Work Text:
Statement of Sonali Ray, regarding a visit from her father. Statement taken directly from subject on Mar 15, 2015 by Gerard Keay, associate to the Magnus Institute, London:
I’m going to start writing, even though I don’t really know how I want to say this yet. There’s so much I don’t know. I’m a first-year graduate student studying Film & Media at the University of Pittsburgh. I’m still considering what I want to focus on in terms of study. I’m interested in Indian cinema, particularly Naxalite-era and onward. In general, 20th-century Indian independent films and experimental lit (think Harbart) and theatre (think Tughlaq). I’ve been devoting most of my time to theatre, recently, while trying to organize a showcase. But I’m technically in the English department. It’s a whole thing. I’ve had this strong affinity for Indian media for as long as I can remember, which doesn’t exactly surprise people when I express it to them. I feel conflicted about it. I’m also obfuscating my own point, sorry about that. This has nothing to do with anything. Essentially, I’m pedantic and defensive about who/what I ‘am’, and it shows in my interests. I’m not unique for that.
I recently had a weird experience that I’m trying to distance myself from.
I’m not from Pittsburgh, or anywhere in/near Pennsylvania. In 1992, I was born in Plano, which is sort of a sub-city of Dallas-Fort Worth. The first few years of my life were spent there, in a house I don’t remember well, with my parents and sister (who is older by two years). For reasons I won’t disclose, my sister and I did not continue to live there after my mother died in 1997. We lived in Brenham (a small-ish town about four hours away) with our grandma.
Our grandma was a good person. Though we were supported financially by my dad’s income, she was the one who raised us. Our life wasn’t exactly interesting or exciting, but I had a relatively safe and comfortable childhood after age 5. I’m grateful for that.
The main thing that Brenham is known for, other than a high concentration of Germans, is its wildflower season. Every year in April, enormous fields of bluebonnets and other native flowers spring up and basically paint the town, the county, and all surrounding roads. Memories of running around in the sun and trying to secretly pick flowers to take home in my pockets (which is illegal, due to conservation efforts) are some of my happiest.
As I got older, I became more and more interested in botany, forestry, and similar fields. I remember being really into trees, especially. I thought I was going to major in biology, and initially, I did. I went to San Antonio for college when I was 17 and, predictably, I changed a lot once I moved away from home. As I became more independent and mature, my goals changed pretty drastically. I was able to interact with art in a way that was completely unavailable to me before. The things I watched and read in that early-college period really changed my life. By my second year, I switched to an English major. I wanted to minor in film, too, but I decided on it too late, and didn’t end up doing it. Instead, I made a lot of films with my friends, edited a lot of videos, and applied to grad school.
Now, I’ve been a grad student since August of last year, brainstorming dissertation topics and trying to do as many new things as possible. Up until January, my life was a whirlwind of exciting, fulfilling experiences. I was doing really well before my dad visited.
Originally, my sister and I had been planning for her to fly up to visit me around New Years. She got the flu a day before her flight was supposed to leave, so I encouraged her to just stay home and recover instead. I’m not a nurturing person; I didn’t want to have to nurse her back to health in an unfamiliar place and risk getting sick too. I had just resigned myself to having to figure out new plans last-minute, when my dad called me.
My sister and I never went no-contact with my dad, and he was technically present in our lives throughout our childhoods. But because he didn’t raise us at all, we were never close to him. I don’t trust him. He’s misogynistic, and I don’t think he’s a good person. I hadn’t even told him I’d moved to Pittsburgh, I’m still not sure who did, so I didn’t pick up the first few calls from him. Eventually, he just texted me: ‘Congratulations. Enjoy school. I will come visit soon.’
I texted him back, startled, asking him when he was planning on visiting. Other than the time I had set aside for my sister, I was pretty busy every day and didn’t have space for him to stay in my apartment. We went back and forth on it for a while, but he eventually decided to fly in for two days during the time my sister would’ve been here. He agreed to stay in a hotel, so it wasn’t like I could forbid him from entering the city just because I was there.
The night he arrived, I picked my dad up from the airport and we drove to his hotel. After helping him put his bag and suitcase up in his room, I told him that I would come back tomorrow morning to pick him up, show him around the city, and take him to dinner. He seemed really happy to be there, and he hugged me on my way out. He hadn’t been very affectionate with me or my sister in the past. I don’t remember if I hugged back, or what I said to him. I just went home.
The next morning, I woke up when it was still dark outside. This has happened to me before. I’ve always had trouble sleeping when I go to bed nervous, and I really had no idea what the next two days would look like for me. When I realized I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, I stretched out in bed and stared at my ceiling fan in silence until I heard my roommates waking up and moving around the kitchen. I listened to them talking quietly, making coffee, and grabbing their shoes. Once I was sure that both of them were out, I dragged myself out of bed and got dressed. I left my apartment, bringing nothing with me except my keys and a bottle of water.
Oakland, which is the area we’re in, has a lot of little parklets and trails. This is especially true in the university area, which is where my apartment is. By that point, I had already formed a habit of walking around in nature and finding somewhere to lay down in the grass when I was stressed. Doing that was comforting. It reminded me of being a carefree little kid picking flowers. I didn’t need to go meet my dad until 10:00 (likely later, since he was chronically late for everything). I had more than enough time to decompress.
