A whole year would go by
before I could visit her grave. It was my first trip back to Goa. Twenty years
on, and it is still one of my two biggest regrets of moving to the United
States: I could not be there for my grandmother in her final days. Now, two
decades later, I have the opportunity to make up for the second misgiving.
My
parents named my sister after my grandmother Inacia. When my sibling had her
daughter, she named her after Adeline, my brother-in-law’s grandmother. Inacia
had passed away on my parents’ wedding anniversary and Adeline on my birthday.
A metaphor for life, then, that jubilation is not without counterpart. Though
those two matriarchs never met, they may as well have been kindred spirits for
their fierce independence and straightforwardness, qualities I already see in
my niece. Having not had the chance to grow up with my sister, on this the longest
sojourn in my ancestral homeland since having departed, perhaps it is not too
late to mitigate that shortcoming by being in the life of her daughter, the
latest addition to our family.
The
trouble with being a transnational is not simply the impossibility of existing
in multiple places at the same time, but coming to terms with knowing that life
and death happen even when one is not “there,” wherever there might be. Yes,
there was every joy to be had, this year, in watching my niece take her first
steps, utter her first words and, finally, say my name. But on the other side
of the planet, in my other life in America, Andy, a close friend, was to
succumb to a hit-and-run accident. I had to mourn from afar, again. Only, this
time, the geography was the other way around, and I wondered, again, if my
presence might have changed something, anything. Around the same time, my
godmother came to the end of her life. I was in Goa when she breathed her last,
and I wondered – if I had the choice – if I would have chosen to be elsewhere. But
how would that change the grief I felt? It was becoming only too clear, that
while I had lost loved ones before, I was at that point in my life where the
space between those losses might only get smaller.
A
neighbour, whose father had died not too long ago, asked about my mother who
was being treated for a recurrent illness. It was how I had found out that my
godmother had taken a turn for the worse – both women had been referred to the
same hospital. While my mother was being attended to by the doctor, I went up
to see my godmother. She had been sedated, and the family kept vigil outside
the intensive care unit. The priest had already been to administer extreme
unction. I tried not to dwell on the future and what it might hold, nor did I
want to think about how this scene may be one I might bear witness to again.
Outside,
the monsoons pelted rooftops and turned the streets the characteristic red of
Goa’s laterite soil. I recalled how my godmother would come to see me at my
grandmother’s house where my family used to stay during trips from Kuwait where
my sister and I were born. The last email I wrote Andy was to tell him about my
godmother and to share my niece’s latest exploits – he had gotten to meet her
on what was his only trip to India earlier this year. It was only after that I realized
he never got to read my message. I tried not to be angered by my neighbour’s
question, which came from a place of concern and memories of the parent she had
lost. “Your mother... Are you looking after her well?” Instead, I recalled with
shame what I had said to my uncle nearly twenty years before. It was right
before I left for America. I could not have known that it would be the last
time I would see my grandmother when I said to my father’s brother: “Take good
care of her!” My uncle, a patient man, simply replied, “Do I not?”
I
could not return to Goa when my grandmother died. It had only been a few months
since I moved to America and did not have the means. I was saddened, too, to be
absent at my niece’s birth. Instead, that November two years ago, I was doing
battle with graduate school in London while desperately missing my family in
Goa, as well as the relative warmth of the California autumn. I shared news of
the newborn with my flatmate, a fellow student of Nigerian and Ghanaian
origins. She promptly responded, “Another ogbanje!”
Our
friendship had been firmly cemented when at a conference to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the publication of Things
Fall Apart, we both remarked upon the phenomenon of changelings in Chinua
Achebe’s novel. The ogbanje of Yoruba and other Nigerian traditions are children
destined to die and be reborn in the same family; often considered malevolent,
we decided that Achebe had incorporated these babies that traverse spiritual
and physical terrains as a postcolonial metaphor. Ogbanje might symbolize the
past reincarnated, but also remade in the present – always evolving, but never
certain. Achebe’s death this year reminded my friend and me of how we related
his use of ogbanje to our own understanding of otherness in the lands we called
home – of being transnationals. Ogbanje became
our code word to refer to those we identified as having had similar
trajectories to ours: fellow travellers trying to make home in several places,
but never really at home in any one place.
That
my friend should classify my niece as an ogbanje seemed apt, named as the
little one is for her great-grandmother, born to my sister named for our grandmother.
Those names that have travelled through generations allow nostalgia to live on,
even as new memories are made and baby steps are taken. Despite the
impossibility, I will always regret not being there for those moments in life –
both of loss and gain – that happen elsewhere. But what will carry me is
knowing that the stagnancy of memory is life’s deepest well, even when life happens
in many places at the same time.
This article appears in the print and online versions of India Currents. It also appears on The Compassionate Species Project blog.
