A Mango Tree Two Streets Over

Urmila: Mangoes on the Nailaga Side

*Ba, Fiji, 1975*

Listen, I will tell it the way it was, not the way it sounds good.

In November the mangoes came down by themselves. You lay on the mat on the back step after the midday food and you heard them, one, then nothing, then two together, landing in the dry grass behind the kitchen with a sound like somebody putting down a full bag. My brothers ran for them. I was not supposed to run. I was seventeen, and seventeen is the age when a girl in my grandmother's house walks.

Our farm was on the Nailaga side of the Ba River, eleven acres on a lease, with the house at the high corner where the floods did not reach. By the end of the season the cane closed over the paths and made them into green tunnels. Past the river, on the far side, the smoke from the Rarawai mill stood up gray all day and lay down flat in the evening when the wind dropped. In crushing season the whole valley smelled of that smoke, sweet and burned, like milk that has caught on the bottom of the pot.

That November the crushing was nearly finished. The cane trains still came along the little rails at the bottom of our land, the engine pulling twenty or thirty small iron cars heaped with cut cane, the stalks sticking out every side like the hair of a boy who will not sit for the barber. My brothers Naresh and Jitendra used to wait at the crossing, and when the train slowed for the bend they jumped on the last car and rode to the Votua siding and walked home with their legs black with ash. Naresh was nineteen and Jitendra was fifteen. Nobody hit them for it. My father said, "Boys," and went back to his tea.

One time, I was eleven, I jumped on the last car with them. The iron was hot from the sun and the cane leaves cut my arm and no two hundred yards since have made me so happy. When I got home my grandmother was waiting on the step. She did not shout. She took me by the wrist to the back of the kitchen, where the water drum was, and she washed my arms and legs with cold water and the hard yellow soap, very slowly, the way you wash a pot somebody else has burned. While she did it she named every family that would never send a proposal to a house with a girl who rides the cane train.

Naresh and Jitendra were eating mangoes on the step the whole time, with juice running down to their elbows.

That was Aaji, my father's mother. She was small, with white hair pulled so tight it looked painted on, and a voice that came out of her nose. She ran the kitchen and the money and the calendar. Which days we ate no salt, which day was good for a wedding, which direction the bed should face. She never explained. You did not ask. If you asked, she said, "Ask your mother," and my mother said, "Ask Aaji," and that was the end of asking.

Above the kitchen shelf, where the salt and the turmeric and the tea tin sat, there was a picture in a frame. A mother, very beautiful, with many arms and a calm face, riding on a tiger. Every morning my mother put a fresh flower on the frame, hibiscus or frangipani from the bush by the tank, and every evening there was a small lamp lit under it, a cotton wick in ghee. The picture was the most honored thing in our house.

And under the picture, every evening, my mother ate last.

I am not making a point. I am telling you where the picture was.

My mother talked all day. She talked to the hens, to the pots, to the radio, to me while I ground the masala on the stone, about whose son had gone to Suva and whose daughter-in-law burned the dhal. What she never talked about was herself. In seventeen years I did not hear her say "I want." I listened for it.

I was in Form Six at the high school in Ba town that year. I had the best marks in English and in mathematics, and the teacher, Mr. Lal, had said in front of everybody that I could go to the teachers' college in Suva. I came home and told my mother. She was cutting bhaji for the evening. She stopped cutting. Then she started again.

"Tell your father," she said.

I told my father. He said, "Very good," and patted my head, and went to sit with the men under the rain tree at the corner, where they had a kava bowl going every evening after the cane was in, and they laughed there, and their laughing came back across the dark to the kitchen while we washed up. I thought "very good" meant yes.

Two weeks later the proposal came.

They came on a Sunday in a borrowed car, a gray one with one green door. Four of them got out. The boy's mother, in a sari the color of a ripe pawpaw. The boy's uncle, with a gold watch he looked at even when nobody asked the time. The uncle's wife, who said nothing and missed nothing. And the boy.

He was twenty-three. His name was Harish Prasad. He was a fitter at the Lautoka mill, which Aaji said the way you would say a house made of brick. He had big hands with oil in the cracks of the knuckles, a laugh that started before the joke had finished, and a mustache he had not yet earned.

I brought the tea. That was my part. Aaji had dressed me in my mother's second-best sari, green with a yellow border, and told me three times to keep my eyes down. I put the tray on the table and I poured, the way I had been taught, the cups in order of age: the uncle, the mother, the uncle's wife, the boy. When I gave the boy his cup our fingers did not touch, and I looked up, just once, not long, the length of time it takes a mango to fall from the top branch.

He was looking at me already. Then he looked at the tea as if it had said something funny.

The boy's mother asked me what I could cook. I said roti, dhal, every kind of curry, rice pudding, sweets for weddings, pickles. She asked what standard I had finished in school, and before I could answer, Aaji said, "Enough. Enough for a good wife. Not so much she gets ideas." And everybody laughed, the uncle the most, his gold watch flashing.

My father laughed too.

When they left I watched from the window as the dust stood up behind the gray car and hung there in the still air. My mother came and stood next to me.

"He has a good job," she said.

"I have good marks," I said.

She laid her palm on the back of my neck. She did not say anything else. Then the dhal needed stirring, and she went back to the stove.

That night I took out my exercise book.

I want to tell you about the exercise books, because people in my family have made a big fuss about them since, as if I knew what I was doing. I did not know what I was doing. They were school books from the shop on the main street of Ba, soft blue covers, thirty-two pages, and on the back the times tables printed in a box, up to twelve times twelve. Every child in Fiji had them.

That year I had started writing other things at the back, upside down, so Mr. Lal would only see compositions. Recipes first. My mother's recipes, because my mother did not measure and I wanted to know what she did. A handful of dhal, washed three times until the water is clear. Turmeric, a fingernail. Salt, the inside of the palm. Garlic, as much as the day needs. I wrote the measures in the way she showed me with her hands, and I wrote the dates beside them, the day I first made each one right. Then other dates. The day the first rain came that year, the twenty-ninth of October, at four in the afternoon, so heavy it put out the cooking fire. The day Jitendra got stitches in his chin from the cane train.

That night after the proposal I opened the book at the back, upside down, and I wrote the date. Then I wrote, *Harish Prasad. Lautoka. Fitter at the mill.* And then I sat a long time with the pencil. The kerosene lamp hissed. Out under the rain tree somebody was playing a harmonium very badly, the same three notes over and over, like a goat that has learned one song and is proud of it.

I wrote, *Big hands.*

Then I closed the book and put it under my mattress, and I lay there, and I thought about the teachers' college in Suva, which I had never seen, and which I now knew I would never see. I had imagined a white room with a window, and me at the front with a piece of chalk, and forty children waiting for what I would say.

I did not cry. I want that written down. I did my times tables in my head, the hard ones, until I slept.

The wedding date was fixed for March. Aaji fixed it with an old man from Votua who came on a bicycle and sat in our kitchen for an hour turning the pages of a book with no cover, and said a number, and was given a packet of sweets and a pound of sugar and went away again. I was not asked. You would not ask the pot what day it wants to be cooked in.

The next week, the last week of November, my mother began her fast.

It was the fast for my father's long life. Every year in that season she kept it, nothing to eat all day, not water, from before the sun until she saw the moon. That year for the first time Aaji said I should keep it too. "Practice," she said. "For Harish."

I kept it. My stomach made noises all afternoon like a cart on a stony road, and my mother and I cooked the whole day for everybody else. The men ate at midday. My brothers ate. Jitendra sat on the step with a mango and ate it the way boys do, peeling the skin back with his teeth and sucking the seed until it was white and hairy and then throwing it into the grass for the hens.

"What are you fasting for?" he said to me, with his mouth full.

"For your future brother-in-law."

"Who's fasting for you?"

He meant it as a joke. He laughed at it himself. I did not answer him. My mother, at the stove, facing the wall, turned the roti on the flat pan with her fingers, quick, so it puffed up full of steam like a little white cushion, and she did not turn around.

That evening when the moon came up over the cane, thin and yellow and lying on its back, my mother broke her fast with a glass of water and a piece of mango. I broke mine next to her. We sat on the back step, the two of us, with the mosquitoes and the dark, and ate mango off the same knife edge she had cut it with, and the juice was warm from the day and tasted almost of the smoke from the mill. The men had already gone to the rain tree. We could hear them.

"Was it hard?" my mother said.

It was the first time she had asked me how anything was for me. I thought about it.

"No," I said. "The hard part is tomorrow."

She laughed. A real laugh, short, surprised out of her, the kind she only did with the hens. Then she went in.

There is one more thing, and then I will stop.

The night before the gray car came back for the engagement, I went out after everybody slept. I was in my nightdress. I went barefoot through the wet grass to the big mango tree behind the kitchen, the oldest one, which my grandfather had planted the year he took the lease. But up at the top, where only the bats went, there were still some, dark against the sky.

I climbed it. I had not climbed a tree since I was eleven. The bark was still warm from the day, and ants went over my hands. I climbed to the fork at the top, where the branches were thin and moved when I breathed, and I sat there. From the top I could see over the cane. I could see the river, silver and black, the two red lights on the Rarawai mill chimney, and, far away to the south, a few lights on the road toward Lautoka, where in four months I would live in a house I had never seen with a woman in a pawpaw sari who would decide how much salt went in my dhal.

I picked one mango, the ripest, by feel. I ate it up there, the whole thing, skin and all, the juice running down my arms into my nightdress. Then I threw the seed as far as I could into the dark, out over the cane toward the river. I did not hear it land.

I climbed down. I washed my arms at the water drum, with cold water and the yellow soap, slowly, the way Aaji had taught me.

Nobody ever knew. Not my mother. Not Harish, not in thirty-three years. I am telling it now because my granddaughter says the stories are not finished until somebody hears them, and I have decided she is right, even though she says it like a girl who has never once been told no.

Dale: Things People Said

*Belfield, Sydney, 1982*

The first notebook was my father's idea, though he never knew it.

He worked forty-one years for the railways at the Enfield yard, same as I did after him, and he talked about as much as a coal wagon. But every so often he'd come out with something. I was nineteen, new as a wagon examiner, and I'd done a sloppy job on a brake rigging, and he walked the length of the wagon without a word and then said, "A thing that's almost fixed is just broke with a story." Then he went to smoko.

I bought a notebook that week at the newsagent on Burwood Road. Little thing, three inches by five, cardboard cover, spiral at the top so it flipped like a copper's pad. I wrote his line in it. I didn't plan on writing anything else. By the time Mark was born I was on my fourth.

I'll be honest about what's in them, since my granddaughter tells me honesty is the whole point. It's not weather. It's not what I spent. It's what people said, when they said something I didn't want to lose. My father, mostly, at first. Then blokes on the crew. Then Carol. Then the kids, which is when the notebooks really took off, because a three-year-old will say four things a day worth keeping and not know she's done it.

Enfield was a hump yard. The wagons were pushed up over a rise and let go one at a time, and they rolled down by their own weight into whichever siding the points sent them to, so there was always something moving, something clanking, something coming at you without an engine on it. You learned to listen behind you. In winter the yard was the coldest place in Sydney. The westerlies came straight off the Blue Mountains across the flat ground between Strathfield and the Cooks River with nothing to stop them, and they got into your coat and found every gap, and the frost lay white on the sleepers at six in the morning, and the steel of a wagon would take the skin off your fingers if you were fool enough to grab it bare. Along the embankments the wattle came out yellow in August, whole hedges of it, and the smell of it on a cold morning mixed with diesel and creosote and brake dust, sweetish and dry, is still the smell of work to me.

A wagon examiner inspects and repairs freight wagons. Wheels, brakes, couplings, draft gear. You walked the train with a hammer and a torch and you listened, mostly. A cracked wheel rings different when you tap it, flat instead of bright. I was good at it. I had the ear.

Carol was due the twentieth of August. She went on the twelfth.

She rang the yard office from the bank in Burwood, where she was a teller, at a quarter to eleven, and the clerk came out to the pit and sang out for me, and I came up out of there so fast I left my hammer on the rail. Somebody brought it to me at the hospital later. I still have it. It's in the catalog Mark made, with a photo and a line saying where it came from, which I think is a lot of fuss for a hammer, but it's his catalog.

Carol had driven herself home from the bank, which was so like her I didn't even argue, and she was standing in the driveway when I pulled up, holding her handbag and an overnight bag and Jen by the hand. Jen was three. She had on a red skivvy and a woolly hat and one sock.

"Where's her other sock," I said.

"Dale," Carol said, "get in the car."

That one's in the notebook. Not the sock. The "get in the car."

I should tell you about Carol, because Mark was only twenty-seven when she died and Jen thirty, and the grandkids never met her, and everybody has a piece and nobody has the whole of her. I don't either. But I've got more pieces than most.

She was from Bilpin, up in the mountains, and she'd grown up with three brothers on an apple orchard, and she could do anything a man on that orchard could do and also everything her mother did, and she did both for most of her life without anybody noticing, including me. That's the part I want written down. I didn't notice. I thought it was just how the house ran. I'd come home from the yard and there'd be tea on the table, and the kids bathed, and the bills on the bench with the cheques already written out for me to sign, because the account was in my name, because that was how they did it then. And she'd been at the bank since eight. I'd sit down with a beer in front of the footy and think I'd worked hard.

I had worked hard. So had she. Only one of us got to sit down.

She was tall, about my height, with brown hair she cut herself in the bathroom mirror with the kitchen scissors, and big square teeth, and a laugh that climbed at the finish the way a question does. She hated being cold more than anything. She hated being fussed over second. She read paperback mysteries in the bath until the water went cold and then complained about the cold. She was not religious, exactly, but her mother was, and once a year at Easter and once on Christmas Eve, Carol put on stockings and took the kids up to her mother's church in Bilpin, the little weatherboard one by the road with the apple trees right up to the fence. I went at Christmas, for the carols and the ham after. On Christmas Eve up there it would still be thirty degrees at nine at night, with the doors propped open and the cicadas louder than the organ. That was about the size of it for us. A couple of carols, a ham. Her mother, June, would have liked more. June asked every Easter. Carol said, "Mum, we're here, aren't we," and June let it go, mostly.

Mark came at four in the afternoon on the twelfth of August. Three point nine kilos. He had a lot of black hair that fell out in a month and grew back fair, and he had a temper about being cold, like his mother.

I went out to the car park after, to bring the car round, and the westerly was blowing grit across the asphalt and rattling a sign, and the sky over the mountains was that hard, washed blue it goes in August, and I sat behind the wheel with the door open and the wind coming in and took out the notebook. And I didn't have anything to write. The day had been all doing and no talking. Carol had mostly said "Okay" and "Okay" and then a word I'm not going to put down. The midwife had said "Here he is." That's not a quote, that's a fact.

So I wrote, *Mark Dale Ashby, 4:02 p.m.* And under that, Carol: "He's got your ears. Sorry."

I'd forgotten she said that. I only remembered it when I went to write something down and there it was in my head, waiting. That's how it works, I've found. You go to write and the thing shows up.

Jen was staying with June that week. When I brought her home to meet her brother, she stood at the side of the bassinet with her hands clasped at her spine, the way you stand in a shop when your mother has told you not to touch anything, and she looked at him a long time. He was asleep. He had his fists up by his face like a little boxer.

"Can he talk," she said.

"Not yet."

"When."

"Year or so."

She thought about it. "I'll talk for him," she said. "Till then."

Notebook four, page twenty-two. And she did. Jen talked for Mark until he was about fourteen and told her to give it a rest. She's been talking for other people ever since, if you think about it. She took down every word said in a Sydney courtroom for thirty years. I don't think that's an accident, but she'd say it was.

That spring was a good one. Carol went back to the bank in October. June came down from the mountains three days a week to mind the baby, and a lady over the back fence took him the other two. I put in for day shift and got it, the first time in eight years, and I'd come home at half three and take Mark out to the backyard in a washing basket and sit under the jacaranda while he slept. In November it came out purple, the whole tree, and dropped its flowers on the grass and the basket and on him, so he'd be lying there asleep covered in little purple bells, and the lorikeets would come screaming in to the grevillea by the fence and hang upside down and argue. That's all we did, me and him. Sat.

Carol came out one afternoon in her bank clothes and stood at the back door watching us.

"You know you can pick him up," she said.

"He's asleep."

"He won't break, Dale."

"I know that."

I didn't know that. I'd been around steel my whole life, and steel you can read. You tap it, it tells you. A baby, I had no idea what it was telling me. I was frightened of him for about a year. Carol knew it and never said so to anybody. She'd just hand him to me, in the kitchen, when I wasn't ready, and walk off to do something else, and leave me holding him, until I quit being scared.

That's in the notebook too, in a way. I wrote, C: "He won't break." Then later, under it, in different ink, maybe a year later, I wrote, *He didn't.*

I don't know what religion my wife would have said she was, if somebody had made her pick. I know she said a little thing under her breath at meals, sometimes, when her mother was there, and didn't when her mother wasn't. I know when Jen asked her, at about five, whether God could see her in the bath, Carol said, "I hope he's got better things to do," and Jen laughed till she hiccuped and told it at school, and we got a note. I kept the note. It's scanned in now with the rest.

Here's what I want my grandkids to know about the way we raised Mark and Jen, because I've heard how it was on the other side of this family, from Urmila, sitting on her back step with that tea of hers that's half milk and half sugar and half something else. Three halves, she says. In my house nobody had rules, much. Not about God and not about anything. Be home for tea. Don't lie to your mother. That was about it. Carol made one more: Sunday roast, everybody, no excuses, and she meant it till the day she died.

Urmila thinks that sounds like freedom. Maybe. Some of it was just nobody paying attention.

I'll give you one more thing from 1982 and then I'll stop, since I talk less than anybody in this family and I've already said more here than I said all of that year.

Just before Christmas we had a run of hot days, forty-one on the Tuesday, the kind where the wind comes off the inland like the door of an oven, and the bush was burning somewhere up in the mountains, so the sky over the yard went a dirty orange and little flakes of black ash came down on the wagons. I worked a double. Coming home at two in the morning the heat was still standing in the streets, and every house had its windows open, and you could hear babies crying up and down the whole of Belfield.

When I got in, Carol was up in the kitchen with Mark on her shoulder. He had a fever, and he was making the noise they make, like a little percolator. She was walking him up and down in her nightie, with a wet tea towel over his back and the fridge door open for the cold. She looked at me. I was cooked through and black to the elbows.

