Articles

The man at the window is my father. He has lost most of his sight and suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. His vision drifts and spins, the wind blowing light across the yard of his house on Blackhawk Street. All day he sits in his chair looking out, seeing cats and Cadillacs, rabbits with mittens, a child with red hair, weary soldiers standing in a circle smoking. All are born of light, all a blur of energy and memory. Something green is swallowing something white, a boat perhaps on stormy Pine Lake.

The dream goes like this: barefoot in the grass, I follow the white brick wall that separates the gated community from the sprawling golf course behind it. My left-hand grazes the wall as I pass a dozen back patios with the same glass tables, the same expandable umbrellas, deck chairs, potted mums, hoses coiled perfectly into stacked loops. The blinds are closed in each dim window of each sleeping house. One of the houses is where I live with my partner, JM, who is sleeping as everyone else sleeps.

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. 

Literature may not fix our problems, but it fixes us to one another. It allows us to see that the view from another’s space in this world is both akin to ours and radically different.

In 2019, scientists at the New England Aquarium in Boston published a paper on chronic illness in whales by studying and measuring the stress hormones left behind on baleen plates. While I lack a push-broom mouth for filter-feeding, my teeth show the wreckage of the neglect and trauma I endured as a child. My CPTSD is well medicated, but still: so much stress, a lifetime of fighting. Research clearly shows that children who grow up with chronic abuse are more likely to develop chronic health problems as adults. After years of reading about trauma, I have finally aged into the statistic I’ve been destined for since childhood.

Death draws a veil over the living. Like a somber version of the game, my sister Zoya and I played as kids. We’d get under the bed sheet when Mom was spreading it over the mattress. We’d bounce the sheet and catch fleeting glimpses of each other as the soft cotton rose and fell over our bodies. We’d try to escape half-heartedly, but our little bodies continued to move around in circles playing peekaboo. 

Most surprising of all were your hands; they never carried a fleck of dirt or dust. Your fingernails might have been painted by da Vinci, and when you curled your hand around a cup, your index finger protruded over the top like a blue heron down on her fishing-luck, but still wavering there over the liquid.

Today when I get the mail, I see my neighbor Zach who was training the father of a little boy who fell to his death from the balcony the day before Easter. Zach, in perfect shape. Zach, the personal trainer who everyone in the condo seems to have a crush on. Today his smile was small, his eyes exhausted. My mouth was hidden under my mask.  I sit with the family, he says, but I don’t know what else to do.

The statistics all wash away, and it’s suddenly just that one child, his family, their grief. Zach tells me if I pray that I might want to know the little boy’s name was Jesse. My mother’s name is Janet.

Cook even when the dishes are piling. Cook; the food will be ready before UberEats gets there. Cook because of taxes. Cook to keep family recipes. Cook to have leftovers, so you don’t cook tomorrow. Cook so there’s no MSG. Cook for vegetables. Cook for your son. Cook for yourself, so you can stop feeling guilty for spending money, for gaining weight, for ordering dessert with every meal. Cook jerk chicken with rub; garlic cloves, scotch bonnets, allspice berries, dried thyme, grated nutmeg, soy sauce, vegetable oil. Cook jerk chicken because it’s your son’s favorite dish. Cook jerk chicken; it goes with white rice, rice and peas, broiled potatoes, blanched broccolis, oven-baked zucchini fries, mac and cheese. Cook jerk chicken because a whole chicken will last three days before you have to cook again.

How can I explain this flightlessness? You’re in my air, I whisper back too late and turn away.