In the land of my father, as I recall, there was a pink Ganesha Scotch-taped to the back of the door. I pushed the door open, one hand parallel to the face of the idol, into the twisted light of a blue winter morning and saw him waiting for me there, on the stone steps. He did not have the comic humility of a playful divinity; he did not doff his cap with his ringed fuchsia trunk. But neither was there any tedious, studied seriousness in his manner. He was only there, and he waited, with a diamond-cut patience that spiraled out into infinity, for me to speak.
I can’t remember the last time someone listened, not just with the fullness of their attention, but without their assumption of me superimposed on top, like a blind over my eyes. I used to be able to endure that, graciously, gracefully, but not anymore. Now, I just let my mind filter away, down the cracks in the floor, to the house of hell.
At the breakfast table, I chew my food and swallow too quickly; it trembles in my throat, a lump of pulp, and I nearly panic. I, the first child of a hypochondriac, seize with the memory of the million visits to the infirmary—leaping onto a cot like a tiny gymnast, insufficiently shielded by thin curtains running on metal rings, scrambling to find purchase on the scratchy cotton and then swiftly arranging myself on it, my hands folded over my still chest and my eyes closed. Over the imagined grave, the grass was damp and green and fetid. I was a morbid, unduly ambitious child. I believed that I could know my own death, could snatch it from the sky and hold it like a coin in my pink hand, could maneuver around it tidily, like stepping over a toy train chugging down plastic tracks. But the years haven’t humbled me so much as terrified me. Today, I have no beliefs, only fears.
January is a tough month. I work on a story laboriously, fruitlessly. It fights me every step of the way. I am cynical and sad—a deadly combination. I get my hands bloody. I get scammed at a bazaar. I forgive him—because what other choice do I have? I zip and unzip, over and over, the clamshell suitcase of my mind. I get overly self-congratulatory, then overly self-deprecatory. Nothing in balance. I don’t forgive myself—was that ever a choice I had? Everything taking on water, just at different speeds.
In the half-moon gaze of my grandmother, black-and-gray in the photograph, I can see a pain rooted so far down I could dig a hole as deep as the world itself and never find its true origin. The blood from which she drank was of the darkest kind. But as I grow older, I come to wonder—was it real pain, or only a grudge? What would be the difference? Was it her dreams that were lost, or only her delusions? What would be difference? I’m sure that, to her, there was none. The bearer of a sword cannot distinguish between carmine glass or carved ruby embedded in its hilt; she swings just the same, she cuts just the same. But in the faces of her progeny, I see the stiff, stilted half-smiles of difficult emotion and I remember again, the danger of assumption, the ricochet, through time, of the articles of our faith, long-held.
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