Liminal Lit

Noor came into the kitchen while I was cutting oranges and asked if I still had the custody file. She said it too formally, one shoulder against the fridge, one sock half off her heel, as if the kitchen had rules she had studied. Her phone lay faceup on the table. It had already lit twice with her father's name, silent.

Before I could answer, she asked me to listen once without interrupting.

I told her I could listen. This was not the same as promising not to help, but I heard it as a courtesy, proof that language could still open a room to me.

On the counter, four wedges waited where I had left them, juice drying on the board. The dishwasher kept clicking to itself.

Noor sat at the table and put both hands in her lap. "I know what happened before," she said.

I waited. She looked at the salt shaker. "I know about the Lantern. I know Dad drove after he drank. I know about the pantry door. I know about my wrist."

The order was poor, but not unusable. She began with incidents rather than fear, which made them sound like exhibits brought in from another room. Still, I understood the choice. Dates steadied people. Objects steadied people. A door, a car, a wrist. They gave the listener somewhere to place disbelief.

For twelve years I had interpreted for people whose lives depended on being believed in the right order. In a clinic in Elizabeth, a woman from Lahore kept placing the first threat after the funeral, meaning a neighbor's funeral, not her brother's. The lawyer asked for the month. The woman gave the smell of the bus station, her son's uniform, lentils soaking in a pressure cooker. None of this was wrong. It was only memory arranging itself before it knew it needed to be useful.

I translated faithfully at first. Then I learned to do it well.

Noor cleared her throat. "I'm not saying you made it up."

"I know."

"I know you were right to—" She closed her eyes. "I know I'm not supposed to forget it just because he's better now."

"Better," I almost said. The word came up behind my teeth and stayed there. She had heard the weakness and removed it before I could. By the third pass, the woman from Lahore had learned to say March first, then bus station, then lentils, her mouth flattening around each item because order was another fee she had agreed to pay.

Her phone lit again. I did not look. Tariq would not write anything open to objection. He would say "take your time," or "no rush," or "I'm downstairs," as if patience were a condition he had earned in the loading zone.

"Are you asking me to go with you tomorrow?" I said.

Noor looked confused, and for one second I mistook it for relief. The meeting was with Ms. Klein, the evaluator assigned after Noor told the court she wanted to change the arrangement before graduation. She would be eighteen in forty-one days, a number I had begun carrying like a prescription I did not intend to fill.

"No," she said. "I need you not to."

I cut one orange wedge in half, though there was no reason to make it smaller. The knife had a line of pulp along its edge. "Then what are we doing?"

She rubbed her thumb across her wrist. The mark had been gone for years, but the gesture had remained; or perhaps I only saw it now because I needed evidence of her body agreeing with mine. "I need the picture."

I did not ask which picture. That would have been another kind of rehearsal.

Later, in my own case, I had known what to place first. I did not invent Tariq. He had been drunk; he had punched the pantry door hard enough to split the frame; he had held Noor's wrist until the mark came up during television, while the remote balanced on her knee. He also remembered the name of every dentist she had disliked, salted rice after cooking because she said it tasted brighter, drove across town for the cheap blue quilt she had left at his apartment and then slept on the floor outside her room because she would not unlock the door. On paper, the wrist stayed. The quilt did not.

The folder was in the hall closet, inside the plastic box where I kept passports, expired warranties, batteries, the manual for a blender that had died on frozen mango, three keys to apartments we no longer had. Noor watched me stand. She did not thank me. She pulled the loose sock back over her heel.

When I came back, I set the folder on the table and kept my hand on it. The photograph was near the back. Cropped, it showed only her wrist and the small brown mark above the bone, no face, no room, no child, which had made it useful.

"I want to live with him until graduation," she said. "I know what happened. I know what could happen again." She looked at the phone, then at me. "I know what happens here."

There were corrections available. "Could" was better than "might," though it made danger sound theoretical. "Here" was too vague, and for one second I was grateful for the vagueness. "Dad" might have helped her, if she had still been using "Dad," but "him" was colder and probably wiser. I could have told her that the sentence was strongest if she stopped before explaining.

Instead I slid the photograph from the folder and placed it facedown beside her glass.

For a moment neither of us moved. Tariq's name appeared and disappeared without sound. Noor turned the phone facedown.

She took the photograph.

The orange wedges were still on the board. I picked one up and put it in my mouth with the rind on.

“Do you remember the noise of it? Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins and great-grandparents. Daughters. Four generations at one point… It was too quiet with just me and mum here… But this is where I grew up. This is where I raised Camila.”

Emilia puts her hand to the wall of her home. The old paint job crumbles under her touch. She closes her eyes, and for a moment she hears the echoes of their voices, as if the walls still remember their vibrations. “So many years. All these memories… How do I say goodbye to all that?”

Her neighbour looks at his rubber slippers and tugs at them with his toes. “You don’t,” he says. “You just leave…”

It has been five months since Emilia’s mother died. Five months with only memories for company. She was 94 years old. Her neighbour has agreed to try to sell the house for whatever price he can get, though they both know nobody will want it. Empty houses are the one thing this city has in abundance.

“You’re doing the right thing, Emilia. She wouldn’t want you to be stuck here on your own. There’s nothing left. Go. God bless you. Be with your family.”

There are countless things Emilia couldn’t bear to part with, but had to anyway. Her mother’s diaries, her grandfather’s violin, and Camila’s drawings from primary school: these and a thousand other impossible choices have left her with the heavy, lame-wheeled suitcase she is now dragging along the dusty road.

Emilia takes a side street, where she’s unlikely to run into anyone she knows, though there is hardly anybody left to run into. It is early in the morning, and already the sun is beating down with uncommon heat. She walks close enough to the row of buildings to stay in the shade, but far enough to avoid materials that might come crashing from collapsing rooftops. Above her, a tree sprouts from the rotten wood of a battered balcony, half its roots dangling into the air. It is bound to fall one of these days.

An old dog raises itself as she walks by. It looks at her as if to beg for food, but can quickly tell she has none to give and lies back down. Emilia passes the old ice cream parlour, where she used to take Camila for a treat when she came home with good grades. Its windows are brown with thick grime, and she can barely see through them even when cupping her hands against the glass. There is a broken table. A few stray chairs.

By the time Emilia arrives at the city’s main square, her back is damp with sweat and her suitcase dirty from all the dust it has kicked up. There used to be music here, a few decades ago. Always one group or another, trying to get friends or strangers to sing along to the rhythms they all grew up with. Artists would set up easels and chairs to paint the church or the statues, or the hill that overlooks the city. Kids would play catch around the fountains that still ran with water back then.

Emilia walks past a few drunk men, half-asleep on the stone benches, moving only to turn their backs to the sun. Next to the church, where the buses used to stop, she finds two bike taxis. They are welded together with parts of spare metal and old furniture for seats. The younger driver seems to be about 50. His gut swells past his unbuttoned shirt, and a permanent smile is tacked onto his face. The other man, much older, sits slumped with his back against the wall.

The old man is confused when Emilia stops in front of him. Shifting his weight around, he leans first on the ground, then on his knees for support to stand up. He straightens his crooked body as much as he can. The few teeth he has left jut from his gums at odd angles. People this age don’t work unless they really need the money.

“Can you take me to the station?”

“The station?” he asks, not quite believing someone would choose him over the younger man. The short-sleeved shirt he wears is full of holes. His bald head is crowned by angry, reddish-brown skin, peeling in parts. He sees her looking and takes a cap from his pocket to cover it. “Of course!”

The old man moves to prepare his bike, but the younger driver is quick to grab Emilia’s suitcase and tug at it, though she doesn’t let go. “You’ll be there in 30 minutes at most if I drive you. With him, it’ll take you all day.”

Hearing this, the old man’s face bunches into a fleshy bulb, yet he doesn’t say anything.

“I have all day,” Emilia insists, and wrestles the suitcase back.

The younger man’s grin widens, as if he’s just been told some funny joke. Spitting on the ground between Emilia and the old man, he turns his back to them.

The old man sticks his thumb into a hole at the hem of his shirt. He takes a trembling breath before giving Emilia a grateful nod. Stepping towards her, he tries to heave the suitcase onto the seat of the bike taxi, but finds that it is too heavy.

“Let me help you,” Emilia says, and together, they lift it up. The old man wheezes from the effort. “You’re sure it’s not too far to the station?” she whispers to him.

Chewing on the edge of his flaking lips, he frowns like he’s thinking about a hard riddle, then looks at his tattered shoes, stretching his toes within them. “Do you need to get there soon?”

“Not at all. I was so nervous today that I left six hours early.”

His expression changes into the kind of smile only the very young or the very old can muster. “We’ll get there,” he says.

The old man’s whole body curls as he begins to pedal. For a second, nothing happens. But then his leg stretches, and the bike begins to move. Emilia has no time to feel relieved before they stop at the second intersection next to the old theatre, where colonial pillars sustain a weathered roof. “I once played Sancho Panza in a production of Don Quijote when I was young and still had the stomach for it,” he says, pointing at the decrepit building. “And the gravedigger in Hamlet. I didn’t get many good parts like that, but that’s what I did. I was an actor.”

Next to them stands a statue with a determined westward gaze: the island’s national poet. It has held up well, despite the years of neglect; the roof above it less so. Water has pooled in a cavity between broken tiles and splintered wood, and drips slowly onto the statue’s head, following the path of slimy film down its marbled face.

“That’s nice,” Emilia says, now wondering whether six hours will be enough time to get to the station.

“You’re heading to the capital?” the old man asks, and pedals on.

“And flying onwards from there. I’m going to live with my daughter and my grandson.”

The effort of cycling interrupts their conversation before it can really get started. In any case, Emilia knows it is not a strange thing to leave the country. Many say it’s stranger to stay.

She keeps a guarding hand on her suitcase. They are going far too slow for it to slip from the seat, but there is an anxiety inside of her that flares up whenever she isn’t touching it. Camila has told her she’ll have to hand it over when she flies; that it will slide past one set of rubber curtains, only to reappear through another, 22 hours later and half the world away.

The old man pedals in two stages: first, he pushes hard to speed up, his bony fingers tightening around the handles and the strain of it bending his body. Then, when the bike has gathered some momentum, he leans back, trying to recover from the sprint, though they always slow down before he can catch his breath. Emilia knows there is a slope coming up half a mile ahead, not very steep but long and steady. “Can we take a break here?” she calls.

“Are you sure?”

“You see this?” She points to a large, square building. “That’s where I went to primary school. My daughter Camila, too.” Emilia gets off the bike, passing a big tree sprouting from the cracked pavement. She leans against the fence, careful not to scratch herself on its rusted spikes.

