I wake up to her looming over my pod, my mother’s bony finger sewing her mouth, the angles of her nails accentuating the cracks of her lips. It makes me fear for my arms—what a pity if the immigrant does not have two good arms! Behind, her thinning hair ripples, black streaks interrupting the flicker of the cargo hold and whatever she has turned away from, whatever is still stalking the upper levels. Her face: large, brown, her dark gaze burrowing into me as if she has read my thoughts and disapproved, as if I have disobeyed a maternal dictum. Stay still, child. No speaking, no moving, no thinking.
The moment prolongs itself into a thousand sensations: the damp exhaustion of sleeping fluid holding me afloat, the peripheral blackness of airtight containers, the stirrings of hunger rearing its ravenous head, my heart beating in my muscles, tensing, relaxing, its fluctuations animating my fingers. When they twitch, I know I am relatively safe, relatively alive.
She softens, reflecting the reassurance in my eyes. I want to raise my arms to touch her face, to confirm that I am indeed a big kid now, meant to overcome the harshness of our combined universe, meant to ensure the progress of our combined dreams. She shrivels her lips, their edges quivering and shakes and shakes and shakes her head. No, no, no, no, no, no… it is your sister. Aloud, she has spoken ‘sister’, hissing against the confined air of the metal hold. It is your sister.
When my father enters my room later, he scrapes the edges of objects to remind them of his presence. I have lain awake on my bed, face toward walls to shut out the visible room. He perches on the bed, his thighs tucking the blanket under him, pulling them over feet that I have locked in deep. He runs his fingers through my hair, prying apart the strands at their ends and patting them down. At length, he says, “Ayush, I am so sorry. We could not take her back.” In the small pocket of outer space that we pass, somewhere near a familiar star, he loses the only tears I have ever seen him shed.
The night after is a blur, its sounds mingling with the quiet sobbing of my parents and, for reasons unexplained, a relative dryness in my vision of the world.
***
In the week after the incident, my parents stole away from me when they could, keeping to their priorities, maintaining those parts of the spacecraft worst affected. The larder had been emptied, so it had to be restocked from the emergency supplies until our on-craft farm regenerated food. Most displays had been cracked—some still buzzed from the abuse—so they had to be replaced with freshly pressed layers of metal and plastic. All surfaces were scratched; where fingers had found foam, the linings were stripped and scooped out of their gutters; so, they had to be repainted, refilled and dried. We knew that the little we would gain in this run, trading with the depot in this region, we would use to fix the major issues: broken piping, radiation sweeps, navigation and comms recalibrations.
In a strange way, I felt closest to my parents in that week of consistent work. My mother, the constant engineer, now pulled me into her tasks, extending both palms as I held up panels, tools, spare parts that I would let float up to her outstretched hands, the solidity of contact interspersed with moments when neither of us held anything, a moment of contact developed through a shared sense of motion. Sometimes, she would glance sideways, as if on her other flank my sister stood, extending another part, another palm, another motion, another attempt at contact, until the emptiness of space struck her. It is difficult to imagine a life, I suppose, without a necessary duality of children, a left and a right side. Paralysis: look, the immigrant cannot use her left hand as she does her right.
My father, expert navigator, pressed my hands firmly on the controls, impressing my prints on them as the ship ticked in a circle, changing its bearing. As if through the button, I was supposed to sense the large swaths of the craft in imagined orbits of other near-planet bodies, as if through the pulse of my fingers, he would sense the orbit of my life. Painful as it was, I allowed him my fingers, understanding his need to see beyond what he had been limited to. Blind, this immigrant, and what a waste of two otherwise good eyes!
The dinner table: eating had been reduced to an individual affair; where once we had spoken about the daily comings and goings of people, of imports and exports, of prevailing rates of commodities, spare parts, materials, where my mother had fed my sister, then six-years old, as I manoeuvred the grains on my plate with plastic spoons, there was now a silence thickly pervasive. It was also the week of absences: of silences, of people who would rather be somewhere else than here, of many revisions my parents made that they felt alleviated the incident. “If only we had tucked her in,” my father would repeat, and my mother would arrest the soup circling idly before her, its red surface reflecting a fixed stare into nothing in particular. “If only,” my father would continue, his voice damp, “she had made a sound, just a tussle, when we went in.”
