Memory is no longer confused, it has a homeland—
Agha Shahid Ali
Sometimes the circle breaks
And the woman meets the child
Face to face
Each one seeing for the first time
Her strength in the other.
Genny Lim
Dolls and Bombs by Roshni Rustomji
After more than a year of correspondence and phone conversations, Amy Ling and I met at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was sometime during the mid-1980’s. We shook hands. We were formal with one another. It was early October when the trees begin their annual experimentation with colors before deciding to drop their leaves and go dormant.
“Calcutta was very hot.” Said Amy. It was an unexpected statement. Calcutta had not come up even as a marginal comment in our previous conversations. I countered Calcutta with, “My great-great grandmother was Chinese.” Amy looked at me, shook her head. Was it because she saw no hint of China in my face? Through some strange desire to prove my point, I told her that my first dream during my first night in the USA was about my Chinese ancestors. It was summer 1965 and I was in Loudon, New Hampshire. I dreamed about them again my first night in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1975. Amy looked perplexed. “How did you know that they were your Chinese ancestors?” She asked. I explained that my acceptance of the people in my dreams as my Chinese ancestors was because they looked like my oldest paternal aunt and uncle who were said to resemble our ancestress from China. Amy wanted to know about my aunt and uncle.
My aunt, Dossi Bhujwalla, could mesmerize and nourish any and all of us with her stories. Family stories, stories from around the world, myths, legends, histories, rumors. Stories that have stood by me through nightmares and daytime terrors. My aunt died when she was 90 years old. Amy and I agreed that 90 was a good age to die.
My uncle, Homi (for Hormuzd) Rustomji, died young. He was barely 40 years old. He was an astounding musician. He played the violin and cello. I would crouch outside the closed door of his small room, clutching the various pieces of my doll—she was called Shanti—listening to the music. I would pick up Shanti’s head and place her ear on the door because her ears were smaller than my four, five, six, seven year old ears and I wanted her to listen carefully to the wondrous sounds. I may have known in the way children know that my uncle’s music would disappear from my life far too soon. Amy said, “I got my first doll in Calcutta. We spent some time in Calcutta when we fled China. We were on our way to the States. The doll didn’t look like me. She was an English doll. Light brown hair. Blue eyes. Bought in Calcutta. She comforted me in Calcutta and America whenever I remembered the terrible sounds of the Japanese bombs that had forced us to leave our home.” We were quiet for some time. Amy and I. Both of us trying to move away from the fearful sounds of bombs.
Amy broke our silence abruptly, “What do you mean PIECES of your doll?!” I had three dolls. All three ended up being named Shanti. I got my first Shanti-Peace doll as my mother called my dolls, in Vizegapatam to help me go to sleep even as I heard the distant sounds of World War II bombs behind the high pitched voices of the hyenas— akkai-akkai-oooo-- and the constant, lower pitched echoing calls of the owls. All three Shanti dolls were made of some brittle plastic-like material we called “kachakra”. They were hollow and the different parts of their bodies were hooked together with what seemed like rubber bands. Whatever held those three avatars of Paz together, they always broke within a few weeks and the dolls continued to exist in their separate components. I suspect one of my male cousins as the deconstructor of the dolls. The grownups always promised to reconstruct them but in the way of most grown ups they didn’t have the time to follow up on their promises. Or they forgot that I was carrying around parts of dolls. Except one aunt. She screamed every time she saw me carrying the three sets of legs and arms, the three heads and the three bodies piled together in the rickety doll’s carriage I pushed around the house and the front yard. To assure my screaming aunt that the dolls were really doing very well, I would take out all the parts and reassemble them. Mixing and matching—re-membering--the different parts of the different dolls. A child’s unconscious reflection of the Acts and the Passion of Isis in search of her fragmented husband Osiris and of the Passion of Ereshkigal tearing apart and then putting together her colonizing, bright sister, Innana.
“I still love dolls. I collect them. What about you?” asked Amy.
She seemed somewhat disappointed when I told her that I hadn’t cared for dolls since I was in my teens.
In the late 1990’s, a friend wanted to give me a custom made doll. She asked me what kind of a doll I would like. I thought of Amy and requested a Chinese young girl doll. With my friend’s permission, I gave Amy the exquisite doll.
The last time I saw that doll was in the collection of dolls arranged with great care in the house by the lake in Madison where Amy Ling’s memorial was held in 1999. Nearly seven years after Amy’s death, I remembered Amy when I was in Oaxaca in the sorrow-filled winter of 2006. I saw an old Zapotec woman selling dolls right in front of the terrifyingly young federales blocking the entrance to the zócalo of the conflict-torn city of Oaxaca and I recalled the last doll story I had told Amy.
