Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  It doesn’t surprise me that Tait’s father’s idea of fun is telling his two grown sons how beautiful his wife is. What entertains Tait’s father, at least as Tait tells it, is Sandy.

  But more so, what I’ve always enjoyed about that anecdote is how Tait expressed it to me the first time. The construction of his telling. How Tait chose to describe Sandy not as his mother but as his father’s wife. The indication being that his father was speaking about marriage, about his wife, Sandy, and the woman in the Longo, and while he was speaking to his two sons about their mother, he wasn’t.

  7

  Moby-Dick

  PLOWING through Moby-Dick my senior year of college, I found a reading chair in a well-lit corner of the library where I could sit uninterrupted for hours, readjusting my posture at various times, convinced that with each redistribution of my weight on one leg, one side, I might experience improved focus. I was chapters behind, having procrastinated the previous two weeks’ readings, and now, here I was, confined to the library, tucked beside the main stacks, desperate for a friend to walk by and distract me or suggest we stroll to the vending machine for Peanut M&M’s.

  The day progressed. The library’s quiet came to be its own noise. Like artificial silence forged from real silence. Sham silence. Like everybody in a library is playing pretend—which in college is not entirely untrue. But isn’t that often the case inside spaces where quiet is enforced? How the absence of sound produces a sonic texture in and of itself? I considered leaving at one point because reading so much, so closely, and not merely for pleasure is deranging. Sentences begin to float off the page and my focus becomes unfaithful, and the book starts to flop like a fainted body.

  As daylight waned and disappeared, and the air inside felt wired, I nearly dozed off. I’d read a couple hundred pages and decided that after this chapter, the book’s eighty-seventh—“The Grand Armada”—I’d stop. In this chapter, the Pequod discovers a pod of many whales, including several pregnant female whales. Some have just given birth to infant whales, and are nursing them while surveying the Pequod. Like planets with eyes.

  The “little infants” are described as “frisky,” having scarcely recovered from that “irksome position [they] had so lately occupied,” writes Melville, “in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow.” Their crumpled fins are likened to a newborn baby’s ear, and at one point, Starbuck notices how one young cub is still tethered to the mother’s umbilical cord. Long coils of it. A “natural line” snared with the Pequod’s own rope.

  I’m reading and imagining the umbilical cord, and the cub, and the mother, all of it, in “that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion,” and I’m picturing the satiny surface of the sea, how it’s dark and blue as if promising rare secret moments like this to happen in its shadowy depths, and I finish the chapter and look up from my page and then down at the library’s carpet beneath my feet, and there, coiled and dragging, is a cord. Lengths of it, looping and alive. Winding. Tangled. The janitor has started vacuuming. The library will soon close for the night.

  8

  D As In

  DURGAN. Jerga. Durva. Derika. Durgid. These are just some of the names people have misheard when I introduce myself. I rarely correct them, having long been convinced it’s easier this way. Easier in the totally yielding sense of the word, as if being impartial about and casually erasing my most essential self—my name—complies with an imaginary code I’ve lived by: that establishing room for everyone else is the quickest route to assimilation. My mispronounced name was, I’d fooled myself into believing, how things would always be. Like that one button on my winter coat that I’m constantly sewing back on. Or how I’ll never be someone who knows any jokes. And so, at twenty-eight, I’m still skittish with my own name, fumbling during first meetings as if “Durga” were a bar of wet soap.

  At Starbucks, I’ll place my order and tell the barista in an apologizing tone, “Just D.” Nobody has time for that back-and-forth lingual dance of me repeating my name only to inevitably spell it out: “D as in Dog.” But “Just D,” that’s my escape: the speediest way out of everyone else’s way. “Just.” The word connotes impartiality but also scarcity, and in those moments, another acknowledgment of how things would always be. “Just,” as in “Hardly D,” or “Not quite D.” “Just” as in barely there.

  The same goes for when I make a reservation or greet the hostess at a restaurant. “D’s fine” is what I’ll say in a slack warble as if unencumbering her. Most times though I’ll give my friend’s name without the slightest hesitation, because mechanically disallowing my name in favor of what I assume is more commonplace has, over the years, become reflex. “Table for two under Fiona,” I’ll say spryly. No sweat. Sometimes I feel miserable doing that, like the pangs I pocketed as a kid anytime I couldn’t reconcile my parents’ Indian heritage with my own Canadian childhood, but mostly, I rarely notice my impulse because it’s just that, chronic.

  Mindlessly self-deleting, it turns out, is addictive. And while these little accommodations have simplified some experiences, there is the gamble that my willingness to write myself out of my daily encounters will curb the potential for A Tremendous Me: big goals, big wants, and dreams I’ve left in the cold or crystallized. I’ve often wondered if my friends whose identities have meshed more seamlessly with the world, who’ve never had to repeat their names in line for a coffee, say, are more readily encouraged to occupy ineffable spaces too. Like their future, or the load and levity, both, of ambition.

