Ride

 
Clumps peel from the void, and cloudy tunnels of light lengthen into one another. Gold dapples my chest. A ray dries my open mouth. I huff dust and ash. Ponds fizz in my lungs. A vein revs over my heart.
 
Angles squirm up my sternum, puff my neck, and wriggle in my mouth. My jaw drops, and my lips recede from crooked teeth. A quill brushes against my tonsil and tickles the roof of my mouth. More quills poke my cheeks, tenting them. I fold, gagging, and the whir of infant flight cools my face. I reach for the shards on its wings, to cup the hummingbird and take it outside, but my doorknob creaks and the void cracks open. A layer of the afternoon flutters against the windows, jarring them in their frames.
 
Mma shuffles to me, her eyes shrill. We inhale from the same stream of rust and regret. I take quick breaths so she can take long, steadying ones. I ease my face from a silent howl and gulp against the tender reach of another wing. Birdsong circles Mma’s smell of Jim Beam and chamomiles.
 
“Is it the waves?” I say. We have stood, glancing down at the past, as it lapped at our toes, to slide us from our scarred bodies. We have waited to be wrung out of our lonely years by the currents. My heart jumps at the time Mma almost drowned, the slapdash of limbs as I tried to keep us afloat, how Mma bared her teeth and bit the waves as if they were hands, yanking her deep. How the waves unzipped her from her body and pressed her into their depths.
 
Her face crumples now. Her heaving unclasps the cross-strings of her robe. The cherry print falls from her shoulders and pools in the dip of her back, elbow to elbow. She shrugs it back on, tilts her head at the ceiling; snot withdraws in her nostrils. “They were supposed to leave today,” she says.
 
The opening tune of Mma’s favorite show drips from the ceiling and mingles with her sobs. I stroke static loose in her fringe and squeeze her shoulder. “Why did you go there?”
 
Mma dabs her freckled lids. “Just us now,” she says. “They go today, and tomorrow—”
 
“We’ll be far from here,” I say.
 
She brushes a thumb against my neck. “Sometimes you lose people, you lose things, but you don’t let them go. I mean, there’s uneaten pasta and full wine glasses on their dining table. A jazz song plays from the mantel. Their smells linger, almost in the shapes of their bodies.”
 
“You shouldn’t have been there.” I shoot up and scurry into the bathroom, spin a faucet, and claw at the tiny part of Mma’s grief sinking in my chest, prying skin loose with an electric hiss. The faucet froths slime halfway up the tub. The puddle churns when I slide in—bubbles escape my pores and build white at the rim. Heat snakes from the tub and blurs everything. I slacken under the surface and wait for the world to stop.
 
At night, wrapped in my blanket, Mma faces Jerusalem and her lips flicker with a verse. I sit beside her, tilting her into my weight.
 
“Did you see anything else?”
 
Mma takes quick, shuddering breaths.
 
I nod. “We’ll leave in the morning.”
 
In the numb of a half-moon, I trail sage around our brick duplex (two windows up, two down), ticks in the underbrush quieting at my passage. A wind blows, and raindrops snap flintier than pebbles on the roof, almost pocking it, holes the leaves browned into papery shells. I rise a little out of my skin when a twig snaps behind me. I swing around and raise my lamp. A silver crease in the air, rumbling from the pores of the earth, and what may be a shadow, spilled on the lawn, rising for the porch. I swing the lamp aloft and thrust sage at the storm’s barking. I hurry indoors, and from behind grained glass, I look for it. An outline unseeable in daylight, which slips into houses and empties them.
 
All morning Mma staggers in the haze of her stupor, reaching wildly about, trips on a landing and flops down the remaining steps. Her cry dims the house and shifts dust from the corners. I wedge my hands to my mouth. “Where are you?” Folded at the foot of the stairs in yoga pants and a Lycra vest, hair fanned out on the tiles. She latches onto the newel and stands, burping, laughing. She folds again, bends forehead to knees. I want to wade into my thoughts, away from this crisis, but her sigh tugs me hand over hand by a cord in my chest. I brace her limp to the couch, skirting stacked boxes of ash-tasting cognac and an aperitif famous for its gut punch (one shot and Mma spins inside-out, swimmy-eyed); a dried aquarium bedded with faint, yellowing bone; a table carved from resin and marble to mimic River Yamuna. She flops on the couch and gives me a secret look, a look within a look. You can’t tell anyone.
 
