Chapter 10

From Priya Banerjee’s private collection, undated, translated from Malayalam:

On the year I nearly stopped

By the forty-third letter 

I thought: enough. 

This is a woman in love 

with her own longing. 

You were not in those pages, 

only the idea of you, 

and what is the idea of a person 

but the shape of your own hands 

pressed into paper?

I put the pen down. 

I made tea. 

I sat with the tea. 

I looked at the locked drawer.

I thought about your eyes. 

The particular green of them. 

The way you laughed 

a full second before everyone else 

because you always saw it coming.

I picked the pen back up.

Forty-three years. 

If you are laughing somewhere right now— 

a full second before everyone else— 

I hope you know 

I am still writing. 

I will always be 

writing. You were always

worth it.

***

“She knew,” I told Louise over the phone on my way to meet Aleena. “I lied to her but she knew. She saw me on the phone earlier but I told her it was my grandmother—”

“Why would you tell her it was your grandmother?” Louise said exasperatedly. “It’s allowed for you to date someone outside of work—”

I kept talking over her. “But she somehow knew. She told me, word for word, I swear, she hopes my date goes well. But what’s worse is I also told her, before the grandma lie—are you keeping up?—before the grandma lie, I said I’m not seeing anyone else. I said that right to her face.” 

“Why would she ask you that?” 

I refused to stop talking. “I don’t know how she knew, but somehow she knew I was going on a date and that it was tonight!” 

“That’s none of her business, Kaalia, it’s fine—”

“But I lied to her!” I shouted into the phone before Louise could finish. The other passengers on the bus glanced at me, a little startled. There was always a crazy person on the bus in New York—I guessed today I was that person. “The problem is I lied! I told her I wasn’t seeing anyone and also that I was on the phone with my grandma, but she somehow saw through me and knew I was talking to Aleena and she knew I was lying. Louise, don’t you understand how serious this is?” 

“Kaalia, I know she’s hot and smart, but you are way too obsessed with her. I didn’t think it was this bad. What I understand is that she’s your boss and this is your personal life, so this is really no big deal.” 

“But—okay, I see what you’re saying, but—”

“What I think you should be focusing on is probably your date in twenty minutes that you are currently on the way to.”

“Are you stalking my location again?” 

“Obviously. Your commute is so far from the city, and somehow you’re a PhD who lacks all common sense when it comes to public transportation.” 

“How sweet,” I said dryly. 

“You once got lost on a five minute walk to Baskin Robbins when I left you alone to go pee at a Chinese restaurant. I found you close to Harlem.”

“That was when we stayed up for like three nights in a row to work on thesis papers late because we were so behind. You can’t blame me for not being sentient.” 

“Last week Akila said she saw you walking in the opposite direction of your bus stop home and had to pick you up and drive you home.” 

“I was just a little confused that time. The bus numbers are always changing.” 

“They’re really not.” 

“But they could.” 

Louise sighed. “Anyway, focus on your date. I know you like Roman, but nothing has happened between you guys yet. And until it does, she has no right to care about your personal life. Yes, even if you lied about seeing someone and you’re going on a date tonight. Okay?”

I bit my lip.

“Okay, Kaalia?” 

“Okay,” I muttered. “Fine. Whatever.” 

“Now go have fun. I have to go—I’m, um, meeting Khajee soon.” She said it nervously, like she was lying. “Bye, Kaalia.” 

I hung up and realized there was a significant amount of empty seats in my proximity. 

“You should have let me pick you up,” Aleena teased when I arrived late to Central Park, breathless and flushed from the summer evening wind. “You know I wanted to.” 

“Trust me, I live way too far away,” I said. “My house is in New Jersey.” 

“A home-owner?” Aleena’s teeth glinted, her grin unfalteringly wide. “I would love to have a house wife.” 

I’d dreamed of being a house wife on days when deadlines had climbed unbearably high and I wanted to rip my hair out. But those days had long passed. “You can be my house wife,” I offered. “I want to be like my idol, Jodie Melamed.” 

“Is that a celebrity?” 

“Um, in a scholarly sense, yes.” I couldn’t help laughing out loud. I felt giddy talking about my favourite scholars. “She wrote this book about racial capitalism and my favourite chapter is on how white university students learn about racism at the institution and leave thinking they’re morally superior people because they know about racism. Despite the fact that, well, they’re still racist and occupying a professional-managerial position that would have been far more deserved by a person of colour. And that’s the simple version. She’s amazing.” 

