Visitation

The next time I have you, after your trip, I will bring you here—to the heart of the Middleboro Mall, to where the cream tiles of Concourse A and the gray tiles of Concourse B merge into a checkerboard whirl around the base of a wide fountain. Soon, at peak summer, the conditions will be just right. The light through the upper glass sections will bake the atrium enough; the air-conditioning will struggle with the heat. Of course, I risk your falling asleep in the stroller, and naptime adds up, eating into my allotted share; but here it wouldn’t be a waste. After a water show ends, when enough mist hangs, then drifts, we’ll both close our eyes. You can breathe it in, learn it from the inside, maybe well enough to one day conjure up—wherever you are—the sense of lungs plump with air wet with monsoon.

I will tell you, even though words themselves may not mean much yet, of how monsoon teaches that even we bigger people are small. I will tell you how once there was a family—a boy, his sister and their mother—on their first return visit to India since leaving for America. This boy was older than you are now, but much less wise. All of this was before video, by the way. Unlike video, though, this story will get better each time I tell it to you. 

On the train ride that followed the long plane ride, the mother told the children that there were so many relations to see. “How many?” the boy asked. “You count and I’ll say stop,” his mother replied. “He’ll forget thirteen,” his sister said. This annoyed the boy, who began skipping around all kinds of numbers. His mother shushed him, before explaining that the ones she first had to see were old and sick. She would be leaving the boy and girl for a few days, although it could be longer, depending on when the first rains came. This was why the boy sat deepest in the back seat of the car taking them from the train station to the old house. The boy looked back and up at the sky to guess at the arrival of the rains. It did look gray and heavy, filling him with an awe that comes not from respect for mighty weather, but from a different sense of smallness—a fear of being forgotten.

It won’t take you long to ask if the boy was me. Only then will I confess.

It was your grandmother pulling at my arm once we passed through the front gate of the old family compound. And when our car stopped, it was your aunt Geeta—ever the big sister, the first with everything—leaping in her seat up and down, sticking her hand out the window to point to crows winging by, then a group of them resting on a low branch of a nearby tree. I will say it is a eucalyptus because you need to learn about the trees you don’t have here. 

“Even these crows have cawed for you,” said Bhaljimama, our uncle, from the front passenger seat. The pointy beaks of one or two did seem opened at me. My mouth might have been open too, in jealousy of their view over this compound larger than my school grounds, of how they could fly up and see the railway line, the end of town, the nearby sea. A little higher I was sure they could even see America, where your grandfather was for a few weeks more, where I wished all of us were still too, despite this being the town of my birth seven years before.

We had first left India when I started to walk, maybe run. My mother had been raised here and, before we left for America, this was where she stayed for a month or two for our births and shorter breaks from life as a city mother. The time had come and, what I now appreciate, the savings had grown enough to cover the cost of the plane trip back. Our father would join us later, since he couldn’t take the summer off for this trip that was to begin just as the monsoon was to arrive. My mother wouldn’t begin it earlier because she wanted me to finish all of my after-school speech sessions. My reply when she first told me of our vacation plans must have sounded like this: “The whole lummer in India?” I probably also said: “I have to get thots?”

You’re much braver than I was when it comes to needles.

During those first days countless relatives called on us. “How tall they have been grown up!” aunts and uncles remarked. Only now do I know that never would I again be around so many who resembled me. But back then, if any of them stood over me too close, I imagined my father standing in front and me hunkering behind. You used to do that with me, if you remember. You still can, whenever you want.

To me everyone was unfamiliar but all said they remembered me. The old family doctor, there to check on my grandfather, said I had two birthmarks, a sign of double luck. As he fingered a pale blotch along my elbow, his worried look told me I had lost one. An aunt said I should not feel bad. They all knew how grand was my other, and where—on my left buttock. From his wheelchair even my grandfather smiled. 

