Torn
Kristen Ringman 247 Torn An Excerpt from Makara: A Novel I was Fionnuala. My mother gave me that name. I carried it as far as India, and then it got buried behind the house with the banana peels. I lost the name as quickly as I was given it. My father held me by the hand. His hands were pink like the Irish, even though he grew up in America. He was Irish enough to be pink-skinned. His faded brown beauty marks looked like splattered dirt. I felt safe when his hand wrapped around my own smaller one. I wouldn’t let anyone take his hand away from mine. He would lead me through this strange country. I had faith in him. The airport in Madras. Black and brown skin. Signs with names held up by taxi drivers. We found ours— O Shay—printed incorrectly but distinguishable. The sign was held by a short brown man with a black mustache. He wore a white shirt above tan suit pants above rubber sandals different than any I had seen before—with a circular loop around the big toe and a strap holding down the foot. I kept my unusually dark blue eyes down and my hands with their webbed fingers hidden beneath my bags when he looked at me. His mouth moved strangely and his head wagged side-to-side. My father was smiling as he spoke and shook his hand. The air was filled with dust and black clouds. I choked a few times before breathing it in. Musky perfumed incense mixed with fuel oils. People were everywhere, hanging out of buses or the tiny rickshaw taxis that were like golf carts with bright yellow hoods. We took one of those. Father wanted me to have the real India experience. I didn’t really care either way. Either way, the curvy green hills and rough blue seas of my Irish home were gone. I was in India—squished into the back of a taxi with our bags while my father sat in front and spoke back and forth with the driver. We sped through the wide city streets past bicycles, motorcycles, mopeds, buses, other rickshaws, and regular cars. When I saw the goats, dogs, cats, or cows on the sides of the roads, I smiled. In this story, ISL (Irish Sign Language) is transcribed in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Fingerspelled words have d-a-s-h-e-s between all letters. Two words that make one sign have a dash between them. Foreign spoken languages are in italics. Main_Pgs_1-330.indd 247 3/28/2012 10:24:58 AM 248 Kristen Ringman I loved animals before most other things. They spoke to me differently. I didn’t need to read their mouths to understand what they wanted or felt. I read their movements. The tilts of their heads. The ways their bodies arched towards or away from each other told stories I could not even translate into words. My mother, an Irish selchie, half-seal and half-woman, taught me how to sit close to the animals, to be invisible so that they would be themselves. I learned of sheep first, because they were all over our fields by the sea. They feared everything except the uneven ground beneath their feet. The animals here, the stories I could peel open, were what made me realize that I could exist without her. My mother spoke through them. My father turned back to me as we pulled into a bus station. His hands moved in awkward yet quick ISL: WE GET-OUT HERE NOW. TAKE BUS TO VILLAGE. TWO OR THREE HOURS. O-K YOU? YES. FINE ME. I answered with one hand gripping the black edge of the driver’s seat in front of me as we stopped short. Father looked thrilled through the sweat that poured down the sides of his face. His bright blue eyes gleamed with something I had never seen in them before—a mix of excitement and nervousness. I knew he hadn’t been to India since before I was born, but he had a strange obsessive fascination with all things Indian. Old photos from the 1970’s filled our mobile home in Ireland: father smiling beside his Indian fisherman friend, holding up the fish they caught, painted cows, stretches of empty beach, close-ups of the strange blue circular plankton that washed ashore. But I didn’t want to think of that. Instead, I kept...
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