A tree grows upwards with no room to stretch its limbs. After all, what else is it to do in a place like this one? A small plot of land, a house with two beds but nine who seek rest. My father, the second eldest by birth, but by circumstance the eldest after a rickshaw crash felled Bazhrul Uddin Choudhury from a tower to a stump at my father’s waist. A vow to protect became a passion for medicine became an acceptance to medical school became a gun and camouflage uniform embroidered with “Choudhury” hanging from a hook in the Chattogram Cantonment after that dreadful dreadful number left his mouth dry as he stood by his father’s hospital cot. I remember my father used to sleep on the basement couch instead of in my mother’s bedroom when I was growing up. The dreams, he told me. Dreams from which he woke thrashing, dreams that made my home foreign to him. Sometimes when he woke, it was he who was foreign to me.
One letter distinguishes my mother’s surname from my father’s. When I was younger, my mother used to tell me that I could change my last name to hers if I wished. My head shakes as my mind wanders. Choudhury. What does it mean? My mother reminds me that Chaudhury was a title for land-owning Bengali families centuries ago, and that some faux variants arose over the years. Choudhury.
My fifth grade final project was to create a family tree. My mother’s sister’s husband was enlisted to dig up all the names of the Shahs and great men from whom she, and I, by extension, hail. One side of the tree was bushy and vibrant, the other full of starving twigs. The tree culminated as most trees do---with one trunk: me. A tree may grow upwards when it has no room to stretch its limbs; here, our tree expands.
I wonder who my father was before I knew him, before even my mother knew him. I admit that I do not know much---though I identify myself as an only child, I was not his only child. Nika: Annika Chowdhary, who took her mother’s last name. Another difference of mere letters, another faux variant, as my mother would say. I know facts about her, but I do not know her. She grew up with her mother; after her mother died, she lived with my father through high school; she went to Amherst College. My mother knows her better than I do, a fact that makes me green at times. I find myself wishing I knew her; whenever I am asked if I have any siblings, I shake my head. She promised to stay in touch. So many years ago.
My father and my half-sister did not get along. Since his death, she has appeared indirectly every so often in my life, most often through an annual phone call to my mother in which she rains blights on my father. Perhaps this is a poor paraphrase on my mother’s part. The father Nika describes is not the father I knew, but then again, how well do I know my father? The sound of his voice escapes me, though I remember it reminded me of an elephant, my favorite animal in youth. He had an outsized nose, one that my mother often remarks I’m lucky to not have inherited. I know that I loved him, I know that I was loved.
My half-sister appears to me in both my mind’s eye and my Google search history. How are you, I ask her. Last we checked in, she lives in Palo Alto and works as a coder for a bio-tech start-up. The sun sets as I stare at her LinkedIn profile picture and search for any physical resemblance, do I yearn? It seems she too was left out of the inheritance of his nose, the one that was so monumental to me in my youth. My mother asks me, with guarded voice and lowered gaze, if I plan to connect with her later in life. My eyes find my lap too. A parasocial relationship will suffice.
My cousin, Sami, the son of my mother’s older sister, has become my de facto sibling. A faux variant of sorts. My mother refers to him, twelve years my elder, as her first-born. Sami, the victim of my prepubescent pummels and punches. Nika has never met him. She has never met any of my friends. I wonder what she’d think of them all.
My contact with my father’s family has waned and waned, and now, unbeknownst to me, a new moon sits in the sky. At times, I blame my mother; at times, I blame myself. Language barriers divide me from many of them; others used to reach out on WhatsApp in the years following my father’s death. A layer of dust has settled on my inbox. A gusty gale: my mother answers a phone call from one of my uncles, most likely the talkative one, Salim. I hear her tell him I’m busy. I am sitting a few feet away on my phone.
*
Let our orchard expand. Ventum est. I enter Harvard Square in late August of 2024. The world is my oyster, or so I think. My mother and I walk with linked arms down Massachusetts Avenue in the early evening, and I wonder, not for the first time, what it will be like to exist without her. I suppose college will be a taste of that. She chastises me for what she likes to call my “emo spells.” Her grip is firmer than I expect, perhaps not a gesture of farewell but of insistence, as if I might evaporate into the red brick if she lets go. I glance at my reflection in a store window and almost don’t recognize myself. So much of me is borrowed, from my cropped black haircut that matches her graying one, even though I will never admit that she cut it short first, to the socks that I stole from her suitcase. My mother says something, in Bangla, about dinner---sweet or savory---but her voice blends into the traffic. I nod in response. There is nothing urgent left to say. I don’t want to exist without her.
Later that week, I am packing for a pre-orientation hiking trip. My bag bursts with flour tortillas and biodegradable shower wipes. Leave no trace, they say. Surely the trees will grow anyway. I am sitting with my group on the top floor of the student center when my phone rings. A New York number. Perhaps my doctor calling about some update regarding my annual thyroid checkup? I answer. “Is this Samara Choudhury?” I hear. “Yes, who is this?” The line hangs up. What a shy doctor, I remark to myself. I guess we can’t all win in life. I continue my conversation with these new friends of mine.
Minutes pass. My phone rings again. Another New York number, maybe the same one, but I only register the first three digits that match my own. Something has happened to my mother. I answer immediately. “Samara Choudhury?” I hear a female voice say on the other end. “Yes.” I reply with a clipped voice. “Who is this?” Her answer is muffled. “What?” Indecipherable again. I stand up to leave the group. I am met with raised eyebrows. I tell them it’s my doctor. I walk to the window and lean against it. “Who is this? Why are you calling?” I feel my chest tightening as I wait for the news that I have prophesized since April 2015. “This is Annika---Nika. It’s your sister.” My chest contracts. A reflection in the glass stares back at me, and suddenly, I am nine again, sitting with her on that jagged rock in Morningside Park the night before my father's funeral. I had imagined this moment differently, and I had always imagined it as an outgoing call, not one that was incoming. “Are you there?” She asks. I wish I wasn’t.
