KROS Magazine: Hope Issue by KROS Magazine

ISSUE II: HOPE

â&#x20AC;&#x153;As long as there is life, there is hope.â&#x20AC;? Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes

Creative Director Tasneem Motala Illustrator Gabrielle Pipo Social Media Manager Allyson Aritcheta Contributors Nimra Bandukwala Qurat Dar

Dan Hong Monica Nathan

Cover Image by Nimra Bandukwala KROS Magazine, Issue 2, Hope. Published July 2019. All material is ÂŠ to the authors, artists, and KROS Magazine.

The Space Between

//Dan Hong

Close Examination

//Nimra Bandukwala

LARA

//Qurat Dar

A Meeting of Faith

//Monica Nathan

Embrace the Light

//Nimra Bandukwala

DAN HONG I have never been to Vietnam. I’m not sure I’ll ever visit. When people ask me why, I lie. It’s too hot. I’m sensitive to foods and prone to food sickness. It costs too much. I can’t take the time off work. The truth is, I’m not sure I want to know Vietnam— the real Vietnam. For me, Vietnam is some distant, dangerous land, frozen in the 1960s or 1970s. A ghost before I was born. It exists in my dying grasp of the language, in my father’s war stories told over beers to his friends, in the fairy tales my mother would recite as she folded laundry, and in her retelling of their escape from communists by boat. It hangs over me, both as sharp as a guillotine’s blade and as nebulous as the idea of stardust and life. I’ve worked hard to reconcile who I am with the chunks of what I don’t know of my family, of their homeland. The Space Between was one of the first stories I completed during my MFA program at George Mason University, and one of my earliest attempts at putting into words my perspective on being Vietnamese American. I had come to realize it wasn’t so much the parts I knew, but the parts I 12

didn’t that drove me to fill in the blanks. I didn’t know it at the time, but The Space Between set the tone for my thesis, a novel-in-stories about a small group of family and friends growing up in the Washington, D.C. area in the 1980s through the 2010s. This story, like its brethren, is about the passage of time and the inevitability of change, and the losses that accrue and mount over years and decades. By the end of it all, we are left with mountains of unknowing, shaped somehow exactly like the cracks that form between the generations of refugees and their children. While this story, and the stories that eventually sprang from it, can feel pessimistic, my hope is that it serves as an attempt to accept that what we don’t know about our families plays as 1important a role as what we do know. I don’t know if I’ll ever know Vietnam’s scents, her sounds, or the feel of her soil between my toes. The Vietnam of now, a country of growth and metropolitan ambitions, holds no memories, no answers. I don’t know what I’m missing, my friends tell me when they return from their visits back to Vietnam. Of that, I’m sure.

THE SPACE BETWEEN John Vo shifted in his airplane seat and stared at the sheet of paper in his lap. On it, printed in large, neat letters, were an upper-case B, and a cursive, lower-case z. He eyed the letters’ lines, tracing the black ink over and over, and lingered on the white expanse that separated the two characters. With his index finger and thumb, he curled the upper left corner, rolling it back and forth, like the coming and going of the tide, and watched the paper soften and wrinkle. It was usually taped to the wall above his desk at the design firm where he worked in downtown San Antonio, and once, someone had asked him about the letters, what they meant. John had shrugged, glibly explaining that he just liked the look of them. He wasn’t sure why he brought the paper along on the plane trip; he had simply grabbed it from his workstation as he hurried out the door the previous day. Outside, the ground slowly disappeared in a haze of cloud as the plane ascended, leaving Texas for D.C. The day before, in her apartment in Arlington, Virginia, John’s mother had died. And other than booking a flight from San Antonio to D.C., John had no idea what to do, or even who to tell. They were, he thought, strangers. During his childhood years, she had often been absent, working at her two jobs as a maid or at the local deli, and he never really got to know her. And, if he was being honest, he never felt the need to make the effort. He wasn’t sure if she had any friends, or if she even had any family other than him. Of course, there was Sammy, the Cambodian boy who lived nearby and looked after her, who took her on walks or to the store, and who made sure she got to her doctor’s appointments. It was Sammy who had found her, cold, dead, and alone, in the middle of her small apartment, and it was Sammy who called John at work to break the news. John knew his mother had been Buddhist, so that was something; but it didn’t tell him how to organize a proper ceremony, and he 13

had no idea who to ask. Brief internet searches were unhelpful, and being Vietnamese complicated the matter, since most Buddhist literature he found was for Indian ceremonies. John’s vague recollections of his father’s funeral ceremony involved white headbands, chanting, and monks, but this was all so long ago, when he was barely in elementary school, and he had not paid attention. His mother had taken care of everything, and now that the responsibility was his, he wondered why he had not prepared for this eventuality. He wondered if this was because she had occupied such a small place in his life that, until it became real, her death seemed irrelevant. As the people around him settled in for the flight ahead, some snoozing, others simply staring out the windows at the passing clouds or down at the cragged, brown and green masses of land below, John withdrew a small packet of Post-It notes, and started drawing on the yellow paper. *** The summer break before John entered fifth grade was a scorcher. Across the D.C. region, local weather records shattered. The creeks that wound through Arlington’s parks evaporated, thinning out until they were little more than collapsed veins. Waves of heat, shimmering, wafted from the asphalt, the fumes smelling bitter and stale and toxic. Like many of the other nine- and ten-year old kids in his grade, John had an old bicycle, but pedaling was too difficult on days like this; the air left his chest feeling raw. So he and his mother, who had a rare day off from both her jobs, spent most of the day indoors, in their small, one-bedroom apartment, watching television. Planted on the brown corduroy couch in their living room, John surfed through the five or six channels that the antenna provided. Around them, the living room was cluttered, as always, with boxes filled with cans of food, folded blankets,

and gallons of water. “Why do we have all this stuff?” John asked in slow, halting Vietnamese. He eyed a box filled with bundles of chopsticks, each tied with thick, red rubber bands. With her feet propped in his lap and her head resting on the armrest, John’s mother dozed. Her hair lay crumpled under her, wavy and thick and peppered with gray. The creases on her face and the droopy folds under her eyes disappeared from gravity’s pull. She wasn’t old, not really, but looked it. “Mom?” She snorted. “Hmm?” “This stuff. Why do we have all this?” “Just in case.” “In case of what?” Before she could answer, bright colors and quick movements flashed on the television. Cartoons! John threw the remote aside and concentrated on the show, his mother forgotten. But it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t a cartoon show; it was a special behind-thescenes look at how to make cartoons. “What is this?” his mother asked, poking John with a toe. “Cartoons.” “What are they saying?” He waved at her to be quiet. “You watch too much TV,” she whispered. She rolled on her side and pulled her knees up, hugging them. Soon her breathing steadied and John forgot about her as he eagerly watched on. On the screen, the host appeared, a fat man with a brownish-gray beard and thick glasses. He introduced an artist, a thin man with long, greasy hair, who flipped through a stack of drawings over and over again. John watched, fascinated, as the drawings of a bowling ball, rough, wild-looking sketches, moved with each flip of paper. The ball rolled down a lane, knocking over pins. The drawings weren’t clean, the lines not solid—they looked messy,

