A Stranger at My Table. Ivo de Figueiredo

      Dressed for the city in a snowdrift in the middle of the forest. For years I’ve looked at this picture and felt it safest that he stay there, at a distance, frozen, tranquil, before the snow melts and stirs everything into motion.

      The snow has begun to pile up in my own life now. I can’t leave him standing there any longer. I need to know how he came to be there, how it all began, and why everything went so dreadfully wrong between us. I need to know this now, before everything freezes again.

      For the last eight or ten years Dad has lived in Alfaz del Pi on the Spanish Costa Blanca, surrounded by people I’ve never met and don’t know. I could visit him there, but I don’t. Not yet. I’m not ready. Instead, I take a plane to the United States, to Boston, where his sisters live. We sit around the dining table in an old apartment building on Mass Avenue. The apartment is arranged around a long, dark corridor with doors that lead to a series of rooms that all face out toward the traffic. The floors are warped with age. The thin windowpanes keep neither the noise nor summer at bay. The air is heavy with heat, except in the dining room where an air-conditioner roars.

      My aunts look at me with the same gentle, empathic gaze I remember so well from their visits to Langesund when I was a child; it’s as though everything I tell them, any feelings I express, become etched in their faces. Though, in fact, they speak with their whole bodies, the way Indian women do. The many years they have spent in the United States have undoubtedly wrought changes in them, but not in their body language; heads that sway as they talk, forefingers that wag. When they get animated, up pops a forefinger, always the right, and always rocking in a perfect sideways arc, back and forth, affirming or negating, as though they need a metronome to maintain the stream of conversation.

      Now and then the metronome halts, and the forefinger points straight up in front of two gentle, but penetrating eyes. Then I know that what will follow is important:

      “Your Dad got very hurt. He was only nineteen when he left East Africa. And he’d been like a king.”

      Dad hadn’t been any kind of king when I knew him. Not in our house. So where was it he’d been king? In Zanzibar, in Dar Es Salaam or Nairobi? In Goa perhaps, or in England? Now that I think about it, I’m not really sure where he came from; whether it was from just one of these places, or all of them. But somewhere in the world, at some point in his life, he seems to have been strong; a king. Then, somewhere along the road, a king he ceased to be.

      As I’m about to leave, Dad’s youngest sister emerges from the bedroom carrying a black folder stuffed with old letters. I recognize the flimsy, blue air-mail paper from my childhood. It arouses memories of Dad sitting at the kitchen table reading.

      “Your father wanted you to have these.”

      The folder holds all the letters he received from his parents and siblings during those difficult years when the family was scattered to the four winds, uncertain whether they’d ever see each other again. Dad wants to give the letters to my brothers and me, but since we’re no longer on speaking terms, his sister has agreed to hand them over to me.

      On my flight home to Norway I glance through one of the letters to Dad from his mother, Herminia:

      Nairobi, March 19, 1965: “What passport have you got, Xavier?”

      I open another, from the following year:

      “We are in a desperate situation…”

      Then another, also from my grandmother:

      “Please, please, start talking to Baby in English, right away, do not talk to him in Norge [sic]…”

      Suspended over the Atlantic Ocean I am grasping fragments of a world in my hands, a world and a history that I’ve started to realize is far greater than I’d ever imagined. Confusing glimpses into the thoughts and anxieties of a stranger – Herminia, the grandmother I never met. Baby. Is that me? A voice from a world about which I have a vague notion, but have never known because it is long-gone; a world that went under and disappeared years before he came to us. Dad’s world. And perhaps mine?

      THE EARLIEST PHOTOGRAPH I HAVE FOUND of Dad shows him sitting on a lawn. The year is 1939. I assume it was taken in Victoria Gardens, just outside the city of Zanzibar, where the family’s African ayah often took my father and his siblings. It’s unlikely the servant would have taken this picture. My guess is that Grandfather is the photographer. In which case the picture was probably taken on a Sunday, when he was free. The rest of the week he sat in the office of the British District Commissioner shifting papers, while my grandmother, Herminia Sequeira took care of the housework at their home in Vuga Street.