Immigrant Delay Disease
I. Homecoming
They don’t stop you for fingerprints this time, Ma, now that you’ve squeezed yourself into an urn. After our 22-hour flight from Kolkata jolts to the ground in Portland, Oregon, Miguel and I sashay with you through the airport. Ma, you wouldn’t believe it—how delicate and unobtrusive the TSA agents are with urn-bound you. Hell, maybe we immigrants should be born into urns. When you’re swathed in one, no one frisks you. They don’t deny you entry into this country for not having fingerprints.
No one ever checked my fingerprints when I flew back from visiting India. U.S. citizens don’t have to pass that test. If they’d checked, they’d find that my prints, like yours, are flat and indistinct like dead eyes.
But they fixated on your missing prints, scanning your body like you’d hidden them in your pocket or ass crack.
Even Dr. Gupta’s note didn’t suffice, though he explained and pleaded your case. Aditi Chatterjee suffers from a genetic mutation. Adermatoglyphia. She has limited sweat glands in her hands, flat finger pads, and no fingerprints. The Swiss dermatologist, Dr. Peter Iten, calls the condition Immigration Delay Disease. Please accept alternate forms of identification.
The first time, Dr. Gupta wrote a page; the fifth time, sixteen, hoping another paragraph might do the trick.
“I’m so sorry,” the TSA agent said the last time. Disease had stripped you down. Your skin, like the rest of you, was stretched too thin. “You don’t exist in our system without prints.”
You hobbled back to the terminal and flew back to Kolkata, alone.
II. Welcome to America
At Customs, I slide the TSA agent our passports. He flips through them.
The agent reminds me of Miguel, with his faux sturdiness and ruddy good looks. His body bursts at the seams like an overpacked suitcase, a vessel for compulsive hoarding. I don’t fault him for employing his body as a human shield. Some of us have to fashion our own protection.
“It’s Ma’s first time coming home with us,” I say.
The agent wrinkles his brow and checks for a third passport. I wag you—in your new casing—at him. He pales. Miguel murmurs a consolation and gently tries to pry you from my fingers. I tighten my grip. You spent your whole life in the hands of men. In death, you’ll be carried only by women.
“Her mama always got turned away at Customs,” Miguel says to the TSA agent. “No fingerprints.”
“Ma,” I correct him quietly. Miguel calls his mother Mama. Too often, he assumes his endearments are mine.
The agent rubs his eyes. “This’ll be her first time on American soil?”
I nod. Death is looking up for you. They don’t demand much documentation from the dead. Now you can slip through borders. Maybe we should’ve died a long time ago.
You once kept me safe in your womb. Finally, I can return the favor and protect you.
But the agent’s mouth droops with shame. His sadness ignites mine. Past him, a sunset-red rain jacket hangs in the window of an outdoor clothing store. You could’ve used it when we tramped through Meghalaya’s root bridges during our backpacking trips in monsoon season. There, the rainforest corridors were an outgrowth of the earth, not a violation of them.
“The roots, and the bridges they form, become stronger as they grow older,” you said. You wore your hair in loose braids—never too defined or decorative. We climbed trees and nested in branches, trusting in their sturdiness, trusting even more in each other. On the ground, Baba called to us, arms flailing, voice shrill. He looked small. Helpless. His concern was founded, we knew. Not every branch would support us, we knew. The downside of climbing, we knew, was that we could plummet to the ground—hard, without notice.
As humans, we aren’t meant to hover above the world for too long. But you and I—we did it for long enough to feel that surge of transcendence, of limitless joy. Limitless possibility. We waved at Baba and promised to return. Soon enough, we’d rejoin him on solid ground, accommodating his cautious steps.
In the meantime, the leaves caressed your face with their edges—or was it you, stroking them? We held hands and locked eyes from adjacent branches. Your eyes were mine and mine yours—black, brilliant, and scorching. But your sight wasn’t muddled by introspection. No inner demons interfered with your gaze. You looked fiercely outward, absorbing, sure, but also enveloping all the world in your warmth.
I am still learning to live like you.
I need you here to learn from you, Ma.
The TSA agent stamps our passports. I’m jarred back by the sound. I’ve been staring at the outdoor clothing store too long, too hard.
I wonder aloud if the store has the jacket in urn-sized. Miguel flinches.
The TSA agent hands our passports back. “Welcome to America,” he says, his voice hushed, like you’re a sleeping baby.
At security, agents pat Miguel and me down. But your urn skates past us on the belt. It’s on a joyride. It’s going places.
This time, I’m the one getting held up.
III. Busting Out
Outside, we climb giddily into an Uber. It drops us off at Forest Park, where we hike up to Pittock Mansion. I swaddle you in front, carrying you in a sling like a baby. “That’s right, Ma,” I sing. “We’re going urning!”
