Documents

The birth certificate that documents my entry into the world is the first of many documents that explain my life, but when I look at it, things go wrong immediately. My birth certificate says I am Diane Sarah Mehta, daughter of Carole A. Leonard and Dilip J. Mehta. I was born in a hospital in Frankfurt am Main on May 12, 1966. The tiny pink wristband with a snap button identifies me as ♀ who is 3,000 grams (6.6 pounds) and 50 centimeters (19.6 inches) long.

This announcement says I was born, but doesn’t specify if I was reborn, a viable option for the daughter of an Indian Jain, who, if he were practicing, might believe in rebirth and nirvana. It doesn’t say what kind of Jewish household my mother will keep, or whether I was expected to believe in a god who is, in the traditional sense of the word, a maker. It doesn’t say how dangerous my birth was, but I know that it was risky for my mother to have children. The birth certificate tells me nothing about what transpired in the four days I was in the hospital with my mother. It doesn’t express the May 12 Frankfurt weather, a lovely 25.5ºC at 7:00 p.m., or the angle of Earth in regard to the moon, or how much the moon pulled at the tide, and it makes no reference to my time of birth. Instead of describing the colors in rotation across the world that night, there is a galaxy of white space between the words.

My mother gave birth to me alone, in a foreign country, an omen of lonelinesses to come. Because my mother is dead, those days will always be a mystery. She told me once that she didn’t remember the birth, and that the German nurses were mean and refused to help her go to the toilet or get onto the delivery table. I imagine a steel table similar to those in police procedural thrillers, washed clean of victims who were dissected there, as the vehicle for my entry into life. For a Jewish American woman living in postwar Germany, the nurses’ refusal to help her bring my blood-and-bones being into being must have felt like an absence of compassion and a pathological condition of German society, which had tuned itself out to the normal preindustrial processing of empathy. I am certain that my mother hated every moment of my birth, and I imagine it felt like a sanatorium instead of a place where you deliver an unfettered creature into kaleidoscopic new life.

Those days in the hospital are better served by myth, so I create an alternate narrative, because the relationship is mine to shape now. My mother had a view southeast over rooftops that maintained the same stern facade as the woeful labor and delivery nurses who spent their lives listening to women screaming. For them, pain had lost its context. But they believed that fresh air aided the constitution, so they left the windows open. We smelled diesel from engines driving boats along the river. It was spring, and laughter floated about in the soprano voices of young women looking for husbands or escaping them. When they rolled my bassinet into the room with the other German just-borns, I learned that many of us would be shipped off to half-timbered homes along the riverbanks, and others would live above grocers, and I would live in a flat. I discovered that I would be bottle-fed. When I complained to my mother about missing out, she reminded me that I had emerged whole, with ten fingers and ten toes, and that this itself was a miracle of design, though God, we agreed, did not exist in a postwar world.

When my father showed up, he told me what to make of the world, and when he left, my mother edited his advice a little. She said never learn to sew more than a button, and don’t bother getting married, but definitely have children, even if it’s risky, as it is for me with my congenitally enlarged, unstable heart, because nothing lasts except your children once you place them in the world. Stick with me, she said.

. . . . . .

My father helps me patchwork my story with facts, but much of the content is missing. Höchst am Main, where I was born, was an independent historic city on the north bank of the Main River, and became part of Frankfurt am Main in 1928. The town, a center for porcelain manufacturing, became known for Hoechst AG, a chemical-dye manufacturer that evolved into the pharmaceutical company where my father worked and the subject of an exhaustive study by the historian Stephan H. Lindner, who has documented Hoechst’s complicity during the Third Reich. My father took the job twenty years later. He was a minority and a citizen of India, and husband to a minority Jewish American wife, and he was the rising star at this company that had once produced half the Zyklon B for the death camps in Germany. My father told Hoechst that he wanted to launch clinical research in India instead of Europe; it had never been done, and they agreed. He was thirty-four.

Yet when he arrived with my mother at the hospital, the attendants shooed him away at the door, and no amount of arguing could convince them to let him stay the night. My parents had arranged for a female obstetrician to deliver me, a woman with whom they had scheduled many prenatal visits, but I was swept out of the womb by the male head of obstetrics instead. My unruffled, handsome, and quietly commanding father must have been irritated at being so dismissed. He does not see himself as a discounted version of a European because he is dark skinned. He grew up in the North Indian town of Rajkot, under colonialism, an ordinary citizen who was not allowed to frequent the same places as Europeans. He trained as a physician and traveled to America in the sixties, married a woman he loved, and helped blaze a trail developing a framework for clinical research. But whom did the German matrons see, brown knuckled, at the door?