The old man pinches his shirt near his heart and tugs at it to cool his body. “As did I,” he says, beaming. “I think… ah yes, that one, with all the broken windows? That was my classroom. Which one was yours?”

“I don’t remember. But Camila’s was next to the entrance over there. I picked her up every day. Right here.”

They stand in silence for a moment. Sunlight draws the shape of leaves on the dried-out lawn, swaying to the rhythm of the wind.

“When did she leave?”

“Almost 20 years ago,” Emilia says. “She’s an architect. In Europe.”

He smiles at Emilia, as if he, too, were proud of Camila. “You mentioned a grandson?”

“Nine years old already,” she says, and out of habit, takes her phone from her pocket to show him the pictures. “The last time Camila visited was before he was born. She sent me this phone, and we talk all the time, but she works very hard. And she’s raising him all on her own. It’s not easy to get time off for such a long trip. And I could never go visit them either, with my mother to take care of…”

Emilia worries that she has said more than is proper. People usually avoid the sad undercurrent of it all. A wave of embarrassment prickles her skin, though the old man gives her no cause to feel it.

“You must be excited to see them.”

“I am,” she says, and nods, leaving the fear that paralyses her unmentioned: of living in a place with a strange language, where people will look at her for sounding foreign; where the freezing cold will burn her skin and the winter months will leave her starved for light. Where her daughter and her grandson will spend all day at work and school, and she will be alone in a small flat, with nothing to do except wait. A place where, Camila says, your neighbours might as well be strangers, and where people don’t speak to each other at the bus stop.

“What about you, do you have children?” she asks to stop herself from thinking about all this, though she already knows the answer.

Shaking his head, he adjusts his cap. “It wasn’t meant to happen for me.” The air has come to a standstill. The old man slaps the back of his neck and checks his hand. Flicking away a crushed mosquito, he nods at the bike. “Shall we?”

Emilia pictures her daughter running through the entrance at the ringing of the bell, her braided hair among the heads of children. She is waiting for some signal in her body. Some sense to tell her she is ready to leave, but it doesn’t come.

She lets go of the fence and pats the rusty residue from her hands.

A rotten stench rises from the river below. It has always been full of rubbish, but is now brimming with it. Only a few stray streams of dark water glitter between piles of plastic bottles, disintegrating clothes, and old children’s toys. There are pale bones of dead birds buried in their fluff of feathers. Emilia pinches her nose until they’ve passed it.

The old man speeds up before the incline begins, but within seconds, all the bike’s momentum has evaporated. There are no low gears to switch to, and his thin legs labour as they push. Drenched in sweat, his shirt clings to the bulging shape his back has hunched into. Soon, he is rocking back and forth, leveraging every ounce of his weight to fight his way up the slope. There’s a crackle to his wheezing breath.

“Please stop here,” Emilia calls, and steps out with one leg onto the road to prevent them from rolling down again. “I didn’t bring any water. And I would really like a drink. There’s a place over there.”

The old man turns to her, squinting from exhaustion. “I know it,” he says.

Two blocks along a perpendicular street, they arrive at a house with open doors. Several bedsheets have been stitched together into an improvised canopy, giving shade to a few tables and chairs on a dry lawn. The hum of a generator sounds out from behind the building.

“Would you watch over my suitcase for a second?” Emilia asks and walks into the house without waiting for an answer. A minute later, she comes out with two cold lemonades.

“For you,” Emilia says, placing the glass bottles on one of the tables.

The old man pushes the bike onto the lawn. “I can’t accept that.”

Emilia picks the closest chair to her suitcase. “You can. Where I’m heading, the money I have in my purse won’t buy me anything at all. Please just take a seat and have a drink.”

The old man wipes his face with his collar, though there is not a dry spot left on his shirt. He looks at his trembling hands and rubs his swollen knuckles. “Thank you,” he says, and sits opposite Emilia. He makes himself drink slowly, even though he clearly wants to gulp the whole bottle in one go.

Emilia slides her hand over the table. The wood is rough and worn down by weather and age. On the labels of their glass bottles, the shape of the island is printed, peeling from condensation. Lágrimas Negras, a song they’ve heard a million times, starts playing from a radio inside the house. It’s a sad song, but even the sad songs make you want to dance in this country.

“My family comes from back there,” he says, pointing with a shaky finger to the hills in the west. “I remember living there when I was still very young.”

“Is that so?” Emilia can’t see far through the shimmering air.

“We had grapevines growing all around. We made wine, sometimes even sold it. Not very good wine. It was much too sweet, I’m told. But it was something. And it was ours… This was a long time ago.”

Emilia keeps her eyes trained westward. She tries to imagine a patch of that hillside overgrown with vines, but finds that she can’t.

With a rattling cough, the old man loosens something in his lungs and swallows it with a sip of lemonade. Then he begins to bob his knees and hum to the rhythm and the melody of the music.

“Did you ever think about leaving?” Emilia asks.

The old man shrugs. He takes his hat off to fan himself with the cap and, leaning back into his chair, gives a gum-filled, cheeky smile. “You know the four groups of people who stay? They are: the stupid, the old, the poor, and the ugly. I’m a proud member of at least three of those groups. And the fourth one is up for debate,” he says, laughing. “But of course I’ve thought about it,” he continues, before Emilia can answer. “Who hasn’t? Sometimes I regret that I didn’t do it. But then I think back, and I remember that no matter how bad things got here, there was never anywhere else I wanted to be. I had family. I had friends. Most of them are long gone, of course, but even now…” He sticks his thumb into the mouth of the bottle and flicks it out with a melodic pop. “Look, I’m 79 years old. Memories are the one thing I have left in life. And this place, for all its faults… It helps me remember. I see those hills, and I remember growing up there. I drive past my old school, and I remember my first kiss. I was eleven, and she was called Isabel. I remember sitting at this very table, maybe eight years ago, with a good friend who has since died. We used to act together. Why would I want to be in a place where I have no history? No memories?”

Emilia takes a sip of her lemonade. The sweetness of it coats her tongue. She stares at the old man without offering an answer to his question.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to… I’m sure it’s different for you. You have your daughter and your grandson. Besides, you’re still young.”

Emilia has to laugh at this. “66 isn’t young.”

“It is to a 79-year-old.” He smiles and then, after a breath, leans forward to look at her closely. “You’ll have a good life there. You’ll see.”

“Touch wood,” she says, knocking on the table. “Camila has been wanting me to come for years. But I…”

“You had to take care of your mother,” the old man says.

Emilia bites her lip and shakes her head slightly. “I’m not even sure that is why I stayed. The house we lived in, it used to be full. A little too full, maybe. But then my nieces and nephews left, and pretty soon my brothers and my sister went to live with them. And Camila too… I know that they all did it out of necessity, but… I was angry. I never admitted it, but I was angry with each and every one of them. Not because they were leaving me or my mother behind, but because…”

Emilia grapples for words she can’t quite find. A bird flutters by and lands on the decaying roof of a house across the street. Its windows are boarded up. There are no materials to fix it. Even if there were, nobody would have the money to pay for it. And even if they did, there are no workers left to do the job.

“I don’t know whether there was ever any real chance of things getting better here. But maybe the whole reason it turned out like this is because everybody left. Maybe the problem is that nobody is willing to stay…” Shards of glass glitter in the puffs of dried grass around them. Emilia pulls the label off her bottle and tears the wet paper into little pieces. “I don’t even know if I believe that. Without the money Camila sent, there’s no way we could have…”

Emilia falls silent. The old man’s stained and tattered shirt is only now beginning to dry. The joints of his hands are swollen, and the peeling sores on his scalp shimmer with sweat.

“How do you do it?” Emilia asks.

The old man lifts his bottle as if it were an object of admiration, holding it by the tips of his fingers. One last sip of lemonade swirls at its bottom. “To be or to be. There is no question,” he says, and drinks what is left.

They push the bike up the rest of the hill. The station lies a few hundred metres below. Rushing air cools their bodies on their way down, and Emilia keeps a tight grip on her rattling suitcase. A sign tells them the bus bound for the capital will leave as planned in three hours. There is a small crowd at the station, more people than she is used to seeing together. Most of them are too old to leave, and have come to wave their family or friends off. They see Emilia’s suitcase and are quick to help her lift it from the seat.

“The capital, huh?” someone asks.

“And onwards from there,” Emilia says.

One of them is tuning a guitar that is missing the second string. He asks the crowd for suggestions, but nobody reacts until the old man calls out the song that played on the radio, halfway up the hill. The instrument is beaten down by age and has to be strummed hard to be heard over the nervous chatter, in which the impending farewell is becoming steadily harder to ignore.

Emilia checks her handbag for her passport and her purse. There is nothing left to do but wait. She wants to pay the old man, but he is so caught up in the music that she doesn’t want to interrupt. From behind his flaking lips, he sings along, at first mumbling, but then in a cracked baritone voice for the last repetitions of the chorus.

The silence that follows the final chord is immediately swallowed by noise. Only Emilia and the old man notice that the song is over. He lets out a happy sigh and turns to Emilia, bowing to her like he used to on stage. She pays him three times more than he asked for. “Thank you. For everything,” she says, and closes his left hand around the money. With things as they are, it might be worth half as much in a month. “Take it. It’s okay,” she adds before he can protest.

He takes her hand and holds it tight. “You’ll have a good life there. I know you will.”

Someone pulls out a chair for Emilia to sit. She closes her eyes, letting the voices around her melt into a blur. There is birdsong and a breeze, and the workings of the rusted bike pedals. The guitarist retunes a string. And it is only after the old man has disappeared around the corner that Emilia realises she forgot to ask his name.

One February, when the Karachi sky turned a groggy blue, and the koel birds were at their loudest with the koo-ooos, I started accompanying my mother to the beauty parlour two streets away from home. My mother was a woman of routines. She firmly believed that routines were the only anchor holding you down in life. Without them, she said, your soul can float away and lose grounding.

A monthly visit to the beauty parlour was a part of my mother’s self-care routine. This was when she sat in a tattered swivelling leather chair, and a lively woman hovered around her, scooping a viscous, syrupy substance from a plastic bowl, and slathering it on my mother’s face. The substance would dry quickly and look like volcanic ejecta, beneath which her skin would soften, heal, and become plump like a tomato.

The beauty parlour aunty would carefully pluck stray eyebrow hair from my mother’s face with a scientist’s precision, and end the facial by massaging a serum into her skin pores, where she had to freeze all her facial muscles for it to do its magic.

