Papa,
Sometimes the sun comes out in Northampton, but mostly it does not. When I call on Mummy’s phone, she talks to me for hours about snow, school, breakfast, whether I’ve applied coconut or mustard oil in my hair, and why she named me after a constellation. I could be struggling to overcome a headache or to pick a Halloween costume, her one-stop solution to all my problems is: meditation. When I call on your phone, Mummy picks up again and explains why almond milk is not milk, only cow’s milk is milk, and it’s also a better skin-care product than any of my USDA certified organic gunks. Even the closest constellation to us, she says, slowing down suddenly, is really far away. Sometimes I accept her love, but mostly I do not. I resent her love for not being yours. I resent her for not being you. Yet, if you were to answer my phone call for once, I wouldn’t know where to begin. How do I talk to my father about constellations when we don’t talk at all?
I write. You do not read. Writing to you, for you, because of you, then, is to run away from you, from full stop to full stop, only to race back to where you are. My sentences come out round like the earth. I am told that you talked to me when I was a baby. You said, Olleee-olleee-ollee kuchi-poochie-poo, and I said, Waa-waa-waa. I was obsessed with scoring a 100/100 in mathematics so you would pat my back and say Good job!, which happened exactly once. Then I needed pocket money in college and you asked, Is 1200 a month enough? Finally, I said no to marrying this upper caste Hindu boy you picked for me, and you said, How selfish. So now I only ever say grown-up words and have no use for long division and my money is mine and more or less enough and you and I don’t talk because I have no husband.
When your silence plagued Ranchi, I dragged my husbandless self to Northampton, across oceans, continents, clouds, and armed immigration officers with buzz cuts who assured me they loved chicken “tikki-takka” masala. While blazing north Indian skies left me nauseated, sunless New England days make me long for sunlight. However, if by chance the sun comes out in Northampton, I promptly lower the blinds, only to wistfully sit by the window when it’s gone.
I must love the sun in a hating way.
• •
Three hundred twenty light years away, a sun-like star, HD 240430, stands accused of eating at least fifteen of its own earth-like planets. A clue to the future of our solar system, maybe. In order for us to have stopped talking, Papa, to talk again someday, the cosmos must cooperate. The earth and the sun must wander neither too close nor too far from each other. All the dust, gas, emptiness, and angular momentum in outer space must safely balance out the astronomical volumes of ache in our hearts for you to ask about my day and for me to say that I bought a T-shirt with holes all over because moth-eaten clothes are à la mode in 2020.
Stars can and do eat the planets to which they give birth. These are the forever homesick child planets, the crybabies that are intent on orbiting dangerously close to their parent stars. On my first day of school, I did not cry when saying goodbye to you, but I did later, lying under my teacher’s car, spread-eagled and devastated, where she spotted me with her mouth agape. Just as I fidgeted with my passport to hold back tears at the airport while you simplified the time difference between Delhi and DC. We’ll be getting out of bed when she cooks dinner, you said to Mummy, ignoring me. The airport personnel wrinkled their eyebrows as I sobbed during the security check, a moon-sized lump in my throat.
You never wanted me to leave the country. When the national anthem played before cricket matches, you stood at attention in the living room and smacked my head if I did not. You wouldn’t eat Karachi Biscuits even though they are not actually from Karachi. You discouraged me from watching HBO because westerners kiss on screen. You didn’t allow me to wear shorts or sleeveless tops because only depraved women dress like that, the kind that end up kissing on screen. You refused to sign my application to go to college in Singapore because Singapore is not India. And India is the best country in the world.
Stephen Hawking said that we are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special. It is easier to understand the universe, Papa, than it is to call you up and ask if lychees are still your favorite fruit. I downloaded a space simulator to make Andromeda and Milky Way collide on my computer screen. It is easier to simulate catastrophic devastation than it is to say: Is your knee pain any better now, Papa? Do you agree with Twitter that owning plastic bags full of other plastic bags makes me an adult? What are the consequences of love? Tell me a riddle.
