Reality Check - by Jocelyn Prasad
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLYThis is part of our new 5-piece suite from South-Asian Australian writers inspired by the COVID situation in India and the Australian response
‘You’re drinking wine,’ Lakshmi says, a little envious.
The light is fading on the balcony. Behind me, Sydney’s sky turns burnt orange, like the leaves clinging to the plane trees on our street. It’s getting cold and I drink to stay warm.
Lakshmi is inside, sheltering from Hyderabad’s intense, dry heat. She hasn’t left the house in weeks, since India’s COVID-19 cases really took off.
She’s been there since January, when her mother was dying from pancreatic cancer. It’s late April now, and she has been trying to get back to New Zealand for more than a month. COVID has morphed into a beast, feeding on unchecked mass gatherings and ravaging a nation many thought immune to the virus’s worst excesses.
The ban on anyone from India entering New Zealand has lifted. But Lakshmi is juggling a diminishing schedule of flights and New Zealand’s Kafkaesque quarantine system. She is at an impasse and I wonder if I can help.
Flipping the camera on her phone, she shows me the house’s cool, concrete interior, laced with climbing plants nurtured by her sister. She points out an enormous curry leaf tree outside her window, alongside a covered car.
I realise how little I understand about Lakshmi’s life in India and her annual visits home, despite knowing her for most of the 17 years she has lived in New Zealand, my birth country. I try to imagine growing up in that house, running up and down its narrow flight of stairs and waking to singsong chatter in Telegu.
*
‘Do you have curry in your pants?’ asked Dion. Someone had given him the idea that our food resembled shit. I already felt different from the other kids but as I dangled, bewildered, from the monkey bars, I felt shame. It started as a lurch in the gut before rising to my throat, making it hard to talk.
“As I progressed to intermediate school, it was curry muncher, Gandhi, faux accents and wobbling heads.”
As I progressed to intermediate school, it was curry muncher, Gandhi, faux accents and wobbling heads. At home, I stopped eating Indian food and shouted about how much I hated being Indian. I put talcum powder on my face each morning to lighten my skin. Once I didn’t rub it all in, leaving a white, floury patch under my chin.
‘She’s trying to make herself look whiter,’ someone at assembly mocked. I wiped it off on my sleeve and hid my face under my long fringe.
*
To get home, Lakshmi must find a vacancy in New Zealand’s managed isolation and quarantine system, MIQ. Then she needs to book a flight that matches her quarantine dates. She has 48 hours to do this before the MIQ spot is lost.
Quarantine slots are not readily available and flights even less so. Most countries have shut their doors to flights from India.
Methodical and persistent, Lakshmi scours the internet. May 7, she confirms, as she gives me a virtual tour of her family home. Her sister’s plants line the stairwell and occupy the landings. Portraits of deities hang above the door frames and in the living room there is a picture of an older couple.
‘Your parents?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’ She is sad they are both gone, but not prone to outbursts. And life goes on; in her video, rangoli patterns chalked on the floor mark Tulsi Pooja, a Hindu festival celebrating the monsoon’s end. Lakshmi makes a brief cameo, dressed in a green sari, her long black hair pinned at the sides. The soundscape fills with passing motorcycles and a tinny speaker playing the high-pitched lilt of a Bollywood songstress.
Three days later the airline cancels the Doha–Auckland flight.
I help her to email New Zealand politicians. She asks for clarity about how stranded citizens like her might return. Suggestions include underwriting a flight, or consulting airlines on the availability of commercial flights. She requests MIQ slots be made available to those somehow able to find an elusive plane seat.
We receive noncommittal, form responses.
I ring one morning to check if she’s okay.
‘I’m fine, about to have breakfast,’ she says.
‘What’s are you having?’
‘Aloo paratha.’
Potato-stuffed flatbreads, served with a bowl of sour yoghurt. Beats Vegemite on toast any day of the week.
*
In my twenties, I got my first full-time job, at a PR firm, and started cooking Indian food for my friends. I bugged my family for recipes. They were bemused when I asked them to specify measurements for ingredients they added in pinches instead of grams.
‘I don’t know … why not half a heaped tablespoon?’ Dad said when pushed on how much masala he used in his lamb curry. ‘But don’t forget the garam masala. Mix it with hot water before you add it. You want it to be liquid, but not too runny.’
‘Just make sure you use heaps of fresh garlic and ginger,’ my sister Vineeta told me as I prepared fish curry for my first dinner party, attended by colleagues from work.
The dish became part of my standard dinner party menu, served with a vegetable curry made with eggplant, potatoes and peas. Friends would help themselves to seconds while pouring more wine. We’d stay up until the early hours, and the leftovers I ate the next day eased my hangover.
After three years of penning press releases, I quit my job and made plans to travel through South-East Asia and on to India. I was in Vietnam when my trip was cut short by a job offer in New Zealand. Deferring my pilgrimage to India was almost a relief; that part of the trip was feeling more like an existential test than a holiday.
“Deferring my pilgrimage to India was almost a relief; that part of the trip was feeling more like an existential test than a holiday.”
A flight via Mumbai comes up, but Mumbai seethes with 22 million people: the eye of the storm. Lakshmi had hoped to leave from the relative safety of Hyderabad. But if she has no other choice, she will risk exposure to the virus and the increased chance of returning a positive result in her pre-flight test.