“Today,” I say. “We agreed.” I prop her up, sit the turbulence inside her, my back groaning. “This is just great. Who’s going to drive us now?”
 
Mma nearly closes her eyes. She slides down and pools on the couch and drips down its folds, snoring.
 

*

 
As soon as she regains herself, we dust and scrub and bleach and vacuum all hints of grief from our lives. The house, unlived-in for how well it shines, will make whatever took our neighbors wonder if it has the right address, Mma says, and I smile. In the hours that envelop the house like sun, she cradles a banjo and plucks solace for us. She hoses down petunias in the garden. When she turns the hose on me, I laugh the way I did as a child, before I knew shame. She snips the yarn on a tapestry of the Agra Forte and I hurry my fingers along its sheen. We steam mussels and pour nauseatingly sour yogurt in zinc cups and char jolada rotti in a pan. We spray crumbs on parakeets and pigeons, a robin, a crow, a wryneck. I spew more birds than Mma can feed. They cloak her and peck at her hair, and she smiles with nervous wonder.
 
“Where do we go?” I say, cradling a finch, and her smile droops—a fear too faint for me to place ravages her face. “Oh, God,” I wobble, startling the finch. I turn from Mma, a buttery morsel cooling on my tongue. She cups my face, and I flinch. Her hand falls away. The birds flail in their places, their throats twitch with music. “We’ve nowhere else,” Mma says. Sweat trickles down her neck and pools behind her collarbones. She blurs as the lane behind her sharpens, the last row of pines in the estate swaying strips of sun on the tar, bowed fatally, roots slipping from the earth.
 
“One day,” Mma says, and something strikes my chest as if kicked in there, “I will find myself again, away from all the noise, perhaps in nature. I mean, why not? How many of us normal people can afford modern living?” A bird leaps from her palm and forges north, floats wings across the sun.
 
“As long as you take me with you,” I say.
 
More wings unfurl and flick skywards.
 
“Hey!” Mma protests.
 
The lattice grill of Mma’s Buick—sat low on its spring and coated anew with dust—winks shards of the glare from our lawn.
 
“I know a place by the sea.” I strain for the name. A long-ago summer blazes across my vision. I squint through it, blink the lawn again into focus.
 
“Manama.” Mma perks up. “Your father took you there when you were eight. So you remember?”
 
“Breeze all day, dizzying light, rare sea creatures littered the shore at dawn. We slept in a speedboat, below stars.”
 
Mma unbends and dusts the other birds off. “Well, all we have now is Amritsar.” She swings around, and her footprint dries in a crooked path, lifted by the sun from the steps in front.
 

*

 
I peer sideways at my belongings, scraped from the corners and from the closet and heaped on my bed—around my room, which is too high and too wide with absence. My eyes well as I unclip my yarmulke. My skin absorbs the silence to a feverish degree. I retch: mush spurts from my mouth and spatters the bedpost. An odor of fermentation rises and makes my throat itch. I smudge tears from my cheeks and shrug on a hoodie—Sapphire Graduating Set, Kolma High waxed on its front, fill my only sack with a Talmud, my dead grandfather’s rolled-up tallit, mint paste, a shaving stick and a scented face towel, Mma’s manicure kit. I palm my outfit and dash downstairs, and Mma, pacing in the hallway, slows at my crazed breathing.
 
She takes nothing except the white kurta she has on, her arms stems lost in its sleeves. I slide her steel box in back and fold her mattress on top the Buick and she starts the engine and yowls yee-haw, rocking in the driver’s seat. She tweaks the rearview mirror as I reach for the trunk, to load her bonsai. “Leave it,” she calls, frowning, and revs the engine louder.
 
