I find a notepad in April of 2019, after completing the first draft of this book, a time when I find myself taking screen shots of cherry trees blossoming in Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which are broadcast on the Internet. I check back every few days to see which trees will bloom first, the order, the location, the individual, its species, its origins, and take new screen shots each time even if nothing changes. Plants with accession numbers starting with “X” represent plants whose origins are unknown. In the first few days of April, change is slow. Even no change is as meaningful as change, in science. Why track spring this way? Why track it elsewhere? Because I cannot go in person. Because watching, observing, even from a great distance, is the next best thing to witnessing. And I want to slow down time. I was there in April 2011, during the peak bloom of Sakura Matsuri with my husband and children. Those cherry trees once helped to heal a deep wound in my marriage. As I take the screen shots, I drink black coffee out of a white mug with equations printed in black depicting a thin-red-lined graph.
x=16 sin3t
y = 13 cos t - 5 cos (2t) - 2 cos (3t) - cos (4 t).
These are from the family of functions called the cardioid functions. They were first named as such by an Italian mathematician named Johann Castillon in 1741. He was also known to translate poetry. The cardioid has a cusp at the origin, the part where the two halves of a heart meet. A cusp is mathematically defined as a point at which two branches of a curve meet such that the tangents of each branch are equal. Like husband and wife. Like Work and Life. Like Art and Science. My husband gifted the mug to me on Valentine’s Day many years ago, before The Wound, and when I drink from it, my lips touching the inner part that is glazed bright red, I am reminded that almost any shape you can imagine can be made with equations. What did I find in the notepad? Writings about a cherry tree in Guelph, about ghosts from three years ago. I do not keep a diary, just a lined notepad sometimes, if I remember, beside my bed to jot down dreams and thoughts I have in the middle of the night.
Suddenly I hear footsteps. A girl is running in the July night. She is my echo, my past, my me. She is wearing sandals, they slap the sidewalk, she is running. Because somewhere a girl is always running. “It’s like it’s the 1960s,” he says, doing the dishes. He owns the dishes. There is a rooster emblem on them and the words Made in Portugal. They use the good silverware! The bandits are on their way. The thai basil will not survive. Stan, did I even know a single one? When I write “one” too quickly, it looks like “me”. And the lawn mower was not mechanized, and it left tall stalks that went to flower and I started to pull them until I was saying look at all these missed spots, until my husband reminded me: seeds! At the age of nine, my daughter won’t let me swear, skinny dip, speed, sleep…Today I took a walk with my nine-year-old. Here we go. In puberty…She interrupts. Oh mom, let me show you the cherry tree! We approached, and to her shock, every cherry is gone. They must have been picked, I say. Then, through the branches, I see one. See? See
I ask, but it is no longer a question, it is a command. Language is tricky that way. But now I want to know everything about April. I start to reconstruct the month through my emails, calendar, and tweets. An inferred diary.
April 4, 2019. I tweet: My 10 yr old son this morning before I leave: “did you buy your carbon offset mom?” I take the Red Car shuttle service to the airport and our last pick-up is in the south end of Guelph. I tweet: Asian man my age is last pickup on this airport shuttle & his father watches from front step until last second & waves but son doesn’t see. Just like my father does whenever I leave, I want to add, but I am already over the character limit. A few hours later, I am back in New York City. I say back because I was just there, in February, with my family. On that trip, my daughter and I stayed with my artist friends Ellen and Paul in their rent-controlled Soho loft. We are visiting to see a play, City of Illusions. Paul wrote and directed it and Ellen acted in it. One morning we chitchatted over tea and in the course of the conversation, Ellen told me that I had just said a line from their play, but I had not yet seen it, and I hadn’t read the script. The exact line: “I usually don’t get enough sleep to have nightmares. I’m grateful if I have one, because it means I’ve been sleeping.”
