Like a Bird

1.

To be a person was a great mystery to me; even at a young age I felt heavy with the weight of dissatisfaction. Like a frog in warming water, I had spent much of my early years feeling as if I were slowly simmering toward my own demise. As if I were sedately, on a low setting, boiling to death. And yet, I was nothing if not quietly ambitious. I didn’t know how to locate my compass, but I knew I had one; looking back, maybe that’s what eventually saved me. My desperation to survive, even if I didn’t know if I really could.

Because, since childhood, forlorn and fast-eyed, the most abstract of all emotions to me was happiness. How did one get it? I wanted to own it, to have it in my possession, beaming out, because I, Taylia (Tay-lee-uh) Chatterjee (Cha-taar-gee), had never been happy. It’s something that I had never fully understood, either, as I had two parents who hated themselves and, together, passed down their own qualities of self-loathing on to me.

2.

Our building jutted out with perfectly aligned alabaster columns that stood like ivory trunks, recalling the miniature jewelencrypted elephants Baba brought back from India once. The orange blossoms were arranged neatly in the yard, shaping the crisp exterior. The whiteness of our home, a beaming Taj Mahal on the Upper West Side, was gaudy. Like the way immigrants who desperately want to be white were all Gap-wearing and Howdy, all Wonder bread and capitalism, incapable of knowing who they really were, like my father and his feelings of inadequacy, a constant lump in his throat. This is what it meant to assimilate.

Baba was a closeted law-abiding coconut. I always assumed that Indians, to Baba, were mosquito-ravaged infidels. But I’d see him sometimes miss the motherland. I would catch him lingering before the ghee at the supermarket, or taking a second glance at the DVD section dedicated to Bollywood films in a Blockbuster we used to frequent. I once overheard him telling Mama that he could still taste the faint sulfite burning in the back of his throat, the memory of his tonsils brushing against the arid heat of dry cinnamon. India was home—but the United States was the future, his star-spangled American dream. But it was complicated; I knew his feelings for America, for white people, were confused. I could see how he knew he was in a country of wolves, but I wondered if he believed in a real escape or just an imagined one.

Mama was an American Jew, Ivy League educated, and a woebegone liberal fighting for immigrant rights at dinner parties, where her faux-Marxist friends digested full-bodied côtes du rhônes and discussed the lack of American health care and Philip Roth. Her face was intoxicating, and her hair was either worn in twisted milkmaid braids or free-flowing and thick, bouncing silently as she sang. Her voice was rapturous and silky, rounding r’s like a Canadian. My sister, Alyssa, was such a portrait of our mother, right down to the flushed cheeks, easily reddened to a perfect blush.

My parents met accidentally, inside a bodega. She was buying Tylenol for an impending cold; her face pale, a trickle of slime slowly oozing through her nasal cavity, she smiled at the handsome Indian as he slid past her to buy a soda. His voice had a transatlantic twang, the charm of a man who was begging to be taken seriously. I love pop, he said, the incongruence of pop striking a strange subtlety, Mama recalled. He paid, gulping down his purchased goods. Perhaps fevered by the secret twenty-three flavors of Dr Pepper, they began talking. She explained her flu-like symptoms, and Baba commiserated, suggesting a concoction of lemon, honey, garlic, and ginger instead of pills. A naturalist with a love for soda, thought Mama, as she focused on the peach-fuzz beard Baba had managed to grow, paired with the Dr Pepper that dribbled at the corner of his lip. She decided right then and there that she liked him, and that was that.

They were both students at Columbia: Mama, an art history major; Baba, prelaw. In her mind, Mama had it figured out. The ’80s, like the few decades before it, were about experimentation, and he, her soon-to-be husband, was the most exciting and masculine thing she had ever laid eyes on. Their blooming love was inevitable, their future impossibly quaint. They were smart, they were beautiful, and they were an aberration to tradition.

