sweet fallacies

you can go anywhere you want

To A,

Salmons have a baffling sensory arrangement and nerves and whatnot. They give birth and succumb in the act. And then they drive their exhausted grown bodies, with whatever scarce energy remains, back to the lowly waters that first held them. Their bodies out grow their home. Did you know salmons swim all the way back to their birthplace to die? They spawn, they empty themselves, they lose their purpose of life, and in that depletion they complete the cycle like obedient, god-fearing creatures. Stuck in the matrix, so you would say.

I am not god-fearing, Aadu, but I remember the taste of the waters I came from. It has coarse salt sticking to the roof inside my mouth like the hard boiled eggs we would have on winter mornings. It has sand grains housing between my teeth. It tastes like a naked wire conducting electricity. To you, it should taste like an amalgamation of all your favourite Indian sweets and a gulp of warm honey sliding down an aching throat. I was never heavy on sweetness, you know that. I think about all the roads that lead to our place, still, even after the bitter aftertaste it leaves me with. Though it feels rather unnatural to me.

But coming back home should feel instinctive like a pilgrimage scripted into the marrow. If we’re animalistic like fishes, turtles, and moths, then we’re also destined for homecoming. This would mean that you and I too might meet again, perhaps, in our mother’s womb, but for that she’ll have to swallow us whole. I promise you we’ll be menaces in afterlife, we’ll be like the sickness inside her skin, she’ll have to stick a finger inside her throat to spit us out again. Then you wont have to be the naughty seed alone; I’ll get in trouble along with you. We'll be two stubborn remnants, clenched like something sour on her tongue. Like power bites collected with her four fingers. Or we might meet in the hospital where we were conceived three years apart, the same room, the same bed, the same gynae will push us to hug it out when we will be standing startled at the sight of each other. But I will not see you there soon enough, I refuse to see you again so soon, I want to wait for you for fifty years, until you grow a hunchback and are old enough to shrink to my height and old enough to tell me the tales you told your grandchildren. I will wait until you are old enough to forgive me, or at least tired enough to try.

Are you lonely there, Aadu? I wrote to tell you that I am not going to swim back like salmons. But I am concerned about the hollows inside your cheeks; they’re starting to match mine. I swim in these backwaters now. It’s nice here. It’s starting to grow on me. You would know it if you were here. Though it’s very selfish of me. Would you hate me if I said that the water here would only worsen your acne? It’s okay. You’re a beautiful baby and the constellations on your face can’t take that away from you. You know, papa is right, you’ll outgrow the scars on your face and it won’t hurt as much. Nobody will make fun of you, ever again.

These backwaters make me feel like I can go anywhere I want. Lying here makes me feel the looseness of it all. I can skitter down alien places, slip between unacquainted streets like a loose thread, let the world hush-hum, hush-hum around me. I can dissolve into places that do not know my name, let them take me in without question, like a mouth  not bothering to chew. If it's freedom then it's slick and glimmering like a plate full of warm pasta you used to make for dinner. If it's homelessness, then I'm too tired to feel it ache. It's the way rainwater gathers at the edge of a blade before it falls, sometimes I feel so close to hearing my heart break.

Anywhere else feels soft in its indifference. Doors open. Windows look at sunsets. I can press my palms against walls and feel nothing press back. I can laugh and hear my voice. The world outside is all drip-drop and tick-tick. It's all music, Aadu. It's all like our favourite music. It makes me sick because I feel like I could’ve been free all this time.

Home will only ever suffocate me. Home will suck the blood out of my head and mock me as it'll burn my bones to my last ashes. Home will fill itself with people i don't know how to understand. Anyways, home ceased to exist when they took down all the pink walls. That place now reeks of old socks, wet wood, burnt rice, and Sunday alcohol. The thought of it fills my body with a blood rush, a palpitating heart.

Do you worry about me like I worry about you? But don’t worry like mum does. Her worries are allegorical. I must make her worries mean something more to me if I want to be happy. Like when she would want me to marry because she does not want me to be lonely and paralyzed. Like she would want me to bear children because she wants me to feel the joy of creation. Like she would want me to return because good girls don’t go so far. I so badly want her worries to mean more than they seem. I want them to feel like love. But I don’t want you to worry about whatever happens to us. I won’t be like our uncle, Aadu. I won’t go so far only to beg to come back home. Beg for a moment of familiarity. I won’t let doctors from another country to stop me from visiting my own. I won’t let my health keep me away from you. And I won’t be like grandmother’s black dog who went deep into the woods to die alone. I dream of his body sometimes and how scared he might have felt. Somedays I wish I could be like them. If I could choose like they did. I don’t have it in me to want more, neither do I have the hunger running in my veins.

We’re oblivious machines. We don’t know what will become of us. Aadu, the most dangerous animal on the planet is the one that loves you. And I love you very much.

If you don’t know where to find me at thirty, and if the need to see me becomes unbearable, then look for me in the trees that grew beside the road leading to our home, in the sun rising above your head before you have decided what the day will mean, and in the migratory birds — flappers that leave, return, and leave again.

And one day, if you truly believe I’ve died, look behind our house.

Yours

From too far