Looking For Bapu

by Anjali Banerjee

  fter we get through security, the Sikh man walks away to his gate. Then we wait some more, until I see Bapu striding toward us—same long nose, same eyes, same dimple! Only he's a woman with long gray hair, hitching up her sari as she runs, wheeling a house-sized blue suitcase behind her. Auntie Biku!

  She keeps smiling at me—she's covered with wrinkles—and smiling and smiling while she squeezes Dad and pinches his cheeks and wraps me in a tight hug that smells of sandalwood and mothballs. She takes my face in her hands. “How you've grown, so handsome. The family resemblance!” Her eyes go watery as she turns to Dad.

  On the ride home, I can't stop staring at Auntie's profile, so much like Bapu's—only her jaw is softer and she's shorter than him. A strange hope gathers in my chest. If she's Bapu's sister, she must know secrets about him. The questions pile up in my head, but she and Dad are too busy discussing people I've never heard of.

  At least I got to stay up to come to the airport. I can't wait to tell Unger. His mom makes him go to bed early. Nobody cares that I'm not in bed on time, but my mind buzzes with latenight fuzz. The questions float out and whiz away. I lean back against the seat and my eyelids droop. When I fall asleep, I'm in the forest. Water drips from the trees, and the cool air smells of pine and cedar. Bapu crouches beside me, and I try to touch him but I can't move. He says I have to remember the shimmer in everything, to listen and watch, and then he topples over on his stomach, and I'm running and I can't find my way home.

  I wake up heavy with sleep, still in the car, nearly home. Empty air pushes in around me.

  I stay close to Auntie Biku as we go inside.

  “Such a lovely home, and so large!” she exclaims. A hint of Bapu's voice hides inside her words. I have to get him back before I forget his voice, the smell of his clothes, the way he saved baby birds when they fell from their nests.

  Ma's waiting inside. While we were gone, she made Indian food—the aromas of curry and samosas fill the air—and she's even playing Indian music. A twangy melody with tabla drums flits in the background.

  The house behaves itself. There isn't a speck of dust anywhere, and Ma looks neat and tidy too. She's wearing a kurta over jeans, like she just now remembered to be Indian. She and Auntie Biku hug, and Dad wheels the suitcase to Bapu's room.

  I nearly yell “Wait!” but maybe it's good to have Auntie in Bapu's room. Maybe she can help bring him back. As she follows Dad into the room, a new thought comes to me. What if Auntie Biku has seen Bapu too? I have to ask her, but I need to lie in bed for just a minute first.

  When I wake up, still in my crumpled clothes, I'm under the covers and it's morning. The sun throws sparkles of light across the walls. A soft singing drifts in under my door.

  Bapu, singing his prayers! I throw off the covers and dash into the hall. Auntie Biku's coming out of the bathroom, a cup of tea in her hand. Her voice unfurls in ribbons of song, a high, sweet version of Bapu's. She looks thin in a long white kurta.

  Ma and Dad are talking in the kitchen, and the smells of toast and sweet cha drift into my nose. Usually, Ma makes Lipton tea from teabags, but not today.

  “Ah, Anu, come,” Auntie says. “I have to show you something.” I'm in Bapu's room again, but it all looks different. The open suitcase takes up the whole floor, with clothes and books everywhere and the smell of Auntie. The only thing the same are her chappals, which she slips off her feet inside the door, the way Bapu did. But her sandals are smaller than his, with a thin strap over the toe instead of a fat one.

  “Come, sit.” She pats the bed and I sit beside her, and she opens a pink photo album.

  “Your Bapu when he was a young man.” There he is, standing with Auntie Biku and Amma; and again, in college with other men in uniforms. Auntie explains all the pictures and tells me who the people are.

  I don't understand the family connections, all twisted like pretzels. I'm staring at a brown teenager with buckteeth, short hair plastered to his head, a striped shirt and polka-dot pants.

  “Here's your second cousin Prem. He's all grown now, studying film in Mumbai.” Auntie sighs. “Here's your Bapu again in university. Great cricket player and a hit with the ladies. Your Amma was lucky to get him. He loved her so.” She sniffs, her nose red. “When he was very young, he loved to play crocodile with me. You jump from one bed to the other without letting the crocodiles get you. The floor is the moat. We would push the beds close together….” Her voice trails off, and she stares at the wall.

