eulogy

to my guardian angel, to the star.

this was our (me and my bestfriend’s) favourite poem in 7th grade

There was a man with winter hair who lived beyond the sea. And before I knew the shape of my soul, he left a dress for me. Pearl-white, the colour of old bones in riverbeds, the colour of paper. I wore it when I was 3 and knew nothing of the man who had chosen it.

A decade later, my father told me about him, of the old poet in Canada who watched the years pass through a frost-coated window and was pinned against the weight of a body barred from returning. Doctors nailed him to a foreign country.

And while he sat there, an old man among books, I was growing into the very thing he had spent his life loving. The same strange affliction, the same strange sickness, the collecting of books, the worship of pauses, the belief that language could raise the dead and soothe my aching soul.

All the yearning for his homeland had hollowed him into a bell. Every winter wind that crossed the Atlantic rang through him. The homesick poet wanted someone in the family to love literature as he did. He did not know he had already chosen me with the pearly white dress. Like two wolves calling through different forests, we spent years answering each other without hearing the sound.

My proud father mailed him my poems. Across countries, he read pages touched by my hands. I imagine him reading them under a lamp's yellow wound. I imagine his white head bent low. I imagine him smiling but I stop because the dead are dangerous. I grinned at his texts like a child being fed sweets for dinner, I was his extraordinary child, I was supposed to be a prodigy. English was the dream we shared. It slept in different houses, fed from different hands, but knew the same path through the dark.

I wanted to interview him for my final year project work at school. I wanted to speak with him myself. I wanted to ask what homesickness looked like after a lifetime. Whether exile ever hardens into something bearable, whether it ever calcifies. Whether the places we leave behind eventually leave us too. I was a month too late, tangled up choking on science that never made sense to me, miles apart from my poems. He died before i could hear him speak. And maybe i left science because i owed it to him, to follow what was in my heart. And maybe i never miss a day of college because I'm grateful for that choice, I'm grateful to know what he knew too.

His absence has become an organ. It hangs somewhere behind my ribs, pale and glistening. I keep discovering new veins attached to it. A book I love, a line I mark, the life I choose. Tug one thread and there he is again, buried in the tissue.

Now he exists only in a white dress, a stack of books, a voice carried secondhand through my father. My copy of Gitanjali is unread in a cardboard box, and I've lost all his messages from my digital archive. The ocean between us was glass. I spent years pressing my palm against the opposite side.

And yet I know him. I know the colour of his eyes not the sound of his laughter. The corridor of his mind but not the depths of his heart. The animal that lived inside him and fed on stories, not the man who ached till he died.

When I am writing, if I think too hard, I feel him looking from over my shoulder. And there is a feeling of being recognized by someone who no longer exists. It's futile because you know someone could've saved you by simply seeing you but they're no longer here and no matter how hard you try you can never speak to them again.

I didn't make it to his funeral, nor did I see his huge library. I think of all the books he touched, thousands of pages turned by his fingers that have collapsed back into the earth. The skin is gone, the nails are gone, the thoughts remain, like mould moving through a wall, like weed growing on graves. Sometimes I imagine his library dismantled shelf by shelf. The books carried away in cardboard boxes. A slow scavenging. His marginalia separated from his body. His books were donated to a library. I ached to read his diary with the greed of an archaeologist. I wanted the rough drafts, the shopping lists, the crossed-out lines.

An Indian immigrant dies in Canada prompting a girl of his mother land to change her degree because she is done cheating herself. Sometimes I think I'm destined to become like him, that I am him, but I don't know. The cruelest thing is not that he died, it is that we almost met.

My great-grandfather's brother was an ocean away from me and is now nearest he has ever been. The poet with eyes like marble and white hair was my soulmate, but my soulmate is dead.

Shipbound like a seedling,

afraid I'll bloom elsewhere and

rot facing homeward.

him.

Ps. There is nothing I wouldn't give just to speak to you once. I don't know what I would say. Perhaps, I would like to thank you for nudging me to choose the right path, the path which was right for my heart. I wish I could tell you what I was studying so you could feel the shared joy again. I met you once and never again, I would tell you how i loved the white dress too much and wore it to its rags. You didn't know me, but you knew my writing, and I knew yours, and maybe that is all there is to know.