Slouched at the wheel, lighter strands swirling about her face, she pilots us away from loss and into light, swerving steam from the tires. Red light after red light, split facades and sunless roads, mildewed slopes and tangled groves, fall away as the Buick hums and pebbles ping its underside. We move with the doomed desperation of the displaced, the spaces between seconds barbed borders that we must cross. At our first sighting of other humans in days, Mma slows and lowers her window but does not stop. I twist around as they slide behind us. What must be a family, stranded by the mill, lined from turbaned, tunic-wearing, canoe-shoed father to slouched, surly-looking son to stooped toddler—like a time-lapse of man’s evolution.
 
The air cools the farther the Buick pulls from all that is familiar; I hoard lungfuls of air, swishing the cold in my mouth, and so does Mma.
 
Shades of green build to the fungal damp of a community park, whose shoots snap off on the cracked, creaking leather, the windshield smeared with dried bird piss and fruit trails. The Buick grunts down the shade from foliage and creaks into a tremendous light, which settles to snowy peaks. Mile-high rocks scarred with scree slide in my window, bringing up the Himalayas. A bridge unwinds under the tires toward a wilderness of sky, softest white bales rolling in it.
 
I grip the edge of my seat. If I keep looking, if I see more of the fallen world, if the sky pours any further into me, I might disintegrate.
 
The silence leaches an ancient hurt from my veins, raises a bell in the deepest recess of memory, waking it, swaying its tongue.
 
Some people find faith and, entranced by it, seek nothing else, give away the treasures of their heart so there is room for it. Boys my age, swooned by the promise of love, swim from the safety of their lives into uncharted territory. It took forty years of his living away from home for my father’s ancestors to call him, over sand and sea: “Rest among your people. Come home.”
 
In the weeks after the divorce, I looked up Nigeria more than Mma would have liked.
 
He lives now in Lagos, “a hell hole,” Mma said about the place, squinting back tears. “You belong here.”
 
Mma pulls a flask from the glove box, tilts it over her mouth, gulps and then coughs in a way that sounds to be grating flesh from her throat.
 
I tense through a surge of despair. “I hope that’s water, Mma.”
 
“Ding ding ding,” Mma says. “Have some.”
 
I look away. “I may wake up one day,” I mouth at the rushing landscape, “and find you’re gone, because of all the drinking.”
 
Mma squares her shoulders. “Until then.”
 
Short of the clouds, the Buick descends, and a qawwali streams from the radio and drizzles earthenware cottages and mud huts fragmented along a valley; wets fenced-in bison and red Sindhi cattle coughing up cud, flicking bushy tails at ticks; slows raucous toddlers playing cricket and racing down a gully. Locked in sacred veils, stooped at the curve of a rivulet, women sieve trayfuls of salmon and krill.
 
Mma lets the cymbals flow through her, the frenzied sitar, the pentatonic warble. Her hands shake and she tries to steady them and her other parts start to shake, even her voice. She sniffs and taps her chipped nails on the steering wheel. I hold myself, though waves of nostalgia wash through me. The tune swirls its last, and Mma claps, forgetting where we are. Where are we?
 
Mma sighs. “When Oum Kalthoum sings, all I hear is welcome. Welcome to our land. Welcome to our culture. She makes me want to fit in here.”
 
“Oum Kalthoum was Egyptian,” I say.
 
Mma hardens her mouth.
 
I sit forward and toy with the dial, tune it for a minute of static. Then another song unwinds from the radio, and my breath catches: “I know this one.” From a Hindi classic, rainbow-striped footage with shifting spots and hiccups in the audio. Mma replayed it on VHS till the colors bled. Fondling his walrus mustache and Elvis Presley sideburns, the lead dances down the aisle of a plane and sings to the fairest hostess. It irked me then, his boldness, how his lips kept almost-touching hers. Mma pulls me in, presses her nose to my scalp. “We’re weightless now.” A weary whisper. I almost believe it. And she sings.
 

