Mother Ocean Father Nation

A Novel

Nishant Batsha

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780063211797
• eBook ISBN:
  9780063211810
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

LONGLISTED FOR THE MARK TWIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD

“A brilliant debut novel.” —Joyce Carol Oates

A brother and sister’s paths diverge in the wake of political upheaval: one forced to leave, one left behind

On a small Pacific island, two siblings tune in to a breaking-news radio bulletin. It is 1985, and an Indian grocer has just been attacked by nativists aligned with the recent military coup. Now, fear and shock ripple through the island’s deeply rooted Indian community as racial tensions rise to the brink.

Bhumi hears this news from her locked-down dorm room in the capital city. She is the intellectual standout of the family, an aspiring botanist on the path to success. But when her connection to a government official becomes a liability, she must flee her unstable home for California.

Jaipal feels like the unnoticed sibling, always left to fend for himself. He avoids their father’s wrath as he manages the family store, distracted only by his hidden desires. Suddenly, he is presented with an opportunity—one that promises money and connection, but may leave him vulnerable to the island’s escalating volatility.

Mother Ocean Father Nation is an entrancing debut about how one family, at the mercy of a nation broken by legacies of power and oppression, forges a path to find a home once again.

Part One

1

“IT IS ANNOUNCED with sadness that Ram Maharaj was burnt alive last night,” the broadcast began. Bhumi looked at the red digits on her clock radio with a sense of dread. The South Pacific University had set a curfew earlier that day, and now Bhumi felt paralyzed by the evening’s emptiness. A few hours ago she had tried to find Aarti, but she wasn’t in her dorm room, so Bhumi had gone back to lying on her bed, finding patterns in the foam of her drop ceiling. And now, at seven in the evening, a bell sounded three times on FM 93.6, Radio Zindagi.

Radio Zindagi was the background hum of daily life for the island’s Indian community. Growing up, Bhumi’s weekday evenings were organized by the seven o’clock bells, and looking back, it was one of the few things they did together as a family. Bhumi; her brother, Jaipal; and their parents gathered around to listen to the radio announcer, elegant in his use of pure Hindi (as opposed to the patois of the street). He would begin the program by announcing, “Dukh ke saath suchit kiya jata hai ki . . .” It is announced with sadness that . . . Then he would list the quotidian deaths of Indians throughout the country: farmers, schoolteachers, and politicians alike were featured when they passed on. After every name and summary of a life and family left behind, Bhumi saw her parents nod their heads, as if, on this small island, they knew each and every person the announcer mentioned.

Brevity was the single rule of broadcast. The announcements tended to focus on the sum total of a life’s accomplishments: He was a good husband, she a dutiful mother. Loved by all. Survived by so-and-so.

For the past few days, instead of reading out the obituaries, the announcer had been talking about the missing: the ones the government said had been arrested yet couldn’t be found in any jail. It was a jarring change, but everything had all gone to shit in the past couple weeks. Bhumi had arrived on the South Pacific University campus in August 1983 and now, at the end of her second year, it had all begun to fall apart.

Tonight, the announcer didn’t even list the names of the missing.

“Ram Maharaj was killed when one woman and three men—all native—emerged from their late-night Bible reading and went to his store on Hamilton Street. He was burnt alive!”

The group of native Christians had been looking to make a point about who this country belonged to, the announcer explained. After the General had seized power, the leaders of various churches had put out a joint statement in the newspaper appealing for peace and empathy.

While the leaders said one thing, their parishioners wanted something else: to restore godliness by cleansing the country of vulagi. Foreigners. The first thing to do was to destroy vulagi businesses.

Bhumi shuddered at this and, for the first time, felt a fear for her family. She was cut off from them: the university was a four-hour bus ride from Sugar City.

Witnesses reported that the prayer group had brought supplies. First, they lit their scrap wood wrapped in a kerosene-soaked rag. Then, they threw their stones through the shop’s front window, shattering its panes into long knives. In silent unison, they threw their torches through the broken window.

