by Anosh Irani
“Anyway, I must be going,” he says. Then he gets up and goes into his room. He leaves me in the darkness of the living room, sunk in an old sofa that smells of disinfectant.
I get up, I walk towards the door. But then I go back inside. I sit on the sofa. It’s black and leathery. There are small patches on it, bits of skin that have been ripped out. I lie down on the sofa and close my eyes.
LEAVING
I dump things into two suitcases. Books, shoes, clothes, belts, socks, some medicine that someone has asked me to carry for them—a head balm or painkiller that is either unavailable in Canada or too expensive. Along with my carry-on, I take a neck pillow that reminds me of a toilet seat. When we humans fly, we wear fluffy toilet seats around our necks.
Friends come over to visit me and offer their condolences, as if my going back to Canada means I will freeze there, or I will get lonelier and therefore more irredeemable by my next return. There is pity in their eyes as well, for I will not be here for a particular wedding, or a trip to Goa, or a wild night out at a club; I will be unable to randomly meet people at midnight if I feel like having a coffee. That’s the beauty of Bombay—someone you know is always awake. But I tell them the usual: man, it’s too polluted here, it’s too chaotic, it’s so this, so that…Then why do you keep coming back? they ask. To remind myself, I say, of what I’m not missing. Of what I’ve thankfully left behind. They don’t believe me, and even though I’m a good storyteller, I’m unable to weave a story for myself, one that I can get lost in, and never emerge from.
Saying goodbye to my parents is always hard. When I was a kid leaving the house to play football or cricket, I used to rush out the door. I was a tiny tornado who couldn’t wait to leave. Now I trudge along, pretending it’s the heaviness of the suitcases that is causing slowness. But no one ever stops me. Life goes on. Things keep turning. It would perhaps make sense if the world stopped, just for a millisecond, to help us feel a little less insignificant. But then again, this idea of finding meaning is what needs to be abandoned. Leaving is the ideal way to embrace your obsoleteness.
That’s what airports are—lines and lines of people checking in to register their obsoleteness. And that’s what airport lounges are: incubators of the sickness, built to exacerbate the condition. Once at Heathrow Airport I had a nine-hour wait, to go to either Bombay or Vancouver, I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter, and I slept in a corner of the business-class lounge. I had used my miles to get an upgrade—that thing that makes us feel like gods—and I started to fall asleep, began to taste the deliciousness of it. When I woke up an hour later, an Indian couple, elderly, kindly, was staring at me. Before I could orient myself, the woman said to me, “You sleep exactly like my son.” There was a smile on her face, and her husband went back to his newspaper. I had the distinct feeling that their son had died. She looked at me with such longing that I felt compelled to ask, but I didn’t. I just smiled back, then got up and left. Two people, feeling obsolete without their grown son, incubating in sorrow and business class regret. Back then I could still sleep.
I have been handed my boarding pass. My entry into the tunnel has been granted. I am a verified escapee, who will soon descend onto a plane that is actually a tunnel that is really a large MRI machine, scanning our insides while we stay half-awake, registering minor tears and cracks, and bulging discs that impinge upon nerves and send signals of pain straight down our thighs to our feet—because once again the land we land upon is not ours, and never will be.
There it is—a validation of my condition, a reminder of my mistakes. Of promises I was unable to keep, loved ones I was unable to look after. Suddenly, the boarding pass transforms itself from paper to electronic, and I’m holding a screen in my hand, and it flashes news and headlines the way Reuters does in green, at Times Square:
You weren’t there when your grandmother died of cancer in your room…you left people you loved…you ran away from land your forefathers owned…you became moody and against life…
And then the statements become more and more accusatory, related to things I didn’t do, have no knowledge of, that aren’t related to me in the slightest, but they are being directed my way, transmissions meant for another immigrant, someone in another lounge, but perhaps they have anaesthetized themselves to the headlines, they are fine, but I am the interloper, the one in search of answers, and they come hard and fast my way, and it does not matter if they aren’t mine:
Where the fuck were you when Daddy died?…you just left, you didn’t think of asking me to join you…you don’t deserve to be called a daughter…you get a raise and you stop sending money…fuck your lawn, the weed is you…listen, we can start a business together…brother, please get me out of here…sister, don’t marry him, he’s no good…son, today your father forgot my name…I’m so sorry, but she died last night…where are you, call me, call me, call me…
I don’t know whom to call, whom to tend to. I try moving forward.
When I am in my seat, I think of the things I need to do once I land.
The house will smell of emptiness, the mail will have to be sorted out, vacuuming, dusting, oh, look, someone stole my garbage bin, and then the horrible beast of jet lag, providing sleep and then taking it away, and then…then what?…back to the same…a new story, a new play, a new grant application…but what is the thing behind the thing?
I stare at the boarding pass. It has turned back to paper, back to something material, and it occurs to me that this is the problem. I am too physical. I need to see myself from afar, everything from miles away. I get myself a new boarding pass.
I don’t need an airplane because I am a writer, a combustible being, a flammable object. A rocket. I feel a tremendous amount of heat, my nerves are on fire, they are singing hallelujahs, they are chanting oms, they are sending out the sweet ring of temple bells, they are incanting the gathas of Zarathustra, they are millions of muezzins sending out a call for prayer, they are feverish and erotic, they are going back centuries and pulling whatever strength they can from both believers and heretics, from the algae and the dinosaurs, because all are in search of the same thing behind the thing, and I lift off, I implode, my heart eats itself as it has been created to do, and a beautiful nothingness envelops me.
I am both awake and asleep, in both womb and sky at the same time, and I can see what we call Earth from a great distance, this ball that we feel entitled to. At first, space feels uncomfortable. I find it hard to steady myself, so I keep spinning, and the Earth remains frustratingly still. But then I realize that this is nothing but black water, and I am in a pool, a large public pool, with a population of one. I start cycling my arms and legs, I do the crawl, and I am stable.
