by Alice Pung
There was a day or two when the ocean took off its mask and was as smooth as velvet. Never before had I seen a mass of water so calm. I wished I could share the scene with my family, and the scene of stars at night, too – a sight rarely enjoyed by residents of Hong Kong.
At sea, it felt as though the world was endless. I sat on a deck chair and rested my chin on the ship’s rail, like I did from the rear balcony at home, and gazed into the horizon. I contemplated my future, but my mind was blank. On some days we passed islands – some of them deserted. When we crossed the equator, every passenger was presented with a certificate by the captain.
Before I left Hong Kong, my older sister had told me to look out for the famous Great Barrier Reef. Our ship would surely pass through it, she said. However, I did not quite know what to look for and could not see anything resembling coral. Instead I saw flying fish trying to escape the path of our ship. A day before we reached Sydney, I watched four dolphins leading our ship for a good half-hour. Under a clear blue sky, I watched them dive and tumble like little jesters opening the way for a royal carriage. By the time I went to the cabin to take out my camera they were gone.
On the thirteenth morning I got up very early and commenced packing. Someone yelled into the cabins, ‘Come and look at the Sydney Harbour Bridge!’ I followed the others and ran up to the upper deck. A gigantic curved steel structure passed overhead and dwarfed our ship. It was awesome! Not long after that our ship came to berth and Uncle Tat was there to welcome me, but there was no sign of Ah Sing.
‘Is Ah Sing here?’ I asked.
Uncle Tat betrayed an uneasy smile. ‘Let’s talk about it after we get home,’ he said.
Thus I landed on this distant piece of land where, so it now seems, I was destined to spend the rest of my life. It was 28 April 1961 – an Upside-Down Year indeed.
The Water Buffalo
Thao Nguyen
He was not crowned or otherwise adorned. He did not look so different, though his horns curved a little more than the rest. His back was solid and strong. Even though many flies came to rest on him, he did not flick his tail to shoo them away like the others did. He was willing to share his body. ‘A product and companion of nature,’ he would say. His stance was noble. He was the king.
As they gathered around him in silent acknowledgment, he looked at each one of them. He thought of his dreams for them and he imagined the future. They all nodded in agreement.
The water buffalo grazes in herds of about fifty animals. Both wild and domesticated buffaloes have a keen sense of smell.
The sky was fading and the slight breeze in the air was momentarily trapped in the tall bamboo. The herd had dissipated and he was on his own. An occasional tinker could be heard from a bell that hung around the neck of a distant cow. But the king smelled unease. His bones told him of something impending.
The darkness came and he waited. It was an unusually black night. The stars did not emerge and the slight moon was hiding. Still, the wind innocently played hide-and-seek with the bamboo.
Then, as deafening as the thunderous roar of an immense storm, screams echoed so hideous that they carved themselves onto the field. The noises came quickly, one after another, producing a monstrous earthquake of terror. The king knew it. He smelled it coming. He cocked his head to the left and listened for the next anguish. He paused. Then with graceful swiftness he sped towards the echo. Just behind the bamboo cluster, he slowed to a halt. He lowered his head and listened to the silence. After the horrific cries, the silence emerged like a lost, curious child. Then with all his might, the king groaned to the starless sky, a sound so mournful the moon came out from its hiding and sobbed. As he walked slowly among the dead herd, he knew the time had come.
He had no reason to stay and fight. What was left of his strength was buried. He was no longer a king, but an ordinary buffalo, an animal soon to be domesticated to graze and work. Leaving his heart behind, he walked towards the South.
The Indian water buffalo is used in Asian rice fields, but has been taken to many other parts of the world, including the East Indies, the Philippines, Egypt, Hungary, Spain and other countries. Its bone structure and the distribution of weight across its legs make it well suited to agricultural labour.
When the king arrived in the South, he was astonished. There was so much abundance! So much fertility in the soil! Its green was so bright and wholesome he began to weep for his herd. It was busy and exciting. There was movement everywhere. No one noticed his arrival. He took up work at a local farm and, as the days and nights passed, contentment began to seep through his skin. He worked and rested and worked and rested and was fed and worked and rested. The cries of that horrific night began to fade from his ears.
After one long day, as the sky began to fade and he began to rest, he noticed that the stars did not emerge and the moon was hiding behind a cloud. It was an unusually black night and the spirits of his herd came to visit, each one gently rolling over his eyelids. The cries came back and haunted his ears and he groaned a mournful sigh to the starless night, wishing for the heart that he had left behind.
Then, suddenly, the ground began to move and the trees began to shake and divide. The moon split up into twenty pieces and the ground tore beneath him. He was frightened and tried to hold on to anything, but even the air was being torn and ravaged. Suddenly he felt a sense of lightness, something he had never experienced before, a lightness so beautiful he felt he was going to drift away. Then with horror and amazement, he saw the horns on his head begin to fall out as if some giant hand was plucking them from his skull. His dark blackish-blue skin began to fade and his feet were dividing into five short stalks.
