He Could Be Like Cronus

My father and a crew of six dressed in black, wearing knit caps and dark sunglasses, drop in from the ceiling on ropes during my ninth-grade English class. Sliding his glasses up his forehead, his eyes sweep the room, pausing when they find mine. He knows it’s me, his child, though he has never seen me. His firm jawline unwavering, he gestures at me with a curt nod.

I run to him, and he slings an arm around my shoulder. He smells of rivers and wet soil. My classmates stare at us open-mouthed, their faces gleaming with jealousy.

My father guides me outside, his crew accompanying us silently. A helicopter, its blades chopping the air, waits for us. My hair swirling, I follow him and hop in. We rise high above, the school buildings below fading to beige rectangles. This is how I begin imagining the myth of my father. What happens next? What does my father say to me, having never met me before? My imagination, despite its voraciousness, stutters here, unable to fill in his words.

Racially ambiguous, I’m stalked across various classrooms by the question “Where are you from?” And sometimes, “What are you?”

My mother teaches me to answer, “I am three-quarters Polish and one-quarter Indian.” Often a globe is involved, and I point to the labeled lands where I supposedly am from.

I begin adding “Indian from India” after my fifth-grade classmate asks excitedly, “Oh, me too! Do you know which tribe? I just found out my grandparents are Navajo.”

In seventh grade, the boy I have a crush on who sits next to me leans over and whispers, “Why don’t you look more Polish?” Earlier that day, our golden-haired classmate, Sophia, her sky eyes sparkling, had told everyone her parents were Polish. With my brown hair, my pupil-swallowing ebony eyes, and my copper-hued skin, we look almost nothing alike.

My mother doesn’t speak about my father. “I only knew him for a couple of days,” she explains. “He stayed at my bed and breakfast. I never thought… I didn’t even know I was pregnant.”

Occasionally, when she is angry at me, she snaps, “If only I had known about you earlier, then I could have had an abortion.”

As I get older, I am eager to know more about my father. I’m curious about the quarter part; I assume he must be half-Polish.

One day after I come home from school, I press my mother for more information. She tells me, “I sent him a letter, asking him for his blood type at least. But he never wrote back.”

“Maybe he’s dead,” I suggest.

Sea-green eyes misting, she whispers, her pale round cheeks wobbling, “I hope not.”

I am surprised by how much she cares for someone she only knew for a couple of days. Finally, I ask, “If I’m a quarter Indian, is my father half-Polish?”

At first, she doesn’t reply; she only stares at me intently. Eventually, sighing, she says, “You’re three-quarters Polish because I raised you, because you were born in Poland. You’re more Polish than Indian.”

Her answer perplexes me. How could I be more Polish just because I was born there?

“So,” I clarify, “he is full Indian?”

Her jaw flexes, annoyance spreading across her stress-wrinkled face. She doesn’t want to talk about my father, especially not about his ethnicity.

To appease me, she rummages through the plastic bags in our living room’s walk-in closet, where she keeps her documents, photographs, and the mink coat she never wears but doesn’t have the heart to sell.

Emerging from the closet, in between her fingers is a white business card with red lettering that states my father’s name, an address in Bangladesh, a phone number, and his job title: documentary filmmaker.

I roll around his name on my tongue, fingers caressing the thick woven cardstock. “He lived in Bangladesh? I thought you said he was Indian.”

My mother grunts. “India, Bangladesh—it’s all the same.” In my mother’s imagination, Bangladesh is too small of a detail to matter.

In my room, on the wall by my closet, I have taped up a National Geographic map of the world. Tracing my finger from China, I find India and then, to the right, a tiny, carved-out slice of a country—Bangladesh.

Then I do what any kid of the early 2000s would do: I type my father’s name into Yahoo’s search bar.

The first result is his website, listing his email, a short bio, and the movies he’s produced. The next few links are newspaper articles discussing the importance of his work for the burgeoning Bengali film industry. He is not quite famous, but in Bangladesh, he is well known.

