Chapter 3

With Oprah replaced by one of those dreadful afternoon advertorial shows, Mum was snoring on the sofa after lunch.

It was the weekend and with Monday the Labour Day holiday, I was grateful to have the extra day off.

Weekend’s off were rare. There were usually Open Houses or Auctions to attend on Saturdays and sometimes, my more zealous clients wanted me to show people through their properties on Sundays.

As the principal of my own agency, I enjoyed great freedom and flexibility. But the demands of the property market meant I rarely allowed myself time off.

My mother complained I was a workaholic, usually coughing dramatically into a handkerchief or moaning about mythical pains in various, alternating body parts. She meant, of course, that I wasn’t at home to attend to her cups of tea and sandwiches, that I was an “ungrateful child”, the favourite of her accusations.

But after 42 years living with her, I was impervious to her puerile efforts to manipulate my guilt.

I took my days off when I chose, not when my mother’s lumbago was playing up.

Now, in my bedroom, I vaguely contemplated the top drawer of my dresser. The large vibrator Mohini had given me for my last birthday beckoned.

I toyed with the notion of sexual pleasure. A girl had to get it when she could. But without the TV to hide the sound, I didn’t want my mother discovering me self stimulating my clitoris, although even with her fiendish ability at Scrabble, I doubted she knew the meaning of that word.

In fact, I had a vague recollection that once Mum had heard the word and asked me what it meant. I had shrugged as nonchalantly as I could and feigned ignorance.

“Sounds like some kind of European car,” Mum had surmised. “I must look that up.”

Now I lay back on my European pillows with a sigh.

My room was a haven in more ways than one. Here I was mercifully separated from the cacophony of mauve and lace that characterized my mother’s taste. This was my sanctuary where my eyeballs could be spared the array of bad art, Sri Lankan artefacts – brass bowls, painted monster masks, wooden elephants – and crocheted rugs that leapt from the clutter of the rest of the house.

My two fingers wondered toward my knickers when I heard him.

‘THAT’S A FILTHY THING YOU’RE DOING.’
‘Must you speak in Capitals, Dad?’
‘HOW ELSE WILL YOU KNOW THAT I’M CALLING FROM THE GREAT BEYOND.’
‘It can’t be THE GREAT BEYOND, Dad. You’re Buddhist. There’s no BEYOND, remember’
‘YOU SHOULDN’T MOCK THE DEAD.’
‘I’m not mocking you, Thathi. But shouldn’t you have come back as something? “
My eyes warily scanned my walls. There were no living things to suggest my father might have returned as say, a gecko or a daddy long legs, the usual creatures lurking in the corners of the house.
‘ANYWAY, SHOULDN’T YOU BE AT LEAST A LITTLE SHOCKED THAT I CAN SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING?’
‘I didn’t realise that Buddhists could be reborn as invisible perverts.’
On my bedside table, a clock chewed carelessly through the seconds. I turned my head to check the time. It was almost three o’clock.

Through an open window overlooking the garden, I could smell my mother’s marigolds. It was May and the sky outside was a cloudless blue. I heard the sound of a lawnmower.

‘It’s a bit early , even for you, isn’t it, Thathi?’
‘NIRVANA IS TIMELESS AFTER ALL’, my father tsk-tsked.
‘Yes, yes I know but really, it’s afternoon for god’s sake. In the books, spirits aren’t supposed to reveal themselves in broad daylight?’

To be honest, I was miffed that my ritual of weekend masturbation had been interrupted so rudely.

‘What do you want anyway?’
‘I WANT TO KNOW IF YOU’VE REMEMERED.’
‘What?’
‘YOU KNOW.’
‘I don’t’
‘YES YOU DO.’
‘No I don’t’.
I threw myself off my mattress with a grunt.
‘God, dad, you’re still so bloody childish’
‘YOU SOUND LIKE YOUR MOTHER.’ Even from the dead, I already knew Dad could still be wounded. I relented.
‘Look, it’ll come to me, I know but for now, can’t you just go off an do what dead people do?’
Silence.
‘Dad?’
There was a rustle by the window. A crow with a knowing eye had landed on the ledge and was pecking its reflection.
‘YOU’LL REMEMBER, SHIVVY. I KNOW YOU WILL.’
‘Trust you to be a crow,’ I grumbled. The bird cocked its head and winked at me.

*
I may have been imagining things.

I don’t know if my Father really spoke to me as he often did. He’d be a voice I heard in capitals for some unknown reason.

I only know that it FELT as if I were in conversation with him.

My left brain did not like it at all but the Buddhist part of me, somewhere in my right I think, loved the idea.

At times, I considered seeking the services of a psychiatrist. Dad would speak to me at the most inopportune moments, sometimes scaring the crap out of me.

Nobody knew. I hadn’t had the heart (or the guts) to discuss the way my father had unexpectedly materialised to me.

My window ledge vacated by the crow, I concentrated on the blue skin of the sky.

My father had been killed suddenly a decade earlier.

Enough time had elapsed for the raw wound of his not-being to have healed and we could all – Mohini, Lakshmi , Mummy and I – talk about ‘the old man’ as we called him, without at least one of us bursting into tears.

But it was my mother who, I think, was not entirely unhappy when her husband of 36 years finally went off to the next phase on his Wheel of Enlightenment.

In many ways I believe it was relief.

Malcolm, my father, had been a diabetic Type I since at least his mid-thirties and I often felt as if it were a way for the heavens to taunt us.

