My Young Italian Landlady

Faruk Kader

A long time ago, I fashioned a sweet little home at 10 Abbot St. in a cosy suburb called New Farm in Brisbane City. Rented though, it became my home pretty soon. It is still there perhaps, unless Marcella, my young Italian landlady tore it down because it was getting old.
A beautiful curved internal mahogany wooden stair used to take me upstairs to my one-bedroom unit. The wooden stair rail was so shiny dark brown that it reminded me of the skin of an African mamba. My unit had a so-called sunroom too, with all-around external glass walls that allowed the morning sunlight in like a waterfall. The irony is I went to the sunroom not for sunbath, but for vacuum cleaning. Since New Farm had so many open places, gardens, and parks by the Brisbane River to busk in the sun, who would use a room! On a sunny day, you just go there, close your eyes, and feel the warmth of the sun shine on you.
During the weekend, I went to the farmer’s market that would take place on the riverside to buy my weekly fruits and vegetables. With so many fruit and vegetable makeshift shops, quite a number of boutique coffee shops, antique stalls, the market had the outlook of a festival. One or two singers sang country songs with guitars; people stood in long queues leisurely with children in strollers to buy coffee and home-made cakes, muffins, and cookies. The farmers who came from far-off places to set up makeshift shops glowed with pride when they showed their fresh and exotic produce from their farms and gardens! Believe me, life sparkled all around in the market! I thought New Farm was the best suburb in this world to live in.
In the weekends I would vacuum clean my unit and wash my clothes in a community laundry room in the basement under the wooden ground floor. The laundry room was dark with worn-out floor slabs. We all had to light up the room while running the washing machines. Marcella, my landlady, thought the laundry room was spooky enough. After cleaning I would hang my washed clothes on a circular stand that you could rotate with a slight push. On a windy day, the stand would rotate by itself making a tinkling sound. It would remind me of small towns on the Danish coast (where I lived for one year): Every house in those towns had clothes stand in their backyards that could be seen from outside, and the clothes on the stand would flutter in the gale wind blowing from the sea and made that “shat…shat” sound. I am not sure if “shat…shat” could replicate the fluttering sound.
Marcella my landlady lived in another unit opposite to mine. I spent time chatting with her in her unit occasionally during weekends. She would offer me sausages or salamis and black coffee, and I would listen to the story of her Italian grandparents’ migration to Australia across the continents at the onset of World War II. One day, she took me to a vacant but well-organised bedroom in her unit which used to be occupied by her maternal grandmother a long time ago. She died in an old home at the age of ninety-five. The get-up of the room gave me the feeling that it was still being occupied by someone, who was not there at that moment. It seemed as if he or she was in the toilet and would appear any moment. An antique-looking hand telephone set sat on a table. Marcella rang a number on the phone to be sure if it was still working or not. “It works,” Marcella exclaimed. But she was not sure about the person on the other end, so she hung up. I too found it crazy enough. It is possible that Marcella pretended the phone still worked. May be, she wanted to entertain me, and why she wouldn’t! I was quite an attractive young man.
During my last days in Brisbane, a severe thunderstorm hit Brisbane city. The storm hurled hails of such big size from the heaven that the tiled roof-top of the whole building was perforated, Marcella confirmed me, at forty places. “You know, Faruk, I could see the starry night sky through the holes,” she said. The roof-top could not be repaired immediately. Marcella could not start roof repair on her own, because the building was insured, and the insurance company could not mobilize soon enough because it had a long list of perforated rooves in the city to settle the insurance payout. She gave me a bucket though to collect rainwater that seeped through the polythene sheet cover on the whole roof-top. Thank heavens, my queen-sized bed was just one meter away from the point of roof leakage.
At that time, Brisbane city was experiencing moderate to heavy showers almost every second or third day because of the La Nina weather phenomena that took the east coast of Australia under its spell. After that severe thunderstorm, at my sweet little home, I had several guests who flew from Sydney to watch the 2014 ODI World Cup Cricket match between Australia and Bangladesh scheduled to be held at Brisbane Gabba Cricket Stadium. Because of the intermittent showers throughout the day, the start of the match was delayed couple of times, and thousands of Bangladeshi cricket fans at the Gabba anxiously waited and waited for the rain to stop, while the team of bored commentators relayed what was happening in terms of the ground conditions. My guests and I, we all sat on my bed and gossiped about people we knew or met, and situations we thought funny but could be serious for those who were in. We munched Mushuri Dal Piaju with puffed rice. And I kept watch on the proceedings at Gabba from time to time on TV. While the bucket kept on collecting rainwater from the leaked roof drop by drop.
In the middle of our gossip, Marcella came to see us, and she apologised for not being able to fix the damaged roof yet. “I am happy to let you use my grandma’s vacant room in my unit for sleeping as long as your guests are in Brisbane,” she as the landowner of the building tried to communicate her concern about the roof leakage issue as well as her offer to compensate us. “We will see, Marcella,” I said. Then I offered her one Mushuri Dal Piaju from our platter, which she accepted gleefully.
“Delicious”, she exclaimed after having a few bites at the Piaju. I gave her another one. After five minutes, she returned with tearful eyes. “Faruk, it’s very hot,” she complained like a child. We understood what happened: Marcella chewed one or two pieces of the shreds of the green chili in Piaju. I apologised to her for not warning her of this possibility beforehand. “This will calm you,” I offered her a chocolate then. Marcella joined us in our gossip and I related an anecdote about Marcella’s culinary misadventure with Bangladeshi food prepared by me: One day, I intentionally offered her the bitter Corolla Bhaji in addition to Mushuri Lintel Dal, which she was very fond of. As expected, Marcella stopped eating bhaji after one or two mouthfuls. “It’s disgusting,” that was her reaction. “What is it,” she wanted to know. “It’s one of the tastiest vegetable fries from Bangladeshi cuisine,” I assured her. “What!” she couldn’t believe it. Everybody laughed a lot at the misery of Marcella; she enjoyed too.
When the ODI match was finally declared abandoned after the Magrib time, I was relieved because it didn’t give Bangladesh any chance to overcome a strong and thorough professional Australian team in a rain-curtailed match. Now the points would be shared between the two teams, bolstering the chance of Bangladesh moving to the next round, hopefully.
Then everybody was speculating what we would do to spend this evening. “Let’s go to a movie,” suggested Era, my ever-exuberant niece from Sydney. We all came out on the road with a hired four-wheeler. . Then we watched the movie The Theory of Everything in a cinema hall, the biopic on Stephen Hawking who made the ground-breaking discovery of Blackhole Radiation but failed to fetch him a Nobel Prize in Physics for reasons not clearly understood by me. This guy, despite his serious physical handicap, lived his life full, married twice, and fathered two children.