In the months before their marriage, she scoured his dorm for Playboys and dirt. She found nothing, Baba was clean. Avoiding all things that could possibly distract him from his wholesome American future, he sublimated his desire for pussy by eating ice-cream sandwiches and slurping Popsicles, growing fond of encyclopedias, old almanacs, and the tattered pages of American classics. Naturally suspicious of narrative literature (but equally committed to safeguarding his pop-cultural knowledge), he resigned himself to mulling over the tomes of Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—a preventative measure for the off chance he was ever quizzed on what it meant to be a true American, comme Melville, Hawthorne, and the rest.

Like many white girls, even Jewish ones, Mama wanted to cause her Ashkenazi parents deep distress. She watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with a sadistic reverie and preached to her friends that the racial divide was the true abomination in American society. Ignorant to the fact that her white-girl utopian idealism was a privilege in and of itself, she considered herself a savior and thought her protests were enough, an Angela Davis type wanting to be the target of police, not knowing that pretty white redheads were rarely seen in handcuffs. But she tried. And she fought. And she married Baba.

3.

Alyssa and I enjoyed competing against each other, just like any two sisters would. We constantly tried to best the other, usually in the form of proving to our father that we were something, anything. As a wannabe intellectual, my heart insisted on his approval, though it was hardly ever won. I related to him, I even looked more like him and felt Indian in a way Alyssa didn’t. So, I guess you could say my love for him was more complex. Or maybe being Indian gave me a sense of purpose, in a way, that it didn’t give Alyssa. For me, it became my very own lighthouse: a reflection of my being, or the possibility of who I could be and what I could become. It gave me a reference.

Warm nights always ignited conversation at the Chatterjee residence. Monomaniacal by nature, Baba was a militant grammarian, obsessively monitoring our usage and syntax, turning it into a game. His English had an archaic diligence birthed from a deep fascination with etymology. "What does nadir mean? And what is its direct antonym?"

Alyssa and I grew fond of dictionaries.

It means ‘the lowest point of any given thing,’ I would say, quickly looking at Alyssa as a buffer. "The antonym is zenith."

I would usually stay focused on her, my hands sticky with perspiration, and as if through a chain reaction, she’d turn to watch our father. If we were right, he would sometimes nod, replying with good. More often than not, he would simply say nothing. If we were wrong, he would clear his throat with a hmm, dismissing us entirely.

Baba wasn’t cold, he was austere. He never learned the beauty or value of gesture, of kind words. Mama would say it was because men from India were socialized in such ways, but I disagreed. Baba was different. His austerity was rooted in a disinterest in small talk. He hated hyperbole and despised social niceties—he deemed them unnecessary. There’s nothing wrong with silence, he would say, muttering like a croaky parrot.

Through the years, his reluctance to show affection became manageable; it was accepted as one of his many idiosyncrasies. In some ways, I almost admired it. Still, I yearned to see a glimmer of familiarity shine through his face whenever I answered correctly. That look that would speak: Good, I have taught them well.

Alyssa, next to me, was a complete juxtaposition. People were drawn to her beauty and energy, and for that I was always jealous. In those days, I couldn’t finish a glass of water without sighing. My mind, filled with deliberations, pulled at my interiors like a harness. There was a restlessness inside me, gnawing to be sated. I was no good at it. I wanted to be like her, and it crept through me like a disease. I sometimes felt like I was stalking her, obsessed with her languid, nymphlike mannerisms; with her face, the way her skin was pucker-free, not a pore in sight, dewy like dulce de leche. She was like Rani Mukerji in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai: divine, light eyed (almost), and brown haired. Every girl at every family gathering ever wanted to be like her, inching toward her like she was Mother Mary. Her tiny waist in her lehenga, the way she made it cute that she didn’t hardly know any Bengali. All the girls fawned, and all the boys watched with wide eyes.

We sat at the dinner table, Alyssa groaning with despair about something school related, and our parents (especially Mama) gathered around her like lovers from commedia dell’arte. We were in our early teens, when Alyssa still had the verve, the steeped innocence, that she wielded so mysteriously. I remember the moon being swollen, like a wheel of cheese—when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie—a big hunk of brie, peering in and hitting us at the dining room table. The bones of the fish we ate glistened on our plates, and the mashed sweet potato that I abandoned still on mine, golden under the moon’s hues.

"Ms. O’Neil is such a bitch, though, Ma!" She had grown cocky, swearing more to see how much she could get away with.

