by Ami Rao
And when she stopped believing, Ameena’s disbelief came, not with a sense of sadness or anger or betrayal, but with the same kind of matter-of-fact acceptance that is felt when one day, a child wakes up and stops believing in Santa Claus.
1.3
David was the oldest son of a family of Ashkenazi Jews from Lithuania, by way of Vienna, Rome, Rhode Island and then eventually Manhattan Island.
His father, now dead, had been a watchmaker, fastidious in his trade with his sharp eyes and deft fingers. His mother, also dead, had been a schoolteacher, also with deft fingers that she put to a different use, for she had been a gifted pianist and the music teacher at the local school, and, on this basis, had inculcated in David and his younger brother Abraham both a love of music and a belief that education and industry alone were the twin tickets to freedom from the historical oppression of their people.
David, a quiet and sensitive boy, had taken both pieces of wisdom to heart. By the age of eight, he had sat his grade 6 piano exams, sang with a voice that made people gasp and played a medley of different instruments including saxophone, clarinet, trumpet and guitar. But like his mother, piano remained both his greatest talent and his greatest love. At school, he was a bright boy, albeit a bit aloof, often preferring to keep his own company, and yet when he chose the company of others, he found it easy, in the way that bright boys at school with consistently good grades generally do.
It was probably because of this – because David was an evolving example of his mother’s precise ambition for him – that her death had been, for him, a truly terrible loss, not only because of the loss itself – her loss, the loss of the life she would have had – but also because he felt that he had lost the opportunity to show her the fully formed version of himself, of everything she would have wanted her son to be.
Many years later, David would marvel at things, at the concomitant effect of things, at how just as one stray ember sparking a forest fire could cause such devastation, so one death could lead to many deaths, not simply in a poetic sense, but in a real, literal sense.
David’s parents had been childhood sweethearts, having grown up on the same street in the little town of Babtai in Lithuania, and on windless, summer days, when the windows were flung open and houseflies buzzed, the strains of Ruth’s piano travelled across to Ben’s bedroom and touched the softest compartments of his heart. It was significant, but not unexpected, then, when the time came, and they were finally granted the freedom to leave, that both sets of families made the collective decision to flee a home where sites of wartime massacres had become monuments, for a new land that they believed held both opportunity and redemption.
Ruth’s mother had been especially persuasive on the merits of emigrating to America, backed in part by her impassioned conviction in the idea of the diaspora as fundamental to a new Jewish awareness of the world, and a new awareness of the Jews by the world.
This had caused some strain in her relationship with the others, particularly with her own husband, but the clever and artful woman that she was, she swayed them all in the end. She had a cousin, she said, who lived there, and had made some name for himself in the garment business and who, she was sure, would help set them up. And like that, albeit with some continuing resistance, pragmatism had trumped ideology.
So, David’s father Ben, and David’s mother Ruth, both young adults now, found themselves once again on the same street, just in a new adopted homeland, their new home now a little town in the state of Rhode Island, the town itself occupying a narrow strip of land running along the eastern bank of the Pettaquamscutt River all the way to the shore of the bay. Ben had been in love with Ruth long before he even comprehended the meaning of being in love – surviving genocide, fleeing oppression, uprooting lives, danger-fraught journeys across one wide sea and one wider ocean, all that was small fry held against the power of his passion – and so when on one September evening he proposed to her at Point Judith Lighthouse as the sky blazed and the waves crashed and all around them everything turned to gold, no one was really surprised.
David’s mother died of lung cancer when David was twenty-two and Abraham was eighteen, on one of those days when the sun never set, and the night came late, one of those days in the long, languid summer that fell in between two other life events, for David had just graduated from college as spring blossomed into summer, and his brother was due to begin college, just as summer would melt into fall. The timing of these things, David would often think to himself, was one of those details, both tiny and vast, with the power to change everything, because that – the timing of his mother’s death – had made the difference between the course of his brother’s life and that of his own.
They hadn’t caught it until it was too late; the symptoms had been subtle, easily explained away by any number of innocuous reasons, which was exactly what his mother had done for as long as she could, and so the weight loss had been attributed to cutting out sugar, the cough to her smoking, the dark circles to being kept up at night by the constant tick-tock of the multitude of clocks that inhabited the house like an army of pale-faced ghosts.
David found himself changed by his mother’s disease, perhaps as we are all changed by certain events in our lives. It had caught him unawares, this possibility that he was going to lose the person who had given him life, and who would, even to that day, have easily given her own life to save his. And so, he found himself changed, and also fearful, and also shocked, not only by her death but by the rapidity with which it came. And the suddenness of it, like a truck coming off a bend in the road in the dead of the night without lights, without sound, without any warning. Just as her disease grew and spread through her body, so his terror grew and spread through his. He sat by her bedside and watched her scream in those last few months as she wafted in and out of the morphine-induced cloud of pain-numbing delirium; it was the closest he would ever get to seeing agony. And then he held her hand as he watched her die, not knowing – in the most polarising dilemma of his life – whether he was devastated or relieved.
