Three Conversations and a Rainbow Mat on Holiday
There are several surreal stories contained in a weather-beaten iPhone filled with digital photographs. Each begins with a question and ends with a rainbow. You might ask, how does a rainbow find its way into a holiday? Well, I contemplated the same question and I should begin first with the question to the woman seen in a photo on the cracked iPhone, her silhouette looking away, appearing silent and distant as if waiting for someone or something to happen.
‘Are you still liminal?’ A blue text beeps on the mobile in her hand.
Winona had been… very much indeed. Furthermore, she believes she might still be caught in between two or more worlds of her making, not quite here nor there; somewhere and nowhere on the borders of the in-between loosely marked by both geographies and time. Between the fine sands of East Africa and the corridors of Asia, there might be some rainbow magic delineating a very ordinary-looking, liminal doorway, in the shape of a rainbow mat.
‘Have you been half asleep
And have you heard voices?
I’ve heard them calling my name
(The Rainbow Connection by Kermit the Frog)
“Hey look, isn’t that our rainbow mat?!” Winona gestured wildly to the neighbouring unit’s straw mat at the foot of their door. It looked like it was hastily purchased at IKEA. The lyrics of The Rainbow Connection song popped into her mind,
‘Rainbows are visions
But only illusions
And rainbows have nothing to hide’
She pondered the rainbow sightings on her recent travels. She had seen her fair share of rainbows but never in experiential succession. Winona was taken back to three conversations she had in three countries in the last three weeks. The conversations themselves were not overwhelmingly interesting, but a happenstance of three similar instances in a row…?
Back on the 9th floor, Winona polled her thoughts in, as—
clanky lift doors open,
kids board in,
shouts to screams,
doors close.
For ten days, they walked right past the placid demeanour of the rainbow ‘doorway’, without blinking an eyelid. Everybody busying about with stories in their heads, whining about each other. When it grew quite impossible to ignore screaming children altogether, Winona cast her mind back to her not-so-distant memory of their recent holiday — on the white shores of Mombasa — where she was drawn to its chasmic pockets of peace. At night, the enormity of the dark sea under the fullness of the bright-eyed Yuletide moon brought forth stirrings of bliss beneath a canopy of twinkling skies.
That afternoon, a rainbow had graced the dusky evening—hues of purples, blues and pinks painted across the horizon. Right there on the forsaken sands lay a world beyond Winona’s grasp — the feeling, as if she were standing at the end of the world — its tantalizing smell of freedom matched equally by the weight of the earlier afternoon heat tanning her round shoulders. She sucked the vision of wonder in, threw her head back to the dance beats of the poolside DJ coo-ing, breathily… “on that serious note…” The Rainbow Connection played in her mind again.
‘Why are there so many
Songs about rainbows
And what’s on the other side?’
Time and rain / rolling in / in sweet accordance with, the / ebb and flow of the sea. Pounding beats cradled her into the night soon to be greeted by a gentle peachy glow reflected in her slow morning smile. Time remains unhurried and unmoved along the devastatingly beautiful coastline, where a lone fishing boat fishes for prawns, fish, and lobsters to cater to the local demands. In the early hours of the next morning, she breathed in the salt in the air, its taste latching onto the tip of her tongue. She leaned over the towering balcony on the fifth floor to confront her fear of heights by looking directly below. As if looking past a moment into the future… might there be an invisible doorway? Perhaps one that comes in the shape of a rainbow after the rain.
No one could forget the rainbow on ‘maimahue’ road after the rain on the way back to lake Naivasha that evening. Rain washed down, cleansing the dust from the air, trees, and plants, which had already brightened up as if to thank the sky with its lush greenery. This particular rainbow reminded her that falling short of expectations is one of the few social conventions Winona can let go of. Perhaps, they did not expect her to converse in such a colloquial way? Few could deny there is joy in rediscovering simple awkward pleasures in unfamiliar surroundings, much like finding a rainbow and several connections...
Juliana, the cleaning lady in Mombasa, was so excellent in her service that Winona was missing her. Winona recollects Juliana bristling with indignation at her suggestion to forgo cleaning that day. “Mzuri sana… still, the cleaning should be done today,” Juliana insisted, as there are young children. She insisted on changing the bedsheets and towels, then on wiping the floor dry with her poised foot like a cat ready to pounce on her meal. On the first day, there was no water. The only working taps were churning out seawater, probably unsuitable for cooking, Winona surmised. On the second day, Juliana smiled warmly with a wave of her hand, “M’am, let me come again after 1 pm. You take your time with the children… it is hot… but at least, now the aircon is working.” She smiled.
They had spent a couple of hours trying to fix or pump into rusted corroded units worn down by the salt in the air and aged past their printed functional date.
“Oh, you are not going out today?” Juliana queried, inquisitively.
“If you need anything, anything at all, you can call me…” she leaned forward with an emphasis in her melodic singsong voice, her hand waving her mobile in front of Winona’s vision.
Pushing aside the tattered rainbow straw mat with her foot holding the door open, her mobile in mid-air, she made sure to make eye contact to confirm again that cleaning was to be done every two days.
