Shanti Mathias
Knots
I tie myself in knots to remember, but there’s a knot in my skin I use to untangle myself.
It is a twist in my neck, a spot once held by a thicket of stitches when my body grew where it should not have, and had to be removed. I run my fingers along the groove when my brain growls worries, letting them heat against the pulse of my jugular until my fingers are warm and my skin less sticky and my mind has cleared.
I often frequent the stretch of highway between my rational brain and the twisting worries of my stomach. These journeys are always urgent, because I am bad at listening and afraid that I will forget the message. Calm down. You can do it tomorrow. It will be okay.
When I am anxious, scale floats away. I become a continent bound by highways, blurred messages telling me who I am supposed to be. Continents need highways, just like I do; roads thread along the spine of South America, telling its parts that they belong to each other. The empires of the Andes stretched long and thin, and their organs were bound together by persistent road-building efforts.
The messengers who travelled these roads (I imagine on llamas, but that is a cliché that I probably got from The Emperor’s New Groove; they were more likely on foot) made the stretch of their countries function. It is information which turns a society into something which coheres; it is roads which comb out the tangles.
The Incas had no alphabet. Instead, they tied themselves together with knots.
Quipu is a mnemonic knot system, where the strings are made of wool and cotton in various colours. Strings dangle from a thicker horizontal string or a stick. The knots grow meaning into their tangles, an intricate system of threads. They had numerical meaning, could bear census data across the mountains, but also could be used to remember stories. People were trained to read the knots, to interpret them and make them into stories and answers.
The inside of my lip is snarled and lumpy. It has carried many memories: the ordinary things, the things that make me weird, wired, worried. I catch my lips between my incisors: this is for times when I will be silent, and must remember to send an invoice or write an email. Canines: go to an interview, bring the washing in. Molars: bank statements, birthday cards. When I am jostled, my teeth crunch together, and the memory stays put. When I speak, I release my memory. I have forgotten countless things this way, and sometimes the forgetting gnaws.
I can read the stories of myself in my mouth, with my tongue, but find that for the most part they are mundane. Chipped tooth? Moved my head while laughing, and a gate got in the way. Dent in my gum? The power went out while I was brushing my teeth and I walked into a wall. Slightly wobbly incisor? Bumped into a pole when trying to read and walk simultaneously.
Sometimes I weave my fingers together, tap them in certain patterns until they are threaded with responsibility. But fingers can’t hold memories for long: I need them to hold pens and open doors.
My parents have taught me to turn my scars into stories. They untangle their knotted narratives with the ease of practice; stories are figures of eight or half hitches, a reliable form. My father has a slit missing from his eyebrow where he fell off a truck; my mum has pale threads woven around her kneecaps, smashed on Auckland tarmac and Swedish ice, ligaments which have ruptured on basketball courts and swollen with medical malpractice.
I have mimicked their scarred storytelling all my life. When I was about 11, I lost a section of my knuckle to the teeth of a grater. The cheese went on the pizza anyway, and I opened the doors to our guests, a little gleeful. ‘One of you is going to become a cannibal tonight,’ I told them. I’m not sure, now, that this story paired well with the consumption of said pizza, but there was a shiny reminder of the night on my knuckle for several years afterwards.
I worry at my tangles until they become stories; good stories, not made-up, unwanted ones about cannibals. I want to know my own knots, and loosen them until they are narratives.
I feel for my knots, and I remember. The scar is faded from the touching. I have been told the story enough times that it is stronger than seasons, like the quipu that are found in the modern day, knots stiff from the stories they still hold. The story of my scar, as I have learned to tell it, is not my own story, not really.
There was a lump in my neck, and it had to be removed by surgery. The surgeon was, my father tells me, a severe paediatrician who terrified me. I was two.
The Iraq War was on, and my father was unhappy about it. His vehement opposition to the war had already caused a rift with one of his brothers-in-law, who worked for the army. On the same day that my surgery was scheduled, he climbed the Chalice, a sculpture in the Christchurch Square, with a friend, and hung banners from its silver lip, asking the government not to participate in the invasion of Iraq. They sat in the sunshine all afternoon. I’ve seen the photos, taken from the bottom; two distant cheerful figures sit up high, the words on the banners saying things like ‘Not Our War’ and ‘New Zealand Stay Out’.
