ABOUT THE PAST

If you were to ask me what I miss the most about the past, I would never say my youth. I would tell you instead about that one summer in New Delhi when we had a power cut in the middle of a scorching and oppressive heatwave. How, out of desperation, at dusk, I laid on the grey marble floor on the edge of the living room and the balcony, high on hashish and without moving an inch, watched air planes fly against the setting sun, one after the other until I could only hear them in the darkness. In limbo, but content.

I would tell you about Switzerland, and how I would ride my bicycle with its training wheels to a hidden creek in the neighborhood and sit on a rotting log to write in my diary. And about that one time when cycling through the wheat fields I crossed paths with a baby fox who was as mesmerised with me as I was with it. Arrested, we had both frozen in our tracks to stare at each other until I retreated home but even then, only because I had to. And how, a few weeks later I rode by the same spot but this time, I stared instead at the sight of its innocent, mangled corpse being accosted by a handful of flies.

I would describe the dim red lighting of the rice paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling of the only Chinese restaurant in Islamabad, Pakistan and how their stiff, starchy cloth napkins never loosened in our laps but made the perfect tented blankets later in the meal when we would tire and lie on the length of three chairs while the adults drank late into the evening, our heads on their thighs, their intermittent, raucous laughter lulling us to sleep. I would recall the story my parents loved to tell at parties for years to come, about the time we found a large cockroach in our hot and sour soup and how the waiter asked in all earnestness if we would prefer for it to be cooked a little longer.

A few years later, bored and with the satellite television on the fritz, we would force ourselves to practice squash at one of the only three courts available in Myanmar at the time, though we would never move past the point of being terrible, useless opponents. Our hot water for showering was delivered to us by a gentle old man who carried two repurposed industrial sized paint buckets suspended from a flat wooden dowel rod which laid over his shoulders. In the evenings before bed, we hung the day’s garbage from the porch ceiling to ward off the hyenas who had a habit of ripping through any plastic bags found in the dumpster. On one of those days, I would wake up to my older brother cowering under a sheet on the mattress next to me, sobbing because he had accidentally twisted the arm off my favorite teddy bear and I would recount the odd feeling of having no anger or attachment while I continuously patted him on the shoulder to soothe him back to sleep.

If you were to ask me what I miss the most about the past, I would never say my youth. It would be all the things that I don’t and can’t remember.