If only the immigrants had travelled for seven years instead of seventy! How far are they from, anyway? I had imagined hypersleep as a time-hole: a two-dimensional, pulsating, transparent surface that bubbled each time a swing, hung from nowhere, swept my body through it, its rhythms keeping me alive, to and fro, to and fro, my attempt at childhood preserved even as the universe kept ticking. “If only we had travelled for seven years, not seven decades,” my mother said one day, interrupting my father, and looked at me as if there was some fault to be found within the sibling who had survived. Who, as the older one, clearly deserved life’s bigger share of sorrow, of mishaps, of accidents that would bounce off him into the distance. She had not spoken aloud, choosing instead to stare over the table after my father retired, wondering if she could replace eye for eye, ear for ear, lip for lip, child for child until that point, where the amalgam was both of her children rolled into one. I remember wondering if the shadows in my room deserved examination, if my mother would crawl from them and scratch at my nose, wailing as she did, Ayush, give me a leg. Only a leg. What good is the child of an immigrant without a leg?
On such nights, I breathed the air deeply, the air that circulated in the ship, scared that I would begin to drift away as if caught in an immense whirlpool, as if I would dissolve through the metal in the ship and drip all over my sister in the other room, the room with the beige door. My mother had often pulled me to wait at that door, pressing our temples against it until the ragged breathing of a person filled our ears and reverberated in the hollows of my chest. My sister’s breaths as she slept, untouched by the perils of growing up seventy years absolutely alone in space. “She is sleeping now,” my mother would say and shake and shake and shake her head. That was also the week my sister kept sleeping, drugged, peaceful, old.
***
“It is time for you, I think,” said my mother, calculating responses that she had envisioned the day my father and she had woken up to the screeches of an old lady in the room banging her fists on their pods. “I think you are ready to meet her now.”
“I do not want to see her.” What good is an immigrant who is old, so very old?
“She would want to see you, Ayush,” my mother said, “Maybe that will help her find something, anything.” She turned away from me as soon as she said those words.
“Don’t make your mother cry,” my father suggested from the recesses of a darkened kitchen. He seldom rose, his alcohol-riddled hiccoughs thrusting him back to the seat he had occupied for two months now. Don’t-hiccough-make-hiccough-cry. Don’t-hiccough-make-hiccough-get-up. No, of course not, I thought, but when I looked up at my mother, she had not cried at all. She had turned to unlock the door. “Come on in,” she beckoned and pushed open the beige doors into a room a few bodies wide.
I had seen old people: they were folded over themselves in giant dregs, their skin touching more of the world than they did, their eyes vacant, prizing meaning from the heart of things, from the heart of children like me.
“Don’t be silly, Ayush. You have met many old women and they are not like that at all.”
“No,” I repeated, but can she smell as well as I can? What good is an immigrant without a keen sense of smell?
Ahead, my mother had cradled my sister’s head, crooning softly, “Look who is here to meet you.” In her hands, I saw a face, wrinkled, nostrils spread apart by tubes, white hair cropped indiscriminately, sunken cheeks, and eyes whose balls squelched in their sockets as they rolled my way. Those eyes fixed upon me, two orbs poised over spindly arms that were perhaps too heavy for her to lift. And then they rolled back toward my mother’s face with the same barren look.
“Yes, Bona, he is your brother.”
If she made sense of this, she did not give any indication. I think once we grow up with a sense of who we are in this world, it is difficult to shake it off. Bona, Labonya, my sister as others called her, had grown up with a sense of overwhelming loneliness. A sense of having to fend for herself in a spacecraft that would drone across nowhere for decades, where no sounds were made, where nothing much was to be seen, where among all things that mattered, living and dying were the same. The only family she had once known had left, slept, over half a century ago, their faces, their stutters and pauses, the quality of their voices, all relegated to the corners of a memory she no longer possessed. Memory that served her no purpose, no reference, no solace. Only instincts: hunger, languor, pain, pleasure, only veritable cycles of life making life possible. Until age had found her, even in this deep space, hiding, doing what she did best when confronted with a situation she had not yet learnt to master. Until age had dropped her into a body that hindered movement, that did not allow her to reach as high as she used to, as vigorously as she used to. Until one day, after she had almost died of hunger, she had found the pods in her room stirring, the few familiar faces in them lighting up.
