Missed Translations Read online

  On the few days Bishakha’s face appeared in my mind, I swam in an ocean of self-reproach. I felt bad for not being there for her, even as I tried to convince myself that she and my father were mere footprints on a path I had long ago left behind. She was a woman in her seventies—it was a guess, I wasn’t certain of her age—who was brought up in another country, had little understanding of technology, and who lived by herself in a New Jersey suburb with no family to look after her. She had no one to lift boxes for her. She had no one to install a light bulb or fix her wireless Internet. If she fell, neither of her two sons would be by her side to help her, since she had fallen out with each of them. She was also no longer in contact with Atish, her brother in Toronto, and was very much alone.

  It’s painful to face the fact that your own mother is alive, less than a two-hour drive away, and you have no idea what she does on a daily basis. This was assuming she even still lived in New Jersey. It’s easier not to think about the guilt when you don’t think at all.

  Call, I demanded myself. Call her now.

  Of course, there was one problem: I didn’t have her number. I had a cell phone number for her, but she didn’t use it. I knew that because I had purchased the phone for her in college and I had paid the bill on it for several years as part of a family plan. I noticed the usage on her phone was mostly zero. I called it anyway. It kept ringing. Was this cell phone even in her possession anymore?

  Sitting in my living room, I briefly wondered if there was no way to get in touch with her. I called another number: my childhood home phone number, with a somewhat ridiculous expectation that it still belonged to my mother. It didn’t.

  Luckily, buried in an email from 2014, I found another number. I dialed. After three rings, I heard my mother’s voice. I leaned forward on my couch and gripped the phone tightly. I could feel my blood pulsing.

  “Hello?” my mother said.

  “Ma, it’s Shambo,” I said, trying to project a sense of calm that didn’t exist.

  “Oh. How are you?” my mother said. I could hear that she too was displaying that same faux sense of calm. She sounded old and tired, as if a lifetime of loss and loneliness had taken its toll. I, perhaps recognizing this, summoned my childhood Bengali in an attempt to alleviate the awkward space in which we found ourselves.

  “I am doing well. How are you doing?” I nudged.

  “I am doing well. What’s new? How’s work?” My mother. It was terrible, uncomfortable small talk.

  “Work is very busy. I write a lot about theater, film, and television. What else do I write about? A lot of comedy,” I answered. This was during my time writing for the culture section, before switching to the NBA beat.

  “Really? I saw you on MSNBC,” my mother said. Her voice became lighter. She was recalling a recent segment during which I was discussing whether Oprah would run for president in 2020. Meanwhile, my organs felt like they were splitting. The only time my mother had seen my face in the last few years was in a cable television news hit.

  “I see a lot of Broadway shows now. It’s a good break for me from politics. When you cover politics, you don’t sleep at all. You’re always working and checking your email. Now I don’t work very much on weekends,” I said.

  My mother asked me if I was still living in my apartment in Harlem. I had lived in Harlem for about five years, and my mother had never seen either of the two apartments I lived in while there. I told her yes, but this wasn’t true. I had moved in with my girlfriend, Wesley, something I didn’t, at this point, feel was necessary to tell my mother. She suggested I buy a house.

  I quietly sighed. She didn’t quite understand the New York City real estate market.

  “I don’t have that kind of money,” I gently chided her. “If you want to buy anything in New York, you have to put down a minimum fifty thousand dollar down payment.”

  She suggested I go outside of New York. I told her I’d see. She asked me if I’d be going on MSNBC again. I said maybe, but that I didn’t discuss politics on the air anymore since I wasn’t covering it.

  “The next time you’re on, why don’t you let me know?” my mother said.

  My stomach had unclenched slightly. We had advanced from Peak Awkwardness to Genuine Catch-Up. Impulsively, I stammered a sentence that seemed inconceivable a few minutes before.

  “If in the next month—if you’re not—if . . .” I paused to gather myself. “Do you want to come to New York to watch a Broadway show sometime?”

  Silence.

  “Uh, the last time I saw a Broadway show? When was that?” My mother had misunderstood the question, possibly because of my stammering.

  I clarified: “No, I’m saying if there is a Broadway show you want to see, you can come to New York if you want. I can get tickets.”

  Another pause, this one less prolonged.

  “If we can go, let me know,” she said. “Weekday or weekend?”

  “Whenever is convenient for you.”

  Pause. I could hear her breathe.

  “Yes, let me know.”

  “There are lots of good shows out there. There’s a new show you might like—”

  “I’ve heard you’re doing comedy now.” My mother changed the subject, not wanting to test our good fortune.

  “Yes, I’ve done a lot of comedy. I try to do one or two shows every month,” I responded, without a clue as to how she had found out.

  My mother asked me if I was getting married. That, of course, would be news about which she could get excited. I laughed and told her about Wesley. That she had graduated from Harvard Law School and was a practicing lawyer. I took immense pride in telling her that.

  I said that we could come over soon and that she could meet Wesley if she wanted.

  Another pause.

  “I have nothing. If you want to come, that would be great news.”

  When my mother said she had nothing, she didn’t just mean her calendar was empty. I knew what she meant.