"Hot," I said.

"I know," she said. "The southerly's coming. Radio said by three."

She handed me the baby. I was filthy. She did it anyway. Then she sat down at the kitchen table, for the first time that day, I'd bet, and put her head down on her folded arms, and she was asleep in about a minute. I stood there with Mark breathing on my neck, hot and wet and rattling, and I walked him the way she'd been doing, up to the fridge, back to the door, up to the fridge.

At ten to three the southerly came through. You hear it before you feel it: the trees in the street all start up at once, then the screen door bangs, then the cold air comes down the hallway as if somebody has opened a window onto the sea. The curtains went straight out sideways. Mark stopped crying. He just stopped, and lifted his head off my shoulder, and turned his face into the wind.

Didn't write anything down that night. There wasn't a line to write. Sometimes you just have to remember it the regular way.

But I'm putting it down now.

Urmila: The Southerly at Four O'Clock

*Lautoka to Liverpool, Sydney, 1988*

Twelve years I lived in my mother-in-law's house on the hill at Simla, above the Lautoka mill.

From the front step you saw the mill chimney and the long iron sheds and the wharf behind them, where the ships came in high and empty and went out low and full of raw sugar, brown as river sand. When the wind came off the harbor it brought the smell of molasses and salt and diesel, all together, so strong in the evening that the washing smelled of it when you took it in. The royal palms along the main road stood up in a line like men waiting for a bus. Harish walked down the hill to the mill every morning at six with his lunch in a tin carrier, three tins stacked, dhal at the bottom, curry in the middle, roti on top wrapped in a cloth, and he walked up again at four with oil to his elbows and his shirt dark on the back.

Eight years it took for a baby. I will not tell all of that. I will say that in eight years nobody asked Harish what was wrong with him. I will say that my mother-in-law took me to three old women and one doctor, and that I drank things that tasted of tree bark and kept fasts on days I did not know the names of, and that when the women came to sit on the step in the evenings, the talk always found its way to me the way water finds the low corner of a yard. Harish, at the kava bowl in the next yard with his friends, never heard any of it. He would come in at ten, smelling of the root and of cigarettes, and kiss the top of my head and say, "Don't worry so much," and go to sleep like a stone falling into a well.

Then Sunila came, in March of 1984, in the rain, so fast the midwife was still taking off her sandals. My mother-in-law held her up to the lamp and looked at her a long time and said, "Well. Next time a boy." Not unkind.

Then Ronil came, in 1987, and she cried and sent sweets to forty houses.

I have both of these in my exercise books, the day and the hour and what the weather was doing, and what each one first ate, and the first word. Sunila's was "no." Ronil's was "more." You could not write it better if you tried.

Harish's older brother Jagan had gone to Sydney in 1979. He worked at a car parts factory in the west of the city and drove a taxi on weekends and sent photographs of himself standing beside large cars that were not his. He had been sending papers for us for six years. I did not believe in the papers. I thought they were like the three old women and the tree bark. Then in August of 1988 a letter came that was not like the others, and Harish read it at the table twice and then went out to the next yard without his supper, and I heard the men shout.

We left on the first of December, in mango season.

There is a lot I could tell about the leaving, and most of it is about suitcases. One thing. On the last morning my mother-in-law got up before me, which in twelve years she had never done, and when I came into the kitchen she was at the stove making roti. For me. She had never once made food for me. She made eight, and wrapped them in a cloth, and put them in my hands, and said, "For the airplane. They will give you rubbish."

She was right. They gave us rubbish.

I want to say something about her now, while I am here. She was hard on me for twelve years and I do not forgive all of it. But she had been married at fifteen, to a man of forty, and he had died when she was twenty-six and left her with four sons and a lease, and she had held the lease and raised the sons and married them all. Nobody had made roti for her for the airplane. Nobody had even made her an airplane. I understood her better later, in Sydney, when I had a daughter of my own and heard myself saying her words in her voice. That is all I will say about her.

My own mother came down from Ba on the bus to see us go. She brought a jar of mango pickle, the hot kind, sealed with wax, and she stood at the gate with it in both hands like an offering and did not cry until the car was moving. I saw her start in the back window. Then the road turned and the cane hid her.

The road from Lautoka to Nadi airport goes south along the coast with the cane on both sides, and the mountains to the left, the Sabeto range, purple in the morning, with the long one that looks like a man lying on his back with his face to the sky. People call it the Sleeping Giant. I had seen it my whole life from the bus. That morning I looked at it the whole way, past the rice fields at Sabeto and the little shops with tin roofs and children waving at every car. Ronil was on my lap, asleep. Sunila was on Harish's lap, awake, asking where the airplane was, where the airplane was, where the airplane was.

"It's waiting," Harish said. "It's not going without you."

We came into Sydney in the afternoon. The man at the quarantine desk, very young, with red ears, opened my suitcase, found my mother's pickle, and turned it in his hand like a doctor reading an X-ray. He said it could not come in. Fruit, he said. Seeds. I said it was not fruit, it was pickle, it was my mother. He was sorry, he said, and he did look sorry, and he put it in a bin with a lid, and I heard the jar knock against the bottom. Sunila cried. I did not. I have it written down: *Pickle taken at the airport. S. cried for both of us.*

Jagan met us with a borrowed station wagon. He had a new mustache, bigger than Harish's, and a shirt with parrots on it, and he hugged Harish so hard they both nearly fell into a luggage trolley.

The drive from the airport to Liverpool goes west, a long way, much longer than I had thought a city could go. Houses, factories, houses, red roofs, red brick, under a sky so white with heat that it hurt to look up. Then, at one point, a river, brown and wide and slow between gray trees, with a smell coming off it of mud and leaves, and Jagan said, "Georges River," like he was introducing a friend. The trees were the thing I remember. Gray-green, with white trunks peeling like sunburned skin, and their leaves hanging down sideways so they gave no shade at all. I looked at them and I thought, these trees are tired. They have been standing in this heat too long.

The flat was in a red brick block off Macquarie Street, upstairs, two bedrooms, with louvre windows of frosted glass and a carpet the color of wet cardboard and a kitchen as long as my arm. It was hotter inside than out. Jagan's wife, Sarita, had put food in the refrigerator: milk, bread, a bag of rice, a packet of frozen cassava, a jar of instant coffee. She had also put on the wall above the stove a nail. Just a nail, hammered in. She had thought of it. I have loved her for that nail for thirty years.

I unpacked the picture first. The mother on the tiger, in the same frame from my mother-in-law's kitchen, which she had taken off her own wall and wrapped in a towel and put in my suitcase without telling me. I hung it on Sarita's nail. I did not have a flower. I did not have a lamp. Sunila came and stood by my leg and looked at it too.

"She came on the airplane," Sunila said.

"Yes."

"Did they let her in?"

That night Jagan took Harish out. Some friends, he said, from Lautoka, from Ba, from Nadi, men who met in a garage in Hammondville on Friday nights with a kava bowl and a cassette player. Harish looked at me at the door. He had the decency to look.

"Go," I said. "What will you do here? Unpack?"

He went. He came back at one in the morning, very happy, smelling of the root. He was asleep in a minute, the stone falling into the well. In Australia too.

I unpacked. Then I sat down at the little table with the children asleep and the strange refrigerator humming and the cicadas outside going like a hundred sewing machines. I wanted to write. I had brought my exercise books, eleven of them, wrapped in plastic at the bottom of the suitcase. But they were full, every page, even the times tables on the backs, where I had written in the margins. I had not thought to bring an empty one. I sat there with my pencil and no paper and laughed out loud, by myself, at midnight, in Liverpool.

The next day was the third of December. By ten in the morning it was thirty-eight degrees. A hot wind was coming from the west, dry like nothing in Fiji, a wind that sucked the water out of your mouth while you were still talking, and the flies were on everybody's backs. I took the children out to look at the street anyway. There was a tree on the corner covered all over in purple flowers, no leaves, only purple, and the footpath underneath it was purple too, and Sunila walked on the fallen flowers on her toes as if they were something that might wake up. A jacaranda, Sarita told me later. In Fiji I had never seen one.

There was a fruit shop on the corner with boxes on the footpath, and among the boxes, mangoes. Big ones, from a place called Queensland, orange and red with a little green at the shoulder, and they smelled, even through the box, almost right. I bought one with Jagan's coins, which I could not tell apart, and held out my hand and let the man pick. I ate it at the table with the juice running to my elbows. It was not a Ba mango. But it was a cousin of one. I kept the seed, I do not know why, in my handkerchief.

Sarita came at noon and walked me to Moore Street.

There was a shop there, with a sign in English and a picture of a coconut tree, run by a family from Labasa, and when I went in it was the smell that got me first. Masala, cumin, the hot dust of chili, incense, dried fish, the sour of tamarind, bags of rice stacked to the ceiling, a fan in the corner turning it all around. A woman behind the counter, my age, in a sari with a cardigan over it in that heat, looked at me and said, "Ba?"

"How did you know?"

"The way you look at the rice," she said. "Like you want to argue with it."

That was Vimla. Her people were from Tavua, next to us. She is in this story more later.

I bought masala and a big tin of ghee and dhal and flour for roti, and I went next door to the newsagent and asked for exercise books. They had them. But I turned them over and there were no times tables on the back. Only a blank cardboard. I stood there a long time. What kind of country, I thought, does not print the times tables on the backs of its books. In the end I bought a thick spiral notebook with a cover the color of a lemon. Two hundred pages. I thought, this will take me five years to fill.

It took eleven months.

At four o'clock that afternoon I was at the window of the flat with the dhal on the stove and the hot wind still coming. And then, from the south, from the direction of the sea, I saw the sky change. A dark line, like a wall of bruise, coming fast, and in front of it the trees in the street all suddenly bending the other way, and the dust on the road standing up and running, and paper flying, and a bang as somebody's gate went. I thought it was a cyclone. I really thought it. I snatched Ronil up and shouted for Sunila and ran to the telephone in the hall and rang Sarita and said, "A cyclone is coming, a big one, do you see it?"

She laughed until she coughed.

"That's the southerly, Urmila," she said. "Hot day, then the change. Every summer. You'll see. Open your windows."

I opened the windows. The wind came in cold, cold, from the sea, smelling of rain that had not yet fallen and of something like the wharf at Lautoka, only clean. The temperature fell so fast I felt it on my arms. The curtains stood out into the room. Sunila stood in front of the louvres with her mouth open, drinking it. I stood at the stove with my back to the window and stirred the dhal and felt the cold on my neck.

Then I sat down and opened the lemon notebook to the first page, and I wrote the date. *Liverpool. 3 December 1988.* And under it: *Southerly at four o'clock. Not a cyclone.*

Under that, after a while, I wrote the recipe for my mother's mango pickle. From memory. Every step, the way she did it, with her hands. The quarantine man could take the jar. He could not take that.

The seed from the Queensland mango I put in a cup of water on the windowsill. Just to see.

Sunila: The Little Brass Lock

*Casula, Sydney, 1997*

The diary has a lock the size of a fingernail and a key on a pink ribbon, and it would not keep out a possum. Ronil opened it with a bobby pin in September, the first week I had it. So now I write the real parts backward. Not mirror-backward, which he figured out with the bathroom mirror in about four minutes, but word-backward, last word first, like reading a sentence from the end of the line. He doesn't have the patience. He's ten. He has the patience of a toaster.

Today is the twenty-third of October and I am thirteen and a half and I am writing this sitting on the floor of my wardrobe, which is the only place in this house with a door that shuts properly, if you count holding it shut with your feet.

Here is the situation.

The Year 8 social is Friday, seven to nine, in the school hall, which smells like floor polish and the canteen every day of the year and will smell like floor polish and the canteen and forty kinds of body spray on Friday. Mele is going. Jess is going. Kim Tran is going, and Kim's dad is a pharmacist in Fairfield who drives a car with leather seats and is stricter than anybody I know except my father, and even Kim is going.

I asked on Sunday. I asked at the right time, which is after dinner when Papa has had his tea and the video is on and he's in his chair with his feet up on the little stool and his shirt open at the neck, so you can see the gold chain. I said it fast. I had practiced it in the wardrobe. I said, "There's a school thing Friday, it's supervised, the teachers are there, it's in the school hall, Mele's mum can drive me, it finishes at nine."

Papa didn't even turn his head. "What thing."

"A social."

"What is a social."

"A dance."

"No."

That was the whole thing. One syllable. Then he turned up the video, which was a Hindi film he'd hired from the shop on Moore Street, where a lady in a wet sari was singing in a field, which, I'd just like to point out, is what my father was watching while he told me I couldn't go to a supervised event in a school hall.

I looked at Mummy. She was at the kitchen bench wrapping the leftover roti in a tea towel. She didn't look up. She said, "Sunila, come help me with this," which is what she says when she means *don't*.

Ronil was on the floor with his cricket cards. He looked up at me with his eyebrows high and his mouth in a little O like a cartoon. He is ten and already knows exactly how much trouble everyone else is in.

Ronil's bike rides, for the record, this week: Monday to Ashneel's house on the other side of the Hume Highway, which he's not supposed to cross and does. Tuesday down to the river, to the bit under the bridge where the boys catch eels, until it got dark. Wednesday, no idea, he came home at half six with mud to his knees and a cut on his shin and nobody asked. I asked. Mummy said, "He's a boy, he's fine." Papa said, "Did you win?" Because he'd been playing cricket in the street. Did you win. That's the question for Ronil. The question for me is where were you, who was there, whose mother, what time, why.

I am not allowed to ride my bike past the end of our street. Our street is a cul-de-sac. It's a circle. I can ride in a circle.

---

Okay, more. It's the twenty-fourth, and I'm in the wardrobe again, and I can smell the frying all the way in here through the door.

Diwali is next week, so Mummy has been making sweets for four days. The kitchen is a factory. She makes the little round fried ones soaked in syrup and the milk ones cut in diamonds with silver paper on top, and she makes about four hundred of each, because she gives them to every Fiji Indian house from here to Campbelltown, and every one of those houses gives us theirs back, and we end up with the same number of sweets we started with but different. The whole house smells like hot ghee and cardamom and the syrup that gets on everything, the doorknobs, the phone, my homework. Papa put the lights up on the gutter on Saturday, the same strings as every year, half the bulbs blue and half orange because he buys whatever's on special and then refuses to buy more. Ours is the only house in the cul-de-sac lit up like that in October. Mrs. Kowalski next door asked me last year if we were early for Christmas.

Here is a thing I want to write down because nobody else in this house will ever say it out loud.

On Thursday it's the fast. Mummy's fast, the one for Papa's long life, where she doesn't eat or drink anything from before sunrise until she sees the moon. She's done it every year since forever. And this year Mummy told me on Monday, very casually, while she was rolling the sweets in her palms, "You're old enough now. You'll keep it with me."

"For Papa?"

"For your father. And for practice."

"Practice for what?"

She looked at me like I was being slow on purpose. "For your husband."

I'm thirteen. And I said, which I shouldn't have, I know, I said, "Does Ronil have to?"

And she laughed. Like I'd made an actual joke. And said, "Ronil is a boy," and went on rolling, and the syrup was dripping off her wrists.

So on Thursday I'm not eating, for a man I'm not going to meet for, I hope, ten years at least, and Ronil is going to eat a bowl of cereal with chocolate in it in front of me at seven in the morning, and then go to school and buy a sausage roll from the canteen with the two dollars Papa gives him every day, and then come home and eat two of the sweets I helped roll, and then ride his bike to the river.

And Papa doesn't fast for anybody. That's not even a question anyone asks. I asked Mummy, last year, and she said, "Men don't," and I said why, and she said, "Ask your father," and I asked Papa and he said, "Ask your mother," and then he laughed and tickled me, like I was six.

The picture in the kitchen, the one above the stove, the lady on the tiger with all the arms, Mummy says she's the mother of everything. Mummy puts a flower on her every morning before she starts the tea. Even in winter, when the only thing flowering is the camellia by the letterbox. The mother of everything gets the first flower in the house, every day. And then Mummy eats after everybody, standing up, at the bench.

I'm not saying anything. I'm just writing down where everything is.

---

Twenty-fifth. Saturday. I am in the wardrobe and I have to write this before I forget the order of it.

Thursday I kept the fast. I want to put on record that it was horrible and that I did it. By lunch I had a headache like someone was tightening a belt around my head. In science Mr. Nguyen was talking about photosynthesis and I could smell the canteen through the louvres and I thought about hot chips the way people in films think about someone they love who died. It was thirty-four degrees and the classroom had one fan that went around like it was tired. By three I didn't feel anything except light, and kind of mean. Mele gave me a lolly and I held it in my hand all through last period without eating it and gave it back to her at the bus. She said, "You're mental." I said, "I know."

At home Mummy was cooking. She'd been fasting longer than me, she gets up at four, and she was making a whole dinner, the good one, goat curry and pumpkin and dhal and rice and fresh roti, and she wasn't even sitting down. Her face looked thinner. Her eyes looked very black. She said, "Go lie down, you look green." I lay on the lounge. I could hear her in the kitchen, the flat pan, the slap of each roti in her hands, the hiss.

Papa came home at half five from the factory and kissed her on the cheek and said, "Smells good," and sat down and ate. Ronil ate. I lay on the lounge.

At quarter past seven Mummy came and got me. We went out to the backyard. The heat had gone off, and there was a smell of cut grass and somebody's barbecue and, from down the hill, the river. The sky over the bush along the Georges River was going dark blue, and the flying foxes were coming over in their hundreds, the way they do every evening, big black wings flapping slow, heading out to wherever they go to eat, and in the east, over toward the Liverpool lights, was the moon. Big, yellow, a little squashed, like a pat of butter that's starting to soften. Mummy held up the little brass plate with the lamp on it and looked at the moon through the sieve, the way she does every year, and then she looked at Papa, who had come out with his tea and was standing in the doorway in his thongs, a bit embarrassed, the way he always is at this part. Then she drank water. Then she gave me water.

Then she put a piece of sweet in my mouth. With her fingers. Like I was a baby.

It was the best thing I have ever eaten in my life. I'm not exaggerating. I could feel the sugar go all the way down to my knees.

And then, at the doorway, while Papa was going back inside, Mummy said to him, very calmly, "I'm taking Sunila to Vimla's tomorrow night. Seven o'clock. For the sweets. We'll be back by nine."

