The Weight of Water

When Zara cries she can make it rain. Her tears are like acid, scoring down the world, cleansing it of sorrow and anger and frustration. Even after they dry her tear stains run like furrows of scorched earth, leaving their mark. Her mark. Forever.

But Zara does not cry angry tears. So she will not learn of their potency. Instead, she is staring, outwardly calm, at the airport official who is staring back at her with an expression as if she is stupid. As if she was the one who had messed up.

“Where is…he?” She cannot bring herself to say ‘it.’

“Lost,” the man says confidently.

“Lost? What do you mean lost? It’s not like he’s a suitcase. How can you have lost him?” She is speaking quietly, in an oddly polite tone. However, the twenty-hour journey, on top of the emotional turmoil of the past week is making her faint.

“Madam, you sit there and we will inform you as soon as we find out. As soon as.” The man is looking at her with some compassion now as she sways on her feet. He had finished reading the claim forms she had handed him. For a few long moments she stares at him, as if she is frozen. The man shifts uncomfortably, not sure she is not going to make a scene.

“Madam please. Please sit down,” he begs desperately, looking at the other rumple haired, tired travelers waiting in the arrivals area of the airport. They are looking at Zara and the man, trying but not succeeding in curbing their curiosity. Zara has been standing at the counter, her suitcases beside her, for over an hour.

Zara cannot believe they have lost her father. Or rather his body. He…it was supposed to be on the plane with her. She had verified that on the first leg of the journey, from JFK to Schipol. But somewhere between Amsterdam and New Delhi, the coffin had disappeared, as if it…he… were a lost piece of luggage.

She sits down in one of the molded plastic chairs, impaling with her eyes, the man behind the counter. She needs to sit down. Her legs are shaking with tiredness and nerves.

Just eight days ago, her father had died in his sleep, of a massive heart attack. Just seven days ago she had uncovered secrets that he had hidden too well. She had not imagined the look of pity on the lawyer’s face as he had read the will to her.

Her mother had not died when she was three. The woman, Alice, who had died when Zara was three, had not been her mother, but her father’s second wife. No wonder, try as she did, Zara had never been able to find any resemblance between the pale, blue-eyed, faded woman in the photographs and her own olive-skinned, dark-haired self.

“Strong Indian genes,” her father would say if she ever brought up this fact.
Zara had also discovered that Manzoor Alam had never converted his green card to an American citizenship even though he had lived in the country for over thirty years. He had never severed that one tie though he had fled his small town Indian roots, abandoning his pregnant wife, Rubina, and taking Zara with him. These are the bare bones, just the facts in the will, but Zara wonders if he had lied to his wife…her mother? Had he told her he would send for her and the baby as soon as he was settled in America? Had he ever wondered about his other child, her sibling?

Had he come to America with the best of intentions but then just fallen in love with Alice? Or had the new freedom of lost ties intoxicated him and had he had taken the easy way out to get a green card?

Why do the dead have so much power over the living? Why do their dying wishes have to be fulfilled? Why must the living put their lives on hold to cater to the whims of the dead?

Why had her father, after thirty years of being away from India, demand in his will that he be buried there? He wanted to be buried between his parents who were interred in a little Muslim cemetery in Allahabad. He wanted Zara to travel with his body and ensure that this was done. He wanted his son and his wife, Rubina to be there with Zara.

The lawyer had made arrangements for the burial. Her father had left him the contact information for his Manzoor’s wife and other child. Zara still cannot bring herself to call them her mother and brother. She cannot even bring herself to anger. Despite her grief, confusion and fear, she feels no anger. She feels placid, like a pool of stagnant water.

“Women are like water,” her father used to say, “they are gentle and patient and they take the shape of whatever situation into which they are poured.”
Any time he would see her anger begin to surface he would tell her that and Zara would subside. It was unseemly for nice girls to be angry and even more unseemly to let others know of that anger.