*

 
Mist from a nearby waterfall slicks Sanskrit signboards and the wares of an open bazaar. Quartered carp and chopped mushrooms pinched on wood slats face the Buick, brinjal and cauliflowers stacked as pyramids on rusty carts, heaps of turmeric and flour reduced vaguely by a breeze. The gaunt seller loops a shawl at her neck, fading in and out of sleep. Brass pots in the next shop echo her defeat, her sigh in a faraway tongue choked with consonants. The Buick splashes through grime, sweet wrappers and sawdust peeking from puddles as if playing at hide-and-seek. Clip-clopping mules and their cloud-bearded herders, women wearing hats wide as space vessels and hugging cane baskets of cheese, naked children patched with mud, splashing through bubbled slime, slide away. Finally, in the shadow of a seven-story tenement leaned forward, ready to topple, the Buick halts. Mma palms sweat from her brow, shakes the flask and tosses it in back, unclicks her seat belt. “Count to ten, babu,” she says, pinching her door handle. But then silt ripples ahead of us to the burning metal smell of local vigilantes gathered on one post, and in unison they look up from a phone screen, dart tobacco-stained eyes at the Buick.
 
Mma gives a limp wave.
 
Guns shift.
 
A vigilante scoots to us, tilts around the hood on his skateboard, and bangs on Mma’s window. “Gori-walla not allowed here,” he says. “Go back to England.”
 
Mma guffaws. “He thinks we’re from England.”
 
“Fucking foreigners,” the vigilante says. “Bastard foreigners.” An instant crowd blots out the tenement and fills the Buick with the sort of gloom on the other side of the moon. Mma grips my hand through the jocular rocking, the vigilantes muscling the car almost sideways. She drops her window by an inch and yells, “Alright, that’s enough.”
 
“White dog,” the youngest-looking identifies Mma, and yaps. It occurs to the others to ask Mma to yap. “Certainly not,” she says in her manicured accent, and they laugh and laugh. “This is my son,” Mma continues; “we’re to meet a relation in Amritsar.” The vigilantes throw mock-salutes at me. “How much to let us through?”
 
The vigilantes confer.
 
Mma locks her window and glares ahead, face sour. “Why would anyone think I was white?”
 

*

 
My dad used to flip seashells over and unwind the sounds the sea had stitched in them. Dazed by his sleight of hand, I would surface within my body, climb several rungs up to consciousness, and shape myself to the moment. A gurdwara starred with floating lamps, the wistful white of its columns, the smear of moonlight on its domes, the field of turbans and sequined veils around it grips my heart to bursting. In the drift of a thousand lights, nowhere else—no other time—exists. All the world is now.
 
A ram shifts the Buick and bends its side mirror, sheds fog and shit clustered like grapes. Urchins in torn khakis tap across the red light and swiveling motorcycle lamps for a soccer ball. Tires screech. Fists strike a bonnet. Mushy shouting ensues. Saucer-eyed toddlers cross the maze of bumpers and lean on the Buick, paw at my shirt and point to their mouths: “Satsriakaal, Sahib. Datar mehar kre, Sahib-baba.”
 
I wind my glass up and exhale. At first I am unsure what slides across the screen of my lids as we motor on. Waves lined with kelp rolling a great head onshore, roaring from its many wriggly arms. “Two weeks,” Mma slurs, and I kneel on glinting sand and stroke the octopus; its gray mottling pulsates against my hand. “It’s a shame my own sister can’t host us for longer. I would have let her live the rest of her life at our place, if she wanted.” How does one revive a landed octopus, short of rolling it again into the sea? “Oops, I forgot something in the trunk. Count to ten, babu.”
 
The octopus flares its tentacles.
 
An ache pops in my chest and saws to my back.
 
The shore dims until the waves exist by sound.
 

*

 
“At least she took no one with her.” My face feels unfamiliar when I wipe it, cold and abrupt in its dips. I sniff. Mma-na, hair so dark light trembles in it, presses her hands to mine and brings the knot of fingers to her lips. The shadow of a cumulus drifts on our huddle outside the morgue.