Five in a Suitcase
i. The Customs Declaration
There is no box to fill on the customs form for a father’s name. Gifts, yes. Commercial samples, food, plant matter, currency above ten thousand dollars. There is nowhere to declare the man whose bed I am standing over, packing into a suitcase one object at a time. He would not cross the ocean to visit me and my wife. Because it was me and my wife and not me and my husband. I understood he would not cross the ocean for me.
The light through the window in my parents’ bedroom in my childhood home is always mottled because of the mango tree that looms over the house like a nosy neighbour that has been witness to all our secrets. My own things are already in—two salwar kameez, both of which I will never wear back in the States, and a kurta that smells of all the curries we spent our time around for the last two weeks. Two almost dry marigold flowers are tightly wrapped in a pouch made of thin red gamchha cloth that has been blessed by the priest. They rustle under the pressure of my fingers like receipts at the bottom of a bag, as I turn the pouch this way and that. I took the flowers off the head of the earthen pot we let sail in the Arabian Sea.
Baba is, at last, emigrating to America as dried flowers I do not expect I will have to declare to Customs.
ii. The Glasses
One arm of it is bent at an angle no optician can fix for cheap. The metal half is still warm from where it was forgotten on the window sill. On our video calls—those for which I held my breath because they started arriving only after Ma died, once in four or five months, and never lasted more than three minutes—he’d hold the phone an inch from his nose hairs and squint and declare the screen broken, the camera cheap of quality, the internet in America not what they claimed. Anything rather than admit his eyes were going. He’d reach for these glasses before the morning tea or the paper or his side bag. Or so he could see my grades better. But he hadn’t seen me through them in years.
I’d wager a guess he hadn’t been able to look at me since the evening I told him about Jessica. I, his daughter, eldest, my older son he’d say proudly in gatherings wagging his finger in warning, was to be with a ‘Jessica’? As if the word ‘daughter’ might suddenly remind me of my gender and make me decide not to pay his bills in his old age. Or as if it lessened him as a father.
He’d frowned that evening, turned his mouth upside down while my mother had cried into the back of the armchair he was sitting on, taken his glasses off and never could see me again.
iii. The Photograph
I printed this one of Jessica and me and posted it to him and Ma because they had still not figured out how to set up the printer. We are laughing in it, in the kitchen of our first home together, the eve of our wedding. The edges are soft, maybe from handling, maybe from the turmeric-stained steam from all the cooking because the photograph was stuck to the door of the fridge that faces the stove. I never expected them to put us up on the main wall where all the big photos go. I never expected him to not throw it away either.
Unable to display me, unable to discard me, hanging in the kitchen suspended in indecision. When I told them about the wedding, they stayed quiet for thirty seconds and then asked me what the price of prawns was in Walmart, like that was their most pressing concern.
iv. The Side Bag
It is tattered and not just at the corners. Black synthetic with leather lapels and piping, but turning grey—white—fraying where it has rubbed against his waist and shoulders and arms over, well, I don’t know how many years. I don’t want to take it with me but I want to.
The last evening I sat here, before the final illness, I tried once more. “Jessica could come, the two of you could finally meet, you could see the life I’ve made.”
He grabbed the bag off the floor where it lay resting against the leg of his chair, and with shaky hands pulled out a docket of papers. The yearly accounts meticulously documenting every penny he’d spent of the money I’d sent him every month. And the transfer deed to the house. This house. I signed off my inheritance to my brother. What would I, a daughter, do with the house I’ve grown up in? It was never mine, or ever going to be mine. He then asked if I wanted tea. Which could have meant anything from I love you to I hate you to I can’t to I’m sorry or That’s enough.
v. The Passport
No American visa stamps. Three British ones though, to my brother. He has a wife and twin daughters. Thank God for him. Baba’s reasons for not wanting to come to America were the stairs that he would have to take to climb up to our fourth floor flat.
The pages after the last stamp are blank, empty and precisely measured sarcophaguses of every trip we did not take. The light through the tree mottles on the bedsheet and on half of my body as I zip up the suitcase. Jessica walks into the room, which is a cue to the end. I wash my face and ask the cook for tea and survey the house one last time, before the Uber arrives. Welcome to America, Baba, I mumble. We have an elevator, but I suspect you’ll still find something to complain about.
Amrita Chowdhury
Amrita Chowdhury is a British-Indian, own-voices writer of fiction, based in Hertfordshire, England. She is currently working on her debut novel. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Bridge Eight, Barely South Review, Apricity Magazine, Mud Season Review, The Writing Cooperative, and others. More of her work is at www.amritachowdhury.com.
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