The year I turned eleven, my father made plans to purchase plane tickets. Whenever I asked him why, he always said the same thing. “It’s time for you to visit your roots. Or half of them.”

“But it’s so far away,” I had said once. I didn’t really want to go. My father’s homeland was a place I had never been nor spoken the language of.

“Don’t you want to see your cousins?” Most of my cousins I hadn’t met in person, but had seen in pictures my father showed me. “I don’t even know any of them that well,” I had said in retort. A stranger with the same last name as you was still a stranger

My mother poked her head out from around the corner, and at that moment I knew the debate was out of my hands and into my parents’. I heard their hushed voices arguing.

“He needs to meet his relatives,” my father said. Remember how happy they were when I told them we were having a boy?”

“And so what?” my mother responded. “If we had a daughter, they wouldn’t care?”

“That’s not what I mean. You know how it is, back home.”

“Your home,” my mother clarified. “Not mine. And not his.” I remember those words the most, because they served as a reminder I was a person made of two places. And that I might’ve belonged to neither. After ten more minutes, I started to pack; I could hear through the walls that my father was winning the argument.

The day we left for the airport, we got up when the sky was still dark. I napped during the car ride to the airport; I regretted the decision later, because on the plane I was unable to sleep. I stayed wide awake the whole trip, and through a stretch in the middle the whole thing began to swerve and tumble around in a way that made my stomach shake. Minor turbulence was typical along this route, they had said. I wondered what major turbulence would be, if it could toss the plane upside down, side to side, or maybe out of the sky altogether. I wondered if a baby born on a plane was a resident of the country it happened to be flying above, and if turbulence could shake the plane out of that country, that country out of the newborn. I wondered if turbulence could shake a history out of someone.

By the time we had finished flying, the night had settled. That first tired hour was nothing but a blur to me, my relatives’ faces all blended together into a mass of clothes and voices. The one thing I do remember was my father. His laugh, ringing through the halls of the buildings, was clear as water, brighter than I had ever heard it before.

━

Every morning there, I awoke covered in sweat. It was hot, but also humid in a way that made the rays of the sun stick to you and drench you in heat. I pulled myself out of the blanket and onto the floor, covered in arrays of thick and patterned rugs. On the wall was a map of the world; the night before, my mother had showed me this map and pointed to a country shaded in green that hugged the border of India like a sibling. She told me that it was where we were now. She was the one to tell me because my father was too busy to remember.

I ate breakfast surrounded by people I didn’t know. I was supposed to, but in truth I had no idea of their names, their wants, what kind of people they were. The only thing I knew was their blood, and how at least on some level, it was similar to mine. After eating, I was ushered into the crowd of the rest of the cousins. It was awkward to be grouped in with them, made worse by the words lost between us. The only thing transcending the language barrier was the way they looked at me. Disdain, in any language, was clear.

            After a few minutes I left and went looking for my father. I found him with a group of other adults of various ages, all seated around a collection of old objects which at some point must’ve held some value to them. My mother was there too, sitting on the outer ring of people. She looked bored compared to my father, who excitedly interchanged stories with others in rapid streams of words that weaved in and out of something I could understand. I wasn’t used to it. Back home, the only people my father talked to were his colleagues at the butcher shop. He held conversations with them over bloodstained aprons and the lingering scent of fresh-cut meat, a morbid reminder of the work that bound them together. Occasionally, one of his coworkers would eat dinner with us, but they never went further than that. It was strange to see him now, acting as if this all came so naturally to him; perhaps it did, and I had just never seen it.

I decided then to leave the room. I didn’t want to bother my father, not now that the usual sense of melancholy surrounding him was finally gone. I didn’t want to take that freedom away from him.

Back home, I was decent cricket player. For my cousins, that was my way in. They couldn’t deny I had some skill in the sport they loved so much, and so they let me play. Yet even when they stopped staring at me with disgruntled eyes and allowed me to be with them, they spoke of anecdotes from the past, huddling in groups and trading stories that I was not a part of. I was an intruder, a strange spirit that had snuck through an open window and positioned itself near their reunion. In truth, I was never going to feel comfortable with them. To pretend I was the same would be to pretend my mother’s side of me wasn’t from somewhere else, somewhere that made my skin lighter than all my cousins. I couldn’t ignore that half of myself, because then I would be half the person I was. That was what father, or my mother, for that matter, couldn’t understand.

