PROLOGUE

The Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home sleeps deeply on this summer night. The heat trapped in its brick walls radiates outwards, through the skin of its painted facade. It forms a gentle nimbus around the building. Arabian jasmine climbs the wooden trellises staked in the garden beds. They are bold travellers, dark vines carrying white stars up the two-storey walls and around the windows of the residence. The plant grows obediently in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney, but its tropical ancestors are a wilder breed, a vine that grows rampant in the villages of Sri Lanka, a home more familiar to many of the residents. They remember this fragrance from their childhood, and it creeps into their sleep, turning nightmares of war into dreams of their parents, long gone but still loved.

To the passer-by, the grand old Federation building has been restored to its colonial corpus. It looms over a circular driveway, wide enough for ambulances to speed in and for hearses to crawl out. The driveway curls around a small garden of giant agaves. In the moonlight, the succulents look like granite statues; spiky oversized sentinels that hide a sandstone plinth in the centre.

The plinth is empty; no statue sits astride it. Without a purpose, it has been forgotten by almost everyone.

The southerly swells around the nursing home. The residents are used to a more feverish summer that rots the wooden bones and crumbles the clay muscle of their homes. But they welcome the southerly and breathe more easily when it slips through the mortar of Cinnamon Gardens and lifts the blanket of heat from their ageing bodies.

The wind, now reduced to a breeze, explores the nursing home as it has many nights before. While the outside of the building has been restored, the inside has been completely transformed. A few vestiges of its history remain—high ceilings with ornate bas-relief carvings here and elegant architraves there. But the inside of the building is functional, repurposed to hold and house a community of elderly men and women.

The southerly passes the office and the industrial kitchen on the ground floor of the old building. In a few hours, the cooks will begin frying onions, curry leaves and green chillies for the breakfast omelette, served with idiyappam, sothi and sambal. Omelette on a bed of steamed rice noodles, topped with milk gravy and a side of freshly grated coconut tossed in chopped chilli. It’s something to wake up for.

Ascending the wooden staircase to the second f loor, eight residents, the longest serving, sleep and dream of the books they want to write, the battles they haven’t finished, the lovers they didn’t marry and the children they couldn’t protect. Each resident has their own room along a corridor that leads to a large shrine room. Its altar is heavy with the gods of the Hindu pantheon, the main faith of the nursing home. But there are other statues too, representing both the Hindus’ hedging of divine bets, and the religions of the rest of the community.

The nursing home’s previous owner built a shiny, red-brick monolith behind the old Federation one. Its four f loors and ample girth cast a shadow across the elegant grounds. This wing is home to the other fifty residents of Cinnamon Gardens. The two buildings are connected by a covered ramp on the ground f loor: a tunnel with a gentle gradient for the wheelchairs and trolley beds. Maya, the nursing home’s current owner, and the resident of Room 1 in the old building, named this new wing Sivam, in honour of the god of destruction. Shanthi Segaram in Room 6 asked Maya if she thought she was being funny.

A wide garden stretches around these buildings. Over the four decades that Maya has run the nursing home, it has been terraformed from a neglected wilderness to orchards and large beds of vegetables that feed the residents. The crops are more comfortable in the red, hard earth of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka and the verdant f latlands of the Vanni jungle to its south, but Maya and her family have ploughed and tilled and nurtured. They have coaxed and cajoled the earth of Westgrove to yield manioc, vallaarai, murungakkai and kariveppila.

At the very bottom of the garden, beyond the vegetables and ayurvedic herbs and almost hidden by a row of black jamun trees, stands a house. With only two bedrooms, a generous bookshelf and a kitchen that’s more of a kitchenette, the house is small in stature, but the memories it holds are immense. It is rightly called the caretaker’s cottage. The different people who have lived there over the last four decades have accepted that responsibility and burden with courage.

 

MAYA

Cinnamon Gardens, Westgrove, Sydney, present day

Maya shuff led towards the front desk. The new linoleum of the nursing home f loor bubbled and curled in places, the heat expanding under its synthetic skin. The lino was only six months old, a change required by new aged care regulations. The old blue gum boards underneath it would outlive the new Minister for Health.

The teenager at the desk studied her mobile phone with surgical intensity, her thumb skating across its screen, both aimless and purposeful.

