Sometimes, it is red. My memory poses with the mirror swimming in color. Wherever I look, there is red on my hands, face and the entire dressing table. A flicker. Mum's lifting me and putting me down. She pulls the lipstick out of my hand. I don't recall shouting, but maybe there wasn't any. The four year old mind loves to forget whatever she doesn't like. But this memory is handed to me clearly, a clear sky sticking in my lungs. I remember walking into the living room, the room vaulted with silence. The image which flashes without falter is the strand of understanding unfolding in me. This is when I remember my dad is away in another country. He is the missing piece. The reason why the house in enveloped in quiet. I didn't know it then but he's left for Bahrain. Away from India to make a new life for us abroad.
Even though you don't know the specifics, your mind always remembers the way you felt. I remember understanding that my dad would be away for awhile when I stared at the clock closing in on midnight, and heard my mum shuffling around the room, her footsteps familiarly ringing with a shade of worry. I felt lonely.



~~~~~~



A child's mind doesn't think of cause and effect. Maybe it doesn't understand it. But that's where they rise apart from adults, daring to veer into the unknown without wanting to know what would happen.

I remember this one clearly too. The wind from the table fan pushes at me continuously. My mother has my sister in one hand, and her bag and our passports in the other. I am bored, the line in the immigration office never moving at all. The fan moving to its own rhythm is my only distraction.

Even in the future when it comes back to this, I remember the sea of thoughts lapping my walls gently, the current of the water barely existent. I've always been the daring one, the one who never thought out properly before she did something.

I fly my fingers into the incoming blades of the fan. This memory too also dissolves in red. Blood sprouts over the third and fourth fingers. There are gasps I think. I've managed to disrupt the entire department. There are officers, people in suits, everybody hovering. The next thing I know is I'm being carried away. My mother searches frantically for the nurse. This is the part where I remember only flashes- I can't remember why there's no nurse. After that, its cotton and Band-Aids. Then we're back in the line, again, wading our way from immigration to duty free and into the flight that would take us into a new world completely.  

My dad who's been waiting at the airport in Bahrain for hours is very happy. That is until I come down the escalator with my mum, waving my injured left hand at him, the third and fourth finger sticking out specifically to do the waving job. I got a tetanus shot that day. I'm glad my mind doesn't remember that bit.