When it was my turn to sit in the swiveling leather chair that appeared gauntly with its peeling edges, I was already overwhelmed by the stinging smell of foaming bleach and cheap hair dye. Hair spray cans, skin whitening lotions, navy-blue tins of Nivea cream, and face serums lined the counter like soldiers. The brightness of the vanity lights magnified every pore and filament on my face and made me shrink in my chair. The beauty parlour aunty stood over me and knit her brows together as she inspected what needed to be done. I felt like a specimen caught between two glass films, being studied under a microscope.

“Look at the state of her upper lip. I’ve asked her to bleach it several times.” My mother pointed; her own face slick and plastered with a glossy sheen.

“No bleaching!” I screeched at the thought of it burning and stinging my skin.

“Threading will be just fine.” The woman decided.

I saw her pick up a spool of thread and expertly wrap some of it around her fingers, holding one strand between her teeth. Sneering like a lion that’s just found its prey, her face came close to me, too close for it to be comfortable, her cleavage an inch from my nose, in which nestled a small gold pendant in the shape of an F. Her name was Fahmida, I learned. She smelled like Tibet talcum powder and jasmine oil.

“I was your age when my mother dragged me into one of these places,” she winked at me. “I’ve been working at a parlour since.”

What fascinated me about Fahmida aunty was how much she owned her womanness. In a place where women walked with bent necks and crossed their arms around their chest in shame, Fahmida aunty didn’t mind wearing a kameez with a plunging neckline or bother to drape a dupatta to veil herself.

She didn’t mind caking her face with wrong shades of foundations and concealers that made her skin appear a shade lighter or loading mascara on her lashes, which made them look like chunky caterpillars. She laughed raucously and unapologetically, she walked with a swing in her hips, and slurped when she drank her chai.

She loved Amitabh Bachchan and played old Bollywood songs on her shiny speakers. She wore gaudy jewellery and bright hues and would often swear at the men from the window who’d try to take the parking space for her little scooter. She lived as if she belonged in the open, like a breath of fresh air, unlike the rest of us.

Women who visited her parlour, clad in burqas textured with cloying shame, would pare down to their lawn shalwar kameez upon seeing her face. Her face, which always gleamed like a burning candle, would melt away their carefully measured need to make themselves smaller. They would suddenly shed their idea of what’s dishonourable and conjure the confidence to bitch about their mothers and sisters-in-law in front of Fahmida aunty. That was her power. She would listen, really intently, and order sweet chai from the dhaba for you. She’d make you feel safe in her presence, with reassuring nods and glances, and have a totka for pretty much everything.

It filled me with disbelief, how modest women from the neighbourhood, marked and mottled with compliance, would let their hair down and talk so freely about their sex lives and men problems at Fahmida aunty’s beauty parlour. It was safe to be a woman because she wouldn’t look at you with questioning semaphoric eyebrows or make incondite remarks.

I started enjoying my monthly visits to the beauty parlour with my mother. There would be chai, laughter, gossip, and the magical unravelling of women whose minds and bodies never belonged to them.

When I turned twenty-three, my mother started complaining to Fahmida aunty about the strenuous process of finding me a man.

“She’s the eldest of my daughters, what am I to do?” My mother said. “Getting them married at the right age is important. If the eldest won’t marry, who’s going to marry the rest?”

“Nausheen, you’re being too hard on your daughter. The right man will come at the right time.” She looked at me and smiled, her dangly gold earrings hanging low on her lobes. “Have you got someone in mind already?”

I shook my head no and looked down, mortified. The task of finding a husband follows every girl in this place from the womb.

When my mother got up to leave after her fruity facial massage, her skin rubbed raw, and each hair plucked, I started following her before Fahmida aunty stopped me. She waited until my mother was out of earshot and pushed something inconspicuously into my palm.

“This is something that helped me meet my husband.” She whispered, her face serious.

I looked at what looked like an old, handmade beaded bracelet in confusion, the beads still warm from being held in her fist.

“I brought it from my village. Something my mother gave me, for a little good luck in the romantic department. It’s made with jade; it attracts good fortune and luck.”

I looked at her trusting face and smiled and thanked her. I put the bracelet inside my purse for safekeeping.

I didn’t wear the bracelet for a long time. I wasn’t ready for what it was to bring me yet. I let it sit in my bag for weeks, until it developed a voice of its own, always calling out to me. Always reminding me how I am running out of time.

It was the week leading up to Bakra Eid. The streets were lined with brown-eyed cows and goats with legs so skinny you’d think they’d collapse. I wondered if these animals were aware that they were fated for sacrifice. Their worth carefully calculated, from womb till they’re in front of a butcher’s knife. Their meat being prepared to be hung upside down to dry, and then rubbed with salt, yoghurt, and unripe papaya until it’s so tender it melts in your mouth.

The city would widen to make space for the sacrificial animals that would roam at night. Ropes tight around their necks, an end held by a herd of laughing children, bells jingling under the yellow streetlights, each mouth movement chewing dry grass that seemed like a prayer.

My mom and I visited the beauty parlour on chaand raat, the night before Eid, to get our hands painted with mehendi. We crossed the chai dhaba with its tin roof that was bending under the weight of the hanging branches of the ancient banyan tree, the cobbler with his rusty hammer and collection of leather scraps, the grocer batting flies, and the dimly lit dirt parking lot.

The two-roomed parlour was buzzing with activity in excitement for Eid. Two girls with thick braided hair, that looked like floppy ropes, sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding a cone of mehendi, making classic paisleys and coiling vines with their nimble fingers on soft white palms.

A flock of chatty women circled the mehendi girls, waiting for their turn, while the mehendi girls’ wrists coiled and twisted, painting concentric circles. My mom had brought over a small box of sweets for Fahmida aunty. It was to celebrate the finalisation of my wedding date.

When we spotted Fahmida aunty in the midst of all the chaand raat chaos, she didn’t look like her usual self. Her beautiful, luscious hair looked off-kilter, giving her a frazzled look. Her eyes were tired and looked sunken, the shadows under them like partial eclipses. Her skin, which always had that well-hydrated glow, appeared lacklustre, as if she were a crushed flower petal.

When her gaze finally fell on us, her mouth stretched into a bright smile. My mother handed her the box of sweets, and Fahmida aunty exploded with happiness upon the news. She held me in a hug, and I could smell the tangy sweat of toiling all day clinging to her lawn clothes. I spotted a concealed bruise on her face, hidden expertly under layers of creams and powders. I recoiled internally.

“Congratulations, beta!” she squealed. “Khuda tumhare naseeb achay karay. (May God grant you a good fate)”

She looked at me with wide eyes that disguised a dark omen. “Looks like the bracelet still works after all.”

She made me promise her that I would let her put mehendi on me on my wedding day.

We were walking back home when my mother started expressing concern over Fahmida’s husband beating her. “It’s getting out of hand now,” she said.

My pulse stuttered.

“Her husband has always been a chutiya.” My mother only swore like this on our trips to the beauty parlour. “Don’t ever bring it up in front of her.”

The sacrificial animals lined the streets, sitting with straw baskets filled with dry grass. They looked at me with deep, half-lidded eyes, as if they understood what I felt. It was like we knew what was coming for us. I removed the lucky bracelet immediately from my wrist and pushed it deep inside my handbag. It was suddenly starting to burn and pierce my skin.

It was Eid morning when I woke up with a headache. My soon-to-be husband was visiting to join my family for the festivities, and the entire house was busy making meetha and tucking everything into place.

I stood on the balcony and looked at the men gathering in the garden downstairs for the sacrifice. The animals stood next to the golden pothos, which covered the limewash walls. Each unfurling leaf appeared like a warning to me.

The air was thick and wet and smelled of monsoon soil and cow skin. I spotted my soon-to-be husband in the throng in his off-white kurta, his sleeves folded all the way to his elbows, not neatly, but hurriedly, and his curly pompadour making him stand out. They slipped a freshly sharpened butcher knife into his hands, and maybe it was just me, but his eyes looked almost lustful. They rolled the animal onto its back, four men holding its front and back hooves, exposing its soft neck. Its pearly skin gleamed in the sunlight as my soon-to-be husband slid the blade at the base of the throat. Not carefully, not cautiously, but with an erratic motion that made the animal tremble in helplessness.

Rosy flesh opened following the tip of the knife. I bit my tongue and tasted copper in my mouth. I could see into the eyes of the animal, now lolling in the aftershocks. I see his arms, coated in blood, and he looked almost satiated.

She was just Sam when I knew her. From a single-parent family on a Bethnal Green estate in east London: humble origins. That’s what she says in her interviews. And it’s true. Her background was never desirable, not at the time, not when I knew her. Now that she’s made it, stories about growing up in a council block and stepping over comatose addicts in the concrete stairwell sound so, well, glamorous somehow. In that real-life, gritty kind of way. Like she’s walked off the set of a crime miniseries and straight into Hollywood.

I don’t suppose it can have been that easy, but Sam was the kind of person who made it look easy. As if poverty and despair simply washed over her. When I knew her, back when life was one never-ending party interrupted only by enough shifts at the restaurant to keep us in Mimosas, she was a porcelain queen with black hair that shone in the reflection of the retro glitterball. Now, on the posters, she looks just the same, but it’s hard to know how much of it's because of make-up and airbrushing.

It doesn’t matter how many times I see her God-sized head on the wall of a tube station or on the side of a bus, it still feels like I’ve bumped into my old friend. That moment of recognition. I can’t help it; my heart skips a beat. That’s the way she made me feel. Still makes me feel. Then I take in the two-dimensional nature of her. Up close, I can feel the ridges of the wall behind the poster. I can see the fibres of paper that weave together. Printed and scaled up, she’s a representation of someone I once knew. She’s no longer just Sam. She’s Samantha Burnett.

At school, she was popular with students and teachers alike. Later, when we were working at Papagallos, she had that effect on the customers and waiters. Even Papa Gallo himself, who wasn’t Italian, but a Bosnian survivor of the 90s war, was soft on her. He’d feed her delicate quantities of ravioli as if she were a cat. Sometimes he’d sneak her a nip of limoncello, and have one himself, if the day’s takings had been satisfactory. No one else was offered this small bonus, but there was an unspoken agreement that Sam was the best of us. She earned most of the tips after all, and insisted on sharing them equally, as if she didn’t rely on tips at all. As if Papa’s pay was enough to cover London rent in the new millennium. Sam didn’t have an easy life, but you wouldn’t know it; she made living look effortless and that’s a very attractive quality.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that she’d make it. She always seemed to be surrounded by people of that world when we were out on the town: minor celebs, footballers from the lower leagues, would-be rappers. I recognised them from the magazines and was quite silly over them, but she treated them as normal people and they seemed to like that. They didn’t know she returned home every night to the council estate.