• •
I rent a room in Northampton on the third floor of an eighteenth-century house, complete with a widow’s watch where women have waited for husbands who never came back home, where I sometimes get out of bed and walk to the bathroom, pretending to be married. Then I wonder: why do we marry? Borders on the world map are causes and consequences of wars. Marriage makes us draw similar borders around each other and ourselves. A crusade to turn human beings into territories. An invasion. A conquest. Laws for whom to buy roses, whom to binge watch Netflix with, whom to lend your sweatshirts to, whom to admit to that you’ve never made a decent omelette. And breaching these laws may seem as natural as breathing, nonetheless we treat them as crimes. The terms arranged-marriage and love-marriage sound absurd to my American friends. For them, marriage is by definition a bond of love. But I suspect that all marriages, like all wars, are by definition antilove. I often picture the world map with billions of additional borders around every married couple. And the world looks too broken up to be the world. Too war-ravaged, too married.
Besides, my guess is that even if I had a husband, you still would not talk to me. You would talk only to my husband, or at best, you would talk to me through my husband. Maybe you don’t talk to me because I am not a girl anymore. Because you don’t know how to listen to a woman.
But, Papa, if you think that I won’t talk because you don’t listen, you are wrong. Today the sun has not come out in Northampton, and my husbandless life is crammed with details. Most days I eat oatmeal for breakfast, but sometimes I make a green bowl. Four days, to be precise, between two grocery trips. Each time I buy one pineapple and divide it into four equal parts that then end up in four green bowls for the next four mornings before I go back to microwaving handfuls of oatmeal again. In order to live, we must not overthink certain things, like the number of parts a pineapple must be divided into on a given day. In order to live, we must sometimes do without thinking. Like when I look at the yogurt, banana, kale, spinach, pineapple, blueberries, strawberries, and almond milk—my green bowl ingredients that end up in the blender—and think, protein, potassium, vitamin A, vitamin B2, vitamin C, vitamin K1, antioxidants, vitamin E, before catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and thinking, How selfish. In Massachusetts, though, you either feel cold or you feel selfish. I seldom feel both at once. Or so I think.
My wealthy, white landlady allows heat from her part of the house to travel to mine, but snowstorms require me to switch on my own radiators, which I never do. On overcast days when the windows rattle and silvery, soft things fall from the sky, I wear three layers of sweaters and socks and stay in bed to save some dollars. The bed belonged to my landlady before the frame got wobbly. But every time I search for perfectly affordable bed frames on Amazon, I remember the time I broke my bed while practicing Bollywood dance moves on it, and your friend who worked in the shipping industry sent us a bed from one of his ships, a low, springy iron bed. Soon I was sailing to Japan in my nightly dreams, while you stayed up feeling ashamed of being unable to afford a new bed. So I skip Amazon and save some more dollars. Mummy says that, for a long time, money was so tight that you had only two shirts but still threw me a birthday party because I refused to turn five otherwise, although you didn’t know what to wear when the guests began to pour in. Now my winter coat is ripping at the shoulder, and I have enough money to not only get it mended but even buy a new one, yet I simply walk around with my torn coat and save many more dollars.
Every dollar is all of sixty-five or so rupees. That’s more than half of what Mummy spends in the vegetable market each week. Money makes me sad, Papa. It reminds me of one of your two shirts from when I was little, with rupee currency notes printed on it, complete with Gandhi bald heads on each of them. Maybe you didn’t become a successful capitalist because Gandhi didn’t want you to. After all, the last place the unswerving man ever wanted to be was on currency notes. But unlike me, you never sat inside air-conditioned classrooms to discuss Gandhi and Marx and Gramsci. You worked in a small pharmacy with a broken heart so I could learn all about why capitalism is a heartbreaker. You sold medicines for headaches, stomach aches, sore throats, and acidity with the face of a sickly man. Maybe that is why the boy you wanted me to marry only ever talked about his Mercedes Benz. No, I told you, Because he only ever…you didn’t let me finish my sentence. How selfish, you said, We may not find another Hindu Brahmin boy with a job like his, the car and house and two acres of ancestral land. You rendered my biggest accomplishment smaller than the car and house and two acres of ancestral land of my husband-to-be. The good ones get taken quickly. You sounded like the End of Season Sale.
