i June 1997, Hawai’i Island

This is when you tell me to close my eyes.
This is when you tell me that I can do this.
This is when you tell me to jump in.

ii  March 2020

In the beginning, Portland believes everyone has a bad cold. In Maine, March means winter. I stock up on Tylenol and Sudafed at the drug store conveniently located next to the Maine College of Art & Design.

All seven of us at MECAD’s Salt Institute for Documentary Studies make audio—narrated and non-narrated, reportage, podcasts. We have been exhausted since January: a year-long soup-to-nuts professional certificate program, crammed into 15 weeks, learning NPR and BBC-style features production. Our time awake is spent reporting and editing scripts when we are not in workshop or figuring out how to engineer and mix tape.

One of us is a sugar baby: tequila and soda. Another, an empty-nester: chardonnay. Four are daddy’s girls: hard seltzer. I am on my first sizable break from caring for Ma—a massive stroke survivor—since 2013: gin martini. This time, I’m the only one at the bar.

Worrying the pimento out of my olive, I think about why—as Ma has lost most of her ability to hear; as Baba prefers obedient silence—I am learning to master sound. Āthō bārō bārō batā mēharunā আথো বড়ো বড়ো বাত মেহরুনা, a Bengali idiom that means don’t speak above your station, can be heard as an invitation to be quiet, to disappear.

iii

In our audio workshop we are taught that to transmit means to pass forward, to conduct, to inherit. Transmittal is how the noise of signals—think love, radio, data, disturbance—are conveyed between people, places, or things. Without reception there can be no transmission. And here is where it gets tricky: receiving is a form of response. So yes, silence can sound like erasure but it isn’t, even as it can be difficult and painful for an individual to withstand; unimaginable to hold as a collective condition.

iv

Three weeks in, at the start of spring break, the governor declares a complete lockdown. Schools and universities, confused, close. But restaurants catch on quick: big emotions need feeding. Bistros develop lobster and wild spring leeks-driven curbside menus. Irish pubs scramble to source growlers for green beer takeaway. Coffee shops bake through the night; maple bacon donuts and Japanese milk bread sell out every morning. It’s a brisk business to supply the strange new holiday.

Eight weeks in, lines become less friendly, more anxious. Each Monday invents another public health safety measure. Cocktails in to-go cups give way to handles of vodka and bourbon. The future, never governable, is now unnavigable. Tired of the party at the end of the world, Portland calls its ships home, puts out the lights, tucks itself in.

v  June 1997, Hawai’i Island

This is when you tell me that I can do this.

vi September 1985, Manahatta

When I think back on that night, jaywalking across Broadway from Hewitt Hall to John Jay, my first Monday as a grownup in New York City, I remember feeling nervous and a little bit lonely. Low Library loomed on the left and Butler to the right, as I passed the sundial where older students sat smoking and laughing and of course someone was playing an acoustic guitar as if the New Student Orientation Program had planned it. I cut across the South Field lawn, crunching early autumn leaves: determined, eighteen, wearing brand new Doc Marten 1461s, the first one in my family to go to college in Amreeka. Was that the fragrance of possibility I smelt or maybe just clove cigarettes?

On the seventh floor, your room is full of disciples who want to know about your dark wavy hair, hazel eyes, the nineteen years you’ve been alive. I’m meeting a high school friend and don’t want to interrupt so I wait quietly by the door. You look up. I look over. Transmission! When we close our eyes, dawn arrives. It seems ridiculous written out loud but back then I believed we thought meeting each other marked the start of the rest of our lives. Because we didn’t know better we ran towards girlfriend-boyfriend. 