When a repeat customer at the restaurant finally got her to agree to a date, I didn’t think it would go anywhere. Neil Bampton claimed to be a barrister working at Lincoln’s Inn, and he would sweep into the restaurant demanding his ‘usual table and a bottle of your finest Chianti Classico.’ The way he pronounced Classico with a faux Italian accent was enough to make me want to throw up, but his slicked hair and pointy shoes didn’t help matters. He was obnoxious, but he was persistent, and Sam was kind. I’ve often wondered how many acts of kindness have led to a woman’s downfall. But I didn’t worry about Sam. Like I said, danger always washed over her, and it would be no different this time.

Neil planned to take her to the opera because she was ‘a classy bird.’ There were so many things wrong with that sentiment that I didn’t know where to start, and that’s probably where I went wrong. I should have said more, but I had so many objections, I couldn’t get them straight in my head. There was also the small matter of Sam being far more experienced than me in the whole relationship game. My boyfriend was a sweet young man who was still at college. He made a daily packed lunch for himself and generally thought the best of people.

From this sweet little bubble of loveliness, I did not feel equipped to weigh in on Sam’s romantic choices.

So, Neil took her to see Cosi Fan Tutte in Covent Garden. ‘All women are the same,’ he said, winking at me as he helped Sam on with her coat. He was trying to get one over on me, but I looked it up later. Cosi fan tutte: all women are like that. I kissed Sam on the cheek and wished her a good time.

We weren’t on the same shift for another week, so it was days later that I discovered she was going out with him again, this time to the ballet. When I asked her if she actually liked the opera and the ballet, she shrugged as if that wasn’t relevant. Did she like Neil? I asked. Again, she shrugged. She was still forming an opinion I thought, although how anyone couldn’t see he was completely detestable was beyond me. Unlike me, her head had never been turned by the many glitterati we’d met while clubbing, so perhaps there was something about Neil that I’d missed.

The ballet was Swan Lake, which I’d always thought a gruesome story for children at Christmas, not least for a romantic date, ending as it does with a double suicide, but again Sam came away having enjoyed herself enough to allow Neil to progress to a weekend in the country. ‘Jealous, are you, little black swan?’ he said to me, a sneer on his lips. Sam wasn’t party to any of this, of course. She was in the loo at the back of the restaurant doing her hair before Neil whisked her away to the Cotswolds.

I don’t know exactly what happened on that weekend away, but afterwards I didn’t see a whole lot of Sam. Papa went around with a thundercloud over his head. Rumour was that she’d picked up shifts in another restaurant, somewhere more central, upmarket, where the punters were paid members, and the tips were eye-popping. Neil would come looking for her, drunk, but Papa would chase him off. Seems like Sam had slipped free from the slimeball’s grip. It made me wonder whether she’d always known he wasn’t good enough for her.

Don’t ask me why I didn’t tell him to clear off when he found me sitting on the back steps of the restaurant taking a cigarette break. It was a balmy June evening, one of those really golden moments in London when you feel it heating up for the summer, when the hanging baskets are spilling with colour, and music drifts from open windows. The kind of evening that has you yearning for something, someone.

Neil looked glum, and I gave him my cigarette. He asked where Sam was, and I could truthfully answer that I had no idea. Every once in a while, I’d caught a glimpse of her dancing in a nightclub, but by that stage she was spending most of her time in the VIP section, or so I’d heard. Some might think of her desertion as a betrayal, but I never held it against her. She was a free spirit, and I wasn’t going to be the one to cage her.

I let Neil sound off a little – I could smell beer on his breath – then I suggested he should accept that she’d moved on. He cried at that, and his head found my shoulder. I thought him pathetic, but I was lonely – my sweet boyfriend had exited the scene some time before - and it was nice to feel needed, even if only for ten minutes or so. My shift was due to end soon, and he said he’d wait then we could go for a drink. I didn’t make him any promises, but he was still on the steps when I emerged with my bag and paltry tips that wouldn’t even cover my fare home. We went to the bar next door.

He'd wanted to photograph Sam, but she hadn’t let him. Now that she was gone, he didn’t even have a photo by which to remember her. Those were the days before social media. I was about the same height and size as her, maybe I’d let him photograph me instead? His words came back to me: ‘All women are the same.’

‘I’ve got brown hair,’ I said. ‘My eyes are smaller, my nose is longer.’

‘Tie your hair up,’ was his answer. ‘Turn your face away.’

I’d had several tequila shots, but I wasn’t too drunk not to know what I was doing. At his flat, I stripped down and let him arrange me, his cold fingers prodding me this way and that.

In one or two of the photos, I suppose I could have been mistaken for Sam – he had a talent for manipulating light – but mostly it was in his imagination. I allowed him his photos, then we slept together. You might think it was upsetting that he called me Sam throughout, but it was hardly a surprise. All evening he’d treated me like a stand-in. Call me crazy, but it was quite a thrill to be her that night. In a way, I felt it brought us closer together, me and Sam. I’d missed her, you see.

Occasionally I wonder if Neil ever sent my photo to the restaurant like he threatened to if I didn’t sleep with him again, but I left Papagallos not long after. If he did, old Papa will have had a great laugh over it. That makes me smile. I don’t exactly have the body of Samantha Burnett, but Papa had seen far worse sights in his time. Bodies, naked or otherwise, strewn about the streets of Sarajevo.

It’s not only posters of Sam on the tube that take me by surprise. It’s all the promotional stuff she does when one of her movies is about to come out. I’ll be scrolling through reels and suddenly there she is with her flawless face and easy charm. Moments like that, I wonder how differently things might have played out if Neil had taken naked photographs of her instead of me. How much money he could have made blackmailing her, how much power he could have had over her life. Whenever I watch one of her films, I think of Neil watching her too, jealous and embittered. He took photographs of me because he couldn’t take them of Sam. How that must enrage him. I suppose he could get a little something out of me, post my photos on the internet, but I had to reinvent myself when I entered the corporate world and I go by a different name now, so he would struggle to find me. In any case, I’m not sure anyone would care. I simply don’t have the currency of Samantha Burnett.

I do love watching her films. She’s so talented. In those films, she’s real. More real to me than I am to myself. My Bethnal Green Queen. When I’m watching her in a scene, she has the ability to draw me right in. She makes me feel as if I’m there with her, crying at the deathbed of her child or racing through trees to escape an axe-murderer. I feel her quiet devastation, her terror, her courage, her vitality, and it’s easy to forget myself.

Before San Francisco was 三藩市 (San-fan-city), it was 旧金山 (Old-gold-mountain), a city that prospered in its mythical pledge of fortune. Gold to humans were as flame to moths. One sniff of a probability to upward social mobility and citizens would abandon their mundane, repetitive lives in pursuit of a quicker, richer and more dazzling trajectory to success.

When Ba abandoned Ma and the 3-monthed fetus in her womb, she called him a 负心汉 – a callous, unfaithful betrayer who chased after a bone with glittering clings of flesh like a dog. Ba knelt on the floor and grabbed Ma’s waist, piously kissing her lumping belly, again and again. He stayed there long enough for his knees to numb, long enough for the floorboards and the mother-skin to remember the shape of his organs. Ma did not touch his hair. She watched the place where his mouth met her skin and watched the reverence gather and thin, gather and thin, like breath on glass.

When he rose, his eyes smudged everything but the contours of his wife. In attempts to squeeze out salty water, he reprinted in his mind the last image of his lover – a bony, short-haired woman blemished by the blood and scales of naughty fish.

“When I return for you and our third child, I will bring for us endless money and an American passport. Money is all we need now. I will change our lives. Just you wait and I will prove it to you. Just you wait.”

People said that there were three females in the house, but only two were women. Ma was the woman who loved Ba with a devotion soft as water and wavy as willow, swallowing crusty-sweet peach pits in her pupils as she let the broke fisherman impregnate her three times and marry her ring-less. My sister Xin was the woman who woke before the roosters, rinsed the rice twice, once for grit and once for care, cut scallions thinner than necessary, and stored Ma’s sentences the way others stored coins.

So when Ba chose one person to accompany his journey, the second daughter, I, Yu, was the one and only choice. Yu (余) meant remnants and sounded like the character Yu (鱼), which meant fish. From the start I was a child thriving on remnants of a dish and entertained myself with the agility of a leaping fish — a headfast, rocky creature often disliked for my mischief and cherished for my quick-wit.

Before heading off to the deck, Ma sat me down and shaved my head bald to, one, prevent the upcoming filth to bestow my hair with lice and, two, let me become rootless. Circling my forehead, her fingers lingered as if they were the softest thing that will ever touch me from now on.

We set sail in August, summer, when the village was still loud with life. Nets dried on bamboo poles, silvered with fish scales and sun. The river smelled thick and sweet, and the paddies held the sky so fully it seemed the earth might drown in blue. It should have been a season for staying.

In the night, the deck was pressed flat by bodies and breath. Men slept on planks rubbed smooth by salt and fear, turning in turns when space ran out. I was almost dreaming when I heard Ba whisper his confessions, the quiet, vulnerable type men would utter in sorrow to their wives to justify an affair. Much of the stuff I already knew: storms had begun to speak early that year and debts did not wait for weather. It was a choice out of necessity. And that he made the right choice.

An under-loved, inattentive daughter to a woeful father was as a lousy, playful cat to its owner. My head nodded with the currents water along with some “嗯s” and “哦s” as to prove the loyalty of my wind-drifted ear. I was not a big fan of the redundant chewings of his introspections, how his long-made decision was first flawless, then a mistake, and then somewhat amendable, how his fidelity to the big-bellied lady awaiting on the shore stuck strong, and then wavered, and then meandered back again. I told him there was no need to fret already: a decision made is a pot of cabbage stew spilled. No matter what there is no reverse. He nodded, and reassured me that this departure was only temporary. Fishermen always leave and return. This was only a longer tide.

Days ahead were measured in meals. Food always came at the tipping point of hunger, and water, however much algae and rust it carried, counted mouthful to mouthful. The ship moved on without days. Six weeks passed. Then eight. Then time loosened its grip, and the crossing became the only place that existed. I was blessed with an American dream to keep me aloof from boredom. I often asked Ba and other men on deck what America was like– whether gold mines sprawled as vines and opportunity scattered as redbeans, awaiting for us to scoop.

A man with a scarred left eye told me that America was a place where a man could outrun his past, if he ran fast enough.

I told him that I wasn’t a fast runner, but I was a fast swimmer. Does that still count?

