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At The Table
Priyanka Champaneri
My parents have a fondness for furniture, in particular large, hulking, wood-carved pieces that have glossy polished surfaces that gleam like a glass of cola held up to the light. The feet on these wardrobes and tables, curios and night stands, are immovable, resolute; sometimes nothing more than artfully carved wood blocks affixed to the legs, and other times they are curved talons and claws that grip spheres of wood in a bizarre balancing act. Each of these pieces, that my mother lovingly wipes down for dust each weekend, and that my father refers to in proud tones to guests as if introducing another child (“This is Mahogany, and that is Walnut, and over here we have Cherry.”) is what I imagine my parents thought America would be – what they thought luxury would be, when they were each tied to white-washed concrete walls in Indian houses that I have never seen, not even in pictures.
The oldest piece is a dining room set that includes an elaborate room-spanning table, eight chairs, and two extra leaves that we’ve never used. The table is one of the heaviest items in my parent’s house, a fact I know from experience during the two times my parents moved. It is a table that I have never once eaten at. Instead of people, bags from weekend shopping trips sit in each chair, and newspapers and books pool across the table surface where the place settings should be.
My parents had just moved into their first house when they bought the table, and I was newly-born. At the time they imagined large family gatherings sitting at the table, with overflowing thalis of rotli and puri crowding the corner ends, while larger vessels of rice, dhals, spiced vegetables, and meats might have their place in the center. They imagined extra chairs gathered from the kitchen and sitting rooms shoved into the small gaps around the table to accommodate all the adults, and they assumed the children would either sit in the laps of big people, or they would be content to run around the house, stopping only to eat food proffered from some hand. Any hand. A family hand.
When I look at old family pictures, I can find numerous baby photos of my older brother, but none of me. It is as if those days had vanished, just like the family – my parents’ families – who never showed up to fulfill the promise of that table. I have reproached my mother about the lack of photos, and the one time she ever gave an answer, her eyes were vague and distant. “It was a difficult time for us,” she said. “Nobody ever takes pictures when they are sad. And things happened in that year that we could never dream of.”
I have never known my cousins or uncles or aunts, although they are very much alive and well. I am conscious of this fact each time I sit at the table, each time I lean against a beveled corner or stub my toe against a chair leg. The table has become a fixture to read at, or to write at. And just as my parents imagined a very real family sitting in place, I have to imagine what it would be like to be part of a family of dozens, rather than a family of four. I have to imagine myself as a niece, a granddaughter, a sister-cousin, a didhi and a babhi. These titles float around me each time I sit at the table that is always empty, and each time I sit at the one chair that has become my place to think, I wonder what it would be like to not imagine, but just to be.