I monitored the sun as it trod across the sky before starting to descend. It seemed to move slower than usual, not that I had paid much attention to it before. When I asked to help in the kitchen, they let me cut vegetables. I started and didn’t stop, not even when I grazed my fingers and tiny threads of blood started to drip. I only washed my hands until the water ran clear, and then picked up the knife again. I saw them later as they put the vegetables into the dinner. I hoped my father would, by any chance, happen to eat the ones I had prepared.

The room my parents and I slept in had a window at the top of a shelf. Through it, you could see the tops of clouds and trees, with one branch that darted up the wall and almost touched the window frame. Before we went to bed, I got on a stool and tried to open it, but couldn’t figure out how.

“Here, this is how you do it,” my father said, and held one side of the frame down to unfasten it. He stuck his face near the opening and took a deep breath of the night air in, savouring it like an elixir. He smiled and stepped off, making room for me on the stool. I was too short to get my face to the window, so he supported my feet with his hands, lifting me up enough that I could meet the opening, feel the air.

We went to sleep and left the window open, the soft whistling of the wind a light lullaby. I watched the moon at night, as it made its way from one end of the world to the other. Eventually, my father started to snore, the sounds snaking across the floor and into my ears, quiet and low.

“Take me,” I whispered, to only the air. Nothing answered.

━

The sound of tapping woke me up. It was a natural sort of sound, but not in the way that rainfall or footsteps were natural. This noise was frenzied, panicked, desperate to survive. The sounds were coming from the open window, my father standing right below. My mother was nowhere to be seen.

            My father didn’t notice me at first, not until I was right next to him at the window. He was looking out at a treeline in the distance. The lights of the city warded back the darkness, baring the tree trunks, how gnarled their bark was. Behind the trees were mountains so high they looked like they might tear a hole in the sky.

            “What are you doing up so late?” my father gently chided. I thought I might’ve been dreaming because of how distant his voice was, how it was someplace else far away from any one of us.

            “You guys are loud,” I said to my father. “The noise woke me up.”

            “We can stay up tonight. It’s a special time right now, isn’t it?”

            There were many questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t say anything back, not wanting to push my luck and end up sent back to sleep. My father hadn’t once looked at me, his eyes fixed outside. I dragged a stool next to him and stood up on it, raising my head to his level.

            The woods were dark and deep, their green mixing with the black of the night. Yet there was something there that caught my attention. A speck was hidden along the canopy, nestled in the bristling leaves. It could’ve been a star, fallen from grace in the sky and caught in the thick branches of the forest.

            “What’s that?” I asked. My father turned his head, trying to locate what I was referring to.

            “See, over there,” I said. “That yellow thing in the trees.” He still didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. I reached my arm over and rested my wrist on the windowsill. “There, over there. It’s gold.”

            My father scrunched his eyebrows together and scanned the horizon. “I don’t see it.” Suddenly the thing moved, arcing across the treeline. When I squinted, I could almost see a face in the centre of it, with large eyes that shone in the night.

            “Look, look!” I pointed excitedly. “It’s moving now.” I could see it shining, moving through and around the treetops. My father remained clueless. “It’s bright gold! Right there! You can see the eyes!” I shouted in frustration.

            “There’s nothing gold around here,” my father stated. “I don’t know what you might be seeing.” I watched the yellow speck as it slowly disappeared, diving deeper into the foliage.

“No, no, there was something. I saw it in the treeline, I promise. It was yellow. Its eyes were flashing.” My father sighed and relaxed his shoulders, the way he often did when he was trying to make a point.