smudged. Lines of varying darkness and thickness seemed to fly everywhere. John’s drawings never looked like that—his lines were much cleaner, thin, neat, and carefully applied. But the drawings on television looked more complete somehow. Better, like the wild lines had created a weight, a depth that he knew instinctively he could not replicate. The host explained the process that filmmakers used to create a cartoon: an illustration drawn on a clear plastic sheet called a cel was placed over a painted background; its picture was taken; then another cel, slightly different from the first, replaced it, and so on and so forth; then, the images were put on film and run through a projector, creating an illusion of movement, a mimicking of life. Next, the artist took out a sketchbook filled with drawings, and flipped through the pages. And between the pages, the drawings moved, breathed, and lived. The artist called it a flipbook. John wondered for a moment about the missing links between the drawings. Everything seemed to move flawlessly, and he marveled at how his eyes didn’t register the missing pictures. Then the artist held up a yellow Post-It notepad and said he got started in animation by drawing frames on each note. After begging for a week, John’s mother finally agreed to buy him one Post-It notepad. But soon, library books, textbooks, loose leaf paper—anything that could be flipped— became a flipbook to him. He drew elaborate, violent fights, and used crayons and colored pencils to simulate blood splatters and brain bits exploding from stick figures. By the time he was eleven, his mother grew tired of his hobby and refused to buy any more supplies for him. That was fine, because by then, he and his friends had become really good at shoplifting. *** John shuffled through the crowds at National Airport. He had grown up with its original

name and refused to call it Reagan National. The airport’s arched ceiling overhead reflected the jumbled noises of footsteps, speech, and announcements down to him, filling the corridor with a hollow, warped echo. It sounded to John like he was listening to everything while submerged, and the tinny, distant sounds seemed to build a buffer between him and the crowd. No matter how much the people around him pressed in, forcing him through thick pedestrian traffic, John felt alone. He saw no fond farewells, happy greetings, or Hallmark moments. Just hustle, bustle, and flow. A woman ahead of him in a beige pantsuit dropped her briefcase, and the clamor, the instant ripple through the crowd of people readjusting their paths as they walked by, put John at ease, reminding him that they were, after all, people—humans—and prone to clumsiness. Outside the airport, a late autumn wind, crisp and dry, swept through his short hair as he carried his duffle bag to the curb. Almost immediately, he spotted an old green Honda Accord station wagon puttering along, its driver scanning the crowds. There was something oddly familiar about the face behind the steering wheel, and John squinted to be sure. Yes, it was Sammy. John waved. “Thanks for picking me up,” John said, after stowing his bag and getting into the passenger seat. “Yeah, man, no problem. Of course.” Sammy was about eighteen, eight years younger than John. His dark skin and thick, tightly-curled hair was cropped short and neat, like he was in the military. He grinned. “Johnny Five, back home again. Crazy.” “Man, nobody’s called me that in years.” John shook his head, smiling. “Just John now. But look at you, man. You got skinny.” He hadn’t seen Sammy for three years, back when Sammy was still a short, pudgy, fast-talking kid who

always hung around older boys, toughs and crooks, eager for their approval. Sammy’s growth spurts must have stretched him pretty thin. “You look good, just taller, you know? I’m amazed I even recognized you.” “Well, thanks. You know how it is.” Sammy drove for a while in silence, navigating their way out of the airport, until he took a deep breath, somber. “I’m sorry about your mom.” He said it delicately, almost a question. “Yeah. Thanks. How had she been doing?” John bit his lower lip, not really wanting to know. “Not great. Weak, tired. But, you know, kind of happy. Like she had plans or something. Since you’d been sending her money, she wanted to quit one of her jobs. Who knows what she would have done with her time—probably take up mountain climbing or something.” He chuckled a little, and let it die. “I was supposed to take her to her cardiologist that morning….” Sammy spoke slowly, in barely a whisper. “Yesterday. It was only yesterday. She didn’t answer her door. I kept knocking until finally I had to get the landlord to let me in ‘cause I didn’t have a key.” John numbly stared at the window, at his reflection, at the finer details in his face, at the nose and eyes he had inherited from his mother. He used to hate his long eyelashes. In high school, a girl said they were feminine, and for years he wore sunglasses as often as he could to hide them. They no longer preoccupied him, except now, when he considered his mother. He wondered if he would develop bags under his eyes like her, or start to swell and bloat as she had as she aged; and somewhere underneath those questions, he wondered if his heart would give out, if he would also die alone, listening to panicked knocking coming from the other side of his front door. Slowly, John came to realize he had been holding his breath, and he gently released it, fogging the

window where breath and glass met, blurring the reflection he owed his mother. “Thanks for everything, Sammy. I mean it.” John sighed, suddenly feeling very tired. “So what’s next?” “You already called Baker Funeral Services to pick up her body, so we just have to go decide what type of casket, time of funeral, all that stuff.” Sammy shook his head. “I mean you have to decide. Not we.” “Yeah. Well. You did more for her than I ever did.” Sammy didn’t disagree. For some people, organizing a funeral for a loved one meant a sense of closure, of keeping busy, busywork to keep their minds off the things around them, and more importantly, to keep their composure. Up until that moment, John wasn’t even sure he cared. But as he and Sammy drove through the Crystal City and Pentagon City neighborhoods, John felt an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, a suspicion that just over the hills, or around the bends or corners, just out of his line of sight, stood solid walls, and that what he saw around him was actually a box, its sides hidden. He felt the walls press in, pushing, kneading his skin and bone and muscle, and he wanted them to press harder, all around, to squeeze him until nothing was left. His vision filled with tall buildings and long shadows, but John kept noticing the trees and the orange and brown leaves that peppered the landscape, and he searched in those spaces for an escape from everything, for a way to return to yesterday, the day before yesterday, and all the years that had led up to today. They merged onto I-395, and headed south, toward home. *** John was fifteen, and known as Johnny Five because of the V in his last name and the movie Short Circuit. It was late spring, and though it was a school day, he was at home,

the first time in nearly a week, changing and getting ready for a barbecue. In the living room, the telephone rang. Johnny ignored it and searched through his closet for a Polo shirt he had stolen from Hecht’s the week before. Surprisingly, Kim Tran was going to be at the barbecue, a goody two-shoes who got straight As and competed in essay contests or whatever else their high school wanted her to do. She was also pretty, and nice, and funny, and she never annoyed him like some other girls did. Johnny had always felt at home around her, having known her since they were in kindergarten, though they’d grown apart since they entered high school. The phone finally stopped ringing as the answering machine picked up. Johnny found his shirt, pulled it over his head, and modeled in the mirror as the voice of his mother’s boss from the deli filled the air. He heard the woman say that his mother wasn’t in trouble for not coming to work, but that they were just worried, and that she should get in touch. Johnny froze. His mother wouldn’t skip work, not the way he skipped school or left home for days without feeling anything that even remotely resembled guilt. Something was wrong: he’d have to find her. But the barbecue had been planned for the past two weeks. Money had been saved, food purchased, meat marinated, and girls invited. If he left in search of his mother right then, he might miss the barbecue. He thought of Halloween from the previous school year, when he dared Kim to kiss him, and the way her lips tasted like waxy cherry. An image of his mother, crawling on the ground somewhere, bloodied, crept into his head, unbidden and unwelcome. Johnny tried to fight it, argue that she was probably fine, that he should go to the barbecue, but the image grew larger, and he heard her call for him: her son, her only child, her only family. And in his mind, he didn’t answer her. He stripped off the