I yearned for your bright, confident world of ease and privilege. It played like the movies—a gin martini sundowner; cheese course for dessert; eight older golden brothers and sisters; parents who joked with me. In turn, you hoped that by introducing me to your family you wouldn’t really be gay. Maybe just bisexual, like David Bowie, our idol. We didn’t know how to say fluid preferences, then. You needed a way out. I needed a way in. An opening. We were kids dancing our asses off at Area, The Tunnel, Limelight, unaware of the expenses tied to such an arrangement. Perhaps we should have ended things then? Instead, we’ve occupied each other over the years, sometimes as chosen family or old friends and exes; sometimes, in silence. 

vii  April 2020

Everyone in our program leaves, scatters overnight. I weigh returning to my parents’ in Maryland. I think: Because Ma has low immunity—a consequence of  Wegener’s Vasculitis, the virulent autoimmune disorder she was diagnosed with two years before she had her stroke—I should really keep to myself any new germs I’ve acquired. I think: I’m not sure how to measure this new unknown that outpaces my imagination.

Neither consideration spells the truth. I want to stay. It has been seven years since I’ve had anything of my own. I’m now twenty-one days into social isolation. I live in a little studio with large windows that overlook empty streets. I can’t tell if I’m doing it right. What’s happening now doesn’t remind me of anything I’ve experienced before. And, even as I am an introvert; okay, mostly a loner, this new kind of quiet suffocates.

viii

When we speak on the phone Ma says she and Baba miss my kōlkōl  কলকল, an onomatopoeia for the indistinct sounds I make. What she means is that they miss my chatter that fills the air like tinkling bird call when they’re feeling generous; like squawking, when they’re not. Yeah I miss you too, I say, and think maybe for once we are equal; lonely, in absence of transmittal.   

ix

During a pandemic, Portland sounds like a sea village. I spend my time making field recordings of deserted streets that crisscross downtown and the quietening Atlantic coastline, along Route 77 from Cape Elizabeth around Higgins Beach to Prout’s Neck. My final documentary project needs attention but I like layering tracks of empty city buses gently accelerating and slowing over soft lapping waves, until I can’t tell which my ear is riding.

This is called sound design. I use Pro Tools, Ableton, and Native Instruments to make compositions that no one in my program will listen to, live, because we are screen-to-face. Our Zoom calls fail at simulating in-person recording studio sessions. I am so behind I’m standing still.

x  June 1997, Hawai’i Island

This is when you tell me to jump in.

xi May 2020

A freak snowstorm cloaks the forsythia bunched around my building’s parking lot. It will soon be a year since you and I have spoken. Not the first time this has happened but maybe it’s the last? We’ve hurt each other plenty of times since the mid eighties.

It must be strange for you to be locked down on an island, already isolated as it is, in the middle of the Pacific. Does it make a difference to learn that we have all become islands, now?

As the kettle screams I convince myself it’s too early for wine but the bottles piled around our recycling bins offer undeniable permission.

• xii June 1997, Ka’awoala, Hawai’i Island

The first time you brought me to the back side cliffs at Manini Beach was 25 years ago. The ‘beach’ is what makes tourists drive there. Eager for a secluded ocean Aloha and hoping to save on parking fees, they veer left at the fork on Kahauloa Road because that’s what the local guy said to do, back at the ChoiceMART on Mamalahoa Highway. He’s probably chuckling just like you did, as we passed them, scraping the undercarriage of their mid-sized rentals, wishing they had chosen the SUV option. Lava fields require four-wheel drive trucks and hardened feet. That’s why the back side cliffs at Manini are local. Only hospitable to kama’āina. And perhaps longtime haole settlers like your family. And by extension, me.

We drive as much the lava allows. Park. Pull out our gear. We strip. You had picked me up at Kona International two hours ago. I was wearing a little dress and rope-soled espadrilles. After a couple of large guava cocktails on the beach at Huggo’s On The Rocks, you had a plan. You tell me that we will be swimming to a special place. That we have to walk a little first. That it will be fun. Because the world presents itself to you as an adventure, an invitation to play, risk is inexpensive. Years of knowing you kicks in.

xiii May 2020

Slippahs are flip flops. In Bengali, we say barīr jutā বাড়ির জুতা, house shoes. For those who consider Hawai’i home, barefoot is native. You were going to make me local, even as you were not; even as I could never be. We were both interlopers. My feet, ridged with scars from that welcome, need to wear a double layer of wool socks these days. In Portland, May can be an extension of winter.