  There’s a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about the meaning of one’s name, or one’s country of so-called origin, or to explain that the way you look is generationally and geographically worlds apart from where you were born. Since childhood, there’s been an assumption that I owe strangers an answer when they inquire about matters I myself struggle to have words for, let alone understand. When it comes to my identity, the ways in which it confuses or interests others has consistently taken precedent, as if I am expected to remedy their curiosity before mediating my own. In this way, I’ve caught myself disengaging from myself, compromising instead of building aspirational stamina. While uncertainty about my future is of course not unique to me, I do marvel at the bounty of hesitation I have acquired over the years because I surreptitiously presumed potential was a dormant thing; that it only functions as a trait others see in me.

  One response has been to blend in. When I was very young, I used to have a running tab of Indian names that were, I perceived, not so Indian. That could pass as what, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that they seemed more accessible. Anita was one of those names. Kiran too. Looking back, this kind of quiet yearning was not something that preoccupied or pained me so much as it was an element of some deeper and unmined sense of disorientation: that I am first-generation and, in turn, proficient at splintering who I am in order to accommodate everyone else’s environment. I’m in awe of people who appear immediately comfortable on a stranger’s or new friend’s couch because I am the friend who is always encouraged to take off my coat, to “make myself at home.”

  To be first-generation means acquiescing to a lasting state of restlessness. It’s as if you’ve inherited not just your family’s knotted DNA but also the DNA acquired from their move, from veritable mileage, from the energy it took your parents to reestablish their lives. I grasped early—perhaps one February morning as I warmed my feet inside the car while my mother scraped snow off her windshield, her rosy cheeks emerging through icy diagonals on the glass—that my parents were not from here but from there: Kolkata. There she was, removing snow with great purpose and rhythm as I spasmed with chills until I was toasty and warm. There she was, my Anglo-Indian mother, Dolores. She from there but now living here, wearing winter boots and a puffy coat. And me, her daughter, who is from here but also, in some conveyed manner, from there
too.

  That distinction is one that accompanies me every day but one that I have been careful to never overly indulge. What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I’ve only experienced through photos, visits, food. It’s not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I’ve always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.

  While in some ways my name is one of the smallest kernels of who I am, I now know that something far more furtive is at play when one’s name is misheard. The act of mishearing is not benign but ultimately silencing. A quash so subtle that—and here’s what I’m still working out—it develops into a feeling of invalidation. Nothing will make you fit in less than trying, constantly, to fit in: portioning your name, straightening your hair, developing a wary love-hate fascination to white moms whose pantries were stocked differently than yours, who touched your hair, admiring “how thick” it was.

  Swapping between the varied pronunciations of my name had its effect too. When I was growing up in Montreal, my French teachers would sputter the D with a tsk, and at home, my father’s Bengali accent would round the Dh-oor sound. In my mind I always imagined his articulation written in felt marker; in bubble letters. But the North American way of saying my name is the one I’ve come to know and use. Durrrr-gah. Like the hum of a machine capped by the gleeful sound a wiggling baby makes after knocking over her bowl of Cheerios.

  The first-person essay is not one that comes naturally to me. Who is this “I”? Am I entitled to her? Is she my voice, or is she the voice that is expected of me? One editor has urged me to claim the “I” instead of exhausting my rhetorical crutch: “One might say…” When I have a point to make, I’m tempted to sideline it or deceive myself of its ownership. To delight in anonymity. The way I see it, these admissions are everyday to anyone who was born accommodating—who’s read enough “I’s” in enough essays but has never seen “me.”

  To want and to write in the first person are two actions that demand of you you. But this long and lanky “I” has never arrived at me freely. How can an “I” contain all of my many fragments and contradictions and all of me that is undiscovered? Is this “I” actually mine to own? If you are someone whose first-self intrigues others, writing in the first person necessitates that you grow fascinated with yourself.

  The very desire to write it all down, to trust that my experience and what I might share of it has merit, is a foreign prerogative. Often, I’ll be thinking aloud with friends or deliberating on ideas that have been simmering or, on luckier occasions, ideas that have been connecting, and a friend will excitedly chime in, “You should write about that.” But the impulse to write it all down is at most secondary or tertiary, and generally not even on my radar. “Everything is copy,” Nora Ephron famously said. While those three words inspire, in my case, being held accountable for a voice that is perhaps not my own but is inferred because of my name or the color of my skin can be stifling. My first inclination is to let ideas sit. To overthink and wrestle with them. To feel outpaced by them. Or grow impatient with this odd affair I have with writing. And then maybe, just maybe, I’ll draft an email to a friend where I blunder the original purpose of my note: to seek out a single-person audience.

  And so at twenty-eight, here I am working hard to unlearn. A couple years ago, my friend Sarah and I followed a group of friends to a bar after attending a panel organized by a magazine we’ve both contributed to. At some point a guy approached us and asked our names. “Sarah,” she said. I followed, only to be asked what I’ve now deemed the token follow-up question: “Where are you from?” Before I could answer, Sarah snapped back at him, “Why would you ask her that?” Sarah’s barbed inflection when she delivered her you and her that entirely delegitimized him. She not only rebuffed his question but the entitlement he’d likely subsisted on his whole life, unchecked. I was mortified at the time. It’s possible I recoiled into the collar of my coat. Sarah! Really?! We were new friends, and her sharp takedown of this stranger seemed unjust to me. Briefly I thought, Poor guy. That is, until the next morning when I woke up feeling light and unburdened.

