Issue Twelve
“On Samosas” by Melissa Lambert
“The rain is dripping and drizzling its way across my car windshield as I turn into the half-full parking lot of the only Indian restaurant in this small college town in Utah.”
The rain is dripping and drizzling its way across my car windshield as I turn into the half-full parking lot of the only Indian restaurant in this small college town in Utah. I just left work, where I made the mistake of reading a novel about a family from India living in the Eastern United States, about their struggle to retain tradition and be a family and fit in, all at the same time. It was a mistake for me to read this book because it mentioned samosas, and my teeth have a costly weakness for samosas.
I was in high school, at the home of a friend and her Pakistani parents, the first time I tasted samosas. I found them magnificent. I thought they were the most persuasive reason I had come across yet for visiting Pakistan, or India for that matter. That is really saying something, because I’m sure we can all agree that there are many persuasive reasons for visiting both India and Pakistan. For some reason I feel uncomfortable juxtaposing the two countries like that. As clarification, I am not trying to be political; this is really about the samosas. And my Pakistani friend’s mother made samosas that taste much like the ones at the Indian restaurant down the street from my house. That is to say, delicious. Flaky pastries loaded with soft potatoes and peas and those yellow spices that stick to your knuckles so that you can still smell them hours later. In my humble opinion, the most exquisite part of a samosa is its well-formed corner.
The problem with reading books about immigrant families, especially immigrant families that come from countries with truly distinctive and delicious food, is that they make me homesick for places I have never been. Like India, for example. My foot has never touched its soil, but reading about displaced Indian families makes me ache for curry and rose water and silk saris. Hence, my arrival here at the Indian restaurant. I cannot banish samosas from my mind. I ask the turbaned man at the front counter for an order of samosas, to go.
“Just one order?” he asks.
“How many are in one order?”
“Two,” he responds.
“That will be fine,” I say, and he looks at me strangely, as though he is in disbelief that I would choose such a meager helping in a restaurant full of Indian bounties. For a moment I think he might shout at me, “But the curries! And the garlic naan bread! And the rice cooked in coconut milk!”
Instead he says, “That will be $4.32.”
So I pay him, already regretting the smallness of my order. I do love rice cooked in coconut milk, especially if it also contains sliced nuts.
As I wait for my samosas to come out of the kitchen in the expected white paper sack, I find myself drawn to a small outdated map on one of the walls. My eyes trace it, ravenous. I am a shameless consumer of maps. I love to remind myself which countries touch in which places. I am a little embarrassed when I realize I am reading the names of countries and cities in a whispered voice, feeling them roll around like red hot candies on my tongue. On such a small-scale map, it looks as though a person with particularly long legs could easily jump from one country to the next. I imagine the route I would take, stopping for a few days in each country, tasting the local method of harvesting and cooking rice, sitting on the floor of someone’s home, hiking in the mountains or savannahs or glacial fields. I look at the countries I have lived in and visited, and feel shocked at how close I was to other unfamiliar lands. Why, with those particularly long legs I could have visited China and Taiwan and Vietnam inside two days! I could have stuck my big toe in Papau New Guinea or French Polynesia or Turkey or Argentina without even moving the rest of my body! It feels strangely like a series of lost opportunities, but then I remind myself that at the same time as I wasn’t in Vietnam, I was in the Philippines. And so on. That doesn’t really count as a lost opportunity. But it does make me want to pick up my legs and jump.
I eat my samosas in the car, with my eyes shut, feeling the seasoned yellowish peas exploding on the roof of my mouth, before even leaving the parking lot. I imagine myself in Bombay or Calcutta, but when I open my eyes, I am still in my car, and it is still raining. That’s not such a bad thing; I hear it rains a lot in India.
