THE LAST MOUTH

My mother has graced the front page of a newspaper twice, and very nearly a third time. The first occasion my mother made the paper was in 1966, three years before she came to the Netherlands. The Times of India printed a picture of several nurses gathered around the deathbed of a famous film star. One of those nurses was my mother. Or rather: one of the grey blurs was my mother. The paper had lost its colour, the photo its sharpness. What remained was a large black stain (the film star) and various grey dots (six or seven gorgeous Indian nurses). This edition of The Times of India was kept in a bank safety deposit box.

Occasionally my mother would retrieve the paper from that box and show it off to visitors. In fact, people visiting us could be divided into two groups: those who didn’t get to see the front page of The Times of India, and those who were expected to scrutinise the front page of The Times of India as though it were a sacred image. Not infrequently, visitors would point to the wrong collection of grey dots, thinking it was her, but my mother never corrected anyone. She was too proud.

I knew which set of dots represented my mother. Once, inside the bank safety deposit room, she’d whispered in my ear: ‘You see those luminous grey dots? That’s me. I’m holding Prithviraj Kapoor’s hand.’ My mother was the collection of dots standing closest to the film star’s bed.

The other front page that showed my mother was carefully hidden from visitors. I only saw the evening paper in question the day it landed on our doormat: Thursday 12 December 1996. It was a cold, bright day, as I remember it. The wind was sharp as a scythe. People were skating on Kralingse Plas. I had borrowed our neighbour’s speed skates and pretended to be a champion skater. My mother and my eldest brother had watched from the side of the pond. My eldest brother can’t skate, and he’s none too good at reading, writing, arithmetic, or telling time, either. What he’s good at is sneezing — when he has a sneezing fit, that is.

On 12 December 1996, my eldest brother had a sneezing fit. Every couple of seconds his nose seemed to explode; and every other minute a foghorn bellowed across Kralingse Plas, as my brother blew his nose on the sleeve of his coat.

I remember the occasion when my brother had a sneezing fit in a restaurant just as the main course was served: tacos with beans and sour cream. If we went out for a meal, it was always the same Mexican restaurant we’d go to — Popocatepetl in the old harbour. Before we left the house, each one of us had to drink half a litre of tap water, because we weren’t allowed to order anything to drink at Popocatepetl. My mother thought that drinks prices in restaurants were disproportionally high. For the price of a single glass of Coke you could buy two one-and-a-half-litre bottles in the supermarket — or even three, if it was on special. When the waiter appeared at our table and asked if we wanted something to drink to start with, we had to chant ‘no’ in unison. And that included my father. My mother thought the food was expensive too, but then there’s no avoiding that in restaurants.

In Popocatepetl, the restaurant of my childhood, my eldest brother succumbed to a terrible sneezing fit. The waiter had just wished us ‘bon appétit’ when the snot went flying and landed on the tacos.

‘You can’t taste it,’ my mother said, and simply carried on eating.

My eldest brother took a bite, too, but sneezed, and out it flew again.

My father lost his patience. ‘Stop it,’ he snapped. ‘Stop it.’

‘It’s not me who’s doing it,’ said my brother, the one who’s no good at reading, writing, arithmetic, and telling time. ‘It’s doing it by itself,’ he said, and pointed to his body.

My mother had seen the photographer coming. He’d been prowling around them like a predator circling its prey. ‘A brown-skinned lady,’ my mother said, brandishing Thursday’s paper. ‘He wanted to photograph a brown-skinned lady in the snow!’

‘Vincent Mentzel,’ my father said proudly. ‘None other than Vincent Mentzel took a photograph of you!’

‘Who?’

‘Vincent Mentzel. He’s photographed the Queen as well.’

‘When I get my hands on Vincent Mentzel,’ my mother shouted, ‘I’ll whack him over the head with my rolling pin.’

The issue was this: my mother wasn’t dressed for a photo. My mother is petite and extremely thrifty, and she was wearing clothes that were practically disintegrating. In My Jerusalem, the Israeli writer Meir Shalev writes: ‘The laundry was done in the shower water, the laundry water was used to mop the floor, and the water that had mopped the floor was used to water the garden.’ The clothes my mother wore on 12 December 1996 had been worn by my eldest brother and by my middle brother before I got to wear them out in playgrounds and sandpits. My mother graced the front page of NRC Handelsblad dressed in rags you’d expect to see on a homeless person. And my eldest brother? He was pictured with snot on his chin, snot on his coat, and snot on his mittens.