Polo, threw it hard against the wall, and put on an old tee shirt. Outside, Johnny scanned the street, and the playground at the center of the apartment complex. They were empty. In the distance, he saw bicyclists speed along the Washington and Old Dominion Trail that ran past the community gardens that the county had set up, and decided to start his search there. But when he reached the bridge overlooking the creek, well short of the gardens, he paused, and leaned over the railing to watch the water. The creek bubbled along smoothly, despite the rocks that lay along the bottom which, if they were big enough, sometimes broke the surface. He had only searched for a few minutes, but he already wanted to give up, to forget about finding her, but was afraid to do so, to abandon her. How long would he have to search for her? That bothered him the most, once he thought about it. He had started the search, and now he couldn’t stop; the mere act of looking for her indicated that her absence was enough to warrant worry; stopping the search implied he didn’t think her important enough to continue on. However, he reasoned that if he simply pretended he had not heard the message, or didn’t think it important, then he’d have an excuse to go to the barbecue. Who could blame him? Shame flooded him, or was it guilt? He wasn’t sure—how could he not know? He wondered if his mind was creating an illusion of what he was supposed to feel at moments like this, and he just wasn’t accustomed to feeling either emotion. Frustrated, he stared at the right bank, which was concrete and sloped at a steep angle, hoping his mother would materialize so he could get on his way. She did not. Johnny gripped the brown metal railing, letting the uneven paint dig into his skin, and twisted. Bits of paint and dirt chipped off. From below, faint but excited cheering floated up to Johnny, a little boy’s victory cry. He

leaned way over the edge and listened. Yes. He heard splashing, and decided to go down to see what was going on. Maybe the kid had seen his mother; at least he was someone Johnny could ask. He made his way down the path next to the bridge, reached the concrete bank, and stopped, stunned. Standing in the shadow of the bridge was a small woman with rounded hips whose arms were spread upward, cheering. Her short, round body shook with laughter, a high-pitched, tinkling sound that barely rose above the rush of the creek. For a moment he couldn’t process what he was seeing. His mother, laughing. Johnny frowned, unsure if it was really her. After all, her back was to him. But no, he recognized the bright red polo shirt and black pants, thrift store clothes she had found months ago which she thought made her look more American. A little boy, fat and brown, ran down the creek, chasing a little handmade raft as she cheered him on. Johnny had never seen her so relaxed and energized, and he wondered who this woman was. He watched them for some time, leaning against the support pillar of the bridge, feeling like an intruder. The boy, on his second trip upstream, saw Johnny, and froze. Johnny’s mother turned to him. “Your work called,” Johnny said loudly, walking toward her. “They’re worried. Why aren’t you at work?” His mother didn’t flinch. She walked out of the water to him, her expression suddenly sour. “I call sick,” she said. “They stupid.” She didn’t ask why he wasn’t at school. She never did. Water from her pants pooled on the ground between them. Johnny stared at her for a moment, nodded, and walked to the edge of the bank. “What are you doing?” he asked the boy. He had not intended it, but he recognized a hardness under the question, an accusation. The boy came over to Johnny and held out

the small raft with a toothy grin. “Check it out, man. She made me a raft. It’s so bad.” Johnny scratched his chin, appraising the raft. It was little more than a stack of long twigs twisted together with blades of grass and string. A little twig shot upward from the middle, a makeshift mast. He was impressed. He had no idea his mother had any experience building anything at all. Johnny’s mother peered at the raft, took it from the boy, and moved into the light to examine it better, her sandals making spongy sounds as she walked along the concrete embankment. She mumbled to herself as she replaced a broken twig in the raft’s base, her fingers working in small, fast, and jabbing movements. When she was done, she handed the boy the raft, and pointed at its naked mast. “Okay, boy, use plastic bag. Tear, stretch.” Her hands moved as she spoke, trying to convey the instructions to make a sail out of plastic. The boy nodded enthusiastically and ran upstream along the bank. After a few yards he stopped and turned around. “Thanks!” Johnny’s mother smiled and waved him off. “That Sammy,” she said to Johnny. “Nguoi mien.” Cambodian. “Why isn’t he in school?” She shot Johnny a look of annoyance. “Who cares? Huh? You don’t care.” “He’s a little kid.” She waved her hand and turned upstream to watch Sammy. Johnny fell silent and followed her lead, watching the boy jump into the water. Sammy bent low and held the raft in the current; the creek pushed and pulled at it, searching for a way to wrest it from his grip. Johnny saw him stiffen for a moment as the nose of the raft twitched and moved, like a directional compass gone haywire. Then he let go. As they watched the raft float slowly away from Sammy, his mother switched to speak-

ing Vietnamese, as she always did when she had something long to say. Johnny had grown wary of her speeches over the years, annoyed at her attempts to reach him, to control him, and started tuning people out as soon as he heard them speak Vietnamese. But she knew he could understand her, even though his limited vocabulary prevented him from answering. Usually he just nodded and made agreeable grunts. Perhaps it was because of this that she lectured him in Vietnamese. “I remember,” she said softly. “When we first came to America, we were so scared. You were so young, and Daddy and I worried that you wouldn’t remember Vietnam.” She never spoke about his father, who had died in an accident at the warehouse in Springfield where he worked, loading and unloading photocopying machines. Johnny stayed silent, watching Sammy splash through the creek, lumbering after the raft. There was a little Vietnamese girl,” his mother continued. “She was about four or five. This was in 1982, I think.” His mother waved her hand, as if it didn’t really matter. “She was walking on the street by Stonewall Jackson Middle School.” “Uh huh.” She paused and watched the raft as it weaved around rocks and held steady through miniature whirlpools and waterfalls. “Someone ran the little girl over and killed her,” she said finally. “Terrible. The only child in the family.” Johnny grunted and shook his head. “The police didn’t know who did it. People were so upset—they wrote in to the newspapers, called the radio stations…” She shrugged. “Some people said she deserved it. They said Vietnamese people didn’t belong here.” She bent down and rolled up her wet pant legs. “This isn’t our home, anyway. It’s not for us.”

“Did they ever catch the driver?” Johnny asked, concentrating on making the right sounds with his mouth. She nodded, her mouth set in a grimace, like she had tasted something bad, and stepped into the creek. She turned back to him, shaking her head. “It turned out to be a little girl who hit her. Sixteen, I think. She just got her license and didn’t even know she ran over someone. She thought she hit an animal. Then one day her mother spoke to her about the dead girl, and how terrible it was that the driver just left her there to die. She wanted the driver to be found and punished. Then the girl was very quiet and asked, ‘What if it was me?’” Johnny stood silent, not sure how to respond. “Wow,” he said finally. “Mmm,” she agreed, nodding. “I wonder if the parents of the dead girl ever had more children. I bet not.” She walked to the middle of the creek, the water breaking against her legs, readjusting around her, fitting her in its path, moving with her. She looked down at her feet. “This reminds me of the beach in Malaysia when we arrived at the refugee camp there. You probably don’t remember, but I always held you, and we stood in the water, like this, and watched the waves come in and out. Every morning, before everyone woke up. It felt so peaceful standing there. We were in-between everything, far from home, nowhere to go. Like we were outside, or behind everything. Just off to the side, waiting. We almost died—should have died—leaving Vietnam on that boat. Then, we were there at the camp, and I had you and the water every morning, just for a moment, to breathe the beach air, away from the smell of the toilets and the filth, and watch.” She drew a squiggly line in the air. “Like that. That’s how the water looked when I looked down at my feet. The tide came in, went out. For hours.” She turned her back to Johnny and watched Sammy sprint back upstream, the raft in his

hands. “It was so beautiful, but then I would turn around, and it would be ugly, because the refugee camp was so full. People everywhere. Nobody cared about anyone else, just themselves and trying to get somewhere, to America or Australia or France or who knows. But going there—anywhere—was the end.” Johnny watched her watching Sammy for a while, trying futilely to pull from his memory the refugee camp, the mad dash out of Vietnam on the boat, and, after a fashion, Vietnam herself, and all the things that were lost to his mother and to him. *** John’s mother’s apartment seemed to him to be more unkempt than ever before. For a moment he stood, staring around the empty living room, trying to imagine her, sitting on her floral-patterned sofa, or watching television, but mostly he tried to remember something about her, anything at all. He wondered where she had collapsed the day before, where her life petered out of her, draining into—into what? The empty apartment? The air he was now breathing? In the dining area, on the floor in the corner, a small altar pot with burnt sticks of incense sat, cold and untended. A small, blurry photo of his father in a cheap drugstore frame leaned against the wall behind the altar pot. Boxes filled with canned goods, blankets, and utensils were scattered along the wall, under the coffee table, and next to the sofa. John’s mother never told him why she had collected these things, why she didn’t put them away when she purchased them and brought them home. He shook his head. Despite the clutter, the apartment seemed empty, vacant. A thin layer of dust covered her things. He realized with a jolt that perhaps she wasn’t able to clean as often as she wanted anymore. Her cardiologist had warned her to rest as much as possible, that her cholesterol and blood pressure were

