Saltwater People

Fiction
Location – Milingimbi, Australia
Written – August 2009
[This story was kindly published by ‘Wet Ink’ magazine in Issue 19 of July of 2010. I call it ‘fiction’ but other than a few tweaks it’s all based on the times and people of Milingimbi. You could say that this is my final tribute to a couple of people who aren’t around any more.]


The walls aren’t closing in on her. The walls stay exactly the same.

●

Luce goes for a walk every evening at sunset. One afternoon she finds a dirt track she’s never been down before. A group of Yolngu sit in the shade of a paperbark tree.

‘Manymak marrtji dhuwala dhukarr, wäwa?’ She asks, pointing up the track. Okay to go walking this way brother?

‘Mak,’ one man says - OK - and returns to poking the fire.

She stays on the path. There’s a sacred area nearby that’s prohibited to Balanda, to whitefellas. It’s the dry season so the undergrowth is brown and sparse. Much of it has been burnt off. Tufts of spiky green spring from the ashes. The track passes the island’s sewage facility. Lilies have grown on the ponds and magpie geese sit on the concrete rim. She walks further, through grassy plains and groves of pandanus, toward the salt flats. A wallaby bounds towards her and stops a few metres away. The wallaby pauses, as if wondering what she’s doing out here, before bounding off into the scrub.

●

Luce crouches to pick up wood the proper way.

She’s been living in Arnhem Land for six months. When she arrived her Yolngu teaching assistant instructed her in the rules of Yolngu ladyhood. The proper way is to bend from the knees - not from the waist - so your backside doesn’t poke out. Breasts aren’t a problem. They’re for milk. The Yolngu word for ‘breasts’ and ‘milk’ is the same - ngamini. She’s had toddlers try to suckle her at the beach and some of the older women go bare chested when it’s hot. Breasts don’t have erotic overtones. The backside does. It’s inappropriate to walk in front of a man, waggling your arse. It’s more lady-like to walk behind.

She gathers an armload of semi-charred wood under her arm and wipes her hands on her long white dress. It hangs loosely around her hips. Women don’t wear tight-fitting clothes on Yurrwi island. It might be a hangover from the Missionary days. The women still wear the long mission dresses with their floral starbursts of colour.

The sun is dipping and it’s time to go home. She’s been chastised for walking after dark. It arouses suspicion - the act of single men and women out on the prowl or of married ones hunting for fresh love. The Balanda teacher seemed to take pleasure in putting her in her place.

I know better, her smirk said. You’re just new here.

●

A group of djamarrkuli came running up to her. Kids, with curly hair crusted by salt water.

‘Luce! Luce! We come your house for bisit? Bisiting?’

The djamarrkuli struggle with the ‘V’ sound. There’s no ‘V’ in Yolngu matha. After a while you stop trying to correct them.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We’ll make pikelets.’

The driveway rumbled. Ten djamarrkuli arrived on her doorstep. Girls, about eight years old. They burst into the empty house like a tropical storm. Luce cooked the pikelets as they opened cupboards and explored every room. They jumped on the spare bed and strummed her detuned guitar. She brought out the pikelets.

‘Miss! Miss! We eat him?’

The Yolngu often call objects ‘he’ or ‘she.’ In Yolngu matha the same word ‘ngayi’ is used for ‘he’ ‘she’ and ‘it.’ There isn’t a difference.

‘Mak.’

The djamarrkuli left when the last pikelet had been eaten, and she laid down with a headache.

●

The Balanda teachers live in stilted houses. Alone, or in pairs. The Yolngu live in to rambling houses with ten to fifteen people sleeping on the mattresses. The government is offering large sums of money to the community for housing and development. In exchange for the money they want the community to sign over their land and lease it to the government. Some people are worried the gub’ment wants to mine their land, like at Groote Eylandt and Gove.

●

The gub’ment is a long way away. Arnhem Land is closer to Indonesia than it is to Canberra.

●

There’s bunggul at Bottom Camp. Ceremony. The Yolngu are blessed with a natural abundance of food in Arnhem Land, compared to the desert mob. They don’t need to spend as much time hunting, and so have more time to devote to ceremony and culture. When the Europeans came the Yolngu here fared better than some. The culture remains strong. Balanda are adopted into Yolngu families when they arrive and can attend many of the ceremonies.

This bunggul is for the initiation of six boys. Two of the boys are students in her class. Luce takes a seat with the djamarrkuli who sit to one side of the cleared patch of sand.

A group of older men stand, leading with the click of bilma clapsticks. They sing their call in Yolngu matha and the younger men answer with dance. The dancers have bundles of eucalyptus leaves attached to each thigh. Each sequence rises with the gathering chant - ‘ruh, ruh, ruh ruH, ruH, RUH, RUH, RUH!’ - as the dancers lock into a semi-crouch, their bent knees shaking the bundles of leaves, until the climactic ‘RUH! RUH! RAAY!’ They stop with a flourish before returning to where they started from. At ease, and ready to start over again. The sand is covered with fallen leaves. They dance for several days.

On her way home the Balanda Vice-Principal calls her over.

‘Luce I wanted to see you.’

‘Hi Wendy.’

‘I saw you at bunggul Luce. You were sitting in the wrong spot. You’re not meant to sit with the children. You’d better start listening if you want to stay.’

●

She eats dinner at the table while the fans spin overhead. The phone rings.

‘Luce! How are you doll?’

‘I’m okay Mum. Just eating. Things are okay. The other teachers are starting to ease up.’

‘What’s it like up there? What do you think should be done about the problem?’

‘The problem?’

‘You know, with the Aboriginals.’

‘Aboriginal people. The people here call themselves Yolngu.’

‘Yeah. So what do you think should be done?’

‘I don’t know Mum. I think part of the problem is whitefellas thinking about the people only in terms of a problem.’

‘It must be incredible up there. Arnhem Land.... So... adventurous.’

‘Yeah. I think I have culture shock.’

‘Culture shock? You funny doll. You’re in Australia. I mean, Arnhem Land is still part of Australia...’

‘I gotta go Mum. I’m eating. I’ll call you back okay?’

Luce finishes eating her dinner for one and tips the leftovers into a tub. She puts the tub in the fridge.

●

The Education Department speaks of English as a second language for the Yolngu, but in reality it could be their third, their fourth, or their seventh. Yolngu matha is a group of languages. At Yurwwi island the most commonly spoken dialects are Gupapuyngu and Djambarrpuyngu. The classroom lessons are conducted in English.

The djamarrkuli would rather be hunting or playing basketball. Sometimes she’ll promise them an hour on the court if they do their class work. She doesn’t know the rules. Her assistant umpires the game. Luce sits on the sideline with her head on her palm and a bottle of water dangling from one hand. The Vice Principal strides into their midst.

‘Luce! What are you doing? You’re making too much noise out here. Keep your class under control and keep the noise down.’

The djamarrkuli freeze, shocked to see their teacher shamed in public.

Luce goes looking for the Principal to talk. She finds her office empty. The receptionist says she’s gone home.

She walks to the Principal’s house and knocks on the door. The front yard is filled with boat engines and broken down four-wheel-drives. The lights are on. She can hear the football on the television. No-one answers the door. Luce knocks again, harder.

Nothing. Bäyngu.

●

The Yolngu are saltwater people. Most of what they hunt comes from the sea. They catch fish, mud crab, stingray, shellfish, and turtle.

While fishing on a boat one of the Yolngu blokes spotted the dark head of a turtle surfacing from the blue. They swung the boat around. Two spears were thrust into the water as the turtle began to dive. The floating spears bobbed up in the bloodless water. The turtle was gone.

She was told what happens when you spear a turtle. When you pull it from the water the turtle starts to cry.

●

She imagined that the few Balanda on the community would stick together as a clique as in other outback towns and communities. That isn’t how it is here. The Balanda mostly get along with the Yolngu, and squabble amongst themselves.

She read a study on conflict once. Some researchers studied different conflicts around the globe to see if there was a link with cultural differences. It’s intuitive to think that the worst conflicts are between cultures that are radically different. But that wasn’t what the researchers found. The researchers found that most conflicts are between groups that are culturally similar.

●

After work most of the Balanda teachers hide away in their homes. Some are just exhausted. Others are reclusive by nature, or become that way through culture shock. But Luce can’t look at her walls any longer. She walks around the community talking to the kids. It was on one of her walks that she met Val.

Val has been living in Arnhem Land on and off for the last forty years. When she first arrived at the school she was hazed for a year before quitting the job and moving in with a Yolngu family.

Her adopted Yolngu family respects her, enough to entrust her with their hair. Val has bag fulls of hair in her cupboard. When her family cut their hair they’ll put the clippings in a plastic bag and hand them over to Val. They don’t want to just leave the clippings laying around to be picked up by a sorcerer.

As they walk along the beach Val gestures to the clothes washed up on the shore. Underwear. Basketball singlets. Mission dresses. Shoes. Luce thought they were discarded for no reason. But Val says the Yolngu won’t just throw their old clothes away and leave themselves vulnerable to a curse. They put them in the sea to be cleansed by salt water.

●

There’s a honk in the street. It’s Val. Idling her 4WD with the boat trailer attached.

Luce climbs onto the tray with her dog, Turtle. Some of the teachers name their dogs after the places they picked them up. ‘Manny’ from Maningrida. ‘Milly’ from Milingimbi. Her dog is just Turtle. She paddles out with them as they winch the boat down into the water. Her head bobs above the swell.

‘No Turtle. Stay there girl.’

Turtle whimpers until the sound of the engine drowns her out. The dog can’t come. She gets tangled up in the net. Val opens up the throttle and they move away from the shore. When they’re out past the sand bar she gives it full throttle and the boat starts jumping over the waves. They brace themselves for each thump, bouncing on milk crates.

