*
We walk into the river. It licks at my toes, then my knees and thighs. He pulls me in, his hands under my body holding me. The water feels purely alive. I am a small toy tugged this way and that, harboring terrified visions of water closing over my head and blocking off the sky. I cling to his shoulders and he says, “Shh, shh … It’s okay, I have you. I won’t let you go.”
He says it again and again over the course of weeks until slowly the terror recedes. His hands are lighter and lighter under my body until it seems he is holding me up only by the tip of his finger, my own moving limbs making me somehow magically aloft. He says, “Yes. There you are. Just like that,” and then his hand slips away and I am borne up, moving in the water, joyous. It is alive and I am alive with it, and then immediately I am falling, swallowing river water, drowning, dying, everything exploding, but his hands reach in and pluck me out. He laughs at my coughing, my spluttering face. He says, “You have it. Just do that a hundred more times and you’ll have it.”
Amma stands at the shore, hands on the hips of her sari. “Aiyo, be careful, be careful.”
He is laughing, saying, “Come on! I’ll teach you too.”
“You must be mad. What shall I wear ah? A small-small bikini like a sudhi woman?”
“Wear anything. Wear a sarong like a village girl if you like. Just come. I’ll teach you.”
“Don’t be crazy. I’m not ready to die.”
I stand on a rock in the middle of the water. The sun beating down on my shoulders, the river parting around my tiny island, dashing silver droplets onto my feet and legs. I listen to the banter flowing like sweet honey between them. I can taste it. The sound of my parents’ mingled laughter. The most beautiful sound in the world. I am willing to do anything to hear this sound again and again.
*
We swim together, my green one-piece bathing suit tight against my body. The dogs wait for us on the bank, their tongues lolling. Somewhere I know Samson is hiding and watching us. But I know this with only a corner of my mind. In the river with my father, I am safe. He holds me up against the tug and flow and then slowly lets me go as if the water is a bed that moves and rolls. I dive down to the sandy bed, see smooth stones, my father’s legs magnified, silver bubbles caught in the hairs. Some terror rises into my throat and immediately slips away.
We swim every day. Downstream, women bathe and men cast fishing nets. Our swimming for pleasure is rare and precious. This is an island of people who don’t know how to swim, who are suspicious of the rivers and of the sea. My father defies this fear. It is his greatest legacy to me.
*
Shorts! My American aunt Mallini, my mother’s sister, who got married to a rich man and moved abroad a long time ago and who now lives in California, a place that I know from the song we all sing about a mysterious hotel, has sent a box as she does every three months or so. Shoes, lipsticks, and cast-off purses for my mother. Books and clothes for me from her daughter, Dharshi, who is only a few months older than me. And shorts! I’ve never had a pair of shorts before. I pull them on, look at the reflection, my legs long and exposed from the middle of my thigh down.
My mother says, “Okay, but only here. Only in the house. Not out on the street where anyone can see. I won’t have people saying vulgar things about you.”
There are other magic objects in these boxes that come smelling of abroad, magazines from America called Tiger Beat and Teen Beat. Amma doesn’t like these, but she lets me have them because they are from her sister and therefore must be safe. I hurry to my room and pore over the boys with big hair and eyeliner, read every article about makeup and clothes and haircuts over and over. I take them to school hidden at the very bottom of my bag, and all the girls gather together to pore over these pictures, rushing to hide them under textbooks when someone raises the alarm that a teacher is near. They make me special, linked to something glamorous. At home I keep them in a box under my bed, pushed as far back as I can. They are precious, evidence of some other magical but faraway world.