by Scaachi Koul
In the first few minutes of these drives, I am my cleverest to him, while he’s at his most charming. I can forgive his garbled pronunciations—like the time he saw a sign saying “Pet-Co” and read it aloud as “Pedophile”—and he can forgive my insistence on being the smartest guy in the room, like that one drive home where I baited him into a conversation about sexual assault statistics just so that I could be right about something. Once, we drove past a church offering a free lunch, and he tried to persuade my mother and me to pretend being Christians just to get a sandwich. “Could save me a few bucks,” he said, chuckling and accidentally speeding past a traffic cop.
But the drive from the Calgary International Airport to my childhood home in a dead-silent neighbourhood sandwiched between gas stations lasts around half an hour. It’s just long enough that by the time we’re pulling into the garage, my father has already found fault with how much clavicle I have dared show in his presence and I am already irritated by the way I think he looked at my thigh, indicating that he thinks it’s too big.
My trips last anywhere from four days to ten, and the tone we establish in that car ride is then set for the rest of my visit. His refusal to learn correct terminology stops being cute and starts being grating. “It’s not Jazzy,” I’ll say. “It’s Jay-Z. And his wife is not named Shobna or Binaka. You have the internet, how is this happening?” And he will stop finding my willfulness, my stubborn attitude, endearing and will start finding it an impetus to peaceful coexistance. “Just because you went to Paris for five days, once, three years ago, does not mean you know more about wine than me,” he will say, unscrewing a bottle of sour white and refusing to give me any. Then we fight. We’ll have an argument where I call him selfish and he calls me ungrateful, and by nightfall of day one, we’re not speaking. Without fail, we spend 70 per cent of the visit giving each other a staunch silent treatment, icing each other out in a way typically reserved for mortal enemies forced to attend the same office potluck.
It was a version of this scene that I anticipated before my flight to Calgary to introduce Hamhock to my family. I went a few days ahead. As usual, Papa drove my mom to the airport, but he didn’t get out of the car to greet me. He didn’t chat much in the car either, didn’t say something about “the inescapable darkness of human existence” or ask me about “that girl you met when you first moved to Toronto, what’s her name, Gibbon or something?” Instead, when we got home, he just roamed around the house in his slippers, looking down, readjusting picture frames that didn’t need adjusting.
“So,” he tried once. “Does he…What does he…Is he tall?”
“No,” I said, “he’s not tall.” Papa nodded.
When Hamhock landed, my mom, Raisin, and I picked him up from the airport. Raisin ran at him for a hug and he sat in the back of the car with her, feeding her little doughnuts. He called my mom Mrs. Koul, as I’d suggested. When we got home, Papa was still pacing in the foyer.
They shook hands. Papa led him into the kitchen, where all serious family matters tend to take place. He offered Hamhock tea. “You look good,” Papa said. “For someone your age.” It was…fine. It was fine. Hamhock listened to my advice and accepted three helpings of food from my mother, even when full. He played with Raisin, who seemed to want to sit directly on his head whenever he was around, asking to play on his phone or to talk to her about baseball. He joined my brother in his favourite activity: staunch, cranky silence while staring at a Seinfeld rerun.
There wasn’t a fight until four days in, when Hamhock went rogue and suggested to my parents that he and I move in together. Papa’s face, which had otherwise been locked in a lightly clenched aspect, filled with all his blood like it always does when he’s furious. He told Hamhock it was impossible, it would never happen, that no one in the family had ever lived with a partner out of wedlock. (This was hardly the truth. Papa was lying either out of intentional misdirection or because of a blocked-out memory—my brother and his wife, for one, moved in together after four months of dating.) Hamhock nodded respectfully. “I wouldn’t want to do anything to upset you,” he told my dad, while I stormed off upstairs to lock myself in my room, cry in my pillow, and maybe let out one tortured scream of, “BUT IT’S NOT FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIRRRRR.” Just one of the classics.
