The right hands draw bows smoothly across violin strings.
Maybe they are playing the song of my mother in the kitchen, patting salt and turmeric on sliced pork. Or, the song of the frying pan (ha!), bearing a sprinkling of curry leaves, sizzling expectantly.
The left hands’ fingers jump smartly, like eight fairies, on the necks of the violins. Maybe they are practicing the song of the road trip we will soon take—my 16 year old brother, and I, his twin, our father and mother piled into the Toyota Sienna, headed for Ithaca, Toronto, New Haven, then back here to New York for college visits.
The players stand relaxed, but cradle their instruments with skill. Their arms reticulate back and forth over the bridge of the violin. Their craft isn’t the work of the doctor’s, steadily checking my dexterity, or of any one of the nurses on-call at different times at the hospital, reassuring me as they wipe my skin with alcohol.
Or maybe it is the song of dad and me in the garden, as soon as this late March snow thaws.
I let the music encircle my wrists and abdomen, brush the outline of my spine. The notes are silky, like the fans of sarees displayed in the windows of Little India’s bazaar. Like those fabrics, this music enfolds me, drapes itself over the very spaces of this home.
I think about my brother’s Turkish violin teacher. He has two grown sons. The elder is studying to be a cardiologist, though Mr. Altug wishes that son would pick a simpler life, perhaps pursue his passion for animation. The second, Billy, of whom he’s so proud, has taken an easier road. Billy owns a landscaping company, and leases out landscapers to various enterprises. Mr. Altug has a wife, and a mother, who has grown bitter in these later years, but he and his wife will never stop caring for her in their house.
He has two bird cages, one holding a couple of house finches that chatter now and again, interrupting the lessons he teaches in his living room, and the other containing a yellow-breasted conure that liked to perch on his mother’s hand. Mr. Altug’s mother used to attend to Zoey as though he was the product of her creativity. And the twitter and chirrups of house birds, the legato of their piano, the violin swelling with sonatas—the tinkle of the wind chime rustling in the pear tree outside his kitchen window—formed Mr. Altug’s natural habitat.
Not too many people know about him, the way he can saw away on a fiddle, but it doesn’t matter.
“You know I’m getting old Neesha,” Amma says to me the next day, as morning makes room for the afternoon. “Fifty-five this coming August, and I have yet to see my two children off to college.”
My mother doesn’t look fifty-four. The few laugh lines on her face blend easily into, even accentuate, her fresh cinnamon brown complexion. Her hair is still black, black as the New York skyline at night. Today she brushes it away from her face and pulls it into a casual bun at the nape of her neck. Loose strands fall, betraying the bohemian that she is. She seems to be the svelte dancer she once was, but on a day off.
My mother is fifty-four, while my brother and I are still just sixteen, because she spent her early married years delighting in pastimes she knew she would not have time for when she finally devoted herself to children. My father and she literally spent years whiling away days, lazing in parks, intent on one book or another. When the curtain of night fell daily, a black veil in the place of sunlight, they would pull out flashlights from their knapsacks, and continue to turn pages. They were a duo of lightning bugs, radiant in the summer heat. And then when they finally looked up, in the last moments of whatever adventure, when they decided to leave and began to fold their blanket, and tuck their books and flashlights back into their knapsacks, as they walked sleepily, happily, in the dark to the car for the drive back home, my father would be singing verses of Randy Spark’s famous ballad until my mother feigned annoyance, coyly rolling her eyes. But in her heart, she was singing along:
Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine
I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine
A million tomorrows shall all pass away
ere I forget all the joy that is mine, today
I’ll be a dandy, and I’ll be a rover…
I know well and truly that even if my father and mother had not always been financially secure, they would still have adopted the avant-garde lifestyle of park enthusiasts. They believe life to be redolent with fragrance, ripe for gorging—if you have the eyes and ears for it. They understand life may not be this fortunate for everyone, but they wager it is so for more than realize. I fight to believe that too. But there are important questions these days. What about Darfur? Maybe a compilation of stories from Abu Shouk camp: the stories which overcome the frames of refugees, natural as fear and sweat. What about a girl that is in and out of the floor of her hospital so often, she knows the number of footsteps between one framed picture and another down the desolate medical halls? My caustic questions…
As it was, during my parents’ idyllic and privileged youths, in the parks they wandered, my mother taught my father the cha cha and the waltz, and the moonlight filtered through the autumn leaves and cast shadows which could barely be discerned in nights that encompassed them. And the two painted, camped, biked and ran together. They heeded their instinct to protest, which led them to orphanages in Peru or clinics in Sri Lanka. And they traveled by car, on road trips through the hills and plains and route 66 motels of the United States, their eyes wide as De Tocqueville’s, their sensitivities piqued to what they might learn. They always joked they should buy a telescope!
To this day, their active, adventurous spirit keeps my parents carefree and hardy. Or, I should say, used to keep my parents carefree, though I guess they are still hardy, continue to be more so even, and extended to further limits, since their daughter fell ill.
“Come rasathi, help me make dinner for the evening.” My mother’s suggestion draws me back to the present, and I go to her, thinking, “Does she notice that I’m jealous of her past and her health?”
We decide on pork, for the second night in a row, but this time in a curry form, collards, lentils, and home made yogurt, and of course, the rice which we eat almost every night. I know my way around the kitchen. I know to wash a cup of rice to rid it of the invisible top layer of starch. I’ll watch the water I’m rinsing it in turn chalky before I drain the raw grains. When we leave the rice to boil, we start in on the onions. I know to cut onions vertically, along the natural lineaments, from the root to the stem, to minimize the amount my eyes tear up. I know the yogurt, which my mother incubated and cultured over night, is now cooling in our fridge. So far, our meal of rice, onions, yogurt, is bland, and white and austere.
Next though, we will cut the red meat, stain our fingers with the turmeric that we roll it in, and feel the blood rush to the tips of our hands as the curry powder that we douse the meat in stings. This is the passion in the cooking, following the simple rice and yogurt, the tango, after an unaffected waltz. Next, when we chop the collards, a fresh smell is unleashed that cuts the pungency of the spices.
The cooking fills our nostrils, even our eyes. It smells good. It feels good, until I notice the lentils soaking at the other end of the kitchen counter. I think to myself that the water soaking the lentils is like my disease, infiltrating me. There is nothing I can do to protect myself from the thoughts creeping in, but I try to distract myself, the way others so often try to distract me. My father will come home from work tonight, to the sound of my mother and I having fun, and the scents of our afternoon’s work wafting to meet him.
That night, in bed, I think about the news around the neighborhood. Mr. Altug’s mother’s lupus ravages her body, but, as Mr. Altug says, more crucially, “the lupus disparages her joy.” Violets and snow crystals are in the garage, protected from the winter chill under a blanket. Laurence, my driving instructor, can’t take me out on drives anymore, in that terrible Honda Civic with the embarrassing sign, shaped like a dunce cap on its roof. “Sharp Awareness Driving School” it says, for all the other cars and world to see. Laurence called on Monday and told Amma that the doctors have discovered he has skin cancer. The sweet potato vine, also under the blanket in the garage, will, by August, creep up the front brick of our house, into a green bouquet, and we will hardly remember that just now it stood only 3 inches tall. According to the BBC, black Congolese babies’ bones protrude, almost breaking through a thin layer of skin. Their bellies puff with starvation. Under the blanket in the garage, impatiens and hispidas, blue ageratums and deep yellow callies, are sleeping but soon will bloom, spilling over, like miniature waterfalls from the clay pots that we plant them in. And I hear my parents’ song.