I have wondered what it would have been like for my mother to have woken up to Labonya. Would she have recognized her at once, a child of hers, her own blood? Or was there a moment of registering, of coming to terms with an accident one was forced to confront as destiny, of loss that evaded measurement, loss that could not be quantified and communicated as if one could say, “Oh I lost one daughter over the course of the journey: she was six years old and weighed a little over 20 kilograms.” Or was my mother, who stood before me cradling somebody neither of us had known for more than a few months, had never really recognized my sister and had instead, merely attached significance to the first person her eyes fell on in the absence of my sister. Like ducklings, who take anything to be their mother, had my mother taken anything to be her child?
“Look, she is smiling,” my mother said, “She is smiling after meeting you.”
I saw Labonya’s old face undergo not a shade of change in those long twenty minutes.
***
The longest stretch of my life was between the day my sister turned seven, according to the time that we kept outside the centuries spent sleeping, and the day my father left the ship. It was on a station that glowed neon bright, a fizzler as my father called it. They were the mayflies of space, expending their fuel in a twelve-hour razzmatazz, a burst of energy in space that attracted nearby ships for a night of revelry and storytelling. When the entire station was fire, all its nooks became campsites. By and by as the fuel waned, the station fizzled out, its last spurts used for relaunching the discovery ships that had first made home on the asteroid. What remained was dead rock.
Halfway through our return to the ship, my father had let go of my hand. For a while I thought I was lost in the crowd, let go into it as a matter of examination of my skills of bargain, my skills of survival, a real-life test that I felt unprepared for. But he was there when I looked back, stuck at the edge of the dock, immobile, immovable.
He did not wave me on. He just looked at my feet as if it would start moving on its own accord, would carry me to a ship that would carry me to a planet other than the one he was on, to a life that intersected with his at no other point than those in the past. What good is an immigrant with a family like his? to which he would say nothing, staring endlessly at the ground expecting it to shift. Nothing needed to be said. The last burst of energy had escaped him with my hand.
“It is what it is now,” said my mother.
But it was more than what it was then; it was perhaps the integral consequence of years of scurrying around, of making do with life with less than a whole of one’s heart, the calculus of one’s life upset by ever-widening circuits of concerns in which, repeatedly, one was entangled. The economics of our situation did not affect him much: provisioning for an old person was not unlike provisioning for a child. Nor was the weight of a child lost so heavy on him as on my mother. No, his was the concern of someone in-charge of directing ships along a course, someone whose life is a series of courses toward destinations, toward the consequences of actions. He saw, perhaps, from his forward position in the ship we flew, the direction that our lives were taking. He saw that there was good chance that he would survive the death of his daughter.
Perhaps the day he realized this, he began drinking and bickering with my mother. I remember him flinging open the door to the navigation unit and pacing down to the kitchen, eyes bloodshot, hands trembling, his gait jagged as if he were walking on a serrated floor. That day he was without blame, looking to steady himself against the speed with which his own destiny had caught up with him, tapping him in his seat, whispering to him the sure conditions of his expected life.
“And what of it?” he had barked. “What if she dies before we do, Hitesha?”
My mother had stepped in, catching up with his flow. “Who will cremate her? Whoever has heard of a parent cremating their child?”
“She has a brother to do it, for God’s sake. But what you want…”
“He is a child too. My Ayush is a child too.”
Something in her words had given him pause. He had hurled the empty can against the tabletop and stumbled out. He had stomped down the staircase where I lay hiding and swiped at me with his lean arm, pinned me to a container and towered over me. The stench of acid when he had breathed loudly down my face, his jaws resolute and gnashing teeth, each muscle taut, ready to deliver a killing blow.
“You are my son,” he had said and relinquished me to the darkness.
