When I’m traveling, I tuck the flamingo into my purse. It sits next to a stuffed red heart that my friend—the one in the gold dress on pea soup day—gave to me. The heart fits into my palm—flat-round like a plush pebble—and was mailed to my friend with a box of other novelties, including the vile of dandelion fluff, I think. The heart, I learned, is from Build-A-Bear. I’ve never been to one of its stores or know much about it, but I’ve heard there is a tradition of placing the heart inside the bear while it’s in the workshop. Maybe the employees blow on it? Or ask the customers to? Something like that. Maybe the children make a wish and rub the heart between their thumb and index finger the way adults test the touch of cashmere or gossip about someone’s financial provenance. Either way, there is a ritual. How strange. How sort of gruesome and surgical. The most benign transplant, occurring in malls across America.
I think about my mother again. Young again. I wonder if she did in fact, like me, consider the fit of things: how the cherry liqueur gets inside the chocolate and if it’s possible to sit on clouds. If cracking open scabs and peeling them off like bark on a tree was pleasing to her. If she dreamt about attics and the potential for troublemaking sloped ceilings provide. How everyone in an attic becomes a giant. How someone’s head cautiously ducking under wood beams is, in some way, the universal symbol for explorer. Did they even have attics in Calcutta? Was the concept utterly foreign? Whenever I’ve asked my mother about what I deem rudimentary to child-wonder, like the mystery of attics, the word dampness repeats. Calcutta’s dampness, that is. Like a relapsing obstacle for children born in tropical, wet-and-dry climates. It was too damp for this, too damp for that, she might say. Too damp for attics.
Or what about skylights. Did she have those? Know about those as a kid? How the sky seen through a skylight creates—at least in my mind—a more viable world. Isn’t it cool how a skylight doesn’t bring the blue inside, but instead influences a category of stupor? Everyone is reduced to aquarium eyes. There’s no suspense in wondering what lies outside the frame, because skylights show bias but abet abandon. Bordered and mounted on a ceiling, a blue sky looks especially artificial, doesn’t it? Like a portal elsewhere. Soothsaying.
I think about Build-A-Bear too. Would my mother have cared for one of those toys? Was she a child who hid things in other things? Was she curious about their make? The how? The How?! Had Build-A-Bear existed when I was a kid, would I have begged for one? Probably. The toys I wanted and never got as a child were one of many spites I held against my parents. It wasn’t simply greed but superiority. The rank we pull as children of immigrants, believing our parents are, most days, confused or dead wrong. That they just don’t know. That they’ll get you a version of what you wanted; what’s close will have to do. That they are uniquely assertive in the kitchen and don’t pick up on cues, and smile reluctantly because smiling is the quickest way to appear as though you are aware. To mislead anyone doubting your ability. Especially your ungrateful children.
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.