This coincidence, this apophenia, this spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated phenomena, is addictive, and is what makes me return to New York in April to see my friends again. That, and the fact that I did not have time in February to get to “Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” the new exhibit of Frida Kahlo artifacts at the Brooklyn Museum. I want to see it because I saw a photo of Frida’s polio shoes on the Internet. There is no relationship between the fact that both my father and Frida Kahlo had polio; it is neither coincidence nor causal. But I feel I must see her shoes with my own eyes. Polio was not discovered to be contagious until 1905. The virus was isolated in 1908. Frida Kahlo contracted it in 1913 at the age of six and it permanently affected her right leg and foot. But only in 1955 was the vaccine introduced in the U.S. I look at graphs of “Cases of Polio” or “Cases of Death from Polio vs. Time.” The trajectory is plotted in blue. A vertical red line cuts the graph into partitions: before and after the vaccine was available. Americans and Mexicans are perfectly safe, but it still circulates in my parents’ birth place, Pakistan, which I have yet to visit.
Before I go to the exhibit I spend a bit of time in the archives of the museum. I search the catalogue using the keyword “India.” I find a few objects with interesting titles and ask to see them. One is an artist book entitled YESNO, which reminds me of the essay I wrote months ago. It is a small red book with a gold title by the famous avant-garde French poet and painter Francis Picabia. It measures 2.5 by 4 inches and features a picture of Picabia in his studio on the cover. What is the India connection? It is a thin dotted line. The book is published by Hanuman Books, which was founded by the American art critic and editor Raymond Foye and the Italian painter Francesco Clemente. Wikipedia: The name—as well as the striking format—were influenced by Indian prayer books collected on a trip to India in 1985. The Wikipedia entry explains that the books were always dedicated to a guru or saint and were meant to be small enough to fit into a pocket, to be part of daily life. The press was named after Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. Within YESNO, I find these lines: “the world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.” My mother went to mandir every Tuesday night to read the Hanuman Chalisa with other devotees. It contains forty verses written by the Indian poet-saint Tulsidas. The last time I was home I told my father I was not a saint when he scolded me for something I did not say.
Another is entitled Buri Nazar Wale Tera Mooh Kala. It is by the artist and poet Priya Pereira, India’s foremost book artist and founder of Pixie Bks. From its catalogue description: “a book that richly illustrates the various avatars of the evil eye and thankfully offers several cures. The book is bound using a black thread that is typically used to ward off the evil eye.” There is a one-page text giving instructions on how to avert it. In her fist, let there be seven chillies…I search my whole book for the word chillies. But I type in chilies, and it occurs three times before I find the right reference. “I get five dried red chilies from the cupboard.” I just hope I am not doing things wrong.
Finally, I arrive at my timed entry into the Frida Kahlo exhibit, carefully reading all the text for meaning, examining her clothing, her diaries, her medications, her makeup, and then, yes, the polio shoes. Ankle Boots with Badge Embossed “To Frida with love Pita and Olga,” 1948-52, Coyoacán, Mexico, Satin, leather, cotton, metal, and glass…These boots have a built-up wedge heel. They are customized with strips of beading and silk embroidered with dragons. The badge was a gift from poet Pita Amor and Olga Tamayo, wife of Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. They are a dark pink with yellow ribbon shoelaces. They are nothing like my father’s plain brown polio shoes. They are the opposite of them. She wore them to fix her limp, but more than that. To retain her identity. After the exhibit, apophenia strikes me again. Illusionary correlation. Apparently even pigeons do it. Scientists claim it can help the brain detect true patterns quickly.
I look up a place to eat and find a well-reviewed restaurant named Oxalis just a few metres away. I am not thinking about the name. The word sounds pretty, not unfamiliar, but not one I remember the meaning of. I overshoot the restaurant by a good three blocks (things are always closer than they seem), and on the way back notice a used bookstore. On the table outside, which has a seemingly random mix of fiction, nonfiction, and everything in between, a title catches my eye: Things On Which I Have Stumbled. A book of poetry by an American poet, Peter Cole, I am unfamiliar with. I buy it for the title and proceed to the restaurant. It is after three or four sips of red wine and after I have ordered that I pick the book up. I start to read the first poem, which is entitled “Improvisation on Lines by Isaac The Blind.” It starts:
Only by sucking, not by knowing,
can the subtle essence be conveyed—
sap of the word and the world’s flowing
that raises the scent of the almond blossoming,
and yellows the bulbul in the olive’s jade.
Only by sucking, not by knowing.
