DEAR LOVE,
I am 30. I sit somewhere between formed and forming. Thankfully, you are here with me. Three decades, and still you haven’t left. You and I, two misfit kids who met in the loud silence, back when we were barely knee-high. Here in our own space, we speak in words only we know.
Together we haunt this house, pulling my anger room to room. It lumbers behind us like an enormous, devoted, shaggy pet. I tug it by its dirty, frayed rope, one end tied around its neck, the other around my wrist. You can see the rope rubbing raw the flesh, but neither one of us can undo the knots. At night we sleep curled on the same bed, my head on anger’s warm belly, my two breaths for its one. You sit by the window, guarding until fatigue pulls you in too.
“What are you angry about?” Momma arranges her syllables carefully. “For it not working out? It was your dream, I know. But you didn’t fail. Or, is it—do you miss him? Or, is it your—?”
“No, Momma. It’s not one thing or person.”
“Then what?”
“It’s . . .” The words fall into line without me. “It’s all the things that happened and all the things I have allowed. For thirty years.”
Momma’s face surrenders color, the tendons tense in her neck, and I silently berate myself for causing her pain.
“How are we going to . . .” Momma doesn’t know how to finish her sentence.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just . . . I want to be.”
“Be what?”
“Just this. I want to sit and—”
How can I explain that I simply wish to sit and speak in the stillness with you? Long ago I stopped trying to explain you to anyone. My loved ones have collected fistfuls of reasons to question my sanity. I don’t need to add to the pile. Thus, you and I do what we always have. We tuck ourselves into a room and try to make sense of our pieces. For long minutes I sit staring at my hands or at my reflection, asking, How have I become the person I am? How can I feel better?
Even in my present state, I know anger is a side effect of pain. And I know that when one is hurt, one needs love.
From the spot where my spine meets my brain comes a clear answer and stern order: Write. Record these words. Draw forth and transcribe the lines of you and me until we forge the love I so desperately need.
Beginning where?
Ever practical, you reply, At the beginning.
I AM TWO DAYS shy of being born. I’m trying to be good, to let the day end before I begin the task of arriving. Momma walks the hallway back and forth like a dutiful pendulum. She is 22. Dhaka University feels deserted but hums with fierce concentration. It is exam season.
Her giant belly leads and dictates her sway. She is attached to it more than it to her, being pulled like a child tethered to an adult. She walks to alleviate the searing pain in her back and the swelling in her feet. Once the swelling ebbs, she returns to the classroom for a few blessed minutes before I force her to resume walking.
She performs this pattern for the three hours allotted to the exam. When she leans forward to write, I kick furiously, determined to arrive, begin, emerge to the surface and break. Momma is in her final year for her bachelor’s in English literature. The exam she is taking is in Shakespearean tragedy. Momma is a remarkable writer with a near-photographic memory. These two qualities have earned her the highest scores in her class, although she has been taking care of a husband, a pregnancy, and two households—first her parents’, now her in-laws’. During the final verbal exam, Momma’s mind rifles through reams of memorized plays and sonnets. She smiles, and answers between clenched teeth as I kick like a flag in the wind. Only because I’m depleting her, she graduates second in her program.
Her marriage was arranged quietly, suddenly, a surprise for everyone. She vanished for a few months and returned with an occupied belly to confirm rumors. Her professors were mortified by the sight and state of her: an ambling embodiment of quashed possibility. She had been preparing for a career in teaching and writing. Now I, my unborn self, ensure her hopes remain muted, indefinitely.
“Why?” her professors ask, aghast. They know my grandfather, my nana bhai, is a civil servant and writer. “Your family is progressive. We thought your parents were different.”
“Well, my husband is highly educated,” Momma says. “And you know his family.”
They nod. Of course. Papa’s family is Zamindar, generations deep, one of the two political clans that volley power in Bangladesh. His cousin is the prime minister.
“He didn’t ask for a dowry,” says Momma. “My parents don’t have much. They didn’t think another offer of this nature would come our way. Declining was an impossibility.”
The contractions start the day after her final exams. Momma and I, we already have an understanding. But although I waited for the school year to finish, I take forty-eight hours of pain to arrive. Everyone cries, sweats, and huddles. On November 20th, 1983, at 2:15 p.m., I am born, serenaded by the hum of mosquitoes the size of a child’s fingernail, under a single ceiling fan offering little relief from the heat. My cot is white, the paint peeling in petal-shaped pieces, a line of rust spreading along it like a meandering vein. At 7 pounds, 8 ounces, I am a compact baby with long limbs. My eyes are dark blue initially before they deepen to brown. Papa hasn’t a car. To drive home, we borrow Nana Bhai’s. Ferociously protective, terrified of germs, and suspicious of others’ abilities, Papa prohibits everyone but Momma and my grandparents from touching me. He says, “Right now, the child is perfect.”
