by Scaachi Koul
Rhythms of the house have changed since Raisin took over. She wants to jump on all the beds and eat whipped cream straight from the freezer and use her baseball bat in the house. When she sleeps over, she sleeps in my old room, which used to be my brother’s room, or in her grandparents’ bed, another place I feel like I still own. My dad’s armchair isn’t his anymore; she sprawls across it instead and refuses to leave. She’s taken his seat at the kitchen table, too. And his aluminum water bottle. And his office, now filled with plastic baseball bats and Disney tea sets and board games. “Do I own anything in here?” Papa once muttered to himself, and Raisin replied with, “NO, IT’S MINE.”
When I visit home, then, I live out of a suitcase, and, since the house hardly looks the same, I listen for sounds that remind me that this is home. Mom closes the glass door of her shower: that is morning. Papa flicks on the radio: that is early afternoon. His armchair creaks and snaps to bring up the leg rest: that’s late afternoon. A pressure cooker screams in the kitchen: it’s almost dinnertime. The curtains are closed in the living room and it sounds like soft strips of fabric are being gently torn: my parents are going to bed. My apartment doesn’t have these same sounds; instead, my sounds are a cat pawing through her food bowl, the front door being locked, the swish of sheets being readjusted. These sounds don’t feel the same. They don’t feel as comforting, because they are mine, are my responsibility, while the ones at home are my parents’—the promise that everything is fine, consistent, safe at home.
—
Chacha’s new house is far from the home he grew up in with my father, in a more suburban area I’d never been to before. It’s comparatively palatial, all marble and bright flowers in the yard and a porch swing. Raisin and I went for the swing as soon as we saw it. “Your grandmother liked that seat too,” Chacha told me. They have a computer, a desktop that isn’t very fast but gets the job done. All the bedrooms have big windows that let in plenty of light.
On one side of the house is a dirt road that leads back to the city, and on the other, a few miles away, is Pakistan. The internet conked out a lot, and I asked my uncle why that kept happening. For a country booming with industry and at the very tip of the IT industry, it’s a weird problem to have. He rifled through a junk drawer and pulled out a little lead slug.
“What do you think this is?” he asked me.
I weighed it in my hand. “A bullet?”
“It flew from the Pakistani border to our house and landed on the roof. And that’s why the internet is so slow here.”
There is always unrest around here—the airport is a military airport, and Jammu’s connection with Kashmir means you see men in green berets with rifles walking around, smoking skinny cigarettes—but you wouldn’t know it by the evenings we spent at Chacha’s house. Guava grows in the backyard, and it is bright pink and so sweet that I didn’t even bother dusting it with salt like I had been taught by my mother, the way to tolerate Canadian amrood. Everything here is pink and cozy. My brother and I didn’t want to leave. We had no interest in travelling, in visiting attractions. We just liked being home.
This was nothing like the house I remember my uncle having, but it might be closer to what he and my dad remember. There isn’t a ravine, but a goat walked past our window followed by a little boy trying to guide him in the right direction. If that isn’t bucolic, nothing is.
My brother, sister-in-law, Raisin, and I left India two weeks before my parents. Chacha helped us pack our bags into his car before driving us to the airport. Mom and Papa hugged us goodbye—none of us cried, largely because I think we had all had enough of each other for a few weeks at least. Chachi cried so hard that I wanted her to go back inside. “You’ll come back, haan?” she asked me. I told her of course, but she kept crying, and hugged me one more time before pushing me away from her.
When we climbed into the car, I turned back for one last look at this new house, at the new gate in freshly painted black, and at the plate affixed to the fence with the house’s address. Above the house number is “Prithvi,” my grandfather’s name, one last link to a man who will never see this house or the people in it. We drove off to the airport, and I watched as his name shrank in the distance.
Papa
You are a ray of sunshine in this dark, ominous world.
