My Third Grandma
By Ilene H. Kingsbury
Part 4 – Nandi
Our air machine cruised with a quiet throbbing of multiple engines at the height of 20,000 feet above the South Pacific. It was five in the morning and even as far “down under” the earth as we were, the same soft light covered the clouds and the atmosphere as it does at home in the Southwest of North America. Through the window we stretched our gaze to see whether the waters of the deep were still below, or whether our pilot had at last decided to ignore the earth’s pull and try an astral exploration on his own.
At that moment the stewardess made her good morning salutation. But who cared at that unearthly hour, we said to ourselves! She went on to caution us to fasten our seat belts, for we would land shortly in Nandi. As I said, the early hour and the clouds below created an unbelievable atmosphere. I responded by saying, out loud, “But that’s the name of Grandma Morgan’s cow!” Odd that I hadn’t remembered this when we received our itinerary for a flight to New Zealand, that spring of 1958, and had read that Fiji was one of our landings, and at Nandi International Airport, at that. But here we were rapidly losing altitude. Even now there was not a trace of the seas below us, let alone that minute piece of earth that scarcely merited a place on the map. Pray that the pilot had read page 34 of his manual and could find it. Pray that Nandi was really there and hadn’t existed just because Grandma once had a cow by that name.
All that day on Fiji I lived in two worlds. One was that of Grandma Morgan’s era in the last century. The other was the most modern present with highways and a taxi journey of eighty miles to a coral beach. There, under leaning palm shade, we watched natives scoop out from a sandy oven, dug deep, a feast of fish, each tasty bit woven into marvels of palm frond basketry.
Two races live on Fiji. The first race consists of the natives of Fiji, each person with a bushel basket of kinky hair trained with brooms and wet lime to stand up and out from the head. The second is an imported population of malcontents from India. No feature of eye or skin or hair of the East Indians even slightly resembles those of their hosts. The Indians are to be seen on lonely roads or bunched in the shade of trading centers in the frequent villages, although they are said to outnumber the Fijians at present. The men from India wear turbans wound in ceremonial pattern. The women cling to Mother India’s style of the long, flowing outer garments and the draped sari of exquisite workmanship. They arc never for a moment to be confused with the other race with whom they have lived for generations.
The tortuous road over Fiji followed every up and down elevation of the island, which is the top of a mountain range that crawls the bottorn of the Pacific. After a clay of feasting and swimming in a paradise called Corolavu Bay, we careened back to Nandi.
I kept thinking of my grandma and hoped to see her counterpart now that I did not have to go to Calcutta to find her. But the women were retiring. Only one daughter of India could be found. Beside a road she waited. Her coral sari was folded over her dark, straight hair, billows of silk followed the contour of her shoulder, a Grecian fold of it fell to her sandals. In her arms she held a child, all eyes, limpid as a well. At her side, or rather sidling behind her mother, was a replica of what Grandma Morgan must have been when she gracefully fanned her mistress in the southern India garden over a hundred years ago.
Grandma’s old white cow, of the Southern Utah community, kept coming to mind. I remembered that she had always insisted that it was Nandi and not Mandy, and we had sort of indulged her in the spelling and the pronunciation. Now I found out that she had been right all of the time. The ancient worship in India of the white bull called Nandi is memorialized in this modern airstrip in Fiji. As these people adventured the ocean through the down under part of the world, they took with them their culture and left place names to remind them of their heritage. Nandi, the guardian of all quadrupeds, lives forever!
Dear little, old, generous Third Grandma and her cow called Nandi! She brought a culture to the valleys of the mountains the like of which, and the source of which could never have been dreamed up by the most fanciful fiction writer.
I was homesick in Nandi!
(The End)