Secrets We Kept

by Krystal A. Sital

  In Trinidad the body is brought to the house the night before the funeral. Because we are all Hindus in my family, it is customary for the casket to be wrapped in white and for the body to be draped in traditional whites—saris for the women and kurtas for the men. In the living room, people hold hands and support one another, approaching the dead. The next day the body is transferred to a makeshift stretcher constructed of bamboo, the whites of everyone’s clothing, the color of our mourning, dazzling beneath the sun. We go to Waterloo at the southern tip of Trinidad, to the temple at the sea. The men of the family lift and carry the stretcher to the pyre of wood prepared on one of the concrete cremation sites. We follow, gripping one another. We watch as the eldest male lights a cube of camphor on a silver spoon and places it into the mouth of the dead. Sometimes the eldest, broken in grief, can’t do it and a younger brother or a friend steps in. Fire licks the lips and curls around the mouth. The men, their muscles straining from the weight, slide the body into the center of the pyre. Bamboo hides the body from sight. With torches, the men touch the four corners of the pyre, and fire leaps from one place to another. We wait and watch. We visit the temple and touch the feet of gods, extending offerings as we pray for the lives of our family members and our own. Only when we hear the explosion of the skull do we leave, making sure all are taken care of and have a ride home.

  Early next morning the family returns to the site of the cremation, and whether or not they do this alone is something they decide. They gather the ashes and set them free into the ocean. Prayers mingled with sobs escape their lips, and while they are tempted to let the sea swallow them as it has the remains of their loved one, they will turn around and trudge on. They are not the only people to lose someone, and we all know the pain, like everything else, will fade.

  My grandfather can’t be cremated by the water’s edge, can’t be taken to his home for a viewing of the body, doesn’t have his prayers and ceremonies. We’ve all now scattered in America, and his traditions and customs are lost, forgotten. Instead he is incinerated, and no one is allowed to watch as he is shoved into the cold steel fortress of the crematorium.

  One of his last surviving sisters makes the trip from Trinidad to attend his funeral. Traditions and customs are held intact within her—she knows the Puranic songs and chants from their shared childhood, the length of the mourning period, the funeral rites in the correct sequence for the days and even months after he is cremated. Though she and my grandmother are polite to one another, between them is a deep rift that can never be mended.

  At the wake, someone invites us to the front of the room to sing bhajans and utter prayers. My mother urges me forward, physically pushes me, knowing I am the only other one besides my father who knows the words by heart. I stumble into the aisle, and a few people turn back to look at me, their gazes inquisitive. No, I say firmly. And doh push meh again. Ah will sing from right hyah, Ma.

  My mother is taken aback at my resistance and sways by my side to the familiar songs. My grandfather’s sister is the only one singing; her voice follows the swell and fall of ancient words. She falters, and the swaying crowd stops. I pick up where she’s left off, and my cousins glance at me through slits of eyes. They think I’m showing off, but I am only trying to give my grandfather a semblance of the end he should have, what we all know he would have wanted.

  In Trinidad, we do not live shut up in our houses. We see the outside of our homes more than we see the inside. It often rains without thunder and lightning, and on those days we laugh and talk in the rain. The island is small, tiny even, and we are bound to see each other often. While in America, we escape to our city or town or house for years before we see one another again. On the islands, death affects us differently, drawing people from their homes to pay their respects to the dead. It is a place where grief falls in wails and thickens the flat blades of grass and earth around the deceased’s house, the same earth we will eventually trample when visiting again.

  But in the funeral home in Jersey City, we stand in rented space and time. And so when my cousins and I cross paths, everything is tainted; we exchange sneers or simply ignore each other as we pass by. I look at them as they flounce away as a pack, and I don’t understand what has happened to us, that as adults we have come to face death and loss with anger and pride. Maybe in Trinidad there would have been more room for forgiveness; maybe we would share stories about our grandfather, and I could apologize for welcoming his favoritism, explain to them that I didn’t understand how he could be so hurtful. We would hold one another tightly, chest to chest, exchanging tears in our embrace. But there is too much isolation in America, too many miles and people between us. We yearn to be apart instead of together, preferring the darkness of our homes to the wails that unite us.

  These nights of the wake are torturous; it goes on for days, and I can’t bring myself to go to all of it. Instead I bury myself in my work, immersing myself in the poetry of Frost and Tennyson and letting the language of Hardy consume me.

  EULOGY

  I HAVE NO REGRETS about not attending my grandfather’s funeral. I lie to my family and tell them I have a midterm I can’t miss. Yuh teachah goh undahstand, my mother says. And she is right, of course, but we are reading Thomas Hardy, and that is more appealing than roiling in my seat at his funeral while speeches are made about how perfect my grandfather was. Hardy makes love to language in his descriptions of landscape; his work is rich and enticing, paragraphs pregnant with succulent words, a world I want to succumb to, even if only temporarily.

  My grandfather’s eulogy—my cousin wrote it, considering it her right as the eldest grandchild—starts off saying he is a “magnificent person, and awesome dad,” then continues to extol him as though he is Christ returned to earth: “Our father, Shiva Singh, was a very loving, compassionate, caring, hardworking . . .” No attempt to marshal some measure of truth.

