Yeah, the photojournalist said, I get that. It’s tough cobbling things together. I always hated having to line things up all the time. Diya gathered from his slight smile as he said this that he was self-aware about his current professional status, which involved others chasing him rather than the other way around.
Why photography? he asked. What got you into it?
The box of family photographs under my bed, Diya thought; the way she’d grown up thumbing through the stack, envying the way an image could capture, could hold a person in place. The wooden toy camera in that same box, which her mother had picked up in this city and given to Diya as a baby, the only toy Diya had managed to save from childhood. It had no functionality other than to look like a camera, but it didn’t feel like a useless object; the symbolism felt weighty, like her mother had meant it to tell her something. On the back, a pair of eyes were painted along with a line in the local script. Underneath, her mother had written in English, What do you see?
It kind of fell into my lap when I was younger, Diya said, and the photojournalist accepted this, moving on to another subject.
In one of their first meetings Diya had asked him, What’s your best ghost story? and this had developed into a game between them, both of them trading stories, the stories eventually evolving into masks, feints, secrets, like two truths and a lie, some real kernel buried amongst the other realities they’d chosen to label as fiction.
Once, a person:
- drowned in a pothole and now emerges from the pitted street after every rainfall, luring drivers to their demise
- died of old age and decided to check in on how their descendants were doing, a hundred years later
- lost their newborn to disease while a doctor was out drinking, and returns to the town posing as a stranger seeking aid in order to gain entry to the residents’ houses and steal their children
- set out to fulfill their own dreams of their destiny and dropped back in, years later, on the family and life they’d left behind
Diya noticed that the photojournalist’s ghosts were all steeped in tragedy, were malevolent, stereotypically scorned; she wondered what he thought about hers (probably nothing; he seemed not to be truly listening when she spoke, and while this suited her perfectly—that her words could land with no impact—she sensed his gaze growing more searching, more demanding).
But Diya could tell already that he’d made his work the purpose of his life, and that all other commitments and obligations would be, to him, flexible and secondary. It seemed impossible for him to maintain the level of focus he applied to his work in the rest of his life, especially to quotidian matters. This became evident when she examined the front tire on the scooter he’d lent her and found a hole that looked to be poorly patched, which he’d no doubt forgotten to have fixed properly and then neglected to tell her about. So when the woman in the village handed Diya her cell phone, Diya’s first thought was not relief but, shit, because she had no relatives, friends, anyone else to call in her (grand)mother’s city except the one person she vaguely knew, which was him, and this made her immeasurably sad.
*
When Diya was six, her mother walked out the door—Just off to the grocery store for milk—and never came back. Nothing sinister had happened beyond her mother’s own change of heart.
Diya’s grandmother had been visiting at the time, as she did a couple times a year. Diya’s mother had left a note in the napkin holder in the kitchen, which Diya’s grandmother lit on fire over the sink after reading. The note must have given a confession, if not an explanation, enough to result in Diya’s grandmother moving in for good to care for her. And then it was just the two of them amidst their ghosts: wayward mother/daughter, dead grandfather/husband, never-present good-for-nothing father/ luckily never son-in-law.
The morning after Diya’s mother didn’t come back, her grandmother simply said: Your mother is gone, but I’m here. That was one of the only times she spoke of it—or would permit them to speak of it—because of course Diya wasn’t immune to questions and demands, none of which were acknowledged. She sensed her grandmother felt ashamed, somehow responsible, that she’d caused a misfortune that could never be addressed lest it multiply. Diya walked past whispered phone calls in a language she couldn’t speak, caught the shift in her grandmother’s weather on certain days—stormy, overcast, prone to rain—and sensed that there was some sporadic but existing line of communication between her mother and grandmother that she would never be privy to, that she couldn’t access however much she begged. Her grandmother became a fortress, and particular rooms remained wholly off limits.