Too Much and Not the Mood Page 6

  My sophomore year of college, my father had surgery to repair a valve tear in his heart. The edges were frayed. A vascular-ring Dacron connector graft was, I believe, used to stent the tear. The sutureless nature of it confuses me. While my father has explained how his valve was fixed, my mind is intent on dreaming up floating parts, like a valve that looks like a pool noodle or a ribbed dryer vent, and 3-D doodads rendered into 2-D graphics, and ducts and hoses, and bolts, and whenever I hear the word frayed I only think of jeans anyway.

  Still, I do appreciate the consequence of the surgery. My father has since been semiretired from his job as an engineer and vice president for a company that, of all things, manufactures industrial valves. There is no irony to be lost, merely coincidence, and a broad reminder that, after all these years, I still have no idea what a valve does. How it works and for what purpose.

  There are moments when I wonder if my ignorance stings my father. If my disinterest has offended him. There’s a degree of apathy inherent to children and how they prefer to recognize, or insist on misunderstanding, their parents. There is too—how can I put this?—an unspoken expanse. The wilds that separate us. An acceptance that love has many versions and one of them is, plainly, the act of not knowing. An implicative bargain between parent and child that leans on time’s mercy. Or maybe it’s the inaction of not knowing. The lulls we favor in order for each member of a family to guard some sanity—to sit through traffic, clear the table without fuss, not ask who was on the other line.

  Perhaps it’s useful to classify this particular form of not knowing as different from the more existential crop of not knowing. This one involves more play. I choose to misread the workings of big, vital stuff like the heart, because, by and large, my preference to not know provides me with relief. How reinforcing it can be to create an untrammeled, let’s call it “adjacent self” to my otherwise tightly wound, seeking self, who—much to the pain of anyone telling a story over dinner—is listening but requesting more detail. This other me tolerates occasional caprice; like imagining little men using a pulley-lever system to receive oxygen-rich blood into my heart. To my father’s heart. Gluing together his valve. Grafting and sealing material that looks like a tube anemone.

  My father’s father, Amiya Kumar Bose, was a cardiologist. Eminent in his field, my father has reminded me ever since I was a kid. So much so that I now associate the characterization “eminent” as one specific to immigrant parents. One of their many isms—essential to their lexicon of pride. Of keeping the narrative strong and the achievements mantled. Of introducing their daughters as “My daughter who…” As though personhood is fixed to ability. As though parenthood is the practice of immodesty. Because awards and degrees, and recognition, and pioneering efforts in general, fade over time. They lose their shine, and sadly these feats so rarely translate. Masterpieces are paraphrased. They don’t survive the journey or a grandchild’s lopped retelling of them.

  Growing up in Montreal, the folklore of family recipes was what my friends hyped. Secret ingredients for baked goods were somehow central. And guarded. But in my family, food was not the great family story. Food was the fabric. The basics. Dinner was elaborate but made quick. There was always rice.

  My paternal grandmother, a statistician who’d go to work every day at the Writers’ Building—shortened to Writers’ by most—the red, Greco-Roman–designed secretariat building in Calcutta that housed the State Statistical Bureau Government of West Bengal, which later moved to the New Secretariat building on Strand Road, now that, that fact was repeated to me over and over. My grandmother Chameli was the director. She was in charge of an office of only men who called her “sir.” A detail so ridged into my understanding of who she was that I’ve often imagined an office long and exaggerated, and practically surreal. An office in space. I’ve imagined men standing up from their desks as she arrived each morning; greeting her as she glided to her office in her sari. A woman gliding was—I’d devised—power incarnate.

  Recently, my mother recounted a story to me about Chameli. One year, Chameli noted a statistical error in West Bengal’s rice farming figures; one that she deemed serious enough to change. The dheki is an agricultural tool used for threshing and separating the grain from the husk. It’s composed of a wooden lever, a pedestal, and a pestle. Picture a rocket-shaped seesaw; the pestle like a walrus tooth pounding rice. In all village households, it was the Bengali peasant women whose job it was to husk the paddy into rice. While it was work, the work wasn’t statistically counted as such. Those hours spent were negligible; ignored by virtue of being considered everyday household chores instead of hard labor. Chameli disagreed. She saw the gaffe as a severe misreading of numbers.