And Papa said, "Okay," and went in.

I didn't get it. I swear I didn't get it until she was backing out of the driveway on Friday night at ten to seven and she didn't turn toward Liverpool. She turned the other way. Toward school.

My mother has had her driver's license since 1994. Auntie Vimla taught her in the car park of the shopping center at Casula on Sunday mornings for six months. Papa thinks she only drives to the shop on Moore Street and to Vimla's and back. Which is true. Mostly.

She drove me to school and pulled into the far end of the car park under the light pole and turned the engine off. The music was already going inside. You could hear the bass through the walls, thump, thump, like a heart that's late for something. Kids were going in, the boys in their big shorts and their hair gelled into spikes, the girls in the shiny tops. I was wearing my school uniform. Of course I was. We were going to Vimla's for sweets.

Mummy reached into her handbag and took out a lipstick. Pink. Not a bright one. She handed it to me.

"One hour," she said. "Eight o'clock. I'm sitting here. You come out at eight, not one minute past. Your father doesn't hear about this from you, or from Mele's mother, or from anybody's mouth ever."

"Mummy."

"Go."

"Why?"

She looked out the windscreen at the lit-up door of the hall. Her face was orange from the car park light. She had her cardigan on over her sari, even in that heat, and her hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, the way Vimla taught her, though the car was off.

"Go before I change my mind," she said.

I went. I danced with Mele and Jess and Kim in a circle with our bags on the floor in the middle, which is what you do. A boy named Danny Haddad asked me to slow dance and I said yes and we stood a foot apart with our arms out straight like we were holding a box between us, and he smelled like the green body spray, and he said, "You smell like lollies," and I said, "It's Diwali," and he said, "Cool," and that was our entire conversation. It was the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.

At two minutes to eight I was in the car.

Mummy started the engine. She didn't ask me anything. We drove to Vimla's. We picked up a box of sweets. We drove home. Papa was asleep in his chair with the video on.

---

I've been thinking about it all night and this is what I can't figure out.

She kept the fast. She stood at the bench and ate last. She put the flower on the lady on the tiger. She told me I'm practicing for a husband.

And she drove me to the social.

I don't know which one is her. Maybe both. I'm writing this in the right order, not backward, because I don't care if Ronil reads it, he wouldn't understand it anyway. Nobody in this house would understand it except her, and she would never read anybody's diary.

I'm keeping the lipstick. It's in the wardrobe, in my school shoe.

Mark: The Cooler on the Roof

*Belfield, Sydney, 1999*

Here's how an evaporative cooler works, since nobody ever asks and I'm going to tell you anyway.

You've got a metal box on the roof. Three sides of the box are pads, thick mats of shredded wood fiber packed tight. A little pump at the bottom pulls water out of a tray and dribbles it over the top of the pads so they stay soaked. A big squirrel-cage fan in the middle sucks hot, dry outside air through the wet pads. The water evaporates, the evaporating eats the heat, and the air comes out the other side ten or fifteen degrees cooler and smelling like a wet forest. It falls down a duct into the hallway of a brick bungalow in Belfield, where a family of four stands under the vent with their shirts pulled up, going *ahhh*.

It is the simplest machine in the world. It works best when the air is dry, which in Sydney means the days the westerly blows. And when it breaks on the first Sunday in December with the forecast at forty-two, you learn real fast that simple doesn't mean easy.

I was seventeen. I'd just finished Year 11 with marks I'm not going to put in writing, because my kids will read this, and a decent result in physics that I'd fought for like it was a war. My dad and I were on the roof at seven in the morning, because by ten the terracotta tiles would be hot enough to cook on. You could already feel it coming up through your sneakers. The sky over the Blue Mountains was that hard pale blue that goes almost white at the edges, no cloud, the air so dry it made the inside of your nose crackle. Down the street somebody's sprinkler was going, tick-tick-tick-tick-shhhh, and you could smell cut buffalo grass and hot bitumen and, under everything, the rail yard, which in Belfield you can always smell if the wind's from the north: diesel and creosote and hot brake shoes.

The pump was dead. My dad held it up, a little black plastic thing the size of a coffee tin, and turned it over and shook it, and something rattled.

"Impeller," he said.

"Can we fix it?"

"We can replace it."

"That's not the same."

He looked at me over the top of his sunglasses. My father has a look that's like a wheel tap: he's listening for the ring. "No," he said. "It's not."

He took a notebook out of his shirt pocket and wrote something in it. He'd been doing that my whole life. Little spiral-top notebooks, he went through one every couple of months, and he'd take them out at the dinner table, at the cricket, on the roof, write a line and put it away. I used to think they were work notes. Wagon numbers or something. I'd never looked. You didn't touch Dad's notebook, the same way you didn't touch his crib tin or the hammer in the garage with the tape on the handle.

We drove to the hardware place on Canterbury Road for a new pump. While Dad was inside I waited in the ute, windows open, and the notebook was sitting on the dash, where he'd tossed it with his keys.

I'm not proud of this. I picked it up.

It was the November one. The first page said *14 Nov* at the top in his square capitals, and under it, J: "I'm not a child, I'm in second year at uni, which is worse." Jen. I could hear her say it. Then C: "Your father thinks a microwave is a kind of weather." Then a line from somebody named Lou at the yard about a brake inspector. Then, halfway down the second page:

M (on the roof): "Air's got to go somewhere. That's the whole trick."

I'd said that. I'd said it that morning, about forty minutes before, to nobody, while I was looking at the duct. I didn't even remember saying it. He'd written it down.

I put the notebook back exactly where it had been, at the same angle against the keys, and when Dad came out with the pump in a bag I was looking out the window at the car park, very interested in the car park.

He got in. He looked at the notebook. He looked at me.

"Air's got to go somewhere," he said, and started the ute.

That was all. We never talked about it. But I've thought about that line more than anything I learned in four years of mechanical engineering at the University of New South Wales, and I'll tell you why later, when we get to the hospital, because it turns out that's my entire job.

We had the cooler running by eleven. The pads darkened as the water came over them, and the fan caught, and the smell of wet wood came down the hallway, and my mum, who had been lying on the kitchen lino with a bag of frozen peas on her forehead reading a mystery, said, "Oh, thank God," which is about as religious as she ever got outside of Easter.

---

My sister Jen was home that summer. She was twenty, at Macquarie Uni, and she'd moved back in for the summer to save money, which meant she'd moved back in to fight with my mother. They were exactly alike. Same height, same big square teeth, same laugh. Same refusal to be the first one to stop talking.

That summer the fight was about a guy named Shane, who had a ponytail and a band that played at a pub in Newtown on Thursday nights, and who wanted Jen to move into his share house in Enmore in the new year. My mum was against it. She didn't make a big speech. She was not a speech person. She just said, every time it came up, "You've known him since August," in the same voice, like a blinker.

I didn't get involved. That was my main strategy in that house. I was seventeen and I could, more or less, do what I wanted. My parents had about two rules. Don't lie to your mother. Be at Sunday roast. That was it. Nobody asked where I was going on a Friday. Nobody asked when I'd be back. I had a 1984 ute with a cracked dash that I'd bought with lawn-mowing money, and on summer nights my mates and I would drive out to Cronulla and park by the beach and go in off the rocks at the point in the dark, the swell lifting us and dropping us, the water warm on top and cold underneath, so your legs kicked in winter and your shoulders floated in summer. We'd lie on the warm sand after, looking up at the stars, which out there you could almost see, and talk about nothing, and get home at one in the morning, and nobody was waiting up.

I thought that was normal. I thought that was what it was to be seventeen. It took me a long time to understand it was what it was to be seventeen and a boy in my house, and even longer to understand that in my house it wasn't that much different for Jen. She just had the worse luck to be born first, so she broke every trail I walked down later.

Sunila says my family didn't have rules because my parents didn't believe in anything. I think that's half right. My parents believed in a lot of things. They just didn't believe in saying them out loud, which isn't the same as not having them.

My grandma June believed out loud. She was Mum's mum, up at Bilpin, and she went to the little weatherboard church by the road every Sunday of her life, and she'd ask us up for Easter every year, and every year we'd go. I went for June. I'd sit in the pew in my one collared shirt, between Mum and Jen, and count the ceiling fans, six of them, and watch how they pushed the air down onto the people at the front and how nobody at the back got any, and think about how I'd re-space them. June would hold my hand during one particular hymn, always the same one. Her hand was dry and light, like holding a leaf. After, there was a leg of lamb and roast potatoes and apple crumble from her own trees, and then we'd drive home down the mountain through the gum trees with the windows down. That was it, the whole of it. One morning a year. It was nice. It didn't run anything.

---

So: Sunday roast, the first Sunday in December 1999, with the cooler running and the tiles ticking in the heat.

My mum had made what she always made in summer when it was too hot for the oven, which was Dad on the barbecue with sausages and lamb chops, and her potato salad with the celery seed, and a bowl of beetroot that stained everything purple. Dad cooked the meat. That was his one kitchen job, if you can count a barbecue as a kitchen. Mum did everything else, the salads and the bread and the pavlova, and she'd also worked a full week at the bank, and mowed half the yard on Saturday because the mower had died on Dad and she wanted it done. I didn't see any of that at the time. I'm telling it now because I see it now. At the time it was just Mum, and there was always food.

Jen came out to the back patio late, with her hair wet from the shower, and sat down hard, and said, "I'm moving in with Shane in January."

The sprinkler was going next door. Tick-tick-tick-tick-shhhh.

My mum put down the salad spoon.

"You've known him since August," she said.

"I know when I've known him since, Mum."

And here's the thing my dad did, that I've never forgotten. He was at the barbecue with the tongs. He didn't turn around. He turned a sausage, and the fat dropped onto the hotplate and spat, and the smoke went up, and he said, to the barbecue, "Bring him to the roast."

Jen and Mum both looked at him.

"Sunday," Dad said. "Bring him to Sunday roast. If he won't come, you'll know something. If he comes, we'll know something."

My mum looked at him for a long second. Then she picked the spoon back up and served Jen a huge pile of potato salad, too much, more than anybody could eat, which was how my mother said a whole range of things she wasn't going to say.

(Shane came. He came for four years of Sunday roasts and married my sister and then they got divorced. He was a nice guy with a ponytail. That's Jen's to tell, not mine.)

---

That afternoon the southerly came through.

If you're not from Sydney you don't know what this is, so I'll explain, since I'm an engineer and it's the most beautiful machine I know. All day the inland heats up like a skillet and the hot wind pours off it toward the coast. Then a front comes up the coast from the south, cold air off the ocean, pushing underneath the heat like a hand under a blanket, and when it hits, it hits all at once. You feel it first on the back of your neck. Then you smell it: salt, wet dust, something green. The trees turn their leaves over silver. Within an hour it's fifteen degrees cooler. Every house on our street had its windows open by five o'clock. Dad shut off the cooler, because you don't need it once the change is in, and the house went quiet without the fan, and you could hear the cicadas stop as if somebody had switched them off, and the freight trains in the yard, the long slow bang of wagons coupling, like somebody far away dropping a heavy suitcase down a flight of stairs, over and over. Air's got to go somewhere. That's the whole trick.

I came out on the front step. My mum was there already, sitting with her knees up and a glass of iced tea, looking at the street, where the wind was blowing the jacaranda flowers down the gutter in a purple river.

"Your sister's going to do whatever she wants," she said.

"Yeah."

"You too."

"Probably."

"Good," she said. And then, after a while: "Just tell me first. Before. Not after. That's all I want, Mark. Before."

I said I would. I mostly did. I told her about Sunila before I told anyone else, in the autumn of 2007, on the phone, standing in the hospital car park, and she said, "Before. Good boy," and then, "Is she nice to you?" And I said yes, and Mum said, "Then bring her to the roast."

She met her twice.

I don't want to make too much of it. But that line about before and after is in Dad's notebook, the December one, page five. I looked. Years later, when I was scanning all of them, one page at a time, I found it, in his square capitals: C: "Before. Not after." And I sat at the table in Casula with the scanner light going back and forth and let it stay on that page a long time before I hit the button.

Ronil: Keys

*Casula and Liverpool, 2004*

So okay. The car.

It's a 1991 sedan, champagne color, which is what they call it when a car is beige and wants to feel better about itself. Papa drove it to the factory every day for nine years. It has two hundred and sixty thousand kilometers on it, a tape deck that eats one side of every tape, a dent in the back left door from a trolley at the shopping center in 1998 that Papa always said he'd fix, and a smell inside that's half pine air freshener and half my father: hair oil, Lautoka, the lunch Mummy packs him. You get in that car and you are basically sitting inside my dad.

On my seventeenth birthday he bought himself a new one, a used one, a silver one, and gave me the keys to the champagne one at breakfast. Just slid them across the table next to my plate. Mummy was at the stove, facing the pan. Didi was at the table with her anatomy textbook open next to her cereal, the one with the see-through pages where you flip them and the skin comes off and then the muscles and then the bones.

"Don't kill anybody," Papa said.

"I won't."

"Don't kill yourself."

"I won't, Papa."

"Home by" and then he stopped. He thought about it. I watched him think about it. And he waved his hand, like a fly was bothering him, and said, "Be sensible," and went back to his paper.

That was it. That was my curfew. Be sensible.

Didi didn't look up from the anatomy book. She turned a page. The skin came off somebody's arm.

---

Here's the deal with my sister, since everybody in this family is going to tell you about her and I'm the only one who actually lived across the hall.

She's twenty. She's in third year nursing at the uni campus out at Campbelltown, which is hard, like, actually hard, she comes home and recites drug doses at the dinner table like other people talk about traffic. She works three nights a week on the checkout at the chemist. She's the smartest person in our house, and that's counting the TV.

And she has to be home by seven. Seven p.m. She's twenty years old. Her pracs finish at half four and her shifts finish at half six and the drive from the chemist is twenty minutes if the Hume Highway is moving, and every night at five to seven Papa is in his chair with the TV and one eye on the window, and if her headlights aren't in the driveway by five past he's on the phone to the chemist. He's done it. He's rung her manager. She wanted to die.

I'm seventeen with no curfew and a car that smells like Papa. I want to be clear that I know how this looks.

She's never once said anything to me about it. Not once. That's the part that gets me. She'll fight Papa, sometimes, quiet and cold, and she'll fight Mummy all the time, mostly about clothes, but she's never once said to me, "Why do you get to?" I almost wish she would. It would be easier if she hated me.

I read her diary in 1997. I want to get that out of the way. All of it. She wrote the secret parts backward, last word first, and she thought I couldn't be bothered, but I was ten and it was raining and I had nothing to do, so I sat in her wardrobe with a torch and read every backward word. I know about the social. I know about Mummy and the lipstick. I've never told anybody. I'm telling it now because it's been a long time, and because I think Mummy should get credit, and because nobody in our family ever gets credit for the stuff they did quietly.

---

Saturday was my cousin Vikesh's engagement, at Uncle Jagan's place in Hammondville, a big double-brick house on a corner block with a wall of bougainvillea over the fence, magenta, so thick the bees sound like an engine.

When a Fiji Indian family in the south-west has a thing, here's what happens. On Friday the uncles put up the tarps. Blue tarps, over the whole backyard and the driveway, tied to the fence and the gutters and the clothesline, so when you're under there everything's blue and it's like being underwater at the Liverpool pool. They hire trestle tables and about a hundred plastic chairs. Somebody's cousin has speakers. By Saturday midday there's music going, the old film songs for the aunties and then the newer stuff for us, loud, with bass that rattles the plastic cups, and kids running around under the tables, and the smell. The smell hits you from the street. Curry in the giant aluminum pots, the ones so big it takes two people to carry them, goat and chicken and the potato one, and dhal, and rice in a pot you could take a bath in, and the fried stuff, and the sweet stuff, and over all of it the smoke from somebody's barbecue going in the side yard, because Uncle Jagan can't help himself.

The kava's in the garage.

The garage is the men's place. It's got a big plastic bowl on the concrete, and a couple of mats, and the uncles sitting cross-legged in a circle around it in their good shirts and their gold chains, and there's a cousin who does the mixing, kneading the root powder in a cloth in the water until it's the color of mud from a riverbank, and then the half coconut shell goes around. You clap once, you take it, you drink it all, it tastes like dirt and pepper and makes your lips go numb, and you clap again. And you sit. That's mostly what kava is. Sitting. And the talk. The uncles talk about cane prices in a country none of them have lived in for twenty years, and rugby, and the cricket, and whose son's doing what at uni, and whose daughter is, quote, getting too smart.

Papa's always in the middle of it. Papa at the kava bowl is the best version of Papa. He laughs with his head back. He sings, sometimes, an old song from the Lautoka days, his voice cracking at the top, and the uncles all groan and then join in. Everybody loves him there. I love him there.

This year, for the first time, they waved me in.

I'm seventeen. I've got the car. Uncle Jagan looked up when I came into the garage and said, "Look, the man with the champagne car," and everybody laughed, and somebody shifted over on the mat, and that was it. I sat. The shell came to me. I clapped. I drank it. It was disgusting. I felt about nine feet tall.

And I was sitting there, numb-lipped, in the circle, with my knees going stiff, and through the side door of the garage I could see the kitchen window.

Didi was at the sink.

She'd been there since I'd seen her come in, at twelve. It was four now. She had her hair up in a clip and her sleeves pushed past her elbows and she was washing the big aluminum pots one at a time, in a sink that's too small for them, so she had to turn each pot around and around under the tap like you'd steer a boat. There were four other girls in there, cousins, and a few of the aunties, and Mummy, all of them moving around each other in that kitchen like a dance they'd been doing forever, nobody bumping, passing bowls over each other's heads. The window was steamed. They were laughing, some of them. Didi wasn't. She was just washing, with her jaw set, and every so often she'd look up out the window, not at me. Past me. Over the fence, at the gap between the houses where you could see the gum trees along the river.

So I did a stupid thing.

I got up. My legs were asleep, so it was more of a stagger. I said "Toilet" to the circle, which was a lie, and I went into the kitchen, and I picked up the biggest of the clean pots off the drying rack, and I said, "Where does this go?"

The whole kitchen stopped.

Then Auntie Sarita, Uncle Jagan's wife, laughed until she had to grab the bench. "Look at this one," she said. "Ronil wants to be a wife!" And everybody laughed, all the aunties, and two of the cousins, and even Mummy, a little, covering her mouth, and one of the uncles stuck his head in the back door and said, "Hey, champagne man, wrong side of the house!"

