Gia Éna Tan’go
Chapter 3
“Life is half of what you see and nothing of what you hear.” Claire could hear her mom’s voice whispering in her ears. She could feel all the parts of her body cold except for her torso and butt, which made her realize that she may be wearing a tank top and underwear. She tried activating her sense of perception to make sense of what’s happening, except that her eyelids refused to obey her brain’s command. The last time this happened, she was at least lying on a rug in her master bedroom. Her body feeling cold, she narrowed her choices to the kitchen and restroom. Guessing her outfit, she realized she may be lying half unconscious in her washroom. ‘Stay calm, you are going to be alright,’ she told herself. Claire tried focusing on her breath. Because that’s what she did the last two times this happened. She’s certain that even doctors may not explain how the brain could momentarily disconnect from all the motor functions. Right now, she has to be patient and wait for her eyes to open; then, she can start moving her hands, legs, and the rest of her body. From her experience, she knew it would take anywhere between a couple of minutes to one or two hours.
Her thoughts drifted back to her mother, and she felt the need to respond to her whispering. “Mom, If you were alive today, you would turn 54, and dad would be 57. It’s both of your birthday,” she murmured as she lay there. Knowing how much she knew about her parents, she knew that astrology may not be so accurate in attributing certain traits to a person based on the day they were born.
Claire never fully understood her depth of love for her father, not to mention how it swings between the extremes of love and hate.
Most of her childhood, She remembers the visceral image of her father in his study room, always reading. She knew her father liked writing poems. But he never read it to Claire nor shared it with the outside world. When Claire was 16, she sneaked into her father’s study room to look for her father’s poem booklet. She knew it was grey in color. After searching all over her father’s bookshelves and through every drawer of his desk, to her dismay, she couldn’t find it. Exhausted from the search, Claire sat down on her father’s reading couch. She laid back relaxedly and saw a thin leaf of paper extruding from a book. She leaned in and grabbed the copy of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, opened it, and discovered a sheet of brown paper with a handwritten poem.
“Mi amor
You are the hidden verses in my soul’s poetry
that I never share with the outside world.
you are,
the thought-provoking words I read,
the perfectly composed pictures I capture
that I never share with the outside world.
you are,
My penultimate kiss,
dreams of my innermost desires.
I do not want to share you with anyone.”
The poem was not signed with her father’s name. But Claire knew by the squiggly handwriting that it was written by her father. That evening, she ran to her mom to show her this poem when she returned from work. Her mom read the poem with a blank face, blushed at the end, and said to Claire, “Looks like your dad has got a mistress now,” and started laughing.
****
****
Her dad is nothing like the sweet, romantic guys she read in books or saw in the movies. He never bought Mom flowers nor took her out for romantic candle-lit dinners. Her father was his own man, in his own world. He didn’t even care to wear matching outfits with her mom when they went out for important ceremonies. One time, she remembered his dad wearing a polo shirt and sports shoes for dinner when her mom wore her favorite maroon skirt with a matching plaid scarf.
Claire often pondered how her mom felt about his unromantic husband. Did she disapprove of him? Or maybe she stopped caring at some point? Maybe her dad did all those Romantic things, and she never got to know about it?
Claire characterized her father as a man who switched between his inner world of dreams and being present in the moment. When he is working, he could ignore the world around him, which includes all the people he deeply care about. On the contrary, his father knew how to make someone feel special. He can look at them with such intensity and a loving stare and that slight head tilt to make them feel like they are the most important person in the whole world. She has often seen her dad ignoring her mom and everyone around him for days, just doing his own thing. And as if he has his heart synced to people around him, just before people around him are about to go mad, in a moment, he would stop everything he’s doing and acutely listen to the people around him. She knew that her father lived in the moment too. Because he writes poems.