For my father had not only cheated death but almost seemed to covet it – especially as his diabetes progressed.

Whether it in involved poisionous creatures, automobile accidents, medical scares or just plain acts of stupidity, my father had 90 lives it seemed to us and we had all anticipated my Father’s early demise.

Yet the decades progressed unrelentingly and, when at 50 and 60, my Father still remained alive and kicking, I think my Mother simply lost patience.

We imagined the diabetes would claim him but in the end it had been something none of us could have anticipated.

We called it ‘an accident’ to make more palatable our terms of reference.

It explained why I could still hear the Old Man.

And perhaps it explained the absence of anything like grieving on the part of my Mother after Dad doffed his hat and passed through the Eternal Portals.

My Mother was not given to unnecessary emotions. Aside from some jubilation upon scoring a 50-pointer in a game, she had an essence about her that would not be moved by death or disaster. She was not given to unnecessary displays of affection and was monitored her emotions as if she were a brigadier and her feelings – love, fear, hatred, anger – soldiers on a parade ground, brainwashed and cowed into single file and made to perform various formations on command.

So it’s no wonder that Mummy had a reputation for a little carelessness where the feelings of others were concerned.

Aside from the Sri Lankan’s trademark expression of sympathy – “Sin, Ai Oh” - my mother was impervious to anything other than the most superficial sympathy.

I put it down to her own stoic upbringing. A product of Ceylon’s unpredisposing boarding school system, Mirabelle Simbilage had taught her three daughters that tears were useless. All life was suffering and it was best to stick your chin and get on with it without grumbling.

‘Be grateful for what you have,’ was Mirabelle’s motto and she lived by it. She did not tolerate self pity and despised complaining. In many ways, she was bullet proof, a toughness that at times meant she could be callous, and even cruel.

So, when my Father died, we were, none of us, alarmed when my mother, in the middle of the eulogy at my Dad’s funeral, began rummaging manically in her purse.

I had hissed: “Mum, stop it! I can’t concentrate.”

“What men! I’ve lost my keys,” Mum had hissed back.

As the priest had boldy rallied on, the rest of us attempted to turn a deaf ear to the sounds of Mum’s wallet, a torch, a Stanley Knife and an array of card cutting tools were dislodged from her cavernous bag.

When the packet of large glass pearls (left over from one of her forays into beading) was accidentally released, we all tried to ignore the clatter like pellets of rain across the hard floor of the church.

If only we had stopped the ceremony to pick them up, we might have averted the disaster that ensued when at last, it was time for us to leave the church.

The priest, making his way to the front of the aisle to bless Dad’s coffin, slipped on the beads, skated like Jesus on thin ice into the pedestal on which a vase of bromeliads were displayed. When that fell, it crashed onto Dad’s coffin, dislodging a spray of water that drenched my aunties sitting in the front row.

Mummy, all the while, stared unperturbed at her hymn book as I indicated to the organist that she should begin the recessional hymn.

At that point Mum leaned toward me and said: “I told you we should have had a Buddhist ceremony. “

She hadn’t. The Buddhist ceremony had been my suggestion but Mum, a keen church goer, had insisted on a Catholic one, to appease her pastor with whom she had forged a strong friendship.

Pastor Jack, apparently, was a dab hand at knitting, and he and Mum had become firm friends over a church project to make blankets for the homeless.

Even if ‘the accident’ had no part to play in it, I blame the Catholic funeral for the fact that Dad, it seemed, had failed to fully make the passage into the nether world.

Because a few months after his death, I started to dream about him, until the first time he talked to me.

I can’t recall what I’d been doing. All I knew now was that Dad was still around me and I had become used to routine conversations and interruptions from the nether world.

There were some rules of engagement that had been set, he told me, by a greater power.

‘Who?’
‘IF I TOLD YOU THAT I MIGHT BE DEMOTED DOWN THE WHEEL’
‘It seems like you already have, Dad. Shouldn’t you be communing on a more heavenly plane?’
‘I CAN’T GIVE YOU ANSWERS, SHIV. THAT’S ONE RULE. YOU CAN’T TREAT ME LIKE A SPIRITUAL SEARCH ENGINE.’
‘No questions?’
‘YOU CAN ASK ME WHAT THE CAPITAL OF SURINAM IS – BUT NO QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR PAST.’
‘What about the future? At least you’d be useful then.’
‘PROBLEMATIC. I CAN’T BE SEEN TO FAVOUR YOU. IT CREATES ATTACHMENT.’
‘To the future?’
‘CONSIDERING WE BROUGHT YOU UP AS A CATHOLIC, YOU HAVE A GOOD GRASP, SHIV.’
‘So you won’t tell me if they’re true.’
‘YOU MUST FIND YOUR OWN PATH TO YOUR OWN UNIVERSAL TRUTH.’
I grunted. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘WHEN YOU REMEMBER, YOU’LL , KNOW.’
‘What?’
‘YOU’LL KNOW.’
‘I’ll know what I should remember?’
‘WE MUST DISCOVER OUR OWN QUESTIONS.’
‘And find our own answers.’

Initially, I had been surprised at how much like the Dalai Llama my Father sounded when he spoke as the dead.

Certainly, in his living years, he wasn’t known for any grandiose language. Asked to comment on the issue of the future when alive, Dad would more likely have said – and this, in the terrible Australian accent he had crafted over the years: “Fuck what’s going to happen, mate. Let’s worry about the shit going down right now.’

But spirits don’t speak like that.

Why is that?