When America almost reached my feet, I reached for my head. The stubble had come back uneven, as if it could not agree with itself. It had a soft shadow in some places, a bare shine in others, and small stubborn tufts rising where the blade had missed and a mother’s mercy had intervened. I pressed my palm against it, feeling heat and the faint rasp of new insistence, and for a moment I did not know whether I was growing or being stripped again. The wind of the bay found sport in tampering the skin I have yet to learn how to protect, lifting nothing and braiding nothing.

One thing about my hair was that I used to have lots of it. It reached past my waist, heavy with the smelling of soggy, old nets. When I fished with Ba, I tied it with twine torn from a rice sack, looping it twice so it wouldn’t slip, then tucked the knot under my collar. Sometimes when I forgot it would drag. It either caught a hook or brushed the slime-slick flank of a carp, pulling in alongside the dynamic of the line. When the wind lifted my hair I had to stop, teeth working through the snags, spit and fingers doing what combs couldn’t. To me, being a woman for the past eighteen years didn’t go past anything but a flick of such a burden the way Ba flicked water from nets. At dawn, it held the cold. By noon, it held the sun. And after hours by the water, it stiffened with salt.

Boys were different. Their braids were a little skinnier, with a shaved front and a long queue at the back. The boy that sailed with us, Han, whom I have managed to befriend, had a braid so skinny like a single spike of a wheat. When he held it in his clothes I could barely notice, so oftentimes we looked the same, with no particular disparities in height, strength and figure. We were both undernourished in our own ways: mines leaving me breast-less and his leaving him hollow-cheeked, all angles and tendons. His shoulders jutted like the corners of a crate while mine sloped inward, taught early to make room. Sun flattened us both. We shared the same cough at night, the same dizziness when we stood too fast.

He asked me if I would ever be able to breastfeed a baby, as at that time I was flat as a bamboo stick, so I told him I am starting to become one of them. He then told me if I were to become a man, I would’ve been executed now for my hair not obliging to the laws of the Manchus.

So when I first stepped on American lands I thought to myself: they were all gonna be executed by the Manchus.

Upon the shore, Americans gathered, met and walked. American boys had short, golden hair, as though I would’ve assumed from the Westerners I’ve seen before who conglomerated in foreign factories throughout the Riverfront trading zones, smoking from pipes and laughing from lungs.

The men here acted similarly, except it was more of an outspread than a sole gathering of them. Their voices came first. Loud and loose, tossed into the air without care for where they landed. Laughter broke open like wood split too hard. Words struck each other and scattered. I could not understand them, but somewhat understood the rhythm of impatience.

I wasn’t able to go any closer to the noisy, white men, all of which had hair with the resemblance of a lion’s fur. But male lions had long fur, so white men were like female lions, and white women were like male lions. I was drawn to them for their delicacy, that is, a type of cleanliness and steadiness that varied from my own. But of course I was not of remorse: I have been on sea and unwashed for ages, of course I was unkempt in any form!

In Guangdong, foreigners were something brighter, esteemed with their freckles that dotted them elegance and a curled tongue none of us understood. For a moment, a sudden lightning of fear struck me: never, or at least for the many months ahead, will I ever get to hear Cantonese from anyone’s mouth other than my dear chinese acquaintances! Who will be there to understand me?

When I spoke of my concern with Ba, he only laughed and waved his hand. Oh no, baby, there are more Chinese acquaintances here than you can think of. We are not alone!

Oh but how would one define loneliness? Ba, we are but flies huddling and buzzing at a trash can, eagerly and hostilely battling for a bite of shit. We are alone in that we are in absence of a united heart. The heart has long been segregated since the two-month fetus and many fetuses are left father-less or waterborne. Where can unity be found in a land different from my own, where I am nothing but an alien, estranged in conversations, cloth and hair color?

When I looked at Ba, he seemed way too enthusiastic, as for gold to overtake his eyes, bubbling with an ambition for a near-prosperous future and posterity of wealth. So I only asked him about their hair color, and why Americans had yellow hair. Unsurprisingly, he told me that Americans were wealthy enough to brush gold onto their hair, and thus the dazzling hue. One day, we will brush gold onto our strands of hair as well, as to cover the present ebony. Soon enough, our whole bodies will shine golden.

Our conversation and my yet-to-come insult was interrupted on a pat on Ba’s back. Precisely speaking, it was the sound of footsteps that came seconds before that — the sound of leather stomping against rocky grounds — the sound of money. I have heard that soft, crunchy sound when I worked as a bootblack for rich merchants who travelled to Guangdong for business. Some men were nice and gave me a few copper coins along with encouragement that let me scrub faster. The others lifted up my chin with the tip of their shoes, telling me: poor little ghost, this might be the only leather you’ll ever get to touch in your life! Might as well appreciate it and scrub cleaner! Oftentimes I wouldn’t know how to respond and only let the warmth of the worn-leather penetrate my head, hoping that the same leather wouldn’t leave a bruise or stain on me today.

When I turned around, I was met with a Chinese man, one like myself, but with short hair. His hands, dry and practiced, closed around Ba’s sleeve, with a grip of someone used to counting bodies the way others counted crates.

“You from China?”

As if he wasn’t himself.

“Yes, yes, both me and her, and him.” Ba pointed at Han and I.

“Okay,” He nodded. “You three, follow the crowd over there.” He pointed east, at a bustling stampede of people.

“Okay, okay.” Ba answered semi-obediently, eyes dropping to his leather shoes, then drifting upwards to his denim pants and linen shirt. All expensive, foreign clothing.

We were not allowed to drift. Men in dark cotton jackets began to funnel us decisively away from the open shore and its shouting brightness. Their Cantonese was clipped and economical, the kind used for ledgers. Names were asked. Then villages were named. Then districts were sorted. A voice called “Toisan,” another “Zhongshan,” another “Panyu,” and bodies answered by moving, as iron filings drawn to separate magnets. Ba spoke for us. He always did. I stood half a step behind him, trained by years of nets and debt to know where daughters belonged. We were pressed through streets that narrowed quickly, and the city itself learned to hold its breath around us. Buildings leaned in. Signs stacked vertically, characters painted thick and confident, promising services we did not yet understand: lodging, employment, remittance, mediation, burial. The smell shifted from salt and tar to soy, damp wood, old oil. I recognized it as the smell of men waiting.

Inside, the huiguan was darker than I expected. Practical-dark. Windows were high and light was rationed. A long table ran the center of the room, scarred with years of elbows and ink spills. Ledgers lay open like animals pinned for study.

Ba gave his name. His village. The name of his father. The man across from him nodded, dipped his brush, and wrote as if the information had been waiting all along. Numbers followed. Passage cost. Interest. Advance already eaten by time. I watched Ba’s shoulders tighten as his future was converted into columns.

When the man looked up, his eyes flicked to me.

“How old?”

“十八,” Ba said, after a pause.

I looked back at him. I was in fact, not yet eighteen.

But age is just a number, right?

The man looked at me again.

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl.”

This time I answered before Ba could.

“Aiya, girl? Girl not good. Do less labor earn less money.”

“She can do hard work. She fished with me back in China. Hands and back of rough steel. Treat her like a boy.”

I looked at Ba again. Really, I couldn’t see much in his eyes, despite how shallow they already were. A man who can abandon his wife and two children for gold will treat his daughter like a dog. Ma was right. What much can we expect from a callous, unfaithful betrayer?

We were led upstairs to a boarding room. The stairs were steep and smelled of boiled greens and unwashed cloth. The room itself was long and narrow, lined with sleeping platforms like shelves. Men lay already, some awake, some sunk into the kind of sleep that arrives only after surrender, drooling and murmuring. At least I hope they have a nice dream.

Ba and I were given a corner, a mat, a bucket and a bowl each.

“This is temporary,” the attendant said, not unkindly, and I believed him because nothing here pretended to be permanent.

That night, I listened.

Men whispered of contracts already arranged. Of camps upriver where gold had been scraped thin but not clean. Of white foremen who paid late and counted wrong. Of others — Chinese men — who spoke the same dialect but wore better shoes and grew softer faces. Contractors. Middlemen. They came and went through the huiguan like owners inspecting stock.

They looked like us, if you squinted. Same bones. Same mouths. But when they spoke, their words landed aloof.

One of them looked at Ba and smiled in recognition.

“You’ll go north,” he said. “Three months. Maybe more. Wages docked for passage. Half sent home.”

Ba nodded. He nodded a lot now. It was a new habit, acquired somewhere between the sea and the ledger.

Like father, like daughter, they say. I smile, and nod along, agreeing to the instability that lay before me, actively succumbing to the passiveness of life.

Afterall, I was still, biologically, classified as a woman. Hence, I was sent near a Chinese railroad spur labor group, where I was taught to wash their clothes and cook rice, fish and some other simple stew — some conventional labor not unfamiliar to my hands. Ba worked in railroad labor but a few districts away. When I asked him why he still had to work and not mine gold by himself he told me how we practically were still in debt. The voyage from home to here was not free (when he arrived at this sentence, he stopped to mock my naivety, of which I fully take the blame). A steerage ticket from Guangdong to San Francisco costs several taels of silver, which vastly exceeded our budget as a family who lived on copper cash. Very few households held spare silver, while we barely had none. His eyes, when attempting to search for the right words to embellish his deeds, were ingenuously guiltless, as if a fresh-born fawn trembling its legs. I was surprised at his sheer audacity, and admired his courage to tell me undisguised. He then introduced me to the credit-ticket system, at which most migrants travelled under. We didn’t have money to pay for the full trip so instead, huiguan affiliate paid for the passage upfront.

At the end of his early-morning speech I smelt his breath (or maybe my own) that smelt like a starved stomach and its grueling, howling acid that stirred within it, and understood three, simple things.

One, we arrived owing tons of money. Two, our bodies were sheer collaterals. Three, freedom, and, the great dream of gold, were things that only came after repayment.

My first day of work began before the sun remembered itself. I sat up into a cold that felt already used, as if the air had passed through too many lungs before reaching mine. Around me, men were rising in pieces: a cough first, then a spine, then a curse swallowed back into habit. Outside, the camp lay low and gray. Canvas tents sagged like tired mouths. Smoke from last night’s fires still clung to the ground, thin and sour. Somewhere upriver, metal rang against stone – one man starting early, or late, or never stopping. Time here did not seem to move forward.

A big, iron pot was shoved into my hands. It was still wet from the river and marred from leftover food stains.

“Rice,” a man said, pointing, as if I had ever cooked anything else.