Lyse, please…

It’s true—Tay, back me up!

Sometimes, I felt cuckolded by my sister. Drawn into her dance. I surrendered. I mean… she’s annoying, but she’s all right.

Tay. Don’t… She’s a goddamn paleolithic cr-creature.

Lyse, don’t talk about women like that.

Maaaaa, you’re not listening to me! I’m not talking about women any kinda way, I’m jus’ saying that she’s annoying as fu—! She clicked her tongue to fill the sound of fuck.

Mama laughed, defusing Alyssa’s strange current, the way, even when she was whining, she made you feel like she was revealing an important secret only to you. That was Lyse’s strongest skill: her ability to feign intimacy. The two of them went about whispering, and I got up to clear the mood, returning to my own internal dance, where I was paid attention to.

Baba was prone to smoking a fat, dark cigar at the dining table after dinner, ashing into a beautiful crystal midcentury modern ashtray that Mama bought in an estate sale. He looked so out of place, a Brown, skinny Indian smoking a thick knob, resembling anything other than a Mob boss. Certainly not Tony Soprano, whom he was not-so-secretly emulating, given his recent and uncharacteristic obsession with The Sopranos. I returned to the table, sitting opposite him, lost in my thoughts about Ms. O’Neil, a pretty white woman who looked like a nun. She had introduced me to Toni Morrison, and I felt indebted to her for that. I related so much to Pecola, the protagonist of The Bluest Eye. As I watched Alyssa in full form, heady with confidence, I thought of how odd it was that two girls with the same parents, one white and the other Brown, could feel so differently about existing in this world. How that impacted their cellular constructs in such a way that navigating life was so distinctly dissimilar. I thought of how much I longed to be seen and how I could count the people who had made me feel special on one hand.

Alyssa was beautiful in a way I’d never been, fair skinned and rapturous, the way that girls you can’t place are normally exotified. The light-eyed/light-skinned cocktail. I was darker skinned and darker eyed, which made all the difference. Baba would talk about Alyssa like a specimen of grand genetics—An almost Kashmiri! he’d say, slightly proud. A rare compliment from a Hindu Indian, and the absence of one directed at me hit like a flood. Today I was merely observing the grace that Alyssa exuded, Mama fully locked in to her story like an avid audience member, and I felt the darkness in my center of not being enough, even for my own family.

After her story about Ms. O’Neil, we sat still, lapsed into the night’s quiet fortress. The silence beckoning us into our separate slumbers. Nobody said another word, as we all in unison stood to help Mama clean up. That night even Baba helped.

4.

I covered the sadness of being invisible to my family in many ways. I treated my ability to hide and remain unseen like a sport. Besides, I told myself, I hated that the glare of attention made my body convulse in shame and nervousness, which made it impossible to casually interact with people. So, to avoid such atrocities, I’d blanch myself with unappeal, never wearing makeup, allowing my figure to be subsumed by toting a massive JanSport backpack at all times. Longish loungewear that Mama bought me from Bloomingdale’s was my preferred method of clothing. I liked the way a basic smock could stretch and sling over my body like a compact hammock, erasing my physicality that had become such a burden.

Mama had a friend named Zeina. She was Mama’s closest friend—the isomorphic auntie, an Eastern beauty—who was obsessed with telling me that I could be beautiful if only I didn’t crouch all the time, frown all the time—if only, only, I smiled more. But I was disgusted by my own presence, and I wasn’t sure how to cope while being in somebody else’s. I had been whipped into thinking a certain way, and I was forsaken into that loneliness for what felt like an eternity. The pain festered in volumes.

Herself Muslim Iranian, Zeina had married an Ashkenazi doctor. She and Mama had met at Columbia, after Mama had admired her emerald-green peacoat. Zeina still wore it years later, the coat the color of fresh-packed succulents, with big floating arms and a hefty bow at the neck.