‘How can I still show my face around here?’ my mother despaired. We were living on Tiberiaslaan in Kralingen: everybody here read NRC Handelsblad. Everybody had seen my mother, the brown-skinned lady in rags. She was the woman my mother didn’t want to be, but sometimes was, because the force of the past can be overwhelming. Poverty, war, and nine older brothers and sisters had certainly put their stamp on my mother’s character.

‘I was the last mouth,’ she once told me, continuing in a whisper about Muslims occupying the region where her family lived. My mother was the tenth child, born during a difficult time. When she was only three weeks old, the family was forced to flee. My mother’s mother was so anxious that her breasts stopped producing milk. The last mouth sought food, but found none — not a drop. My newborn mother’s life was saved by a small goat. Her eldest sister took her to this goat, where several times a day she drank greedily of the milk that flowed from its udder. ‘Pucha’ was my mother’s nickname, the name given to her by her nine older brothers and sisters. Pucha: after the sound her mouth made at the goat’s teat. Pucha-pucha-pucha. It’s a story that haunts me, that tells me where I’m from, too.

Years later I was photographed by Vincent Mentzel for De Parade, a touring theatre festival. As part of a literary programme that stopped at cities including Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, and Amsterdam, I’d be reading from my work all summer. Slowly, as the camera clicked and flashed, a smile formed on my lips.

‘Great,’ Mentzel said. ‘Nice, natural.’

I was thinking of my mother, her rolling pin at the ready.

And then there’s the front page my mother narrowly missed. This time the newspaper was a little more modest — neither of NRC Handelsblad or The Times of India stature. It was De Ster van Kralingen, a free weekly paper delivered to our neighbourhood. It featured reports on local centenarians and missing cats, but also lots of ads from grocery stores and butchers, spreading the word about discounts and bargains. It was my mother’s favourite paper. Every week, she devoured it.

The contested front page of De Ster boasted a photo of a white woman on an old-style granny bike with heavy shopping bags dangling from the handlebars. The woman in question is Ans de Ruiter, the final customer of Den Toom, a small, local supermarket. It had been in business for 30 years, but having fallen foul of the big takeover machine, it was due to be converted into an Albert Heijn, the latest outpost of a large supermarket chain. The shop had a closing-down sale, with lots of special deals and cut-price offers.

De Ster accompanied the photo with a brief interview with the white woman, mostly about the contents of the bags dangling from the handlebars.

De Ster: ‘What did you buy?’

Ans de Ruiter: ‘As much as possible.’

There was another woman just like my mother.

‘Poor Mr De Ruiter,’ my father mumbled.

At the end of the interview, my mother was mentioned. The article said that my mother had been buying her groceries at Den Toom for more than 20 years, that everybody in the supermarket knew her, from the shelf-stackers to the cashiers, and that she’d dearly wanted to be the last customer. But someone else had that honour.

Ans de Ruiter.

When this newspaper hit our doormat, my mother began swearing in Indian. Although I don’t speak the language fluently, I can swear in Hindi with ease. My mother only ever wanted the best for our future, so she always spoke Dutch to us — sometimes even with the rolling ‘r’ affected by our neighbours. But whenever the social brakes came off, my mother would erupt in a deluge of Indian swearwords. Who knows, perhaps my brothers and I were the only children in the world who knew ten Indian words for bastard son, but who were unable to ask where’s the toilet? in Hindi.

That good future is happening now. My clothes haven’t been worn before, and I’ll always be able to fill my mouth. And yet it’s as if this future isn’t good enough, and will never be good enough. I haven’t lived up to my mother’s expectations. I’m not a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant — someone to be mentioned in conversation with neighbours.

When it all becomes too much for my mother and tears roll down her cheeks, she mutters: ‘My eldest son has learning disabilities, and my youngest son is a writer.’

Later that same afternoon, the front page of De Ster van Kralingen was burnt at the stove. I could hear my mother chant an Indian spell. The rest of the paper was saved and would be pored over later, in search of bargains.

‘She hid,’ said my mother after she’d disposed of the ashes in the neighbours’ garden. ‘She waited until I was at the checkout with my trolley, until all of my items were on the belt, until I got a receipt pressed into my palms.’

