The Anthropologists

It’s tough to see parents age, Ravi said. Mine get a little stranger every year.

Manu argued that his parents still had it together. Parents are bound to be a little strange, he said. They’re parents.

Forms of Enchantment
By our bedside was a blue-green bowl filled with bundles of herbs and branches, tied together tightly like brooms.
Next to the bowl was a candlestick, a small lacquered box we’d found at the flea market, a lamp in the shape of a tulip. I never got tired of this assembly, those small and beautiful things gathered with mystery. Perhaps it was because these objects didn’t quite belong to us—they were not part of an aesthetic either of us had grown up with.

At university, Manu and I had known people who burned sage, whose rooms were filled with objects of ritual from foreign countries. These people also had a knack for picking out clothes from yard sales and vintage shops—things that would have looked awkward on us, because we didn’t have the right attitude, that sense of playful entitlement that was its own language.

Every time we burned herbs before going to bed, Manu would make a joke to ward off the feeling that we were impostors.

Shall we burn some trees?

Let’s start a forest fire, I replied.

This was the great relief: that we did not consider each other strange.

He propped the notebooks on a shelf above his bed, like postcards, alongside the empty picture frames. He loved these things of impractical poetry.

I wanted to tell her it was all right, it even made me happy. I wished she would ask me for things more often. This was what I had in mind when I imagined growing native to a place—this sense that I was needed in someone else’s life.

Thank you for coming, Lena said. I’m sorry that I wasted your day

Other things we considered indulgent were eating pastries for breakfast, going to the cinema on Sunday afternoons, watching two episodes of a detective show in a row. Sometimes, at the end of a day of editing, I would buy myself striped socks or sparkling tights.

In some ways, Ravi was also an expert at self-portraiture, or rather representing himself through objects. Most
weekends, he went to the flea market at the edge of the city, beginning at the small, barren park, and extending for several kilometers, with smaller stalls set up on the branching streets.

Over the years, Manu and I had taught each other words and phrases from our own languages: those without any equivalent, that defined not just something essential about our mother tongues, but about us as well. These words became part of our shared language, growing in meaning once they were plucked out of their habitats.

We spoke differently to each other when there was no one around. Something like a high-pitched mumble.
There were years of inside jokes, accumulated personas, and mispronunciations. We had nicknames for each other, words with no meaning in any dictionary. That was how we came to claim our own language, a native union, rather than two people speaking to each other in a foreign tongue.

I was always coming up with routines for us, in bursts of panic.

Asya, my grandmother said, don’t complicate the point. We named you after a whole continent and you’re filming a park.