But, Papa, if you think that my accomplishments are small, then also you are wrong. I hope you will be pleased to know that I am writing my first novel and I have figured out how to set up a cactus terrarium and the other day I made cottage cheese from scratch and sometimes I paint very colorful pictures of trees that look like people and now I can sew buttons on my shirts and twist my body into the Plow Pose and I know that the world map is all wrong because Africa is fourteen times larger than we think it is and I finally memorized Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat with the correct Urdu pronunciations and I made a new friend last month even though she loves Moroccan mint tea and I don’t and I’ve managed to understand the difference between socialism and democratic socialism, between agony and acceptance, between sleet and freezing rain, and between you and me.
• •
Energy is generated in the sun when four hydrogen atoms become one helium atom. In the simulated world, I convert all the sun’s hydrogen into helium, watch it become a red giant on my computer screen that grows bigger and bigger until it is bigger than the earth’s orbit and hold your hand as we are fried to a crisp.
I anxiously shook you awake at 4:30 a.m. as the crickets chirped in the backyard, to help me revise before my third-grade math exam. You had worked until 11:00 p.m., but your bloodshot eyes lit up every time I recited a multiplication table without errors. After the exam was over, we sat down with the question paper to predict my total score. My answers painstakingly calculated in the margins. You, orally tallying everything like Dexter in his laboratory. And now the last question, 248/42, you said. My pulse raced. 2 is less than 42, you continued, so is 24. Good. But the 2 of 248 is in fact 200 and the 24 is 240. Good . . . Subtract 210 from 248. No more digits to drop down. Good. But is the divisor multiplied by quotient plus remainder equal to the dividend? I stopped breathing. 42 times 5 is 210. Good. And 210 plus 38 is 248. Good good good good! I froze. That makes it a 100/100! Good job!
Hydrogen became helium became carbon.
Hydrogen became helium became photosynthesis.
Hydrogen became helium became mathematics.
Hydrogen became helium became: Good good good good!
Hydrogen became helium became the silence between us.
Did you know? The vacuum between the earth and the sun doesn’t allow any transmission of sound whatsoever. An astronaut’s brain copes with this sensory deprivation by amplifying their heartbeat and breathing, even hallucinating sounds. My knee pain disappears like magic with the warm, turmeric paste your mother applies, I imagine you telling me. The consequences of love are courage and shame.
• •
Lena, my best friend in Northampton, who wears a yellow Salvation Army jacket and writes poems about her father’s “gangsterish suits,” visits me on Thursday evenings. We sit cross-legged on my wobbly bed and read the Bhagavad Gita in English and eagerly look forward to having all the answers, which seem to be taking a while. But reading the Gita makes me feel like a good Hindu. So does keeping my potted basil in the bathtub, because the tiny bathroom stays reasonably warm, which is the only way a good Hindu, in this polar weather, can keep Trader Joe’s holy basil from dying inside her house, thereby avoiding a bad omen. So does having a batik painting of Saraswati in my room. I bought it in San Francisco, not India, for comic relief, because all goddesses are illegal immigrants in the realm of religion—bearing their roles as wives, daughters, sisters, girlfriends, like forged divine passports—and thank goddesses for that. So does walking to the bus stop every morning, thinking how there are no cows on the streets of Northampton. No cows on Prospect Street. No cows on Elm Street. Pleasant Street is cowless too. No cows on King Street causing a traffic jam while daydreaming. Nope. Not one. But beef is available in every restaurant you walk into. Remember the time you stormed out of the Tibetan restaurant in Hauz Khas Village because they had beef on the menu? I know this will make you mad, but when Junaid was stabbed to death on that train from Delhi, before being called a beefeater, I walked to the Subway on King Street and ingested a roast beef sub with tears rolling down my face. It was my first time eating beef without spitting it out. Until then I had only ever chewed on a piece of crispy beef once, two years ago, before being terrified of what my sins might do to you and Mummy, and spitting urgently, then sticking a finger down my throat and throwing up. I do not know if I didn’t like the taste of the roast beef sub or didn’t want to, but I swallowed the whole thing, retching all along. I didn’t eat beef to find it tasty. I ate it because I was not supposed to. Because the Muslim men who are lynched on the streets of India are told that they are not supposed to. Not unless they wanted to go to Pakistan or the kabristan.
