Sunil Badami

From "allergic" - a novel in progress

My Father's Stories

    Sometimes, in an expansive mood, forgetting his oath and ethics, my father would tell us stories from his long and distinguished career. Despite his absent-mindedness that summer, he was still able — even then, before he was carried away — to tell some good stories, cradled in our mother’s good food and his whiskey on the veranda after dinner. As he always reminded us, he may have been terrible with names, but he always remembered faces, and beneath their skin, their stories.
    They were always good stories, and there were many; but eventually he’d be stung from his warm reveries by the ravenous mosquitoes.
    There was the young girl who grew a third ear in the back of her neck; the woman who spoke in foreign accents, even though she’d never left the District; the man who lost his face in the wilds of Borneo; the twins, joined at the rectum, whom he’d delicately treated for diarrhoea and broken hearts; the man who grew allergic to his wife; and a myriad of others.
    One might find them hard to believe today, but my father wasn’t a man given to deliberate untruths.
    He was a big man, he had big hands. The veins that cabled his arms were enormous, covered in thick black hair. In later years I’d often wonder how he was able to practise with such hands, more suited to sailing or wrestling than surgery.
    My father was a dark man. He did intimate to us once that when he was younger — before he became a doctor, before he met and married our mother — he’d been a sailor, among other things; enjoying a wealth of experiences before he became the respected pillar of society he was then, before he was carried away. He never really told us about those times, preferring to share instead the case histories he found most interesting. They’re educational, he’d say, the other stuff is boring. My brother, painfully silent that summer, didn’t much care for either. But I loved them, and always wanted to hear more, even as the night air got chilly and our mother called us in for bed.
    Often when I was younger, I imagined we’d all be swallowed up by his big boa arms and dark brown rumbling laugh. We’re small like our mother, but I’m dark like my father. Maybe that’s why he’d wink at me conspiratorially from time to time and remind me that, like him, I too was “shady”. A touch of the tar brush, he’d say almost proudly, and in a town like ours, it was no mean feat to admit it.

Case History No. One: Tergo-Collitic Cochleitis (The Girl Who Grew an Ear in the Back of her Neck)

    Once there was a young girl (my father would begin, bemused) who had the misfortune of being born with three ears. I say (he said) misfortune because in the early stages, the ear took on the features and symptoms of a cyst or abscess in the back of her head.
    She presented to me at the clinic with her mother, complaining of acute pain, chronic sleeplessness and suffering the additional trauma of being teased by her classmates about the strange appearance of the ‘cyst’ — as it was labelled then in early prognoses — which leaked a thick, viscousy mucus; or vibrated when she raised her right arm.
    It’d gotten to the stage where she was being forced by her classmates to stand in a corner of the schoolyard and raise her arms up and down, up and down for the duration of the lunch period, causing her severe discomfort.
    After initially unsuccessful attempts at draining the cyst, I decided on further tests, including an ultrasound in Borrigal. They’d just gotten the machine and Sister Una Baker was eager to try it out.
    Anyway, when the results came back suggesting the possibility of a cochlea and ear drum in the back of her head, I knew that we had two possibilities: either to treat the ear infection she had in the back of her head with drops; or else consider the ear’s removal.
    In many such cases, an extra finger or toe is an impediment, rather than a gift; as it turns out, that ear was actually dysfunctional. When we cleared up the infection, she reported hearing voices, that’d rush in towards her and then fade away. Fly around all over insider her. They didn’t speak any language she knew, she couldn’t really understand them, but they frightened her. She got bad dreams, she couldn’t sleep at all in the end. She couldn’t hold the secrets they filled her up with. In the end, she was like a cracked cup, and we decided in the end to fix her handle. We ended up sowing up the ear (he noted, with a little scientific regret, given that he’d named her condition “tergo-collitic cochleitis”), though it would’ve been useless if she’d put her collar up anyway. I suppose sometimes, you can be more deaf with three ears, than with none at all. Even the two you have. Are you listening?
    (For a respected, rather than philosophical man, my father was liable to philosophical musings such as the one above, especially after dinner. I’ve found this to be true in my adulthood as well, for after three or so drinks, one is prone to questions one wouldn’t consider in the normal course of things.)

