Translated from the Gibberish: Seven Stories and One Half Truth

I ’ve been staring at the underwear hanging on the balcony opposite mine for several minutes now. It’s old, it’s tattered, it belongs to an elderly lady. A lady who happens to be deceased.

I am troubled, but it’s not the underwear that’s troubling me. My niggle is something else entirely.

Who is this strange entity watching underwear flutter in the breeze? Is it me the writer, the narrator, the character? Is it an alternate consciousness without a body, single-minded in its pursuit of truth, or at least a story, gliding in and out of worlds both fictional and real only to disappear, once the writing is done, into the ether? It is perhaps this eye that I invoke now, this phantom “I” who happens to be gazing at the third-floor balcony of the flat belonging to Dr. Hansotia, now in his late seventies, a man who once had the love and respect of every person in Shapur Baug, the Parsi colony where I live.

The garment in question is large, like a bag you can hide something in. It is off-white, with a creamy hue much like the one that the pages of books acquire when left unread over time, or exposed to sunlight. Its elastic is worn; stretched beyond capacity, it has refused to snap back to its original circumference. The reason for this is not limited to the characteristics of cotton. There is an emotional, metaphysical explanation as well. After all, the owner of this underwear was Dr. Hansotia’s wife of fifty years. With her gone, there is no reason for the elastic to snap back, just as there is no reason for Dr. Hansotia to continue hanging the underwear on the balcony a month after his wife’s funeral. The underwear has thrown the residents of Shapur Baug into a tizzy. It is all they can speak about. The doctor has lost his mind. He needs help. Someone needs to speak with him.

Perhaps that is true. The mind can become unhinged after a singular traumatic event, or after a series of smaller traumas. But I think: The underwear hangs…and so what? It’s not as if the doctor has put his wife’s kidneys out to dry. I’m content to let the garment stay there. I’m closest to it in physical proximity, closer than any other resident in the colony. Therefore I feel I have more right to attack or defend it than the others.

EXHALE/EXILE

I once had a yoga teacher who would use the word “exile” when he meant to say “exhale.” This was because of his accent. I was still in Bombay, before leaving for Canada twenty years ago. I had a perpetually blocked nose thanks to a deviated septum, and my family doctor—Dr. Hansotia—sent me to this man.

“Exile! Exile! Exile!” the teacher would say, letting out the breath from his belly and mouth at great speed, encouraging us to do the same. I found the idea of breathing in a closed space with fifteen other humans quite repugnant—all those germs moving around with the arrogance of frequent flyers, threatening to enter whomever they chose. But the word “exile” stayed with me, purely for its comic effect. Back then, I hardly knew what “exile” meant. Little did I know that the word would enter me more than any other germ, cause me to sneeze, writhe with fever, laugh, dance, dream, cry, do who knows what, as time went on, as a result of hurling myself from Bombay to Vancouver like a swashbuckling pirate. Now my swagger has gone, and I am as loose and unable to come back as Dr. Hansotia’s wife’s underwear.

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever.

This is a terrible piece of writing. Terrible in its truthfulness, in the feeling it evokes, in its ability to both ask a question and then conclude, without question, that there is no solution to its pain. It left me feeling weak and angry. I have been moved by literature time and again, inspired by its awesome power, such as when I first read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, or Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. These are stories that contain truths. This passage, however, was truth that told a story, my story. And I couldn’t bear to hold it in my hands. Twenty years of being in a foreign land, and instead of gaining something, I was being told that I had lost?

I cannot remember my yoga teacher’s face. At least, not entirely. I remember his nostrils and his mouth. But not the eyes. He almost never opened his eyes. I have a feeling he was from Kerala, and was stuck in Bombay. He was expressing, through his nostrils, what Said had written. The self and its true home were so far apart that only breathing could calm him down, smooth out his anxiety. I didn’t know at the time that he was offering me a tool, a coping mechanism that I could use in Canada. Dr. Hansotia hadn’t sent me to him because of my deviated septum. He’d sent me to this man because he somehow knew that my leaving India was going to cost me much more than international student fees.

“Why are you going?” he asked me, when I went to his clinic for a final checkup just before I left. I still remember the day and date. August 11, 1998. It was a Tuesday. I was set to leave for Canada a week later.