I crouched by the fire pit and learned quickly how hunger sharpened everything. The rice was poor with broken grains and dull with age, but when it hit the water it bloomed, white spreading like a small mercy. I stirred with a stick, wrist aching a little from poor rest, long travel and the sleeping position last night. To extent Ba was wrong — I was vulnerable, just like anyone else.

The only thing that differed was a heart to show my capability and to show that I belonged. I was never a good fisherman, and yet I craved to become a fisherman’s daughter of good competence. Although I couldn’t really define myself now. What am I? The daughter of an immigrant, child of a railroad laborer, and hence a cook. I stared at the men that stood before me and took into account their cracked skin, chapped lips, and the small streams of blood that spotted their face in one corner and another. The smoke of the pot stung my eyes.

I sighed.

I guess I will see myself as the sustainer for the survival of these poor, poor people.

My colleagues were a lot of other Chinese women with differing dialects. Most of them were wives of the toiling men.

Having worked at the railroad camp for a few hours, I was surprised by how little white faces I saw and how little English I heard. English was something too distant to labor. Seldom a few American workers would pass and stare at us as apes – a dirty, yellow crowd of animals crassly moaning foreign languages. Meeting their eyes I only beamed at how Xin wasn’t the one here, with her and her heart soft as spring snow.

When the men lined up, they did not look at me. They looked at the pot.

Bowls appeared. Tin mismatched. Hands thrust forward. I learned to portion fast, and tried not to be generous nor stingy. Too much and someone else complained. Too little and someone remembered your face. I did not know yet which was worse.

After breakfast came washing.

The river was colder than the sea had ever been. Snowmelt, a woman said, laughing as if pain were a joke you told yourself to survive. Shirts and trousers were stiff with sweat, dirt ground into the seams. I beat them against rocks slick with algae, the sound dull and endless. My fingers went numb first, then burned, then disappeared entirely.

鱼儿鱼儿水中游，

游来游去乐悠悠

Little fish, little fish, roaming in the water;

going nowhere and everywhere, just glad to go.

The Deaf guy I’m interpreting for today at the ophthalmologist’s office isn’t exactly a friend. But I know him. He’s not a family member either, though I know his whole family. “Are you a family member or just a friend?” the doctor asks me as I follow him and the Deaf patient into the examining room. “Neither,” I reply. “I’ve been hired by your office to interpret for you and your patient—I do this for a living.” He gives me a surprised look as though he’d never seen anything like it in the history of ophthalmology.

Doctors can be pretty dumb about Deaf people and sign language. But the thing is—and I don’t tell the doctor this—not only do I know this Deaf guy and his family, I have interpreted for all of them at one time or another; I have interpreted for his Deaf wife; I have interpreted for his Deaf son and his Deaf son’s Deaf ex and their Deaf children, i.e. this Deaf guy’s grandchildren. As a matter of fact, just last month the ex and her Deaf father had dinner with me and my Deaf wife at my Deaf sister-in-law’s house—along with some other Deaf friends whose kids and exes and step kids I know and have occasionally interpreted for. So, you see, it’s all kind of incestuous.

Which is why the National Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf has a strict Code of Professional Conduct that we sign language interpreters must abide by, and it includes, among other tenets, the one about all assignment-related information being kept strictly confidential. We can’t talk about our interpreting work outside of the assignment, and we can’t tell anyone anything about the Deaf consumers that might identify them.

So you’re probably wondering right about now if I’ve broken the Code of Professional Conduct by telling you about this Deaf guy I’m interpreting for at the ophthalmologist’s office today, not to mention having mentioned his entire Deaf family. I wondered about that myself as I began writing this little essay. But the thing is, nothing I have told you so far about him or his family would allow you to identify them. There are thousands of Deaf people who go to the ophthalmologist and who have Deaf families: Deaf wives, Deaf children, Deaf exes, Deaf grandchildren. This Deaf guy could be anybody. He could be any Deaf body.

I like writing about Deaf people because I have spent the last forty years learning their language and culture and hanging out with them and falling in love with them and, of course, interpreting for them. There’s a lot I could tell you about them but since I don’t want to violate the Code of Professional Conduct, and since I don’t want to be accused of speaking for Deaf people—who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves—and since I don’t want to be one of those annoying hearing people who goes around spouting off about Deaf people as if he actually knew what it’s like to be Deaf—I don’t know what it’s like to be Deaf, as my Deaf wife is only too happy to remind me—I should probably quit while I’m ahead.

But let me just say this.

Sometimes I wish I were Deaf. Because as a hearing person who is in love with Deaf people and their language and culture, I will always be on the outside looking in. I will never quite belong, not the way Deaf people belong among each other. Which is not to say that all Deaf people feel a sense of belonging among all other Deaf people. Far from it. They are as heterogeneous as any other group of people and there are circles and cliques and groups and tribes and communities within the so-called Deaf community.

But you can study a foreign spoken language, move to a country where that language is spoken, grow fluent in the language and culture of that country, get a visa, get a green card, get naturalized, even marry someone from that country and become a citizen of that country. But there is no country of the Deaf. And there is no Deaf citizenship for hearing people. But we can be allies.

I like to think of myself as an ally, but I’m also a voyeur. A fly on the wall. I mean sometimes it feels like I’m watching a soap opera. Lots of soap operas. The Deaf soaps. This one married that one, had an affair with this other one who used to be a hopeless drunk but is sober now thanks to AA. That one is dating this one who is recently divorced from that one who is a famous Deaf person—famous in the Deaf world—and is in a rebound relationship with that one who is estranged from their kids. This one has a terminal illness and that one just got out of jail and this one is probably headed for jail. This one is almost blind but refuses to sign tactilely and that one recently had all their teeth extracted and this one had bariatric surgery and that one was a phenomenal basketball player in high school but is now a drug addict. This one has a Ph.D. and that one has HIV and this one has an ankle bracelet and that one is an artist and this one is a carpenter and can fix anything and that one is a financial planner and is richer than Croesus. I mean I could write a book. I mean sometimes it feels like I’m living vicariously, watching all these dramas play out from the cool remove of the sign language interpreter—the fly on the wall, who must remain neutral and confidential and professional in the midst of all this Deaf buzz.

And now the eye doctor, who may know a thing or two about ophthalmology but is as dumb as they come about Deaf people and sign language, looks at me and asks me to ask this Deaf guy—who isn’t exactly my friend, though I know him—if he’s experiencing any flashes or floaters. And the Deaf guy notices, notices that this eye doctor won’t look him in the eye—doesn’t see him—and says to the doctor to ask him himself, in the second person. But the doctor doesn’t know what the second person is. And the doc looks at me again and asks me what the Deaf guy means by that. And I am tempted, so tempted, to reach across and gingerly take hold of the doc’s chin, and gently turn his head clockwise until he’s facing the Deaf guy—looking at the Deaf guy, eye to eye—and prompt him: “Now ask again.”

I am fifteen, waiting with Pop for our number to blink red on the crooked black monitor at the DMV in Ladson, South Carolina.

Ladson was bursting at the seams. Bulldozers and paving machines were as common as sweet tea and porch swings. Overnight, our house number jumped from three digits to four, though the paint color changed only once a decade. Most people don’t realize that where we live isn’t a city or a town—just an unincorporated community without so much as a welcome sign. Pride lifts Pop’s chin, puffing up his soft chest that sinks into the swell of a Santa-sized beer belly. A grease-stained wife-beater stretches tight beneath dark denim overalls. He’s taken a break from tinkering in our garage to escort me two turns and one stoplight to this rite of passage. He’s been through this three times: once for himself back when TV was just black-and-white; once with my mother, when he decided she should work outside the home; and once with my brother on his fifteenth birthday. They passed everyone back in Pop’s day. Mom passed on the first attempt—the instructor had asked her out despite the wedding ring. But it had taken my brother three tries to pass, and it was a sore subject.

Pop had quit on them. With Mom, it was the language barrier. When she mixed up her lefts and rights, her stops and starts, Pop’s lightning-quick temper flared, and Kapampangan curses fell from her mouth like tiny knives wrapped in silk. She took to calling Pop Kulo, which means to boil. He laughed at the endearment, but she smiled knowingly. With Rob, it was his slow-as-molasses reactions. Pop dropped them each off unceremoniously at Rusty’s Driving School, with a hollered “Good luck” out the window.

I was his last chance to get it right. And I needed to pass the first time. For both our bragging rights.

Our number flashes red, and Pop tailgates me to the counter.

“Congratulations, darlin’,” the clerk says, smacking her gum, mouth wide open. I see more crown than tooth. I smell artificial mint jockeying with stale coffee and cigarettes.

He beams, inspecting the driver’s permit form over my shoulder, and my No. 2 pencil shakes across the page. Until.

Race.

It’s the only question I didn’t study for. Three bubbles stare back at me—Black, white, Other.

Pop studies my hand as it hovers between white and Other. He looks at the fidgeting line of teens forming behind us.

“White,” he states, like it’s obvious.

I bristle and whisper that “Mom is Filipina. So I am at least half not-white.”

He looks around the room like a bomb is about to go off. His face is redder than usual, and his eyes grow almost wider than the bifocals that magnify them.

“Excuse me,” I say to the clerk, who has already gone back to her Solitaire game. “Can I fill in more than one bubble?”

“Nope. Sorry, sweetheart.” More mint. More stale coffee and cigarettes. “Messes up the machine.”

“But I’m not just one race.”

She turns from the bulky monitor and looks at me—takes in my dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, and small flat button nose—then the white man towering behind me, his silvering blonde hair, ruddy complexion, and patrician nose. Her face flickers with surprise, then confusion. Pop and I exchange looks and hold our breath.

Then she looks back toward her monitor and shrugs. “Just pick one.”

The line behind me coils around the room and hugs the back wall. Heads pop out to see what the holdup is. My cheeks blaze, and my shirt clings to the sweat on my back as I glance at the line, a gigantic serpent with many heads, all judging me.

The holdup is an existential crisis, but to them, I’m just slow with a pencil.

Pop’s hand lands heavy and damp on my shoulder. “You’re wh-hite,” he says, slow and deliberate, like the word is more than one syllable.

Would loyalty to him betray my mother, along with her family back in the barrio—the ones we send money orders to and letters on cassette tapes, twice a month?

Sweat slicks my palms, and the pencil slides loose. The tip splinters as I darken the bubble for Other and try to hand it over before he can see. But he’s several heads taller, and his face tells me I’ve failed—in more ways than one.

He walks resolutely out to the car, and even though I was supposed to drive us home, he is buckled in and turning the key before I open the passenger door.

