The small brick bungalow was still pink, the door was still blue. But the windows looked freshly painted, and I could see through into what had been the living room – now housing two desks, computers and printers, and beyond – through the door, into my parents’ bedroom – a larger desk and chair. Two ladies lifted their heads. I smiled and raised my hand in greeting, and that was enough; they returned to their work. I could also see, to the left, through the door into what had been my bedroom, shelves lining the walls, packed with files. It was a tiny space. Had we really all lived there? All four of us at one stage? My horizons had grown wider; it looked like a doll’s house.
The tree with the perfect branch that had held Danny’s swing remained, as did the one with the low branch on which I had sat with Jonah, but the garden was otherwise unrecognisable. Landscaped now, with a fountain, flower beds and pebbled pathways, and to one side a green lawn on which benches were arranged in a semi-circle, perfect for the office workers’ lunch hour.
Miss Munroe’s house was now the infirmary; the Devasias’s a home economics unit, complete with counters and hobs fitted around the perimeter. I walked the length of the row of bungalows in what felt like minutes, even though as a child the time I took had felt endless when I was pelting down the road in agitation, fearing that Bobby and Aravind had abandoned me. I rounded the curve at the end that led to the convent, which was still surrounded by a low wall and still looked over a verdant garden, and took the turning which was the alternative route to the netball courts. Then I went down the steps to the science laboratories. I found my mother’s lab without much difficulty, and peeped through the window, much as I had done when I was twelve years old. You left Danny alone? It looked largely unchanged; the benches were polished, but they had always shone. There was a new glass-fronted cabinet at one end, but the large roll-up blackboard still stood at the head, extending to the width of the room, and in front of it, as before, the teacher’s desk. I tried the door, but it was locked. I could not satisfy my urge to go inside and stand where she had stood, rows of navy girls in green dresses before her, and so I went to sit down on the patch of grass opposite the lab. I remembered how she had bent over the marks that afternoon, after my father’s phone call at the convent, as she filled in a report sheet.
I had not told my mother of this visit; she knew only of an exciting expedition to Cameroon. Perhaps I had wished to reserve the right to change my mind, and I was glad I had kept her in the dark. For this belonged as much to her memory as mine; I was trespassing on her past just as I was visiting mine. She had spent most of her twenties, into her early thirties, teaching in this laboratory, chalk on her fingers, preparing chemicals for practical exams, manipulating pipettes and burettes and Bunsen burners. She had climbed back up the steps nearly every weekday afternoon, basket in hand with lab coat folded inside, to return to the bungalow and her children and domestic responsibilities.
Returning to a place where my mother had spent so much of her life as a young woman, as a young woman myself, made me feel an extraordinary oneness with her, despite the fact that she was thousands of miles away. My own early adulthood had been a rush of experiences. I had slept with three men before meeting my fiancé, not an extensive list by many standards, and I had had what could be called a relationship only with two of those. But I had fallen in love, had my heart broken, all those things, and after each episode I was left unencumbered. For my mother, by the time she had had her first experience of heartbreak, presumably when my father left us, she had two children to consider. At my age now, nearly thirty-two, she had been married for nearly all her adult life, had lived in that tiny house, lived on this campus nearly all that time, surrounded by nuns who did not understand and Malayalee women who begrudged her. Miss Munroe, with whom my mother still kept in touch, had been a unique female companion. But even then, the chasm between their personal circumstances had limited their friendship. Would I tell her of this return?