  “This would be glorious news to meet your girlfriend,” she added. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. She would never have said that in college. In fact, she didn’t.

  “Okay, we can rent a car and come see you.”

  We said our goodbyes and hung up the phone. I sighed deeply. Have you ever walked into an ocean that’s just a little too cold? It’s a deeply uncomfortable shock to the senses at first, but you hope your body gets used to it as you submerge yourself farther into the water. And then you take another step. And then another.

  I was one step in and ankle deep.

  Three

  “I almost did not recognize you.”

  It was hot. I mean, really hot. It took approximately eight seconds after I stepped outside to reconsider the wisdom of this trip, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, we were in Kolkata in July.

  For those of you who might need a reference point: Take a blazing ball of fire and put it in a microwave, and you have Kolkata in July. Add in a sprinkle of monsoon season and you have a recipe for unbearable discomfort.

  Wesley and I stepped outside the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport after a four-hour flight from Dubai (which was preceded by a fifteen-hour flight from New York). We emerged to the chaotic pulse of the city. The honks of cabs. Yells in Bengali. Police officers ordering cars to keep moving. It was worse than Times Square at the height of tourist season.

  I felt overwhelmed, but Wesley looked strangely calm about everything. Knowing her, that made sense.

  We met shortly after I started working at the Times in early 2017. For a brief period, the reporters for the culture section were being cycled through the breaking news desk, also called the Express desk. It was an ambitious section, known for producing the paper’s best digital content. Rotating culture reporters through the section was an effort to get us to move faster and be more like the reporters there.

  During my first week on Express, I was assigned to write about a story that had gone viral. A gate agent fo
r United Airlines refused to allow two teenagers to board a flight to Minneapolis from Denver because they were wearing leggings, incurring the wrath of the Internet. It turned out that the teenagers were flying with “pass riders,” tickets given to friends and family of airline employees. United claimed that passengers had to meet a certain dress code to use these tickets, so I posted a message on Twitter asking the public to write or call with their stories of flying with pass riders. Many did. (That includes one person who was working at a temp agency answering phones. He reached out again more than a year later after starting as a writer for Stephen Colbert, and we’ve since become friends.) I wrote the story and it went online. Easy peasy.

  After it published, I got a message from someone named Wesley Dietrich, offering a friend who could talk to me for the story.

  I thought this was a little odd, considering that my story was already up. I thanked her for the offer but didn’t think much of it. We started exchanging messages. I learned that Wesley was finishing up law school and also concluding a gig working for Al Franken, who at the time was a Democratic senator from Minnesota. It also turned out we had a mutual friend who had covered the 2016 presidential campaign with me. I let her know that I’d love to get drinks if she was ever in New York, though I never expected to hear from her again.

  A couple of weeks later, she followed up to say that she was in town and that she’d like to get a drink. We went to a bar next door to the Magnet Theater, where I had taken improv classes years before and still occasionally performed. I was blown away by her. She was barely over five feet tall, with striking blue eyes, blonde hair, and a face that reminded me a bit of Reese Witherspoon. She was beautiful, like way out of my league. In my head, all I could think was: Play the New York Times card early and often. She won’t know how junior you are. Or just make something up. Either way, you need a plan.

  I spoke too fast and perhaps a bit too loudly on that first date, much like during my first ever stand-up routine. I was nervous and wanted to impress her. Wesley, an Arkansas native, was confident, smart, and quick-witted. Sometimes, especially when discussing politics, she would get animated and gesture wildly.

  When the bartender asked us if we wanted any food, I flubbed. I answered on behalf of Wesley and said, “No, we’re good.” As I learned later, she had wanted snacks. I could’ve gone for some fries too, but I wanted to give her an out just in case she wasn’t having a good time. Besides, who orders food on a first date in 2017?

  Like me, she came from divorced parents. Except she was the product of a second marriage for each of her parents, who each remarried again after that. This was a real-life Brady Bunch situation. When we first met, Wesley joked that she was the Tiffany Trump of her family (in chronology only).

  Before our second date, which featured cookies from Levain (a bakery on the Upper West Side with cookies as large as my head) and a bottle of wine in Central Park followed by an improv show at the Magnet, I told a friend that I was in love and that I was going to marry this girl. I was being facetious, but not by much.

  When we first started dating, Wesley was a bit cold, or so I thought. She had this terribly annoying habit of going to sleep in the middle of a conversation when she was living in Massachusetts and I was in New York.

  Our texts, early on, would go something like this:

  ME: How was your evening?

  WESLEY: It was fine, just had a lot of work to do.

  ME: That’s great! Did you get it done?

  WESLEY: Yeah, but . . .

  ME: But . . . ?

  ME: Hello?

  ME: Are you there?

  ME: Are you kidding me?

  She came back to visit New York a few weeks before her commencement. We stopped at a bar near my apartment for a nightcap, and I popped the question: Can I come to your graduation? Wesley looked at me as if I were the Boston Strangler. Let me rephrase: She looked at me as if I were popping the question. She said no, after a long and awkward pause, giving me the impression that our relationship was doomed. I really should’ve ordered some snacks for the table.

  But we kept seeing each other, and very quickly, she became my biggest advocate—for my career, my comedy, and my investigation into my family history.