“Don’t worry, we’ll watch over you,” said another aunt, a petite one whose English seemed the clearest among all my relatives, who were each nodding. “Everything will be fine,” I thought I heard my mother say. It was actually my older cousin-sister Sanoja, whose voice was closer to my mother’s than that of her own twin, Oma. They had been given the job of watching over me. That was how I learned my mother had already left. I ran to find my sister, who was in the kitchen seated on an inches-high stool, rolling chapati with great effort, while a different set of relatives watched her with great pleasure. Tears slid down my face in a big mess. 

Perhaps I should be glad this was all before video.

My sister and I had been given beds in a very large room the furthest back along the veranda, which is like an outside hallway, of the house. Reserved for youngsters, our room was where—which I would learn years later—the smallest of my mother’s siblings, the one who never grew beyond age five, slept under the eyes of my grandmother and a nurse. Perhaps I’ll wait until you’re older before I include that part. Excepting meals, I made it my plan to protest while my mother was away by keeping within the corners of the room. If I heard Sanoja or Oma shout for me, I hid from them. From behind a water urn or basket of bedding, I listened for their entry, then each step in their hunt. It never occurred to me that it was for show, since they knew all the hiding places. I took peeks, watching their kinked black hair, their long loosely braided tails. Neither could recall their last cut. I see them whenever I picture a teenage you. Their skin was fair, their faces identical apart from their eyes: Sanoja’s were larger. They had the stern whiteness of an eagle’s, sharp to the shiver of little boys in shadow. They were in the final year of high school and I didn’t know their next steps were marriage and motherhood, that I was a form of practice.

It took two days before I found the pencils and small pad of paper from my mother’s luggage. That she might have scripted the very moment did not cross my mind. I sat and began drawing with such concentration that I forgot to always listen for my cousin-sisters’ approach. Maybe it surprised them to find me one time in my cane chair instead of under it. They sat in opposite corners and watched me for a while.

“He has come here by plane,” Oma said to Sanoja. “Just to sit?” 

It was a trap to make me speak, I knew. Even my grandfather, whose paralysis prevented full use of his mouth, uttered more half-words than I did whole ones then.

“Here is dull,” Oma added. 

Sanoja hummed in agreement.

I’m sure you’ll believe how that sheet of paper excited my eyes plenty. After all, I’m always so interested in your drawings. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you but that day I was penciling out a place far away, where I would be alone. If my parents could leave me, I was thinking, it was just as easy for me to leave them, which was silly, don’t you think? 

Sanoja stood up, clapped her hands. “Here is not there,” she said as she pointed to the window, out toward where my eyes probably noticed nothing more than crayon patches of colors: scribbles of brown here, spirals of green there, the sky just a blank section. The cost of straining so hard to hide, to not speak, was that I hadn’t bothered to actually see. 

“Your sister is playing by the bathhouse. You should join,” said Oma, unfazed by how often my sister and I fought. To pick at a scab of a mosquito bite would have been more of a temptation. 

“We will play too,” said Sanoja to my surprise. 

I would not be drawn away and warmed myself with a child’s sense of victory as they left. Naturally though, I crept to the doorway and watched them descend from the veranda and enter the compound. With the help of old photos I can now properly sketch what lay beyond the bathhouse. A two-storey building with rounded edges and plaster walls stained with damp knelt in the far corner like an enormous well-trained elephant. It housed the offices of the family trading company. One side faced the compound’s entrance gate. Two others looked onto an overgrown garden. Perhaps it was a stop that hour for preening robins, safe and clear of the noise, smells and smoke from the work sheds on the other end of the compound. Low walls striped with green creepers marked the corners of the drive-paths, along which leggy trees let their leafy arms droop. The sky wasn’t blank but probably the color of beat-up metal, like that old nickel you found on the ground last month, which you told me I should keep. 

I’m not sure how, but I should teach you how to really look. Here, for example, in the square hall of a shopping mall surrounded by parking lots, we see a fountain shooting water amid beams of light colored like a rainbow. The walls are covered with stucco in a moon-like gray—Okay, it may not be so easy to teach this here. 

