Toyo
Page 17
At one stage she thought a layer of ash was forming on a Sai Baba photograph in her shrine. She had been to rooms in India where these miracles occurred, of ash inexplicably clotting up the surfaces of Sai Baba’s portraits. The owners would remove it, but the next day the layer of ash would accumulate again. Tiny talismans and statues continuously emitted amrita, a honey-like nectar, which was collected in pots and distributed to devotees. Lotus flowers, severed at the stem, opened and closed their petals in time to music. Toyo watched the photograph over several days but the spot grew no bigger, and finally she wiped it clean with a cloth.
Narrogin had one main street and no traffic lights and yet it gradually became Toyo’s world: the flat wheat fields and crackling Dryandra scrub surrounding the town centre, a montage of red-brick paths and shops. At the weekly pottery class, all women, she rolled out clay and spun vases and bowls off the wheels.
In the afternoons she accompanied Shuying to Coles where they bought supplies for lunch, dinner and everything in between. Increasingly, Shuying took care of these while Toyo vacillated among non-essential items like flowers and greeting cards.
her eyes are wide awake
Toyo initiated her grandchildren into the precise way to drink tea, rest chopsticks on the plate, and smile without baring the teeth. They became her garden of little companions.
She told them about the miniscule insects crawling in the ridges of pak choy leaves, how they were small and white and crawled like maggots, and how to scrape along the base of the leaves with a fingernail in order to remove them. She told them that a splinter left unattended would travel through the arteries and veins, straight into the heart, piercing the muscle wall and causing painful death. She covered her bedroom mirror with a cloth at night so her reflection would not scare her. She lit the incense sticks in front of the memorial altar and extinguished the flame with a wave of her hand because blowing it out was inauspicious.
She preserved her mother’s rules and passed them on. She watched her grandchildren for any lapse in propriety. She was still the scolded child, atoning for the sins of putting her elbows on the table and failing to wear thick socks in winter.
“If mother were here, she would strap a ruler to my back for slouching.”
“If mother were here, she would tell me off.”
“She was very strict.”
“She slapped me across the face.”
“You’re lucky you don’t have my mother as your mother.”
There was the ritual of removing every shred of dirt to create a whitewashed world. Bathing was a two-hour ritual. She taught her grandchildren to fold their clothes in neat mounds
rinse their bodies and scrub between their legs
vigorously knead shampoo around the edge of their scalp
wrap a modest towel around their waist before entering the bath
rinse their hair in the shower before entering the bath
pick out every single hair floating on top of the water before entering the bath
pour a concoction of lavender oil and onsen powder into the water for slick and healthy skin
trickle the hot-water tap so the temperature would remain hot
emerge gleaming lobster-red good for circulation
Amen.
Toyo applied moisturising cream to her skin, plucked the hairs from her upper lip, lined her eyebrows and lipsticked her mouth. She put lipstick on her nearest granddaughter. She instructed Lily to purse her lips and rub them together, then blot them on a tissue. “Kiss the tissue,” she said. They examined the imprint as if it were a Marilyn Monroe relic.
Every morning after the children had been whisked off to school – their lunches packed, their textbooks and files in bags – Shuying, Toyo and Yoshio held a study circle where they each read and dissected a new discourse by Sai Baba or revisited older ones anthologised in one of the Sathya Sai Speaks volumes. Like his ashram, these were printed in pastel pinks, creams, greens and blues, with ornate symbols on the cover: a sacred calf, a peacock, diadems and musical instruments, details embossed in gold.
Sai Baba’s discourses blended the fantastical with practical spiritual teachings. The stories he told seemed closer to mythology, yet were given historical credence: once, men over ten feet tall, of sage-like prowess and endurance, prowled the earth; flying chariots and strange weapons were powered by incantations; monkeys and animals served human masters and yet ruled their own forest kingdoms; a pure woman’s curse immolated a male attacker; the sari of a queen grew longer and longer the more it was unravelled; an asteroid hurtling on a collision course with earth was shattered by a discus. Here, a blind king wept for news of his hundred sons battling for control of an empire; a prince built a bridge across the sea to rescue his wife; a god could be part-mammal, part-bird or part-fish; gods and goddesses danced across snowy mountaintops, collected skulls for necklaces and were embodied in a hundred different forms and places.
Beside this array of colourful stories, Sai Baba was radiantly confident on his purpose: Where there is a desire for mental tranquillity, I hurry to grant tranquillity. Where there is dispiritedness, I hasten to raise the drooping heart. Where there is no mental trust, I rush to restore trust. I am ever on the move to fulfil the mission for which I have come.
Sometimes his words moved Toyo to tears. God is the echo of the hills, the flutter of the leaves, the whisper of men, the babble of children and the OM that is wafted everywhere. The world is a very essential part of the curriculum of man; through the agony of search is born the infant, wisdom. The pains are worthwhile; they indicate the birth of new life. She had seen the way his eyes lit on his followers, full of gentle amusement, and his deceptively unassuming manner, for the next moment he would spin out a comment demonstrating his omniscience to an astonished recipient.
