Non-Fiction
How to Scare the Birds / Sheniz Janmohamed
Image courtesy of the author
Just the other day, in my home just outside of Toronto, I slipped on the basement stairs and landed on my back. Wincing from the sudden shock of pain, my immediate thought was that someone put nazar on me. Not that I was looking at my phone while taking a half-minded step. Not that I wasn’t paying attention to what was in front of me, or in this case, beneath me. No, my immediate thought was an ancestral one: the evil eye.
After I recovered from the pain, I laughed at my ridiculousness – the fact that somehow my Nanima’s voice had infiltrated my mind, so much so that after tending to my sore back, I tended to the ritual of banishing the evil eye. The ritual requires strands of chilies to be burned and then circled around the “victim”, its pungent smoke winding into their clothes. I didn’t have chillies, so I burned frankincense instead. The smoke clouded my room in a familiar scent of protection. My Nanima is a woman of superstitions, as many of our grandmothers are. From not cutting our nails at night to turning over a slipper if it’s flipped upside down, each superstition has a purpose and a consequence. Cutting our nails at night would drain all the barakat, blessings, from our homes. Leaving a slipper overturned would result in something catastrophic happening to our mothers. These superstitions have become instructions from ancestors, undesired gifts passed on from one generation to the next.
Perhaps the one that holds the most weight for me is not really a superstition at all.
We were sitting in her kitchen in our family home in western Kenya, finishing our cups of strong tea when I gazed out the window and noticed it – a rusted tin tied to a string, hanging from the pomegranate tree. “Mama, what’s this for?” My Nanima looked wistfully out the window and explained, “It’s to keep the birds away. You take a tin, tie it to a string, put a stone in it and hang it from the fruit tree. When the wind blows, the stone rattling in the tin will scare the birds away.”
My first thought was for the mousebirds. Perplexed by the sound of rattling stones, would they be too afraid to dip their beaks into pomegranate jewels? But my second thought was for myself, deprived of handfuls of daram. I’m not sure who I felt more concerned for – myself or the birds. The next morning, I surveyed our little courtyard and laughed. Open caverns of empty pomegranates, still hanging from the trees. As if the birds were mocking human ingenuity in the wake of their feast –
What you’re trying to protect doesn’t belong to you.
In the late 1880s, my great grandparents left their seaside village in Kutch, India, to settle in Eldoret, a town close to the Rift Valley in the highlands of Kenya. Once known as the “White Highlands”, swathes of the land were reserved for European settlers up until as recently as 1961. Eldoret, or Eldare, “stony river” in Maasai, is close to Iten, where marathon runners from all over the world come to train. It was only recently that I discovered that my Nanima was a long distance runner in high school, her body acclimatising to the rarefied air from a young age.
The first time I visited my grandparent’s house in Eldoret, I was three years old. My grandfather, affectionately called Papa, was sitting on the verandah, smoking his pipe in between sips of tea. He was the silent observer, the self-educated collector of quotes. He smelled like betel nut and Brut aftershave. Never seen without his dark glasses or his stylish handkerchiefs, he had an understated grace. I couldn't remember much except for the way his woollen sweater smelled when I buried my head in his chest. He always spoke softly to us, and when he wasn't speaking, he was thinking.
After he died, my Nanima believed it was her responsibility to preserve his memory by remaining in the house he built. When we’d arrive in Eldoret, she’d greet us in the sun-patched dog compound, sitting on her wooden chair where she’d been waiting for us to arrive. “This house is everyone's house,” she’d always remark, or, “I will never sell this house.” Its walls carry too many memories, too many scents of people who have now left its rooms. It is, and she is, the one constant in a family of migrants.
The garden is incomplete without my Nanima. It’s as if the bright bougainvillaea vines wove themselves into the folds of her shawls.
One time when I visited Kenya on summer vacation, I ventured out into the night-dew of the garden to help my uncle feed a hungry puppy. The dogs huffed at my feet, their wet noses leaving mud stains on my sandals. When I finally looked up, I was greeted by the revelation of the Milky Way, and the steady red of Mercury. More stars than I could fathom. How was it possible that they had always been there, even when I couldn’t see them? On the way back into the house, I tripped over my gown, unable to shake my gaze from the clusters of pulsing gems.
On my last visit, I noticed it. A high-rise visible in the horizon, jutting up just beyond the borders of our garden. At night, the lights stay on. And now looking out, fewer stars. Pockets of noise pollution, the faint buzz of piki-pikis swerving their way in and out of traffic.
In the morning, when I visited the marbled eucalyptus tree, my eye caught the sunlight glistening on a discarded wrapper, thrown over the hedge from the neighbouring street.
We are no strangers to change.
The house Papa built has been painted, repainted and extended over the years. The terrazzo-tiled verandah where I drank chai and wrote bad poems is no longer in use. The balconies are off limits, except to the birds. We buried our beloved dog, Roo, near the foot of the jacaranda tree she used to sniff at. The stuffing from our swing was ripped apart by the guard dogs, and then replaced. The familiar joy of the gospel choir was met with the melody of the azaan ringing out from the new mosque across the way. One year, our rubber tree buckled and fell over the fence onto the street until men with chainsaws and pangas finished the job.
In 2008, when post-election violence erupted in Kenya, burning tires blocked roads and an overcrowded church just outside town was set ablaze. A ghost-like smoke lingered in the air. The ficus trees smouldered for days. After the haze dissipated, some things miraculously remained the same. The iron-rich soil still coated petals in a thin veil of rust, the hadada ibis still laughed its call overhead, the heart-shaped anthurium leaves still grew bigger than my face. But broken bottles on top of boundary walls were no longer a sufficient defence. The hedged borders of the garden were reinforced with an electric fence.
Once enclosed by a sleepy town in the Rift Valley region, our garden now sits at the periphery of a burgeoning city almost half a million strong. Eldoret is one of the fastest growing cities in Kenya, with foreign investors building better roads and urbanisation quickly taking hold.
I keep asking myself how much longer. How much longer should we resist the pace of industry? How much longer can we protect this patch of land soaked in ancestral reminders? How much longer will these fig trees hold memory of an older people, before my great grandfather crossed the Indian Ocean to settle here?
Since Nanima’s stroke, she hasn’t been able to speak – or, what she loves to do most – sing. Ever since I was a child, she’d sing ginans to us in her unmistakable rasp, pausing only to explain the meaning of the lyrics. Just the other day, on a blurry video call, I attempted to sing a ginan for her. I couldn’t remember the next verse.
I close my eyes to listen for the faint singsong of her Gujarati. I light a stick of incense and pray the scent reaches her. A veil of sandalwood smoke twists in the morning light. Just outside my window, I hear the gentle coos of a pair of mourning doves.
What you’re trying to protect doesn’t belong to you.
A stone rattles in the tin of my heart.