at dangerous levels. Walks and an avoidance of stress and strenuous activity had been prescribed, along with medication and a booklet on heart surgery. His mother had left John a message telling him all this the year before, and at the end of the message, she wondered, shyly, if he might want to come back from Texas to find a job in D.C. “Lot of jobs,” she had said, her voice high-pitched and hopeful. He returned her call with an unfulfilled promise to visit. Her bedroom was neat, sparse. A full-size mattress, a rare extravagance, sat against the wall on the floor. The plain, dark green sheets were neatly made, the blanket folded and crisp. John lay on her bed, tired, even though it was still light out. Sammy would pick him up in a few hours for his appointment at the funeral home. As John stared at his mother’s bedroom ceiling, he thought about dust. He had heard once that dust contained high levels of human skin flakes, and that the bed one slept in logically contained the most detritus from that person. John knew it wasn’t true, that while there was inevitably some human skin in dust, it was a negligible amount; but now, for a little while, he let himself believe it. He held his mother’s blanket, absorbing its minty, spicy smell, its scent reminding him of the green rubbing oil she always used on minor injuries. With his eyes squeezed shut, John willed her to him, to wrap herself around him in an embrace, to remind him that she was there, alive, waiting as she always seemed to be. The past few years, after the parties and drinks were done with, and after he got his degree in graphic design and found a career in Texas—all of that seemed unimportant, insignificant. Through it all, he barely remembered her being there, a ghost while she still lived. What had she done in her spare time? What was her life like in Vietnam? What made her laugh, made her happy? He had simply never bothered finding out, having con-

sidered her little more than a nuisance, someone he quietly suffered as he grew up and away. John huddled on his mother’s bed in her empty, lifeless apartment, and wondered what it would be like to die, and how she must have felt in her final moments. It wasn’t her dying that bothered him, but her fear. When had she known her life was over? Was it when pain coursed through her arm, and pressed against her chest? When light burst behind her eyes? When she fell to the floor, wondering where Sammy was? Sammy. Not John, not Johnny, not Johnny Five, not anyone in her family, but a boy, a stranger who took care of her more than her own blood ever had. John imagined her floating on her back, bobbing up and down in the ocean, alone, staring at the sky, at peace. But she began to sink, slowly at first, then faster, like someone was dragging her down by her ankles. She instinctively took a short, sharp breath, and threw her head back, trying to keep her nose above water. But she plummeted into the foggy, grey ocean, its mix of blues and blacks and browns swirling, covering her head. Her fingers clawed at the water around her, her eyes wide, and she whimpered and kicked. But still the ocean’s surface rose higher and higher above her, and the deeper she went, the colder she got. She was vaguely reminded of her escape from Vietnam aboard the makeshift boat that should never have made it to Malaysia. The waves at night during that terrible week towered over them, and she had clutched John, just a baby then, in a death grip refusing to part from him. But they had made it through. Perhaps the ocean was now simply collecting a debt decades overdue. She stared straight up, at the fuzzy, distorted light breaking through the surface above, and thought she should have died somewhere between Vietnam and Malaysia, that she had wasted the ensuing years gifted

to her after giving up her home, her life, and her family. The light dimmed. Down, down, down she sank, her heart pounding in her head, the beat announcing her to whatever was coming. And as her air ran out, her instincts took hold, and John’s mother stretched her arms upward, desperately trying to reach the surface, knowing she wouldn’t, until at last she resigned herself, maybe, or cursed her only son for not seeing her, now or ever. John buried his face in her blanket then, pressing hard, shaking, thinking about the things she would never do, never see, and never accomplish. She’d never visit Hawaii, or see the northern lights in Alaska, or travel the world, or remarry, or give birth to a son who would spend the time to know her, to acknowledge that she was worth knowing. Whatever her life had been was done and over, and John realized that what little he knew of it—of her—would never be enough. And he mourned for what he could not know. *** Rupert Chinn, the owner of Baker Funeral Home, was a large black man, mustachioed and white-haired. He spoke with a slow, southern drawl and a gaze that simultaneously looked weepy and reliable. His office was small, and framed photos of him with various friends and family filled the wall to his right. Behind him, sunlight filtered in through his drawn shades, warming John and Sammy. In the middle of Rupert listing the prices for burials, cremations and various types of caskets, John stopped him. “Do you do Buddhist services?” It was a wild shot. Sammy shifted next to him and gave him a strange look, but remained silent. Rupert paused. “Naw, you’d, ah…” He leaned back in his seat. “Let me see.” He stared at the bookshelf to his left, not really searching. “Ah, I remember. Vietnamese, right?”

John nodded. “You have a normal viewing and all that here, right? Most get cremated, but I don’t think it’s important one way or the other.” “Okay.” “You got to find a temple, right,” he made slow, chopping motions with his left hand and leaned in toward John and Sammy. “No, sorry, it’s a pagoda, not a temple. And, ah, let me think.” He tapped his fingers on the desk between them. “Pretty sure you got to hold a memorial service there, and the monk’ll lead it. Not a big deal, right? So, you got to go and hold a service once a week for seven weeks. About an hour. They’ll give you everything you need, I’m sure.” He gestured to his forehead. “The white bands you wear. You seen them before?” John frowned. “Guess I have to find a pagoda for her.” “I know where she went,” Sammy said quietly, nodding. “It’s this place out in Annandale. It’s just a house full of women-monks. They can’t get the permits to erect a full-blown pagoda. Government thinks they’re terrorists or something.” He shrugged, a bemused look on his face. “I don’t think they speak English though.” “Okay,” John said, grateful and jealous at the same time. They continued discussing the prices. In the end, John chose a cremation and a round, simple urn with little waves carved into its neck. As they got up so John and Sammy could see John’s mother before they started preparing her body, John paused and turned to Rupert. “You know a lot about the Vietnamese stuff,” John said. “Lot more than me.” “Well,” the older man replied. His tongue rolled around his mouth, searching for something. “The Vietnamese started coming some twenty, thirty years ago. Long time.” He nodded as if it was obvious. They stepped outside the brick building, past huge, cursive, white

letters on its side that spelled “Baker Funeral Services,” and walked down a short flight of stairs to a separate basement entrance. Rupert paused as he gripped the handle. “We got the third largest Vietnamese population in the country. This one guy told me that, and I doubt he’s lying. What’s the point, right? So we get a good amount of services for Vietnamese. You just pick up on things along the way. Don’t have to know everything, just got to know enough to get a picture of it. Enough to get by, right?” Rupert led them, single file, into the basement and down a long hallway. John followed Sammy, silent. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, and a bulletin board on the right was empty except for a few red and green thumbtacks. At the end of the hall, Rupert opened a set of double doors for them. “My mother told me once that here was just a stopping point,” John said as he stepped past Rupert and into another hallway. “Like she was going somewhere else. This wasn’t home, you know? I mean, it’s my home, sure. But maybe not for her, not ever. I don’t know.” Sammy laughed. “Yeah, sounds like her.” He shrugged. “Maybe she wanted to go somewhere else. Maybe back to Vietnam.” “We’re going this way,” Rupert said. He led them into a sterile room that resembled a laboratory. The lamp overhead cast a bright light down on John’s mother’s body, which lay on a metal table in the center of the room. A cloth covered her up to her collar, and her arms were arranged at her sides, above the cloth. John looked away. “Give you a few moments, right?” The door clicked as it shut behind Rupert, and they were alone. Sammy crossed the room and leaned against a tile wall, facing John. They stood, awkward and silent, not looking at each other, not looking at the body. John folded

