Songbirds

by Christy Lefteri

  I didn’t reply. I could feel my neck and face heating up.

  ‘So. How would you put it then?’ he asked.

  ‘I care about Nisha very much. She has been working hard for nine years to send money to her family . . .’

  His smile broadened and he started waving his hand, as if he couldn’t be bothered to hear the rest. ‘These people don’t care about their families. They have no real roots. They would throw their families away at the drop of a hat! That’s why they are able to come here, or travel even further to countries in Europe, or to the Arabic Emirates and God only knows where else. You wouldn’t see a Cypriot lady making that sort of decision now, would you? Leaving her children behind? That would be unheard of, no matter the circumstances. But then again, their lives are so shitty back home. They are peasants. No prospects. They come over here and we give them more than they could have ever imagined – good accommodation, good food, higher wages. But they have no gratitude – some steal, some sell their bodies, others take off. You’d think they’d appreciate being here more. Don’t make the mistake of thinking they are like us. They are made of different stuff, mark my words.’

  ‘Whatever you say, she is missing, and I would like you to launch an investigation.’

  ‘Look, I’m not here to be chasing after these women. They come here. They don’t find what they are looking for. They run away to avoid the debts they owe to their agents. Don’t you think we could put taxpayers’ money to better use than launching an investigation which will inevitably be a complete waste of time and resources?’

  This guy was an arsehole. His skull an impenetrable wall. I focused on the blue veins that ran down from his receding hairline, the steep bridge of his nose, his yellow teeth. I clenched my fist beneath the table to trap the anger.

  A woman came in with a coffee and a plate of biscuits, which she placed in front of him. He took a sip and sighed with contentment. I got up to leave, leaning over to take the flyer from his desk, but instead deciding to leave it. Let him throw it away.

  *

  At home I cleaned the birds. Mechanically, systematically. I needed to get the job done. I defeathered the blackcaps, song thrushes and chiffchaffs. These birds would be pickled, roasted, fried, eaten whole in secret. The tiny blackcap sat beside me, chirping now and then, struggling to flutter up onto the table in order to eat some berries. It succeeded, then clumsily wafted back down again to give itself a bath in the bowl I’d set out for it. It was getting stronger, its wing clearly mending, but it needed more time. I’d purposely put its food on the table and the bird bath on the floor so that it would exercise its wings, test its strength.

  When I first starting poaching, I did some reading on avian intelligence, hoping to confirm the bird-brain theory, so that I would feel better about what I was doing. Instead, I learned that certain bird species were so smart that they were considered ‘feathered apes’. For decades, scientists believed that birds weren’t capable of higher thinking because they lacked a cerebral cortex; however, now they knew that a different part of the brain – the pallium – evolved to fill its place.

  In my heart, this revelation was not surprising. I had known since I was a child – and had held that dead golden bird – that they had an inner life. Throughout my boyhood, I had known birds solve problems with cognition beyond instinct, their minds flexible and sharp. I even had a crow-friend I called Batman, whom I’d watch make tools out of twigs and wood. Sometimes I would offer Batman some metal wire and create sort of a problem – a puzzle as such – and sit beneath a tree and watch it work out a solution.

  Seraphim killed Batman during one of his visits. He shot the bird with a pellet gun. His dad had given him the gun to practise aim control so that he could go out hunting with the men. He was using figs as targets. He was pretty good: I remember him scrunching up his left eye, holding the gun steady on his right shoulder. Aim. Fire. Aim. Fire. He became more proficient by the second. Then, while we were having our lunch one afternoon, Batman flew down from the sky through the pines. Seraphim swiftly put the gun to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. The bird didn’t die straight away, and Seraphim held it by its legs upside down, the bird squirming in his grip, and took his trophy down the mountain to show his father.