A writer? Who said anything about becoming a writer? What the hell was this guy talking about? But of course, secretly, that’s what I had decided. I just had no intention of announcing it. To anybody. To say it would make it real. This was my dirty little tryst with destiny. Perhaps, back then, I didn’t understand the seriousness of my undertaking—I was about to lock horns with something that was larger than me, more powerful, and completely dangerous. I was on my way to becoming a flammable object. That’s what writers are. And I knew I had it in me, this innate ability to combust.

Writing isn’t about prose. It’s not about stories, plots, characters, themes, images, ideas, and, certainly, not about redemption. Do you have the ability to combust? To fucking implode time and again, day in and day out, with the stamina of an athlete, until you have written that novel of yours? Once the book is out, even if it gets great reviews, this still doesn’t prevent your nerves from being on fire, because the next story has already come along, it’s already spewing and vomiting inside your gut—it knows that your ability to combust is far greater than your capacity to heal.

Maybe Dr. Hansotia saw that in me, much more than I did at the time. I was, as they say, full of the arrogance and exuberance of youth. And in the three years since I had graduated from university with my B.Com. (Bachelor of Complacency), I had grown shadowy. I no longer lived in the light. I stopped playing football, stopped going to nightclubs, avoided large crowds, felt pissed off hearing laughter. I just stayed at home and stared out my window into the dark, at the glow of lumber mills and cooking fires. But I wrote nothing. I didn’t know how to. I was seething, the fury was building, and I had to leave. That’s all I knew. Leave. If I had stayed on any longer in Bombay, I would have had a motorcycle accident, or gone to the red-light district and smashed a pimp’s head with a bottle.

“Just make sure you do yoga,” said Dr. Hansotia. “Keep doing it even there, it will help you.” In other words, make sure you breathe.

As soon as I landed in Vancouver, I inhaled. On that very first day, I took such a deep breath that my lungs were shocked by the purity of the air, the sheer audacity of oxygen. I continued doing yoga breaths for a few days. Then I told myself that if this was the quality of the air around me, I wouldn’t need yogic breathing. After Bombay’s smoke-filled, polluted death offering, this Vancouver air seemed like a trick.

TWENTY YEARS LATER, I SIT by the window in the very room where I grew up. It’s dark outside, the only light coming from a small cooking fire in the lumber mill visible through my window. This is not a typical Bombay view—there are no vehicles, no smoke clouds, no skyscrapers. Just low tin roofs that stretch out for hundreds of metres. In the distance, there is a small building near a cemetery. More space, the dead laid out horizontally for my benefit, not blocking the view. If you think about it, bodies should be buried vertically, to save space. At least, that’s how I would do it. This is what I think about at night. I cannot blame the jet lag. I wouldn’t call myself an insomniac, but sleep and I have a tumultuous relationship. Or perhaps, like so many relationships, it’s one-sided. I love it, but it doesn’t love me back, and what I’m left with is thoughts of vertical burials. My friends tell me that I’m morbid. Why do I think of these things? But if not vertical burials, what? The stock market? Bank statements, families, children, picnics, weddings? No, thank you. Vertical burials need some pondering.

The thing is, something keeps me up at night, whether I’m in Vancouver or Bombay, and I know what it is—or what they are—but I can’t catch them, I cannot exhume them. They are fragments of something deeply embedded in my consciousness. They are all this back-and-forth between continents and cultures, for two decades now, and my inability to own a home, to find a home, to feel at home. Exhale/Exile. Vertical burials. A woman’s undergarment. All gibberish, really. But they make it impossible for me to sleep. And so I have come to the conclusion that nights are not for sleeping. Nights are for translating.

I recently had the pleasure of reconnecting with my Italian translator, Anna Rusconi. On the topic of translation, she mentioned that she doesn’t like to “touch the body” too much. In other words, a translator is not a scientist who examines the text with a scalpel. She simply stands next to the work, really close, “feels its breath, and understands it as though heat is being exchanged by two people who are very close to each other.” My body is exuding these fragments of consciousness into the air, but there is no one but me to intercept them, catch them. I am my own translator, my own doom.

I move to the other side of the apartment, to the row of sliding windows near the main door. My parents are asleep in their room, at the opposite end of the apartment. They are sleepers. No fragments, no translating. While they sleep the sleep of kings, I stare at the underwear. The garment is so motionless that I’m afraid it will come to life any moment, and smother me because I’m staring at it. What a marvellous death that would be.

– How did he die?

– Oh, by underwear.

– By underwear? What do you mean?

– He was staring at a dead woman’s underwear, and it suddenly sprang to life and smothered him.

I would insist on being buried vertically, with the underwear in my mouth. Halfway down my throat, the rest of it rising like sour milk in a horrible puff.