Perhaps when your mother takes you on this upcoming trip—where is this family reunion again? The Berkshires? Maybe your Aunt Donna will take you again to that goat farm. Or your mother and her new friend can find somewhere more interesting—maybe a hike in the woods, perhaps by a pretty pond. You can tell me all about it. We’ll practice hearing, seeing, remembering.

Back then, there on the other side of the world, was a lot to hear and see, especially now that I’ve tried hard to remember, to fill in where I need.

It wasn’t long before Kush—the youngest of my cousins, a few years older than my sister—succeeded in getting me out. He teased me with a promise of sweets stashed in the company office. They had, he said, an American flavor. Perhaps it was that, or perhaps it was the sound of that word office, that place where your grandfather spent so much of his time. It’s funny: now I do too. We crossed the compound and Kush told how years ago laborers covered the pavement with sailcloth to dry a sea of yellow beans. He pointed to puny blue dew flowers, told how after the rainy season, even more would push up from every break in the concrete. 

I told him of the American flowers I saw in picture books that were bluer. 

He nodded. 

Everything was bigger in America, I tried to explain. Brighter. Wetter, too. 

He kept smiling through the gush of my words—he had thrown me off my game.

I could always be tricked easily, which your mother knows.

We entered the office’s main hall. The windows were tall, not of glass, instead staffed with iron rods to keep out the most likely intruders—monkeys during mango season. The clerks in their white cottons sat cross-legged on cushioned platforms, backs against bolsters, sandals placed neatly on the floor, heads at first facing down at their wooden lap desks, then up at me. The lone typist in the center stopped his work. Overhead fans made noisy circles, parhvar-parhvar. My uncle sat at a desk in the exact center and rose and motioned me to his unused space on the platform. There, he explained, my mother used to leave me to waste time with my rattles. I sat—it was soft as a hard bed. 

On a tray was a nearly finished cup of tea with a spoon sticking out, and in it a cracked-up cube of wet sugar. It was slow to crumble. While I watched, wondering if it had been tasted, even licked, another clerk told my uncle that a district medical officer had agreed to come vaccinate the family and staff. But I didn’t think my sister and I were included since my mother had said ours were done. Kush was now across the room wiping clean an old cushion chair that he pulled from between dusty wooden showcases packed solid with ledgers. He waved to me to come sit, which I did as he brought out from another cabinet a dish filled with hard candies wrapped in wax paper. I unwound one. It would have been better manners, I can now tell from my memory of Kush’s face, to have at least smiled when the candy was in my mouth, even to have kept it in longer, instead of spitting it out with an instant yecch. It was like tree bark, like the sugar-free candy that curly-haired lady always offers you from the dish at the welcome desk of your grandfather’s home. The taste remained in my mouth all day, even through the night, which was when the rain at last came. The monsoon’s first cascade arrived earlier than anyone expected. I hoped that somewhere it also surprised my mother. 

Like at a good water show in a mall, everything seems to slow down in the presence of so much fluid in motion. All rushing around ends. One by one, members of my extended family came to stand on the veranda for ten to twenty minutes at a time, to watch the deluge, to listen to the kettle-drumming upon tin roofs, the spurt from gutters, the trickling everywhere of water meeting each obstacle on its way into the earth. Sanoja and Oma, parted for once, each came to stretch a hand out with eyes closed. From inside a door I admired the length of their thin adult arms, so different from a mother’s. My grandfather, brought in his wheelchair, his leather-and-marigold smell of antiseptic creams mixing with the damp air, asked to be raised up for a time. He held his weight against the veranda rail with the help of two, sometimes four, hands of others. Afterward he sat, his sandy cotton shawl covering him like a baby. Sometimes your grandfather sleeps the same way in his room facing the big lawn. By the way, he asks about you all the time. You have him too, as you know, even if he should sleep for a long time.