In the days that followed, he played the piano obsessively, like a madman, for hours on end, as the black nights dissolved, and the sun rose over the Seven Hills and his fingers hurt but the notes still rang – strident and beautiful – breaking the eerie silence of the house with their intransigence to the very idea of death.
His father lasted less than a year before he suffered a stroke that came, much like madness comes, without warning out of nowhere, leaving him in a wheelchair, his limbs paralysed, his face frozen in an absurd expression of permanent surprise, eyebrows raised, eyes wide but unseeing, mouth open but unspeaking, dribbling saliva onto a cloth that the nurses changed diligently every few hours. He died in the nursing home only a couple of months later, quietly in the middle of the night, and this time for David, the relief had eclipsed almost everything else.
‘Men,’ David’s mother’s oncologist, Dr Noimark, would say, standing by the garden door with a bagel in his hand, while shiva was being sat in the living room, ‘are definitely the weaker sex, David. For men, losing a partner is like losing an essential body part – a lung or a kidney or, more accurately, it is the heart I suppose – that has been cut out and taken away. And well, without an essential body part, of course, it’s only a matter of time. Women, on the other hand, when women lose their husbands, it’s like they get a new lease on life.’ He took a bite of his bagel. ‘Nice, this bagel – onion? Definitely the bolder, braver sex, young man, remember that when you find a girl of your own to marry, women hold the key to the box.’ But what’s in the box? David wondered but didn’t ask.
Abraham had been most affected by their mother’s death. Or as David tried to explain to their father just before he died, only because he knew he couldn’t hear him and therefore couldn’t possibly be saddened by it, Abe had ‘become fucked in the head’. He had walked out of university after the first week, with no phone call and no le
tter, just got up one morning and packed his belongings and walked down the long path, lined with maple trees just beginning to blush, and out the gates. Just another truck coming off a bend on a different road. David had tried to contact him when their father had died but hadn’t been able to trace him, each promising clue turning out to be yet another red herring, until the space between them was filled with a sea full of red herring, infinite and crimson and impossible to cross. The last he heard of his brother was that he was a diving instructor somewhere off the west coast of Australia. Or that he was a coke-head roaming the streets of Sydney with his electric guitar. It could be either. The only thing that seemed verifiable by mathematical triangulation was that he was still alive and that he was somewhere in Australia.
1.4
A few years after eight-year-old David had passed his grade 6 piano exams with flying colours, on a different island-kingdom across the mighty Atlantic, another eight-year-old discovered an unusual talent in an altogether different form of art.
Ameena first started doodling in the classroom out of boredom, starting in the margins of her notebook, first one line, then a curve, then a pattern, then another, then many, until the margins, first top, then bottom, then right, then left, were crammed with designs – countless crowded scenes of lines and curves and waves and spheres and teardrops. Soon, she outgrew the margins, and her patterns started to invade whatever white space they could find and Ameena began crafting entire constellations of triangles and stars floating across the pages of her ruled notebooks that were meant to be filled with letters and numbers.
When she was a little older – and a little bolder – she began to sketch picture books, telling full stories, intricate and detailed, through a spectrum of carefully constructed illustrated characters, making up these characters partly in her head and partly on paper, never knowing exactly what they were going to look like or how the story would unfold until she started sketching.
One time, her handiwork was discovered by a teacher who, suspecting something amiss, walked over from the top of the class to the back row where Ameena was seated and snatched the notebook from under Ameena’s bent head, catching her unawares. When the teacher looked at the pages, sheet upon sheet upon sheet, of Ameena’s notebook, she scolded her loudly for all the class to hear, albeit with a slight tremor in her voice, for she was taken aback by the child’s exceptional control and finesse.
Later that week, Ameena and her mother were both summoned to the headmistress’s office, and Ameena, expecting somewhat of a nasty dressing-down, was surprised that the purpose of the meeting was in fact to express to Ameena’s mother that her daughter was believed to be gifted, that nobody without such a gift could possibly create art so beautiful.
The headmistress held open Ameena’s notebook to reveal in one instance what appeared to be a strange sea-creature, which grew larger and larger as the pages turned, coiling and uncoiling, alive in the movement of its waving tentacles. Other creatures joined in as characters in the story, each one distinct with its own lively markings and features, creating all together some sort of mysterious underwater city with inhabitants that spoke in a visual language so compelling, it could almost be heard.
‘What are you drawing here?’ the headmistress asked Ameena, not unkindly.
‘A magical sea.’
‘What’s the story about?’
‘Magical sea animals.’
‘I see.’
‘Is this one of them?’
‘Yes, a magical octopus.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘She.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘She. It’s a she. And she hasn’t told me her name yet.’
‘She hasn’t… who hasn’t told you her name yet?’
‘The octopus. All my characters tell me their names. I start drawing them, and then they tell me what they want to look like and what they want to say and what they want to be called… and this one hasn’t told me her name yet, because she’ – Ameena pointed her chin accusingly at the teacher – ‘didn’t let me finish.’
