Strange that you can mourn in advance for the one who will die. Mourning: when I found, while he was alive, the postcard to me addressed, daddy, I was already in mourning. For whom? For the child I was? For the child whose father would call himself by that word and not, dad, as he would call himself later? He found it absurd, that change of names. Absurd – that what he was to me was to receive a new name. He shared this with others who had come from overseas and for whom English was not his first language.
There it was, the signed postcard: daddy. Was it him I mourned, already – he in relation to me? The relationship had changed; when I found the postcard, I was already grown up. Yes, grown up, but not grown up enough – had I not returned there, to the family house, when I should have been too old to return? How old was I? I do not want to remember. But then, it is customary in India to live, as a bachelor, with your family. And that’s what I was – a bachelor. We were in the house, together, just as we were when I was a child.
In the house – because it was too expensive to live elsewhere, because I’d fallen off the edge of a contract. Months would pass, and soon there would be a contract again, but in the meantime? Invisible, these struggles where the child become adult is too old for the family house but too young for the world. A life not begun, or hardly begun – a life interrupted, but for how long? But wasn’t that where we got to know one another as adults, each facing one another across life, I facing forwards, and you, hoping I would find my way into life?
In the evenings, I worked in the room that was now mine. I wrote. And in the day? I cycled out, and sometimes, when she was down, I went out with my girlfriend into the woods. Difficult times. Life like a trail that had stopped abruptly in the woods. One evening, by the lake, there was mist as though rising up from its surface. Extraordinary, and only us to see it. I kept that memory, but did she? We split up soon enough. Soon after that – nothing; oblivion, another trail run to nowhere.
He kept quiet about all of this, dad. He listened without judgement. What did he expect would happen? He kept quiet. Asked, he would have spoken with insight. Perhaps I asked him. Meanwhile, life had stopped in the woods, to which I would go every day. Mediocre woods, a lake that was more a pool, a muddy path. Where was I? Nowhere in particular. And life? Going nowhere. Look up in the woods: the broad sky. Then cycle home, go to my room; work.
I found the postcard before I moved back to the North. I found it; I mourned. He was upset I was moving. Then he understood. I was to go; a year later, one job, and a few months later, another, and I found myself here, further north. The woods – I remember them. The path that led nowhere – I remember that. And the relationship that ran to nowhere?
Him. Behind and before all this. The context, ever-present, then as when I was a child? Or was he falling into the past? Was it that falling that I mourned when I found the postcard?
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