    Although we didn’t know much about his life before he became a doctor and married our mother after a whirlwind romance, we did know that she, in much scandal, left her fiancé for my father as he passed through on a plane.
    The fact he’d been a flying doctor suggested something as romantic as a pioneering aviator, but my father insisted he was merely a passenger. From that day, his first and only flight, he suffered from severe vertigo. This was corroborated by our mother, who always had to clean the gutters due to the severity of his condition.
    But despite this, my father was still a very capable, upstanding man. It was his only weakness — as far as I can remember — at that stage, before he was carried away.
    He was well-respected in the community, and his many contributions were well-noted and regarded. I felt proud when people from old Earl in Top Pub to Matey at the General Stores regarded me with the conferred respect of the Doctor’s Family. An extra lolly at the shops, a kind word from someone; these all meant as much to me as if I’d earned them myself.
    We lived in a beautiful tree-lined street. There were only four streets in town, but ours was the prettiest. The trees were thick and green, with fingers that smelled of earth and water. Often our parents would find me asleep in the crooked lap of the big banyan at the front of the house, rubbing my childish cheek against its barky stubble. My father, due to his condition, unable to get me out, would call for my mother, and she’d soundlessly swing into the branches to carry me down, my face speckled with tree dreams.
    My hair would be covered in its leaves, my pockets full of its fruit. My fingernails caked underneath with the wet soft tree skin. If you “sniffed my fingers”  you’d be able to smell where I’d been (no, not the river, I know I’m not allowed there) and what I’d been doing (yes, I won these marbles fair and square) and other, other things important to me at the time. Of course, sniffing a child’s fingers is foolish to grown-ups, especially before dinner, and of course, I was made to wash my hands thoroughly. Not all the dirt could be scrubbed away, though, and I was always trying to excuse its tenacious grip under my small, ragged fingernails.
    Although my father would often wink at our mischief where our mother might scold us, he was extremely particular about cleanliness. These things are important, he’d say, and it was only in regard to cleanliness that he was ever strict with us, insisting we were always neatly pressed and dressed. Sometimes, embarrassingly, the same. Shiny shoes show good character, he’d always remind us, and no-one’s shoes were shinier than his.
    My father was a man who had his own napkin ring, even then, when most men in our town would eat their tea in their vests. He’d insist on drinks before dinner, and sometimes after as well, which is when we got to hear his many stories. It’s due to my father’s influence in relation to cleanliness, preciseness and manners, that I’ve grown up to be who I am today.
    Our town wasn’t big like Borrigal. Everybody in our town knew everybody, and most knew everybody else’s business. We had a school, a general store, a hairdresser’s and a milk-bar, a small church and three pubs — Top, Middle and the Down, which summarised the town perfectly: the itinerant workers who came for the summer to help bring in spawning prawns from the Spit, or the jackaroos that worked with stock in the hills, drank and brawled in the Down Pub (the Lansdowne); the small land-holders, beneficiaries of the Digger’s Grants bestowed after the war, and the shop owners, would drink and gossip in Middle Pub (the Criterion), looking enviously on at the shimmering lights of Top Pub (the Royal Oak), membership of which was limited to the likes of my father; Mr Ferguson, the Solicitor; or Mr Fulbright, the biggest squatter in the District.