With only occasional gaps, the rain went for days. No call came from my mother. No telex. Nobody looked worried except for me. Not even my sister was. Your Geeta Auntie had the advantage of her few additional years. She remembered these people, this place. She even remembered the rain. She asks about you all the time too. I hope you remember her, because you have her too. It’s a bit sad she lives on the Pacific side of the country, which is quite pretty actually. We’ll go visit. We’ll take a plane. 

Nowadays it’s routine—I get bored on all my business trips and wish I didn’t have so many. Sometimes all I do is look out the window at the land moving so slowly far below. I even think back to those early nights that summer, how I lay in bed on my side with my eyes open onto a small section of mattress. It was like a little stage and the mosquito net rounding my bed the background curtain. My fingers strode by, one finger in front of another, acting out the journey back through the empty lands and oceans we had flown over to get there. When a departing night train whistled, it reminded me that I wouldn’t need to walk or swim all the way. 

That’s what we should do. We’ll take the train, perhaps next summer. Your mother and I can come to some kind of agreement. It isn’t always hard. It might even be easier then. I suspect she and her friend might go on their own special trip to some place sunny.

The rain let up in the middle of the night while I was asleep. After breakfast Kush took me to the office. A junior clerk with his cheek resting in his palm told Kush that the tracks were flooded, that nobody can know when my mother was going to come. Another said maybe tomorrow, certainly tomorrow, yes. Another said that she must have turned around. My uncle joked that maybe she went back to America and will come back next summer to collect me. I was the only one who didn’t laugh. 

“Where is she stuck?” Kush asked. Everyone looked at each other and soon they were back to ledgers and pens. Kush too seemed unconcerned. He went to sit by a window. With an ill feeling in my stomach, I joined him to look outside, at the dense clouds running stone gray, streaks of white tucked within. Inside me was a strange sense that at this moment my mother could be dead. By accident, however, I did what some children are good at: I blamed her for all my problems, and with such intensity that in my mind I seemed to have pulled her back to life, almost like she was next to me That’s a trick I hope you will learn for whenever you might be angry with me, which of course you can’t help. 

We moved to a window overlooking the road. A neighbor, from a second-floor veranda, was lowering a basket of leftovers to an old bent street woman. “Some say she is a witch,” Kush said in a hushed voice. “Maybe she knows where your mother is.” He turned to me, I think to measure my shock. He must have had second thoughts, or feared bad luck, because minutes later he told me this woman was just a simple widow, honest, but with no good sons. He asked me to not tell anybody what he had called her, and promised in return to not tell anyone how much he had heard me actually speak. “We are family,” he added, maybe to remind me.

Soon we heard loud horns, like the sounds of giant angry ducks. Through his push-broom moustache, the gatekeeper shouted around for all to make way. Jeg-yaah banaa-woh! Bhaljimama’s trucks coughed soot as they arrived. The closest porters, their knuckles thick and fingernails blackened by constant re-injury, pulled worn-out kerchiefs over their mouths. Kush and I climbed to the second-floor balcony for the atlas-like view of the compound’s drive and paved terrace. You need to learn some geography so I’ll tell you that each lorry sailed through the rainwater that had collected into lakes, bays and inland seas. Waves of muddy water shifted sediment onto new shores, enough for me to see capes and great peninsulas: one I called Florida and another Maine. 

Now there was a charge of activity. From the estate of the family company across the road came a noisy effort to start their lorry, a truly ancient one. The engine howled and whinnied. The dogs of the road became crabby, and into our compound mud-stained mothers with their pups steadily drifted.

Jaa-ah! Away! the porters shouted as they, the gardeners, the second drivers, and the watchman stomped up a clamor to turn them toward the open gate. Eh, gun-dhid-yu! Ja-oh! 