* * *
As you can see, I am no authority on India or samosas. In fact, I’m not sure I’m an authority on anything. One thing I do know is that if you took an extraordinarily long and well-sharpened pencil, and stuck it directly through the globe at the exact coordinate of my favorite Indian restaurant in Utah, the pencil’s tip would emerge from the other end of the globe somewhere near the African coast, very close to where I am sitting at this moment. And you may or may not find this ironic, but I am at a beachfront restaurant in Mozambique eating an extra-spicy samosa and watching the Indian Ocean lap at the smooth white sand. It has been three months since I’ve paid $4.32 for an order of samosas. Now I order them off of menus that call them “chamoosas,” but they still taste familiar, and they’re much less expensive. Most importantly, the corners still tend to be perfect.
My table is right on the beach. At that mystical, ever-changing place where sea meets shore, there is a shattered piece of concrete sticking out of the water. Maybe at one point it was a pier, but now it is merely an obstacle for the waves. These waves are not kitten tongues lapping gently at the smooth sand. These waves are furious, with magnetic undertows and strong currents. They reach out of the sea like monsters and crash impudently around the sides of the concrete.
I look out into the distance, imagining the landmasses I would see if only the horizon didn’t bend so early. First Madagascar, which I suppose would rise out of the sea with fog-laced trees and twirling vines, depending on which direction I approached it from. Then, if I continued straight, I could potentially make contact with any number of small islands, floating like colorful clouds in the vastness of the Indian Ocean, before I hit the western coast of Australia. Or, alternately, I could turn my trip into a 90-degree angle and skim the coast of Sri Lanka before landing smack-dab in the middle of samosa land. If only maps were more trustworthy and true-to-size, I could visit India easily from here, with a huge boat and a pair of sturdy galoshes for wading through the shallows.
Maybe I should have been a geography major. Over the course of my college career to this point, I have met only one other psychology major who is equally infatuated with maps, and the idea of taking the same pair of flip-flops to every corner of the earth. (I have limited myself to the earth because I am sort of indifferent to outer space for now. It seems such a big leap for someone like me who has never even been to China, Sweden, or Ethiopia.) I think that my mapaholic friend dropped out of school, or at least changed her major, probably frustrated with the frequent psychologists’ claim that the human mind is its own universe. I myself am unsure on this point; I think the human mind is more like a small but brilliant sun, always discovering a way to make everything else revolve obediently around it.
Last week I was convinced I had malaria. We forgot to buy our weekly anti-malarial medication, and took the pills five days late. It would be just my luck; I take the pills faithfully, suffering from the side effects of nightmares and audio-hallucinations all along, and the first time I miss a dose some damn blood-sucking malaria-carrying mosquito makes a meal out of me. At any rate, the first day of my mystery illness found me with prickly heat dancing above my skin as freezing blasts ran immediately beneath it.
It turned out I didn’t have malaria, but actually some simple virus. I don’t regret my paranoia though. I spent two days in bed, which was enough time for my husband, Joe, to read virtually all of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, the story of a Baptist missionary family in the 1960s-era Congo, out loud. I marveled through most of the book; where does one learn to write like that? At moments I was unsure whether my chills had their origin in a parasitic bug, or in the perfect combinations of Kingsolver’s adjectives.
Joe took breaks from the reading to make soup and boiled potatoes, rub my aching back and legs, manually hold down the bathroom’s broken electrical switch so that I could take a warm shower, and take my rising and falling temperature; aside from these brief intervals, he read for two days straight. It is a long book. And I have a remarkable husband.
I decided, at the end of the book, that my new response to the frequent question, “So how’s Africa?” would be a simple, “There’s a book you can read that will explain it better than I can.” Mozambique is far away from the Congo, but Africa’s common colonial history lends itself to natural comparisons. The Congo suffered at the hand of the Belgians; Mozambique’s conquerors were the Portuguese. Both countries have histories of revolution, civil war, and virtual genocide. And crucially, and this might be a surprise to some, many rural Mozambican villages look exactly as they must have forty years ago, and much further back than that.