I light a cigarette just to burn the taste of the underwear. It’s the lighting of it, and that first drag, that I enjoy. The rest gives me a headache. But what else can one do at night? How many almonds can one eat, how many cups of tea—green or otherwise? It’s fine; it will be morning soon. Soon, I will hear the sound of the newspaper being tucked into the space between the door and the latch, and the nation’s news will find its way into our home, where it will mix with tea and curdle everything it touches.

Now that the morning light is about to enter, I go back to my room, and close my eyes. The three hours or so of sleep that I get will be full of dreams. More unnecessary fragments. My most recent one: I saw a black-and-white photograph of a man’s face. Below it, his name, Sitar K., written in pencil. He used to work in a circus. Then, another drawing—an architectural sketch of the circus. Someone had drawn an arrow and scribbled the following words in pencil: This is the spot from which he fell and died. Translation: not a clue.

The next morning, I google “Sitar K.” Nothing. Then, “Sitar K. + Circus.” Nothing. I google my dreams. Should I consider myself lucky? That I have the time? That I don’t, or choose not to, rush to an office and sit in a cubicle, which is just another version of a grave?

The doorbell rings. I take my ashtray to the door and empty it into the garbageman’s cane basket; it’s full of half-smoked cigarettes, a healthy, expensive way of smoking. My next-door neighbour greets me with a big hug and a kiss. She asks me, as she always does when she sees me, if I am finally married. In my mind I tell her, as I always do, that I would prefer a vertical burial, while I am alive, to the M-word. But she’s elderly. So I just nod and tell her, “Soon, soon.” Then she tells me about Dr. Hansotia’s wife. “She used to be my childhood friend,” she says. “The three of us, Hosi, me, and her, used to be in the same school.”

I know that already. I have known since I was a child. But I let her speak. Sometimes old people need to speak. The bodily muscles no longer move much, but the tongue moving makes them feel muscular. I let her feel muscular.

“She died of a brain tumour. And that son of hers didn’t even come to see her.”

That I did not know. It’s not what I would have expected of Yezdi. The last I heard, which was several years ago, he was in Silicon Valley.

So that I have a son and he doesn’t show up when I’m dying? I say it was great to see her, and start to move back towards my door.

“How dare he…that is Jaloo’s personal…I told him what I thought, but he just nodded. He has lost his mind.”

Wouldn’t anyone? If your childhood sweetheart, your wife of fifty years, is gone, and your only child doesn’t come to visit, wouldn’t you lose your mind too? Shouldn’t that be the primary concern for my neighbour? For everyone?

Once I am back inside the apartment, I look at the undergarment again. I love the word “undergarment.” A garment, according to the dictionary, is simply an item of clothing. But add the word “under” to it and the wheels of outrage start to turn. For a deeper understanding of the word “undergarment,” I turn to Wikipedia (as one should for a reliable account of anything):

Undergarments are items of clothing worn beneath our outer clothes, usually in direct contact with the skin…They serve to keep outer garments from being soiled or damaged by bodily excretions, to lessen the friction of outerwear against the skin, to shape the body, and to provide concealment or support for parts of it.

Now that Jaloo’s body is gone, what is the underwear doing? It’s creating a ruckus in the minds of my neighbours. But what’s it doing for Dr. Hansotia? Or to him? He doesn’t go out much anymore, according to my father. He gave up his practice a while ago, and now he just sits at home. My head starts to hurt. I go to my room, shut the door, pull the blinds down, turn the fan to full speed, and let the dust enter my nostrils. The histamines in my body are now going berserk, my eyes are red, I sneeze and I feel choked up. There’s no question I’m home.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

When Tennessee Williams’s lover died of a brain tumour, Williams expressed it thus: “An awful flower grew in his brain.” As I stand by the window at night, and stare at the underwear again, I think of the first time I read that name. It was through the glass of Dr. Hansotia’s bookcase. I was in grade five or six, and I had gone over to his home to apologize to his son, Yezdi, for teasing him about a particular girl. All I had done was tell Yezdi that he was in love. That was all. And it had made him cry. It had terrified him, but I had no idea why. When I went to his house, he refused to come out of his room. His mother, Jaloo aunty as I called her, went to fetch him, and I was left seated with Dr. Hansotia in the living room. We sat in silence. It was then that I read the name Tennessee Williams. I must have tilted my head to read it along the book’s spine, because Dr. Hansotia asked me what I was looking at.

