The Inherited Custody

CHAPTER IV

Every path indicated that the outer world had evaporated. There was nothing left except the weak world of the house, the cafe, the outside and the inside. Once or twice a day the sparrows sang on the veranda and, noticing Rumi's presence, they'd fly, returning only once later in the day.

That evening he sat at the cafe. The only people that often went there were the old, known customers. Not a lot of new people came to hang along the driving hours and gossip about with a pile of glasses of tea. But enough came. Enough to help him pay the bills. He couldn't do anything else because he couldn't bear the thought of leaving Baba behind. Rustom was too old, too ill. He wouldn't even eat voluntarily anymore. Rumi would have to put the bowl of soup on his lap and watch him drink it and then place tablets on his tongue and force some water down his throat. He often scolded for that. Rustom, if anything, was like any other parent who didn't like being taken care of by their child. He fussed over medicines and taunted his son. A couple of times he asked Rumi to leave him to die. And Rumi was often left thinking what would happen if he was left all alone— with nobody he knew around.

His mind flitted to a bleak memory of the man that once sat in this cafe, one whose face he remembered, one that wasn't his father. Charles. What a simple name, with an odd twist to the tongue. That week- Which week? The one when Rumi had read the letters were long gone, passed and crashed and sunk under the burdens of reality. He barely even thought of them. Only now, and very, very rarely did he even think of the different looking man that had once made his way to the cafe, that he had once encountered in the garden, that he remembered so weakly, he often questioned himself whether what he remembered was even real? Certainly those letters were.

His father had never spoken about Charles either. 'He was a customer,' said Rustom, he was dragged, somehow, out of pity, to a stranger's funeral. And he went out of respect. He had very accidently found the body of that old man in the alley behind the cafe. Of course, he reached out to the authorities. It was a decent thing to do. And so he was dragged by the police to answer some questions-- When? How? Why? He did all of that. The police considered him to be a friend, the only known person of the deceased. They were the ones who had handed over the stack of letters to Rustom, told him to go through it since they only found the letters addressed to family. They assumed Rustom to know the family.

Of course, he didn't. Rustom quietly took those letters, and never opened them, gave it to him, and never asked about them ever again.

Rumi believed that his father did not even remember that man, or those letters, or perhaps that funeral. It altogether summed up like a ball of snow, and raggedly tossed around like an insignificant, breakable memory. But he still kept them. For reasons unbeknownst to himself, those letters were filed neatly and tidied up in a paper file in his drawers in the dusty house, under several important school and university projects, under piles of books, somewhat forgotten, and never touched after its first encounter.

While the sun like a biscuit dipped into the bright tea of the sky, Rumi couldn't help but draw parallels to his and Charles's family. The distance of physicality in the letters reflected the distance among his parents and him, the lack of words that lingered, somehow were fulfilled in Charles's family by these letters he had read and kept. There was always too much to say, too much unsaid. But what felt absent, most of all, in both these families was love. The lack of it bothered Rumi. He didn't know how to compensate for it even in his own life.

He believed that perhaps love lingered in between— the past and the future, the tables and chairs, the bed and the bookshelves, the words in the letters, the empty glasses of tea, the wanting and the wanted— everything that left space in between them and the other. And that love wasn't as romantic as one thought— it was much more barbaric, violent and savage than one could imagine.

French, now that was something Rumi had repelled himself from. The language itself made him uneasy. Of course, that muscle was already delicate and weak. He never got the opportunity to use the language, nor did he know someone (he barely knew many people) who spoke a foreign language. He feared being alienated again. He thought that if anybody heard him speak a strange tongue, or read a book in an unrecognizable sound, he would be judged, or looked down upon. Not that he cared. But it spiked his anxiety.

A couple of times he would read Simone De Beauvoir's old copies he had gotten long ago, years after he had even stopped taking french classes in university. He had started reading books in English, translated from other languages like Chekov and Tolstoy from the Russian, Elena Ferrante from the Italian or Indian and Chinese writers who wrote in English famously.

In fact, he felt as if he never even knew the language, or anything related to it anymore. Did Charles really exist? Or the history of his life that somehow did not matter to Rumi at all? It was, after all, a hidden memory. The reality of Rustom and Rumi's mother was too real, it overshadowed anything else that seemed entertaining enough. It blew in flames whatever came in it's path, like the flow of lava sheds and turns a city into ashes. Nothing else ever mattered. And perhaps what made them dominant in his life was that he was after all, connected with them, by blood, by flesh and bones, by his very biological anatomy, that flowed under their beings like spoken language. The thing about a family-tree isn't that it connects people from its branches. It connects them though roots, the seeds that began it all.

Night came to the city like stars to the night. Rumi shut the shop and walked home with a cigarette burning.

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