Maya parked her walker against the desk, her swollen fingers still wrapped tightly around its cushioned frame. She could move from her bed to her bathroom without it, but the walker was essential for long-distance travel.

‘It’s just arrived, Aunty,’ the girl said, picking up a package. She turned it over but didn’t hand it over. ‘“Mrs Maya Ali”,’ she read the name on the label and shook it. ‘What is it?’

‘Carnatic music tapes, lots of them. My cousin in America sent it,’ Maya answered, not too quickly. ‘Recordings of MS Subbulakshmi’s last concert in Colombo. Your grandmother will remember her. My cassette player still works.’ Maya tapped the small tape recorder clipped to the frame of her walker. She took the recorder with her everywhere.

‘Oh, is that all.’ The girl gave her the package and went back to her phone.

Maya’s daily mail checks had started to raise suspicion but not enough to compete with the allure of other people’s gourmet dinners, exotic holidays and impossibly talented children. Maya was relieved her deep-fried eggplant curry never had to stand up to the scrutiny of millions of Tamils on Instagram, just that of the constantly dissatisfied Mrs Sivaguru, a former resident of Room 15, God damn her soul to perpetual reincarnation.

Maya had worn her caftan especially. Its batik folds were capacious, allowing her to hide an entire packet of Kingston biscuits. Old Mr Padmanathan’s grandchildren brought them for him, but ever since Mrs Padmanathan died, he was sleeping his life away. He would never miss them. Plus, he was diabetic, like most Sri Lankans over the age of fifty-five from their generation. It was thoughtless of the family, really. She placed the package in her caftan pocket, next to the biscuits, and adjusted her incontinence underwear. One midnight treat next to the other. She shuff led back to her room.

Ruben was already there, changing her sheets.

He winced as he straightened his back, pulling the sheets off awkwardly. The bruises on his face were healing. The colours were hardly visible against his dark skin but the swelling couldn’t be hidden. The damage was fresh, not like the wounds he carried from before she knew him. Both were unexplained.

‘Leave it, mahan,’ she said, the heat rising in her face. ‘You don’t need to do that. I was going to let it dry. I don’t mind.’

‘Doesn’t matter, Aunty,’ he answered in Tamil. ‘I don’t mind either.’ His wide smile triggered the dimple on his left cheek and his skin shone faintly with sweat. His daily shift started at 6 am, but on Fridays he worked the first half of the day in the garden.

He had been hired as a cleaner, shortly after Zakhir had disappeared, but over the last ten years Ruben had demonstrated a collection of skills as innumerable as they were random. He knew how to grow things because, as he explained, his grandfather had been a manioc farmer near Kilinochchi. He knew how to translate things because his father had made him study languages. He knew how to clean things because his mother had raised him properly. Most intriguing to Maya, he knew how to hide things.

She stood at the doorway of her private room on the top f loor. It was a luxury in a place like this, where there were usually two residents to a room, sometimes three. She was different. Shanthi Segaram called her the Maharani of Cinnamon Gardens, behind her back but loudly. Maya was the co-owner and then, after Zakhir died and her daughter Anjali took over, she was the owner’s mother. Legally, she was still the owner.

Ruben f lipped the heavy mattress over; the muscles of his arms f lexed and released from the strain. Something under the bed caught her eye but before she could bend forward to look at it, he dropped the mattress in place and it was gone.

His shirt lifted at his waist, revealing a tattoo of torn skin that hadn’t healed properly despite the many years that must have passed since it had been scored into his body. Maya only ever glimpsed the tips of the pattern, the place where the design had come to an end—or was it the place where the design began? She would never know. The fingertips of the scar beckoned her, daring her to ask the questions: how did it happen; when did it happen; who did this to you? And the question that plagued her the most: does it still hurt?

As if sensing her scrutiny, Ruben pulled his shirt down and deftly tucked the clean sheets around the mattress, his hospital corners tight and geometric. The freshness of Sunlight soap powder blended with the cloying but familiar sweetness of her Ponds talcum powder. She always left it out for him, right next to her eau de cologne. He had once said the smell reminded him of his mother. It reminded every Sri Lankan of their mother. She still used it for the same reason.

‘It’s not appropriate for a woman of your age to stare at me like that,’ he said, smiling.