As I grow, whenever Momma, Papa, and I go to doctor’s appointments, we travel by rickshaw. One time, Momma’s sari gets caught in the wheels. Thankfully, it’s made of cotton and Momma is a mother. She tears her sari while holding me in her other arm before the wheels can suck us under. We start to fall. She jumps. We land on her left side. That wrist will forever click, sounding like a child cracking her knuckles. But we are otherwise unharmed.
Were her sari made of silk, this book would not be.
I AM 30. Try as I might, I cannot still the stenographer in my mind.
The scenes arrive fully formed, sodden with color, scent, sound, taste, and texture, each memory heavy as a hunk of bread used to soak the final flavors of a meal. They need but the lightest contact with the page to transfer from past to present.
I feel everything still. All the moments you and I have soldiered through, they live potently, the past pulsing with equal, solid urgency as the present. The blunt hardness of tailbone hitting wood. The butterscotch of his voice threaded thickly with the acrid scent of tequila, his favorite. The gaping maw of hunger, how it sits inside me like a hole that is tangible. You keep repeating, Let the memories be. Write them here.
I am writing a book. But I haven’t harbored a lifelong dream of writing a book. What I have longed for is a book I could read whose world mirrored mine. Reading it would feel like coming home. “Home” has been such an elusive shadow, one that dances over the walls, slipping out of sight as often as it slips in. Ever since I was a child, I have looked for this imaginary book. I was convinced it would be my direct, unhurried line of love. A balm for my every ache. A friend for my every flaw. A tonic for my anger. But it never arrived. Thus, now, I am trying to give myself that book.
I am 30 and I sit in my younger sister’s bedroom, in a house foreign to me. I didn’t grow up here, but my face can be found in photos walling the rooms of this house. Peering at my child self, I’m still shocked that I look any different when I turn my gaze toward a mirror. In every frame, the eyes remain the same. They stare into the lens, daring the world to break contact. In every photo, little gold hearts glint on my tiny ears. I remember the tantrum I threw to acquire them, a month before my second birthday. My only tantrum. I begged Momma to pierce my ears, promising I wouldn’t cry.
I didn’t. You and I, my love, we are our will. Should we want something, we attach ourselves to it with the surprising stubbornness of a baby gripping an adult’s thumb.
“Reema! Dinner!”
“Alright, Momma,” I reply, hardly loud enough for me to hear, let alone her, amidst the din downstairs of contrasting voices threaded in happy disharmony. I search myself for hunger only to realize I haven’t the kind that can be sated with a meal. Still, I should join them.
Momma says from the time I switched to solid food, it was brutal trying to get me to eat. She finally found a way. She would stand me on a windowsill, point to the trees and sky outside. I’d talk to the birds, neighbors, you. Between sentences, Momma would sneak me a bite.
I rise to go toward her voice. Blood rushes then leaves my mind. Clutched in the cold vertigo, I think for the infinite time, Thank goodness you are here. My love, the fact that you are confirms I am too, however weary my tread as I walk the steps to my waiting family. I wrap myself tightly in you.
I AM 3. I know some things, but I don’t know many. I know crayons don’t taste like their names. A name is a word, and a word is different from a promise. I know I don’t like loud. At home it is happy and quiet and then loud. Loud makes my head hurt. It is happy, quiet, loud, and then quiet again. Sometimes it is so quiet, it is loud. That hurts too.
We live in Oahu now. We moved from Dhaka last year. Papa goes to university, and Momma has a baby in her belly.
Momma is crying again. She is trying to hide, but I am too good at seeing. I am small so I can see from everywhere. There are many places to hug her because I always fit. There are many ways to love Momma. Hugs, drawings, staying asleep until 7 a.m. and going to bed at 7 p.m. There are many ways to love me because I still need help with things like tying shoelaces and making the slanted leg on the letter R. Momma takes care of all that to let me know she sees me.
I ask Momma who God is. She says, “The one who made all things and takes care of all of us.” This makes me laugh. I don’t know why Momma has two names. God and her real name, Momma. How silly. When she cries, her face folds like paper and she looks like me. She always looks like me and I look like her, but when she cries, she stops looking like Momma and looks like a baby.
