A ghost
The best part of family gatherings was when after the late night singing folk songs, after the uncles put down their guitars and make-shift drums, and everyone, in a whiskey haze, begins to tell the stories of those who recently passed on into the next world, or next life—depending on if it was my Christian uncle or Hindu uncle or Muslim uncle speaking of the dead. Whether in Ozone Park, Brampton, Orlando, or Scarborough, the stories were all rooted in some part of Guyana that was mostly a figment of our wild imaginations—a land of jungle cats and botflies, of mystery and horror.
My Aji used to tell a story about the longtime—how life was a long time ago. A time when people still spoke Hindustani. Before Westernization. Her mother was born on a British Guianese plantation sometime in the late 1800s or early, early 1900s. I don’t remember the actual order other than the fact that she was one of the eldest in her family. My Per-Aji, or great-grandmother, helped her own mother labor with her children, supporting her back, tearing cloths, and boiling water. Of course, I narrate this as though it were some kind of movie in black and white, “Mother India” style, just in Guyana and without the guns and intentional filicide.
Since the medicine in the logies probably wasn’t the best, the barracks being the quarters of the formerly enslaved now updated for indentured laborers, rumored to stink like unplumbed shanties or bastis, infant mortality was high. Women refused to sing sohars until the ninth day when they came out of their ritual sequestering with their infants to be blessed by Maiji or Pandit.
My Per-Aji gave birth to a stillborn son. No wind. No pipes. No shriek at bursting into this world. Dismayed she dismissed this regular occurrence with the reassurance that through persistence she could give her husband a boy-child.
In my fantasy account she wanted to have children and opted into the sexual intercourse that was to be reproductive. In my fantasy there is the haunting of sexual trauma because this is a truth that my Aji refused to engage when narrating this story, though I have a suspicion that “optional” and consensual intercourse in the British Guianese plantation in the 1800s probably didn’t have the meaning that it has today.
Whatever the situation that nests in my familial mitochondria, my Per-Aji pushed out another child, who died the night after breaking the placenta. Who is not dismayed with the death of a child? She summoned the pandit, her term for a Hindu priest who was learned in tantras and mantras.
“Na jaani kahe aisan bhaile. Batiawo Pandit-ji, ham ka kare taki hamar pickni na mare.” She cried into her ordhni as she asked him.
His answer was simple. Clip the ears of the child. Clearly this is a son who wants to be born but due to some prior karma has to live out more than just the one life in your lineage.
Did she use a knife or scissors? Did she use her teeth—the way my Aji sharpened pencils until the day she passed into the next world? Let’s go with teeth. After my Per-Aji clipped her dead son’s ears with her own teeth she buried the body. Langtime people didn’t burn their dead. Who had the money?
When the next child happened (in Hindustani and Bhojpuri children happen to women), my Per-Aji and Aji alike were both astounded. Where they had torn the ears of the earlier child that died, this new child bore the missing earpieces. This was my Aji’s proof of reincarnation.
This story haunts me. Even at the days before her death my Aji told me that she will be born in either my or my brother’s line. She died in March 2010. My niece was born on April of that same year.
This is just one ghost story that stoked the wonder of my child mind. Did this child portend upset in my own genetic expression? What was the “real” reason for the high infant mortality of my Aji’s generation? Was it malnutrition? Capture? Indenture and servitude? Alcoholism? Destitution? White supremacy and colonization? The transportation from passage to plantation? What is my actual inheritance in this archive of familial stories?