My father had wanted to let Labonya live out her life, assisted by the three of us, in her final years. It was bold—he was brave that way—to face one’s worst mistake day in, day out, until one could turn it by sheer will into a mission. Perhaps he was driven toward an eventual deliverance, a life beyond Labonya where the three of us could live out once more as a normal family. The everyday challenges of our living would perturb us again with the regularity of clockwork: the many docks, the many hands that traded with us, the many mouths and eyes that darted around when we arrived or departed, speaking of us in tongues and terms foreign to us. Live first like this, then live like that, he would have thought, and would have committed himself to the preliminary act of living like this, Labonya with us, awake, alive until dead.
My mother had other designs. She believed that all things had to be maintained, touched slightly by human hands to ensure their continuance—no deaths until those strictly necessary, strictly foretold in the constitution of our world. When she had woken up to my sister, this was one of the first things she had put herself up to: the maintenance of my sister, the tending that came with it. “Her body needs long periods of rest. Who knows how much she slept, my Bona?” The day they had found her by the pods, my mother had been quick to extend the sleep cycle for my machine by a few hours. “We can discuss what to do,” she had convinced my father.
Over time, she had come to consider this the best solution to the problem at hand. Labonya had slept lesser than the rest of us; she now had the arduous task of catching up, the task of slipping into dreamless sleep until she was awoken, fed, washed, clothed anew and put to sleep again, living out a few hours of life over the centuries that lay ahead of her. The pace of her life, so quickly forced out of sync with the rest of us, could be conditioned, like energy expended by a hot metal immersed in ice.
“She will live out her full, normal life,” my mother had said, “which is life longer than any of ours. Longer than that of her brother.”
On the planets, the people judged her. This immigrant is always compensating, always measuring. My mother was an expert negotiator, having lived her life hanging between markets, in exchanges between buyer and seller, between the price that was set and the price that the goods would eventually be transacted at. “This one is perfect for an extended hypersleep,” she told me at one station, pointing toward a kind of reinforced fluid that was available at a marked up rate. The extra money she had spent she saved by carrying the cannisters, half of them on her, half of them on me, through the winding streets down to the docks. We would have appeared strange to onlookers, a big humped lady followed by a small humped child walking the streets to a ship, but my mother was no stranger to strange looks. What is an immigrant without a thick skin?
It had been her sheer will, then, which had kept Labonya breathing and asleep, rather than awake and dead. It had also been her sheer will that had closed the doors on my father, the spacecraft careening to the right, dropping below the horizon where my father had stood, long after we had left, gazing into the abyss of the night sky and a few bright stars.
I saw my father only once again, many years later when I was no longer a child. I saw him across a bar on a planet not far from that fizzler, hunched over a book. It is quite strange how one ends up finding things like this, a chance encounter. a plan almost cancelled, under muted illumination and the nudges of a dozen people in the space of a few. No bright sunny morning in the big cities where I had searched for him. No redirects from town to town to town, along a labyrinth that both misguides and leads. It felt wrong to approach him there, as if I were somehow debasing my search, as if he would look up and be disappointed that I had stolen from him the dignity of being found in the pursuit of better ends. I left the place soon after, walking out knowing that under a different set of conditions, our paths would intersect.
When I told my mother of his condition, she let out a sigh. “Always a book, yes?” she said, focusing on what I had underemphasized, “Always with a book.”
Labonya had lived. She had not resisted hypersleep; perhaps, my mother thought, she had wanted it all along. In her passivity toward being hooked to a machine, letting fluid wash over her body, entering a darkness from which only intermittent release was available, my mother interpreted a commitment to life. “My Labonya has always loved life,” she would say as she closed the pod, standing around for the better part of an hour to look for signs of malfunction. She would sleep last, ensuring that I was hooked on perfectly, that I would not jump out of bed midway through the night and spend thirty odd years looking for her everywhere but in the pods. There was no reason to be afraid: I was old enough to disable her sleep, to bring her out in case of an emergency. To Labonya, we had never explained the complicated functioning of her nightly routine, assured by the safety of the procedure. For me, my mother had conducted multiple practice runs: I would sleep, the timer set to ten minutes, then she would sleep, the timer set to twenty minutes, then I would wake and I would try to bring her out in ten minutes. “It should be a memory of your body, yes,” she would say, repeating the process over days.
