Armaan Bamzai (18)
Aquarium
Chinatown this morning clicks slowly like a bullet being loaded. A fortune-teller’s stall is laid out on the sidewalk, a parrot chipping at a thick stash of cards. A child standing in an open doorway chews on his finger, ravenous.
Mr. Sinha has your chilli powder and ginger in a droopy plastic bag at the counter. Somehow, he doesn’t smile at you today. It’s because you remind everyone of your mother. Nobody liked your mother. She was not the woman people offered to help with armfuls of brown paper bags. She wasn’t vague, not in the ways that mattered. She called women ugly behind their backs, as some do. Perhaps you’ve noticed the was and did. Your mother, in this story, is not home anymore.
You take things without paying. This is another thing that has started of late, not having to pay. This is because people feel guilty about you. They don’t know what to do with you. It feels like stealing, although you know it’s being added up somewhere. The numbers are being put together in some secret columns, Roman numerals of owing, of being indebted. Everything feels like burglary, like lying.
The act of waking up in your own body is like breaking and entering. Maryam sets down your coffee when you ask for it. Your clothes fold themselves. Everyone feels so sorry for you; they tiptoe around you as if you’re asleep. The day they burnt your mother, your aunts moved in a pale cloud, a white mass afraid of the same thing. Dinner that night tasted like smoke, and they let you stop swimming. You said if asked that she was afraid of water and it doesn’t feel right.
Nobody told you why she was sleeping or why she was in a box. You didn’t ask why smoke rising made everything behind it melt away. You didn’t like swimming lessons, don’t like feeling drowned, shaking yourself dry and seeing your breath in the space between the roll and the rush, knowing the water will resist your form in it. Water does not like intruders. Mr. Sinha was a champion before he grew a moustache and a belly, so he taught you diving.
You are still swimming, wading through. You still smell like chlorine and the relatives won’t come near you for fear of catching what you have. What would you say to the boy looking at the television, girls in bathing suits the evil crash of the ocean. Would you watch him watching and tell him to move on for God’s sake. Get over it.
Armaan Bamzai is a eighteen-year-old writer from India whose writing has appeared in Polyphony Lit, Parallax Online, and others. He is a freshman at Columbia University and hopes that he will one day create something worth looking at.
Aquarium
Chinatown this morning clicks slowly like a bullet being loaded. A fortune-teller’s stall is laid out on the sidewalk, a parrot chipping at a thick stash of cards. A child standing in an open doorway chews on his finger, ravenous.
Mr. Sinha has your chilli powder and ginger in a droopy plastic bag at the counter. Somehow, he doesn’t smile at you today. It’s because you remind everyone of your mother. Nobody liked your mother. She was not the woman people offered to help with armfuls of brown paper bags. She wasn’t vague, not in the ways that mattered. She called women ugly behind their backs, as some do. Perhaps you’ve noticed the was and did. Your mother, in this story, is not home anymore.
You take things without paying. This is another thing that has started of late, not having to pay. This is because people feel guilty about you. They don’t know what to do with you. It feels like stealing, although you know it’s being added up somewhere. The numbers are being put together in some secret columns, Roman numerals of owing, of being indebted. Everything feels like burglary, like lying.
The act of waking up in your own body is like breaking and entering. Maryam sets down your coffee when you ask for it. Your clothes fold themselves. Everyone feels so sorry for you; they tiptoe around you as if you’re asleep. The day they burnt your mother, your aunts moved in a pale cloud, a white mass afraid of the same thing. Dinner that night tasted like smoke, and they let you stop swimming. You said if asked that she was afraid of water and it doesn’t feel right.
Nobody told you why she was sleeping or why she was in a box. You didn’t ask why smoke rising made everything behind it melt away. You didn’t like swimming lessons, don’t like feeling drowned, shaking yourself dry and seeing your breath in the space between the roll and the rush, knowing the water will resist your form in it. Water does not like intruders. Mr. Sinha was a champion before he grew a moustache and a belly, so he taught you diving.
You are still swimming, wading through. You still smell like chlorine and the relatives won’t come near you for fear of catching what you have. What would you say to the boy looking at the television, girls in bathing suits the evil crash of the ocean. Would you watch him watching and tell him to move on for God’s sake. Get over it.
Armaan Bamzai is a eighteen-year-old writer from India whose writing has appeared in Polyphony Lit, Parallax Online, and others. He is a freshman at Columbia University and hopes that he will one day create something worth looking at.