The Japanese edition of Sai Ram News came with anecdotes of followers’ experiences and dreams of Sai Baba, of life-saving serendipity, of his miracles and manifestations. She lined her notebook with notes on the edict to Love All, Serve All; Help Ever, Hurt Never. The bliss that you give and the love that you share will be your lasting possessions. She resolved to be gracious with the ignorance of those who were not spiritually evolved. For he had said, This I will tell you, there is no escaping it; all creatures have to reach God some day or other, by the long route or by the short route.
Toyo taught her grandchildren origami. Their delight in these paper creations triggered a desire to share her knowledge. She carried boxes of coloured paper squares to the three primary schools in Narrogin and taught them how to fold samurai hats, boats, masks, jumping frogs. The children watched her fold the coloured paper and gasped in wonder when she held the finished pieces up. She liked to wander around the classrooms and examine the children’s bent heads, their industrious fingers folding and unfolding. They presented their lopsided creations with a flourish.
The teachers were delighted. They shook her hand and thanked her. A journalist from the Narrogin Observer published an article; in the photo she stood in front of a class surrounded by festoons of tiny swans.
Toyo watched paper sculptures pile up on desks, adorn the corners of blackboards and windows. Children ran to their parents at the bell, brandishing their boats and birds and frogs and sumo wrestlers. She felt complete.
Her kitchen was full of secrets, of cinnamon and cardamom and the thick brown sugar which looked like loam. She baked gigantic apple and berry turnovers
crumbles and pies with thick cream
kiwi and strawberry and cinnamon twists and ginger
biscuits and meringues and almond slices coated in honey sauce.
Upon her command, her grandchildren presented spatulas, bowls, testing spikes and measuring cups reverently. They watched the alchemy of the egg yolk beating into the sugar through the glass bowl; they watched the cakes rise in the oven, swelling like dou
ghy balloons.
She poured rice grains into the omochi machine and closed the lid and switched it on. The rice was boiled and mashed and tossed and rolled into a ball, the machine rocking it from side to side, rumbling like a volcano. She leaned in to its clear stomach and watched it go around and around, a smooth white mass undulating like a thick, glutinous baby. The rice paste emerged white and smooth, a pregnant bump. She sliced it into little rectangles, served them with red-bean sauce and sesame powder.
the chick pen
The conifers lining the long driveway between the neighbour’s paddocks and their own had been struck by a blight of mould. Once a dense green, they had been reduced to brown, desiccated exoskeletons; they needed to be burned away before the bushfire season.
The water blaster ordinarily used for control burns – a white whale of a tank with a long black hose operated by a motorised engine – was in this case perched atop the ute and Yoshio and his army of children criss-crossed the driveway, lighting flames, putting them out, leaving in their wake an array of smoking clumps.
Toyo watched her grandchildren’s progress with some anxiety, poking the remnants of a conifer with an unsteady stick. Occasionally she called out a warning that they should not burn themselves; she repeated to them stories of how she had once escaped from a house fire, of a ball of flame ripping down the hallway. Fire had once destroyed everything she owned; she would not let it take any of her grandchildren.
Toyo was not reassured until the last of the fires had been put out with the aid of the water blaster. As the new ashen landscape emerged, the swathes of dead and charred trees smouldering down the driveway, she saw little flecks of ash falling, snow-like, pretty and silent onto the ground.
Ash had also been falling on her favourite JAG sweater, burning through the cloth to leave tiny holes until it looked moth-eaten. Toyo was aghast; she treasured her clothes and even remembered the shopping trip when she purchased the sweater and afterwards marched back to her Melbourne hotel room, exhilarated. She flung the damaged garment onto the couch and refused to look at it.
A week later, Shuying presented Toyo with the sweater patched with a floral-patterned cloth, sewn so that the little holes now formed part of a quaint embroidery. Toyo was so touched that at first she could not speak. Then she thanked Shuying repeatedly, running her fingers over the flower details, the small neat stitches.
Yoshio delivered a carton to the house. It had been constructed to hold mangoes, but instead baby chicks were cradled in each of the plastic indentations, looking up at her, their beaks opening and closing.
She watched them for hours, playing, stumbling over sticks and logs, going to the water feeder for a drink. They huddled together in the pen, beaks scraping the tin walls, shuffling with their claws spiked like garden picks, stamping their prints into the mud. Toyo lay on the ground and watched their fluffy bodies bobbing at the corners of her eyes like yellow haloes. When they stepped on her limbs and pecked at her clothes, all she felt was a light nibble.
She found a chick drowned in the water feeder, its legs up in the air, eyes shut tight as if trying to swim through a dream. Another chick had a crushed leg and when the other chicks rushed to the feed, it hopped towards her instead, cheeping, dragging its leg after it. She picked it up and cradled it in her palm, fed it bits of shredded spinach and grains. It was so small, so light. Even as she watched the vet’s silver needle slide into its yellow bones, a part of her resented his calm assessment of the chick’s prospects. She returned from the clinic carrying its body in a tissue box. It looked as if it were sleeping, its delicate eyes shut tight against an unseen nightmare.
