witnessing the ghosts hidden inside of my parents unleash while in quarantine
realizing my parents are human during a pandemic.
At the beginning of the pandemic and when quarantine had first begun, I kept hearing this same phrase repeatedly:
“I’m so happy I don’t live with my parents while I’m self-isolating. I wouldn’t make it on the third day. They would keep nagging at me!”
I would laugh along with them and roll my eyes in amusement. But a part of me secretly felt relieved that I was able to stay at home with my parents. Ever since I was a young girl, I always considered my parents my best friends, which I knew not many people could say.
After coming home from a long day of school, I was excited to tell my mother the latest gossip while we heated up the leftovers for lunch and we would giggle in the dark under the sheets, watching Facebook videos reporting on the scandalous drama in Bollywood. My dad would secretly call me when my mom was outside to ask me if I wanted samosas or piyaju from Kabir’s Bakery, and we’d gobbled it up before she came home, leaving not a single crumb for her to find.
I was excited to be in quarantine with my parents. I imagined the late movie nights of watching old Bengali movies while munching popcorn on an ungodly hour, learning how to crochet from my mother, teasing my dad about his untrimmed eyebrows (trust me, they are BUSHY). I couldn’t wait to listen to my father’s childhood stories, because he always refused to tell me. He would make up silly excuses that he was too tired or busy. I wanted to take the time to finally learn more about my parents. But nothing prepared me to witness the ghosts that have lived inside them slowly unleash.
The first few weeks of quarantine was a dream. My mom found a bag of teal colored yarn and we started crocheting together. I started drawing everyday, watched Studio Ghibli films and feeling nostalgic over 90’s Bollywood films, while also starting to realize how pathetic and misogynistic they all are (I’m serious! I mean Rahul started to love Anjali in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai once she started to dress more feminine and wear makeup…. what the fuck!!).
Day by day, my father’s golden skin was fading and it was slowly turning grey, as if the ghost inside of him was trying to find its way out. My father was always a quiet person, a man with a few words. From afar, you feel a bit alarmed and intimidated by his tall presence, thicky bushy eyebrows, and droopy cheeks that make him look almost permanently angry. But when you come a bit closer, you realize that he always has a childlike, innocent smile with pink rosy cheeks. “Thank you, mam. Good morning, sir. You are a very nice man,” I would always hear him say.
Somedays, he would buy dozens of guavas and mangos, marching up and down at Church avenue to talk to his friends. Other days, he would sit on the sofa, staring into space for hours.
The elders in my family would always tell me that my father is a very “soft man”. He would always start crying when he saw someone else tearing up, even if it was a character from a natok (Bengali soap opera). He always sees everything at face value- which means he never can tell when someone is cheating him, and when he does, he won’t come out of his room for days.
My dad also never raised his voice at me. Ever. Instead, he would be sad, which I felt was worse than him being angry. I always pinch his rosy cheeks, kiss his forehead, and hear him giggle to himself as he rested his head on my shoulder.
But something my mother always warned me about, was to never tell him when someone died.
“What do you mean?”, I say. “How can we not tell him if somebody died?” I was puzzled and found this deceitful. But my mother was firm about this.
“We will tell him slowly when he is calm. And when we do tell him, we cannot be emotional when telling him the news. Act as if it is no big deal.” I looked at her strangely but just nodded.
I always deemed all of these things as normal. Just some unique quirks my abu has.
As quarantine went on, his soft giggles echoing the house was no longer heard. Hours of him staring into space turned into days. He would leave the television on for an entire day even though he wasn’t watching, but refused to turn it off because it allowed him to “be distracted”.
“Distracted from what, Abu"?” But he would give me no answer.
He then began bothering my mother and I for every little thing you can possibly imagine. Passing him the remote even though it was right beside him, give him this, give him that. It just felt nonstop. My mother started growing irritated and restless, biting at him every time he ordered us to do something. She started to snap and bite more frequently, which was something I wasn’t use to as I always viewed her as patient. I didn’t think much of it because everyone was turning cranky staying at home all day.
“Stuck with each other like sardines in a can”, my mom would say. I told myself that she was just tired like we all were. But then I noticed her glossy skin had started to melt. She too was starting to look grey.
My father would burst into incoherent ramblings. Each story starting off with “Ami akash urate chai. I want to fly to the sky,” and then ending with, “Ami Bangladeshe jayte chai. I want to go to Bangladesh.”
I would ask my father occasionally what was wrong and what was making him sad. But he kept saying over and over again “amar balo lagtese na. I am not feeling good.”
“Why, Abu? Tell me what you’re feeling.”
I would watch him struggle to form his thoughts into words. And when he realized he couldn’t, he would shut his eyes.