On the radio, Patsy Cline is already singing about “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “sayin’ I love you,” like it just might be my romantic future and not the nightmare I am contemplating. He swerves onto the busy road. I grip my thumb tight inside my fist—a little trick that calms me when Pop drives too fast or too slow, always on the lookout for wildlife rather than other cars. I can never tell if he’s being careful or careless.

We jerk into our circle driveway when he breaks the silence with a heavy sigh.

“Other. Is that really how you see yourself?”

My eyes water and my throat burns. I stare at the smudge his thumb left on the steering wheel and let the answer die there.

He looks older than when we left the house. I notice white creeping into his whiskers and sideburns.

He turns off the ignition and slams the car door.

A month earlier, at the kitchen table, I had asked him how he’d feel if I liked Henry—a sweet, bespectacled Black boy who offered to carry my books and passed me thick love letters folded into paper footballs in homeroom. My father had set his sweaty tumbler of sweet tea down without a coaster, and I bit my lip. He crossed his thick, freckled arms above the heft of his belly and whistled, taking his own sweet time.

“How would I feel? Well, I wouldn’t like it.” His lips stayed puckered like he was about to say something else.

The color left my face.

“I’d be disappointed, to tell you the truth, but I’m not sure if I can explain why,” he said quietly.

He must have seen the word inside my head, traveling toward my own pursed lips: Why.

“What if—what if Rob—if he brought home a girl…who was Black?” I asked, tripping over my words. “Like Whitney?”

He turned toward me, recognition in his eyes, and licked his thin, dry lips.

“Well, that would be fine, I suppose.”

“But not fine for me. To be with a Black boy. Even if he was light-skinned?” I taunted, shaking every word like a gift I was shaking to guess its contents.

“I think I’d see it…as a rejection of me. Don’t little girls want to marry someone in the image of their father?”

“Who’s talking about marriage? I just said what if I liked him?”

“And I gave you my answer.”

When Henry stood too close in the hallway, my stomach fluttered—but Pop’s voice echoed in my head, steady as a caution sign.

A year later I brought a boy home for dinner. Wesley. I was smitten. He was half-white and half–West Indian, with dark chocolate skin and wavy, coarse hair, funny and handsome in an offbeat way, his cheekbones pitched so sharply they made him look like a chipmunk when he smiled.

My parents loved him immediately. I was surprised by my father’s ease. When Wesley and I later broke up, Pop seemed more heartbroken than I was. I asked once if he had ever minded that Wesley was Black. He stopped, genuinely puzzled.

“I guess it doesn’t matter after all,” he said.

Later, the DMV form came back to me—the bubble for Other faintly smeared.

I had mistaken being marked for being seen.

From the kitchen, my mother’s Filipino lilt moved through the house.

I belonged.

Every day I’d start my journey the same way. I’d take the tiny elevator down the six floors to the bottom. Close the interior doors first, otherwise the elevator wouldn’t move. I’d go down with Serban or Andrei if they had an early class at the university. My host family mother wanted them to spend as much time with me as possible. I was supposed to be helping them with their English. I’d talk to them in my shitty, pidgin Romanian and they’d laugh until they cried and answer me in English. They looked up to me. It was kind of sad. They thought I was a good guy, here to help out the poor Romanians. They couldn’t tell yet that I was a loser, another drunk running away from America. We’d get out on the bottom floor. Walk through the markets that were clustered around the bottom of the bloc like a bruise stemming out from a black eye in shades of yellow and ghastly purple. They sold shirts there out of bags. All my clothes were Romanian by this point. The American clothes I’d come with had evaporated from overuse.

I parted ways with Serban and Andrei and walked down to the train station. There was a long bridge that went over the station, which swung high up in the air and looked very unstable. There were missing planks of wood, but because I took it every day I knew where to step and where not to. I’d look down at the trains underneath, mostly World War Two relics, and occasionally an Intercity, the modern ones. After the train station it was all uphill, a good half hour walk from my host family’s flat to the school. During the school year it was nice, despite the gray of the air, the shitty Novemberness of everything. It was the same gray Midwestern air with no sunlight poking through, the same shitty November feelings I used to have at home but now translated romantic and majestical. It was only nice because during the school year there would also be college girls walking up the hill of Copou with their books. They were tiny girls and they carried their books with their arms across their chest, like it was still the 1950s. And they were dressed in heels like it meant something to be a person who went to class. The road up the hill of Copou was lined with lime trees and it gave the air a fragrance. Sometimes I’d buy a loaf of bread to snack on throughout the day for seven lei from ladies at the bread stand, always stoic and unsmiling. I’d lay my coins on the counter in exact change and they would hand me a bread with no words passed between us.

Today I’d have the fifth graders make a threefold travel brochure. For the older students we’d discuss pages from a Lonely Planet guide about their country and I’d ask them how did it feel? It usually made them angry. They wanted me to know that Romania wasn’t all gypsies and drunks. I already knew that, but it got them talking. It’s hard to conjugate verbs when you’re angry, but that’s how you get better at speaking. I wasn’t that much older than some of the girls in the twelfth-grade classes I taught, but I tried to be professional, between occasional glances at their cleavage.

They didn’t have lunch at school. So the school day ended earlier and everyone went home to have lunch to save money. Since I was making a big American salary of $300 a month. I went to the cantina at the university. I would get a ciorba radauteana, a creamy chicken soup with pools of fat and flavor and pour sour cream in it like they had taught me to. You could even buy beer there. So after I finished with the ciorba, I’d buy a dark beer then just sit and watch the college girls in a procession. I never talked to them, which was stupid, but I had the same trouble with girls at home. I’d study their profiles, the European grace with which they strode purposefully, until my beer was finished and I got my deposit back on the bottle.

One day, a chubby girl saw me there watching. She wasn’t really chubby, she was like, American-sized. As soon as I got up, she started coming toward me, and I got scared that she was going to curse me out for being a perv, so I walked faster. But I could hear her heels behind me click-clacking. So I sped up. Then she sped up. I walked up Copou Hill, she click-clacked up Copou Hill gaining on me, past the park where there were crews coming along cutting the grass with scythes. To lose her, I dipped into this bar with pool tables. A lot of students went there. But I wasn’t very good at pool, so I just bought another beer and found a corner to hide in.

She came in after me and bought a coffee from the bar and found a table she could sit at and watch me. It was hard to tell exactly what she was doing because I kept my head down so as not to make eye contact. She got out some papers and pretended to do her homework or study. I got out some papers I had from students that I was supposed to be grading. But I was too nervous to grade them, so I just kept reshuffling the papers and would occasionally make marks on a piece of scratch paper, so it looked like I was actually busy.

Theoretically, you could say it was out of loyalty. I was dating another American Peace Corps girl in a town three hours away by bus. I felt sorry for her. She was stuck in Dorohoi, a shithole in the Moldovan countryside. I knew if I went up there for the weekend we would fuck. So I’d go up there once a month and we’d get drunk and fuck all weekend, just casual shitty sex before we’d pass out.

I went up there for Thanksgiving the year before with some other volunteers. She fucked up the turkey and I tried to make my potato surprise. Somebody made a dish with apples, but they came out blue and we weren’t sure if it was safe to eat them. Eventually, we got hungry and ate them anyway. Raven and I weren’t really dating, at least in my mind. She was a girl that I fucked with from time to time. So the loyalty argument was really an excuse.

But this mystery girl, even if we were to talk, what could we do? I wasn’t interested, and even if I were, there was nowhere to bring her. What was I going to do, take her back to my little room covered in icons and quiltwork at my host family’s flat? Let her get cross-examined by my host mother? It wouldn’t be fair. I suppose we could have gone to Copou Park. Sometimes students would make out behind the bushes there. But usually that didn’t happen until after dark and it was still mid afternoon.

I felt more than a little ridiculous. I didn’t really want to be in this bar drinking my third beer of the day at four o’clock in the afternoon. But if I left she might follow me again and it was downhill until the train station from this direction. Which meant that if I walked quickly I’d be practically running by the time I reached the bottom of the hill. And I’d have to pass by the school where I taught. What would my students think, watching their teacher get chased down the hill by a lady in heels, half-drunk in the middle of the afternoon?

In the half light of the pool hall, her long dark hair made her seem more alluring than frightening. Why was she following me? Was she a spy? Would she fuck me in exchange for state secrets I didn’t have? Don’t think, just act, I coached myself. By the time I was halfway to her table I realized she wasn’t there anymore and froze. Then I saw her playing pool with her friends. I couldn’t hold a conversation with a whole group of students. I could barely manage a one on one conversation without music playing in the background under the best of circumstances in my shitty Romanian pidgin dialectics. This was a mishmash of overheard sayings, idioms like o brunza buna in burdof de caine I had learned from my students, one of whom compared me to ‘a good cheese wrapped in a dog’s bladder,’ halfwitted ejaculations taught me by my previous host family in the mountains, and swears I had picked up by living between two football pitches behind the school. I would relate them in a slurry of Texas twanged Moldovan accented Romanian that happened in a world where time existed exclusively in the present and I repeatedly bounced back and forth between the formal and casual forms of verbs because I couldn’t tell what the conversation called for.

Luckily, she rescued me from my state of indecision by returning to grab a lighter from her coat pocket. I sauntered over the remaining three feet as casually as possible and asked her, “I see you are a player of the billiards?”

“Oh no, just saying hi to some friends.”

“Ah, ma’m, I also am not a player of the billiards.”

“Very good.”

“Why did you come here, ma’m if not to play of the billiards?”

“I might ask you the same.” She smiled and lit her cigarette.

I deeply regretted finishing my beer and not having a prop or any sort of stage business to do with my hands.

“My name is Nathan. I teach of the English.”

She switched over to English, mercifully.

“I am Alexandra,” she said and offered me her hand.

I reached out to shake it where it remained limp.

She laughed.

“Professor Nathan, it is customary to kiss a lady’s hand in Romania, not shake it.”

“Still?” I asked, confused. Then switching back to Romanian, “I had thought that this was had been done how they were the gentlemen to do in the past with the hand of a lady.”

“Then too,” she said and exhaled her cigarette smoke daintily.

“Always are saying the men I kiss of your hand, but never are they kissing of the hand of the lady.” I offered. Sara mana, was a common saying in the teacher’s lounge.

“Yes, it is true there are not so many that are gentlemen’s in the time we have of now living in” she offered in a grand gesture of English.

A pause stood between us. I became aware of her friends' eyes on us, their game of billiards having ground to a screeching halt.

“Is it possible, I can buy you something to drink?”

“No, thank you. I already have a coffee. But that is very beautiful of you Professor Nathan.”

Romanian girls do not drink with strange men unless they are dating, so her refusal wasn’t as hopeless as it seemed.

