Too much at once

There was just too much happening to her all at once. Mina walked
through the market,
absorbing the busy sights and sounds of bric-a-brac traders vying for
the attention of
distressed housewives. They, in turn, fought the fierce wind in
cashmere shawls while
gasping for breath under loaded baskets of fruit and vegetables.
Although she always
liked the prospect of coming and walking around the market, she usually
hated it as soon
as she got there. Like most things, the ideas enticing her were the
ones she tended to get
depressed about as soon as they transformed into the reality of her
life. Dreams always
proved too big to handle for a little girl like her. Today she was
trying to cope with the
concept of living with a European boyfriend. Once, this had merely been
a constant
fantasy plaguing her dutifully, but now, it was her biggest dream come
true.

She walked around the plant sellers, admiring Java palms nestling among
young ficus
shoots, tall slender bamboo stalks, neatly trimmed rounded magnolia
bushes, small 2 for
1 potlets of ivy, fresias and the usual variety of herbs. She did not
speak the language
they all spoke (not yet she told herself, not yet) but she studied the
gathering crowd
observantly, without giving away her inability to understand what they
were saying. She
noted a particular fondness for Mother-in-Law's Tongue among the crowd
of over eager
buyers. This detail struck her more keenly than any other observer. But
then this was only
her natural reaction, for she had heard disparagingly - on the occasion
of a polite little tea
party when she was introduced to a small disparate collection of
'friends' - that it was a
plant reserved for the Belgians. This dichotomy puzzled Mina - that
they hated it while
buying it in droves - and lingered in her mind, compelling her brain to
analyse the
significance of this otherwise perfunctory occurrence. It lodged
inescapably in her, a
minor point somehow now strangely mutated into a critical cultural
delineator. Arthur
had chuckled uproariously when she mentioned Mother-in-law's tongue.
This was the
name she knew it by, this was what they called it back home, for that's
what the tough
scaly tongues resembled. Callous, mean and calculating mothers nagging
newly wed
daughters-in-law about the routines they had to get used to. It
appeared to be a popular
choice among the white city dwellers. A man, visibly engorged with a
beer belly, walking
with the exhausted stoop of someone who'd unloaded rice sacks from the
big container
ships all his life, paid almost 50 guilders for one mid-sized pot, the
particular specimen
exhibiting few extraordinary features to justify the price. But his
wife was pleased. She
placed her arm in his, wrapping her brown suede jacket around her more
closely as her
chocolate-tanned breasts spilled out of a tight baby blue blouse
underneath. The man
pocketed his change and grabbed the plastic carrier bag bursting with
three sharp
pointy...stalks? Branches? She hardly knew what to call them except
tongues because
that's what they looked like. But the man didn't care what they were
called. He smoothed
the thick black twin sections of his moustache, their waxed firmness
had been slightly
unruffled when he'd opened his mouth to buy the three-tonguer. His lips
were thick, pink
undulations vibrating with the excitement of having bought something.
He would place it
on the balcony of their small apartment in the paper clip ghetto block
and his wife would
be pleased.

Mina walked away from the happiness-embedded ugly couple and their ugly
plant. Only
the plants made her happy, not all the buying and selling, nor the
loutish shouting for
customers. Everything else detracted from the pure reality of such
beautiful lush tropical
foliage. When she could have had all the plants she wanted for free -
in rainforests that
surrounded their bungalow, acres and acres of long wet grass in which
she lay reading
Little Women on languid hot afternoons sipping lemon tea - it had just
been too hot to
enjoy. Now she was trying to convince Arthur to make her a terrace
garden on their 20th
floor flat.

Much as she desperately wanted to, she wouldn't buy some small creepers
to start off her
project just yet. At least it would have given her something to do,
some lightweight
gardening to occupy her waking hours, she sighed with a tremulous tinge
of disdain.
Instead, Mina decided it wiser to wait until Arthur came down to the
market with her on
Saturday, and they could pick and choose some small types to adorn the
balcony rails,
and maybe a birds nest fern in a hanging basket for the far left corner
of the ceiling. That
way, he would spend his money on what was a household investment
purchase anyway,
and she could avoid touching the pocket money he gave her weekly. There
were many
things she wanted herself which she deftly accumulated under the list
of household
purchases, so that her meagre allowance would be better saved in case
she got into
trouble. Moreover, she added to reassure herself, it would allow him a
sense of
involvement.

