Daughter

Written by: TRICIA CHIN

"It's a bedi", he said.

"A what?" I asked as I scrolled down to his last picture.

"A bedi", he repeated, even as he sent more pictures he had taken in the Faroe Islands or Newfoundland or maybe the Canary Islands. He had one of those rare jobs the rest of us could never imagine, and it had taken him to the most remote places on this earth.

I had lived abroad for a little bit, and we had connected over mutual friends who thought we had something to speak about because of our travels. Over a few weeks we shared pictures; eventually he knew which ones I’d ask more about or scroll past.

The bedi turned out to be a small table, no more than a few inches high. He had placed an assortment of flowers and brass items on its surface in careful order.

"We put the offerings on it for prayers."

"Oh."

I understood then and saw the window he had given me to view his life clear up, maybe even with a lightbulb on inside, as my mind built an image of a hard-working man who loved his family and kept his religion.

It was a lot to share, and we were both hesitant. Life had taught us to be cautious.

We didn't meet then, or for a little while after our first conversation. He had received multiple assignments to places far from my life, so firmly rooted in Trinidad I wondered if I would ever be able to shake myself free again.

We kept in touch, but by then the molten silver of his eyes that I had only seen in pictures had chipped to hard glass. I didn’t know this stranger who had spoken to me so gently about bedis. I kept my hands in my lap, eyes darting everywhere but into his, afraid the window of a few months ago was covered with the darkest cloth.

As dates go, we had a few drinks and a truly terrible dinner, and we parted ways.

As a parting gift, he told me he was moving to London, and I knew then those gentle moments between us had disappeared completely into what was, for him, a long-forgotten past.

The years passed by. Life and work intertwined into one, the drums of childbearing age beating like a "taal" in my ear.

I was a woman but still a child, so I could sit on my grandmother’s lap, balancing my weight on her arthritic knees as we sat together in a small panchayat.

"When you will marrid, girl?" she would ask as I spent my time with her on a Saturday evening, after faithfully watching the Mahabarat or whichever religious serial was shown on the local station that day.

"When the Hindu man ask me to marrid him, Granny."

My grandmother, who had an arranged marriage and a table wedding before a pundit, would throw her head back and laugh with her whole belly. She'd repeat to anyone in hearing that out of all her grandchildren, I would be the only one to have the traditional three-day Hindu wedding.

My mother, a former student of Bharatanatyam dance who had danced herself away from her family and into the arms of a man of another race, my father, would shake her head.

"When she going to do that?" she would ask.

Time passed. My grandmother died without my getting married.

Men came and left, never going past the inevitable "tryin" stage of modern relationships.

With each relationship I became loud, powerless, broken inside, a churile in a dating scene I had never understood.

They say if someone has completed their role in your life, you will never see that person again.

Except one day in August, I saw him again, the man who had shown me the bedi he had built with his hands. Through our friends, I had heard he married an English girl in a big three-day wedding in Princes Town. The day I saw him, he was happy; the chipped grey glass of his eyes had warmed to molten silver again.

I walked past him quietly, head down as I tried to stay on the opposite side of the aisle. He didn't see me as he stood with his wife and small daughter in the grocery, pointing out local snacks and laughing.

Although I was quiet, his daughter caught my eye. Her eyes were his but clear as glass. I left the shopping cart and walked out the door to my car.

I remember my grandmother saying a single person, unmarried without children, had completed their karmic cycle on this earth. Their soul would be reborn into this world no more.

My hands gripped the steering wheel as I drove off.

Glossary