by Jessica Faleiro

We are on summer break in Goa when my father first hears. “I was just there,” he tells everyone. “It won’t last.” We hear the stories of Kuwaitis being tortured and Indians being airlifted. I’m quickly enrolled in the local school, expected to befriend the other tenth graders. My mother brings a kitten to the place we’ve been calling home, to distract us. We name her Bushkin. She’s more of a Chaplin with her black philtrum and comedic personality. My father keeps thinking he’s having a heart attack. My mother tells him to snap out of it. Even Bushkin notices the irreconcilable fracture between them. She sharpens her nails on the rickety leg of the kitchen table; one of many objects lent to us. The family friend entrusted with the keys to our home in Kuwait leaves the plants to die while he helps himself to our jewellery, electronics, and my parents’ crystal goblets. Relief comes in December, when my father’s bank sends him to Dubai port to label which cargo belongs to their clients. Bushkin gets pregnant. My mother tells me that she’s been adopted by some people, with a farm, who were willing to look after her little family. I believe her.

After the war ends, my father is among the lucky few to be recalled to his job in Kuwait city. He sends us letters detailing Red Adair’s attempts to reign in the burning oil fields, set against the backdrop of black skies haloing a bright sun. He writes that our neighbours tried to hotwire his Chevrolet Caprice Classic. He tells us he’s made an inventory of what was stolen, for the UN Compensation Commission. On his return to Goa, he visits Joe with my mother, to confront him. My father needs closure so that he can trust again. Later, my mother tells me that Joe’s wife served them tea. She was wearing my earrings. I still wonder which pair.   

Jessica Faleiro’s fiction, poetry, essays and travel pieces, have been published in Asia Literary Review, Forbes, Indian Quarterly, India Currents, eTropic, Himal Southasian, Mascara Literary Review and The Times of India as well as in various anthologies. Her first novel Afterlife: Ghost stories from Goa (2012) is about a Goan family and their ghostly encounters, and her second, The Delicate Balance of Little Lives (2018), is a collection of interlinked stories about five Goan women trying to cope with loss. She won the João Roque Literary Journal’s “Best in Fiction” award in 2017 for her short story “Unmatched.” She has an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston University.

Banner image by Christian Paul Stobee has been downloaded from unsplash.com