by Shani Mootoo
OUT OF ASHES COMES A FIRE
Harry was sipping black tea in the kitchen, preparing to head to the newly purchased station on the far side of the town. Dolly sat at the table with her son, as she always did regardless of how she was feeling, dressed in a worn nightgown and a pink pair of bedroom slippers he had given her several Christmases ago. The radio played low from the drawing room. She was awaiting the death news, for at her age, she expected to hear of the death of people she knew, if not personally, at least by rumor. When the dirge came on, she got up and weakly stood at the entrance to the drawing room. When Harry heard the first name mentioned, which sounded like Sangha, he snapped, “Who?”
His mother, too, had started. She pressed a finger to her mouth to silence him. He stood up and listened. Wife of Mr. Narine Sangha, beloved mother of Mrs. Rose Bihar, mother-in-law of attorney general Mr. Shem Bihar. And then the details of the funeral. “But eh-eh,” Dolly said, looking at her son, the tips of three fingers of the hand that had silenced him now lightly pressing against her lips. She nodded as if news she was expecting any day had at last arrived.
“I didn’t know she was sick,” said Harry. Dolly moved her hand from her lips and gestured without speaking that she didn’t know of any illness, either. She went to Harry and rested her hand on his shoulder, a gesture that caused his eyes to swell with tears. But before he could react, reach for her hand, she skirted around, picked up his cup and saucer, and took them to the sink. She stood at the counter for a while, staring out the window to the trees that had grown so fully that they blocked the view of the valley behind.
Harry sat at his desk that day thinking of Mrs. Sangha’s daughter. Countless people would be gathering around her. But none of them were likely to have shared early memories of her mother as intimately as he once had. Not even her husband. He was sure of this and was gripped by the unshakable notion that he was the only one who knew the depth of her sorrow, who could comfort her, in this moment. Her husband had not been with her in her early childhood like he had, could not have known the smell or coolness of Mrs. Sangha’s skin like he did. Several times he took his jacket off the hook on the wall behind him. Several times he picked up the car keys. But each time he was halted by insecurities; he became unsure which house it was he should visit in order to pay his respects. He became paralyzed with questions like where would Rose Sangha—or rather, Rose Bihar—be? At her father’s house, comforting him, or at her own house, being comforted by her husband? It had been some years since his and Shem’s paths had crossed. The last time had been before Shem was appointed attorney general, when he was dabbling aimlessly in politics, the year he spoke with everyone, it was said.
“Ey, man. St. George! It’s been a while, man, been a while. Times treating you good, man?”
Harry had stood by Shem’s car as an attendant cleaned the windshield. He replied reluctantly, “Can’t complain.”
Shem quipped good-naturedly, “Can’t complain? What you mean, you can’t complain? You putting on a little paunch there, man. I can see you living up the good life in Marion. Is how heart problems does start, you know. We need to keep healthy! In this country of ours, we want strong, healthy citizens, you know!”
The need to attend the funeral the following day became dizzyingly urgent. Dolly, having begun to suffer with aches and pains in the joints and muscles of her aging body, had not been out of her house in several weeks. Still, Harry expected she would somehow mine the will to attend the funeral. When she told him that she felt it would be too taxing on her own health, he realized his expectation was selfish.
He arrived a half hour before the memorial was to begin at the church where Mrs. Sangha was a devoted member. Even so, he got no farther than the opposite sidewalk, well at the end of the block with the church. “Standing room only, man! You can’t get no farther than here. Well-known family, in truth!” a man advised as proudly as if it were an event he had personally organized. The crowd, sweating in the angled heat of the evening sun, had spilled onto the lawn of the churchyard and into the street in front, blocking it from traffic entirely. Once the ceremony was under way, the street was shrouded in silence broken occasionally by an evening flock of lilting parrots flying and squawking high overhead. Still, from where Harry stood, the words of the speakers were indistinguishable. He left before the service ended and went briskly on his own to the cemetery.