Mama was obsessed with Zeina’s beauty: her cowlicked eyeliner, the pale peach lipstick she’d wear—Mama never missed an opportunity to make us acutely aware of the power such beauty possessed. Of how Zeina would always have the best velvet bell-bottoms, curving over her ass, flowering out after her calves. Or her strappy sandals, matched with tailored white blazers. She was like Bianca Jagger, making Mama exotic by mere association. Once, recalling with embarrassment, Mama confessed her reliance on Pond’s Cold Cream, Elizabeth Arden, and tacky drugstore perfumes—until she met Zeina, the cultured one.

I made your mother cool, you know! Zeina had once told Alyssa and me as she obliterated a hamburger in just a few bites (after dressing it with half a jar of Dijon mustard).

I watched Zeina laugh, her face youthful, eyes brightly amused. She had a voice that was sweet and faraway, the timbre of the notes carrying through the house like diffractions of a lighthouse. She drank her cosmopolitans without spilling a drop, a clove cigarette or a Camel lodged between her right index and forefinger as she held the glass by its stem. She’d suggest polo, sudoku parties, and wear pantsuits with deep bare backs. Her hair was short like Mia Farrow’s in the summer, then long and black like Cher’s in the ’70s just in time for fall. She was as elegant as a flamingo and flamboyant in the way Pakistani aunties are, vivacious, lively, and rapturous.

She owned an eponymous boutique in the Lower East Side, consigning the coolest brands from Sweden and Denmark, imprinting her fashionable quirks on the fabric of American style. She encouraged Lyse and me to come down for a visit and to bring our friends. Lyse would sometimes go. She even worked for her one summer as an intern. I passed by but never went in. Everything looked magical, if heaven was furnished with ergonomic lounges and heavy, wall-sized art. Every edge of Zeina’s body smelled fragrant, as if wrapped in a robe of smoke and coriander. When I walked past, I could smell her from the curb, too.

One afternoon Zeina was over for tea, and her and Mama’s voices reverberated through the dining room and into the rest of the apartment. It was Mama’s favorite place to sit, overlooking the vines of ivy that laced the old walls of our back fence, the daffodils abloom with tiny petals of yellow.

How’s Alyssa?

Oh, she’s great. Mama’s voice was bursting with pride. Wait, did I tell you she has a boyfriend?

No, you didn’t! I can’t wait to meet him. I bet he’s handsome, or I hope he is, because she’s so beautiful!

The way in which Zeina said she’s so beautiful was a fact, a summation. I could sense my mother’s face light up from the kitchen.

Oh, he’s great. Ryan. He goes to the Dwight School, too. Plus he’s Black.

Mama loved telling people this.

Have you met him yet?

I haven’t met him! It’s agonizing! But she’s been telling me about him… He sounds kind of perfect for her, my mother almost screamed.

They both laughed. Kathryn, please!

"Ugh, you know they always say this, but it’s true—kids really grow up so fast, too fast."

Zeina started humming and laughing, maybe to dissolve the momentary sadness that lingered in my mother’s voice. I sat on the staircase, listening, feeling the sudden grief usurp me.

God, I don’t know what I’ll do when she leaves.

Mama loved art. An art history major, she’d take us to exhibits or on day trips to MoMA. I enjoyed the great expanse of museums and art galleries. The way people, full with ideas, interacted in galleries was intoxicating, gathered in reverent luminosity over the Carrie Mae Weemses and Kerry James Marshalls. Their measured footsteps like sleepwalkers’.

One time at the Brooklyn Museum, Mama looked at a line portrait by Kiki Smith and stated with an insipid arrogance (classically snooty, a perfect New Yorker), All portraits of people are just portraits of Mona Lisa. Alyssa and I stood behind her, snorting with the infiniteness you experience when you’re young—a rampant sense of possibility, especially in those diurnal art settings where rogue thoughts were fostered and encouraged. Well, at least from snooty, of-a-certain-class white women.

Mama introduced us to artists like Ryan Trecartin and Ryan McGinley, proving to us teens that art could be created from angst. They felt like rare moments when she was directing us, providing Alyssa and me with the tools for creation. I loved McGinley and Trecartin because sin attracted me. The sin of being alive, with the gangly bodies of McGinley’s world, ripe like fruit, nudes that were supple and grotesquely white; with Trecartin’s combustive colors, the agonizing breadth of his Sodom-and-Gomorrah-like panels. I was consumed by these things that I never had access to—that’s when I felt most alive. When I could see the possibility of what was outside of myself.