Underneath me, on the steps, stood Bhaljimama clapping with the men. Near the entrance, some of the dogs lodged in the style of pigs, in a fresh mush of tire-tracked earth. Beyond the compound a sound rumbled. Soon I learned it was from the pushcarts, buggies, motor rickshaws, cars, all freed from their wait at the station. I winced at the possibility that some vehicle might blindly turn into the compound. I didn’t yet appreciate how those dogs were survivors of the street. Saw-cut screeches from a clever laborer scraping a shovel on a slab of concrete caused one stubby-tailed mother with a dozen nipples to shoot up and away from the mud. Still seated, her pup twisted its head back and forth with hungry ears and eyes widened to find either his mother or the source of this peculiar and interesting new sound. He kept his spot in the mud. I waited for his mother to bark a call of comfort, or warning. In the road the sound of traffic grew. Swallows whistled by, toward the tree branches woven in a maze over the garden. From the entry gate the puppy’s mother looked back at him, as though preparing to forget. 

“Aay!” I shouted at him. 

There was a fantastic splash of water and dirt near where the little dog was lying, then a yelp. The puppy limped away. The men cheered. I checked around for the one who threw the rock. I looked for my uncle, expecting him to scold as a teacher would, or a mother, or the oldest cousin-sister. My uncle stood on the bottom step, his hands in his pockets, head turned up to the clouds. Another year, another rainy season, in his hometown, he might have been thinking. While going back to my room, I made a choice whose effects I have worked hard to overcome. On a piece of paper, I had already begun drawing a rocket on the launch pad—that was what everybody liked to draw in those days. In a still-empty part that was to have been some welcoming place in distant space—I marked a tick, the first in a careful count of the days until the end of our stay in this country of my birth. This was my partner in the act of letting memory slip away. 

Don’t ever keep count like that.

My sister did not return to our room after lunch, as we both usually did. I had the hichka—the divan-like swing in the middle of the room—to myself and lay back, one leg extended, the other hanging off. The hichka was slung by long iron arms anchored in the ceiling, through eyelets caked with grease. This allowed some leeway to move in small squeaky circles, enough for variety, enough to make me wonder if the eyelets would loosen and the whole thing fall while I was in it, drifting and dreaming. My sister called for me. I stopped the hichka and pretended to close my eyes. 

A few minutes later—Sanoja’s voice, then her steps. I let her rouse me. 

“Your mother is here,” she said, which surprised me and made me happy for about two seconds. How, I wondered, did I not hear anybody arriving? The only noise to me were squeaks, yet the world had changed. “The doctor is here too,” she added. A piece of cotton was neatly taped on her forearm.

Except for my grandfather, they were all in his anteroom. On the wall hung pictures of my great grandfather and his last wife, the one who survived each childbirth. Your grandmother and your aunt were seated on the room’s hichka, which was motionless. I wore my angry face, the one I hoped said to my mother that she had taken much too long. My sister’s hand was in my mother’s lap, her other hand spread over the center of her forearm. If her job was to hide it, she wasn’t doing it well enough: the visible part of her piece of cotton was a touch red. 

“Come,” my mother told me.

Oma, Kush, and some second cousins were standing, a few covering their forearms too. The oldest lady servant, her garment tied in tight rings around her body, just as in the mornings when she heated the water for our baths, squatted by a covered pot. Her feet were bare except for her silver anklets. The doctor was in a chair. Next to him stood his assistant, minding a large pot on a portable electric burner. Steam rose. On a small table lay a dish covered with a white cloth, a cozy resting spot for slivers of shiny metal. As soon as Sanoja stepped away, I turned and ran.

The veranda had only one exit: the staircase I rushed down to reach the compound. My cousins called out my name. These slabs of the concrete drive had admitted my earliest toddler steps. My feet flew like they knew each battered edge. On the clay-caked terrace, my sandals chopped the ground as I sprinted by all nature of topography until I reached the high point of a continent. A brown ocean lapped against it. I stopped there, a place where later in the summer we, the assembled cousin-brothers, would line up for Raksha Bandhan, Sisters Day, to have forget-me-not rakhee bracelets tied to our wrists and photos taken. I looked back. Sanoja was running after me, followed by Oma, also in her school uniform. My sister looked on from the top of the stairs, probably delighting in the fuss or some detail that only she could see, maybe my cousins’ hair flinging like reins held by red-ribboned fingers. I moved quickly toward the compound walls until I was behind the office, hidden from their view.