It’s from multiple moments like these at home that she learned that the act of loving someone is a skill. Loving someone is not an innate trait like what she saw in most Disney movies. Loving someone is a skill that can be learned. (Isn’t it true that we tacitly learn a large part of those skills to love someone from our parents?). Her dad had learned and always known how her mom liked to be loved.
*Claire whiffed the smell of eucalyptus oil as she lay there in the restroom. She could finally open her eyes. She felt relieved. She knew that the blood is still flowing. She just couldn’t get her muscles to listen to her. Claire could see the bright yellow lights on the ceiling. The scent of eucalyptus made her realize that it may be evening (the time of a typical day when she typically massages her head with drops of eucalyptus and Amla oil). And that made her think of the golden hour of the day. Decades ago, she was celebrating her parent’s birthday on the beaches of Puerto Rico. It was one of those evenings. She reminisced about her parents dancing on the beach to the beats of ‘Gian Ena Tango’.
She remembered the warm, cold breeze of late July evening. She remembered sitting there with Shaun. Her father was wearing a polo shirt and cargo pants that evening. Her mom wearing a flowery orange skirt that just cut to one side of her hip, & revealing her belly button and strap of her undershorts. She remembered how her dad did not take his eyes off her mother. Her mother moved elegantly to every beat of the song. She remembered how all the other couples on the beach looked up at her parents. Her father made her mom giggle every now and then as they danced. (Claire was also reminded of another poem where her dad wrote how a man gains the confidence to marry a girl when he can make her laugh at his whim). She remembered getting her first quick kiss on her lips from 12-year-old Shaun during that vacation on the beach. She remembered how little Shaun said, “Sorry,” blushed at her, and gushed away. She remembered how she chased him on the beach, pinned him down, and kissed him back on his cheeks. She remembered how Shaun’s parents and other adults were having a laugh over the whole scene.
Oh those transient golden lights. She wished she could wield nature, go back against time, get back to that single evening with her parents, and get back with her mom. Ever since that day, she always had a peculiar emotional resonance with the golden hour. A single sunset could evoke a million emotions; for Claire, it is the feeling of a ‘longing to go back in time’ or what she later learned as ‘pining.’
****
****
Frank found himself standing in front of a Russian tea house near downtown Chicago. He peeked inside. It has a picture of Van Gogh painting frames inside their glass door. Why Van Gogh? He is not even Russian. He’s a Dutch. That made him question the authenticity of the restaurant itself. He searched on his phone for other nearby restaurants. The next closest one was a 0.7 mile away. Google Maps showed 14 minutes by walk. Frank knew he could walk there in 11 or at least 12 minutes. As he was standing there pondering his decision, a waitress came out to clean the marble table left by an elderly couple who were walking with a rollator. The waitress, who looked Polish to him, greeted him and asked, ‘Would you like to sit outside or inside, Sir?
‘I’ll just sit outside.’
‘Let me clear this table for you in just a minute.’
‘Thank you’
As he waited for his table, he saw the older lady walking at tortoise speed with her rollators. The older man, who cannot walk faster himself, patiently walked beside her, watching her every step.
‘Oh boy, it would have taken this couple at least 1 hour to walk to that Starbucks.’ he thought gayly.
‘Your table is ready, Sir, ’ the waitresses interjected with smiling eyes.
‘Can I have the menu and some water without ice, please?’. The supposedly Polish waitress nodded her head and walked inside the cafe.
*Frank sat at the table overseeing the Chicago art museum, which seemed to have a special exhibit of the ‘Van Gogh immersive’ experience. He opened his laptop to check his emails. There were no new emails, which was not so surprising for a Monday afternoon. He reviewed his short presentation deck for the 5th time this morning as the waitress arrived with the tea menu and some tap water.
Frank’s lip curled to one side as he felt his suspicion getting true. He couldn’t recognize a single tea that sounded Russian. Not that he can speak Russian or has a rich knowledge repository of famous teas. Frank was a little disappointed by the banality of the menu. The menu looked very similar to the local café he visits often. Being in an experimental mood, he ordered, ‘I will have the Darjeeling tea. Thank you.’