I walked around, thinking about how strange it was that my dad was here, that he seemed so different, and that, as soon as I saw him standing at baggage claim the previous night, I suddenly felt the same as I did when I was a kid gritting my teeth through ten-minute phone calls. I was small, frustrated, and stuck somewhere I didn’t want to be. Why was I doing this? Just for his sake? Was I seriously going to have to let him have an emotional claim over me and my life just because he was my ‘father’? He hadn’t played the role of a ‘father’ when he was expected to. Yet, there was no option for me to escape being his ‘daughter’. He essentially owned me for the first eighteen years of my life, and there’s no real way to bypass a connection so coercive and persistent.
So, I was left to be upset and he…wasn’t. He was spending his own money to come visit me, and was seemingly happy to do so. He held me for no reason. It was like he had moved on from the past and I hadn’t. But then again, what did he have to move on from? The major sources of shared trauma between us had been his fault. His temper, his immaturity, his disrespect for the woman he married and her children, all of it. Like most kids from broken households, I was just a vulnerable bystander when I lived with him. Maybe a bargaining chip, when the situation slammed its fists on the table and demanded it.
It took me a minute to realize that I’d stopped walking. I’m not sure how long I’d been standing on the pavement, bracketed by grass and trees on either side. I had only been awake a few hours, and I was already exhausted. I made sure my keys were in my pocket, tossed my water bottle onto the grass, and lay down on my back beside it.
This part will be hard to articulate. It’s the first time I’m telling anyone.
I was in pain. I noticed this before anything else, most likely because I was in pain all morning and finally had enough time to process it. My throat felt like it was closing up and I wanted to cry, but couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I was blinking slowly at the sky, an early-morning blue, until I realized I couldn’t see it anymore. My eyes were sealed shut. I tried to inhale sharply, to express alarm, but breathing was no longer a function I had access to. My skin, hardening and stretching as I began to panic, was no longer skin. I felt an excruciating, burning sensation throughout my ‘body’, which I now understand was the pain of undergoing transformation at a cellular level. My outer epidermal layers stiffened into vascular tissue and cork cambium. The soft inner meat of my flesh and organs bundled into layers upon layers of fibers. Every part of me was growing, stretching, differentiating rapidly. I am unsure if my nervous system was intact during the process, but I know I was conscious somehow. I tunneled into the soil and branched upward simultaneously.
My entire being was ‘breathing’. That word doesn’t accurately describe what was happening to me, but what other word is there? Every part of my discernible ‘self’ exposed to the air or the soil was absorbing, secreting, absorbing, secreting, absorbing, secreting. I was endlessly cycling through processes I was familiar with but not equipped to experience. I was the center of a bell crashing into its lip. I was a sound beyond my own range of hearing. I was flowering, densely populated with little white magnolia blossoms, despite the season.
Other organisms were all over me. Confused birds pecked at me and covered me in their shit, which I digested when it seeped into the soil. Insects entered me. Pedestrians stared at me and took my picture. All these observations are retrospective extrapolations, which is why my descriptions are so vague. At the time, I couldn’t see or comprehend anything except the fact that I was in agony. Later on, the presence of fat red welts on my skin from prying beaks meant birds had been with me, and so on. I was stuck there for at least a day. Maybe two.
The only time I felt I had any access to my senses was towards the end of the experience, when my dad found me. He was walking along the path I had been walking, hands clasped behind his back. He looked so calm. He was the only thing I could see, or hear, or recognize outside of ‘myself’.
When he saw me, he didn’t look surprised. Had he been expecting to find me like this? I still haven’t asked him about it. He approached me and his figure cut through the miasma of my pain with its jagged outline. I could see his humid breath. He reached out and ran his hand along my bark. Oh god.
He stared at me with a weird look in his eyes for a long time. Then he sat down on the grass beneath my shade and rested his back against me. I could do nothing. I felt him settle into a comfortable position. We sat together in silence for hours, until I ceased to photosynthesize. Him, the weary old man using my body for shade. Me, the nothing.
He turned to face me, then, and said, “You look so much like your mother. So much. I’m proud of what you’ve become.”
As if my dignity had not already been destroyed. Soon after he spoke to me, he left. I remember barely anything beyond that moment. I stayed where I was kept and was miserable. Hours later, I was suddenly struck with an intense feeling of relief. I thought, “He’s gone.” and wilted back into my body. It was an extremely disgusting process that I don’t want to revisit. For your notes, though, I’ll include a few relevant details:
When I returned to myself, I was fully clothed and physically intact. I was not uninjured, though. I mentioned the birds earlier, and my keys (which I had dropped on the ground at some point) had been partially absorbed into my right foot, near the heel. I tore them out as soon as I noticed, so I can confirm that my blood and scabbing patterns were normal. My water bottle was nowhere to be found, so I assume it was stolen. I did not look any different. I had stains from dirt, bird droppings, and other materials on my clothes and skin. Some insects had remained inside openings on my body, but they all appeared to be dead.
I had no epiphanies. I was exhausted.
I walked home on my bloody heel.