Momma, Papa, and I sleep on a big mattress on the floor. I like jumping on it when Momma throws up a clean, new sheet, making a bubble for me to pop. Sometimes, you sleep here too. You share my pillow. But mostly, you sit by me. You sit through the night, and that’s how I first found you. There was a noise, I woke up, and you were there. Sitting. Watching. You spoke:
I am here. I love you. I am yours.
We have one mirror on the back of the door in our bedroom. When I look into my face, you are there too. In the mirror, I sometimes make Momma’s face. I put her on like makeup. Her smiling face, laughing face, crying face. I tell my face, Go this way, jump, crouch, hide, and it does. This is our favorite game, yours and mine. Our other favorite is singing. I know many words, but there are so many new ones every day. We put them in a song because then they will never leave. We didn’t do this before and then, in tomorrow’s morning, we couldn’t find yesterday’s words. But now we know the trick. A song makes the words sticky. Tomorrow, the words will still be here like when I peel a sticker off my arm and, the next day, find fuzzy things on the spot.
Momma’s teaching me how to read and write because sometimes I have too many thoughts, flying like hummingbirds in my head. Sometimes they grow and move so quickly that they hurt. She says if I write them down I’ll be okay. She teaches me all the words I want to know. We stand at our window. I point. Momma says, “Hum-ming-bird. Hi-bis-cus.”
I ask Momma questions, all the time.
“Hey, Momma.” I pull on the tail of her salwar kameez. “Hey, Momma, Momma, Momma. Where does water come from? Why is sweet sweet and spicy spicy? Why does it hurt when I fall? Where does pain go when I stop hurting? Is it like love and we hold it inside, waiting to feel it the next time we fall?”
She always tries to answer my questions. She talks and talks until I’m happy. I talk and talk, too, because there are so many days all the time.
This is something we learned the other day: there are more days. I was reading a book. I finished it. I got so sad then scared because I thought, If books can finish, can we? Will Momma finish? I try never to cry but I had to.
“Momma, when do we finish? When does tomorrow finish?”
“Finish what, jaan?” My soul, in Bengali. “Every day ends at 12, midnight.”
I make a scrunched face. She didn’t understand.
“When does tomorrow stop coming? When’s the last one?”
She smiles. “Tomorrow will come, always. There is always a new one. And you will always be mine and I’ll always be yours. That will never change or end.”
I climb onto Momma. She takes me in like a deep breath. We sit as one body in our chair. I put my head on her to hear her heart. She kisses my head. I’m so happy I giggle and kiss back. That makes Momma happy, and this is my biggest favorite. I love making Momma happy. We’re happy, Momma, me, and you. We love things a lot until it gets loud.
Papa tries to talk, too, but he doesn’t know all the things Momma does. That’s okay. Momma says that’s not his job. Sometimes, I tell Papa things and he small-smiles. Small-smile is different than big-smile, laugh-smile, and happy-smile.
Sometimes he doesn’t have small-smile, and he looks very sad and worried. I love him so much I get sad and worried too. Then I do a dance or a song, a giggle, jump, and clap, and then he big-smiles and laughs, and I’m so happy I’ll pop like a bedsheet bubble. But I have to be careful not to do the wrong dance or sound. The other day, I twirled and my dress started flying, and everyone could see my underwear. Papa said, “Chi, chi, chi!” Shame, shame, shame! Bad Reema. I made the loud happen.
I try to make Papa’s faces in the mirror. He has small-smile face, sad face, angry face, and big-angry face. His face changes quickly, so that is fun for me to practice. Like jumping but only with my mouth, eyes, and nose. There’s a TV show I watch with Momma, with many people sitting down to play music with violins, trumpets, and drums, in a huge room with many lights. The music has no words. The sound is too beautiful to hold anything more. I make the music from the TV when I stand in front of the mirror. I move my hands like the man standing in front of the sitting people, and I jump my face from sad to angry to big-angry, fast, fast, fast like the violins. Louder and louder and louder. Papa, Papa, Papa, please look at me.
One day I ask, “Momma, why do you cry?”
She makes a sound like the air has cut her. She turns away. She doesn’t answer me. But Momma always does. Every question. Now she’s not even looking at me. She’s looking at the door. She looks sadder than any face I’ve seen or know how to make. I need to make her happy again.
I AM 4. I have a brother now. He is my most favorite thing. He is three years, nine months, and five days younger than me. And like me, he was born nine days earlier than the doctor said he would be. That’s because my brother knows there’s so much to do. He hasn’t stopped moving since he arrived. He crawls, jumps, falls, everywhere. Momma has to run after him all the time. It’s good that I’m good. She runs after him, and you and I play for hours, happy.