The wind was picking up as Mina stood staring at rows and rows of tacky
displaced
furniture, different styles and seasons stacked together in a disguise
of belonging, an
Egyptian styled marble fireplace alongside a 70s creamily glossed
drinks tray on wobbly
wheels. The noise was intense, both the shouting by intrepid sellers
and the rapid gaggle
of foreign tongues from shrill hawkish ladies itching for bargains. The
men who sat by
their vans smoking pipes looked as if they were Eastern European,
although she could not
really be sure. She tried to discern their national origins from the
corner of her eye, in her
stealth attempting to make out some distinguishing features, but their
ruthless stares made
her shy. Secretly, she imagines what it would be like to feel one of
them inside her, lifting
her saree and shoving their tight denim crotches against her dark skin
with the forlorn
penetrative lust of itinerant street hawkers. However, the realisation
that the ordeal of
later explanation would be too shameful a prospect relegated this
fantasy to the
irreducible minimum of Definitely Not A Dream to Come True. Well, not
at this point in
time anyway. As she walked on boldly, their slithery eyes caught her.
She told herself not
to be frightened - after all, she had every right to be here, to leaf
through Ike &; Tina
Turner records, disco-era posters and coasters, and feel the airy
gnarled fabric of faded
Turkish carpets. But still, a latent sense of trepidation always
accompanied her whenever
she went out alone.

Everyone seemed to be from somewhere else, yet there was a peculiar
calm in their
intermingling, as if all the shoppers hardly noticed the difference in
their clothing, their
hairstyles, their skin and teeth and the shape of their nose and eyes.
How did they fit in
with the casual ease of fearless permanence in a place not theirs, yet
a place embraced in
justified exuberance? She meandered on through the narrow alleys
created by blocks of
temporary stalls with their wooden tables and plastic awnings. The
crowds swelled as the
lunch hour approached and officed employees grabbed the chance for
cheap buys while
they could. The entire whirlwind embattled her fragile emotions because
she could only
envision the same oppressive feel she'd felt in the Delhi bazaar.
Nothing else spoke to her
except a resonance with her past.

Mina was sweltering. The sun rose quickly once the early morning clouds
cleared,
beating down on the vast open cobbled square. Her saree was never
enough in this
unpredictable weather, and she only had the one grey wool overcoat to
huddle inside
should it pour suddenly. She never left the flat without it. But today,
it was obviously an
encumbrance inhibiting her right to breathe, constricting the desire
her skin felt for the
delicate rays of the early spring sunshine. She felt in her small cloth
coin purse for some
change. The jangling sound rattled her, and she was unsure if she
should count out the
exact amount in the middle of the packed market's bustle. But there was
nowhere quiet to
go and it would be too far to walk all the way back to the flat just to
count out her coins
in some privacy. Much as she hated others looking at her like some
uneducated,
unemployed lady using her last remaining cents to see what she could
afford, she grabbed
a fistful of coins out and held them close to her face, quickly
replacing the purse inside
the inner coat pocket. Try as she might, she was never able to
differentiate the miniscule
5, 10 and 25 cent coins from each other, despite having felt their
cloying cheapness for
almost two months now. They were just too small and delicate and she
had to resort to
separating them with her other hand, placing the varied denominations
in a triangle of
piles inside her palm. What upset her more, deepening the furrows on
her already lined
forehead, was the discovery of a 10 pence and an American quarter among
the bunch as
well. Arthur had told her to only carry Dutch currency, to avoid the
suspect impression of
an overstaying tourist laden with foreign cash. That's why she'd left
the pounds and
dollars in her filofax safely at home. She wondered if she should
bother to get these last
few remnants of her Anglo-American days exchanged for their local
equivalent as well.
But the thought of going to the bank counter and seeing the look on
some imperious fat-
cheeked clerk beseeching mercy for such a useless waste of her precious
time by an
Indian lady in a saree asking for petty change soon ensured she held on
to her little global
collection of money. Who knows when she might need them again, if
Arthur and she
broke up and she ended up alone in the London underground or the New
York subway?
Then, you always wished you'd kept your coins.

