March 4, 1961
I read somewhere that it’s common in India for a mother to squat during birth. I don’t know if that’s true, or healthy, better than the Western version or worse. I don’t know what it feels like to be split open by an animal clawing inside you, to be cleaved in two like a dividing cell. I only know that tomorrow, in the southern reaches of Kolkata, my father will be born. I can’t tell you if it will be a home or hospital birth, expected or accidental. I can’t tell you how his mother, a teenager when she married a much older man, felt in that sickbed, how much pain she was in, how her muscles contorted when my father finally undid her like a descending zipper. Will she will fall to the ground in the patchy, tear-shaped garden? Will she be trapped on the second floor, the stairs spilling out underneath her like a long tongue? I don’t even know what that house looks like, or what birth means in this wretched decade before industrial strength painkillers or tub birth or doulas. I only know that tomorrow my father will be born. Later he will also die.
When my father is eight, his mother will take him to a fair, pulling rupees from a shrunken purse to buy him treats and toys. When he demands a ride on the pet donkey, his mother will readily agree, even though it is more than they can afford. Since her husband’s motorcycle accident, she has been floating the family budget with pawned trinkets and heirlooms. But as long as she shares the same earth as my father she will never get in the way of his joy. On the donkey facing the camera my father half squints, resulting in a photograph of overlapping shadows. Only his nose emerges, hooked and wanting, from the pixelated shade of his face. This nose, like misfortune, is inherited. His mother, too, had a nose that could kill, in the crescent shape of a dagger.
As a teenager writing my first stories, I will have that picture of my father teetering on the edge of my desk. When it falls, I step on it. The frame digs into my soles.
My father will go to school, a decent college within walking distance of the family home in Park Circus. To his classmates he will seem like the typical student, equal parts lazy and studious. Fail marks will spread like stains over his report cards, but strategically, only in classes that do not matter. In these days my father will feel damaged, bruised. A bitter emptiness will wail inside him, the same emptiness that will one day lead him to death. He will fill that nothing with paan and pranks, chai stirred under tin roofs with strangers. He will smother that nothing with the noise of life and carry on as he always must.
My father will meet my mother in the biochemistry labs of the University of Kolkata. It will be adorable in the way that only doomed romances are. Watch: my father gallantly offers my mother bacteria for her thesis, a special strain she cannot continue without. My mother—so cautious, so wary of men—will be touched to the point of trust. She doesn’t yet know that his act of selflessness has generated an infinite moral debt. So when he kisses her in the radiology lab, deep in the delta of plutonium and uranium, she will kiss back without any thoughts of danger. In the following years, I will hear of my father’s favor many times, but of the kiss only once.
And suddenly my father will be thirty, married, moving to New York. When he signs the marriage documents, the pen will break. And if not the pen, then something else; my mother is not meant to marry outside of her caste. The money she is promised all her life curtsies once, then leaves the stage. He will live alone in America for a year, having slapped together his thesis months before my mother painstakingly birthed hers. The amount of American dollars in his pocket upon landing will fluctuate upon each retelling, usually between twenty dollars and five dollars, sliding down to two dollars when he is feeling particularly victimized. Then my mother will cross the ocean, too, and they will prop up a home in a basement full of fire hazards, failing to make love to the sounds of laundry crashing. Five years will pass. In this time, my mother will make more money than my father.
I will be born the year my father’s mother dies. One life will be traded for another. Growing up, my father will tell me that he believes there are parts of his mother buried inside me. He will tell me this only as long as I am pink and mirroring, my thoughts conforming to the slant of his face. He will say this only as long as I run to the door at the sound of a jangling key.
My first memory will be of a family vacation in Florida, where my mother burns the pizza into a radiant black disc. He will scream at her, thrash and cry. His rage will match the heat that blows in from the balcony, and for years hotels will remind me of arguments. This is how I learn in the backlit red of my father’s mind: my mother is a murderer. He believes that my mother’s unkind thoughts spread like a karmic cancer across the ocean, settling in his own mother’s gut, becoming her disease. Scream, thrash, cry. At one point, emboldened by toddler courage, I will say something precocious in my mother’s defense.
And discover how hate sits on my father’s face.
As time shudders past us, my father will learn how to carry his anger in his jaw. The skin covering his teeth will blacken with stubble, as if some mass had drained from the roots of his hair to the ledge of his mouth. My mother will quit her job to become a housewife, and we will move to Richmond, where my father becomes the sole breadwinner.
In Virginia, my father will study our nerve endings to cinch them shut. My new friends take a liking to him, his jokes and the little pom-poms he carries in his pocket. It will be difficult to explain to them the nature of our fear. After all, he never hit us.
My father will be happiest when he sees himself in our faces. The blank, shut-down look, the robotic yes: these are not preferable to joy, but better than rebellion. My mother will never quite learn how to handle him. Marriage is mutual consumption, and she has always been a messy eater.