  As I made my way through the bin-bag – an indistinguishable mass of bodies, feathers and beaks tangled together – my eyes fell upon an owlet. I reached down for it. It was smaller than my palm, but its body carried heft, its feathers impossibly soft and fine. I wondered if it had flown into the net while following his mother on a night hunt. Its oversized opaque black eyes in its pale, heart-shaped face looked up at me without seeing.

  I thought of Nisha’s story of the owl, of losing Kiyoma, and I almost dropped it on the floor. How did I not notice this bird in Akrotiri when we were sorting the birds? Did Seraphim see it and let it pass into the bag on purpose? I can imagine he would have bitten into its neck indiscriminately. To him, a bird was a bird was a bird. To me, I worked like a machine. A hunt was a job was money.

  Not knowing what to do, I covered the owlet gently with my other hand, making a cocoon. I thought of Nisha’s first story of loss and how she had felt and heard for the first time the stillness and silence of death. I considered the other birds. The ones I had trapped, killed and defeathered. The ones that were soaking now in the basin and the bath, and all the other species that I had discarded in a bin-liner because they would not sell. This is where the baby owl would end up. I could not bring myself to throw it in there. So I sat. I sat there on the stool with the owlet nestling between my palms and I did not move for what must have been more than an hour.

  Music drifted in through the open doors in the other room. It was the woman again, at Theo’s. Her voice pure gold. After a while I heard Aliki laughing out front; she must be home from school. I heard Mrs Hadjikyriacou’s voice. It sounded like they were playing a game.

  I thought about how simple everything used to seem. How I used to sit out on the balcony, after these sounds of the neighbourhood had ceased, when most had gone to bed, and waited for Nisha. Those nights after the miscarriage, she came to me with eyes carrying pain. But she still came. Because that’s what we do. When there is love, there is a safe place for sadness.

  *

  Nisha told me another story of loss the second night after her miscarriage. She lay down on the bed and placed her hands over her stomach in the corpselike manner she had done before. She inhaled deeply and her chest trembled. She wanted to cry, I was sure, but she held it in.

  ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘But what if you were given a choice, the last colour you saw before you died, what would it be?’

  ‘I’m still not sure. It’s hard to choose.’

  ‘You have to choose one!’

  ‘Maybe this is a game Aliki would appreciate.’

  ‘Yes, she loves these games. But choose.’

  She tilted her head in my direction, staring at me with wide eyes, as if she’d asked me the most important question in the world.

  ‘Amber,’ I said.

  She nodded to herself.

  ‘I don’t know what colour Mahesh would have chosen,’ she said. I held my breath at the mention of her husband – she very rarely mentioned him. ‘I never got to ask him that question.’

  Then, in a soft, faraway voice, she told me the second story of loss.

  *

  Nisha’s parents had worked in the paddy fields. They rented a plot from a rich landowner, ploughed the earth, grew rice and sold it at the market. They lived in a simple house, not quite a mud hut, but with makeshift walls of asbestos sheets. There was a well in the back garden that brought forth cool and fresh water from the dark veins of the earth, even in the heat of the summer. They had a jackfruit tree as well as papaya, mango and passion fruit. Trellises of jasmine flowers separated their garden from the neighbour’s. Nisha’s father gre
w yams and mace in the yard. He was a tall man with lighter skin – it was well known that his ancestors had joined the Dutch East India Company fleeing Catholicism in the seventeenth century, and that was why her family carried the surname Van de Berg, which meant from the mountains. Her mother’s colouring was rich and dark, like Nisha and Kiyoma, but Nisha had her father’s amber eyes. The kids at school called her ‘mango-eyes’.

  Their house was at the end of a long road that divided the paddy fields from the sea, overlooking a coconut plantation on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other. From her bedroom window, Nisha could see the fishermen take the boats out in the night. She’d wake up early to watch them cast the nets in the water just before dawn and then pull them in at around nine o’clock, before it got too hot. On Saturdays, she would go with her father to buy fresh fish. She liked the silver scales, but she didn’t like the sea. It wasn’t a friendly sea, rough and unforgiving, and most people in Sri Lanka had never learned how to swim because of it.