Then his snout began to flatten like a mound of clay melting in the sun. His ears began retreating into his head. Afraid he would no longer be able to hear, he twitched them vigorously in a futile effort to stop them receding. He felt as if someone was stretching out his body on a canvas and he could not bear it any longer. But his eyes did not change. He squeezed them shut while rubbing them, hoping it would all disappear. Then with all his might, he yelled out a raging roar. As the rivers rippled with the sound and then became calm again, a freakish stillness overcame him. The land had stopped tearing.
Despite the buffalo’s ability to adapt to its environment, physiologically it is less able to adapt to extremes of heat and cold than various breeds of cattle.
Slowly, he peeled away his hands and un-squinted his eyes. What had become of him? Who was he?
He looked around and saw concrete paths, shops, a coke machine gleaming from a shop window and a bus pulling up to the kerb. He was confused and dazed. But these surroundings felt strangely familiar.
He slowly learned to walk. It took many weeks. After he had mastered walking on two feet, he ventured to learn to talk. This was much harder than he ever could have imagined. What was this language that these people were using and why could they not understand him? Every now and then, he would let out a groan to the sky above, but this was always quickly met with, ‘Why don’t you speak English?’
Buffalo hide is thick and tough and makes good leather. The water buffalo is hard working and powerfully ploughs deep into the mud, making rice farming possible in many places.
As a stranger in a new land, he began to fade into the background. He became a working man and thought, ‘At least I am safe here,’ but he knew where he had left his heart. He tried hard to forget.
He had children and they graduated from medicine, pharmacy and computer science. They were all driven by his desire for them to walk faster and talk smarter than he could. And they succumbed to the pressure, never knowing why they always did better in maths than their colleagues who spoke English at home. Maybe it was the extra tutoring.
Though the water buffalo is strong and versatile, its greatest loss is among its calves. Newborn buffalo calves can fall victim in large numbers to diseases and poor nutrition. The most dangerous and susceptible period for the calf is the first tw
o months of its life.
His only daughter, sick of treating girls with chlamydia at the hospital, gave up her career and returned to college to become a painter. This destroyed her father. They had an angry fight. She said shameful things like, ‘You’re worthless.’ He said, ‘You’re a selfish, ungrateful daughter. I wish you were never born.’ The schism lasted for years.
Then one day, the daughter found herself lying on an expensive couch, drinking expensive red wine, reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. She glanced out the window of her apartment at the hundreds of people scurrying along, and she noticed an old man. He was trying to catch the bus, but was still learning how to walk and how to talk. She returned to her novel, but the feeling of loneliness would not leave her. Maybe that man was from the same land as her father. Then she realised she did not even know where that land was.
She had exhibited her paintings widely and won numerous awards. But from that day on, her work changed and the critics were harsh. ‘Too sentimental,’ they said. ‘The artist is in a professionally dark phase, she has lost her edge and traded it for the human condition. It is rather unfortunate.’
She existed on a plane far away, staying still while the world moved faster and faster around her. She never did belong, here, there or anywhere. She was a stranger in a familiar land. She was fatherless.
One day she returned home. It had been years. Her father was sitting on his favourite chair – a milk crate in the garage. She grabbed another milk crate and sat beside him. They looked at each other and sat in silence until the sky faded.
‘I know you have suffered, but I want to know where it came from. I want to know where your heart is. I want to find it because it has never been here, and I have never been complete,’ she said.
He replied, ‘It is in another lifetime, my daughter. It is impossible to reach. It is gone.’
The water buffalo when wild is very fierce, and it is said that it is a match for a large lion. But generally, the water buffalo is a docile creature, as seen in many postcards from South-East Asia, carrying children on their backs.
She took out a large blank canvas and her paints and told him, ‘Father, I want you to paint your life.’
He took the brushes and began with efficiency. He painted a landscape with hues the daughter had never seen before. Then he painted himself, the second-hand Levi’s jeans, the T-shirt. Hours passed and the sun rose. The daughter woke up and found her father asleep near the canvas, the paints strewn across the linoleum floor. She inspected the picture. It was beautifully peculiar with these vibrant colours and foreign feelings. Amongst it all, there was an image of a man without a face.
Time passed, but the daughter was still trapped in a world she could neither explore nor explain. She was caught in a dimension between reality and a dream world; a world that belonged to her father. She became consumed by the search for his lost heart, to understand it and to bring it home.
More than five per cent of the world’s milk comes from water buffaloes. It is high in fat and solids, which gives it a rich flavour. In many countries, it is much more highly valued than cow’s milk, resulting in high levels of calf mortality, as milk is taken from the parent to be sold.
Years later, she received a note, brief and empty. Callously typed in Times New Roman, 12-point font: ‘Father is dying. St Albert Hospital. Intensive Care. Room 12 Bed 6.’
She arrived. His body had shrunk and he looked like a creature from a fantasy novel. He glanced up at her and asked her to bring him the canvas, the one he had painted for her all those years ago. She did not understand but left immediately. She searched the garage violently. There it stood, in bubble wrap, under a wise layer of black dust. She took it to him, along with some paints. He asked her to leave and to come back in two days. For two days she sat outside the door; the old man locked himself in tightly, refusing food and aid.