The sculpture is next to the police station, and my dad’s friend had written a list of facts to mollify the police: they had the permission of the sculptor, who had said that it could bear their weight, they were experienced climbers and had alpine-quality ropes, they were taking strictly peaceful action, and if the police needed to contact them, they had a cellphone. They dropped this down to the police officer who came out to squint at them. They sat up there for a couple of hours, and eventually an officer asked them to come down. At this point in the story, my dad always sighs, rubbing his fingers together as if he feels imaginary knots. ‘I think they agreed with me, really, but they didn’t want it to look like we could just stay there indefinitely,’ he says. With his friend and their ropes, he reluctantly rappelled down the slippery silver cone.
In the retelling, my mother takes up the story. ‘And there I was, heavily pregnant, with two grumpy toddlers, one of whom had just had surgery. Your dad had promised to come and pick me up – but he wasn’t there. I wasn’t that worried at first, but after two hours – I didn’t have a mobile, and he had the car. What could I do?’
Eventually my dad showed up; he had been delayed in the police station talking to the officers and had had to agree that he would not go within six metres of the Chalice for three years. He was pleased with his protest effort, and we returned home to Banks Peninsula.
This is the story I tell about this stretch of my skin. The scar is listed on my Overseas Citizen of India card as an identifying feature. It is a legal part of my identity, and so are my parents – or at least, my father’s name appears on that same document. My parents are part of my story, after all. But this knot in my skin has been overwritten, used to tell my parents’ story so often that my own part of the narrative was forgotten.
The quipu cannot be decoded now. There are no more expert translators, storytellers hurrying up and down their country carrying tangles of information. But I can remember my own story of this knot.
It’s called scrofula: a goblin name for an unusual condition. About 20 people in New Zealand get it a year, most of whom are children. It causes the lymph nodes in the neck to swell; by the time mine was excised, it was about the size of two of my clenched toddler fists.
Once, scrofula sufferers were told that they could be cured by the ‘king’s touch’. This is a disease that afflicted those so distant from power that they could pretend that crowns meant healing.
There are several kinds of scrofula. Adults often have it as a less aggressive form of tuberculosis. Their skin greys and swells. Divorced from the flowing strands of arteries, the skin over the swelling becomes cool, almost numb. I was too young to remember, to care; did people on the street stare at a small girl with a golf ball sized lump in her neck?
Children, though, seem to get scrofula from the environment; from bird shit, probably. I was two, and we lived on a lifestyle block; I had definitely been eating dirt. My neck swelled, and a surgeon cut through the tangle, removed the lymph node blown up like a balloon.
I probably didn’t have tuberculosis. I’d like to think I did, though. It makes a good story. It’s a nice thing to pull out for Two Truths and One Lie icebreakers. I imagine myself as Ruby Gillis from Anne of the Island, wearing a lot of lace and growing slowly more pale before dying in a pool of phlegm and angst, so people could shake their heads and talk of another girl taken by the spectre of consumption, never realizing her own potential.
But that is not my story. Instead, I encountered the term ‘scrofula’ in a book I was reading a few years ago – Quackery, by Lydia Kang and Nate Pederson. I read the description and turned to my father. ‘Dad, did I have scrofula?’
‘You knew that, Shanti.’ And maybe I did; but I had forgotten. I researched my own disease. My body, in service to my parents’ narrative. I had the luxury of slowly forgetting this piece of myself, washed out as the scar faded.
Who will I be if this scar ever untangles completely, until all I have left to remember it is an old Overseas Citizen of India card where I have a nine-year old’s grin and an unfortunate fringe?
The world grows more tangled, more scarred: skin and bones, bark and limbs, memories and stories. Knots await, invitations to unravel: grafted pear branches, family myths, new lines laid against my skin.
Shanti Mathias is a writer, journalist and student in Wellington. She likes long words, honesty, and the quality of silence between 11pm and 12am. When not writing for Salient or absorbing Twitter, she explores opshops and goes running.