Matt laughed and came over to pinch my thigh. “I would eat you for sure. I would cook this leg first.”
“Oh my god! Stop it already. I am not supposed to move!”
“Toes are underrated. There must be a soup recipe out there that makes good use of them.”
“Did you read Perfume?”
“Yes, and?” He jumped back up again to grab the cooked peas and I looked at him enviously. I hadn’t moved from the couch in days. The only thing I could eat without throwing up was plain unsalted peas.
“How did he make the perfume smell so good, again?”
“He used the blood of young virgins and their enticing pheromones. Why?”
“The Mexican lovers. I remember reading he didn’t preserve the meat properly, and it began to rot over time. Maybe perfume would have made for a more lasting preservation. You could spritz the memory of your loved one on your body. You know, bottle their essence.”
“Making a perfume out of your lover? Celebrities bottle up their so-called scents and sell them, so why not make scents from actual ordinary people? And forget about going to a laboratory and choosing extracts. Use the real skin and bones!” He sniffed my hair. “Yes, your hair smells like citrus and oak. Perfectly marketable, if you ask me.”
“I am far too vain to fork over a hair sample.”
“I’m sure you would only need a few strands to make the perfume. Look at me, talking like I am a professional perfumer. Okay, gourmet peas, coming up. I hope the two of you approve of Daddy’s cooking!”
I put a hand over my small bump. Nearly three months pregnant, I started bleeding a week ago. While the doctors had told me bedrest was a good idea, they said it was by no means a guarantee to save the baby.
“Don’t blame yourself,” they said. “Miscarrying is a part of life. Try again.” Like losing a baby was the same as getting a flat tire. They said every time I bled, it was the aftermath of things that had already happened internally. Getting up to pee didn’t directly cause bleeding. But I still found ways to blame myself.
I was already acquainted with the miniature human growing inside of me. I saw baby fists thrown in the air and smelled warm yogurt-and-cheese baby breath. The torture of being in limbo: would I be a mother or wouldn’t I? It was painful to imagine the fetus already had fingernails and hair follicles. Instead, I tried to convince myself the baby was a black period at the end of a sentence, nothing more than a circle of blackness.
I spent my bedrest watching talk shows featuring two-legged dogs with wheelchairs. I cried into tissues watching parents celebrate weekly birthdays for a baby born dying, knowing full well it would never make it to six months. As a pregnant vegetarian, I found myself downright rude to people defending their right to consume meat, for now I thought of all cows, chickens, and pigs as mothers who deserved the right to raise their children. Suddenly, I felt tyrannically conservative in my views about abortion rights, finding it impossible to comprehend how anyone could kill something inside of them. I watched shows featuring adoption, and I cried more. How could anyone give up their own baby, no matter how dire their circumstances? I found it sickeningly impossible to understand other points of views. I could only see my own.
I lost the baby bit by bit. I felt an intense need to go to the bathroom, where I experienced mini contractions. I watched the baby fall out of me in red chunks. I became the type of person who cried into the toilet bowl, fishing out the plasma to put it into a plastic zip-locked bag so the doctors could identify it.
The doctor did not want to see the bag.
Nobody wanted to see the bag.
Matt yelled at me when he found it hidden under a bag of carrots in the refrigerator crisper box, and disposed of it without telling me.
My plan was to bury it in the backyard with candles and flowers. Usually, I abhorred eulogies and incense-waving of any kind, but the thought of my poor baby being tossed out with the banana peels was unbearable.
We didn’t speak for days over this. I had to blame someone for the loss, and Matt was the best candidate. I put my hands over my ears to his argument that we were all organic material. This was no time for rationality.
After two weeks of slowly miscarrying, I sat in a spearmint green hospital gown, waiting to be observed. The doctor told me I was bleeding internally. He said an emergency dilation and curettage would remove any “remnants” of the baby, which posed a risk to my health. I sobbed.