I put the pot down. I went back to the garage. I felt about nine inches tall.

Didi didn't laugh. She looked at me over the steam, with her hands in the gray water, and she shook her head a tiny bit, like, *don't*. Like I'd made it worse. And I had, kind of. I'd made it a joke. Everything I do, it becomes a joke, because I'm the boy, and it's cute when the boy does something, and when the girl does it it's just Tuesday.

---

At half seven she found me by the side of the house where the barbecue was.

"I need you to drive me somewhere," she said.

"Where?"

"Picnic Point. Some people from my course are watching the sun go down on the river. I told Papa I'm going home with you. You're taking me home."

"I'm taking you home."

"After."

I looked at her. She looked at me. She was twenty and she was asking her seventeen-year-old brother for permission to watch the sun go down, because the seventeen-year-old was the permission. That's what I was. I was a walking hall pass.

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

Picnic Point is where the road runs out at the Georges River, past the last houses, into the bush. There's a grassy bit by the water with picnic tables and barbecues and a boat ramp, and the river's wide there and brown and slow, with mangroves along the far bank, and the gum trees come right down to the edge, white trunks and that gray-green that looks silver in the late light. It smells like mud and eucalyptus and somebody's sausages. There are bell birds somewhere back in the scrub, ding, ding, like a tiny tap dripping, and kookaburras, and at dusk the water goes the color of a copper pot.

Her friends were three girls and a guy, sitting on a picnic table at the end with a bag of chips. She walked out to them. She didn't look back.

I stayed in the car. I put a tape in. It ate side A. I flipped it.

I watched her the whole time, I'm not going to lie. Not because I was spying. Because I'd never seen her like that. She was sitting on the table swinging her legs. She had her hair down out of the clip. Somebody said something and she laughed, big, with her head back, the way Papa does at the kava bowl. In the house she never laughed that way. Not one time.

The sun went down behind the trees upriver and the whole sky went orange and then a kind of bruised purple, and the river caught it. And then the flying foxes came. They come out every evening from the colony up the river, thousands of them, big black wings going slow, flap, flap, glide, right over the water, so many the sky is moving, and they make this noise, squabbling, like a schoolyard. I'd seen them my whole life from our backyard. I'd never watched them. She was watching them with her face up and her mouth open.

She came back to the car at twenty to nine. She got in. She smelled like river and smoke and the chips. She didn't say thank you. She didn't have to.

I drove her home. Papa was in his chair. He looked at the clock and then at us.

"Ronil drove me," she said.

"Good," Papa said. "Good boy." To me.

I went to bed and lay there and thought about it. About how I'd never have to do that. Never have to ask anybody to drive me to the edge of a river so I could watch the sun go down for an hour. I could get up right now, at eleven at night, take the keys off the hook, and drive to Picnic Point, or to Wollongong, or to Canberra, and nobody would ring anybody.

I didn't. I lay there with the keys on the hook, and listened to her across the hall, typing her assignment on the old computer, click click click, until two.

Sunila: The Oxygen Alarm

*South-west Sydney, 2006 to 2007*

The alarm went at 3:12 in the morning, which I know because I charted it.

I was twenty-two, eight months into my first job as a registered nurse, on nights in the intensive care unit of a public hospital in the south-west, a great sprawl of brown brick and newer glass beside the railway line, with corridors that went on so long the night cleaners rode bicycles down them. At night the hospital had its own weather. The air conditioning came through the vents in long sighs. The pipes knocked. In our unit there were twenty beds and most nights fourteen of them had ventilators, and every ventilator breathed on its own count, fourteen a minute, eighteen, twenty-two, so that if you stood at the desk with your eyes closed you heard a room full of slow, overlapping tides.

I liked nights. I am not going to pretend otherwise. I liked them for the work, which was real and exact and nobody's opinion. Tidal volume, oxygen saturation, peak pressure: the numbers on the screen were what they were. And I liked them because my father, who would ring the chemist to ask where I was at five past seven in the evening, would not ring a hospital to ask where I was at three in the morning. Work, to my father, was sacred in the way almost nothing else was. A girl at a party was a scandal. A girl in an intensive care unit at three in the morning was a girl with a good job in Australia.

So I had the nights. The nights were mine.

At 3:12 the medical gas alarm panel at the desk went red and started its two-tone squawk, and the display said LOW PRESSURE, OXYGEN, ZONE 4. My stomach dropped through the floor. Every ventilator in that unit ran off the wall oxygen. If the line pressure was really falling, I had patients and maybe minutes.

I did what you do. I rang switch for maintenance. I grabbed the two portable cylinders from the store room and started checking the ventilators, the bed nearest the door first, a man in his seventies with pneumonia whose numbers I knew by heart. His pressures were fine. His oxygen was fine. Everyone's was fine. The wall gauge read four hundred kilopascals, right where it should. I stood in the middle of the unit with a green-and-white cylinder in each hand and the alarm screaming, and the nurse in charge, Maureen, who had been doing this for thirty years, said, "Love, it's the sensor. It does this every summer when the air-con's flat out."

The lift opened at 3:19 and a man came out at a jog with a tool bag on his shoulder.

He was tall, in navy work pants and a gray polo with the engineering patch on it, and his hair was the color of wet sand and standing up on one side as if he had been asleep on it, which he had, in the on-call room by the plant. He had a pressure gauge in one hand and a torch in his teeth. He took the torch out to talk.

"Where's your zone valve box?"

I pointed. He went to it, opened the little glass door, looked at the gauges, tapped one with his knuckle. He listened. I remember that. He actually put his ear near it, as if it would tell him something. Then he followed the line up to the ceiling with the torch, pushed up a ceiling tile with his gauge, climbed onto a chair, and was gone from the shoulders up for about four minutes.

The alarm stopped.

He came down with ceiling dust in his hair. "Pressure transducer," he said. "Condensation in the housing. The chilled-water pipe above it's sweating. It thinks it's drowning." He wiped his hands on his pants. "Your actual line's fine. You were never low. I'll swap the sensor in the morning."

"I know the line was fine," I said. "I checked every ventilator."

"I saw." He looked at the two cylinders I was still holding. "You were ready, though."

"That's my job."

"Yeah," he said. "That's a good job."

His name was Mark. It was on a badge clipped to his pocket upside down. He had a nice face, a big, open, slightly worried face, and ears that stuck out a little, which I would learn later were his father's, and a way of talking too much when he was nervous, which I learned that night, because instead of going back down to the plant he stood at the desk and explained to me, for eleven minutes, how the hospital's oxygen system worked. The liquid oxygen tank out behind the loading dock, frosted white even in January. The vaporizers that warmed it into gas. The main line, the risers, the zone valves on every floor. How the whole building was a set of lungs, really. How air went in and air went out, and his whole job was making sure it went where it was supposed to. "Air's got to go somewhere," he said. "That's the whole trick."

Maureen, behind him, raised her eyebrows at me so high they went into her hair.

---

I'll be short about the next months, because they were short.

He was on call one weekend in three and on day shift the rest, but he started swapping onto nights. I did not ask why. At four in the morning, after my rounds, I would go down to the staff tea room off the ground floor, which at that hour was empty except for one hot-water urn and a tin of broken biscuits, and he would be at the table by the window. Outside, the car park lights made orange circles on the wet bitumen and beyond them the freight trains went past slow on the Southern line with their wagons squealing. The coffee was terrible. We talked about everything.

He told me about Belfield, the rail yard, his father's notebooks, his mother at the bank, his sister with the ponytailed husband. He told me his family had a roast every Sunday and that was the only rule. I could not understand it. I asked him over and over: but who decides? Who decides where you go, who you see? And he would look confused and say, "I do," as if I'd asked who breathes for him.

It made me jealous. It also made me, a little, sad for him. That nobody was watching the window for his headlights. I didn't say that.

I told him about my family a bit at a time, the way you'd introduce a patient to a ventilator, a little pressure, then a little more. The seven o'clock rule. That I was twenty-two and lived at home and would live at home until I married, and that this was normal, and that I wanted him to understand that it was normal before he decided it was strange. My mother's fasts. The picture above the stove. My brother, who could come home at any hour, who was a sweetheart and a disaster. My father at the kava bowl, singing. My father in his chair at five past seven.

He listened. He did not say "That's mad." I had been braced for him to say "That's mad," the way my friends from school sometimes did, and he never did. Once he said, "Does it make you angry?" and I said, "Yes," and he said, "Okay," and waited. And when I didn't say anything more he didn't push.

In February I brought him roti.

My mother made them every evening and there were always extra, and I wrapped two in foil and put them in my bag with a little container of the potato curry, and at four in the morning I put them on the tea room table in front of him. He unwrapped the foil and looked at the roti, folded in quarters, soft, a little brown in spots from the pan, and he picked one up and bit straight into it. Cold. Folded. Like a slice of bread.

"No," I said. "Oh my God. No."

"What?"

I showed him. You tear it. You tear a piece with your right hand, using your fingers, and you use the piece to pick up the curry, and the roti is the spoon and the plate and the food all at once. He tried. He got curry on his badge. He tore it too big, then too small. He was hopeless. By the end of the second one he was doing it almost right, and very pleased with himself, and I was laughing in an empty tea room at four in the morning with my hand over my mouth the way my mother did.

"Who made these?" he said.

"My mother."

"Tell her thanks."

I didn't tell her thanks. I didn't tell her anything. I told nobody anything, for eleven months.

---

In late September of 2007 we went walking at Chipping Norton Lakes on a Saturday morning after my last shift of the week, which was the only free time I had that my family did not count. The path goes around the old sand-mining lakes beside the Georges River, under paperbarks and river gums that drop long strips of bark on the path like brown paper, and the smell of them, sharp and medicinal, is the smell of the south-west to me forever. That morning there was mist lying on the water, and the far bank was a smudge, and the black swans were going in and out of it with their red beaks, and the wattle was finishing, the last yellow going brown on the branches. We walked to the weir and back. Somewhere in the middle he held my hand, and I let him.

Nikita saw us. Nikita was Auntie Vimla's youngest daughter, nineteen, running the lake loop in pink shoes with her earphones in, and she came out of the mist at the bend by the boat ramp, and she saw me, and she saw his hand, and she saw his face, and she did not break stride. She lifted two fingers off her earphones at me. Like a wave. Like a warning.

By that evening my mother knew.

---

She did not shout. That was worse. She was at the stove when I came in, at five, after sleeping all day at a friend's because I could not go home, and the dhal was on and the roti dough was resting under a damp cloth, and she did not turn around.

"Vimla rang," she said.

"I know."

"What is his name?"

"Mark."

She said it to herself, once, like trying a fruit. "Mark." Then: "What does his family do?"

"His father works on the railways. His mother works at a bank."

"Do they know about you?"

"His mother does."

She turned around then. She had flour on her hands to the wrists. She studied me, flour and all. The rangehood was going and the window was steamed and the picture above the stove, the mother on the tiger, had a fresh red hibiscus tucked in the frame.

"Is he going to make you change your name?" my mother said.

I didn't know what to say. It was not the question I had prepared for. I had prepared for "He is not one of us" and "What will people say" and "Your father." Not that.

"I don't know," I said. "I haven't asked him."

"Ask him," she said, and turned back to the stove.

My father heard that night. My mother told him in their room with the door shut, and I heard his voice once, loud, one word, and then nothing, and then the front door, and the car, and he was gone to the kava garage in Hammondville until two in the morning. The next day he did not speak to me. Not angry. He just did not speak to me. At dinner he said to my mother, "Tell your daughter the rice is ready," with me sitting across the table, and my mother said, "Sunila, the rice is ready," and I said, "Thank you," and Ronil looked at his plate as if it were the most interesting plate in New South Wales.

That went on for six weeks.

I had stopped keeping a diary when I was eighteen. I had decided it was childish, and anyway, Ronil. But that first night, after the front door, I went into my room and found an old notebook from my anatomy unit with only the first twenty pages used, and I tore those out. And I sat on the floor of my wardrobe, which I had not done in years, with my knees up, and I wrote the date. And I wrote, forward, the right way round, every word in order:

*Tonight I asked Mark if he'd want me to change my name. He said, "Why would I want you to be somebody else?" Then he said, "Wait, is this a proposal?" Then he went very red.*

Then I wrote: *Papa isn't speaking to me.*

Then I wrote: *Mummy asked the right question. How did she know which one to ask?*

I left the wardrobe door open when I was done. I didn't care who read it.

Jen: Transcript

*Belfield, Christmas Day 2010*

I take down what people say for a living. Two hundred and twenty words a minute, court reporter, Sydney District Court, eleven years. You'd think it would make me a good listener. It makes me a terrible one. I can't hear anybody talk without my fingers moving on my thigh, without wanting to mark it, who said it, where they stopped, where two people talked over each other. (Crosstalk.) (Inaudible.) (Witness indicates.) My ex-husband used to say that arguing with me was like arguing with a court record. He meant it as an insult. I've come around to it as a compliment.

So I'm going to give you Christmas 2010 the only way I know how, which is mostly what people said.

It was the first one without Mum.

She died on the ninth of February, a Tuesday, at the bank, at the counter, between one customer and the next. A stroke. She was fifty-seven. I'm not going to say more about it than that, because Dad doesn't, and Mark can't, and I've found that the more I say about it the less of her there is, somehow, as if the words use her up.

Dad had been alone in the house in Belfield for ten months. He'd kept it very clean. That was the first thing I noticed when I came in on Christmas Eve with the pavlova: how clean it was, how nothing had moved. Her reading glasses were still on the windowsill over the sink. The paperback she'd been reading was still on the arm of her chair, face down, open to page one-forty. He dusted around it.

"You're doing the turkey," I said.

"I'm doing the turkey," Dad said.

"Dad, it's going to be thirty-seven tomorrow."

"Your mother did a turkey every year."

"Your mother had a system."

"I've watched it done thirty-two times."

"That's not an answer, Dad."

"It's a kind of answer." And he went to the garage to look for the roasting dish, which was in the cupboard over the fridge, where it had been my entire life.

---

Mark was bringing Sunila. And her mother. And her brother. That was the plan, and it had been the plan for two months, and every time Dad mentioned it on the phone he said it in the same tone, a little too casual, like a man reporting that he's agreed to host the Easter Show.

Here's what I knew about Sunila, in December of 2010. She'd been with my brother for four years, three of them in secret from her family. Her father had died the year before, of a heart attack, at fifty-seven, the same age as Mum. (Nobody pointed that out. I noticed everybody not pointing it out.) She was an intensive care nurse. She'd met Mum twice, both times at a café in Parramatta, because she was still living at home and couldn't be out at night. Mum had liked her. Mum had said, on the phone after, "She doesn't waste words, that girl," which from my mother was a knighthood.

What I knew about her mother: nothing. A name. Urmila. Mark said she was "great" and "kind of terrifying" and "you'll see."

They pulled into the driveway at eleven on Christmas morning in Mark's car, and it was already thirty-three, the sky white, the cicadas in the gum across the road so loud we had to shout hello in the driveway. The bitumen was soft. Somebody up the street was playing carols on a speaker on their verandah, and somebody else, further up, was playing something with a lot of guitar, and they were fighting it out.

Mark got out first. Then Ronil, from the back, a big friendly bloke in a Hawaiian shirt who shook Dad's hand like he was trying to sell him a car. Then Sunila, from the front, slim, serious, hair in a long braid, a cotton dress buttoned to the top. Then Sunila went round to the back passenger door and opened it.

Urmila got out of that car like a queen getting out of a carriage she has found disappointing.

She was small. Maybe five feet. Fifty-two, I found out later, but she held herself older, or maybe just straighter. She was wearing a sari in a very pale color, cream, almost white, with a thin gray border, and a white cardigan over it in spite of the heat, and white canvas sneakers. No jewelry. No color anywhere on her at all. I didn't understand that yet. It was Sunila who told me, later, in the kitchen, very low: "She's a widow. That's what you wear." And I thought about my father, who had worn the same blue work shirt every day for a month after Mum, until I took it off him and washed it, and how nobody had told him to.

Urmila looked at the house. She looked at the jacaranda, which was still dropping the last of its purple onto the lawn. She looked at my father.

"You are Dale," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Your son talks about you too much."

"He gets that from his mother."

She considered this. "Good," she said, and handed him a stainless steel pot with a lid, heavy, wrapped in a tea towel, still warm. Then another one. Then Ronil handed him an esky. Then Sunila handed him a cardboard box. Dad stood in the driveway holding about twenty kilos of food, looking like a man who has been asked to hold a baby, which is to say, alarmed.

---

The turkey was not done at one. The turkey was not done at two.

(Dad, at 1:10: "It says four hours." Me: "It says four hours at one-eighty, Dad, you've got it on one-fifty." Dad: "I thought lower was safer." Me: "For what?" Dad: [No response.])

The kitchen was forty degrees with the oven on. So we ate Urmila's food first. That's what happened. Nobody decided it. She simply went into my mother's kitchen, took off her cardigan, folded it over the back of a chair, looked at the stove for about four seconds as if it had personally offended her, and took over. Sunila went with her. And I stood in the doorway because I had no idea where to put myself, and Urmila looked at me and said, "You. Come. You can roll."

"Roll what?"

"Roti. Your brother cannot do it. He makes maps of Tasmania."

I rolled. I was terrible. She stood at my elbow and watched, and every so often she reached over and moved my hands on the rolling pin without a word, a quarter turn, lighter pressure, and the dough went rounder. Her hands were small and very warm and dry, nails cut short, a white, shiny burn scar across one knuckle line, and she smelled of cardamom and some kind of hair oil, like coconut.

"You are married?" she said, rolling.

"I was."

"Children?"

"No."

"Why?"

Nobody asks you that. You'd be amazed. In eleven years, among all the people I knew, all the girlfriends and the women in Mum's bank, nobody ever just asked me, flat out, why. They asked around it. They asked if I was "thinking about it." Urmila asked it the way you'd ask somebody why they're not wearing a hat in the sun.

"Because I didn't want them with him," I said. "And then I didn't want him."

She nodded, as if this made complete sense. She flipped a roti on the pan with her bare fingers and it puffed up like a pillow. "And now?"

"Now I'm thirty-one."