Each of the chicks manifested their own personalities as they sprouted brown feathers, bristling. Some of the hens ran away as she approached, peering out from under the low-hanging trees with beady eyes. She had to crawl beneath the shrubs and collect their eggs, still warm, almost pulsing, the shell forming like the head of a newborn baby, the soft membrane underneath.
She rose at dawn, turned on the food processor and converted cabbage leaves, over-ripe tomatoes, carrot tops and wilting cucumbers into a frenzy of diced colour. She scraped this mix into a red bucket and walked down the hill, balancing it between her hip and her elbow, walking with a village girl sway as the sun rose and illumined the red earth. The chooks sensed her coming. They crowded up against the pen, rustling their feathered bodies behind the tin gate as she dragged it open and scattered the feed like confetti and they burst out and began to peck.
Once a mouse darted out of the cupboard where she kept buckets of grain and the chooks chased it and stabbed with their fat beaks plunging down like hammers of no mercy. The mouse squeaked, squirting blood in a little irregular trail behind it as it ran.
The family danced in the lounge room to the radio. Toyo and the grandchildren laughed and Yoshio did funny chicken moves, flapping his elbows and pecking at the air, and she imitated him, and she did not know then that it would be the last time she danced, that the track playing on the radio would be replaced in their memories by her incandescent smile.
Lily climbed a haystack with the new neighbours, two sisters with hair like angel spaghetti. Toyo walked towards them, carrying her contribution to the communal lunch in a large iron pot.
“That’s my grandma. She’s baked a rice pizza,” Lily declared.
“What’s a rice pizza?” asked one of the sisters.
“It’s like a pizza, with cheese on top, and mushrooms and tomatoes, but it’s made of rice.”
The blonde sisters looked at each other. “Sounds yuck.”
“No, it’s really yummy. It’s really yum, I swear. The cheese on top is really good –”
Suddenly the advancing Toyo tripped and fell, the iron pot a weight plummeting her down head-first, the lid falling and rolling away, the rice pizza flapping up and down as though struggling to fly, a slice slouching over, curling like a cheese petal, kissing the dirt. Toyo stayed prone on the ground, and they watched her still figure, uncomprehending, as the adults began to roar and run towards her.
Lily falteringly repeated to the blonde sisters, “And, uh, that’s my grandma,” and they all stared, waiting for her to stand up and act like a normal grandma again, a grandma who brought casseroles in cast-iron pots, a grandma who smiled and talked and greeted people, who did not fall and collapse like a paper doll. They watched the adults rush towards her, slowly lift her back up and shuffle towards the house.
Toyo kept thanking everyone in a flurry of embarrassment. They brought her a glass of water and dusted the dirt off her clothes. Forced to sit, imprisoned by the consequences of her fall, she tucked her legs neatly underneath her chair and waited it out. She thought of Sai Baba saying: You must not be a bit of blotting paper, absorbing all the passions and emotions, all the joys and griefs. You must be a lotus, unfolding its petals when the sun rises in the sky, unaffected by the slush where it is born or even the water which sustains it.
on the wheel of karma
One autumn the family stayed at a chestnut grove homestead. The trees grew in little rolling dips of earth and fallen chestnuts collected in the inclines. Toyo remembered the chestnut stalls in Tenma where she had purchased paper cupfuls and roasted them in the oven until they were crisp and hot, encased in satin shells.
She sent the grandchildren on forages and they returned with baskets full. She showed them how the nuts were inside spiky banksia-like pods, like echidna babies, and how to coax them out by flipping the prickly outer skin open, and how to boil and steam and roast and peel them, and how to make a creamy dessert puree.
Walking in the chestnut orchard, she saw a pair of rust-red kangaroos clutching chestnut pods in their velvet fingers (almost too long to be paws), nibbling. She froze and watched them; they watched her for an instant, then bounded away together at an unseen signal. She sat underneath a tree, clearing the spiky shells away.
She felt as though she were held in a long and quiet dream, that her whole life was sliding away from her.
Toyo enshrined the memories of her past, polished them in her mind so they outshone other things, driving past them and then reversing all the way back to the start and accelerating again. Her life was a continuous loop of tape running back over key events while she trotted alongside with her grandchildren and pointed out areas of light and shade.
Sai Baba spoke of the immortality of the soul. Apparently it reincarnated multiple times in different lives and bodies, and with each of these births the soul learned lessons and would ultimately merge in the universal consciousness from which it had come. He taught that one should not be attached to the body but view it as a vehicle through which to fulfil the soul’s purpose. Toyo read his teachings in a Japanese translation, a slim orange volume, before going to bed. Time ticks on relentlessly and man is born, lives and dies, rotating on the wheel of Karma and consequently unaware of the means of escaping from the oncoming destiny.
She could not help viewing the gradual encroachment of old age with horror, at her skin growing lines and speckles, at the nodule of flesh nestled at her collarbone, just under her neck, which the doctors confirmed was merely a deposit of fat trapped under her skin, soft and squashy like a water bubble. She took to wearing shirts with tighter necklines and scarves to hide her collarbone from view, tugging them across to cover the unsightly protuberance. She bought anti-wrinkle creams and lotions: Dove, Neutrogena, L’Oréal, Lancôme and Olay lined her shelves.