Everything Was Good-Bye Read Online Free

to the closet and found, typeset on a half-empty container of penicillin: “Akal.” Years later, while reciting the morning prayer in Punjabi school, I paused on his name:
    Ik Onkar
    Satnam
    Karta purukh
    Nirbhau
    Nirvair
    Akal moorat
    Ajuni saibhang.
    Gurparshad
    Jap.
    That was the only prayer I learned, and I repeated it several times before asking my Punjabi teacher what “Akal” meant. She told me that it meant “not subject to time or death.”
    I whispered it sometimes—at night as I fell into the quiet possibility of dreams, and even at times like these when I needed something to mute the staid condolences that made loss less than what it was.
    “So unfair… such a tragedy… he was so young, such a good man… ” As always, my mother’s face fell, the distance of events blurring behind warm eyes. Her voice cracked, her tone dropping into soft gulps of lapsed grief. “They said it was an accident…there was an investigation…they were sorry…some of them even said it was his fault, but I know he was careful.” She spoke of it in fragments, allowing everyone else to complete her sentences with sympathy.
    My father had fallen from the twentieth floor of a luxury high-rise apartment building where he’d been framing the walls. He was proud of his work and boasted about the complex’s amenities: air-conditioned units, an in-ground pool, a private park. It seems strange to me that this building existed somewhere outside our mention of it. That somewhere people were living in these air-conditioned units, pushing their blond, blue-eyed babies in strollers along the very sidewalk where my father lay dead; he’d died instantly. Sometimes I dreamed I was him. Sometimes I dreamed I was the fall. Either way I woke with a screamless breath escaping, my gut twitching into knots. I would lie back loosening them with thoughts of something, and then nothing.
    But no matter how many times I dreamed of his death, I could not conceive of it; he was a myth and my mother was a martyr.
    “If only he had a son… what can we do… it is kismet.”
    I listened to them explain our entire lives away with one word. Apparently, it was my mother’s fate to be a widow with six daughters and our fate to become casualties of fractured lives. Though I struggled against such a predetermined existence, I knew that my sisters and I were all carved out of this same misery, existing only for others, like forgotten monuments that had been erected to commemorate events that had come and gone.
    “No one knows why these things happen. Only God knows. S atnam Vaheguruji,” said the matriarch. She joined her hands in prayer towards the lithograph of Guru Nanak that hung above the brick fireplace, before falling silent, nodding to the beat of the grandfather clock that clicked likea metronome. Serena had given it to my mother for her birthday several years ago and since it was too large and cumbersome to fit in the hallway, it was left standing in the living room like a watchman. At the end of each month the pendulum stopped and the clock fell silent until it was wound again—a small reprieve.
    Twisting a handkerchief in her fingers, my mother echoed prayer in whispers. I half expected an origami animal to appear out of the cloth. But all that appeared was a distant look on her face that dissolved only when her chunni slipped offher head. She quickly readjusted the fabric and wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. “Meena will get the chai.” She hurried after me into the kitchen.
    “Use the good dishes—the cottage rose china,” she whispered, and ushered Tej in the direction of the silver tray, reminding her not to forget the coasters. “Make sure you let the tea boil after you add the milk,” she instructed, as though we’d never made chai before. But the chai had to be perfect. Something had to be.
    My mother returned to our guests composed: the perfect widow in perpetual mourning. I listened to the guests’ dutiful sighs,