'Call': Sehri Tales selections, Day 29

I. 

I asked you a month ago if I could call you,

And you said you were busy,

I just didn't realize,

It would last a whole month.

I called you last week,

And you declined because you were at work,

My bad.

I can't keep track of time zones.

I asked you yesterday if I could call,

And you haven't replied yet,

I wanted to ask if you remember the poem I wrote for you.

I thought of texting you again today,

But I forgot,

And now that I remember,

I don't know if I want to,

And I don't know if I'll ask for a call again,

And I don't know if either of us,

Will care to talk about my poetry again.

by Rafid Khandaker

II.

"Call me when you land?"

"I will. I definitely will."

He was at the airport. He was leaving. 

I knew he wouldn't call. He was running away from me. He decided it way before. 

But I didn't stop waving at him. It was habit, by now. Forgiving him, a habit.

There at the immigration, I saw a mother. 

She was waving at her son as well. 

"Baba, call me when you land."

"Ok." the son tilted his head in despair. "Now, let go! I am embarrassed!"

She sobbed with the saree wrapped in her face, hiding it. The pain, the agony, the helplessness--she tried to cover it with a piece of cloth, hence people think her to be a bad omen.

I knew her son wouldn't call. The borders are weird, makes you feel you have run away from all your attachments.

But really, they just cut you off from the kind of love that you will spend a lifetime finding.

Just when I thought this, a man with a wooden frozen box next to him, shouted on his phone "Apa! Found Bhai's body. Tell Amma we are on our way. Tell her that Bhai will finally get maati here. The maati called him after 20 years."

I looked at the way that stupid boy just walked. I hope maati calls him faster, with life. I can only hope.  

by Tahseen Nower Prachi

III.

After a quarter of a century of friendship, we know the story beats. Nagging moms, philandering dads, brothers nursing some dark addiction. From one coast to another we share tales of secret boyfriends, storage units where we stash the contraband when the parents come to visit, the escapes to coffee shops and drives along the water when the past starts pulling us in. We are reduced to twelve-year-old versions of ourselves, cradling phones in the palms of our hands, dropping our voices so that our mothers don't hear. "She's driving me crazy," we say. Or, "My dad's at it again." A quarter of a century later we inhabit different bodies, have driver's licenses with the hologram of a country that we did not grow up in, but when we pick up each other's calls it is easy to slip into a past where we ate jhal muri from the same paper cone and blew up balloons for each other's birthdays.

by Shehtaz Huq