Toyo

by Lily Chan

  India was dirty. Brown. Hot. Coffee ran through her veins, dripped down her face, stained her limp collar. She did not know her body contained so much sweat. Bangalore airport was dipped in coffee. Everything was made of cardboard: the paper echoes of people walking down the corridors, sandals flapping, wearing faded linen, yellow with sweat. A mosquito bite adorned her ankle within five minutes of landing, and she hastily swallowed a clump of anti-malaria tablets. She touched everything gingerly. Her luggage handles were damp. The heat pressed in on her, every molecule of air, so that she wanted to sink, to fold in and let it press her into the ground like a leaf under someone’s foot.

  The ashram where Sai Baba lived was located further inland, in a town called Puttaparthi. The four-hour drive by taxi was long but scenic: the fields were green with occasional hills and rock clusters. Motorbikes and trucks shared the pitted road with cows, children walking to school, cyclists and herds of goats.

  The ashram was heralded by a succession of gates, pink and white columns decorated with carvings and paintings of Sai Baba and various demi-gods from Indian mythology. Buildings seemed to be made out of ice-cream cake; white and baby blue and pink plaster had been cheerfully slapped on, and garlands of flowers strung from beams wilted under the heat, to be replaced the next morning.

  They handed over their passports to be checked at the entrance and were waved through into a miniature village: apartments, sheds, halls, a bookshop, canteens and travellers from all over the world wandering about clad in saris and long-sleeved clothing.

  On the first night at the ashram, Toyo hung the mosquito net from a hook in the ceiling and Hiroto slept on the mattress by her side. By morning, he had flung his arm outside the net and the mosquitoes had feasted. His little arm was swollen and red and huge. He carried it around like a sausage, cradling it. “It feels itchy and numb,” he announced. Toyo’s next few days were spent in the intermittent application of balm to the multitude of bites appearing on his body, and in preventing him from scratching them.

  Every morning they lined up in the ashram grounds for darshan – a vision of the divine, a glimpse of Sai Baba – navigating their way past limping street dogs, haggard silhouettes of fur, the monkeys lined up like small gargoyles. They glared at her with baleful red eyes, clutching scraps of fruit and their furred babies. Toyo marched past, holding a cup of water to throw onto any screeching monkey that dashed towards her.

  A monkey broke through the flyscreen in the window of her room to steal some bananas and left a trail of destruction – upturned seats, pots and pans, a pool of urine on the floor.

  Every day Toyo sat cross-legged for hours on the stone floor, waiting for Sai Baba. He moved through crowds of people and their faces turned towards him like flowers opening. Their hands came together in prayer as he glided past, contained in his orange robe, contained in his dense hair. Indian singers raised their voices to the sticky ceilings of the hall, their rich tones aching with despair and devotion.

  Manase Bhajare Guru Charanam … Toyo clapped her hands and sang the repeat chorus. Without worshipping you in the mind, we cannot cross the turbulent ocean of life. Yoshio told her that this was the first song Sai Baba had taught his followers after declaring his divinity, his omniscience, and walked out of the family home – a village hut – to set up his ashram.

  On their second visit, Yoshio and Shuying brought Hiroto, Lily, Anabel and Saishan, who was two years old. The monsoon rains came with a fury, cooling the ashram grounds and confining the devotees to their rooms.

  They spoke to neighbours from Japan, Poland, Russia, Africa, America; exchanging stories on how they came to know Sai Baba, copies of vegetarian recipes, and books on spiritual growth, meditation and mantras. The children were placated with mango-flavoured icy-poles and bags of boiled peanuts. They sat on towels and mats in the hallway around growing mounds of nut shells, watching the sun go down. Hiroto ran after the monkeys, hooting and scratching his armpits.

  On the third visit, Yoshio convinced Toyomi and her husband to come to the ashram. They endured the stifling heat, retreated to the shade, covered their heads in white shawls, swatted at flies.

  This time Yoshio and Shuying brought their new baby, Seva; Yoshio had named him after the Sanskrit word for service. Seva was carried from place to place, sleeping despite the flies crawling over his body, the flies everywhere.