    Even Constable Hudson only ever drank in Middle Pub, though he did occasionally enjoy a complimentary lemon squash if he ever wandered into Top Pub while on duty. Looking back now, I wonder how old Earl the publican ever made any money, given the exclusivity of his clientele, but he always kept his establishment immaculate, and like his wife, Mrs Earl, was always expansive and generous, wearing loud batik shirts his son sent him from Hong Kong. My brother and I, being the Doctor’s Children, always enjoyed a bag of crisps and a lemon squash out of a schooner glass on the way home from school, courtesy of Earl and Mrs Earl.
    It was a measure of the esteem that my father enjoyed that he had a bottle of Famous Grouse reverentially kept for him on Top Pub’s top shelf; and that the “Doc’s Bottle” was only ever served to my father — not that it would have necessarily bothered the other patrons, who, like the patrons of the other pubs, usually only drank beer — unless their wives were away visiting relatives or shopping in Sydney, when they’d drink rum till their eyes watered.
    Our town really wasn’t by the sea, but we lived near the shores of a lake that connected to the sea on the other side. And sometimes the water was really salty after a big wash, and I remember being bitten by sea lice, so then, from a child’s perspective, for all intensive purposes, we lived by the sea. Like my father, I’m not a person given to deliberate untruths, I assure you.
    Our mother loved the sea: for her, it was an infinite, shimmering expanse of possibilities. My father, though tall and strong, and despite having inferred he’d once been a sailor, was not much of a swimmer. That, and the way he wore the pleasure of our mother’s cooking around his waist, comfortably and contentedly, meant he never did much more than wave to us from the picnic blanket, while we drifted further out.
    Our mother, though small, had a grace and unfathomable energy that enabled her to rescue me from trees and my brother from deep currents in the sea. It was she who’d wanted to move near the ocean, and later on, in that terrible summer before everything happened, she’d spend more and more time out on the dunes past the Big Lake, looking out to the inscrutable sea, the echoing breeze calling back to her in rhymes of cold shells and deep water.
    Although we are small like our mother, people have always commented on how much I take after my father in both looks and disposition. Where my father was an egregious, ebullient man, our mother was gentle and reserved. In many ways, our mother was the perfect foil for my father, in relation to some of his more pronounced eccentricities (which, I hasten to add, did not fully reveal themselves until that summer).
    Our mother was a quiet woman, whose poise seemed much like the meaning conveyed by the silence between words. She who taught me how to climb trees and stand on my head and do somersaults, though it was in the kitchen that you could taste a sense of our mother’s grace, arranged artfully on a plate.
    I never knew much about our mother’s past and early life, either. It seems as if the moment of their meeting was the point at which, like caterpillars, our parents cast off their pasts, and changed into the people they were when we knew them. I am not sure if this change was as glamorous for our mother as it is for a caterpillar transformed into a butterfly; but in most of the time our parents were together, it was an entirely satisfactory arrangement.
    Sometimes, by the window near the sink, her hands steeped in washing, a lock of hair splashed on her forehead, I’d see our mother suddenly look out the window, looking but not looking. Even then, I knew she wasn’t looking at the back garden or the shed, but somewhere else, somewhere I’d never been. She wouldn’t be aware of me standing there for many many moments, and after a while, she’d hum a soft, tuneless tune I didn’t recognise. Even now, despite hearing it many many times (with increasing frequency in that summer before my father was carried away), I’m still unable to describe it. Wisps of it flit through me, like angel hair on a windy day, and though I might grasp a note here and there, it is soon lost.