He then walked over to the bookcase, took the book out, and caressed its cover with so much care that I thought Williams must be a doctor. But his book didn’t look like a medical book. There was a plastic cover—to preserve the original—put on by Dr. Hansotia himself, I assumed; it looked like his work, so precise and surgical. He tried to explain what the book contained or what it meant to him, but I was too young to understand. I only remember the look on his face. There was such longing in it; there was admiration, envy perhaps, and a deep sadness. When I think about it now, it was as though he was touching Mr. Williams’s face, removing his glasses, cleaning them for him, performing some small duty that only a disciple could. I wonder if he still has that book. I wonder if he feels one way or the other about the fact that the love of his life, like Tennessee Williams’s love, died of that “awful flower.”

A fragment from Canada. A year ago, I lost someone close to me, a person whom I had met not more than fifteen times in my entire life. And yet the hole, the one she has excavated within me, is so vast that I can only fill it with gratitude, nothing else. Perhaps that was her plan all along. Not just for me, but for all those she dug into.

But Iris was no ordinary dramaturge. She could really see—the play itself, and the soul behind the play. After all, that was why she was named Iris. “Yes, asshole,” she would tell me. “But that’s not what the play’s about.” Then, through the haze of cigarette smoke that surrounded her, came this beautiful clarity. All those months spent in isolation, all those darkened rooms and doubts, were bathed in this light, thanks to her. Eventually, flowers grew in her too. But not in her brain.

Tonight, I light up in her honour. Oh, how she would have hated that word. “Just smoke. And get it over with!” would have been her advice. But I have nights to counter. I have the night to live through, inch by inch. I don’t lie still in bed. I crawl. I crawl like a worm from one end to the other, hoping to find something. The very thing that Iris found time and again, the thing behind the thing. From a young age, I’ve been after life itself: what’s behind you? You can’t be it. There has to be more. These balloons, picnics, jobs, salaries, exams, wars, riots, puppies, husbands, wives, partners—and more balloons. I mention balloons twice only because as a child I’d release them and watch them fly away and wonder where they went. What disturbed me was that no one else seemed concerned about their fate. Screw the cake; what happened to that poor balloon?

Where once there was plain grass in the rains and dry earth in the summer, there is now a children’s playground. It used to be a haven for us when we were kids: we played football, cricket, a game called hitty-kitty where you formed a human chain. There would be two teams of six or seven each. One guy would lean against a parked car or a wall for support, his back flat, his knees slightly bent, then another would stand behind him in that same position, his arms circling the waist of the guy in front, his head to the side, and another would stand behind him, and so on. The opposite team would take a long run, speeding towards the chain, thumping on his back the guy on the end, then flying into the air to land as far forward as possible, with a huge thud. The idea was to make the other team collapse under the weight. This was the whole point—and it was marvellous. I imagine playing it in Canada and chuckle. And I wonder how none of us, as children, got spinal cord injuries. Not one of us received a scratch. Sometimes we’d hear something crack, but we brushed it off, figuring it was a nearby twig, not someone’s vertebrae. It was all in a day’s play. Even back then, Yezdi would cry. Once, as he was standing with his back flat in the chain, the guy in front of him, his own teammate, farted in his face and the whole chain collapsed laughing. Now I wonder, was he crying for his mother who would die years later? Or for his father who was perhaps disappointed in him? Or for the fact that he hated India and his friends and always wanted to leave? Was the fart in his face life itself, that thing behind the thing, which trumpeted his future without warning?

I walk around in the dark, circle the playground of my past, the way I’ve always imagined Edward Albee circled his typewriter each morning before he started writing. There’s something about this playground that I need to write about. I haven’t found it yet. I look up at the surrounding buildings: C Block, D Block, E Block. A couple of lights are on, some air conditioners are whirring. I stare at the underwear again. I wonder if any pubic hair is still stuck to it. A fragment, nothing more. I wonder what would happen if I were to actually reveal this thought to someone, express it out loud. Would I ever get another Canada Council grant?

In your final report, please state the research you undertook for your short story collection.

Okay. We wish you the best in your future endeavours. Please do not contact us again.

This is what my MFA in creative writing has resulted in. I feel for my parents. My father had to sell off his old Jeep for my plane ticket. All I had when I arrived in Canada was enough money, barely, to survive for six months. A note to young people: Please think hard before pursuing a career in the fine arts. There’s nothing fine about it. All things fine—fine wine, fine food, fine homes, fine cars, fine art, especially fine art—are enjoyed by other people, people who listen to their parents and to society. Become doctors, lawyers, accountants, RMTs, bankers, politicians, whatever, and then keep Tennessee Williams in your bookcase, first editions, signed by the master himself.

