On Brunswick Ground Read Free

Brunswick. It was in the newspapers. An Indian man killed his wife and set fire to their home, burning them both in a kind of joint sati.’
    She gives the earth another vicious dig.
    â€˜ That disaster, directly connected with my parents’ culture, doesn’t touch me as much as Jill Meagher’s death. Her killing takes as much room in my mind as in the bloody newspapers .’
    She thrusts and buries a bulb into the soil without gently covering it up as usual.
    â€˜And that’s not all. Just two days ago one of my old students, from RMIT, died in a motorcycle accident in Vietnam. He volunteered in a soup kitchen on the weekends and did well at his studies. And this is without counting my friend Olga … She was my oldest friend.’
    The wind blows her hair in her face and she brushes it angrily away.
    â€˜But even she doesn’t haunt me like Jill Meagher. All I can do now is mourn this unknown woman who was nothing to me.’
    She wipes her nose with the heel of her hand.
    â€˜Jill Meagher seems to be holding a candle in all my dark cupboards.’
    As we plant the bulbs, her anger spreads out as blindly as the roots of the trees in the soil around us. I don’t say anything. You can’t come near that kind of pain. It’s there, like a thunderstorm you can only witness until calm returns. Yet my simple presence seems to be part of the process. I am carried along in spite of myself. From time to time, Mitali casts a glance at me, like a wild animal surprised by human company, half accepting it, half rejecting it.
    Soon the afternoon of work is over. Kim drops us at Mitali’s. She and I live in the same street. As we stand in the unquiet dusk, Mitali shivers and asks me in for a cup of tea. She lives with her partner and his adult daughter who has come back home for a while. I stay on the small verandah. I’m too tired to pull my boots off, and lean against the warm sanded weatherboards, looking through a dappled maze of leaves. The wood has an old honey glow. Someone must have peacefully sanded it with no eye on time. I press my fingers to its soft texture and let my thoughts wander through the meandering path of their small garden. Mitali returns with two cups. Her husband Ian appears – a tall, lanky man. He squats near Mitali without a word. His humorous eyes take us in, dirt, weariness and all. They seem to be full of land, as if they contained a view seen from a train window. Suddenly everything is perfect – a perfection that is part of the leaves and the enormous sky. One of those moments, lasting seconds, just enough time for a sigh, a koan, a haiku.
    He leaves and returns a minute later, just as dusk grows thicker, bearing slices of fruit on a plate. They exchange a few comments on his daughter. Mitali announces:
    â€˜She’ll soon be studying again.’
    Ian nods.
    â€˜And she’s sleeping better.’
    Then he turns towards me:
    â€˜My daughter Billie has had leukaemia, but she’s pulling through.’
    This new shadow of death is there with the food we are sharing. Ian nudges the fruit towards us. He has long fingers that move slower than other people’s. I guess he is the one who has sanded the weatherboards by hand, spurning a power tool.
    We stay silent a few moments. The fruits are fresh and delicious, as if my tiredness itself were tasting them. Our heads are all leaning against the weatherboards. I smile at them.
    â€˜Dusk is my favourite hour.’
    I haven’t made any comments on their daughter, but I am touched by their openness. Jill Meagher has died, but Billie is getting better; that’s something, I tell myself, as if I had really met these two young women, as if this information had a direct influence on my life. Immersed in the verandah’s calm, I have a strange feeling of kinship, of not sitting here by chance, of our lives’ connection to the dead.
    Then, as if inexorably, another death is