Momma now takes care of many babies in our apartment, not just my brother, from upstairs and down the street. I’m her sidekick. I know the difference between the sound of a baby crying for a hug, a bottle, a diaper change, or a nap.
Momma loves the babies. No one loves the way she does. She loves so big. She loves me, Papa, my brother, our neighbors, the Korean family whose mama teaches me piano—anyone and everyone, really.
I love everything except for school. That’s kind of a lie. I love it, but I also don’t. I love my books and my crayons with names like cinnamon, cotton candy, burnt sienna, and daffodil. But I hate being there. You come with me, but I hate any time I’m away from Momma. I beg my teacher to let me come home. Momma cuts fruit, cheese, and veggies into squares and hearts and puts them onto toothpicks for me, to make them pretty so I’ll eat. I take them out of my pink Tupperware and stand them like flowers. But I can’t eat. I miss her too much. I want to be tightly gift wrapped in Momma. Even if someone tried with their sharpest fingernail, they wouldn’t find the Scotch Tape lines to tear us apart.
At school I draw Momma a picture of her face. She’s wearing a necklace of pink jewels. “Crimson rose” from my box of one hundred colors. They smell old and feel sticky but are still beautiful. On her picture I write “I love my Momma because she loves me and takes care of me.” Those are two different things.
I put the picture up to my face to see if the colors smell different now that they’re the shape of Momma. No. They don’t smell like honey and flowers. They smell stale. So many things aren’t what I hope they’ll be.
I draw you too. I draw you and me. I cannot tell what you look like, so I draw how you feel. Like light. The best I can do is “buttercup yellow” in a big circle next to me.
I draw when it is loud. I draw also when I have a cold and fever. Cold and fever make my fingers and toes white. I put my hands in my mouth to make them warm, as far as they can go, up to the top knuckles. They only turn my mouth cold. I press my hands under my armpits. I fold them between my legs. It doesn’t work. I cough. It hurts, and my mouth tastes like a coin.
“Why is the child coughing?” Papa is angry.
“She has a cold.” Momma’s voice is slow, quiet, like a lake.
“Stop it.” Papa uses his hard voice. It sounds like the ground.
I order my throat to stop. The cough pushes against it, making it burn, and my eyes, wet. The place where my heart lives starts hurting. The hummingbirds fly faster. But I don’t cough.
Love is love but it sits inside people differently. In Momma, love makes her soft. In Papa, love makes him hard, makes him say, Why are you coughing, stop.
It is love.
Sometimes he tells Momma, “We are lucky. We are fortunate.”
Momma has a special trick. She knows how to cry without making a sound. It’s like magic. Her face doesn’t move.
“You should be happy,” he says.
“I am,” she says, over and over. “Thank you,” she says, over and over.
We are happy. Momma. Me. You. We are always smiling.
I AM STILL 4. Growing up takes a long time.
“Today’s our day, amanjee,” Papa says. Amanjee means little mother. He’s skipping university, and I’m skipping kindergarten. We go to McDonald’s, then the playground. We play on the swings and monkey bars and he takes so many photos of me. I look like a vampire because the dentist took out my top front teeth. I’ve only the pointy ones. We lie on the grass and look for angels in the clouds. My skin turns warm, then hot, from the sun. I won’t burn because I’m already the color of honey. When I become browner, it means I’m stronger, full of more light than before. I know Momma says there are always more tomorrows, but I already know. Today is the happiest day of my life.
I have three best friends now. You, Momma, and my brother. He is 2. We can talk about everything except for the things he isn’t supposed to know. He’s learning words fast because I never stop talking. His hair is softer than a feather and smells like milk, baby powder, and Johnson & Johnson’s No-More-Tears Shampoo. It’s gold in a bottle. His head is my favorite smell in the world, even better than Momma’s head. All of us sleep on one big bed, not a mattress anymore, an actual bed. Every night I go to sleep smelling his head and listening to Momma sing.
My brother has dimples right under each cheek, not on the sides of his face but closer to his nose, above his smile. He drools all the time. When he’s asleep, when he’s awake, when he’s laughing, when he’s crying, eating, playing, running, jumping. I don’t care. I love him more because he drools. I will love him always and forever. He’s my baby. I get to take care of him and wipe his face. I’m like Johnson & Johnson shampoo except my name is No-More-Drool.