At one point during the week, Papa told Hamhock he was “bothered” by how much he liked him, as if digging down into his disapproval would have been easier if Hamhock were the monster he’d invented in his head. We left Calgary emotionally exhausted, our bellies aching from too much rogan josh and raita. Back at his apartment, which was starting to feel too small for both of us to sit in, we unpacked the trip. I knew Hamhock had been hoping for some immediate reversal, as if meeting him would make my dad say, “Why, he’s perfect! Take my daughter, please! My decades of cultural stipulations and moral repudiations have vanished merely by seeing your powerful haunches and formidable calves!”
Instead, we talked about what to do with, at best, my father tuning out a relationship he might have preferred to occur behind his back, and at worst, his explicit disapproval of our going forward with it in a more meaningful way.
“What now?” Hamhock asked.
“I think,” I said, “we look for a bigger apartment.”
—
Do other dads not end their phone calls with existential despair? Because that’s what my dad does. Papa ends most of his calls with me the way you might close a conversation with someone you want to menace. “Anyway,” he’ll say, “I’ll be here. Staring into the abyss.” Or, when I have given him good news, “The talented will rule and the rest will perish in the sea of mediocrity.” Or, when I have given him bad news, “I am sorry for everything that happens to you, as everything is my fault.” He never ends with anything that couldn’t one day be construed as a tragic and yet comic last word. He never just says goodbye because goodbye has no weight. Goodbye would not haunt his children if he actually did hang up the phone and then die of that heart attack he’s been anticipating for the last quarter-century. Goodbye wouldn’t be significant.
Papa and I are at our best when we’re on the phone, every evening, fifteen- or twenty-minute chats that weave together and make me feel as though we are forever in contact. Usually Papa is witty and ironic and magnanimous with anecdotes about the past or advice for the future. When he started watching The Wire he answered the phone with “What up?” or “Who dat?” or some other linguistic appropriation that does not actually appear in the show. If I don’t acknowledge this greeting (perhaps with a similarly enthusiastic, “It’s ya boy”), he will say it another two or three times. It’s important that you notice this good mood he is in, because it is fleeting.
After I brought Hamhock home, little about my and Papa’s calls changed. We continued to not talk about him as we had during the lead-up to the trip. We talked about my work or his crushing ennui or about how the biggest tree in the backyard rotted and he had to get it taken out or how Raisin started to yell “HOW RUDE” anytime someone did something she didn’t care for. We walked around the edges of my relationship, a boundary I was fine with because the alternative was not speaking. While Mom, slowly, began asking more questions about Hamhock, called him on his birthday, spoke to him after his uncle died to give her condolences, Papa resumed life as if nothing had happened. I liked it this way; I didn’t have to acknowledge with my father the uncomfortable fact that I was an adult, and he didn’t have to pretend he was happy about any of it. We just hit the buzzer and started all over again.
Some months after Hamhock and I decided to move in together, we miraculously found an affordable two-bedroom apartment in a quiet, leafy neighbourhood a few blocks away from his old place. I mentioned it to Mom and she acknowledged the information the way a computer might recognize a USB key: a fact she noticed without emotion. I slipped it into conversation with Papa and he said even less, seemingly trying to reject the information the same way he conveniently “forgot” where my brother lived bef
ore he got married to his wife. (Guess what! It was with her!)
I prepared for the move without discussing it with my parents, packing up the first apartment I had where I paid rent without help from Papa, who used to slide me a few hundred dollars every few months just to “grease the wheels” even when I didn’t need it. Hamhock and I fought three times in two different Ikeas about couch colours and the wood finishes of our new bed frame. (“I don’t want it to look like a girl’s apartment,” he said to me, so I forced him to hang a four-foot-tall drawing of a lingerie-clad Sophia Loren in our kitchen, saying, “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”) On the morning of our move, Baby Braga and some of Hamhock’s friends came over to lift my heaviest boxes, the ones filled with books, with binders filled with notes, diaries filled out at fifteen and transported across the country for some reason. I didn’t bother to call my parents. They didn’t want the details and I didn’t want a fight.