As he saw the waitress leaving, he whispered to himself,
“A Darjeeling tea,
in a Russian tea shop,
that has a Van Gogh painting,
by the streets of Chicago…
*He paused for a few seconds, completing his train of thought, and muttered,
Economic Sanctions.”
****
****
After what felt to her about three hours, Claire finally gained enough strength to get out of the restroom and walk down the stairs to the living room. It’s the 3rd time in the past year this has happened. Coincidentally, Frank was not home when she goes into these moments of her knockout phases. Her neurologist friend had told her that she has a special medical case. ‘I may actually need a wearable physiological monitor’ thinking as she walked towards the kitchen counter.
A piano version of Gian Ena Tango played in her living room. The last thing she could remember was having a Tuna Salad in the morning. As she walked towards the dinner dining table, she saw Diya lit. It’s unusual to see the lamp lit for that time of the day. She’s yet to tell Frank about her ‘courageous renaissance from the unconscious’ episodes.
Claire could see the hue of azul on the prismatic glass surface. The lamp created an image of the sun shining from behind the clouds. This is the first Smart home object she saw when she came over to Frank’s apartment when they started dating. When she asked about the thing, he said, ‘Oh, it’s just a smart tech toy that changes color when you rotate this textured glass.’
‘What do you call this creation of yours?’
‘It has not no name?’, Frank shrugged
‘No name?’
‘Yes, that’s the point.’ Frank just looked at her with smiling eyes and raised his shoulders.
It’s only after marriage that Frank told her the design philosophy behind his creation. “You know how we feel these hundreds of subtle emotions in a single day, and sometimes we struggle to find the right words to describe how we feel? I think of these subtle emotions as this flame coming from this oil lamp, pure and kinetic, looking for a way to escape but getting stuck inside the prismatic glass surface. It’s like the flame wants to show its true color to the outside world, but as much it tries, it always shows up in different colors due to the prismatic glass surrounding it. I see it as the metaphor for the human struggle to express our deepest subtle emotions.”
Claire peeked inside to check the oil level for the lamp. It was running low on oil. She grabbed the oil dispenser from Kitchen and topped the lamp with coconut oil. Involuntarily, she rotated the glass clockwise and see changing hue to a vivid, iridescent blue color, the color of the butterflies in her backyard garden.
Claire thought briefly, what if we humans did not invented words ‘sadness’ or ‘pain’? Would that mean that mankind would only know ‘happiness’?
(On the contrary, Claire often copes with the moments of loneliness she feels with the void of her mother’s absence by telling out loud ‘I’m pining’.)
As Claire stood there near the dining table, she felt a small pain on her lower abdomen. ‘Should I tell Frank about my condition when he’s back?’ she pondered. She does not know yet. Claire felt weak. She was yearning for Frank to comfort her, to hug her tight and tell her that its all going to be alright.
Suddenly, a whirlwind of emotions overtook Claire, and a side of her she seldom showed burst forth. ‘I am Starving,’ she shouted on top of her voice. She dashed to the wine cellar in the storage room to grab a bottle of red wine. She took off her tank top, flinging it to the floor, and poured a glass of wine.
She raised the glass of wine as if to give a toast to them both and hollered, ‘Here’s to you, mom and dad. Dad, my favorite bastard. I don’t miss you one bit. Mama, enough with your whispers! You are wrong, all wrong. But hey, happy birthday to you both.’ *She gulped the whole glass of wine and slammed it on the wooden dining table with such ferocity that a drop of hot oil from the lamp fell on her hand from the vibration of the wood.
Feeling her hand burning, Claire squeaked ‘Fuck’.
~Rahul Sekar
P.S: You can read the first two chapters of this series here,
Chapter 1 — Mood ring, empathy, and brown tomatoes
Chapter 2 — Mandalas, oxidation paintings and everything ephemeral