What have we done, Papa?
You are proud of being a Hindu, but I am very ashamed. My most important New Year’s resolution, therefore, is to be a bad Hindu. Because good Hindus are not good people.
My less important New Year’s resolution is to be loved.
At Randolph Place, past the big intersection where pedestrians press buttons and wait for the white neon person on the traffic signal to light up before crossing the street, lives a boy who looks like Jesus. It is true that, unlike in Ranchi where pedestrians and drivers communicate with their bodies, faces, voices, and at times almost telepathically, here they press buttons and don’t always look at each other on the streets, mostly thinking entirely different thoughts. Like I could walk past a girl in her car waiting for the light to turn green, thinking about my overdue assignment, while she could be thinking about, say, her dog, or Russian hackers. Who knows. It is also true that I am learning to be loved by a boy who looks like Jesus. He is a bad Christian himself. His name is Manuel, and he does not drive a Mercedes. But he notices the wildflowers in the scruffy grass around my landlady’s garage where she parks her three shiny, burly cars.
• •
Some mornings I look into the mirror and see two of me, not one. My secret self—cloaked in sleeveless dresses, with beef in her bloodstream, defiant and disquiet, and Manuel’s socks under her bed—feels distinct from myself. I want to tell you all my secrets, but what if you never want to see my face again? The gravitational force of a passing star can permanently break the earth away from the sun. Not every planet circles its star forever. Several end up starless, homeless, without sunrises or sunsets. There are twice as many starless planets as there are stars in the Milky Way.
Those who are starless, however, could very well be starfree. Any water bodies on starfree planets are frozen in the cold of outer space, but under the blanket of ice may exist unfrozen oceans, warmed by geothermal heat, and inside the oceans, sheer, undaunted life.
There is this boy I like, but—please don’t be angry—he is not a Kanyakubj Brahmin from Jharkhand, Bihar, or Uttar Pradesh, I imagine telling you, and you saying: How does that matter? We are all human beings here, aren’t we?
When we look for life in outer space, we look in places like the one we are from. We search nearby solar systems, rummage through Jharkhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh. But how are we to find anyone else if we only ever look for ourselves? Starfree planets are not warm and wet like the earth, their bodies frozen, their souls thawed. But Brahmins are no more human than non-Brahmins, and life-forms that are unlike us are no less alive.
• •
When walking on the streets of Northampton, Manuel likes to rub my fingers with his, but I stuff my hands in my pockets and walk at arm’s length from him, just like I did with boys in Ranchi, to keep all relationships secret from you. That way I feel at home in love. Unlike you, Manuel likes to move around the house without slippers on and does not wash his feet before going to bed. How could you? I want to ask him, not do what Papa would do? However, when he noisily bites into a toast, which he loves with the same intensity as you do, I lecture him about simple carbohydrates, before confessing, Eat something else and don’t make me look like a Freudian nut job because Papa eats toast. He gapes. So does, like, half the world, he mutters. The sun renders all the other stars in the afternoon sky invisible, not because it is the brightest but the closest to us.
