I felt nauseous, acid coming up from my stomach, burning my oesophagus. I went to the bathroom and vomited in the toilet. As I flushed it, I remembered the blood and grey tissue in the toilet bowl – the child that would never be.
I lay down on the bed again. After the night of the miscarriage, Nisha changed. She would come late at night, as usual, and lay down where I was lying now, hands crossed over her stomach, protectively – like the position in which one places a corpse, except her hands were on her stomach instead of her chest.
She would look out of the window and watch summer fade, each passing day an equation: ‘On this day,’ she would say, ‘I would have been eight weeks pregnant, but instead I have been empty for seven days.’ Or, ‘On this day I would have been nine weeks pregnant, but I have been empty for fourteen days.’
At 5 a.m., she would wake up and speak to Kumari on the phone. It would have been 7.30 in the morning in Sri Lanka and Nisha wanted to catch her daughter before her school day. I would be half-asleep, the feel of Nisha’s warmth still beside me on the bed. She would sit at the desk and her conversation and the light from the tablet would reach me. Sometimes my eyes would flicker open and I would see her silhouette, hear her words in Sinhalese and Kumari’s response. Though I didn’t understand the language, I got to know their tones and rhythms. I could understand if they were having a joke, or an argument, or a light-hearted conversation about school or Kumari’s homework or her friends. I could tell when Nisha was annoyed about something, or when she was firm and insistent. Sometimes I heard love in her voice; other times concern, joy, irritation, determination. Kumari was sometimes cheeky, sometimes agreeable, often so chatty that Nisha couldn’t get a word in edgeways; other times quieter and solemn, moody. There were a few occasions when I could even hear the first signs of adolescent rebellion sneaking in. All the emotions that one would expect between a mother and a burgeoning teenager, but all of this was through a screen.
Many early mornings Nisha would teach Kumari English. They each had copies of The Secret Garden and they would take turns reading the pages aloud. They sometimes both got stuck on a word, but Nisha kept a dictionary by my bedside – a gift from her friend, Nilmini – and she would consult it for assistance. Their chatting drifted over my dreams like the echo of a birdsong.
One time, she said, ‘Yiannis, come here. Kumari wants to say hello.’
‘You’ve told her about me?’ I mimed.
‘Of course,’ she said, her eyes bright and encouraging.
It was roughly a year ago, so Kumari must have been about ten at the time. She was wearing her uniform, ready for school, with a massive rucksack on her shoulders.
‘Hello, Mr Yiannis,’ she had said, smiling. Although she had darker skin and eyes than her mother, her smile and expressions were exactly the same.
‘Hello, Kumari, it’s lovely to finally meet you!’
‘Finally? Have you heard stuff about me?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good stuff ?’
‘Wonderful stuff.’
‘That’s OK then.’ She scrunched up her face. ‘So you are my amma’s friend?’
‘I am.’
‘She said you feed the chickens in the garden downstairs.’
‘I guess I do.’
‘What else do you do, Mr Yiannis. Or are you just a chicken feeder?’
I laughed. ‘I’m not just a chicken feeder. I go into forests and pick wild vegetables and snails.’
‘Hmmm. What do you do with them after you pick them?’
‘I sell them.’
‘Hmmm.’ She nodded. ‘I guess that sounds all right.’
After that particular call, Nisha lay down next to me, entwining her limbs with mine. ‘I have an extra hour or so before I should leave. Hold me really tight.’
And of course, I did. It was all I wanted to do. She would set her alarm for just before 6 a.m. I would drift in and out of sleep, and sometimes I would hear her crying.
‘What is it, Nisha?’ I would whisper in the dark.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, I just remembered something.’
‘What did you remember? Tell me.’
During this time of grief for the lost child, Nisha told me three stories of loss. The first was of her sister’s death. The second of her husband’s. The third of making the devastating decision to leave Kumari in order to come here. Her sister’s death had coincided with the Vesak Poya festival of lights, on the first full moon in the month of May, when she was twelve years old and her sister, Kiyoma, had been ten. She told me about the white lanterns at night, hanging over the door of every home in the street apart from theirs. Her sister had died that morning. The year before her death, they went together to the Koggala lagoon and took a gondola to the tiny island where a Buddhist temple was located. There were hundreds of lanterns, and a thousand lights floating on the water as they glided across the lake. Her sister had called them tiny moons in a starry sky. Tiny moons that filled up the world.