Non-Fiction
The Muscle of Her Heart / Brian Braganza
Image courtesy of the author
Brown Madonna, 2007
Morning’s ablution is a bucket, bare feet, and lungi, as the man polishes his taxi, one honeybee in a line of a hundred. He blesses the black hood and trunk, yellow roof, scrubs the steering wheel, seats and meter, the holy dash. This cabman’s daily devotion removes all obstacles, each swipe of the rag an homage, rinse and flick so droplets fly to evaporate before they land.
Lord Ganesha on the dash and tassels from the ceiling, my father and I hold tight as the Padmini taxi hurls us through Mumbai traffic. This apiary: jostle of buses, men haul loaded carts, helmetless family layered on a motorcycle, pedestrian leap, and a beggar taps without hands at the passenger window. All the while this taximan’s impeccable navigational prowess edges in closer and closer, so along with his car horn’s incessant drone, he weaves us through this throng.
In Bandra we are welcomed as brothers. The key clicks in the lock behind the iron gate, our footfalls echo over stone tiles as we step up to the second story sitting room. My father embraced by laughter and arms-wrap-slap-backs, his field hockey friends of five decades ago. This room conjures the British Raj—cool marble floors, sparse furnishings and high ceiling fans, tall unshuttered windows three sides of the room and curtains blown in from the hot breeze. Chatter off the street and car horns drift in, family pictures on the road-dusted walls, hard liquor and Feni on the side-board, glasses upturned.
While the men’s memories spill over—college hockey games, tours to Calcutta by train, and a grasp at Team India—I’m snagged by the wife of a teammate who tells me that Saint Michael’s church in Mahim, where my grandparents are buried and my parents were married, is the church of the Brown Madonna. And yes, it’s true, she’s seen it for her own eyes—the Madonna weeps tears, some say blood drips from her palms. This woman’s son, preparing to write his final exam, made the required pilgrimages to Mary for the novena, dreams of becoming a doctor. On the morning of his exam he makes his ninth visit to Madonna, his mother prone praying all day, by evening he had passed his finals—A miracle! she exclaims.
The Mary statue was snared in a fisherman’s net, hauled to shore on nearby Juhu beach and delivered to the priest at Saint Michael’s. He built the grotto and entombed her in stone and glass. Yet her story spans oceans, the Lady of Perpetual Succor doesn’t just cast and haul miracles, she is the miracle herself. Each Wednesday’s novena draws faithful Christians, Hindus, Muslims, clutching for salvation. The prayerful murmuration as thousands of hands push close to touch stone, touch heart, touch forehead, touch stone. The granite-cobbled grotto slick with the oil off pilgrims’ fingers, while kisses stain the window. Their drone a supplication for Madonna to open their hearts, share their joy, release their grief.
Broken Hearted, 1949
Joseph, my grandfather, was attuned to whistles: the eight o’clock commuter to Churchgate Station, two-thirty to Pune, four-fifteen to Delhi. From the tower or switching tracks while the fates of thousands held in his clasp. My mother tells me how his left hand, sacrificed to rail and wheels, was crooked into a claw, unable to retrieve coins from his pocket. Her two brothers would steal his change. Two generations away, I touch the sun-warmed Canadian National rail-line which runs through the center of this Eastern Ontario town, a resonance beneath my fingers. We build forts trackside. A heavy stone crunches, stirs up pungent creosote. Throughout the entirety of my childhood the train whistle slipped through windows, steel wheels slapped tracks and bear growl of engine pulled the cargo of my ancestry along. Anywhere in town, an echo of a grandfather who never knew me.
Santanna, my grandmother, crushed seeds between the stone rolling pin and a slab of black granite. Masala magic sifted through her fingers while a ghost of curries wrapped her and my mother at her side. She’d pat flat and fry two dozen chapattis, the brown of her hands cloaked in flour. While feeding her family of nine, Santanna regularly shared dishes with the Muslim family across the corridor, or with anyone who appeared. Her table was always bountiful, yet she didn’t live long enough to prepare a meal for me. As a child I watched my own mother, Lucy, knead, pat and roll dough, I’d butter the small round pads which she’d fold in squares and roll again, the pin squeezed margarine from between the creases. The skillet so hot the rings of the burner tattooed the bottom of the pan, her bare hands reaching in and with fingertips she’d draw the chapatti to the edge, then flip, the flatbread growing an air pocket like a frog’s throat, she’d warn of the scalding steam should it burst.
British rule left India in disarray, and in the spring of 1949, following the largest forced migration in history, chaos endures. There is fighting between Joseph and Santanna in their two-bedroom family flat, a secret holds them apart. Yet when an uneasy peace breaks, Santana and her four daughters evade Bombay’s blanket heat and street river monsoons, find sanctuary in coastal Goa. Ripe mangos freefall, sand-caked feet pat over tide packed beaches, women in saris wade hip deep in waves, and courters glance over shoulders. Beneath moonlit nights fishermen push off ancestral outriggers, throw nets, and by sunrise silver fish glimmer, flip-flop in market baskets—a final grip on a life tumbled by the Arabian Sea.