  Those few seconds in the bar were a revelation. Ever since I can remember, it’s been customary that I arrive somewhere, anywhere—a party, a new school, an interview—with a tagline or tributary anecdote, like a note that I’ve tied around my neck with yarn. “Where are you from? What does your name mean?” Those two questions have been asked of me so many times that I respond with a singsong cadence, as if rattling off my address when I order Thai over the phone.

  My preparedness with new encounters has always been in the service of others, so much so that I wouldn’t even call it preparedness; it was just how things would always be. But after that night when Sarah spoke up, everything changed. I recognize the dramatic nature of pinpointing change to a single seemingly insignificant event, but I’ve also come to realize that some shifts should never be backtracked, because the only person you’ll end up devaluing is yourself. Since that evening, a newfound and speedy confidence sprang up in me like a cartoon flower in bloom. I am now awake to the undermining agency and the chain reaction of everyday reticence such questions imposed on me. Thanks, Sarah. Love you.

  I now too recognize the absurdity of people who can’t be bothered to pronounce my name properly but are willing to straightaway request I tell them where I’m from. Their othering of me depends, it seems, on their capacity to other. It’s usually those same people who roll their eyes when I say I was born in Canada, who reiterate “Where?” as in “Where where?” like I haven’t heard them the first time. A life of this farce is sure to sand down anyone’s sense of self. And maybe that’s the point, to bolster one’s power and belittle someone else’s: mine.

  After years of my pleading, my mother finally gave me her yellow-gold D ring that was passed down to her from her mother. Daisy, Dulcie, Dolores, and now Durga. The ring’s band is thinning so I don’t wear it often, but when I do, I feel the clout of family. Few things yield such command. I’m from somewhere! And these women had something to do with it! The weight of those two facts is, as I grow older, increasingly humbling. With that lineage comes the consideration that if I have a kid, I should perhaps give him or her a D name. But what? Should it be Indian? How many Indian D names do I know? These are the sorts of thoughts that slide through my mind in the morning when I’ve been in a long-term relationship, when I’ve considered my future, seriously and unseriously. These are also the sorts of thoughts that cross my mind when I’m out at a bar and a stranger asks my name and where I’m from. And as I impatiently play with the ring on my finger, I wonder, Do I really want this kind of dim encounter for my kid? But then I feel the embossed gold lettering, the most capital D I’ve ever seen. D as in Durga, Dolores, Dulcie, and Daisy. I’m from somewhere! I’ll be reminded. And these women had so much to do with it. I am an accumulation of them and myself, and have a newfound vitality born from no longer accepting that I am an accumulation of my misheard name, no longer inured to self-evasion, to ceding my totality.

  9

  Since Living Alone

  1.

  I LEARNED last summer that if you place a banana and an unripe avocado inside a paper bag, the avocado will—as if spooned to sleep by the crescent-laid banana—ripen overnight. By morning, that sickly shade of green had turned near-neon and velvety, and I, having done nothing but paired the two fruits, experienced a false sense of accomplishment similar to returning a library book or listening to a voicemail.

  There is, it’s worth noting, a restorative innocence to waking up and discovering that something has changed overnight. Like winter’s first snowfall: that thin dusting that coats car rooftops and summer stuff like park swings and leftover patches of grass. Or, those two books that mysteriously fell off my shelf in the night, fainting to the floor with a cushioned thump! I place them back where they belong, pausing to stare at their binding
s, which I’ve memorized, if for no other reason than when you live alone, the droop of plant leaves, a black sock poking out of my blue dresser, or an avocado that ripened overnight—all this stuff provides a rare, brief harmony: the consolidation of my things, all mine, in a space fit for staring off as I skirmish with a sentence on my screen or wait for water to boil. The only person who might interrupt my thoughts is me.

  2.

  “When you travel,” writes Elizabeth Hardwick in Sleepless Nights, “your first discovery is that you do not exist.” This sentence, which I read in late September as I shuffled and flopped from my couch to my bed and then back to my couch again, chasing patches of shade as the sun cast a geometry of light on my walls, this sentence surfaced on the page like a secret I’d been hurtling toward all summer but, until now, was nothing more than a half-formed figment. (I’ve come to hope for these patterns that build in increments, eventually sweetening into an idea I’ve long been blueprinting in my mind; I’ve come to understand them as a huge chunk of what writing involves.)

  While reading Hardwick, I noted that since moving into my one-bedroom apartment in late April I had traveled little, declining invitations upstate or weekends on Long Island or in Pennsylvania. I chose instead to stay put. To seek the opposite of not existing and acclimatize myself, it turns out, to myself. Even writing those words now feels like a radical act because a large part of who I am has always hinged on someone else. I am a daughter, a daughter of divorce, but with my own stubborn and cautious interpretation of what that means. A child that never quite reveled in the traditions of childhood, a younger sister and her eventuating appetite for the sentimental, for the Beastie Boys, for asking “What did you eat for lunch?” when what I meant to say was “I love you.”