Grandma’s Garland Rebecca Haque
F
rom year to year, nature and seasons are cyclical. The human drama also unfolds in a recurrent circular universal pattern, with the revolution of the wheel of fortune. Life's circles are whirls and eddy in the ocean's currents. An individual's life-circles are measured by the totality of birthdays celebrated whilst alive upon this earth, symbolically by counting the increasing number of flaming candles. Pondering this quasi-metaphysical strain of associative wisdom, grandma sits at her desk in her bedroom, with her fingertips playing memory's tune on the laptop keyboard in the quiet early hours of the ninth day of December. Grandma feels the pulse of time flow in slow circadian rhythms. She happily remembers that three nights earlier, on the sixth night of the last month of 2012, her fifty-eighth birthday, she had received gifts of flowers and food from her aged mother. A song of praise, of grace, of gratitude – a hymn of life – emanates from her innermost being as she composes her thoughts this night, her voice audibly in simultaneous synchrony with the soulful voice of Ani Choying Drolma chanting serene Buddhist verses on the CD, “Inner Peace 2”: “If there is intense will, one can transform suffering into bliss. Instead of cursing the darkness, you can simply light a candle.” It is nearly dawn, and from the south, the rising melody of the fajr azaan vibrates into the room. It does not seem at all incongruous to her, this merging of female and male voices, of Buddha and Allah. Is it not all celebration of life, of creation, of the gift of light? Tonight, she has not grown old. Memories take her back to the blushing days as a young bride and a new mother. She thinks of the growing circle of the womb, and then of the two who were taken from her before their time. Now, tonight, a quarter-of-a-century later, flashes of dry days of insanity are distant and quiescent in the palpable spiritualism of Ani Choying Drolma: “In the pollen heart of the lotus, Marvellous in the perfection of your attainment You are known as the lotus born And are surrounded by your circle of many dakinis. I pray that you will come and confer your blessings.” This year, the miracle of new life born of her daughter's womb, works its own miracle of closure, of suturing the jagged edges of the deep gash of the heart's wound. With new life in Melbourne, settlers beginning a new journey in a new country, the first footprints of another special circle within her own family circle, grandma offers a silent prayer to ward off the evil eye. Invigorated by a belief that the algorithm of providence and chance disallows the probability of destiny's drone to target the same circle one more time, she weaves a garland of variegated memories into a wreath of images to celebrate life. First light of the morning sun pours into the long rectangular veranda, open to the sky on the east and south sides. She savours the green corner of her home, her mother's jack-fruit and mango trees canopying the sky on the south, with the large Neem tree, and the guava and jujube- berry trees providing privacy on the east. Skyping allows grandma to bring Melbourne into her home in
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