CHAPTER 2
IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE
“Look at this! This is our house. Our house.” Lorraine pointed to a picture in the Mother Goose book she was reading. Lily and I duly peered at the black-and-white sketch and saw a building of bizarre angles and planes and shadowy shapes and shadows. We nodded our heads because Lorraine knew everything. She was eight years old.
The home we inherited was massive and strong and accepted everything thrown its way, from the vicissitudes of weather to the oddities of my family. It had started life as four central rooms with external walls three bricks thick to withstand cannon fire and provide insulation against the great heat of summer. The ceilings soared up to the high heavens, providing ample room for spacious thoughts to flourish and many preposterous arguments to grow and expand. Surrounding these rooms was a wrap-around verandah and in front, a high porch supported by eight 5-metre rusticated columns.
Over the years, successive generations of my family sought to compensate for the enduring inconsequence of their own existence, by leaving what they assumed was an indelible mark on history. They repeatedly modified the ancestral place, so periodically parts of the verandah were imprisoned, and a generation later, released.
More rooms were added higgledy-piggledy. Standard dimensions were for other people. My ancestral home insisted on living outside the rules. Ceiling heights followed personal whims so the roofline was a convoluted series of lumps and bumps. Doorways had been bricked up at random, storage cupboards were in odd places and to communicate between adjacent rooms my sisters and I became proficient in our own version of Morse code. My childhood home was a labyrinth of dark, mysterious corridors that led nowhere and staircases that opened on small poky cupboards stuffed to bursting with all sorts of exciting, ancient unknowns.
If I stand on tiptoes I thought, I’ll be able to reach the door handle. Then I’ll know what’s in the cupboard. The loud crash accompanied by my screams, more of fright than pain, brought my mother, who found me submerged beneath the paraphernalia of earlier generations.
“That’ll teach you to go poking your nose where it’s not wanted.” Her lack of sympathy soon taught me which door I could open with impunity and when it was advisable to hop out of the way as a grateful closet disgorged its excess baggage and, with multiple creaks of relief, settled back to enjoy its original girth.
There were an inordinate number of hiding places – useful hiding places.
“It’s bad manners to eavesdrop,” reproved my mother, but since she looked down from a great height it was easy to ensure she spoke only to the top of my head. I knew it was rude to secretly listen to other people’s conversations, but what option did I have? There was no other way to learn those delicious, adult secrets.
The rooms we lived in were so large we had to shout to be heard from one end to the other.
“Cake,” shrieked Lily one day as she raced from the pantry room, beside herself at an unexpected treat. “Come quickly! There’s cake for afternoon tea.”
“Snake,” I heard from my allocated seat at the dining table almost three metres away. Jumping up onto my chair I set up a wail designed to capture adult attention.
“Don’t make so much noise,” my mother admonished. “Do you want your neighbours to hear?” But there were no neighbours as I looked out of the dining room window, through the verandah and porch to a velvet lawn that was surrounded by an acre of garden bounded by mature trees, their size evidence of the many years my family had been anchored in Kanpur.
“What neighbours, Mummy?
There’s no one there.” “That’s because you’re a very lucky little girl. Now finish your tea and go outside to play. And stay this side of the trees where I can see you.”
In the distance 6-metre Indian Laburnum trees glowed with vitality and life. It was early May, the start of summer, so they were in full bloom with pendulous gold blossoms. Alongside them neem trees spread their leafy branches up and out, helping the laburnums to give us much-needed shade that was five degrees cooler than the adjacent sunshine.
It wasn’t possible to survive in Kanpur without respecting the great heat of summer, heat that could melt your muscle and boil your brain in a few seconds flat. The year before I started school the heat killed Mrs Farelli who we knew in that arms-length way we knew most of the Catholic community who attended our church. She had made the fatal mistake of making “a quick dash” to deliver lunch to her son’s workplace when the only way she could see was to screw her eyes up against the glare of that pitiless ball of fire in the sky.
She returned home trembling, her skin dry and head throbbing. It wasn’t long before she became delirious and fell into a coma.