I can’t remember if I had seen Marcella at 10 Abbot Street without her half-pants and sleeveless t-shirts that made her look like a young boy. Sometimes she carried a spanner, hammer, and screwdriver in a leather holder around her waist, on the lookout for fixing a leaking taps or broken pipes.
Since I moved back to Sydney to my family, I saw Marcella again when my wife I and were visiting Brisbane to catch up with my old acquaintances during my five-year stay in Brisbane. We were in Brisbane city and I gave Marcella a call to check if it would be possible to meet her. She readily obliged and waited for us at the entrance of the Brisbane city hall. I saw her from a distance working on her mobile phone, and I was receiving her text messages instructing me where to find her. For the first time perhaps I saw her with attire covering her body. She had put on a trouser and a half sleeve shirt, and looked beautiful too. She was not the same boyish Marcella I used to know. I tried to perceive her romantically as would a Bengali married man do.
We exchanged greetings and spent some time together, then departed. Due to our tight schedule, we could not say yes to Marcella’s offer of a cup of coffee.
I kept in touch though with Marcella over phone occasionally, when I thought about her and felt the urge to reconnect with her. The last time when I talked to her, she expressed her delight that I still remembered her, although many years had passed. I told her she was important to me because of the unit she hired to me which was my little sweet home in Brisbane for more than five years. “You were the nicest landlady I had and I was drawn to you in a friendly way,” I added. “Really? But I didn’t see you that way Faruk, frankly speaking. I reckon you could have been a good friend of mine,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Faruk, see me next time you come to Brisbane,” she said. “You can stay at my grandma’s vacant room, and you can cook Bangladeshi food for me,” Marcella sounded very friendly to me.
“Thanks, Marcella, I would keep it in mind,” I said.
Then I casually asked her about her boyfriend. I didn’t know if she had one at that time and wondered who he was. Marcella had a casual way about life. Over the years she had a number of boyfriends who didn’t last long. She said she broke up with her last boyfriend from Peru with whom she was living together too.
She didn’t sound sad at all to me, and I found my heart extremely satisfied.