We will get a dog and name her Cupcake. She will be young, aloof, and impossible to train. We do not know it yet, but this bundle of angles and awkwardness is destined to outlive my father. He will die when she is on the edge of death, and then she will recover. For many months she will lope around the house looking for him, sniffing the sneakers he has left in the closet. When we move, we will stuff his belongings into embryonic trash bags, and the dog will slowly forget.
At eight years old I will go to school, dragging my father behind me. He dips bananas in liquid nitrogen and smashes them on the table with a red rubber hammer. All my friends laugh and I am so, so proud. My baba. The scientist. Lab coat and an untrimmed mustache.
We will go on vacation twice. Yellowstone and Hawaii. We plant our worries on each enviable landscape, watch them choke out the fauna and blanket the earth. In our Montana cabin we microwave cans of Chef Boyardee and raise our voices without fear of neighbors. On the charcoal sides of Kilauea we daydream our bodies, crisping in lava. I will think of an expensive watch and fanny pack melting in the red, black, red. I will wonder when my thoughts became so grown up.
The turning point will come when my mother enrolls us in a father/daughter triathlon in Pocahontas State Park. I will be sickly with skinny wrists, my father will have tennis elbow. In the woods I will leave him without water, rushing ahead to the finish line. In the woods, I will not care if he dies, stopping only when he calls the park rangers to rescue my traitor’s body.
He will realize that I am no longer a part of him; I am capable of my own thoughts and terror. This will break his love for a long time.
Years will pass in no time at all. One day my father will find himself screaming at the boss he tried so hard to impress, his anger reverberating in the fluorescent cubicle. No wonder, then, that he is fired at the first sign of downsizing. We will spend a formative summer at home, my father and I, eating pasta and watching Phineas and Ferb with an academic fervor. I will love him so bad in these moments, when we argue over the lyrics for songs we have long been too old for.
I will learn that my father’s surface is booby-trapped. What word will set the marble rolling down to the tip of his tongue? How will I know which of my laughs will be embraced, and which will be turned inside out and strip-searched? We maintain a silence during commercial breaks.
My mother will take up small jobs. Substitute teaching, mostly. This will anger my father, but he won’t quite know why. We know. My mother’s income will remind him of the days when he walked down the arterial streets of Manhattan to her better lab, better job, better boss. He will pace the house, feet slapping the white linoleum, stretching his arms out to touch the orange-painted walls. He will leave banana peels on countertops, and my mother will clean.
If he spits on the floor, my mother will clean.
My father’s mind will crack like hands in the cold. He will corner me in my room and ask me who my mother’s fucking. He will tear her blouse apart on Thanksgiving and demand that each relative count the scratches on her back; he will collect curries and fish chops in Tupperware containers and mail them to laboratories that test for arsenic and other poisons.
He will find a job in DC and come home only on the weekends. When he leaves Sunday evening, the house will bubble back into being, air moving fiercely through our gasping lungs.
My mother and I are eating lettuce wraps in the car when she tells me she wants to die. Dogwood blossoms fall open-mouthed against the window and fill the car with fishy pollen. My stomach turns round and round, my nausea peaks and multiplies.
To save my mother, I will push her toward divorce. That terrible word, thick with money and death, that my parents have half-heartedly pointed at each other like a gun with the safety on. But this time, for real. There will be no precedent for this in our small Bengali community. Brown women don’t leave behind. They are left behind.
Many times my mother will be close to giving up. But there will be no time; I will be on the cusp of college, and what will I leave in my wake? A house in shards, a hatred of matrimony. I will slap my mother with my words: weak, foolish, stupid, lost. I will feel responsible for how our story unfolds.
When my father receives the divorce papers, he will go to my room. He will move quickly, but disjointedly, as though his skin is escaping without his skeleton. Sweat hangs silver in the space between his eyes like the edge of a dime. He will ask me how it could happen. How she could do this to him. What gave her the right? He will never begin to suspect that I am in on it. That I am it.
I have never seen his face crease this way. His tears follow the new landscape eagerly, seeking out borders and caverns, pockets of flesh. My parents have always argued about whom I look more like. I realize in this moment my father and I look the same when we’re crying.
Things will move quickly from there. My first week at college, my father will steal the keys to my mother’s safe while she sleeps and take all of her documents: bank statements, credit cards, the adoption papers for our dog. Even the apology letter my ex-boyfriend wrote when the cop caught us naked in the movie theater parking lot. My mother will have nightmares about wedding rings and home invaders, and even when she throws the ring into the reservoir (like in the movies), the silver band will coax tension headaches from her memories.
My parents will spend the entirety of my college tuition several times over on the deposition, hearing, deposition, challenge, hearing, suit, countersuit, divorce. Meanwhile, I leave home. The moment I walk into my Lego-shaped freshman dorm I will shatter into a depression. I will do things I never thought I would do—things from pamphlets like never eating and crying in the bathtub with my clothes on. One weekend my father will drive to New York to take care of me. In the apartment I will fall to my knees in exhaustion and spit a clear, yolky puddle on the floor. He will whisper to me, lift me up by my armpits, and set me down on the toilet. He will wipe the spit off my face with his own towel.