Sometimes I think of suicide, but there’s always that next sentence. There’s always that next image. I’m being fed lines, like an IV drip over a hospital bed that prolongs suffering, not life. Something tickles my brain in the most tantalizing way, then disappears. And I know that my next book has begun.

I see something move, right above the underwear. It’s Dr. Hansotia. He’s by the window, three floors up, staring out into the sky. He hasn’t seen me. I know I shouldn’t wave. That would be too jarring. So I cough. The night is quiet, and maybe he’ll realize I’m here, just like him, trying to find something. But he does nothing. He’s as still as a bat now.

The next thing I know, I’m walking up the stairs again. His stairs. It’s 3 a.m., but who cares? He’s up, I’m up. I go to the third floor. It’s been more than twenty years since I’ve stood at this door. It’s still the same, with the same dull nameplate: Hansotia. I knock on the door with my knuckles. The doorbell would shatter the moment. It’s hardly audible, my knock. Even to me. I wait. Nothing. I wonder what I’m doing. I can see my apartment window from here. That window looks so pointless, like a rectangular hole in concrete, like a photograph, and I see what Dr. Hansotia must have seen from his window, a little boy who was once happy, played sports, studied, ate raw mangoes dipped in chili powder, then became a hormonal youth and started wearing tight clothing, followed by extra-loose clothing, then grew a strange moustache because he was hairy, then shaved it for the first time, read only Amar Chitra Katha comics, Tintin, Asterix and Obelix, and could have cared less about the Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton—thought they were dull, so dull that he was forced to imagine a colour that didn’t exist—then fell ill, grew moody, irritable, stood at the window again, but was no longer the same boy who had once stood there, then left for Canada, came back intermittently, looked even more confused, went back, came back, continued this placement and displacement for two decades, and now, finally, all that was left was a rectangular hole in a four-storey concrete building, nothing more, in which a living ant, a miniature, insignificant insect, had played out some shitty short film, one that had some moments but lacked unity as a whole, and as the camera zooms back to take the landscape seventy-millimetre shot, I see thousands of windows, the whole city of Bombay, the whole of Mumbai, a city with two names and twenty million souls, all performing in the dark, only a fraction of them realizing they are nothing more than petty cash.

After a few seconds, I hear the slow shuffle of feet, the sound that old people make when they go to the toilet in the middle of the night, muscles not quite awake, feet unable to lift, or perhaps not lifting on purpose, staying close to the ground because they know that’s where they’re headed. The shuffle stops. I know Dr. Hansotia is on the other side.

He doesn’t look at my face. He looks at my chest for some reason. Still, silence.

“I just wanted to offer my condolences,” I continue. “I saw you were awake…”

More silence. Then he shuts the door on me. It’s not rude; it’s like a slow curtain closing. He’s allowed my condolences to enter, a whiff, but not me. I don’t even hear the door click. I stand there and stare at my feet. I wonder why humans do this, stare at their feet when things go wrong. Am I blaming my feet for bringing me here? Up these stairs? Then I should be blaming my hands too, for writing, for doing that most ridiculous of things, making me believe I was of value, had something special to offer. Shouldn’t I blame my hands for holding books, realizing their power, allowing their electricity to enter my body and brain? Why just the hands, though? The eyes as well, for seeing. For seeing things in a strange and wobbly light.

EAR, NOSE, AND THROAT

There is something to be said about the human body. From the time we are little, we are always being told that we need to look after it. Health is wealth. Without your health, you have nothing. And where does this health reside? In the human body.

The body is present everywhere, even in literature. We call a writer’s work a body of literature. One of the most beautiful pieces of writing that I have come across has to do with the body—the opening page of Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian, written as a letter from Hadrian to his successor, Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian speaks of a visit to his physician Hermogenes, and how the latter was “alarmed” at the sight of the emperor’s body, and the “rapid decline” of his health. Hadrian writes:

It is difficult to remain an emperor in presence of a physician, and difficult even to keep one’s essential quality as a man…This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master.

Naked before his physician, Hadrian suddenly feels like a child, a slave, a patient, a worthless, weakened reptile. And his impending doom towers above him, just as I tower above the reptile that I have killed in my room tonight—a lizard. Again I am not able to sleep, and the white tube lights in my room give off a subway station glow, as if underground. For the past three nights a lizard had been gliding along my window, its belly pressed flat against the other side of the glass as it moved back and forth, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly.

