One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

by Scaachi Koul

  Once we got to Ko Phi Phi Don, Hamhock jumped overboard before we even came to a full stop. He swam around, letting the water cool him down like a playful dolphin. I hung off the side of the boat before letting my body fall in, then flailed towards him and clung to his back like a kinkajou just trying to stay alive long enough to be sent to a nice, temperature-controlled zoo where I’d be guaranteed that the other animals had also been vaccinated.

  Later that day, we went snorkelling. I had spent days psyching myself up to swim in open, unregulated waters with choppy waves and salt that rubs itself into all the tiny cuts you didn’t know you had all over your body. When we climbed into the boat that would take us to the reef, I quietly prayed for this to go smoothly, for me not just to survive it but to avoid embarrassing myself in front of the other couple joining us. I wore a life jacket in the water like a child too unsure of herself to go into the community pool alone. I saw a reef shark underwater—a vegetarian—and panicked so fiercely that I smashed my knee on a chunk of coral, then worried that the shark would smell the blood and take a sharp right, suddenly deciding he liked the taste of Brown Coward.

  Even more pathetic, maybe, is that I actually can swim. My mom made me take six years of swimming lessons, in case I somehow risked drowning in landlocked Calgary. She likes to tell the story of my brother, who, the first time he encountered a pool, jumped into the deep end without being able to swim. I, you will not be surprised to hear, never did this.

  When we returned to shore, Hamhock and I took a dip in the water—our feet touching the bottom, an imperative for me. But Hamhock pulled me in and lifted me up, threatening to dunk my head under. I kicked and punched until he released me, my head still dry, his body covered in deep scratches from my long nails.

  “Were you always like this?” he asked before diving under and not coming up for ten, fifteen seconds, each of them a lifetime for me.

  —

  Fear was inherent in our family, but it was magnified by the ever-looming promise of death. As long as I’ve known him, my dad has always been on alert, either because his father died so young and suddenly or because his mother could have died at any moment. I’ve only ever known Papa as a man without a father, but I was in my early twenties when Behenji died. Papa cried for a full day, and then took on her fate for himself: “Be good,” he told me, “because one day I won’t be here.”

  Mom raised me with an undercurrent of fear beneath her hysterics, but it was only after she lost both of her parents within eleven months of each other that it really seemed as though a screw was knocking around loose in her heart.

  When I was twelve, my mom’s mother got sick. I had only met her a few times, and she didn’t speak any English, so our communications were guided by her firm hugs or heavy sobbing or sometimes both. She fretted constantly, fussed over my mother when we visited, and they seemed to have the same relationship that in hindsight my mother and I were on the verge of having: my grandmother worrying over my mother, and my mom trying to explain to her that she was an adult, and safe, and cared for. Canada isn’t so bad. It’s cold, but the house has plenty of heat and sometimes we roll tree sap into fresh snow. It’s a little gross, but the kids like it. Though I never understood what she was saying, it was clear that my grandmother loved my mom so much that I felt embarrassed by its intensity. Who is this lady? I wondered. Why does her breathing get shallow when my mom leaves the room, if only for a second?

  Mom said little about her mother’s illness, but we vacationed less and she flew more and more to India. I was left in Papa’s care more than once, which could have been characterized as actual child abuse because he didn’t know how old I was, or what my date of birth is, or where my school was, or how to get there, or how many portions of half-cooked basmati rice (and nothing else) might lead to scurvy. Mom would return from these trips a little more deflated each time. Her phone calls became more strained, and it was almost as if you could hear her vocal cords snap every time you inquired about her mother’s health. She didn’t even have the energy to fight with me. Once, when she returned home from India jet-lagged and devastated, I presented her with yet another failed math test that my teacher required I get signed. Usually this resulted in Mom screaming about my missed potential, how it was important I become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, how I needed to work harder. Instead, she scratched her signature on the top of the page and asked, softly, “What happened here?” I shrugged, and she sank into the couch. I waited by her side, thinking she was gathering the ire to grab me by my collar or to ban me from using the internet for a few days. Nothing came.