his arms and stared at the floor, at the grey streaks from the rubber soles of shoes. Slowly he turned to look at his mother’s face. She looked the same as she always did, but empty, like a doll. John stared at her, his eyes traveling along the cracks and crevices of her face, the hollows of her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, and he kept expecting her skin to be smoother, the creases around her eyes, nose, and mouth to be painted on instead of actual wrinkles. He’d heard people say that the dead looked like they were asleep, but to him this wasn’t accurate. Something was missing, something that gave her mass, or depth, or weight. “She doesn’t even look real,” Sammy said, perhaps reading his thoughts. “She looks like I remember. But different. I don’t know.” John sighed. “It’s been two years.” He pulled up a stool next to the table and sat for long moments in silence, not staring at her, not staring at anything. Just staring, somewhere distant inside. “I shouldn’t have left her alone.” He could not remember a time when he hadn’t left her alone, hadn’t run from her, hadn’t struggled to be free of her presence. From the corner of his eye, he saw Sammy bow his head, misunderstanding, and John recognized in the younger man a generosity he never really acknowledged. “I don’t mean you, man. You were great, Sammy. Better than me. I should have been a better son, is all. Or any kind of a son, maybe.” “It’s fine, man. I’m going to wait outside, okay?” Sammy smiled at John, a sympathetic look, an acknowledgement that he had already said good-bye, had already in his memories the things that John would never have. He clapped John on the shoulder as he walked past. “You know, when I met her, I didn’t know she was your mom.” Sammy shook his head, his face looking suddenly young and childish. “Johnny Five’s mom. Coolest guy around. Sometimes I hoped I’d grow up to be you. But

you were always gone. Never there. And she was good, you know? I didn’t have anything, less than nothing, really, and she treated me better than anyone else had ever treated me. I don’t know what I would have done without her all these years. But you’re her son. No matter what, that doesn’t change. Take it or leave it, it doesn’t matter, you know? She loved you—how could she not? It’s still going to be there at the end of it all. Everything she did.” And then, Sammy too was gone. John stared at his mother. In front of him was her hand, cold and stale on the table. For a long time he sat there quietly, grasping at something he couldn’t quite place. Finally, he reached out and covered her hand with his own. It was tough, like old bread. He felt the knotty knuckles and little scars that adorned her skin, each one with its own story. His mother had worked her fingers hard over the years, in scalding water, through cuts and nicks and sprains. He intertwined his fingers with hers’ and blurred his eyes, pretending that they were connected, that they flowed seamlessly, mother to son, child to parent, blood to blood. Once, in art school, an instructor declared that people didn’t read letters by the shape of the letter; people didn’t identify words by the lines that skewed, stretched, or curved to create symbols. They identified words, she had said, by the space between the letters, the shape of the empty, negative space. That it was in that empty space that words took shape, that meaning was given. John hadn’t believed her, but now, for a moment, with his mother, he understood. He knew that his view of her, incomplete and consisting of only short moments, and filled with the empty, negative space of her absence, created something more, something solid, with multiple sides, and a story that only she knew. And the image he had of her was filled with that space, that sense of unknowing, and, taken with what little he did

know, drew a complete picture. She wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be who she was to him if that empty space was filled with anything else, anything at all. She was his mother. Whatever that meant, John accepted it with something he hoped was love. John quietly got up and pulled from his pocket the stack of Post-It notes that he had drawn on the plane. There were no stick figures, or violent deaths, or fights, or cartoon figures. It was filled with squiggly lines. He set it down next to her head, and flipped through it. The lines moved up and down the pages, slowly receding before rushing back. It went on and on like that, until he reached the first page, which was the last. Then he flipped it again, and imagined what it would be like to stand with his feet in the sand on a beach in Vietnam or Malaysia, and watch the water move in and out. The padâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sheets fluttered, compressing the empty area between the pages as they flipped in rapid succession, releasing a short breeze, and pushing out something that felt to him like a living breath.

Nimra is a multi-disciplinary artist and developmental therapist, based in Mississauga. She holds a BA in Psychology from McGill University. She has facilitated art workshops with children and adults with disabilities, and currently works at a special education school. Her art has been exhibited in The Fridge Door Gallery and the AnticafĂŠ in Montreal, and published in In/words, re:asian, Nuance and The Living Hyphen.

NIMRA BANDUKWALA

QURAT DAR Hope isn’t always a blinding light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes it’s more a flare of warmth in the cold. Even if it’s brief, even if it reminds you just how cold you are, it also reminds you that you can still feel something else. Originally, this work ended in a much darker place. It was what seemed like the logical conclusion. But it also felt like I’d cheated the characters. Trapped them in a cycle of suffering. I wanted them to have a fighting chance, after everything that had already happened. I wanted them to have hope.

LARA Hi Ami-na! How can I help you today? The cheerful voice always delayed the last syllable of her name, as if hesitating when its processors struggled to make sense of a name unincluded in any of its directories. Amina deliberated for a moment, the voice waiting with an unnatural silence, before she spoke. “I’d like something to eat.” Okay! How about a 3-topping pizza from MEGA Pizza for only 29.99? “No.” Amina sighed, almost wishing she had forked over the money for premium, “Not pizza.” Would you like the Double Burger menu? You’ve ordered there three times in the past week! “Thanks for the reminder,” she muttered. No problem! The voice trilled. Showing: Double Burger menu. As soon as the screen popped up about a foot from her face, Amina waved it away in irritation. Have you decided, Ami-na? “I don’t want anything,” she said finally, standing up. “Bye, LARA.” There was a moment of silence, as if the voice was in disbelief that it had been dismissed. Bye, Ami-na! Amina stood from her place on the sofa, walking into the kitchen. There was no delay in the lights turning on—the apartment anticipated her movements and acted accordingly. “Hey LARA,” she called out, “What’s in the fridge?” Hi again Ami-na! Currently there is: three eggs. One carton skim milk. And one tub of expired hummus. “Ugh. Why is that still in there?” Self-cleaning functions had been disabled by— “Turn them back on,” Amina ordered. “And remove any allowed users except me.”

Okay! This will delete one user profile. Are you sure? “Yes, I’m sure.” She started looking through the cabinets, sighing at the sight of all of the appliances she was never going to use. The food processor. The cherry red mixer. The damn pasta maker. Even the French press was still there. As if she would be in the mood to froth milk. The thought came to her to give them away, but it seemed a waste. Nobody would want them, except for a collector, maybe. There was a whirring noise and Amina knew that LARA was putting the maintenance unit, the waist-high multitasker that looked awfully like a rolling steel trash bin, back to work. It was about time too. Both of them had hated it. LARA, even more so. Probably because they both had these notions of independence and doing things yourself. It seemed absurd to think they had anything in common. Other than being gone. Amina looked at her hands and felt suddenly drained. “LARA… I’d… like to talk.” Okay. Would you like to call Blaire? “No! No. Delete that contact, please.” She managed to force out, wiping at her nose. This will remove Blaire as a contact and remove all associated data. Are you sure? “I…” Sorry, I didn’t get that. Would you like to remove Blaire as a contact? “Yes?” That was all it took. One word. Would you like to call Zeenat Auntie? Amina hesitated. Had Amma told her? She probably would have been too ashamed. Still, it wasn’t worth it. “No. I… never mind.” Suddenly she felt her wrist buzzing. You have a call from Desmond. The rising mixture of panic and anticipa-

