found God, and then found Kelsey and then found meaning.
Sister Karenna goes next, talking about escaping the brutality of poverty when she was taken in by a church school, and going on to become a nun to serve others.
Then it’s my turn. I pause. My first instinct is to tell about Lulu. Because really that was a day I felt like I escaped danger.
But I decide to tell a different story, in part because I don’t think this one has been told out loud since he died. The story of one hitchhiking girl and two brothers and the three centimeters that sealed all our fates. It’s not really my escape. It’s hers. But it is my story. The founding tale of my family. And as Yael said about the Seder, it’s a story I repeat because it’s a history I want to see repeated.
I laugh. “I’ll do my best.”
“When does the film come out?”
“I’m not sure. They just finished shooting.”
“Funny how it all worked out.”
“Right place, right time,” I tell him.
“Yes, but you wouldn’t have been in the right place in the right time had we not canceled your camel trip.”
“You mean it got canceled. Because the camels got sick.”
“Oh, no, camels just fine. Mummy asked me to bring you back early.” He lowers his voice. “Also, plenty of flights back to Amsterdam before tomorrow, but when you disappeared to the movie, Mummy asked me to keep you here a little bit longer.” He chuckles. “Right place, right time.”
• • •
The next morning, Prateek comes to drive us to the airport. Chaudhary shuffles to the curb to see us off, wagging his fingers and reminding us of the legally mandated taxi fares.
I sit in the backseat this time, because this time Yael is coming to with us. On the ride to the airport, she is quiet. So am I. I don’t quite know what to say. Mukesh’s confession last night has rattled me, and I want to ask Yael about it, but I don’t know if I should. If she’d wanted me to know, she would’ve told me.
“What will you do when you get back?” she asks me after a while.
“I don’t know.” I really have no idea. At the same time, I’m ready to go back.
“Where will you stay?”
I shrug. “I can stay on Broodje’s couch for a few weeks.”
“On the couch? I thought you were living there.”
“My room’s been rented.” Even if it hadn’t, everyone is moving out at the end of the summer. W is moving in with Lien in Amsterdam. Henk and Broodje are going to get their own flat together.
“Why don’t you go back to Amsterdam?” Yael asks.
“Because there’s nowhere to go,” I say.
I look straight at her and she looks straight at me and it’s like we’re acknowledging that. But then she raises her eyebrow. “You never know,” she says.
“Don’t worry. I’ll land somewhere.” I look out the window. The car is climbing onto the expressway. I can already feel Mumbai falling away.
“Will you keep looking for her? That girl?”
The way she says it,
“What girl is this?” Prateek asks, surprised. I never told him of any girl.
I look at the dashboard, where Ganesha is dancing away just as he did on that first drive from the airport. “Hey, Ma. What was that mantra? The one from the Ganesha temple?”
“
“That’s the one.”
From the front seat, Prateek chants it. “
I repeat it. “
Yael reaches out to touch the scar on my face. It’s faded now, thanks to her ministrations. She smiles at me. And it occurs to me that I might have already gotten what I asked for.
MAY
“Hey, little man. You coming to clear your shit out of my attic?” There’s no introduction, no preamble. Not that I need one. Even though we have not spoken in years, I know the voice. It’s so much like his brother’s.
“Uncle Daniel,” I say. “Hey. Where are you?”
“Where am I? I’m in my flat. With my attic. That has your shit in it.”
This is a surprise. All the years I grew up, I have never actually seen Daniel in the flat he owns. It’s the same flat on the Ceintuurbaan that he and Bram used to live in. Back then, it was a squat. It’s where they were living when Yael came and knocked on the door and changed everything.
Within six months, Bram had married Yael and moved them into their own flat. Within another year, he’d cobbled together the funds to buy a broken-down old barge on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht. Daniel stayed in the squat, eventually getting a lease for it and then buying it from the city government for a pittance. Unlike Bram, who went on to fix up his boat, floorboard by floorboard, until it was the “Bauhaus on the Gracht,” Daniel left the flat in its state of anarchist disrepair and rented it out. He got almost nothing for it. “But nothing is enough to live like a king in Southeast Asia,” Bram used to say. So that’s where Daniel stayed, riding the ups and down of the Asian economy with a series of business ventures that mostly went nowhere.
“Your ma called,” Daniel continues. “Told me you were back. Said you might need a place to stay. I told her you needed to come get your shit out of my attic.”
“So I have shit in the attic?” I ask him, stretching out from the too-short sofa and trying to digest my surprise. Yael called Daniel? For me?
“
We arrange for me to come over the next day. Daniel texts me the address, though that’s hardly necessary. I know his flat better than I know him. I know the stuck-in-time furniture—the zebra-striped egg chair, the 1950s lamps that Bram used to find at flea markets and rewire. I even know the smell, patchouli and hash. “It’s how this place has smelled for twenty years,” Bram would say when he and I would visit the flat together to fix a faucet or deliver keys to a new tenant. When I was younger, the lively multi-ethnic area where Daniel lived, right across from the treasures of the Albert Cuyp street market, seemed like another country from the quiet outer canal where we lived.
Over the years, the neighborhood has changed. The once working-class cafes around the market now