He helped her to her writing desk and threaded her wasted arms through her husband’s oversized cardigan—her writing cardigan now. The desk was the only piece of furniture she’d insisted on bringing with her to the nursing home. Zakhir had bought it for her on their honeymoon, forty-three years ago. He had carved their wedding date, 3rd December, 1977, on the inside of its drawer.

Ruben lowered her gently into the chair and arranged the folds of her caftan. She held on to his shoulders longer than she needed to. He heard but ignored the rustling in her pocket.

‘I’m only eighty. It’s inappropriate for me to admire my gentleman caller?’ she asked.

Last week’s movie club had been the Bollywood remake of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Abhishek Bachchan, the son of the great and far superior Amitabh. It seemed unlikely to Maya that Kajol would want to dance in the streets of a Mumbai slum after her brother-in-law had essentially raped her. But who was she to critique the fusion of mid-century American literature with modern Indian cinema? Plus, in India, #metoo would need more time and more than Reese Witherspoon to catch on.

Ruben laughed. Again, the dimple danced. He arranged the pillows on her bed and retrieved the emergency button from under the mattress, placing it where she could reach it.

‘Inappropriate and salacious. A predatorial grandmother of Sri Lankan ancestry will make headlines, demonstrating why we shouldn’t let refugees into Australia.’

‘Because we’re all sexual predators and terrorists?’

‘Exactly,’ he replied.

He rolled her dirty sheets into a bundle. There was soil under his fingernails from this morning’s labour. A dark half-moon encased the ridged pink of his nails. In Jaffna, the half-moon would have been a rich red.

‘Which one are you?’ she asked. She pushed strands of grey hair behind her ears and straightened her thinning plait.

He paused and looked at her directly. She held her breath. Such sad eyes, even when he laughed at her jokes or made small talk with the staff. The muscles of his face shifted the right way, his body made all the right movements, but his eyes remained the same. He had learned to mimic the behaviour of others, to respond with the language that was expected of him. You only noticed his eyes if you were looking.

If you were looking and longing to be seen.

She knew him well now. He had worked for her for ten years, and had been changing her sheets for nine. In the last twelve months, the sheet changing was done with increasing frequency and discretion. He didn’t pity or patronise her. He didn’t use that sickening tone the other staff used. They all called her Aunty. They all called every resident Aunty or Uncle, as was their tradition. The title was respectful but sometimes the tone was not, revealing the judgement that the young had for the old.

It was the same tone her daughter, Anji, used when talking to her recalcitrant seven-year-old.

‘Darling, it’s time for you to put your shoes on otherwise you’ll be late for school.’

‘Darling, it’s time for you to take your blood pressure tablets, otherwise you know what will happen in the middle of the night.’ False patience and forced lightness.

‘Well?’ She raised an eyebrow. She had lightly shaded the wispy hair with her kohl pencil. Nothing excessive, like that painted racoon Shanthi Segaram down the corridor.

‘Neither. I’m an Australian citizen. Just like you.’ He smiled again and tucked the sheets under his arm. He didn’t seem to notice the odour, or if he did, he never shuddered the way some of the staff did.

‘Don’t let the matron catch you with the contraband.’ He gestured to her left hand, resting on the bulge in her caftan pocket. ‘And always dispose of the evidence. It’s the best way to commit a crime,’ he said as he shut the door.

Her heart pounded.

She smiled at the photograph of Zakhir seated in the middle of her small shrine, and adjusted the necklace of japa mala beads around his neck, her fingers lingering on his wide smile. The twins, Anji and Siddharth, smiled like him; a beautiful, painful reminder. The photo was taken in 1978, a few years before they migrated. The day he got his second PhD in ancient Tamil architecture. As if one was even useful. She had made Zakhir stand outside the Jaffna Public Library. The heat melted the Brylcreem and collapsed his thick puff of hair that was very fashionable back then. She remembered resting the camera on her pregnant belly while he tried to revive the pompadour.

She took the package from her caftan and placed it on her writing table. It contained the proofs of the twelfth Clementine Kelly novel, sent by the publisher for her to review before it went to print. She was ending with a cliffhanger, Clementine potentially dead. She was sorry to do this to her heroine and her readership, but it was time. They had come a long way together, but even the best partnerships had to end.

Cinnamon Gardens, 1981

‘Come, come.’ Cedric ushered Maya and Zakhir down the path to the nursing home. He almost skipped towards the front door in his Savile Row three-piece suit. Maya stumbled behind him, dabbing the sweat from her neck with her cotton sari pallu.