Matt was at work. How convenient for him he did not have to experience this. No doubt, he would say something stupid like, “We can try again,” or, “It wasn’t meant to be.” Ordinary things every person was programmed to say.
When all was said and done, I couldn’t bring myself to share my loss. A miscarriage wasn’t some silly breakup where you could call a girlfriend and open a bottle of wine and laugh and cry. No, this was real adult pain, not martini meetup material. When I was first married, I was surrounded by a beehive of women: at bridal showers, lingerie parties, bachelorette parties. But now they were off buying the next bridesmaid dress and the next baby shower bassinette. There were no special gift baskets for a miscarriage.
“Go out and grab a coffee, learn to enjoy your own company again,” my mom advised. When I did, I saw babies dressed in Halloween sleepers in the window of Baby Gap. Mannequins of ghosts and goblins, less than three feet tall, knee-deep in faux autumn leaves, stared at me. Worse, I bumped into real babies, pumpkin faced with plump drumstick legs dangling out of carriers. Men surprising me around corners, casually sipping lattes, wearing babies strapped to their bodies like armour, looking like they’d been baby-wearing for centuries.
I found myself hating people who had nothing to do with babies: lone people walking their dogs, cranky sales clerks, peppy baristas. After all, they were all babies who’d had the good fortune to be born. And I deduced, through simple calculation, that the majority had working reproductive organs and had not experienced a miscarriage, or if they had, they’d moved on and had another baby. A healthy baby. Or they were blessed because they didn’t want children to begin with. How lucky to be free from such yearnings!
In other words, I did not get through my loss by being a bigger person. I got through it being a rather pitifully petty person.
To avoid all the people in the world that irritated me, I locked myself at home. I still had cravings for pregnancy food, odd things like mashed potatoes with corn mixed in, French fries with my grandmother’s recipe for Indian chutney. My gut-wrenching nausea remained. When I looked in the mirror, I saw I still had a pronounced belly bump. Yep. There was no mistake. I was actually growing, not shrinking. Was this some scientific miracle? Had my baby survived despite the odds? I went to see the doctor.
“It’s been a while since my, my … loss,” I stammered. “But I look extremely pregnant. In fact I have been gaining weight in my belly, not losing it.”
“Hmmm,” the doctor said, examining my belly. “This happens once in a while to women. I have heard of it, but you are my first case.”
“Am I still pregnant?”
“It’s a ghost pregnancy,” said the doctor. “It will take a while yet for your body’s hormones to normalize and take notice that you are no longer pregnant. Unfortunately, your body is growing and acting as if you are still hosting another being. But don’t worry, eventually your body will register the fact and your symptoms will vanish.”
Don’t worry.
I took to wearing baggy clothes. My eyes froze into two champagne icicles. The eyebrows that framed them desperately needed to be shaped. I let my black roots grow four inches long. The leftover blonde streaks hung down my back like hay. Most days, I braided it so I didn’t have to wash it. Fed-up, I decided dying my hair back to dark brown would mean less maintenance. The worst part of that was staring at my colourless face in the salon mirror. I placed a protective hand over my empty womb while the colourist brush
ed dark paint through my hair, slapping it on like mud on a monster truck.
“How many months along, honey?”
I didn’t say a word. I knew I would never come back here again.
Not too long after, I came home one night and switched on the lights, thinking I was the first one home. At some point I must have started teaching ESL again. I looked down at my body for proof of this. Oversized peasant tops paired with boyfriend blazers did wonders for disguising a ghost pregnancy. Examining my hands, I saw they were like my mother’s, soft and worn. Absorbed with myself, I heard a soft, muffling sound coming from the would-be nursery. I should have been afraid — I should have been the only one home. But grief had robbed me of all sense. I strode into the room unarmed, more curious than alarmed.
Matt was on his knees in the closet. I dropped and touched his shoulders. “Babe! Why aren’t you at the university? What’s wrong?”
“I miss the baby.”
“But you were never upset before.”
“Of course I was.”
“But you always just said we’d try again. Like it was easy for you.”
For a long while he didn’t respond. He only held his gut and squeezed his eyes shut. Finally, he spoke: “Look, I needed to hear it will happen again for us. Did you ever stop to think I was trying to reassure myself?”
I was shattered. “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “We’ll try again.”
“We will? Will it work?”
“Of course it will. We will have a nice fat juicy baby with butter-cream thighs.”
Matt laughed then. “Sounds delicious,” he said, rubbing a thumb under his eyes.
“The baby will be delicious, but you have to promise not to eat it.”
He picked himself up from the floor. “Good thing we never got around to buying clothes. Remember that time I tried to buy a baby bikini? You were pretty sure it was a girl.”
“It was too early to prepare.” I didn’t tell him about the miniature yellow dress hanging in the closet, mine from when I was a baby.
“You are so sensible now. That used to be my job.”
“I do have something on the bookshelf that might help us,” I offered. “Now, despite this hiccup in your sensibility, I know you are not superstitious. This will be purely a symbolic act to make us feel better.”
I pulled all six feet plus of him into the living room. On the bookshelf sat the fertility doll. I cracked open its belly. “You are supposed to write how many kids you want on a piece of paper, and the doll grants your wish.”
“Where did you get this thing?”
“A friend gave it to me in the Philippines. She was certain it would come in handy one day.”
In all the time I had known Matt, he would have laughed at this suggestion. But today he hurriedly grabbed two scrap pieces of paper. On his he wrote: I want four babies. My strategy was to ask for a little and hope for a lot. I want many babies. But I would be happy with one. I drew hearts and stars around the word “one.” I tucked the papers deep into the belly of the doll. We stood back and looked at the shelf.
“Babe, can I ask you something?” I looked at the collection of books. “Have you read every single book on our bookshelf?”
“Who the heck has read every book on their bookshelf?”
I smiled, touching my belly. “I need a cup of chai.”
Before he could respond, I rushed to the kitchen and pulled out the steel container that held the spices. For the first time in days I had energy, and I moved blurry-fast, pulling out the pot, filling it with water, throwing in fennel, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, pepper, sugar, adding in tea bags. When the water boiled, I added milk. Whipping around, I saw Matt sitting at our breakfast bar, hands folded in front of him.
“I hope you poured me a cup.”
“Well,” I said coyly, “I’m used to drinking my chai alone, but if you insist … ”
“Mine has to be to go, though. I have to be at the university.”
“Oh,” I said, “of course … ”
Before he left, he kissed me on the cheek. I looked into my cup, that soothing pool of milky peach, and saw my reflection in white light, quivering ever so slightly. I knew Matt and I would survive this loss. I would even survive this loss. But I was not the same anymore. That carefree Maya, chasing after shipwrecks and sharks, was someone from yesterday. Someone I might have had a nice conversation with, one Saturday night at a house party. Oddly, I didn’t miss her even a little. With that thought, I tipped back the sweet tea and tasted a tiny bit of pepper on my tongue. I moved it onto my teeth and crushed the grain.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MUCH OF THIS BOOK has been written while nursing one of my three boys. Reflecting on my heritage inspired me to take on this project, but when I looked to my own history, the stories of how my family came to Africa from India had eroded with time. I thus researched a variety of immigrant experiences to concoct a fictitious journey for Maya Mubeen and her foremothers. Beyond books and articles, my interviewees’ sharing of historical events such as Idi Amin’s rule over Uganda and their experience of covering treacherous terrains decades past, allowed me to shape and design the setting and backdrop for this novel. South Asian dishes mentioned have been the one staple that has stood the test of time, and while I have enjoyed imagining the characters of this book, I had no need to do so with cuisine. I did, however, delight in inventing a recipe to go along with the concept of chocolate cherry chai.
There are many people to thank who helped me along my journey in bringing this book to life:
To my first and last writing teachers, both influential and inspiring: Cariboo Hill Secondary’s Mr. Kirby and Simon Fraser University’s Ms. Dionne Brand, for recognizing my passion.
To the lovely people of Puerto Galera, thank you for the warm memories. To Tomoko Okamoto and Toyofuku Sensei, for making Japan home.
Candice Montgomery, Ashiya Khan-Sequeira, Noriko Hagiwara, Lisa Visser, Ashvinder Lamba, and Nick Andreychuk, for tremendous support and guidance.
Philippa Joy, for walks, talks, and encouragement.
Ken Robichaux, your informative take and expertise on all things cinematic history helped me stay true to movie theatre technologies and their respective time periods.
Lisa Bertsch, for your keen eye and photography.
Nihan Sevinç, for your insight I make a real recipe to go along with the title.
Rosemary Winks, for reading over passages pertaining to Chinese culture and making sure I represented Cantonese sentiments to the best of my abilities.
Sunita Bowal, for checking accuracy in Punjabi customs, delicacies, and traditions.
A sincere thank-you to Maureen Kihika and Anthony Ndirangu for information on East African culture, East African railway, and proofreading the Swahili dialogues used.
Abdul Rahim Abubakar, for your historical pictures of Old Town Mombasa and assistance with archival research. Thank you for helping me envision the landscape of Africa’s past, from the details of automobiles to buildings.
I am grateful to the talented Batul Tejani for proofreading passages containing Gujarati, Hindi, and Urdu, in addition to doing English editing.
To Daniela Abasi, my first reader, thank you for your invaluable feedback and guidance on the original work, as well as redrafts, and for listening to new ideas and directions.
To Gulbanu Jaffer Visram, I appreciate you allowing me to interview you, both in Gujarati and English. Your firsthand experience of riding the Ugandan Railroad helped me shape and develop Sukaina’s (imagined) journey.
To my mother-in-law, Aleksandra Burkowicz, and my father-in-law, Kazimierz Burkowicz, for your champagne toasts and belief in me.
To my late uncles, Mohammed Hemraj and Rizwan Hemraj, for painting the scenery of East Africa in my young mind, and to their respective families for additional support.
; To my aunt, Shirin Suleiman, for our travels and your recollection of Pakistan and East Africa. You helped me construct layouts of entire neighbourhoods better than any research book.
This book would not be here today if not for my mom, Naseem Sherif, whose passion for telling stories now extends to her grandchildren. Thanks to my dad, Zahoor Sherif, for our India trip and anecdotes on Tanzania. To my brother, Nishat Sherif, for championing my project.
To my sons, Anjay, Alek, and Augustyn, for showing me every day how important it is to leave stories behind with my children. Thank you, my three little bears, for your love.
To my publisher, Beverley Rach, and all the fine people at Roseway Publishing, for believing in CCC right from the start.
This book would not have been possible without the unending support and suggestions put forth by my editor, Sandra McIntyre. Thank you, Sandra, for putting the spices in the chai that made this book.
And finally, to my husband, Jakub Burkowicz, for convincing me that I already was a writer before this work got published. You are the muse for all the great loves in the lives of the women of CCC.
xxx.
Taslim Burkowicz
A NOTE ON SOURCES
TO HELP ME STAY TRUE to the times and places that this novel skips around to, I obtained information from the following books:
Ettegale Blauer and Jason Lauré’s Enchantment of the World: Uganda; Rob Bowden’s Kenya; Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes; Ellen Labrecque’s Pakistan; Sean McCollum’s Kenya; Liz Sonneborn’s Pakistan: Enchantment of the World; J.H.’s Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile; Stacy Taus-Bolstad’s Pakistan in Pictures; Quintin Wink’s Culture Smart! Tanzania
Credit also goes to the following websites for their treasure chests of available data:
“Asians of Africa – Everyday Culture” http://www.everyculture.com/Africa-Middle-East/Asians-of-Africa.html
“Electrical Goods and Appliances in the 1920s” http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/20selectrical.html
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