Ida

Ida was born into a peasant’s family in a tarnished metropolis.

Not that the family still plows field for a living; there’s none in the tattered city. Ida’s grandfather, a moody carpenter, pushed his way into the city before his first child was born. He was later renowned for chasing after his own children in the streets with an axe, a cleaver, spitting, cursing, threatening death. But the children grew up fine, sturdy without and sentimental within, approaching life with weary practicality. It is the fiery grandfather that didn’t last. He died of uncured tuberculosis in the then poverty and ignorance, coughing bouts of blood in his last days like a phoenix before rebirth, barely fifty, still fiercely handsome, his oldest son a dreamy young man still.

Ida never gets to meet him, all this she knew from fragmentary accounts from the father, the aunt and the uncle, sometimes old neighbours too, and occasional reminiscences of her widowed grandmother, that illiterate, wrapped up woman. Ida wondered how much of her grandfather’s ignitable blood ran in her veins, for she was a grenade of a child, solemn and deathly still for hours when she wants to, and in tantrums kicks trees with a bleeding toe, and bangs her head on iron railings and brick walls. Her forehead now a jagged bony plane, and always a shade of dusty crimson from the red bricks. People say such strange child has demons born into the heart, for how else could there be such utter unspoken and unspeakable rage in such young heart? But Ida didn’t hear any of those. Those days she just attended to the chickens.

Ida’s grandmother raised a dozen chickens on one end of the long, narrow L-shaped balcony. It was the only thing she did and perhaps the only thing she could do. Her sons did the cookings, and her daughters-in-law the housework. Whenever she wanted to give a hand she was politely asked to not tire her old body. Grandmother was respected in the family for her seniority, but other than that Ida knew the adults found grandmother’s alternating illiterate mutterings and heavy silence depressing, a burden, an unsightly phantom existence.

Ida, on the other hand, savored the long chunks of silence, with the grandma, with her chickens, with the oozing well water of July, with caterpillar-infested wild bushes that tickled her shins and kissed green juicy smears on her flighty cotton skirt.