Luce sees Turtle receding into the distance. She’s still paddling out towards them. She has a vision of the dog paddling out to sea after a boat it can never reach and drowning.

●

The school has a canteen where the kids eat lunch. ‘The Tuck Shop.’ The alarm was set off several nights in a row and the staff tried to figure out what was going on. The security camera caught footage of a cat. It was sneaking in there at night and eating the food.

Two of the teachers set a trap. They put a chop bone inside. In the morning the cat was trapped inside the cage. It sat calmly on its haunches. Waiting.

●

The local word for cat is butjikit. It’s pronounced ‘butch-e-kit,’ a bit like ‘bush cat.’ Maybe that’s where it came from. Derived from English like mutikar for ‘motorcar’ and buliki for ‘cattle.’

Words like rrupiya for ‘money’ and rrothi for ‘bread’ came from the Macassans, who visited the shores of northern Australia for hundreds of years. The Macassans used to trade with the Yolngu until the relationship was severed by the White Australia policy.

The word Balanda also came from the Macassans. The Macassans had encountered the Dutch, and so all whitefellas became known to the Yolngu as ‘Balanda’ - from the word ‘Hollander.’ Introduced names for introduced things.

Luce saw a roaming bush cat once. Just one, in six months on the island. She was eating breakfast on her porch and saw it pacing the long grass next door. Each step was slow and deliberate, as it tip-toed its way around. Terrified of dogs.

It’s not the place for cats. The butjikit, tolerated by few and loved by none. Even the animal lovers want it dead. It preys on the local wildlife - eating the smaller marsupials and birds.

A rogue. Forever alone. Truly out of its element. But it’s there.

●

They sit on the porch watching the crows and the blue-winged kookaburras. Fires burn in the roadside grass exposing red flour tins and lizards. The kookaburras swoop on the stunned lizards. Some djamarrkuli throw a football into a tamarind tree, knocking down the pods of tamarind fruit.

‘I’ll tell you something, Luce,’ says Val. ‘I’ve felt like a foreigner for much of my life. A traveller. And I love it here, the freedom, the lifestyle. But I’ve learned something about travelling in that time. A lot of travellers chase a shadow.’

Luce is only half-listening. She leafs through the photographs in Donald Thomson’s book. His pictures inspired the movie Ten Canoes. If she had her way Thomson would be talked about in every Australian school, like Burke and Wills, or Sir Douglas Mawson.

‘The illusion that you can out run yourself and your culture. That recreation is as easy as a two-week holiday at the beach. People talk of recreation as if it means relaxation, but it’s more than that. Many of the Balanda here arrive thinking they’re going to learn the ways of the Yolngu. They want to live a bit like the Yolngu on a tropical island. People are stunted by the idea of paradise as a physical thing, as a place you arrive at and unfold your towel. But no matter where you go it’s still you unfolding the towel.’

‘Yeah.’

‘People like the idea that they can leave the city and slip into this way of life, but it isn’t that simple. The most extreme travellers are immigrants. Some immigrants feel at home in their new country, but some still pine for their home after fifty years. It’s a hard thing to change your lifestyle, your culture. To try to leave the hectic life of the city and live the quiet life. People don’t know what to do with themselves. They’re used to being stressed. The culture here overwhelms them. They become frustrated and stay inside their houses. They pick up their towel and move on, searching for the next paradise.’

‘Some of the Balanda are just here for the money. Some are here to tell other people how to do things. But if you want to learn - if you truly want to recreate yourself - you have to be a kid again. Go rolling around in the sand. Taste the salt water.’

●

They watch Baz Luhrmann’s Australia on an old TV. Val laughs at the kid using magic to stop the stampeding herd of cattle, moments before they’d topple into a CGI canyon.

●

Larruway and his wife Rittjil stop in for a visit. Val puts a video of Mauritian music clips on in the background. She went there last year and talks of it often.

‘Do you understand the language?’ Luce asks. ‘Do you know what they’re singing about?’

‘No,’ says Val.

‘They’re singing they love the sea,’ Larruway says, even though he doesn’t understand the language either. ‘The wind. The salt air. They’re saltwater people too.’

The Mauritians dance by the water. They cup their hands in it and touch it to their faces. Their noses tilt to the breeze in rapture. Their bodies flow back and forth like waves.

Saltwater people.

●

Larruway knows where the fish are. He looks for the stirred-up patches of sandy water, or for the flocks of sea birds that hover in the air and dive upon the schools of fish.

Baz Luhrmann might call it magic. Larruway calls it reading the sea.

●

Turtle spots her from a distance and bounds towards her. She’s been waiting in the long grass outside the school.

Back home she knows dogs as solitary animals that live in back yards and are walked on leashes. Here the dogs run free. They have friends - people, and other dogs. They go to people’s houses for bisits. Even dogs know better than to stay inside all the time.

●

She chooses a spot for a fire on the dry mangrove mud well up from the high banks of the river. It’s crocodile country and she stays away from the water. She makes a fire from the dead mangrove wood. When it burns down to coals she boils the water for tea in an old saucepan with the handle busted off. Next to the saucepan she lays down a pair of mullet.

A couple of Yolngu girls emerge from the mangroves carrying a bag full of mussels. They’re sisters. One is supposed to be in her class but doesn’t show up often. Luce pours them a cup of tea. When the fish are cooked she invites them to eat with her. There’s plenty of food but the girls are shy. They’re amused by this Balanda cooking fish the local way, alone in the bush. With some encouragement they take the ice-cream tub lid. They soak the fish in sea water for the salt. They’re not as wasteful as she is. They pick the bones clean, eating everything but the bones and the guts. They eat in silence.

●

She likes the fish cooked this way. Slightly smoked by the fire and salted by sea water. You are what you eat.

When people say that, back in the city, they’re thinking about health. They’re not usually thinking about place. You don’t get the same feeling from food you buy at the supermarket. From food that comes from scattered corners and is disconnected from a sense of place. It’s a different feeling to eat straight from the land and fresh from the sea. It takes on a different meaning. The place is your food, and the food is your place. The food is wänga - it is land, it is home.

The sea is inside of her. Not in a vague or metaphorical sense, but in the cells of her earthly body. In her ripples of flesh, and her bones.

Wänga.

●

Luce looks out over her street. The cooking fires glow like porch lights. The people sit in cross-legged circles on tarpaulins laid upon the sand. The sound of laughter rises like smoke from their campfires. Luce can hear their voices in the stillness and understands the occasional word of Yolngu matha.

She walks across the road. Her adopted mother nods at her and beckons her to sit on the tarpaulin. She doesn’t speak. The old bloke pulls out a guitar and starts to sing in a high, unsteady voice. He’s singing a hymn in English. The old bloke is her adopted father. He’s dying of liver cancer. A blanket is wrapped around his shoulders to keep him warm at night. His song is about gratitude. It sounds clear in the night air, with only the distant wash of the sea to accompany him.

Sea Eagle Dreaming

Non-Fiction
Location – Milingimbi, Australia
Written – June 2009
[This piece was published in 'Overland' Magazine, Issue 197 in November 2009. It was the first piece I had published in a magazine. I tried to keep the writing as simple as possible, almost like a children's story. I did this in an attempt to capture the feel of the place. To read it again makes me nostalgic for Milingimbi...]

The city went bad, so we moved to Arnhem Land.

●

Our house is on stilts. I climbed the stairs of our new home, and put my hand on something that moved. I looked down to see a green tree frog hopping off the hand rail.

●

I sat by the window with a map of the island. I like maps. Especially maps without much on them. Sparse contours, broken lines of dots.

Amy thinks it’s odd that I can spend an hour poring over patchy folds of colour. But my eyes don’t just see the brown and green and blue. They see possibilities. The spaces are alive.

●

In the afternoon the rain comes.

●

Amy cut her foot in the ocean. She stepped on an oyster bed. The wound became infected, and made it painful for her to walk. I told her to put on her shoes, to keep the wound clean. She wore thongs. The wound swelled up red, with a tiny white blister. I told her to go to the clinic. She said she’d bathe it in the sea-water instead. We walked back to the ocean. She dipped her foot in the water and screamed. I rushed to look at her foot. A thread of blood washed away. The blister had burst, and a lone maggot crawled out.

●

The kids were fascinated by Amy’s sunscreen. She explained what it’s for.

“Black skin not get burnt,” one girl replied thoughtfully. “Because it’s healthier. What your homeland?”

“Melbourne.”

“Yaka, your homeland. Milingimbi? Maningrida? Elcho? ....Darwin?”

Most of the kids have never been to Darwin. Some have never left the island.

“I don’t know. We live here now...”

“What your skin name?”

“Gutjan.” Amy says.

“I don’t know mine,” I said. “I haven’t been adopted.”

●

The orphan of Milingimbi.

●

The community is called Milingimbi. The island is called Yurrwi.

When the tide is highest, two-thirds of the island is submerged, and isn’t called anything.

●

We share our house with frogs that appear after rain. With spiders that live on the balcony, one with a furry egg-sack suspended in web. With geckos, I leave the outside light on and it attracts their dinner. With the snakes in our backyard, chasing frogs in the dark. With the giant cockroaches that scuttle across the kitchen floor at night, and take flight when you try to catch them. With ants alert to any spilt crumb or drop of cordial, you get used to them crawling over your legs while you sleep. With the birds that live in our backyard jungle, and with the dragonflies that herald the outback spring.

●

After a month we watched television for the first time. We were minding the house of a friend. He has a satellite dish. We flicked the TV on and saw Japanese businessmen. They were throwing beans off a balcony, praying for the economy to improve. I turned the TV off.

●

We walked out onto the mud flats as the sun set. The mud is baked hard. We spread our arms to the breeze as the air cooled. Amy laid flat on her back, with a sigh.