  Rice-growing was a family affair. Husband and wife worked together, the children expected to follow in their footsteps. However, when Nisha had reached her teenage years, an increasing number of people were leaving the farms to work in factories – garments, ceramics, gems and jewellery. With Kiyoma gone, Nisha’s father encouraged her to find a job where she could be independent and not owe rent money to the rich landowners. The country was changing. Since the 1960s, the Sri Lankan government had imposed much control over trade, with heavy tariffs for imports, even banning some imports entirely. But in 1977, a new government came into power, which introduced trade expansion under new policies. Nisha’s father would sit with her in the garden and explain all this; he would bring her books and articles to read – he wanted her to understand, he wanted her to understand life, the economy and people, and how these were intertwined, so that she could make productive and logical decisions.

  In 1995, when she was sixteen years old, Nisha left Galle for the alluvial gem fields in Elahera. Along the banks of the Kalu Ganga river the land was luscious and green, but the foliage had been stripped away, exposing the muddy, red earth. Men climbed down deep mine shafts in Rathnapura, hoisting gravel into baskets to the surface.

  In a large reservoir next to the mine, workers washed the gravel in wicker baskets, swishing them in the water a few handfuls at a time. This was Nisha’s job, and it was hard work. She spent most of the day in the sun bent over the reservoir, or wading in the cloudy water, until she would see a crystal sparkle in the light amongst the dirt: blue, yellow and pink sapphires; rubies; topaz; chrysoberyls. Nisha loved finding the blue sapphires: they were her favourite. They reminded her of the colour of the early morning sea from her bedroom window, with the silver fish that twitched in the nets.

  Mahesh worked in the mines. He noticed Nisha immediately. He thought her eyes were like yellow sapphires. This is what he said during a lunch break when they sat beneath the canopy of trees drinking hot tea, looking out at the arid land where the mine shafts were, where the workers cleaned the gravel chest-deep in brown water. She laughed at him and told him that his comment was cheesy, but that made him like her even more.

  They became frequent lunch companions, and Mahesh told her about the journey down the shaft and along the dark tunnels of the earth, the unbearable heat, the humidity, and the fear he had of being buried alive. He was a small, gentle man with a smile that was bigger than his face. He would sweat in the mines and nearly hyperventilate, but he gritted his teeth and kept going. Nisha admired his strength, his character and determination. She told him this and he’d said that he would remember her words, that they would give him courage. Every morning, from then on, when she saw him descend into the mines, she prayed for him.

  He would descend fifteen or so metres beneath Rathnapura, looking for topaz and sapphires. He would push a metal rod into the porous mine walls and listen to the sound it made, try to feel the vibrations of the earth along the rod. He could normally tell when he hit alluvial gravel or sapphire, but sometimes he would inspect the rod after pulling it out as harder gem material would scratch the metal. He was good at his job, fast and agile; he hoisted more sacks full of good, gem-filled gravel than any other worker there.

  They were married in Galle some years later and bought a house in Rathnapura, which was bigger than the house she had lived in with her parents.

  She loved him with all her heart. He was kind. He never raised his voice, like the neighbour who shouted at his wife day and night. He cleaned his own shoes and always put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket. He had a high-pitched laugh that made Nisha laugh. No matter how tired or wary or fed up he became, she could always see the child in his eyes. That was what she liked about him. It is possible to love someone without really liking them, but she liked Mahesh a lot.

  Every night he’d have sore, swollen hands. After dinner Nisha would rub them with cream. ‘You don’t have to do that again,’ he would say, with his huge smile. ‘You are tired too. How about I rub your feet?’

  But Nisha wouldn’t have it. ‘What, with those crusty things?’ She’d point to his hands and pull a face. ‘Besides, I can rub my own feet. Now lie back and think of the open sky.’ He liked the open sky. It was the opposite of the mines.

