Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri — The Open Manuscript

Thirteen — The Letter

Baba,

I am not writing to you because I expect you to read this. I am writing to you because the things in this letter have been living in me rent-free for years, eating from my table without my permission, rearranging the furniture at night. I am evicting them into language. What happens to them after that is not my responsibility.

I want to tell you about the report card. The one I put in front of you at dinner when I was nine. You said mathematics was weak. I had improved in four subjects. I had scored higher than the previous term in nearly everything. You found the weakness and you put it on the table between us like a centerpiece, and we spent the meal arranged around it.

I want to tell you that I memorized that report card. Not intentionally. It memorized itself, the way things memorize themselves when they matter enough. I can still tell you every number on it. I can tell you where the good numbers were and where the weakness was and what the weakness looked like in your face when you read it and how the face did not change, not one degree, when you read the good numbers.

I am not telling you this so that you will feel something about it. I have given up the wish that you feel something about it. I am telling you this so that it exists, in language, outside my body, somewhere other than the place inside me where I have been keeping it.

I want to tell you about the recitation competition. First place. Fourteen schools. You said it would not get me a job. You were, in a narrow practical sense, correct. It did not get me a job. Neither did the Sunday school attendance you insisted on, or the cricket matches you took me to without asking if I liked cricket, or the conversations at family dinners where I was required to demonstrate academic progress for an audience that was not particularly interested.

None of these things got me a job. What got me a job, eventually, was the voice that Mrs. Abbasi heard in me and sent to a stage, and the confidence that a cream-colored certificate gave me by putting my name in a large font in the center of something, and the habit of preparation that you could not have known you were teaching me by being the thing I always had to be prepared for.

You taught me how to prepare. I have prepared for every difficult thing in my life the way I prepared for dinner. I am not grateful for this in a simple way. But I am not ungrateful for it either. The skill is real. The manner of its transmission left something to be desired.

I want to tell you about Tariq.

Tariq did not know what you used him for. I want you to know this because it matters: the damage was not in Tariq's achievement. The damage was in what you did with it. Tariq's mathematics score was Tariq's. What you made of it in relation to mine was yours. The comparison was your creation, not his achievement, and I want you to own it, here, in this letter you will never read, in the space where ownership can happen without defense.

I was afraid of Tariq for years. Not of him as a person. Of what his name meant when you said it. Of the specific quality of silence that followed his name in your mouth. The silence that said: and here is what you are not.

I am not Tariq. I was never going to be Tariq. Tariq was not the standard. Tariq was the mechanism. Do you understand the difference? I think you do not. I think you believed you were motivating me. You were not motivating me. You were teaching me that my worth was relative and the relativity was always calibrated to someone else's advantage.

A man who measures himself against others can never stand still long enough to know who he is.

I have spent years standing still long enough to know who I am. I am still learning.

I want to tell you about the Sunday afternoon. You came to my room. You knocked. You sat in my desk chair. You said: are you alright. You put your hand on my head for less than a second.

I want you to know that I have thought about that afternoon more times than I have thought about all the report cards and the recitation competitions and the Tariq comparisons combined. I want you to know that the less-than-a-second of your hand on my head has lasted longer in me than most things that lasted much longer. I want you to know that I understood what it cost you to knock on that door and I understood what it cost you to sit in the too-small chair and I understood that you were, in that moment, at the very edge of what was available to you.

I want you to know that I am not angry about the edge. I am not angry that the edge was where it was. I am something more complicated than angry. I am grieving the distance between the edge of what you had and the beginning of what I needed. The gap between those two things is not nothing. But it is not, I think, the whole story either.

You found the door. You knocked. This matters.

I wish you had stayed longer. I understand, now, why you didn't.

Here is what I want to say, having said all the other things:

I turned out alright.

I know you do not know how to say this to me. I know that the mechanism that would allow you to say it is the mechanism that was not built into you, or was built and then dismantled by whatever your father gave you in place of recognition. I know that the counterweight is not malice. I know that the man who says ‘mathematics is weak’ when his son shows him a mostly-good report card is not a monster. He is a man with a limited inventory, dispensing what he has, which is critique and information and the practical assessment of shortfall, because these are the things in his inventory and a man cannot give what is not there.

