The agent’s fee was astronomical to Nisha, the equivalent of 10,000 euros. Of course, she couldn’t afford to pay it upfront, so she would pay the debt in instalments, commencing with her first pay-check. She calculated that this would still leave her enough money to send home, and to also put aside for Kumari’s education.
Meanwhile, Kumari would no longer settle on Nisha’s chest when she returned from work. She would writhe and mutter and claw at her skin, then cry inconsolably, as if it was herself she had hurt. Nisha was convinced that Kumari understood on some instinctive level that her mother’s heart and mind were somewhere else. Nisha couldn’t bear it. She knew that Kumari knew. Kumari grew each day and became a force to be reckoned with. The muttering turned to actual words. ‘No!’ she would say to her grandmother when she didn’t want to sleep, and ‘No!’ she would say to her mother when Nisha wanted a hug and a kiss on her return from work. By the time she was two and could string sentences together, there was no arguing with her. ‘No, Amma! You go back to work now!’
‘But you were waiting for me all this time, and now you don’t want me?’
‘No. Not waiting. Kumari playing with Ziya. Ziya hungry.’ Ziya was Kumari’s favourite doll that her grandmother had made with old rags.
Kumari watched Nisha as she packed.
‘Big bag, Amma?’
‘I’m putting my clothes in, ba-baa.’
‘Why?’
‘Amma is going away.’
‘Kumari going?’
‘No.’
‘Ziya going?’
‘No, ba-baa.’
*
Nisha arrived in Cyprus late one Sunday night, with a small suitcase, wearing a black linen dress that a neighbour in Galle had made for her. She was picked up at the airport by the agent’s representative, and taken to an old dark house in an old dark city where a forlorn pregnant woman greeted her with a broken smile and distant eyes.
Isuri had been right about one thing – she was given a lovely bedroom with antique furniture that backed onto a garden full of plants, chickens, a cactus, a fig tree and an orange tree. There was a small fishing boat in this garden, which reminded her of the fishermen in Sri Lanka – those she had seen from her bedroom window – and Nisha knew she had come to the right place.
That night, she was awakened by the sound of crying. She got out of bed and held her ear to the closed door. It was a child, very young, probably around Kumari’s age. It was as clear and present as the darkness. She walked along the corridor, following the sound, and it led her out into the garden through the communal door. There the sound was louder. She thought that it might be a neighbour’s child, but it seemed to have no direction. It was coming from everywhere, or so it seemed to her. She sat in the unused boat in the garden and tried to understand where the crying was coming from. It came from the earth and the trees and the sky. She sat there until she fell asleep and woke at dawn to the sound of a cockerel crowing in the distance. The crying had stopped.
She only had an hour before she needed to begin work, so she decided to start straight away. She cleaned and scrubbed every surface until it shone, until the memory of the night’s disturbance began to fade.
Petra was happy with Nisha’s work. It was the only thing she seemed happy about. She appeared to live in a constant state of despair and she carried her stomach like an object, as if she was carrying the earth.
The following night, when she was tucked up in bed after a long day, Nisha again heard the crying. Once again, she got out of bed and followed the sound out into the garden, through the glass doors in her bedroom. It was a clear night, frosty and cold. Stars in a dome above her. The air was still, no wind, and she listened, alert as a cat, in order to locate the source of the sound. But once more it came from everywhere: from the leaves on the trees, from the branches and bark, even from the roots – it seemed to run like rivers beneath the earth, like the deep song of the trees. Equally, it came from up above, from the fabric of the sky, from the waves and particles that make up our existence; it was carried on the wings of bats and owls, and higher still, much higher, it came from the stars.
*
At this point in her story, Nisha paused. She stopped talking and looked at me right in the eyes, then she ran her hands along my arms as if to clarify my existence, to ground herself in the present.
‘Did you find out where it was coming from?’ I had asked.
But instead of replying she drew her body close to mine, so that there was no space between us; she moulded herself onto my body, she tucked her head into my neck and for the first time since the miscarriage, she had begun to cry.