“Lay down,” she said. “The earth is still warm.”

We laid there looking at the sky. Crows hovered overhead. They made slow passes with a pffft pffft pffft of their wings, their heads darting about with quick eyes. Watching us. I sat up. Twenty crows were milling about, pacing the mud flats. I stood and they took flight, retreating to the mangroves.

“Hey Amy. Lay still a moment. I wanna test something.”

We laid back and waited. The crows returned. Making their watchful passes with the pffft pffft pffft of their wings, only metres overhead. They gathered around us again.

“They’re waiting for us to die,” I said. “They want our eyes.”

●

The rain stopped and the fresh air carried its scent. Black cockatoos screeched overhead. We passed a grove of pandanus, palm trees bulging with coconuts. Blue-winged kookaburras are flashes of colour in the canopy. The sound of insects was all around us.

“This place makes sense,” I said.

●

Simplicity.

●

The church is a relic. The windows are broken, the door swings open, and there’s dust on the uneven rocky floor. The Milingimbi community was started by Methodist missionaries, in the 1920’s. But they’re not here anymore. The only visible remnants are the broken church and the colourful missionary dresses worn by the women.

A Yolngu boy ran up to us.

“Give me lollie and I tell you I love Jee-bus,” he said.

●

There’s a sign in the only shop on the island, that reads:

“Children Must Wear Clothes In The ALPA! No Children Without Clothes Will Be Served In This Store!”

●

Amy had to prepare her class for a standardised test. Every student in the Northern Territory had to sit for it. Her class wasn’t ready. She sat with one boy and tried to explain the hieroglyphics of text. It was the story of a kid who got chocolate cake on his shirt. The chocolate stain ruined his day. Amy thought the boy understood every word of the story. The boy waited patiently, and after some time Amy asked a question to see if he followed. There was a long pause.

“Miss,” he said, in his small voice. “I want to go hunting... Crab. Fish...”

●

We started with mussels. The women gather them at low tide, on the rocks off Top Camp. You throw them in the fire. When the shells pop open they’re ready. The ALPA shop was closed for a long weekend, and it gave us a good excuse to go hunting. The mussels are hard to find. Most of the shells are empty. Some looked intact, but with a tap we found them full of sloppy mud, and seawater.

Kids were fishing with hand-reels. They asked what we were looking for, I showed them the empty mussel shells. A boy resolved to help us. As I picked about in the sand, occasionally coming up with one, he’d return to present me with double-handfulls of them. Silently. The boy was about five years old. After some time, he showed me how. You overturn the rocks, and pick about in the sand underneath with a knife, or spoon. He handed me a knife and I started to find them.

●

You make spears from the branches of a certain tree. I don’t know its name. Johnny showed me the one. It grows in the sand by the mangroves. He took the axe and disappeared into the leaves. When he found the right branch he chopped it at the base, and passed it to me. It must have been five metres long. We went back to the fire and he laid the branch in the coals. Turning it so it wouldn’t burn. When he’d heated the length of the stick he peeled the bark back, to the smooth wood underneath.

●

There are cycads in the bush. Plants that have been around since the time of the dinosaurs. The Yolngu take the nuts from the plant and use it to make a sort of bread. The cycad bread keeps for a long time. They used to wrap it, and take it with them on overland journeys. But the nuts must be prepared properly. They’re poisonous, and if you don’t prepare them properly then you die.

●

In the night there are stars.

●

I always avoided the water. Then I learnt to fish with nets.

Paul attached a wooden pole to both ends of the long net. Five of us took up a length of it into our hands. Paul ventured out first, into the water and mangroves. There was a channel in the water, and I slipped into the brown. Up to my waist. We held the net up above our heads so it wouldn’t get snagged on the submerged logs. The water is an unknown language. As I was up to my chest, standing there in the water, one of the Yolgnu men saw his kids splashing at the water’s edge, and waved them away.

“Yaka! Bäru. Bäru.” He said.

I understand that much.

“No! Crocodiles. Crocodiles.”

●

The days are hot. Tamarind trees lend us their shade.

The Macassans brought them here. Yolngu used to trade with the Macassans, who came from what is now called Indonesia. The Macassans would live in Arnhem Land for several months of the year.

The Yolngu had a intricate system of trade with the Macassans, and with tribes as far away as Central Australia. Shortly after Federation, in 1901, the government introduced steep licensing fees for the Macassans, who’d gathered the trepang sea-cucumber from the shores of Arnhem Land for hundreds of years. In 1906 they were prohibited from entering Australian waters at all. The Macassans stopped coming. The Yolngu trade networks were destroyed.

Most people would say the Macassans brought the tamarind trees here for the tamarind fruit. But maybe it was also for the shade. The shade remains.

●

The trick to making a spear is in getting it straight. Paul saw the bend in my spear and showed me what to do. You put the bend in the hot coals. Turning, turning so it won’t burn. When the wood was soft he put the spear in the fork of a tree, and leaned on it. Pushing on the bend. The trick, he said, is to push hard enough so that the bend straightens. If you push too hard the gara will break.

At work, Paul told me he went fishing on his lunch break. He keeps his spears out the back of the storeroom. He showed me. Elegant, perfect. My gara is still bent. When the spear is finished, you can hunt turtle, and stingray.

●

The kids splash about in the Arafura Sea. They called to us. One boy rushed over, holding something in his hand. It’s a baby turtle. He handed it to me. It fitted on my palm. It’s beautiful, with shades of blue and gray. I thought it was alive. There’s more than one, the kids seem to be collecting them. A dog grabbed one of the baby turtles in its mouth and the kids yelled at it, “Sha! Sha!” Brandishing sticks like spears. Amy managed to retrieve it. By then we could see that the turtles were all dead.

We saw Pete, further up the beach. He was trying to fix the engine of his boat. Last night, some of his adopted Yolngu family tied up his boat too close to the waterline. When the tide came in his boat sank, wrecking the engine. The boat was filled with hundreds of turtle eggs they’d gathered that afternoon. The sea brought in the tide of broken shells and dead baby turtles.

●

Pete is balanda, like us. A whitefella. Him and his wife got divorced, a long time ago. So he started walking. He walked for four years, and he ended up here.

The other day he said he’d just been shipwrecked on Mooroongga Island. Him and nine members of his Yolngu family were fishing in a boat when the engine died.

“That must have been scary,” I said.

“Nah. Best time of my life, mate. We slept on the sand. Ate fish. Crab. Turtle eggs. After five days someone rang for a charter plane to bring us back.”

●

The bush south of Bottom Camp is out of bounds to balanda. We don’t go there.

●

Otis looks like a wise man. He’s fifty, with a full white beard, black face, and a tubby belly. He giggles easily. Every time I see him he has his tiny grandson on his shoulders. He calls his grandson “my father.”

His father jumps off his shoulders and totters about. When he wanders too far Otis pitches a little shell or two at him and calls him back. Otis’s father is two years old, his name is Jim. He’s only recently been called by his Yolngu name again, as someone with that name died. Otis said Jim loves to dance to the yidaki, the didgeridoo. He picked up a piece of PVC pipe washed up on the shore, and played it like the yidaki. But Jim was shy to dance in front of us. He climbed back onto Otis’s shoulders.

●

There’s wreckage in the undergrowth near the airfield. The tangled remains of aeroplanes. They might be Australian Spitfires, or Japanese Zekes.

Milingimbi was bombed by the Japanese during World War II. There were dogfights above the island. The R.A.A.F made the airfield during the war, it was used to refuel planes.

A Yolgnu woman tells me that up the north of the island you can still find fortifications and fuel dumps left over by the air force. I went looking for them. I found nothing. The woolybutt, the pandanus, the cycads, and the stringybark forests gave me no clues. The kookaburras laughed at me. I went home.

●

Milingimbi is a dry community. I got thirsty, so I flew to Darwin for a beer.

I entered the Frogshollow backpackers to foreign grins. A world of people laid back in deck chairs, swilling bourbon, a group of Germans crouched by the pool smoking a joint. Swedes and Southern European women swanning about the pool in bikinis and tanned skin.

I rushed around the CBD, trying to get things done.

As I walked back to the hostel, drunk, I saw a pair of Yolngu women I recognised. They called out hello. Their serene, sober eyes reminded me.

“Tom. What you doing?”

“Walking. You?”

“Visiting family.”

“When are you going home?”

“Thursday.”

●

‘My Island Home,’ by the Warumpi Band, wasn’t written as an ode to Australia. The song pines for Elcho Island, in Arnhem Land.

●

On the morning of Easter Sunday we got up before dawn. There were three crosses facing the Arafura Sea. A group of older Yolngu stood facing the rising sun. One bloke gently strummed a battered acoustic as they sang hymns in English:

“He rose again/ he rose again.”

●

The sun sets over the bush. The sun rises over the Arafura sea.

●

A mob from Elcho came for Easter. They had a huge turtle. Miyapunu. The men cut it up on the sand. They had long knives. With the bottom half of the shell removed, they carved the flesh into large chunks, that were placed to one side. Each part was set into a different pile, and some into tins. Nothing wasted. They were getting ready to cook it up. I spoke with an older bloke. He handed me a bit of raw turtle meat to taste.

After cutting up the turtle the women place the chunks of meat onto hot coals, and atop the meat add a layer of a particular type of branch. The bloke said the leaves make the meat taste good. Then they put the empty top half of the shell over that, and cover the lot with a layer of sand. When the oven was complete they started to wander away, while it cooked.

I asked the bloke, “how long do you cook it for?”

“Oh, one hour, one-half hours. Half-hour. Two hours - something like that.”

●

Twenty people eat in the sand.