When he returned in the morning, they told him that he had a daughter.

I send him emails, but I do not get the answer I am looking for: two thousand solar flares shot out, and purple-pink and alligator-green auroras drifted about Frankfurt for the first time, and it was recorded as an unusual incident at an impossible time of year, perhaps a UFO or a military exercise. Streets were filled with women. All the trees turned upside down and stuck their roots straight up; then they did a U-turn and became banyan trees when their roots began searching for the ground. I had planted myself here. The world would be forever mixed; now Germany had some India and more Ashkenazi Jew in it.

Because my mother is dead and my father is old, I would like to know whether she held me when I cried or left me to the nurses, and whether in those first moments she immediately loved me or whether it took a while. I didn’t ask him this question. He and I both think I’m after the valuable facts. He tells me that my mother often sat with me outside, on a bench, with my sister, and that she had met another Jewish woman, named Bernstein, who was there to collect her family’s property, and what stands out to him is that the Bernstein lady did not know that my mother was Jewish, because she had taken my father’s surname.

My mother’s surname was Leonard, airbrushed from Levine to cloak the family’s Jewish identity from gentiles who might do them harm. My maternal ancestors had emigrated to the US from Minsk, Poland, and London, as rabbis, umbrella salesmen, tailors, and wives. At first, I discounted this detail; so my mother made a Jewish friend in Germany, and they chatted on a bench. But over months of digging for information that did not yield the satisfaction I wanted, it hit me that this Bernstein woman was not just looking to gain her rightful property, as recompense, but was using the legal system to rebuild the architecture of her family’s former life, before they fled Frankfurt, through their possessions. In the process of procuring the documents she needed, she was, in her tiny way, reclaiming something still intact from the jaws of an annihilating genocide, and maybe in her commitment to retrieving what had been stolen from her family, she might reinvent that time of childhood in Frankfurt. But what pained me was what was lost in my mother’s own name and her own childhood life. Excising her given name from her marriage contract opened up the possibility that she would lose track of who she was. Who was my mother when she was a girl?

There are countless ways we allow documents to betray what is legally and emotionally ours, and other ways in which they seal our fate. What emotions do women feel when they get married and choose to sign their names away? Perhaps my mother enjoyed folding herself into my father by following tradition, a Keatsian contract: like a compass, fixed and free. He would care for her and keep her safe. The marriage had already disappointed both sets of parents: hers because she was marrying an Indian Jain instead of a white Jew, and his because he was marrying a white American woman who would keep him in America. It is not unusual to hang on to pipe dreams around heritage, genetics, color, and sect when it comes to our children, in the hope that we will stall the end of our tradition or lose our own sense of what is left after our bodies are gone. My mother sawed away the name Leonard, chopped from Levine, but like all of us, she had only one half of a name: the father, the patriarch, the money earner, the strongman. How did she feel being Mrs. Mehta, when strangers excised her first name?

. . . . . .

The word document originates from the Latin documentum, which means “lesson, proof, instance, specimen,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. This document itself embodies an experiment in truth-making. Medieval Latin is closer to the contemporary meaning of “instrument, charter, official paper.” More promising, for my purposes, is the Latin docēre: “to teach.” How much recompense for suffering this term ignites! What we learn, or struggle to learn or appreciate, is how to create phosphorescence from dull life. Alas, the OED marks all the usages before the eighteenth century as obsolete, which distracts from the fact that all meanings are evidentiary, even if settled usage is closer to what the OED tracks to 1728, when the word appears in Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia; or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: title deed, tombstone, coin, picture. The OED has made a mistake: if you skip the thousand-year history of the Latin, you lose the thrill of docēre. Language is there to lose and find, but not to lose.

“Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,” says Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself,” a poem in which he left out nothing, as if to say: Do not restrict me in body or idea. Whitman, who had no truck with anyone, didn’t want to be misunderstood, but I think he wasn’t entirely comfortable being understood, either, because if his output were perceived as the full measure of his being, then his encompassing lists would encompass him, and he would never be free. He slashed what was intrusive by saying, “I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you.” It is an agitated and awkward way of crushing opposition with certainty of mind. My mother, even without her surname to center her, could do this too.

