ANSHI PUROHIT

minutes before the end of a cricket match

Anshi Purohit | Prose

“They need to lose wickets.”

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I am treading the border between inadequacy and incompetence. 

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I do not tell my father that he is bad luck, or that the Indian team needs to reform their game strategy. I know nothing of cricket, but I’ve picked up on team cohesion. They must knit their eyes and clench their stomachs so all they see are the dizzying fastballs catapulting forward. Then, they might cash in stability with prestige. But I know nothing of cricket, destiny, or game strategies. 

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“What do you want for dinner?” I peer over his slouched position on our living room couch. The back of his head is silvery white and greased with palm oil. When my mother would insist on rubbing my split ends with oil and massaging my dark skin with cream that would make me ‘fair & lovely’ -- he would laugh. What a rebel daughter we have, he would repeat. Staring at my father’s scalp, I wish I had learned to cook and tame my ravenous hair, which is sealed off in some envelope. My hair prepares itself to become a poor soul’s wig. 

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“Not now, not now,” he says, his voice somber and three octaves lower than its usual cavalier drawl during his midafternoon meetings. I sidestep into the adjacent gray coffee table, stumbling into his view. Another disapproving brow crease. “Just get me whatever food from wherever.” Another soft mutter: they need to lose wickets, twenty runs in twelve balls. His ideas closest to adventure are slouched between these jelled couch cushions stained by sweet n’ sour sauce and turmeric-infused curries. 

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What I’d hoped to tell him is how my student ID was rejected by the hospital volunteer registration department again. For missing the deadline for submitting some referral form or another. For not cropping my profile picture to the correct dimensions…or something. And I am supposed to be on summer break, whatever those words mean. I was supposed to be employed last year. 

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My father waits all year for these cricket matches, but I haven’t learned the art of pretending to understand their value. Digging my bare feet into the soft carpet in our living room, I open my mouth but language flees me. Threads escape the carpet’s gray lining, and my father’s brow creases similarly to tears in its worn fabric. Soon, we will be redoing the floors in our kitchen and everything will be tiled. Our floors will be square tiled and my feet will turn purple. 

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Though I could gorge on street-style deep-fried birria tacos, instead I brainstorm possible takeout orders he would prefer while thumbing the rejected ID card in my jeans’ pocket. The picture was taken at my hometown’s post office a few days before junior prom, and I used the same one for my learner’s permit. 

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 I whisper incoherent prayers over my unsatisfied father’s floating head. It bobs on a carousel, landlocked by a childhood fondness for sports that will expire in his generation. Indian uncles are splitting hairs over bets, beer cans within entrenched man caves spoiled with aftershave and future sex scandals. 

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Tragic, almost, that I cannot expect my father and I to share any similarities except our friendlessness. Even that relationship gets testy when we decide to clean out our closet and he rediscovers some memento from a past life, a celebrated triumph shared among friend groups I never had.

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Back in India, my father knew our neighbors by how well their families were doing overseas, whether they received their travel bonuses on schedule or were registered with the right unions. Inadequacy versus incompetence; my hometown rubbed off on me and failed to sharpen my direction. 

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“I didn’t go to parties when I was your age. So you’ll be better off if you just help around at home when they go off like normal people, ” my father said to me a week after my high school graduation. A cohort of students I couldn’t call my friends were taking pictures on a boardwalk, salt and spray tanned bikini bodies boasting through my dimmed phone screen. I lost my physical diploma, since Beach Week. My father imparted similar words of wisdom and encouragement throughout my undergraduate adventures. 

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 We both sharpen our anger against the other’s attention.

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Glommed in pain, he would write in his journal. Still chasing fulfillment but forced to slam on brakes. When I was advised to keep a journal, I scribbled more than I wrote, which might reveal more about my life than I’m willing to divulge. When my mother was advised to keep a journal, she decided to bail on family therapy. 

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“Do you want tea?” I ask, daring him to turn away from his cricket game and look me in the eye and watch my bloodshot eyes with morose interest. 

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“What did you say was in the kitchen?” The space between his responses seem to reverberate. “Just give me what’s in there.” The plastic forks and cracked glassware he keeps stored in our cabinets (though we never cook) rattle in their prisons. 

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Ginger from the nonexistent tea steaming in my cupped palms hits the back of my throat and I curl my toes to keep out aches. Have my hands always felt so damp, so barren? My mother would wring her palms and wipe at her tired eyes while she spoke to me, the daughter who dresses herself in colors on the spectrum of sadness.

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My room used to be a private haven when I was a teenager who could slip from a bedroom window with the simplest sleight. But developers are arriving tomorrow, before the sun turns golden brown above our town. Soon, tile will overcome our house, this metamorphosis diabolical, capturing shards of ourselves in wavelengths. Soon I will trudge back toward another foreign isle I will learn to call my home. 

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Nobody will chorus over doomed cricket matches, and perhaps I will learn to miss what I have already left behind. Behind me, a scented candle’s incense dances across an empty granite table where my mother sits with a cup of coffee when she comes home from work, her penciled eyebrows affixed to her creases. Tonight I can imagine her casting a lure at me, the wire swinging, a catapult that misses and snags on seaweed before her grasp can reach me. 

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With nothing but honest intention, I gather my palms into fists and tell my father to take it all himself.

Anshi is a high school student from Maryland. Her work has been published in over fifteen literary magazines and was nominated for Best of the Net. When she's not pretending to write, you can find her listening to indie music, eating popcorn, or attempting to learn how to sketch again (and failing).