Case History No. Twelve: Post-Embolism Foreign Accent Syndrome (The Woman Who Spoke in Foreign Accents)

    Once there was a woman (my father would begin, bemused) who started speaking in a foreign accent, despite having never left town. It happened after she’d suffered a stroke which left her unable to talk for a few months. At first we thought she might not talk again: she seemed like a blackboard with the words roughly rubbed out. She knew what she wanted to say, but the words were lost to her, as though they’d been misplaced under the couch or fallen behind the refrigerator. You could see the frustration in her face — as in all post-stroke patients’ — as she rummaged around in the empty corners of her brain for the simplest expressions or phrases: for a while all she could say was “dog.” Imagine asking for a cup of tea and it all coming out as “Dog’d dog dog dog dog dog dog, dog.” We thought she might be a lost cause, although her husband sat next to her all day for weeks, trying to understand what she might be saying... he said later after her new symptoms had started manifesting themselves that he’d never understood her better than when she said nothing  but “dog”: he appreciated the eloquence of her silence.
    When I visited her for a routine check-up, her husband was greatly excited, telling me that she had started to speak again, but that she was “torkin’ funny.” I told him to expect that her speech would be a little wrinkled and creased after all that time away, her voice would be crackly, her teeth unwieldy around all those words, all of a sudden dusty and stuck with lint. However, more remarkable than her new-found speech was the way it sounded. It had more than a few wrinkles in it: she sounded like a South African woman, even though she’d never been there, never even left the District.
    You know my own talent for accents (my father continued, even though my brother groaned at the thought of another of his impersonations, I always enjoyed them — he’d often interrupt his story to do the Indian or the Cowboy to my delight), but I was amazed at the accuracy of this woman’s accent: her “r”s rolled like the Serengeti, her “a”s were flat and barren, her “e”s were clipped and ridge backed.
    My prognosis was that due to some peripheral damage in the speech and language areas of the brain, it was reasonable to expect some flattening of the vowel sounds. It was simply a case of lack of practice, after her silence for all this time. But it was extraordinary: although she didn’t use any Afrikaner words, she had all the inflections of an Afrikaner. I gave her some exercises to strengthen the muscles in her tongue and jaws, although I wasn’t sure how they might work... I told her I’d check on her the following fortnight to see how she was going.
    You can imagine my surprise when her husband told me sadly that while she’d stopped speaking with a Boer accent, she’d started speaking “like a Frog, Doc,” he said with a dismayed look on his face. Of course, she wasn’t croaking, but her consonants elided silkily, as though they were swooning on the chaise-longue of her tongue. I changed the exercises and told her I’d see her again in a fortnight.
    Of course, the only change the following visit was that she spoke in yet another accent, this time a clipped, precise German bark. It was as if her mouth had become the transit terminal of an international airport, and that while she spoke like a foreigner, she had become one to her husband.
    (I should briefly interrupt to point out that while my father didn’t often discuss his past, it was inferred that he’d been quite well-travelled before he met and married our mother and became the staunch pillar of society as I like to remember him before he was carried away. It was natural then, that he’d be able to identify the afflicted woman’s different accents, as opposed to those at the Middle or Down Pubs who believed the world was divided into “Us” and “Wogs”. And “Blackfellas”, as they called the tribe down the creek. Although my father appreciated the wonders of the great world beyond the Big Lake, he instilled in me a greater appreciation of home, of the easy familiarity of a small town like ours. Although there were times when, younger and more impetuous, I sometimes thought of leaving as others did, I could never bring myself to do it. Sometimes I wonder if I might have enjoyed seeing the wonders of the world as much as I did reading about them, but the comforts of home soon disabused me of such fancies.)
    In the end (my father continued), the woman spoke in so many different accents that it seemed to her husband that the house had become like the Tower of Babel, filled with the cacophony of different voices, each stranger than the week before. When she started to speak in a Japanese accent, he spent three days in the pub, out of his mind with memories of the war...  it was the talk of the town for a while, the way he’d sit silently down at Middle Pub, talking to anyone, talking to no-one, just talking, and immersing himself in a sea of drawls like a hot swimmer on a burning day, his eyes often closed with the pleasure of such laconic vowels...
    Soon, his wife, seeing that he was falling out of love with her, stopped talking herself, afraid of the effect of her affected speech, and he returned to the comforting silence of his home, to bring her cups of tea, undisturbed except for the occasional sound of the floor boards breathing beneath them. They decided then, they’d write each other notes from pads they wore around their necks — apparently, you never heard them argue after that — but of course, you’d never know. They always incinerated their conversations in the morning. Matey at the General Store loved her because all she did was hand him her shopping list, never holding him up on busy mornings with gossip (apart from the odd discreet note from time to time)...
    In the end, the silent couple (as they’d become) ended up celebrating their golden anniversary, more in love than ever. Had a big shindig down the School Hall, filled it to the rafters with descendants and lamingtons. You could see how close they’d become in all those years of silence together, as though their binding silence had helped them understand each other so much more. All their children and grand-children and even the great-grandson all clamoured for a speech, which the old man scrawled on the blackboard at the back of the Hall:

“Silence is Golden.”

    They all applauded and cheered, thinking it the funniest thing they’d seen. But by all accounts, it wasn’t a very rowdy party, said my father, suddenly aware of the stern shoulders of my mother in the kitchen, as she washed up a little more loudly than usual.

* * * * *

Biography

Sunil Badami was born in Sydney, Australia. He has written for a number of publications, including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Cultural Studies Review and the prestigious literary journal Meanjin. He is currently working on his first novel, of which this is an extract.

sunilbadami@yahoo.com