We watch Sesame Street, eating cinnamon Teddy Grahams and drinking apple juice. The cinnamon is sandy on my tongue. My brother eats three bears. He doesn’t eat the last one. I finish my four.
“Can I eat yours?” He drools, smiles, and nods.
Some of the drool falls off in a string and drops onto his tummy, which always pokes out from under his T-shirt. We giggle. I reach for the last bear. I bite off the right arm, then the left. Momma checks on us.
“Reema! You don’t take your brother’s food! That’s not nice! That’s selfish.” Her voice is loud but not angry. She sits beside me on the carpet. “No, no, jaan. We don’t take things from one another.”
“But Momma, he said yes! I asked him.”
She smiles, frowns a little. “Really?”
I nod many, many times. My head will come off like my Barbie’s.
“Yes, Momma. Honest. He did.”
I cry. I don’t like seeing Momma sad, especially with me. This is the worst moment of my life. I will cry and die forever.
“I believe you.” She kisses my head, pulls me onto her lap. She pulls my brother in too. We sit three as one, under our blanket of crumbs, kisses, and drool.
“Momma, why am I a selfish? What does it look like?”
“Selfish isn’t a fish, jaan. It isn’t a thing you can see. It’s something you feel. Meanness inside a person that makes them unkind toward another person. You do the mean thing because you’re thinking about yourself and don’t care that you’re hurting someone else. But the other person feels very sad.”
“Momma, I never want to make sad people.”
“I know, babu.” Babu means baby. “You’re only kind. You’ll make happy people.”
She rocks us like a chair. Momma gets us more juice and two more bears each. One of my brother’s bears is missing an arm. I swap it with one of mine. The other I offer to Momma, but like always she says, “No, thank you.” She eats very little because eating makes a person fat. My brother makes paste out of his bears and wears it like lipstick. This makes us laugh so he laughs too. He starts to hiccup from laughing so much. Laughing is my favorite thing he does. Sometimes I poke his belly to make a giggle pop out and his dimples pop in. Sometimes he hiccups so hard he tumbles over to his side, then laughs and hiccups more. Oh, his laugh is the best thing ever. If life has only one poem, I want it to be this.
That night I have the first dream I actually remember. In my dream I am on Sesame Street as Ernie and Bert’s guest friend for the day. The letter of the day is L. We bake lemon cookies and talk about love. They ask for my thoughts.
“If you give someone the bigger half of your cookie, you know you love them. Now, they know it too.”
Ernie and Bert nod.
I wake up. I’m between Momma and my brother. You’re sitting by the window. On the other side of my brother is Papa. He’s snoring. The garbage truck beeps its special beep outside. My brother wakes up, jumps out of bed, shouting, “Dump tuck, dump tuck!” His favorite word and favorite sound. Momma and Papa wake up. We laugh and point outside for my brother, because he’s pointing and he likes when we do it too. He loves, so we love. Love, like a song, is sticky like that.
On the bus, my brother and I share a seat. On the carpet, he has Kermie, I have Miss Piggy. Outside, he has a puddle he sits in to collect worms after it rains, and there I am like Johnson & Johnson.
MOMMA SAYS WHEN I feel things, I feel them big. When I’m happy, it’s all people see. When I’m quiet, it’s all people hear. “You’re a very serious girl, aren’t you?” Momma says, watching. I tell her, “I’m just thinking.”
When I get angry, it’s all people feel. It always happens for the same reason: if a person hurts someone I love, I will hurt them back. One time, we were playing outside and one kid knocked my brother down. I sat on that kid and screamed in his face, one long note.
My hands and feet are always cold, but like my head, my heart is hot. My heart doesn’t feel like it’s filled with hummingbirds—it is one. I put my hand over my brother’s heart. His beats so quickly too. When Papa is asleep, I place my hand carefully on his chest. His heart is slower.
Momma and Papa invite two friends to our house, a man and a woman. Papa and the man play cards at the dining room table. They play for a long time, laughing, talking. Suddenly, the man slams his cards on the table, laughs, and hits Papa on the arm. I feel hot. My brother and I are playing on the floor. I jump onto the man. I hit him and hit him and hit him on his stomach, on his chest, on his shoulders.
“You will not hurt my Papa!”
Papa pulls me off the man, who is too surprised to say or do anything. I cry in Papa’s lap, hiding.
“Shh, shhh, amanjee,” he says. “It’s okay. He didn’t hurt me. We were just joking around.”
The man rubs his shoulder. “She sure loves her Papa,” he says.
Papa rocks me until I calm down.