“Nothing here would be in the trees this close to us. Not anything golden, at least. Trust me. I know this place. I do.” He was stuck at the window, his hands gripped tightly on the wooden frame. His voice shivered, the tiniest hint of a plead woven into the sound. That was when I realized my father was never really looking. His vision was clouded by desperation more than anything else, to know he was completely sure of himself. That at least here, he understood things. Things that I did not. He didn’t have that sort of confidence in the butcher shop back home, but here? Here, he had to have it. Because what sort of father would he be if he didn’t?

“Yes,” I conceded, a relief wrapped in the clothes of an admission. “Yes, you’re right.”

I got down from the stool, and the view through the window slipped out of my sight. On the back of my father’s head, the hairs were greying, dispersing. Next to him was a wooden shelf with framed pictures stuck behind glass panes.

The lights were off, but I could make out a figure in one of the photos. It was a man, wearing wide-rimmed glasses and holding on to a suitcase. He was standing by an airplane, with a wide grin visible through the fuzziness and crinkles of the picture. The street around him was spacious and empty, grey against brown against a golden sky.

When I got closer, I realized that the man in the photo was my father. Or at least, who he used to be.

━

The rest of the visit passed quickly. There weren’t many hugs when it came time for me and my mother to leave. I noticed how most of my relatives looked at my mother in a similar way they looked at me.

            I wanted my father to hug me, to hold me in tight and go back home with the rest of us. As my mother and I walked to the car, I thought I heard him wishing us a safe trip home. I turned around, but he wasn’t looking at me.

            I had learned from the trip there. I kept awake the whole ride to the airport, keeping myself from sleeping by telling my mother how I had spent the time on the trip. I fell asleep nearly the whole flight, a continuous and deep dream. I dreamt of the golden thing, the fleeting details of it that I had caught sight of expanding in my mind. It only warped more as time went on and I forgot more details, contorting into a nightmarish amalgamation of traits. When we got back, it was still the middle of the day, so I spent the time unpacking and clearing space on my shelf. My father said he would bring me gifts when he got back.

I savoured the feeling of being home again, the comfort of familiar walls and people. On the second night, I was looking for my mother to answer a question I can no longer remember. I only know that it seemed important to me then.

            The door to bedroom was just barely open, wide enough for an ant to sneak through. I didn’t hear my mother’s voice, but what couldn’t be hidden was the squeaking of the bedframe. She lay there with a man who was not my father, someone built fitter and nicer to look at. He was sitting on top of her, his slicked-back hair trimmed into a sharp beard. I had never seen my father be close with my mother, not like that. I hadn’t even heard the man come in.

            Leaving the door, I sat down in the kitchen. Not on a stool, where I would be suspended high above any sort of earth, but on the wooden floor. I laid my body down fully, as if I was sleeping. I could feel every vibration in the ground.

            Eventually, my mother came down as well. She didn’t mention the man, and I didn’t see him. He must have left through a window.

            We went to the airport a day later, just my mother and I in the car. The street signs that zoomed past us glowed, just like the signs in the airport that told us when a flight was coming or going. I stood by my mother there, waiting for my father’s plane to land.

            There was a large monitor on the ceiling. It had several cities listed there, destinations of the flights leaving. There were so many. All the other people in the airport kept flowing around us, some in a rush, while others glided through the halls with family. They kept stopping beside us, checking the monitor to watch whichever flight they would be boarding. When they paused, I saw my father in them. He had done the same thing before we came, his eyes lit up yellow by the colours emanating from the screen.

            I wondered how many of the people were going somewhere new and how many were returning to the home they had come from. I couldn’t fathom it fully at the time – I was only a child, after all – but my mind teetered on the cusp of some kind of epiphany. That no matter how far away someone might’ve been; the place they came from was still home, their first home, whether they wanted to go back or not. What mattered was seeing the letters on the airport screen, the time next to it, and knowing if you could stand to live when home was someplace you were not.

            I kept reading the monitor while we waited, seeing the names of so many places I had never been. Near the bottom of the list of arrivals, I saw my father’s flight. There was bold, yellow text adjacent to it: DELAYED. That was common, my mother told me, for a flight to be delayed. Not a problem.