Being one of the few families to own a fridge, it was my mother’s task to supply ice to cool her body. “She’s lucky she didn’t collapse on the street where no one would have found her for hours,” my mother muttered to herself as she feverishly filled cones of newspaper with ice. It was so hot the landscape had emptied. Birds, animals, humans, had all sought shelter from the unforgiving sun.
Efforts to cool Mrs Farelli by wrapping her stick-thin body in soaking wet sheets and laying ice on her forehead were of no avail. She died later that night. At her funeral the following morning even the horse-drawn hearse paid tribute to the heat.
“I couldn’t have done that.” The admiration in my father’s voice was at odds with his bemused expression as he shook his head in disbelief after he and my mother had attended the funeral. “That young chokra, Eric Mullins who is rumoured to be growing up as a wastrel, showed fortitude and compassion. He and his friends carried rubber bags of water and jogged alongside the hearse, ladling water onto the tyres.” No one wanted the rubber tyres to expand, fall off, knock the coffin around and further distress an already bereaved family. “The sweat poured off them but they kept going all the way to the cemetery. I couldn’t have done it.” Bemusement made him shake his head again.
The shock of Mrs Farelli’s death was a reminder that worse was to come.
June was hotter – stinking hot, even at 9pm, a good three hours after sunset when the tar on the roads was still molten. The hot dry air was made worse by the loo winds that felt like a blast from a furnace. It exhausted the earth, reducing her to a dry, dejected brown. No amount of water helped. Lawns everywhere curled up their collective toes and became crunchy. Dust reigned supreme and with malicious intent invaded our minds and took possession of our eyes, noses, ears and skin.
The wooden soundboard in the piano writhed in pain, making ominous sounds, threatening to warp – or worse, crack.
I watched in wordless dismay, though I knew it was inevitable, as my mother and ayah filled my favourite hiding place behind the piano with chattis of water. These unglazed earthenware containers would sumjhour the wood, soothing it with cool and moist air. Pots of fishbone ferns were added to keep the chattis company and to help pacify the soundboard.
“I helped, Daddy,” I boasted to my father. “I used the watering can you gave me for my birthday to water the fishbones.”
But my father wasn’t interested in ferns. “You mustn’t go outdoors during the day. Remember Mrs Farelli! You must stay with Mummy.” I wasn’t too young to learn the connection between death and the summer sun.
While the weather in June was murderous we knew that one day, abruptly, the loo winds would vanish, leaving behind a greater horror – humidity, as well as heat. People got small pimply rashes called prickly-heat, in the folds of their elbows, in wrinkles of skin around their necks and in other unmentionable areas where sweat collected. The itch was unbearable.
“Offer it up,” Lorraine and Lily mimicked the nuns at school. “Offer your itch to God to atone for your sins.”
It was the only consolation the nuns gave their students but at home our mother dusted rose-scented powder to alleviate the chafing and for this small luxury we said Thank you, God, knowing it was more than most people received.
At church, silent as church mice, we watched people. I heard Lorraine whisper to Lily, their heads together as they shared a prayer book, “Mr Jachu’s got bum rash. See the way he’s wriggling his bottom. He’s trying to scratch without actually scratching.”
They giggled in naughty helplessness until my mother’s stern eye pulled them into line. She knew the congregation wasn’t interested in their opinion of Mr Jachu’s discomfort and perhaps Mr Jachu wouldn’t appreciate a broadcast on his posterior movements.
We needed the monsoons to break this awful stalemate, heavy downpours that would saturate our parched land and resurrect life. So we waited patiently for the torrential rains that would bring instant, luscious, green magic; that would fill ravines and gullies; that would join our river to rush into floodplains and lay a thick layer of humus where we would plant crops the following year.
We knew if the monsoons failed it would be a catastrophe for everyone; it meant crops withered, animals died, people starved and life was heart-breaking. Our dependence on the monsoons was innate. It lay deep in our souls, at the absolute core of our being, making us who we were.
With hope in our hearts, as though the combined strength of our longing would bring rain, we focused on the darkening sky. But time and again promises were broken and, like people the world over who live in searing hot climates, we were left shattered and hotter than before.