I believe my parents had intellectually slingabout ways that guaranteed they could survive in Whitmanesque worlds; I mean, they were both so meticulous about using the mind to soften the sting of the body. For my father, that meant understanding psychopharmacology, the effect of drugs on the mind in an individual body—the efficacy of a drug, and the ways in which it interacts with other drugs or with food as a measure of statistical truth. For my mother, it meant allowing abstractions to fulfill what reality is not doing. One day, when I was a teenager, my mother and I were looking at a book with reproductions of paintings. She showed me two images of an industrial English landscape and asked which I preferred. She excoriated me for preferring the prettier, realistic painting. The other had looser brushstrokes, and the buildings were blurry and textured. It was a darkly impressionistic rendering that seemed to magnify the stormy dabs of paint in atomic space; it did not reproduce the landscape photographically. It takes imagination to see beyond what’s right in front of you, she scolded, without seeing the impoverishment of our emotional lives right in front of us.

It seems to me that the shock of giving birth to me in Germany audited their sense that either had any real control over their lives, and between my mother’s anger and my father’s refusal to express anger about that night, when the German matrons did not let them build the proper foundation to my life, something ran afoul of expectation; that is to say, nothing happened. They went on as before. My father didn’t roar at the hospital door like the tiger I know is in him or call the authorities after he was dismissed, unwelcome, and my mother, on her back or on all fours, like Satan raving but getting his bearings in the muck after God throws him out of heaven, well, she fought as she might, she gave birth to me that night, and after all the celebrations—her parents arriving from America, my sister staring at me with brown-bright round eyes, my father rolling along the tracks of his pharmacological career, making drugs that fix or mitigate what’s not right in the body or mind, and the congratulations and mazel tovs arriving on schedule—it must have been true, no doubt it was true, it was documented all right, and having proof with a birth certificate proved they had created something good together.

My mother suffered. My father put up with her lapses because there was enough joy and belief in institutional family–unit happiness to be had. They believed in the pleasures of signing their names to a contract that proved they had found their center in their marriage, and they believed in irresistible children and an irresistible life. How many of us can look at that paper without the sour realization that we have documented our lives by pulping the lives of hemlock, fir, and pine? Like trees, we are axed, cudgeled, and squeezed into becoming; we are wood pulp transfigured, only a component part of a society. The tree that was a coniferous, dendritic seed of knowledge is no more than a filing system for what would be better served by memory. Fool yourself, but your papers are proof of nothing.

My life grew so fast in that hospital room. It was invigorating and sweet to breathe the earth-air, to feel my lungs turning on like a nineteenth-century machine. Wind in, wind out. “The air tastes good to my palate,” says Whitman. The atmosphere smelled like hair spray and starched cotton. My mother showed me a photograph taken at her wedding, so I would recognize my father when I met him. The imagery had drama because they were young, and because color, and the way film was processed, was different then. They were a unit, a pas de deux, the way you can’t help being that unit when you are center stage, glissading across the pupils of everyone watching. In love, in that moment, you create, from the machines of your bodies, a person.

Here was the love machinery of a mixed-race union of East and West. They had no idea what they were getting into.

I kept returning to the photograph, because it documented not their wedding but their love, in the angles of the room. This showed me how three-dimensional their love once was. The broad, flat white surfaces pulse with so many unknown colors and light wanting to be discovered but bound by the room’s geometry. It told me how they felt for an hour or two. And then what? After the guests went home and they were two? Their love-wedding was so unlike my own that spring afternoon by a creek in a small forest uptown, before I realized that marriage was nothing but a document that led to a marriage contract and then a divorce contract, and in between the beginning and end was my baby, who was screaming.

Docēre, I think. What did they learn? What did I learn? How three-dimensional their love was. I will never know more than a handful of stories about them. I decide, in this moment, that if there were diaries or a video of me in that hospital room—being handed from one parent to another or picked up from my pram, any moment between May and July 1966—I’d be a different woman. But that is only my blindness to the magnitude of experience. It is all so mundane and so exterior. What can I encompass?

“Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me”—I wonder if Whitman was sly, because you cannot encompass worlds, and he knew it. Behind his tender bullhorn, he seems so lonely. There must be a point at which we become such an embodiment of love that we boil ourselves in it, unable to love singularly. I keep trying to prove with the documents that my parents loved me, just as Whitman keeps trying to prove with his lists that he—and vicariously, we—could abandon ourselves to so inclusive a love that everyone in society would be lifted up, but his sentimental encyclopedia of advice, jobs, injustices, and sexual desire makes me first enthralled and then bereft. Leaves of Grass is the grandest one-night stand in poetry.