“Vinod!” my cousin-sisters called again. “Come back!” 

“Vinny!” my sister shouted. 

I moved along, parallel to the garden until I arrived at the entry gate, too heavy to move. I slipped as I climbed up its frame and looked back. Sanoja and Oma were so much taller, faster. 

“Where are you going?” Sanoja yelled out, her eyes swollen, her mouth open wide.

On a rail near the top, I looked through iron pikes, onto the road. I was not thinking of which way to move next. I did not see passing vehicles, lumbering bullock carts, widows without good sons. I saw a train, a jet, a sky plain and blue. I saw a car brown as a lunch-bag in a smooth glide down a tarred road with evenly spaced white dashes leading to a normal house and a bedroom painted the same yellow as the inside of a Twinkie. That was my large boxy room with light—my atrium, though it didn’t have its own fountain—a place where shots weren’t required, the place where I was sure I belonged, in America. 

Sanoja climbed up and wrapped her arms around me, tips of long fingers finding an easy grip through my light shirt made for Indian summers. Oma held my ankles to help me down. I cannot say if I cried, kicked or shouted but for you, I will say I did it all. 

“Come,” the one holding my left hand said.

“It is not even like a pinch,” said the one with my right. 

Then it began to pour.

~

I wonder if you remember Sisters Day. That was when you helped make a rakhee bracelet for your grandfather—just something we threw together with pink yarn and little felt flower cut-outs, and I told him it was mailed from his cousin in Bombay, the only cousin-sister of his generation still alive. You tied it, we said, in her honor. The funny thing is Geeta Auntie and I often don’t remember it in time. But this year I’ll remind her. If she sends us one, you can tie it on my wrist.

On that trip long ago Sisters Day came near the end, shortly before my mother showed us how to press our hands properly to say goodbye on our way to the train that took us away to the big city. That was where my father eventually joined us for little more than two weeks, our last in the country. My sister tied rakhee bracelets that Sanoja and Oma helped her make. Hers was the first of the three I received. Morsels of sweets were placed in my mouth. As I chewed, I asked my sister quietly, “Am I supposed to do something?” She shrugged her shoulders.

Sanoja and Oma turned to us. Their faces looked much less curious than earlier in the summer, before my long show of pining for home, my quarrels with my mother about what I would rather eat, my complaints about the rain or even the texture of my milk. My eyes would be red, my nose would run. I must have proved to them that I was plenty American.

“There is nothing to do now,” they both whispered. 

Bhaljimama must have also heard me because he began to tell us boys that for Sisters Day, the one sacred task was always to remember. Eyeing me—perhaps he had spotted the weak link—he told the story of his grandfather’s sisters, how they marched to market to select woven thread, snips of satin, felt and painted beads whose colors grew in richness each year. When they sat to make their rakhee bracelets the youngest of the group sang. Some years the rain paused; but the heat, like an old woman, always refused. My mother interrupted him. She told of how under an electric fan, the first luxury, the ladies of her father’s generation made sweets by hand. Seated on the floor even the daughter struck by polio appeared an equal. Melted ghee pooled on steel plates. On occasion the boys—brothers, cousins—sat to observe, rarely helping to press the patties or slice the wafers. Bhaljimama asked her to bring her story to an end. I wish now that she had not. Your grandmother tied a rakhee onto Bhaljimama’s wrist. A sweet landed in his mouth. When a tear showed on their faces I turned away without understanding, of course, how the task becomes less easy when you are alone.