He took his place near the freshly dug hole. The air smelled of the candle wax that ran down the sides of stone markers and cement plinths, and of the newly turned earth. A group of men solemnly passed around a bottle of rum, each taking several turns toasting Mrs. Sangha’s life and her journey onward. Their toasts acclaimed that she was a good woman, yes, a good woman. Harry moved a few paces away from them and thought of Mrs. Sangha, his dear Mrs. Sangha who had, on their last encounter when he was still in high school, betrayed him. She would soon turn to dust.
The hearse, shrouded by wreaths, rolled in through the cemetery gates and behind it a black Buick. Any sounds either vehicle might have made along the gravel path were muted by the shuffle of the hundreds of feet that slowly followed. The men and women behind Harry began their unabashed display of grieving. Harry walked hurriedly away from them toward the gate.
In the past few years, his and Rose’s paths had seldom crossed. He’d had a few fleeting glimpses of her as the car in which she was being driven by her chauffeur sped past his, but if she saw and recognized him, she had not made any attempt, except once, to acknowledge him. That once, when she herself was driving her husband’s car, which was well known about town, they stopped opposite each other at a major road. To his surprise, she smiled and waved to him.
He was anxious now. He didn’t at first expect that there would be the chance to speak with her longer than to express his and his mother’s condolences, yet he was overcome with the desire to be seen, to be recognized, by her.
When the hearse came to a halt, the mourners in the procession filed in, scattered, and regrouped around the grave site. A young man opened one of the back doors of the car, and an aged Narine Sangha alighted, followed by his daughter, whose head was covered with a black mantilla. Through the crowd, Harry caught a glimpse of Rose. He turned his body this way and that and slid through the crowd.
Shem Bihar, who seemed to have been at the head of the walking mourners, approached his father-in-law and his wife. Together they walked to the back of the hearse. The door was opened, and the pallbearers took their place to slide out the lacquered brown coffin. Rose faced her husband, buried her face in his chest. A low wailing ran through the crowd. The coffin was positioned on the bier and the crowd became silent. The ceremony to commit Mrs. Sangha to the earth began. A wail of anguish hushed the crowd, and then the words “Mummy, no, no, no! Oh God, don’t go” rang out. Harry stood three people deep away from Rose. He heard her moaning, saw her pound her fists against her husband’s chest. Shem, bewildered, struggled to restrain her against him.
The grave diggers lost no time. The thunder of dirt falling on the wood lasted but seconds, then the rhythmic scrape and slide of shovels, the dull thud of dirt on dirt. Rose stopped screaming but wailed softly into her husband’s chest. She seemed to lose her strength and was about to collapse. Shem cupped his wife’s face in his hands sharply, lifted it toward his, and spoke directly to her. She moved away from his chest, seemed to compose herself, and, standing on her own, covered her face with both hands. Once the dirt had taken on the mounded shape, the crowd began to disperse. Shem left Rose and moved away to attend to a query from one of the grave diggers. It was then that Harry moved over to her. Her head hung down as, under the mantilla, she wiped her nose with a handkerchief. He had not been so close to her since they were children. He tapped her arm, the gesture awkward. She did not respond but seemed to pull her shoulders together, to crouch in toward herself more. In the midst of all the people waiting to speak with her, of all that commotion, he stepped closer and called her: “Rose.” Her head rem
ained down, and she kept the kerchief to her nose. He spoke that one word again: “Rose?”
This time she lifted her head and to Harry’s utter surprise, she came toward him. Trembling, he reached for both her hands. The mantilla parted slightly and a wet though soft cheek pressed against his. As sudden as she had done so, it was over. She pulled back, but for the briefest moment—so brief that no one else would likely have noticed—her weight seemed to come to rest against Harry. Something had dripped on the breast of his thin white cotton shirt. Startled, he looked to see a gray wet dash and realized that his shirt had caught her tears. He could hardly breathe. He wanted to reach under the veil and wipe the tears on her cheeks with his hand. In that moment he didn’t give a care in the world, even if it would have been entirely evident, that he was Mrs. Sangha’s long-ago servant’s son. It was he who was permitted to catch a little of the weight of Rose Bihar, Narine Sangha’s daughter, Shem Bihar’s wife.