The torches had, by a grotesque chance, landed adjacent to three tin drums of coconut oil. The heat of the flames had caused one of the drums to explode, leaving its accelerant smeared across the shop floor.

From there, it took only a few minutes for the entire shop to surrender to the flames. As it did, they dropped to their knees, clasped their hands together, bowed their heads, and prayed.

Unbeknownst to the four, the shop’s owner had decided to buck the rules and stay in his store overnight. He had heard rumors of looting during the curfew and thought he could shoo off any criminals if he slept near the back of his store, cricket bat in hand.

“Where was the fire engine?” the announcer pleaded. “Some say it took its time to get there, that they knew it was an Indian in trouble, and this did not merit haste. Some others say that it arrived in time to save Ram Maharaj, but the firemen simply joined the crowd and watched him die.”

In her mind’s eye, Bhumi could hear it, smell it, taste the sour odor of burning hair as the man staggered out the door. The announcer said that his cries were so loud, they masked the rumble of the burning building behind him. He whimpered and shrieked and fell to the ground, where he writhed until he didn’t.

“They are not satisfied with taking the government!” The announcer’s exclamation was so loud it crackled in her radio’s speakers. “Sisters and brothers! Leave if you can. Our fathers and grandmothers left their homes to come here. Now, it’s our time.”

Bhumi felt a shiver grow from her shoulders to her spine. She raced into the dorm’s empty common room. The women’s dormitory for scholarship recipients housed only four students, and Bhumi rarely ever saw the other three. In a far corner of that spartan space was a black rotary phone placed next to an old corduroy chair she’d often sunk into between classes.

That was before.

For the past year, Bhumi had been swept up into the wave of activity on campus surrounding the lead-up to the national election. Students held debates, the youth parties leafleted, and finally, in April, a left-leaning Labor government led by a handful of Indians won the election. Most of them were young, too, only a few years out of university themselves. It was Bhumi’s first election, and when Aarti joined the Labor Party’s campus wing, Bhumi listened to her arguments with rapt attention. “We can join together, native and Indian, and build this country better,” Aarti had earnestly told Bhumi. Bhumi felt a sense of infectious possibility: she cast her ballot down the party line.

Almost immediately after the ballots were counted and the results were certified, the protests started.

One week after the election, two thousand native-borns had gathered in the streets of downtown Vilimaji—just across the street from the Parliament building—to protest that the Indian minority, numbering about 10 percent of the country, had gained too much power in the government. The protestors scrawled phrases onto cardboard signs: “We Hate This Vulagi Government” and “Left Party Worst in World.” The remaining signless protestors thrust their fists balled tight in the air. The protest was only a half-hour walk from campus, yet Bhumi dared not get close. Growing up, Bhumi had heard cautionary tales from family and friends about how the natives could get jungli—wild. This was one of those times. It was safest to keep a distance. She, along with the handful of other women in her scholarship-program dormitory, watched the news report on the television in the common room in silence. She could make out more signs in the crowd: “Our God, Our Land,” “Vulagi go home to India.”

The country had been us-versus-them since the Empire brought the Indians to till the island’s cane fields. In a fit of benevolent paternalism, the Empire had sought to protect the old ways of native society, and in doing so, forced them to stay in their villages under the power of their chiefs. The colony needed to make money, so the Empire took tens of thousands of Indians and moved them here, to labor in sugar fields. In time, they were considered to have enough of a work ethic to be placed right in the middle of a clear hierarchy: White, Indian, Native.

Kept separate, the natives saw the Indians as permanent foreigners. The only time the two groups truly interacted was in the marketplace, where Indians seemed to own it all. Bhumi herself had no interest in India, even though she spoke Hindi and was called Indian. Most of her Indian countrymen had never seen the place their ancestors had left a hundred years ago. If Bhumi was to leave, it was going to be for shores that offered her a measure of opportunity: a country with a respectable graduate program in botanical biology—the dream.