  At the wake, I stewed while the same group of adult cousins bawled their eyes out, snot dripping from their noses, voices cracking as they spoke of this man they knew nothing about, didn’t even bother trying to find out anything about. Yet they spoke of him and remembered him without truth, without glancing at his wife, their grandmother, who sat through their performance without a teardrop forming in her eyes. My ­grandmother struck up hearty conversations with people around her and laughed her throaty laugh that resonated deeply in her chest. A free woman now, she could grin as she wanted and wherever she pleased.

  I still wonder how my grandmother must have felt when she heard these words at the funeral:

  Family meant the world to our father. He treated his family with respect, and dignity. He cared for his family so much more than words can describe . . . He cared for his wife like no other. He treated her as if every day was his last, and even did in his last moment.

  In his last moments, when my grandmother approached him at his bedside, he screamed the familiar string of no we’d all learned to endure—No-No-Nonononono! Eventually even this reaction dropped away. When my mother asked him, Pappy, yuh know meh? there was no response. When I asked him, Grampa, yuh know who dis is? there was no response. Yet every time my grandmother opened her mouth, or someone said her name, he’d muster up enough energy to scream his string of no’s.

  His grandchildren meant a lot to him in all aspects of his life. He treated every one as if they were his own. Helped raised them all and taught them every life’s moral he taught his children.

  Shiva’s children were, in his view, destined either to be nothing like him or everything he embodied, nothing in between. That is what he taught them. He shunned the grandchildren he called wutless and bhad, told them, goh from hyah, meh eh wahn to see yuh, yelled at their parents, take dem chilren away wid dey nasty behavior.

  Given the chance to write that eulogy, in front of family and friends, I promise I would have told the truth.

  MY FIRST TIME BACK in Trinidad since leaving twelve years before, I find myself alongside Uncle Avinash, planting my
toes in the soil while we sit in the shade of a coconut tree. My family and his lie in the sand just where the water pools at your back, then recedes, the calmest point of intersection between sea and land.

  Only a few seconds before I’d been playing with my teenaged cousins—Avinash’s son and daughter—and talking of our shared interest in music. They were quite involved with ­American pop culture, while I was more interested in the rhythms of the island, each of us yearning for the other side of the divide.

  And then I saw Avinash sitting off to the side, everyone occupied with someone except him, at ease by himself, loneliness his company, much like his father, my grandfather. How complicated it must have been for them all with Avinash’s entrance into their lives. Young Arya was unable to understand the depth of her father’s betrayal. Avinash’s existence posed a threat to the life Rebecca had fought so hard to preserve, the life she was providing for her children. Rebecca must have felt that giving her children permission to physically harm another child was an act of self-preservation. And yet this child who grew into a man, who became more of an uncle to me than some of my full uncles, is kind and generous, but I do not know if this stems from the favor my grandfather showed me as well.

  And so we sit and watch the ocean before us, one of the most glorious beaches in the Caribbean—Maracas. It is a natural bay etched on unblemished terrain, waters pristine and picturesque, that aquamarine blue that tapers off and meanders around mossy green mounds and emerald waters, where stray dogs trudge along the sand picking at bits of fried bake and shark, dried roti chunks, congealed pieces of breadfruit, and pigtail people have left behind. We cook on these beaches over open fires, taking the day’s catch and dousing it in lime and pepper sauce, drying fish and shells on pieces of galvanized metal before roasting them over the fire. The waves are tempestuous, exactly the reason we’ve traveled through the mountainous region for an hour to arrive at this gem of ocean nestled deep down in the valleys. For us, comfort lies in the least calm waters.

  Today the notorious Maracas waves pulverize the shoreline; the coconut trees dance as nuts shake loose from their bunches, and a pain sprouts in my heart as I look into Avinash’s face. What I want from him, I realize right there in that moment, is for him to be my grandfather because he looks so much like him. His eyebrows threaded together across his handsome face, the gleaming darkness of his skin, his free locks blowing in the breeze. He looks the way I once remembered Shiva—tall, fierce, and dark. I yearn for the moments of gruffness my grandfather had toward others and how I was capable of turning his mood around with the suggestion of a checkers game or a story. Avinash is my grandfather incarnate. The child he never meant to have is the man who will carry forth his legacy.

  Krystal, Avinash says as he digs in the sand. His voice sounds so much like my grandfather’s I cringe from him for an instant. My mother is talking to Avinash’s wife, Delilah, and her eyes keep flicking to us, to him. When she locks eyes with me, I know she is thinking the same thing.

  Yuh know wah dis is, Krystal? He says my name in that same voice, in that same way my grandfather always did. Uncle Avinash reveals a translucent creature scrabbling in his cupped hands.

  We does call dem sea cockroach, he continues, oblivious to my reaction, speaking more to himself than me. We use toh ketch dem plenty and ross dem right hyah on de beach back een de day. I look at the creature lying supine and kicking its many legs, trying to flip over, the wet sand around it holding it down. Me and yuh faddah use toh come all de time and cook dem, he says, dat an chip-chip.

