lone pebble

My father will occasionally have one us of check his emails for him. Every time we do so constitutes a technological intervention, beginning with the retrieval of his password and ending with a careful explanation of the metaphysics of the Internet. We remember to check his email so rarely, though, that more often than not we end up having to reset his password, only to find his inbox scrubbed empty all over again by Hotmail’s invisible slaveforce. When we do check his mail in time to read his letters, I skim through the emails, tell him who wrote and repeat the gist of their messages. Sometimes he requests a print out of his emails, sometimes he has one of us reply for him, and sometimes he types out a response himself, tortuously reassuring himself of the location of each letter on the keyboard before committing himself to touching it.

There was one man whose emails I never attempted to summarise to my father. Arjun emailed, I’d say and my father would never ask what he’d written, only tell me to note the email so he’d remember to read it himself. He emailed fairly regularly, a childhood friend of my father’s who’d moved to Ohio in the 1960s to do a PhD. Thirty years later, dissertation incomplete, he made a trip to Canada, wandered drunk into a snowstorm where he saw Jesus, and lost four fingers to frostbite, two from each hand. He had his surgery done in Toronto General and his baptism in Montreal. That December, sans former accoutrements of wife and children, he returned to Jaffna, from where he now sends rambling emails addressed to people who have nothing in common with the others listed in his randomly-generated CC fields. The BCCs are rendered only slightly less obscure when my father gets a letter in which his own email address is invisible, where his name shows up in the third person in a conversation with someone he doesn’t know.

And yes, I thought as I read those emails, you had to be certifiably insane to be that explicit about the loneliness that people endure. It bordered on obscene, the clarity of this man’s writing. The first time I read his emails, I thought someone had written my father poetry, compact paragraphs of harsh beauty. Only later, after my father had told me more about Arjun Ishwaran, would I project his depression onto his writings, and do so selfishly, out of a need for self-preservation, because it frightened me how wholly his letters had made sense to me.

“In the Summer of 1990 I sent Rajeevan to New York in the car of Amrit Singh Dhillon of Singapore with $20 and he never came back.”

He appears to be getting better now, though. The letters have lost much of their old lyricism and he uses fewer ellipses. He’s grown fond of rhetorical exclamation marks. He writes about specifics now, about particular incidents and particular people, so that at first glance his emails look like genealogical maps, scored with full names and and key dates, as though each letter is an archival labour, the effort at tracing oblique interconnections meant to counteract the scatteredness of his readership’s body. He writes about his parents dying of old age in his house with him, about their looking after him while they do it; about wartime killings and the drawn out court procedures that follow in the place of funerals and graves; about his daughter who lives in Tasmania with the Australian husband he’s never met; about weddings to which he’s not invited and the affairs he’s never had. They’re still disjointed letters, still addressed to the wrong people, but they no longer strike me as heartbreaking as they once did. My reading them no longer feel likes a violation of his privacy, though it is. Previously, I could not read them except as though addressed to me. Now I read them only as an extension of my father. Conversely, I read them more carefully now, my aloofness letting me linger without significant damage to my composure.

My father sits at the computer, glasses perched stiffly on the end of his nose, and leans into the screen as though it were a portal. He sits like this a long while and then carefully, gingerly clicks the mouse, dragging the scrollbar down as though this motion were a science. He never replies to the emails, but every so often he makes a late night long distance phone call.

Is this the nature of friendship then, I wonder as I watch my father, this particular way of dying, two aged men facing each other over continents and oceans, sharing this distance between them. Is that what it is, that out of respect for a handful of summers my father spent in this other’s childhood home, that one will accompany the other down this inching whorl.

Jihae – Fig Leaf (via zshare)