tion died inside of her as soon as she heard the name. She tapped her watch. “… Hi.” “Hey Amina. How are you doing?” he was choosing his words carefully. “I… I’m getting by,” she offered. “Listen, I know you’re probably going through a lot right now… and I hate to be the one to ask, but… when do you think you’ll be back at work?” The prospect of being surrounded by a sea of pitying faces and unsolicited hugs hit her full force. “Oh. Uh… honestly… I don’t know.” “Okay. That’s… that’s totally fine. Just let me know, yeah?” “Yeah.” She offered, not really feeling the word coming out of her mouth. “How’s Blaire?” Something tore inside of her. “She left. We’re not—” “Shit. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” “It’s okay. It was bound to happen.” More than he could ever know. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?” “I will.” Not. “Take care, Amina.” “Bye.” Call ended. Duration: 2 minutes, 5 seconds. She sat in silence, before going back into the kitchen. The pasta maker was sitting there, staring back at her. Blaire’s pasta was beautiful. She would churn it out effortlessly, making the most symmetrical, perfectly proportionate noodles. Amina tried not to think about all of the lasagnas and ravioli and tortellini made with that beautiful pasta that she had stuffed in her face while complaining about the absurd deadlines at work or how the bullet train had been delayed, or how many nights, intoxicated with

alfredo, they had spent in a haze on the carpet, when even the thought of upstairs ceased to exist. She still hadn’t eaten. She sat on the couch again. The apartment started to sink into silence. “LARA, play the ‘Favourites’ playlist.” I’m sorry, I couldn’t find that playlist. Would you like me to search online? It must have been on Blaire’s user profile. “No. Never mind.” She went back into the kitchen and continued browsing the cupboards. The cupboard above the stove was the spice cupboard. Amina started rifling through the assorted group of jars, trying to recognize their contents. Some of them were Blaire’s – the dried oregano, the cayenne, the tall, slim pepper grinder. But towards the other side, in a series of plastic baggies and tied packets, were Amma’s. Whenever she had come over, between asking Amina if she had found a nice boy and if she was eating properly, and almost always offering some words of caution against ‘all of these fancy gadgets,’ she would cook. If Blaire was the paragon of precision in her cooking, Amma was the opposite. She would come up the steps with a few mismatched plastic bags, trundling in and handing them to Amina with a huff and throwing her shawl over her shoulder. Invariably she would comment on how the place looked terrible and the ‘robots’ were an absurd waste of money, especially ‘the LARA thing.’ If she was so unfortunate as to have to hear LARA saying something, she would be jumpy for the rest of her visit, muttering about it just loud enough that Amina could hear. Amma brought food with her—a series of yogurt tubs with indiscernible labels, which would go into the freezer. Usually there was a tub of daal, maybe one with either chicken corn or hot and sour soup (Amma didn’t see

why anyone could ever want any different kind), and at least a few different curries. But she would also bring something to cook in Amina’s kitchen, maybe in the hopes of inspiring some domesticity in her ‘careerobsessed’ daughter. Sometimes it was a bag of synth meat, other times an entire cauliflower, or zucchinis. Over the course of her visits she had amassed her own spice collection in Amina’s kitchen, probably disappointed to see each time that it was always exactly as she’d left it. She would get Amina chopping or peeling something, reprimanding her for ‘taking off half of the potato with the peel’, and would get something started on the stove. “Almost every curry starts with ginger, garlic, and some tomatoes.” Amma would try and offer helpful tidbits as she cooked, haphazardly tossing things into pots. The very idea of a measuring cup seemed laughable. Amina wished she had written them down. Within a few minutes, the kitchen would start to smell like her childhood, of days of looking up at the stove before she was tall enough to look down at it. Some of the spices stopped being nameless powders, but the process in of itself was still a mystery. Watching Amma cook was like looking out one of the giant tinted windows on the bullet train—even if you promised yourself you would spot the Helix on the skyline or remember where that promising Chinese place was, the scenery would become a blur, and you would find yourself at your destination, looking at a pot of mutton curry that materialized from nowhere. Her food tasted different. You could tell she’d made it. Even if Zeenat Auntie brought something over, it seemed like nothing more than a poor imitation. Amina felt herself wondering how many lamb curries she’d given up, how many oppor-

tunities to decipher how Amma managed to summon it from a pot with nothing more than synth meat and a number of powders thrown into it. “Amina, I can cook for you, I can tidy things up…why do you need all these robots? They haven’t raised a daughter.” That had been one of many iterations. While Amina felt something hot like shame flare in her chest every time she said no, the thought seemed unbearable. She couldn’t go back to the pretending. The bitterness, the double meanings in everything. The ‘work friend’s and ‘not my place’s. Sneaking around in her own apartment. Having to explain the situation all over again. Amma didn’t appreciate Blaire moving in. She made no secret of feeling betrayed, of being shocked that Amina would choose a stranger over her own mother. Who cared about the rent? Did she even know what kind of a girl was moving into her home? Blaire didn’t appreciate Amma coming over. She had tried to keep an open mind (which seemed terribly ironic), but Amma’s bitterness at being snubbed always seemed to come through. That, and having to recite the story about being Amina’s old classmate, of pretending to live in the guestroom, worrying every time the bell rang, took its toll. Amina had to try and appease both parties, knowing full well what it would come to. She tried to convince herself that she could keep things that way, that she could jump back and forth between lives, between gnocchi and lamb curry without any consequence. She got her ultimatum. “Tell her, or I leave.” It was bound to happen. She told her. Standing in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, her mouth was forming words but it felt like someone else was saying them, someone else was watching the wooden

spoon fall, droplets of curry spattering the floor. Someone else was seeing Amma cover her mouth, seeing her face contort like it would after one of Baba’s worse moods. Someone else made her cry. Amma left without a word. Amina called after her, but she couldn’t find it in herself to follow her past the threshold. The curry burned. When Blaire came home, she didn’t try to say anything. She cleaned up the kitchen and ordered takeout. Amina had shut herself in the guestroom. Someone else was pacing, then lying in the bed (the one she hadn’t poisoned), and ruining the pillows. Blaire would knock every few hours and leave something to eat at the door. It almost began to look like a shrine, a collection of peace offerings to a mourning Persephone. LARA wouldn’t shut up about reminding her to eat, so she turned off her watch and threw it under the bed. When she emerged, a day and a half later, Blaire hadn’t come home yet. Amina went into the bathroom, stripped the clothes that had started to feel like a second skin, and sat in the tub, turning on the shower and letting the hot, almost-scalding water run over her. She plugged the drain and felt the water rising to midway up her calves, then to her knees. The shower automatically turned off when the water was within a few inches of the top of the tub. She lowered herself further into the tub, feeling the water climbing up her neck, climbing over her chin and dirty mouth, filling her nostrils and burning against her eyelids. The water started to feel heavy, like it was squeezing the shrinking bubbles out of her chest. Then it started to feel light. Maybe it would have felt like nothing at all, if the water level didn’t automatically drop a few inches

until she was gasping in air, feeling cold. “LARA, soap in the tub please.” Hi Ami-na! Welcome back! Dispensing: soap. Amina watched the soap being shot into the water from the sides of the tub, and the water turning into foam and suds as the whirlpool turned on. Welcome back. Ami-na, you haven’t eaten yet! Would you like to order something? She was still looking in the spice cabinet. She closed it. “Turn off health reminders, LARA.” Are you sure? This will turn off health reminders. “Yes.” Okay. Health reminders are off. What she wouldn’t give to taste Amma’s curry again. The last few yogurt tubs had been precious. Amina had tried her best to make them last as long as she possibly could. Even a bite or two would take her back, to looking up at the stove and at Amma. Blaire knew better than to touch them. Amina had thought about calling, mainly at Blaire’s insistence, but as soon as she remembered Amma stepping over the threshold, hiding her face in her shawl, she knew she couldn’t do it. In one day short of a month, she really couldn’t. She didn’t even go to the funeral. The possibility of a confrontation, however small, was too much to stomach. Everything died with Amma. Amina didn’t leave the apartment. Rarely answered the door, let alone the phone. Blaire tried. Urged her to take a break, get away, get help, open up. All the things you’re meant to say. More. Her mouth, the mouth that knew her too well, was moving, forming words, but Amina could hardly hear them. She apologized, even though it was Amina that was wrong, Amina that had ruined everything.