If my mother were here, on this bench next to where I probably will park your stroller, she would be able to fill us in on the rest of her story—if you are also awake, of course. If not, she would probably point to your eyelids—how they don’t meet when you’re asleep—and tell me it is past time to go home. “She is stubborn just like you,” she might tell me, perhaps to rib me since I am late to fatherhood, too late for her. Or maybe she would just admire the fountain and the water threshing in the manner of monsoon as I finish the story that, after I have told it to you enough times, will make you always remember even her too. 

~

The doctor asked that someone hold me while I sat on a chair and rested my arm on a side table. From the steam he pulled out what appeared to be a hundred needles. Years later I learned that this particular vaccination against tuberculosis, which was not a priority in America, required a half dozen small needles and a puncture depth of precisely two millimeters. If I flinched it would have meant redoing it in another spot, after a waiting period of ten days, with my mind a pot full of boiling needles the whole time. 

My shirt was soaked. Water dripped from my wet head. My grandfather arrived at the entryway in his wheelchair rolled by his oldest manservant, Lallu. He was the one who on our arrival at the house had put our luggage on his head and asked my sister if she wanted to climb on top. With Lallu’s arm braiding my grandfather’s own, and another hand leaning on the doorframe, my grandfather stood up. This was just before my eyes closed. 

“He is fainting!” my sister and Kush both said. I was not.

“It is better if he does,” Bhaljimama said. My mother and Oma agreed. 

“No,” said Sanoja, who must have been as wet as me, “then the lesson is lost.”

Someone took hold of my free hand. Onto my shoulders came someone’s heavy palms. These certainly didn’t belong to my grandfather; but there was a time when I wish that they had—his was the skin I wouldn’t touch, out of shame, or fear, that beneath his wrinkles lurked some contagion of old age. When I tell this story to my father now, I say those hands were his. Yes, he says, that seems familiar, and right—as it should be, after all my retelling. When it’s time, I might even convince myself.

My mouth opened for the rush of air that should have been a scream. But I was breathless, like the first time I was here at the fountain, during those points in the routine when the heaving gush rides into the air, reaching, straining, as if toward escape; then—while I hold out hope it will climb higher—watery muscle yields, the rise ends with the clap of the fall, of water smashing water. People sometimes get a little wet, including me, as surely you will too. When a stray drop dashes against my skin, it raises hairs just like when I am jabbed by a prick of sudden remembrance.

The doctor had a firm grip of my wrist. I swallowed and squeezed my eyes harder. Blurred golden blotches washed around the red-black inside of my eyelids. It was like a close-up on flames bursting from a rocket engine. How I wanted so much for one to take me away. I waited for the feeling of needles. In the quiet, or at least the sounds I didn’t notice, all I heard was the shoosh of rainfall on the world beyond the veranda, its patter against the old house walls, the drip plunking on the sill by the unshuttered window. 

After the sting on my forearm that seemed like nothing more than a raindrop, after the doctor taped a piece of gauze and pronounced it “perfect,” after my mother told me I could open my eyes, I kept them shut. I wanted just to hear more of the rain and watch the swirling glow, the shades and shapes floating behind my eyelids. Just before they started to fade, they had come to look more and more like figures. 

Perhaps you will learn to see them too. 

After removing the gauze that night, I didn’t make a wish for my day’s memory to be erased, or even more. In fact, I relived the day despite the embarrassment. I remembered how Sanoja and Oma, after they had caught me, ran with me back to the house. My head was hung in shame. Under my feet was concrete awash with moss and passing dirt. The worn wood of the staircase told me of the thousand sandals and shoes that had crossed this line. We climbed the steps, with the floor of the veranda coming into view. My face angled up to see who had enjoyed the spectacle. Only one remained: my grandfather, in his wheelchair. His head was angled too, not easily, to its limits, toward where I had just come from. He mumbled as we approached, and passed. 

“What did Dada say?” I asked them after a few steps more. My mouth and tongue had worked slowly, to be clear.

“Over there is nothing. No one,” said Oma, turning toward the gate, still catching her breath while Sanoja finished his words: “But we all are here. Always.”