I, however, am living in one Mozambican city that is actually in worse shape than it was forty years ago: Beira, located halfway up the coastline of Mozambique. There is one street, in particular, which amazes me. Along both sides of the street, tall trees reach so high that they bend at the top and make a tunnel, letting just enough light through to remind the visitor that they are, after all, in the second-biggest city in Mozambique; not some densely-canopied rainforest. The houses on this street are like most buildings in Beira: drab, gray, peeling, crumbling buildings in dire need of some brightly-colored paint. But looking closer at the buildings, it becomes apparent that their architecture is exquisitely beautiful. The houses on this particular street are large, spacious, and marvelously-designed. It makes me want to buy ten thousand buckets of yellow, red, and blue paint, and cover the whole city with something colorful. It makes me want to go back in time and stroll dreamily down this street in 1965, before the mass exodus of the Portuguese.
Over the centuries of oppressive Portuguese rule, native Mozambicans were forbidden from getting an education, owning shops, or working in certain possessions. As a result, when Mozambique gained its independence and the Portuguese left in 1975, Mozambique was left with virtually no one who was trained and prepared to run the country, treat illness, teach reading and math, write and defend the law, or conduct business. There was a brief, and relatively successful, bout of communism, followed by a bloody revolution and civil war. The war killed a million people and effectively shattered the country’s infrastructure, destroying health posts and schools, killing almost all the animals in the once-renowned national parks. Mozambique has been a peaceful nation for only thirteen years.
The first time I drove through the residential streets in downtown Beira, I was surprised by the many broken sidewalks. I imagined that they were post-war reminders of war; perhaps they had been blown up, or bombed. But I was wrong. Apparently, back in the time of colonialism, the city trees were simply planted too close together underneath the concrete. Today, they continue to grow, their roots bumping together under the surface of the concrete like great shipwrecks. As a result of their underground violence, the sidewalk is broken, shattered. The streets in these areas are like angry waves beat into a frenzy during a storm out on the ocean, falling, rising, then climbing on top of each other before they descend again.
The residential streets of Beira contain crumbling, glorious houses with shattered windows, tiny shacks made of sticks and –with some luck—mud, and also high-rise slums. Many of the colonial-era apartment buildings still exist. People who live on the sixth floor walk down the stairs every day to draw water out of the closest well and find some kind of a latrine, because many of these tall apartment buildings have no electricity, water, or waste disposal. Out by the beach sits the Grand Hotel. Once upon a time it was one of the finest and most expensive hotels in Africa; now it is a lightless, waterless, all-its-windows-broken home to squatters.
When people ask what it is like here, I usually describe homes or streets or landscapes, mostly because I harbor a distaste for generalizing “the people” to be one way or another. Additionally, let’s be honest, idealism aside, I can’t find many generalizations that work in Mozambique. Maybe it’s because my husband and I speak strange Brazilian Portuguese instead of the breezy, whooshy Portuguese spoken here, but we have marveled at the difficulty we’ve had in forming relationships, and then at the sudden warmth and closeness we feel with those people who have set their barricades aside and let us come in. So this will be my only generalization: The Mozambican people I have met are kind and gentle, but simultaneously a bit untrusting and unwilling to show any kind of weakness. The chilly public interactions between strangers are closer to what I witnessed in post-communist Russia than anywhere else I’ve been. Who says politics have no effect on our daily lives?
One question haunts me as I pass by the high-rise slums and shattered sidewalks: If I had been around in the time when England, Portugal, France and Spain were dividing up the rest of the planet, would I myself have hopped on those boats and sailed off, hungry to discover the world with them, and then make it mine? Would I have contributed to the destruction of ancient cultures? Would I have carried with me new and deadly diseases? Would I have, simply by the force of inertia or lack of courage to speak up, become an unwilling part of the violence that made people born on the African continent into slaves, in their own lands and abroad?
Perhaps I would have been a mere map-maker, or even some kind of anthropologist. In reality, though, I don’t think I would have had much to do with these colonial trips. I am comforted by two things: I am a woman, and from my understanding women were not usually very welcome on exploring journeys. Also, I get terribly, grotesquely seasick on long boat trips. Probably I would have just stayed home. Probably I would have just sat in my chair and wondered, just as I do now, who was the most correct, whose team I was on. The only easy thing, then and now, is deciphering who is the loudest.