"So?" she said. "I was twenty-six with Sunila. Eight years married. Everybody told me I was finished." She slid the roti onto the plate. "Everybody was wrong. They usually are, but they never learn."

(Sunila, from the sink, not turning around: "Mummy.")

(Urmila: "What? I am being encouraging.")

---

We sat down at half two, under the pergola, with two fans going on extension cords. My grandmother June had come down from Bilpin, eighty, in her church dress with a brooch, and she asked if she could say grace, and Dad said, "Course, June," because Dad has never said no to June in his life. She said a short one. Urmila bowed her head along with everybody, hands in her lap. Ronil, next to me, peeked; I saw him. When June said "Amen" he said it late and too loud, and June patted his hand and said, "Thank you, dear," and he went pink to the ears.

What was on the table: a leg of ham with the cloves stuck in it in diamonds the way Mum did it. A bowl of prawns on ice from the fish market, which Dad had queued for at six in the morning. Mum's potato salad, which I'd made from her recipe card. Cherries. A box of mangoes, because it's not Christmas in Sydney without a box of mangoes. And then Urmila's: a pumpkin curry, orange and glossy with black mustard seeds; a pot of yellow dhal thick enough to stand a spoon in; potatoes and peas in a red gravy; a stack of roti in a tea towel, half of them perfect and half of them shaped like Tasmania; a jar of mango pickle so hot that Dad took one bite, went silent, drank an entire glass of water, and then took another bite.

"That's something," he said, eyes streaming.

"Too much?" Urmila said.

"No, ma'am."

Urmila watched him the whole meal. I watched her watching. She ate very little herself. She ate last, I noticed, after everyone else had served themselves, and she ate from the edges of what was left, a little curry, one roti, and she never sat back in her chair. Sunila saw me noticing. She shook her head, very slightly. *Leave it.*

The turkey came out at four, pale and apologetic. Nobody had room. After, Mark and Ronil and Dad played cricket in the backyard with a tennis ball and Mum's old garbage bin for a wicket, and Ronil hit Dad for six over the back fence into the Nguyens' pool, and Dad said that was out, and Ronil said it was six, and they argued about it for twenty minutes with the seriousness of a High Court appeal. Neither of them knew the rules. It was beautiful.

---

At around seven I was at the sink washing up, and the kitchen window looks onto the back patio, and it was open for the air, and Mark and Urmila were out there.

I didn't mean to listen. I'm a court reporter. I always mean to listen.

The southerly had come through at six, and the heat had broken, and the wind was moving the washing on the rotary clothesline and lifting the edge of the tablecloth. The sky was going pink over the rooftops toward the city. The two of them were standing by the clothesline, Mark hunched in his shirt with his hands in his pockets, Urmila with her cardigan back on, small and pale, almost glowing in the last light. Mum's wind chimes were going on the eave. Mark was talking. He was doing the thing he does when he's nervous, which is explain everything twice.

Here's what I got. (I've cleaned it up. Not much.)

MARK: I know I'm supposed to ask her father. I know that's how it's done. And I'd have asked him. I want you to know that. I would have driven to Casula and sat in his lounge room and asked. And I'm sorry I didn't get to.

URMILA: You are asking me because her father is gone.

MARK: Yes, ma'am.

URMILA: If he was here, you would ask him. And he would say no.

MARK: (Pause.) Yes.

URMILA: And then he would go to his friends with the kava for one year and complain about you. And then after one year he would say yes. And then he would like you more than his own son. That is how he was.

MARK: (Indiscernible.)

URMILA: So. I am saying yes now. I am saving you one year.

MARK: Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Prasad. I

URMILA: Wait. One thing.

MARK: Anything.

URMILA: She keeps her name. Prasad. She can add yours if she wants. Hers she keeps.

MARK: She already told me that. Like, two years ago.

URMILA: (Laughs.) Good. Then she is my daughter.

And then my brother, who is six foot two, bent down and hugged this tiny woman in her white sari, and she let him, stiffly, patting his back twice like you'd pat a horse you weren't sure about, and over his shoulder she saw me through the window, at the sink, with my hands in the water.

She didn't look away. She looked straight at me. Then she lifted her chin, like, *well?*

I lifted mine back.

---

Dad was in his chair when they left, at nine, with the wind still blowing and the street full of the smell of everybody's barbecues. Urmila had gone around the house before she left and touched things. Not Mum's things. Just the door frame. The kitchen bench. The arm of Dad's chair. Lightly, with two fingers. I don't know what it meant. I didn't ask. Some things you don't put on the record.

After they'd gone, Dad took out his notebook. He was on number one-hundred-and-something by then. He sat there a long time with the pen.

"What are you writing?" I said.

He showed me. In his square capitals:

U. (re: me): "Your son talks about you too much." Me: "He gets that from his mother." U: "Good."

And under it:

U. to Mark, by the clothesline (per Jen): "I am saving you one year."

"Per Jen," I said.

"You were at the window," he said. "I saw you."

"Dad."

"You're the court reporter," he said. "I'm citing my source."

That's the whole transcript. I could give you more. I won't. Mum wouldn't want it all on the record. She'd want some of it kept the ordinary way, in the people who were there.

Mark: The List on the Fridge

*Casula, Sydney, 2012*

We bought the house in March, which in the south-west is the month the heat finally lets go of your neck.

Not all at once. March in Sydney is still summer pretending to be autumn. The days are warm and gold and the evenings come a little earlier each week, and the liquidambars in the older streets start to go red at the edges, and the storms that built up every afternoon in February stop building. The bush along the Georges River goes quiet in the middle of the day and loud at dusk, the cockatoos coming in over the roofs in screaming white gangs, the kookaburras starting up from three directions at once. The air smells of cut grass and eucalyptus and somebody's barbecue, always somebody's barbecue.

The house was a 1962 brick bungalow on a street that runs down off the main road toward the river, three bedrooms, one bathroom, a big lemon tree in the back, and a ducted gas heater under the floor that I took one look at and fell a little bit in love with, because it was original and it still worked and it was going to need me. Sunila picked it for the light. The kitchen faces north-east and in the morning the sun comes over the trees and straight across the bench. She also picked it, she admitted later, because it was eleven minutes from her mother, which is close enough to get there fast and far enough that her mother can't just walk over.

(Her mother moved to a house two streets over the next year. So much for that.)

We'd been married five months. The wedding was October 2011, two days, one in the Fiji Indian way and one in what Ronil called "the Belfield way," meaning a backyard and trestle tables and my dad's notebook. I won't go through all of it. There's a lot of it in the family timeline already, with photos everybody labeled. The day before the ceremony, I'll say, about thirty aunties sat me in a plastic chair in Urmila's backyard and covered me in turmeric paste from my forehead to my ankles, laughing so hard some of them had to sit down, and Ronil filmed it, and I was yellow for four days. I went to work yellow. The blokes in the engineering workshop called me Canary until Christmas. The ceremony itself was long and smoky and beautiful and I understood almost none of it, and at one point there was a small fire and we walked around it, Sunila's sari tied to my scarf, and I counted, because I count things, and it was seven. Urmila stood the whole time. In white. She didn't cry. Sunila's aunties cried enough for a small country.

The next day in Belfield my dad gave a speech. He'd never given a speech in his life. He stood up at the table in the backyard with his reading glasses on and a notebook in his hand, and he read out things people had said. Things Mum had said about me. Things I'd said at four, at nine, at seventeen on the roof. Things Sunila had said, the two times she met Mum, that he'd got from Mum on the phone and written down. The last one was Urmila's. "I am saving you one year." And he closed the notebook and said, "That's all I've got," and sat down, and Urmila, at the next table, put her hand flat on the tablecloth and nodded at him once, like a judge.

---

In June Sunila came out of the bathroom at six in the morning holding the test and said, "Okay. Okay. We need to talk about the rules."

Not "I'm pregnant." That was implied. "We need to talk about the rules."

So that weekend we sat at the kitchen table, in the winter sun, with the window cracked and the lemon tree right outside heavy with fruit, so the whole kitchen smelled like a cake about to happen, and a writing pad between us. She'd been thinking about this, it turned out, since she was thirteen. She had lists in her head that went back to a wardrobe in Casula. I'd been thinking about it for about four days. We spent the whole of Saturday and half of Sunday.

I want to be honest that it wasn't easy. People assume it was, because we agreed on the big thing, which was that whatever we had, boy or girl or one of each, they'd be raised the same. But "the same" turns out to be about two hundred small things. Who gets the car. Who does the dishes. Who's allowed to walk to the shops alone, and at what age, and who decides. Whether there's a fast. Whether there's church. Whether there's anything.

"My family didn't do anything," I said. "Easter with Grandma June. That was it."

"That's a thing," she said. "Easter with June. That's a thing they'll remember."

"I know. But it didn't run anything."

"Mine ran everything," she said. "The picture over the stove ran the whole house." She looked out the window at the lemon tree. "And I loved it. That's the thing nobody gets. I loved the lamp and the flower and the sweets at Diwali and Mummy's hands. I loved the fast, even, a little, the moon at the end. I just hated who it was for."

We wrote it down. Here's the list as it ended up, more or less. We typed it out and stuck it on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a pear that my mum got at the Easter Show in 1994.

1. Same rules for both. Same curfew at the same age, same chores, same car.
2. Both learn to cook. Both learn to change a tire. Both learn to say no.
3. Nobody fasts for anybody else. When they're old enough to choose, they can keep any fast they want, for whoever they want, including themselves.
4. The grandparents can teach them anything: food, songs, stories, the lamp, the picture, Easter, the notebooks. Anything except that one of them counts more than the other.
5. Their names are both of ours. Prasad Ashby. Both, every time.
6. Before, not after. (Mum's.)

Sunila read it over about ten times. Then she took the pen and underlined number two, *say no*, twice.

---

Urmila came to lunch the next Sunday. She came every Sunday by then; it had become our version of my mother's roast without anybody ever saying so out loud. She drove herself, in a small white hatchback she drove at exactly the speed limit with both hands on the wheel; she brought a pot of something, always, and she would walk in without knocking and go straight to the kitchen, as if the kitchen had called her.

She saw the list on the fridge right away. You couldn't miss it.

She stood in front of it with her reading glasses on, her cardigan buttoned, and she read it, top to bottom. I was at the bench chopping onions, and I watched her out of the corner of my eye, and I'll tell you I was scared. More scared than by the clothesline in Belfield. Sunila was in the lounge room, pretending to read.

Urmila read it twice. Her face did nothing. Then she reached up and took the pen that hung from the fridge on a string, the one we used for the shopping list, and under number six, in small, upright, careful handwriting, the handwriting of a girl who'd had the best marks in English in Ba in 1975, she wrote:

7. Nobody eats last.

Then she let the pen go so it swung on its string, and said, "Mark, those onions are too big," and took the knife out of my hand.

I didn't say anything. I looked at Sunila through the doorway. Sunila had put down her book. She was looking at the back of her mother's head, and her face was doing something I didn't have a word for and still don't.

That day at lunch, Urmila sat down with us. First time. Sat, in a chair, at the table, when the food went down, and served herself at the same time as everybody else, a little awkwardly, as if her arms didn't know the order. She didn't make a thing of it. Neither did we.

---

The exercise books came in August.

I'd been talking about it for a while. A way for the whole family to keep things together, in one private place, where everybody, Urmila, my dad, Jen, Ronil, cousins in Lautoka, could add things and see what the others had added, and nobody outside could look. Photos, mostly, I thought at first. Then Dad's notebooks. Then I said something to Urmila about her books, the blue ones Sunila had told me about, and she said, "What books?" and then, "Those are just recipes," and then, two weeks later, she came on a Sunday with a plastic shopping bag and set it on the table and said, "Don't spill anything on them."

There were eleven blue ones from Fiji, soft, the covers gone pale and furry at the corners, held together with a rubber band that had melted into the cardboard. On the backs the times tables were printed in faded red, and over the times tables, in the margins and right across the numbers, in pencil, in a small upright hand, were dates and words. Then nine of the thick spiral notebooks from Liverpool and Casula, the first one with a lemon-yellow cover, dated December 1988.

I set up the scanner on the dining table. Urmila sat next to me. We did it page by page, a whole Saturday and then three more. I'd scan, and the page would come up on the screen, and she'd look at it, and she'd tell me what it was, and I'd type it in under the image, her words, exactly. Not mine.

That was her rule. "My words. Not your words about my words."

"A handful of dhal, washed three times." She looked at that one a long time. "That's my mother's hand," she said. "Write that. Not a recipe. My mother's hand."

*Southerly at four o'clock. Not a cyclone.* She laughed out loud. She told me the whole story, Sarita on the phone, and I typed it.

*Pickle taken at the airport. S. cried for both of us.* That one she read twice, and then said, "That boy had red ears," and nothing else.

*Harish Prasad. Lautoka. Fitter at the mill. Big hands.* That one she didn't explain. She just said, "Leave it how it is," and I left it how it was.

By September there was a whole shelf of her, in that private space, in order, with her words under every page. And then Dad sent down a box of his notebooks. Two hundred and six of them, in rubber bands, in a shoebox labeled in marker, BEFORE 1990. And Jen started typing those, at night, because she types faster than any human being alive, and Ronil started adding photos of the Fiji Indian shops on Moore Street before they changed hands, and a cousin in Lautoka added a photo of the house on the hill at Simla where Urmila lived for twelve years, the paint gone pink in the sun.

It wasn't anything fancy. I want to say that. It was a family keeping its stuff in one place, finally, where everybody could reach it.

---

Arjun came on the eighth of November, at 3:40 in the morning, in a storm.

It had been building all afternoon, the sky over the mountains going a dark bruised green, and at eleven at night it broke, hail first, then rain so heavy the gutters on our street overflowed and ran like creeks down to the river, and the jacarandas along the main road dropped all their flowers at once, so when we drove to the hospital at one in the morning with the wipers going full speed, the road was purple. The hospital where we met, because Sunila wouldn't hear of anywhere else. "I know the air handlers," she said. "You do the air handlers."

He was three point three kilos. He had a lot of black hair, like me at birth, and Sunila's mouth, and he was furious about the cold, also like me. I held him and he breathed on my neck, hot and fast.

Urmila got there at six, with the rain on her shoulders and a stainless steel container of something that smelled of ghee and cardamom, and spiral notebook number nine in her handbag. She held Arjun for about ten minutes without saying anything at all. Then she handed him back to Sunila and sat down in the vinyl chair by the window and opened the notebook on her knee and took out a pencil.

I watched her write. The date. The hour. The weather: *Storm, hail, jacaranda on the road.* His weight. And then she stopped, and thought, and wrote something else, and closed the book.

"What did you write?" I said.

She peered at me above the rims. "You will scan it," she said. "Then you will know."

I scanned it in December. She'd written, under his weight: *First grandson. Nobody sent sweets to forty houses. Good.*

Dale: Two Streets Over

*Casula, 2017*

I retired from the railways in 2013, at sixty, with forty-one years in, same as my father. The last eighteen of them were at the Chullora workshops after they cut Enfield back. They gave me a plaque and a lunch at the pub on Hume Highway. The plaque had a picture of a coal wagon on it. I'd examined maybe two hundred thousand coal wagons and I couldn't tell you a single thing about any of them, but I could tell you what every bloke at that lunch said, because I wrote it down under the table on my knee.

I lasted one year alone in the Belfield house. Then Mark came up one weekend in the autumn of 2014 and walked around it with me twice, opening cupboards, and then said, "Dad, there's a little place for sale on Kurrajong Street." And I said, "Where's Kurrajong Street." And he said, "Two streets from Urmila. Three from us." And I said, "Is that a selling point?" And he laughed, but he didn't answer, which was an answer.

So I've been here three years. It's a small place, two bedrooms, cream brick, with a gum in the front yard so big the roots have lifted the footpath in two places, and a backyard that runs down to a back fence with nothing behind it but a strip of bush and then the river. In spring the bush comes alive. Wattle first, then the bottlebrush going red, then the grevilleas, and the birds go mad for all of it, lorikeets and wattlebirds and little honeyeaters hanging off the flowers, and every morning at five the kookaburras start up from three trees at once, like somebody's told them a joke. In the evening the flying foxes come over, heading out, and you can hear them squabbling. In summer it's forty in the shade and the cicadas are so loud you can't hear the radio.

It's not Belfield. You can't smell the yard. I didn't expect to miss that and I do.

---

Saturdays I go to Urmila's.

That started in 2014 with her gate, which was sagging on its hinges so bad she was lifting it every time to latch it, and I saw her doing it walking past and stopped and said, "Want me to fix that?" and she said, "Can you?" in a voice that meant she doubted it. I fixed it. It took twenty minutes and two new hinge screws, longer ones, into the post where the wood was still good. She stood on the step and watched me the whole time with her arms crossed, and when I was done she swung it, three times, and listened to it latch.

"Okay," she said. "Come have tea."

Her tea is a thing. She boils the water with the milk and the sugar and the leaves all in one pot, with ginger and cardamom pods she cracks with the flat of a spoon, until it comes up foaming and the color of a paper bag, and she pours it through a strainer into a glass, not a cup. It's the sweetest thing I've ever drunk. Three halves, she calls it. Half milk, half sugar, half tea. I said that doesn't add up and she said, "It adds up in the glass."

That's in the notebook, from 2014. U: "It adds up in the glass."

After the gate it was the gutter. Then the tap in her bathroom that dripped all night. Then the drawer in her kitchen that came off its runners. Saturdays. She'd have a list. I'd come over at ten with my toolbox and do the list, and she'd cook, and the kids would show up around midday with Mark or Sunila, or I'd walk them over myself, and we'd all eat in her kitchen with the window open and the smell of her cooking going out into the street.

I know what people say. Vimla told Urmila, who told me, that the ladies at the shop on Moore Street say the widow Prasad has an Aussie widower coming round every Saturday with a box of tools. Urmila laughed about it for a week. "At my age," she said, "a little scandal is good for the blood."

But I noticed she didn't come into my house. Not once in three years. She'd come to the front step and hand me a container of dhal and go home. I asked Sunila about it once and she said, "It's not about you, Dale. It's about who's watching." I've been watched by a lot of people in my life, foremen and inspectors and the safety regulator, and none of them ever told me which house I could walk into.

---

Here's a thing I saw that I didn't understand till later.

