell everyone, are you?”

  But he just held the plant ready, indicating that I was to rest my arm on the wall. He rubbed the leaves above it like he was handwashing a piece of clothing. A strong, unpleasant smell filled the air, and liquid from the leaves dripped into the cut.

  “Ow!” I hadn’t expected it to sting.

  “Hurts, yes. But it’s a very good antiseptic. This will clear it.”

  Later, I thought, I would dress the wound properly with the first-aid pack I had in my bag.

  “Can I have your bracelet?” Priscilla asked.

  I was going to give it to her, but Uncle answered before I could. “Priscilla. Hush. You don’t ask like that. Now, where’s your brother?”

  “Pedro’s playing football.”

  “Soccer?” I was intrigued. “Where does he play?”

  “Near the church.”

  “Later in the day you can go,” Uncle said. “Have breakfast and take rest first. Come, I still have to show you the toilet.”

  We said goodbye to Priscilla, who went back to searching for her rooster, and Uncle led me back to the outhouse. The door was thin and didn’t have a lock. Inside, pieces of wood and tools were tucked against one wall, and around a short corner was a squatter toilet and a pail of water with a small plastic container floating inside. I had encountered the squatter toilet in Mumbai, and my leg muscles struggled to sustain the required position.

  Light snuck in through the space between the walls and the roof, and a bare bulb hung from the ceiling. “Where’s the switch?” I asked.

  “Ah, come,” Uncle said with a half smile, and led me back inside the house.

  In the backroom was a red light bulb and switch, sitting above a small fridge the size of the one I had had in my dorm room. Uncle flicked the switch and the red light went on.

  “I put this in a while ago to turn the outside light on, too. So just flick this switch before and after you go.”

  “It’s a smart idea. What was it like here w
hen my mom was growing up, with so many people in this house?”

  “Chaos.”

  He didn’t elaborate further, and I wished Maria had come here with me—all of her stories were about people. When I’d asked her when the last time she’d come to Goa was, she went quiet, then answered, “It’s been a long time.” When I asked her if she didn’t like it there, she said, “I love it, but Brother Abraham says we must let go of what we love.” I didn’t agree with this but couldn’t find a way to tell her that wouldn’t contradict her beliefs.

  Uncle flicked the switch off and said, “This bulb will probably go soon, though; I haven’t changed it yet.”

  “I heard they’re working on light bulbs that could last up to twenty-five years.” This was one of the few things I’d retained from my chemistry professor’s lectures.

  “I don’t think I like the idea of a light bulb lasting longer than I will,” Uncle said, moving into the kitchen. “Sit, I’ll make some tea.”

  I sat on the grainy wood chair and rested my arms on a matching table. Looking around, I wondered how many meals my mother had had in this kitchen.

  Jolting upright in bed, I woke to the sound of something shattering. The tangle and blur of the white mosquito net confused me as I struggled to get out from under it. It was still daytime, and light came in through the windows. Uncle’s bed was empty. I went to the front door, where Molly was barking. The almost thunderous cracking from above went in waves, then stopped.

  A boy was peeking in through the window. “Monkeys,” he said.

  Uncle came rushing in from the back of the house. “Are they still out there?”

  “It’s okay, Uncle, I chased them away with stones.”

  “Good job, Pedro.”

  “Monkeys?” I asked, taking a step back from the window.

  “In between the trees they run on roofs, and sometimes knock down the tiles,” the boy said. “It doesn’t happen too often, so you should feel lucky—not everyone gets the monkeys welcoming them.”