●

I walk home on my lunch break. There’s a shortcut, a 4WD track across the patch of grassland between the ALPA shop and our place. It’s a narrow track, almost obscured by the long grass that rises to waist-height on either side. I keep a watchful eye out for snakes. As I walk, with the sound of chirping insects almost deafening, I sweat in the air. The air is warm and moist, like breath. I can feel it coming from the green. The air of the grass, and the trees, breathing.

●

Everything has its place, to the Yolngu. Every person, every animal, every fish, every plant, every object. Everything that it in this world, and everything that is not. That’s why balanda are adopted into Yolngu families. Then your place is known, and understood.

●

While fishing we saw a sea eagle. It’d spotted the fish we’d sat on the mud of the mangroves. The eagle circled, and then left with a broad stroke of its wings.

●

We threw a few fish in the coals. After eating the mullet, Jack asked our skin names. Amy said she’s Gutjan, a subgroup of the Yirritja.

“I haven’t been adopted,” I said.

“You are Dhuwa,” Jack said. “Your wife Yirritja, you must be Dhuwa.” He asked Amy who adopted her. Jack thought about it, then said to me, “your skin name Wämut.”

My heart beat warmth through my body. As it always does. But you only notice it sometimes.

“Wämut,” he repeated. “Your totem is sea eagle. Damala. Your dreaming is sea eagle. Jabiru. Barramundi. You cannot harm these things, you must protect them. Every skin name protects their dreaming. This way everything is protected.”

I’m not an orphan. I never was.

Sea eagle dreaming.

●

We sleep with just a sheet to cover us. The Wet is almost over, and in the last week I’ve felt a tiny chill. It’s only a drop of a degree or two. But the weather is steady from one day to the next. When it’s the same temperature every night you notice that one or two degrees.

In the morning, I can tell the time by the temperature. You don’t need a clock. The heat climbs evenly, and the feel of it on your bare skin will tell you if you’ve slept in.

●

I don’t like the word ‘Paradise.’ Paradise is just in your head.

●

In the morning, Poppy the dog waits for me on the porch.

Whispers In Words That Make No Sense

Non-Fiction
Location – Adelaide, Australia
Written – May 2009
[This wasn’t an easy piece to write. I discovered a trick of writing to music - playing particular music on the stereo that fitted the mood and then riffing off of it like a guitar player. It remains unpublished though I personally think it’s one of the better things I’ve written about my mother’s dementia. It isn’t a happy story.]

I was blind to my mother for many months. I was away in India. Thoughts of her would come to me in darkness and in dreams but I haven’t seen her since Christmas. In my mind’s eye I saw her content in the Parklyn Aged Care Facility. I saw her as I remembered her. But the plot always thickens. You’re not swallowing enough of what goes on around you if it gets any thinner.

The last time I rang my mother she didn’t speak a word into the telephone.

“I’ve been in India, Ma. I haven’t seen you in a long time. I’ll come over and see you...”

She didn’t say a word. I could only hear her sobbing.

Then I start getting the calls from the doctors and the nurses. They tell me that I’ll need to make a decision. They say I’ll need to decide whether I want Mum to continue getting the tests and medical procedures, or whether I want her to be ‘comfortable.’ The head nurse of Parklyn tells me about the need to draw up a plan for Palliative Care. I’ve never heard those words before but I get the idea. My mother is dying.

I drink a bottle of scotch and then I sit down to think it through.

_____________________________________________________________________

I catch the bus to Adelaide. I don’t know what I expect to find - a zombie, perhaps, or a shiny surgical tool to incise my deepest misery. I’m afraid to see.

When I walk into the Parklyn ward I don’t just see the bent back and the skinny arms. I see the light and the presence of my Mother. I rush towards her. She’s sitting in a chair with her head down. I throw my arms around her and put my head on her shoulder. She smells old like a book. I can feel the upheavals of her breath. She wears an Indian dress and runs the fabric through her fingers. Her hair, like her skin, is gray. My mother is fifty-eight years old.

“Do you remember me Brenda?” Says my Aunt. “Bren? It’s your sister, Gail. Do you remember Gail?”

Mum doesn’t look up. She whispers something. Garbled. Her back is hunched forward so she doesn’t meet our eyes. The doctors call it ‘severe spinal degeneration.’ As the Alzheimer’s takes her mind so it takes her body. After some time she raises her head. Slowly. For just an instant our eyes meet and dazzle with recognition, or love.

“Where did you come from?” She asks clearly.

“I came from you Ma.”

We walk together. As I hold her hand I can see her pulse beating through her skin. She walks hunched over. She can’t see where she’s going. I guide her away from the walls and the closed doors. She walks as if inspecting the ground just in front of her feet. Leaning in close. Looking for something she’s never going to find.

She walks and then rests. She doesn’t see the nearby chairs. If you don’t guide her into one of the chairs then she crouches on her heels. I crouch with her, like her, inspecting the same things as her - the hem of her Indian dress, embroidered with a golden fabric that glints in the sun. We explore this tiniest of miracles together. When she’s ready to stand I ease her into a chair. There’s always a chair nearby in Parklyn.

I need to rest myself. I haven’t eaten or slept since last night. I give a nod to the pair of Punjabi blokes who work the afternoon shift and they take Mum by an arm each to lead her away. If you don’t do this she’ll never leave your side.

“I’ll see you tomorrow Mum.”

I clasp my hands in the prayer-sign before I go, in a wordless prayer to no-one and to no-thing. I’ve never done that before. Going to Parklyn isn’t the hard part, I remember now. It’s leaving that’s hard.

_____________________________________________________________________

Gail and I go back to her place and talk, using beer bottles as microphones. She’s still trying to get off the booze. I tell her I don’t want to be a bad influence, but tonight she’s having what a woman of clarity would call a moment of alcoholism. The nurses have told us that Mum still has life in her and we’ve seen it with our own eyes. She isn’t dying in a medical sense. She’s still on her feet. Part of us is relieved. But as the night grows long the guilt starts soaking into Gail’s voice. She used to care for Brenda before having a breakdown.

“I could have done more,” she says. “I should still be caring for her.”

“Don’t feel guilty Gail.. Mike and I tried too.”

It took my brother and I a long time I to realize that no matter what we do for our mother we can’t save her. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza. A hole. And no matter what we do to fix it there’s still a hole.

“I tried to warn you and Mike. I knew what would happen.”

“We needed to Gail. We needed to understand.”

We thicken the plot with breath and cigarette smoke. She brushes the contours of her guilt onto the table with fingers tracing the ashes.

“But you don’t understand,” she says. “My mother never wanted a third child. When I was born my mother couldn’t hug me. She left. Took off to Sydney for a few years. Left raising me to Brenda, who was eight. She changed my nappies, bathed me, sang me to sleep. Brenda was like a mother to me, and I always looked up to her like a mother. She took care of me when I was helpless. So when she developed Alzheimer’s, I felt a duty to repay her. To look after her as she looked after me. But I failed.”

I don’t know how to reply. I take a swill of beer.

“I failed.”

“Barbara cared for Mike and I in a similar way,” I say. Our mother was lost then in the caverns of schizophrenia. “I guess both our mothers weren’t always around.”

“It was hard on you kids. You needed your real mother. One time I rang up your stepmother, Barbara, angry that she bought you a copy of a Stephen King novel. It was inappropriate for a kid.”

“Barbara did buy me that. Skeleton Crew. But it wasn’t the first Stephen King novel I’d read. You wanna know who bought me the first?” I take a drag on my cigarette. “Mum. I convinced her to buy Firestarter for me in a Melbourne book shop when I was eleven. She didn’t realize what it was. But I’d been reading Edgar Allen Poe before that. That kind of writing just made sense to me. You should have thanked Barbara when you called her, for helping to spark my love of reading and writing.” I stub out my smoke. “Sometimes the best way to help someone seems odd to other people I guess.”

Gail coughs. I’m changing the subject. I’m cursed with the blindness of day as Gail is cursed with the blindness of night.

“I’m a failure,” she repeats. “A failure. Your mother was educated and travelled the world. But look at me here. I can’t look after your mother. I can’t even look after myself.”

“Fuck, Gail,” I say, “you’re one of the few people I can talk to about this stuff, you’re one of the few people who understands. We don’t have much family left.”

But I’m drunk, there’s nothing I can say, and perhaps there is no antidote for guilt anyway.

_____________________________________________________________________


Gail wakes me.

“Tom! Get ready. Sam’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“What? Sam?”

Sam was my mother’s first husband. Mum used to talk about him a lot but I’ve never met him. I still getting dressed when he knocks on the door. He’s out of place in Gail’s broken home - a portly, middle-aged, successful man. A lecturer of Philosophy. The dogs bark at him. Gail takes a mug from the sink of dirty dishes and washes it to pour him a coffee.

He says that he’s in Adelaide for the weekend. He flew from Sydney for a high-school reunion. Yesterday he went around to 3 Godson street, the old family home, and found strangers living there. He couldn’t find Brenda in the phonebook. After some effort he tracked down Gail’s number. He speaks quietly as he slips down the tunnel of guilt.

“It was my fault the marriage ended. I cheated on Brenda.”

He speaks with his head down - presenting himself for our judgment. The room falls silent. He hasn’t seen Brenda in thirty years.

“Mum never expressed anything but fondness for you. There was no bitterness. And, on a selfish level, if you and Mum and stayed together then I wouldn’t exist.”

“I’d like to see Brenda.”

“It’ll be distressing for you to see her. It might be easier for you to remember her as she was.”

“I’d like to see her anyway.”

Perhaps he needs to go for his own reasons. So we go.

_____________________________________________________________________


We take his rental car.

