There was a man of South Asian descent at the Atlanta airport, waiting at your gate. Indian you presume. His hair was that silver color dark hair changes to through time and travel. As if it patinas like copper left in the air and rain. You know he isn't from Atlanta because of the corduroy pants he wears, loose but not baggy, as befits a man of his age. Those aren't the pants you wear in the South, no matter how old you are. Rochester doesn't have too large of an Indian-descent population, but here he is at your gate. You've been away for a week and you miss the rich, textured tap water of home, and the bite of the wind when it strikes your cheek. This old man, he's dressed for that. Clearly.
What first drew your attention to him was his hands, and the thick blue vein that ran over the top of brown skin. You wonder the story of those hands. Did they belong to an American immigrant? When they were younger and more round, did they grope at muddy Ganges soil? You could see them losing the baby fat and lengthening, and then gripping around a plow, or perhaps more likely a pencil for tests. A test to leave India for school in America, and then a test for American citizenship. Perhaps those hands proudly gripped a red, white, and blue flag with the pride of new citizenship, like you've seen them do on television. Surely they gripped flower stems for a wife, the wife's hand, their children, their grandchildren. Maybe he was returning home to that wife now, alone where he left her in their modest South Clinton Ave house.
If only you were the kind of person who talked to strangers, who had the ability to get them to open up the way your brother can. You could watch the relaxed curl of his fingers as he told you about the crowded markets in India, about how even though he loves America with all his heart, sometimes he misses the country of his birth. You of all people, weary traveler, understand that feeling. But that hand reaches down and fingertips find the handle of rolling luggage, right where they left it. And off he goes to another gate, into the fog of memory.
What first drew your attention to him was his hands, and the thick blue vein that ran over the top of brown skin. You wonder the story of those hands. Did they belong to an American immigrant? When they were younger and more round, did they grope at muddy Ganges soil? You could see them losing the baby fat and lengthening, and then gripping around a plow, or perhaps more likely a pencil for tests. A test to leave India for school in America, and then a test for American citizenship. Perhaps those hands proudly gripped a red, white, and blue flag with the pride of new citizenship, like you've seen them do on television. Surely they gripped flower stems for a wife, the wife's hand, their children, their grandchildren. Maybe he was returning home to that wife now, alone where he left her in their modest South Clinton Ave house.
If only you were the kind of person who talked to strangers, who had the ability to get them to open up the way your brother can. You could watch the relaxed curl of his fingers as he told you about the crowded markets in India, about how even though he loves America with all his heart, sometimes he misses the country of his birth. You of all people, weary traveler, understand that feeling. But that hand reaches down and fingertips find the handle of rolling luggage, right where they left it. And off he goes to another gate, into the fog of memory.