xiv April 1973, Bar Harbour

Maine skirts another ocean. A colder sister, no less immense. No less blue. When I came to Amreeka from Kolkata through Heathrow, I crossed the Atlantic. Our first family trip is to Bar Harbour. Ma, in a light silk sari, as close to the parking lot as possible, and me and Baba, in the water. We didn’t know to wait until August. I am not afraid as I lose sensation. I learn that if I stay in long enough, the edges between my body and the water disappear. I can become one with her in this way. At fifty five degrees fahrenheit, it takes about three minutes. Becoming American takes a bit longer.

xv June 1997, Ka’awoala, Hawai’i Island

I follow you to the edge of the lava. Below, the Pacific roars an invitation. Gear on, you jump in. Spitting in the mask, rubbing the goo across the lens is what enables sight underwater. Blowing hard, twice, through the snorkel, is how breathing happens. See it’s easy, you say, just don’t take too long. The break is hard and fast. I watch your long white body as you dive under swells, pop up to shout, Jump in! You can do this!

I hover. I hesitate. I crouch on the edge. Minutes feel like hours. One day turns into the next. A year goes by. C’mon, don’t think about it, you can do this c’mon, the usual invitation you make, gets chopped up by the waves. On hands and knees now, I look down. My perspiration combines with the salt tang in the air. I pray.

The backside cliffs of Manini are a drop off. There’s no shallow water. Does my fear make the jump to be twenty feet from the ledge? Thirty-five feet to the bottom? There are several opihi-covered volcanic jags I could shimmy down, but the break slams obscure safe divots, and what if I step on some little fish, no— 

I stand up. I spread my arms wide. The size of my world as I leave it.

In the second that exists between land and water my apprehension grows louder. I pound down subsumed. My hair pushes up grey. I push up too, to breathe. You rip off your snorkel—It’s Amazing!—as I struggle to shove mine in. We’re having fun now, I think. You grab my hand and we descend. Our destination, a blowhole, a common lava formation. Yet an opening that’s filled by the ocean, controlled by the moon, in ebb and flow, could be a sacred conversation; kapū, taboo for outsiders like us to use as an afternoon’s play.

xvi

The opening is large enough for two—for us—before it narrows. We swim single file as the Pacific pulls back. I struggle to keep moving and scrape against the lava. My shoulders cut badly. Did I imagine the water turned red? I feel an enormous push. The violence startles but is familiar. The Pacific propels me forward and up. The sun shines on my head.

xvii

Maybe I thought, this is amazing. And, is this what it feels like to arrive? To come out of my mother? I did what was asked and survived.

xviii

It’s dark now: everything has joined together—the sky, ocean, and lava. The heat of the afternoon has dissolved but I want to stay in. I knew it, you say, shivering and laughing, c’mon let’s get dinner, we can come back tomorrow if you want to. We scramble up the cliff.  Walking back to your truck, I can’t feel my feet.

xix May 2020

I wonder when you and I will talk again. If you and I will talk again. The last time you picked me up from the airport, a year ago, it didn’t feel right. At the backside of Manini, you grabbed my hand and we jumped in together. When we came up, there it was, between us. Silence.

It reminded me of the night—was it summer, 2000?—when you made it official. He’s the one, you said. You cried with relief as I held you. I think it was my chance to come out, too: I’m worried, I wanted to say, will I still be able to find a way into the world? Instead, four years later, at a farm nestled in a valley, I made two flower garlands and helped to officiate your marriage. 

xx

I’m lost in my final project. It sounds foreign to me. This can happen during editing, my professor says, when the story or the sound gets overworked. It’s tempting to trash it, and sometimes one has to. And sometimes, one has to find a way back in.

Transmittal assumes belonging: A signal issued is a signal received. Connection. Perhaps native might just mean something similar: that there is no need to differentiate between oneself and what lies beyond or behind. And that there’s nothing to be afraid of—or that there is everything to be afraid of, spoken out loud or held in silence. Maybe, we’re all connected in fear and delight, a part of the same thing.

Listen—

Who is to say what sounds best?

I close my eyes.