  Here’s the thing. By no means did my grandmother identify as a feminist. Quite the opposite actually. For her, fixing this error was merely a matter of valuing accuracy. For her, imprecision was totally substandard. When my mother told me this story, I thought about my grandmother gliding through her office, perhaps instilling acute fear in the men who reported to her. Scrutinizing their efforts. Suggesting they reexamine their data. The thought makes me grin.

  I too was a bit scared of Thama. She could be mean. Often ailing but impassable. At no point would she back down; the sort of woman who is so obstinate that even the knot in her silk scarf looks stubborn, like a bulb unwilling to blossom. She was callous, brushing me aside by asking about my brother’s day instead of mine. If I was wearing a new sweater, she’d ask me if my brother had gotten a new sweater too. There’s a form of humiliation we learn to stomach young in order to receive attention. Mine was clarified by my relationship with my grandmother, whose fondness for my brother was openly warmer, even if her love was evenly spread.

  Thama disciplined but seemed detached; a terrifying combination from a child’s perspective. Her wood cane looked like it was up to something. A sidekick. A snake. Nowadays, I regret every second I spent with her where I didn’t hold her hand or tell her I loved her, or showed her what I was reading or shared with her what I was thinking; who I was friends with; their names. I regret my teenage petulance. I regret the displeasure I wore in my posture. The unappealing stink that secretes from teenagers with a bad attitude who slope in their chairs and see only an old lady who’s taking up a perfectly good Saturday in June. I was sad about the mushy, tasteless food my grandmother was forced to eat, but just as impatient that she eat it faster.

  I regret how I wasn’t gentler when combing her hair. Or how, more than once, I absently pushed her wheelchair into a door’s frame. Or pushed her wheelchair too hastily back to her bedroom at the Grace Dart extended care center in Montreal East, where she lived the last years of her life. It’s possible Thama would have enjoyed a more scenic route back to her bed—perhaps one that involved escaping the Grace Dart center entirely. Fleeing in her nightgown, somewhere less cold with a garden and trees, whose leaves reminded her of Calcutta sounds. A place too with an infinite supply of Pepperidge Farm hazelnut Pirouettes. She really enjoyed eating those rolled wafers, as if they were contraband.

  I regret one afternoon in particular when Thama was asleep in her hospital room, snoring so quietly it sounded less like snoring and more like a person who’d lived many lives, simply breathing. That afternoon, when I was alone in her room, I noticed a vein protruding from her forehead. Like a cord of thick wale corduroy running down her temple. For no reason I can explain, other than some eagerness to touch, I pressed my finger against it. Thama kept sleeping. I touched it again and went further to push the purple blood that filled it, back up her vein, only to watch it rush forward as I let go. I did this a few times as if magic were involved. As if the tiny purple torrent were anything but blood. Kool-Aid. Dye. Beet juice. It was an odd impulse, certainly.

  But even in hospitals, sunlight is beautiful. It animates the sterile and that feeling of sick. Brown cups look caramel and all that metal turns mauve, and Jell-O, well, Jell-O wins—it traps the sun. And suspended ceilings are hardly science
fiction when the evening light thaws their grid. And the humiliation of loosely tied gowns and bare skin, and elastic waists, even those degradations fade some when the light pushes through blinds and discovers bare skin, not to shame but to warm. And on that day, the sun was beginning to dip and the purple blood was rushing back each time I pushed it up, and why was I doing this? Why wasn’t I leaving her alone, to sleep her many lives? I regret touching her forehead like that, as if she weren’t Thama but a new, random fascination. Her skin was jellyfish-transparent. Her fingers and knuckles were bent like gingerroots. She was fading. Shrinking. As if there were hardly any room inside of her to contain her memories. From here on out, Thama’s memories would be forced out. They’d emit from her. They’d circle above her like cloud cover on a satellite map. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to feel haunted by the draft of vanishing memories. I felt them that afternoon, escaping from her as the sun washed her hospital room with a little show. The sort of glory you only see when something else is being lost.

