by Tamara Gray
Oh it was shameful! By the following evening, the artichokes that Daniel Flint had salvaged from the floral arrangements were bobbing about in a pan of salted water in Olivia’s Holland Park kitchen, and they were both still laughing as she opened the second bottle of wine.
He had noticed her almost immediately: she was hard to miss with that hair and those legs. He had picked out the drummer whose band had provided the soundtrack to his youth, and there she was staring up at him with huge doe eyes, twisted around in her chair, blonde hair lustrous around her shoulders and falling in thick waves against the emerald sheen of her dress.
She’s wearing a loose silk blouse this evening. Her amber eyes glisten, he sees tears wobble and spill as he tells her about the things he’s seen. The carcasses: so many of them. The bones with bits of tiger skin still attached that are suspended in the bottles of rice wine. ‘Like the worms in tequila,’ she says, twisting her hair. ‘Much worse.’
‘Oh yes, I didn’t mean that…’
He reaches over and touches the sweet tip of her nose where a little butter has made it shine. ‘And the tiger’s nose leather is used to treat wounds,’ he says. His fingers move to the top of her head. ‘The brain is ground into a paste for pimples.’ He kneels at her feet, takes her hands in his. ‘The claws are used to cure insomnia…’ Her nails are lacquered bright red and he kisses them one by one. She smells deliciously of aniseed.
She woke shivering from the strangest dream. Daniel Flint lay stretched out beside her, one arm thrown across the pillow, palm upwards as though waiting for something to be placed into it, the other lost beneath the sheets. He was smiling slightly in his sleep in a way that made her envy whatever was going on in there. Her own dream hadn’t been so bad, just odd: she had been tiptoeing through the snow on a high silvery plateau, wrapped in soft furs, a tiny fawn-like creature on wobbly legs beside her, nibbling and nuzzling her, looking up at her with liquid brown eyes, and in the dream she knew that this was her baby, and that just out of sight Daniel was standing, sniffing the air for danger, guarding them. She steals another look at him across her pillow: his nostrils flare slightly, his eyelashes and brows are so dark they appear to have been sketched and smudged on to his face with charcoal. It seems impossible that such a beautiful specimen is lying in her bed. It’s like finding a Faberge egg in a junk shop.
She tiptoes from the bed. Moonlight floods the room as she slides back the curtains and she can smell the night-scented jasmine that winds its way from the garden to her window, but still she can’t shake her chill. Daniel stirs slightly in his sleep, mutters something that sounds like “beloved,” and turns his face into the pillow. Olivia can’t stop smiling as she wraps herself in her shahtoosh and wonders at her strange dream. How can it be that a mere vision of a snowy wasteland can make her feel so cold on a summer’s night?
She slips back into bed, shivering despite the shawl, her beloved “toosh” given to her on her wedding night, and the envy of all her friends. The fine faun-coloured cloth so wondrous it was said that a pigeon egg would hatch if it were to be wrapped in it. ‘There,’ her husband ran the miraculous bolt right through the centre of her wedding ring. ‘The real thing. I won’t tell you how much it cost.’
Daniel wakes with a dry mouth and Olivia’s sheets tangled around his legs. He reaches for her across the bed and his fingers snag against something soft. He slides his eyes sideways and even in the pinkish dawn he fears that he knows only too well what it is she has wrapped around herself.
He turns onto his elbow and gingerly rubs a piece of the cloth between his finger and thumb: it is unmistakably a shahtoosh, made from hairs so fine that whoever wove it had probably gone blind.