At night, I keep the window closed. There are too many reptiles, insects, bugs—winged creatures that believe they have the right to enter my room just because they have wings. I would like to tell them that angels have wings too, and angels have been banished, sent into exile. But it’s hard for me to get through to the insects and reptiles. My father, on the other hand, does not believe in communication. He simply reaches for the cockroach-killing repellent and sprays the entire room with it. Bugs, mosquitoes, and lizards fall from the ceiling of my room like dead stars. My pillows smell of repellent, and I get hit by it, too, an extra surge of chemicals to keep me awake. The fan above me whirs, another winged creature, angrily spinning in the same cycle again and again. I sweat with anxiety and heat. It is on nights like these when I long for Canada. Not so much for its vast open spaces, but for a particular recreation centre in North Van, and its freshly minted pool, where I spend evenings doing laps and breathing hard: exile, exile.

As I lie in my Bombay bed, I start doing the butterfly stroke, I make the white sheets turn blue and sink into the water. I drop into another dimension and observe creatures like myself who think their bodies mean something. The pool is the best place to observe humiliation and decay, hubris and illusion.

We are flesh on vertebrae. That’s about it. And yet we refuse to see that. Young men with rippling abs glide through the water like emperors, without the slightest clue that one day they too will meet their Hermogenes; then there are the old men—white, brown, hairy, scary—who feel power surge through their bank accounts even while they are one step away from using shit bags.

The water is trying to tell us the truth by shrivelling our skin, but no one pays attention. Water, that most truthful of things. We drink it, it keeps us clean, but we do not allow it to keep us honest. Swim for an hour. Look at your finger; those concentric shrivelled circles, that’s the truth circling around us, trying to find a way in. But all we do is dry off and put on a thick layer of cream.

I often watch one man—I think he is Iranian—who has a full mane of back hair. He swims beautifully, and his hair swims along with him, behind him, but almost separately, wavy strands creating a jazz riff through the water. I sometimes think I would like to buy him a pair of scissors or a razor, but then again, perhaps he is wiser than the rest of us—he is allowing himself to turn into a root, or the side of a hill; he is ready to return to the earth.

The lane to the extreme right is the slow lane. It should be renamed the bobbing lane—everyone in this lane bobs up and down in the water, following the instructions of a fitness expert who has promised them…something. Everyone tries so hard to maintain the body, to keep it going. Health is wealth. And apparently, judging from what can be seen at the pool, the exact place where health resides in the human body is in the butt.

Butts jut out of swimming costumes, restrained by fabric from falling to the floor. But I say they should fall to the floor and slide away from us entirely, where they will merge with other butts, and the collected mass of butt jelly will make its way past the reception area of the rec centre into the concrete parking lot, then cut across lawns, through a wedding ceremony whilst the couple is exchanging vows, then over concrete again, over buildings, over that ugly mass of unaffordable Vancouver housing, and finally into the beloved Pacific Ocean.

But no, we love our gluteus muscles more than we love our own children; we give them the care they so desperately need in order to keep them close to us, proud and shapely. We imprison them in our underwear, so that they stick to our bodies; we trap them in jeans and tights. In our next incarnation, I propose, we should all be born without arses. Nothing but flat skin, like the top of a butter block.

Dr. Hansotia’s wife had a butt too, and underwear once carried it, contained it. Now that container is the cynosure of all eyes. I’m done with my laps now. I’m done thinking about underwear. I beg for sleep, I pray for it the way a farmer prays for rain. I exhort the gods to provide me with it. I invoke them by closing my eyes, and I hear the ceiling fan cutting the air. Quincy Jones has said that he likes to compose music at night. That’s when it’s quiet, he said, and he always leaves room for the Lord to come in. That’s how the magic happens.

I don’t write music. But writing itself is musical, it’s about rhythm. It is contained in the body, essentially. The stories that I will tell ten years from now are already embedded in my DNA, and they will erupt when they need to. There it is again, the body. It is useful, but it needs to know its place, it cannot have so much power over me. Again, the body is keeping me awake, staying up when it needs to stay down. If sleep is so crucial for the body, shouldn’t there be a switch? Switch on, switch off. Simple. But perhaps the lack of a switch is the human struggle.