Sometimes I talk to Manuel in Hindi and he talks to me in Spanish, and we both understand each other perfectly. Dimaag toh kharaab nai ho gaya kahin? I ask him, expressing my disapproval of pairing brown trousers with a floral purple T-shirt, and he quickly changes into something else. He rolls his eyes when the germaphobe in me points to a speck of dirt on his just-washed feet. Me vas a matar mujer! he says, and I proceed to make peace with dirty feet.
Before visiting his parents in Chile, Manuel and I rehearsed the Chilean greeting of a semihug, followed by a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the back, like actors in a high school drama. We stood some distance away from each other in his living room as he pretended to be his mom or dad, while I pretended to be me in Chile. As we walked past each other and he leaned close to brush his cheek against mine, I squirmed and burst out laughing. But in Chile, all went well. I also remembered not to call his parents Aunty and Uncle but referred to them by their first names.
Now we are rehearsing for India.
Manuel knows never to address you and Mummy by your first names but only as Aunty and Uncle. Standing in the living room, I pretend to be Mummy or you, while he pretends to be him in India. We walk past each other, and if he even remotely attempts to hug, kiss, or touch in his greeting, anything other than joining the palms of his hands in a reverent namaste, I make a horrified face like I imagine Mummy or you would, and we laugh and start over again. He has agreed to cut his hair and wear boring nonfloral shirts for the meeting that we both know might never happen at all.
This one time when you, I, and Mummy ran into a cheerful Italian couple on the train to Calcutta, you refused to make small talk or even eye contact with them before whispering to Mummy, “Bloody foreigners.”
• •
Have you been in love, Papa? Mummy and you looked at each other’s passport-sized photos before getting married on February 14. The date was decided by a group of saffron-clad old men based on the position of all the nine planets in our solar system at the time of your births. The men, as well as Mummy and you, were unaware of the foreign festival of love coinciding with your wedding anniversary. But economic liberalization took off in India in 1991, a year after you got married, and Valentine’s Day merchandise began to inundate the market. I imagine a sudden storm of heart-shaped cushions and teddy bears with their hearts in their hands and coffee mugs and greeting cards and blond men in tuxedos kissing blond women in white wedding gowns inside lit-up revolving globes amidst a rainfall of hearts. I wonder if the whole business left you feeling cheated. As if all subsequent marriages in India were sure to be unions of love, and Mummy and you were the last ones to be married under the strict dictum of upper-caste Hindu respectability. Or, after all these years, if you think about the mole on Mummy’s left cheek and the way she cuts her nails only partially before peeling them off with her fingers to avoid clipped nails flying off around the room, her germophobia perfectly complementing yours, and conclude that love can be arranged.
My earliest memory of love is from when I was four. We had gone to a wedding party, and the marriage was not arranged. An actual love-marriage, a rare spectacle in the Ranchi of the early ’90s. While you sipped on Coca-Cola, and Mummy ate her second or third aloo tikki chaat, I overheard a group of gossipy aunties deriding the young couple for not allowing their parents to pick their spouses. At the time I didn’t understand everything they said, but I could tell that their Hindi and Bhojpuri sentences were punctuated with a single English word, love. So I reasoned that love must be a foreigner. Even today, at times when Manuel gives me a warm smile or instinctively kisses my hand, love feels like a foreigner, Papa. And only when it feels like a foreigner is when it feels the most familiar to me.
• •
The more I fiddle with gravity and time and mass and temperature on the space simulator, the more I feel part of a simulation where guilt and love and silence and sorrow are in turn being fiddled with. After all, it is hard to explain everything that is happening between you and me, as well as the world over. Some say that we are living in a computer game that is bugged. Remember how we used to play Super Mario for hours on end? You sipping chai, me drinking that very sweet chocolate milk, and both of us clinging to our joysticks with a bowl of Haldiram’s Bhujia between us. Those were some of our happiest moments together.
If our sorrows are real, then we must do our best to be happy once again because—real feelings having real significance—the stakes are high. However, if the responsibility for our sorrows lies with neither you, nor I, but with those who render us sad with a click of their joysticks, then the stakes are even higher. Because the only way to transcend simulated sorrow is to want happiness with such sincerity that those who make us jump up and down like Mario believe we are more real than not.