A small snore escapes from Olivia’s mouth, and with it a sour smell. Stupid woman! He doesn’t know if he wants to shout at her or run away. Both probably. He wonders if she’s one of the brainless ones who believe these things were fashioned from the shed breast feathers of the fictitious Tooshi bird, but doubts it. The newspapers have been full of this fashion scandal: the massacre of four young Chiru antelopes for every shawl. He stands from the bed and bends down over her, just to be sure. He should wake her up and tell her how the chirus died for her: caught in the headlights and gunned down, or with their legs bitten through by the teeth of a barbarous trap. He should tell her how soon these beautiful creatures will become extinct and how it will be a double tragedy since the chiru’s fleeces are carried over the mountains to the Indian border and bartered for Tiger parts: India trading with China so that every shahtoosh has the blood of a tiger upon it. But the nausea he feels is rising from his stomach and burning his throat and she doesn’t smell so good to him now. A breeze sucks at the curtain and shadows fall across her face. She had seemed almost radiant to him the night before, with her trembling tears and righteous indignation; he would have been happy to die in her arms; but now he can see that it was all artifice. If he tugged hard enough the blonde tresses would probably come off in his hands and there is something unnatural about the curve of her cheek, in the tightness of her jaw and in the way her brow remains mysteriously untroubled. He grabs his things, leaving her lying beneath her shroud, and finds his way out and into the morning.
A Dream of Cranes
by Nirmal Ghosh
Maya’s father was a farmer in India. Before inheriting land from his father, he had been a boatman on the Jamuna river. From its glacier at Yamunotri, high in the icy Himalayas, the Jamuna snakes across the lower plains of tropical heat and the deluge of monsoon rains and cold, cold winters, past the city of Agra and behind the shining Taj Mahal.
The Taj Mahal was built long ago, but the river had been there for a long long time even before that. It only changed course a little bit each year, determined by the monsoon rains. The rains always came after a hot dry summer, to flush the land and turn it green again.
Every day Maya’s father would pole his boat full of people across the Jamuna.
He had been friends then, with another boatman he referred to as Pagla Baba—the mad babaji: one of the Hindu mystics who roam alone with no material possessions.
Pagla Baba had given up his boat to wander the land. But years later he came to their house one day to meet his friend. Maya had heard her father Abhijit talk about him. But it was the first time Maya had seen him.
He was a lean man, naked from the waist up, so wiry you could see his veins and muscles. His body was a burnt coffee brown, his hair hung in dreadlocks. He carried a simple jute bag over his shoulder and had worn sandals on his feet. He wore just a sarong, with a shawl for the cold.
He had a beard, as matted as his hair. He had a hook of a nose and furrows on his brow. But it was his eyes that fascinated Maya. They were large, dark brown and bright, with a wild crazy light in them.
Maya was only six years old then. He looked at her face with a knowing glint and nodded as if he had understood something. Then he suddenly laughed and said,
‘What are you doing here little one? You do not belong with us. You have the soul of a Sarus crane, you belong with them. You’d better stay free like them when you grow up!’
He gave her a closer and more intense look, and then laughed again, saying ‘Hahh! You think I’m joking, huh? Remember, there is nothing you cannot do if you follow your dreams!’
He leaned forward, his face suddenly gentle and kind. Placing his hands on Maya’s shoulders he said to her, ‘Freedom.’
She was thinking about this later as she drifted off to sleep. The two men, Pagla Baba and her father, talked quietly on the other side of the wall. In their tiny house with the white paint now yellowed and peeling, the old electric fan whirred quietly in a corner, pushing out the still muggy air. Frogs croaked in the rice paddies outside.
She woke in the silence of the pre-dawn darkness. It seemed that a tap on the window had woken her, but she could not be sure. She sat up and looked out at the starlit night. She saw the silhouette of two big birds, very close to the house.
> She got out of bed and went outside, carefully and quietly opening and closing the door.
It was autumn and a cold fog lay across the endless rice fields. In winter the farmers here plant wheat and mustard, but through the monsoon and into autumn, as far as the eye can see there are rice fields, their green stalks shifting like waves in the wind. Sometimes the wind seems to play with them, carving S shapes. Sometimes it just roars across the rice in a straight line, especially in the monsoon season, and the rice stalks bend until it seems like a flat green road is opening up in the endless plains.
She walked to the edge of their land balancing easily on the narrow bundhs which separated the rice fields. There she saw the Sarus cranes standing in the water. She stepped off the bundh and into the water that reached up to her waist. The cold bit into her legs and suddenly she was really wide awake. She walked slowly through the water, wading across the muddy bottom, towards the cranes.
