There is a story I read when I was in college. In it, the gods and demons churned the cosmic ocean to extract the nectar of immortality. But before the nectar rose, the ocean released a poison called halahala, something so potent it could destroy all creation. Shiva imbibed the poison to save the world but did not swallow it completely. Nor did he spit it out. He simply held it in his throat until it turned his neck blue.

I think now of my father’s throat. The way he clears it before speaking English as if dislodging something stuck. One could attribute this to accent, but now I know it is everything he could not say, everything he held rather than released.

◆

My father listens to Willie Nelson, and when he does, the house takes on a stillness that forms around a person concentrating. He hums but never sings. When he tilts his head forward, his full head of gray hair appears to thin in the light. He is more than listening. He is dreaming. He does not know I am watching, or maybe he knows and does not mind. What I know is that he has traveled far away, to a place he does not want me to follow.

The song is one I have heard a hundred times. “Blue Skies” or “Stardust” or one of the others that all sound to me like the same longing set to different melodies. My father’s eyes are closed. His hands rest on the arms of his recliner. His fingers tap occasionally but rarely feel appropriate to the rhythm.

I want to ask where he goes, want to understand what Willie Nelson has that I do not, what voice can reach him when mine cannot.

◆

Instead I turn to photographs. Mine and not mine, found and taken. I shoot, and I catalogue, and the accumulation of images, both the noun and verb of it, becomes comfort, talismans via which I can create scaffolding to hold what silence cannot.

◆

I have two photographs. In one, a room that is in black and white. Dense with furniture, with frames on the wall, with the accumulated weight of years. A figure sits by the window, silhouetted against the light. Alone. Waiting.

The other is a room in color. There are toys scattered on the floor. Also a high chair. Crayon drawings taped to the wall. A man on the couch with a pillow balanced absurdly on his head.

The same life. Two versions.

The first is how my parents lived before we were born. The apartment they kept so carefully. The furniture they polished and the silence they maintained. The waiting by windows for something they could not name.

The second is how I live now. The chaos and ridiculousness of parenting. The games that make no sense and willingness to look foolish for the sake of a child’s laughter.

I wonder which room I will imagine when my children are grown and gone and I am the one sitting by the window, silhouetted against the light.

◆

My son enters the room and climbs onto my father’s lap without asking. My father’s eyes open. The spell breaks or bends to make room for the boy.

My son says, Papa, what are you listening to?

Music, my father says.

What kind?

The kind I like.

My son considers this. He says, I like it too.

My father smiles. The smile is different than the smiles he gives me. Easier. Less weighted. He wraps his arms around the boy, and they sit together, listening.

◆

My father uses a walking stick now. Not always, but on uneven ground and on days when his back is worse than usual.

From ahead I can hear pieces of their conversation. My son’s voice is high and clear. My father’s voice lower, harder to catch like he is withholding it from me.

The stick is for balance, my father says.

Why do you need balance?

Because I am old.

How old?

Seventy-three.

That is very old, my son says before announcing that when you become eighty, you die.

◆

To hold a teacup, my father wraps both hands around it even when the tea is not hot. Then he lifts the cup to his face so he can inhale the steam before he drinks. His eyes remain half closed, as though the act of drinking tea requires complete concentration.

He learned this from his mother. I know this because he told me, and that is enough.

Sometimes I catch myself holding my own cup the same way and wonder how many generations of hands have wrapped themselves around clay and ceramic in exactly this configuration. How many faces have lifted toward steam, eyes closing, breath drawing in.

Then I wonder if it is passed down in the body, or because it is told. If I do it only because of the story he shared with me.

I can tell my son. I will. And then he will do it too. Or should I wait and see if he does it without the information?

I can already imagine him holding his cup of hot chocolate with both hands, lifting it to his face, closing his eyes.

◆

There is a small pool of rainwater collected in a depression no bigger than my hand. The sky reflects in it. Clouds. A sliver of building. The edge of something dark that might be a tire or might be a shadow.

My son crouches beside it, fascinated.

What do you see, I ask.

Lots of stuff, he says.

And he is right. In that small rectangle of captured sky, the whole world is inverted. Up becomes down. Solid becomes liquid. The permanent becomes temporary. By tomorrow the water will have evaporated and the reflection will be gone. The sky will have moved on to other mirrors.

My son reaches down and touches the water. The image shatters into ripples.

Now it is different, he says, delighted.

◆

My son opens his mouth to show me a loose tooth, and for a moment I see everything. The countries he will visit that I never will. The languages he will speak that I have already lost. The grandchildren who will not know my name. The whole future, housed in a mouth full of baby teeth.

My son closes his mouth. The tooth is just a tooth, and I am just a father again.

But for a moment, I saw it all.

◆

The road was narrow, and the fog did not drift so much as stand there. Shapes rose at the edges of the road, and I could not tell what was alive and what was not, because the fog had made them equal, had unmade the difference between a body and its shadow, between someone waiting and something that had simply been left behind. A post became a figure, became a tree with arms, and I stopped trying to distinguish one from the other because the fog did not care about such distinctions, and it was right not to. The headlights pushed into the white, and the white absorbed them without acknowledgment, and I remember the sound of gravel under the tires was the only proof I was still moving, because everything else, the road, the country, the self I had been before entering the fog, had become suggestion, had become the kind of memory that exists only when you are not looking directly at it.

There is a name for this. I learned it later, in a clean room far from any fog, and the name is ambiguous loss, which is the grief you carry for someone who is still here, the mourning of a place that still exists but no longer holds your shape, and when I heard it I thought, yes, that is the fog, that is exactly what the fog was doing to those figures by the road, dissolving the line between presence and disappearance until there was no line at all.

◆

There is an hour that belongs to no one.

I know it from the nights I took the train home after working an overnight shift in the hospital. The 5:47 that left Newark for Manhattan while the sky was still black and arrived just as the darkness began to thin into something that was not yet light but was no longer night.

I tried to sleep on these trains but I could not because my body refused to let go.

It was not always like this.

When I was a boy I could fall asleep anytime my father was driving because the backseat of the car was the safest place I knew. My father was in control, and the world was moving, and I was not responsible for any of it. I would watch the streetlights pass across the ceiling, one after another, and then I would watch nothing at all because sleep had taken me without my noticing.

Once, on a long drive to Niagara Falls, I woke to gravel under the tires and the car tilting in a direction cars are not supposed to tilt. I saw trees where the road should have been. My father had, for a moment, fallen asleep and taken us off the road. But I was not afraid because my father’s hands were still on the wheel, and even as we left the highway a new road seemed to appear beneath us, a road that existed only because we needed it to exist, and he guided us back as though the world had simply rearranged itself to keep us safe.

I want to feel that way on this train.

But I am the one who steers now.

◆

My wife makes photographs of empty rooms. A dress hanging on a wall. A window with fingerprints on the glass.

She says she is documenting what remains after people leave.

I say that sounds like grief.

She says everything sounds like grief if you listen long enough.

◆

There is a photograph I cannot stop looking at. In it is a figure, blurred almost beyond recognition, standing in a room. The light behind the figure creates a halo. Or an erasure.

The figure could be my father. Could be me. Could be the ghost of someone who has not died yet but is already halfway gone.

The blur is not a mistake. Actually, it is the point.

My father has started to blur in real life. When he enters a room, I have to look twice to be sure he is there. His voice comes from far away, even when he is standing beside me. He is becoming the silhouette of himself.

◆

My son takes my father’s hand. I try to slow down. My wife matches my pace. But even slow, I am too fast. I have never been good at my father’s pace. Even as a child I walked ahead, rushing toward whatever was next, attempting to reach a destination first or maybe, I conclude now, ahead of my father.

The distance between us grows. Not far. Twenty feet, maybe thirty, enough that I cannot hear them clearly anymore.

I am thinking that my son has something I did not have, or he is something I was not. The thought sits in my chest like a stone while behind us, I hear my son’s laughter floating through trees.

I turn to look. They have stopped again and now my father is pointing at something low to the ground. A mushroom I guess. My son crouches to look closer. My father leans on his stick and watches him almost touch it.

◆

In the bathroom mirror I watch my wife bathe our son.

I am always holding the camera now, as if the act of documentation could slow the passage of time, could pin these moments to something solid before they flutter away.

My son splashes and my wife laughs. I position myself so that the mirror holds all of us. Me in the doorway, them in the tub, the towels on the rack, the door slightly ajar. A family arranged in glass.

I take the picture.

◆

My hand rests on my son’s head. His hair is soft, still baby fine in places, though he is not a baby anymore. He stands beside me, barely reaching my hip, looking down at something on the floor. A ball, a toy, maybe a crack in the wood he has decided is interesting.

I do not remember my father’s hand on my head. But he must have touched me, must have ruffled my hair, guided me across streets, steadied me when I stumbled.

What I remember is his voice.

My son looks up. Daddy, why are you just standing there?

How do I explain that I am trying to memorize this? That I am terrified of becoming a father he does not remember being touched by.

Just thinking, I say.

About what?

About you.

He accepts this because children accept everything. They do not know yet that adults are capable of carrying weights they cannot name.

He runs off.

My hand closes on empty air.

◆

I strain to hear any exchange of words between my son and father, but the sound of the stream covers their voices.

A thought occurs to me. It is an ungenerous thought that feels small and petty, and I am ashamed to even share it.

They are talking about me, I decide.

My father is telling my son things about me. He was not like you, I imagine my father saying. He was always rushing and never satisfied with where he was.

They reach the stream. My son releases my father’s hand and crouches at the water’s edge. He reaches in. The water is cold, so he laughs.

I drift toward them until I am close enough.

My son says, Papa, look. A fish.

My father says, I see it.

There is no fish. Or there is a fish and I cannot see it. Or the shadow of a fish. Or the idea of a fish.

My son says, Do you like fish?

My father says, To eat, yes.

My son laughs. He says, I mean do you like to look at fish?

My father considers this. He says, Yes. I like to look at fish.

They are quiet for a moment. Both looking at the water. Both seeing or not seeing the fish.

My son says, When I am big, will I need a stick?

My father says, Maybe. When you are very big.

My son says, As big as you?

My father says, Even bigger.

My son seems satisfied with this answer. I am going to be as big as you one day, he reassures his papa, then stands and wipes his wet hand on his pants, then holds my father’s hands again, and all I can think, as they look toward me together, is that I missed the point of their exchange completely.

They were not talking about me, I understand then. What they have been doing, I realize, is writing a song of their own, yet another one that I cannot follow.

◆

Salmon, I read, can smell their home river. A single drop in a billion gallons. They follow that scent for years and thousands of miles until they find the exact bend where they first became.

My father can smell it too, I imagine. That explains why he checks the weather of every city, each day. Because he is swimming in place, testing the current. And when he dies, when he finally stops swimming, his body will decompose and feed the river of us. His children, his grandchildren, and on and on, until the original shape is unrecognizable but the nutrients remain.

◆

Once I photographed the sun through rain covered glass. The droplets refracted the light until it looked like a hole in the sky like a portal or an eye looking back.

My wife asked what I was doing.

I said I was trying to see what happens when you look directly at something you are not supposed to look at.

She said I would go blind.

I said maybe that is the point.

◆

The doorknob is in focus. Everything behind it, the closet, the shelves, the accumulated life of a family, dissolves into blur.

I photographed it because I was thinking about thresholds. About the moments we stand at doors, deciding whether to enter or leave. About the hands that have turned this particular knob. My hands. My wife’s hands. My children’s small hands reaching up on tiptoes.

My father once told me that in India there were doorways you were not supposed to cross. Temple thresholds that required bare feet, rituals, the right caste. He crossed them anyway, he said. He did not believe in such rules.

But then he came here, where every door was supposed to be open, and he found new thresholds, invisible ones. Like doors that closed when you spoke with an accent.

I turn the knob and the door opens. Behind it lies just a closet full of towels and old sheets.

But for a moment, before I opened it, it could have been anything. A passage, or a portal in time, or way back to somewhere I have never been.

I walk toward the father in the photograph, but he is already moving. In my mind he steps out of the frame, the phone receiver in hand, the cord spiraling like a question without an answer.

He was a dentist. But here, in this invented light, he is someone else entirely. A man calling across oceans, his voice traveling through copper wire trying to reach a place that is receding.

My boy will be just like me, he says without turning, his voice a shadow on the wall.

I reach for his shoulder, but my hand passes through air.

The photograph is what is fading.

◆

My father holds the poison in his throat. Halahala.

But below the throat there is a cave. A small space in the heart where nothing is held, where nothing is carried, where the self is at complete rest without needing to swallow or spit out.

I do not know if my father has found that cave.

Sometimes, when the children are laughing, and the tower is falling, and my hands are empty of cameras, I feel something open beneath my ribs. A space that does not need to hold. A place that was never wounded because it was never separate from the world that could wound it. Someone mystical may call this liberation. But really, it is just Tuesday.

◆

Two images layered on top of each other. A woman in a sari with flowers in her hair. Another woman’s face, looking directly at the camera.

The double exposure is an accident of chemistry, a mistake of light, but it is also the truest photograph in the entire collection because this is what memory, identity looks like. Multiple selves occupying the same space, neither fully visible, neither fully erased.

◆

My daughter looks at her brother. Her brother looks away.

Between them is a blurry hand, a toy, something in motion that the camera could not freeze.

She has my eyes, people say. What they mean is that they are dark and watchful. She sees everything and says little. She is collecting information for the day when she will need to understand why things are the way they are.

Her brother has my wife’s eyes. Open, earnest, sometimes naive. He looks at the world as if it is a gift he is still unwrapping, surprise after surprise.

They do not know yet that they will spend the rest of their lives orbiting each other. Coming close, pulling away, coming close again. Siblings are the only witnesses to your entire childhood, the only ones who can say I was there, I remember, that is not how it happened. They will corroborate, and contradict, and eventually, maybe, converge on something that resembles truth.

◆

Sometimes my kids wonder why I like lying on the floor in the evenings. I tell them that from down here the world is different.

The rug becomes a landscape. The hardwood becomes a horizon. The dog’s bowl in the distance glows yellow like a small sun at floor level.

I lie on my stomach sometimes and photograph from here, from a child’s-eye view, from the angle that adults forget exists once they have grown tall enough to see over counters.

I tell them I want to see what they see. The dust bunnies under the couch, the lost toys beneath the bookshelf, the crumbs that fall.

Meanwhile the dog watches me from her bed, confused. I am too old to be down here, she knows that.

But I stay for a while anyway, my cheek against the cool floor, watching the light shift across the grain of the wood, pretending.

◆

I remember hiding under tables at family gatherings, listening to the conversations I was not supposed to hear.

Chair legs like tree trunks and feet passing by. Small bare feet, larger feet in socks. The underside of things.

My son crawls out from under the table, clutching a milk carton. His pants are gray, patterned with stars and planets.

What will he remember from this angle? What will he carry into his own adulthood?

The way light fell through the glass top. The sound of voices, muffled and strange. The feeling of being small in a world of giants.

I just hope he remembers it was safe. I hope he remembers he was loved.

◆

My children run into the waves. Their small bodies silhouetted against the brightness of the water. The sun is so strong the photograph looks overexposed, bleached out, almost white, as if they are running into light itself.

I stand on the shore and watch.

The ocean, a gray horizon is what my mother saw when she first met my father.

But for my children the ocean is not a wall. Wet, cold, fun to splash in, full of shells and seaweed and the occasional terrifying crab.

◆

The boy chases the bird. The bird flaps its wings, escapes but doesn’t fly. Maybe this is a metaphor for migration, an endless pursuit of something that keeps slipping away. Or maybe one for childhood. The way we run and run and never quite catch what we’re chasing. Or history. The way it repeats itself, generation after generation, the same gestures, the same futility, the same inexplicable hope.

What I know is that boy’s shirt, the bird, the sky, all of them are white, all of them bleached by the sun and time.

After some time, the bird flew. That is what birds do, that is the nature of wild things, to leave us standing in the sand with our arms outstretched and nothing in our hands.

From his expression after it left I thought he would cry, or run after it, or demand that we find another bird. But he did none of these things. He stood there for a long moment, looking at the place where the bird had been, and then he turned to me and said it was here.

Yes, I said. It was here.

He nodded, satisfied, as if this were enough.

I think often about the way he accepted the leaving, the way he did not need the bird to stay in order for it to have mattered.

Simply put, the bird was here.

◆

I photographed birches from a moving car. The motion, or my hands shaking, blur each moment. I say wow, this is beautiful.

My father asks why I take pictures of nothing.

I say it is not nothing.

He says it looks like nothing.

I say maybe you have to know what you are looking at.

He says I know what I am looking at.

◆

My father’s closet is full of blue. Blue shirts. Blue ties. Blue sweaters. Blue windbreakers. Even his socks are blue, my wife pointed out once.

I never noticed until she said it. I had looked at that closet a thousand times and never registered the saturation of it, the way it looked like a small captured piece of sky.

Why blue, I asked him.

Blue does not show stains, he said.

I wonder if I have inherited the blue.

◆

The afternoon sun falls through the window and makes a rectangle on the hardwood. The rug bisects it, creates a border between illuminated and shadow.

Instinctually, my children sit on either side of this border. The boy in darkness, the girl in light.

Their feet are bare, their legs extend toward each other but do not quite touch and between them lies the geometry of light, the architecture of an ordinary afternoon.

I want to tell them to remember this. The way the sun felt. The way we were all here, together, in this room, on this day, with nothing more urgent than the slow passage of hours.

But they will not remember because they are too young, too busy being inside the moment to know they should memorize it.

But I don’t tell them, like my father didn’t tell me. Maybe, I wonder, do I want them to later search for me like I search for him now?

◆

People tell me to ask my father more questions.

What was your father like? I asked him because he is someone I never met.

He was quiet. He was a singer.

What did he sing?

I do not know the names of the songs. Classical. Only classical.

Were you close?

I do not know what that means.

Did you talk?

We talked about practical things.

Never about feelings?

We did not have that word in our house.

What word did you have?

Duty. Sacrifice. Endurance.

Is that enough?

It was what we had.

Silence.

Do you wish it had been different?

I wish I had asked more questions.

Why did you not?

What is this? Stop it. Anyway, it is too late now.

◆

Daddy, what are you writing?

A story.

What is it about?

Our family.

Am I in it?

Yes.

Is Papa in it?

Yes.

Is he the hero?

There are no heroes.

Then what is the point?

Silence.

Daddy?

I do not know. To remember, maybe. To make sure we do not forget.

Forget what?

Everything.

That is a lot.

Yes. It is.