My family and I, we are little birds, all sitting together in one nest, squawking impatiently. Everyone is loud, and sentences trip over each other in a desperate attempt to be heard. But mother is a chickadee, with a quiet voice like summer wind chimes against a cruel wind- and when she does raise her voice, you know something is wrong. Her dark hair crowns her face like a scruffy halo, and her forehead crinkles when she smiles- and she always smiles. My mother’s ‘angry’ is not like everyone else’s ‘angry’. She sits quietly with a sad look on her face, as if she has just fallen out of her nest, and you try to do everything to reach up and put her back in. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we couldn’t speak. Would we shout at each other with our hands when we were angry? Or perhaps we would never be angry at all.
My skinny father with his loud voice and endless chatter, has the largest hands. When he gets excited, they fly around with wild gestures, and the rest of us have to duck when he gets too close. He shouts a lot, too, but he is never angry. It is happy-shouting, like the kind when you get to the top of a roller coaster. In his mind, he is always at the top of the roller coaster, and I don’t think he is ever going to get off.
Grandfather, on the other hand, talks about getting off the roller coaster all the time. He is like a falcon, wise and aged, with a smile full of knowing, that crinkles around his eyes. White hair that sticks up like a mess of weeds atop his head is a stark contrast to the papery, chocolate brown skin that is stretched thin over brittle bones. His soft voice is a quiet birdsong that penetrates the chaos. He doesn’t speak all that much, but when he does, everyone turns to listen.
Grandmother never leaves the nest. Her hair- silver and wound tightly in a thick bun at the nape of her neck- never sees the sun. She walks with a limp, too, from when a car knocked her down in the bustling Indian streets. Grandmother is quiet and warm like fresh cookies because she spends days on end in front of the oven watching her bread rise and her banana cakes glaze over. She buys pots and pans and cleans them meticulously, as if they are her children instead of my mother. In old pictures, my grandmother is beautiful- all bashful glances and soft eyes. People say she looks just like my sister, which isn’t true at all. She tells stories now, of when she was young, and the birds outside her bedroom window like to sit on the ledge, fluff their wings, and listen.
