Chapter 19
I walk up to my childhood bedroom that is now my adult bedroom.
Before I know it, the dirty clothes I’ve worn are on the floor and I’m taking a long, hot shower.
Once back in my room, I’m reaching for my familiar pajamas—old shorts and a favorite band tee.
My room is filled with lots of books, now mostly ones about the law, the legal system, and legal thrillers.
There are a few out-of-date law school textbooks my brother had found at a garage sale and a few we found sitting on neighbors’ stoops.
My brother could always find treasures in the trash—even turning a truly hideous eighties baby-blue tuxedo complete with requisite frills into the most stylish and unique suit for prom that year.
Back then, I thought he had done it to be cool and edgy, and only realized later it was because we didn’t have the money for him to buy one at the mall like everyone else.
The posters on my wall are probably over twenty years old, featuring Guns N’ Roses and AC/DC—music my parents worried would lead me to a more nefarious life.
I have many memories of listening to cassette tapes with Alex.
Both of us exchanging a mixtape weekly, and occasionally surprising each other with new songs.
Usually, we were just listening to the same classics rearranged in a different order for hours on end.
Given the amount of time Alex spent in this bedroom, I could probably consider it his bedroom as well.
Ammi has urged me to update my room so it doesn’t look like it belongs to a teenager, but to spend money on changing it would mean continuing to live here longer…or maybe forever.
I look up and see a photo of Alex and me from high school sitting on my desk.
The other people in the photo are cropped out, friendships that faded as we grew older.
He’s since grown out of that awkward pimply phase, only I’ve remained the same with less acne (thank god) but only a marginally better haircut.
Somehow, I still don’t know my best angles yet.
I think I need female friendship more than I realized.
Alex takes the worst photos of me, which is why I’ve had to regrettably include a selfie in my dating profile.
I come down to see my mother setting the table with the food I brought, despite it being well past dinnertime.
Ammi tries to force us to have dinner together as much as possible—though sometimes work becomes a suitable excuse.
Now that I’m faced with impending jail again, the family dinners I dreaded don’t seem so bad anymore.
In the past, my mother cooked laborious Sri Lankan meals, each dish requiring multiple ingredients that could only be found at the local Asian grocery store.
At one point, back in the day, curry leaves had been so hard to obtain, my parents just grew their own.
As I see my mother grow older and more tired, what once were family meals that resulted from a day of cooking are now more simple affairs whipped up in thirty minutes or less.
I’m not hungry, but the smell of the curry pulls me in, and I eat at the table in silence.
My mother and I fall back into our normal routine of late where she asks me some questions and I provide one-word answers and occasionally a mostly imperceptible roll of the eyes.
I was looking at alternative options for additional income before my arrest. I’d suggested renting out my brother’s old room.
The mere suggestion had made my mother look at me aghast, as if I’d said that her chicken curry was undersalted or something equally heinous.
When I’d pressed her, she had merely said that she didn’t want strangers in the house and this wasn’t a hotel.
I understand that. Our home, as small and now dilapidated as it’s becoming, is our private sanctuary.
Our place to get away from it all, where people won’t comment on the food we eat and the saris my mother wears.
I also know the real reason they don’t want to have anyone in his room.
They don’t want to take down the shrine to my brother that has been there since his death.
The photo of him smiling, not knowing that in less than a year he’d be dead, sits in the middle of the shrine.
He’s forever frozen at the age of thirty-three.
His name is written above the photo in calligraphy.
The A was a little wonky, but even a stranger could make out the name: Ajith.
I avoid going inside his room, or even looking in there.
The memories are still tinged with grief, even the good ones.
It’s hard to remember the laughs without also wanting to cry and maybe punch a wall—emotions I’d hoped would have evaporated by now.
People say time heals everything, but I don’t feel healed, and my parents still wear the devastation daily on their faces.
It’s almost as if their physical appearance changed after he died.
Yes, the wrinkles were already pronounced and their hair had begun to gray, but the sadness accelerated their aging.
Somehow the grief seemed to change the shape of their eyes. They looked sorrowful even when happy.
Yet we moved on as the basic needs of being human prevented us from lying in bed for every minute of the day.
We woke up in the mornings and got dressed.
My mother works at the corner store, which may let her go at any moment, and my father is a part-time sales associate at a car dealership around the corner—a job taken after his heart condition forced him to pass his taxicab medallion lease onto me.
My father has sold six cars—only five if you don’t count the one that was returned—six months into working there.
It’s a commission-paid job, so he can rarely contribute to household expenses, but it’s something to do.
Despite an outward appearance of life, we have been ghosts these past two years, shells of the people we once were, going through the days like robots programmed to do certain tasks.
There are still joyous moments. My parents smile when someone says something funny on TV.
I laugh at amusing things on my podcasts, but late at night when I’m finally alone, I feel terribly sad.
Then I get up for work and bury that sadness with a “don’t fuck with me” facade.
The death of my brother turned my mother’s hair prematurely white, a fact she didn’t try to hide. A permanent nod to her mourning. We rarely talk about Ajith anymore. Even thinking about him elicits emotions I hope will continue to remain hidden until they disappear entirely.
After dinner I trudge to my room. Outside Ajith’s door I stop and enter for the first time in months.
I see fresh flowers and a small plate of kiribath—a traditional offering of a mix of rice and coconut milk—sitting on Ajith’s dresser.
Other than the shrine, the room is exactly the way it was on the day he died.
It is still filled with all the books he loved to read: dozens ranging from nonfiction to fiction, Pulitzer winners to Agatha Christie mysteries.
Ajith was so curious about the world. Even the books on his bed, the medical school exam prep guides, remain open at the exact page he had turned to.
It is about infectious diseases. I memorized everything on that page.
That was during the days I still came back in here often.
To keep his room in the exact way it has been is to offer some supernatural, unreal hope that maybe if we wait long enough, he will come back to us.