Salty Oranges

My late grandmother found it apt that her parting advice to me was to say a prayer and ask permission from the spirits if I ever found the urge to relieve myself of bodily fluids, or solids, when passing through a jungle. Spirits are very temperamental she said, and if my lips do not whisper the silent prayer before my waste touches the ground, these spirits will follow me home and walk in my shoes.

Surely not in my white-patented Mary-Janes with the gingham strap, my 8 year old self thought, these were my treasure shoes. Even then I found it quiet ridiculous that a flaccid, easily-offended ghost would parade about town in my delicate shoes. For that was surely what I did the day my mother gifted it to me.

I remember that day vividly, I remember it in citrus. What is it about scents that trigger solid, tangible memories of forgotten pasts, when I can't even remember what I ate yesterday? I was sitting in my grandmother's outdoor kitchen, left to my own vices. A cerulean plate filled with four orange wedges sits in between my outstretched legs. My grandmother was outside raking the leaves and just past the kitchen window I can see her head bobbed up and down. I was sprinkling granules of salt on my orange wedges and reciting incantations as if I was a witch-doctor making potions. When the coarse salt finally dissolved into the pulp of each wedge, I bite into it whole. The combination of sweet, salt and sour danced excitedly on the roof of my mouth and slivers of juice dribble down my skin, like tears. When I've completely sucked the orange dry, I pushed the corners of the peel into my lips and smiled an orange wedge. I looked up to see my mother coming in with a newspaper wrapped parcel underneath her armpits. She looked at the bottle of salt and the remaining three wedges on my lap and said "you're going to have high cholesterol when you grow older, just like your nana." She then placed the newspaper parcel next to me and said "for you" in a sing-song voice as she saunters of outside, as if the sting of her words can be easily sugared with a gift.

I feigned ambivalence towards the parcel and was busy attending to my second wedge but the shiny patent leather peeping out the newspaper caught my eye. I ripped apart the wrapper and squealed in delight to find the Mary-Janes and hurried to put in on my feet, abandoning my magic oranges. How easily dispensable objects on my childhood desires were, in those days, before I learned to treasure acute memories only revisited when triggered in scents.

My grandmother passed away not long after that. On the day of her funeral I managed to string together from stolen adult conversations that my grandmother's body was to be burned. It's a celebration they told me, you're grandmother is to be cremated so that her five elements, earth, water, fire, air and ether can be released so she will be reincarnated back into this world. Their faceless smiles told me to sing and dance, but only misery inhabited my limbs. Orange tears dribbled uncontrollably down my chin as I watch the confetti flames consume my grandmother's corpse. A weeping child is a bad omen at a cremation and so I was sent back to the outdoor kitchen. My mother gave me oranges and took it upon herself to sprinkle the salt to appease me. And I was left alone to swallow my grief in salty oranges.

Nadia Norzuhdy
(Group 3)