Miguel and I clutch hands. He has big-ass fingerprints—not the carbon kind, either. They don’t correlate with the size of his hands, which are dainty and nervous. This discrepancy makes his exhibitionist pads—with their plentiful grooves and swirls—even more remarkable. The man knows how to make his mark.
On our fourth date, he drove me home. I’d told him at dinner about not having prints. Miguel mounted his iPhone near his steering wheel. A hundred smudges greased the screen.
I’d never felt so aroused.
“You’re just showing off,” I said. At my house, we fucked ourselves into delirium.
You need prints that big when others see you as small. I don’t begrudge him his.
After we finish our hike, we walk the five miles home. I’ve come bearing talcum powder and bust it out as we loop around our neighborhood with you in my arms. I douse Miguel’s fingers in the powder and gesture to lampposts and street signs. Miguel presses his luscious fingerprints against them.
We pass by an illuminated home. A family—white under the glaring light—plays in their living room. They’ve cast aside their curtains like anachronisms. Miguel flattens his hand against the window. They vaguely register our intrusion.
Miguel’s fingerprints are mine and yours. We mark a country none of us can claim as our own.
IV. Dermatoglyphics
When we return home, I set you aside, unpack your wedding sari, and put it on. Miguel and I fall into each other, our hearts ticking.
You once asked me if I married Miguel for his fingerprints. No. I loved the man first—then his friction ridges. We met online—the way people do. At dinner, even before I spotted his delightful corrugations, I noticed how he skimmed his napkin and tablecloth with his fingers before touching them outright, as though asking for consent.
I knew then that his life was a lot like yours, and mine.
Later, I grabbed his hand, grazing the tips of his fingers with mine. The first night we spent together, I waited till he fell asleep, turned on my iPhone flashlight, and marveled at his tented arches. I delighted in their thrusts and plunges.
And Miguel thought my passion had peaked earlier that night.
His snores droned on as I salivated over his delectable prints. They were thicker than even Baba’s, with more defined ridges. Subconsciously, I must’ve sought out a husband with overcompensating tips, just like you married a man with prints that eclipsed Grandpa’s.
I’ve become a fingerprint aficionado. When I worked at the Verizon store, I envied customers who forewent passwords with a press of their fat fingers. I saw their prints everywhere. Even their eyes swirled with furrows.
When my dates left for the restroom at restaurants, I held up their water glasses to the light and eyed their smudgy arches and whorls. After the debacle with Parik, I had to assess my prospects’ prints early on. Do you remember, Ma? We’d been engaged for a year when I realized during our wedding ring fitting that his center loops weren’t legible. Yes, I’ve dumped men for their paltry pads. But don’t we all judge one another’s residue?
For people like us, genealogy is a blame game. I pray the lima bean of a child inside me will have finger pads twice the size of Miguel’s. We all want better, bigger lives for the ones we birth.
“I want to take you,” I say to Miguel. He smiles and gropes into the folds of our sari. Over time, he’s grown careless when it comes to asking permission. When you were sick, his eyes skimmed over your wilting body, trying to speed along the foregone conclusion.
“She’s still here,” I said to Miguel.
“I’m still alive,” your body said to us all.
And it was—more alive than ever. How could Miguel miss it? Even as you lay immobile, warding off spasms of pain with your stillness, you sought us—and the world—out with your eyes.
How could he miss it? The immensity of your resolve to not miss a moment of the time remaining. Your eyes fixed on the mango tree outside your window as though you were summoning it inside. Your gaze brought it inside. You could taste the mangoes—I could tell by your slight smile. But Miguel? Not a clue. Even Baba whispered to you about letting go. How could he miss it? The fact that you weren’t relinquishing your hold on the world—and your joy in it—until your body cast you off?
Now, I say again: “I want to take you.” Miguel’s smile flounders. He gets it now, Ma. It’s not all for fun. I lunge for my husband, devouring him. I want to crawl inside him and take possession of his hands. He’s groaning. Soon, we’ll merge. I’ll find my entryway. Then I’ll be inside him, carrying you and my sliver of a child. He’ll dim. The three of us will take over.
We’ll swirl through the house, brushing our pilfered fingertips against every wall, window, and surface.
How could we miss it? The world will say. They were among us all along.
We are here, our prints will pronounce. And here. And here.
Keya Mitra is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University and received the 2018 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She earned an MFA and PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program and a Fulbright creative-writing research grant to India. Her fiction received notable mention in Best American Short Stories 2018, was a finalist for the 2021 Indiana Review Prize, and has appeared in The Kenyon Review (2011 and 2015), The Bellevue Literary Review, The Southwest Review, Best New American Voices, The Bennington Review, and many other publications. Her essays appear in Witness Magazine (2021), and were runner-up for the 2021 Witness Magazine Literary Awards and finalists for the 2021 Iowa Review and Disquiet Literary Prizes. Keya has written two novels, a short-story collection, and book-length memoir.