Here and Back Again (updated)

Nina Simone – I Can’t See Nobody (Daniel Y. Remix)

“I’m really here,” I thought. I was standing in the balcony, the bright floor waxy and red beneath me, watching your father walk towards the entrance on the ground floor. He looked old and unexpectedly fragile, his shoulders and slender chest bent beneath his pressed white shirt, as he crossed the dirt path in front of your house. He paused at the iron gate, one hand reaching for his keys and I tightened my grip on the balustrade. It curved reassuringly firmly beneath my fingers, real. It was mid-afternoon. That day it was still out, the traffic had slowed so that the thoroughfare at the end of the street was quieter than usual, and the metal bar was cool against my palm.

“I’m here,” I thought. I could hear you moving inside, walking to the balcony’s door, about to come stand beside me and as I turned my head towards your footsteps, I thought, “I’m really here and this is not a dream.”

I woke up a few minutes later. I stared at the ceiling and I felt as though I’d swallowed light, as though I’d been painstakingly hollowed out and filled with something intangible, a glow pulsing along my diaphragm.

A night a week later I was there again, in a different part of the city. It was night now, crowded with the noise of water. As though I were really there and really had been there seven nights ago, I remembered my last trip, remembered that particular combination of stillness and cool on that balcony, and the sound of you at my back like heat. “I was here last week,” I said, over the noise, to you, speaking to your bemused and concerned eyes.

It’s not so strange. After all, that building has existed as much in my sleep as anywhere else. My first memory of your old home comes from a recurring childhood dream that featured as its central motif the tightly-coiled iron staircase that twisted up its three floors. The self-referentialism of my dreams, when it comes to the time I spent in the place you grew up, is nothing new.

Several months ago, I scoffed, “you don’t really mean that,” when someone I knew mentioned he’d “go back” to Sri Lanka to “refresh his vigour for life.” He responded that he did mean exactly that. I, attempting honesty, admitted that I too could see myself “returning”, though for other reasons.

That was in May, when the desperation to be somewhere else, anywhere else first set in. I loved the city I live in very much, but I wanted out just then more than I could explain. I spent my time piecing together piteous little designs, impossibly far-fetched plans for how the future might be and where I might find whatever I was looking for – which, after all, was nothing more and nothing less than difference.

This summer it became a matter of some urgency that I track down the relatives I’d never met. It became important because for the first time I could remember I had begun making the necessarily logical connections about my life, though I consistently arrived at characteristically illogical conclusions.

I’ve been thinking about family and home, about the specific buildings that ground us, the ways those particular rooms define the choices we make. What if, after all, what I am is a collection of all the rooms other people have been: the bedrooms and the hospital wards; the college dorms and the jail cell; the tea houses and the post office; and the kitchens – so many different kinds of kitchens, most of all the kitchens. Maybe if I met them, these people I’d never known, talked to them in their homes, surrounded by their families or their solitudes, I’d know where my own life was heading and what kind of hurts to prepare myself for.

“Part of the reason i want to go,” explained my friend in May, “is the myth that i feel some sort of inexplicable entitlement to some portion of it. and then part of the reason i want to go is to destroy that myth too i guess.”

It’s not so inexplicable, my sense of entitlement, because it isn’t the island to which I feel entitled. There are only a few places I need to revisit, only a very select group of people to whom I need to speak. Among other things, there is a specific building in Colombo, that roof, that balcony, that light. It is your home, your childhood, your family to which I am entitled, even though I’m not. You aren’t blood, but something close, something that will always keep me connected to the island. Memory.

I would wake up mornings in Kingston thinking I heard crows and would lie in bed disoriented, expecting a thicker and brighter light than that which invariably greeted me, expecting a different noise than the quietness of the basement those three years.

I am entitled to nothing of the country. I was only ever an interloper there, a visitor in other people’s homes, someone whose presence was suffered for the love those people had for my parents. But what I can claim rightfully as mine is blood, is family, is the fucked up way things resurface across generations and continents. What I can claim rightfully is also you, the way you continue to figure in my life, the way your absence across these years continues to inexplicably prefigure my movements. This is not nostalgia, except when it is. When it isn’t, it is curiosity and occasionally anger.

So you see, there is this story that I want to write and like everything I’ve ever written it is about me, and this is ultimately how I connect myself to that island and to you, to those months I spent in that place you once called home, that particular triple-storied building, those particular days when the sun was not as bright as I remember it now. And the rain and the sound of the mornings and the arguments and the nights and the deaths and the love.

I owe your father an email. Like most of the letters I’ve written this last year it would begin with an apology. Dear Uncle, I’m sorry. As the apology grows ever more pertinent, it becames an increasingly difficult letter to send. How are you? It has been a long time.

I have a picture I took of your father preparing dinner the night I came to visit. It is a poorly lit picture, dank with indoor shadows, dampening my previous memories of the breakfasts he would insist on making me in your bright kitchen. In this picture, he is standing at the sink, back to me, one arm raised, reaching for something from one of the cupboards. It looks as though he’s dancing there by himself in his thin white dress shirt with his sleeves rolled up and his striped grey sarong.

I have a picture of your brother too, this one taken in the other house, the one they called ‘mine.’ The lighting is somewhat better here, but it’s still clearly evening. I think of that picture now and the memory of the nights I spent there in that wide, low building swells up from the base of my stomach, that combination of heat and waiting as viscerally present now as it was then. In this picture, your brother is holding a little girl in his arms and she is reaching out to the camera, eyes wide and laughing. He has his face turned into her neck. The veins standing out along his own and his shoulders are too straight, too tense.

That was the first night he came to visit, a few days after I arrived. He’d grown into a breadth that weighed down his former leanness. Unlike you, he has remained as dark-skinned as he always was. How did that happen with you? How did your skin change so drastically in the short time I was away? What was this change and how did you learn to know yourself in your new body?

Five minutes into our first conversation that night, he interrupted me. “You haven’t changed,” he said. I continued talking as though I hadn’t heard him, noting the finality with which he’d said that, as though he’d just resolved an argument he’d been having with himself, noting also the ways that he had changed. I wished he’d said nothing; he couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about.

I saw him off afterwards. We said brusque goodbyes on the verandah, choppy and carelessly awkward farewells. I watched coolly as he put on his helmet and got on his bike. It was a few hours after midnight, so it must have been quiet out as he left, but his engine didn’t seem to kick up much noise, not much more noise than the sight of him of leaving, with that strange new tension evident in the angle of his back and the tightness around his neck.

Your mother is as beautiful as ever. You grew into her eyes, her mouth. I was not entirely sure what to say to her, and so adopted a policy of silence that revealed far more than even I had thought worth hiding. But still, she had grown even more indecipherable. When we were younger, I had put her irrationality down to the mutual illogic of our parents, but I’d grown up and the transparency of her desires now was bewildering.

You are still the most beautiful man I’ve ever known, which fact has come to mean different things than it once did. It used to be a straightforward thing: you were a beautiful man and charming as a result.
But you grew up there, in that house. I know what went into the making of you, the child you were, whose prickliness must always feel at odd with that new, too-slick charm that you did so well.

Please give my salaams to everyone.
Fathima

In May, I winced listening to my friend talk, especially at this phrase ‘go back.’ I can’t go back. There is nothing to which to go back, nothing that waited for me. This place moved on in my absence. The building emptied, you left, the childhoods fell away from us. The person, I, who will arrive is not the person who left, so even my presence in this motion, backwards or otherwise, is suspect. When next I see you, you will not be the person I knew, nor will I.