Anyway
The first real boyfriend I had would meet me in a park, halfway between our houses. It seemed like fate that our homes were so close to each other, that we liked the same music, that we hated almost everyone else. It was confusing, then, that our biggest similarity was our biggest difference: I was being raised in an Indian Hindu household, and he in a Pakistani Muslim one. While we knew the details of each other’s upbringing (we ate so many of the same foods, our parents wanted so much of the same things for us), we also knew we weren’t allowed to be dating in high school, never mind dating someone from a warring region, never mind someone from a warring religion, never mind sneaking out to a heavily wooded area in our suburb so we could lie in the sun together.
To get to the park, you had to walk through a puddled alley to a small forest, with tall trees that obscured the sky, thick brush that made it impossible to see the end of the path until you caught a glimpse of a little slide. We’d hide behind the bushes next to the park while younger girls crawled on the jungle gym and tried to complete a full loop on the swings.
My boyfriend wanted us to keep the park, or more pressingly, our relationship, a secret, and I never asked for anything different. We already knew it was impossible, we would never make it out alive if our parents found out. He once invited me over to his house when his parents were away and he showed me around and said, “Do you like it?” It was important that I did because we probably wouldn’t be in each other’s homes again. He guided me into his family’s kitchen and I thought to myself, This will never last. Once, before I even met my brown boyfriend, a white boy in my high school asked me on MSN instant messenger to be his girlfriend. I said okay mostly because saying no seemed rude, and besides, he was on the football team, he had shiny teeth and blue eyes, dimples in both cheeks. Who was I to say no to an interested boy, like some caucasian. His name was white, forgettable, something that even now makes me think of warm, soggy bread, or crackers with the salt brushed off. He’d ask me on dates, to the mall, to the movies, places where people—my people—might see us, and never understood my suggestions: “How about you go into the theatre first and I’ll sneak in after. You’ll know me by the wool face-mask I’ll be wearing. Very trendy for spring.” So it was comforting that this real boyfriend and I had an unspoken agreement, and that he never deigned to ask me to the movies.
We only told a few people that we were dating, but word spread regardless, so we were paranoid someone would tell one of our cousins would tell our uncle would tell our moms. My mom did, indeed, find out—she claimed an aunty drove past the park where we spent our Saturdays—and demanded that I break it off, lest I be disowned. This was a real threat, one that shook me up because, while it was calamitous that Mom knew, it would be a literal life-ender if Papa did. I told my mother I would dump the boy to stay out of trouble, but I didn’t: we just learned to be better liars, to be quieter, to take our feelings and squeeze them until they were unperceivable to anyone other than us. It was worth it to lie, even though we knew it was temporary. Our choices were always between family and freedom. Neither, frankly, were all that easy to walk away from. But it didn’t matter much: we broke up right before I moved out of my hometown for university. We met up in the park for the last time and said goodbye. “It was never going to work,” he told me. I nodded and cried and we hugged while small children climbed the jungle gym near us, beyond the pine.
That relationship was all about restrictions, about working within the confines we needed to in high school. We didn’t want to get in trouble, to have our morality questioned by the cultural norms within our families. We didn’t want a fight, to lose the pro
tective wing of a brown mother, and we knew we each understood this. When it was too risky, he never pressed me to come out anyway, to sneak around when our parents were suspicious.
Hamhock was never like this. When we started dating, I refused to tell my friends about him, to bring him up with my cousins, to acknowledge him anywhere other than in my own head. I figured he would be temporary, a future joke between my friends and me, like, “Remember that Lego-shaped guy you dated for three weeks?” But every date or interaction with him felt like sinking into warm quicksand. He invited me over to his apartment, a two-bedroom on the other side of town, and he made me lobster. He taught me how to crack its claws open, suck meat out of its joints, break its back and dip it into burgundy ramekins filled with melted butter. He met me at the ferry docks and held my hand—pinky between his index and ring fingers, for some reason—while we sailed to the beach, where he would let me hang off his back in the water, the only kind of swimming I like. Once, I made a passing joke about an old shelf in his bathroom, the white paint chipping off and gathering in little corners or flaking off onto my fingers. The next weekend when I came over, he had sanded it down, painted it anew in ghost white. I ran my hand across it and knew, for sure, this was serious.