“It sounds like you have a crush on her,” Aleena said, raising an eyebrow. 

My crush was on a far different scholar. One with dark eyes, dark brown skin, and a gold lip ring.

“No, no,” I said. The blush came without warning, burning my cheeks. “This is just how I get when I talk about my favourite things I’ve read by other women of colour. Emphasis on the women of colour part. I mean, yeah, Foucault and Beauvoir were great. And it’s like, yes, I think John Guillory is brilliant too, his work on the canon is phenomenal, but him and the others, they’re not my hero because they’re just white people, you know?”

Aleena led me deeper into the park, in an area where the gentle evening sun seemed to melt the grass into a sheet of liquid gold. She spread a plaid blanket and motioned for me to sit with her. 

“I’m getting the feeling you don’t love white people,” she said, laughing. She opened a picket basket (a real, honest-to-God, woven picnic basket) and started pulling out glass containers filled with sliced fruit. Watermelon, mangos, and strawberries. 

Despite my earlier tension, I laughed easily with her. “I hate white people. I mean, not all of them are evil and racist. But most of them are. Enough that I feel comfortable making a blanket statement like that.”

“You don’t have to explain to me, I get it.” She opened the strawberry container and popped one into her mouth. Her lips glistened a lush red. “I’ve hated white people since I was twenty. Shame it wasn’t earlier, but internalized racism had a chokehold on me.” 

“Me too.” I was getting along so well with her. It made me regret that I’d nearly ended things. I loved anyone who hated white people with as much passion as I did. 

“So, English literature, huh?” She popped open a lid from the mango container and offered me a fork. 

If we kissed, she’d taste like strawberry-mango. But even as well as this date was going, that thought still felt forced. Who cared about strawberry-mango if it wasn’t on Roman’s lips? 

“I’d have thought the favourite thing you’d have read would be Wuthering Heights or something. I didn’t expect an academic thing. That’s nerdy.” She leaned onto one elbow. “But don’t get me wrong. I love nerdy. Go on.” 

I was likely scarlet-red. “It’s just . . . living through a twice-elected Trump administration which is so vile and viciously racist . . . I think it’s nice to be able to put words to things you’ve felt but haven’t been able to name. It’s just, like, this cathartic joy when you see something articulated so perfectly by another person, and it feels so good to know that not only did they feel it too, but they had the words for it and those words can help you too. That’s what I want to do. Put words to things that will make other brown and Black girls and girls of colour feel like, Oh, oh my God, finally, this horrible thing is a real thing that other people like me have experienced too. You know?” 

“Tell me more,” Aleena said. The slowly-setting sun lit her short brown hair into a fiery auburn colour. She looked mesmerizingly beautiful as she stared at me—so sweet and attentive, the sky flaring red behind her like a dream. 

“You’re going to regret saying that. I love talking. It’s one thing I should probably be told to stop doing, actually.”

“Never,” Aleena said, mock-horrified. “Your voice is so wonderful. And I love listening.” 

There was a chance we really would be perfect together. Was I about to throw my future wife away for the work crush I had on Roman? 

But something still felt missing. Not wrong, but missing. 

“It’s—well, it’s like bell hooks’ Oppositional Gaze thing, but in real life, not movies and media and everything.” bell hooks was another one of my personal celebrities. “It’s like the world is just so awful, and people are so outrageously, absurdly mean to people who aren’t white, especially who have melanin in their skin, that you can’t really do anything, you know? All you can do is watch, and yeah, experience it. But hooks theorizes that you can find pleasure in recognizing exactly how what you’re witnessing is terrible. Which is like what I’ve been trying to say about the scholarly papers and everything. It just feels so good to know—well, no, it’s awful someone experienced it—but to know you’re not alone in this experience and to be able to name just how and why people think and feel the way they do about things.” 

Aleena blinked up at me, a soft smile on her lips. “Mm, like what?” 

“I don’t know, like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. After it happened, Trump went there and made it sound like Puerto Rican leadership was uncivilized and incompetent and irrational. Okay, and then Rivero-Burgos did this experimental research thing, where they tested how people perceived skin colour and Latinx people, and the overwhelming result was that based on racial bias, on skin colour, white people thought places like Puerto Rico didn’t deserve federal support after crises like that.” 

