32 today

"She could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on."

(the author a few weeks short of her 32nd birthday)

“Poor woman. Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools. The end. The end. You were right to put that down. The end.”

I didn’t want to argue, but I had to say, “Well, it is not necessarily the end, Pa.”

“Yes,” he said, “what a tragedy. The end of a person.”

“No, Pa,” I begged him. “It doesn’t have to be. She’s only about forty. She could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on. A teacher or a social worker. An ex-junkie! Sometimes it’s better than having a master’s in education.”

— Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father”

In Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” the narrator is tending to her ailing father. She writes: “My father is eighty-six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs anymore.” But the narrator, much like Paley herself is a writer. In her rendition, the heart in an unsporting curmudgeon, limiting her father’s movement around his house. The truth is much plainer, boring even. “Potassium shortage.” Not the stuff that makes good short stories.

The father, keen to the way writers dramatize and flourish, makes one request of his autorial daughter.

“I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” he says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.”

To keep matters simple, the author-narrator recounts plainly and briefly a story that had been transpiring in their neighborhood, right across the street. But of course it isn’t enough. The father insists the story lacks flourishes known to Chekhov’s writing. Or Turgenev. Maybe he meant ennui. Maybe he meant an isolated society. Maybe he meant the cruel nature of ticking time. Who’s to say? I haven’t read all of Chekhov and Turgenev either.

So the narrator-author flourishes the story, dramatizing its minutiae to great effect. In this turn—best understood if you read the story in full, here—the story of a woman who becomes a junkie to remain enmeshed in the life of her junkie son only to be abandoned once he cleans himself up, is a chronicle throbbing with the tragedy of absurdism. This version, filled with authorial commentary and wisdom, concludes with the mother, all alone, left to grieve a son who would never return to her.

Predictably, the father has gripes with this version as well for it no longer reads to him plainly, as a story of truly ordinary people. But he agrees that the author-narrator’s decision to end the story on a declaration — “The End” — is true to form, that nothing can come of the woman who took to drugs to be one with the youth. No, his daughter-author-narrator says (here I must clarify that the story never insists the narrator is a woman, I just read her that way). The once-junkie woman can become anything, she argues. Maybe because she’s no longer only a woman who lives across the street from them, but a character left to the devices of its author’s ambition.

I kept thinking of this story because much like Grace Paley’s narrator, I too have been writing pointedly of the people I once knew. Like her, I too have been calling it fiction. Called “Anatomy of a World,” it’s a story composed of seven short fiction vignettes, capturing the myriad characters populating a suburban apartment complex in Mumbai, India. Like the one I grew up in, where I made sense of the world and its random allotment of rules. Where I was allowed to be small and insignificant, but also potent and viable. Where I was ingratiated into the lives of people who lived around me in close proximity, to learn that fortifying cement walls can hide both love and violence only so much. Where I became a person.

In my story, every character resembles a face from memory. But of course, they hide behind the arrogance of fiction, remain superficially unrecognizable. In fiction, I can hide and deny, rearrange the limitations of ordinariness by awarding my characters the “open destiny of life” as Paley writes. In doing so, this feeble attempt at capturing a time and place in the genie bottle of a short story has become my wishing well for the people that raised me from the ground up. A testimony that I saw them for who they were, warts and all. That in my story, I have written them only with love. That in this writing, I discovered not only my love for them, but my love for that time. That even in the confusing heartbreak of childhood, there was so much candor to cherish.

Many of them I still see now when I return to India, to visit my parents. Some others have long left the suburban cavity behind. Who’s to say how the tourniquet of life functions? I too left that building behind at 23, to live in a country 8000 miles away. (I have also learnt to think of the world in miles, and not in the kilometers of my early life.) None of them know I turn 32 today. But perhaps, they already knew I’d live to be 32 one day. They already saw who I’d become. Some one. Who “could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on.” They too were the authors of the life I’ve whipped out. And I’m living still to say this: I was seen, therefore I am. Visus sum, ergo sum. Maybe. I don’t know Latin.

Fittingly, writing “Anatomy of a World” finally concluded the short story collection I’ve been writing for a few years now. A collection that has now left the nest to make its own way in the world. Isn’t that a joyful coda to a life lived?

On that note, here’s also a picture of my birthday lunch, no different from the ordinary everyday of childhood lunches. It’s only been a good birthday so far!