On a Saturday afternoon we went to Walter de Maria’s Earth Room. It was a terrifying place, the darkness of the soil contrasting against the lightness of the white, the sterility of the walls stark against the hard-packed earth, 140 tons of it. It made me feel small, as if I were standing at the edge of the ocean. In the stillness of that moment I thought of death. I thought of my body, sunken into the soil, in the very depths of being no more. Mama turned to me, witnessing the color drain from my face. Soon after, we walked out.

What did you think, T?

I couldn’t stop thinking about being underground, in a casket, locked beneath the soil with no hope of coming out. I wanted to tell her that I felt Dadi-ma, my father’s dead mother, deep in my chest, giving me a sign—ghosts, ghosts, ghosts, swishing through me like carp, guileless in a shallow pond. But, instead, I murmured inaudibly, pushing those imaginations as far from myself as I could.

We stopped for lunch at Mama’s favorite restaurant, Souen (she liked it because she heard Fran Lebowitz ate there, too), and as I began to emerge from the dark place I had been, something shifted. Suddenly, a spirit of the dead began to materialize right in front of me. Mama and Lyse sat across from me, chatting about nothing, and I just sat, dumbfounded, before turning to the figure who had appeared to my right. Her neck was wrinkled, and she was wearing a shadha saree. Dadi-ma was sitting at the table. I could see her body moving like a ripple of water, and I could feel her hazy warmth surround me as I stared at the empty chair next to mine. Mama, in an attempt to break me from my daze, reiterated her question regarding my thoughts on the exhibit.

I breathed: It felt like death.

Do you want to explain ‘it felt like death’? She said it with air quotes, exaggerating the last bit through her teeth.

I shook my head.

She scowled, immediately turning to Alyssa. How about you?

Alyssa went on a tangent, but at a distance of a thousand miles away. I sat transfixed on Dadi-ma. Her moon-shaped smile lingering for just a moment, and then she was gone. I felt calmer, and suddenly, words didn’t matter so much.

Alyssa would often recite Austen—I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!—her favorite Pride and Prejudice bit to whip out at times of social lethargy. Her faux-English accent, liquid and charming, wooed our guests and her friends; waxing lyrical of nineteenth-century realism, she’d educate us on Austen’s history. She suffered from Addison’s disease, just like JFK! Did you know? I didn’t know. She never married. Can you imagine never marrying, T? I definitely could.

When she was young, my sister’s waking life was spent dreaming of the moors and green pastures, the idyll of bluish clouds and grand Gothic castles of Great Britain. I’d sometimes find her watching BBC renditions of Austen on her MacBook, paused on swathes of fine linen (or was it silk?) and Elizabeth Bennet pondering the caustic nature of Mr. Darcy.

Her book collection told a story in and of itself: a candy-cane-pink copy of Nabokov’s Lolita sat perched on the middle shelf, where everyone could see. Every young neo-feminist needed to understand the complexities of infantile sexual desire and the phenomenology of disgraceful, horny old men. She collected the classics, from a 1958 edition of 1984 to a battered copy of Brave New World. Books excited her, because there in the pages—indelible in blue—would be her distinctive scrawl, paragraphs blotted with ink and peppered with annotations. I had once picked up a copy of Wuthering Heights and read her inscriptions:

To love is to hurt… to sacrifice… to persevere for the other and for your own happiness. Torment is desirable and often required in order to fully appreciate life and love.

She was such a Scorpio.

5.

I met Simon for the first time at maybe nine or ten. He was a couple of years older than Alyssa and me. It was at a family gathering in the fall. I remember because the air in New York is different in the tall—there’s a crispness to the pavement, the sun-bleached sidewalks are no longer glistening with wavy heat. We enter a new realm of the psyche in the fall, fatigue setting in for the impending winter.