Three-year-old Anjali and Siddharth ran ahead towards the building. On the f light from Colombo to Singapore to Sydney, the dense clouds of cigarette smoke had kept them awake the whole way. But their fatigue was forgotten as they surveyed their new kingdom. Zakhir turned back for the suitcases in the van.

‘Leave it, we’ll do it later. I want you to see the place first,’ Cedric said proudly. ‘It’s not much right now, but it will be.’ He pointed to the swollen and sagging floorboards of the verandahs that circled the building, the plaster stucco that flaked away like leprotic skin, revealing crumbling red brick underneath. ‘Once the last of them die, we will fix it up and sell it off.’ He opened the front door with the key and his shoulder.

‘Welcome to Cinnamon Gardens,’ he said with a f lorid bow that suited the elegant manor home the building used to be, not the dilapidated nursing home it was now.

Cedric Furholmen was descended from three generations of plantation owners. He had grown up next door to Zakhir’s family in Cinnamon Gardens, Colombo. It was after this fashionable suburb of moneyed families, aristocratic exiles and alcoholic diplomats that he had named his business venture in Sydney. He and Zakhir were like brothers. Their mothers had played bridge together for decades, leaving their children and their husbands in the care of their ayahs.

Cedric could have moved to Woollahra with all the other Sri Lankan burghers who had migrated to Australia in the 1950s, deemed worthy of entry by virtue of their European ancestry, colonial affectations and milky complexions. But Cedric was nursing a prematurely failing liver and the eternal shame of his parents. Hiding in Westgrove’s western suburbia suited him. He had been sent down from Oxford, stripped of his robes and dignity. During his undergraduate years, Cedric had a taste for pretty English girls, with their translucent skin and the confidence that can only be born of class. Although he was the top of the social food chain in Ceylon, he was still a colonial underclass in Oxford; white, but not white enough. A darkie to those who knew his accent was British but his blood was not; exotic and appealing to the bored ladies who were looking to rebel one last time before they married the rowing captains they were destined for. One such heiress actually broke his heart. Cedric drank the rest of his Commonwealth Scholarship, had a cocktail named after him at Magdalen College (the ‘Cedric Special’) and was exiled from Oxford. He was refused entry into the family home in Cinnamon Gardens and found himself on a journey of redemption in Westgrove.

He was reinventing himself as an entrepreneur, and his first venture was the rundown nursing home with a diminishing clientele. As the old residents died, new ones were not being recruited. The bones of the building were strong and the original features of a once-proud family home still gleamed with ageing beauty. Behind the small Federation mansion, the previous owners had built a modern monstrosity to house another thirty residents, giving the whole nursing home capacity for thirty-eight pensioners.

Cedric was able to afford Cinnamon Gardens because, as a business, it wasn’t working. The nursing home was on notice from the Department of Health and due for another inspection in six months—an inspection Cedric intended to fail. He would then accept his sanction from the government, apologetically dump the remaining residents at the local hospital in Westmead, and begin renovating the home back to its former glory.

Maya walked the corridors of the nursing home, lightly touching the walls, scabs of paint sticking to her fingertips. The building had absorbed the memories of decades of residents who had lived the last years of their lives here. The stories lifted out of the pores of the walls. They were released into the air and inhaled into her body and then her blood.

She looked at Zakhir. He had climbed halfway up the sweeping staircase and stopped at the landing before the stairs circled around to the top f loor. He did that a lot; he began a task and then stopped, as though the thought behind the act had been abruptly confiscated from his mind. He was confused by it but also compliant, waiting until the intention returned or, as was more often the case, until Maya touched him gently and reminded him of what to do next.

Standing in the early morning light at a tall sash window, he was still beautiful. A noticeable presence in any room, with his tall frame and skin the colour of milk toffee. When trauma receded and he returned to her, he was the intelligent, kind and often irreverent man she married.

Dust motes danced around him like a halo of quizzical fairies.

‘Don’t close the home,’ she said to Cedric. ‘We can do something with it.’

‘There’s no money in it,’ Cedric protested.

‘There doesn’t have to be money in all our endeavours.’

‘You would say that,’ he replied. ‘You’re a failing author.’

‘True, but we can build something here. Zakhir can do it.’