Little things began to confuse him. He didn’t know how to turn on the fan, even though we had it for 7 years and he knew how to operate it before. He would stare at a package of Oreos and struggled to figure out how to open it. Noises from the apartment hallway started to make him nervous.
On the fourth week of quarantine, I had started to hear cries in the middle of the night. He was having nightmares on a daily basis and I’d hear him shake and cry in fear. I would wake him up, watch his eyes flutter back in forth, coming back to reality.
“Don’t worry”, I say as I’d hold him in my arms, brushing his hair back with my fingers while my other hand used a notebook to blow wind at his face drenched with sweat, “it’s just a dream. I’m here now.”
The ghost locked in his body would whimper a bit before going back to sleep. I’d watch his heavy puffs and heaving chest turn into slow breaths. He no longer looked like the tall man with an intimidating look on his face or my father. He looked like a lost child.
My mother had started to become irritated by his constant orders and badgering. We were already stressed enough by the virus no one understood and watching the number of deaths rise day by day.
Whenever my father began to ramble, she would immediately go to another room and tell me to deal with him. I felt hurt by her reaction that she couldn’t understand that my father was going through a hard time being stuck at home.
“She’s not patient like me”, I told myself with pride. “I can handle this.”
But surely, I started to burn out. From frequently calming my dad down in the middle of the night, to waking up to work meetings, to telling my dad that no one was watching us every time he heard a sound from the hallways, I felt as though I was at my breaking point. But I told myself to stay strong. To be there for my dad, and that he couldn’t handle the changes the pandemic had forced upon us because he was “a soft man”.
Then, I finally did reach my breaking point. And it was… scary.
After days of not being able to get out of bed because I wasn’t able to move my neck and my body was aching from pain no matter how many massages with Vicks Vaporub my mother gave me, she decided to lay down with me and tell me something important.
“You’re older now, and it’s time that I tell you everything.” My mother was staring at the ceiling. She looked frail and small, almost like a young child that was scolded at.
“Your father is very mentally ill. He always was.” It hadn’t come to me by surprise when I heard this, but for some reason, I was still taken a bit back. I’d read stories on my Instagram feed about fathers being mentally ill, and I would comment something along the lines of “sending light and love to you”, in sympathy. But I never thought of my father being the one that is mentally ill.
“Do you remember when his mother died?”, she says.
I did. I remembered sitting beside him and watching him wail and sob, clutching onto his phone and an international calling card, as he heard his brother tell him that his mother, who my father had not seen for 16 years after moving to America, had died.
“Your father was never the same after that. It’s like something… broke inside of him. I took him to the mental hospital after it happened. And you have to understand…it was different back then. We had young kids.. we were new to the country… no one knew Bangla… he didn’t know English… the doctor said to be patient with him….they said he’s just wired differently… we didn’t know anyone… we couldn’t tell anyone…I tried my best.”
She was quiet, still staring at the ceiling. The ghost inside her wanted to spill all of her secrets, painful memories, and thoughts. But she restrained her ghost from speaking, afraid that they would be too harrowing for her daughter to hear.
I tried to imagine my mother and my father at a young age. Him laying on a hospital bed at a mental hospital, emotionless, my mother trying to understand what the doctor was saying. Were the doctors nice to them? What happened when they went home? Where was I? What did my dad talk about? I wanted to ask her these questions but I decided not to. I was going to let her say what she could and I would leave it alone. I looked back at my mother’s face and wondered how much she went through and how much I do not know and will never know. Raising two children in a country that is a stranger to her while also raising a man with a childlike conscience. I had thought that she was impatient and too arrogant to understand my father, when in reality, her ghost was just tired. It was only 4 weeks, and I had already reached my breaking point. She had been doing this for 35 years. Did she ever reach her breaking point?
Subsequently, I was wracked with guilt. How didn’t I notice anything earlier? Was I too warped around my own life that I didn’t notice my own father? Was he always like this but I just didn’t see it until now? Was I always so distracted?
I placed my hand on her chest. She looked at me and smiled weakly. She pinched my cheek and whispered to go to sleep and to not think too much, because according to her, “thinking too much would make my head ghoram (hot)”.
I always told everyone that my parents and I had a close relationship. They were my best friends. But the truth is that I have no idea who they are. Will I ever know who they truly are as people? Can I acknowledge the reality of the kind of people my parents are? Or am I too scared at the thought that my parents are more than just the people that brought me to this world and had existed long before I was born? Although I wish to understand the answers to all of these questions, the truth is somehow too painful to face.
I will never learn who the ghosts are hidden in my parents’ bodies. In quarantine, I’ve only witnessed sneak peeks when they weren’t able to control themselves before they quickly yanked their ghost back into their body. I wanted so deeply to learn more about my parents but I had come to realize, I don’t want to meet their ghosts. I am too afraid that I am weak and that I won’t like what I see.