I envy men who’ll see their wives and children tonight.
Exactly three months shy of Kitty’s departure, I got on a plane to Prague to attend the same conference that I attended when he was alive. He was alive and Maya was just a wisp, a dream. Now, I’m on my way to Prague again and he’s the wisp, a slowly, slowly, fading memory while Maya is real, probably upset at being unable to make me stay and not knowing how to express the feeling. I left like a thief, unable to even kiss her goodbye as I left, afraid that she’d cry. This is the first time I’ve traveled for more than a night away from her, and even that single night has been only once. “Don’t forget the two times you left us alone in my mother’s house”, I can hear Shanthala say.
One the plane, a book called “Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name” kept me company. It told the story of a woman who goes in search of her biological father when she learns that the man she called father was not biologically so after he dies. She had been abandoned by her mother when she was thirteen. Her mother vanishes and is never found. It is a sparse, literary thriller, a thriller not in the sense of a whodunit, but a thriller nevertheless for creating a tension in the woman’s quest for her biological father, for an attempt to decipher who she is, of who she may be. The writing is simple, unadorned, nothing got in the way of the story. When I pause in my reading and look outside, the plane is over some mountain range, the white of the peaks offset by the black of the valleys. I wonder if the plane went down and I couldn’t keep my promise to Maya of returning soon, would she grow up seared and searching. I’ve heard of a woman who lost her mother when she was six or so. Her father remarried. To help turn a corner on the past, they forbade any discussion of her biological mother and severed all contact with her relatives. I heard that even when she was sixteen, when everyone was in bed, she’d comb the house looking for pictures of her lost mother.
Loss. I knew the word, but not what it meant. Now I know the word like I know breathing. I know now that I can never protect Maya from ever knowing it’s meaning. With life comes loss. Just as the poem said, the ledge itself invents the leap:
The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,
Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,
The merest thought of airplanes. You can call
It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;
But it isn’t the unfathomable fall
That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,
It’s light again outside. I see the landscape is no longer wild, desolate, mountainous and snow covered. The day looks beautiful. Just enough wisps of cloud to accentuate the blue of the sky. I see a winding river with boats and barges plying its waters. I wonder if it is the river Rhone, wonder if Shanthala had passed this way when she toured Europe with her parents. I imagine people on the boats, the captains navigating the vessels, the crew working the ship. I wonder if they live nearby or if their homes are far away. I wonder what their lives are like. In so many ways so much like mine, yet so different. All those differences adding up to such different lives, to such different people. They say the devil is in the details. But as I imagine their lives, I think god is in the details, the mystery is in the details, the wonder is in the details.
A few months ago, I was on my way to the airport, the first time I was leaving Maya for a night. As the cab approached the airport, I saw two giant planes, taxiing to their runway. Flight. Escape. Runaway. Bolt. The words had come unbidden to my mind. I wondered why. Did I crave for a break from the relentless of parenting ?
As the cab approached my terminal and slowed to edge itself in front of the terminal, I saw a man hurriedly hug an older woman and rush into the car to drive away. In one of the few scenes I remember from the movie “Love Actually”, a narrator says that if you ever think that love is dead, just go to the arrival lounge of an airport and you’ll see people surrounded by love. If the arrival lounges are where love blossoms, are departure lounges where they wither or just seek respite ?
I felt like I was running away from love that morning. Love that lay asleep in bed. Love in the form of a toddler, almost three, and Shanthala. I longed to hold both of them for a while before I left home, but that would’ve woken them up and Maya would not have let me go so easily. If she had started wailing, I would have found it difficult to leave. That day, as I waited for the taxi, I heard her stir on the baby monitor and ask for me, but thankfully she went back to sleep without fully waking up. I say thankfully, but I’d be lying if I didn’t add that I was also a little saddened. I wanted her to wake up and demand me, make me not go.
That time, I was at the airport because I wanted to surprise another loved one, my sister – younger by 9 years – who was graduating that week. I knew that she wanted me to be there when she was awarded the certificate. I wanted to be there too. My sister is how I discovered that I had a side of me that loved babies and wanted to care for them. This graduation would mark the end of a journey began 10 years ago when she first came to this country. The road had meandered and almost gotten lost in the undergrowth. Not that it mattered to me that she didn’t finish her Masters. I wanted her to be content is all. But I was heartened to see her return to the course years after she had walked out of it, return of her own accord and finish it with flying colors. So I wanted to be there when she walked on stage.
That weekend was also my mom’s birthday and I thought that she might be pleased at the gift of my being there for my sister’s graduation. “There’s only the two of you,” she’s fond of saying, as if we were the sole inhabitants of a lonely outpost from Cormac’s “The Road”. “You must take care of each other”. She frequently asks me to visit my sister, on the other coast, always worried that the geographical distance might become the metaphor for the relationship.
Leaving Shanthala had always made melancholic. With the coming of Maya, this has only gotten worse. I wondered if I was really sad or if a part of me was only aping what I’d seen my father do in such situations. When he was away, he’d never really enjoy himself. Even in a city playing the latest English movie, which he so loved to watch and which he got so little opportunity for in the provincial towns we lived in, he’d not go to the cinema. “I don’t enjoy watching a movie without you all”, he’d say.
I didn’t understand him then. But on a plane, crossing oceans, I envy men who’ll see their wives and their children tonight.
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