Spitalfields Life

Anthropologist & Writer Delwar Hussain sent me this follow-up to his recent pieces, describing his experiences of self-isolating with his mother in the family home in Spitalfields

Portrait by Lucinda Douglas Menzies

It has been several days since our bodies returned to us. My mother and I are free of the virus. We no longer have coughs and pains but await the return of our senses of smell and taste. During the ordeal, I put on weight while my mother, who has always been lean, looks thinner. The inability to taste has had an effect on how much she eats. Yet we remind ourselves that we are the lucky ones.

My friend’s father died of the virus and was buried in a body bag with just five members of the family allowed to attend the funeral. My brother’s best friend’s father was buried in Ilford when the death certificate was eventually issued. Some people my mother knows have died and several are in intensive care. Our neighbours are unwell. My friends are living with uncertainties around employment, homes and, indeed, their health.

As we recuperated, my siblings brought us food. Dressed in surgical masks and rubber gloves, they dropped off curries, fruit and lemons on the doorstep. Friends and neighbours offered to deliver supplies too. We accumulated so many Tupperware containers that a mountain of them formed on the kitchen table, threatening to topple over onto the cat when she brushed her neck against the table leg.

In the evenings, I put the scraps in to the compost bin and wash each container fastidiously, making sure I clean in the creases and the binds of the lids, ready to return to the owner the next day. And herein lies the problem – I cannot remember who it was that gave us which one. The boxes look the same yet belong to different people. My sister-in-law who works at the Royal London Hospital asked my mother on the phone whether she had seen the one with the blue lid, it belonged to her own mother.

A friend once told me that Tupperware containers are not to be held on to but should always be in circulation – amongst friends, neighbours, family, colleagues – preferably with something inside. Apparently, it is bad luck to return an empty one, not in keeping with the spirit of reciprocation. However the washing is all I am able to manage before the little boxes go back out in to the world to be returned to other sets of hands than those that gave them to us.

Over Easter weekend I stood in the garden. Leaves glistened as though encrusted with tiny jewels. Birds swooped and circled, reclaiming the skies. I stared up at the sun with my eyes shut. Stars floated and danced behind my eyelids. Filled with intimations of summer to come and memories of ones past, I felt a quickening of the heart, reminding me of why I live and want to continue living.

Like everyone else, I want life to go back to normal. At the same time, it was that ‘normality’ which delivered the pandemic. That normality was also the cause of climate change, deforestation, wars, streams of refugees, scarcity of resources and excessive consumption. So I wonder, what is the normality without all of the devastation and how do we get there?

My mother arrived at the kitchen door, swathed in shawls, surveying the garden. She had spent the morning transferring little bean and gourd plants that she had grown from seed into individual pots and, once bigger, she will plant them out in the garden. She has placed the pots on every available space in the house including, most inconveniently, on the staircase. Throughout the day, she rotates them into the shifting pools of sunlight. She always grows much more than she needs so she can give some to her sister, friends and neighbours – receiving plants from them in turn.

‘Seeing as you’re just standing idly around’, my mother said, ‘Can you attend to the compost? The roots of the olive, plum and orange trees could do with a boost of new soil.’ I harrumphed, preferring to be reminiscing about summer glories but she asked again. From experience, I have learnt it is best to acquiesce to her gardening demands yet – regardless of her wishes – I knew the spade was missing. She could not remember who she had last lent it to or whether they had returned it. I thought about using one of the Tupperware boxes to shovel the soil until she indicated with her chin the little hand trowel, with its handle broken, half-buried amongst the gooseberry bushes.

I approached the compost bin. The top layer had not fully decomposed, with scraps from recent meals still evident, and I was relieved that I was still unable to smell it. As I dug out the compost the best I could with my broken trowel, I came across the old credit cards my mother had snapped in half and put in there as a secure way to dispose of them. Thick worms, as thick as my finger, and a cornucopia of other creepy crawlies grew irritated as I disturbed their lives.

All the while my mother watched me, cautiously making sure I did not spill any of the thick, dense, heavy compost I was digging at the bottom of the bin. She wanted to make sure I was treating it with due respect and care. ‘Most of that,’ she said, her breathing laboured, ‘was the peels and scraps that your brother and sister brought back from Jennifer’s restaurant in Spitalfields Market when they worked for her. She’s dead now. What a good woman, she loved your brother and sister.’ My mother was not being morose, she was instructing me that gardening is about remembering. Remembering those who are still with us and those who have passed on.

Portrait by Patricia Niven

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