‘He’s a temple architect, not a magician. Or a geriatrician. Even a mortician would be more useful. And with whose money?’ Cedric asked, his eyes on Zakhir, frozen in the sunlight.

‘With your money for now, and then with our money. We’ll work it out.’

Cedric shook his head but his eyes gleamed. He liked a futile challenge, as his previous love interests had demonstrated. And he loved Zakhir.

And so Maya, Zakhir and the twins moved into the caretaker’s cottage, fifty metres from the nursing home at the bottom of the property’s wild garden. They had to cut a wider path through the shoulder-high weeds when Maya’s three trunks of books finally arrived by sea, months later. The name of the cottage suited her. She was a caretaker now.

Cinnamon Gardens, 1982

Cedric and Zakhir unfurled the roll of thick paper across the dining room table. Maya weighted the corners down with the heaviest books on baking. Between the three of them, they had borrowed eighteen books on home improvement. Although she’d treated them with suspicion initially, Mrs Vandermark, the cardigan-clad librarian at the Westgrove Public Library, had since extended their borrowing privileges. She even ordered in specialist trade manuals for the amateur renovators and Australian cookbooks for Maya. Australian cooking seemed to be just a variation of English cooking, which seemed to be just a variation of one piece of meat accompanied by three vegetables, but no coriander, cumin, turmeric, fried onions, chilli, garlic or mustard seeds. It was confusingly simple. And very bland.

The nursing home dining table became their work table. It was covered in colour charts, tile samples and lists. Zakhir was a pedantic draughtsman who insisted on producing 2-D and 3-D scale drawings of the nursing home. Cedric prohibited the creation of scale models in balsawood.

‘According to Dave at Mitre 10, we need to strip the walls back to their base layer of paint, bleach them at least twice to kill the mould and then repaint. The wallpaper in the common rooms is a violation of three new health codes, so that has to go.’ Zakhir opened a book at the marked page. He searched his shirt and then trouser pockets for a pencil, eventually locating it wedged behind his ear.

‘The wallpaper has to go because it makes those rooms look like a brothel in Madras,’ Cedric responded. ‘Not that I’ve seen one, but I’ve heard they have embroidered wallpaper in f leur-de-lis prints.’

Zakhir laughed. He was doing that a lot lately. Maya laughed too, more with relief than mirth. Zakhir hadn’t laughed so freely since Appa died.

Zakhir flicked through the pages of the reference book. ‘If we mix turmeric with the paint, it will slow future mould growth too. Maya has chosen Arabian jasmine white for the colour. It has undertones of pink that will become duskier with the turmeric.’

‘No more institutional white,’ Maya said.

‘This place is an institution,’ Cedric pointed out, studying the colour chart.

‘This place is a home. I read an article that said colours can change a person’s mood. Reader’s Digest—they get that here too,’ she said, more to Zakhir than Cedric. ‘White is clean but it’s also cold. We want warmth; a sense of welcome.’

‘Have you been sniffing the paint samples? People come here to die, Maya. We want a sense of people paying upfront before they do that,’ Cedric argued.

‘They come here to live with dignity and community.’

‘They might die faster if we don’t sort out the mould,’ Zakhir noted, his head inside another encyclopedia-sized book, this one devoted entirely to bacteria and aptly titled Home Bacteria: Kill it before it kills you.

‘According to this book, we’re going to have to excavate the sub-f loor to create proper ventilation and stop spore proliferation. I did that once in Anuradhapura,’ he said, referring to his former job in the ancient capital of Ceylon. ‘Sydney has a very high clay content which retains water, promotes spore reproduction and, in the event of a tectonic shift, will most likely cave in on itself. There’s new sub-f loor fan technology evolving in Singapore but we can buy that in phase two.’

‘Phase two? We can’t afford phase one! Is it possible he’s reading too much?’ Cedric asked Maya.

‘There’s no such thing,’ Maya replied. ‘I have a plan.’ The nursing home would restore her husband as much as he would restore it. ‘We have a plan.’

Zakhir looked up from his book and smiled.

Mr Petsas, aged eighty-eight, in Room 7, was a welder. He had come to Sydney from Psarianos, a small village in southern Greece, in 1910 at the age of seventeen. He had met his wife, Soula, a northerner with hair the colour of sunf lowers, at a Hellenic club dance. She was light in his arms and laughed with him instead of at him. She didn’t mind that he was riddled with scars from the sparks and the shards of half-molten metal that f lew like miniature comets and burrowed deep into his body.

