Father

I learned that you don’t miss what you don’t know,
a doctrine spoken in half-phrases, revised yearly,
like something everyone remembers differently.

I imagine him walking the corridors of his own life,
white shoes squeaking,
clipboard pressed to his ribs,
a student nurse, a biologist,
a man whose profession shifted according to the weather in my grandmother’s house:
Biologist when they were feeling fancy,
nurse when they returned to the script.

He was Hari Krishna. He was Muslim. He was absent until he wasn’t.
And I was to be sent to live with him at four.
I sometimes wonder if he really offered to have me packed off,
parcelled up and sent to him - the man whose name is not on my birth certificate,
whose ethnicity was treated as exotic, a distant holiday I would never take.

But I remained, in my house of shifting shadows,
where mirrors asked quiet questions.
Some days I felt him near,
not as a man, nor a father,
but as a question suspended in the rafters:

Doesn’t she have lovely olive skin?

In the pause between those questions,
I sometimes sensed a shoreline I had never seen,
an island I carried like a faint bruise,
my darker skin a lucky mark or an ostentation,
depending on the observer.

I remember other thresholds:
the echoing hallway of my grandmother’s flat,
the smell of mince and pearl barley,
the heavy thud of fireproof doors.
These were the small landscapes where he existed,
slipping past me, present but untouchable.

I was white. I was Spanish-passing. I was half-caste.
Who was I to take offence?

Time folded around these things.
She spoke of his family:
their disdain for the scarlet woman,
the white woman,
the westerner,
the scandal.
And me.

He spoke of my mother’s illnesses,
a footnote to the story that had ensnared him:
her self-made fragility,
her recast tales,
his incapacity to cope.

He never asked about the child
waiting on the other end of the line,
a teenager now, speaking to him
for the first and only time.

I learned the things he couldn’t handle,
disoriented within them,
with no point of reference - like a spinning top.

And after he drowned,
at sea, without the certainty of a body,
the past tightened like a knot pulled tight.
His absence became final,
a door sealed in a house without windows.

Even now, I feel the thread of him
thin, trembling, unfinished,
running through me like a seam.
A lineage unspoken, unnamed,
caught between salt water and silence.

Sometimes I feel myself in the spaces he never occupied:
corridors that stretch like tunnels,
small rooms holding memories like lanterns,
faces and voices flickering,
the smell of food I never tasted,
the echo of the life I almost might have lived.

A feeling,
a ground I can stand on,
even if the foundations are mist
and the map remains incomplete.

The past hums below, persistent,
a low tide drawing back through years.
And yet, what you don’t know,
you never notice.