By now my appetite felt sated and clawing at once. I had not expected to fall into floods of tears but neither had I expected to feel so discomposed at seeing, brilliantly alive and present, in mint condition and vividly coloured, not sepia-past, the familiar places. I had hoped, I realised, for something more, as if returning to that point would ensure that time and space converged, so that I would be that young, smooth-skinned girl again. But I knew it was not only so that I could shed my yin-yang appearance, like a snake would shed its skin, that I had wished to return; I was searching for someone. I got to my feet and walked up and down the walkway in front of the laboratories, and for some reason, my mind went back to the day of the school anniversary celebration. A day which I recalled as a series of vignettes playing before me in the clear, bright light of an African spring. My playmates conspiratorially leaning over something unseen, their backs to me; the figures of Miss Munroe and Mr Lawrence sitting cross-legged on the grass as if at a music festival, not in the grounds of a Catholic school. And Jonah leaning into the young cook while, her eyes shining, she looked up into his; this image leaving a familiar ache in my chest. But as I paced up and down, what I could not conjure was an image of my parents. I had left them on my travels around the campus, and they remained outside my vision, sitting next to each other, their shoulders touching, in their best clothes.
I left the science laboratories, walked up the steps, past the storeroom which, remarkably, looked untouched, only mossier. But I did not linger. I walked on, up again, up the second set of steps, and in front of me, as always, was the small pink bungalow. I found Veronica on one of the benches in the green space, stubbing out a cigarette. She had reapplied her lipstick – a deep vermilion. She smiled as I sat down next to her. It must have changed, she said.
It has, I replied, and so have I.
She smiled again, then glanced at her watch. You are due to meet with the professor in forty-five minutes.
I was floored. I had spent more than an hour and a half in a reverie, but it had felt like minutes, as if I had returned to a childish ignorance of time.
She was saying: before that, we can pay a visit to the new Mother Superior or go back into town. You mentioned your old convent school?
But then, without having thought about it, but I must have done, because it was not a request to suddenly emerge from nowhere, I asked if we could renege on the visit with the professor. Drive back into the city and visit the hospital. Veronica did not query my capriciousness, only offered to phone and cancel my meeting with the professor herself, pass on my apologies. She perhaps assumed a masochistic desire of mine to revisit a place in which I had spent weeks, months, bandaged and broken, inside and outside. But then I mentioned I had no wish to visit the burns unit, and explained what I wanted to find. She told me as we got back in the car that she would try her hardest to find someone who would be able to help us in the hospital, but that we could not just pitch up as we had done on the campus. This was a teaching hospital, once the best in independent southern Africa, and there were regulations over visitors.
We drove back into the city and returned to the travel agency. While I looked in the shops on the street, Veronica made some phone calls. It was a quiet time of day, and I marvelled at how Lusaka was not dissimilar in temperament to my memory of it, so very unlike its more extrovert cousin, Douala. I could not recognise much of it; nothing looked familiar from my faded collection of memories. I had no memory of the city as a panorama, a fact that disturbed me more than I had expected. Was a child’s memory really so selective, so unformed? What else then had I forgotten or not noticed in the first place? I was standing outside a large department store, the ground floor of which was given over to selling stationery, when I saw Veronica’s reflection in the window, crossing the road to approach me.
I’ve found someone, Sissy, she said, and I murmured my thanks, adding: this is more than you expected to do for me.
But she interrupted me: no, not at all. Only let’s go right away, because I must make sure you get back to the
airport on time.
The hospital was east of the city centre, and, handily, on the way back to the airport. I remembered nothing of it or its environs. We could have been driving into somewhere I had never ever been. And the corridors we walked along, to enter a pleasant courtyard, then re-enter another corridor, then yet another courtyard, only served to make me feel I was indeed on a road to discovery, passing through layers of time to arrive back at the past.
We met our guide for the next hour, an obstetrician on her break, who introduced herself with her first name, Cleopatra, and who spoke in low tones, as if advising on an academic interest of hers, of the perils of childbirth. There was a high percentage of stillbirths in the seventies, she informed me, which led in 1979 to a seminal study of two hundred women in the unit, alongside two hundred women with healthy deliveries, for parity. A huge undertaking, and one which found that prenatal visits were rare in the unfortunate cases, leading to a drive for more midwives in the early eighties. These women were dispatched all over Zambia.