  My father, mother, and Avinash. They had good times once. Before Arya married and moved away. Before my mother had me and my sister, catapulting her first into motherhood, then onward to America. They didn’t forget one another in the interim, the obligatory appearances at weddings, funerals, baby showers, births, and celebrations bringing them together, but not in the same way they had once listened to music and drunk beer, tumbled in the waves and wrapped themselves in the sweetness of their stolen time as friends.

  Avinash still lives in Trinidad, working as a maxi taxi driver, the only one of Shiva’s children who didn’t witness his demise.

  Yuh nevah try it before? he asks, inviting me into the conversation the same way my grandfather would. Right here is where I want to say so much to him, lean my head on his shoulder in the most familiar way and tell him everything I know, but now I don’t know which him I would be talking to—my grandfather or Avinash.

  I shake my head and choose to say nothing as he talks more about sea animals and cookouts on the beach. Such a mundane conversation told in the dangerous bass of my grandfather’s voice, one that makes me feel as though I am slipping into velutinous darkness. He asks me another question, and I venture a no. He laughs the same soft heh-heh-heh my grandfather used to laugh so amiably with me. Uncle Avinash’s laugh conveys I’ve missed out on an important Trini ritual, and try as I might to look past his laugh, the sound swells in my mind, becoming louder than the waves crashing in the background.

  Uncle Avinash closes his hands over the sea cockroach for a moment, and I stiffen. He opens it and closes it again. My stomach twists. Open. Close. I cringe. He’s going to kill this tiny thing right in front of me, right in the middle of his hand, he’s going to squash it to death, I think. For no reason.

  But then he opens his hands like a clam displaying a pearl, and the defenseless critter scuttles around before leaping from the sand bed in his palm. It arcs elegantly through the air before plummeting to the beach, then skips and hops its way to the sea, where it burrows deep into the ocean bed.

  My grandfather would never have let it go.

  What remains is this: long after Shiva has withered away and died, cooking remains the sacred ritual binding my grandmother, my mother, and me. For many years I watch my mother and grandmother become stronger, powerful even, around the fire. We continue to gather together often, and eventually he seems almost to not matter anymore. As my grandmother briskly spins spinach seheena balls in the center of her palm, my mother sears brown sugar in oil for jerk pork, and I boil bits of dasheen tossed with habanero-infused smoked herring; and when we all partake of a meal, our fingers soaking roti bits in curry—we build together. These familiar smells release our inhibitions, draw us closer, and around the tantalizing aroma of food, comforted, these women whisper their stories for me to weave together, to make sense of our lives, healing and understanding passing from one generation to the next.

  WE FOLLOW THE FRACTURED ROAD that spirals first up, then down the mountain. The foliage along the hills is incandescent, the coarse tree trunks almost black from morning dew. After so many years away, each time we jump into our rented car to visit a place of distant memory, the energy is electric, coursing through us and crackling the air. The streets are wide enough for one car only, and when there is an oncoming vehicle, my father pulls aside on the grassy embankment of a drain to allow the other car to pass.

  My mother and I want to go back to the place where she grew up, to walk through the estate, touch the walls of our childhood, find something familiar in this country that has changed so much while we were gone. We make stops along the way to eat in the shade of shacks, to visit with old friends who still live off pathways where cars can’t drive, like my grandmother’s childhood home. They live in houses constructed from corrugated tin, clothes flapping on lines outside their home. My parents remember these roads that veer off paved streets and channel down steep inclines. We must pull off the main road and leave the car to walk down a path to get to these friends, people they’ve not seen since school days but who remember my parents in an instant.

  Seeing my mother’s curled hair and carefully made-up face, painted nails, designer blouse and jeans, these women shy away, gulping her in with their brown eyes. Their skin is greasy, their hair oily and flat against their heads, the clothes on their bodies ragged and torn. When they smile they cover their mouths to hide their rotted teeth or toothless gums. Nevertheless, the
­hospitality remains the same, and they draw us into their homes, offering drinks they do not have or cannot afford. We decline collectively and opt for water, and while our glasses sweat in the incredible heat and our make-up melts off our faces, we rediscover these lives.

  These houses are far removed from the fortress I grew up in, but the poverty is familiar. To look upon the faces of people we once knew and see their pain wrenches something from deep within. I clutch these women and men, friends of my parents, in a tight embrace; I wish them well. I kiss their sweaty cheeks and wrap my arms around their thick necks. They are surprised and step away, as though scared to wrinkle my colorful sundress. Tears glitter in our eyes as we leave them behind. I start the hike back to the car, allowing my mother to linger and slip them money they refuse to take but which she leaves anyway; ­American bills, an oddity, a luxury.

  We resume our journey to Sangre Grande. I place TT bills on my skirted lap, and Colette unrolls US currency on hers. I straighten the bright reds, greens, purples, and blues. They are luminous against my white clothes and prismatic in the sunlight compared to the muted greens, yellows, and grays of America’s money.

  We reach, my mother says, and I cock my head as I look out the window. The mountain along the gravel road, once teeming with trees, has been shaved. Atop it is a garish steel structure fenced in by a swaying chain-link fence.