Ronil got married last year, in the spring, to a girl named Roshni whose people are from Nadi. Big wedding. Two days, like Mark's. The day before, there was the yellow paste in the backyard, and all the aunties came out with their bowls, singing, laughing, the same as Mark's day, the same plastic chair. And Urmila stood at the back.

It was her son. Her only son. And she stood at the back of her own yard, by the fence, in her pale sari, hands folded, and she didn't put the paste on him. Other women did. Women she'd known forty years, women who weren't his mother. She watched. She smiled, I'll give her that. She smiled the whole time. But she didn't go up to that chair.

I asked Sunila, standing next to me. She said, very low, "Widows don't. It's supposed to be bad luck."

"For who?"

Sunila looked at me. "For the bride and groom."

"She's his mother."

"I know, Dale."

I've seen a lot of rules. The railways have got a rule for everything, and most of them were written by somebody who watched a man get killed. I can respect a rule like that. I don't know what that one was written for. I watched her at the fence and I thought, there's the most important woman in this yard, and she's the one who has to stand furthest away from it.

I didn't write anything down that day. Whatever got said worth keeping was said in a language I didn't have.

---

The mango tree.

She's had it since 1988. Grew it from the seed of a Queensland mango she bought from a fruit shop in Liverpool her first week, a mango she says was a cousin of the Ba ones, not a brother. Put the seed in a cup of water on the windowsill, just to see. It came up. She's had it in a pot ever since, a bigger pot every few years, through the flat and the house in Casula and now this one. It's about two meters tall now, in a big blue glazed pot, with leaves long and dark and shiny as a new shoe, and when new leaves come in they're red, almost purple, and they hang down soft and limp like wet cloth before they stiffen up.

It has never fruited. Never flowered, even. Twenty-nine years.

"Too cold," she says. "Mangoes want heat."

I said it's forty degrees in January. She said, "And in July there is frost on your car, Dale. A mango remembers July."

Every May, before the first frost, she drags that pot under the back verandah, against the brick wall where it's warmest, inch by inch, on a bath towel, by herself, and every September she drags it back out to the sunny corner by the fence. She's fifty-nine. That pot full of wet dirt weighs about ninety kilos. I watched her do it last May and I couldn't stand it.

So this spring I built her a trolley. I had some old hardware in the garage from the workshops, things I'd carried home over the years, heavy steel casters off a parts cart they'd scrapped, a sheet of thick ply. I cut a circle, bolted on four casters that'll each hold two hundred kilos, put a lip around the edge so the pot won't slide, painted it gray. Arjun helped. He's four. His job was handing me the bolts and saying "Here, Grandpa," and he did it like a surgeon's nurse, very serious, holding each one out flat on his palm.

We brought it over on a Saturday in October. Mark and I tipped the pot and slid the trolley under it, and then Arjun pushed. Four years old, pushing a ninety-kilo mango tree across a concrete patio, red in the face, with Maya, who is two, walking beside it holding a leaf like she was leading a pony. It rolled. Urmila stood on the step with her hand at her throat.

"Now you can chase the sun," I said.

She came down and put one hand on the rim of the pot and pushed it, a foot, then back. She didn't say thank you. She said, "What did it cost?"

"Nothing. It was in my garage."

"Then why did you have it?"

"In case," I said.

She looked at me a long while. Then she said, "Come have tea," which is what she says instead.

---

That same week Mark showed me the thing he and Jen had been building.

They'd taken all my notebooks, all two hundred and some, and Jen had typed every line, and they'd put them in order by date, and then Mark had put them together with the other things in there about me: pictures, the plaque, the hammer from the day he was born, a voice recording I'd let Arjun make of me telling about the night the southerly came in 1982. He'd strung it all together in order. Like a life. My life. It had my name across the top.

"Read it," he said. "Tell me what's wrong."

I sat at his kitchen table with my glasses and read it for two hours. It was strange. You think you know what's in your own notebooks. You don't. I'd forgotten half of it. There were things my father said that I'd have sworn I remembered word for word and I'd remembered them wrong. There were things Carol said that I didn't know I'd kept. There was Jen at three, "I'll talk for him." There was Mark on the roof.

And there wasn't much of me. That's what got me. Hundreds of pages and it was all other people. Carol said, Jen said, Lou at the yard said, Urmila said. Me hardly at all.

"This isn't me," I said. "This is everybody else."

Mark had gone out the back. It was Urmila who was there, at the bench, she'd come over with a pot, and she had been reading over my shoulder for I don't know how long, without asking, the way she does.

"It is you," she said.

"It's all what other people said."

"Who chose?" she said. "Who sat with the pen and chose which ones to keep? Out of everything everybody said, forty years? That is you. The choosing." She put the lid back on her pot. "You think I am in my books because I wrote my name? I am in my books because I wrote my mother's hands."

I thought about that. I'm still thinking about it.

"I want to read yours," I said.

"Not yet," she said. "Mine is not finished."

---

The next week the fire brigade did a burn in the bush along the river, the way they do in spring, a hazard reduction they call it, to clear the dry stuff before summer. The smoke came over the whole of Casula on the second morning, a yellow-brown haze that turned the sun into an orange coin you could look straight at. The suburb smelled like a campfire the morning after. Ash came down on the cars, fine and gray.

I walked over to Urmila's. She was standing at her gate, the one I'd fixed, with the end of her sari over her nose, looking at the sky.

"Cane fire," she said. "That is what it smells like. Exactly. Ba in November, before the cutting."

"It's not cane."

"I know what it is." She looked at me. "In 1988 I thought the southerly was a cyclone. Now there is smoke over my house and everybody says it is good for the bush." She shook her head. "This country."

We walked down to Chipping Norton Lakes that afternoon anyway, because the kids needed out. The water was flat and brown-gold under the haze, the river gums hanging still, the black swans going in and out of the reeds. Arjun on my shoulders. Maya in the stroller with Urmila pushing. Halfway around, Arjun put both his hands on top of my head, his signal for something important.

"Grandpa," he said. "Why does Nani's tree have wheels?"

"So it can go where the sun is."

He thought about it. "Can we put wheels on the lake?"

I wrote that one down at home. A., age 4: "Can we put wheels on the lake?"

I don't know what it means. Urmila says that's not my department. I put it in the private family pages myself that night, typed with two fingers, under the date, and I put the photo with it, the one Sunila took on the path: the boy on my shoulders, both hands on my head, and the lake brown-gold behind us under the smoke.

Arjun: The Cane Train

*Casula, 2021*

The cane train is going to be green. Nani says it was green. Grandpa says some of them were yellow, in the pictures, and Nani says, "Not on our line," and Grandpa says, "Okay, green."

I'm nine. I turned nine on November eighth. For my birthday Grandpa gave me a box with a locomotive in it, a little one, the kind that runs on tracks that are closer together than regular train tracks, because the real cane trains in Fiji ran on tracks like that, narrow ones. Two feet apart, Nani says. Grandpa says it's called narrow gauge. The locomotive is black right now, but we're painting it green, so it will be right.

We're building the layout in Grandpa's garage on a big piece of plywood on two sawhorses. It takes up the whole side where the car would go, so Grandpa parks in the driveway now. The garage smells like sawdust and the oil Grandpa puts on everything and the hot tin roof, and the pedestal fan, which smells like burned dust when it first comes on and then stops. Outside the cicadas are so loud Grandpa has to turn the radio up. Grandpa has a radio on the shelf that plays old music very quietly, and there's a calendar on the wall from 2013 that he never changed because he likes the picture, which is a train in snow.

The plywood is painted brown and green. Brown is the dirt and green is the cane. The cane is going to be hard. We tried green pipe cleaners but they looked like pipe cleaners. Grandpa says we might try broom straw painted green. Nani says, "You'll need a lot of broom."

---

Nani comes over on Saturdays to tell us how it was. She sits on Grandpa's folding chair, the one with the cushion, in her long cardigan with the big pockets, and she drinks tea out of a glass that she brings from her house because Grandpa's cups are "too thick." She doesn't touch anything. She just tells.

Today she's telling about the cars. The cars that carry the cane.

"Small," she says. She holds her hands apart like she's carrying a box. "Iron. Like a bathtub with no ends. Thirty of them, forty, one behind the other. And the cane piled up on them so high, higher than the engine, sticking out on all the sides."

"How high?"

"Higher than your father."

"Higher than Dad?"

"Your father is not so tall. Fiji cane is very tall." She thinks. "Like hair. The cane sticks out like the hair of a boy who won't go to the barber."

Grandpa laughs. Grandpa's laugh is like a cough that's having fun. "That's you, Arjun."

I touch my hair. It's long because I don't like the barber. The barber smells like hairspray and talks too much about football.

I ask Nani if I can record her. Mum says you have to ask. I ask her properly, like Mum showed me, with my tablet held down at my side and not pointing at her. "Nani, can I record you telling about the train, so it's kept? You can say no."

She looks at me over her glasses and keeps on looking.

"Ask me properly," she says.

"I just did."

"Say why."

I think. "Because when I'm old I won't remember how you said it. I'll remember what you said but not how."

Nani looks at Grandpa. Grandpa looks at his tea.

"Okay," she says. "Yes. And put my name on it. Urmila Prasad. Not Nani. Nani is only for you."

So I press record and put the tablet on the edge of the plywood, and she tells it again, the whole thing, the cars like bathtubs, the cane like hair, the engine that made a sound like an old man coughing up his breakfast, the bell at the crossings, the smoke from the mill across the river. And when she's done I press stop and I type in the name, Urmila Prasad, and the place, Grandpa's garage, and the date, and then I put it in the family pages, in her part, under Ba, next to the scans of her school books. Dad showed me how. You can't just put it anywhere. It has to go where it goes.

---

Nani's brothers rode the cane train. Naresh and Jitendra. They jumped on the last car at the bend when it slowed down and rode to the siding. Great-Uncle Naresh still lives in Ba. He's sixty-five, which Nani says is young, but he looks old to me. I've seen him on video calls; he has very big ears and no top teeth and he laughs at everything I say, even when it's not a joke.

"Did you ride it, Nani?"

She doesn't answer right away. She drinks her tea.

"One time," she says. "When I was eleven."

"Cool! How far?"

"Two hundred yards."

"That's like two football fields."

"Then it was two football fields." She puts the glass down on her knee. "My arm got cut by the cane leaf. Here." She shows me a place on her arm, near the elbow. I can't see anything. "And when I got home my grandmother washed me. Arms and legs. With cold water and the yellow soap."

"Why?"

"Because I rode the train."

"But you said your brothers rode it every day."

"Yes."

"Did she wash them?"

Nani looks at me. Grandpa looks at Nani. The radio is playing a song with a lot of trumpets, very quietly.

"No," Nani says.

"Why not?"

"Because they were boys."

I think about that. I don't get it. Washing isn't a punishment. I like baths. But the way she says it, it was a punishment. I look at Grandpa to see if he gets it. He's looking at the plywood, at the place where the river is going to go, with his mouth tight.

"That's not fair," I say.

"No," Nani says. "It wasn't."

She doesn't say anything else. She drinks the rest of her tea. Then she says, "Arjun, the river is in the wrong place. The river is on the other side of the mill. You have it on this side."

So we fix the river.

---

We're making a map of Ba first, on butcher paper, so the layout is right. Butcher paper is the brown paper that comes on a roll. Grandpa had a roll from when he and Dad painted the fence. We tape it to the wall of the garage and Nani tells me where everything goes and I draw it with markers.

The farm is on the Nailaga side. That's here. The river is here, curvy, like a snake that ate something. The mill is on the other side, Rarawai, with a big chimney. Nani says the chimney had two red lights on the top at night so airplanes wouldn't hit it. The town is over here, Ba town, with the shops. The siding is here, Votua, where her brothers jumped off. The road to Lautoka goes down here, south, along the bottom. The house is at the top corner, here, because that's where the floods don't come.

And behind the house, the mango trees. Three of them. Nani makes me draw them in exactly the right places. The big one is the oldest. Her grandfather planted it.

"Did you climb it?"

"Girls don't climb."

"Maya climbs everything."

"Maya is Australian." Nani says it like it explains everything. Then she says, "Draw the fruit. Up at the top. Dark."

I draw little dark circles at the top of the big tree. She tips her head and studies them.

"Good," she says. "That is right."

When it's done, Dad takes a picture of the map with his phone and puts it in the family pages too, in the map of places, the one that has the farm and Simla and the flat off Macquarie Street and Grandpa's house in Belfield and all of our houses here, little dots, with lines between them in the order everybody moved. Ba is the dot furthest away. Our garage is the dot closest. The map Nani and I drew goes right on top of Ba, like a sticker.

---

At lunch we go to Nani's house, two streets over, because it's Saturday and that's where lunch is.

Nani's kitchen is always hot. Even in winter, and in December it's like the inside of an oven. She has the stove going and the windows steamed and the little picture over the stove with the lady and the tiger and the flower in the frame, and the TV in the corner on with no sound, and the smell is roti and the yellow dhal and something with pumpkin. Mum's there and Maya's there. Maya is six. She has a scab on her chin from falling off the top of the monkey bars at school, and she's very proud of it, and she shows it to everybody, even people at the shops.

Nani makes roti one at a time on the flat pan. She rolls them with a little rolling pin that's skinny in the middle, round and round, and slaps them on the hot pan, and turns them with her fingers, her bare fingers, which I'm not allowed to try, and they puff up like a balloon full of steam. Then she drops a little ghee on top from a spoon and it melts and goes shiny.

The first one always goes to me. On my plate. Hot. She doesn't even look, she just does it.

Maya is watching. Maya is always watching.

"Why does Arjun always get the first one?" she says.

Mum looks up from her phone. Nani is rolling the next one. She stops rolling. She doesn't turn around.

"Because," Nani says, and then doesn't say because what.

I look at my roti. It's shiny with ghee and there's a brown spot on it like a map of an island. It's the best one, the first one always is, it's the hottest. I look at Maya. Maya has her arms crossed and her scab out.

I tear it in half. It's hot, it burns my fingers, the steam comes out. I give Maya the bigger half. Not because I'm nice. Because she'll be mad all afternoon if I don't.

Maya eats it so fast she burns her tongue and then says, "Ow," and then, "Thank you," with her mouth full.

Nani has turned around. She's looking at the roti in my hand, the half. Then at Maya. Then at Mum. Mum has put her phone down. Nani turns back to the stove.

The next roti she puts on Maya's plate. Then she makes one for me. Then one for Mum. Then she makes one for herself, and she sits down at the table with us, with her glass of tea, and eats it. And then she gets up and makes more.

---

After lunch Grandpa and I paint the locomotive green. We use a very small brush. My hand shakes and I get green on the wheels, and Grandpa says that's okay, real ones got dirty, and he wipes the wheels with a rag that smells like turpentine.

When Nani comes back over at four to see, it's done. It's on the track, the circle of track on the plywood, with three little iron cars behind it that we painted rust color, and some broom straw in them painted green for the cane, sticking out every side. Grandpa plugs in the transformer and the train goes, slowly, around the loop, past the river that's in the right place now, past the cardboard mill with the chimney.

Nani watches it go around twice. Three times.

"It's too clean," she says.

"What?"

"Too clean. Everything in crushing season is black. The smoke, the ash, from the burning. Everything had ash on it. The cars, the cane, the boys' legs. The washing on the line."

Grandpa looks at me. Then he goes into the house and comes back with a paper bag from the ash bucket by his wood heater, and inside is ash, gray, soft, and he puts some in a jar lid and gives me a dry paintbrush.

"Go ahead," he says.

So I paint ash on the train. On the green locomotive, on the cars, on the broom straw cane, on the dirt by the tracks. It goes on soft and gray, like dust on a car. The garage smells like a campfire. Nani watches with her glass of tea in both hands.

When I'm done Grandpa runs it again. Around the loop. Past the river. Past the mill. Gray and green and rust, with the little bell going when it comes to the crossing Grandpa made from two toothpicks.

"There," Nani says. "Now."

I want to see the real one. I ask Mum that night if we can go to Fiji. She says, "Someday." I ask when someday is. She says she'll ask Nani.

Maya: Gloves

*Casula, 2023*

My gloves are orange and they are too big and I love them more than anything I have ever owned including my scooter and including the stuffed platypus that I am too old for but still have, which nobody is allowed to know about, so don't tell.

I'm eight. I'm a goalkeeper. I'm the goalkeeper for the Lightning, which is the under-9 girls' team at the soccer club, and we play on Saturday mornings in winter on the fields down by the river, and it's always freezing at eight in the morning when the games start, so cold there's frost on the grass in the shady corner and mist lying on the river flats so you can't see the trees on the other side, you can only see the field and the goals and the parents on the sideline in their puffer jackets holding coffee, and the grass is so wet it gets in your socks before warm-ups are even over. The field smells like wet grass and the white paint they use for the lines and the sausage sizzle the canteen ladies start at seven, onions on the hotplate, which makes everybody hungry by the second half. By halftime the mist goes up and the sun comes through and the magpies come down onto the field to look for worms in the bits we've churned up, and you can see the gum trees along the river, gray-green and dripping.

I wanted to be goalkeeper because the goalkeeper is the only one who gets to use her hands. Everybody else has to just kick. I can catch, punch, throw, dive and roll, and if I'm in the box nobody can touch me. Coach Dana says I'm "fearless," which is good, and "a little bit nuts," which she says is also good.

Nani says I'm going to ruin my knees.

---

Nani comes to every game. Every single one. She sits in a folding chair right behind my goal, not on the sideline with the other parents, right behind the net, which Coach Dana said was fine as long as she doesn't talk to me during play, which she does. She brings a shawl and a thermos of her tea that's so sweet it makes your teeth hurt, and a blanket for her legs, and a container of something for after, and she sits there in the mist like a little round bird on a fence.

Today she says, before the game, through the net, "Your legs."

"What about them?"

"All the scratches. All the mud. Look at your knees."

My knees have three scabs and a bruise shaped like Tasmania. I'm very proud of them. "They're fine, Nani."

"When you get married," Nani says, and then she stops.

"What?"

She makes a face like she just bit something sour. "Nothing. I'm an old lady. Ignore me." She drinks her tea. "Half ignore me."

Arjun is next to her. He's ten. He sits next to Nani at every game and explains soccer to her, even though she's been coming for two years and knows all the rules, and she lets him. Right now he's saying, "So the goalkeeper's job is to stop the other team from scoring," and Nani is saying, "Yes, Arjun," like she's never heard it before.