His frail hands shakily picked up the paints and began to mix them with precision and grace. As the clock ticked slowly, doctors and nurses scurried along holding bedpans and needles.
The water buffalo, though strong, works quite slowly, and walks along at about three kilometers per hour. It feeds on pastures and farm waste such as crop stubble and sugarcane. The average working life of a buffalo is about eleven years, but some can work to age twenty.
It was time. She opened the door to see her father a transformed being, yellowed and shrivelled. She was filled with bewilderment: not sadness – just confusion. As he drew her near, he whispered, ‘This is my last and only gift to you; carry it with pride and keep it warm beside your heart.’ And with this, his body collapsed, with a gentle sense of deflation.
She sat for a few moments watching this now empty body, a carcass. The air felt crisp. The old air-conditioner hummed nonchalantly. Remembering the painting, she held it up to the light. The world stopped and her head began to buzz. The ground began to fade. Looking at the painting, she finally saw the endless pain in his eyes, the hundreds of stories buried in the abyss. She saw a lifetime of heroism and pockets of private hopes. She saw time and humanity, war and life. The face of the painted buffalo stared at her with so much sorrow and nobility, she felt her heart dissolving.
She looked back at the body on the hospital bed and didn’t know what to do. She ran outside as fast as she could, but there was no one on the streets. It was 4 a.m. and the air was chilly. There was a homeless man sleeping among some green rubbish bags. She ran towards him and rambled some incomprehensible sentences about a buffalo and a great man passing. The homeless man shrugged her off and went back to sleep.
Finally, she was on the border of the dream world, but it was too late. She would never know and she would be caught forever in this place between dream and reality. As she collapsed on the ground, she gave a mournful groan to the still-dark sky.
She slowly returned to the empty halls of the hospital and made her way back to the room where the body lay. Sitting on a grey plastic chair across from the bed she watched. As the sun came up and forced itself through the sterile venetian blinds, it cast itself on the painting, highlighting the hues she had never seen before, those foreign but brilliant colors. Somewhere between this reality and her father’s dream world was where she now existed, a place of truth.
She picked up the bedpan, walked out the door and closed it gently behind her.
The Ganges and Its Tributaries
Christopher Cyrill
My mother said that empty houses were protected by the spirit of Visakha, who would guard the house until the family of his choice had inspected it. He would then leave a sign to convince them that they had found their home. My mother said that she had bought our house because the spirit of Visakha had arranged nails in the shape of three crucifixes on the windowsill of what eventually became my bedroom. My great-grandmother kept three cruci-fixes on every windowsill of her home in Howrah. My mother remembered having to kiss each crucifix before going to bed when she stayed with my great-grandmother during the festival of Divali.
My mother said that everyone in India lived in their rightful homes because they understood the signs of Visakha.
*
When we first moved into our house in Dandenong it smelt of the wet newspapers that had been laid out in front of the doors of all the houses. Later, when we peeled away the newspaper pages, fragments remained stuck to the doorsteps, and thresholds to rooms, as if all the doors of our home were epigraphed. When we walked on the timber floorboards small puffs of dust coated our shoes. The backyard was full of tiny hills over which I led my army of clothes-peg soldiers, and elephants that my father had carved out of sandalwood for me. My father used an iron mallet to flatten out the hills and I remember feeling the ground shake every time he brought the mallet down.
For four weekends workmen brought truckloads of soil and sand. My father raked the soil and sand into the backyard and sprinkled lawn seed over it.
When the grass began to grow, my father cut out a three-metre square of dirt from o
ne corner of the backyard. He placed a fibreglass mould into the square. He covered the mould with sheets of plastic and weighed it down with pebbles that more workmen brought in trucks on the weekends. It seems now as if there were always mountains of materials on the nature strip of our Dandenong home. My father stapled the plastic to the fibre-glass mould, and filled the mould with water.
When the pond was ready, my father spent three days and nights building his model of India. He pencilled a map of India onto a piece of chipboard, and then went over the outline with a texta. He went over the texta outline with a razorblade and then, with a knife, he cut away the excess chipboard. He was left with the rough borders of India, with room enough at the northern point for the Himalayas.
My father pasted paper maps of India onto the chipboard and wrapped it tightly in plastic. He carved mountains out of sandalwood to represent the Himalayas. He painted the mountains a darker brown and glued them to the line that divided India from Tibet.
My father ignored all terrain outside the borders of India, except for the Himalayas. I believe he omitted the neighbouring countries solely to banish Pakistan from the map of the world in his mind.
My father used blue thread to represent such rivers as the Tapti and Penner, but for the Ganges he used shoelaces, dyed blue and stitched together. The shoelaces were as thick as the shoelaces of desert boots, and when he glued them to the map the Ganges and all its tributaries looked out of proportion to the rest of the map, as if they had been designed to a different scale. The shoelaces covered the point where Calcutta was supposed to be, so my father had to move the toothpick marker a centimetre from its proper place.