  I was then, in that hospital room, dense about a lot and specifically about my grandmother. About her clout. It would be a long time until I would learn about the statistical error she corrected all those decades ago. A minor detail, but one that wows me. Quiets me proud. A facet of her character that reveals my grandmother’s second ply. She was a scrupulous woman; compulsive about precision. She wasn’t remedying those statistics in order to serve or fight for the rights of peasant women—outwardly, anyway—but because work was getting indexed improperly. It was how my Thama operated. What pressed her. No wonder my father insists on repeating stories about my grandmother. On remembering her like a zipper stuck on its slide. Chameli was a force. She had kick in her until the end, despite grumbling to me that God had forgotten about her.

  My father’s repetition, especially with regards to his family—especially when it comes to excellence—is fundamental to his speech pattern. As though his thoughts accrue but cannot prosper without checking in with what came before. Like his body domiciles the past. His tone is, time and again, commemorative—which I’ll admit can grow tedious, though with parents it’s good to keep one’s cool. (Something I have yet to learn.) To heed one’s frustration, because aren’t we all disquieted by what we’ll leave behind? What we won’t. Aren’t we all overrun by the blotting-out that is inevitable? How every year we claim that this year went by faster. What was realized? Did I connect? If I’m mostly—often only—the sum of what I’ve noticed; should I keep better track?

  Did I discern between admiring and enjoyment? Did I try on a dress? Even once? Did I disturb some peace? Experience some peace? Was I strong physically? How many times did I say yes when I should have said no? Can someone, please—anyone—devise a “no” that clarifies how no serves many reactions? How it can deliver beyond its blunt, single unit of speech? A “no,” for example, with less glare. A shallower, vaporous “no.” A “no” that riffs off “nope” but is more nimble.

  Did I drink less? Sleep more? Eat more? Was I a body? And did the boundaries of my thighs and the span of my arms inform my flight, or were they limbs only? Swinging, stretched, crossed. Folded around me and furthering that feeling of deadweight when I wake up in the morning and think, Again? When I wonder if it’s possible to deplane from this week; from this period in life.

  Did I listen to Tidal in its entirety instead of “Shadowboxer” on repeat? Illmatic in its entirety? The Miseducation without skipping over Lauryn’s interludes? Did I recover from the minor tragedy of gifting someone I love earrings she will never wear? Did I finally admit defeat and stop photographing sunsets?

  Did I properly mourn my mother’s maple tree? She loved that century-old tree. It was, in a word, providing. When the city cut it down in February because of a vertical split they deemed dangerous, she sent me an email with the subject line: “our tree—RIP.” Attached was a picture from the scene outside her living room window. Our snowy front lawn powdered with sawdust and two city workers in neon orange, severing fallen branches into smaller logs. The tree’s stump looked irrelevant. And even though I couldn’t hear the violent, hacking buzz of their saws, I could. A vibration that tapers and starts over, tapers and starts over, like a terribly fatiguing and stubborn goodbye. This will be my mother’s first summer without her maple. But summer is not intended for withouts. So what now? As with all endings, nothing suits. In July we’ll play Scrabble on the balcony; unprotected, in view. A sudden rainstorm will no longer feel abundant. The green is gone. That magically indistinct quality of dancing leaves and their shadows, and how it’s impossible to tell where branches begin, end, and reach, unless a squirrel darts or a breeze gets rowdy. Will we miss the tree or move on and grow accustomed, and tolerate this new opening as an understanding?

  What new habits did I develop to cut myself off from the world? When will I learn that those habits are, it’s possible, delimiting me from innocuous connections. Someone to sit next to on a couch too small, flipping the pages of a book too big, where the pages graze my sweater’s stomach, and I can’t pin why, but the whole small-big ratio of pages grazing my sweater creates an impression of secrecy.