For decades, he worked on the bridges of Sydney, canisters of liquid fire strapped to his back, an umbilical line from a harness tethering him to a platform suspended a hundred metres above the earth. The world was easier to love from a distance, he said, leaning into Maya’s new tape recorder.

When younger men and machines replaced him, he spent the rest of his life as a mechanic working for other younger men, fixing the cars of richer men.

Maya often noticed that when she visited Mr Petsas, something in his room had improved. Once, it was the window jamb, previously sealed shut by a sloppy painter. She found it now opening and closing, its inner wheels cleaned and oiled. A mosquito net had been inserted too. Another time, the curtain tracking around Mr Petsas’s bed, which had slipped its cracked brackets, was refitted with new brackets and new plastering.

Someone with skills and commitment to aesthetics was fixing things.

‘It’s my youngest son, Ahilleas,’ Mr Petsas explained proudly, when she told him he had the most operational and attractive room in the nursing home. ‘He can fix anything. He has a whole crew, mostly my nephews. They even do mansions on the North Shore for posh white people. Make sure you write that down in your notes.’

Maya smiled appreciatively. Ahilleas was clearly successful and exactly what she needed.

‘If I may ask, Mr Petsas, why do you live here and not with one of your sons?’

Mr Petsas smiled, his sun-weathered skin cracked and crenellated like the pictures of the Nullarbor she had been studying.

‘Your families are like ours, yes?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I think so. I don’t know, because you’re the first Greek person I’ve met, but given the quantity of dolmades and moussaka your daughters-in-law bring you when they visit, I think we may have things in common.’

He laughed. ‘Their spanakopita is improving. Not like my wife’s, but not bad.’ He paused and looked towards the window, leaning back into his bed. ‘I gave the house to my eldest son, Costas. There’s plenty of space for me there, but without Soula it feels empty and unjust. Life feels empty and unjust. Does that make sense?’

It made perfect sense. Since Appa’s death, Zakhir had occupied their marriage intermittently. Sometimes he was there and sometimes he was not. Sometimes it felt empty and unjust, although he was still living, unlike Mr Petsas’s wife. Since moving to Australia and starting the nursing home project, Zakhir had occupied their marriage more often and more joyfully.

‘How’s business?’ Mr Petsas asked.

She shrugged. ‘You can see for yourself.’

In the months since she and Zakhir had moved in, two residents had died, four had left and three more had given notice under their residency agreements. Four staff had left too.

Cedric didn’t say anything; he didn’t need to.

Families had noticed the new management.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mr Petsas reassured her. ‘They were like that when the Greeks first moved here, and now look at us: we own Melbourne. They’ll come back.’

The truth was they wouldn’t come back; they would die somewhere else. But she couldn’t do anything about that for now.

Maya hired Ahilleas Petsas and his crew of cousins to move everyone into the west wing of the big nursing home (now renamed Sivam) at the back, and they began work on the old house at the front of the property. Over the next few months, the Petsas family stripped and bleached walls, excavated and created new ventilation, re-rendered and painted everything Arabian jasmine white with a touch of turmeric. At lunchtime, Maya fed them kolokythokeftedes, using a recipe from a library book. Zakhir became an apprentice tradesman and learned everything the Petsas family would teach him. They were impressed with their new assistant and tutored him generously. He had spent years restoring temples and was an intuitive, patient nurturer of a building’s potential.

Ahilleas heard that Primrose Preparatory School in Mosman was renovating and he negotiated with them to strip and bring their laminate back to the nursing home. Zakhir covered every floor in Sivam in synthetic parquetry, while the young men of Primrose Prep were treated to the new hardwood parquetry their future-leaders-of-Australia feet deserved.

Maya removed the plastic shower curtains that separated the beds and enlisted Mrs Borkowska in Room 6, who was once a seamstress, to sew new curtains for each of the shared rooms, even the empty ones. Maya chose a palette of pastel blues and greens, as she had read these colours were soothing for babies and the elderly.

The sun-bleached and time-faded prints of impressionist paintings were removed. Maya convinced the art teacher at Westgrove High School to lend her art by Year 11 and 12 students as a revolving exhibition. She invited the young artists into the nursing home to see their work and to use the residents as subjects. Mrs Borkowska’s offer to pose nude was politely declined.