I suggest that he resists the urge to play the ‘Do You Remember Me?’ game. It distresses Mum to put pressure on her, to fire questions at her that she can’t answer. Sometimes I have dreams where I find Mum in the wilderness - standing in a river, or crouched in a cave - and I embrace her, and as I embrace her I’m crying and I’m asking, “you remember me Mum, do you remember me...?” So I know the impulse to ask. But I don’t. Mum is a sunset that will not be the same tomorrow. And to clutch at an image of how the sunset was, or how it might be, is to lose your clear sight of what is happening right now.

We find Mum being spoon-fed her lunch. I rush towards her and rest my head against hers. Sam sits opposite her at the table.

“It’s Sam, Brenda. Sam? Do you remember Sam? We were... married. We lived in Glebe. Glebe? Do you remember Gracus and Claude? The cats??”

Mum says nothing. She’s inspecting the hem of her dress again, cradling the fabric in her fingers. Her hand moves to hold mine. The slightest movement, so small that the others don’t notice, and I don’t draw attention to it. Sam turns to Gail and begins asking questions about Brenda’s Condition.

“Is she always like this?”

I break from my hug with Ma.

“I’ll give you a moment alone with Mum. Hugs are better than conversation,” I say, and go outside to smoke a cigarette.

When I return Gail and Sam are in Mum’s room talking. I walk with Mum hand-in-hand doing laps around the ward. We stop to look at things - red flowers, Holly the cat, pictures on the wall. An old man knocks on one of the pictures. “Is anybody in there?” He says. “Is anybody home?”

Sam has to go. He needs to return the rental car and catch his flight to Sydney. He looks stunned. He hasn’t gotten whatever it was he wanted from Mum. I remind myself not to be harsh. He’s never seen anyone with Alzheimer’s before. He’s a lecturer of philosophy but he doesn’t understand.

Gail thinks differently. “When we were alone in Mum’s room, Sam seized upon a photo of Mum,” she says. I know the one. It’s a large print on her dresser. In the picture she’s twenty and beautiful, with Mona Lisa eyes. “‘That’s how I remember Brenda,’ he said to me. Tears welled in his eyes. He browsed the room, slowly.” Chewing. Searching for something he’ll never find. “He walked over to Brenda’s bed, and picked up the stuffed snow-leopard toy. Mum’s favourite possession. I could feel the love in the room. He picked up the toy and cradled it a moment then set it down exactly as he’d found it. Perhaps it was his way of saying goodbye.”

_____________________________________________________________________


I go to Parklyn in the morning alone.

I enter the office to speak with the head nurse. As she finishes some paperwork I look around the room. There’s a sign on the wall that reads, ‘Respond To The Need, Not To The Behaviour.’ Fair enough. I take it to mean, as a reminder to staff: ‘these people will send you fucking insane with frustration if you don’t keep your cool, and see through the ranting, rocking, crying, spitting, sobbing, self-hitting, bed-wetting behaviour to whatever it is that the patient actually needs.’

But I don’t have that job any more, not since my brother and I arranged the Parklyn placement. I was never too good at caring for my mother. We didn’t have these snappy platitudes of wisdom on the walls of 3 Godson Street. And I could never get to a point of slick professionalism as a Carer, for I also happen to love Ma. Now I come in without the shield of occupation. Not as a worker but only as a person. And as a person you feel things - love, pain, your own needs. I write my own sign on the wall of my mind: ‘Respond To The Person, Not To Your Own Needs.’

I need the love of my mother. I need to know that she remembers me. But, in this place, my needs are epitaphs written in sand. In the wind of time they mean nothing.

Joy emerges from her filing cabinet clutching the blank Palliative Care document. She regards me with old tired eyes.

“Do you want your mother resuscitated?”

I don’t meet her eyes. I stare through the photocopied document with an unfocussed gaze.

“No,” I say. “If her heart stops beating then I don’t want her resuscitated. I don’t want her to go through any more tests. I don’t want to put her through any more medical procedures.”

Joy pushes the document towards me to sign.

_____________________________________________________________________


My mother walks and then crouches. We don’t talk much. I show her a copy of National Geographic with pictures of Proboscis Monkeys. She isn’t too interested in them. She keeps turning to the back cover with a picture of a wolf. She wraps the magazine into the folds of her dress and carries it around with her like a treasure. I hold her other hand in my own, trembling. As we’re walking she raises my arm and kisses the back of my hand. I close my eyes and weep without tears for the smallest of things. Like a kiss, or a signature.

There’s so many things I’d like to say to her, so many things I’d like to ask. But I don’t. She whispers something to me that I can’t understand.

“I know, Mum. I know. I love you, Ma.”

A kiss as small as a signature on a photocopied document.

_____________________________________________________________________


The plot always thickens. The sound from its many mouthpieces becomes so dense that it rises to a screaming. But perhaps too, in the din, there are echoes of a simplicity. So faint that it cannot be heard no matter how hard you listen, and so far that it cannot be found no matter how hard you look. Just whispers in words that make no sense. You could cast words to call it love but it’s a love so streaked through with the pain and the guilt and the longing of being alive that the colours all blend into white. An every-thing that is also no-thing. Like the whiteness of the morphine patch on my mother’s arm.

I don’t really know if she remembers me or not. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it doesn’t matter all that much.

“I love you, Ma. I love you...” The words spill from my lips so easily it’s as if I haven’t spoken at all.

She touches the fabric of my shirt before I turn to go. That’s enough.

The Cookie Crumbles

Non-Fiction
Location – Melbourne, Australia
Written – April 2009
[This story was published in ‘Wet Ink’ magazine Issue 17, in December 2009.]

It began with a pair of legs. The heat brought the short skirts, and singlet tops. I was polite, I’d wait until she’d walked past before dropping my gaze to her ass, and her legs. Just a quick glance, there’s no need to be unprofessional about it. My mind filled in the rest.

I don’t remember when I first saw her. It wasn’t that kind of moment. She didn’t arrive at the workplace, she seeped into it - into long hours, the mindless toil, and the emptiness of the bustling office. So many people come and go in this place that you don’t pay much attention. As a supervisor said to me, “it’s like Vietnam in here - you don’t get too attached to anybody.”

It doesn’t really matter what I do. It’s a keyboard, and a computer screen. In the spare moments I write in my journal, or read the newspaper. I read the articles about the war in Gaza. My brother is in Sderot, with his Israeli girlfriend. The last time I spoke to him he had to drop the phone as a Qassam rocket came crashing into town. I imagine him safe, I and wonder what we’ll talk about when he returns. I skip the articles about the economic crisis. I hear enough about that on my cigarette breaks, from workmates whose stories don’t make the headlines. Sometimes while I work I’ll look around at the faces of my co-workers. And that’s when I began to notice her.

She smiles. Her teeth break free like a gap in the clouds. Clothed in one of her colourful dresses, with swirls of blue, and white. She doesn’t look like the others. She might be Spanish, or South American, and that lure of the exotic runs straight from your genes to your jeans. She might have lived on the edge of the Amazon jungle, bathing naked in the cool water. Or she may be the only daughter of a Colombian drug lord, who’d kill me if he found us languishing in tangled sheets. She could be from anywhere. But that doesn’t matter too much, either.

We’ve never spoken. I’m not shy. I’ve built up a repertoire of sarcastic one-liners that I use to break the ice with new co-workers. But I avoid her, and the guilt that comes with the idea of her.

I’ve been with my girlfriend for four years. And we have an adult understanding that, sometimes, we will be attracted to other people. This is to be human. Crossing the line is to act, to move from an attraction to something else. So I don’t. If I talk to the Spanish girl I might discover we have a mutual love for Herman Hesse, or Thai curries. She might play with her hair and laugh at my jokes, even when they’re not funny. I’m wary of her.

We reach a pleasant stalemate. Our only language is spoken through the silence of the eyes. She’ll leave her terminal to take a break in the alley, and pass me on the way. She returns my gaze with effortless calm. With eyes that speak of neither fear, nor glittering friendliness - just a cool awareness of things. A readiness, for whatever could happen next. These wordless conversations linger, like old friends. I don’t nod, or smile. I’m the first to look away.

When she walks past my eyes slip down again to her ass, and her legs. I try not to, but it happens anyway. It’s a natural thing, like influenza. She has that endless tan, a tan that has nothing to do with two weeks on a Bali beach. The tan is only punctuated by the reality of her hemline.

This isn’t the time for dreaming. My computer demands input.

I can’t afford to be fired. My girlfriend lost her job a couple of weeks ago. Her company got the job agency to deliver the news. Cowards. She got off the phone in tears. I held her, on the train platform, and told her not to worry.

“I’ll try to pick up some extra shifts,” I said. “We’ll be okay.”

But it isn’t so easy. People have been flooding towards dead-end jobs like mine, as they’re laid off from their regular jobs. Most are older than myself. You can tell they’re of a different breed, by the way they come in wearing suits, and black dresses. The veterans of this job are lucky to come in wearing shoes. This influx has meant there’s more competition for shifts. I’ve started coming to work early, to squeeze a few extra dollars from every shift I can get. But I’m getting so few that I earn less than the dole.

The rumour floating around the alley is that management is flooding in the new workers to cut costs. The recruits are paid at the training rate. My guess is that once they’ve completed their training period, they’ll start getting the ‘sorry, we can’t offer you any shifts this week’ line, too. There’s plenty of people out there to replace them.

A while back I tried to find new work. I’d go to the library to use their free internet, and send off dozens of applications through the job-search websites. It’s quick, easy, and pointless. There’s less jobs advertised than there used to be. I didn’t get a single phone call. The rejection emails told me they’re sorry, they’ve had a large volume of enquiries about the position, and good luck out there in the cold. I could have tried harder. I devote a larger section of my mind to masturbation fantasies than I do to job hunting.

