Where the Fig Falls
By Nisha Aoyama, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
As Father's Day came and went during the pandemic, I found myself reflecting on my family's unique (or, more accurately, not so unique) American-ness, which is rooted in immigration. My father bought a one-way ticket from India to the U.S. in 1970 to attend graduate school, and, a few years later, was set up on a blind date with my mom. She grew up in a small New Jersey town, her grandparents from Italy and Poland. I've always considered this a quintessentially American story. I come from generations of immigrants who crossed oceans from far-flung corners of the world. Somehow all of their fates converged in New Jersey, where my parents– two people from vastly different backgrounds– eventually met. In the summer of 2020, this very American story suddenly feels like a miracle. These reflections inspired this poem.
Where the Fig Falls
To be in a pandemic is to have a body.
Mine, a haven and a liability encased within
familiar walls, windows, screens.
Not a battered or ailing body, uncertain
even in healthier times. Not my father’s body —
embattled joints, knees, and knuckles lost to rheumatism,
then reconstructed to set off metal detectors.
A brown bionic body, immunocompromised in America,
now impossibly distanced from me, from my children.
Our bodies too vulnerable to fly across a continent
to my beginnings, across an ocean to his —
where his young body skirted banyan branches in Bombay,
hand over foot, raucous, thoughtless of bones and cartilage.
Summers spent herding water buffalo across a river in Changa,
rural Gujarat, where his father and his father’s father began.
Dad, did you imagine your daughter’s chlorine-drenched
suburban California summers? Could you fathom your fate,
your future bionic body an ocean away?
His young throat adorned with flowers,
goodbyes threaded with tears,
electric thrum in the airport terminal.
Salt shore to salt shore, migration in faith.
Dad, did you know that tree roots travel two to three times the radius
of the treetop, sometimes even five times as wide?
My roots span the whole world. My foliage has potential still.
My body, chance collision of fates flown over oceans —
a pattern impossible to replicate while sheltered. And yet
deep banyan vines, viscous, bow to kiss the earth,
rooting great-weighted branches that stretch to meet the breeze.