There is a photo of me, five by seven, in black and white. I am wearing a brand-name multicoloured striped sweater, acquired in the 1980s by forcing my mother to take me to the downtown Toronto Fairweather on a Boxing Day, where they would famously throw items of clothing into the crowds lined up outside before the doors opened. Now those stripes are rendered monochrome. There are other stripes superimposed on them, wider stripes. There is an ordered gradation of shades of gray. Five shades of gray. It is from grade seven Art, a session on photography. We were learning how to develop, to make use of a darkroom. We took photos of each other in the schoolyard to start the process. The lesson was that the longer you left the paper in the solution, the darker the image got. I spent a lot of time staring at the photo, trying to figure out which shade was the most correct. The goal was to find out the right amount of time for immersion. It came down to two shades and I was either both of them or neither of them. I could not decide. These days I try to remember when my mother stopped insisting I put on some lipstick to give my face some colour. It is not like her to concede defeat on anything, let alone something like that. It is not that I do not own lipsticks. I have many shades of red. Every one of them makes me feel like a clown. But I have seen Bollywood actresses with and without makeup. I know what a difference it can make. I wish my mother would ask again sometimes. I hope she does not think I have given up. Just the other day I went to a Christmas party and could not find my own blush. I ended up using the artifact in my closet, my mother’s first blush from 1968, which I had stolen from her dresser. It is still a pretty colour. Just the other day I forced my mother to throw out a wool jacket she had acquired from catching it on a Boxing Day at Fairweather in the eighties. She stopped wearing it years ago and uses it now solely to wrap the pot of homemade yoghurt as it sets overnight in the dining room. It is a good insulator, she says.
I need my mother to come and stay with me a few days so I can interview her. She is hard of hearing, or just will not listen. Either way, it is impossible to do it over the phone. When we go to her place in Oakville, it is too chaotic with my kids running around. At my house, the kids in school or in bed, we sit in my living room on my dark-green velour sofas. I bring her tea. I spend hours listening, typing notes even though I am recording her voice, occasionally interrupting her with another question or for clarification of a detail. At one point she tells me that my father thinks the reason I want to speak to her alone is that I want to ask her whether he physically abused her. I tell her we already know he did. “What do you know?” she asks. I think it may be the first time she has asked me that question, about anything.
My first memory of a human interaction is of when I was five years old and in kindergarten. All my most vivid memories are at an interface with our home. The ten-minute walk to school. Trespassing through shrubs in some stranger’s backyard in order to take a shortcut. The agonizing breakfast table in our tiny kitchen beforehand. I lacked hunger as a young child and could not keep my breakfasts down. If I was forced to eat, I would vomit on the way to school, tidying myself up as well as I could, telling no one. The doctor gave Mother a bottle of brown tonic to help me get my hunger back, but it did not work. I resorted to hiding my pieces of toast or egg in the tiny broom closet in the corner of the kitchen, which was used solely to store plastic bags. When, months later, Mother discovered my trespasses, they would be green. She blamed me for the cockroach problem. But I somehow knew it was not my fault. I knew that cockroaches could travel through the wall dividing our home from the semi on the other side. Sure, I may have been contributing to the problem, but I did not start it.
I remember the fabric on the curtains Mother made for our bedroom, yes. So cheerful and colourful against the white canvas background. A hippopotamus in a red floral skirt pushing a cart full of flowers. A fox sitting at a table with turtles serving as the legs. A singing goose. A circus tent. A bear lifting dumbbells. A lion in a cage. A monkey with balloons. The width of the pattern was three feet and then it all repeated. I stared at it for hours from my bed. I could describe it perfectly, like the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman described the yellow wallpaper in her character’s room in the 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” But in that story the woman is already losing her mind. Or maybe it is the wallpaper that makes her crazy.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it.
My staring was not crazy. It was close observation, valuable and scientific. I looked for symmetry-breaking, like where my mother had joined two widths together without matching the pattern fully. She was likely working with an end piece she found on sale at Fabricland. What was I doing in my bed for hours? I do not know. Expanding and contracting time like the folds of the curtains, into a strange attractor, my mind jumping across scenes like distant peaks and valleys. The strange attractor would appear in another form twenty years later in my Ph.D. thesis. There were hypotheses about those foxes and flowers I had yet to articulate.
In the first case study I asked: through what path could succession progress in the direction of chaos? I found that the observed path can be recreated in the manner of a very simple mathematical function. By performing simulation experiments on the model, I found deterministic chaos…. A very symptomatic tendency of general chaotic dynamic systems is observed: convergence of the attractor trajectories, starting at different fiducial points, intensifies under increased randomness, and also, increased randomness increases the attractor’s structural complexity. Furthermore, the process shows explosive behaviour, another hallmark sign of general chaotic dynamic systems. (Anand, 1997)
I remember the group of five pine trees in a public area leading to the private recreation club, a few metres from our tiny backyard. Other children used it as a fort, their own secret club. The evidence of their use: rocks arranged in a semicircle, a pile of sticks, but nothing I could link back to individuals, nothing proprietary. I spent a lot of time there alone, happy to be hidden in plain sight. Five trees for the five members of our family. Five trees, five needles on each of hundreds of bundles, many tiny trees within the tree. Too many to count. Those white pines were entire universes. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. I learned how a small patch of trees occurring suddenly like that in a sea of grass could be useful. Decades later I would model forest-grassland mosaics using mathematical questions for a living. Figuring out how they could co-exist indefinitely.
“What do you know?” my mother asks. I tell her that my sister remembers. That she has told me, vaguely, what she saw. I never asked for details. I tell my mother she should ask my sister. And we leave it at that.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN: I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of. It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise…. and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.