Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

Malli was about two when he began telling us about his real family. We were his family, too, but he had another family, his “real family.” “I am going back to them,” he’d say. “I am staying with you only a little time.” “So what’s your real dad’s name?” Steve would ask. “Tees.” “Tees? What kind of weird name is that?” “Don’t laugh, Dad, it’s a real name.” “And your mum?” “Sue. And I have a sister. Her name is Nelly.” He said he loved his sister the most. They lived in America. “Our house is near a big lake, we have a boat even, we do. It’s in Merica.” Malli was undeterred by Vikram’s smirks and the incredulity of his little friends. “But you don’t have a sister, Mal. Where is she? Show me.” “Don’t be silly, Alexandra, she can’t come here. She’s in another country, Merica.” My mother and our nanny, Malee, insisted that he was talking about a past life. “This is just the age some children remember their previous birth,” they’d say. They sometimes asked that Steve and I “do something” about it, go to the temple, talk to a priest. All we did was entertain our children by pretending to be Malli’s “real” parents, we’d do it for whole weekends sometimes. Steve proposed they lived in rural Mississippi. The boys had raucous fun when he acted as Tees coming to London to visit Malli. In his rather comic version of a southern accent, he would launch into tirades about how crowded the big city was and how he missed the mosquitoes of the swamps. “Again, again, Dad. Do Tees again!” Malli...