Before we slept next, my mother called me upstairs to the navigation unit. “Wait with me here for a while, Ayush, would you not?”
“We should really start sleeping. Labonya is already tucked in.”
“Oh good,” she smiled. Then furrowed her brows and sat me down. “I want you to see something.” She pointed toward a green envelope. “This is from your father’s things.”
I opened up the envelope to a bunch of photographs that had not found themselves in the marked albums: Ayush’s lessons, Labonya eating, Wedding: Shriraj and Hitesha. Loose, outside of a collection that can be duly stamped with an inherent order, like Labonya’s accident. In the ten-odd pictures that I held, I found shades of my father’s life that I had not seen before. A school for boys in a large, sparsely decked ship, a packet of cigars which competed with the photograph to how long it lived, running out perhaps when my father’s craving for a smoke won over the permanence of the displayed picture, a collection of books with his face propped on them: classical texts on politics, religion and literature, so much literature, a picture of my mother, the curves of her face emphasized in the direction of her gaze, blowing a bubble in zero gravity, and then six pictures of my grandmother, his mother, all of them the image of Labonya. Per the unspoken rules of time and descent, Labonya had grown up to possess the features of my grandmother—her eyes, her bent of the neck, her wispy hair—long dead, preserved only in the photographs that my father carried around in the green envelope, one that he had given up that night on the fizzler.
My mother swayed on her seat, looked at the edges of my eyes and leaned in to embrace me completely.
***
I grew up to twenty-seven over two hundred years, aging faster than others who had been born with me, who had taken longer routes around stars and planets, who had slept longer, who would live longer. We would seldom hear a familiar pitch over the communications channel, its irregularity breaking the monotone static that accompanied deep-space journeys, its voice pulling us to the lives of people we seemed to have known for over millennia. My mother always broadcast us to all immigrant ships, looking for contact in deep space from those who had arrived on the same port as us, who count recount from their experiences the kind of stories that we could.
But she was also wary of revealing too much, of letting people in on the chance fact of Labonya’s age. In the social engagement that she had designed for herself, Labonya was always missing, asleep in her pod, aging slower than us. “My daughter often keeps sick,” she would tell her guests and close all questions with a surreptitious nod. I avoided these encounters, turning away from their drab reprises, the false performances that we kept repeating each time a guest would chance upon some mention of my sister: a slipped reference, an object misplaced.
There were no other people my mother spoke with. It is difficult to run an immigrant ship by yourself: the daily system checks, the poring over navigation logs, the management of inventory, of cargo and supplies, the many documents forbidding us from docking here or there, allowing or restricting our flight patterns, the keeping watch over my sister, the ins and outs of a life so eroded by work for two that my mother often found herself wishing for a nothing-world. Her only motivation came when she could upgrade the paraphernalia around Labonya, when in snatches of five or ten minutes, having shifted Labonya’s body to the bed, she would rewire the pod, replace the fluid, and then immerse her back again. She was always calibrating the timer to longer and longer intervals, phasing out the utter blackness that interrupted my sister’s life, disallowing the minute fluctuations of moments of the kind that kept my mother moving.
My mother was forty-nine but she had lived a lifetime worth of labour.
“I think I can handle it from here,” I said when I realised how to pull my weight in the ship. That day, she had looked at me dazed and realised that something had changed between us, that we had shifted from being related in one way to being related multiply. When she released her tools to me and sat down to watch, I could sense that she had travelled along an arc, had lost a husband, had surfaced for breath in moments away from my sight. Her hands had turned a bony white and her nails had come undone from their places, her eyes had blurred, her legs had barely held the mantle of her delicate frame but my mother had scampered through life anyway: worrying, counting, measuring, negotiating, arguing, living.
She spent a week observing me with Labonya, paying attention to the way I moved my hands. How I positioned her head, how I supported her body, how quickly I made the adjustments. I felt that I was under scrutiny for a role in my life that I had to graduate into, fill some adult shoes that I had only just perceived. On these occasions, I kept thinking of the particulars of the task: disconnect, retrieve, support, reposition, rewire, replace, recheck, lift, support, reposition, connect. On these occasions, her eyes went from noisy organs looking dimly ahead to an intensity of sight, a way that I could imagine me looking at myself. The skin on her arms melted, their dying cells glistening with an inner warmth. Her mouth was no longer agape with vacancy; they moved in a will to speak, to let herself be known to me. Each time I touched her, a little more of Labonya came to life through my memories. For the first time in twenty-odd years, I permitted myself to remember her.
