I remember the day that I got off the plane so vividly. I remember the sun that day, a cruel god beating down upon me from its court of cloudless blue. It scorched my skin and left no prisoners. It was nothing like the benevolent sun over my homeland of Calcutta, where the gentle rays of morning would shine over the backs of a hundred thousand people, wrapped up in their idiosyncratic lifestyles since twilight.
But there was no one here. There was just me, my father, and the red earth that stretched out before me in every direction, desolate and uninviting. My father, a self-titled opportunist, yearning to abandon the stagnancy that is the defining characteristic of the Indian middle class, saw Laxmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity, hidden in every crack of the drought-stricken land.
I always thought my father was a little bit of an oddball. His brain was rattled around by the many, many wars it had been exposed to. In the same spirit, his nervous yet paradoxically poised energy set our house alive. It would wake up with the soft, repetitive chants of his Sanskrit prayers in the morning and fall asleep to his many lectures about the ideal governmental system come nightfall. It smelled like incense, asafoetida, and cumin, instead of the burnt smoke of the great Australian outback outside our porch door. It was the only piece of home in a strange new country. I cherished it with all my heart.
He was quick to find his way. In three years' time, he was listening to The Beatles whilst fortifying himself with double helpings of Milo and Bengali egg fry, perusing an assortment of Hindi newspapers he got internationally delivered to us. The blokes at his sheep shearing job liked to alternate between calling him African and Indigenous Australian, slurs for both inclusive. He paid no heed, jovially punctuating his latest tales of workplace discrimination with, “Their stones and sticks can only rattle my bones! In Calcutta, we used gulel when we really wanted to hurt someone.” I didn't have the heart to quip about his idiomatic misquoting. His spirit was indomitable. Nothing could faze him.
I, on the other hand, could not extricate myself from the diminishing gazes of my peers. Every remark on the failure of my foreign tongue to mold itself to the valleys and troughs of a new language, every question underpinned by perfunctory distaste, every snigger swirled in my head each night, consuming the liminal space between waking and sleeping. The movies I watched, the songs I liked, the food I ate, all underwent a strict metamorphosis like the caterpillar confined within the fecund dark of a chrysalis. Slowly, one choice at a time, aligning more and more with the Australian lifestyle. Slowly, one choice at a time, departing from my roots.
That was, until the diagnosis. “Hepatitis B,” the doctor called it, the only bloke in town willing to look at a 'coloured' patient. “From infected needles, or maybe passed down in the womb from his mother.” My father, try as he might, could not pronounce the name of the illness eating his liver alive. He jokingly called it a gift from our motherland. Over the next few months, I watched him disintegrate into a shell of himself. He could barely open his eyes most days, and when he could, he would talk. He would rasp his smooth tenor into a small tape recorder into the early hours of the morning, flitting from English to Hindi to Bengali as the disease continued its unending assault into his being.
When they complained to me, he laid his papery, wizened hand, which once, in a bygone era, would emanate vitality so potent it was palpable in his air, upon my shoulder and looked at me in the eye with a desperate so intense I felt it in my very soul. “You must find your way, beta. You must tell my story before my time is up.”
When he passed, I lost the only person rooting for me, both on this side of the Indian Ocean and the one where I came from. I was lost without him. I felt stagnant, stuck. Our house suddenly felt as desolate as the golden land on my very first day. Over time, I have found my way. I honour his memory by telling his extraordinary story to anyone that will listen. I continue his tradition by hanging his portrait above my mantel and pestering my eldest daughter to hang a garland of fresh marigolds underneath it every morning, just as my father did with his father's portrait, and how his father would have done with his father before him.
Because of him, I have spent a lifetime working as a social worker, aiding those fragmented because of migration, granting me the insurmountable pleasure of listening to a thousand stories. Many of them are like my father and I's, each marked with their own anecdotes and idiosyncrasies. People, struggling, trying, grappling with making sense of a new world. I see the glint of my father's smile in the face of a stranger coming to Australia to make a better life for themselves and their families. I hear his voice in their adversities. It feels like home.