---

Uncle Ronil comes late, like always. You can hear him before you see him because he yells "MAYA!" from the car park, and then he's coming across the grass with my cousin Kavya on his shoulders. Kavya is five. She has a pink beanie and a juice box and she's yelling "MAYA!" too, because she copies him on everything.

Uncle Ronil is big and loud and he owns a smash repair shop in Prestons where they fix cars that got crashed and paint them so you can't tell. He smells like the paint, a little, even on Saturday, sharp like nail polish. He always has a joke. Most of them are bad. He's the best uncle in the history of uncles. Mum says that when he was a kid he could do anything he wanted and got away with everything and now he's "trying to make up for it with Kavya." I don't know what that means but it seems like Kavya gets a lot of stuff.

Today he has a bag. He gives it to me over the net.

"Open it," he says.

It's a shirt. A goalkeeper shirt. Black, all black, with long sleeves and padding on the elbows, and on the front there's a little patch with a picture on it. It's too big for me. It's perfect.

"It's from Ba," Uncle Ronil says. "Your Nani's town. Their football team plays in black. They call them the Men in Black, and they've been the best team in Fiji for like a hundred years, and my cousin Anand sent it in the post. It took six weeks. It smelled like a mango when it got here. Smell it."

I smell it. It smells like the bag.

"It's a men's team," Nani says from her chair.

"So?" Uncle Ronil says. "She's a man in black now." And he laughs at his own joke, which he always does, and Kavya laughs because he laughs, and Nani shakes her head but she's smiling into her tea.

I put it on over my Lightning jersey. Coach Dana says I can wear it if it's a different color from my team, which it is, because we're yellow. The sleeves come down over my gloves. I roll them up. I feel like I'm nine feet tall.

---

Okay so the game.

We're playing the Sharks, who are the best team, who have a girl named Bella who is the fastest girl in the whole competition and maybe the world. She has a ponytail that goes straight out behind her when she runs, like a flag. She scored on me four times last time. FOUR. I cried in the car. Not in front of anybody. Just in the car.

The first half is okay. Mostly they're down at the other end and I'm just standing there bouncing on my toes to stay warm and my breath is coming out in clouds and the dew is dripping off the crossbar onto my head. Nani says, "Maya, you look cold," and I say "Nani, I'm working," and Arjun says "Nani, she can't talk, she's in the game," and Nani says "She's standing there doing nothing," and Arjun says "That's part of it."

Then in the second half Bella gets the ball at halfway.

And she turns, and her ponytail goes out, and she just goes. Past Ellie, past Priya, past Hana, nobody can catch her, she's coming straight down the middle with the ball right at her feet like it's on a string, and it's just me. Me and her. And I can hear Uncle Ronil on the sideline yelling "COME OUT, COME OUT," and Coach Dana yelling "MAKE YOURSELF BIG," and I come out. I run straight at her. Coach says you have to make the angle small. I don't totally understand the angle but I know you have to run at them, which is the scariest part, because every part of you wants to stay on the line.

She shoots. Low. Hard. To my left.

And I dive.

I don't even decide to. My body just goes. I'm in the air sideways with my arms out and the orange gloves and the black sleeve and then I hit the ground in the mud, the big muddy patch in front of the goal where nobody's grass ever grows, and the ball hits my hands, both hands, SMACK, and it stops. It's in my hands. It's against my chest. I'm lying in the mud on my side with the ball and there's mud in my mouth and up my nose and in my ear.

Everybody's yelling. Uncle Ronil is yelling so loud a dog in the car park starts barking. Kavya is yelling. Coach Dana is yelling "YES, MAYA, YES." Arjun is standing up. And I look up from the mud through the net and Nani has stood up out of her chair. Nani never stands up out of her chair at games. She's standing there with her blanket fallen down by her feet and her tea in one hand and her other hand on the net, holding it, her fingers through the holes.

She doesn't say anything about my knees.

She yells, "That's my Maya! That's MY Maya!"

Which is the only time I've ever heard Nani yell. Mum says Nani only yells at the TV when there's cricket on.

We lose two-one. Bella scores twice off corners, which isn't my fault, Coach says, it's the defense's fault. But I don't even care. I made the save. Coach Dana gives me the player of the match medal, which is a plastic one on a ribbon, and everybody claps.

---

Grandpa wasn't there. Grandpa had a cold. But Mum sent him a video that Uncle Ronil took, and by the time we got home Grandpa had written it down in his notebook and sent a picture of the page. In his square letters it says:

M, age 8, the save. Urmila: "That's my Maya!" (per Ronil.) First time I've heard of U. raising her voice in public. Will need confirmation.

Aunt Jen was there, though. Aunt Jen drove out from the inner west at seven in the morning and she stood on the sideline the whole game typing into her phone, really fast, with her thumbs, which she does at all my games. She types what everybody says. She types what I say. She says she can't help it, it's her job, she's a court reporter, which means she writes down everything people say in court so nobody can lie about it later.

After the game she showed me. On her phone it said:

Maya, post-save, face down in mud: "Is it in? Did I get it? I can't see, there's mud in my eyeball."

"I didn't say that," I said.

"You did," Aunt Jen said. "I have it in writing."

---

After lunch Mum and I sat on the lounge with my blanket because I was tired and my knees hurt, actually, a little, but I'm not telling Nani that. And Mum opened the family pages on the tablet and showed me something.

There's a part for everybody. Nani's part has her school books from Fiji, all scanned, and her recording about the cane train that Arjun made. Grandpa's has his notebooks. And Mum's has her diary. Her diary from when she was thirteen. It's scanned too, every page, and her writing is round and loopy with circles over the i's, and some of the pages are written backward, the words in the wrong order, last word first. Mum said she did it so Uncle Ronil couldn't read it.

"Did it work?" I said.

"No," Mum said. "He told me last year he read every word."

Mum's put the backward pages back in the right order under the scans, so you can read them. And there's a part where everything gets put together. Like a story. Of Mum. Her life, from her baby picture in Lautoka with Nani holding her, to the airplane, to the flat in Liverpool, to the diary, to the hospital where she met Dad. It has her own words in it. You can read it like a book.

Mum showed me one page from the diary. It said, in her round writing:

"I am not allowed to ride my bike past the end of our street. Our street is a cul-de-sac. It's a circle. I can ride in a circle."

I read it twice.

"That's so dumb," I said.

And Nani, who was in the kitchen, because Nani is always in the kitchen, laughed. Really laughed, out loud, a big one. She came to the door with the tea towel.

"What's dumb?"

Mum read it to her.

Nani stood there in the door with the tea towel. She didn't laugh at that part. She looked at Mum for a while. Then at me, with my orange gloves still on, because I hadn't taken them off since the game, because I didn't want to.

"Yes," Nani said. "That was dumb."

And then she went back in the kitchen.

Mum put her chin on top of my head. She just stayed there like that, with the heater ticking.

I've decided I'm going to write backward too. Not because anybody's reading it. Because it's cool. I tried it before bed. It's really hard. You have to know the end of the sentence before you start.

Maya: Bula

*Lautoka and Ba, Fiji, December 2027*

The first thing is the heat, and I want to be specific about it, because everybody said "it's hot" like that was information.

It is like walking into a dryer that's also a shower. When they open the airplane door at Nadi at six in the morning the air comes in and lies down on you, wet and heavy and warm, and it smells green, like the inside of a greenhouse, with something sweet under it and something burned under that. By the time we get to the bottom of the stairs my shirt is stuck to my back. Arjun's glasses fog up. Dad, who is the whitest man on the entire island of Viti Levu, just says "Wow," and then "Wow," and then nothing, and his face is already pink.

Nani is the only one who isn't sweating. She comes down the airplane stairs one at a time, holding the rail, in a cotton sari, and when she gets to the bottom she stands on the tarmac with her eyes closed and breathes in through her nose for a long time, like she's smelling a cake.

"Okay," she says. "Now."

I don't know what she means. Mum does. Mum puts her arm around Nani's shoulders.

Uncle Ronil comes last, carrying three bags, sweating like a car wash. He hasn't been here since he was one. He looks around at the mountains, which are purple and close, so close, with the clouds stuck on the tops, and he says, "Okay, so I don't remember any of this," and then a man in a flowered shirt and a sulu, which is like a skirt but for everybody, says "Bula!" at the bottom of the stairs, and Uncle Ronil says "Bula!" back, so loud the man laughs, and that's it, Uncle Ronil's having the best day of his life.

Grandpa didn't come. He said somebody had to water the mango tree through a Sydney December, and anyway he's seventy-four and he's been on an airplane four times in his life and three of them were to Perth. He gave me a notebook. A little one, with a spiral at the top like his. He said, "Write down what people say. Not what you see. Everybody writes what they see."

So this is mostly what people said.

---

We're staying in Lautoka, at the house on the hill at Simla where Nani lived for twelve years when she was married, before Mum was born and after. It's Great-Uncle Mahendra's house now. He's Grandpa Harish's youngest brother, the one who stayed. He's skinny and bald and wears an undershirt and a sulu all day and listens to cricket on a radio the size of a sandwich, and he calls Nani by an old word that means his older brother's wife, which wasn't on the list of words Mum taught me before the trip. He says it like she's still twenty.

The house is pink. It was white once, Nani says, but the sun did it. It has a tin roof that bangs when it rains, which is every afternoon at about three, the sky going dark green over the mountains and then the rain coming down so hard you can't hear people talk, and then, twenty minutes later, done, steam coming up off the road, frogs going like crazy in the ditch. From the front step you can see down the hill to the mill. The Lautoka mill has a big chimney, and the smoke comes out of it all day, gray-white, and it smells like burned sugar, like when Mum makes caramel and forgets it, and behind the mill is the wharf, with a huge ship tied up, and the ocean, which is a color I don't have a name for. It's not blue. It's like if green and blue had a kid.

There are mangoes everywhere. It's mango season. There are mango trees in every yard, and the mangoes fall on the tin roofs at night, BANG, and the first night I thought it was a gun, and Priti laughed at me for ten minutes. You can buy a whole pile of them at the market for almost nothing. They're sweeter even than the Queensland ones at home, which I didn't think was possible. They're so sweet they make your throat itch, and the juice runs down to your elbows, and you have to eat them on the back step over the drain. Arjun has eaten eleven. He's keeping count.

---

Priti is my cousin. Second cousin, technically. She's Great-Uncle Mahendra's granddaughter, and she's fourteen, and she wants to fly planes. Not be a flight attendant. Fly them. She has a poster in her room of the inside of a cockpit, all the dials and switches, and she knows what every one of them does, and she quizzed me on it the first night and I got zero.

She also gets up at five in the morning.

I found this out on day two, because I woke up at five-fifteen from jet lag and heard sweeping. I went out on the step. Priti was in the yard in the gray light with a broom made of a bunch of sticks tied together, sweeping the dirt. Sweeping dirt. Making lines in it. Her older sister, Kajal, was at the outside sink washing last night's pots. Their mum, Auntie Sangeeta, was at the stove already, making roti. In the corner of the kitchen, on a shelf up high, there was a picture in a frame with a flower tucked in it and a little lamp burning in a brass dish, and the picture was the same lady. The same lady on the tiger with all the arms. The one in Nani's kitchen. I didn't know there was more than one.

"Where are the boys?" I said.

Priti didn't stop sweeping. "Asleep."

Her brothers are Vikash, who's sixteen, and Akash, who's twelve, like me. They got up at nine. They ate the roti that Auntie Sangeeta made, and drank the tea Kajal made, and then they went out on their bikes, and nobody asked where.

I wrote it down in Grandpa's notebook. Priti, 5:20 a.m.: "Asleep."

---

On day three I went with them. The boys. Not on purpose. They were going to play football at the school field down the hill, Vikash and Akash and about ten other boys, and I had my ball, and my gloves, and the black Ba shirt Uncle Ronil got me when I was eight, which now fits, and I just went. I said, "Can I play?" Vikash looked at me like I'd asked if I could drive his car. Akash said, "You're a girl." I said, "I'm a goalkeeper." They didn't have a goalkeeper. Nobody wants to be goalkeeper. So I got in.

The field is dirt. Red dirt, packed hard, with patches of brown grass, and two goals made of iron pipes with no nets, and a mango tree in one corner where everybody leaves their slippers. Everybody plays barefoot. I played in my sneakers and the boys made fun of me, so I took them off, and the ground was so hot I yelled, and they made fun of me more.

I saved four shots. One of them was Vikash's, and it was hard, and I dove for it in the dirt and it hurt, and I got it. After that nobody said "You're a girl." They said "Keeper!" when they wanted me. Akash high-fived me. Some of the boys from other houses came over to look.

When I got back up the hill at noon, covered in red dust to my knees, there was a meeting going on in the kitchen.

I could hear it from the yard. Auntie Sangeeta. Great-Aunt, Mahendra's wife, whose name I can't say right, who's very small and very loud. And another auntie from next door. And Mum. And Nani, sitting at the table, not saying anything.

The aunties were saying it wasn't right. A girl, twelve, out with the boys, all morning, on the field, where everybody could see. What would people say. In this neighborhood, people would talk. It was different in Australia, they knew, but here.

And Mum said, very calm, the way she talks to doctors at her hospital when they're wrong, "In our house the rules are the same for both of them. Arjun can go. Maya can go."

And Great-Aunt said, "This is not your house."

The kitchen went quiet.

And I looked at Nani. Nani was at the table. Nani, who yelled "That's my Maya!" through the net at the save, who wrote "Nobody eats last" on our fridge before I was born, Mum told me, in her own handwriting. Nani had the end of her sari pulled up over her head, over her hair, like a hood. She's been doing that since we got here, whenever Great-Uncle Mahendra comes in the room, or the old men from next door. I'd never seen her do it at home. Not once. And at meals here she doesn't sit down. She stands with the aunties and serves the men and the boys first, and then us, and then she eats last, standing up at the bench, the way Mum says she used to, a long time ago, before the fridge.

She didn't say anything. She was looking at her hands.

I went back outside and sat on the step and wrote in Grandpa's notebook: Great-Aunt: "This is not your house." And then: Nani, nothing. And then I sat there in the heat with the red dust drying on my legs and felt like I was going to cry, and I didn't know if I was mad at Nani or sad for her, and I still don't.

---

Priti came out after.

She sat next to me on the step. She smelled like the woodsmoke from the stove and the coconut oil she puts in her braid. She looked at my legs, all the dust.

"How many did you save?"

"Four."

She nodded. Then she said, very low, "Can I come tomorrow?"

"You want to play?"

"I play," she said. "At school. At lunch. With the girls, behind the toilets. We have a ball made of plastic bags." She looked at the kitchen door. "But I can't go to the field. Not by myself. Not with the boys."

"So come with me."

She just kept looking at me. I didn't get it, and then I did. If I went, she could say she was going with me. To look after the Australian cousin. To make sure I was okay. I was the reason. I was the permission.

Mum told me about this, later, in the car. About Uncle Ronil driving her to Picnic Point in 2004 so she could watch the sun go down on the river. Mum said, "He was my hall pass." Then she laughed, but not like it was funny.

So the next day I went down the hill to the field, and Priti came with me, "to look after me." And Auntie Sangeeta watched us go from the window, and she didn't say anything, and when Great-Aunt asked where Priti was, I heard Auntie Sangeeta say, "With the Australian one. Somebody has to watch her."

Priti is good. Priti is really good. She played barefoot in her school skirt, out on the wing, and she was faster than Vikash, and she scored twice, once off a pass from Akash, who didn't even look surprised, like she'd always been there. The boys didn't say anything about it. They just played. At the end, all of us were lying in the shade under the mango tree with our slippers, red to the knees, and Vikash threw Priti a mango from the tree without looking, and she caught it one-handed.

"Keeper hands," I said.

"Pilot hands," she said.

---

On our last night, it rained at three, like always, and then it stopped, and the frogs started. Priti and I sat on the front step after dinner in the dark. The mill chimney had its two red lights on. The ship at the wharf was lit up like a building. Somebody down the hill had a radio going, an old song, a man singing very high and sad over a harmonium, and the whole hill smelled like wet dirt and smoke and mangoes, rotting a little, sweet, in the ditch.

I gave her my gloves. My orange ones. They're my old ones, from when I was eight, I've got new ones at home, black ones. I brought these just in case. They're too small for me now. They fit her almost perfectly.

She put them on and held her hands up in front of her face, in the dark, turning them, looking at them.

"I'll fly to Sydney," she said. "And then you can show me your field."

"Our field has nets."

"Real nets?"

"Real nets."

She laughed. She wrote her name in Grandpa's notebook, at the back, in her own handwriting, very neat, and under it: *Captain.*

The next morning at five-fifteen I heard the sweeping again. I went out on the step. Priti was in the yard in the gray light, making lines in the dirt with the broom made of sticks.

She had the gloves on.

Arjun: Rarawai

*Ba, Fiji, December 2027*

I'd been building that train for six years by the time I saw the real one, and the first thing I thought was that we'd gotten the color wrong.

It wasn't green. It had been green, once. Now it was a kind of no-color, the green worn down to gray-brown under a crust of soot and molasses and red dust, so it looked less like a machine than like something that had grown out of the ground. It was small. Smaller than I'd pictured, even after all that time with Nani's hands held apart in Grandpa's garage. It was idling on a siding at the edge of the Rarawai mill yard, ticking, breathing out heat, and behind it were forty cane cars heaped so high with cut cane that the stalks stuck out over the sides and drooped and dragged, and every one of them was black with ash.

Nani stood next to me at the fence. She was sixty-nine. She'd drawn the end of her sari up over her hair when we got out of the van, the way she'd been doing all week, and it made her look like a different person, smaller and older and from somewhere else. Which I guess she was.

"Like hair," I said.

"Like hair," she said. "I told you."

---

I was fifteen. I want to be honest about what fifteen was like on that trip, because Maya's already told her side and she was twelve and saw everything clearly, the way twelve-year-olds do. At fifteen nothing is clear. At fifteen you're mostly embarrassed.

What I was embarrassed by, mostly, was how much I liked it.