There’s a syndicate at my work, for Tattslotto tickets. Kat, the older lady who sits at the terminal behind me, buys one every week. There’s always a ticket on her computer, sitting next to the crime novels she borrows from the library.

“It isn’t about the prize money,” she says. “I’d just love to be able to quit this job, and never have to work a six-day week again.”

My Dad says you don’t pay for Lotto tickets expecting to win. You pay for a week of fantasy.

My friend Dean has been working this job for years. His passion is birds. Before this job, he co-authored a field guide on Australian birds, and travelled widely in search of exotic species. He’s reluctant to talk about it. Happy memories can bring pain, too. Then he surprises me. He says he wants to go to Thailand at the end of the year. Go ‘birding’ there. He shows me pictures of Thai birds on his mobile. His eyes light up as he tells me about them. I don’t share his enthusiasm, but I ask him dozens of questions anyway, just to keep that glimmer in his eyes. After working in dead-end jobs long enough, you realize that fuelling these fragile sparks of passion is the truest sort of friendship there is.

I encourage him to book a flight. He’s starting to falter.

“But I’m not getting anywhere near enough work to save the money,” he says. “The bills are coming in.”

“You could always take out a loan.”

Dean just laughs. Unlike myself, he does read articles on the economy.

I don’t know what the Spanish girl dreams of. Is she an aspiring artist? Does she yearn to return home, and visit her family? Does she dream of love? Of learning to dive beneath the sea? I know she doesn’t dream of being here. So what is her fantasy? I’d like to ask. But I can’t, for she’s become one of mine. And dreams, too, can destroy you.

I go out to smoke a cigarette. I rolled one before logging out, so they won’t dock my pay. I pull it from my pocket. I spark it up in the alley, surrounded by garbage. The garbage festers in the heat, but the smoke kills the smell. Summer rain begins plopping down, and I take shelter beneath a scrap of overhanging sheet-metal. As I smoke, alone in the alley, she opens the door and steps outside.

Our eyes meet. It’s just the two of us there. She stops. There’s no way we can get away without saying something to each other.

“Oh! It’s raining!” She says.

“Yeah,” I reply. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

She smiles, and holds her jacket up over her head as she turns to go, protecting herself from the rain. She rushes off, as if trying to out-run the weather. She’s finished her shift and headed home.

The next day something has changed. She usually sits up the other end of the office, and our faces only sometimes cross paths. She sat up there for months. Today she moves closer, close enough that I can hear the clack of her keyboard. You can tell a lot from that sound - whether someone is calm and composed, or whether someone is having a bad day. Her clack is in light, joyous little clicks, that bounce like music. She’s happy.

The young bloke sitting next to her reaches out his hand and starts rubbing her back, in slow, soft circles. She’s at ease with the touch. His chair is rolled over next to hers. He whispers something in her ear. I look down and clack something into my keyboard. There’s a squeal of giggles as he tickles her. I look up, reluctantly, to see their beaming smiles.

The cookie crumbles.

I don’t mind. There’s work to be done, and my girlfriend is at home waiting for me. Despite the games I play with myself, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll return tomorrow. In pure fantasy nothing can be gained, or lost. I pause, as the dreams dissipate into the fluorescent office air. Then, when I’m satisfied they’ve been banished away, I return to my computer screen.

The Christmas Party

Non-Fiction
Location – Melbourne, Australia
Written - December 2008
[I started sending out my work to publishers only recently - after I returned from India, in July 2008. This story was written about an experience I had during that time. It doesn’t have all that much going for it, it was written quickly and then sent out to the same magazines I was writing about....]

I’ve been submitting my writing to Overland and Meanjin magazines for the past six months. So far, nothing published. But when I hear they have their combined Christmas party coming up, I figure I’ll go along. It might be a good chance to meet some people. I don’t have the knack for networking. I don’t have business cards in my shirt-pocket. But I’m curious to see the faces of the people I’ve been sending my work to.

When the day comes I’m wracked by nerves. My girlfriend Amy persuades me to go. “It’ll be a good opportunity for you, Tom,” she says. “I’ll come with you.” I put on my best black shirt. It’s unwashed from some previous occasion, so I spit on my finger, and rub at a grey stain of cigarette ash. I smoke furiously in the car, and more ash spills into my lap.

I’m not usually nervous about parties. I can happily banter with almost anyone. But this is somehow different. We park the car and begin walking through the Edinburgh Gardens. Sunday is living up to its name. There’s frisbees in the air, and the dogs are unleashed. We scan the parklands for the gathering. There’s plenty of them around. We pass a group of beer-swilling boys with bellies out - probably not the ones. What does a group of editors and writers look like? Do they, too, have ash-stains on their shirts?

“Just relax, Tom,” Amy says.

“But we don’t know anyone,” I say. “How will we know which group to approach? I
feel like a stalker.”

“We’ll have to go up and ask.”

“Nah, give it a bit. We’ll walk awhile.”

Delaying tactics. We’re not really invited to the party. Usually at a party you’d know at least a face or two. I only know a few names. I’m not even a regular reader of their magazines - but of course I’m not about to tell them that.

We come across a trio of people who look similarly lost. I approach them. “Are you looking for the Overland and Meanjin party?”

“Yeah,” they say, and introduce themselves. “So are you with the Overland or Meanjin?”

“Um, I’ve been sending my work to both,” I say.

“Sitting on the fence!”

One of the girls rings someone, who directs us to the gathering. It’s a young crowd. There’s eskies and picnic blankets laid out on chequered blankets. The sunny clink of hands rummaging through ice, in search of beer bottles.

Amy spreads out her jumper on the grass as a blanket, and we kneel on it. We wonder what to do next. A lady approaches us with a platter of sandwiches. I thank her, and take one. It’s a good sandwich. And, for the moments I’m eating, it makes it impolite to talk. I eat another.

“What do we do now?” I say quietly to Amy. She’s usually good with social situations, but my nerves must be contagious. She fidgets with her phone.

“I don’t know. We should talk to someone.”

I roll a cigarette.

One bloke approaches us, and introduces himself. As soon as he says his name I forget it. I take it this is not good networking form.

“I’m Tom,” I say, blowing my smoke away from his face. “I’ve been sending in work to Overland and Meanjin for a few months. I thought this might be a good chance to put some faces to some names.” A dog runs past, barking. “Are you a writer, or an editor?”

I read somewhere, it might have been Helen Garner, describing this as the most often heard line at writer’s festivals. ‘Are you an writer or an editor?’ Most here seem to be both, making the line not only cliched, but largely redundant. I’ve never been to anything like this before. I suppose all cliches exist for a reason - they’re handy when you’re not in the mood for thinking.

A group nearby bursts into uproarious laughter.

Say something, Tom. Say something insightful, or witty. Say something Memorable. Say... something... But thoughts like that only clog up the works, and make it more than likely that you don’t say a damned thing.

Silence.

The bloke spots someone he knows and goes over to say hello.

My throat is dry. “We should’ve brought something to drink,” I say to Amy. “I’m gunna get some orange juice.” My stomach isn’t ready for the beers being passed around. Amy says she’ll stay, I set out to find a shop. As I walk, I reassure myself that there’s something inherently weird about turning up to a party where you’ve never met anyone. It is perhaps stranger again to go to a party where your only contact with the crowd has been consistent rejection over a period of months. I smile to myself as I write down the thought into my notebook. I put the notebook back in my shirt-pocket, where my business cards aren’t.

When I return, Amy is talking to a young lady about Sweden. I set the orange juice out in front of me, just so far away as to not claim ownership of it. Damn, I didn’t remember to get any cups. I scan about for some. There’s some plastic cups by an Esky, set just so far away from a nearby circle as to not claim ownership of them. I approach and take one, awkwardly, expecting at any moment to be exposed as a thief.

A bloke turns to me. “So you’re Mister Ones And Zeroes,” he says, referring to something I’d sent to his magazine. I wrote it about my job in market research. As a non-fiction writer it’s also, unfortunately, my life. I ask him what he liked about it. It’d be more useful to ask what he disliked about it, but it’s too early in the day for criticism. As I listen, his mobile phone rings.

I pour another cup of juice.

Amy is faring well. The song of her laughter is punctuated by my ringtone. It’s a mate of mine, who, by sheer coincidence, is also in the Edinburgh Gardens. He joins us, and begins ranting and cussing. His boss has cancelled all his shifts for the next week. As I cringe at his trucker’s talk, so I smile at his unaffected realness. Perhaps I should inject more cuss-words into my conversation: “so you’re a fucken’ editor, eh? Awesome mate, fucken’ awesome. I need a good fucken’ editor, to edit out all my fucken’ cuss-words. Us bastards should collaborate, eh? Eh?”

I shouldn’t think so much.

We’re going to see C.W. Stoneking play at the Corner. After checking the time, Amy says it’s time to go. I’d rather slink out, unnoticed. But we say some sudden farewells. I shift on my feet as Amy explains why we can’t stay for the soccer game. “I’m not wearing the right shoes!,” she says, raising one foot demonstratively. It would have been good to stay for the soccer game. It’s harder to be calculated when you have a litre of beer in your belly and you’re trying to dribble a soccer ball about.

“Uh.... Bye,” I say. I don’t look anyone in the eyes. I’m about to joke, maybe I might see you all next year, but I don’t.

I take my bottle of orange juice, and leave the gathering. The crowd of people who’s stories I don’t know, who’s stories I may never know. They may be wife-beating assholes for all I have learned, there may be infidelities, torments, or triumphs. We could have spilled cigarette ash on our shirts, together. I’ve been so lost in my own caverns of concern that I have missed it all.

What was I thinking? They’ll probably think I’m some antisocial bastard. The afternoon has been so surreal, so odd, that all I can do is write about it.

Big Things

Non-Fiction
Location – India - Ladakh
Written - May 2008
[Reading back on this my trip to India feels like a long time ago. But the final line still stands, and the return trip is still planned.]