  I see Bapu as a kid, jumping from one bed to the other. I want to tell Auntie Biku that I saw Bapu in the hospital, in the woods. Will she think I'm crazy?

  “Here, he's only a month old.” She shows me a faded picture of a woman with toffee-smooth skin and long, black hair. She's wearing a silk sari, and on her lap sits a jolly baby with sagging cheeks.

  “That's your ma? That's Bapu? He was chubby!” I can't imagine he ever had rolls of fat. I can't imagine he gurgled and pooped in his diaper and ate soft baby food and lost his teeth and grew a whole new set. All for what? Now he's gone.

  Auntie Biku gives me that funny look again, as if she is looking through me at the past. “Our ma died young,” she says. “Your Bapu became quite close to his ayah. You know what an ayah is? Like a nanny. She was a second mother to him. I was more independent, not so much in need of an ayah, although I was four years younger than Bapu. But in India, we spoil the boys! She doted on him, cooked his favorite desserts and took him shopping and played with him in the garden, until he grew old enough to go to school. Even then, she was like his mother. Our father never remarried. We had many aunties close by. But—” She looks at me and her eyes brim with tears. She holds my face in her hands and says something in Bengali, shaking her head all the while.

  “I saw him,” I blurt. “Sometimes he talks to me.”

  Auntie lets go of my face and wipes the tears from her cheeks. “Of course he does.” She does not sound surprised. “I dream of him too. All the time.”

  “He gave me a daisy in a dream.”

  “Bapu was very generous, Anu. Here's something else he would want you to have.” She rummages through her suitcase and brings out a bigger photo album, frayed at the edges. But when she opens it, I see it's not a photo album but a stamp album full of colorful, shiny stamps like jewels.

  “For me?” I can hardly speak.

  “You must take great care of this—passed down through generations. Belonged to your Bapu.”

  My Bapu. I leaf through the pages. Several stamps are stuffed into pockets on the cover, and some extra copies of stamps are in special pockets attached to the pages. I never knew Bapu collected stamps!

  I sit on the couch and tap my foot on the floor. My knee moves up and down so fast, I could have a nervous tic. Auntie sifts through her suitcase again, brings out a VHS tape and puts it on the bureau. “Family video shot by your cousin Prem, to show all of you. He never turns off the bloody camera. We'll watch it later.”

  We have an old VHS player in the garage, but I don't know if it works. We watch DVDs, but I don't say anything. I don't want Auntie to feel bad. Dad said India is still behind us in some ways. This must be one way.

  I go to my room and hide the stamp album under my pillow. At breakfast, Ma and Dad and Auntie Biku remember Bapu. His loud singing, his love of birds, his pipe smoke, the way he read the newspaper backward, the last page first. The best stories are hidden, he always said.

  A lump sticks in my throat. I can't breathe, can't talk about what I remember. The wind will suck the memories from my mouth and whisk them away forever.

  “Ate ten eggs at once,” Auntie Biku is saying, and everyone laughs.

  “Always boiled eggs when I was little,” Dad says. He's smiling, but his eyes shine with tears.

  “You should've hired him as the family cook!” Ma says.

  “God knows he would've been better than our cook, who burned everything,” Dad says.

  They fall into Bengali—I understand only a few word
s here and there. Where will I find my answers? In the stamp album? In Auntie Biku? I feel as though Bapu is here, closer to me although I can't see him. I miss him with a sharp ache.

  Outside the window, a nuthatch pecks at the suet that Bapu hung from a tree branch. A new idea sprouts in my brain.

  “Auntie,” I say, tugging on her sleeve.

  “Anu, you're interrupting!” Ma gives me a warning look.

  “It's okay, Priti. What is it?”

  “Will you go bird-watching with me?”

  “Anu, it's been raining,” Ma says.

  “We have ponchos.” I'm already out of my chair.

  Ma shakes her head. “Anu, Auntie's only just arrived—”

  “Nah, nah. It's all right.” Auntie winks at Dad, or maybe she has dust in her eye. “Sounds like great fun.”