So Zara would fantasize about her angry tears that could change the course of events. They would burn like cleansing fire within her and clear out, in one rush, all the dusty secrets of her life. For she had been aware even then that there were secrets. Something in the way her father would talk, the distant look in his eyes sometimes, the things he would say, the sad, wraith-like pictures of Alice.

Alice, who always looked somewhere out of the frame of every picture, as if she were looking for someone, for something, Alice who seemed lost herself. In one photograph, Alice holds a smiling Zara on her lap, her arms clasped around the baby, her eyes anxiously looking towards the right, as if searching for a way out. In another, Alice, in a simple white dress but no veil, clasps Manzoor’s hand tightly as they pose on the steps of some courthouse. Manzoor is smiling confidently, young and handsome, while Alice, her profile sharp and distinct, stares at him. Almost as he would disappear from her.

Almost as if he was not hers at all, as if he were on loan. And now, apparently, even though they were legally married on paper, it turns out Alice was never truly her father’s wife at all. She was a second wife, not knowing a first existed but not unaware of some shadowy hold on her husband.

Zara is feeling faint now. The long flights, the plastic food she had been unable to eat, the questions and scenarios tumbling over each other in her head and the struggle not to dishonor her father or his memory. Trying to do this thing he had asked her to do. This one last thing. So she refuses to feel anger at his deceit, anger at not knowing her own mother, her own brother, her roots, anger for Alice. Anger. But women are like water. She loves her father still and she cannot reconcile her feelings about the events of the past week.

She feels as if she is drowning. Water is flowing up her nose, burning down her lungs, stinging her eyes. It surrounds her from all sides. Women are like water. They are life giving, gentle and patient. They adapt.

Zara stares at the man behind the counter, watching him make phone calls. He sips tea from a chipped, thick porcelain cup. A few other people in airline uniform walk up to him. They talk and then they turn to look at her appraisingly.

After an hour has passed one of them brings over a cup of tea to her.
“Chai…I mean tea?” The woman is slight, fiddling with her walkie-talkie. Her nails are polished a dark red.

“Yes, thank you. Thank you very much.”

“You are traveling alone…with the…with the…I mean, your father?” Her name tag reads, S. Raghav.

Zara clears her throat. “Yes.”

S. Raghav sits down. “Can I call anyone for you? Any relatives? Anyone?”
Zara is not sure what or how much to tell this woman who is looking at her so directly. She wonders if S. Raghav is like water. She opens her mouth almost ready to ask her, then closes up again.

“I think I have some relatives outside. A…a…Rubina Alam and Shahbaz Alam. They have come from Allahabad to pick me up. Please tell them about this…this.” She cannot find the words to describe the situation but the woman understands anyway.

S. Raghav leaves, perceptibly relieved at being able to help in some way while also trying to mitigate a huge problem. Losing a dead body en route is not great publicity for an airline.

Zara wonders about Rubina and Shahbaz. Her mother. Her brother. Savoring the taste of the words on her tongue she feels curiously unmoved. She wonders if it is normal to feel so unconnected to them. Does she look like them? Do her eyes mirror theirs in some way? Does the little bump on her nose come to her from her mother? Is it strange that she feels no great ties of blood calling to her from the outside?

She wonders what they are feeling? Did her mother ever miss her? Did her brother ever wonder about his elder sister? She knows that her existence in their lives had not been wiped out as effectively as theirs from hers. And here they are, strangers, divided now only by a bureaucratic mess and the space of one large building.

Did they come here to meet her? Does Rubina feel some measure of triumph, some sense of victory that at the end of it all, her absent, erring husband had come home to her? Forever. That her lost daughter, a stranger from another world, who till now had believed herself to be half another ethnicity, has been returned to her, even if temporarily?

S. Raghav returns. “I have told them. They said they’ll wait.”

“Thank you,” Zara whispers.

For some time, she dozes off in the now-empty arrivals area. Then she awakens. Through the large plate-glass windows, she can see the first light of the day begin to break. She checks the large digital clock near the Thomas Cook booth. It’s almost 7 in the morning. She has been here for almost six hours.