The grass and the oxalis
I stop right there, at the appearance of oxalis in Oxalis. Hardly predictable as the thing to push me over the edge, but when I see the word on the page I snap the book shut and push it away from me on the table, as if it is some kind of demon. Later, I ask my friends Ellen and Paul what they think the chances are of that. That particular word, finding it like that twice. This is before any of us even looks it up in the dictionary. (It is a plant, of course.)
I start to read about apophenia everywhere on the Internet. It is a disorder that is often linked to the beginning stages of schizophrenia. It explains my father’s “gambling fallacy,” my mother’s conviction of having seen Durga’s feet in a rock. My search leads me to another poet new to me, Amit Majmudar. He writes in the Kenyon Review: The mind—particularly the religious mind—seeks and finds patterns where no patterns are: The poet will naturally do this with language, in fact, poetry grows stronger the more wildly this is undertaken. The act of gratuitous pattern-finding in random data has its own neurological term, apophenia. Sounds like a goddess or nymph from Greek myth: Apophenia. Mnemosyne, Memory. I ask my friends if they think I am schizophrenic. They say no. I know I am not religious. That leaves poetry. Or the science of Type 1 error.
April 7, 2019. We are celebrating my youngest daughter’s fifth birthday (she was born after The Wound) with a party for fifteen children. My parents are visiting our house in Guelph for the first time since Mother’s medical crises. They arrive a couple hours before the party starts. My mother speaks sparsely. She tells me about the good dream she had the night before: I am standing in front of a crowd, and an announcer is saying “you are a winner.” Then I see two gold coins, shiny like nothing I have ever seen. I am wondering when this dream will come true, she tells me. I know it will. I am waiting, she says. But I am certain the gold coins are both one-sided: Death and Death.
April 9, 2019. I go to my mom’s ear-nose-throat appointment; the good news is that the tumour they found in her jaw (while she was in the hospital for her brain bleed) is “highly improbably malignant,” and so we should wait before we head to surgery. She will get another CT scan in July to see if it is stable and hopefully it will be, because these kinds of growths are very slow—you only need to take images of them every few months. On the way out the doctor asks us to follow up with some paperwork, blood work, scheduling, etc. I let my mother go ahead to sit in the waiting room, since she walks very slowly these days. The receptionist assumes I am the patient, that I am my mother. She keeps saying “you.” She speaks of my diabetes, my forms, my medications, my allergies, my blood work, my family doctor. I try to correct her but she does not hear me, so I just let it go on like that. It makes me feel like I am in the First Partition. It feels totally natural now. I become my mother.
April 10, 2019. I visit my daughter’s grade seven class to talk about poetry and science. I ask them to write list poems entitled “Alternate Names for Trees.” It is based on a poem entitled “Alternate Names for Black Boys” by Danez Smith. Even crazier, I whisper to them, when they show me their draft lists. What would a tree look like in your dreams? Can your heart be a tree?
April 3, 2011 (from an old note in my Drafts folder that I can finally delete): My son is learning to speak and my mother teases him, asks him what Pashto language he is speaking. I have to look it up. Pashto is the native language of the indigenous Pashtun people, who live in the area between the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan and the Indus River in Pakistan. My mother would have heard it as a child and not understood it.
April 18, 2019. I come across a story about the source of the largest equipotential gravitational field distortion in the world, a 106-metre anomaly in the Indian Ocean. A dent in the earth’s geoid, a low-gravity region. There are several hypotheses as to why it exists, but scientists want to explain why this anomaly differs from anomalies in other parts of the world. Indian scientists placed ocean-bottom seismometers to unravel the anomaly. Seismometer: an instrument that responds to ground movements as small as one ten-millionth of a centimetre so they can be detected at quiet sites. The seismological data from the anomaly will be under moratorium for three years before it becomes available to other researchers. Moratorium: from the Latin moror (delay), from the Proto-Indo-European mere (to delay, hinder). When will data collection for this book be complete? Meanwhile, my mother complains that my children cannot speak to her in her own language and scolds me for not teaching them Hindi.
