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 three 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.
Born on Christmas Day in the year 1900, my grandfather died a month short of his seventy-fifth birthday, three or more months into Indira Gandhi’s declared Emergency. That my father’s father would never know his son had two children is a sorrow that doesn’t loom, so much as, sporadically, I get the sense, my father is hit with the hypothetical: Imagine he could have met you. There’s an understanding that my grandfather would have liked me. Loved me, sure. But liking is altogether different. It’s gentle. Almost chewy. Liking someone is taffy.
The moment one hears that sentiment expressed—that someone who has passed would have enjoyed you—one begins to carry it. I heard it young, and I became, in little ways, curious about what in me he might have found interesting. He would have, I’m convinced, asked me about my friends. Pronounced their names fondly. One of my top five favorite sounds: when my family enunciates my friends’ names with an odd emphasis on certain syllables. Rachel became Raaaaay-chel. Collier is suddenly French, like the word for necklace. My friends India and Echo have been tagged together and confused, and I rarely insist on correcting the mix-up because how are parents expected to keep up? They shouldn’t have to. Elana is pronounced “Uh-La-nuh,” which seems correct enough, though there’s a trace of casual melody in my parents’ accents, especially my mother’s. So even “Elana” sounds like the name of a song by a seventies folk band my mother might have listened to on tape.
Over the years my mother has mentioned in passing how she thinks my father should have, like his father, been a doctor. He is, it’s true, the first person in my family anyone calls when there are questions about a cough, a lump, an ongoing pain. He knows what to do, how to heal. Who to call. The next logical step. He accompanies his aging friends to physiotherapy and, at night, to the emergency. He sits and waits. He fills prescriptions. Buys them new pants when, in sickness, they’ve lost weight. And new ones when they’ve gained it back, to mark the occasion. He cares for those not lucky enough to have grown children. He gives rides. Buys and delivers bags of basmati rice.
When there was a tear in my father’s valve, I wondered if he missed his father; if he spoke to him in his head and went forth with a small amount of heritable wisdom. If in those days leading up to his surgery he was, once again, a son.
The day of his surgery, I sat in my college’s dining hall clutching my phone, waiting for the call from my stepmother where she’d say, choked-up but relieved, that everything went well. I was with two friends who were talking about another friend, and I remember thinking how noisy friends can be. How they are, at times, battery-powered clamor and emotionally expensive, and briefly I wondered, Why have friends? Why sit through their noise when what I needed was an impossible silence. There’s no such thing as the silence one needs. It doesn’t exist because need is loud. So I sat and listened to my friends and clutched my phone, and then, without noticing it, a tear slid down my cheek. My nerves had burst but my face was numb. My friend reached her hand across the table and touched my arm, and what’s more, she didn’t ask why I was crying. She barely made eye contact. We were each other’s tolerable silence. Energy between two people can feel the opposite of energy. The most muted, beloved bailout.