I trace an old parliamentary contact in New Zealand, someone I worked with when I was a staffer years ago. Keep rebooking MIQ slots after they expire, he suggests after asking around the building. There are plenty to go around, apparently.
Apparently not. MIQ is a biiiiggg problem, Lakshmi messages. Wellington, we have a problem.
The Mumbai flight is cancelled.
*
‘I’m a real Indian,’ a taxi driver once said, after I told him my parents were from Fiji. Apparently one of us was more Indian than the other because of their birth country. I had spent so long denying my heritage that I couldn’t feel angry when a stranger did the same. It was like he knew me.
When I eventually got to India, I revelled in being surrounded by people who looked similar to me. But real Indians walked, spoke and dressed differently. I felt out of place with my sneakers and t-shirts and a smattering of Fiji Hindi spoken in a Kiwi twang – I was more at home among backpackers and their well-thumbed copies of Lonely Planet. The real Indians were out of my reach. They were so self-assured in their Indianness that I felt like a fraud, like someone who arrived late to a party and couldn’t find her way in.
“They were so self-assured in their Indianness that I felt like a fraud, like someone who arrived late to a party and couldn’t find her way in.”
*
After more ferreting, Lakshmi finds a flight from Hyderabad, via Doha, leaving 13 May. It costs thousands. The MIQ cat and mouse continues. Lakshmi stays up all night, constantly refreshing her browser in case a vacancy pops up.
In Sydney, an Uber driver tells me about his brother, a doctor in Hyderabad. ‘It’s hard for him,’ he says. ‘There’s not enough oxygen or equipment to deal with all these patients.’
While I sleep on and off, Lakshmi scores a quarantine slot, but an officious email arrives a few hours later, its subject shouting: INDIA SUSPENSION OF TRAVEL – VOUCHER HOLDERS. Lakshmi is in a high-risk country, and so ‘not eligible for travel at this time’. Her MIQ voucher will expire in 48 hours unless she provides ‘evidence that you do meet the criteria for travelling’.
She forwards me the email which I read as I brew my morning pot of tea. We are confounded.
Desperate, I spam former parliamentary colleagues in the hope someone can interpret MIQ’s blunt rejection. ‘Sent in error’, ‘poorly worded’, come the replies, some sheepish. Someone tells me Lakshmi just needs to reiterate her travel plans and reconfirm her citizenship.
Duly done, her place is finally assured. But how many others received this response and gave up? How many ways can you interpret ‘not eligible to travel?’ Why was the government saying citizens could come home, yet putting up barriers at every turn? It is hard to not feel the pandemic has recast Lakshmi as a second-class citizen.
I have no idea what brought her to New Zealand but she has no less right to call it home than I do.
Besides, she is family.
*
We were raised Christian because Dad converted at an early age but when Mum died, we agreed she had remained a Hindu at heart. As the eldest brother in our family, Victor was charged with the Hindu funeral rites. Like all of us, he had little idea of what that entailed.
It was cold and wintry on the day we sprinkled Mum’s ashes in Auckland’s Manukau Harbour. We gathered on Onehunga’s foreshore, numb with cold and finality.
Until then, Lakshmi had been a backseat figure in our family. She had arrived on the scene some years after Victor’s first marriage ended, perhaps not long after she emigrated. They were coy about their relationship and she kept her own flat.
Victor looked lost, in old gumboots hailing from his days at the freezing works. Lakshmi took his wrist and instructed him. She quietly whispered Sanskrit prayers for him to repeat as he sprinkled Mum’s ashes and sent her on her next journey.
*
“The flight from Doha is no sure thing. Others are arriving there only to be told their connecting flight has been cancelled. I work, I eat, I drink, I sleep. I wait.”
The flight from Doha is no sure thing. Others are arriving there only to be told their connecting flight has been cancelled. I work, I eat, I drink, I sleep. I wait.
I am asleep when Lakshmi sends a message from Auckland. She’s on her way to quarantine at the Holiday Inn. Happy holiday! I reply on waking.
People from her flight later test positive. She had briefly sat next to one in transit, a passenger who hadn’t been in India. More testing will follow. The rigmarole will continue. But Lakshmi is home.
I am relieved. Lakshmi and I have had little to do with each other over the years, and we don’t have a lot in common. She is a real Indian, while I am steeped in Antipodean ways. We remain mysterious to each other. But I care about her, and I admire that she has embraced New Zealand’s cultural nuances while holding fast to her own.
*
I knew some Hindi the second time I visited India. Enough to ask the chai wallah where he was from and to enquire about the spices in his brew.
Enough to argue with a boatman who tried to extract more money from me at Triveni Sangam, a holy confluence of rivers, while I floated flowers to honour Mum.
Enough to haggle with rickshaw drivers. ‘I’m not a golden bird,’ I said in Hindi as one touted outside a train station. It was a textbook colloquialism. His friends laughed as I dismissed him with a wave. Were they mocking me? I removed my sunglasses and turned to look. No, it seemed I had successfully chided their friend, who was chastened but still smiling.
Everyone was in on the joke. In that moment, the best of two worlds had come together, and it was joyous. ▼
Photo by Tapan Kumar Choudhury on Unsplash
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