Songbirds(22)

I reached out and took Nisha’s hand in mine; it was warm, and she squeezed my fingers.

‘The owl would come in and sit down on my sister’s favourite book – The Mahadenamutta and His Pupils. She loved those stories. She would ask me to read them to her every night. One day, I shooed the owl off the book and started to read. The owl sat beside me and watched me turning the pages. I think it was listening! It came again and again for a whole year, and I read that book every time. On my sister’s next birthday, it disappeared.’

She squeezed my fingers again and remained silent. She looked out of the window, and I did too.

‘I love the way the snail trails glimmer in the light,’ she had said.

‘I love you, Nisha,’ I had replied.

There wasn’t even a pause.

‘I didn’t come here to love anyone,’ she said, pulling her hand out of mine. ‘I came here to send money to my daughter.’ She was so deliberate with her words, as if she had rehearsed them. The way she had stressed anyone, with a fierceness in her eyes, made me reluctant to say anything else to her. I nodded and she put her hand on my knee, then dunked a biscuit in the coffee.

*

Remembering this now, I was all the more convinced that I had scared Nisha away with my proposal, that it had finally been the thing that had been too much for her. She had probably packed her belongings and gone home without telling me. But I had proposed on Saturday and she had left on Sunday. How would she have had time to reserve a flight so quickly? Something didn’t quite add up. Perhaps she had already decided to leave before my proposal? And, once I had proposed, that had made it even harder to tell me, so she had just left. I decided that this was the most probable explanation. But I still couldn’t be sure.

I noticed that the little bird was struggling to open its right wing. I filled up a smaller container with about an inch of water and placed it in there to bathe. I didn’t think its wing was dislocated and I hoped it was bruised rather than broken. The bird moved around in the container, splashing its beak into the water, turning once or twice to glance in my direction. Each time it did this my heart fell to my stomach. When the bird finished its bath it hopped out, without opening its right wing at all, and ate some of the berries that I had put on a plate beside the container.

Eventually, it stopped raining and the sun came out. I decided to head to the river to find some snails: there’d be an abundance of them now after the rain, and I just couldn’t sit still.

It seemed that the river had overflowed, carrying along with it all manner of detritus. There were plastic containers and plastic bags, barbed wire, car wheels and hubcaps, a pair of sunglasses, a yellow foam mattress clinging to the side of a tree, even a dead cow. A stench travelled along with it, most likely from the north part of the island, which was often polluted by spills from a badly maintained sewage system. The smells travelled across the water with a southern blowing wind, like today.

Suddenly, I heard a voice – a woman’s cry – so quick and sharp I wasn’t sure I actually had heard it. I couldn’t distinguish voice from wind from rush of river.

‘Hello?’ I called across the water. But no reply came, even when I called again.

*

In the mountains, the water is clear and fresh, nothing like the water down here. Before it gets contaminated by human waste, you can drink from it and swim in it; there are waterfalls that pour down amongst the trees. It’s the kind of water one might imagine in paradise, if such a place existed.

I went up with Nisha last winter, up to the hills above the valley to sit by the river. She wanted me to show her where my grandparents and parents had lived, where I had grown up – the old farmhouse with the arches was now owned by tourists, who came only in the summer. The rest of the time the building was dark and empty. Nisha wore an abundance of clothing: a scarf, a woolly hat, thick gloves, two pairs of socks, thermal tights beneath her jeans, a thermal top beneath her jumper, and her big puffy coat with the fake fur running around its hood. All this, and her teeth were still chattering! ‘See,’ she had said, ‘isn’t it nice to see the place where you grew up, because now I think I know you better.’ She planted a big, cold kiss on my cheek.

You see, I thought you were a different person.

If I followed the river through time, would I find Nisha at the top dressed in all her cold weather abundance? Would I find my father and grandfather there with flocks of sheep, both with high boots so they could walk easily though the fields, sheepdogs by their side? The sheep roamed free in the pastures – back then, the borders between farms were fluid, they weren’t divided by fences but instead by trails of wild herbs, like rosemary and thyme.

There had been two sheds attached to the farmhouse, one for churning the milk to make haloumi and anari, and the other for spinning wool into yarn. My mother and grandmother used the yarn to knit blankets. The men – including me, though I was just a boy – would load the mules with cheese, yoghurt, milk and rolled-up warm woollen throws and head out to the farmers’ market. My grandfather, strong as an ox and with a head of thick white hair, loved his animals, caring for them as if they were his children; although it’s true that he killed around four or five lambs a year – one especially for Easter after the long fast. The meat was clean and pure. We also had some chickens for fresh eggs, and a dozen turkeys.

I told Nisha all this when we went to the hills, and she had a similar look on her face as she did that day when she had seen the photograph. She held my hand tightly, as if the wind might blow me away.