‘God is in the folds,’ I say, though I can no longer remember what pushed these words out of me.
It is encouragement for my nephew Tuku, who, at eleven, is impatient with almost everything, but particularly with things that don’t move. We are folding paper, following instructions from a book that we don’t understand completely. My niece, who is four, is copying us, but copying us only in the way a shadow copies us, incompletely, exaggeratedly, and disappearing from time to time, like a shadow does. Tuku wants a chair to erupt from the paper. The paper doesn’t acquiesce. We must do the labour, we must tease form out of it, we have to create dimensions out of its flatness, we have to make it come alive, we have to believe that there is life inside it; yes, we must believe that folding paper can give birth like we believe that making love can produce children, like he has come to exist. I keep the last simile to myself.
I continue to fold, making ends of paper meet. When he gets irritated with himself for not being able to find the ‘centre’ of the piece of paper, I show him how to find it – fold it diagonally once, then fold it again, let the two ends of this triangular piece of paper now say ‘Hi’ to each other. As I say this, I begin to hear my words as if they were being spoken by someone else. I don’t know why this is happening, but, once it does, it takes on a metaphorical life: is this how one finds the centre of things, is this how God found the centre of the world, is this how we find our own centres … I have to stop myself, I have to build this paper table after all.
Tuki, my niece, has dropped out of the game. She has created her own rules and is folding her piece of green paper into aberrant folds, in all directions, and when the folds resist by trying to return to their original flatness, she scolds them, first with words, ‘Oi, you naughty one, stay, stay where I’ve put you, stay here …’, and later, when they continue to be disobedient, with a slap of her little fingers. To my eyes, the folds in her paper look like a staircase that could have been had the masons not stopped midway. It takes me a little while to remember that she’s seen these folds before – her memory of me making a hand-fan for her doll, folding the paper into thin strips, this way and that. How easy it is for a fan to turn into a staircase – just a few folds? My niece, though, is telling us that it’s a tap – water will flow out of one end, she’s insistent. Yes, yes, we say, in half-belief, like one trusts a plumber.
We manage to make a table – actually two, his and mine, in different colours. A leg in one of these is wobbly, or it just doesn’t want to stand. My nephew is irritated again – everything doesn’t like to stand, I say, and then, looking at my mother lying on her bed, forced to rest in this position for fractures in her ribs, I correct myself: everyone can’t stand even if they want to. He moves to the chair, saying, ‘This should have strong legs – one has to sit on it after all, it’s okay even if a table can’t stand perfectly well, but a chair must …’.
I can’t remember the rest. I am distracted. My 71-year-old mother has been lying in this position for the last four months. An active schoolteacher, an energetic mother, an enthusiastic celebrator of occasions, her feet stopped being supportive nearly a decade ago. They do not look like human feet – they have lost their form, no slipper or shoe can hold them. Now the loss of calcium has affected her spine – she freezes in pain from time to time, so as not to disturb us with the sound of her suffering. I’ve heard women speak about how beautiful they were in their youth; my mother only talks about how fast she could walk, fast enough to put the rice in boiling water, run to the market to buy fish, return back to the kitchen to find the rice just about ready to be taken off the stove.
Tuku is struggling to fold the paper in such a way that he can pull the legs for the chair out of its complicated folds. The truth is that I am struggling too. The instructions in the book are vague. We’ve folded and folded and folded the paper towards the centre – now we must pull out rectangles out of these triangles to build these legs, four of them.
If only I could just build two of them, I’d have …
I force myself to stray from the thought.
My mother, on whose bed we are sitting building this world in paper, asks about our progress. ‘Holo?’ she asks in Bangla. Are you done, have you finished, could you build it … the sense of all these queries in that one word. No, we say, Tuku and I. Tuki, indefatigably ebullient, says yes. We laugh looking at the crumpled piece of paper in her hands, unsure what she’s been trying to make. For her, making is only imagining, of course. But we still have the chair to build. The table is waiting for company …
I have made so many things with paper – boxes and balloons and stars and elephants and seahorses. I have made a life in paper – I write on it, I read what my students write, I underline and dogear pages; I spent years folding paper to fit into envelopes and forcing inland letters to crease along the marked broken lines, writing letters to the man who now sleeps next to me … I have built so many worlds with paper …
But I haven’t been able to build my mother’s ribs and feet, I have not been able to build her bones.
