Hina

The story

In Hawaii, when the world was still young, there lived a woman who never stopped working.

Her name was Hina, and she made tapa. Tapa is a cloth that people in Polynesia make from the bark of trees, and in Hawaii they call it kapa. It takes patience. You strip the bark, you soak it, then you beat it with a wooden beater, and you beat it again, tap, tap, tap, until the fibres join together and become a soft, thin sheet. Then the sheet is spread out in the sun to dry. Tapa is for wearing, for keeping warm at night, for giving as a gift to someone you want to honour.

Hina started at dawn. People said the sound of her beater carried all the way to the beach, steady as a heartbeat.

The work, though, wasn't the problem. The problem was everyone else.

In Hina's house, somebody always needed something. Someone was hungry, someone wanted a new sheet, someone couldn't find a thing they'd put down somewhere and which, naturally, she must have moved. “Hina, help me.” “Hina, have you got a minute?” “Hina, where's the…?” Nobody ever asked whether she needed a hand. Nobody picked up the beater to take a turn, not even for as long as it took her to drink a sip of water.

And then there was the sun.

In Hina's time, the sun ran. It sprang up out of the sea, climbed, dropped down the other side, and the day was over before anyone had time to notice. The tapa sheets, spread out with so much effort, stayed damp. Every evening Hina had to gather them up still limp, hang them under the roof and, the next morning, start all over again.

One evening, after yet another wasted day, she sat on the doorstep with a wet sheet in her lap and said to no one in particular: “If the day is this short, what's the point of working?”

Her son Māui heard her. In the island stories, Māui is the one who is afraid of nothing, not even the gods, and seeing his mother like that was more than he could bear. He took some strong ropes and climbed the mountain the sun rises from every morning, the one Hawaii calls Haleakalā, the House of the Sun. He hid among the rocks and waited for dawn, not moving, barely breathing.

When the sun peeped over the rim of the mountain and stretched out its rays to climb over it, Māui threw his ropes. He caught the rays one by one, the way you catch a fish on a line, and tied them tight.

“Stop,” he said. “My mother has cloths to dry.”

The sun wriggled. It grumbled. It said it was the sun and nobody gave it orders, that it had to run because running was its job, and that no one, in the whole history of the world, had ever dared to tie it up. Māui listened to the very end, the ropes held fast in his hands.

“I know,” he answered. “But I'll only let you go if you promise to walk more slowly.”

For the sun, a long time passed. Then it promised.

From that day on, so they say in Hawaii, the sun crosses the sky more calmly, and the days last long enough for tapa to dry. Hina spread her sheets on the grass, and for the first time they came home in the evening already dry, light, smelling of sunshine. She folded them one on top of the other. She smiled.

You might think the story ends here.

But sometimes people who work very hard need more than longer days. Sometimes they need quiet.

Because with longer days, the demands grew too. If the sun walked slowly, there was more time to ask, to search, to call: “Hina! Hina!” And one afternoon Hina put down her beater and stood still for a long time, listening to her own name bouncing from one room of the house to the next.

Then she took her gourd.

It was one of those dried, hollow gourds that people in Polynesia use as bowls and containers, and into it she put what she needed: the beater, the soaked bark, the folded sheets. She left no note. She said goodbye to no one. She tiptoed out once the house had finally gone quiet, at just the hour when the light is low and the sky begins to turn the colour of milk.

Over the sea, at that hour, a rainbow had just appeared. Hina looked at it. Then, with the gourd under her arm, she put one foot on it, then the other, and began to climb.

She never looked back. She climbed for a time that nobody has ever measured, above the palm trees, above the clouds, above the place where the air grows thin. And where the rainbow ended, there was the moon.

The moon was white, smooth and silent. There was no wind. There were no relatives, no children calling, no lost things to find. There was only a great pale space, where the light arrived slowly and stayed.

Hina set down the gourd. She took out the bark. She picked up the beater and raised it.

Tap.

The sound travelled very far, like a drop falling into a well, and nobody interrupted it.

Tap, tap, tap.

Down on Earth, somewhere, someone looked up. “Hina?” they called. Nobody answered. Down on the island, at some point, people noticed that something had changed: the house was tidy, and there was no one left to ask where a certain thing had gone.

They say Hina is still up there. That she works her tapa calmly, day after day, and spreads it on the moon to catch the light, unhurried, because up there no sun runs any more. That is why, when the moon is full, it has those grey marks, big and soft, like the folds of a sheet laid out flat.

They are her cloths, you could say.

Try looking at them one evening. And if you think you can hear, from the far end of the sky, a faint, steady sound, tap, tap, tap, don't disturb her.

She's working. At peace, at last.