Once we arrived at our new place, it came to our attention that our landlord had neglected to finish renovating half of the apartment. The stairs leading to our basement were gone, just splintering planks of wood in their place, the hardwood flooring in the bedroom was unfinished, moulding was missing from the hallway, and light fixtures hadn’t been installed. The only rooms that were habitable were the guest bedroom downstairs and the kitchen; everything else was awash in boxes and new Ikea furniture that we couldn’t even put together because we didn’t have the room. I wanted to call Papa and tell him about the indignity of moving into a half-finished space where we could only set up a bed downstairs and wait for our landlord to get to work. But I knew that instead of solemnly laughing together at this minor misfortune, it might just bump up the inevitable yet undesirable fight.
And so I went through the transition of moving in with a partner for the first time largely alone. For the first four months, we fought near constantly: he hated dishes, any dishes, in the sink, I wanted to burn all his shoes when he left them splayed out near the front door for me to trip over, he collected old copies of The New Yorker as though they weren’t an obvious and tempting fire hazard, he wanted to drown my cat, Sylvia Plath The Cat, who tore holes in the new couch and then woke him up at five every morning with a little “Whrrrrrr?” I dug into Hamhock to look for fights. I wanted him to defend himself and get angry and a little mean because fighting is the only way I’ve learned how to be in love. I’d accidentally drop receipts next to the garbage instead of in it and wonder if it was worth it to just leave them there, see how bad I could make this, see if I could ruin everything from the inside out. Maybe if this relationship was weak, weak enough so I wouldn’t have to make the eventual, impossible choice between my father and my boyfriend, then the universe could just do it for me. We would break and we could move on. Like most things, it just needed some pressure.
Being with Hamhock has never felt like a sacrifice, like an unnecessary burden. For my parents, though, it might have been. It changed things, as I knew it would. It was worth it to validate him, to make him real, to stop stuffing a T-shirt into his mouth every time my parents called so they wouldn’t know a man was near me. But even then, the loss was clear. In the pursuit of honesty, of a greater intimacy with both my partner and my parents, I had to destroy it to rebuild. This was the work I had avoided for so long, the hard question no one stuck between two worlds wants to answer: do I protect him, them, or myself from the truth?
For weeks, Hamhock and I slept on the lumpy guest bed in the basement, my beloved old bed, the one my dad had bought for me when I first moved to Toronto. We wrapped ourselves in our blankets and held each other, as if we were on a raft swimming among our suitcases filled with clothes and trinkets, boxes filled with books that, eventually, we’d have to negotiate space for, Sylvia Plath ducking in and out of crevices I couldn’t reach. We struggled for sleep because our home was still just a place with all our junk in it, and we still felt lost. Hamhock and I were at our closest, and yet, everything felt distant and unattainable and painful. I wanted to call Papa to ask him if he knew this feeling, but I already knew the answer.
—
The great irony of growing up is that it’s often once you leave your parents’ home that you understand them the most. You get less angry; they get less anxious. I think fathers, in particular, are supposed to soften in certain ways, to appeal to you more, especially when you’re a woman. You’re supposed to find even footing, with the fighting of your childhood finished with. If you’re lucky enough to have non-abusive, non-dead parents in your twenties, it’s nice to have them in your life as allies rather than wardens.
But my dad sometimes gives me the silent treatment when he’s upset, or sometimes he explodes with joy, or sometimes he is so sullen with the inevitability of death he hardly wants to breathe. The silent treatments are, without question, the worst of his reactions: they can last a few days or a few months, can break without my even knowing it, can extend into my face-to-face visits, can poison the rest of the family if he wants. When I bought a laptop case he deemed too expensive ($32.99) in 2010, he didn’t speak to me for ten days. When I decided to stay in Toronto for the summer of 2012 to intern instead of returning home after I finished university, he didn’t speak to me for two weeks. In 2008, my mother went to the mall during his midday meal hour and he attempted to make a tuna melt, burning his hand in the process. He spoke to no one for forty-five minutes until he realized he was still very hungry. (He wanted her to throw out the toaster oven, too.) And a year and four months after Hamhock and I moved in together, he shut down yet again, this time a delayed response. Papa’s sun is the brightest, so when he decides to set, it makes for some very long, cold winters.