  Toyo worried that Seva was not developing at the same rate as other babies; he was months past the time they usually turned over by themselves. And then one evening, when she had cooked lentil curry for the family and they were eating together, he did it. She spooned curry into her mouth, turned to check on him, and he had flipped himself onto his tummy, looking up at her with a smile of pleasure and surprise.

  The whole family was called in for an interview. A nod, a flick of the wrist, and they leaped up from their seats and shuffled into a small room with a wooden chair. Sai Baba came in and sat down on the chair, smiling and swinging his head from side to side. He leaned down and, in accented English, asked Toyo, “How are you?”

  She stuttered some syllables in reply, but years later she remembered him, remembered his eyes looking into hers, and how close his face was, so she could see individual strands of hair, the pores of his skin, and those three English words, “How are you?” with the word “you?” lilting upward, and she played the scene over and over again, so that sometimes he bent down and gazed into her eyes until she was lost in the dark pools, and sometimes he patted her head as though she were a child, and sometimes he told her, “You’re a good person. You’re a good person. You have a lovely smile!” If he asked her, “How are you?” again, she knew she would be ready with an answer. She would not stutter and stammer. She would say, “I’m very good, Swami. And how are you?”

  “Look,” Sai Baba said, and turned up his right hand, a wooden whorl appearing in the centre of his palm. The whorl grew bigger and bigger, became a mound, a small head, a statue, rising out of his skin as if it were emerging out of water. It was a replica of the statue Toyo had first seen in the video Yoshio had played, where the ash had poured out of a vase: an old man sitting with one leg crossed, a cloth bound around his head. It was as if he had always been there, resting on Sai Baba’s palm, unobtrusive.

  Toyomi was very close to Sai Baba’s chair as this all unfolded and she burst into tears. Toyo was unsure whether it was from shock or amazement.

  Despite the discomfort of the ashram, each time Toyo returned to Perth she began to miss India, an ache at the back of her throat. She remembered the meditation tree behind the ashram, at the end of a crooked path up a hill. She had sat at its base and watched the village spread out before her, the roofs of houses and grimy apartment blocks and the domes of mosques gleaming through the tree’s branches.

  She had closed her eyes and listened to all the sounds of the town below, of people moving and talking and scooters and cars and beeping horns. Eventually the sounds faded, as if the white sand on which she sat, and the grains cradling her toes, rose up and rained on her; muffling all sounds, gently caking the insides of her ears, until she was sitting in total silence and fell into a stupor.

  From the Perth city train station she herded her grandchildren to the Annalakshmi vegetarian restaurant located on the second floor of an office building. The lift opened into a dark cave-like space adorned with wooden carvings of Indian gods and goddesses, statues and fern fronds. The space seemed endless: a maze of further corridors, rooms, hallways and glimpses into the bowels of the kitchen where Indian women clad in Punjabi suits and saris appeared like apparitions, holding bulbous steel pots and carrying sacks of potatoes. The hallway leading to the toilet was decorated by gigantic ceiling-to-floor murals of warriors armed with bows, and animals with large, almond-shaped eyes. Teenage boys completed their homework on tables at the back of the restaurant while toddlers tumbled in the corners.

  Toyo fe
asted on a buffet of dhal, curries, saffron rice, spiced potato and mango lassi. Hiroto, Lily and Anabel finished off their meals with silver cups of sultana halava drowned in custard. An entire afternoon could go past in Annalakshmi; it seemed to swallow up time. Classical Indian music emerged from the speakers, suffused the air like the aroma of food.

  Now that he had found his spiritual teacher, Yoshio was feverish with joy. He cleared his bookshelves and stocked them with books about Sai Baba by English and Japanese writers. He subscribed to spiritual and alternative health magazines. Sai Baba recommended a daily ritual of prayer: once in the morning, once in the evening, and a mantra to recite before each meal. The family listened to a tape of Sai Baba reciting the gayatri mantra, repeating it line by line until the strange syllables became familiar:

  Toyo repeated the syllables on her tongue, felt their rhythm dancing across her teeth and throat. It reminded her of the prayers the monks chanted in the temples back home; the long, unwinding road of sound was punctuated by pauses, rolling on and on like waves.