In July, when the monsoons arrived, all was forgiven. With the first downpour the local people rushed into the streets, fully dressed, to immerse themselves in celebration of this annual miracle. We were no different. Stripped down to thick cotton petticoats that allowed freedom of movement and at the same time satisfied society’s requirement to preserve our female modesty, (even though we were only eight, six and four years old), we dashed out.
Our house had no guttering as in modern houses. Instead, strategically placed tin spouts channelled rain to the ground, making forceful, fast flowing waterfalls, ideal places for a rain bath.
“I’m singing in the rain,” carolled Lorraine as she cavorted around trying to emulate Gene Kelly. It wasn’t long before all of us were splattered with mud. But that didn’t matter as ready-made showers of warm, therapeutic water were part of the magic.
The monsoons also encouraged earthworms to make their annual journey to the surface – large, luxurious, soil-enhancing earthworms. For many years Lily and I collected them, Lorraine having outgrown this childish game. We competed over who found the largest.
“Mine’s bigger than yours,” and it was an earthworm I was talking about.
“How big is it?” my mother asked and so started my first lesson in feet and inches. I had already learnt colours from our daily walks around the winter garden.
The abundance of earthworms was evidence of a fertile soil that could, and did, work wonders. The first shower of the monsoon exerted an emerald green charm on trees and grass alike. Succeeding showers saw the grass grow in leaps and bounds until, in no time at all, it was knee height. At night a chorus of frogs and toads sang contralto to the joyful chirp of crickets while fireflies danced in and out of happy shadows.
“Catch it! Catch it!” squealed Lily as we pranced about the verandah after dark, chasing fireflies that were too quick for our young, uncoordinated limbs. Watching us miss them time and again our father came to the rescue, as fathers of lucky little girls do the world over. Daddy is so clever, I thought as he matched his steps to mine and reaching high above my head caught the flickering beetles in a fold of his thick white handkerchief, the ubiquitous garment that lived in his trouser pocket.
“Don’t touch,” as he brought the glowing handkerchief down to my eye level. “Look with your eyes but don’t touch with your hands.” And he unfolded the linen to expose a flickering beetle.
“It’s pretty!”
“It’s beautiful!”
“It’s gor-gee-ous.” the superlatives came fast, matching our gasps, each of us trying to outdo the other to show appreciation of our father for joining our game.
These were also dangerous months. The lush grass sheltered all sorts of creepy-crawlies. Snakes that had gone to ground to stay cool during the hot summer months now came to the surface as their homes flooded. By day they hid in the long grass, protected from the burning sun, but at dusk they emerged, foraging for food. Centipedes, millipedes, scorpions, multi-legged, crawling lily-ghoras, and red, velvet-backed lalboochies all made their presence known. Mosquitoes, myriads of them, tormented us with gleeful, high-pitched eeee-ing.
The year before I started school August was a month of dark nights and darker deeds. The heat and humidity appeared to be particularly severe and the mosquitoes seemed more active than ever before.
One evening we were collected under the ceiling fan on the verandah. It was after dinner and Lorraine was demonstrating the art of complaining. “This is intolerable! I can’t live like this!” She swotted hard, killing one of the offending bugs. The unacknowledged aim of the game, as with most games my sisters played with each other, was one-upmanship. If Lorraine used a multisyllabic word that Lily couldn’t match, her response would be dramatic.
“I’ll kill myself.”
I, not wanting to be left out but with no understanding of what I was enunciating, added eagerly, “Me. Too. I’ll till myself too.”
Our parents usually ignored our interactions but that year the weather must have been particularly trying so nerves were taut and tempers frayed. Speaking gently but with obvious sarcasm my mother said, “You can live here with the comparative luxury of electric fans and lights or you can join your friends down the road and swelter in darkness. The choice, definitely, is yours.”
It was almost as though she had a direct line to providence because she had hardly finished speaking when the electricity failed. We were plunged into the blackest of blackness while a choir of mosquitoes warned us of an impending attack. Protected as we were, nose to toes in loose white clothing, we were still vulnerable as mosquitoes are adept, even in blinding darkness, at locating the one and only square millimetre of bare skin.
We were used to this onslaught because the municipal electricity often failed. The infrastructure was old and lacked adequate maintenance. It had been built for an elite minority and now struggled to cope with larger demands. It was nothing for a generator to overheat and break down.