In the post-election chaos came one claiming he alone could bring peace back to the island. He, beholden to no one, could stop the protests and find a solution amenable to all. Bhumi had never heard of the General—without any wars or real foes to speak of, armies in a country as small as hers were made available for parades, national pride, and not much else. At first he showed up to the protests, making grand speeches to rapt audiences of native-borns. Perhaps it was the old colonial mentality: when someone with a gun and a uniform began to talk, the country stopped to listen. Then he took a few meetings with the Indians who controlled the businesses across the island. And finally, he had a meeting with the prime minister.

Then came the day he appeared on television. He arrived in the Parliament building with four men behind him, jet-black semiautomatic rifles slung from their shoulders, index fingers just inches away from the triggers.

For Bhumi, politics had always been distant: men in the capital argued, and potbellied fathers in Sugar City repeated these arguments over drinks. At university, it was Aarti’s interest, and Bhumi loved the way her friend leaned into political conversations with a look of focus, a fast-paced clip to her words. But as the General explained his takeover—he kept calling it a transition to peace—Bhumi felt a true sense of the powerlessness that came with the political. For the first time, this country felt like a strange place to her. She, and the rest of her people, were being singled out for who they were. She hoped the General knew what to do to make things right again.

This sense of being off balance remained as she settled into the worn cushion and dialed home, all the way across the island in Sugar City.

“JAIPAL!” SHE EXCLAIMED. HER NERVOUS ENERGY SENT HER FOOT tapping, and she drew a finger along the scar on her neck. “How is work? Did the hotel have to shut down because of the curfew?” she asked.

“The hotel is still open, but last night there were only five tourists by eleven. Five! They told me to close early.” Bhumi could feel the lazy saunter of her brother’s voice working itself into the frenzied pace of worry.

“They’re thinking of closing the gift shop,” Jaipal went on.

“Hey,” Bhumi said. “Remember, the sea turtle is out there, somewhere . . .” Perhaps what had always reassured her as a child could be turned back onto him.

“You forgot. The chickens came first.” She could hear him slowing down again.

“And finally there’s the man selling coconuts.”

“And if they’re all there, we’re good.”

Bhumi laughed. She couldn’t remember the last time they had snuck down to the water and seen all three signs, but the memories of those comforting moments were the frayed twine that bound them close, and what she could use to bring him back.

“How’s Papa and the shop?” Bhumi asked.

“It’s probably fine, Papa too. No curfew here. They’ll kill us in the capital. They probably won’t kill us over here, in front of the goras,” he said, a macabre joke. He cleared his throat and began again. “Listen, the campus is safe, right? You’re not running a shop, don’t worry. Remember what the General said: ‘The transition to peace is not anti-Indian.’ He’ll bring it all back. They’re saying he might call new elections soon. Those people went jungli, and they killed that guy. It was a one-time thing. It won’t happen again.”

Bhumi wanted to believe her brother, but the country’s newfound peace had been filled with arrests of opposition political leaders and trade unionists.

“Ma wants to talk to you,” Jaipal said. “Just stay away from everything, okay? Just stay on campus until this all ends.”

Bhumi rolled her eyes at her brother’s worry. She hated being told what to do, even if the command was made of hopes and best wishes. “I’ll be fine, Jaipal,” she muttered. She heard the muffled sounds of a receiver being handed over.

“Beti? Is everything all right? Are you okay?” her mother asked in rapid-fire succession. “You know, yesterday, I saw one of the jungli kill a snake on the side of the road. Who can kill a snake? A dead snake only brings misfortune.”

“Ma, I don’t believe in that,” Bhumi said, her patience already running thin with her mother’s nearly infinite supply of superstitions.

“You should take this seriously,” her mother said. “Our beliefs will keep you safe from them. Have you thought about leaving?”

“Maybe after exams finish in a month. I wanted to stay to work with a professor in his lab. If that is canceled, I’ll come back to Sugar City.”

Bhumi could hear her mother take a deep breath. In the silence that followed, the call filled with static and the low murmur of a conversation from crossed wires somewhere in the distance.

“You’ll be safer away from here. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. What c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One
• Part Two
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher