Are your blue eyes scared of dog bites?
The man appears, addresses me in English, then disappears behind me into the crowds of Bowrington Road. I internalise his words before committing them to memory.
I’ve seen him before, I realise. At a Marks and Spencer in Taikoo Shing. Then, too, he’d asked me something, but the cashier interrupted him, and before I understood what was happening, he was gone. His haiku-like question is a signal affirming our history.
His words linger like an incantation as I cross beneath the Canal Road Flyover. Evening shoppers pass rows of aunties crouched on low plastic stools, beating paper effigies with their slippers. Their din echoes within this semi-enclosed environment, slicing through the pneumatic sighs of the buses pulling in beside them.
The matrilineal side of my family hails from a city in Campania called Benevento, which translates as ‘fair wind’. It’s apt, as the family name, ‘Polvere’, translates as ‘dust’; a people of dust from a town of fair wind. Benevento is a city steeped in witchcraft. Lombards once performed their pagan rites around a sacred tree, only for a bishop to cut it down and build a church in its place. But old words and superstition outlived the tree. Beneventans would speak of the janare—the local witches—with caution. To mention one by name required a counter-spell: oggi è sabato. ‘Today is Saturday’.
Above me, incense smoke lifts from the aunties’ offerings and thins into the evening air.
See also:
Remembering Through a Screen
A Slower Mode of Time
Disarming a Ghost