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.