In reality, only one thing is for sure: Culture, that enigmatic entity that lives in my mind and in yours, crying out right and wrong and left and right, has wings and fins and a thousand feet. It is a creature difficult, but fortunately not impossible, to kill. Sometimes it crosses oceans; sometimes it stands on shorelines wondering at the approach of its white-sailed hunter. Culture sings and dances; it breeds and cross-breeds. It writes poetry, in its spare time.
* * *
It took a short plane ride and a long bus ride to get to where I am now, which is Johannesburg, South Africa. I have left the coast behind. My husband and I have just finished our shopping at a local chain grocery store, located at the end of a mall’s hallway. I am still reeling from the vast array of fruits and vegetables, the sea of green and red and orange and white and yellow that filled the vegetable bins to overflowing. And there were rice cakes! Soy milk! Microwave popcorn! My husband was more impressed with the salami, cheddar cheese and hot mustard; I think he will eat sandwiches for days. At the only grocery store in Beira, there was never much selection. We never went hungry, but variety like this had slipped to the far reaches of our memories.
When we left the grocery store, I noticed a little Indian takeout place across the hall. I made my way over to it like I was sleepwalking. I ordered three samosas: potato, lentil and mixed vegetable. My husband ordered two: chicken and beef. I also ordered two vegetarian spring rolls, for good measure. And now I am eating them, crunching on the corners and rolling the spices across the backs of my teeth.
So I am standing in this echoing mall corridor, nibbling on the corners of my blessed vegetable samosa, and suddenly the music starts. Understand, in Africa, the air is made out of tiny melodious crystals, and when the moisture and pressure of the air is right, there are frequent collisions. Music happens so naturally. The crystals bump together and there is unexpected harmony. This music is mournful just as often as it is celebratory. I think I will miss this more than anything else when I leave Africa. In the grocery store there is a circle of people singing and clapping and swaying and, apparently, celebrating something. I ask a passer-by what’s going on, and she explains to me that they are on strike. I am shocked. Aren’t people on strike usually angry? These workers are laughing and dancing! She looks at me and smiles and says, “Have you forgotten where you are?”
To this, all I can think to say is “Sometimes.”
I was in high school, at the home of a friend and her Pakistani parents, the first time I tasted samosas. I found them magnificent. I thought they were the most persuasive reason I had come across yet for visiting Pakistan, or India for that matter. That is really saying something, because I’m sure we can all agree that there are many persuasive reasons for visiting both India and Pakistan. For some reason I feel uncomfortable juxtaposing the two countries like that. As clarification, I am not trying to be political; this is really about the samosas. And my Pakistani friend’s mother made samosas that taste much like the ones at the Indian restaurant down the street from my house. That is to say, delicious. Flaky pastries loaded with soft potatoes and peas and those yellow spices that stick to your knuckles so that you can still smell them hours later. In my humble opinion, the most exquisite part of a samosa is its well-formed corner.
The problem with reading books about immigrant families, especially immigrant families that come from countries with truly distinctive and delicious food, is that they make me homesick for places I have never been. Like India, for example. My foot has never touched its soil, but reading about displaced Indian families makes me ache for curry and rose water and silk saris. Hence, my arrival here at the Indian restaurant. I cannot banish samosas from my mind. I ask the turbaned man at the front counter for an order of samosas, to go.
“Just one order?” he asks.
“How many are in one order?”
“Two,” he responds.
“That will be fine,” I say, and he looks at me strangely, as though he is in disbelief that I would choose such a meager helping in a restaurant full of Indian bounties. For a moment I think he might shout at me, “But the curries! And the garlic naan bread! And the rice cooked in coconut milk!”
Instead he says, “That will be $4.32.”
So I pay him, already regretting the smallness of my order. I do love rice cooked in coconut milk, especially if it also contains sliced nuts.