One of them, the male, was standing on one foot. ‘How do you do that?’ she said. He looked at her solemnly, the rising sun catching the colour of his red eyes. He moved his elegant purple head sideways to look down at her.
‘It’s easy if you know how, I’ve been doing it since I was born’, he said.
Maya tried to lift one leg up and balance but it was difficult, especially in the cold water. She almost fell.
The crane’s eyes glinted and he spread his wings briefly. He seemed to be laughing.
To Maya who was much shorter than him, his wings were enormous, almost blocking out the sky.
‘What’s your name?’ she said to him.
‘My name is Earth,’ he said. ‘Her name is Sky,’ he added, looking at his mate, who was at the edge of a huge tangled circle of twigs and grass floating on the water. Inside were two big eggs. Sky was bent over the nest, repositioning the eggs with her long beak. She looked up briefly at Maya and said: ‘And our next child is going to be called Water.’
‘But there are two eggs,’ said Maya.
‘Well we haven’t decided on the second one’s name yet,’ said Sky a bit impatiently, as she walked on to the nest and slowly lowered herself into it, settling herself on to the eggs.
Earth looked at Maya.
‘Maybe you can help me, I have been meaning to try and find out what these things are all about,’ he said, glancing up with a tilt of his head. He looked towards the huge electricity pylons and the thick cables they held, that walked across the land like giants.
‘They are for electricity,’ said Maya proudly. ‘For the big hydro electric project to the north.’ She had asked her parents what they were when the workmen were putting them up just a few months ago.
‘What’s that?’ said Earth.
She thought for a while and then said, ‘To get light. To read at night. For heat when it gets cold. And a fan when it gets hot.’
And she thought for a while more and said ‘For the TV!’
‘Huh?’ said the crane. ‘TV? What’s that?’
‘It’s something like a box, and you can see moving pictures and drawings and see and hear people talking, with music and all,’ she said.
‘Hmm, interesting,’ he said, and she could tell from his voice that he was getting bored.
‘Maybe I should leave,’ Maya thought. She stretched and bounced on her toes, and flapped her wings. She had wings! Something had happened.
With strong, rapid wing beats she powered up into the sky, now beginning to lighten with the first pale pink streaks of the rising sun. She wheeled above the green rice fields, looking down at Earth and Sky who were glancing up at her anxiously.
Sky left the nest. Stretching her neck and throwing back her head she gave a piercing bugling call. Maya answered. Then Earth and Sky ran a few steps and took flight as well. They came up to meet her, flying alongside.
She could hear the wind whistle through their pinions, and through her own. She experimented with the wind; facing into it and soaring; getting above it and gliding; riding warm rising thermals as the sun stirred the air.
Earth and Sky just circled nearby, anxiously it seemed. But soon they came and flew alongside. They chirped at her and she knew it was time to go down.
As she glided down, she heard screams and a sickening thud behind her. The fright unbalanced her and flapping in alarm, she pulled up and around. She saw with horror Earth and Sky lying crumpled in the rice field below the huge electricity pylon.
She flew down, her heart cold with dread. The two big birds lay next to each other, their beautiful long necks now running with fresh bright blood. Their wings were broken and trailed uselessly as they tried to stand up. They fell repeatedly. The strength drained out of their hearts and the glow in their eyes grew dimmer and dimmer.
She stayed with them through the night. In the morning when she awoke, she cried aloud as she saw them lifeless at her feet. Her cries woke the people in the nearby house. As they ran towards her she moved away, half flying and half walking. They gathered around the corpses of the two adult Sarus cranes shaking their heads in sorrow.
Maya suddenly woke up, the cold of the autumn morning on her face. Her mother hurried out anxiously, sweeping her up in a warm shawl. ‘What are you doing out here?’ she asked nuzzling her neck.
‘I was dreaming,’ she said. ‘About the big birds. About the Sarus cranes. And they died.’ She was sobbing as her mother led her into the house.
