But my father’s gripes with the pool were an extension of other presentiments, perhaps even imperceptible to him. Part of a greater pattern, like how he’d often point out while looking through photo albums that he wasn’t present in any of the pictures because he was, customarily, the one taking them. The swimming pool and the pictures were both, in his way, father cargo. Drummed-into self-erasure carried out by someone whose experience of love seemed pending on another, unresolved lifetime, or raveled by how disorienting it is to find yourself skimming leaves from a pool on a Saturday morning when your daughter—who promised she would help with its upkeep—is instead inside, squinting at a television screen, refusing to wear her glasses that she too promised, for the price of their brand-name frames, she would wear.
Etched in my memory is the image of my father standing by the pool in his shorts, doing that thing he’s always done: which is, to assess. The engineer in my father cannot escape his obligation to efficiency. Even in fatherhood, he’s moored to logistics. It’s what regulates that congenital disquiet I once thought was unique to writers but that I now see is shared by parents whose lives have been gratifyingly set astray by a gulch of worry and hope that comes with having a kid who one minute adores you and the next is grown and implicating you less and less. Because irrespective of how mundane a task, my father mulls over its mechanics until he’s appraised the timeliest way to, for example, clean the swimming pool, mow the front lawn, and simultaneously prepare supper so as to serve the dal and rice hot—not warm—hot. So as to later enjoy from our kitchen window the pool’s glistening surface at dusk while he scrubs and sets to soak the pots and pans.
But the look of satisfaction that warmed his face in these moments, that slid his glasses down his nose and ironed free the wrinkles on his forehead, was not mere fulfillment. It was far from it, actually. The meditative appeal of a swimming pool’s evening reflection had little to do with how much work it took to create such calm but how, over time, my father had discovered that prosaic pursuits in a country he now called home eased the regret—that riotous, ill-boding strain of regret—of having never permanently returned home home.
As I witnessed very young, feeling favorably yet detached about one’s life was a parent’s province. To be wild about one’s family while longing for the occasional interlude was inevitable because, for someone like Baba, the older he gets, the more disbelief about his everyday and deep ache for his own parents accrues. Unlike my mother, the act of missing provides him with purpose: reverence for what came before, for his roots, despite feeling uprooted. For his Jesuit school days at St. Xavier’s, for so many friends from Jadavpur University—many of whom are long dead. For those who are alive, whom my father can reunite with in Kolkata and tease. Isn’t it lovely to tease old friends? To neglect the past’s insurmountability and simply poke fun.
Striking up conversations with strangers, waiters, cabdrivers, and, in recent years, our dog, is, I’ve estimated, how my father both shakes off and communes with his ghosts. Unlike my mother, who does things in time—wonderfully exonerative time—who might peel two clementines and make a cup of tea before unpacking her groceries, who seems nourished, beyond what is normal, by some core system of replenishing ease, my father, like me, indulges, perhaps even self-indulges, in a sense of emotional hazard.
We’re the types who keep from joining everyone outside, or rather, we enjoy-with-skirmish an autumn sunset’s afterglow, anticipating instead the quick tide of darkness that comes next. Doom’s ricocheting effect presses us and we’re already back inside turning on lamps, commissioned by what feels intestinal. Still today, when afternoon light dapples and silver-streaks my stuff, exaggerating my pen’s worth by extending its shadow across my desk or reflecting the right angles of my window in the round bowl of my wineglasses as they sit by the sink, drying from last night’s dinner, even this sort of magic feels—I wish I knew why—somehow morbid to me. Perishable. Nobody ever teaches you how to be a person torn-between. How to shape your breaths so as to accommodate both the solitude and the stampede.
The morning we found the squirrel, my mother was tasked with skimming the pool and retrieving its body because by then my parents had separated and my father was living nearby in an apartment, not far from the bowling alley where friends would throw birthdays. I was too young and selfish to appreciate all the ways my mother was now attending to things she had otherwise expressed no interest in prior to their separation. That she was also perhaps reacquainting herself with what I realize now were purely playful articulations of happiness—discovering a new shade of lipstick called Brick, for instance, which she still wears today, or reclaiming from her closet a cropped silver jacket she’d only ever worn on holidays but was now throwing on because, for whatever reason, Wednesday called for a cropped silver jacket. Back then, these adjustments were somehow threatening. Extremely suspect. My bad attitude was burgeoning and that silver jacket was aggressively too festive.
I was angry. Noxiously rude to any man my mother spoke to. I gagged with great effect when they’d ring the doorbell and relished how defenseless they seemed when taking off their shoes in our house, standing somewhat uncomfortably in socks.
I was a pest with very little patience for anyone who seemed laid-back around my mother; anyone whose baritone would carry from the kitchen to the second floor; who’d thumb through our CDs, crack open a case, and assume any of us were interested in listening to the Beatles.
It was around this time the word idiot lost its funny. I’d say it with my teeth clenched and something wicked. I was a girl upstairs in her room with the door closed, growing hostile. Impenetrable and uncertain. A combination that only seemed to accelerate matters and freshly renew my sensitivity to other families, mostly white, and their mountain-topped superiority. Their pantries with ready-to-eat snacks and incredibly practical junk drawers with seemingly no junk; wrapping paper and various colors of ribbon—new and spooled instead of recycled from old gifts. In my mind, these families were an avatar for goodness. Well-organized thoughtfulness. My envy churned thick since I wasn’t yet teenage, and happening upon the translucent blahs that arrive with those years.