Songbirds(54)

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 grew 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.