Appreciating Reetika

It was a hot, sunny day in June, 2002, when Reetika and Jehan came over to spend morning until late afternoon with me on my porch. We sat in the kitchen while I fixed lunch and later took a walk around the neighborhood to encourage Jehan to take that nap that he was trying so hard to resist. But generally we just sat on the porch and talked about poetry, her mothering, my grandmothering, the specifics of spices in soups, the big questions of love and time. With Jehan playing on a blanket and conversation curling from hour to hour, time seemed endless. Yet now—when I look at the photo Reetika snapped that day of Jehan, my dog Rosie, and myself—time stands still.

Or I wish it could because I, like so many others in her life, want to figure it out, to understand, to do our sleuthing through memories, letters, poems, even e-mails to find clues. It's all that we can do. The first time I laid eyes on Reetika was at E. Ethelbert Miller's Ascension Poetry Series in 1997, and I found her reading, her performances, touching and powerful but also hilarious. This woman put that carnival of strip mall architecture called Rockville Pike in poems! She gave me Mrs. Biswas, who lamented, "I sent my sari / to new dry cleaner, and I was in shock/to be billed for two tablecloths."

So was that humor a cover? Should I have probed? Could I have done more than simply enjoyed getting to know her as we wrote and talked to one another? When Jehan was born, three months after Rowan, my first grandson, I recognized Reetika's struggle to balance time for her work with the demands and joys of motherhood. But, when she wrote to me, "My life is an unexpected gig at winging it," and "I'm still reeling from the trajectories of this last year," should I have seen a distress far more acute than that of most new mothers?

She called one Saturday night while visiting her mother here in Maryland, sounded at loose ends, and took me up on my invitation to come to dinner with Jehan, who played with Rowan. Her spirits seemed to lift during the evening, at least I thought they did, but I wonder now if I saw only the harmony I wanted to see? Another time when she declined an invitation, she wrote, "I regret I didn't make the party, but I'm sure there'll be other gatherings." I was sure, too, but I didn't know then that she would be an absence in those gatherings, and now her remark is freighted with shadows. Like others, it's taken on the import of history.

Yet I know there's no point in trying to figure it out. That's as futile or as unfair as finding a moral to this sad story or trying to assess Reetika's career, to put a value on the powerful writing that she left. In fact, the work continues—another whole manuscript yet to be published. Will that chapter change, confuse, confirm, or confound what I know of her?

When I was working on the piece that became a profile for Poets & Writers Magazine, I was so struck by the constant movement of her life. The article began: "Twenty-two times in eighteen years: That's how often Reetika Vazirani has moved since she graduated from Wellesley College in 1984," and it ended with her describing how she relished life at The College of William and Mary, where she claimed she was ready to empty those perpetually packed bags. Ironically, no sooner was the article out than she had decided to move again. The truth is, time didn't stand still, no more than she did.

So maybe there are no clues, just the simple fact that Reetika only visited and visited briefly. I thought of her when I read an appreciation for Edward Said in The New York...