She stood in front of him. He looked directly at her, nowhere else. He was able to draw a curtain around her and him and shut out everyone in the cemetery, including her father and her husband. Narine Sangha never would have recognized him, but Harry knew and didn’t really care in that moment that Shem Bihar would.
It had taken all his strength when Rose touched her cheek to his not to wrap his arms around her. She looked directly at him and said weakly, “Thanks for coming. How is your mummy?”
Harry closed his eyes and nodded, unable to utter any words. His gratitude to her for recognizing him so intimately ran deep and raw. He was light-headed. She whispered, “Come home and visit sometime. You know where I live? When you have time?” Before another word could be exchanged, a woman came and threw her arms around Rose and began to cry loudly. Rose looked at Harry over the woman’s imposed shoulder, and he nodded again.
THE EGGMAN
Two weeks after Mrs. Sangha’s funeral, Harry went down to the coop with a small basin. He reached in and offered his knuckles to the birds, none of which could take the place of the old cock which had long ago died. He filled the basin with twelve of their large brown eggs and returned to the house.
In the kitchen he washed each one free of feather bits, traces of afterbirth, and dried bird feces. His mother said nothing, but her tightly folded arms, intermittent forced expulsions of breath, and intent gaze spoke loudly. Harry ignored her.
When he was leaving the house, she shoved a wet washcloth at him and gruffly said, “Here. Wipe the bird shit off your shoes before you go making double donkey of yourself, child.” Harry looked toward the ceiling and, trying not to smile, shook his head with feigned disbelief. She said, “Eh-eh! What? What is that? Shaking your head? Harry, she is a married woman, you hear? You better study your head good before you bring down yourself—and me—you hear? A married woman! You playing with fire, child. Fire. Hm! I don’t know what nonsense is this.”
It would be the first time that he would pay a visit to the Bihar house. Years after her marriage, he still called her—in his mind—Rose Sangha.
They had married three months after Rose’s graduation from high school. Shem was already attending university abroad, and had returned home especially, the gossip section of Guanagaspar’s only newspaper reported, to be married. Dolly and Harry had received an invitation to the wedding.
The day before the wedding, leaving home before dawn, returning after dark, Dolly went to the Sangha house, albeit purse-lipped and stoic. She showed up among those who would help with the preparations, that is, the poorer friends and unfashionable family members from the outlying country areas. She and these people helped with the inch-by-inch cleaning of the house and yard and with the outdoor coal-fire cookery of food in large vats.
But on the day of the wedding, which she knew her son had no intention of attending, Dolly asked Harry to drive her to Raleigh to see Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako.
Once there, a sea bath, a cleansing in salt water, seemed to Harry an antidote to an insalubrious day. But Dolly caught a fit as he headed in his bathing trunks toward the water. She bawled fiercely that it was in that hour, and that hour exactly, of his deep despair at Rose’s marriage, when, if it were his fate—like it had been his father’s—to die by drowning, the sea was bound to snatch him from her. She didn’t have to plead with him. The day had already worn him weak. He went and lay on his back on the hot sand, with a newspaper covering his face.
A photo of them, Shem in an embroidered kurta, a bejeweled turban on his head, and Rose in a sari, the two of them smiling at each other as awkwardly as newlyweds, appeared on the front page of the following day’s paper. The day after that, a photo of them was in the section titled “Talk of the Town.” He wore a suit, she a blouse, a narrow skirt, and a pillbox hat. They were heading that day, the paper said, back to the U.K. so that Shem could finish his studies. He would graduate with a bachelor of law degree in less than three years, at which time he would be called to the bar. The paper predicted that with his good looks and breeding, he might have a future in politics, like his great-grandfather had had as minister of transport.
