My voice trails off and suddenly I am shaking. How can I do this? How can I leave everything known? How can I leave language and belonging and familiar faces, faces that look like mine? How can I leave this patch of earth that has been mine? Samson taught me once that the hydrangea blooms in a range of shades depending on the soil it sinks its roots into. From faintest pink to darkest night blue, the flower reflects the acidity of its patch of earth. How am I different? This person I am, will I be killed in the transition across the planet? What new person will emerge in that other soil?
Puime wipes her face, takes a deep breath, and says, “At least you’ll have the right clothes. Not like these old things.” She gestures to the school uniform she’s wearing and then her eyes get big, “Maybe you’ll see Duran Duran! My god. That could happen there.”
I nod. I hadn’t thought of that. They are in America. I’m going there. I could actually see a concert. The thought makes my heart race. The idea of being somewhere new and bright and shiny. A place I have seen in my magazines for so long about to become real. Under the sadness, I feel a razor’s edge of excitement. I say, “Anyway, here, these are for you.” I point to a stack of books, folded clothes. Her eyes sparkle. “My god. All this for me?”
“Yes. The jeans that you like, the strawberry-pink blouse. Lots of other things. I don’t think I’ll need them there.
“I’ll keep them for you. For when you come back.” Her fervent words: “You will come back. I know you will. I’ll keep everything for you until then.” She hugs me tightly and fiercely and then bends to examine her new cache.
*
The night before we leave, Punch raises his snout to the sickle moon and howls for hours exactly as Judy had before. The sound of it rocks the house, echoes through the garden. He has never done this before; he had not joined Judy in her funeral lament. Now it is as if he knows exactly what the suitcases in the living room mean. He cannot be stopped; he is determined to give voice to what we cannot.
I shut my door against him. I try to sleep one last night in my own known bed, but I toss and turn until dawn. At some point in that long night I dream that Sita comes into my room, sits on the edge of my bed, smooths my hair, and murmurs words of love and sadness. She will hand the house keys over to my father’s relations in a few days, and then she will make her final journey back to the village of her birth. She had expected to die in this house. I had expected to live here all my life. But none of our expectations are to be fulfilled. We have all been tossed up in the air like pieces of confetti.
*
In the morning the driver comes. I say goodbye to the river and the garden, the house and the dog. I hug and kiss Sita one last time, hold on to her and feel like I will choke until finally she pushes me away, wiping her face with her sari pallu. We get into the car and behind us she waves goodbye, Punch at her side. I watch until they are tiny and then we drive away from Kandy and down into the hot, crowded press of Colombo. A week later we leave the island. Framed in an airplane window, it lies below us, its palm trees waving goodbye, its long white beaches like lit crystal, its bustle and boom forgotten. It turns smaller and smaller until from this distance it is a garden blooming in the sea. I put my forehead on the cold window to say goodbye to both my father’s ghost and the threat of Samson. On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure. Then we trace a path between the tempest-tossed ocean and the canopy of stars and are carried into a new world.
Part Two
Eight
We land in Fremont, a suburb in Northern California full of wide-open freeways, a sky that turns plum at dusk. This is a place where life is lived inside houses on silent streets and in strip malls. There are some sari shops, a few “ethnic” restaurants, but the predominance of brown skin, of Afghanis and Pakistanis and Indians that will come to mark this place, is far off in the future. We are few and far between. These are lonely days full of misunderstandings.
In those first few weeks I saw unbelievable sights. A woman walking down the road with a small black dog on a leash, a plastic bag in her hand. At home a dog like this, a mutt, would be left to wander by itself. It might be beloved, but no one would leash it and walk it. It might perhaps follow at its owner’s heels, but only a dog of some preciousness, a discernible breed, would be put on a leash and led. But much more than the dog, what catches my attention is that mysterious bag in her hand. Full of what? I watch astounded as she stoops down behind the dog’s lowered flanks, the plastic bag spread wide in her hand, and scoops up shit, ties the bag, and walks away. As if the bag is precious, as if the dog has bestowed upon her a treasure that must be carried home and savored. How impossible to imagine, in this richest country of all, that people are saving dog turds? For what possible purpose? My imagination boggles at the question until Dharshi, my guide to everything in this new place, explains.