The Blighted Harvest
Sema Carvalho
I. Mrs Fernandes
Mrs Fernandes stepped out of her house and on to the quiet Azad
Maidan Road. The light fell low and slanting on the street. She wheeled her
youngest in a stroller; the other two, about five and nine, followed
reluctantly on foot. Plump and still pimpled at thirty-six, she had over the
course of ten years managed to produce three remarkably dull but sane children.
Mrs Fernandes knew she was being watched. She patted down her
skirt and pushed the stroller with even more determination. That’s
right, Mrs Fernandes, you go ahead and waddle down the road with that smug
smile on your face, content in the knowledge that in time, your children will
produce some goodness in this world, however mediocre and meritless.
I moved Mother away from the window. On good days, we’d map out
the futures of those children: glorified clerkdom perhaps, some humdrum but
secure occupation shifting files from one desk to another, stapling papers
together, filing them in rust-eaten cabinets and then returning to their desks
to eat from their packed tiffins, chapattis and fish curry, rescued from the
previous evening’s meal. They would come home, retire for the night, turn to
their spouse in gratitude and pleasure them, a desultory pleasuring of
diminishing returns. They would be happy if somewhat unfulfilled. They would be
overcome with a sense of greatness because Mrs Fernandes would spend a lifetime
assuring them of it, and because being ordinary is a much-valued performance in
society.
A few hours later, Mrs Fernandes’s curtains would be drawn and her
door barricaded, shielding her children from the screeching siren parked across
the road.
II. Mother
The summer before, I overhead Father and Mother talking.
They were sitting on the garden bench. It must have been morning.
I remember the cicadas singing and a pale light pooling at their feet. Mother
had in her hair a white champa flower. It was wilting already.
Father said, ‘I’ll break your neck.’
‘How will you do it?’ Mother asked matter-of-factly, as if taking
down notes.
‘I’ll wrap my fingers round it,’ he told her.
‘And?’
‘I have a technique. You’ll see.’
An awkward silence spilled between them. That evening, Mother came
into my room, sat on my bed and said, ‘I must consult a dietitian.’
‘Why?’ I asked saucer-eyed.
‘Oh it’s nothing to worry about sweetie. I just need to eat
healthy.’
She kissed me on my forehead, her skin damp and decaying.
‘Good night,’ she said and flicked off the light switch. Darkness
flooded the room. She was still standing there, by the door; an angular shadow
cast on a moonlit wall. ‘Your Father will be leaving tomorrow. He won’t be
coming back,’ she said after a while and closed the door behind her.
A few days later, I saw her reading Your Blood Type Diet.
‘It’s important to eat food compatible with your blood type,’ she
told me, ‘I’ve been eating the wrong food. I’m an AB, and I’ve been eating the
wrong food my entire life.’
Her eyes were dead. I stared at her, not fully comprehending.
Along with the diet books came several DVDs; a didactic male voice,
robbed of joy, kept us company at all hours of the day, informing us about
carbohydrates, vitamins, proteins, fat, and sugar, the great white poison which
would settle like powdery snow in our cells and kill us in our sleep. His
predictions were dire; an apocalyptic act of nature awaited us as we sunned in
the bliss of dietary depravity. I felt my stomach churn with guilt.
I watched as Mother counted her calories, liquefied her proteins
into green smoothies, and rationed her carbohydrates until she refused to eat
any more. I watched as she became a fierce opponent of red meat. Even fruit was
not to escape her vilification; too much sugar, she mumbled. Her eyes sunken,
her skin papery, her hair listless, the still summer days turned with her
shiftless ambitions. She dissipated and deflated until her skirts barely hung
onto her dwindling hips. Her body was a chrysalis steadily detaching itself
from her soul.
That year we had come to believe the bounty of summer would last
forever - the false hope which engenders itself in the human heart contrary to
evidence that all things come to an end.
‘You know, I’m so afraid,’ she said, when at last the monsoons
struck, and the first rains came weeping down on our garden vines.
‘Of what?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. So many things.’
‘Like?’
‘The people on TV. They’re watching me. All the time, they’re
watching me. Plotting against me. Will you stay home today?’
Mother expected me to be the grown-up at sixteen. ‘I can’t,’ I
said, ‘I’ll miss class. Nobody is watching you.’
When I returned from school, she had moved into my bedroom. She
had dragged a trampoline-line bed from the guest room and propped it against
the wall.
‘It’s only temporary,’ she assured me. I looked into her eyes,
buried now in pools of black, and I knew she meant it.
Something happens when you start sleeping with a grown woman. You
learn things about them: that they cry late into the night, that they moan in
their sleep, that floating images creep into their minds causing them pain as
they sleep; that some distant past, some fearful future, some primal burden
rests permanently within them, fathomless, bottomless, and relentless.
Increasingly the curtains remained drawn in our bedroom. ‘We don’t
want anyone watching us, do we? Especially not Mrs Fernandes from across the
street.’