  The incense sticks in the prayer room burnt down to their nubs, glowing yellow as the abdomens of fireflies. The smoke formed strange shapes when undisturbed by human contact. It accumulated in a kind of strata in the middle of the room, just below eye level, curling and crawling into wispy sinews like a restless white dragon. Toyo, passing through the prayer room, sometimes paused for an instant and watched the smoke form as if it were a live animal pacing its cage. She would think of ghosts and shiver.

  the triangle plot

  Just as Toyo began to feel settled in Perth, Yoshio’s restlessness took flight. He searched for symbols in his dreams. He saw them in conversations and encounters. His face was illuminated. Toyo and Shuying looked at each other and sighed.

  Yoshio began to dream of a piece of land shaped like a triangle, with an outcrop of rocks crowning its centre. He spent weekends motorbiking from Yallingup to Wickepin and beyond. He placed photographs of Western Australian towns inside envelopes and these accumulated before the prayer shrine. Three months into his cross-country endeavours, he found a vacant plot for sale near Narrogin, a town two hours southeast of Perth. The plot was identical to the one he had seen in his dreams.

  “Let’s live there,” he announced.

  It was as clear to him as if Sai Baba had given his blessing for a spiritual centre to be set up in Narrogin.

  Toyo was bemused. She packed up her things and watched the flat wheatbelt country unfold across the car windows. It was canola season and the thick yellow crops seemed to press up against the glass. The fences went on and on like pencil lines on paper, punctuated by the occasional clots of sheep and cows.

  The triangle plot, as pretty as it was, was just that: vacant, nestled at the end of a snake-winding road through a reserve of bushland called Foxes Lair. A forty-minute walk to the southwest of the reserve was a huge reservoir maintained by the Water Corporation. During spring, surrounded by native blooms, it glistened dark blue like a pregnant whale.

  The family spent half the year in a transportable unit, waiting for their house to be built; when they moved in, it smelled of new wood, varnish and sawdust. The children slept on mattresses on the floor until the furniture arrived.

  The house was a large, square green building enclosing a central courtyard. The children rode their bicycles around this courtyard with singular intensity, their coloured spokes turning and turning.

  Toyo occupied several rooms along one arm of the building: a bedroom, storage rooms, a bathroom, her own small kitchen and a craft studio.

  Over the years more buildings sprang up. Yoshio planned to operate the original house as a combined school for the children and an ashram for Sai Baba’s devotees. He said he would build another house that would become Toyo’s residence.

  “Really?” Toyo asked. She could not quite believe it. “Are you really going to build me my own house?”

  Crates of building materials were delivered. Builders came with their machines, digging up holes and pouring concrete to lock in the columns, forming the base of her new home. Interlocking planks slotted into place to create frames and platforms. Each day she saw its incremental growth: the walls rising, the ground floor with a narrow set of stairs leading up, the annexe at the top and the pointed roof sealing it. When the builders had retreated for the day, she went to the construction site and wandered about, touching the walls, tracing the steps she would one day take to enter her own house.

  Shrines dotted the corners of the triangular property. Yoshio had ordered these hexadomes from South Australia: wooden geodesic domes constructed like jigsaw pieces, slotting into each other. Hiroto and Yoshio spent days inching across the domes, stapling fake grey tiles onto the wooden frames. Tin sheds, water tanks and storage containers were planted in the sand.

  Next to the original building was a playground for the children. Yoshio had designed the sprawling circular structure, which featured a wooden boardwalk, a cubby house, triangles dangling off the monkey bars as if waiting to be played in an orchestra, a gigantic sandpit and trampoline.

  He installed an oval wall of limestone slabs next to Toyo’s house, filled it with soil and put up a net under which she planted Chinese vegetables, herbs, tomatoes and many flowers. Crouched under the green netting, she was a turtle slowly moving in and out of its shell. She cultivated four kinds of roses. She planted a jasmine creeper at the front of the house that eventually began to strangle the verandah; she spent hours weaving creepers around the balustrades.

