Rarely shelved in our home was a copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Some books were just left out like that. No reason, no mind. The mess drove my father mad. I stared at the book’s cover, watching it fade over the course of one summer, where it sat on the edge of a table in a particularly sunlit room. Either the dining room or the living room, the same year new curtains were being sewn at the tailor’s with fabric my mother had brought back from a recent trip to Calcutta. The book’s cover features a painting by the nineteenth-century artist Jean-Léone Gér?me titled The Snake Charmer. A blue-tiled wall, an audience of armed men, a fipple flute player, and a naked boy whose back is to us. A large, thick snake is coiled around the boy’s muscular body. I remember the boy’s bum. It looked real; round like melons. I was only slightly scandalized by the painting because I couldn’t understand why the boy was naked. I somehow knew it was intentionally plotting intrigue. The West’s fascination with the East. I knew this, but I didn’t. The notion was vague. A sentiment I’d heard expressed at home and one that wallpapered our bookshelves—the bindings of academic tomes, somehow bolder than fiction. Isn’t it curious how some fonts appear more dogmatic than others? How italicized neon pink on a book of nonfiction is suddenly: Commentary! Sometimes I think our house was too full of ideas, near choked by them. Other days I’m grateful ours was a house of unrest, because isn’t that what ideas are?
It was a house where adults came and went: for meetings; for tea; to discuss, to organize, to speak with their hands; to flex histrionically about history. My father’s theater group or the South Asian women’s center my mother cofounded. Potlucks. Dinners. My parents had built a home, and continued to build their separate homes later, where ideas circuited the space, and where I gathered what I could or, rather, what I cared for, like the round shape of that boy’s bum on the cover of Edward Said’s Orientalism. At any rate, comprehension was a series of clues. The Snake Charmer’s whole scene looked precarious because it didn’t seem like a painting but a photograph. Rarely does a subject disturb me as much as when it slopes my ability to discern what’s real and what isn’t. Likely because I fear—more alarmingly quick as years pass—the fine line between being conscious and becoming jaded.
I’ve been so young for so long and so old for longer—so heart-wrinkled and naive all at once. So brow-furrowed but heart-open too; a detective. Snooping yet easily sidetracked. I’ll believe anything because I want to understand, yet understanding can sometimes organize itself like a series of false starts.
It’s part of what happens when you develop an optimism that wasn’t inherited, necessarily. An American optimism. A Canadian one. A pop-culturally American one. A North American one. A TV optimism. However you like to delineate your geographies. It’s an optimism of remove. Of untying myself from my parents’ lives by becoming enthusiastic—at times forcefully—about my own. The con-artistry that first-generation kids learn young: to adapt, yet remain amenable to your home. To identify how seamlessly the world expects you to adapt and, as a result, how early you practice pushback. You are born spinning. In dispute. I was my own project.
But memorizing the Bruegel or the cover of Said’s book was part of my practice formed early to repossess. Or to confuse repossession with the distraction it allowed. Zeroing in and slingshotting far were tantamount. For a girl so alert, I was absent. For a girl so AWOL, my insides were a microcosm of raw materials. Or rising sea levels. It really could be either. It’s as though I miscarried all that glee we are entitled to in childhood. At picnics, I was impatient to wipe the sticky off my fingers. Honeydew was a drag.
Because ever since I can remember, I’ve been captivated by life’s second ply. The sharks inside the sandbox. The horror of seeing faces everywhere. On electric outlets. In food. Or how daylight looks curiously divine when it shines underground through subway grates. Or the woman confirmed by her superstitions, who says little and wears sunglasses indoors; who attracts attention like a big house set back on its overgrown lawn.
Moreover, life’s second ply meant envisioning with enough detail, for example, the DJ whose voice seemed to grow out from the radio each morning. Based on how she spoke, I decided she had a fondness for long-haired cats. For French manicures, a glossy lip, and glittered eye shadow. Her face twinkling—communicating at all times—even when she was silent. Makeup as Morse code.
Pip’s eloping understanding of the world; that too is an example of life’s second ply. How on the first page of Great Expectations, he imagines his dead parents, whom he never met: “My first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man with curly black hair.”
Like Pip, my first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things may as well have occurred in a marsh. On an inclement beach where the sky is broth and gusts of wind flare up like shameless hints. Similar to Pip, I might miss the big ideas. I’ll devise another layer to avoid what’s at stake. I care little for plot and prefer a lingering glow, and often flip back a few pages because I overlooked a crucial turn while half reading on the train, distracted by a group of French teenagers who are, by some chemical law or cultural precedent, cooler than I’ll ever be.
Increasingly, I find it hard to read on the train. My mind roams off the page, and no matter what novel I’m reading, I’ll angle instead for its less essential stories; the ones I raffle might spout hope or an image I can more readily hold on to. Like the burnt-cork mustaches Sonya and Natasha paint on their faces at Christmas; that they wear as costumes to the widow Melyukov’s party. The burnt-cork mustaches that Sonya and Natasha don’t bother wiping off before bed, lying awake for a long time, as Tolstoy wrote, simply “talking about their happiness.” What comes to mind when I think of War and Peace is the moonlit sleigh ride on Christmas Eve. The frosty air. Sonya’s fur coat. The earth speeding past and the “magical kingdom” that Nikolai perceives. The kiss that smelled of burnt cork.
There are times when the degree to which I just don’t want to know manifests in, recently, overhearing a man on his phone say to whoever was on the other end, “There’s no proper way to say this.” The man was standing next to me on the corner of West Thirteenth, and because I couldn’t bear to overhear what his next words would be, I dashed across Seventh Avenue, leaving behind a perfectly warm patch of sunlight. As cars zoomed past between us, I looked back at him. He was not so much pacing but pivoting on the ball of his foot like someone who was now patiently at the mercy of another person’s reaction. I bought a small bag of grapes from a fruit stand and started eating them, tasting the filmy dirt-wax of unwashed grapes; pleased that I’ll never know what that man owned up to. That his privacy belonged to him was less an indication of my courtesy and more a combination of other factors. The mystery! Obviously. Judgment too stirs my imagination. It’s awful, but there’s nothing like arbitrary judgment to reposition how badly I might be feeling; how, briefly, a stranger’s drama can recirculate the air.