As a writer, I’m constantly trying to remember. As a human being, I’m trying to forget. Sleep is that in-between state, between remembering and forgetting, where water, the eternal truth-teller of which we are made, swims around within us, nudges our organs, and tells our bodies exactly what to remember and what to forget—so that my remembrances become fictions, and my forgetfulness makes me human, brings me peace. But I remember everything.

I open the window. But there is no Lord; instead, a lizard enters. Perhaps she is looking for her son; a mother coming into my room and shuddering that her little one is gone.

LANGUAGE

Immigrants speak in fragments. This is their language of choice—or rather, this is the language that has been chosen for them. Incoherence. The inability to understand, to be understood. Ask immigrants where they are from, ask the question, “So what is home for you?” and you will see the agony on their faces. Of course, as a writer, I get asked that question all the time, and it is a valid one, and I answer it without missing a beat: I have two homes, and I have neither. That is what I say in interviews. But catch me off guard, catch me at a train station in Bombay, or when I am staring into someone else’s home from a bridge, and you will see the lines appear on my face.

As my neighbour did this morning. I was emptying my trash into the garbageman’s cane basket, and she asked me, “Do you like it there?”—meaning my other home, Vancouver—and I said, “Sure, sure,” and she said, “It must be so clean,” and I said, “Yes, yes,” and just as I was about to re-enter my apartment, she asked, “So, are you happy there?” and the truth is a resounding no, but then I’m not happy here either, because there is no here, here was, it no longer is, and it’s questions like these that keep pharmaceutical companies in business. Am I happy anywhere? Was I ever happy? Is there such a thing as happy? I don’t think so, and if there is, I don’t want it. I want to combust in such a powerful way that the effects are felt deep in the oceans; I want craniates to read my work and get my meaning, and that’s about it. It won’t make me happy, but it will give my combustion the distance it deserves.

While I’m feeling all this, my neighbour tells me that she went over to Dr. Hansotia’s place and rang the doorbell but he didn’t answer. What if he’s dead? What if he’s had a stroke and is just lying there on the kitchen floor? But then, upon further investigation, she discovered that he has been opening the door for the garbageman, and has also hired a new maid to help cook, clean, and get groceries. So he has every intention to live. My neighbour seems a bit disappointed by this. Just as I’m disappointed by my constant need to make sense of a decision I made twenty years ago—to leave. I can feel my body turning dark; I can feel an eclipse occurring within me, the light being blocked.

Over the next few days, I keep one eye on Dr. Hansotia’s window as I do my regular Bombay things—I visit friends’ homes, try to partake of the natural rhythms of their daily lives: their morning jogs, afternoon naps, shopping trips (oh, how the malls have grown; they are the Great Barrier Reefs of our age), domestic arguments, laughter that I hear and remember from long ago, lovers who have aged and seem “happy,” money flowing in and out of wallets and cards, and me, reaching into my wallet to pay for dinners only to be scoffed at, but in the most affectionate way, because I am an artist, an adorable pye-dog. So many natural, daily rhythms that seem completely unnatural to me, such as sharing space with another human being; waking up next to one; having a miniature version of oneself and then holding it, scolding it, cuddling it, cleaning it. Once in a while, someone hands me their baby, hoping it will change me, hoping that some of its babyness will redeem my soul, make me less grouchy, or whatever it is they think I need. This obsession with happiness—to me it’s just a new-car smell that one day disappears without warning. I try to partake of daily life, but I find natural rhythms only when I am writing. But I cannot write all the time. So I think.

It’s 2 a.m. A peaceful time to be awake in Bombay. I still call the city Bombay when I speak, but I’ve started using Mumbai when I write. Mumbai is creeping into my work. Those seven islands are speaking up, telling me it’s time to acknowledge the name change. If it’s only a name change, I tell those islands (when you’re up four days in a row, you can communicate with islands), why is it so difficult for me to say it? Is it because when I say Mumbai I don’t know where to go? Or is it because Mumbai has no use for me, doesn’t need me the way I need it? On my previous trip, a year ago, I went to Chowpatty beach at night and dipped my feet in the sea. And just as I started to feel the warmth of the water, the water tightened its grip around my ankles and I realized that water, that eternal truth-teller, was back at work. You did not leave Bombay, the water said. It spat you out. Remember this, each time you hold that new passport of yours. When I returned to Vancouver, I dipped my feet in the waters of English Bay, thinking I would spite the Arabian Sea. But the Pacific had a message for me as well. Not so much in words, but in its cold, steely silence.