The doctor made frequent house calls: asthma, heart palpitations,
dizziness, bobbing walls. A sinister black abyss opened up before Mother, into
which she fell frequently. She stayed in bed refusing to leave the house. I
became her errand girl, her buffer against evil, cosseting her from the eyes of
the world. It wasn’t until I found her on the bathroom floor clutching her
towel, her naked skeletal body forming a curious V-shape, that we realised the
extent of our problems.
The doctor at the government hospital held her hand and said
tenderly, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you. Not with your body at least.’
What I came to know of my mother that winter is this: she was kind
and funny underneath that sheath of fearfulness. She disappeared every day into
a thicket of trees which hid her from view. She shivered like a leaf at the
mere thought of living life. She watched the night and she watched the day from
behind drawn curtains. Outside the window, in the fog, she saw poisonous
plumes, in the flowers, she smelt fumes, in the mounds of garden earth, she saw
toxic wastelands, in the distance and within close proximity, there were always
shadows watching her, waiting to engulf her. A year later, she slipped
willingly into the shadows forever.
III. Father
Mrs Fernandes no longer lived across the road. She had moved to a
street far away, with houses that had gates and guards.
Our garden had turned to grassland without protest. Wayward bushes
scrambled over fences. My daughter stood on an uneven mound of earth performing
an imperfect pirouette with her skinny limbs arched skywards, the arc of life.
‘Look Mother, somebody’s watching us,’ she said suddenly, pointing
to the window above.
It was Father.
I pushed open the door and ushered in my daughter. Once
magnificent, the house had fallen to ruin, the walls eaten by moss on the
rainward side and tunnelled by ants. Where we stood was shrouded in darkness. A
long shaft of light leaked from the top of the marble stairwell, and there
stirred signs of human life. Father appeared on the landing in his pyjamas.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Your daughter.’
‘Come up then,’ he motioned impatiently with his hand, and
retreated into his room. Always his anger had frightened me. It lurked just
below the surface and I was afraid of what would happen if it burst forth. The
room smelt of Vicks VapoRub, unwashed clothes, and dried up urine.
‘Sit,’ he said.
I moved a month-old pile of newspapers from the only chair with
its caning still intact. My daughter sat on the chair. I sat on the bed beside
Father. How old he had grown: his eyes were a cataractic glassy-grey; his hairs
were but limp shoots of white. The once tall, large man sat slumped in front of
me, covered in layers of clothing, huddled against the perpetual cold of old
age.
My daughter and I sat there for a long time in silence. In between
Father’s grunting, panting, swearing, and shouting, there came brief moments of
lucidity.
‘You know the truth about me? I killed my wife,’ he said leaning
forward, and then he disappeared once again into the labyrinth of his mind,
slaying dragons and trying to find a way out. Here, in these four walls, Father
had incarcerated himself after Mother’s death, picking at the carcass of his
guilt. Here, he had curled up, trying to come to terms with his recalcitrant
urge to hurt those closest to him.
I took his hand and looked over at my daughter. It was too late to
absolve him of his guilt by revealing the truth but I did so anyway: ‘It’s a
blighted harvest, I’m afraid. I’m glad you’re gone too,’ I told him.
On the way home, my daughter said, ‘I like Grandpa.’
Children are like dogs; they can sniff out the tiniest shred of
goodness in human beings.
IV. Daughter
I felt myself being drawn into the folds of a familiar place. In
those last months, before the bleakness overcame us, my daughter and I were
blanketed by a divine clarity. We spoke of great things to accomplish in the
future. We spoke of the type of men to date and the ones to avoid. We went to
fast-food restaurants, ran our fingers over ketchup smeared table-tops, ordered
chicken far too greasy and unhealthy for us. We went on holiday to Portugal,
looked down on the River Tagus, took a giddy ride through Mouraria, marvelled
at the tile work, even as our tour guide told us of the history of the Moors
and the fado, tinged with so much sadness much like our lives. We
laughed and cried that summer. On those days, when I could feel the sinister
black tugging at my hem, I spoke incessantly and insanely about things that
mattered. Her young face was flushed berry-red with squishy hope for the
future. Her watery eyes pleaded for time; afraid that the waves would smother
me in their pleated folds and carry me away before she was ready. Before she
had said all the things that needed to be said, before she had told me, her
Mother, how much she loved me, and how she was going to protect me from the
eyes watching us.
***
Selma
Carvalho is the author of three books documenting the Goan presence in colonial
East Africa. Her short fiction has been widely published. She won runner up
place in the New Asian Writing Contest 2017 and was a top six shortlistee for
the London Short Story Prize 2017. Her stories have been short or longlisted in
several contests including DNA-Out of Print 2016, Exeter Writers 2017, the
Berlin Writing Prize 2017 and the Brighton Prize 2017.
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