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Kiah Harmon

‘Kiah,’ Arya asked me once, ‘didn’t your mother ever tell you what your name means in our language?’

I’d been seeing Arya regularly since the Week from Hell. I guess you could call our meetings counselling sessions, though Arya would never have called what she did counselling, and I wouldn’t have cared what you called it, as long as I could sit back in that enormous soft leather armchair in her living room, inhale the ever-present aroma of her Neroli incense, and let her soft, hypnotic voice wash over me until the pain began to recede a little.

I have memories of that voice from as far back as I have memories of anything in my life, because Arya was my parents’ closest friend and we were in and out of each other’s houses all the time from my earliest years, and I had the sense, even as a small child, that my parents thought of Arya as a source of wisdom and hung on her every word. I remember wondering, when I became old enough to formulate such questions, what Arya actually did, whether she ever claimed a specific profession or vocation. She was older than my parents, and lived alone, having been widowed much earlier in her life. But when I asked my parents about it, they never answered directly, almost as if they were afraid that defining her, putting her in a box, giving her a label such as mystic, healer, counsellor, soothsayer, or astrologer, might somehow diminish her. I accepted this, and never felt the need to ask her myself. If she ever made use of any chart or instrument of divination, it was done out of my sight. For me, Arya was the voice, and it was Arya I needed after the Week.

I’d begun to drop in to see her after school and at weekends, without my parents, from the age of eleven or twelve. I don’t remember whether she suggested it, or whether it was my idea, or whether it just happened; but it continued as and when we both had the time, throughout my schooldays, and later when I did my undergraduate degree at Georgetown University, and then went on to the law school. Neither can I remember in detail everything we talked about together. But I do remember that she showed endless patience in listening without interruption to whatever I wanted to say; I remember that never once did she judge me; and I remember that she always seemed to have some word, some idea, for me that brought order to some area of my life that had become chaotic and was about to spiral out of control. I can’t say exactly, in fact I’m not sure I can even estimate how much influence she has had on my life, but she has been a constant wise presence, and I don’t think there is any part of the woman I am that doesn’t owe something to her.

Arya was the first person I told about my ambition to become a lawyer. My family, immigrants to the United States from India, had been doctors as far back as anyone could remember, until I defied the tradition. They had settled in Arlington, Virginia, and adopted the American surname ‘Harmon’ in place of their Indian surname of ‘Hariya’, believing that this would ease their integration into American society. That was two generations before me, and by the time I made my appearance as my parents’ only child, there was nothing, except our obvious Indian physical attributes and a few small images of the Hindu deities in our house, to mark us out as in any way different from any other American family. My decidedly non-religious, non-traditional lifestyle didn’t bother my parents. My departure from the doctor tradition, on the other hand, bothered them a lot. My undergraduate grades would have been good enough to get me into several leading medical schools. But Arya’s comforting and encouraging words, both to me and to my parents, poured oil on the troubled waters. She also supported me after I had graduated from law school and been admitted to the Virginia Bar, when I opted for the freedom of my own office in Arlington, rather than a life of indentured servitude with one of the large national law firms that offered to take me on as an associate.

I’d been in practice for about five years when the Week from Hell hit me. I’d built up a respectable client list in the DC and Virginia Indian communities, and I was just beginning to attract some significant commercial litigation from the wider community. I was thinking about expansion. Then the Week struck.

On the Tuesday, my parents died together in their car on the Custis Memorial Parkway, when the driver of the speeding truck ahead of them misjudged a bend at the junction with Lee Highway at East Falls Church. The truck turned over and burst into flames, giving my father no time to react. On the Thursday, Jordan, my live-in boyfriend of three years, told me that he was leaving me to move in with his secretary, who, in contrast to me, was not the kind of selfish bitch who insisted on putting her career ambitions ahead of settling down to start a family with him. He had chosen that day to break this news to me, he explained, because with my parents dying it was going to be a time of change for me in any case, and so there was no point in delaying matters. Might as well get it all over with at once.

I closed the office for three months while, with Arya’s help, I gradually crawled, inch by inch, out of the seemingly endless dark tunnel I had come to inhabit in my mind; until I clawed and scratched and dug my way through deep layers of primeval mud back to the surface; until I began to see daylight and the trees and the moon again; until I remembered how to breathe freely. It was at some point during this darkest period of my life that she asked me whether my mother had told me what my name meant in our language. She had, I’m sure, but it had become buried in the deepest recesses of my memory.

‘It means “new beginning”,’ Arya reminded me. ‘It’s your time for a new beginning now.’

I remember shaking my head. When you live in the kind of tunnel I lived in then, you can’t accept that there is any good news, much less a new beginning. Such a thing doesn’t exist, and even if it did, there is no oxygen to sustain it. To believe it then was impossible. So I filed it away for possible future reference. But I knew that Arya attached no importance to whether you believed something she said right away. She never said anything unless she knew it to be true, and if it was true, it would manifest itself at the right time, and then you would know it was true, and she would never say ‘I told you so.’