Goan palm leaves like rough chimes tatter in the sea breeze. Then, like the beggar’s tap on the window, a telegram reaches out: Husband sick. Start. Joseph is dying of double pneumonia. With daughters in tow she starts for home in a sweltering train. The lungs of the coal engine gasp while the carriage jangles back to Bombay.
Hurtling through city crush, Santanna and the girls are halted on the staircase to learn Joseph is dead and beneath the heat of Bombay in May, has already been buried.
From her grotto the Madonna lorded over Lucy’s early years as she passed by on her way to school each day. Now standing before the Mary statue, six decades since her father’s death, Lucy’s childhood buoys to the surface. Santanna sobbed three months following Joseph’s burial until one day, Lucy’s brothers came running, hauling her and her younger sister, home from school. They ran along Lady Jamshedji Road, uniforms sweat-stained, tears stinging their cheeks as they leapt past the Madonna. Fourteen-year-old Lucy vaulted the stairs in twos towards the caterwaul bursting into the hot bedroom, her aunty wept in the drape-drawn darkness, her sisters wail, while brothers clawed at their mother to wake.
Years after, my mother would tell me: She died of a broken heart.
Cor, Heart
The cardioid or heart shape shows up frequently in the non-human world. In the leaves of the linden tree, northern catalpa, and sweet potato vine; in the blossoms of bleeding hearts and the papery husk of tomatillos; in the seeds of the black walnut and the pods of the golden rain tree; in heart-shaped stones along the seashore, and the crest at the base of the skull of the northern yellow shafted flicker, perfectly blood red. Heart is derived from the Latin root cor and, while a critical organ in sustaining life as it moves blood and oxygen throughout the body, for centuries it has been seen as the porthole to the soul, the fountain of our emotional selves.
Cardiologist, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar makes the direct link between our organ, the heart, and its relationship to human emotions: The heart may not originate our feelings, but it is highly responsive to them. A record of our emotional life is written on our hearts[1]. Though the heart has been associated with love and loss in art and culture for centuries, the heart’s relationship to our emotional lives isn’t just a metaphor.
Jauhar states that heartbreak—death of a loved one, a near death experience, harrowing news arriving unannounced—can physically change a heart. Research has found that our emotional states have a direct physical effect on the human heart; fear, grief and loss can cause extreme cardiac damage. When fight, flight or freeze kicks in, our hearts race, our vessels constrict and blood pressure begins to rise. The shape of the heart changes to a wide base and a slim neck, like a takotsubo, a Japanese round-bottomed narrow throated vessel used to catch octopus. Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy or Broken-Heart Syndrome is a languishing of the heart due to major distress, misery and anguish. Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy can resolve itself within a few weeks, but when acute, is known to cause heart failure, periling arrhythmia, and at times, death.
Broken-heart syndrome can also be linked to large scale social turmoil, a natural disaster or a sudden mass trauma. This physical change in the heart also occurs following happy events, however the ballooning is in the middle, not at the base.
When we say a broken heart, we are indeed talking about a physically damaged heart. We must turn our attention to the influence of the emotions, life’s stressors, their impact on our heart and the impacts on the hearts around us. We must also deepen our understanding of the potential of human connection and love to heal our hearts.
Heirloom
As Lucy enters St. Michael’s church, curtains blow between bars, drawing in the traffic and pedestrian cacophony, softened into murmurings of the Rosary. Along the main aisle a husband and wife on their knees, hands in prayer position, climb the stone steps to the altar—novena, their appeal to Mary: a baby to fill their cavernous longing, or perhaps liberation from their grief over loss of their child.
Sitting in pews, with the tatter of curtains on iron bars, Lucy whispers that following her parent’s death, the children are raised by their aunty and the older brothers rule ruthlessly. It was common for her brothers to demand her earned money and they didn’t like her dating the man who would become my father. There was safety in family and manipulation. An incredulous laugh as she speaks of the brutal beatings beneath their knuckles knocking her near unconscious. She points to her head where they would rap her. Her misplaced cackle a clatter that resounds through the high ceiling. As they grew older many of her siblings lived close to the bottle and cigarettes, deep-fried foods, and sat sedentary. It was not uncommon for them to rage against each other, claims of stolen money or property. A frayed distance lies between the broken-hearted.
In Saint Michael’s church-yard, saffron, turquoise, magenta saris; a creeping cat; children skip over graves. No room between headstones for grass, palms shade and surround the cemetery, high stone walls and an over-flowing columbarium. Towering tenement buildings now shade this place. We stand before the family plot: her parents, two brothers, two sisters, one aunt, names chiseled in black marble.
Cor is also the root for courage, and many see the heart as intimately connected to the source of our valor. Lucy’s bravery is her quick laugh, nimble feet and saucy confidence. While heartbreak can be transmitted genetically, permeating our bodies and souls, so can courage and resilience.
