2023
Amar and Reza, Reza and Amar. They swim in and out of my dreams. The one’s face blurs into the other’s. Sometimes Boy Reza grows up into Young-Man Amar and sometimes Boy Amar grows up into Young-Man Reza with an Adidas duffel bag. Sometimes I find myself face to face with the Ghost of Amar Future who upon closer inspection seems to be an artist’s projection of Present-Day Reza. But as this face comes into focus I realize it’s not Reza not Amar no neither one it’s just a man no longer young but not yet old. A gently ageing specimen like me.
“Try with your internet,” Mama says. “You know how to do the Google and all that.”
So obvious that even a seventy-three-year-old woman can call up the words and yet I swear to you it had never occurred to me. But there it is as soon as she has spoken the words: the seed of an idea. The germ if you will because I always like a word that can multitask and what we have here is the possibility of both growth and disease.
It turns out there are people who will take your money and an old photograph of your missing person and age him or her for you. Not the police (who in their right mind wants to go poking the hornet’s nest we call the police when it is not absolutely necessary? No bloodshed no kidnapping no fire therefore no police thank you very much) but private companies. In the red photo album in the TV cabinet there are photos of Baby Reza and Small-Boy Reza and then a significant lacuna but then oh yes then in the back of the album on the very last page where you are unlikely to look because after all those empty pages you will have thought there is nothing more: there is a photo of Reza in those last strange months. Our aunt took it apropos of nothing at all one afternoon in her sitting room. It was printed on the matte photo paper that was in vogue in those years and the colours have gone all funny as they do: a thin wash of pink over everything. But the fading and the discoloration cannot obscure Reza’s refusal to humour our pestering aunt.
“Ala, smile la sikit,” she’d begged. “Working at Pizza Hut, surely you know how to say ‘cheese,’ can?”
Then she’d laughed alone at her own lame joke. In the photo Reza is sucking in his cheeks and frowning. His arms are sullenly folded. At first you might think he is doing the exact opposite of what she wants; indeed that was what I thought for many years each time I turned to that secret page to confirm that the photo was not a figment of my imagination. But when I was the same age as he is in the photo I had a sudden realization: he could have ignored her entirely couldn’t he? He could even—truth be told—have got up and walked away. It would have been much more in keeping with his character at the time: Sorry, don’t feel like it. Our aunt would have been powerless against his whims as she always was. But he chose to sit and stay and look at the camera. People are always more complicated than our memories make them out to be. And so it is that I have this photo now. But I don’t have USD200 to blow on a professionally aged photo of my brother.
As though Mama’s hectoring is not enough Ani has begun to attempt a nudge here and a hint there.
“They always say it is good to make old people happy. God showers with blessings those who are kind to old people.”
I laugh pointedly. “My mother is not that old,” I say. “She likes to merepek but don’t be fooled, she’s doing it for attention.”
But Ani shrugs. “If it is attention she wants, then attention is what will make her happy isn’t it? I’m saying let her have whatever makes her happy.” Her single-mindedness—in a less charitable mood one might even call it mulishness—astonishes me into a moment of silence just long enough for her to seize her advantage.
“Hasn’t she earned it?” she presses on. “She gave birth to you and fed you and clothed you and brought you up properly. I’m sure when you were small you also wanted lots of attention.”
I could stop her right there. I could tell her the whole story. Oh I wanted their attention all right. How I longed for it. But it’s much more efficient to agree.
“You’re right. I wouldn’t lose anything. I’ll never find him anyway, but I can give her the small happiness of my effort, it’s true.”
Knowing what Ani does not know about the calculus of attention and love and gratitude I know that in the end I will do it not for Mama but for myself. To satisfy my curiosity. The question is what if I actually could trace Reza? My internet as Mama calls it did not exist in 1988. In those days one would have hunted down old friends and acquaintances. Written letters. But to whom could Mama have written? She had made no allies in life. That left only prayer which I am sure she bravely tried but prayer—let us just say that the internet is a surer thing.
Of course the first question is what name he goes by.
Let us recall the name he inherited from the good-for-nothing real-not-real probably Australian father. And would you look at that! This side I have prepared myself for a long and arduous search but that side he is quietly sitting on the staff of a vegan cooperative cafe in Melbourne in 1998. Can you believe it? He must really have gone looking for his father. I think of him as he was when he left. His barely-needing-to-shave face, his Adidas duffel bag. I think of his heart holding his secret hope—small and flinty as an arrowhead it is—of his father saying all the things one might want a father to say after twelve years. And as I think of it the finest of cracks appears in my own heart. All those years I thought he had everything I wanted when actually he was as full of longing as I was.
Here he is more troublingly in what appears to be a Dickensian eviction process in 2000 (picture it: the dreadlocked vegans in their bean-smelling pot-smelling squat). And here he is in 2005 on the board of an anti-GMO activist collective and there next to his name is an email address. So simple in the end. Of course who knows if it still is his address but it is a beginning. I write it down on a little pad of paper. I stuff the pad into a drawer.
One of these days. One of these days. Nothing really so urgent about it. Mama is not dying. Reza is not dead.