• •
My biggest concern regarding telling you about Manuel is not that you would reduce me to a girl in love, but that you would reduce me to a girl in love with a boy. I worry that you’d make this about him, like most Bollywood movies do, where girls must fight with their fathers to be with boys they love, not to be who they love to be. But I was a girl in love way before I fell in love with a boy. And the climax of the movie that is my life was back in seventh grade when I wrote my first poem, part Hindi, part English, leaning against the dug well in our backyard in Ranchi. A very bad poem about war.
In Northampton, above my writing table is an oil painting of a woman with skin as ambiguously brown as mine—Native American or African or South Asian—left behind by the previous tenant. As one woman writes to you, the other one cuts long green grass, topless, with a pink flower tucked behind her ear. Sometimes I feel like she and I are the same person. A woman writes naked, after all.
Writing is sheer discovery, and while the world allows you men to be seen, it forces us women into hiding. Clothed and unclothed. Hence, we must discover ourselves in spite of the world. We must strip before we can choose our own clothes or no clothes. When we write, we notice that truth has been veiled together with the roundness of our stomachs, the circumference of our waists, our double chins and dark circles, the hairy celebrations of our armpits. We write to unhype the hype between our legs. Then we learn to make love to our own invincible selves.
You wanted me to be an important person, like an engineer, or an MBA, or a civil servant, or a doctor. But I only ever wanted to be a disobedient daughter. No one tells us disobedient daughters that we are important people, after all. We must find that out for ourselves. While abandoning my career as an engineer, or not marrying the boy who adored his Mercedes, or leaving for another country, husbandless, or loving a Latin American boy were all brave attempts at disobeying you, I have disobeyed most gravely with pen and paper and Microsoft Word. And it could all have been avoided, Papa, if you didn’t buy me every book I wanted to read.
Why did you?
Each time we drove around town, you slowed down your motorcycle as it approached a bookstore. Do you want to see if they have something new? you asked. I smelled every book before turning it around and ruminating over the price. Rupees 450, I said, that is costly. You paid the shopkeeper before I made up my mind. Books are never costly, you said, not having read any of the books I lost myself in each night since they were all written in English, not Hindi. Later at night, I read in bed while you tied the four strings of my mosquito net in the four designated corners—one on the doorknob, the other on a nail sticking out of the wall, yet another on the window grill, and the fourth held down by a big jug of water on my table—before tucking the loose ends under my mattress to keep the malarial mosquitoes off me, as I silently read away, away from you.
The universe may have begun with the Big Bang. It may not have. It may have begun with the Big Swoosh or the Big Hum or the Big Whimper or the Big Giggle or the Big Growl or the Big Fizzle or the Big Knock or the Big Trickle or the Big Snip. It may not have. So much about us is merely theory.
• •
The world ends over and over again inside my head, a different ending each time, until my fear of no tomorrow comes to an end, too, becoming a habit. Maybe our fears are misplaced, after all. Whether we live in a video game where one afternoon the clouds spell Game Over across the blue sky or we live in a reality whose conclusion inevitably feels unreal, doomsday may not be half as scary as what leads up to it: the here and now.
Envisioning nuclear mushroom clouds, A.I. invasions, a sinking Antarctica, and the dramatic interplay between the sun and the earth is simpler than decarbonizing the economy, denuclearizing geopolitics. Just as who and when and whether I will marry are less tricky questions for you to answer than who I am. Having imaginary conversations with you, likewise, is easier for me than asking Mummy to give you the phone for once, which in turn is much, much easier than boarding a plane, returning to India.
Why is there something—including, but not limited to, the universe—rather than nothing? We’ve been trying to answer that question since before circa 515 BC but still don’t have any clear answers.
Nevertheless, let us keep trying, Papa.
Because until father and daughter turn to dust, they can remain father and daughter, albeit imperfectly so. And that is something. It really is.