Hamhock first told me he loved me two weeks into dating. I was in Toronto, folding laundry at eleven in the morning, and he was tailgating a football game in Buffalo. He called me, clearly a few drinks deep, from a porta-potty. “I love you!” he said, and the rest was incoherent before he hung up on me. I continued to date him after that, possibly because I had low self-esteem but more realistically because he felt like home. “Falling in love” sounds so passive, but it did feel unintentional, like tripping into a pit that happened to be filled with downy gold.
So it was early in the genesis of our relationship when Hamhock asked me why my parents didn’t know about him. Without hesitation, he had taken me home and shown me off to his parents and extended family, and everyone seemed relieved that he had found someone as intolerable as him. But my parents didn’t know, my cousins didn’t ask, I didn’t bring him home with me for years. He wanted to be real, to be acknowledged. My first boyfriend and I understood the necessity of being secretive, but to Hamhock, it felt like shame.
I don’t like change, or making big decisions. I don’t like changing my personal status quo even when my status quo isn’t comfortable. For Hamhock, it was easy: you just call up your folks and tell them you’re in looove, that it’s so cooosmic, maybe adding some nonsense about how this is the ooone—platitudes that, overwhelmingly, brown families are immune to. “The one?” I imagined my father saying. “What the hell are you talking about? Five years ago, you were crying about Orlando Bloom marrying some waif with two different eye colours but now, this is the one.” I pictured my mother, meanwhile, weeping endlessly, throwing herself on fainting couches—any couch you faint on is a fainting couch if you just believe—and threatening to die, to just drop dead right there because of her daughter’s rebellion.
I tried explaining to Hamhock that our age difference—an impressive thirteen years—would be the greatest issue. When I told my brother about him—my brother who is twelve years older than me—at first he took Hamhock’s side. “They’ll get over it,” he said. “You’re an adult, they’ll make their peace with it. You know they can’t hold grudges.”
“He’s thirteen years older than I am,” I told him.
My brother let out a heavy sigh, punctuated at the end by a mournful “aaauuughhhhhhhhh.” He mumbled to himself for a moment. “Yeeeaaah,” he said. “That’s not going to work.”
My brother knew, as I knew, that this would be an uphill battle, a lifelong standoff until either I or my parents died. (I am, still, not convinced they won’t outlive me, like lovable radioactive cockroaches or crushing personal debt.) Hamhock was white, which wasn’t necessarily a problem but hardly ideal. He was older than the surface of the earth, adding to a poorly imagined narrative of me, an innocent, being subverted by an old man. But the biggest barrier, ultimately, had nothing to do with Hamhock and everything to do with my genetics: I’m a girl, and brown girls are inevitably treated differently than their brothers or male cousins. My brother married a white girl and moved in with her before marriage to limited if only muted controversy. For me, however, the baby in the family, the least willing to “behave” and, worse, a girl, the rules are rewritten and rarely in my favour. It wasn’t fair, but it was predictable.
When I was twelve or thirteen and starting to notice boys and they were noticing me (but more like how you “notice” a pelican is eating your lunch on the beach), I thought about what it might take to get my dad’s approval to date someone. A white boy, of course, in part because there were so few brown guys around, but mostly so that I could have the ultimate approval of being loved by a white boy. (Getting male attention was one thing; getting white male attention meant something even better, at least to my woefully under-developed brain.) The guy maybe wouldn’t like me at first, but through some disaster, some unknowable misfortune, we’d find each other. Our classroom would have to burst into flames and he’d have to save me, or maybe a school shooter would take over the entire building and I would guide him to safety in the vents. Or what about me getting a horrible illness? A boy could nurse me back to health after a bout of vein cancer, or maybe he could help me see the value of life after a severe thrombosis scare, a disease I had only heard of once and knew absolutely nothing about. That, I figured, would be enough to convince my parents that it was okay to let me date, that it would be good for me, that they would approve of this deviation in my life. The worst thing that ever happened to me as a teenager, apparently, was not being drastically and irrevocably ill.