‘Mzuri!’ Winona nodded, staring at the doormat thoughtfully.
Juliana retreated gingerly with a bow and a lingering concern that she might not be needed after all.
In a kitchen in an off-road motel in a town called Emali, the long pause in the conversation felt incredibly awkward. So much so that Winona wished she had said nothing at all. Three of them stood there side by side in a dank kitchen with chequered green tiles from the floor beneath their feet to the walls halfway. The slow heat crept on them from all sides as they remained motionless watching the centrepiece electric stove struggle to set to boiling two uneven steel containers (‘sufurias’) of tap water.
“You want to boil water for tea?” she asked somewhat contemptuously with a small measure of disbelief.
Winona nodded slowly before it dawned on her… that was probably the wrong option, as was the choice to cook instant noodles in these uneven steel medieval-beaming receptacles with no handles.
Winona and the girl staffer wait in what felt like a long and insufferable silence... … “It is taking long, huh… Does it have to be boiling?” the girl staffer finally breaks the tension.
Winona’s second mistake was to agree to the warm instead of boiling water. How daft — to be taken in by a petulant-looking, stout teenage girl in her matching tile-green chequer pinafore.
How is the water going to be transferred? Winona wondered. The girl, as if she had overheard the thoughts she might have said aloud, quickly replied, “I’ll show you how it’s done,” she said, smugly.
Her strong arms hoisted the two silver urns of steamy water with a red and white dish towel held precariously between her fingers. She shepherded the hot water deftly into two silver stainless steel insulated jugs, accomplishing the task with a refined measure of precision.
For a brief second, she appeared to smile since their first encounter. It was the strangest of all encounters because of the surreal quality of ‘making do’ in this roadside motel for truckers and before this querulous girl. It was as if they were meant and not meant to be there. It took some reimagining that the rooms have no locks or handles. The swinging door could be bolted with its long slim latch-and-catch type of closing. The police station next door is meant as a reassuring presence, but was it?
It was only after the electric hot water short-circuited the shower that it dawned on Winona that the warm water waiting patiently in anticipation of tea in the two pertinent jugs precariously perched on the low side table was not meant for tea at all.
Later in the evening, Winona walked back into the kitchen to look for the fridge. The fridge was surreptitiously tucked away in a narrow corridor behind the squarish kitchen. At its centre stood the electric stove where a tall woman with narrow rainbow-coloured braids was amusedly frying an omelette for dinner. Most likely the evening receptionist, Winona surmised. As Winona flicked the light switch off, from the corner of her eye she caught sight of two large cockroaches racing across the dim green floor.
Next door in unit 902, Winona struck up a semblance of conversation with the elderly lady cleaner in her 60s who rattled off in spurts of Mandarin pausing now and then mid-conversation to receive a confirmation to (in her limited English) some pre-fabricated assumption she had formed about her and her friend as they opened their second bottle of Italian wine. Winona was in the middle of describing the moment she thought she saw an otter emerge from the brown waters of the Singapore River. Brown like the vintage sepia photographs of the same river 80 years ago, as if unmarked by time. For lack of a better description, she said she felt as if she had forged a rainbow connection with the otter, just like the moment when she had a similar stupendous encounter on the Cable Car ride. There was a semi-formed rainbow. It materialised slowly, streaking across the grey sky.
An unbusy state
of being follows her, like
time slow-sipping wine.
“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe”
(Huxley, The Doors of Perception)
The rocky terrain Downunder on her walk this morning reminded her of the slow stroll towards Lake Naivasha on that one quiet December evening. So much care was taken to carefully side-step the thorny plants capable of skewering a pair of the children’s crocs. The gentle lapping of water licking the banks, and the cries of wild birds screeching across tore at her soul, wrenching from her body like a banshee wailing for love lost, like the wind howling twenty floors up on a stormy Singapore afternoon, she thought. The wetlands in Australia have dried out. It is no wonder rainbow serpents are revered, said to reappear around waterholes.
She stood transfixed at their front door. For the first time since arriving home, she felt disoriented. In front of her was their rainbow straw mat from IKEA. A familiarity rushed across the unfamiliarities of time and space as if the mat too had gone on a holiday. Tagging along like a string of conversations strung from revolving doors, physical and emotional connections find ways to surface around water bodies.
Observing the rain that evening, Winona contemplated on the rainbow and the ways liminality has snaked its way into her world, making itself comfortable in the deepest pockets of a waking day. Could rainbow doorways be reserved for surreal travellers intent on writing hunched over in cosy corners?
Winona thought about the three conversations over the last three weeks. She missed Juliana the most. She stared into the raindrops, angling the rainbow straw mat with her foot, looking into the distance as though looking through a moment into the past.
‘Mzuri sana’, she said softly.
“The raindrops stare back,
lined up on the window like
small faces, each drop
one second of my life. I
watch them to see which
will get too heavy and fall.
They have done their jobs.
Now in their old age,
everything said comes too late.”
(Victoria Chang in The Trees Witness Everything, ‘Rain Travel’)
Winona whipped out her mobile, and mouthed “back tomorrow.”