  He didn’t like coffee, he drank sweet tea. Every Sunday they went down to the market to eat kottu with spicy curry sauce, a flat crispy fried bread made with godamba roti. Some evenings Mahesh would make a delicious green jackfruit curry with pandan leaves and coconut milk. He would climb the tree himself to get fresh coconuts. He was sexy when he chopped vegetables because his thick fringe would flop down over his eyes. Nisha would call him a shaggy dog. He would laugh and lick her face from chin to brow.

  When she found out she was pregnant, Mahesh ran around the neighbourhood calling out, ‘I’m going to be a father!’ Then he came home sweating, beaming from ear to ear, pacing the kitchen, making plans.

  One day, months later, after she had just given birth to Kumari, Nisha was in the kitchen breastfeeding the baby. Hearing a noise, she looked up and saw someone through the window, running and tripping as she went. It was one of her neighbours, a woman named Shehara, running through the fields, shouting something that at first Nisha could not understand. Then her voice flowed in through the open doors: ‘It has caved in! It has caved in! It has caved in!’

  She shouted this over and over again, until the words lost all meaning. It has caved. In it has caved. It has caved in it has caved in it has caved in it has.

  Nisha understood immediately what had happened. The very thing her husband had always feared. It was why Nisha had prayed every night from that very first day when they spoke in the shade of the trees. Mahesh was stuck down there in the deep, dank well with no way out. She knew him so well that she could almost hear the beat of his heart, feel the blood pumping in his veins. She could hear the dripping water, see the dripping walls, the shimmering crystals in the light of his head torch. She could smell it – the earth. The earth that produced such beautiful gems, the earth that held such brilliant colours, had now swallowed him up.

  *

  Nisha stopped her story there. She could not go on. She sat up and began coughing, as if she was the one trapped in the mine, struggling for breath.

  I got up and brought her a glass of cold water. She took a few sips and handed it back to me.

  ‘I can’t tell any more,’ she said, eventually. ‘My tears are going into my throat and choking me.’

  It was so hot that night. We were on the bed with the fan blowing on us and the patio doors wide open. Once again, Nisha lay on her back, placing her hands on her stomach. All the lost futures drifted through Nisha into me. I felt sorrow for the lost child. I had a feeling of crying internally; I recognised it from when I was a boy, when my father had returned with blood in his eyes trapped in the visions and sounds of the war, never seeing me again. He made me a desk with fresh oak from the woods. He placed the desk away from the window so th
at I couldn’t look out. He became obsessed with my education. I was no longer allowed to roam around and look at the birds and wildlife. I could no longer go with them to the market. He wanted me to study. He checked in on me. If he saw me standing by the window, he closed the blinds.

  It was this thought: that loss cannot be reversed, that I could not bring back my father’s lost mind, or the child that – this lack of control, this helplessness – made my hand tremble over Nisha’s.

  ‘I wish it could have been safe inside me,’ she said.

  ‘You know it was not your fault,’ I said.

  ‘I do know.’

  She looked up at the night sky, through the window. The moon was not visible, only stars. I placed my palm over her hands and we stayed like that for a long time.

  I thought about the dying man in the gem-filled darkness of the mine. How long would it have taken him to die? Did he have time to sit in the dark and think about his life, his wife, his baby daughter up above, about all the things he loved and those that he hated, about his triumphs and regrets? What would he have felt, meeting the inescapability of death before it had arrived? What kind of hunger did he feel? What thirst? What pains plagued his body? What memories his mind? Or was he so panicked that his death came faster?

  ‘But I didn’t know what his favourite colour was,’ I heard her say.

  *

  Still cradling the owlet in my palms, I went to the balcony and saw that Petra and Aliki were having dinner with Ruba and Ms Hadjikyriacou in her front yard. This was a good time for me to go to the garden. I took a spade and buried the owlet in the soft soil beneath the orange tree. I buried it deep so that cats and wild animals could not get to it. Then I sat on the balcony holding the little bird, who had nestled deep into its feathers, and I listened to the laughter and endless chatter down below.