As I wait for my samosas to come out of the kitchen in the expected white paper sack, I find myself drawn to a small outdated map on one of the walls. My eyes trace it, ravenous. I am a shameless consumer of maps. I love to remind myself which countries touch in which places. I am a little embarrassed when I realize I am reading the names of countries and cities in a whispered voice, feeling them roll around like red hot candies on my tongue. On such a small-scale map, it looks as though a person with particularly long legs could easily jump from one country to the next. I imagine the route I would take, stopping for a few days in each country, tasting the local method of harvesting and cooking rice, sitting on the floor of someone’s home, hiking in the mountains or savannahs or glacial fields. I look at the countries I have lived in and visited, and feel shocked at how close I was to other unfamiliar lands. Why, with those particularly long legs I could have visited China and Taiwan and Vietnam inside two days! I could have stuck my big toe in Papau New Guinea or French Polynesia or Turkey or Argentina without even moving the rest of my body! It feels strangely like a series of lost opportunities, but then I remind myself that at the same time as I wasn’t in Vietnam, I was in the Philippines. And so on. That doesn’t really count as a lost opportunity. But it does make me want to pick up my legs and jump.
I eat my samosas in the car, with my eyes shut, feeling the seasoned yellowish peas exploding on the roof of my mouth, before even leaving the parking lot. I imagine myself in Bombay or Calcutta, but when I open my eyes, I am still in my car, and it is still raining. That’s not such a bad thing; I hear it rains a lot in India.
* * *
As you can see, I am no authority on India or samosas. In fact, I’m not sure I’m an authority on anything. One thing I do know is that if you took an extraordinarily long and well-sharpened pencil, and stuck it directly through the globe at the exact coordinate of my favorite Indian restaurant in Utah, the pencil’s tip would emerge from the other end of the globe somewhere near the African coast, very close to where I am sitting at this moment. And you may or may not find this ironic, but I am at a beachfront restaurant in Mozambique eating an extra-spicy samosa and watching the Indian Ocean lap at the smooth white sand. It has been three months since I’ve paid $4.32 for an order of samosas. Now I order them off of menus that call them “chamoosas,” but they still taste familiar, and they’re much less expensive. Most importantly, the corners still tend to be perfect.
My table is right on the beach. At that mystical, ever-changing place where sea meets shore, there is a shattered piece of concrete sticking out of the water. Maybe at one point it was a pier, but now it is merely an obstacle for the waves. These waves are not kitten tongues lapping gently at the smooth sand. These waves are furious, with magnetic undertows and strong currents. They reach out of the sea like monsters and crash impudently around the sides of the concrete.
I look out into the distance, imagining the landmasses I would see if only the horizon didn’t bend so early. First Madagascar, which I suppose would rise out of the sea with fog-laced trees and twirling vines, depending on which direction I approached it from. Then, if I continued straight, I could potentially make contact with any number of small islands, floating like colorful clouds in the vastness of the Indian Ocean, before I hit the western coast of Australia. Or, alternately, I could turn my trip into a 90-degree angle and skim the coast of Sri Lanka before landing smack-dab in the middle of samosa land. If only maps were more trustworthy and true-to-size, I could visit India easily from here, with a huge boat and a pair of sturdy galoshes for wading through the shallows.
Maybe I should have been a geography major. Over the course of my college career to this point, I have met only one other psychology major who is equally infatuated with maps, and the idea of taking the same pair of flip-flops to every corner of the earth. (I have limited myself to the earth because I am sort of indifferent to outer space for now. It seems such a big leap for someone like me who has never even been to China, Sweden, or Ethiopia.) I think that my mapaholic friend dropped out of school, or at least changed her major, probably frustrated with the frequent psychologists’ claim that the human mind is its own universe. I myself am unsure on this point; I think the human mind is more like a small but brilliant sun, always discovering a way to make everything else revolve obediently around it.