The teacher and the headmistress exchanged knowing glances, Ameena’s mother looked terrified and Ameena, in the absence of pen and paper, played instead with the pleats of her grey school skirt, gathering up the material along the crease lines from both ends simultaneously, and creating, in the process, a strange protrusion between her knees.
After the meeting and for the duration of the bus ride home, Ameena’s mother remained stubbornly silent, as though somehow needing silence to process what had transpired and how best to deal with it. Upon alighting at their stop, she grabbed her daughter’s small wrist, and dragging her unceremoniously all the way home, announced, ‘I will not tell your Abba and you will stop all this nonsense in school, and if that is an arrangement that is acceptable to you, I will buy you some painting things that you can keep in your room and do whatever you want with them in your spare time. If your marks at school do not improve, I will take it away faster than you can say Jack… uh… Jack Whatever-his-name-is… I will take it away very fast – and that will be the end of that. Do I make myself clear?’
Robinson, Ameena whispered, but in her own head. To her mother, she only nodded and nothing more was spoken of the matter.
The next evening Ameena found, placed in the centre of her bed, a large sealed box labelled ‘Artist’s Starter Kit’, which, when she opened, she discovered to her utmost joy contained a stack of blank paper and mounting boards, a whole range of paintbrushes of different sizes and a set of thirty-six watercolours. After that, since her mother had kept up her end of the bargain, Ameena thought it only fair to keep up hers. Her performance in school steadily improved, there were no further complaints from her teachers – and that, as her mother said, would have been that, if not for a birthday lunch that Ameena was invited to, many months later, along with the rest of the girls in her class, at the house of one Sarah Adams.
This Sarah Adams boasted eyes of the bluest-blue and hair of the blondest-blonde and also a mother with the same bluest-blue eyes and the same blondest-blonde hair and also long red fingernails who – to Ameena’s amazement, because she generally associated mothers with peeling potatoes – played the harp.
‘I’ve been invited on a play date,’ Ameena informed her mother, looking up from her book cursorily, ‘the whole class has. It’s a lunch at Sarah’s house. For her birthday.’
‘What is a play date?’ Ameena’s mother asked.
‘Lunch, Mum.’
‘Well, why cannot you just say you have been invited to lunch?’
‘Mum,’ Ameena said with a sigh, ‘really? I mean what difference does it make what you call it?’
Zoya heaved her shoulders with her customary theatrical flair. ‘This country! Back to front in every way! For children to play, you need to arrange a date. But for adults to marry? No, no, arranged marriage is for the backward people of the East. Here you happily arrange the play date, it must be perfect, every small detail must be carefully planned, nothing must be left to chance. But marriage? Oh, but no, no, you rush into marriage like headless chicken and then die-vorce, die-vorce, everywhere you turn your head, someone is dying and someone else is die-vorcing.’
Ameena slightly rolled her eyes but with her face down in her book so her mother wouldn’t notice. ‘Whatever. I need you to drop me at Sarah’s house at noon on Saturday. Please, if you don’t mind.’
It was in Sarah’s house that Ameena saw what she saw, ‘this Sarah’ that both Ameena and her mother would always remember for entirely different reasons, for what happened happened because Ameena saw what she saw – in Sarah’s house.
But first, Sarah’s house! Oh, Sarah’s house!
‘Are you sure we are in the right place?’ Ameena’s mother asked as she turned into the drive, for neither of them had ever seen anything like Sarah’s house except in the movies.
From the imposing gunmetal electric gates to the long, winding gravelly drive, lined with tall rows of perfectly pruned conifer shrubs, to the lovely yellow brick house that sat at the end of the drive, surrounded by flowering bushes and covered in ivy that was, at that very time, beginning to turn at its tips, orange and violet and deep ruby pink with the onset of autumn… all this, and more, so when Ameena stepped out of their dusty, beat-up, embarrassingly bright-red Citroen, and took in her surroundings, it veritably took her breath away.
‘What is someone like this doing in your school?’ Zoya asked with a face full of bewilderment.
Ameena shrugged, but she knew it wasn’t a strange question entirely, even if it came from her mother who was, in Ameena’s opinion, full of strangeness, because the school consisted of people like herself, and Denise Richards, beautiful Denise Richards whose father was a Rastafarian tiler with a head full of dreadlocks, and skinny, blonde Victoria Windsor, who was named for a queen but came from a family so poor that they – all seven of them – slept in the same bed with gloves and woolly hats for half the year to keep warm.
So, she didn’t know either what ‘someone like this’ was doing in her school, but instead of venturing a guess that was bound to burst open the infamous floodgates of Zoya’s reproach, she opted for a far safer approach and simply said, ‘See you later, Mum!’
‘Behave yourself Ameena,’ Zoya warned, ‘and be careful of their things, for God’s sake. I will pick you up at three o’clock as they’ve asked.’ She reluctantly reversed the car, backing straight into a gigantic yellowing wisteria that protruded irresponsibly from one of the compound walls, unsure how her daughter would fit into whatever she had seen of Sarah Adams’s world, even if only for the duration of this play date business. ‘Bloody plant,’ she cursed under her breath. ‘Don’t break anything,’ she yelled out of the open window.