  Almost a year later, my mother again returned to India, to the two-room house her parents shared. Her mother died. Eleven months later, my Gentle Giant grandfather was gone too. Mom came home from India with his reading glasses and a few pictures. For months, I’d catch her staring out the big window in our living room, her face shiny from crying. I’d ask her what she was thinking about, and she’d let out a big sigh. “Oh, sometimes I look around and I think I’ve seen my mom. But she’s not there.” She’d sit upstairs at the makeshift temple she built in their guest room and would weep over her father’s memory, her tears falling on his reading glasses, and she’d wipe them off with her little fingers. What was once worth exploring and seeing and tasting and tripping over had now punished her, isolated her in a second country in her third, maybe fourth language. With both her parents gone, there was no one left to soak up that fear, the responsibility of worry. After Papa lost his mother, he got angry enough for the entire family. He sulked, and he raged at bottles that didn’t open easily or when the television glitched or when the Wi-Fi felt slower than usual. When Mom lost her parents, she sank into fear. She just wanted everyone to stay home.

  We lived three minutes from a Mac’s Convenience where I’d go for ten- and twenty-five-cent candies from a bulk bin, but never alone. (“Someone might grab you,” Mom would say.) I couldn’t go on a sleepover if my friend’s mom wasn’t home and it was just her dad. (“You can’t trust men,” something my father—a human man—would say, which I would later learn wasn’t entirely untrue.) For years, my hair had to be pulled away from my face and fastened with a scrunchie, as if loose hair said something about loose character. (When my mom prepped my ponytail for a dinner party and a strand hung over my eyes, I asked if I could keep it that way. “What are you, a teenager?” she asked, horrified by the prospect of my inevitable aging, dragging the wayward hair into the silvery band. When I became a teenager a few years later, I let my hair hang over my face at all times.)

  It was all in the service of keeping their daughter safe, but with the added bonus of making me afraid of nearly everything, external and internal. Boys scared me well into my twenties, and although it was legal in my province to get a driver’s licence at fourteen, I waited until seventeen and then only drove once on my own because Papa wanted me to go well below the speed limit (also to stop the car as soon as I saw a yellow light, wherever I was, it almost didn’t matter if the light was for my lane, just stop the car and maybe call an ambulance). When I went to Girl Guide camp, I refused to help build a fire by lighting a match because what if I burned my entire fucking arm off? Wouldn’t you feel bad then, Supervisor Tara, when you returned me to my mother damaged and charred, you Catholic devil?

  I left home right after high school, a few years after my grandparents’ deaths, hardly ready to be without my mother. Every cell in me told me not to go, that my parents were right that the rest of the world was gearing up to kill me. Neither of my parents ever told me not to go, but I knew they wanted to. I wanted to stop myself too. When I got into university, Mom smiled meekly and sighed. “I’m happy for you,” she said. “But are you sure?” It didn’t help that once I did leave, my mother called daily, constantly checking in to see whether I was sick or hurt or destitute or desperate. If I didn’t pick up, it merited blind panic and possibly a missing persons report. I started to carry my phone around in my bra just in c
ase “something” happened—that nebulous designation of “something,” the vague suggestion that at any point, the world will collapse, and oh, if only I had my phone!

  I didn’t become afraid of flying until my mother started talking about planes as if they were all doomed Zeppelins. Instead of “Have a nice flight,” it was “Call me the second you land.” I wasn’t nervous around water until a trip to Cuba when she called and warned me to stay away from the ocean: “You’ll get arrogant and a wave will come and just get you.” (On a different trip, to Greece, I received one foreseen text from her that simply read, “Remember it is SEA.”) Papa wouldn’t even acknowledge the trip to Cuba at all and instead gave me an eight-day silent treatment. Nothing, it seems, scares you into perpetual fear quite like becoming one of the oldest in your bloodline.