  Shortly before we took off from New York, Wesley and I sat in an Irish pub at JFK, munching on mediocre chicken fingers. She ordered two glasses of champagne for us and asked me how I was feeling.

  “Like I want to get there. I know that’s not a very good answer,” I replied.

  “No deeper thoughts or observations?” Wesley pressed.

  “I have been trying to figure out how I feel all day, or probably for a couple of months, and I haven’t figured it out yet.” I was curt. “I don’t think the reality has hit me yet that I’m about to see my dad.”

  “Maybe you’ll find out when we get there,” Wesley offered.

  “Maybe I’ll find out when we get there,” I repeated robotically.

  On the plane, we were both anxious; neither of us had any idea what lay ahead. But despite my anxiety, I did learn during the plane ride that Oscar from The Office has a small part in 2003’s The Italian Job. I mention this because it’s precisely the kind of fact you only have the pleasure of discovering on a long flight since there is no other scenario in which you would willingly watch The Italian Job.

  Outside the airport, I craned my neck, looking for Shyamal, but found only a cacophony of greeters, honks, and yelling in Bengali.

  “Ekhene cab ache!”

  “Thumi kothai jethe chau?”

  “Thomar bag knie sadjho kor bo?”

  It was a disorderly symphony, the kind of stuff Tchaikovsky was not made of. I was weighed down by an assortment of bags and plane pillows, and the sweat beads had already begun dripping from my brow. I looked around, pacing back and forth, trying to appear calm. But the noises outside were nothing compared to the frantic questions in my head. My eyes searched the crowd for a frail old man in his mid- to late-seventies. Maybe he’d have a walker. A wheelchair? A new wife? I turned to Wesley and said, “I have no idea what kind of life I’m about to walk into.”

  It was the worst kind of semi-blind date. You know, one with your father, whom you hadn’t seen in more than eleven years and knew virtually nothing about.

  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the contact that said DAD. That’s a weird way of describing a father, right? “A contact that said DAD?” But it was indicative of our relationship at that moment. I knew that he existed, but he was just a phone contact, in the same way that DAN FROM THE NETWORKING EVENT YOU HATED lingered in your contact list: something between a stranger and a forgotten childhood acquaintance.

  In 2007, my freshman year of college, Shyamal came to visit me in Boston at the beginning of my spring semester. I don’t remember much of the visit, other than that he bought me lunch at my favorite Thai restaurant on campus, Noodle Street, before taking me to a local grocery store for some supplies. I didn’t realize at the time that this would be the last time I would see him for eleven years. I might have given him a better goodbye if I had.

  The next month, I noticed that I hadn’t heard from him for at least a couple of weeks. My father used to call every Sunday like clockwork. So I called him. Usually, if my father saw a missed call from me, he would immediately call me back. But he didn’t. So I called again and left a voicemail. If my father saw two missed calls and a voicemail from me, he would fly to Boston to make sure I was okay. It’s true that we weren’t close, but he desperately wanted to be, and as I grew older he tried, in his own awkward way, to bond with me.

  Shyamal still didn’t call me back. At this point, I was worried. He was an older man living by himself as an immigrant in a country that hadn’t worked out for him. Spring break was coming up, and I decided that I would knock on his door when I got home.

  Right before the break, I get an email from him. He told me that he was sick and that he was no longer in New Jersey. I immediately responded: “Where
are you? Are you in a hospital in New York? I’ll come visit you.”

  I was startled by his response:

  “I’m in India.”

  Shyamal didn’t know when he’d be back. I had never even been to India. He said he was too ill to live in New Jersey on his own and that he had left for medical treatment.

  He never came back.

  Throughout the next decade, I never found out where, exactly, he was living. Isn’t that bizarre? My father moved to another country without telling anybody, and I wasn’t fazed. It was one step from a parental ghosting. I would’ve asked more questions after a mediocre online dating attempt.

  Perhaps my reticence was born of the same guilt I felt about the situation with my mother. I’ve always had this nagging feeling that I didn’t do right by Shyamal, that I wasn’t a good enough son to him and didn’t give us a chance to work on our relationship. I didn’t want to know why he was too sick to stay in the country because I was sure I partially caused it. I always had this thought in the back of my head that maybe, if I had taken the time to engage with him in a meaningful way, instead of looking at myself as the aggrieved child of immigrant parents who didn’t get him, he would have felt comfortable communicating about his need to leave. Knowing less about my father’s situation allowed me to remain blissfully ignorant of the role I played in his decision to do so.

  As the years passed, and my father would call from India, our conversations grew more irregular. He’d never learn anything about me and I’d never learn anything about him. The calls just let me know that he was still alive. Sometimes he’d ask if we could video chat. I always found some reason not to. Seeing his face would make it too real.

  Outside baggage claim in Kolkata, the time to avoid seeing his face was quickly running out. Days before, he had emailed us a picture of himself since he knew I might not remember what he looked like. Of course, the picture he sent featured him wearing sunglasses, a Bart Simpson T-shirt with cut-off sleeves, and a baseball cap, which is the exact picture you send someone when you don’t want to be recognized.