Glass-Blowing
Mary Daya

A pumpkin can change the world. I know it changed mine. Just the colour of the pumpkin, how a certain hand plucked it off its vine, halved it with a kitchen knife, scraped its seeds out with a spoon. I was six, awake with the ducks, watching the sunflowers on my grandmother’s dress.  My grandmother’s right hand tapping a spoon to rid its hollow of pumpkin seeds. Taptaptap her right hand went, until my father’s legs walked in and his hand cut his mother’s neck and the sunflowers turned red. He cut it the way he cut the necks of goats. And my father’s mother’s body flipped like those of goats under my father’s hand. He held the goats. They died in his hands. He did not hold his mother’s body. He let it flip and throw blood onto the cupboard doors, onto the ladles and the collanders hanging from nails, onto the frying-pan propped against the wall.

My mother planted the pumpkin at the edge of our sugarcane. A handful of seeds thrown into a rising mound of bean pods, potato peel, jackfruit stalks. One seed tore its shell and snaked its way into our lives, slipped around our house, waiting to squeeze the life out of it. And it did. They took my father away in a little truck. His hands behind his back. Another man helped him onto the truck, pushing his back; like he normally did when I climbed onto chairs to fetch bottles of mango pickles or corn oil from shelves. The knife that cut the pumpkin and my grandmother’s neck lay buried under a clutch of eggs in the chicken-house. I lifted the nest and dug the hole with a spoon. I dug deep. I put the nest of eggs back. They looked for the knife and never found it. They did not ask me. He was at the river, catching eels, my mother said. They believed her. For years, I did too.

After they took my father away, my mother hoed the ground; between the cabbages, between the eggplants, between the tomatoes, even between the sugarcane. When it was night she made me stand between the cane rows, holding high the kerosene lamp. She worked the hoe hard, flipping up clods of soil, sweat trailing down her neck like silver worms. Keep it on the hoe, on the hoe, she said. Keep the light on the hoe. She boiled rice and fried eggplants, serving it onto four plates. Two plates sat uneaten. They’re so late, my mother said, go out into the field and see. Is the old bull giving trouble again? I stood among the cane watching the cream moon. Is it the bull? my mother’s voice called from the distance. Is it the bull?

This is how I grew – on bowls of jackfruit curry hidden amongst stalks of paragrass, on pieces of fried fish left in a tiny Tupperware container, on cheap china bowls of boiled rice. The women from neighbouring cane farms walked their goats past our farm, left food at the dusty, brown entrance gate. I found food each day. Returned the bowls washed. Clean. Gleaming. And when they came to visit my mother, they did not speak of what they hid and what I picked to feed my mother and how I returned the bowls and how they took them back. Grateful they were clean. They sat under the mango tree with my mother, reassuring her the bull was drinking at the ditch to the west of the farm. Telling her they had seen my father. He had his blue plaid shirt on. He was urging the bull on. This is how I grew.

When I had grown I became a plumber. Not by choice, no. I was sitting at the marketplace in town when Hira Lal, a plumber, needed help with a gluing job and the changing of several washers in a draper’s blue-tiled bathroom. I have followed him ever since. I bring water into people’s lives so they may wash their vegetables, their shirts, their hands, their hair, their rice.

Hira Lal was ill the day we were supposed to solder copper pipes into an Australian’s washroom. The Australian was a fat man. He was in Fiji selling water-tanks for drought-stricken areas on Vanua Levu. He had seen pictures of cane-farms parched and dry with torn ground. An Indian woman with a bucket on her head. I have to walk 10 kilometres to get water, the caption read. I see money, the Australian said, urging his wife to pray no rainclouds gathered over Fiji for at least a few more months. Hira Lal and I were to solder copper pipes so the fat Australian could sell water-tanks to thirsting cane-farms and return home to the pleasure of a hot bath.

In the Australian’s bathroom, I leafed through some colourful magazines. Stories of hammerhead sharks, of men who tied their ankles to vines and dived from platforms, of fish who swam upriver to die and of men who blew glass at smelting furnaces. Pictures of men with thin long pipes to their mouths, cheeks puffed like blowfish, blowing wind into smelt to shape glass into bottles. How tenderly they blew lest it blow out of shape. How slowly they blew. How I felt their sense of purpose, their sense of fragility, their sense of no-chance-but-this.

You read this story because you seek the juice of my life. You want me to tell you why my father killed his mother, why my mother lived like everything was right and everyone was alive and around. You want me to tell you my mother brought jealousy under her veil the day she wed my father. That I grew under a lengthening shadow of malice that in the end, cloaked us in darkness. That the gods in my father’s mother’s shrine sat silent the morning her blood painted the ladles and fry-pan crimson.

I cannot tell you these things. I do not know why things happened and I learned that to survive, I must not speculate nor seek answers. I learned that like those glass-blowers, I had but one chance. That every day is a blowing into my life, and how I am afraid of drawing breath once I have started giving it into a day. I am afraid of the soft, wet, hot glass of my life curling or curving into some misshapen vessel worthy of holding nothing. I am afraid my life will become nothing but a bad story from a dusty cane-field, a defective glass-piece that may hold nothing but that looks good adorning a cabinet shelf. Simply a tale to amuse between two or three cups of tea.

I am saying these things because you must not read for selfish reasons. I am in the story. I have a life to live even after you have finished reading my story. This is why you will never get it all. If you get it all, I will have nothing.

Mary Daya is a creative writing student at USP. Her first collection of short stories is due to be published by Institute of Pacific Studies in 2007.