I was eighteen and hiking with my classmates in Mexico’s Copper Canyon when, while crossing a rope bridge, my foot broke through a rotten plank of wood and I plummeted thirty feet to the ground, landing on a dried-up riverbed of rocks. I don’t remember falling—that was quick like something that didn’t happen. I came to, and I remember the sensation of my tongue touching my gums and the taste of blood, and mostly the pain of vanity—I’d lost some teeth, it was clear. I remember the faces of my classmates rushing toward me and holding my neck and asking if I could wiggle my toes. I remember thinking, lie. Even if I couldn’t wiggle them, I would lie. But I’m a terrible liar, and I remember deliberating on that too. These were my thoughts as blood trickled down my cheeks and as I committed to memory the faces of people I knew, whose faces now were stricken with panic. Warped worried brows and young eyes suddenly wiser because holding back tears will age you. Lips quivered and smiles cracked as I lay there answering questions—my name, the date, where I was—and as I learned by heart, as if studying for an exam, the way John’s eyelids blinked slowly as if allowing himself a few extra seconds to look away from my busted face as he held my hand, or the way our guide spoke at a gentle metric like a robot with a heart.
The adrenaline that was pumping through me and masking my pain was also prompting my everyday discomforts to surface: I really did and still do hate being the center of attention. I’m no good at answering questions about myself even if they are basic and were meant to address possible head trauma, like, “Durga, what did you eat for lunch?” I stumbled on the word sandwich and couldn’t remember if I’d eaten my apple or if it was still in my pack. Never before had I imagined that misremembering my lunch would yield such concern.
But what comes to mind most from that day is the sound that slipped from my mouth as my foot fell through the plank. It’s hardly a sound and mostly a breath. A gasp that was cut short, as if sliced by a butcher’s knife: it sounds something like Huh. Huh like the laziest reaction. Like a giving-in to. An agreement, sort of. I can never unhear that gasp. It wasn’t the sound of my life flashing before me. It was the very human understanding that gravity was real and that I was about to fall and that nothing was going to catch me.
5.
I can never unhear Allen Iverson saying the word practice. On May 7, 2002, after being eliminated by the Celtics in the first round of the Eastern Conference Championship, Allen Iverson, who was the previous year’s league MVP, gave a different kind of history-making performance: a press conference that lasted almost thirty minutes. For some NBA fans, like myself, Iverson represents a precise time in the sport when the league-small six-foot A.I. played with a conceit that realized miracles on the court, like his rookie year crossover against Michael Jordan. Iverson’s signature crossover was the kind of basketball that could make anyone a fan of the game—the sort of speedy sparring that, even now when you watch clips of him play, unfolds as if there’s a spotlight following him. There was no denying Allen Iverson, and so, when his 2002 press conference, following the 76ers’ elimination from the playoffs and reports that he and coach Larry Brown were at odds with each other, aired, there was a sense that Iverson was working his on-court crossover, off court—choosing to spar with one reporter in particular who brought up the topic of Iverson’s absence from one or two practice sessions. “I’m supposed to be the franchise player,” he responded. “And we in here talking about practice? I mean listen, we’re talking about practice. Not a game! Not a game! We’re talking about practice. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last, not the game, we’re talking about practice, man. I mean, how silly is that? We’re talking about practice.”
Iverson says the sentence “We’re talking about practice” no less than thirteen times, as if delegitimizing its implication with each slackened delivery of the word practice. Like Iverson freestyling with an opponent for a few seconds only to get low, fake right, and then make a quick crossover dribble to his left and lose a defender entirely, Iverson’s press-conference dissidence was showy but earned. I can never hear the word practice uttered by anyone without Iverson’s disenchanted tone hurtling to mind, because yes: What were they talking about? Practice?
6.
In the basement of the funeral home where family were soon to arrive, my mother, my aunt—my father’s older sister—and my stepmother all gathered in a stark white room where my grandmother Thama was lying dead on a table wearing a white sweater blouse and petticoat.
That morning, my mother had asked if I wanted to join her later as she dressed my grandmother in the sari my aunt had brought—green with a gold trim is how I remember it, but I might be wrong. It could have been navy. I was seventeen at the time and said yes the way seventeen-year-olds say yes. I said, “Sure.” Mostly, I was eager to witness my mother and stepmother in the same room. I was worried they might fight, that someone would yell. Nothing could have prepared me, though, for how silent those next twenty or so minutes would be.
I walked in behind them, shyly observed my dead grandmother, and proceeded to stand just beyond the door’s threshold, attaching myself to the wall. There we were, five women, one dead.
My aunt unfolded the sari, and from that moment on, all I heard was: nothing. Nobody spoke. I will never unhear that nothing. It was the loudest nothing I’ve ever experienced. Three women folding and tucking and pleating the silk sari. Forest green, now I remember. It was a subterranean green, darkening where the sari gathered and glimmering where the gold embroidery caught the room’s awful fluorescent light. They lifted my grandmother and worked around her limp body with a delicate simpatico that was born right there and then. None of these women were particularly fond of one another, but they loved my Thama deeply. Circling her body, they were done quickly. I remember my aunt placing her hand on her mother’s hand, and briefly, death was, I wanted to cry out, the most incredulous, excessive invention.
I rarely think of that room or the five of us in it—or should I say four? That silence, though, occasionally dawns on me. Noiselessness, I’ve come to learn, is simply how some memories age.
13
Upspeak
AT a wedding in Palm Springs, I met someone whom I’d only previously known through our correspondence online. He’d introduced himself to me four years prior, in an email that opened with, I think, our mutual love of certain film directors and, as it happens, our mutual roster of friends. Since we lived in separate cities, we’d Gchat and email, mostly about movies, and sometimes basketball, and our own projects too. At one point in 2012, we were each writing our own feature-length screenplays. We’d even made it to the second round of a writing-lab competition, and while we were excited for the other person, we weren’t exactly demonstrative with our encouragement. It’s possible I acted cagey when describing what my script was about—possessive to the point of sounding paranoid. Neither of us moved on to the third round. We stayed in touch.
Now it was May, some years into our correspondence. We were both invited to the wedding of a mutual friend, who was marrying his longtime girlfriend. The plan was to meet in my hotel’s lobby and, with another friend—not the one getting married—cab to a welcome dinner that functioned too as the rehearsal dinner.