  “What about finishing your breakfast?” Ma says, turning my plate around. She has a habit of doing that, turning my plate so the food on the other side moves closer to me. Half a piece of toast grows soggy on the edge.

  “I'm full up to here,” I lie, pointing to my chin, and run for my bird-watching gear.

  Bapu's poncho goes down nearly to Auntie's ankles, but she smiles as we head out into the woods. I go first, and this time, her breathing is louder than mine, and sniffly. Maybe she picked up a Massive Cold on the plane from India.

  “This is where Bapu and I went to watch for barred owls,” I explain. I feel old and important leading the way.

  “I thought owls came out only at night!” Auntie shouts. Why can't she stay quiet, like Bapu?

  “Some owls come out in the daytime too.” Doesn't she know this? Bapu knew—knows—everything.

  “Your Bapu was quite the bird-watcher, even in India—oh, what brambles!” Auntie clucks her tongue behind me. She's so loud, she sounds like a lost elephant stampeding through the jungle. I try to find the clearing where Bapu and I sat the last time, but the sticks and rocks and trees all begin to look the same. I choose a spot and Auntie plunks down beside me.

  “We have to be very quiet to look for a barred owl,” I whisper, training the binoculars on a huge fir trunk in the distance.

  “A whatsit?” Auntie says in her normal voice. You can't use a normal voice in the woods—it sounds three sizes too loud. The leaves quiver.

  “A barred owl,” I whisper. “They can hide in plain sight, sometimes right against a tree.”

  “A whatsit type of owl?” she says, even more loudly.

  “Patience, Auntie,” I say, although my foot taps the ground. I told her three times about the barred owl. Doesn't she know about birds?

  “You sound like Bapu.” She pats my head. Maybe Auntie doesn't know how to whisper, the way I don't know how to whistle. Or maybe her eardrums stayed back in India, sunbathing where the weather is warm, and she can't hear herself shout. She's sitting so close, but I miss Bapu's smell.

  I hold my breath, waiting for him. He has to come back now that Auntie is here with me. If he had trouble hearing me calling him, he'll have no trouble now that Auntie is yelling. But nothing happens.

  “Cold in these woods, nah?” She pulls the poncho tight around her.

  She's right. Fall swerved in toward us, blowing chilly air down from Alaska. In the Northwest, one minute it's summer, the next it's fall. “By Halloween, we could go below freezing,” I say.

  “The weather is like Darjeeling. And smell the woodsmoke.” She turns her nose up to the air, and in that instant, a hint of Bapu glimmers inside her. Then he's gone.

  a makes popcorn while Dad puts Auntie's tape into the VHS player. He spent two hours trying to hook it up to the TV; his curses still ring in my ears. Auntie didn't seem to notice. She spent the afternoon reading to me from The Ramayana, and now she's making a fancy Bengali dinner. The smells of cardamom, turmeric and coriander fill the house. Bapu taught me the names of those spices.

  The VHS tape whirs to life, and cousin Prem sticks his face right into the camera. He looks way older than he did in the picture, but his buckteeth and glasses hung around for the long haul. “And now, for your viewing pleasure,” he shouts in a thick Bengali accent, “I bring you Auntie Biku's sixty-fifth birthday!” He sweeps the jumpy camera around a room full of brown-skinned, black-haired strangers. Aunts in saris, children running around, men laughing together. I try to imagine Curtis making fun of every last brown person there, calling even the tiniest baby Osama Bin Laden. He'd have to yell his lungs out.

  “Say hello, everyone!” Cousin Prem says, and everybody waves. “Hello, Uncle Rijoy, Auntie Priti, Anu!”

  “Hello!” I yell, then clamp a hand over my mouth.

  “This is Auntie Biku's flat in Alipore, Kolkata, first floor,” Prem says, breathing loudly. “Artsy shot number one.” The camera points at the fan turning lazily on the ceiling, then sideways at the doorway, then tapes the relatives talking upside down. I'm getting dizzy.

  The camera bounces and jiggles out onto the balcony, zooms in on a beetle. “Artsy shot two,” Prem says. “Across there is the street.” Auntie's voice shouts in the background, “Where are you going, Prem?”

  The camera angles in on a light-brown lizard clinging to the wall. “Gecko,” Prem narrates, “the house lizard of India.” Then the camera moves sideways to point at cracks and stains in the walls. “Water damage à la monsoon,” he says.

