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i am looking for my father. i look under the bed, behind the curtains, on the other side of the door. i look in desk drawers, beneath the cushion of the chaise longue, in the red & gold pillow under the singing bowl, buddha carved on the inside. are you my father, i ask.

i walk east on macarthur boulevard, retracing my steps over places i’ve been loved. embraced. made love to. the memories thick under the soles of my sneakers. the moments that made wrinkles in the concrete. remembering, being, loved.

i check the eyes of everyone i pass. is it you? comes the convulsive question from way in the back of my head, where the tears don’t reach. & sometimes i think i see a flash of him. lanky, leggy, slender light brown man in subtle plaid & white new balance shoes. his aging face, his many expressions. cockeyed. confused. concentrating. the hundreds of tones of his voice, gentle, angry. impatient. unsatisfied.

the confidence & urgency in his stride. his tall back & gemini elegance. the way he could talk anyone up or bring anyone down to a depressive state in a few sentences.

are you him? rings between my ears when a flicker of recognition arrives. a familiar stranger like a mirror. who are you? each brown, male face a citation of his bengali features. someone’s laughter the sound of one of his lighter moods. now that he’s pushing 70, his fugues of mania & depression are longer than a few months each, like when i was growing up; he’s had some mellower years. but he’s never been well. never been stable. never had a proper diagnosis. my father never took his prozac because as long as he lacked a diagnosis, he didn’t feel the problem was real.

i always wanted to diagnose him. i needed to name what made my family strange, because my friends’ fathers never acted like him. they went to work, cooked for their kids, happily chauffeured them everywhere. came to their advisory meetings with teachers & school counselors. my mother always did those things; my father did them sometimes, & begrudgingly. often he hadn’t showered for weeks & had spent all his time on the couch vegetating in front of a blue-shadowed TV. he couldn’t hold a job partly because of his depression, partly because of his field.

the most money my dad ever made was estimating the costs of earthquake damage in southern california. he swindled people out of money with his independent engineering projects. he would take me & my sister, amber, with him to negotiate contracts & pretend to oversee the contractors’ progress. my much-older sister, shampa, 15 years my senior, told me he had an honest, successful business once, in oklahoma, where amber was born, before the white man took him down. he thought the multiculturalness of california would be better to him. he was wrong.

bipolar disease. when i was a kid, they called it manic-depressive disorder. over the years, it became one of my names. his variant moods, fugues, cycles, swings of inexplicable behavior remained predictably chaotic throughout my childhood. he was controlling & impatient, a terrible math tutor who pecked & clucked over imperfection and loudly disapproved of my less than perfect understanding of algebraic operations.

he was also prone to flight & traveled overseas indefinitely at a moment’s notice for no reason. this wacky behavior made us financially unstable, too. when i was 15 he stole the rent money my mother had saved & boarded a plane to bangladesh, unemployed, to claim my mother’s inheritance. a few days later, my mother, my sister amber, & i moved to las vegas to live in shampa’s converted garage.

chemical imbalances, it was explained to me. over the first 19 years of my life, i was steeped in it, sickened by it. i was a depressed teen, only happy at school. i’d watch the commercials advertising depression meds, the ones that listed all the symptoms, & i’d panic. crying daily? feeling alone? occasional suicidal ideations? the depression synched up with my cycle & slowly became more predictable over the years. when the opportunity came at 20, i used the certainty of my father’s illness to catch & stop the erratic bouts of depression. i gulped prozac for a year, then decided on psychotherapy for life in an attempt to avoid becoming my father–or being with someone like him. my partner of 2 years had just knocked me out. i saw bright white stars when he hit me. clearly, something needed to change. “chemical imbalance” or not!

the truth about his condition didn’t surface early. i was 23 years old when, during my mother’s last year of life, she told me that my father had been raped, molested as a child. he was born in rural bangladesh & staying with another family was his only chance at an education. so he did. that’s where it happened.

there were other details about my father in exile from his family. a dead man inexplicably hanging from a tree on his way to school. the combination of homelessness & ambition that drove him to the new world.

my mother married my dad to get revenge on her father, against my grandfather’s intuition. she was angry at him for remarrying after the early & unexpected death of her mother, the grandmother i never met.

immigration & my father got her hooked on nicotine. but the year my parents broke up–the year my father went to bangladesh & stayed away–my mother’s heart opened up. surgeons & scalpel & hammer performed a quadruple bypass that, along with medication, kept her alive for nine more years. four of those years were nicotine-free & quiet. then my parents decided to live together again. i was 19 & realized my mother wanted misery.

my father’s rape. it explained the dissociation between his various moods, his many faces, the extremity of his behavior. there had been a careful cover-up. a guarded secret & the secret cause of everything. the chaos & instability. it screamed of my family’s repression—our inability to communicate, to overcome difficulties together, to accept ourselves & one another. it explained the need for silence around my father’s mental illness.

my mother was the only one he ever told.

i don’t keep family secrets very well. i told shampa, who had no idea. who didn’t know what to do. she may not believe me. she didn’t want to hear that they were my mother’s own words. same thing with coming out to my crazy family. my sisters refuse to believe that my mother accepted me. which she did, privately.

i’m still seeking my father in the wood of my earrings, the metal of my cell phone. in the lines of hands & beneath the fingernails of the men i call lovers.

in the leaves of magnolias. the petals of garnet trees. between squares of dark chocolate. bags of tea stacked in tin. are you there? the echo. my voice stalking his. i recall a peal of his laughter. i see his mood brighten before me.

i still seek him. an insistence i can’t explain. a tugging desire. not quite nostalgia but the anxiety from which nostalgia springs. the psychotic space of separation from our origins. the dark path leading back to where i was born. to where the answers to all these questions are waiting.

i let myself be filled by this void. a place where the futility of words makes itself painfully known.

i am listening for my father’s voice in the sound of clock tower bells clanging against downtown oakland streets. in the sound of rain. naked in bed, beside a sleeping brown man who doesn’t love me, i measure my cinnamon limbs, tensed & exhausted, for sameness. check for my father’s lanky looseness. are you here?

© tahminah zaman 2008