We set out at 2am to cross the Himalayan Range. The journey from Manali to Leh will take us around twenty hours, in one long-haul. There’s an Israeli couple sitting up front, the boyfriend is furious. “My girlfriend doesn’t have enough room!” he yells, “she has a gear-stick in her leg!” I can tell they haven’t been in India long. A gear-stick in the leg is the sort of thing only new arrivals complain about - when it comes to Indian transport, the old hands appreciate that they're not standing in urine with a goat smothering their face. The Israeli demands their money back, and the Indian driver fires up with shouted garble of his own. I turn to Rick, the Kiwi sitting next to us, and say, “it’s a bit of basic outback wisdom that you don’t start heated arguments five minutes into a long road journey.”

The driver stops the jeep . There’s more screaming. The Israeli bloke declares he’s going to roll a joint and stomps off into the night. When they return they slump into the jeep, defeated by the stone, and fall asleep. The driver collects our five other passengers – all Ladakhis. Four of them climb into the back, one of them squeezes into our middle row of three, so we now have four full-grown adults on our seat. That makes eleven of us in the jeep. And the two sleeping Israelis up front end up with enough room to stretch their legs.

We hit the road. You can’t see much. I don’t sleep, I’m far too wide awake. In the headlights I catch glimpses of steep slopes, wooded with deodars. As we rise towards Rohtang La ("La" means "mountain pass," in Tibetan) we’re caught in a high-altitude traffic jam. The dirt road is only wide enough for one vehicle, and there’s a long line of Indian cargo trucks coming our way. Our driver pulls over as close as he can to the hillside. One by one the trucks edge forward centimetres at a time, in jolting stops and starts as the driver revs the engine, belching fumes into the night, before slamming on the brakes centimetres from the abyss. It takes them some time. Drivers stand out front barking instructions at the drivers (“cello… cello… parava! parava!”) in puffs of fog. I get out to smoke a cigarette and I’m almost crushed between our vehicle and one of the trucks. I won’t make that mistake again.

By the time we move it’s almost dawn. The sun is rising behind the snowy peaks, which change colour as the sun rises to greet them. The Israelis begin snapping photos. I know that in a fast-moving jeep the light is too low to capture anything but blur. I simply look. Patches of snow decorate the sharply triangular arrowheads of black rock, like the skin of a killer-whale. As we descend from Rohtang La into Keylong the road creeps along the side of the valley. Keylong is the last town along the way, for the next 300km we will cross the Himalayan range. The driver declares it wise that we stop for breakfast.

We heed his wisdom. We eat fast, and return to the road. The morning light is dazzlingly bright in my sleepless eyes. It’s time to pull out my camera. It isn’t easy to take photographs from a jeep that’s barrelling along rocky roads and taking hairpin turns at a dizzying speed. They don’t have instructions on this in the manual to my camera. But the trick, I take it, is lightning-fast shutter speeds. Otherwise the movement makes the pictures blur. The catch is that in order to use these speeds you need light that is particularly bright, and clear. As we rise into the Himalaya the morning gives way to a beautiful day. God, if nothing else, is a provider - so long as you recognise Her gifts.

We begin the series of sharp hairpin turns that lead slowly up to Baralacha La, at 4,883 metres. The driver slows on the precipitous turns and I photograph the roof of the world. I gape at a mountain lake of the most brilliant green, resting like molten emerald. From the top, from Baralacha La, you can see all the way to Ladakh – the ‘land of high passes.’

The air is clear over Ladakh. The weather is different north of the Himalaya. At this time of year, the monsoon is being blown up from the south of India, until it covers most of the country in clouds and lashing rain. But the clouds get caught up in the mountains. The Himalayan range is so massive that it literally blocks the clouds from moving further north. And so, Ladakh comes as a revelation. The skies are a distilled blue, as we enter the mountain desert of the Tibetan Plateau. In Ladakh, it is summertime.

The scenery changes quickly. There’s a sprinkling of snow on only the tallest of peaks, the rest of the mountains are awash with shades of ochre and gold. I know I will remember this journey for the rest of my life – cruising through the Lingti Chu River valley at four-and-a-half thousand metres with the wind in my hair, and my head full of delirious fatigue. We snake our way up the switchback roads towards Lachlung La at 5,060 metres. I’m sitting against the window on the side of the drop. Just past the edge of our tyres. The drop mesmerises me like a cobra. Forever close to the edge. Falling from this height, you’d have enough time to acknowledge the view on the way down.

After crossing the pass we enter the Gorges of Pang. The landscape becomes decidedly odd. Natural statues rise from mountains weathered smooth by the wind. Some look like Martian faces, massive artifacts on the mountainside. Others look like rock cities – outcrop colonies inhabited only by the dry wind. I haven’t slept in 36 hours, and the sight has the same textureless sheen of a vision. The journey is not easy. I develop bruises on my right-hand side, I begin to know each of the door’s metal bumps and ridges very intimately. At times we become claustrophobic and ask to stop. As it turns out, one of those occasions is at the ferocious Taglang La – the second highest motorable pass in the world. We take a rest-stop, at 5,328 metres.

I almost fall out of the jeep. The dizziness makes me too groggy to walk. But I'll go higher, in time, higher into the Big Things.

After twenty hours in the jeep we arrive in Leh. Leh is the capitol of a desert kingdom, high in the mountains. Its isolation holds it still. The laneways are made of weathered stone, you get the sense you could have walked the same alleyways a thousand years ago. The stone buildings are the colour of the mountains that surround us. Old Leh is an ancient labyrinth, a city built stone by stone beneath the ferocious sun. An oasis of life, sustaining itself on the sliver of green that springs from the Indus River.

The word ‘Hindu’ is derived from the name of this river. It wasn’t a term the Indians gave to their own brand of religion, and Indians to this day will point this out to you. It was the Persians who referred to India as ‘the land beyond the Sindhu,’ or ‘Indus’ (pronounced ‘in-doose’) River. And so, Indians became known to the world as ‘Hindus.’ To be north of the Indus River does, indeed, feel like a different land. The map may deem Ladakh to be part of India, but in terms of culture and landscape it is far closer to Tibet, 150km east of here. But the majority of people I meet don’t call themselves ‘Indians,’ despite what the map says, and they don’t call themselves ‘Tibetans,’ despite how we might describe their religion. They call themselves, simply, ‘Ladakhis.’

Amy and I come down with mild cases of altitude sickness. Leh is at an altitude of 3,500 metres, but apparently that’s enough. We can’t walk to the shop before needing to rest. Altitude sickness stems from the fact that the higher you go in altitude, the less oxygen there is in the air. Above 5,000 metres there’s about half as much oxygen in the atmosphere as there is at sea-level. I’ve never had asthma, but perhaps it feels similar – a slow asphyxiation. You get headaches. Dizziness. I drink plenty of water, and yet you wake up with a mouth as dry as sand. We’re both distinctly affected, though only seriously enough to remind us to take it easy. If you rest, your body will acclimatise.

I overhear someone talking of flying to Srinigar, rather than braving the roads. The woman says, “but I probably shouldn’t fly if I’m sick at this altitude.” But plane cabins are pressurised to sea-level, and oxygen is pumped in, so ironically she’d feel better in an aeroplane at 34,000 feet than she would here.

So, we rest. When we’re ready, Rick and I – the Kiwi we met on the journey to Leh – formulate a wild scheme to get higher than we’ve been in our lives. We hire a jeep. On the drive I smile to myself at the road-signs. Whoever came up with their anti-speeding slogans had a sense of humour. In Australia, the anti-speeding campaigns consist of stern slogans and terrifying imagery. In Ladakh they take a different approach, seducing you rather than scaring you, with signs like: “I am curvaceous, be slow,” and “I like you, darling, but not so fast.”

Our driver heeds their advice. On these roads, you’d want to. He eases us out of Leh, past the chortens and the Tibetan Buddhist gompas (monasteries) perched upon rocky hills as if they’ve grown out of the barren earth. We begin our ascent to Khardung La. Khardung La is the mountain pass that serves as the gateway to the Nubra Valley, and Central Asia beyond. It’s touted as ‘the highest motorable road in the world,’ crossing the Ladakhi range at a whopping 5,602 metres – over 18,000 feet. That’s higher than Everest Base Camp. The drive does little to allay my nervousness at what is to come. You can feel the change in air-pressure as you go up, it feels like someone lightly pressing their fingers against your temples. My cigarette lighter stops working every time I go above five thousand. I’m now familiar with these things, and I know we won’t be up there long.

So what do you do when you’re on top of the highest motorable road in the world, at an altitude higher than most mountain-climbers reach in their lives? Well, it might be the boys in us, who never truly grew too big for their BMX, but our way of thinking is that you pull a couple of mountain-bikes off the roof-rack of the jeep, and you ride back down.

When I was a boy, growing up in Boolarra, the steepest mountain in the world was Bastin Street. We knew, because we’d careen down every hill in town, whether on billycart or BMX. I still have clear memories of some epic accidents, and even clearer memories of racing at top speed with the wind howling in my ears. I had a mate called Adam Rockall, who lived at the bottom of Bastin Street, and we’d push our bikes to the top, under the belief that we were soon to set a new land-speed record. It was a quiet town, so we were largely unconcerned about the dangers of a car cleaning us up on the T-intersection at the bottom of the hill. You’d usually be going to fast to brake in time anyway, and we’d flash through the intersection to come to a bumpy halt in the paddock over the road. Now, looking down from the mighty Khardung La, at the forty kilometre downhill stretch into Leh, I think of Adam Rockall, and I kind of wish he was here. I think he’d get a kick out of it - I’ve found The Mother of all Bastin Streets.

