Read Ode to Lata for Free Online

mythical bravado and end up as pawns instead.
    My earliest memory of being in kindergarten is not of childhood bliss on the playground or of finger painting.  It is one of deep yearning.  It’s of myself running behind some five year old, calling him, inexplicably, by the same nickname my mom had for my father,
Shila
.  That’s what she called him.  Why I was calling Munir or Sandeep (both confounded at being expected to respond to another name) by this nickname as I chased one or the other relentlessly around slides and seesaws would have given any psychotherapist a multiple orgasm.
    It seems there was always someone I was trying to keep from leaving.  Always someone without whom it just didn’t feel right.  On the playground.  In the classroom.  At home.  In life.  Somebody should have seen it then.  But my mother was too busy making a living and smothering me during the little time she could spare, and my father too busy being unfaithful to her and countering her affections with his wrath. 
Don’t treat him like a girl, for God’s sake!  He’s a boy, can’t you see that?  You are bringing him up to be a bloody sissy!  No son of mine is going to grow up to be a bloody sissy!
    My grandmother,
mama kuba
, tried even harder to make up for the anomaly of both her own life and the absence of my feuding parents, only to exacerbate the belligerent convictions of an only child in the most tempestuous of surroundings.  In her later years she often told me of how, as a child, I had never crawled on account of her fear of me bruising my knees.  I had gone straight from her arms to learning how to walk, my hands carefully held up by her own.
    She told me about the ordeal she had to undergo whenever it was time for me to bathe.  Having spent the afternoon playing tea party – I wouldn’t have been caught dead jostling through a soccer field with the boys – I convinced all my neighborhood girlfriends to escort me home.  There, as my grandmother bucketed warm water over my head, I stood in all my naked bliss, a six year-old exhibitionist in all his splendor.  I simply refused to take one unless they gathered and watched.  She would laugh and say that I had needed an audience even then.  Adrian says that I might have been too afraid to let them out of my sight lest they disappeared and didn’t come back.
    It was no surprise, therefore, that when my father left to end matters with his mistress in Nairobi and promised to come back but wound up being stabbed, his blood splattered all over her room instead, I was determined that nobody would ever leave me again.  The consummation between father and child that comes from spending intimate moments that last more than a couple of hours every few weeks never came.  Teaching me how to water paint as I sat in his lap and then disappearing for months at a time suddenly became a mercifully acceptable notion compared to not being able to see him again.
    No, it would not happen to me again.  This abrupt and unjust abandonment.  Perhaps if I hadn’t failed him in some way.  Disappointed him.  Held on to him tighter.  Appeased him by comprehending signs that he surely must have emitted.
    No, never again.  I would love him as nobody ever had.  He would never have to look elsewhere.  I would manipulate any circumstance.  Experience as an only child had taught me how to manipulate situations.  Offer any sacrifice.  Grant any kind of freedom.  Keep him by my side.  Never find myself in a situation that required reclaiming him.  He would be the father that had been slain.  The mother who had worked too hard. He would make everything alright.
    Enter Richard.

CHAPTER 7
     
    LOVE STORY
     
    Let me tell you about Richard Lopez.  About this 22-year-old boy who has me in the grips of an obsession.  Richard is the perfect boy.  The object of everyone’s desire.  He has the kind of muscled body that everyone gawks at and spends hours in the gym trying to chisel