3 guilders and 40 cents. That was what she'd saved after buying her Tea
Tree Oil
Freshener at The Body Shop and some aromatic bath salts. She approached
a fruit stall,
no clearer as to what she could buy. What did she really want to taste?
The mangoes from
Spain would hardly be as luscious, as moist and juicy as those from
Pakistan that her
uncle sent over in a wooden crate each summer. They looked hard, their
waxy skin
coating emanated the superficiality of greenhouse fruits. Even the
smallest thing like the
taste of mangoes and papayas made her nervous these days. Not having
the simple
pleasure of eating what she craved reinforced what she had left behind
when she moved
here. It annoyed her that the fruits of her faraway homeland were now
glorified as exotic
tropical dishes from dreamy scenic landscapes of swaying palms and
hidden alcoved
beaches with pearly white sand in the promotional display stands of out
of reach gourmet
emporiums. She couldn't explain it to herself, but she was restless and
felt like running
away, doing something stupid. There was a perceptible tinge of regret
marking each extra
day she fell under the comforting spell of her new home.

By the contrary powers of a self-imposed torture, she had resigned her
days instead to
looking forward to the market. Now, placed under her direct gaze were
bunches of
imported bananas. She had come to a pause in her perusal at the only
cheap fruit she
could afford in bulk. She believed in paying street traders a fair
price, and resisted
Arthur's insistence on spending a small fortune at the over hyped
supermarket. Here, the
bananas were half the price. She gently picked up a pert looking bunch,
promising to
bake herself a nice rich banana bread over the coming weekend. A small
label on the
bottom of one of the deliciously tempting bananas regrettably destroyed
her baking
fantasies. She had made one steadfast commitment in her fiery
undergraduate days in
New Hampshire, and that was never to buy Del Monte products. The choice
is
presumably difficult between what you want and what you have, but for
Mina, her
principles guided her. Sticking up for what she could still believe in,
however small a
voice of protest it might be, Mina regained a token of faith in her
little bit of power in this
world.

It was the little bit of control she still retained that mattered most
to her. Invariably, she
had expected some loss of ability to direct things and dictate the way
in which forces
outside her purvey organised the routine requirements of daily living.
For a proud
woman, schooled at a fine New England college in the ritualised
manifestations of what it
is to be the master of your destiny, what she could not tolerate was
her inconsolable fear
that she gave it up for love. After the passionate seduction was over,
it was a love whose
dying embers smouldered on in a pale afterglow that trapped her against
her will.

And so, her only instinct was to reacquire control. No matter how much
Arthur protested
his undying love as they lay wrapped in each other's arms against the
foggy backdrop of
a lashing downpour, she determined always to remember that her father
had not
squandered his life savings on giving her an American education simply
so she could
depend on a man. Despite the slow grind of days spent simply staring at
blank walls,
looking on the Internet for even more unique recipe ideas to impress on
Arthur that her
culinary skills exceeded the curried delights of India, she never let
herself forget where
she came from and what she intended to do with her life.

The flurry of the market awakes her again, and she catches herself
caressing the bananas
with adulation, not knowing if she could escape her high flying
principles just this once.
It is essential to hold on to some values that you can define yourself
by, she insists. It
takes her all her considerably limited resources to resist the
impulsive purchase. As she
turned away, with a substitute bag of locally grown apricots, she is
glad for the choice of
alternatives around the fruit stall, which made her life much easier.
At least, there was a
major decision made today which Mina could describe in fervent
satisfying detail when
she sat down to write her journal tonight.

Mina stopped to wait for a snack of frites mayonnaise with the 1
guilder she had left over.
There is the momentary fear striking in her again: how will she ask for
it once it comes to
her turn in the queue? She examines what the rest of them waiting ask
for. It strikes her
that a McDonalds large fries might be a better option but she remembers
it's cheaper
here, at the little vendor dishing up fries with generous smatterings
of oily mayo. Finally
her perseverance pays off and she is rewarded with a nourishing
carbo-packed snack just
by pointing at the picture behind the grubby bald seller. Without a
single word
exchanged, she hands over her last guilder. All he wants is her money,
not her polite
conversation.

