*
But I must have fallen asleep, because this is what I dream. In the thrashing, lashing storm, Thatha paces the bank of the river, screaming into the wind and the rain as if there are demons set loose in him. He is incoherent, confused, and yet also deadly sure of one fact. He has failed. He has not provided the one thing the father of a daughter must provide: protection. He climbs the tree that curves over the river. Water runs along the planes of his face, drags at his clothes. The branches are as slippery as stripped bone under his fingers and bare grasping toes. He steps out onto the dark branches, the river rushing, hissing somewhere far under him; he can hear its roar more than see its sinuous hurry. For a moment he is still. Listening for a voice to call him back, a voice to release him. My voice. When it does not come, he steps out. I see his body in the air, the moment at which he is airborne and it is unclear whether he will sprout wings and lift into the storm or drop like a stone. When he drops, I hear a gasp as if the monsoon, the trees, the river itself is shocked. The swollen waters close over his head.
Seven
When I wake, the storm has passed. The day is sparkling, the sky draped in clouds, filigreed in sunlight. I wait with my heart in my mouth for someone to come, for the shouting to begin, but instead all is quiet. I stand with my ear pressed to the door, but no voice comes through. Hours later I go downstairs very quietly and find Amma sobbing in a chair. Thatha is missing. He went out last night in the storm and has not come back. No one knows where he is. Samson too is missing.
In the evening a search party is sent out. They find my father’s body three days later. Two policemen come to tell us they have found him. My mother sits with her face dry but every part of her shaking. Sita behind her, strokes her hair, whispers in her ear, tries to make her go to her room, not hear what is being said. But Amma wants to hear everything these men say. She wants to know the exact extent of the damage done to our lives.
The policemen say words that sink somewhere beneath our skins. They say that my father’s body was found in the river, that he must have fallen in sometime during the night. They say that despite the storm and the river’s raging surface, in its depth, all was quiet. He had sunk deeper and deeper until he came to rest on the soft riverbed. They say that when the gases started to accumulate in his muscles and his tissues, he rose. He was found a quarter mile from our house, lodged in tree roots. Village women coming for their daily bath had found him. They will keep him at the police station until the funeral, they say. He is in no condition to be looked at.
*
The doctor comes. He takes my mother to her room and gives her pills; she falls into a wild, disturbed sleep, Sita at her side. Relatives come and fill up the living room. Uncles unroll sleeping mats on the floor, aunties take over the kitchen. I go to my room, where none of them come looking for me. They think I am with Amma, and Sita must think I am with the aunties.
A sound, an eerie hum like static electricity buzzes in my ears, a dizzying sense of the world’s getting bigger and bigger while I have no footing or purchase in it. I stumble around the darkened upstairs, where the relatives do not venture. I stare at the walls, at all the things in this house that are no longer familiar. The mirrors look like pools of dark water. If I touch the surface of one with the tip of a finger, the flatness will undulate and open and suck me under until nothing is left but a flurry of silver bubbles bursting to the surface.
Here is the wedding photo. Sita must have moved it out of their bedroom. The cobwebbed creases stand raised and white as lightning, slashing my father and mother in a thousand different ways.
*