Bangalore.
Exhibit B:
Excerpt from Letter Sent by Prateep J. Pachikara to His Wife, Annamma
The rest of the letter is in Malayalam, and thus illegible to me, but scattered here and there with English words like “Johnny Carson” and “Cheerios.” These few words are pinholes of light in an otherwise impenetrable wall. I once asked my mom to translate the letter, and with a cursory glance, she returned it to me. “He says he has no friends except for Johnny Carson. He eats a lot of Cheerios. He hates his life.” She refused to say more and told me to remove my boxers from the dryer.
The sample above speaks volumes. Note the incomplete
a
and
o
, how the two ends of a line yearn to meet. However despairing the words that precede it, the
a
and
o
reveal a man in search of something, or someone, a man who has not yet drained his deepest cisterns of hope.
I tried to appeal to my mom in private, the day after her return from Nashville, but she was standing over her bathroom sink, smearing a sliced grape all over her face. She’d read somewhere that grape acids would tighten her pores, and she wanted to look good for the wedding. She planned to grape her face every other day until the Big Day.
“That’s a lot of grapes,” I said, without waiting for her to tell me exactly how many. “Can we talk about the
Review
?”
“Come here, Viju.” She flapped her hand at me. “Closer.”
I thought she was going to hug me. Instead she swiped the grape across my forehead and laughed.
“Mom, I’m serious.”
“Are you ever not serious?” she teased, and tossed the deflated grape into the trash. She exercised her facial muscles by widening her mouth, knitting and raising her eyebrows. Meanwhile, I explained a few of the diverging schools of thought I would explore in the personafile: Did the prongs of the double
e
indicate charges of excitement or alarm? Was
L
height and
y
length directly or inversely proportional to extrovert behavior? Was she actually siding with Kirk on this one?
“I am on both sides,” she said, same as when Kirk and I feuded over the benefits of organic produce. Eventually she stopped buying the grocery strawberries we both once loved, the super-sweet diploid mutants, and started bringing back from the farmers’ market a carton of sour red nubs. Then, as now, she repeated the same refrain: “Kirk is just thinkingabout our future.” This time, she added: “He could find you a job, you know.”
“I have jobs. I have lots of jobs.” I was happily getting by on an assortment of pet-sitting and telemarketing gigs, reluctant to leash my days to a normal nine-to-five. I lived with my mom out of both financial necessity and professional convenience, since my dad’s study was the base of my operations. I used the bottom drawer of his gray metal desk to archive all his handwriting samples, compiled from a multitude of sources—viz., old address books, tax returns, receipts, electric bills, grocery lists, aerogrammes, and a yellow Post-it on which he’d scribbled an unattributed quote: “…
by the Lord God of hosts, the Holy, who made you of the happy breed and me of the stricken, He alone knowing the aught of making mortal things, I am lonely!
” Everything in my project was filed chronologically; subfiled according to Professional, Personal, Financial, or Miscellany; and sub-subfiled according to recipient. And out of this would grow, piece by piece, a mosaic of my father.
“Wait,” I said, alarmed. “What’ll happen to the house?”
“We’ll sell it. Kirk has more than enough room for the three of us in his place.” What Kirk has is a white colonial propped up by Doric columns in which there are more bidets than books of substance. “We’ll have the engagement party on the lawn.”
“But the desk, you have to let me keep Dad’s desk. I think, Mom—” Here I took her sticky hand. “I think Kirk might like the
Review
if he gave it a chance. If he really read it. Or if he took
Exhibit B:
Excerpt from Letter Sent by Prateep J. Pachikara to His Wife, Annamma
The rest of the letter is in Malayalam, and thus illegible to me, but scattered here and there with English words like “Johnny Carson” and “Cheerios.” These few words are pinholes of light in an otherwise impenetrable wall. I once asked my mom to translate the letter, and with a cursory glance, she returned it to me. “He says he has no friends except for Johnny Carson. He eats a lot of Cheerios. He hates his life.” She refused to say more and told me to remove my boxers from the dryer.
The sample above speaks volumes. Note the incomplete
a
and
o
, how the two ends of a line yearn to meet. However despairing the words that precede it, the
a
and
o
reveal a man in search of something, or someone, a man who has not yet drained his deepest cisterns of hope.
I tried to appeal to my mom in private, the day after her return from Nashville, but she was standing over her bathroom sink, smearing a sliced grape all over her face. She’d read somewhere that grape acids would tighten her pores, and she wanted to look good for the wedding. She planned to grape her face every other day until the Big Day.
“That’s a lot of grapes,” I said, without waiting for her to tell me exactly how many. “Can we talk about the
Review
?”
“Come here, Viju.” She flapped her hand at me. “Closer.”
I thought she was going to hug me. Instead she swiped the grape across my forehead and laughed.
“Mom, I’m serious.”
“Are you ever not serious?” she teased, and tossed the deflated grape into the trash. She exercised her facial muscles by widening her mouth, knitting and raising her eyebrows. Meanwhile, I explained a few of the diverging schools of thought I would explore in the personafile: Did the prongs of the double
e
indicate charges of excitement or alarm? Was
L
height and
y
length directly or inversely proportional to extrovert behavior? Was she actually siding with Kirk on this one?
“I am on both sides,” she said, same as when Kirk and I feuded over the benefits of organic produce. Eventually she stopped buying the grocery strawberries we both once loved, the super-sweet diploid mutants, and started bringing back from the farmers’ market a carton of sour red nubs. Then, as now, she repeated the same refrain: “Kirk is just thinkingabout our future.” This time, she added: “He could find you a job, you know.”
“I have jobs. I have lots of jobs.” I was happily getting by on an assortment of pet-sitting and telemarketing gigs, reluctant to leash my days to a normal nine-to-five. I lived with my mom out of both financial necessity and professional convenience, since my dad’s study was the base of my operations. I used the bottom drawer of his gray metal desk to archive all his handwriting samples, compiled from a multitude of sources—viz., old address books, tax returns, receipts, electric bills, grocery lists, aerogrammes, and a yellow Post-it on which he’d scribbled an unattributed quote: “…
by the Lord God of hosts, the Holy, who made you of the happy breed and me of the stricken, He alone knowing the aught of making mortal things, I am lonely!
” Everything in my project was filed chronologically; subfiled according to Professional, Personal, Financial, or Miscellany; and sub-subfiled according to recipient. And out of this would grow, piece by piece, a mosaic of my father.
“Wait,” I said, alarmed. “What’ll happen to the house?”
“We’ll sell it. Kirk has more than enough room for the three of us in his place.” What Kirk has is a white colonial propped up by Doric columns in which there are more bidets than books of substance. “We’ll have the engagement party on the lawn.”
“But the desk, you have to let me keep Dad’s desk. I think, Mom—” Here I took her sticky hand. “I think Kirk might like the
Review
if he gave it a chance. If he really read it. Or if he took
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