Okay...so this is not from Onu's POV and he appears only in the last bit, but this is essential. I'm wondering if it sounds too boring or too filled with facts, though...
Will explain a few things here:
1. Yiddishe kinder - Yiddish for 'Jewish child'. Letty is an American Jew, and they end up using a lot of Yiddish which is a mix of many European languages.
2. The events in letter 2 actually did happen.
3. Letty speaks of being Jewish in Europe...she was born much after this, but what she refers to here is the Holocaust.
4. Letty's husband participated in the Vietnam War of the '50s, and Motya dies in the Persian Gulf War that lasted from 1990-1991.
Letters to Motya.
March 4, 1991.
Motya,
Funny, is it not, that I write a letter to you even when you are right before me...your face like marble and your eyes closed as if in sleep. I used to gaze and gaze at your sleeping form when you were born, you looked so much like your father that it had made me want to cry sometimes. And cry I did: he survived Vietnam, how could a running truck and a careless old pedestrian match to that? But the truth was that it did, the truth was that we lost him because I went out to buy milk at a time when I should have been keeping watch over your father. I wondered then whether I would have felt any different if he had died a hero?
With you in front of me now, yiddishe kinder*, it's so easy to see how much more the pain would have been. Your father died a normal man. He died the way everyone else died, and I didn't have to brand him with another title or pretend a medal would replace my husband. Because every time a woman placed her hand to my shoulder and said, take heart Leticia your son died a hero, I wanted to scream, so what! You didn't need to be a hero except to yourself, Motya, and at what cost?
An Arab woman I had never even bothered to speak to before put her hand on my shoulder as I thought this. I will not say your son was a hero, she said, because since when did our sons have to be heroes for us to love them? All I can say is, inshallah, he was a good man who will await your arrival to Paradise one day.
Had she lost sons too?
Whether she did or did not was not my concern. For the first time in years, human touch from a stranger was welcome to me. I placed my hand on hers.
Sleep, child, sleep tight. This last journey of yours requires strength. Because when you wake up I may not be there to guide you...
Ever yours,
Maman.
P. S. Yes, I know, you were always so French...
--
February 28, 1993.
Motya,
Mikhael tries to get used to being the only son in the family, but I know it's hard. In his head he's still little Mikitty, the baby of the family. He's still the one who had to keep watch on his latkes because he knew you were always around to finish off his share when he wasn't looking. His life revolved around us, he was a planet and we were his suns...and even two years down the line his life still seems to be rolling out of orbit.
He was at Hudson Bay two days, Motya, with a few friends. This evening he called up and gave me the most unbelievable news. A bombing at the Twin Towers, he'd said, engineered by a bunch of conspirators with conspicuously Muslim names. They'd intended to hit one building so that it would fall on the second and destroy them both...and they'd failed. My first reaction was to laugh out loud. Destroy the Twin Towers? A hairbrained scheme indeed, and one that was likely never to happen, I said. No wonder they'd failed.
What he said next made my blood freeze. Those damn Muslims, he said, they bite the hands that feed them.
I remembered the woman who had kept her hand on my shoulder when you left us, who saw through the reality of my pain when no one else could. Her name was Sarah Khalil, she was Lebanese and she'd been here only three years. Her husband, his brothers and their fellow Muslim friends did what they had to because they had families back home to send money to. They had more pressing things to worry about besides which building to destroy and which corrupt western government to undermine.
I remembered the acute shellshock you had while at your base in Al Ain and then Saudi Arabia, all the flesh and blood and the horror on their faces before they'd died. I knew it would be tough, Maman, you'd said, I'd trained myself for it. But I never thought that I'd look at the destruction we'd wrecked on the other side and think, what's the difference between us and them? You'd been such a sunny, cheerful young boy, Motya, and when I heard you over the phone that day I realised that that boy was as good as dead already.
I thought about Sarah and wondered...what have we really fed them that they haven't earned? Does our Mikitty forget that before we were Americans we had been Jews in Europe? The dregs of society? The ones they had chosen to dump in Kiev and Buchenwald and Auschwitz? That we'd been accused of sucking up resources and stealing livelihoods the way we now accuse immigrants of stealing ours?
Can I blame him? This is so exclusively his home. Neither of you had ever had to live as the other...none of you had had to worry about how one single innocent action could paint you so utterly black.
Our Mikitty is young still, bless him. He has much to learn.
Maman.
--
August 16, 1998.
Motya,
A new family has shifted to Queens this year, our fifth Indian family now. Mrs. Basu says that they'd shifted because it suited her better than Manhattan did, though her child preferred her previous home. Her husband is a busy man, a good man who has no clue what the word balance means. I know he loves us and I know he tries his best, Sunita tells me when she visits, but will Nupur understand? Already she's growing up and one day before he knows it his little girl will be a woman. And he won't know how to handle her.
Is Mr. Basu any less knowledgable than I am...I, who cannot digest the fact that my second son wants to join the US army too?
Nupur on the outside looks like a girl who could make friends easily and get her way around anywhere. She's already gotten a collection of friends: the Chakraborthy girl across the street, that other family with two daughters who used to stay here but moved months ago because their father got a transfer to Manhattan. Nupur had scowled and whined the moment she'd heard that her best friend had left to where she'd wanted to be staying.
I catch Sunita watching Nupur eat my latkes with tears in her eyes one day, a few months after they've arrived. I can't ask her why...it's upto her to tell me.
She looks back at me then and says, I'm going to miss this so much.
Miss what? I ask, Nupur? Your husband? Are you leaving for somewhere?
She cries.
Two months later, I begin to understand why...by which time Mr. Basu has set her ablaze in the crematorium; dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
Maman.
--
August 30, 2001.
Motya,
Mikitty wants to stay at Hudson Bay. At the same hotel because from his window he can actually see the Twin Towers and the lake. He says he'll come down to Queens mid-September.
Why do I have a feeling he won't come?
Humour me. Tell me to stop being such a Jewish mother stereotype, Maman!
Maman.
--
September 2, 2001.
Motya,
He looks so like you, son. Young Ganguly, with family that shunted him over here without a second thought to how he'll adjust. A little darker than you and a little thinner now, a little more lost, a little less at home.
He looks so much like you it hurts to see him sometimes. And I can't help myself, everytime I look at him I call him by your name. He's as lost as you were and as hurt as you were, and he's a little devil in disguise, making me feel in ways I'd not even thought of since you've left.
Forgive me.
Maman.
--
September 2, 2001.
Mishti,
SHE CALLS HIM MIKITTY?!?!?!
She called him that over the phone today.
I love her and all, but so embarassing :S
Motu.
P.S. Orindam uncle's planning a trip to Manhattan on the 8th I think. We're having a sleepover yay!
P. P. S. Mikitty sounds like a cat with an over-possessive owner. Why, Aunt Letty, why!
Edited by Elizabeth Darcy - 13 years ago
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