Last week I was convinced I had malaria. We forgot to buy our weekly anti-malarial medication, and took the pills five days late. It would be just my luck; I take the pills faithfully, suffering from the side effects of nightmares and audio-hallucinations all along, and the first time I miss a dose some damn blood-sucking malaria-carrying mosquito makes a meal out of me. At any rate, the first day of my mystery illness found me with prickly heat dancing above my skin as freezing blasts ran immediately beneath it.
It turned out I didn’t have malaria, but actually some simple virus. I don’t regret my paranoia though. I spent two days in bed, which was enough time for my husband, Joe, to read virtually all of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, the story of a Baptist missionary family in the 1960s-era Congo, out loud. I marveled through most of the book; where does one learn to write like that? At moments I was unsure whether my chills had their origin in a parasitic bug, or in the perfect combinations of Kingsolver’s adjectives.
Joe took breaks from the reading to make soup and boiled potatoes, rub my aching back and legs, manually hold down the bathroom’s broken electrical switch so that I could take a warm shower, and take my rising and falling temperature; aside from these brief intervals, he read for two days straight. It is a long book. And I have a remarkable husband.
I decided, at the end of the book, that my new response to the frequent question, “So how’s Africa?” would be a simple, “There’s a book you can read that will explain it better than I can.” Mozambique is far away from the Congo, but Africa’s common colonial history lends itself to natural comparisons. The Congo suffered at the hand of the Belgians; Mozambique’s conquerors were the Portuguese. Both countries have histories of revolution, civil war, and virtual genocide. And crucially, and this might be a surprise to some, many rural Mozambican villages look exactly as they must have forty years ago, and much further back than that.
I, however, am living in one Mozambican city that is actually in worse shape than it was forty years ago: Beira, located halfway up the coastline of Mozambique. There is one street, in particular, which amazes me. Along both sides of the street, tall trees reach so high that they bend at the top and make a tunnel, letting just enough light through to remind the visitor that they are, after all, in the second-biggest city in Mozambique; not some densely-canopied rainforest. The houses on this street are like most buildings in Beira: drab, gray, peeling, crumbling buildings in dire need of some brightly-colored paint. But looking closer at the buildings, it becomes apparent that their architecture is exquisitely beautiful. The houses on this particular street are large, spacious, and marvelously-designed. It makes me want to buy ten thousand buckets of yellow, red, and blue paint, and cover the whole city with something colorful. It makes me want to go back in time and stroll dreamily down this street in 1965, before the mass exodus of the Portuguese.
Over the centuries of oppressive Portuguese rule, native Mozambicans were forbidden from getting an education, owning shops, or working in certain possessions. As a result, when Mozambique gained its independence and the Portuguese left in 1975, Mozambique was left with virtually no one who was trained and prepared to run the country, treat illness, teach reading and math, write and defend the law, or conduct business. There was a brief, and relatively successful, bout of communism, followed by a bloody revolution and civil war. The war killed a million people and effectively shattered the country’s infrastructure, destroying health posts and schools, killing almost all the animals in the once-renowned national parks. Mozambique has been a peaceful nation for only thirteen years.
The first time I drove through the residential streets in downtown Beira, I was surprised by the many broken sidewalks. I imagined that they were post-war reminders of war; perhaps they had been blown up, or bombed. But I was wrong. Apparently, back in the time of colonialism, the city trees were simply planted too close together underneath the concrete. Today, they continue to grow, their roots bumping together under the surface of the concrete like great shipwrecks. As a result of their underground violence, the sidewalk is broken, shattered. The streets in these areas are like angry waves beat into a frenzy during a storm out on the ocean, falling, rising, then climbing on top of each other before they descend again.
The residential streets of Beira contain crumbling, glorious houses with shattered windows, tiny shacks made of sticks and –with some luck—mud, and also high-rise slums. Many of the colonial-era apartment buildings still exist. People who live on the sixth floor walk down the stairs every day to draw water out of the closest well and find some kind of a latrine, because many of these tall apartment buildings have no electricity, water, or waste disposal. Out by the beach sits the Grand Hotel. Once upon a time it was one of the finest and most expensive hotels in Africa; now it is a lightless, waterless, all-its-windows-broken home to squatters.
