Echo
Echo I cannot make it lovely, this story of my father: his body raw under the lights like a skinned almond, surrounded by sandalwood, pickled carrots, and the hush of rice settling in a bag. I can’t help it, I need metaphors: his body curls like the curve of a cheek, a knife lies beside him, done with its work. This story in metaphors. Not simply: You lie on the floor.You’ve been cut by two men you don’t know.They wanted money and you were too slow, didn’t understand. But rather: bruises braid his skin, the bitter black of leaves, eyes red as the swollen sting of chili powder. Why do I write into the past? He smells only sweat, sickened blood seeping, nothing familiar—not black and red pepper pinched into the air, not the jasmine of his mother’s kitchen. Nothing—until his breath is like a tea bag twisted, pressed into the cup of the room. But it’s not an Indian grocery, it is a shabby downtown hotel, the kind that lock their doors at ten, have security guards to stop the prostitutes from coming in, from warming themselves in the lobby.The kind where hallways echo of accents.The phone is off the hook. Not, why do I write about the past? but, what story must I tell?You lie there dreaming, but I’m not sure, dreaming of your childhood in Lahore: the city escaping the finite lines of a map, erased by riots, civil war.You remember the hot nights, chattering birds—how the world was never silent then. You tell me over and over but I can’t write it: the same story, but I know we are leaving things out. Embellishing.What they must have said, the words, harsh like Bengali, you never tell, the first cut and then the next, how you fell like a sack of mangoes into a heavy tumble. You have left the spaces empty for me to add in colors, the smells, to translate to English. To translate into the present, into beautiful. ...
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