  “Hey, Prem!” a voice shouts from inside. “You filming mosquitoes again?”

  “Or house flies?” someone else says, and laughs.

  “My family does not understand art,” Prem mutters. The camera pans across a courtyard dotted with palm trees. A woman rushes by in a shiny sari and flashy gold jewelry. She lifts the end of her sari over her face and giggles. Children run by, shouting, their hair slicked back and black kohl rimming their eyes. They don't have Curtis to bully them, and not even a notion that Oyster Cove exists. I want to reach through the camera and touch them. I can't help feeling that Prem's camera is about to show me something important.

  “Too artsy, this boy.” Auntie's sitting wedged between Ma and Dad on the couch. She munches loudly on popcorn and giggles as the video bounces outside, goes black, and then suddenly angles into a busy street where the air is thick with smoke and exhaust. Horns beep. The road chokes with bulbous white cars and scooters. Crowds of barefoot children run up to the camera and stare. I sit back, startled. Those faces come so close, looking right into me. If I didn't wash my hair or change my clothes for a month, I might look like them.

  “This, the real Kolkata!” Prem bounces the camera along a crowded road. I feel like I'm on a roller coaster. I might hurl.

  “A group of people gathers at the corner. We'll see what they're up to, shall we?” Prem's walking, but the camera accidentally points up to the murky sky, then sideways, filming garbage and cracks in walls, and animals crossing dusty roads. Then the camera drops to the crowd.

  “What's going on there?” I ask.

  “They're asking the sadhu for healing,” Auntie says. “Very strange, those sadhus. Holy men, you know.”

  “A sadhu!” I nearly shout. A holy man! “Did he meditate in a cave for twelve years?”

  Ma laughs. “They think they can heal people with a mere touch of a feather.”

  “Not any feather,” Auntie says. “Peacock feather.”

  “What does the feather do?” I ask.

  Auntie shrugs. “The sadhus do strange things for no reason. Some stand for years with one arm up in the air. Or sit in dark caves.”

  “Have you heard of Ludkan Baba?” Dad asks. “He rolled thousands of miles.”

  “Acha,” Auntie says. “Sadhus think they can do anything— banish demons, talk to the dead, and even bring them back. The feather is supposed to bring you closer to the gods.”

  The camera swings through the crowd and catches the edge of a brown-skinned man sitting cross-legged on a mat.

  “Is that him?” I ask.

  “That's the boy-Baba,” Auntie says.

  I'm so cl
ose to the TV, I could fall in. “So the holy man—the boy-Baba—has special powers?”

  Auntie snorts through her nose. “He recites mantras—opening channels to the spirits, one supposes.”

  “How does he open a channel?” I hardly dare hope.

  “When he renounced his old life, leaving behind all earthly possessions, he shaved off all his hair.”

  “Now he lets his hair grow as a tribute to Shiva,” Dad cuts in. “Very strange, nah?”

  “Bapu prayed to Shiva too,” I say.

  “Bapu was not a sadhu,” Ma says.

  “Be careful of sadhus,” Auntie Biku says. “They're dangerous. In the fourteenth century, they were known as magicians who could fly or even live on air.”

  Flying, like Garuda! Could this be my answer? In the traveling sadhu who might be able to fly? A lick of fire races through me. Bapu's stories burn in my mind—the stories of the holy men, the wanderers who seek the Inner Light. They wander hundreds of miles and accept only alms and water, and sometimes cigarettes. They meditate and perform good deeds to find a direct route to holiness. They take the commuter lane without all the traffic and extra exits.

  Cousin Prem's camera breaks through the crowd and there's the sadhu in a red loincloth. I suck in a sharp breath.

  “He's a follower of Shiva,” Auntie says. “Why Prem is filming this, I don't know!”

  Prem's voice whispers, “He's a young sadhu. He carries Shiva's trident of destruction attached to a golden, two-sided drum of creation. In his other hand, he holds a long peacock feather, which he uses to anoint people with holiness.”

  The boy-Baba is not much older than me. A tangle of long, knotted hair tumbles down in dreadlocks. Bright eyes pierce the camera as if he can see right into me. As if he knows all my secrets.