That night, I remembered my father.
He was a small trader dealing in ginger. ‘You will be a seller like me,’ he had told me one day, as we sat on a mat in the crowded village market, spreading his little inventory next to our feet. ‘How old are you—six, seven? I want you to know the twelve different tastes of ginger before you cross fifteen, so that when I am no more, you can carry on without trouble.’
He gave me a piece of ginger to taste. It was dry but very strong, and I had tears in my eyes within seconds.
He laughed and showed my tearful face to his friends. ‘This is how you know ginger,’ he then said. ‘By mingling it with your life. There is no other way.’ He gave me another piece to chew, this time a fresh root. ‘But don’t worry, soon you will feel better. Before you have gone to bed tonight, you will think you know a part of the Big Secret of the World. You will say: I have seen it—I know how awful it can taste. A piece of ginger is not an object of fear for you any more.’
Before he died, a few years later, he had advised my mother to grow ginger upon his grave. ‘At least six columns of them. Loosen the soil before watering. Make a fence around to stop goats. Collect the ginger and dry them before they rot in flood water.’
When the early showers came, and the earth became moist and fine, we saw a dense clump of ginger plants swinging in the evening sun.
My mother died two years after him. She always said she had suffered in her life with my father. There was a chance that she would finally be free after his death. She would begin again. Surprisingly, she decided not to. She could not resist his loud call from the grave. I saw her thin arms getting thinner, her bloodless face getting ethereal. She walked as slow as an earthworm in her last few days, though her memory worked perfectly.
She left a basket for me. Wrapped with an embroidered quilt, it was full of dry ginger chunks, some sour, some sweet, some hot and spicy, some as hard as beef strips.
I threw away her coconut broom, saris, wooden shoes and utensils, and along with them the basket, into the ditch.
I hated my father, as I grew up. I didn’t know why. Probably I thought he wanted to imprison me to the kind of life he knew while I wanted more. Or because I thought if I did not hate the life that he introduced me to, I could not embrace another life. Whatever, I did not return to the village I had left behind. I stood before my mother’s grave for a few minutes only, and prayed: ‘Let me go, let me go, let me go.’ Then I did what I thought was good for me. I moved on. My education, creativity, writing, communication and negotiation skills—all came through hard work, and at this moment, my life was not where it had been a year ago. It was not even where it was yesterday, full of hesitation and confusion. I was now in a situation which was larger than my normal life would have allowed.
I stood at the window and looked at the city. It was sleeping under a dark cloud. Small tin sheds looked like deep, bottomless tombs, cursed and silenced to the last heartbeat under the constant torture of time. The old streets lay in darkness, like dry veins in a body, never to wake again, never to be filled with human voices and footsteps. It was noiseless everywhere, except for the howls of some angry cats at the crossroads, and a cricket calling incessantly from the bush.
It proved to be mysterious, very mysterious, to me, this city. I had lived here for over two decades now. My thoughts were formed here, and my ability to fight for my place in it evolved under its very direction. Day after day I collected the necessary information about it; names of its different areas penetrated my memory not to be lost in a lifetime. I was not sports-minded, but I had gone to the stadium once or twice to watch football matches with forty thousand other spectators who jumped in excitement or cried in frustration with every goal. Then there were the processions, the days of general strikes, throwing stones at government buildings, singing in praise of the motherland on days of historical significance, wearing clothes suited to the mood of the season, soaking in the monsoon. That was the city I knew, not the one that lay before me.
‘But I know what to do,’ I thought. I had come to understand that the unknown was not the problem—the problem was the known, the world in memory. The known had changed; it had changed so drastically that I found myself on the street, fighting over an over-chewed bone like a hungry dog. It was ruthless; it shattered my pride as an individual, and placed me under the weight of a life without course.
In contrast, the unknown stopped before me most compassionately, smiled at me elegantly, cleaned me up, received me into its breast, gave me ambition and dreams, and was ready to walk every step with me.
I would go with it, I said to myself. I was not my father who would find his future in a small ginger bag. I would walk into the unknown with confidence and hope and create a life without memory, without the sense of loss and anguish. And I would keep walking right up to the end.