  When the garden became infested with Guildford grass, she donned snake-proof, knee-high rubber boots and gingerly waded in with the clippers. In her weed-destroying frenzy she chopped off the head of a tulip, blooming red-orange. She lamented its death in a slow funeral procession of the wheelbarrow and presented it to the family as if it were a dead pet.

  She talked to the hedges of white daisies bursting in a starry constellation. “Thirsty, aren’t you?” She uncoiled the garden rope with zest.

  Kangaroos kept eating the shrubs lining the driveway. Yoshio scattered handfuls of cashews, oats and almond flakes near the boulders to distract them. Sometimes the kangaroos watched the family unload shopping from the car, bringing the nuts up to their lips and chewing quietly.

  Many gods and demigods frequented the property and their names peppered conversation as frequently as those of actual people. The rains came due to the power of Indra, god of thunder and rainstorms. When the boys scampered about the lounge room, howling and tickling each other, they were merely imitating Hanuman, the monkey god, in a playful mood.

  During winter nights, Toyo asked the children to load the chopped wood under her house into a green wheelbarrow. They turned over logs, avoiding spiders, cockroaches and splinters. Toyo built up the fire with wads of scrunched-up newspaper embedded in a tent of twigs, nestled above the prize egg of a fat log. If it sputtered out, she invoked Agni, the god of fire, striking the umpteenth match. She imagined he would be very like the Redhead matchsticks lady but in a male form: sensual lips, a narrow waist and long fingers.

  The original building never ended up being a school. It became a library, a storage place and a centre where the family conducted weekly bhajans, or devotional singing. The library was stocked with literature on Sai Baba, spirituality, vegetarian eating and Hindu mythology. Gods and warriors and beautiful women sprawled across the pages of Indian cartoons.

  Yoshio and Shuying enrolled the children in Saint Matthew’s Primary School. Outside of school, there was a program in place – a kind of spiritual class – where the children were instructed to read books from the library and talk about these and Sai Baba’s teachings after evening prayers. Truth-telling was encouraged; discipline and ambition honed. Yoshio would fast for a day if he caught out one of the children lying. He sat at the dinner table and did not lift his chopsticks while everyone ate silently and the guilty ch
ild squirmed.

  Between Toyo, Yoshio and Shuying, the children’s exposure to television, radio, film and books was carefully monitored. In an encyclopaedia about Japan, Toyo glued together the chapter pages entitled “Adult Entertainment in Tokyo”. The children did not need to know about gambling and prostitution.

  There was so much space. Toyo’s house looked like a Miss Havisham museum; it was stocked with memorials to the past, to her travels and family and friends from Japan. Secrets hid in the piles of postcards and books strewn across wooden tables she had carved herself, with saplings and leaves intertwined around the legs. She took up the chisels with zeal, biting into the soft wood, coaxing out the shapes of creepers, stems, buds, petals and leaves. Her most ambitious creation was a large mirror frame, with forest foliage wrapped around the border. The design was doubled, reflecting itself, as if the mirror were a silver lake and at midnight the wooden deer would spring to their feet and nuzzle the surface, dipping their velvet noses in for a drink.

  Damp pot plants held congregations in the corners. The kitchen smelled of ginger and brown sugar. The stove flickered and the kettle whistled and the cookies emerged from the depths of the oven in neat brown rows. Boxes of vitamins and pills were stacked up. Delicate watercolours competed with calligraphy scrolls for wall space. A cloth doll as big as a child cast its button eyes at the ceramic vases and wooden antiques. Toyo carved a wooden child, crying, its belly distended, so small that it fit in the palm of her hand.

  Toyo took to meditating in front of the shrine during the pre-dawn hour, for she did not want to give up on spiritual practice espoused by Sai Baba: If you find that you are not able to succeed, do not give up the Saadhana but do it more vigorously, for it is the subject in which you did not get passing marks that requires special study, is it not?