Ans de Ruiter — a primary-school teacher, as De Ster reported — was in my mother’s eyes a cheat, someone who’d wrongfully become Den Toom’s last customer. My mother should have been the last, nobody else. No one but she should have graced the front page of the local paper. On the supermarket’s last day, she’d gone shopping every hour. She kept going back on her bike, brimming with enthusiasm, returning home laden with heavy bags dangling from her handlebars. The kitchen cupboards were overflowing with food and household articles. My father began knocking together a new cupboard, but he couldn’t keep pace with my mother’s compulsive shopping. Nothing’s a match for my mother’s compulsive shopping. If something’s on special, she can’t leave it on the shelf. It’s an urge stronger than herself, an addiction that screams out for instant gratification. Once she came home with cat food, although we had neither cat nor kitten. My mother’s famous words: ‘It was on special.’

My father refused to have the consignment of cat food in the house. ‘We’ve got a guinea pig,’ he shouted. But my mother took no notice. A guinea pig would be happy to eat rabbit and tuna. But Raj — after the Bollywood actor my mother had nursed — wouldn’t go anywhere near the mashed rabbit in his cage; the guinea pig flatly refused to consume his new food. It earned him a thundering sermon on enduring war and nine older brothers and sisters, and worse: rations of a single lettuce leaf a week.

In the end we gave the tins of cat food to family, friends, and acquaintances. We took one with us to every birthday party to which we’d been invited — wrapped in pretty tissue paper, of course. The reactions varied hugely: from surprised to indignant, from speechless to deeply, deeply disappointed. The upshot was that we received fewer and fewer birthday invites.

On Den Toom’s last opening day, just about the entire shop was on special. If Pakistan decided to start a nuclear war, we’d be able to survive for months, if not years, on our supplies.

Since she had her eye on a special that she couldn’t carry home on her own, my mother wanted me to come along on her umpteenth trip to Den Toom. I feared the worst, but I knew ‘no’ wasn’t an option. People who are addicted to specials don’t take no for an answer — or not my mother, anyway. A refusal would send sparks flying in her brain, and the consequences would be dire.

In the supermarket, my mother pointed to a pallet of chocolate wafers. In an attempt to reassure me, she said: ‘We can put them in bags and boxes.’ I felt anything but reassured. I wanted to run off, as fast as my legs would carry me. But my mother said: ‘Hurry, or other people will beat us to it.’

What other people, I wanted to ask. What other people want to buy a pallet full of chocolate wafers just because they happen to be on special? Those people either don’t exist, or they’re locked away in a secure unit.

My mother began transferring the wafers to her shopping trolley. Keen to avoid a scene, I followed suit. People were all eyes. It was something of a miracle that my mother didn’t feel any shame at such moments. Vincent Mentzel could shoot an entire roll of film without having to fear for his life. It was the past, I thought to myself, the crushing memory of the hunger years, the poverty, war, ten mouths. It wasn’t my mother who was doing this; it was doing it by itself. A force that can’t be stopped, a force of nature, like an erupting geyser.

And so we wheeled two shopping trolleys chock-full of wafers to the checkout. The cashier who knew my mother didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Good day, Mrs Van der Kwast,’ she said with a friendly smile. ‘I see you’re back again.’

She scanned pack after pack after pack of wafers. And once all the packs had been scanned, a total appeared on the till display. With a push of a button, the total amount was halved. My mother heaved a sigh of relief.

That same evening, Raj’s cage was opened. My mother’s hand squeezed in and put down a stack of chocolate wafers. This time there was no need for a sermon. Raj nibbled the wafers as if his life depended on it — and maybe it did. The single lettuce-leaf ration hadn’t done him any favours.

By then, the doors of Den Toom had closed for good. The photographer of De Ster van Kralingen had taken a picture of Ans de Ruiter. The reporter had promised my mother he’d mention her name in the piece, and write that she’d gone grocery shopping at Den Toom for more than 20 years, that everybody knew her, and that she would have loved to have been the last customer.

Unfortunately, we can’t always be who we want to be. More often than not we’re that other person, the shadow, the invisible, the lost hope. And if we ever escape our destiny, we slowly morph into grey dots that nobody recognises.