The fire truck sirens outside my apartment window startle me back into reality. Closing my browser, overwhelmed, I debate telling my mother. I practice the potential conversation in my head. Hey, Mom, I looked up my father’s name on Yahoo…

For the next couple of weeks, I try to discern the right moment, but always the words dry up in my mouth, refusing to come out. I enjoy the secret, like he is mine.

A few days later, walking to McDonald’s, the setting spring sun casting shadows on our faces, I tell a friend, my voice trembling, “I found my father on the Internet.” I am still not quite sure what to do with this knowledge. I am still not quite sure if it is real. That he is real, that the myth could be made flesh and blood.

My friend doesn’t know what to do with this knowledge either. She stares at me, her head tilted to the side, and after a long pause asks, “Are you going to talk to him?”

I shrug and change the subject.

I stop telling people, “I am three-quarters Polish and one-quarter Indian.”

Now I declare, “I’m half Polish, half Bengali.” Soon that gets old, too. I am from two places many have never heard of and cannot locate on a map. I am tired of being a geography lesson.

After discovering my father’s internet footprint, I am a mixture of Pandora and Luke Skywalker. On the corner of Ventura Boulevard, by the Pavilions, waiting for the left turn signal to turn green, I bawl, thinking about how I am exactly like him. How if I were in his position, I would choose my art over my child. I understand why he would abandon me.

I am afraid if I email my father, his imagined wife will see it, and I will ruin his life and destroy his marriage. Terrified of being a burden, I decide to reach out to him, not as me but as a student writing a report on him. “Can you send me your bio and a list of your films?” I type. Possibly flattered, he responds right away.

He is single. No wife. No children. I still don’t know how to say, “I am your child.”

I read everything I can about him online—articles discussing the awards he’s received for his documentaries and feature films, the Wikipedia page where I learn that when he was my age he joined the Communist Party, the photographs where I compare the depth of our black eyes and the chubby swell of our cheeks.

10.

My mother meets my father while he’s vacationing through Eastern Europe and stays at Romeo & Juliet, the bed and breakfast she operates in Warsaw, Poland. In the myth of my father, they fall madly in love immediately. My mother treats him to zapiekanka when they stroll through the Łazienki Królewskie. They sit in the sun on a picnic blanket in front of the Vistula River. In the evening, they enjoy a ballet performance at the Teatr Wielki. Their relationship, though brief, is brilliant—like Icarus reaching for the sun.

11.

Three years later, as a freshman in college, I decide to reach out to him again. My email is brief; part of me is afraid maybe my mother lied or was wrong. Perhaps he is not my father. Still, I write, “Were you in Warsaw, Poland, in 1986? Because if you were, I think I’m your daughter.” Holding my breath, the smell of burnt popcorn and stale pizza permeating my nostrils, I hit send.

He replies a few days later, “Yes, I was. I remember your mother. I stayed at her bed and breakfast for a couple of days.” He had never received the letter my mother sent him, explaining, “The postal service in Bangladesh is not very reliable.” I want him to jump on a plane to California, eager to meet me. This is what my mythical father would do. My real father is cautious with his words, almost aloof. He ends his email with, “How’s your mother? I hope she’s well.”

How do I tell him my relationship with her is a thorny nopal cactus maze, and that for the last eighteen years, while he was off building his career as a filmmaker, I needed him in my life?

I tell him she’s okay. Desperately wanting him to be proud of who I am, I say I am studying neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, and campaigning for a Coca-Cola product boycott. I want him to see we are on similar paths of social justice, want him to want me in his life.

He asks me to send a picture.

I hesitate. I ask to see one of his documentaries.

“I’ll mail it next time I’m in India,” he says.

I give him my address. I never receive anything.

We go back and forth for weeks, exchanging tidbits of information. I learn he has eight siblings, meaning I have four aunts and four uncles. I imagine the cousins I could have played with. In the myth of my father, we are a crackling, loud family. Our voices and laughter are like a forest of squawking birds.

