The Parted Earth by Anjali Enjeti

Author:Anjali Enjeti [Enjeti, Anjali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938235788
Publisher: Hub City Press
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

He had planned to take a trip to Pakistan, one month after his death, only nine months after she last saw him.

Why?

She set it down, searched through his papers again more carefully. She found a familiar index card with a name and address. Gertrude Enzenebner, 84 Foster Street, London. Years earlier, she had asked her mother about the name. Her mother couldn’t recall her father ever mentioning a woman named Gertrude. Shan had hoped she was an old friend of her father’s—not a lover who may have played a role in breaking up her parents’ marriage.

An old pamphlet of the Taj Mahal lined the bottom of the box. Its edges were warped. On the cover was the monument as she’d remembered it—white, glowing. They stood on its terrace, overlooking the Yamuna River, as the red turrets of Agra Fort in the distance kissed the purple peaks of clouds.

She’d remembered how the weight of his sorrow draped over her then. She’d assumed he was invincible, didn’t quite know how to comfort a man she had come into contact with only once a year since kindergarten.

This longing to know him, to understand him, had only intensified over the years. She often wondered, if he had lived, how his life would have shaped hers. When she was teased in school for her brown skin, would having her brown father there to console her have made her feel less alone than a white mother who simply told her to ignore it? Would Shan have placed so much importance on getting married and staying married? Would she have turned down the job offer at Walker & Associates and pursued more meaningful work? Her relationship with her father since his death consisted of a decades-long, one-way conversation from which she had no answers.

She sighed, picked up the maps, the guidebooks, the book of poetry, the slip of paper, and laid them back inside her father’s box. She squeezed the teddy bear once more, laid it inside, and as she did she pictured a world that would never exist, one where both her father and his grandson would know each other. The loss of her son now embodied the loss of a chance at redemption for her own fractured father—daughter story.

It came to her then, the name that she’d held so closely to her heart all of these years, the only name that could help her make sense out of her grief, that could ground her in both the past and her future, that could bring back a piece of her father.

Vijay, she said, closing her eyes.

My son’s name will be Vijay.

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