As I made my way through the bin-bag – an indistinguishable mass of bodies, feathers and beaks tangled together – my eyes fell upon an owlet. I reached down for it. It was smaller than my palm, but its body carried heft, its feathers impossibly soft and fine. I wondered if it had flown into the net while following his mother on a night hunt. Its oversized opaque black eyes in its pale, heart-shaped face looked up at me without seeing.
I thought of Nisha’s story of the owl, of losing Kiyoma, and I almost dropped it on the floor. How did I not notice this bird in Akrotiri when we were sorting the birds? Did Seraphim see it and let it pass into the bag on purpose? I can imagine he would have bitten into its neck indiscriminately. To him, a bird was a bird was a bird. To me, I worked like a machine. A hunt was a job was money.
Not knowing what to do, I covered the owlet gently with my other hand, making a cocoon. I thought of Nisha’s first story of loss and how she had felt and heard for the first time the stillness and silence of death. I considered the other birds. The ones I had trapped, killed and defeathered. The ones that were soaking now in the basin and the bath, and all the other species that I had discarded in a bin-liner because they would not sell. This is where the baby owl would end up. I could not bring myself to throw it in there. So I sat. I sat there on the stool with the owlet nestling between my palms and I did not move for what must have been more than an hour.
Music drifted in through the open doors in the other room. It was the woman again, at Theo’s. Her voice pure gold. After a while I heard Aliki laughing out front; she must be home from school. I heard Mrs Hadjikyriacou’s voice. It sounded like they were playing a game.
I thought about how simple everything used to seem. How I used to sit out on the balcony, after these sounds of the neighbourhood had ceased, when most had gone to bed, and waited for Nisha. Those nights after the miscarriage, she came to me with eyes carrying pain. But she still came. Because that’s what we do. When there is love, there is a safe place for sadness.
*
Nisha told me another story of loss the second night after her miscarriage. She lay down on the bed and placed her hands over her stomach in the corpselike manner she had done before. She inhaled deeply and her chest trembled. She wanted to cry, I was sure, but she held it in.
‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it.’
‘But what if you were given a choice, the last colour you saw before you died, what would it be?’
‘I’m still not sure. It’s hard to choose.’
‘You have to choose one!’
‘Maybe this is a game Aliki would appreciate.’
‘Yes, she loves these games. But choose.’
She tilted her head in my direction, staring at me with wide eyes, as if she’d asked me the most important question in the world.
‘Amber,’ I said.
She nodded to herself.
‘I don’t know what colour Mahesh would have chosen,’ she said. I held my breath at the mention of her husband – she very rarely mentioned him. ‘I never got to ask him that question.’
Then, in a soft, faraway voice, she told me the second story of loss.
*
Nisha’s parents had worked in the paddy fields. They rented a plot from a rich landowner, ploughed the earth, grew rice and sold it at the market. They lived in a simple house, not quite a mud hut, but with makeshift walls of asbestos sheets. There was a well in the back garden that brought forth cool and fresh water from the dark veins of the earth, even in the heat of the summer. They had a jackfruit tree as well as papaya, mango and passion fruit. Trellises of jasmine flowers separated their garden from the neighbour’s. Nisha’s father grew yams and mace in the yard. He was a tall man with lighter skin – it was well known that his ancestors had joined the Dutch East India Company fleeing Catholicism in the seventeenth century, and that was why her family carried the surname Van de Berg, which meant from the mountains. Her mother’s colouring was rich and dark, like Nisha and Kiyoma, but Nisha had her father’s amber eyes. The kids at school called her ‘mango-eyes’。
Their house was at the end of a long road that divided the paddy fields from the sea, overlooking a coconut plantation on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other. From her bedroom window, Nisha could see the fishermen take the boats out in the night. She’d wake up early to watch them cast the nets in the water just before dawn and then pull them in at around nine o’clock, before it got too hot. On Saturdays, she would go with her father to buy fresh fish. She liked the silver scales, but she didn’t like the sea. It wasn’t a friendly sea, rough and unforgiving, and most people in Sri Lanka had never learned how to swim because of it.