Nine years have passed. “Yes.” I don’t want to talk to her, but I want her to talk to me. I picture her in some nondescript California loft, standing in a corner, holding the phone like it might bite. At least that’s what I’m doing at that moment. I hear my group laughing so many feet away. My feet are frozen. “Do you remember me?” She asks. “Yes.” My reply bears no delay. The world was my oyster, but somewhere along the way, I shrank to a plankton. “I got your number from, funnily enough, your LinkedIn. I see you’re at Harvard now, your dad would be so proud.” I want to laugh at how preposterous this all is. “Yeah, I’m glad.” I summon the courage to ask her a question. “Where do you live?”
She pauses. “I’m in New York now.” New York cannot exist without a daughter of Joynul Abedin Choudhury, I suppose. That city seems to hold all his lost features, from his accent to his anger and ashen complexion. Maybe even his laugh, though I can’t remember it anymore. “That’s great.” I am a prospective English major, but I find myself reduced to primordial grunts. “Why didn’t you ever call?” It seems silence is contagious. The brightly colored carpeting of the student center’s top floor has burned itself into my memory. Finally: “I wanted to. I just had so much to work through. I wasn’t ready.” You are forty-two years old, I want to tell her, you don’t get to be ‘not ready.’ I feel a pinch and taste salt in my mouth. “Okay.” I hear myself say, though my mind is now divorced from my body and tongue. “I was so angry. I am still so angry. I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry.” Her voice wavers, and I catch myself feeling pity. I thank her for calling and tell her that I am happy to hear from her. My voice sounds clinical, corporate even. My attention escapes me. Is this what my future holds in this corporate world?
We go back and forth. Nothing of substance is said. I look down at the student center carpet again, that horrible red-and-aquamarine pattern. I feel like I’m standing in a hotel hallway that was never meant to hold a moment like this. “I have to go,” I say. “They’re waiting for me.” No one is waiting for me. I waited for her for years. “Okay.” She says and pauses. “Thank you for picking up.” I almost tell her that I hate her and wish I hadn’t answered. I almost tell her that I’m scared of college and of losing my mother and of being alone. I almost tell her that I love her and forgive her. The tip of my tongue holds the world, but all I say is, “Yeah. Sure.” I hear her cough. She hangs up.
I stare at the screen. The call lasted thirteen minutes and twelve seconds. I text my mother about the phone call. She immediately replies. “I don’t want her in my life. She’s erratic.” I react to her text and turn off my phone.
Silence continues to contaminate when I rejoin my group. Someone asks me if I’m alright. “Why wouldn’t I be?” I respond quickly. Another person asks me who called. I tell them the truth: my half-sister whom I haven’t heard from in a decade. I laugh and flash a smile that I have borrowed from someone far better at small talk than I am.
*
I often struggle with the fact there is no evidence of the fact that my father was once alive. No LinkedIn, no Facebook records, no pictures on the Web. Then again, these are all solely virtual. The only real evidence that exists is me. And Nika. The last living fragments of his presence. Never in our phone call did Nika say “our.” Not our father, but my father. We share so little, neither a last name nor a residence, and now, not even a pronoun.
I see that she has messaged me in the weeks following our phone call. She writes, “Hi Samara, this is your prodigal much older sister. I’m so sorry.” My first reaction is to roll my eyes at the melodrama of it all, and a part of me cannot believe that this is my reality. “Prodigal,” she writes, as if she’s returned to some place that we once shared. As if this is a biblical tale and she is the wayward character with a neat redemption arc and moral to impart. A prodigal son---or sister, rather---but where is the father to welcome her home? Surely I will not be waiting at the door.
I do not respond. I have yet to respond. I think about it once or twice a day. I imagine typing something dry yet diplomatic, or something emotionally raw, or even something that might make her laugh. But do I even know what she might find funny? I reread her message and feel the ache of that singular pronoun again: your sister. She calls herself mine. I cannot bring myself to believe her. I close the message, but I never delete it.
I wonder what she thinks of me, if she too imagines me as a stranger with her father’s eyebrows and without his massive nose. I try to conjure a memory of the three of us---my father, Nika, and me. It never quite materializes. The closest I get is that jagged rock in Morningside Park. Even then, we were satellites to one another, briefly crossing paths in the orbit of his death.
I am nineteen years old, and still, I feel that everything that punctuated my childhood has disappeared without a trace. As my mother would say, perhaps an “emo spell.” From the Thai restaurant that father, mother, and I would go to whenever we were in Queens to the outdated, politically incorrect Native American wing full of totem poles at the Natural History Museum near my elementary school that my mother and I would walk through each day on the way home. Even the Kumon that became my home away from home for the first twelve years of my life. A Colossal Wreck, Shelley might call it. But I am no traveler.
Yesterday I had lunch with a new friend in the year above me. Her last name is Chodhry. Another faux variant—I think it’s come time to escape this habit of mine. She looks exactly like the Nika of my far-off youth. I tell her about my life, she gives me advice. We talk, we laugh, we hug goodbye. Time may be the most reliable salve, but the scar has reopened. The seeds have spread, the tree lives to see another day.
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