I do not remember Labonya the same way I remember my parents, not to the extent perhaps that a ready description of her fascinations, of the inflections of her voice, of her preferred way of holding an object in her hands and relishing the world within it, can survive its telling. To write how I remember her would be to clip apart a part of myself and offer it up for the view of strangers. A strange immigrant, I, who will not reveal all that he hides.
***
Today, I woke up to my mother looming over me again. A similar fear: something had probably gone terribly wrong with Labonya. I sat up straight, held her shoulders, my face twisted in part sorrow, part confusion.
“It is alright. Bona is alright.”
A nightmare, then. I let go of my mother. “You scared me. What happened?”
“I wanted to see you, Ayush.”
“What are you talking about? You do see me every day.”
She smiled and then, perhaps ashamed, looked at the covers of the bed. “You have grown, more than I thought you had. You can take care of things after all and I wanted you to know that.” She looked at me again and placed her hands on my cheeks, “I wanted you to know that you have grown into someone your father and I would be proud of.”
Speechless, I groped for a response. “It is quite late, Maa,” I blurted, “And we have to prepare for another hypersleep tomorrow. You should sleep.”
“Come with me. Let us check up on Bona.”
I wanted to protest but I knew my mother’s will. She would not know a peaceful night’s sleep until she had verified that Labonya was safely tucked in, that there would be no space for a second overturning of our lives.
We cleared down the cargo hold to the room where my sister’s pod lay. She was connected, safe, asleep. My mother ran her fingers lightly over the glass, caressing it above where Labonya’s face lay. Then, she hunched over the pod, peering intently.
“She sleeps,” she said.
“Yes, and you should go to sleep too.”
“I will. I will go to sleep today but tomorrow, when you prepare for hypersleep, I will not join you.”
“What?”
The woman had spent the entire night tiptoeing around a death wish.
“How can you even think of something like that after all that has happened? Do you know what would happen if you do not go to hypersleep?”
She stood still, hunched over Labonya’s pod, its eerie glow highlighting a silhouette on her face: no words, no movement, perhaps no thoughts to share. Do you know what would happen if you do not go to hypersleep?
She would age faster than us. While we slept for a hundred-odd years, she would live out her life all through old age. Perhaps when she felt the faint stirrings of death, she would retire to her room, lie down on her bed and breathe her last. Perhaps she would protect us even from the stink of her death, walking out of the airlock into the relative absence of space. Who knew what the woman was up to, what plans she had set in motion as she sat in this room over the week, watching me take over the last activities that had kept her heart beating? Who knew the depth of her resentment, the expanse of her love?
“I will not let you do that, no. I will unplug Labonya if I have to.”
“Not while I am alive,” she said.
“Look at me. At least do me the favour of looking at me while you speak of dying,” I cried out. She turned the fullness of her gaze on me. Not while I am alive, she had said. She would live up to be ninety, this woman, a good fifty years that she would steal from my life too, if necessary, so that when Labonya surfaced again, I would be as old as she would have been had I been her age. Siblings again, the restoration of a continuance, a balance of life. If I slept and she died, I would keep Labonya alive, if only as the only living relative I could truly call my own, living out my life with hers until the end of days. In either case, the burden was mine to bear. This, then, was my inheritance.
“It is not a choice between your life or mine, Ayush. It is a choice between your life and your own. You can still live.”
There was it, the final matter of my life presented as a choice: a choice between the fullness of my life with my mother, turned inwards to her life and mine in the proximity of a home that boasted only the two of us, or the rich life of trading posts, of people and their judgments, of the many orbits of the universe I had yet to encounter. Before me, she stood waiting, her hands clasped, a tall beacon of the world: part invitation, part proscription, part warning, casting a long shadow over the door. What good is an immigrant who cannot choose for himself, as if she were asking me.