But all this happened a few years after what you recount, she said with a sad smile. Then, on reaching the medical registry, Cleopatra spoke to the registrar, who listened, then nodded. I had not understood the words, but the music of the language was comfortingly familiar.
Cleopatra turned to me – Veronica now waiting at a discreet distance – you think it’s 1972 or 1973?
It’s awful, isn’t it, I replied, but I’m not sure. I didn’t ask my mother before I came here. I didn’t plan this.
Don’t worry, she replied. We’ll start with those years.
I feel sure, I continued, that I would have been six or seven.
In those days, Cleopatra continued, there was not much acknowledgement of the need for a grieving process. She added gently: what I mean is, nowadays there might have been a funeral arranged or at least counselling offered to the parents. This would have been rare at the time you are looking into. She sounded apologetic, and so I reassured her: yes, yes, of course. Then her eyes moved to the side as the registrar returned.
I caught a glimpse of the white label taped to the spine of the folder. Neonatal Deaths 1968–1974. We looked together. She was more adept at reading the notes in the columns, handwritten in faded ink, and I let her turn the pages, one after the other, until, suddenly, there it was: Baby Olikara, female, stillborn, 12
May, 1973. There followed some more details, of weight and length, and then the parents’ names. Mother: Laila Olikara. Father: George Olikara.
I stared at this insignificant confirmation of an event that had held so much significance for my family, and I felt a loss so deep inside me that for a moment I believed I was my mother, looking at the handful of words that told me that the baby inside me, the baby I had carried, had died. My body became my mother’s, so that I felt I needed to hold the page, read those words, wet the paper with my tears, to reassure her that she was not forgotten, never forgotten, and that we – me, my mother, my brother – each carried a fragment of her soul within us. The mention of my father’s name here seemed unnecessarily cruel, and relentless. Part of me wanted to take a pen and scratch it out, so that my mother, who had raised us – me and Danny, the survivors – could claim this baby, my baby, my sister, as my mother’s alone, to give breath to or to send from the living world.
Now, the women fell silent and watched me: this alien, descended on Lusaka for a few hours, with clothes bought abroad, a voice from across the oceans, with a half-painted face. I stared and stared, at one name in a list of many, until Veronica appeared next to me and gently touched my elbow, reminded me that we needed to leave, my plane was leaving Lusaka that evening.
15
EIGHT girls had not returned by sunset. Those who had emerged from the bush at various points on the campus perimeter were escorted back to their dormitories by the staff members who had been positioned to welcome them. Their hair was matted with leaves and thorns, their skin dusty. I watched as some passed by our window, in reverse of their flight early that morning, holding hands with each other; some with arms linked, some being supported by their teachers, docile and silent. Most were wearing nightgowns, now torn into shreds by the bushes they had run through. Others were barely clothed, having either shed or lost their clothes in their desperate flight. But all of us – the teachers and staff and families on the campus who had watched the raid through our windows, the girls who had either stayed or fled and returned, and by the following daybreak all had returned – all of us were alive. Whereas hundreds had lost their lives not far away, in the camp just a few miles to the east.
Jonah came to the house first thing in the morning, but I was in the bathroom and only heard him speak briefly to my mother, his voice concerned and reassuring at the same time. When I rushed out, he was already gone. My mother, her face still pale and her voice tinny, told me that Jonah would be joining the search for the missing girls and then would be charged with repairing the damage done to the school – from the wind the helicopters had unleashed and the ensuing stampede of the girls. He would not be able to come to our house for some time, but before joining the other men, he had wanted to make sure of our wellbeing.
