Scarcity Lingers; Love Conquers

Maya-Rose Chauhan

My father might have once, in a dirty seaport city, unshelled peanuts, with feet in too-big sandals. He may have done this with eagerness, placing each new peanut inside a stainless steel bowl, offering it gesturally, tenderly, to his mother who may have wrapped it in newspaper, in turn, to offer it to strangers for...peanuts. Peanuts are insignificant. They make no one’s day, they neither win awards nor make much money.

The humble peanut will be a replica of my love for my father. It will represent the scarcity with which my love has so often been served to him. The retreating nature of my love, the way I have held it back, in the hope that refusing it might serve to punish the scarcity he had no idea he felt. The peanut will stand in solidarity with my reticence to love.

My father was born of a mother who only had so much; she believed in economy, cleanliness and fastidious routine. Finite, the word that comes to mind. Not in her innate love, but in her means to love. Her scarcity took on the form of rationing. Her love was not on-tap. Rationed was her love, rationed were her gestures, rationed the ways she placed spices with lentils, reluctantly, a little at a time, in order to feed her husband, her seven children and all the others who came to stay.

She grew in love and in expression over many years. Now, with Alzheimer's, she swings between childish ecstasy and subdued oblivion. Her love is no longer rationed by her material economy. Her love is rationed by her mind. She sits, stares, but she no longer wonders why. Why her…why me?

I wonder, in my desire to see what was actually going on in her heart, whether her strictness – that which caused her to ration her love for my father – was forged through external circumstance (migration, poverty, limited education, the imperial politics of the day) or through her own propensity for cleanliness and routine. Did poverty bring about an understanding that there might never be enough? And as such, is it always best to portion things like rice, potatoes, cumin seeds, salt, lentils and love? If her physical energy might never be able to extend across all seven surviving tiny faces, each with outstretched arms and little personalities and many many needs, how would she have survived?

Energy, physical energy, is subservient to love…it is love’s display. Physical energy, the ability to vigorously do a task, makes someone’s love obvious. She was robust, although small. She was fiery and never appeared lost – she wore the pants, did the cooking, dressed the children, worked in a cotton mill in cold northern England. She believed in hard work. She lit aarthi in prayer, she worshipped goddesses who gave her infinite strength, she beckoned guests in and cooked for tens of people at a time. She remembers each day of her life through the food she prepared. My grandmother loved through action, work, and exacting routine.

Peanuts were not a symbol then. They were a means to an end. There was no time for symbols, for an analysis of who they were and why they were in that seaport city. The little money peanuts brought in sustained the children. They facilitated migration to England. Economic leaps and bounds, a better life? Peanuts had made no one’s day, nor did they earn much money, but they did enough. They did help gain access to economic prospects beyond what had been available.  

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The humble peanut will also juxtapose my bleeding heart. It will perform for you the contrast between it, and the flowing of my heart’s generous blood that gives and gives until I am limp and pallid. It will show you of my sentience, of my sensitivity to the fact that all this could not have been any other way.

My father who shows me love now more than ever was a creative, a dreamer and a traveller growing up. The scarcity of his childhood met a plenitude of hopes during the days he was seeking abundance. An abundance of…? Perhaps he couldn’t name it because he hadn’t experienced it. Less restriction? More freedom of identity? More spiritual and social opportunity? A reason to live, outside the confines of a small caste group with whom he felt little sincere affiliation.

His desire for a fuller sense of identity, for symbols that reached beyond his material means, brought him to a country where he was able to breathe. There is scarcely a moment that goes by when he and I are not connected, in mentality and yearning for an abundance of freedom and hope. The heart injuries I have sustained at the hands of previous, the generation’s economic scarcity and consequent emotional rationing, are forever here with me, echoing within the emptiness of those small traumas. I feel them. I don’t hate the past any longer, because hate truncates love, and love is true abundance. And now, when at the aged care home visiting my grandmother, I see light, strength and power in her eyes and in the body that has carried her this far, to 93 and other worlds, other seaport cities - the body that brought my father into the world and which presented me with life, opportunity, and a means to love unstoppably and unconditionally.