The night before the Department of Health’s inspection, Maya, Zakhir and Cedric moved the last resident into one of the newly renovated rooms. Maya took the team of low-level public servants and their clipboards on a tour. She showed them what had been achieved in one half of the nursing home and what could be achieved in the other half, if they had more time. The department gave them a stay of execution.

Cedric reluctantly took her aside. ‘I respect what you’ve done here, Maya. It’s beautiful and warm, and it is more like a home than a nursing home. But I can’t afford to keep pouring money into renovations. The place needs to cover its costs at the very least, and if we’re going to keep it open, which I’m still not convinced we should do, we need to grow our client base.’

‘They’re residents, not clients.’

‘That is part of your problem; they are clients. When they die, they need to be replaced; I’ve got sixteen empty beds.’

‘We need more time, Cedric, but we can do this. We can transform these buildings into a home where people will be valued. We’ll build a community of the elderly, not just a place to hide them until they die.’ She held his arm as she spoke, shaking it to control the tremor in her body. She wasn’t just talking about the building, and Cedric knew it.

He nodded, tears in his eyes. ‘You’ll ruin or restore us all, Maya.’ Zakhir emptied the cabinets in the office and together they went through clinical files that revealed nothing except what medication each patient was on. Half the records were for dead patients and the other half were incomplete. Many records hadn’t been updated since the residents had arrived.

‘These files don’t tell me who they are,’ Maya said, adjusting the folds of her sari so she could sit on the office floor among the papers.

Zakhir interviewed each patient and set up a new file, updating their health status and current drug protocols.

But Maya wanted to know more. On the pretext of learning about their family medical history, she interviewed the residents, tape recorder in hand. She found out who loved them and who they loved back; who looked after them, who visited and how often. Who they longed to be visited by and why they weren’t. She found out their religions, their traditions and foods. She created a filing cabinet of stories—about the years that had passed and their dreams for what lay ahead, because even though they were old, they still had hopes for themselves and those they loved.

Zakhir converted a large walk-in wardrobe into a prayer room, complete with a second-hand copy of the Quran he’d found in the local St Vincent de Paul and his own prayer mat.

Maya converted the linen cupboard next to it into a small Hindu shrine. She hadn’t brought enough deities from Ceylon to properly furnish it, but the local Hare Krishna Society in Paddington was happy to contribute the rest of the Hindu pantheon on the proviso that they were allowed to conduct a cleansing ritual for the nursing home.

The local priest from St Mary’s was invited to meet the Catholics and fewer Christians, and conduct a weekly service for those too old to be wheeled to the church two streets away. He also offered to administer the last rites for a small fee.

Zakhir opened the drawers in the office with trepidation. They were stuffed full of receipts, unpaid bills and notice letters. He had been trained by his father to run the family business and, although he had rejected it in favour of ‘digging holes in the ground’ and ‘restoring obsolete heathen temples’, he was still sufficiently f luent in the accounting system required to run a 100-million-rupee business. The double entry bookkeeping required to run a nursing home was significantly less complicated.

Maya studied the patient profiles she had created. She memorised the medical histories. It was important to know which patients were diabetic, which ones had high blood pressure and heart disease. Which ones were morbidly obese and which ones were anaemic or undernourished. Which ones were from which countries and liked what food.

She gave the nursing home’s menu to an old friend of her father’s, Mrs Ranganathan, who gave it to her youngest daughter-in-law Vidya, who made the best kathirikai kulambu in Keerimalai before the war, when people had enough time and oil to deep-fry eggplants properly. She replaced the f leeing kitchen staff with Vidya and two other Tamil women who had no catering experience but, like Maya, knew how to cook for their families.

Vidya spoke to Dr Sanchayan, the cardiothoracic surgeon from Colombo General who now worked as a GP at the Westgrove Medical Centre, and together they designed a new menu for the nursing home. Dr Sanchayan reviewed the patient files. Vidya and Maya reviewed the recipe sections of Women’s Weekly back issues. They created a menu that was rotating and evolving. Clinically acceptable and culturally adaptive, as Maya liked to call it.