Leaving her luggage but carrying her purse she goes to the bathroom, washes her face, combs her hair and tries to quell the butterflies in her stomach. She walks back to the counter.

“Any news?”

There is another man there now, a large man with a handlebar moustache. The other man and S. Raghav had probably left while she was sleeping.
“What? He asks, somewhat rudely, while punching in some codes into his computer. He continues.

“Sit down please. I am busy here and there are no flights for some time.” His words are superficially polite but rudeness lurks under the surface.

“I have been waiting for over seven hours. Trying to find out about my…about my…” Her voice trails off. “Did the other gentleman who was here not tell you? Or that lady, S. Raghav? Did they leave?” She has visions of being trapped in this airport forever while her dead travels the world.

“Madam, do you know how many bags and suitcases are lost everyday. Be patient please, we will find your bag. Here, fill out this form to describe it. Here are some pictures of luggage to help you.” He dismisses her summarily.
A tsunami comes onshore within her. The weight of the water is enormous as it presses against her, throwing her off balance, consuming her self. It takes her with it, making her part of its strength and fury. She can no longer hear her father’s voice telling her to drink down her anger. Women are like water. Women are like water. They are.

She bites out her words.

“I don’t need to fill out anything. I don’t need to look at any pictures to describe it. It’s a dark mahogany box, plain, simple. About six feet long, two feet wide. And inside is my dead father. Do you hear me? My fucking dead father is inside the fucking lost luggage.”

She feels free, the drug of anger coursing through her, pulsing in her ears like an unending wave that refuses to return to calm seas.

“Uh…uh,” the man stammers.

Zara is shouting. She cannot stop. She is a storm, a tidal wave of acid, tears of rage pouring down her face, overtaking the helpless grief and confusion of before.

Several people arrive, all talking at once, all trying to calm her, fear written on their faces.

“Please madam, please.”

“I am sorry. Very sorry.”

“We will find him. I assure you.”

She is past listening to them. Tired of hearing their excuses.

“Now, find him now. I demand you find him now.” Her voice is strong despite the tears. It is steady and unwavering. She will not listen quietly any more.
Then she sees S. Raghav running towards the crowd, carrying some papers.
“We have found it…him,” she says. Zara sees that one of the brightly painted fingernails has chipped, the white-pinkness underneath, prominent.

S. Raghav’s explanations came tumbling out, the words falling over each other. There had been mistakes made in loading. The coffin had been mistakenly loaded onto a plane from Amsterdam to Singapore. It had been located somewhere in the baggage handling facility at that airport and had been put on the next plane to Delhi. It was now on its way.

“The plane is coming in to land. In about an hour,” S. Raghav said, triumphantly, while the rest of the crowd melted away in relief. “I’ll take you to the tarmac before they do anything else, before they unload any baggage.” Zara stumbles and almost falls as the other woman supports her with a hand under her arm.

Zara stands, looking down at her father. His face is gray-green, the skin so cold that the condensation from the already hot morning Delhi air beads on his skin like sweat. She wishes she had a handkerchief or a tissue so she could mop away the liquid that is running into the hollows of his closed eyes.
He is shrunken, an old man, dead with his secrets within him. Zara knows she will never get the answers he could have given her. Those were his to give or hold on to. But he has brought her here, face to face with their shared pasts; replete with the layered, textured secrets she can unravel for herself.

He has no more to give, no more power over her. He has done this one thing for her. One last thing. He has told taught her. “Women are like water. Sometimes gentle and patient, at other times angry and powerful, destructive when needed. Gentle rain or fierce tidal waves of strength. Women are like water, Zara.”

Kneeling on the hard tarmac she kisses the clammy forehead and gently wipes away some of the moisture. Her hand lingers for just an instant; her eyes fix the image in her mind forever. Then, she looks up and nods at the man holding the lid of the coffin.

As she walks away into the building, her tears stop flowing her shoulders are thrown back and her arms swing by her side. She can no longer feel the weight of water bearing down on her.