My voice had risen steadily louder. I tried to calm myself as I continued, “It’s like why did Trump frame Puerto Rican government as irrational? Well, to make them seem like the Oriental Other, not as developed as white people and lacking what Western society believes is higher knowledge—cold objectivity. And, why did people perceive brown-skinned people as deserving less help? Well, because of white supremacy and the belief that their lives are worth less. Things like that.” 

“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” Aleena remarked.

“It feels like it,” I admitted. That was a kind of Pandora’s box in itself, to talk about whether things were hopeless. “But . . . I didn’t come to hear myself talk. Please. Talk to me. It’s my turn to listen.” 

Unfortunately, I had gotten myself so worked up about my rant that it was easier than not to slip into a thought-racing, daydreaming haze. My mind, so focused on the entrenched racism and coloniality embedded in U.S. imperial structures, wandered to the talk Audre Lorde had given at the Oberlin Commencement ceremony in the seventies. 

And then the idea of local colonial capitalism turned into global colonial capitalism, and then global solidarity. 

Lorde had called it a war for survival, hadn’t she? And Cherrie Moraga had said we were all much closer to each other than colonial systems wanted us to think. 

It was true, of course. The clothes we wore, the phones we held in our hands, the fruit we ate. Made in Bangladesh, made in China, made in Ghana, made in the Phillipines. We were all so much closer to each other than we thought. The genocide in Palestine, Congo, Sudan—those affected us too. 

I am become Palestinian, June Jordan had written in one of her poems. I didn’t agree with that when I’d read it, but I understood it a little better now. Their war was our war. Their suffering was ours.

But Moraga’s theory had its shortcomings. Or, at least, it did for me. That bittersweet disappointment I felt thinking about how close my Punjabi grandparents were—a phone call away, really, and yet still thousands and thousands of miles away from touch and breath. From feeling their cheeks in my palms. From hugging them, wrapping my arms around Dadi and Dada, feeling the real warmth of their bodies, their heartbeats—my tears on soft, wrinkled, brown flesh. 

And even my Puerto Rican grandparents, so much closer but still so far away when it came down to money. Everything in this fucking world came down to money, and privilege, and whiteness. And sometimes the overwhelming desperate devastation of it all was enough to make me want to scream, and scream, and scream, maybe forever. 

What were we supposed to do? What was anyone supposed to do? 

In all my years in school, I had only ever been able to come up with a half-satisfactory answer: try and find people like me in the world and befriend them. And maybe then everything would seem far less hopeless and far more doable. If there were enough of us who understood, who really understood. It wasn’t much, but maybe it could be enough. Maybe. And from there—

“What do you think?” Aleena was asking me. 

“Can you say the question again?” I asked. “I didn’t, um, hear it properly.” 

Her face fell slightly, as if she had realized I hadn’t been paying attention to a word she’d spoken. “What do you think of Nepal as a travel destination?”

I wracked my brain desperately for images of Nepal and came up blank. I had no idea what to make of it as a travel destination. But it was in South Asia—and possibly because of my bias as a die-hard South Asian lover—I believed it would undoubtedly be beautiful. I told her so, and she smiled, but distantly somehow, as if I’d disappointed her in some crucial way. 

“That revolution they had was amazing,” I said. The Nepalese had set fire to buildings and the homes of politicians. They reinstated a new government on their own and elected a woman to be their prime minister on Discord. 

It was a little off-topic, but I wanted to ease the sting her expression made me feel. I didn’t like her, not in the way I was supposed to, but to know I had let someone down so viscerally hurt still. 

“Yeah,” she said. Still distant. “Yeah, it was.” 

The sun had almost fully set now. The glare of the lamp posts had turned the grass from golden to twilight purple.

“We should get going,” she said, already packing her containers and closing the picnic basket. 

I stood and helped her fold the blanket. I had the feeling this was the last time I would ever see her. I knew I had tried breaking things off with her this morning, but . . . she was a sweet, pretty woman. Not only was there nothing wrong with her, but everything was so right about her, at least on paper. 

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out suddenly, as we tucked the blanket into its final fold. “I’m so sorry. I should have been paying attention.” 

Aleena’s eyes softened. Her fingers brushed against mine. “No, Kaalia. It’s not your fault. I insisted on this date.” 

I opened my mouth to speak and then shut it. I didn’t know what to say. 

“You have feelings for another woman, don’t you?” she asked me gently. 