“Well, I should be going,” I said, not knowing how long I could resist in such a conversation with an audience.

“Do you have somewhere to be?” she asked, amused by my stalling.

“I am going to the home where I am living” I managed.

“You have a lot of papers to grade I see.”

“Yes, yes, many of the papers, mine, students of mine have to be writing, for to be graded in this evening, by myself.”

“Yes, that is the teacher’s life. My mother is a teacher.”

“Ah, what does teaching your mother?”

“Mathematics.”

“Very difficult here, I am seeing the students of mine with the notebooks, so full with the notes, they are making tears of the eyes.”

She laughed, more sympathetically this time.

“Yes, is very difficult the math in Romania,” she responded in English.

“Well, you must to return to your game, are waiting, miss, the friends of yours for you, I am believing.”

“I should return to the game, you are correct Professor Nathan.”

“Perhaps we will be seeing of each other again in day of future?” I ventured.

“That would be quite lovely,” she said, finally tipping her hand.

I bowed stupidly and returned to my table to gather my papers up. I smiled awkwardly on the way out of the bar and was blinded by the fading afternoon sun, surprised by the light after the dimness of the bar.

A connection had been made. I hadn’t chickened out after all. I imagined all her friends laughing at me. On the way home I treated myself to a visine tort and an hour at the internet cafe. I saw pictures of the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. At the train station, I kept staring at the signs flipping over every couple minutes with the new Arrivals and Departures on them, hypnotized. The wind knifed me out of my reveries and I crossed the rickety bridge, knowing that my host family mother would be worried about why I hadn’t come home yet and admonishing Serban and Andrei about their failures to look after the American. I weaved my way through the market stands and bought a rose for her for five lei.

I should have got her phone number at least. Jesus, I’m such an idiot, I thought. I sent Raven a text about coming up to Dorohoi for the weekend. She wrote back right away and I felt better and worse at the same time, imagining force feeding a giant plate of lukewarm blue apple crisp all in one sitting. When I got to the bloc the elevator was broken, so I had to climb the six flights of stairs.

I leaned hard against the wall on the fifth floor, not ready to go in yet. Outside I heard the trolley going by, the useless trolley that zigzagged back and forth across Iasi, not going anywhere anyone actually wanted to go directly, but banging and clanging at every stop. I realized I hadn’t written my own mother back at the internet cafe and felt guilty. I trudged the final flight of stairs up to six. Somehow I couldn’t bear to go in. A few seconds passed and my host family mother opened the door, staring dourly at me.

She lowered her glasses.

“Are you waiting for an invitation?”

“I don’t know”

I didn’t then, and I still don’t now.

My father drew spirals in his notebook. He carved small ones at first before the larger, looser ones that swept across the page like ocean waves. I found the books later, stacked in our basement in Toronto where they had lived for over fifteen years, growing mold in the damp Canadian cold.

“Why spirals, Papa?” I asked him once watching him doodle during my childhood in Owerri.

“It is because nothing moves in straight lines, not people, water or even time.”

He was drawing the Niger Delta without knowing it. From above, the delta is all spirals, creeks branching out into smaller creeks, rivers moving apart and finally rejoining, water that cannot decide whether it wants to be fresh or salty so it becomes both. The Omi River where I grew up flowed in loops, curving back on itself like an ouroboros, like time refusing to be linear. I remember standing on its edge as a child, watching how the current would push forward and backward, never the same water twice but always in the same motion. My father would say that the river was breathing and I agreed because there was no other explanation for that in-out, give-take rhythm of the river.

I was a child who hid at the rivers’ edge. When the boys called me “nwoke-nwanyi” or “girl-boy” because I constantly pushed out my hips when I walked, I had no words to defend myself. When they pulled at my wrapper and pushed me to the ground, I ran to the mangroves and stayed there till evening came. The river hid me without asking me to explain myself. I was eight and it was the first thing that accepted me exactly as I was.

In Vodou cosmology which I would learn much later, the spirit Lasiren moves in spirals. She is the Iwa of the sea and women who refused to be possessed by any other thing apart from water. In my father’s Igbo cosmology, Mamiwata does the same. They are not the same goddess but they understand one universal truth; even though water changes form, it never forgets, the ocean that connects Haiti to West Africa doesn’t care about the human divisions of tribes and nations but it is one body, spiraling around the planet, holding the drowned and all our dreams in the same salt.

This is an essay about spirals, about how Haitian Spiralism made me understand my own Nigerian displacement and about what it means to be queer inside a diaspora that doesn’t have the terms to describe what you are.

My family left Nigeria in 2008 when I was fifteen. My father got a position at a Toronto Hospital. We flew Air France, business class. This was not the same as the Middle Passage but there is something leaving does to you. The ocean is the original archive of Spirality, the first in-between. The same water that carried people from the shores of the Niger Delta and deposited them in other places did not forget what it had held, it kept everything, the names that didn’t survive the crossing, and the different cosmologies that collided and rebuilt themselves on new soil from memory. This is why Mamiwata and Lasiren are two siblings born from different mothers. The Middle Passage did not just move people, it moved their water and their spirits. Spiralism was born from this crossing, and understood displacement and migration are recursive and moving in circles.

And so was I. Time stopped moving when I left and I spent it calculating, what time is it in Lagos now? Is everyone awake?

I kept track with two clocks in my phone, one for Toronto and one for Nigeria. I told myself it would help me now when to call home. This was an evidence of spirality, a proof that time for me, was no longer linear and I was trapped in between two seasons at once, the eternal presence of the diaspora and the transient reminder of home, here and there, now and then.

In Dezafi, Frankétienne wrote about a zombie who regains consciousness and realizes that he has been walking in circles. The zombie cannot escape the plantation because the bokor has drawn a circle of salt around it. He can see the freedom but his feet keep tracing the same path, in a circle, spiral, then return.

I read Dezafi in translation, English from Kreyol, in a Toronto library where I was studying for Pharmacy school like my father, already continuing the loop. The realization of the zombie hit me, the circle of salt felt like a border between Nigeria and everywhere else, between who I was and who I was becoming, the child that played on the banks of Omi River and the one that worked behind a counter in a pharmacy. You can leave home but home keeps pulling you back in concentric circles until you realize you actually never left. You carry home in your body like water in your cells.

In Toronto, I had learnt to switch so smoothly like the maple leaf syrup down your throat. I spoke in my best Canadian intonation at work and took it off with my clothes at home where I talked to my parents in Nigerian accent. I learned to translate not just between tongues but entire world views, explaining to my Canadian friends why I sent money every month and my Nigerian friends why I cannot come home often. I was learning what it meant to be multiple, refusing singularity and embodying the spiral in my daily life. Behind the pharmacy counter, I had learned another type of compounding. In pharmacy, a compound is a substance that does not exist in nature, it is made by combining two or more things into something new that cannot be separated back into its parts. The pill itself is a delta, multiple substances mixed together doing different work in the body.

The Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s land art in Utah’s Great Salt Lake is 1500 feet long and coils counterclockwise into water so salty that nothing can survive in it. When the water is low, you can walk the spiral from the shore to the center, when it floods, the spiral disappears, but remains, waiting beneath the surface.

Up close, it takes fifteen minutes to reach the center and when you get there, there is nothing but rocks and water touching stone, you turn around and walk back out, the same spiral in reverse.

There is something to take out of this; structures exist whether we see them or not, just like diaspora, visible during the low tide and submerged during the high but it is always there, shaping the landscape beneath the surface.

Spiralism as a literary philosophy does the same thing, refusing Western insistence on rising action, climax and resolution. Instead, it offers recursive storytelling, pieces that circle back and unreliable narrators that contradict themselves because that is what people do; contradict themselves. Memory doesn’t move in straight lines. Return doesn’t mean going backward but approaching the same point from a different angle, changed by rotation.

When my Aunty died in 2018, I flew back for the funeral. I flew from Pearson airport to Paris, then to Delta before Owerri, a spiral across the Atlantic, tracing a route that my family had flown a decade before but in reverse.

At the airport, my cousin Ngozi picked me up, she looked at me the way Nigerians looked at people who had been in abroad too long, assessing the weight I had lost and the accent I was trying to hide. She didn’t say much but I had understood, the spiral had brought me back but I wasn’t the same water. On the second day of the funeral, the women danced around her in circles, their feet matching in the same counterclockwise pattern, spiraling inward. They were drawing the spiral around her, keeping her in motion and refusing death as a full stop.

In Igbo cosmology, the dead do not leave, they circle back. They return in children and in dreams. Reincarnation is not a second chance but a continuation, the same soul, coming from a different angle, changed by the rotation of a life lived. Ani, the earth goddess holds both the dead and the unborn in one body. Here, spiral is not a metaphor but theology.

I went back to Omi River and collected water on the last morning before Ngozi drove me back to the airport. I had no plastic container so I bought a small plastic bottle of Eva water, drank it in three swallows and walked down to the river bank alone.

I filled the bottle slowly, watching the water darken as it entered the bottle with its sediments, mangrove smell and the memory of all the legs that had walked on its bank. I sealed it and put in my carry-on.

I kept it on my desk in Toronto, next to a jar of water from Lake Ontario, two bodies of water in glass, between here and there. Sometimes I open the bottles and pour a little of each in my palm. The water from the Lake is clearer and colder, the water from Nigeria is darker and warmer carrying the smell of mangrove dipped in diesel which was my home as it was, not as I remembered it. I mixed them together and watched them become one, just like my hair in my mother’s hands when she braided my hair section by section moving in the same spiral pattern as the rivers, mapping a route across my scalp in the same counterclockwise motion the Spiral Jetty makes, becoming something that could not be separated back into its parts.

This is the spiral; and what it means to be non-binary and become a delta in your own body.

Sometimes, when my mother asks when I am going back, I understand that there is no back, only spiral, the continuous return that is also a departure and the arrival that is a preparation of another journey.

Outside in winter, Lake Ontario is frozen, a vast white sheet that is still water, transformed to ice. In summer, the ice will melt and the water will move again, flowing east towards the Atlantic eventually reaching the Caribbean and touching the shores of both Haiti and Nigeria.

My father was right, nothing moves in straight lines; not water, time or people. Spirality has taught me to stop forcing linearity and stop apologizing for not having a clean trajectory from here to there. It taught me that I can miss Nigeria while loving Toronto and grieve people while celebrating the lives they lived. The spiral insists that you can be the delta, a place where opposites refuse to oppose and multiplicity is not confusion but clarity.

This is what migration is. It is how we survive, not by going forward or backward but by spiraling. By allowing the saltwater and fresh water meet in our bodies and refusing to choose which one we are.

We are the delta.