When the second anniversary rolled around, I was basking in the remnants of a weak, European sun, with a man at my side.
The first time I tripped on cobblestones was when my shoelaces came undone. These streets wind down alleyways and open to vast stretches littered with makeshift stalls and buildings resembling dollhouses. You don’t dawdle because people walk fast. The air swings between cool and icy. What little sunlight that flickers through the clouds offers no warmth. I clung onto the Man at My Side as we whisked past throngs, my cheek pressed against his shoulder, his arm my temporary flannel cure. Our pace is composed of brisk rushes or slow, lingering burns. These burns were my new favorite thing.
Months ago, the subject of our music tastes had inevitably surfaced. In the din of a train, I presented Swift’s Marjorie and I could swear he almost smirked. Listen to it first, tell me what you think, I said. He scrolled the lyrics in silence. This is about losing someone, isn’t it? he said. Yeah, she wrote about her dead grandmother. I lost my grandfather, I said.
He looked at me as if I’d suddenly grown three heads. I lost my grandmother, he said. We were very close.
We stared at each other.
Months later, he tells me that his grandmother was his treasure. This announcement was his attempt at consolation in the stoic way men often favor logic over emotions. I had confessed the second death anniversary of mine was looming, and he didn’t hold my hand. My grandmother was my treasure, he said instead, gaze steady and impassive, both elbows resting on the table. I watched her die. Were you there to see yours? The words were as if he commented on the weather. I remember fighting amusement as he spoke. Was I there to see mine? Imagine standing over my grandfather’s body to watch him fight for air, drowning under all the tubes that snaked into him. Maybe he passed in his sleep and it was a quiet affair, like stillness descending and settling on muck after heavy rain. What would I have thought? “Here lies Kaafa, a husk, a shell, a corpse, a cadaver, a lifeless ruin, all bones and remains.” I would have laughed. I would have retched.
It hit me later that zeyvaru translates to jewelry, and so on to treasure. Kaafa, constructing our home before my mother even existed, probably chose it from a list. Maybe he consulted with his wife and she said something or the other. Maybe it was already chosen for him, and maybe it was like an intangible heirloom passed down generations. He probably had the word scratched onto a slab and hung over the front door. He had painted the walls green. When I was younger, the front door used to be a beautiful emerald, the color of evergreen in the depths of European forests. Maybe to him, his home and family were his treasure. Meanings probably held as much weight as it does for me. Or maybe he didn’t care and favored logic over emotions too; maybe it was the only available word left on the registry. Eeny meeny miny moe, migeyah kiyaanee zeyvaru dho?
But did he imagine, even in his wildest dreams, that his third grandchild would sit with a man, the Man at My Side, in a city of cobblestones and dollhouses and icy air, to contemplate the linguistics and sentiments of zeyvaru? To this man, Thaana would appear to be strokes of foreign gibberish. He can barely remember hini means ant. I’ve been looking for irony and I’ve been laughing about it too. Death left me with jet-black hair and pastel shirts and morose iftars and front doors stripped of color, but it’s not enough. Kaafa my love, I’m taking your name and your home’s name too. I took them across a continent and spoke of you in the crowds as a man’s shoulders warmed my cheek. I spoke of you in winding alleyways. I spoke of you in coffee shops and bookstores and trains, entertaining my companion with your stories. I told him he is reminiscent of you sometimes, in your shared intuition and kindness and eerie ability to read through people. Here was someone who, for the first time, grasped my grief fully. Here were two people who had lost their maternal grandparents, two people who were nobody’s grandson and nobody’s granddaughter. I spoke of Kaafa as I stumbled into a forest and gasped at the trees. Our front door used to be a beautiful emerald. Did I enter home?