. . . . . .

The FS-240, or Consular Report of Birth Abroad, that my parents filled out on my behalf, three months after my birth, is a way of avoiding the truth: I have no status inside or outside any clear borders unless I consider my mother’s uterus my original country. Because my mother was American, the US handed me citizenship that was both guaranteed and conditional, which is an accurate summing up of how, at fifty-five, I see the world. The children of American citizens born abroad are granted citizenship, as long as their parents fill out the FS-240 and file it with the American consulate and as long as they live in the US for five consecutive years at some time before the age of eighteen, when they are legally adults. We moved to America when I was seven. If my parents hadn’t moved with me to America by the time I was twelve, in which country would I have become a citizen? Would I have been sent to the German courts or to the Indian courts, to claim citizenship in either country? Who would have fought for or against my becoming a citizen of that country? Would America disown me? Who would I be then?

I’m a fill-in-the-blanks sort of person, so I believe that each of the boxes on the FS-240 embodies all the possibilities of circumstance, pleasure, and menace that as an infant I did not know until they happened to me. Perhaps this is my first clue that I have no control over being, and limited control over the rhythm of my days in this world. There is not only Frankfurt, where I lived for six months, but other borders and cities in me. I can keep filling in the blanks with constructed narratives, to explain the accidents that others call fate; I do not believe in it any more than I believe in astrology or magnetism or the Year of the Tiger. I do believe in habit and imagination, and out of that you can burn your way into any narrative you choose.

. . . . . .

I think that I am an FS-240 named Diane Mehta, a living document based on temporary status in a European country as the daughter of two foreign nationals, in a postindustrial epoch of new automation and thinking machines that know we have passed our threshold of climate, and high-speed internet or not, the land is hot, coastlines are picking up their skirts and moving inland, and even there, droughts, fires, and heat waves are taking a toll.

How does that recalibrate the lives of you and me? I wonder if it is too big, in the way asteroids or volcanic eruptions are too big to ponder. When time wipes out a person, it makes you determined to find more, research forever, and come up with a proper plan for living. Looking back on the five mass extinctions, when single events wiped out much of life on Earth, how do you feel about your petty concerns and your proof of citizenship here on Earth?

When I look closely at the FS-240, I notice that the Date of Report is July 18, 1966, at 10:30 a.m.—two months after I was born. The few dozen boxes on it tell me that people are expected to square their biographies in compartments, without expressing the seesaw of rage, pleasure, and despair that compose our emotional landscape, but we also know that it is our job to invisible-ink the boxes with epigrams that describe the skewering or lyrical memories that shade the address, occasion, date of birth, place of birth, and definition of national or foreign identity that persuade us that we are special or homeless or that the air we breathe—our shared atmosphere—is foreign.

This document that records the just-born children of US travelers suffers from a failure of imagination. The address, listed under my mother’s name, “same as husband,” as if my father’s document sufficed, was Westendstrasse 29, Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Harry W. Williams, vice-consul of the United States of America, signed the document. I searched for the vice-consul online, but there was nothing to track down. His life was missing. Frustrated, I did a search for my parents in The New York Times, and this brought the distracted satisfaction I craved, as if I could build out what I wanted to know about the important dates so the empty spaces didn’t feel so empty, and because I know the tragedy behind whatever documents I could find, which is that they are so meaningful precisely because they are meaningless in that they are not the thing I want; I want to know what really happened in those first moments and days I was alive, and I want to know what it was like living with my parents in those months between the two documents that insufficiently describe the beginning of my time on Earth.

What promise I felt when I went into my prehistory and found the New York Times document announcing their marriage: “Dr. Dilip Jayantilal Mehta Weds Miss Carole Leonard.” Did the writer realize that inasmuch as a man weds a woman, she weds him in return? Was marriage just a job? Did he pause when he read my father’s name and think about how odd it felt to see, staring out from his handwriting at him, a knot of Indian and Jewish names? How miffed she’d have been to be called a miss—wouldn’t she have been? Wasn’t she not only a feminist but also a Mrs. Dilip Mehta? Hadn’t she relinquished her name to be in the hitched-up unit the government requests of couples, and that couples expect of themselves? They had parents to please, and they looked forward, I am certain, to the small wedding they had at the Plaza Hotel. She lived at 239 East 77th Street, and he at 1360 York Avenue. Justice Henry Clay Greenberg, of the New York Supreme Court, married them.

