Aerogrammes and Other Stories - By Tania James Page 0,16

bars. Henry flinched but didn’t let go until Ben whacked the bars again, harder this time. Shrieking, Henry scrabbled across the cage to the farthest wall. “Wait,” Neneh said, almost to herself, and before she realized what she was doing, she had sprung up and wrenched the broomstick from Ben’s hands.

“What the hell,” he began to say, but stopped short, silenced by her wild, rage-reddened face.

“Leave him alone,” she said hoarsely, in a low, raw voice, as if she’d been shouting for days, years. Ben stood there, staring. “Just leave us the fuck alone!”

Ben backed away, palms raised. “Okay. I’m leaving.”

Dropping the broom, she fell to her knees by the cage and reached her arm through the bars, calling to Henry, coaxing, begging even. No matter how she beckoned, Henry would not come. He had turned away from her, a watery blur of black, and all she could do was trace the air with her finger, the question mark curve of his spine.

Somewhere, behind her, Ben was muttering into his walkie-talkie. She knew they wouldn’t let her return. She wrapped her hands around the bars and held fast to the only thing that could keep her intact, the remembrance of last night’s dream, wherein Henry was being chased by the hunter. Neneh had thrown herself between Henry and the barrel of the hunter’s gun, but she felt no pain as the bullet entered her, only an electric tide that swept through her body. This was death—a last, luminous surge. The hunter was gone, but her death was prolonged, painless, as Henry crouched beside her. And though he could not talk, they were communicating in a wordless language all their own, and he was thanking her, he was telling her that he loved her, he was promising her that she was not alone.

The Gulf

• • •

In later years I will come to avoid him, but for now, I am eight years old, and the man everyone says is my father is sitting in the living room. I watch him, discreetly, from the doorway. He is wearing my mother’s baby-blue robe and matching slippers whose seams are pulling apart around his big toe. He arrived the week before with three Air India tags on his single suitcase, looking little like the man in the photograph my mother kept tucked against Psalm 23 of her Bible. In the photo, he was leaning against a coconut tree, an inch of ash on the end of his cigarette.

This was the father I thought we would collect from the airport a week ago. On the morning of his arrival, my mother slipped into her churchgoing heels and dusted her face with Chantilly instead of talcum powder. The Chantilly came in a round pink case as wide as my mother’s hand, and inside was a satin pillow that smelled like the type of lady I was almost sure I would someday become. She looked perfect all the way to the airport, until she parked the car and applied a rash of blush to each cheek. “Is it too much?” she asked me, and for the first time in my life, I pitied my mother enough to lie and say no.

“Don’t ask him about Dubai,” she said. She clapped her compact shut.

But what else would I ask him about? For the past four years my father had been working in the Gulf under a man we called The Sheikh. To me, The Sheikh was a villain robed in black who kept dragging out the work contract by withholding my father’s passport. I pictured my father pleading with The Sheikh for a brief vacation, just to spend a few days with my mother and me. I pictured The Sheikh, petting his beard, shaking his head no.

My mother and I were living in Trivandrum when my father left to find work in Dubai, before I could form a memory of him. My friends with fathers didn’t treat me differently until the school talent program or my Holy Communion, which all the fathers attended but mine, and suddenly I wasn’t myself anymore. I was his absence. Even in my new white veil and black patent shoes, I was the dented suitcase he had left behind, the one with no wheels.

As I grew older, my father remained ageless, preserved by prayers and photos handled only around the edges, and stories whispered by my cousins on rain-battered nights. They said it happened all the time, the men and women who left for the