As she sat on the pavement to savour her frites mayonnaise, the
multicultural multitudes
pass her in a frenzied rush of having to get somewhere, achieve
something, do something
worthwhile with their lives. A man gobbled a ham baguette next to her.
She heard him
chewing coarsely, while rattling off emphatic instructions to a lady
partner who kneeled
beside him, her fingers scratching greying temples furiously. They had
the fleshy
chubbiness she recognized as Filipino. Their faces were long with
worry, yet
simultaneously, they wore a mask filled with haste and work. Mina
thought how busy
they must be to only manage a short lunch break sitting on an open
road. It was as if a
shared sandwich and cola on a market square in Europe was all they had
hoped for when
they took the bold decision to leave the Philippines. However, it could
also be that sitting
in the open was a reminder of how they used to take lunch in whichever
humid village
they escaped from. They were just comfortable with it, with just
sitting and eating even
though the people around them now stared contemptuously. She got up,
brushed her saree
of crumbs, finding walking and munching her fries slowly more
preferable. The
contentment with their lot that the coloured manifested made Mina
anxious. She halted
and turned to face them. Others had joined them sitting on the pavement
by the flower
stall, and as they sat and poured salads and bread and fizzy drinks
into themselves, they
indicated nothing but a sense of refracted happiness just to be here.
She felt a yearning to
somehow connect, ask them why they took all the trouble to come over,
and how they did
it. She pondered the questions she would pose, like a journalist from a
local TV station
looking for insights for a documentary on the changing face of society.
Did they pay
some agent huge amounts of pesos to stow away in the cargo hold of a
jumbo jet? Or did
they sneak in on a boat sailing through a moonlight sky on the
Adriatic, via the porous
Italian coast? In her sheltered existence, protected by Arthur's steady
career ascending
ever upwards in a booming economy, she had never confronted these
life-defining
obstacles. She simply boarded a plane from Heathrow, arrived like a
regular tourist and
had been here ever since. No one asked her where she was from, what she
did, who she
lived with or why she was here. Arthur said no one could stop them from
being together
if they could prove they loved each other. Why would anyone enquire
anyway if all she
did was exclusively stick close to her Arthur. He wanted to demonstrate
she could feel
safe with him and her need for self-definition is thereby fulfilled.
Under the guise of a
girlfriend awaiting marriage, she was relieved from the arduous effort
of moulding her
individual identity.

She wandered aimlessly into the library nearby, sliding through its
swivel doors with the
graceless airs of a lost traveller who needed somewhere to sit down and
just leaf through
a thin romance paperback to kill all the time on her hands. The pillars
in the sprawling
atrium were adorned with huge block posters advertising a wide spectrum
of artistic
events. Mina thought she'd like to go and see something soon. Perhaps a
modern ballet or
some funky avant garde performance artist, the sort who pranced around
on stage tugging
on their poytails, ripping off a floating bedsheet from their typically
sinewy frame only to
singe their pubic hair with an oil lamp while overhead TV screens
filled with graphic
images of mutilation and corpses everywhere. She could identify with
abstract
constructions very quickly now, detecting patterns and connections in
what at first glance
would only seem trivial. One afternoon, she had experimented by placing
a plastic drinks
cup with lid and straw (previously flattened) on a glass side table
together with some
salty Japanese seaweed crackers in a porcelain bowl and a Polaroid of
her breasts (whose
edges she'd coated with drippings of red wax). Then, in a fit of
momentary passion, she'd
liberally sprinkled gold dust over the top, although she hesitated with
the final idea of
painting deep blue lines across the table top. Arthur was not amused
when she explained
that it was an expression of her globalised sexual identity, the
iconography of a travelling
escort who lived on Coke and junk food in between selling her body. He
held her and
sought pleadingly to demand she stopped thinking of herself as sold, or
selling, because
she had him now and there was no need to sink any further into the
abyss from which
he'd rescued her. She wanted to place an ad for art on demand in a
sophisticated glossy
but he adamantly refused to pay for it.