April 19, 2019. Last night I dreamed of a pristine salt pool at the edge of some unknown continent. The first day, it was full of tourists, and I could only manage to wet my feet and face. My heels and eyes being cleansed was enough to lead me back to the same place at night, when public access was closed, for more. I jumped in fully clothed. It was deep, very deep, and it cured me of all my remaining wounds, undid my sins. Most of these resided in my head. But there were still unexposed parts. Tongue, breast, vulva, I began pulling aside my bra, underwear. Only my heart remained immune to the pool’s invisible corrective forces. Many believe you need to submerge your head and your heart completely to be cleansed. This is why the Japanese design their baths to achieve this. It is required of baptism and of receiving the full blessings of Ganga. Exactly sixteen years ago, in April 2003, I dunked my fully-clothed body into the polluted and crowded Ganges River for the first time in my life while my mother cheered for me in Hindi from the nearby bank.
April 22, 2019. It is Earth Day. We are at my parents’ home for Easter weekend, and I am still de-cluttering. For most things, I ask my mother’s permission before giving them to Goodwill. For most things she says yes. But that extremely fancy candy box from Mikasa? No, keep that. I will give it to Barbara, she says. Barbara is one of the home care workers who comes for one hour in the morning or one hour at night to bathe my mother and put cream on her body. I say bathe, but what happens is my mother very slowly descends the stairs, with close supervision, to the unfinished laundry room in the basement, where piles of unopened boxes of housewares still exist despite my best attempts at de-cluttering. There is a drain in the middle of the room and Barbara dumps small buckets of water over my mother’s naked body as she stands there, the artificial Christmas tree and the red and gold decorations in a box within sight. She is not submerged. Regarding the candy box, my mother is right and I am wrong: Barbara is delighted with it. I find more handwritten notes of my mother’s tucked in bags of old clothes as I continue to de-clutter the house and I steal them. Part of me believes she has stashed them there knowing that I will be the only one to find them. They are written in Hindi and I cannot quite make out all the letters in her handwriting. She taught me the letters of the Hindi alphabet when I was young. We had to attend her Hindi classes. There are three or four words in English but they do not help; I need to find someone to help me read them. In between de-cluttering sessions, I try to write and answer emails in short bursts. I only get one hour a day on social media on my desktop because of a program I use called Focus. When I try to go there during blocked periods, the software gives me inspirational quotes. A person who chases two rabbits catches neither. Confucius. I am chasing too many rabbits. The rabbits that make up my mother’s only fur coat, which she has not worn for decades. The unopened Avon perfume-filled rabbit-shaped decanter that still sits in our upstairs bathroom after forty years. The one that visits my mother’s garden every year, the closest thing she has ever had to a pet. It eats her precious garden vegetables and still she does not shoo it away. My youngest sees it for the first time this weekend and yells, “Nanni’s Easter Bunny!” The trip ends in a fight. I am yelling in my mother’s face for wasting my time. In her face because her hearing aids are not working and she will not get them replaced. I think it will be a long while before I return. So I get up my nerve and bring one more black plastic garbage bag from the garage and stuff it with her rabbit-fur coat. I pick out one pair of polio shoes from the hallway closet and stuff them in too. I tape a white sheet of paper to the bag with HOME written in black Sharpie. I take it directly to our car so no one will notice and then, when back home in Guelph, take it directly to my walk-in bedroom closet and close the door. But I am back at my parents’ house in two weeks. My dad has noticed that my mother is behaving strangely. Some delirium. She cannot see her mug in front of her. She walks the wrong way when going to the bathroom. She cannot sleep. I arrive and when she sees me she says, “Who are you?” My husband, who still does not understand her nature fully, lets out a gasp, thinking she means it. I know from the look in her eyes that she knows, and reply, “I know who I am.” It is just her way of expressing surprise combined with a slight act of aggression, for good measure. I spoon-feed her rice, tofu, and broccoli I have brought from home and bring her hot milk. She sleeps like a baby, like my babies did, with me typing on my computer right beside her. When she wakes up I make her fill out and sign a do-it-yourself will kit we obtained from a lawyer many months ago when she agreed it was a good idea, though I never got up the courage to bring it up again after that. I ask my husband to get the next-door neighbours to come. We need two witnesses. Gord and Joyce come. She barely recognizes them. She never needs to learn the meaning of the word testament. She names me as executor. I do not use that word, of course. I say, You have to choose someone to be responsible for your will. She says: I name you.