Once the couple had returned from abroad, the daily papers were never, to this date, without a photograph of Shem, and often of them both at some official or private function.
Harry’s thoughts of and feelings toward Rose, given their futility, had over the course of years gradually slipped—not away entirely but to the back of his mind. The news on the radio of Mrs. Sangha’s death was a poker that stoked old embers. Then seeing her. Every minute since was spent, once more, thinking of her: the way she had all but embraced him, and so publicly. The memory of the sensation of that sudden dampness on his shirt spread fire through his body.
It was no doubt the basin of eggs he held as he stood outside the gate. The young girl jumping rope on the concrete paving of the garage could have been Rose as a child. A boy, with the forward-facing, flared ears of his father and the chubbiness that Indian families admire in boy children, looked from around a doorway that entered onto the garage. He said, “Just now,” and disappeared again. Harry heard him shout, “Mummy, a man selling eggs by the back gate.”
Harry waited, watching the girl. She seemed oblivious. After about five minutes, Harry called out and asked her name. Not looking at him, she said, “My name is Cassie. You selling eggs?”
Harry asked her to run inside and tell her mother Harry had come. She went to the door, but without entering the house, she shouted, “Mummy.” She did not wait for an answer. She shouted again, this time louder, “Mummy!” And yet again. She doubled over as if to expel the most forceful voice she had and she screamed, “Muhhhmy!” This time he heard a voice from inside the house but could not make out the words. Cassie shouted out, “Well, I was calling you, and you wouldn’t answer.” He heard Rose ask, “Well, what is it?” Cassie said, “It’s the Eggman. His name is Harry. Mummy, can I have something to eat?”
Her mother looked around from the doorway. Seeing Harry, she laughed and said, “And I was wondering who is the Eggman!” She apologized for not coming out sooner, said she had been speaking on the telephone with her husband. His work took him daily to the capital, Gloria. He worked such long hours, and so hard, she said. He was busy with a case against a group of black students from the University of the West Indies, the Guanagaspar campus, who had burned down the university chancellor’s house. The chancellor was a white-skinned man from the U.K., and they felt that the position should belong to a man born on the island who happened to be black-skinned and had many more letters of learning after his name than had the U.K. chancellor. Harry was well aware of the incident. It had been much publicized in the daily paper, but it was not the only eruption on the island. There was, in general, noticeable discontent brewing in pockets in the north of the island. The Indian population had halted their lavish displays of wealth, no longer allowing photographs of them at private or public functions. The people of African heritage had begun to hold public forums and street-corner meetings where they
preached and ranted to ever-increasing crowds about slavery days being over, about a back-to-Africa movement, and about not replacing one form of oppression with another—the new one being an Indian-run government. Perhaps, thought Harry, Uncle Mako wasn’t as idle-minded as he and his mother thought. But the north was the north and the south was the south, and in the south, far from the seat of government, life was sleepier, as usual. It was a delicate situation for Shem, Rose told Harry.
But Harry had become distracted; he had imagined them sitting in her living room or on the porch, her offering him a cup of tea, a glass of water, a piece of sponge cake, and he kept expecting they would move from the gate to the inside of the house.
She folded her hands on top of the gate’s wide ledge, leaned against it. She said few people her age had known her mother as well or as long as he had. She said her mother always thought highly of him and wondered aloud not long before she died why his marriage hadn’t worked out and if he would marry again. She thanked him for the eggs and told him he should come again when she had more time to chat, but she didn’t indicate when that might be.
Harry visited her—not more than once every few months in the years since her mother died—bearing the basin full of eggs each time. Shem was publicly hailed, and by the Indian business and religious communities in particular, for putting behind bars several of the dissidents and two high-profile trade union leaders, all of whom were black, and whom he managed to convict for inciting social disobedience. Every day Shem was mentioned and quoted in the newspapers or on the television news hour. They said it was because of him that the country was settling back into its peaceful ways. Harry’s mother said, “If they don’t kill him first, he will run for prime minister one day, mark my word.”