In Lautoka the boy cousins took me everywhere. Vikash, who was sixteen and had a motorbike he wasn't technically allowed to ride with a passenger, and his friends, who were all named something that sounded like a cousin even when they weren't. They took me down the hill to the seawall in the evenings, where the whole town walked after dark when the heat came off, families and couples and old men in pairs, along the edge of the harbor with the water black and slapping at the rocks and the ships lit up at the wharf. There were carts selling roasted corn and peanuts in paper cones and shaved ice heaped in paper cups and soaked in red syrup. Nobody asked where we were going. Nobody asked when we'd be back. We came up the hill at eleven, at midnight, and the house was dark and the doors were open for the breeze, and we went to bed.

Maya was asleep by then. Or in the kitchen. Or on the step with Priti, both of them looking down the hill at the lights.

I knew. I wasn't stupid. I'd grown up with the list on our fridge, I'd been reading it since before I could read, I'd split the roti with her at nine. I knew exactly what was happening. And I went to the seawall anyway, every night, and ate the red ice, and rode on the back of Vikash's bike with my arms out, and loved it. Because it was easy. Because everybody wanted me to. Because nobody, not one person in Lautoka except my own mother, thought it was wrong.

---

On the fourth day we drove to Ba, to Nani's farm.

The Queens Road goes north from Lautoka with the cane on both sides, so tall it closes the road into a green hallway, and every so often a gap where they'd already cut, the stubble black and smoking. The hills inland were dry, gold-brown, with dark folds, and Nani looked at them out the van window the way Grandpa looks at the bush behind his house on Kurrajong Street. We crossed the Ba River on the bridge, wide and brown and slow, with boys swimming off the bank, and on the far side was the mill.

The Rarawai mill is huge. I'd built it out of cardboard, and I'd gotten the chimney right, mostly, but not the size of it. Iron sheds the length of a football field, rusted at the seams. Conveyor belts climbing at angles. Steam coming out of places you couldn't see, hissing. The noise, a deep grinding underneath everything, like the ground itself was chewing. And the smell. The smell was the thing. Burned sugar and wet grass and molasses, so thick in the air you could taste it on your lips, sweet and bitter at once, and under it something sour, like old fruit.

Nani's nephew Kamal runs the farm now, on the Nailaga side, eleven acres on the same lease. His son Avinesh is twenty-two and works at the mill, in the locomotive shed. And that's how I ended up in the cab.

He met us at the yard gate in orange overalls and boots, grinning, and talked to the driver of the engine on the siding, an old Fijian man named Jone with a gray beard and a cap pulled low, and the two of them looked at me and laughed about something, and then Jone waved me up.

The cab was so hot I couldn't breathe for the first minute. Iron everywhere, levers worn silver by hands, gauges with cracked glass, a seat with the stuffing coming out. Jone let me stand next to him. He put my hand on a lever, his hand over mine, big and dry and calloused, and pushed, and the engine moved. Slowly. With a jerk, and a bang down the line as each car took up the slack, one after the other, bang bang bang bang, like somebody dropping a suitcase down a long flight of stairs. Exactly like Grandpa said the Enfield yard sounded at night. I'd never understood what he meant. I did now.

We went about two hundred yards, to the end of the siding, and stopped.

"Two hundred yards," I said, mostly to myself.

Jone looked at me. "Your nani's brother used to jump on this line," he said. "At the bend by the Votua crossing. All the boys did. Fifty years ago. My father used to chase them off."

"Did you ever see a girl do it?"

He thought about it, seriously. "Once," he said. "One time. My father talked about it for a week."

I didn't tell him who it was. I don't know if it was her. I like to think it was.

---

Great-Uncle Naresh was seventy-one. He was the one with the big ears and no top teeth from the video calls, and in person he was all bones and sun, with a white mustache and a laugh that took over his whole body, and he sat on the front step of the farmhouse in an undershirt and a sulu with his knees up, like he'd been sitting there since 1975.

I asked him if I could record him. I asked properly. I said why. He laughed for about a minute and then said, "Yes, yes, record, record, put my name, Naresh Chandra, and say I was handsome."

So I recorded him telling about the cane train. He told it the way Nani did, almost the same words, the cars like bathtubs, the hair, and then he told the part she hadn't. He said, "My sister rode once. Urmila. She was eleven."

"I know. She told me."

"Did she tell you what our grandmother did?"

"She washed her. With the yellow soap."

Naresh stopped laughing. He looked out at the cane, at the mango trees behind the house, three of them, old, heavy with fruit, exactly where Nani had made me draw them on the butcher paper.

"I was sitting here," he said. "Right here, on this step. Eating a mango. Watching. And I didn't say anything." He shook his head. "Fifteen years old. I could have said something. Nobody would have washed me." He rubbed his knee. "Put that in. That I didn't say anything."

I put it in.

---

That night there was kava. Kamal set the bowl out on the mat under the rain tree at the corner of the yard, and the men from the next farms came, and the uncles, and Uncle Ronil.

I want to tell this part carefully, because I love Uncle Ronil.

At home, Uncle Ronil is the guy who does everything. He's at every one of Maya's games. He braids Kavya's hair, badly. He cooks on Sundays, the only uncle on that side who does. He's the one who told me, when I was twelve and some kid at school said something about Maya, that you always, always back up your sister, because he hadn't, enough, and he still felt it.

In Ba, by the third night, Uncle Ronil sat down at the kava bowl after dinner and didn't get up until midnight.

He didn't clear a plate. He didn't carry a pot. When Mum brought out the tea he took the glass without looking at her. He laughed with his head back with the uncles, the way Mum says Grandpa Harish used to, and he talked about cane prices in a country he hadn't lived in since he was one, and the men loved him. "Harish's son," they kept saying. "Look, Harish's boy." He looked happy. He looked like he'd come home to something.

Behind them the kitchen was lit up yellow, and through the window I could see all the women at the stove and the sink, the aunties, Mum, Nani with her sari over her head, Maya drying plates with her jaw set like a door. Doing what they'd been doing since five.

I went out to the edge of the cane at around eleven. The night was hot and loud, frogs and insects and the radio somebody had on in the next farm, and far off, across the river, the two red lights on the mill chimney. Out past the next farm, somebody had set a field on fire for the morning's cutting. You could see it from where I stood, a long low line of orange, crackling, with the smoke going up black against the stars and the smell of it coming across the dark: burned sugar, the smell from the train in Grandpa's garage, the smell of the ash I'd painted on with a brush when I was nine.

Uncle Ronil came out to pee. He saw me and came over.

"Hey, man," he said. "You good?"

"You didn't wash anything," I said.

He laughed. Then he stopped. He looked at the fire across the field for a while.

"No," he said.

"You always wash. At home."

"I know."

"So why?"

He scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. He smelled like kava, earthy and peppery. "Because it's easy," he said. "That's the whole thing, Arjun. It's so easy here. You just sit down, and they bring you everything, and everybody's happy you're there, and nobody wants anything from you except that you laugh at the jokes. It's like falling asleep in a warm bath." He looked at the house. "I was like this till I was twenty. Then your mum met your dad, and he was so bad at all of it, and so nice about being bad at it, and I thought, man, I've been asleep in the bath my whole life."

"So get out of the bath."

He looked at me. He laughed again, short. "When did you get like this?"

"I've been like this since I was nine."

"Yeah," he said. "I guess you have."

He went back toward the house. He didn't go to the kava bowl. He went to the kitchen door.

---

I went in after him. I didn't plan to. I just did.

The kitchen was a furnace. The big aluminum pots were stacked by the outdoor sink, and Maya was there with Priti, and Nani was there, and Uncle Ronil had his sleeves pushed up and was scrubbing the biggest pot, turning it around and around under the tap, the way Mum says she used to at Uncle Jagan's in Hammondville.

I picked up the next one.

The aunties all stopped. One of them, Kamal's wife, laughed so loud the men at the kava bowl turned to look. "Look at this one!" she said. "The Australian boy wants to be a wife!"

Uncle Ronil looked up at me over the steam. I saw him hear it. I saw him remember something.

"Yeah," he said, to her, cheerfully, scrubbing. "He gets it from me."

I washed the pot. I wasn't good at it. The pot was bigger than my torso and the water was cold and there was burned rice welded onto the bottom. Nani watched me, with her sari over her hair. She didn't say anything.

Then Kamal's wife stopped laughing. She looked at me, and at Uncle Ronil, and at Nani, for a long time. And then she took a scrubber off the shelf, one of the green ones, and handed it to me.

"Not that one," she said. "That one is for the plates. Use this."

So I used that one.

Out across the dark, the field kept burning. In the morning they would cut it, and the trucks and the trains would carry it to Rarawai, and it would go through the crushers and the boilers and come out the other end as raw brown sugar and go down to the wharf at Lautoka and onto a ship and away. Avinesh said nobody at the mill knew where. Everywhere, he said. It stayed with me all the way home, and it's with me still. I think that's maybe what I'm going to do.

Maya: Flowering

*Casula, 2036*

I came home in September, at the start of spring, with a jammed thumb from the university championships in Brisbane and a biomechanics exam on Monday, and the first thing Nani said when I walked into her kitchen was, "You are too thin. What do they feed goalkeepers in Brisbane? Air?"

I was twenty-one. I'd been the starting keeper for my university for two seasons and for a women's club in the state league for one. I'd been flown to Perth and Adelaide and once to Auckland, where I let in two goals and got sunburned on the backs of my knees, and I'd been on television for eleven seconds, diving, which Uncle Ronil recorded and played at his smash repair shop on a loop for a month. None of this impressed Nani in the slightest. She sat me at her table and put down a plate of roti and pumpkin and dhal and stood over me until I ate it, the way she has stood over everybody in this family for sixty years.

Then she sat down across from me with her own plate. She does that now. It took her twenty-four years, but she does it.

---

Here's where everybody was that spring, because it's my chapter and I get to say.

Nani was seventy-eight. She still lived two streets over, in the house with the gate Grandpa fixed in 2014, which has never sagged since. She still drove, at exactly the speed limit, with both hands on the wheel, to the shop on Moore Street on Thursdays, where Auntie Vimla's daughter runs the counter now. She still put a flower in the frame over the stove every morning before her tea. When I was home I sometimes did it for her, a sprig of wattle or a camellia from the bush by the letterbox, and she let me, and neither of us ever said why. I don't think it means to me what it means to her. I don't think it has to. I just like the first thing in the house every morning being a flower.

Grandpa was eighty-three. He walked with a stick now, a good one, ironbark with a steel tip that clicked on the footpath, and he still walked it every Saturday down Kurrajong Street and over to Nani's, at ten, with no toolbox anymore but with a list in his shirt pocket of things he'd noticed that needed fixing and would tell Arjun about. He'd filled two hundred and ninety-one notebooks. The last few were mostly things Kavya said, and things I said on the phone, and things Nani said, a lot of them. He showed me one in August. U: "You are not old, Dale. You are only slow. Old is a choice."

Arjun was twenty-three and living in Queensland, in a fibro house on stilts outside Mackay with cane fields on three sides, working as a process engineer at a sugar mill. The mill has its own little railway, two-foot gauge, with locomotives that haul the cut cane in from the farms in long lines of small iron bins, the stalks sticking out every side. He sent Nani a video of one the first week, at dusk, with the cane fires going in the distance, and she watched it eleven times. When he came down to Sydney he smelled faintly of molasses. Nani would sniff his collar like a dog and say, "Rarawai," and he'd say, "Different mill, Nani," and she'd say, "Same smell."

Uncle Ronil was forty-nine and had two shops now, the one in Prestons and a new one in Liverpool, near the factory where Papa Harish used to work. Kavya was eighteen and leaving for university in Wollongong in February, and he was not handling it well. Aunt Jen was fifty-seven and retired from the court and living in a terrace in Marrickville with a woman named Lorraine who grew roses, and she drove out once a fortnight and still typed what everybody said, though now she claimed it was a hobby.

And Priti was a cadet pilot with the national airline in Nadi. She'd sent me a picture in July from a simulator, in a white shirt with a single stripe on the shoulder, with my orange gloves sitting on the dashboard of the fake cockpit next to the throttle. No caption. She didn't need one.

---

The reason I'm telling this part is the book.

That's what we call it, the family, though it isn't a book. It's the part of the family pages where everybody's small moments get put together into a story of each person, in order, from everything they ever kept and everything anybody ever said about them. Dad started it, and Aunt Jen did the typing for years, and Arjun did the recordings, and after a while it was just everybody, adding things. Grandpa's has been done for ages; he read it in 2017 and argued with it, Mum says, for a week. Mum's has her diary in it, the backward pages turned frontward. Mine has the save in the mud at eight, from three different people, all of whom remember it differently.

Nani's had never been finished. She wouldn't let it be. "Not yet," she'd say, every year. "Mine is not finished."

Then last summer, in January, I asked her, on her back step, in the evening, when the heat was coming off and the flying foxes were going over, if she'd tell me the beginning. Properly. From the start. And I asked if I could record it, and why. I said, "Because the stories aren't finished until somebody hears them." I don't even know where I got that. I think I made it up. She looked at me over her glasses, and she said, "You say that like a girl who has never once been told no."

"I've been told no."

"By who?"

"Coaches. Referees. You."

"I don't count," she said. And then: "Okay. Start the thing."

She told it for two hours, on the step, while it got dark and the cicadas wound down and the possums started up in the roof next door. Ba, 1975. The mango trees. The cane train. Her grandmother, the yellow soap. Her mother, eating last under the picture. Mr. Lal and the teachers' college. The gray car with the green door. Grandpa Harish's big hands. The fast, and the moon. And then, at the end, when it was full dark and I could only see her by the kitchen light behind her, she told me about climbing the tree.

The night before the engagement. In her nightdress. Barefoot. To the top, where the branches were thin. The mango she ate up there, skin and all. The seed she threw out over the cane toward the river.

"Nobody ever knew," she said. "Not my mother. Not your grandfather. Not in thirty-three years."

I didn't say anything. I was afraid to move in case she stopped.

"Okay," she said. "That one is finished. Bring me my cardigan. The mosquitoes have found me."

---

So in September, the week I came home, Mum finished putting it together. Nani's book. The exercise books, the lemon notebooks, the recordings, Grandpa's notebook lines about her, Aunt Jen's transcript of Christmas 2010, Arjun's cane train and the butcher-paper map of Ba, the list on our fridge with number seven, "Nobody eats last," in her own handwriting. Her whole life, in her words, in order.

She read it on Saturday, at her kitchen table, on the tablet, with her reading glasses and a glass of tea. Grandpa was there too, by the window, his stick across his knees. Mum was at the stove, which is the only time in her life I've seen Mum at Nani's stove while Nani sat. I sat across the table. I was supposed to be studying biomechanics. I didn't study anything.

She read for three hours. She didn't skip. Every so often she'd stop and say something.

"This is wrong," she said, at one point. "I did not say 'the length of time it takes a mango to fall.' I said 'from the top branch.' The top branch matters. It's further."

Mum fixed it.

At another point she laughed out loud, by herself, and wouldn't tell us why.

At another point she stopped for a long time, at the page with Arjun's birth. *First grandson. Nobody sent sweets to forty houses. Good.* She touched the screen, the scan of her own pencil, very lightly, with two fingers, the way Aunt Jen says she touched the door frames in Belfield.

When she got to the tree, she read it twice. Then she took off her glasses.

"It says I felt free," she said.

"That's what you said," I said. "On the step. You said you felt free."

"I said I could see over the cane," she said. "That is not the same thing. Free is a word for later. Up there, I felt the ants." She put her glasses back on. "Put the ants."

So I put the ants. I typed it myself, on her tablet, at her table, with her watching every letter: *Ants went over my hands. I could see over the cane.* She read it. She nodded once.

"Better," she said.

Grandpa, by the window, had his notebook out. He was writing. I could see the pen moving.

"What are you writing?" Nani said, not looking.

"'Free is a word for later,'" Grandpa said.

"That's mine."

"I know," he said. "I'm citing my source."

---

The mango tree was on the patio, in the sunny corner by the fence, on Grandpa's trolley, where Arjun and I had rolled it out from under the verandah on the first of September. It's huge now. Over three meters. Nani's had it repotted four times since the blue pot. The trolley's had its casters replaced twice; the second time Arjun did it, with Grandpa directing from a camp chair. The trunk is as thick as my wrist. The leaves are long and dark and shiny, and every spring the new ones come in red and hang down soft as wet cloth. It's forty-eight years old.

It had never flowered. Not once. "Too cold," Nani said, every year. "A mango remembers July." Every year we rolled it out anyway.

On Sunday morning, the day after she finished her book, I got up early because I couldn't sleep, and I walked over to Nani's at six. The whole suburb was still. The sun was just coming up over the bush along the river, and the light came sideways through the gum trees and lay on the wet roofs in long gold stripes. The wattle on the corner was out, so yellow it looked switched on. The magpies were carolling from the power lines, that wobbly, liquid sound, and somewhere a kookaburra started and gave up. Everything was wet with dew. The air smelled of eucalyptus and cut grass and the river.

Nani was already on her back step. In her long cardigan and her shawl, with her tea, in her canvas sneakers, sitting with her knees together, looking at the tree.

I came through the gate, which latched behind me, and I stopped.

At the end of one of the high branches, at the top, there was something new. Not a leaf. A spray of tiny flowers, standing up off the end of the branch like a little pale yellow-green feather duster, a hundred flowers maybe, each one smaller than a grain of rice, and wet with dew. Just one. Only the one.

I didn't say anything. I sat down next to her on the step.

We looked at it for a long time. Up close it smelled faintly sweet and faintly sour, like the inside of a peel. A bee was already on it, crawling. Where it had come from at that hour, I couldn't guess.

"It won't fruit," Nani said finally. "Not here. One flower. A cold night will take it."

"Probably."

"Probably the westerly will knock it off."

"Probably."

She drank her tea. Then she reached over, without looking, and took my hand, my left one, the one with the jammed thumb, and held it on her knee. Her hand was small and dry and warm and had the shiny white burn scar across the back that she's had since before Mum was born.

"Don't put it in yet," she said. "Let's see if it stays."

So I didn't. I'm putting it in now, a week later, from a team hotel in Canberra, with the heater rattling and frost on the car park, because it stayed. Mum sent me a picture this morning. It's still there. More of it now. Three sprays, at the top, where only the bees go.

Grandpa walked over to look on Monday, with his stick. Mum says he stood at the fence for ten minutes. Then he took out his notebook and wrote something down, and showed it to Nani, and she read it and said, "That's not what I said," and he said, "It's what you meant," and she let it stay.