She grew irritated seeing nothing like real art promoted on the
billboards, nothing like a
random collection of assorted gimmicks assembled for an alien like her
to find artistic
meaning inside. The sort performed in derelict warehouses she'd
frequented in the Lower
East Side of the city, or West End galleries in London. She wanted to
see naked men and
women with dreadlocks urinating on the walls of a disused warehouse in
the old harbour,
where the select few like her who could appreciate high art trudged a
few miles to enter
via a shabby side door using a magnetised access card. There would be a
real sense of an
urgent mission in watching. All the posters presented however were run
of the mill. She
knew that because in her heart she feel no aching tugging at the sound
of inane
productions with names like Orgasmic Chair. She got the joke even
before seeing the
show, and she wanted more urgent engagement than the porspect of
enduring charlatans
promising little more except a deliberately amusing title in English.
Where could she find
what she was looking for?

With mock interest she cursorily perused leaflets and brochures, flyers
and translucent
postcards. It was just stuff she could not be bothered to attend. And
then, the trance
raves with DJ Mitri and the enigmatic Lemon8 would be too bizarre for
Arthur's
bourgeois tastes. She only wanted what art stood for her. And by that,
she meant
something had to be beautiful while emoting the complexities of
crossing borders,
because, she justified to her rigorous mind, that is what is going on
nowadays. Mina was
in the generation of people moving constantly between oceans,
continents and families
who lived in a global reality they took in their stride. And for them,
there is little point in
one-dimensional displays of ancient art forms unresponsive to people
who wanted to mix
it all up, like their lives were. What hope was there for her in just
more plain European
opera, or another morose sitar and tabla recital from visiting Indian
musicians, learning
the waltz or salsa, or a Chinese martial art show in the plaza across
the concert hall?
Where was the special dance in whose thundering stomping resonated the
empathy born
from an educated analysis of women like her, caught in a bind between
man, land and
love?

Like her life, the art she wanted would have to be self-constructed
because no one else
could provide it. It was the art of too much effusive living and
struggling. She decided it
was best to reverse the polarity, for this was still within her means:
If she could not have
what she wanted, she would not accept what they offered her. By
distancing herself from
the swift smooth integration expected of her, she tacitly refused to
bow to the enforced
pressure of this other culture. Push it away, push it away, she uttered
in self-liberation.
Because she came here just for the sake of Arthur, not cultural
belonging.

Last week, when she first walked in to the library, she learnt that
even non-entities were
given the privilege to read leisurely with no officious interruption.
This put a smile on her
face, given how she loved to read. From a young age she had immersed in
the magnetic
pull of foreign lands and lush adventures conjured up in the vivid
heads of Swift and
Stevenson and Kipling. In her history texts she'd struggled to cope
with the rationale for
foreign colonisation by imperial powers that plundered spices, minerals
and cash crops
while carving up the world into seamless spheres of unrivalled
influence. But the classics
were not on offer here. Nor were there lucid memoirs by ladies who'd
lived in empires
far flung, or academic arguments about what it meant to call oneself by
a national
category, or on the culture of fear prevalent in western societies
intimidated by their own
citizens. She couldn't keep ordering the latest books in English from
Amazon dot com
forever, Arthur warned her, after she chalked up a $100 bill on his
credit card in one hour
a few days ago. But she had to read, for that is where she lost herself
between 9 and 6
when Arthur worked away climbing up the corporate ladder. He worked
12-13 hours
some days, to support them he claimed. To her alarmed surprise, the
shelves on the third
floor, marked 'Engels' stood silent. There were no buzzing crowds
fighting for the two
precious copies of Camille Paglia's discourses on the feminine. It was
primarily because
the stacks had little more than the sort of meaningless tripe produced
in copious quantity,
a disparate bunch given coherence solely by their paperback status.
Murder mysteries by
Cookson, Ruth Rendell and Lynda la Plante; horror thrillers by Stephen
King; pointlessly
lengthy novellas chock full of debonair Italian playboys, jet set fast
car Riviera lifestyles
and debauched heiresses snorting white powder in glitzy toilets of
Monaco casinos. In
fact, she grew embarrassed in their pithy presence, hardbacks of soft
words bought in
bulk for the easy reading of those whose first language was not
English. Now, she wished
she'd saved all her undergrad texts, books that helped her grasp how
the world really
was, after centuries of oppression and dispossesion, migration and
displacement, that
made her accept the sheer futility of trying to find power somewhere
she did not belong.

