as if I was a stray family member recently picked up for the ride.
That’s not a reflection on Sattik and Erica, mind you. They’re wonderfully welcoming, as is Erica’s family. It’s a reflection of how unsettled I felt in my parents’ absence, even recognizing how unhappy I felt when they were there. In my twenties, I never celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas. I tolerated them.
Sattik’s approach to the relationship with Atish and Sima was the opposite of mine, even as he too drifted from Bishakha. He correctly recognized that they could be grandparent-like figures to his children, Tessa and Braden (then seven and four years old), and he made the effort to stay close to them even as he fell out with each of our parents. It’s been important for Sattik, he told me, to re-create the experiences we had on our Toronto visits and pass them on to his children.
So there I was, after all these years, cramped on a couch with Atish and Sima, catching up around Christmas. In recent years, Atish, Sima, and Sagnik had begun making the trek down to New Jersey around the holidays.
When I walked into Sattik’s house, a thirty-minute drive from my mother’s apartment, I heard the familiar “HEY SHAMBO!” of my childhood. I touched Atish and Sima’s feet and introduced them to Wesley.
Part of Erica’s family is Italian, which means a traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. It is easily my favorite part of the holidays: an opportunity to pig out on linguini with clams, crab cakes, fried fish, homemade lobster bisque, and whatever else. After dinner, Wesley and I quickly found ourselves in the living room so we could digest, along with my aunt and uncle. Sattik and Erica worked in the kitchen while Tessa and Braden sat near us on the floor, playing with L.O.L. dolls and Legos, desperately hoping a wayward adult would wander by to play with them. Everything had come full circle. Just as Sattik, Sagnik, and I had played on the living room floor at the feet of Atish and Sima when we were children, there were Tessa and Braden doing the same decades later. We had passed the living room torch from one generation to the next.
Atish and Sima were characteristically warm toward me, even though it had been a while since we had spoken at length. I told Atish, as we settled onto the couch, how difficult some of the recent conversations had been with Shyamal and Bishakha.
“They’re different now,” I said. “They’re older and I think regretful.”
Atish, now in his midsixties, seemed mournful in thinking about his own relationship, or lack thereof, with Bishakha.
“I hope so. You know that’s how it should be. At some point in life, as long as you realize that, you know, we are all human beings, Shambo,” Atish said. “I could get mad. I could get sad. We get mad. We get happy or whatever. That’s how we are as human beings. And when we are mad, we say things and we do things which we regret later—but that’s the key. We should not do this thing, but we should regret it and say sorry for it.”
He seemed to be convincing himself of this as much as he was telling me.
“Shambo, the thing is that if you do not have peace at home, you can work hard or whatever, but you’ve got to have someone to come back to,” Atish said. “You remember I used to watch my favorite television show, Cheers? And there was that song called—”
“You want to go where everybody knows your name, yeah,” I interrupted.
“So this is the thing. Where you are comfortable, where you feel good: That’s the thing that you guys didn’t have. Like if I’m away, as soon as I get out of home, let’s say fifteen minutes, I get a phone call. ‘Where are you?’” Atish said, looking at Sima, his wife of more than thirty years. “Sometimes I get mad. She always worries about me. But that’s the thing: I know inside that I’m wanted. That someone is missing me. Someone wants me home. So that’s the thing: You have to have love in your life.”
Atish had learned how to love properly, despite growing up in the same environment as Bishakha. Atish loved Sima, and vice versa. They both cared deeply about Sagnik. And Sattik and me. It was in their nature.
But as warmly as I felt toward Atish, I had some growing resentment about the situation