shores

when my nana ran away from home a year ago, my nani had befriended an officer at the police station. he visited home today as he was in the neighbourhood.

he belonged to our caste, mukayar, the arabian sea’s favourite fishermen. when my nani comes into my room to tell me he has come home, she also mentions this, her eyes lighting up. i imagine her, desperate to find her missing husband, entering a police station full of upper-caste men, & the relief of finding a mukayan there. he says later in the evening, “mother says people like us aren't built to be police officers. it hardens our hearts.”

he talks about his mother a lot. my nani asks a lot. he says she's been detached from the family since his father died. her emotional primary now is one of those devotional cult setups. she's also an active multi-level marketing type, he says, substantiating her emotional independence with financial independence. “her bank balance is hers obviously” he adds, “we have no right to that.” but the detachment hurts.

i think of my dad instinctively whenever i hear the word detachment. & then of buddha. i imagine how everyone in my family would react to the person closest to them dying. dementia, delusion, despair, i play out the permutations parallel to the conversation happening. my heart feels heavy. i wonder if i’m detached in the moment. i hear him ask my nani if she's a psychiatrist to ask so many questions. i panic for a moment sensing his defenses but she laughs it off easily. he seemed to need the talk anyway, i think. when he leaves, she hands him a copy of the book she published with the help of her writers’ collective a few years ago. it's a collection of short stories she wrote weaving together memory and fiction. set on the shores she grew up on, the same shores his mother grew up on, the same shores we were having this conversation on.

taking the book in his hands, the words tumble out of him, seemingly from nowhere: “it's impossible to ever say who is right or wrong, who is to blame.” for a moment there, i think he forgives his mother.

he had said earlier that she only studied to the tenth grade and she often blamed her parents for not putting her through more schooling. my nani said her parents also only paid for her education till the twelfth grade. she married my nana and moved to delhi after. she completed the rest of her education there. it was a different time, she says. nobody even knew what an education could do. there is no point in her still resenting her parents for it. she repeats this point again when he says the thing about right & wrong & blame while leaving. to blame is to resent, i gather, between the lines. there is no point in holding resentment in your heart, she repeats the way she has to me so many times before. “it's a weight”, she says.

“very nietzschean”, i think. i don't know if i agree. my heart feels heavy.

he misinterprets the whole thing though. “yes, of course, there are some people like that. who act with that criminal mentality” he says. he's talking about revenge, i gather, between the lines. he assumes people who hold resentment in their heart are the few bad people who do bad things. that my nani was giving an exception to his statement about no one being right or wrong.

it hardens our hearts- i remember.

but my nani was simply using no one being right or wrong as the reason for why we can't hold onto any resentment. he opens the door to leave while saying this though, & the misunderstanding dissolves into the ether.

we all hold resentment in our hearts. what my nani says about letting go isn't a moral obligation, but an inevitability. she finds herself returning to this fact over & over in life. that we let go of what we simply can't carry anymore.

somewhere, a woman washes ashore a modern god’s human feet. somewhere, her son buys fish to bring back to our house. in an hour, i find myself at the beach, following the waves until my heart quietens. my nani, at home, watching her husband in front of the tv. her thoughts crash onto the shore of her own mind.