All of it seems promising, yet I sense, in my bassinet, that my parents will not be happy. I wonder what they felt about the epoch they occupied then: 1966 was a year of socially progressive and geopolitical realignment, over which the United States government attempted to exert control. Between my birthdate, May 12, and the date that the consulate issued my FS-240, July 18, Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), which one year later endorsed the legalization of abortion and gave women the chance to achieve equal opportunities with men. The Indian nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize winner Homi J. Bhabha, who supervised India’s development of nuclear weapons, died when an Air India flight from Bombay (now Mumbai) to New York crashed near Mont Blanc. (Or when the CIA, unwilling to accept India’s nuclear program, assassinated him.) We moved into an apartment building near Bhabha’s bungalow on Malabar Hill later that year. America was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and in those two months, time stretched out on a different scale because the death and bombings in two months of a failed twenty-year war are too startling to list. The Civil Rights era was under way in America, in the forever war between North and South. In Miranda v. Arizona, the US Supreme Court guaranteed criminal suspects the right to be informed of their constitutional right to be silent before or after the police laid into them. Finally, Lasix, a drug used to treat fluid retention, or edema, was cleared for use by the FDA.

This is the event that is most personal to me. Lasix is part of my family history, a curative that my father talks about with excitement. He recalls the first use of Lasix (then known by its generic name, furosemide) by Indian troops, to cure the high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) they suffered during the Sino-Indian War, in November 1962. Troops were flown from sea level to five thousand meters in the Himalayas, to fight a border dispute with China, and the Indian Army became hypoxic. Hundreds died. Chinese troops, already on the Tibetan Plateau, were acclimated. My father explains, in an email, that it was a Dr. General Inder Singh who published a paper, in The New England Journal of Medicine, about how Lasix sped the recovery of Indian troops. India suffered massive losses in the monthlong war. That doesn’t tell you or me anything about the troops, or about the foolish trust of postcolonial India relying on its wits to build independent power. The government realized that Pakistan was not their only enemy, and they scrambled to build a more strategic army to become the power India would turn itself into. But after those airlifts from sea level to altitude in 1962, they left hundreds of stories buried in the Himalayan ice, drifting in high winds, evaporated and immaterial but alive in the fog. How did those trained soldiers feel when their legs swelled up and they found themselves immobile, stalled by their own bodies? What did they think of their training then?

I was unable to find any documentation except for a now-declassified document detailing the first world symposium on the effects of hypoxia in high-terrestrial altitudes, which convened in 1969. Dr. Sujoy Roy, professor of cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, explained that he and his colleagues had spent five years studying acute mountain sickness among troops airlifted to eighteen thousand feet, into Himalayan terrain. It was not only in 1962 that the pulmonary edema struck. India airlifted its troops into the mountains again and again. Just as Indians were dispensable to the British, Indians were dispensable to Indians.

Why does Lasix matter so much to me? The FDA approval of Lasix is one link in the drama of my mother’s life and our family history. My mother took Lasix when her ankles puffed up with water, a side effect of heart failure when she was in her sixties. Lasix arrived on the market in 1966, the year I was born, and that small fact melts into the narrative, then still evolving, of how my father built his career developing drugs and bringing them to market—Diflucan, Zithromax, Viagra, Lipitor, Zoloft, Norvasc—and is a character in the years-long medical saga of how each of us struggles with illness and marks our bloody path with mitigating drugs. The narrative of my father’s career delineates one way my mother treated her illness, and the approach of my father and the myriad psychopharmacologists who often turned to him for his expert advice while fiddling with the drug cocktails they served her. The last cocktail, concocted six months before she died, changed her utterly; she became less hysterical, and she lived out those months as an ordinary human who was dying. She died of heart failure because her heart was too big to survive. This reality—her heart—is the document in this story. Her ability to buoy herself with love, and spend it, shrank in proportion to the failures of her outlier heart. Sometimes your body boxes you into a shorter story than you would write for yourself. If depression had not felled her, perhaps she’d have found a way to enlarge her love to the size of her giant, clunky heart, and I would not be bent on discovering her first sparkly moments with me.

. . . . . .

My parents left Frankfurt five months after I was born, in October 1966, and deposited me in the arms of my father’s sister in Santa Cruz, a Bombay suburb, for a month. They took my sister with them and stayed at the Ritz Hotel in South Bombay while they secured a flat to live in. My father was still working for Hoechst. He wanted to move into a sea-facing apartment in a building that Hoechst owned, in Colaba, the southernmost district in South Bombay.