The darkness added to our discomfort and brought on boredom. It wasn’t long before one bright spark thought up some mischief, directed at her younger sister.
“Hutd,” said Lily as she hit out wildly to swat a mosquito on her forehead. With hardly a pause, she leaned over and fetched me a smack on the side of my head – not to inflict pain, purely to annoy.
“I’ve killed your mosquito,” she said in a magnanimous tone, though she couldn’t possibly see enough to make this claim. “I’ve saved you from being bitten. I’ve killed twenty-three and with yours, I’ve got twenty four.” As she spoke the electricity came back on, bringing the magic of light to a dark place. And with it came a new torment – flying ants called eechuls.
“Quick!” My mother knew our only reprieve was to switch off the overhead lights so that the eechuls would cluster around the one remaining glow, which was in the porch.
It’s a normal human response the world over. A single speck of light in a dark world will attract all eyes. Sitting on that black verandah we all looked towards the porch, never dreaming for a moment that a single, usual, everyday action would trigger a string of bizarre events.
My father leaned forward and flicked his cigarette butt into the streaming waters that rushed through the porch following a downpour. Quick as a flash, a frog, using the flow to help him on his journey, flicked out its tongue and caught the lighted cigarette. Quicker than a flash, a snake caught up and swallowed the frog.
My father’s startled gasp was followed by, “I’ve never seen that before. Isn’t nature cruel?” And when his surprise had subsided, “Man, with all his intelligence is cruel, so why are we horrified when animals are just as cruel?”
No one offered an answer. We continued to stare in silence at the lighted porch when the sounds of sulam, sulam, sulam caught our attention. Half a dozen fat, over-fed chipkalies knew the sticky pads on the under-surface of their feet kept them safely anchored to the ceiling while they made a meal of the hapless eechuls.
“How much can they eat?” Lorraine was fascinated. “Their stomachs must only be the size of my thumbnail. How much can they possibly eat?”
The word went out. More chipkalies arrived, each trying to get closer to the light and a better feed. Fights erupted, tails were lost to the water below and it was only a matter of seconds before a body followed.
“Ugg!” exclaimed Lily, theatrically screwing up her face and shivering with distaste. She didn’t have the stomach for the sight of a flabby, white underbelly of a lizard as it floated away to its fate, followed by another and then yet another.
“You know there’s a hierarchy among animals,” said my mother. “You’ve just witnessed the food chain. That’s all.”
Not to be easily shut down, Lily chose a joke at my expense, enunciating slowly and clearly, “No one will eat Lucy. She tastes terrible.” There was always time for sibling banter.
Living alongside the wildlife was a normal part of our lives. Most of the time we stayed in our environment and they stayed in theirs. Occasionally the boundaries crossed, as it did the time a snake came to our fowl-run looking for lunch.
It was an October afternoon, a euphoric time after the monsoons when the air is washed clean and the vegetation is fat and succulent. After months of drooping, struggling to stay alive, the plant life is sprightly, alert, ready to enjoy the next phase of living. The reptile life is also on the move, looking for a jolly good feed.
At eight years old Lorraine was deemed responsible enough to supervise her sisters’ daily game of Treasure Hunt. She had shepherded us towards the fowl run to look for errant eggs that might have escaped the morning collection. As Lily and I skipped alongside her our incessant chatter was silenced by agitated hens, evidence something was amiss. Stopping short in our tracks we looked to Lorraine for leadership and found indecision. She was torn between curiosity and fear.
Curiosity won. We crept forward on high alert and found frightened hens clustered together in a tight knot in a far corner of their run, pressed hard against the wire enclosure, making it bulge outwards.
The reason was obvious. The snake had nowhere to hide as it lay half in and half out of the henhouse. The burnished pattern of its skin reflected the declining sunlight so it resembled the lush pile of the dining room carpet. I wanted to stroke it.
I didn’t.
Turning as one, without discussion but with mental consensus and following instructions that had been drummed into us for as long as I could remember, we bolted back towards the security of our home.
“Snake!” We squeaked and shrieked in fifty different sharps and flats so our mother was left with no doubt that immediate action was required. Taking charge as she always did, she wasted no time in loading the rifle and setting forth alone to do what had to be done.
