Archives for April, 2010

This is what comes of moving and bare cupboards.
With under a week to go, the kitchen is devolving into a patchwork of missing foods. The ketchup’s all done, as are nearly all manner of vegetables — except broccoli. On the other hand, there is a whole block of butter and a huge ziploc bag of frozen dumplings. And we went through the last teabag last night. So today I finally made a pot of tea with the looseleaf tea I bought in Gampola a year ago this week.

I could tell you that the tea stings with the taste of home and history and truth and belonging and all those other things. But it tastes like none of those things. I added too much ginger, the magic is skewed.

I haven’t posted a photograph in a while. Here is one.
I also haven’t taken a photograph in a while. But soon I will have time.

A very dark-skinned Indian man walks in and orders a chicken plate for after salat. For a moment we stare at each other, and then I look away.
“For after salat?” says the proprietor. I’m not used to hearing it as salat, instead of salah. “Friend, I’ll make it for you after salat. It’s not so good otherwise.”
And the customer walks to the back of the store, to where the washrooom is.

The halal shawarma place down the street, besides the best falafels I’ve ever had, also sells kafiyyehs and Puck and Vimto and tiny glass bottles of Arabic shatta. All of them terribly overpriced, but regardless.

And tonight, with two weeks to go in this strange city, I learned they also have a musallah.

This afternoon at the grocery store, I thought about replenishing my depleted store of sandwich spreads. As of last week, I’m all out of peanut butter (and bananas), and as of this morning, jam. For variety, I considered getting Nutella this time. Diversity is healthy.

Several moments of painful deliberation were spent in that aisle. None of the jars come in sizes smaller than Too Big for Your Own Good. And since I’m moving back to Toronto in about a fortnight, the problem is that I probably won’t finish it all by then. Or, worse, that I will.

I tried to compensate with a 59c pack of Reese’s Pieces. I think they must have been old to have been that cheap. They were troublingly salty.

“[The] Plaintiff enrolled in First year law at [Dalhousie] and on mid term examinations in Criminal Law, Public Law, Property and Torts had a B- average; that from that date until on or about May 26, 1993 Plaintiff’s alleged grades steadily became lower as Defendants, and each of them, willfully, intentionally, maliciously, knowingly, unlawfully, wrongfully or by their negligence and lack of skill caused Plaintiff to become ‘brain dead’ and a ‘vegetable’.”

– Sherman v. Governors of Dalhousie College and University (1996)

“By this time it might seem that the parties have become so far disembodied spirits that their actual persons should be allowed to rest in peace. In their place rises the figure of the fair and reasonable man. And the spokesman of the fair and reasonable man, who represents after all no more than the anthropomorphic conception of justice, is and must be the court itself.”
– Radcliffe in Davis Contractors v Fareham (1956)

Mid-April last year, I got back from just under six weeks in Sri Lanka. Besides being born on the island, I’d visited it many times over the years, but that last trip was pivotal in the way no prior trip ever had been. Every day following that return until well into the winter, until long after I’d moved to a new province and commenced a new career path, literally not a day went by when I didn’t talk to someone about that trip. For months, I was convinced I was going to move to Sri Lanka as soon as I could, that that would be the homebase from which I would live the rest of my life. I had not one, but two research projects in mind. I had thousands of pictures and hours and hours of audio recordings. I had notebooks of material, and tightly plotted stories that kept looping through my every conscious moment.

Something happened along the way to now. I stopped talking about Sri Lanka, and the drafts I had saved on my desktop grew stale. The heartache grew a little less palpable. That thing that I knew, when I was in Sri Lanka, that would happen when I got back to Toronto began to happen — it was no longer possible to talk about home, about love, about family, about history without feeling that the conversations had already been determined for me. It was someone else’s novel, someone else’s award-winning screenplay about some maladjusted third culture kid undergoing a delayed and severely pronounced bout of false nostalgia. The force of this industry we’ve churned out about “lost” “identities” towered up and then came crashing down, and I let it go.

I think sometimes that all it takes to make some people come is the word diaspora.

The heartache grew less palpable, became a little less live. It receded from a constant pulse at the base of my throat to a pressure under my diaphragm, a soft throb that I could count beats to when conversations turned to the subject of love and blood, family and memory. I stopped talking about it, but it remains here still, a love I know as more real than most of the things I spend my time reading these days.

But I learned this thing from parents about the nature of love, a lesson that took some years in learning, a lesson I used to hold against them, but which in their stubbornness and wisdom, they never gave up drilling into me — that love is a verb. It is a thing you do, it is a responsibility you shoulder. It is not a pretty thing to put on display, not merely a thing of easy beauty, but a demanding combination of things out of your control. A measure of guilt, and anger, and courage. Blood is something to which you as self are irrelevant; it is the thing you do. What I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter that I claim to love my father’s hometown with a love that changed my life, and yes I know how trite it is to say that. You know, lives can change back.

Etha onagada kudumam, said my cousin one night, as she opened the gate to my aunt’s house. And then she paused, hand on lock, and said in English, Do you understand? Blood.
Literally: this is your blood.
And I smiled a dazed smile at the word, at how deep the knowledge of it runs.

So for a few months this past year, I had a goal in mind. I had tangible projects I was working towards, and I made an effort to speak Tamil to my parents, who sometimes forgot they weren’t speaking English to me. But the deadlines have since become less acute. The mundane drone of the life I’m living here has taken over, and taken with it the energy that kept me focused all through that bright summer and fall.

When I talk — and I’ve stopped talking about it — about how much it hurts that I have no one here to speak my stuttering Tamil to, what I mean is that the forgetting is an active process. And in the absence of any one person here with whom I can share this language, the distance between here and there becomes infinitely greater. The love becomes abstract, a mockery of action.

I spent the happiest weeks of my life with my father’s family, living in his sister’s house.

Last week I called home, and my mother told me my aunt had recently been diagnosed with a degenarative neural condition. Her doctor has given her 18 months. My father came home a few minutes later and when he took the phone, he said, So your mother told you about Maami. And unlike my mother, he had less to say about the details of the illness. The conversation was short, and ended as it always does when I talk to my father with a reminder to eat well.

I have listened several times to my father cry for the deaths of people he loved, and I cannot bear the thought of hearing it again. If people loved me in that village, it was solely because I was my father’s child. I have never known a person to be so loved as my father’s memory was in that place.

Why did you come, said my aunt, one day in her kitchen, if you’re going to leave again.
She had a particular knack for rhetoric. I stood silent and twisted my hands together. I did not know how to say, in English or in Tamil, that I had come because I am my father’s daughter and this was what love to him entailed, but that I was leaving with a connection more direct to the village. I was leaving as someone who — nervous chatter in the diaspora be damned — would claim this place, her house and her love as home.

Call them, says my mother. And then she reads out one of those hilariously long long-distance numbers that come appended with every regional prefix in the world.

I still haven’t called. It seems every conversation I have with family begins with an apology — I am sorry. Sorry for not being t/here, for not being more present, for not knowing how to say the things that need to be said. Sorry I’ve forgotten more Tamil than I thought I knew, sorry I didn’t call before. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

My parents taught me that love is not something you protest, it is something you do.