It was the late 1990’s and again, it was in Madison, Wisconsin. Amy was undergoing chemotherapy. She had already lost her hair and was wearing a magnificent, curly, strawberry blonde wig when she came to pick me up at the Madison airport. I told her she looked like a Chinese Orphan Annie. She said, “I also have a sedate, traditional Chinese wig for formal occasions.”
As Amy drove me to my hotel, she asked about the health of my family in Oaxaca. I ended up telling her about the dolls the indigenous women of Oaxaca were selling in the Santo Domingo Plaza during one of my first visits to Oaxaca. The dolls’ clothes were beautiful but their ceramic faces were the faces of Europe. With bright pink cheeks, long blonde hair dressed in the styles of the indigenous women and the bluest of blue eyes. The women laughed when they saw my confused and horrified expression. They explained that the government had asked them to dress and sell the dolls—cottage industry—and it was the government that had sent the faces for the dolls to the women. Gratis.
Amy shook her strawberry blonde head when I told her how Chenta, my Oaxaqueña sister, couldn’t stop laughing when I described the heads sent by the government to the indigenous women to turn into indigenous dolls. And in the end Chenta cried. She is a Mixteca.
Amy and Chenta.
Dolls, tears, fireworks and bombs.
These have followed Chenta and me over the last thirty years as we have grown to acknowledge one another as sisters.
One day during that December of 2006, I found Chenta sitting at the dining table, watching the news about the war in Iraq on television while clutching one of the most grotesque dolls I have ever seen. The doll was about 10 inches tall and thinner than the real, human models dying of anorexia. The doll was dressed in some kind of a long red gown. Of course blonde hair and green eyes. If one could imagine a bizarre version of a beyond-bizarre-Barbie doll, that doll was it. Chenta had just returned from the fifteenth birthday celebration of the daughter of some friends of the family and the doll was part of the souvenir packet given to all the female guests—regardless of the age of the guests. I was about to make some kind of a joke about that doll when I realized that fifty-three year old Chenta was holding on to that doll as if it were some kind of a talisman. She turned off the television and said, “I hope I never have to eat squirrel meat again.” Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in Mexico. Chenta was born in the mountains of Oaxaca in one of the poorest of poor Mixtec villages. When she was six years old, her beloved father died and her uncle gave her to a family that owned a small ranch and now owns and manages a casa de huespedes. I wasn’t surprised that at one time Chenta had eaten squirrel meat but I wondered what had brought up the squirrel meat that evening. Chenta rocked the small doll cradled within her cupped hands as she told me the following story.
When she was about four years old or maybe younger, Chenta found out that there were dolls in the world. Apparently her father told her about how some of the girls in the city of Oaxaca had little make-believe babies. Chenta wanted a doll. Her parents laughed and shook their heads. Her favorite brother went into the mountains, caught the biggest squirrel he could find, killed it, cleaned out all the meat to give to his mother to cook, stuffed the clean squirrel skin with dried grass and stitched it up. He presented the squirrel to Chenta as her make-believe baby. Chenta loved her brother’s gift but could never eat squirrel meat again.
Just as she stopped speaking, the sound of loud bombas went off. We both jumped. In the winter of 2006, whenever we heard loud noises, we wondered if they were bombs or fireworks set off for a celebration or if they were professional as well as homemade rockets and bombs being exchanged by demonstrators and the federales. Chenta put her doll against her shoulder and began patting the doll’s back in the universal gesture of “burping the baby.”
Her last words to me that night of bombs and television news from Asia were, “Does anyone know how many babies and children have been killed in Iraq? How many children and babies are being killed or thrown out of their homes all over the world? Why does everyone treat us, the indigenous people of the world, as if we are garbage to be thrown away? Everyone speaks about freedom. What freedom?” I had told Amy—at yet another conference in Madison-- that the first time I saw the Statue of Liberty, I thought the statue was a huge, white unbreakable doll. Amy said that her first memory of the Statue of Liberty was of her little brother crying as they approached New York, “What will happen to us now? If the people here do not like us, where will we go? We have nowhere to go. Will they throw us back into the big sea? We don’t have a home anymore. Anywhere.”
Memory does have a homeland. Another memory found a home in Oaxaca in December 2006. The memory of a phone call, a llamada of a bright flame, from Amy. Before I could even say “How are you?” Amy said, “Listen! A wonderful things happened while I was at a conference in Japan last month. I was walking with a Japanese woman my age talking about literature and such things when she stopped, turned to me and said, ‘I wish to apologize to you for what we did to your motherland, China. And I apologize personally to you.’” Amy was laughing gently when she said, “A burden of anger and fear and bitterness disappeared from my life, from my body when my new friend spoke to me. When she acknowledged my childhood grief and offered in my adult life hope in the form of her apology.”
The woman meets the child and memory finds a homeland.