She tested recipes and went to the Westgrove Public Library to borrow more cookbooks. She learned that Jewish people liked to eat honey cake on Rosh Hashanah, that Polish people ate babka on Easter Sunday and that Greek families celebrated Easter a week later than other Christians and ate tsoureki. There were no Tamils in the home, and there might never be, because the Tamils wanted to die in Ceylon or in the homes of their daughters, as was their birthright. But she cooked Tamil food anyway and introduced it to the residents.

Weetbix (breakfast), devon sandwiches (lunch) and meat/three veg (dinner) were replaced with delicacies such as string hoppers, Jaffna omelette and sothi (breakfast), antipasti and orecchiette ai funghi (lunch), rugelach or Sri Lankan butter cake (afternoon tea), pierogi or rice, parippu and an iraicci curry (dinner) followed by kithul pani and curd (dessert). Turmeric was added to everything because it was an antiseptic, an anti-inf lammatory and, according to the New England Journal of Medicine she borrowed from Mrs Vandermark, a cholinesterase inhibitor. She would fight dementia one pierogi at a time.

The kitchen in the nursing home was Maya’s masterpiece. She begged Cedric to renovate it but he refused, saying it would be like giving a new kidney to a dying man; a wasted transplant.

She insisted that he at least install a new oven.

‘A European oven, are you mad?’ Cedric asked, punching the keys of the calculator as if, by hitting it, he could compel it to reveal a different numerical outcome.

‘I need it for my butter cake. And one of those steel benchtops like you see in restaurants. It’s more hygienic and it makes rolling rotis easier.’

‘Rotis? Rotis? Mrs Smith-Jones isn’t craving rotis, Maya,’ Cedric shouted. ‘She wants her chocolate-flavoured laxative and a hot-water bottle. And frankly, that’s all we can afford to give her. God, I need a drink.’

‘Mrs Smith-Jones, and you, need to aim higher.’

Eventually, Maya and Zakhir turned their attention to the caretaker’s cottage that had become their home.

An enthusiastic shop assistant tried to sell them a showerhead guaranteed to provide a tropical rainforest experience. As she talked them through the apparently impressive range of shower strengths, Zakhir leaned over and whispered, ‘Do Australians know that the rainforest experience in tropical countries involves mosquitoes the size of bats and dengue fever?’

Maya shushed him. The showers of her childhood were conducted at the village well, partially clothed. Every second day, she and her cousin-sisters would huddle together, sitting on their haunches. Her father’s sister, her chinnamma, would haul the briny water up in a bucket and tip it over them, the salt stinging their eyes and knotting their curly hair. The children looked forward to the monsoon and the sweet rainwater it brought, first in generous and then dangerous abundance.

They couldn’t afford a tropical rainforest showerhead but Maya wanted one. Maybe she just longed for tropical showers.

They slowly started breathing life into the rest of the cottage, often using second-hand or fifth-hand fittings from Ahilleas Petsas, who admired Zakhir’s eye for structural innovation and Maya’s spanakopita, which was better than his wife’s but not as good as his mother’s.

One year, they peeled back the skin of the dark carpet. Its coarse and stained fibres released droplets of oil from her deep-fried eggplant curry, sending them stale and spinning into the air. The exploration revealed hard wooden floors, wide boards the colour of amber.

The twins returned from school to find their mother lying on her stomach, inhaling the floor.

‘Come, come,’ she said, beckoning for them to join her. She wasn’t inhaling so much as listening. ‘Trees still speak, even after they’ve died.’

The children were used to these moments and, not realising there was anything unusual about a parent who communed with floorboards, they lay down on their stomachs and listened too.

‘This house is one hundred years old, but these trees could be hundreds, maybe thousands of years more. They saw the first brown people come here and then the first white people.’

Maya traced the path made by an insect that had bored its way through the hard flesh of a living, breathing tree.

‘And now us,’ Anji, the youngest by a few minutes Siddharth never let her forget, whispered. She was the most like Maya, the most willing to close her eyes and see the universe beneath the world.

‘What do you think they’re saying?’

‘That the memories of trees will not be included in your exams so you should get up and do your tutoring homework.’ Zakhir’s disapproval was affectionate but final. The children scattered, grabbing their schoolbags on the way to their shared room.

With the guidance of the Petsas cousins, Maya and Zakhir sanded, stained and nurtured the boards back to life. When the last coat of varnish went on, Maya stood at the doorway and prayed to the mighty trees beneath her feet.

The memories of her family were now sealed in the fibre of their floorboards.