12.

In November I have a particularly difficult conversation with my mother, where she says, “Now that you’re in college, I have nothing to live for. Why don’t you call more often?” And then adds, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

When I tell her I don’t, she accuses me, voice crisping, “Are you sleeping with girls? If you’re sleeping with girls, that’s not natural. I want grandchildren.” Her homophobia prickles my skin.

Starving for parental acceptance, I confess to my father, “My mother and I don’t get along. We never have.” I don’t provide the particulars. “Can I come visit you?”

It is more than two weeks before I hear back from him. “Sorry,” he starts off, “I was traveling and didn’t have access to my email. I’m sorry,” he repeats, “that you and your mother are having a rough patch, but remember she’s your mother. Be adaptable. Be like the river,” he tells me, before breaking my heart completely. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to visit me. How about we meet somewhere in Europe over the summer?”

In his vague suggestion, I only hear rejection.

I don’t reply.

He emails me again at the end of December, signing the message with “Love.” He mentions nothing about us seeing each other.

I ignore it.

This is the last time I hear from him. I don’t have the space in my aching soul to be disappointed by another parent. I don’t have the space in my heart to feel more unloved and unwanted. I don’t have the space for a father unwilling to be the parent I’ve always fantasized about. The myth I created dies; its last wail scrapes at my empty chest.

13.

Except the myth, like most myths, isn’t so easily killed. For decades, I keep tabs on him through Google Alerts, witnessing his career soar. I sometimes daydream about going to one of his film festivals where he’s giving a keynote speech. In this fantasy, in the audience of hundreds, our eyes meet, and he knows undoubtedly who I am.

14.

When I am a junior in college, I discover my father’s YouTube channel. Instead of studying, I stay up watching Karnaphulir Kanna, a documentary film he had directed and written. The film, through various interviews, recounts the struggle of the Indigenous peoples living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where the Kaptai Dam is constructed. My soul aches watching the land flood where the people farmed while one hundred thousand are evicted. Wanting to honor their lives and their stories, like my father did, I choose it as a research topic for my sociology final.

15.

After I learn about my grandmother from an interview my father does for a Bengali magazine, I begin including her in my fantasies. I imagine visiting her. In this fantasy, she presents me with a sari, pleats my hair into braids, and anoints my body with sandalwood oil. She teaches me to cook, her warm, cinnamon-scented hands wrapped around mine. She sits with me at night, telling me stories of her rescuing Hindi girls in her rickshaw during the anti-Hindi riots and about her lessons with Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Bengali feminist writer.

16.

Now, I am almost forty, and I consider emailing my father again. I have a friend who wants to travel to India and suggests, “Come with me. We can go to Bangladesh, too.”

My father is in his seventies, and my mother has passed away. Yet my heart still hasn’t hardened to rejection. If I tell him, without asking, that I am coming, perhaps he would refuse to see me. More likely, he would make an excuse, claiming he’ll be traveling for one of his films. I am preparing for how he can still hurt me—this man I have never met, but still feel connected to. Connected to enough to be devastated by his inability to be a father.

17.

In an interview, when asked what he would be if not a filmmaker, he answers, “Writer.” Separated by miles and miles, never having touched, we share the same flame underneath our bellies—the inexplicable desire to tell stories. We are bound together by our creative threads—this is the new myth I am spinning about him. With the help of Google Alerts, I continue weaving this myth as I read about the awards he wins and how often he is cited as a “renowned filmmaker.”

I prefer this myth, for in reality, I don’t know what type of man he is or how else he’s capable of hurting me, whether with his words or with his hands. He could be like Cronus, afraid and insecure, swallowing me whole.

In this current myth of my father, he is no longer a spy come to rescue me from my ninth-grade English classroom; he is a filmmaker, choosing to uplift his culture and his people through his art. And this myth, this father, I can be proud of. Perhaps this myth is what I will decide to love and remember, rather than chasing the reality of a man who didn’t want to be a father.