Chapter 2

Thivanthi!” my mother shouted from the living room. “It’s time to make your move! Come child!”.

Lowering the handle of the toasted sandwich maker, I cringed. “Put your teeth back in, Mum!” I shouted back.

As usual, Oprah blared at a thousand decibels and my mother and I struggled to make each other heard over the din. The black media megastar was interviewing Tina Fey.

It may have been a rerun, but I wasn’t sure.

“ Sometimes, looking at pictures from the campaign, I had to look twice—was that really her, or was it you? So, when you were finally there onstage impersonating her, were you scared? ,” Oprah asks Tina.

Tina: “ No…”

Mum: “Shiv!”

Tina: “… I wouldn't have enjoyed doing it alone, because I never did anything alone on SNL.

Oprah: “When I'm on TV, I can sometimes feel when a moment transcends the studio and is transported into people's living rooms. Did you feel that energy? All those people watching and thinking…”

Mum: “Thivanthi!”

Me (shouting) : “Would you like a sandwich, Mum?”

Mum: “What!”

Me: “A sandwich. I’m making ham and cheese.”

Mum (grunting, something obscure): “Just a piece of bread is fine.”

I sighed. My mother appeared to survive on a diet comprised entirely of white bread, sweets and her daily glass of sherry. It surely did not augur well for her health but at seventy-five years of age, she seemed to defy the odds.

With my toasted sandwich pushed up against a single, thickly buttered slice of white bread on a small plate and a cup of tea in the other, I went to find my mother in what we Simbilage’s called “the television room”.

I had often wondered why the television had been exalted to such a status that it had its own room named after it when in fact it was also the room that housed our best sofa, my father’s prized Jason Recliner rocker (a find at a garage sale) and my mother’s vast collection of tools required for an array of craft activities.

Why this room was not called the Craft Room or the Recliner Room is anyone’s guess and to this day, I imagine that 28 inch Panasonic gloating at its kingpin status.

It was a status that was well earned, I suppose, because, whether crafting or reclining, my parents were inevitably drawn to whatever was on the small screen.

Without a doubt, my parents were what you’d call “TV addicts”, having discovered a love affair with television only well into their thirties after we’d immigrated to Brisbane from Ceylon.

In their defence however, they were aficionados, in the main, of the ABC, which was “obviously” the choice of intellectuals and arty-farty types, and so of course, watching television was never considered to be in any way bad for you.
There was no limit to how much of it we could watch – as long as we were satisfied with whatever “Aunty” had to offer.

The result of course was that, eventually, my family would lay claim to a general knowledge that was, even I have to admit, impressive.

My family, in short, ate, drank and made merry in front of the television set and I’m certain that if fornication had ever been on my parent’s agenda, they would have done “it” inbetween Aunty’s promotions.

I’d been living at home for nearly all of my forty-two years and it gave me a strange sense of certainty in the world that whenever she was home, my mother could be could be counted on to be just where I’d always found her – in the television room.

Now, as I prodded the door open with my elbow and carefully wielded the tray with my sandwich, Oprah was still cooing over Tina.

“Jesus! That’s loud,” I shouted.

I lowered my plate onto a camphor wood chest that passed as a coffee table. It was covered in a fine lace tablecloth embroidered with tiny flowers.

I reached over for the remote control and killed-off Oprah. Silence swooned in my ears.

“Aah, that’s better.”

“Why’d you knock that off, I was listening to that?”

Mum sat in an oversized tracksuit on the dark brown velour sofa that was the centrepiece of the living room. Beside her, a book of Sudoku puzzles had been placed face down. In front of her, a Scrabble Board was laid out over a small, teak card table. She was crocheting, peering through thick spectacles at her handiwork. On the floor I saw the folder of recipes, neatly cut and labelled that my mother had laboriously pasted into a large scrapbook.

On a small table next to the couch was a lamp with a tassled shade that was always on as the ‘television room’ was always a little dark. My mother’s increasing short sightedness meant she relied on every bit of available light, morning, noon and night. There was no concern for electricity bills.

Beside the lamp was a small packet of matches, a pair of scissors, a craft knife and a packet of razor blades. There was also an empty jam jar packed with an assortment of sorry pens, pencils and syringes. Syringes? I remembered my father and his decades as a diabetic. I could still smell him in the room. Sometimes I could feel him brush against my skin. Or was that the dog?

We had put Buster down at least two decades before but often I’d feel a shiver at my legs as if that mangy cattle dog was still farting at my feet.

“God, Mum, you really are getting deaf in your old age,” I groaned.

Mum peered at me with disarming eyebrows that were really nothing more than two lines badly etched with an eyebrow pencil I knew had been whittled down to half with a half-blunt kitchen knife (we could never locate a sharpener).

My mother had an obsessive aversion to body hair, a woman who plucked, shaved and waxed at every opportunity, stopping only just short of a Brazilian although that was only a hypothesis.

It was the reason why I had long ago nicknamed her ‘The Old Plucker’, sometimes shortening it to ‘’the OP’ or lengthening it to SOP the ‘S’ being for ‘Silly’.

Mum made a whistling sound against her teeth. ‘Your turn,’ she said.

Sipping loudly at my tea, I eyed the Scrabble Board. ‘Hey! What’s this!” I said. ‘Eieio’.

‘A sound of pain,’ my mother sagely observed.

‘I don’t believe you!’

‘You never do but when’s the last time you caught me out?’

I sighed and eyed my rack of tiles.

‘All vowels,’ I groaned. ‘Typical’.

‘You always say that, child. Every time you think you will lose you say, ‘Typical’ and then you always end up winning.’

‘Well …’

Mum put down her crochet work and glared at me. ‘I don’t know why you have to lie about everything.’

‘What…’

‘Why is everything about calling your bluff, Shivanthi. Life is not a game of poker.”

With a sudden movement, Mum reached across the tiny space separating my rack from hers and turned it around to face her.

‘Huh! Just as I suspected,’ she said, “P-M-H-S-T and only E and I’.

Mum returned to her crocheting. ‘You should be at work today. I heard you on the phone this morning, you know.’

I threw my chin out. ‘So what?’

An index finger outstretched mid-stitch, my mother frowned. ‘You don’t even have an Uncle who’s an arcaheologist. You told them he’d just arrived here from Colombo and was stuck at the airport and apparently, because I had slipped in the bathroom and dislocated my hip, you had to go and collect him. They must have asked why he couldn’t catch a taxi, because I heard you explain that your Uncle was blind…”

“I did not!”

“Stop it. There you go again. I heard you. What’s more it seems this mythical uncle of yours was blinded after a cobra attacked him while he was out on one of his digs in Bangladesh.”

“Oh, here we go,” I grumbled.

“Make no mistake, Shiv, one of these days your lies are going to get you into really deep trouble. Then you’ll be sorry.”

“No you’ll be sorry,” I said. “Now put your teeth back in.”

I located an “O” on the board and with “Mephisto” racked up 85 points.