When we moved in together, I knew Papa would get mad eventually, but it seemed like such a risk to not do it for that reason alone. Papa gets mad about everything. The older he gets, the more furious he becomes over small indignities, little imagined insults. Once, while in the car together, he half stated, half muttered, apropos of nothing, “You live, you create things, you become a footnote in history. That’s what happens when you get old. It’s a trage—IT’S A TRAGEDY.”
None of this—the impatience, the frustration, the willingness to hold a grudge against an inanimate object—is new to me. He’s always been waiting for something to ruin his life. When I was little and would pretend to be a doctor and he my patient, he’d ask me surprisingly real questions about his hypertension and cholesterol, when all I wanted to do was “test his reflexes” by hitting him in the shin with a plastic mallet. He colours with Raisin but wants her to do something more “cerebral” with her talents. “No, don’t colour like that,” he says. “Colour in the lines. The lines! Well, if you’re going to do it that way, at least do some Cubist-inspired art. Show your inner angst. Show how angry you are at the establishment!” She frowns at him and tries to ignore his commands. “Yes,” he says. “Colour Dora’s face.”
The only confusing part in his silent treatment over Hamhock is that it came more than a year after we moved in together, long after I thought we were out of any danger zone. Mom has, since, softened remarkably, promising to come visit, inviting Hamhock over when he’s in Calgary for business. It took Papa, however, a year to connect with his anger, to ice me out, to deliver retribution in the worst way possible. Some days I can tolerate his moodiness. Others, I am so furious with him I want to throw the silent treatment back at him, as if I can out-rage the man I learned fury from in the first place. Then, other days, I want to shake him and beg for forgiveness. I’ll say I’m sorry, even if I’m not.
It’s been months since I visited home last, even longer since Papa first decided he was in touch with his anger. He didn’t talk to me at all for an isolating eleven weeks and three days, passing me over to Mom for daily updates and ignoring my emails or attempts to pull humour out of him. Maybe he expected I would bend first, but when I didn’t, he eventually crept his way back to the phone, speaking to me nightly like we once did, but now with less e
ase. He’ll chat for two minutes or, if I am lucky, a full ten minutes, asking for updates about work and nothing else. But the undercurrent of any conversation with him is deep sadness, his disapproval over something that felt right to me but insulting to him. This is the newest version of him that I have, one that might finally be willing to talk but is always, somewhere, despairing. He’ll try to crack a joke, but I know I’m the cause for this latest reticence. His rage was always predictably untenable so it’s never clear what version of him I might get when I call. Sometimes he answers the phone wanting to discuss the minor ways he’s been slighted, like how he thinks the Bluetooth in his car is racist for not understanding his accent or how my mother is trying to kill him and “she’s not being subtle about it, either.” Other times he answers just to fight, to tell me he’s “disappointed,” to prattle off nonsense about immigrant parenting that he believes only when he is angry about his wishes being ignored, and how I have irrevocably changed our relationship. Worse is when he doesn’t answer the phone at all, letting Mom handle me, Mom who is now extra chipper, extra sweet, constantly cooing at me and telling me she loves me. She’s making up for lost time, or rather, lost conversation. I notice when Papa wants his absence to be noted. Every cell I have recognizes how ineffective his moodiness is in getting me to change, how it hurts with no other real influence. I tried and I tried and I tried to break my relationship with Hamhock, to get him away from me, but it didn’t work. So instead, I have to wait for what feels even less likely: that Papa changes, that he shifts, that he lets yet another thing go.