The next month he will cut off my health insurance.
Slowly a cold logic will unfurl behind me. I cannot speak to my father without loving him. I cannot love my father without hating myself. My father betrays me. That is what he does.
I will feel these thoughts blot out my favorite memories crudely and as an act of survival, like duct tape on windows.
I won’t be able to pinpoint exactly how it happens, but suddenly I am muting his phone calls, deleting his e-mails, denying his Facebook requests. This will thrill me; to think that nothing was an option all along. My skin will thrum with a glorious anger.
On my birthday he will send me an e-mail asking for my mother’s address so that he can deliver my presents. A dress and a pendant, he will say. When I do not reply, he will friend me on Facebook under the alias Tapan Sinha (a long-dead Bengali movie director) and ask me again and again. My mother panics; we have worked so hard to throw away everything familiar, and his brown Payless shoes on our floors would ruin it all. I tell him not to come. In reply, I get a text that begins, “when I am dead or in jail . . .” and ends in a puddle of madness. That text will make me nervous. When my mother takes too long to come home, failing to answer her phone, I will dial 911 three times different times, hanging up before the How may I help you? even though I learned in school that that’s illegal. When my mother finally appears, short of breath and pickle-brained, I will hide my relief in the tiniest of sighs. I will listen to a thirty-minute lost phone saga with more relish than I thought imaginable. Months later, right before I leave to study abroad in Paris, my father will write again. I’m sorry, he says. He has never said that before, and in response a primal fear rises within me.
I will ask aloud, blanket on my knees and a laptop on my stomach, “Do you think he means to do something terrible?”
“No,” my mother responds, “it’s only tricks.”
My father will move to North Carolina, change lawyers a total of six times, lose one job, then the other. He will steal from us and be charged with fraud. He will slam the door on the court summons, leaving the envelope frayed in the threshold. When he reads the contents, he will move again.
In July he will reappear at the home of a family friend with a suitcase and jittery smile. Their family structure mirrors ours: daughter, father, mother. He will crash on their couch for almost a week, sometimes hungering up the stairs to the daughter’s room with stories of the past. She will nod, brow furrowed, and become annoyed. She has exams to study for.
At the end of the week he will vanish, leaving only instructions that his daughter and wife not be told.
But I will be told. I won’t be able to stop the telling.
When I get the call, I will force the cop to read everything out loud, even though I can feel it hurting him. “This is the worst part of my job,” he whispers, asking me over and over again, “Do you really want to hear this next bit? Do you really?”
The facts are mine to keep. I give my mother a skeleton to hang in her closet, but no more.
Instead of a funeral, we will walk to the Ramakrishna mission and accidentally laugh in the corridor. I will shift too much in the silent room where we are meant to think about death and feel happy, that terrible portrait of Vivekananda beaming down at us in technicolor. Too loud for this place, my heartbeat swallows the God in the room.
A priest will sit cross-legged in the back, the drone of his voice matching that of the sitar. The sitar. My father will learn the sitar as a young boy, but quit because of how the strings bite into his thumbs. I am a child again, staring at his hands while he draws our dog in charcoal. I reach to trace the beaded calluses.
In my dreams I am a murderer, and all my victims are fathers. Backyard barbecue, fanny-packed fathers, whom I stab where their socks meet their knees. In my dreams he is alive again and we set up monthly meetings, like medicine, so that he will never die for real.
Later, I will be told by a family member that I am treating his death “casually.” But she won’t know what I know.
I will not go to his cremation.
It’s March 4, 1961, and India is learning how to walk. My father’s family has survived partition, and the morning is warm and beautiful.
Fingers webbed with veins, umbilical cord rich and rooted, my father is still fifty-six years from his ending. Everything is ready for his arrival, sun and moon and little pale sister. In the courtyard, my grandfather spits betel juice into an unwashed pot. He should be with his wife, but isn’t. Across the city my mother is already four months old, babbling and crying for milk.
In my grandmother’s room strangers are waiting in the dark. My grandmother’s ill-fated eyebrows are soggy with sweat, and I can see in her eyes the fear of dying. The mosquito netting hangs around her like a second wedding veil, but bites still ring her stomach. She is not surprised to see me. We are the same age today and will never meet. With gentle permission, I put my hands on her stomach and search the depths of her soft, stretched skin. With each breath her belly button opens like an eye. Proof that she, too, arrived this way. I feel my father’s toes, chin, the cartilaginous ridge of his spine. The skin laps my fingers in a brutal warmth. What am I searching for? Anything.
I almost give up; this gummy, skin-wrapped prototype cannot be my father. He is too inert, too much like a fumbled object in the dark. I think that I must have chosen the wrong house, the wrong city, the wrong history and wrong body. But just before I leave he feels the warmth of my hands, he kicks. In the dark with the pain my father strains to escape.