In Bombay, once I’m done holding other people’s babies and shopping, once I’m done catching up with friends or watching a Hindi movie in Phoenix Mills, I do something strange—strange to others but not to me. I take late-night taxi rides alone. Even though people offer to drop me home after our nights out, I prefer cabs. There’s a bridge in the city, the JJ Bridge, which connects Byculla, the place where I live, to Colaba in South Bombay. At night, when there’s no traffic, it’s just a ten-minute ride between those areas, and I use that bridge to stare into homes, into people’s apartments, to catch a glimpse of the smallness of their movements, to see complete strangers perform mundane acts such as reaching for a newspaper, or to watch an old woman fanning herself. The bridge allows me to be so close to their windows that I can literally smell their lives. This is an essential part of my Bombay visit. As my taxi climbs up that bridge, I feel a kind of exhilaration—perhaps that’s too grand a word: a release, you might say. I become an eagle who swoops in and out of lives, of narratives, without the slightest regard for plot or character development. I collect snapshots, take photographs in the mind with eye blinks, in order to find the thing behind the thing, which I hope will enlarge my world; and when I do find that moment, I don’t know what to do with it. The second I begin to feel complete, to fill up with something, a sense of loss pervades me. Then I stop looking into apartments, I look below the bridge, at Mohammed Ali Road, at its mosques and minarets, its greenness, its lights sending out signals into the sky, and it feels like an ancient place, a place that contains the breath of centuries, warm and stale. I fill my nights with domes in the sky, and minarets, with roundness and erectness, and this says a lot about how I feel about Earth itself—that I am stuck in its roundness, when all I long for is upward movement, a minaret that will take me so high…And my thoughts stop as soon as I descend the bridge and pass by my old school—or, specifically, the petrol pump behind my school. When childhood memories take over, it’s time for me to leave.

It took me many visits to India, many taxi rides across the JJ Bridge, before Canada made its appearance, before it intercepted me, the way a train switches tracks and suddenly you are off course, or so you think—but you’re really going where you were headed all along. There’s something about the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver that has always bothered me, but I didn’t understand what it was until one night on the JJ Bridge. I’m always being told by people who visit Vancouver how stunning it is, how lucky I am to live here/there. When people from India come here, they say, “It’s jannat.” This is heaven, this is paradise. For a second, I am filled with some sort of pride, but this quickly goes away. I digress. And I digress because that’s what the Lions Gate Bridge is: a digression. The opposite of focus. If the JJ Bridge in Mumbai allows me to focus, to stare into windows, into tiny lives, the two lions at the mouth of the bridge in Vancouver tell me that something regal is at hand, something majestic—and at first, you buy it. You stare at the North Shore Mountains, at those homes in North and West Vancouver that almost seem to touch the sky and the water and the clouds all at once, and you take a deep breath, and it’s invigorating. And that’s what I did, too, until one day I looked down below, and realized: I don’t know a thing about these people. And by “these people” I mean the people whose land this actually is, these people who live on reserves below the bridge, underneath the bridge, as life passes them by above, as we move above them, in machines, full throttle, so fast that we fail to pay attention, fast because we don’t want to pay attention, or have been trained not to. Shouldn’t these reserves below the bridge be in the sky—not to elevate them to the status of legend and myth, because that would once again diminish the real history—but so that we notice them?

In 2003, I took an oath to become a Canadian citizen. I went to the ceremony alone, on a weekday, and stood with another group of people, most of them recent immigrants, I assumed, and listened to a judge talk about Canada. I still remember parts of what he said. How Canada was this great mosaic, this tapestry of cloth made up of different peoples, and now I was being asked to contribute to it, become part of it. And then, this particular phrase: “I invite you to insert your thread into the Canadian tapestry.” For some reason, I got the giggles. I would love to insert my thread, I thought. I looked at those next to me to see if anyone else found these words funny. Not so. There was an Asian woman looking directly at the judge as though she was worried she would be thrown out of the country if she did not behave; there was, to my left, someone whose face I cannot remember, because I kept asking myself, as I looked left and right, Where are those people from under the bridge? Why aren’t they here, as representatives of this great land, to welcome, to educate, to allow us passage into our new home, which was once entirely theirs, and theirs alone? And I knew that if these people under the bridge had been asked to whom the land belonged, some might have said, “The land.” Who else? Who else could land belong to, but to land itself?

Bridges are not connectors, they do not join, they are simply ways to pass over—and what we pass over will come back to haunt us.

(Please follow the bridge, or pass over, until you arrive at Translated from the Gibberish, Part Two, on this page.)