She was still madly in love but could hardly stand the sight of her. She was just as much a reminder as the empty yogurt containers Amina hadn’t been able to throw out. She tried longer than anyone else would have. But everything had died. Amina was back on the couch. After the bed in the guestroom, it was probably where she had been spending the most time. She heard something moving upstairs, and it took her a moment to realize it was the maintenance unit. “LARA, where are you cleaning?” she asked, getting to her feet and running upstairs. Currently I am cleaning: the master bedroom. “Stop!” Amina managed, running into the room just as the maintenance unit hesitated mid-dusting the dresser. She pushed it aside, almost knocking it over, and sat on the bed. The sheets hadn’t been changed. She ran her hands over the dip in the mattress before lying down. She didn’t want to move. The sheets were cold. She tried to convince herself that they weren’t, that they still smelled like Blaire, but it wasn’t working. “LARA.” Forcing herself to speak, to have to hear her own voice in a quiet house, was maddening. How can I help you Ami-na? “Call…” Who would you like me to call? “I… Blaire.” She didn’t know how she’d managed to say it, what momentary combination of strength and desperation had put the name in her mouth. I’m sorry, I couldn’t find a contact named Blaire. Would you like to try again? It was gone. LARA wasn’t particularly patient. Didn’t let her grieve. Would you like to search your contacts?

The screen appeared, and Amina barely lifted a hand to wave it away. Calling Zeenat Auntie. “What?” She sat up suddenly, slowly coming to the realization that she must have selected her by accident, and struggled to form words. “Wait, cancel…um, end—” There had only been one ring before she picked up. “Amina! I’ve been so worried!” “Assalamualaikum Auntie.” She managed, trying not to grit her teeth in exasperation. “None of that now.” She scolded, “It’s been months! I tried to call, I came to your door! Explain yourself!” “I’m sorry Auntie, I was just… after Amma…” she tried to keep the emotion out of her voice. “Now, now, beta, don’t cry.” She soothed, “These things happen. She lived a long and good life, and now she’s finally got time to rest.” “But I… I was such a terrible daughter.” Amina choked, feeling herself start to cry after all. “We’re all terrible children, Amina. And we’re all terrible parents. That’s the way the world is. It doesn’t mean she loved you any less.” “I… but I hurt her, Auntie. I hurt her.” She blurted out, “Really badly.” “I’m sure she hurt you too.” Amina couldn’t argue with that. “I just… I feel like it’s my fault.” She admitted, sighing, “Like I killed her.” “Amina.” Zeenat chastised, “I don’t want to hear any of that nonsense. She lived for you. You know that, right?” She was silent. Zeenat Auntie continued. “Your mother couldn’t stop talking about you since the day you were born. You gave her that. Someone to talk about, someone to take care of. A reason.” “Thank you, Auntie.” Amina mumbled, sobered. Remembering her reason, feeling it blooming unexpectedly in her chest.

“Now, have you been eating?” Amina wiped at her face, trying not to laugh. “Can you teach me how to make Amma’s mutton curry?” “No. But you can learn to make your own.”

MONICA NATHAN In some of my darkest moments, I knew hope as the precursor to despair—an insidious parasite in the brain, swelling expectations and amplifying disappointment. In these times, the word “hope,” uttered by the well intentioned, sounded insincere or hollow, like the beginnings of a platitude. There was fear in hoping. I recoiled from it, trying to protect myself from the inevitabilities of reality. If I could strip away hope, I reasoned, the disappointment might not be as painful. Even as I attempted to strangle hope from my life completely, however, it would sneak up on me time and again, sometimes only making itself known when I felt its loss. I wish I could say there was a sudden moment of insight that made me realize the value of hope, but it was the passage of time that gave me perspective. When the bitterness subsided, when I was finally able to take a step back, I found that hope had worth after all.

For me, hope serves as a personal compass, boldly pointing to my deepest desires, even as I shy away from them. It may seem obvious to some – of course one hopes for what one wants, but it had been a long time since I had the self-awareness to revisit my aspirations and find the courage to go after them. What seemed especially incredible to me is that hope persisted whether I wanted it to or not. As hope preceded sorrow, so did sorrow precede hope. A Meeting of Faith explores this notion— that hope is inherent in all of us. Regardless of whether one wants to feel it, a small nugget of hope remains, even in (and maybe especially in) the most trying of situations. It was human connection that helped my hope flourish and gave it meaning. I wrote this story with this sentiment in mine - that fragile, burgeoning hope can be fuelled by the closest of family and the most random of strangers, people who have their own hopes to contend with.

A MEETING OF FAITH Sundays were for chores, as was commanded by my father. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” he would say, and expected I complete my tasks as if my salvation depended on it. My responsibilities included dusting every surface in the house, picture frames filled with unfamiliar relatives, side tables littered with trinkets, and even an old crib that momentarily took up space in the guest room. Once I moved the dust down to the wall-to-wall carpeting, I wrestled with the slippery tubes of the vacuum cleaner, carrying it from the basement to the top floor. Long isosceles triangles would appear in the short weave as I pushed and pulled the vacuum’s bulky head from the perimeter of each room to its doorway. One Sunday, as I worked to restore the triangular patterns in the living room after a week’s worth of foot traffic, I heard the doorbell ring. I threw off the vacuum chord snaking around my neck and opened the door to two men, looking perversely happy standing at our doorstep. There was an older man, with lines on his forehead and craters in his cheeks, wearing a collared shirt, a tie, and a pair of dark trousers that were slightly worn over the knees. White, wispy hair lifted slightly from his head when I opened the door. An attractive young man stood next to him, also formally dressed. He had an eager expression that invited both friendship and ridicule. “Hello, are you parents home?” the younger one asked. My father came up behind me, a dew of sweat on his face. He had on an old undershirt, holes forming in the thinning material, baggy, paint marked jeans hanging around his waist. In the delegation of chores, my father would have preferred a supervisory role, but labour was scarce in our home of three and he was regularly obliged to maintain the yard and the house. Most recently, he had taken to disappearing to the basement where he had set up a makeshift workshop. “Hello. How can I help you?” he asked the two men.

“Sir, we have some good news to share with you,” the younger man said. “The bible tells us that God wants people to enjoy life on earth and that he created it and everything on it because he loves us. Is that something you might be interested in hearing more about?” I waited expectantly for the brusque rejection my father reserved for people who came around converting, but he remained silent for an uncomfortable length of time. I watched as the younger man shifted his weight from one foot to the other looking back and forth between my father and his unruffled companion. “Okay,” my father said eventually, “Yes, please come in.” The men introduced themselves as Martin, the older, and David, the younger. My father asked that they call him Mr. Sen and invited them into the living room. I watched as their feet indented the freshly vacuumed carpet like footprints on fresh snow. Our living room couches, five years old, were still encased in their original plastic and our guests slipped clumsily into a seating position. I followed them into the living room, ostensibly to collect the vacuum cleaner, and made myself as small as possible to observe the proceedings. It wasn’t often that I saw two white men sitting in my house. “The world, as you must know, is in a constant state of suffering,” David said, “but God will bring an end to this suffering and the current cycle of death.” He took out a thick black book from his satchel. “You are speaking of moksha?” my father asked before David could open his book. “Sir?” David said. “Moksha,” my father repeated. “In Hinduism, we believe that you are reincarnated again and again. Then, you break the cycle and re-join God.”

