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.