  Mom doesn’t like it when I fly or take the subway or cross busy intersections. She suggests I avoid eating new things or talking to strangers or getting the flu, because who knows what could kill me? She sends panicked texts when she hears it’ll snow in my city, checking in to make sure that I have “enough food and socks.” She calls when there’s a power outage in a neighbouring town. As a kid, Mom babied me when I had a cough with soups and frozen treats but never mentioned emergency rooms or blood transfusions. Colds didn’t concern her until both her parents came down with what seemed like small illnesses that, in the end, killed them. Now, if I sound remotely ill, her first instinct is to demand I take a four-hour flight home so that she can take me to the hospital. Is that too inconvenient? Fine, then she is more than willing to come to me with some clear broths.

  Papa would also prefer I stay at home. At this point, he’ll settle for anyone’s home, not necessarily his own miles away from where I now live. At twenty-two, I went to Ecuador for a week, and the night before I left, my dad sent me an email that wasn’t so much a plea for me to be careful as it was a request for me to not do anything, ever.

  What was the rationale in choosing the country you are going to. Is it some sort of getting back at me. You know that I will be up for all the period that you will be gone. Your brother did not go anywhere this exotic. What did I do to you. I did exactly what you wanted to do in terms of your post high school education. Is this Hostel that you are going to be safe. Do you have to share bathroom. What other places are you visiting. I know there is nothing I can do except stay up nights and days while you are away. No other kid has done this. Why, why.

  May some heavenly force be your protector. I have been rendered speechless. Who are other people going with you. Why could you not visit home for these number of days. You have whole life ahead to go to these places.

  He was indeed rendered speechless: as is his wont, he refused to speak to me for a week after I returned, unscathed. “What’s in Ecuador?” he asked once he was ready to talk to me again. “Some volcanoes and people who don’t speak English. THAT’S ALL.”

  When you leave the protective wing of your family for the first time, it takes a while before you learn that the only person now tasked with taking care of you is you. For the first year, I drank too much and licked powdered cheese off my fingers for dinner and collapsed on side streets alone, but once I realized that this was my life now, a life without my parents circling me with hair ties (“It’s going to get caught in your seatbelt”) or plates of protein-rich food (“Your eyes will fall out of your head if you don’t eat”), it was up to me to be afraid for me. I lost any real interest in travelling, because the world was a disease-ridden place that would kill you if given the chance. My panic attacks resurfaced—I lived four minutes from campus, but would be late for every class because I just wasn’t sure if this was a good day to leave the house. The universe told me it was an inauspicious time.

  I now call my parents every day. My dad usually asks the same questions, his barometer of whether it’s still okay to let me be on my own: “Are you okay? How are you feeling? Are you weak? You sound weak.” Every time he asks me, I want to collapse into him a little more. I want to beg to come home, where I can keep an eye on them, and they can keep their eyes on me. Maybe we won’t die if we’re constantly looking at each other.

  Sometimes when I call I feel my mother’s fear and distress so deeply that it scrapes my insides clean. She answers the phone with a weak purr, groaning “Hiiii,” as if it’s taking all her energy to push air out of her lungs. Ask her how she’s feeling and maybe she’ll squeeze out, “Oh, I’m okay, just tired.” Mom’s health always looms over us—over me—thanks to the rheumatoid arthritis in her ribs and her hands and her elbows, the stomach aches, the unexplained chest pains and fainting spells. Every few years, she’s taken to the ER or is mounted in the back of an ambulance and I feel the world stop until I know she’s home again. One morning when I was in the fifth grade, her blood sugar dipped and she fainted in our living room. I packed my lunch into my backpack while a very nice EMT named Chris took her blood pressure and asked her if she knew where she was. She thought he was her son. (Wishful thinking, maybe. They always wanted him to be a doctor.)

  When I first told them about Hamhock, they were livid—he’s white and older than the entire solar system and it wasn’t someone they chose, so I did them no favours—but while Papa was mad, he put on like he was upset for Mom’s sake. “She can barely eat,” he told me over the phone, as if this able-bodied woman had become an amoeba overnight. Papa talks about Mom like this a lot, like a weak fawn, largely because she ends up the vessel for all his anxieties too. (It is, indeed, easy for us to think Mom is weak. She absorbs everything from the rest of us, her ungrateful, dissonant family.) She took on the responsibility for being afraid for everyone. And if you spend that much time thinking that something is going to happen to you, it’s likely because once in your life, something did, and you just don’t want it to happen again.