For several minutes Rick and I are deeply absorbed in the task of checking our brakes. Then without saying a word, breathing open-mouthed in the thin air, we kick off.

Whilst I’ve been a passenger in vehicles crossing some of these passes, I’ve had the thought that no matter how skilled your driver, you’re never entirely comfortable with the idea that your fate is so comprehensively in the hands of someone else. The roads are only wide enough for one vehicle, and the jeep tyres always seem too close to the void below. Now, my fate is in my own hands. As I build up speed on the rocky surface I stay well clear of the lowside of the road. There’s slushy ice-puddles and sharp rocks to avoid. When I glance up I see the icy peaks of the Ladakhi range, with the golden desert-mountains below. You don’t get roads with a much better view than this. I remain tentative on the rocky road, but a few kilometers from Khardung La the road changes to a smooth bitumen. There’s fewer landslides around here, due to the lack of rain, so the road is as good as you’ll find anywhere in Ladakh. On the bitumen I release my grip on the brakes, and I’m eleven years old again.

The corners can’t wait to get to me. My helmet is blown up high on my forehead by the wind. My clothes ripple around me. I keep pace with a white 4WD just up ahead, braking only into the hairpin turns and coming close enough to see the bemused faces of the Indian family watching me through their back window. It’s handy to have the 4WD up front, it helps clear the path of donkeys that amble out onto the road. I have to be careful not to brake in the patches of fine dust and gravel, a tiny shift in weight on the bike and I weave through them. Around each corner I am enchanted afresh by the vastness laid out before me, like the world from an aeroplane. I ride the forty kilometers into Leh in a touch under an hour. As I enter the ancient city I reacquaint myself with the brakes. Rick and I only break our wide grins to down a beer or two at the bottom.

After a few weeks in Ladakh, Amy and I make our final journey towards Kashmir. We’d been hearing of the current problems there. The Indian government granted a patch of land to the Hindus, along the route of the Armanath ‘yatra,’ or pilgrimage, which invoked the fury of the Shiite Muslim majority in Kashmir. There were shootings, bomb-blasts, and strikes, which prompted the government to retract the land-offer, thus invoking the violent fury of the Hindus. We have a flight from Srinagar booked for the 18th of July. Amy spoke to a Kashmiri who assured her that “it’s been blown out of proportion.” It becomes her favourite line, whenever the topic of the recent problems comes up, she tells people dismissively, “it’s been blown out of proportion.” My response is “yeah, well, maybe we can go to Kashmir and get ourselves blown out of proportion.”

The road past Kargil follows alongside a branch of the Indus River, with frothing rapids that surge in a continuous flow of foam. The area is what a newspaper would call ‘militarised.’ We pass long convoys of identical army trucks, khaki with tinted windows. The road is narrow so we dutifully pull over to let the convoys past. Their cargo is a mystery, covered by camouflage netting. We pass our first artillery camp, ‘Tiger Battery,’ with dozens of artillery pieces, some fortified in dugout bunkers, some out on plain view with their long, black barrels glinting in the sun, but all pointed in one direction – Pakistan. In this northernmost pocket of India there’s no official borders, there is the ‘Line of Control.’ In Ladakh, the ‘Line of Control’ is with China. In Kashmir the 'Line of Control' is with Pakistan, marking the point where previous wars cooled. Neither India nor Pakistan recognises this Line of Control as a border, it is a line in the sand across which the nuclear-armed states eyeball each other. At regular intervals there are road-signs which read: ‘Caution! You Are Under Enemy Observation.’

We come to checkpoints where we show our passports to the soldiers. As our vehicle approaches the checkpoints I can see heavy machine-guns trained upon us through gaps in the sand-bagged bunkers, tracking our movements. I've never had a gun pointed at me before.

On a later stretch of the journey we take the bus. When the bus pulls into the station we're slow off the mark, wasting precious seconds for our luggage to be hauled up onto the roof. The locals rush straight onto the bus to secure their seats. By the time we board the bus has become ensnared by politics. Every seat is staked out by a coded system of bags placed on seats and stern sentries guarding the valuable real-estate from all challengers. It is only when we attempt to take a seat that the intricacy of this political network becomes apparent to us. As the bus prepares to leave we park ourselves in one (apparently) empty seat with a lone bag by the window. We presume the one bag indicates one ‘reservation,’ in the local style, which would leave room for Amy and I on the seat. Several Ladakhis rush to tell us that the lone bag in fact represents a reservation for two.

I’ve found the Ladakhi people to be scrupulously friendly and compassionate, and what follows is incongruous with this perception. We remain in the seat for the time being. At the next stop a new horde tramples each other to board the bus. I know we’re in for a six-hour bus journey. By now I’ve developed a stubborn resolve to protect our turf. That is, until a frail elderly woman carrying a newborn infant approaches us, to claim the seat which a friend of hers had strategically reserved with the bag.

The grandmother and the mother of the infant – the two reservees – ask us to move, I stand and the grandmother shuffles across to the window seat with the infant. As I stand, another man, a middle-aged Ladakhi, tries squeezing past me to claim the seat I’d been sitting in. I’ve been in India long enough to know that politeness is ruthlessly punished on local buses, and I stand my ground, pushing sideways to block him. I figure I’m willing to stand for the mother to claim my seat, but I’m not letting this upstart steal it away. He keeps pushing. I turn to him and let fly. When I lose my cool here, I don’t vent an hour or a day’s tension, I ejaculate a month’s worth of it. I shout. I make a scene. I believe I use the words, “here, take the seat you fuckin’ idiot.”

I stand with my head bumping against the railed roof of the bus. I stare with hatred at the back of the man’s head. I can’t stand for long, so I kneel on the floor of the bus. As the kilometres roll by I am calmed by the scenery. I begin to feel ashamed. The man turns to me. He offers me the seat back. I say, “no, you just have it.” I hadn’t noticed until now that he’s an older man himself, with kind, wrinkled eyes. Perhaps he’s as embarrassed at the scene as I am. He asks where I’m from, in a voice that acknowledges my anger with humility. I realize that he speaks English well enough to have understood what I called him. At the next village a few people get off the bus, so that both myself, and the mother who’d missed out on her rightful seat, are both able to sit down. When the bus stops for a lunch-break the old Ladakhi man and I end up side by side. “Chai?” I ask him, and we sit in the plastic seats outside the busted-up old restaurant. I order three chais, but Amy has gone off somewhere and fate decrees that I sit alone with the old man. I ask him about Ladakh, and he tells me of his life in Lamayuru.

Two grown men, perhaps both not without our stubbornness, making their peace through the realisations that only come in the absence of pride. The bus driver blares his horn and we board the bus once again, all seated, rolling towards Kashmir, where perhaps the conflicts of the world will blaze on until both parties become ashamed at their own foolishness.

I guess I’ve been doing a few ‘big things.’ I’ve craved altitude, and high places. But perhaps what we need is smallness, a return of what Arundhati Roy calls ‘The God Of Small Things.’

We sometimes learn via opposites. Perhaps I wouldn’t appreciate the low, humble ground if I hadn’t so passionately sought out the highest places in the world. If I hadn’t played, ‘wow, look at me,’ even in these emails, in some egoistic quest for adventure. But now I’m ready for home. I’m ready to embrace the small things. I only want to sit on a beach somewhere, at sea-level, and drink a beer with my friends. To eat a simple ham-and-cheese sandwich with my family.

The day before leaving India we fulfil a promise we'd made to ourselves - to go and see a Bollywood movie at an Indian cinema. We arrive at the cinema late, the usher tells us “no problem, no problem! Just ten minutes started ago! This film has the actions, the romances, the singing and dancings!” We pay our Rs30 admission (about 75 cents) and enter the darkened cinema. The man in front of us is falling asleep amidst the insanity, his body slowly tilts sideways until his head strikes the shoulder of the person next to him and wakes him up. It is, of course, in Hindi, so we can't understand much of it. The movie is on celluloid, and in the middle of one scene is suddenly cuts out and jumps to an entirely new scene. The crowd begins howling and waving their fists in the air with indignation, before a psychedelic song-and-dance routine comes on and they burst into applause. Some members of the audience seem to know the words and sing along.

At intermission I smoke a cigarette in the lobby. I happen upon a sign that’s been posted up for the staff: ‘Management is knowing that ushers are sleeping during the films. Management is hearing that the staff are drinking the whiskey. There is to be no sleeping and drinkings of the whiskey during the hours of working…’ We debate whether or not to go back in for the second half and then think what the hell. The movie is overwhelming. It makes no sense. The soundtrack is loud enough to make it at times excruciating. And yet, like India itself, it is utterly, stupifyingly wonderful.

The movie is too colourful for this world. The romance is too dramatic – too powerful and heart-felt to exist in real beings. The people are too animated to be find in the outside world, bursting with passions that spill upon everyone in their orbit, and compelling them to dance, calling them to sing. There’s elephants and cows and monkeys popping up in improbable places. The plot is too wild and jaggedly nonlinear to be borne of real life. And then, after the film, you step outside and it’s pretty much like that in real-life, out on the streets of India.

These emails have been self-indulgent, but if they have in any way inspired an interest in the culture, the landscape, or the peoples of India, then I’d feel I’ve done my job. It is not an easy country to travel in – it may well, as people say, be the hardest of countries to travel in – but for my time in India I have experienced life at a sustained intensity unmatched by any other place I have ever known. I feel smaller for having been here, somehow humbled by the extremities of the place. I’m flying home tonight. I’m eager to return home. But before we sit for a beer together I must warn you – don’t ask me about India if you don’t want me to rant on for some time. There’s a lot to say.

So thanks to anyone who’s stuck it out with me and read these things, and I’ll be seeing you all shortly. I might even try recruiting some of you for a return trip.