            People began to join us where we were standing. One hour in and calls began to be made. A half-hour later and a small crowd had formed. The monitor still said the same thing, a monolith in the sea of swiftly moving passengers. DELAYED. DELAYED. DELAYED. It didn’t change, not even once, not even when a lady with perfectly done hair and a logo on her jacket came out to tell the whole group of us standing there that she was sorry for our losses.

━

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of my father’s disappearance, I thought of a lean golden creature, jumping from tree to tree in the distance. It was the only thing of him that persisted in my memory. I was well into my adult years by now, beginning to lose track of the way he was, how he moved, smelled. Even the memories I did have were no doubt a far cry from what had actually happened, distorted by time and loss.

            The flight didn’t return that night. They never found the whole plane, only parts of it, washing up on the shores of the Atlantic. The only explanation they had given us was that there was turbulence. Turbulence that could’ve caused the plane to veer into the raging waves of the sea. A year later we had held a funeral for him, finally resigning ourselves to the fact he was gone. It’s worse, I think, when someone disappears. You don’t get the closure of knowing exactly how they went out. What their last words were. If they thought of you.

            Neither I nor my mother had ever returned to my father’s homeland. We didn’t even see his family anymore, the last time I had talked to any of them a few years past the funeral.

            I drove to my mother’s place, as I always did on this day. It felt strange, to have an annually planned day of sorrow for the both of us. A few hours earlier I had been watching cricket on the TV, not a thought of my father in my mind. My mother and I had grown from it, moving on with our lives, but today was a reminder of what we were before.

            My knocking on the door of my mother’s apartment was unanswered, so I let myself in with my copy of the key. There were a few lights on, and a recipe book left open on the kitchen counter, but nobody inside. She was out, probably buying groceries for tonight’s dinner. My stepfather was surely accompanying her, judging by the lack of his coat near the door.

            The guilt my mother had felt when she had begun officially seeing my stepfather was a small thing, but it weighed on her. When I was younger, I had wanted to ask if she had felt nearly as guilty in the bedroom the night before he disappeared. I never admitted I had seen her, though, and eventually the resentment passed. As did the guilt, and as did the grief.

            There were other things left in the house. One of them was a stack of old informational books, placed in a box and sheathed in a thin sprinkling of dust. My mother liked to keep old magazines, but these were probably my stepfather’s, taken for the middle-schoolers he taught.

            I leafed through the stack and picked out a random booklet. It was thin, with a cover adorned by animals. I flipped to a page in the middle to see a picture of some type of big cat, sitting in a snowy plateau. There were blurbs scattered across the page, filled with information concerning the animal. I turned to the next page and my heart skipped a beat.

            It was there, right there on the page. The golden thing in the trees. It looked different than I had thought it might, but it had the unmistakably coloured hair and wide, piercing eyes. Over the years, I had managed to convince myself my father might have been correct. But it was real, a real animal. A golden langur, that was its name.

            I froze, staring at its eyes. They didn’t seem as predatory as I had imagined they would be that night. I had only seen the sheen of them, a flash of primal anger. The langur in the book, however, seemed melancholy, longing.

            “I told you.” It was the first thing I said, my words dissipating into the air. I hesitated for a moment before my mouth opened again.

“I’m sorry.”

The click of a key turned in the lock and my mother and stepfather entered with bags full of groceries. I placed the book to the side and helped them make dinner. When we ate, I asked if I could keep the book, just the one, and my stepfather said I could. I sped home after dinner, keeping it open to the page about the golden langur.

I cut out the page from the booklet and threw away the rest. It was radiant, the animal, holding my eyes on it for minutes at a time. There was a window in my apartment’s bedroom, not small and on the ceiling but wide, rectangular, and placed on the wall, with a rush of lights emanating from the traffic far underneath. Standing in front of it, I opened one of the panels, the cool air rushing in to greet me. I picked up the page of the golden langur and looked at it again. A tickly sort of feeling began to bubble up from the recesses of my face, emerging in puffs of air somewhere between laughs and tears.

My fingers felt more agile than ever as I folded the page into a thin and colourful paper airplane. I readied my hand behind me and hurled it into the night.