  Though Papa didn’t like Hamhock, he often delegated his feelings to Mom: it was poor, sad Mom who couldn’t handle this, I needed to behave for her sake. He sometimes talks about her as if she’s feeble, but I’ve known the truth from the first time she threatened to strangle me for disorganizing her Tupperware drawer. (“ALWAYS WITH THE TOPS,” she’d say, followed by a Kashmiri curse that, roughly translated, threatens you with actual lightning.)

  And she, meanwhile, would call me privately and weep and whine and beg me to make choices that wouldn’t upset my father so dramatically. “You know how he gets,” she told me. “Now he’s going to be miserable around here and who will I talk to if he’s so angry?”

  But she asks about Hamhock. She checks in on him when he gets a cold, punctuated by demands that we just get married already. She is working on it. She’s trying to put her fears on hold, for now. Being afraid of the world, of unknown beasts, only makes you feel alone. Sometimes you just need to get on the plane and hope nothing bad happens.

  —

  While our boat slapped against the waves in Ko Phi Phi, I braced myself for every impact, trying to be brave for Hamhock. What’s the worst that could happen? I thought. I can swim. Technically. Are there jellyfish in this water? Christ, maybe for our next vacation we can fly directly into the sun’s core.

  I felt like I did at twelve on the back of my mom’s Sea-Doo when we took summer trips to Kelowna. She always sped too fast for me to feel comfortable, the front of the vehicle going smack-smack-smack against Lake Okanagan. I’d grip my mom’s soft belly and she’d laugh, that deep chuckle that rumbles out of her heart, and tell me to stop whining. When we’d return to land, all the other parents would ask me if I’d had fun and I’d grumble and tell them I was never speaking to my mother again. But it wasn’t real fear because I was with my mom. Nothing bad happens when you’re with your mom.

  After we landed from our turbulent flight home, I phoned my mom to let her know I was fine, omitting, of course, all the rickety boat rides and rocky flights and flesh-eating bugs and likely poisonous protein I had eaten. She let out an audible breath and told me she was glad we had a good time. I felt
guilty for being gone, for making her anxious despite her own attempts to not imagine the worst. If I was that nervous having fun, I can’t imagine how it must have felt to be waiting for me to come home. Why do I keep doing this to her? Why do I let her feel so terrible? Are these trips really worth torturing this woman? That’s enough. That’s enough of everything.

  “Oh,” she said. “I forgot to tell you. We’re going to Cuba next month.”

  —

  Though the walls of her house seem to be curling around her, my mom is trying to claw her way out. I can sometimes see her push against whatever her brain is doing to keep her in the house, safe, quiet, sleepy. Sometimes she will talk herself into driving alone in less than ideal weather conditions. Now and then, I can convince her to eat something rapturously unhealthy. I once got her to drink two glasses of white wine and she ended up so drunk that she demanded to know “where the chicken went” and why I “ate all the chicken without asking.” There was no chicken in the house. I apologized regardless. It was just nice to see her fall asleep on the couch, upright, mouth still filled with the pasta she had asked me to reheat for her.

  She’s starting to laugh again when my dad becomes furious over small indignities. He’s still anxious about the future, angry about the inevitability of death, angry when he’s hungry, angry when he’s tired, but Mom just laughs most of it off. I visited them right before they left for Cuba, and sat on their bed watching them pack. They had the same bedspread they had when I was a kid, a white Kutch quilt, pastel pink and green triangles sewn on along with little round mirrors. While my mom packed for St. Thomas when I was in the second grade, I tried to find my reflection warped in those little pieces of glass, tried to figure out how someone could make them so thin that they didn’t hurt when you sat on them, and so malleable that they wouldn’t break under your weight. Nearly twenty years later, I picked at them all the same while my parents considered taking two bags for a week in Cuba. Two bags each.