The Candid Life of Meena Dave

by Namrata Patel

Identity is something most of us examine at some point in our lives. It is universal to feel comfortable or uncomfortable in our bodies, our skins, our commonness, and our otherness.

She didn’t check her actual mail for months at a time.

You and I, Meena, are dreamers, her father would say. And I’m here to make sure you can do, her mother would add. Dreams do not put food on the table.

“She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom.”

Boston winter is incomparable.

“How you present your hair,” Sabina lectured, “tells the world how well you take care of yourself.”

“You haven’t lived if you are not trying to forget.”

have scars as my memories. To fear is to torture yourself.”

Hope is a noun. So is murder.

“The Old State House is the oldest surviving building in Boston.”

There is no order to life. While time is linear, we do not have to live within its confines.

Expectations of how things must be are an anathema.

Neha liked to complain, indirectly, about everything.”

She wanted to be left alone but didn’t like that she’d been left,

Aloneness was a choice, but loneliness felt different. A disconnection from others that felt more like a condition of how she lived her life.

You can’t be lonely when you’re out in the world surrounded by people living their lives.”

She’d been called everything from exotic to dirty. What she didn’t have was a community she could turn to, one that was tied to her ethnicity.

When you don’t have a lot, you take care of what you have.

Once you are over the age of 30 you can no longer blame the past or your parents for the way you are. Fix yourself, it’s within your control.

Bravery is in small acts.

What does it mean to hold someone dear? I’ve concluded that I do not care for it. Let it exist for others. I’m enough without it.

Subtext is often more telling than text.

To exist in London was to conform to its essential Britishness. Boston was a distant cousin of London, more tenacious, more rebellious, and constantly on the lookout for a fight, as if its first battles against British tyranny had formed the nature of the place.

Every adoption starts with a loss.

Her mother used to say that people who lived near water were more kind.

Friendship can only work if it’s reciprocated.”

“Intent and motive say more about a person than their action.”

was left in a group home with others like me, and no, it wasn’t the television or movie kind where we bonded and became our own family, nor were we abused or neglected. It was shelter. We left for school, came back, did homework, ate, and repeated it over again the next day, every day. Alone. Always alone.

She’d run out of tears. She fell asleep in a state of numbness.