Her heart clenched against the familial and generational pain, it was softened only by her love for my father as they embraced the wholeness of life. They jived and did the foxtrot on Saturday nights in Bandra dance halls. They courted along the white sand-packed beaches of Goa. Newlyweds, they landed work in Rehau, Germany. Oscar trained into management in the plastics plant, while Lucy, with no knowledge of German, translated technical texts into English. Their daughter was the first brown baby born in this small post-war village, and when the opportunity arose, they took a two-year placement to Nigeria where I was born. My birth story is a poorly tied umbilical cord. Waking the next morning my mother found my night-blanket dripping red— only hours old, my body near bloodless.
My parents left Nigeria when I was two as the Biafra War was igniting. Sick with nephritis I remained in a London hospital with my mother while my father and sister returned to Germany. My mother would spend each day with me, and when visiting hours ended, she’d step behind the door listening to my wails until I fell to the crib exhausted and slept.
At five feet one inch and ninety-five pounds, my mother’s ferocity is one to be reckoned with. In our early years in Canada we drove to the east coast with friends on a camping trip. Crossing the Sydney Ferry to Port aux Basques, I can only imagine our brown bodies contrasting the whiteness of the east coast at that time. One night, camping in Newfoundland, my parents up late talking with friends, my sister and I asleep in the nearby canvas tent. Stepping from the cabin my mother hears a rustle, catches the yellow eye of a black bear and hollers a threat. The bear retreats to the woods leaving her precious brood. As one of a handful of brown families in Brockville in the nineteen seventies, my mother claimed that place as her own. She worked full-time as a school secretary, then a legal secretary, her ambition and audacity convincing her these places depended on her alone.
My mother’s courage is deeply rooted in her bravado and quite likely her generational trauma. She had a quadruple coronary bypass the year before this return to India. Her heart the size of a chickadee, fluttered in the hand of the surgeon. Throughout the dying and death of her husband of nearly sixty years, she never dropped a tear. Weeping, she feared, would rupture the dam of her being. Her broken heart balled like a fist.
Devotion, 2021
At eighty-six, my mother has outlived her family legacy and moved into our home in Nova Scotia. During this time, we’ll watch the tuning pegs of her cognition slip beneath her fingers, the strings releasing their hold on the melody. Her worlds will begin to collide, the places she trafficked in Brockville for fifty-two years become the places we visit in Bridgewater. She proudly claims her role as legal secretary when she lived in Germany through the sixties, although this career didn’t happen until the nineteen eighties in Ontario. Good friends and family members become washed-out like upholstery in the sun, yet she’s delightfully confused when they appear as images on a screen or a voice at the end of the phone. Speaking full sentences is like trying to find and match socks from the laundry basket.
And yet her body sings its own song. In the spring she’ll spend hours breaking off dead stalks of tansy, motherwort and knapweed, she’ll rake the straw-coloured thatch beneath the sprouting pasture grass, piling it in great stacks at various corners of the field. From the upstairs window we keep eyes on her, dwarfed by the vast meadow, the hardwoods greening along the stone wall. We watch her as she picks weeds on the lawn in a traditional yoga squat, malasana, like the women of India sweeping temples. Her weeding tool slices into the ground, twists, lifts and taps the bucket as she drops in another dandelion. Tree swallows, iridescent in the morning sun, leave their nest boxes to chitter and swirl above her head, her eyes downcast discerning the next weed to pull, and the next.
As early spring turns late and dandelions wane, Lucy walks around with a plastic five-gallon bucket picking and filling it with buttercup flowers, as if the yellow is offending. I’ll ask her to leave the daisies, we like these.
Often Lucy will end up in a blind spot so we circle the house, our throats clenched for the worst, until we find her crouched behind the red currant bush, content in her work. On other occasions while working mere meters away from the house, she’ll stand, lose her bearings and walk off down the lane, her bucket full of buttercups swinging as she walks and picks. Always pleasantly oblivious yet grateful for the ride home when we pick her up on the road to town. In the late afternoon as I’m stacking firewood or mulching the blueberry bushes, she’ll walk over: Okay, I’m finished, I’m going home, and invariably start to walk down the lane. I’ll reach to her with my voice: Sure mom, let’s go inside first and get a cup of tea. Joining me inside, home would become apparent. On lucky days she might call me Oscar, my father’s name and the only man she’d lived with consistently for all of her adult life. Through the summer, she and I pick twenty-four quarts of strawberries, one hundred cups of red currants and thirty cups of blueberries. This is her vocation.
My devotion these days is to empty my mother’s weed bucket, bring her water, keep her fed, hatted and cool, and be present with her intermingling stories, mercurial moods and the gradual degeneration of her brain cells. Her occupation is to drink in the sunlight and breeze, immerse hands in the soil, and bathe in the aroma therapy washing over her. Each green leaf, root or berry passes through her fingers like a prayer. The muscle of her heart still beating, a miracle.