‘Why did they die?’ asked her mother, whose name was Amrita.
‘Because they hit the wire,’ she said, turning around and pointing at the big pylons stalking across the fields with the heavy cables sagging between them.
‘Oh but they are ok,’ said Amrita, picking her up and cradling her. ‘See?’ and she pointed into the distance and Maya saw the two big birds now more visible in the lifting mist.
‘Oh so they are not dead?’ said Maya, peering at them.
‘They are not dead, they are fine,’ said Amrita.
‘But they can die if they hit the wires?’ said Maya.
Amrita sighed. ‘Yes, they can die if they hit the wires,’ she said.
‘Can you ask them to take the wires away then please,’ said Maya, and she began to cry again, the tears welling into her eyes and her little chest heaving.
‘I will, I will,’ said Amrita, holding Maya close. Her father was up by then and had hurried out and heard what Maya had said. Pagla Baba had also heard her. He laughed and turned to Abhijit saying, ‘Hah! What did I tell you?’
Abhijit smiled.
‘Come in and have some hot chai,’ he said to them. ‘Come inside, and I will tell you what I am going to do.’
As the big old blackened kettle heated on the wood fire, Abhijit took Maya onto his lap and said, ‘I am the headman of our village. That means people listen to me. And I promise at our next meeting, I will get everyone to agree to talk to the government about the wires. I will do something to help the cranes.’
Maya nodded, only barely understanding but knowing that her father would do something for the birds.
They all drank tea as the sun came up and the mist lifted. She walked outside and saw the great birds. Suddenly they started running. They took to the air with strong wing beats and circled up into the sky.
She saw them coming towards her, gliding slowly, side-by-side, wing tip to giant wing tip. They landed gently in front of her. Earth said, ‘Thank you Maya.’
And Sky said, ‘Will you come and see us again sometime?’
‘Yes’ said Maya. Then with powerful wing beats they lifted off, disappearing into the sky in a great arc.
Abhijit came running out then. ‘What are you doing Maya?’ he said anxiously. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ she said as she turned and walked back into the house with him.
And quietly, to herself, she smiled.
The Seahorse
and the Reef
by Witi Ihimaera
Sometimes through the soft green water and drifting seaweed of my drea
ms, I see the seahorse again. Delicate and fragile it comes to me, shimmering and luminous with light. And I remember the reef.
The reef was just outside the town where my family lived. That was a long time ago, when I was a boy, before I came to this southern city. It was where all our relatives and friends went every weekend in the summer to dive for kai moana*. The reef was the home of much kai moana—paua, pipi, kina, mussels, pupu and many other shellfish. It was the home too of other fish like flounder and octopus. It teemed with life and food. It gave its bounty to us. It was good to us.
And it was where the seahorse lived.
At that time our family lived in a small wooden house on the fringe of the industrial estate. On Sundays my father would watch out the window and see our relatives passing by on their old trucks and cars or bikes with their sugarbags and nets, their flippers and goggles, shouting and waving on their way to the reef. They came from the pa—in those days it was not surrounded by expanding suburbia—and they would sing out to Dad:
‘Hey, Rongo! Come on! Good day for kai moana today!’
Dad would sigh and start to moan and fidget. The lunch dishes had to be washed, the lawn had to be cut, and my mother probably would want him to do other things around the house.
But after a while, a gleam would come into his eyes.
‘Hey, Huia!’ he would shout to Mum. ‘Those kina are calling out loud to me today!’
‘So are these dishes,’ she would answer.
‘Well, Mum!’ Dad would call again. ‘Those paua are just waiting for me to come to them today!’
‘That lawn’s been waiting even longer,’ Mum would answer.
Dad would pretend not to hear her. ‘Pare kare, dear! How would you like a feast of mussels today!’
‘I’d like it better if you fixed the fence,’ she would growl.
So Dad would just wiggle his toes and act sad for her. ‘Okay, Huia. But those pipi.’ And sure enough she would answer him: