I Can't Time Travel

I won't know all the specifics, all the actual living details of how my father travelled, what he was feeling. I can't time travel and sit on his shoulders so there will be moments when I have to imagine how the facts played out. My husband advised me that this should not just be an almanack of data and documents. It's not just a dossier of a journey.

My dad died in September 1992 of complications from tuberculosis. At the time of writing this, I will be twice the age I was when he passed away and isn't that already an extra life for me? My memory of him is already half fact, half fantasy. He is both a dead, lost archaism as well as a chiseled in stone mythical being. He always had that quality when I was a child because he was either at work or somewhere else - visiting the homeland - or dividing his time between his migrant peers and helping people write letters to their loved ones in Bengali. And when he remarried, I did not see or hear from him for nearly three years. So, once quantified, I only really knew him for twelve or so years. I suppose, I feel cheated.

This, then, is my desire to spend a bit more time in his company. To understand him and to mark him as a legend, a heroic wayfarer whose story will tell all the migrants' stories. It might charm the generations who followed, be they the descendants of those first settlers or those embarking on their own today to other places, to have a figurehead, a god-like superhero about whom they can tell their children as bedtime stories, just as they do with Zeus or Jesus.