I look at this place from a distance, I try to see its beauty, but I cannot.
It looks quite fragile to me, this round ball on which I am held captive. Fragile, but not in a tender way. It is not a healthy, vulnerable fragility. It is something else, and before I can find the correct sentiment for it, I see an old man a few feet away from me, staring at it the same way I am. I recognize him immediately as that diagnostician Hermogenes. He and I don’t speak at all, but his presence tells me all I need to know about Earth—this body is breaking too; it is decaying just like any human. And water, that eternal truth-teller, is once again surrounding us, flooding, tsunami-ing into our bodies, but no one wants to listen.
I didn’t either; I did not know how.
Have I come all this way to find out that we are a failed species? Is our failure that thing behind the thing? Possibly. But I keep looking. Might as well, since I’m here.
I gaze down at Dr. Hansotia’s clothesline. And what I see pleases me. The first rains of the season have come on the day I leave. There has been a downpour, and what else but water—this time, from the skies—can solve the matter of the undergarment? It hits the garment again and again, lashes against it, cleans it, until it is wet with truth, and somehow falls, even though it shouldn’t, even though its
heaviness should cause it to droop and hang more. It falls and lands on the hood of a parked car. I doubt Dr. Hansotia will hang it up again.
I see Canada, too. I see it for what it truly is—the cause and the balm.
What else do I see? The usual. It’s really what all of us see on the news.
Hezbollah, Gaza, ISIS, untouchability, the imaginary wall, some small child carrying water for his choleric mother, Manchester United versus Real Madrid, bombs—both massive and Molotov—an Alaskan cruise, a baby penguin taking its last breath in the Mumbai zoo, some writer in the mountains of Banff trying to find the perfect internal rhyme for a poem, illegal immigrants burrowing through the earth and causing tectonic plates to shift, people meditating and gardening and joining pottery classes, parents dropping kids off at hockey, some kid expert at wiring stealing electricity in a slum, underage sex slaves entombed in boxes for hours at a stretch, over-age sex slaves too afraid to disobey pimps, a production of A Streetcar Named Desire in Turkish, people screaming at the people who have wounded them hurt them betrayed them falsely maligned them trapped them, it’s all there, all at once, and in the middle of it all the ice caps melting, water unfreezing, thawing, showing its empathy.
I believe in reincarnation. But I pray it isn’t true.
Life is so generous, and so bountiful in its pain. I do not wish to come back to this planet, to bask in its unforgiveness. I accept that I have been unable to grow, to make that leap from human to something smaller, simpler, gentler, a living organism quietly content to contribute to the planet in exchange for a small corner. If writing is about truly seeing, then so is living. Complete annihilation is the only way forward for me. For my troubling “I.”
But then…haven’t I failed too? Again?
This must be why the world is round. Roundness is what we have given it through our mistakes, circular and repetitive. Those who came before us created that shape, and we are experts at maintaining it.
I see a mass of humans, all flailing as they swim—towards offices and jobs, towards terrorist cells, towards people and away from them, towards husbands and wives who love them but long for someone else, towards children who may never show up when they die. If I leave, if I combust like the flammable object that I am, am I not flailing too?
Perhaps all I can do is return, and bring some kindness and humour to this soil, so that when I am reduced to bone the worms will eat what remains—but not before I shed my grudges, my hate, and my frustration. For if the worms cannot taste my forgiveness, they will be unable to pass on traces of my humour, or wisdom, or any shred of my intelligence.
But then again, I tell myself, endings aren’t about redemption. There is no redemption for us. Perhaps there’s only a small movement towards healing, a sparrow step, the way a baby curls its tiny palm around your finger and gives its entire being to you, without even knowing who the hell you truly are.
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.
Thank you to my colleagues in the World Literature Program at Simon Fraser University—Melek Ortabasi, Ken Seigneurie, Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani and Mark Deggan—for your support over the years. Thanks also to David Chariandy for always being so helpful.
Thanks to Madeleine Thien, Rawi Hage, Aislinn Hunter, David Staines, Anna Rusconi, Rachel Ditor, and Karthika VK for reading earlier versions of some of these stories with so much care and generosity.
Thanks to Neera Agnihotri and Rajesh Mansukhani for your guidance on “Behind the Moon” and “Butter Chicken” respectively.
Thanks to Kristin Cochrane, Louise Dennys, Anne Collins, Rick Meier, Jennifer Lum, Deirdre Molina, Max Arambulo and everyone at Knopf Canada for championing my writing and being such a pleasure to work with.
My gratitude to Karolina Sutton and everyone at Curtis Brown. Your time and efforts are much appreciated.
Thanks to Medaya Ocher and Erika Recordon at the Los Angeles Review of Books for publishing “Behind the Moon”; to Madeleine Thien, Catherine Leroux, Francisco Vilhena and Luke Niema for publishing “Swimming Coach” in Granta; and to Curtis Gillespie for publishing “Circus Wedding” in Eighteen Bridges.
Thank you to Boman Irani for the author photograph and for always making time, no matter how busy you are.
And, finally, to my editor, Lynn Henry, for your faith, vision and guidance—I say the same things again and again, but only because they’re true.
ANOSH IRANI has published four critically acclaimed novels: The Cripple and His Talismans (2004), a national bestseller; The Song of Kahunsha (2006), which was an international bestseller and shortlisted for Canada Reads and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; Dahanu Road (2010), which was a finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize; and The Parcel (2016), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His play Bombay Black won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play (2006), and his anthology The Bombay Plays: The Matka King & Bombay Black (2006) and his play The Men in White were both shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. He lives in Vancouver.