DEDICATION
To Ishraaz, the brother I left behind.
I love you.
I say goodbye to the hibiscus first.
I planted them with my amma on my seventh birthday. Three red hibiscus plants, two orange, four pink, and one yellow. They have been my responsibility ever since. I water them, I count the buds and wait for them to bloom. Once they do, I tell the flowers my secrets and all the prickles in my heart.
Now I have to leave, and I don’t know who will look after them when I am gone.
* * *
This morning my abbu returned with a thick brown envelope from the post office in town. When he opened it, his eyes widened first with disbelief and then with joy. He told us we are leaving. That we are moving to another country. He said that home will be a different shape, color, and feeling from now on. Why would the idea of leaving make him so happy?
* * *
A grove of mango trees grows by the road just a little distance from our house. This grove is filled with large boulders and smaller stones that my grandfather placed between the roots of the trees. When the wind rushes through this grove, it sings a strange, mournful tune. I say goodbye to the song and to the stones.
* * *
Five months ago, there was a military coup in the capital city. The prime minister, in the midst of celebrating his first year in office with chai and cookies, was deposed, and someone called George Speight announced himself captain. The radio shot bulletins into the air. The media, international and local, went into a frenzy. Some people looted the capital city. Others augured the coming of The End. We, on the other side of the island, some three hundred kilometers from the capital city, found ourselves on a break from school. Suddenly Fiji was no longer safe.
Even though nothing has changed on our side of the island, even though there has been no violence or looting here, people insist that things are no longer the same. They talk about the government and its supposed bias toward the natives of our country. They say that it is time to leave. My father cloaks his eagerness to be away and calls it a concern for my future. My mother is silent—as she always is—in front of my father. I do not want a future if it dawns in a place I do not know, but no one listens to me.
My cousins and I, drunk on the sunshine and the sugarcane, can’t see what the trouble is. Our lives were unaffected by the coup, by the political riots, by everything outside our village—until my father brought home the brown envelope that will change everything.
* * *
My room is not very big. The bed, leaning against one wall, faces the door while the other two walls have screened and louvered windows that somehow provide no barrier to the mosquitoes. The faded curtains wage daily war with the unrelenting sun that makes the obnoxiously blue carpet on the floor even brighter. The walls are a gentle pink. Tube lights overhead provide light and death to moths. My broken-down wardrobe is beside the door. My precious cosmetics (if you must know, one tube of half-used pink lipstick, a tube of lip gloss, baby powder, and a comb) lie on what serves as a vanity table. The mirror is not attached, and I often think it is going to complete its slide onto the floor and lose the little lease it has on life. My shalwar kameez have the place of honor and hang from hangers, flaunting their grace and their glory. In a little green tub I keep under my bed are all the clothes I wear at home. I have a bookshelf crammed with secondhand books, books borrowed, and books received as gifts. The walls contain posters of Bollywood actors I might have crushes on. The back of the door is decorated with lipstick kisses. This room has held all my corners and filled me with myself. It grew as I did and blooms as I do. When the setting sun paints the walls orange and shadows emerge from under the bed to hide the damp on my cheeks, I whisper a goodbye to my room.
* * *
I have an older brother I don’t really know how to talk to. I also have six first cousins I grew up with. Their parents live in two different wings of my grandmother’s house, which is two hundred meters away from mine. Three cousins per family, four girls and two boys. Our names rhyme and our thoughts are collective. We have fought each other and fought for each other. We have whispered secrets about our changing bodies, assuring ourselves that we are normal. We know each other like other people know themselves. The spaces between us are thick with memories.
Two hours after I found out, I tell my cousins about the brown paper envelope, about my father’s words, about leaving. They are quiet. We sit on the cool rocks under the mango trees in the grove my grandfather built. The wind makes music out of the day. Perhaps they, like me, cannot understand what leaving means. Perhaps, they cannot comprehend, either, the nature of distance and what it will do to us. I don’t know how to be myself without them. Do they know how to be themselves without me?
My eldest cousin is angry. “Do you know how big your goodbye is?” She spits out the question. Pauses. Then answers it herself. “It is the size of forever.”
“Then I won’t say goodbye,” I reply stubbornly. It is not as if I am leaving because I want to.
“Some goodbyes do not need to be spoken,” she replies.
“You will come back, won’t you?” my youngest cousin asks anxiously. She’s only seven. There are ten years between us.
Even if I do come back, the home right now and the people right now will no longer be as they are. As I change, so will they and so will this place. When I leave, I will lose this place and these people. I will lose myself. Who will I be without the mountains, the mango trees, and the hibiscus around me? I do not want to know.
* * *
At the bottom of the garden in front of my house is a field. In the far-right corner of this field are a breadfruit tree, a well, a saijan bhaji tree, and my mother’s precious collection of chilli plants. When the chillies are ripe, every breath feels like a storm. My grandmother and I harvest the chillies because, for some reason, she and I are not affected by the heat that makes everyone else cry. Our fingers pluck the red, yellow, orange, and green fruit without burning for days afterwards. I stand in that green corner that is bordered on two sides by sugarcane fields and smell the deep brown of the soil in which the chilli plants grow. The water in the well reflects the afternoon sky. I pick a ripe breadfruit hanging heavily on the branch and leave my goodbye stamped on the soft bark of the saijan tree.
* * *
Our family of four sits around cups of chai during teatime. The silence is full of the things we don’t know how to say to each other. The afternoon outside tempts with its golden light and a breeze that will make silk of your hair. I can feel my father’s gaze on me like little weights on my skin but I am too busy looking at my brother, memorizing him, learning all of him in the smile he no longer smiles and the sadness that has found a recent home in his star-bright eyes.
You see, the people who decide who gets to go say he is too old to be considered a dependent of the family, as if age determines the bond a person has with their relatives. The government of this new country we are moving to won’t let him come with us, so my parents decided that he is old enough to be left alone. I wonder what conversation my parents had with my brother. I wonder what words they used to let him know that we are leaving. That he is not coming with us. I asked my father why we are going if my brother can’t come with us. My father had no answer, so he told me not to be impertinent.