14th July 2015. You watch me leave through the sliding doors of Kolkata’s international airport. You and Papa simmer on the cracked pavement outside, craning your heads for a final glimpse. Security doesn’t let people without tickets into the building. I have two: Kolkata to Bangkok, Bangkok to Melbourne.

Before tonight, you’ve never even let me get on a public bus on my own.

Keep an eye on your suitcase when in the toilets, okay? Tell us when you check in. Thakur pronaam kore jaabe. Take care. Take care.     

The conversation plays itself out. Our smiles knock about in their casings. I turn around for the last time and wave.

You tell me this story so often, it’s almost like I’m not in it. I am not in the cacophonous airport, outsized suitcase bruising my heels, trying to find the check-in counter. I am outside with you in the dust and the stillness, carving shadows in the yellow halogen streetlights. I am watching a diminishing figure, the back of her head dissolving into the mass of everyone else. The watching lasts for seconds – the security guard won’t even let you stand outside and make sure.

Make sure of what? You don’t tell me, and it feels cruel to ask.

It’s like the crimson photo albums you lug out once in a while, hardbound cover filigreed with gold like a wedding card. Plastic film curling stiffly in the corners, faces yellowed and gleaming. I exist in these memories, but they do not belong to me. 

This is what I remember – a blackened airplane cabin, snores perforating the air as I worry if I have to transfer my luggage myself at Bangkok Airport. That is all.

~

I crash land into a sleeting Melbourne winter. Every morning brings a tarmac horizon. I grow depressed three months in, asking to come home. You buy me the pricey one-way ticket.

You don’t ask if I’ve changed my mind, if I want to sit for the national medical entrance exams, if creative writing is not as fulfilling in a foreign country as I’d imagined. It’s winter in India now, but the sun still sifts gently through the windows. The house teems with the scent of chicken steeped in mustard oil, nothing like the brown goop they shovel on campus. You let me sit with my feelings like Thoreau in the woods. You do my laundry.

Six weeks later, you wheedle Papa into accompanying me back to the land of Oz. I transfer courses into a more expensive double degree. I discover banh mi, bubble tea, the white bright blindness of a Melbourne summer. Papa does Sudoku on his phone and walks in the neighbourhood. Indomie noodles are a revelation, accidentally stewed instead of stir-fried. We gorge late in the night.

Papa comes back home to you. The semesters flicker by.

This is what I remember – you call me early in the morning before my classes, night stale in the bags under your eyes. Work is stressful and the house too quiet. You haven’t had hobbies in twenty-six years. Every meal you cook is a reminder that you have two children overseas.

I need to attend my four-thousand-dollar classes, invoiced at the rate of fifty rupees to a dollar. You don’t suggest otherwise. You don’t buy any more tickets. At the end of every phone call, after we’re done talking about what you ate and what I ate, the conversation wanes into static.

Love you beta. Miss you.

You watch my pixelated face, unblinking, waiting for me to cut the line.

 ~

The guilt grates to an intolerable pitch sometime around the pandemic. You still go to work, no matter how much I beg and plead. The Times of India headlines scream of patients dying in hospital parking lots, crematoriums running out of wood, bodies consecrated whole to the Ganges; their lungs drowned long before their feet touched holy water. 

     It’s okay baba, they have oxygen cylinders in my office now. Don’t worry.     

The thirty-six hours between you and me feel impassable, with borders and customs and officers and isolation measures and the threat to my job and the threat to my visa and always, always the passage of time, lumbering forward.

Six months, a year, two years.

If I haven’t made it back to you by now, I’m probably never going to.

The news articles here say that migration is a choice. It’s a funny choice to be making at eighteen – I am both the adult who chose to forsake everything she knew, and the child that got dragged haplessly along in the wake. Everyone I know left home, but their decisions feel so much more porous; like there was room to manoeuvre between staying and leaving, family and self.

Mine feels formalised and legalised, an indigo stamp on a passport page dated 14 July 2015. My thumb scrapes over the surface, but the whorls in my skin stay ink-free. Soon I won’t have this evidence either, this jet-black passport with the gold Devanagari script woven through plastic fibres. India doesn’t do dual citizenship. 

I mourn and mourn and do nothing to remedy my own mourning. I love my country, but patriotism is passé. I love my parents, but it was my duty to leave. A relay race of obligation and sacrifice, one generation to the next. To sprint as far as means allow, and if you’ve toiled well and hard enough, you might get to pass the baton on to someone who can cross the finish line.

Stay there, oikhane thako. Eto koshto kore gechho. I don’t want you to come back.     

These are rivers that swell in one direction; I bear love but owe nothing.

~

There’s nothing worse, you say, than being treated like a foreigner in your own country.

You speak Sylheti with your sisters and mother, but you’ve never been to Sylhet. The closest you’ve gotten is the Bangladeshi border in Dawki, the air so syrupy, as though the delta’s famous rivers are flowing down your back. I was with you that day. I played at keeping one foot on either side of the border, sandals sinking into the silt, the material physics of my sweaty child-body thwarting political geographies.

Your father came over the border, like the other Hindus, in the wreckage of post-Partition postcolonial India. From river flats up towards piney slopes, the newer, chillier sky spiked with church spires. This is the land where your parents married, where you were born. When you were ten, this is the land that was legally decreed to never belong to you. Dkhars, us foreigners, were not allowed to buy property here. Decree followed blood, not birthplace. Even so, you were adamant on your Indianness and that of your father before you. You never expressed any curiosity to visit ‘where you came from’. This place was that place, this sky joined to that sky, cold mountain water thundering down the rocks to brim into the plains, no matter how many times the world redrew its boundaries around us.

I still can’t legally buy a house in the town where I took my first breath. Where I cultivated my best memories. Where I lived for eighteen years, my mother for forty years before me. This is the irony that pricks me most when I read the Australian papers – it is, after all, my fault that rent is rising and the dream of home ownership has grown unfeasible for real Australians. Do they think I am more foreign here than I am elsewhere? No matter where I go, by blood, birth or religion, I must be either rejected or complicit.

My brother and I buy a house in Melbourne. I bring you into it, the unremarkable plaster-white walls that dent under a fingernail, the clackety wood veneer laminate flooring, the unseemly occupation of half the living room by the kitchen. You are enthralled. You bat away the cobwebs, scrub down the cabinet doors, refuse to use the steam mop and resort to paper towels and buckets.

You’re not here to clean, my brother grumps, an eye on your twinging back and osteoporosis.

Your response is simple. I will not be a guest in my own house.     

~

It’s been nine years. You and Papa live in a newly renovated apartment, a state over from where you raised your children. You hate this big city, the highways that flood at a moment’s notice, the caked mud and mosquito clouds. You wanted to move somewhere else, but Papa felt it prudent to stay close to his side of the family. Just in case.

We steal you away to Melbourne when we can, three months at a time. The rest of your year elapses outside your children’s notice.

One day, Papa rolls up the hems of his sweatpants, and I am aghast at the thinness of his calves. The white whorls of hair, the flaps of skin hanging loose. Staying in the same country wouldn’t have changed that, the incessant battering waves of time. Staying in the same country would have changed everything.

There’s a thirty-year wait list for parent visas in Australia. Fifty thousand dollars a pop to reduce that wait time to twelve.

You smile. Chaaro. It’s okay. Don’t bother.