Alyssa seemed overly familiar with Simon. They always happened to find themselves next to each other at parties, and when she was near him, she’d oscillate a fold of hair to one side of her head, massaging the tendrils with the tips of her fingers as she smiled at him. Constantly. I knew this because I watched them both. Not in a creepy way, but out of curiosity and, later, with envy. Most boys would leave the girls behind, playing video games, gossiping in some unsuspecting bedroom, but I always noticed that Simon lingered. He talked to the mothers, welcoming their tedious questions about school, life, and so on, thoroughly enjoying how they fawned over him. And then, after a certain point, he always found Alyssa.

I wondered what he was like in his locked room, when he wasn’t focused on keeping up appearances. His mind seemed brilliant but dark. I always got the sense that Simon would have loved to watch a beautiful house burn down in a magical, haunting way. Even still, I felt myself be open with him. I wanted him to decide that I was worth looking at, like how I imagined some people look at wolvish dogs: boldly, without thinking it might eat you—or maybe, more accurately, in spite of the thought.

Simon’s father, Rakesh, wore thick-framed black Ray-Bans — the same style I’d see the politicians on billboards back in India wear. He was a handsome Indian, like Baba. He seemed impatient, the veins at his temple pulsating like the lines of a Matisse. We would see him occasionally, the once-upon-a-time Marxist now head neurologist at the Mount Sinai Hospital in East Harlem. As an avid walker, every working day he would march with diligence through the rain and mud, under the caved arches of Central Park. Alyssa and I would sometimes watch him, gossiping freely, as he vigorously walked past the edge of our block with a navy umbrella in one hand, always decked in pin-striped pants and crisp white shirts treated with Reckitt’s Crown Blue. I once overheard that he had experienced racism similar to Baba. Patients telling him (to his face!) that they wanted the best guy for the job, when what they really meant was Get me someone white, or get me outta here! Even still, he desperately wanted to be accepted by white people.

Adi, please. Rakesh rocked his head back and forth. Not this again.

You can’t possibly believe there’s any oil in Iraq, eh.

I don’t have to know. That’s not my job—

You don’t think it’s a ploy?

"Ploy for whomst, old friend?"

Eesh. Baba sat back on his tanned leather recliner and took a puff of his cigar, disappointed.

I overheard them debating ideology one afternoon, their voices carrying through the house.

From time to time the whole family would come over, Simon sidling behind his parents. His mother, Marissa, was a white woman type from Georgia, fragile and southern. She was small and mousy, kind but strange, and always slightly removed from the conversation. She had none of the personality that Mama had, who wore her Eileen Fisher jumpsuits and Ralph Lauren all whites next to Marissa, always in dowdy, almost hideous Chanel.

Simon was an only child and wore it with pride, as if it were an achievement. Puckering like broody men do, a semi–blue steel, he’d sit with his parents, scanning our home like a thief. Alyssa would sometimes lock eyes with him, giggling dramatically. What they’d discuss in those half glances I’d never know. But they could never be anything more than silly flirts, because by then Alyssa was dating Ryan.

Ryan was of the right class and of the right privilege, and even though he was Black (both Mama and Baba would never be outwardly racist, but instead just make a lot of racist assumptions), he looked implacable, like Alyssa, and therefore was just right. I’d watch as Mama and Alyssa would talk in secret: their hushed tones as Alyssa dried the plates that Mama washed; the excited whispers as Mama watered her gardenias and Alyssa stood dramatically, her animated hands moving fast as she relayed life and love in drastic gyration. I liked how Ryan treated Alyssa, the way he’d linger like a puppy, smiling and chatting or listening with admiration. I wanted someone to look at me like that, like I was wanted.

Any night was a good time for Baba to whip out his tin of cigars and his amber bottle of single malt Scotch. I’d watch as he would sit in his leather beast of an armchair, a generous sliver of Laphroaig perched in his left hand. He liked Ryan, so he would engage with him. In many ways, Baba was a male cliché: he loved talking about politics and economics, but wouldn’t readily discuss either with Alyssa and me. In his mind, they were gendered topics—I guess our pussies couldn’t handle it. I resented him for his sometimes subaltern weaknesses—you know, where they exaggerated gender like the bubonic plague. I always felt as if Baba fancied a boy and was secretly upset when both of his children turned out to be girls, something he took out subconsciously on me. Alyssa could be overlooked because she was the firstborn. But me? I was the familial force majeure. I was