Hamhock wouldn’t come to my parents like this, like a saviour, like a salve. Our story was delightful in its mundanity: we met, it worked, we’re trying. So after my brother’s reaction I did nothing, told no one else in my family. It’s hard to encapsulate years of your partner quietly waiting for you to take action, of them sitting next to you and though they hold their tongue about the brown elephants in the room, you can hear the constant buzzy hum of them wanting more from you.
Few things get less complicated as you age, but your family, that at least should become easier. You should eventually make peace with everyone, with their decisions and their quirks. With your parents in particular, you should fight less because you have less time to fight. But when I finally did build up the courage to tell my parents about Hamhock, years into dating, I felt that memorable sting of something being so deeply not easy. Over the phone, while my mother said, “I will write in my blood that I will never speak to you again,” and my father told me, “When I have a stroke, you will remember this,” I thought to myself, This is exactly as hard as I thought it would be.
Mom begged me to break up with him. “Just end it,” she told me, steeling her voice to emphasize the demand for finality, for her command to be obeyed. And so I did the same thing I had done as a teenager: “Okay,” I told her the next day. “I did. We’re done.” Her breathing eased and she was friendly again, her anger washed away by my simple act of lying, again, this time a wildly unlivable lie. Hamhock knew I’d lied and he shrank into himself a little more, and the buzz of him hoping for more got louder. Besides that, I was angry for acquiescing—four years living across the country from my parents, an adult old enough to, say, legally purchase a pack of cigarettes and swallow them whole if I wanted, and I was still lying to my mother about who I was dating just to prevent a fight.
Later that week, I confessed to her we were still dating. “I don’t know why you’re doing this to me,” she said, perhaps fanning herself while wearing a feather boa-trimmed robe, mascara running down her face. “Just bring him home and let us meet him.” Mom was flexing towards acceptance, theatrically, like shattering a window to get inside a house when the door is unlocked.
“I think they’ll like me,” Hamhock said, because he is always sweet
, so sweet, and so stupid. We spent a year trying to find the right reason to go home, a good excuse that felt organic and as normal as possible when you’re bringing a boy home to disapproving parents. A friend from high school was getting married and I was in her bridal party, so what better time than her wedding to bring him home? (It’s this, I thought, or a funeral, and there’s rarely cake at funerals.) Hamhock assumed approval would come merely from meeting him, that he just needed to see my mom in person, but she wasn’t the one I was worried about. Mom is unwilling to fight for long. The older she gets, the weaker her rage, the less willing she is to protest the inevitable. But Papa has become more solid, more irritable, less willing to cooperate. Papa is still, at sixty-six, a lot of work. When I first told them about Hamhock, Mom had her moment of vocal panic, but Papa didn’t talk to me for three months.
“It’s not about them liking you,” I said. “It’s about him accepting you.”
—
Papa is difficult, and this either charming character quirk or destructive force of nature is on display best in the first half-hour when I visit home. My mother is always the one to greet me at the airport. My father, meanwhile, usually idles in their Ford Escape in the arrivals lot and waits for me to come to him. He gives me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek, his beard rubbing against my skin and giving me a synesthesia-like tingle in my brain. “Hellllllo,” he’ll say before trying to lift my bag into the trunk and then getting upset that my bag is so heavy and why did I need to pack this much before I end up taking over loading the bag and say that I never asked him to pick up my bag and I am perfectly content with what I brought and maybe lay off a second. “How was the flight?” he’ll ask. Then he’ll tell me exactly how many minutes ahead or behind I am. If I’m right on time, he’ll marvel at it while we pull away from the airport. “Not even a minute off schedule!” he’ll holler. “Amazing. Would you believe it?” I tell him that yes, I can, because that is how planes work.