“What?” I hadn’t even been thinking entirely about Roman on the date. “No, I was distracted by—” 

“Don’t lie,” Aleena cut in, still so agonizingly gentle. “You do have feelings for someone else, don’t you?”

I didn’t understand. Roman hadn’t crossed my mind fully in the time we’d been together. How could she possibly tell I had an outlandish crush on my boss? Had she seen us together? Had I accidentally left my phone on with my search history open? 

“Yes, but—how?” How could you tell?  The words wouldn’t escape me. My body felt numb with shock. This was the second time today a woman had seemed to pull the thoughts right from my mind and say them aloud. First Roman, now her. Did I have such an obvious face? Did my thoughts project above my head like subtitles? 

Aleena shook her head. “I can’t explain. It’s just . . . you have the air of someone who likes someone else, intensely.”

She had sensed my delusional, rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth crush for Roman just like that? I needed, as the white folks said, to get a grip.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated hollowly. “It can never happen anyway. The woman I have feelings for. It just can’t.”

“No.” Aleena held my hand for a moment, her fingers clasped overtop mine. “Don’t be sorry. And whoever she is, she’s lucky. Don’t let her slip away.” She squeezed me one final time and made me promise to text her when I got home.

We were so deep in Central Park I had no idea which way to turn. I picked a random direction, opposite from Aleena, and started walking anyway. I pressed my lips more firmly together and bit down. It hurt. It tasted like blood. And it didn’t make the tears go away.

I let myself cry for a few minutes—painful, wracking sobs—before opening my phone. Louise was the most recent name in my phone history. I clicked on her.

She picked up almost immediately.

“Kaalia, what’s wrong? It’s early for your date to end. Did something happen? Did she turn out to be crazy and try and kidnap you?”

“No,” I said. This somehow made me cry harder. I wished Aleena was a kidnapper. At least then I’d have a nice, good, solid reason to end things with her. “I just need—to let it all out, I think.” 

“Okay, Kaalia,” Louise said, her voice becoming soft and soothing. “You just let it all out, okay? Stop walking and let me call you a Lyft home.”

“No,” I said between tears, “that’s expensive, you can’t—”

“Just be quiet.” Louise’s voice was firm. 

I could hear Khajee’s voice faintly in the background. So she was hanging out with Khajee. Why had she so sounded so nervous earlier? The thought crossed my mind and dissipated. I didn’t have the strength to mull it over.

“Really, you shouldn’t—”

“Be quiet and let me help you, Kaal.”

I stopped walking. The tears fell harder, blurring my vision. It was dark outside, but the city was never asleep; endless people passed by me, glancing at my splotchy face and glancing away. Comforting and lonely at the same time. 

“We love you, Kaalia!” I heard Khajee say, as if she were far from the phone. “We should tell her—” 

“No, don’t tell her—” 

“Well, might as well—”

“Khajee, don’t!” Louise hissed.

But Khajee seemed to have grabbed the phone. Her voice was clear and sweet in the microphone. “The three of us are planning to come visit you while you’re in India,” she said. “We already took the time off work.” 

This only made me cry harder.

“You guys—” I could barely choke the words out. “—are such—good friends—”

“I told you not to tell her!” Louise whisper-shouted, further from the receiver. “She’s too emotional right now!”

“No, that’s perfect,” I said. “Thank you for telling me, Khajee. You’ll visit me? Really, you will?”

“Yes,” Khajee sang. She seemed to be running around the apartment in her attempt to evade Louise. “I mean, don’t give yourself all the credit. We love you but it is a nice vacation spot!” 

I laughed and choked on more tears. “Okay.” 

“The Lyft is there, Kaalia!” Louise yelled. 

I hung up and found the car quickly enough. The tears had slowed, enough for me to at least respond to the Lyft driver asking me, “Louise,” how my night was. Then I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the window pane, and I slept the entire forty-five minute ride home. The crying had tired me out so completely I didn’t dream. Not even about Roman.

When I woke up in front of my house, the Lyft driver waiting for me to get out, an undeniable certainty had burrowed into my bones, my blood, the very fibers of my nervous system.

This trip to India with Roman was going to change my life. For better or worse.

***

I think Kaalia really deserved a good cry 🙂  Or maybe I’m near my period so I’m feeling emotional as I’m writing this. 

EDIT: I wrote this like two months ago but this is true again as I am publishing this! Period in a week. I love you guys!

Love,
Meera