I know all of this.

I also know that knowing it does not fill the shape. Nothing will fill the shape. The shape is permanent, which is not a tragedy exactly, but which is the thing I have had to make peace with, and the making of peace has been, at times, extremely hard work.

I am telling you I turned out alright not so that you will be proud of me. I have stopped needing you to be proud of me in the way I once needed it — the acute, daily, physical need of a child who is certain that the approval exists somewhere and is trying to locate it. I have stopped that particular searching. What I have not stopped is the quieter version: the awareness, on certain days, of the shape, and the wish, on those days, that you could see me clearly enough to say something that would fit it.

I do not think you will ever say it. This is not cruelty. It is probability, assessed from twenty-three years of data.

I am writing it to myself, then. In your name, in the space where your saying would be, if the inventory had been different:

You turned out alright.

More than alright.

I see you.

I have always seen you.

I did not always know how to say it.

This was my failure, not your inadequacy.

The things you brought me and put on the table — the report cards and the certificates and the published story and the vote that made you class representative — they deserved more than what I gave them.

You deserved more than what I gave you.

I am sorry for the shape of the gap.

I made it.

I did not know I was making it.

Not knowing does not excuse the making.

I am sorry.

This is the letter I wrote to myself, in your name, in the space where the saying would be.

It is not the same as you saying it. Nothing is the same as you saying it. But it is what I have, which is what I have always had: the thing I made to fill the space where the original should be.

The made thing is real too. This I have decided to believe.

Your son,

Adam

Afterward — What the Gap Is Now

The letter was not sent.

I wrote it on a Tuesday and read it on a Wednesday and folded it and put it in the drawer where I have always kept the things that needed to exist without being delivered. The drawer is in a different city now. Its contents are the same.

He and I speak occasionally. The conversations are civil. He asks practical questions — about work, about the apartment, about whether I am eating properly — and I answer them practically and ask my own practical questions and we exist, on the phone, in the register of people who are maintaining a connection rather than having one. The maintenance is real. I am not dismissing it. A maintained connection is better than a severed one. I am choosing the maintenance deliberately, which is different from being in the maintenance passively, and the difference matters.

He said something to me last month. I had mentioned, in passing, a project at work that had gone well — something I was involved in that produced a result people noticed. I mentioned it in passing because I have learned that the passing mention is the safer delivery mechanism, the one that does not require his full response, that can absorb whatever he deploys without the full weight of the exposure.

He said: "That's good."

Two words. The most efficient possible acknowledgment. The word that costs nothing and gives nothing and closes the transaction so completely that there is no room left to push against it.

And then he said: "I knew you would be good at what you did."

I don't know what he meant by that. I mean: I know what the words mean. I do not know what he meant — whether he was reaching for something, whether the sentence was the edge of something larger that he did not have the mechanism to continue, whether it was a thing that had been in the inventory all along and had finally found its way to the surface through some opening I had not noticed.

I said: "Thank you."

He said: "Don't be late for things."

And then we said goodbye.

I have thought about the sentence a great deal since. I knew you would be good at what you did. Past tense, which means the knowing existed before the evidence arrived. Past tense, which means he was carrying something I did not know he was carrying. The inventory may have contained more than I thought. The inventory may have always contained more than I thought, stored in a part of the stock I was not given access to.

This does not close the gap.

But it gives the gap a different quality. Not smaller. Different. The difference between a gap that was created by absence and a gap that was created by a kind of presence that did not know how to present itself. Both are gaps. But one of them is easier to stand on the edge of without falling.

I am standing on the edge.

I am not falling.

This is, for now, enough.

The drawer in the new apartment has the cream-colored certificate from the recitation competition. It has the report card from when I was nine, which I cannot explain keeping except that the keeping felt like insisting. It has the first copy of the literary magazine with my name in the table of contents. It has, now, the letter.

The drawer is full.

I do not need to open it every day the way I once did.

But I do not empty it either.

The things in the drawer are the evidence. The evidence is that the things happened. That they were real. That they deserved something.

They deserved something.

They still deserve it.

This is the last thing I know how to say.

―

The gap does not close.

But a man can learn to live on his side of it

without spending his whole life reaching across.

— End —