Miss Munroe spent the morning with us. She had heard from Mr Lawrence, who was helping Mr Cooper’s agency set up an emergency relief tent in the camp and assess what rehabilitation was needed. All the teachers remained at home, relieved of their duties, as a queue of cars arrived on the campus bearing distraught parents who, after emotional reunions with their daughters, spirited them away for the planned fortnight’s closure. I was also exempt from my own school for a few days while Lusaka recovered from the trauma. Both Rahul’s father and Bobby’s father came to our house, full of bluster, enquiring after us and assuring my mother that if she needed any help, she was not to hesitate. If she was scared at night, if there was an intruder at the window, she only had to call out into the dark. They would hear her and rush to our aid – a proposal that I’m not sure comforted my mother in any way. And then, having lavished these promises on us, the two families decamped in convoy. They were taking advantage of the school’s closure to visit some family friends in the Copperbelt, leaving Rahul to stay with another friend on the university campus in the city. Miss Munroe arranged to stay with her friend in the fancy house, coming to see us before she left, my mother interrupting her explanations with: but of course, you should go, Fee. Don’t worry about us.
Everyone, it seemed, could tap into a network of friends and associates. In contrast, we could not muster up anyone.
In short, the aftermath of the raid – when all the girls were accounted for, and when people had made their arrangements for the fortnight’s closure, when the hubbub had removed itself from the campus – brought an unremitting boredom to our life, the three of us keeping sole company and my mother rationing our supplies. The only silver lining was that the curfew that had been so ineffective was lifted temporarily. There needed to be traffic between the hospital and the camp, and there were reports of dignitaries and diplomats scurrying around Lusaka at all hours, in an attempt to bring calm to a fevered situation. There was no mention, either, after a few days, of the need for me to attend school; the logistics were too much for my mother to consider and I did not complain about the unexpected holiday.
The first evening that followed the raid, my mother excused herself, asking if I would look after Danny for a short while. I could see from the direction she was walking that she was going to the convent, no doubt to phone my father and inform him of the events. Perhaps entreat his return, or arrange for us to join him. I was not party to what she said, and when she returned she had some other news to convey. She had also spoken to Mrs Cooper, who had informed her that, with much regret, she would be returning to Virginia, taking Ally and Mary-Anne with her. The news was apt in a cycle of events that seemed bent on unpicking our life and leaving it unstitched. I was less heartbroken by the loss of my friends than anxious about the questions their departure provoked. Who would
I go to school with, which presumably I would need to do at some point? Would I now stay on the campus with my mother every day? And what of the few items I had left in the Coopers’ guest room? Three school books, two hair grips, a pair of socks and fresh underwear. I did not interrogate my mother because she looked pale and exhausted, chewing her lip, smudges under her eyes. I strived to be as supportive and as helpful as possible over the following days. We whiled away the time playing cards and hangman and checkers, testing the television intermittently and cheering if we had one hour of electricity and thus one hour to watch a re-run of the previous year’s independence celebration, or a snippet of an American detective show, before the power cut returned.
When night fell, my mother tried to act as if all was as it should be, but I saw that she continually got to her feet, to check that the doors were locked, the windows closed. For, alone on the campus, our house felt insubstantial, a flimsy barrier against any big bad wolf skulking in the bush behind us. I helped her during the day with washing the clothes in the tin bucket outside, and with tidying the house. We tended to the vegetable patch and picked the fruit from the trees. But not with abandon as before; now counting and allocating the bananas and guavas so that they would last, freezing the mulberries. As the days passed, we forgot to think of any end to this existence, but accepted our fate, became submissive to whatever would happen next. Our lives then entered a passably pleasant routine. My mother sewed and cooked; I read to Danny, bathed him, and pushed him on the swing ad nauseum.
I was doing just that one afternoon when I saw Rahul drive up the road and pass by. I could make out a wave – he would be returning to check up on his parents’ house – and I had a mind to go and ask my mother if I could pay him a visit when a blue car swung into the road in front of our house and then up our short driveway to stop abruptly in front of the cadaver of my father’s green car. I could not help but stare as I watched Mr Cooper struggling to extract himself from behind the wheel. He had in his hand a plastic bag which seemed to have lodged itself by the gearstick, and which he seemed to have difficulty in retrieving. Eventually he disentangled himself and appeared, blinking at me from across the roof of the car.
The Wild Wind Page 17