  Someone to wish well before his trip to Tokyo; to call when I can’t sleep. To share a bowl of blanched almonds with, sitting on stools—small again too—that force my knees to bend at right angles, which feels somehow athletic. Which is, by nature, suggestive.

  Someone to provoke me; to watch Game 7 with; to accompany to a gallery where I don’t care for the art, but oh, how I love being in the vicinity of someone I confide in daily, whose posture is distinguishable, even under the lumpy mass of her winter coat, her scarf, the infantilizing fit of her boots. When will I learn? Nobody knows you’re thinking of him, of her, of our walk along the Thames, eight years ago I think it was, after seeing Peter Doig’s white canoe at the Tate, unless you call or write and say so.

  This year, was I competent? Did I referee my whims or elaborate on them? Did I express gratitude? Feel the potency of night? Accept an offer to stay over without reciting the many excuses I use to screen my doubts?

  How quickly did I quit my diary? How many ballet documentaries did I watch? Re-watch? What is it about ballet documentaries?

  Why, come spring, do I get restless and talk at the people I hold nearest, dearest, instead of talking to them? Did I love extravagantly? Kick the ground, rip the lining, get loud with bourbon, rest my head on someone’s lap and fall asleep? Did I paint? Or use pencil crayons to shade the shy carriage of a pear? Did I enjoy the short-term taste of believing an idea I had arrived at was rare?

  Or maybe it’s beneficial to abandon abstractions about how it’ll all come into being and subsist, alternatively, on touch, smell, Doreen’s laugh, Satyajit Ray, a poem’s scald, my stepmother Lisa’s compassion—her Irish scones too. Miniature awakenings that, with any luck, open one up to love or let go of one’s servitude to external validation. Miniature awakenings that keep me vulnerable to moonbeams and allow feelings to pathfind. To return to an original springboard and jump off again. And then again. Remember the feel of wet cement under your feet at the pool? Of shivering in line and climbing the ladder. The splash! How ordinary it became to splash. And then climbing back out, and shivering and dripping. The cool redundancy of doing the same thing over and over because summer’s inculpability meant it was possible to become your own encore.

  When my father repeats himself, he is not just reminding me of his parents’ lives; my father is coerced by the rubbing-out that comes with remove. How it can rarify a family’s history. Nobody was going to tell your story unless you told it yourself. And nobody was going to remember it unless you repeated it enough for your story and for your memories to develop their own rhythm.

  Because memory is lying in wait, and then, out of nowhere, something blisters. Builds. Sails. Memory is especially choral if the story recalls a childhood pet. Like Duane. My father’s spitz, named after Duane Allman, who one day in Calcutta raced off the balcony and fell th
ree stories, landing on a herd of sheep crossing the street. Duane survived his fall, and I’ve heard that story about the sheep-shaped trampoline again and again, and I’ve often asked it be retold despite knowing it by heart. My parents’ histories, those quiet storms and units of time—the flying spitz, the mischief at St. Xavier’s—sound better when they tell it, because there will be a time when they are no longer here to tell it.

  History is not indelible. History hardly exists. History is a pool of questions that begin with “Whatever happened to?” History is not—on its own—staunch. History is not the number of suitcases you moved with, the plants you carried with you, the people you left behind. History is an obligation that ages you. It trips you up. It skulks and grovels, particularly for those trying hard to move on. History is the daughter repeating to her friends that you moved with two suitcases full of LPs, or that you fell in love and knocked on his door and announced you were moving in—with your plants, of course. With not much else.

  Time’s erasing duplicity, the lost elements, an uncle in a photo whom we only know by his nickname or an earthquake where the walls shook for minutes and Elvis, my cousin’s tabby, hid between my legs, and all these things, like a daughter who might not grasp or care for certain connotations, who for years assumed the word eminent was boastful instead of accurate, these are the reasons we repeat.