Mina conspicuously declined the convenient pulling power of pulp
romance and crime
writing, and pressed on, scanning the shelves for something that would
give her the sense
of joy she felt reading as a little girl.

It was then she noticed a section marked "Journals'. By the escalators,
encased in the
dark shadows of the overhanging stairs and with little precious natural
light, men huddled
over newspapers from abroad, holding stained and smeared dailies or
weeklies with both
hands and scrutinising reports column by column as if lives depended on
knowing what
was going on in the part of the world they came from. Like a craving
that had to be
fulfilled at the risk of death, she sees them trooping in each morning,
marching past the
market stalls, the guards by the door who do not stop and search them,
ascending the two
floors and snapping up the first copies of the latest foreign dailies
from Turkey, Algeria,
Tunisia, Morocco, Russia. They are predominantly male, and foreign. The
few locals
who can sit among them are unthreatened pensioners, retired folk who
spend a morning
or an afternoon looking at the racing results, and how their stocks
performed in the stock
market. This was a mecca for impoverished souls sustained by free
reports. They smirked
ravenously at the informed commentary on developments that could only
concern them,
people who'd run away from impoverishment. Still, in spite of
improvement, upgrading
to a better society or a better job or a better way of life, (for that
is the point of coming
here, she thinks) they relied on the grace of a local library to
educate and keep them
abreast of their homeland.

Mina thinks men who persist in reading papers from their ex-country,
imported courtesy
of library services, cannot truly want to be here. She looks around the
stands for
something she can take, perhaps the crinkly Observer with its thick
sections and small
fonts. Someone else is reading it with the slow paced elegance of
casual browsing. There
is hardly a table free, the men sprawling in chairs strewn with bags of
groceries, duffel
coats and hats and gloves they have discarded in the prickly central
heat blasting through
this remote secluded section. These were men who felt free in the
presence of words and
grammar and languages they called their own. They lost any sense of
decorum or proper
etiquette.

Minah picks up The Guardian. The G2 Section is missing and someone has
cut out an
article from the front page. She walks out of the news section. She
only knows she wants
to go home, sit in their pleasant living room, make a nice cup of earl
grey with digestives
and read the newspaper as if she's bought it with her allowance. She is
fed up with
waiting around this throng and their news sharing room. Unlike them,
she could afford to
pay for the luxury of an overseas edition, but why should she? She
always insisted
reading the papers was a private thing for her, a reclusive pleasure
that she had to
concentrate on away from jostling crowds, creaky chairs and the little
twitchings of
people reading around her. She liked to massage her feet, brush her
hair and put on some
nice music while she caught up on the news of the day as seen through
London. She
looked forward to laughing gaily at some columnist, or see how the
latest international
calamities were perceived by well-paid inquisitive reporters and
Westminster pundits.
Although their immediate impact on her would be nothing, it was the act
of reading an
English paper that sent a wave of satisfaction rippling through her.
This was how she
would end the day, walk back calmly to their flat and spend the rest of
the late afternoon
reading until Arthur returned. She made her way down the escalator,
placing the paper in
her handbag.

With too much happening at once, too much to think about, dwell on,
consider, probe and
try to salvage, she found solace in the sublime prospect of a newspaper
all to herself
when she's all alone. It is another one of her rebellious deeds, to
enjoy a well-written
paper while ignoring the terrifying things she had to do, things which
were catching up
with her. She could hold out a little longer.

As Mina walked through the exit with a big smile wide across her face,
the alarm
screeched loudly and her day was over.

Later, at the police lock up, as she waited for Arthur to come get her
before she was
deported, the police woman asked her with only the slightest hint of
irony: "Do they steal
newspapers from the public library in your country?"

Theme: Powerlessness of someone who has to adapt to a new culture.
Everything works
against her and she can only rebel because rebellion gives the
powerless some semblance
of power against their victimisation.

(c) Gurmit Singh, April 1999.