Later that evening she explained. Looking for food the snake had made good use of a hole in the wire enclosure of the henhouse, had slithered in for a quick feed and then hit bad luck on its exit journey. A hole in a fence that was big enough to accommodate its head and body would not expand to fit a lump that had once been a hen.
Snakes cannot move backwards so the python was trapped with its head on one side of the enclosure and most of its body on the other. In twisting and rolling to free itself, the poor creature had broken its spine and entrapped itself further. The rifle saved the reptile from being roasted alive by the sun the following day.
The incident was merely part of our everyday lives so we thought no more about it. It never occurred to us to wonder about the disposal of the dead snake though we knew it had to happen immediately or overnight the stink would attract blowflies, maggots and other carrion. There is no smell worse than the smell of a dead snake. But these were actions in the back story of our lives and didn’t concern us. Lorraine, Lily and I danced on to the next day without a backward glance.
Until twenty years later.
Twenty years filled with growing-up experiences; twenty years, time enough for a mundane event to become a forgotten memory. It was twenty years later that I was wondering through the Burrens when I was reminded of that snake and at the same time discovered a fundamental truth about human nature.
The sun is higher in the sky now and it’s burning my shoulders through a gap in the canopy. My companion notices my discomfort and silently shifts along the bench indicating that I should move too.
“It’s hotter than it is in winter in Kanpur,” I tell him, but extraneous thoughts soon vanish. I’m enslaved by the emotional release of talking.
“That snake was such a mundane part of our lives I never thought I’d meet it again – in Ireland, of all places.”
He looks enquiring.
I continue.
Leaning against the wooden barrier at the Cliffs of Moher I stared out over the Atlantic Ocean, secure in my anonymity as I blended in with other travellers. I was completely unaware that an elfin of coincidence that only happens to other people was about to happen to me. Out of the blue a hopelessly pseudo-Irish brogue broke my reverie with a banal greeting: “Lucy! What are you doing here?”
I froze. Unwilling to relinquish the catharsis of my solitude I continued to focus on the Aran Islands in the distance. With perseverance that bordered on insensitivity the stranger chatted on as though we were long lost friends. It took several moments before it registered that he knew my name and several more before it dawned on me that his familiarity was strangely familiar. I turned to face him and was knocked sideways.
My third cousin Fergus, who had left Kanpur when I was a tot, who I hardly remembered but with whom I shared a set of great-grandparents, had recognised there were no prospects for him in Kanpur and twenty years earlier had followed the example set by many of our cousins and migrated to a foreign country to realise his ambitions. It was sheer chance that he was at the Burrens at the same time as I, had recognised me because I’m the spitting image of my mother, and was now standing before me grinning from ear to ear.
“Come to lunch on Saturday,” he invited as the conversation progressed, smirking to tell me he was enjoying a private joke. “I’ve got something to show you.”
And there it was! It took a moment for me to remember the python. Shrivelled and withered with age it lay in its sealed glass case and for a moment I was transported back to another life, a different world. I’m not sure what my expression said as I stared at that snakeskin.
Fergus rushed to explain. “The servants wouldn’t touch a dead snake so your mother sent us a message asking for help. I knew I’d be leaving Kanpur in a few months, probably for good, so I wanted something fun to have from the old home. The Tannery in Jajmau did it for me.”
His words were commonplace but when I looked up at him I knew the meaning was so much more complex. The snake was a tangible part of his past, a connection to his boyhood years and the land of his birth. It was a link to his personal history.
At that moment I realised there is an inherent human need in each of us to know what went before us and how we are related to it and therefore to each other. It’s this knowledge that anchors us to our identity, to our sense of belonging to a family, a people, a place. It forms a platform on which we can build our confidence, our individuality, our uniqueness. Without it we are like a cork on the ocean, buffeted by the tide, with no affiliation to anything, going through the motions of living while part of our psyche is home to a black hole.
Such is the strength of that need to belong that Fergus, who’d left Kanpur when I was still a child, who’d lived through a life time of distracting experiences in a totally different environment, still recognised me, knew my spot on the family tree, owned the same stories I owned and had retained a snakeskin from that long-ago, idyllic October afternoon.