Our guests gawked at my father. “Well, the word of God tells us that delivery from sin and death can only be achieved through baptism and lifestyle changes,” David said, collecting himself. “I don’t know about this baptism,” my father said, “but yes, one must live a good life to build up karma.” Martin fell into a fit of coughing then, an ugly, hacking, spitting type of cough that overwhelmed his small handkerchief. His exhales took on a sharp, barking quality, and his inhales turned into long wheezes. “Water. Quickly,” my father said to me. I ran to the kitchen to find a glass, and saw my mother, standing silently at the counter top, staring at the backsplash with a blank look on her face. It used to be that her laugh filled up the kitchen. Her lilting voice would flow down the mouthpiece of the phone, its coiled line pulled taunt between the wall and her head as she sliced food with a staccato rhythm. Now, when she did go through the motions of preparing food, I would hear her blade meet the chopping board with the slow and deliberate sounds of a death march. Racing back to the living room, I handed Martin a large glass of water. He choked on the first few sips, spitting up on his trousers, but with slow determination he managed to swallow the entire contents of the glass. Breathing more normally, he thanked me for the water and leaned back into the couch. I resumed my fiddling with the vacuum, anticipating a dismissal. “Apologies, Mr. Sen,” Martin said in a low and corroded voice, “please let us continue.” He paused for a moment while he patted down the hair on top of his head, “Do you believe in the bible, Mr. Sen?” “The bible? Very nice book, indeed. But very new, relatively speaking,” my father said, leaning back and interlacing his fingers over his

paunch, “Have you looked into Hinduism? I think it can help you on your quest for peace. We have very many positive and life changing things in our religion. But best of all, it is very easy to join. Only practice the Hindu lifestyle, and you are a Hindu. Very easy.” David squirmed in his seat, the plastic creaking under his movements. “Sir, we believe the Bible is the word of God,” he said, “The bible tells us, ‘I, Jehovah, am your God, the One teaching you to benefit yourself, the One guiding you in the way you should walk.’” “But what makes you think it is correct?” my father asked. Martin placed a hand on David’s knee and gave my father a conciliatory smile. “The bible has taught us things about this world well before it was ever proven by science. It predicted that the earth was a sphere, centuries before astronomers proposed it. It prophesized real world events like the conquering and ruin of Babylon. And many other events that are detailed in the bible have later been found to be accurate accounts.” “I don’t think a history book should dictate the way you live your life,” my father said, “Your actions and behaviours should not depend on whether a book’s claims can be proved true as though it is some kind of science experiment.” My father rose purposefully from the couch, the plastic making a squelching sound where it came away from his bare arms, and walked over to the bookcase in the living room. Head bent, he perused the titles on the shelf and pulled out a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. “This book tells of a great conversation between Shree Krishna and Arjuna. It does not matter if it can be proved true, or whether you believe it. It is a code of conduct for how you should live your life with wisdom and purpose for the benefit of all.” “I think it’s best we leave, Mr. Sen,” David

said, standing up. His face had turned pink and small pools of spittle had accumulated in the corners of his mouth. “We won’t take up anymore of your time. If you ever want to learn more about the true word of God, please get in touch.” Martin stood up as well and gave my father a measuring look. Reaching into his satchel, he pulled out a thin magazine, and held it out to my father. “May I leave this with you and perhaps schedule a time to come back and discuss it with you? It can contextualize our teachings and make it simple for people to understand the message of God.” “Simple is good,” my father said, taking the magazine. He turned to me again. “Go get your Mahabharata.” I ran upstairs to retrieve the only version of the Mahabharata I had in my possession, a tattered comic book from the popular Amar Chitra Katha series, which packaged Indian mythology into bite sized bedtime stories. I gave it to my father, who in turn, handed it to Martin. “I will agree to read your book,” my father said, “if you give me your word that you will also read mine.” Martin took in the illustrations and dialogue bubbles typical of a children’s comic strip and let out a raspy laugh. Shaking hands with my father, he promised to be in touch. Martin came back the next Sunday, alone this time, and sat with my father in the living room. I went down to the basement to grab the old undershirt my father had worn the previous week, now resurrected as a dust rag. In my haste to return to the living room, I barely registered the old crib, picked apart, and lying in pieces in a corner of the basement. Instead, I focused on securing a strategic position in the adjacent dining room, and rag in hand, I made haphazard swipes at the furniture while keeping an ear on the conversation in the next room.

“Your Krishna is very much like my Jesus,” Martin began after they had exchanged pleasantries. “Your Jesus is very much like my Krishna,” my father said with a smile. ”Yes. Both born to this world through divine means, both raised the dead, and both very preachy.” They laughed together, and I drank it in, only then realizing how thirsty I had been. Over the next several Sundays, my father and Martin built a steady friendship. I overheard them loudly debating the merits of material attachment and praising each other for their shared outlook on forgiveness and self-control. Martin quoted bible passages, and my father echoed them or countered them through Hindu mantras and philosophies. There were some conversations that challenged my eavesdropping abilities. I would walk by the living room doorway to discover my father and Martin speaking in hushed tones, their heads almost pressed together. As my mother grew accustomed to Martin’s regular visits, she summoned some of her old energy to make him homemade turmeric milk or yashtimadhu tea with liquorice root and honey to ease his coughing. She would join their little congregation, at intervals, listening and refereeing. During one of Martin’s visits, I stood in awe of the spectacle in my living room. My mother, father, and Martin were lying on their backs, arms spread out wide, creating snow angels on the carpet and obliterating all evidence of my labour. My mother later told me she had been showing Martin a breathing exercise to help his airflow, describing the awkwardness of lying next to another man with a playful smile. The last time Martin came over, he and my father held their weekly meeting in the basement. The sounds of hammering and scraping and Martin’s coughing punctuated the relative quiet on the main floor.

As evening approached, my father called for me to bring my mother outside. We came out to see the old crib hanging from the rafters of the porch, thick rope running from the joists to the base of the crib, suspending the frame four feet in the air. The curved guardrail formed an elegant back, the front rail removed to create a bench-like structure. A fresh coat of white paint glowed against the dark brick of our house. My father gave it a tap and I watched in delight as it swung back and forth like a pendulum. My mother let out a hoarse cry and buried her face in my father’s shoulder and I stood there awkwardly, caught between sorrow and joy. Martin looked like a cracked eggshell, with a grin splitting his face and a head now deprived of its wispy hair. I marvelled at how quickly he had aged in the few months I knew him, and how quickly that age melted away as he bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. My mother lifted her head from my father’s shoulder, took my hand and sat down on the porch swing. She motioned for Martin and my father to join us and we all crowded on and held each other as we swayed in the breeze.

NIMRA BANDUKWALA 42

What interests me is the relationships between the tangible and intangible. Rather than distinguishing and separating, as tools such as language constantly do, I hope to add a softness with my art, a possibility, a sense that everything is inextricably connected to everything else. My art attempts to deconstruct the hierarchy between the “human” and the “natural.” Learning about the intelligence within natural systems has brought greater lucidity in understanding human systems. This mystery, perfection, and awe of organisms ranging from microorganisms and plants, to the brain and mind, can be found in my work. I work primarily with oil paint. As one of the slowest drying mediums, that is built up in layers, it adds a third dimension to a two-dimensional piece, time.

Having ideas is great. Putting them into brushstrokes or words is... a nightmare. Could the new idea work better? Or should I stick to the initial concept? What if I tried this instead? There are way too many choices when creating anything, and I’ve found that being too stubborn in sticking to “The Original Plan” can create a rift between me and my work. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? Like, suddenly your inspiration wanes, your motivation is nowhere to be found, and you’re stuck with a work-in-progress that you might not look at again, or come back to think you can salvage it. It sucks.

But lately I’ve started embracing the new ideas and bits of inspiration, and I’ve let them shape and mold my stories and art more and more. The outcome is something that might be messy and unfocused, but at least there’s something I can whittle down, edit, and perfect. This is one of the reasons why KROS Magazine’s themes are so broad. We never want our theme to feel suffocating or limiting, but we do want each issue to have an underlying thread that strings together all of the pieces inside it. But if your first idea doesn’t work, or changes midway, go along with it! We never know where our art will take us, if we just let it.

ISSUE III: TIME DEADLINE: OCTOBER 30TH