When people ask what it is like here, I usually describe homes or streets or landscapes, mostly because I harbor a distaste for generalizing “the people” to be one way or another. Additionally, let’s be honest, idealism aside, I can’t find many generalizations that work in Mozambique. Maybe it’s because my husband and I speak strange Brazilian Portuguese instead of the breezy, whooshy Portuguese spoken here, but we have marveled at the difficulty we’ve had in forming relationships, and then at the sudden warmth and closeness we feel with those people who have set their barricades aside and let us come in. So this will be my only generalization: The Mozambican people I have met are kind and gentle, but simultaneously a bit untrusting and unwilling to show any kind of weakness. The chilly public interactions between strangers are closer to what I witnessed in post-communist Russia than anywhere else I’ve been. Who says politics have no effect on our daily lives?
One question haunts me as I pass by the high-rise slums and shattered sidewalks: If I had been around in the time when England, Portugal, France and Spain were dividing up the rest of the planet, would I myself have hopped on those boats and sailed off, hungry to discover the world with them, and then make it mine? Would I have contributed to the destruction of ancient cultures? Would I have carried with me new and deadly diseases? Would I have, simply by the force of inertia or lack of courage to speak up, become an unwilling part of the violence that made people born on the African continent into slaves, in their own lands and abroad?
Perhaps I would have been a mere map-maker, or even some kind of anthropologist. In reality, though, I don’t think I would have had much to do with these colonial trips. I am comforted by two things: I am a woman, and from my understanding women were not usually very welcome on exploring journeys. Also, I get terribly, grotesquely seasick on long boat trips. Probably I would have just stayed home. Probably I would have just sat in my chair and wondered, just as I do now, who was the most correct, whose team I was on. The only easy thing, then and now, is deciphering who is the loudest.
In reality, only one thing is for sure: Culture, that enigmatic entity that lives in my mind and in yours, crying out right and wrong and left and right, has wings and fins and a thousand feet. It is a creature difficult, but fortunately not impossible, to kill. Sometimes it crosses oceans; sometimes it stands on shorelines wondering at the approach of its white-sailed hunter. Culture sings and dances; it breeds and cross-breeds. It writes poetry, in its spare time.
* * *
It took a short plane ride and a long bus ride to get to where I am now, which is Johannesburg, South Africa. I have left the coast behind. My husband and I have just finished our shopping at a local chain grocery store, located at the end of a mall’s hallway. I am still reeling from the vast array of fruits and vegetables, the sea of green and red and orange and white and yellow that filled the vegetable bins to overflowing. And there were rice cakes! Soy milk! Microwave popcorn! My husband was more impressed with the salami, cheddar cheese and hot mustard; I think he will eat sandwiches for days. At the only grocery store in Beira, there was never much selection. We never went hungry, but variety like this had slipped to the far reaches of our memories.
When we left the grocery store, I noticed a little Indian takeout place across the hall. I made my way over to it like I was sleepwalking. I ordered three samosas: potato, lentil and mixed vegetable. My husband ordered two: chicken and beef. I also ordered two vegetarian spring rolls, for good measure. And now I am eating them, crunching on the corners and rolling the spices across the backs of my teeth.
So I am standing in this echoing mall corridor, nibbling on the corners of my blessed vegetable samosa, and suddenly the music starts. Understand, in Africa, the air is made out of tiny melodious crystals, and when the moisture and pressure of the air is right, there are frequent collisions. Music happens so naturally. The crystals bump together and there is unexpected harmony. This music is mournful just as often as it is celebratory. I think I will miss this more than anything else when I leave Africa. In the grocery store there is a circle of people singing and clapping and swaying and, apparently, celebrating something. I ask a passer-by what’s going on, and she explains to me that they are on strike. I am shocked. Aren’t people on strike usually angry? These workers are laughing and dancing! She looks at me and smiles and says, “Have you forgotten where you are?”
To this, all I can think to say is “Sometimes.”