In India, you bless a house before you move into it, in a brief ceremony called kumbh, and my parents performed this ritual for the Colaba flat, eager to move in. In a kumbh ceremony, the youngest virgin daughter carries a coconut on a tin adorned with flowers refreshed in a bowl of water, and walks around the house to offer a blessing. (This role was usually mine.) The ritual is a hedge against the disappointment you will inevitably feel in every house. Even now, my father’s irritation boils over when he talks about this flat in Colaba in an email explaining that the company’s medical director got the apartment instead of him. This was the home he preferred, and to which he had committed in the traditional way he knew.

The taxes on the Colaba apartment, owned by Hoechst, were lower than the taxes my father paid on the fifth-floor penthouse of the Gold Cornet building, which my parents rented on Gamadia Road, high up on Cumballa Hill and about ten kilometers north of Colaba. This is the flat that my parents discovered for themselves. It was in a far lovelier location, and it spanned the entire rooftop, which was connected to the interior through a bamboo deck, where they hung a swing, and this is where I had birthday parties and giant white cakes baked in the number that represented my age. We were a five-minute walk from the Arabian Sea—a short walk up a hill, on a peninsula between the sea and the bay—and from Breach Candy swimming pool, a members-only club and now-famous artifact of the British Empire.

Like many Indians with means, we grew up at the swimming pool, built in 1928 and shaped like India. It admitted only whites until Independence, at which point they let in Indians married to whites. (It wasn’t until 1967 that Indians were permitted to be ordinary members rather than in tow to someone who was white.) At the club, in the sixties, my father was one of a dozen Indian men, including the movie star Shashi Kapoor. Sometimes the admission card tells only half a story, because we loved it there, and my mother was never going to stop being foreign any more than my father was going to stop being Indian. The same was true, roles reversed, when we moved to America. I don’t know who felt more foreign in the other person’s country, though I suspect it was just as strange to be an American wife in a Jain family in India as it was to be a brown-skinned Indian in a New Jersey suburb in 1973, and at the helm of a large pharmaceutical company where those visiting thought the boss was the man sitting next to my father, rather than my father himself. How quiet they must have been when, after pitching their services or product to my father’s deputy, with all the eye contact and cheerful solicitations that go with it, the deputy turned to my father and asked for his opinion.

For my father, it’s easier to associate memories with numbers, so the memory of our Gold Cornet apartment that comes to him first, and which our conversation hinged on, is the exorbitant taxes on it, even though Hoechst covered his costs and shipped a Mercedes from Germany for him to drive. My parents hired artisans to build the furniture, and filled the house with art.

My parents blessed this house, and in the end, my father says, he preferred it. From the roof, I could see in any direction.

I have known only one home in India, and I cannot imagine any other address, or how my life and my access to my relatives in it might have changed if we had not lived there. I would not have spent years racing the two girls on the bottom floor, children of the landlord, down the driveway, and given Monisha a head start because we were not evenly matched. I would not have feared and one day gotten captured by the strange, barely clad crazy man who lived on a board above the stairway in the garages out back, which housed not cars but a number of families. They were two stories high and decorated with colorful textiles.

If I hadn’t lived in the Gold Cornet building on Gamadia Road, I would not have seen that horrible man’s body under a sheet when he died, and the expression on the faces of the men in the garage on the ground floor of the building when I demanded to see his body after they said he went to heaven and pointed up. I wanted to make sure he was dead, because he had often chased me. I would not have been on a pretty hillside where the roads wind up and up to Kamala Nehru Park, with its thrilling views east across the bay and west to the Arabian Sea, and near the Hanging Gardens, with its mythical topiary creatures organized around a central fountain, and street vendors selling bhel puri or ice cream, or training monkeys. I would be a completely different person if I had not lived on a hill, two blocks up from the salt-dark sea. This was the address I loved. This was the place with ramshackle blue roadside temples and puddles of water where people bathed, and every day, I ran down to the corner to buy a paper cone filled with salty nuts for ten paisas, and I swam in the blue water in the pool the British built, because back then I knew who I was. It is only now, because I do not know who I was to my parents, and who they were, separate or together, that I am in search of my home, because my old home on Gamadia Road doesn’t matter. But I can look around the corner at the absences full of stories. The documents are not even a quarter share of truth.