Searching for Independence Day

At noon on the last July 4^th of his life, Mohan sat in his seat at the kitchen table, staring through the window at the lawn he used to tend, now out of his reach. “Asha beti, we just want to wish you a happy birthday” said his wife, Rani, seated at the telephone desk behind him.

“When will she be here?” Mohan asked expectantly.

“Darling, I told you, she is not coming,” Rani said in a voice tired from its continued burden, omitting the reminder that their daughter who lived a continent away in California had chosen not to spend her birthday in this home ever since it became her choice to make.

An hour later, the absent daughter was seated in her armchair in Los Angeles, ice packs numbing her aching knees after a family hike. The cellphone cooling down next to her held photos of this morning’s golden moments, the bright summer sun hiding any shadows from Asha, her husband Dan, and their twin eleven-year- old daughters, Allie and Avani. In the stillness of the den, Dan harvesting tomatoes from the garden for a salad and the girls at a friend’s pool for the afternoon, Asha searched for memories to frame these pictures with gratitude, buffering her guilt for once again purposefully creating a day in sharp contrast with the birthdays her parents had overseen.

Sharing her birthday with America had wrapped her child-sized birthday dreams in red, white, and blue, even if those colors did not appear on the kitchen table. The bakery where her mother was cheerfully greeted by name would bake Asha a cake to her mother’s order – chocolate with buttercream frosting and “Happy Birthday Asha” in chocolate icing. After her parents both earned tenure, the family moved from the crowded, bustling street bordering Syracuse University to a manicured suburb, and the bakery was replaced by a supermarket counter with seasonal baked goods. Asha’s birthday cake became a white-frosted vanilla sheet cake featuring a cardboard American flag on a matchstick planted in its center, available in the display case for Independence Day celebrations. Attempts to edit the blue-frosted “Happy Birthday America” to read “Happy Birthday Asha” usually resulted in the two names mushed together; the country would ultimately reclaim its frosted property as the leftover cake continued to be cut and served at teatime, with the flag still there, giving proof.

When Bob Kowalski, a chubby boy with long bangs who unfortunately was in Asha’s fifth-grade class told her to “go back where you came from”, she defiantly started to defend her old neighborhood that she wished her parents had never left. The taunt’s meaning then settled on Asha: she was being told to “go back” to a country she had never visited, the country her parents had left behind. “I was born here, on the Fourth of July! Asha sputtered. “I am more American than you are!” she muttered over her shoulder as she walked away, fumbling with her cafeteria tray as she joined in his game of exclusion. Asha hoped this bully wouldn’t find out that she didn’t celebrate the holiday her birthday shared.

By the time she was a teenager, Asha no longer had to be told to decline friends’ invitations to join their star-spangled holiday fun; she was expected to stay home with her own family. Wimbledon blared from the kitchen’s television over her birthday breakfast while town parades and picnic grounds in the Central New York town remained out of sight, separating Asha’s home from the American celebration, and edging her out further still.

After tennis stars like Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors paused to bow to English royalty at Centre Court, and while families like the Kowalskis lined the bedecked Fourth of July parade route two miles away, Asha wandered to a corner by a window. Armed with a spiral notebook and pen, she boiled down her dreams mixed with her parents’ admonitions, leaving a list of necessary steps to gain her independence cloaked with her parents’ confidence and trust. Tennis volleys on television and the drumbeats of invisible marching bands became the sounds of lonely longing, echoing still.

In the bookcase next to Asha’s armchair, The Hemingway Reader sat within her reach. Knowing what she would find there, Asha pulled the book down and turned to its inscription: “Happy 13^th Birthday Asha, with love from Mom & Dad.” A firm red line sliced the bottom edge, a permanent reminder of the reduced value once placed on this book that was destined to become inscribed, unwrapped, and saved. 

Asha started flipping through the heavy paperback’s pages, expecting to find more well-worn memories of forlorn, listless birthdays spent indoors as a country celebrated outside. In the first few pages, Asha recognized the beginning of a Nick Adams story, and remembered. Still stinging from her parents’ recriminations over her report card a week earlier that had been waved about as if to cast a dark spell on my future, Asha had unwrapped The Hemingway Reader. The thick book with its stark title and small type was taken as a silent nod from her parents, telling her that she was up to the task of reading Hemingway. Hoping to be seen, Asha had set about to prove them right, positioning herself in her room as dusk fell, trying to absorb words while an evening breeze through her window told her about the crowd awaiting fireworks on a nearby field dotted with picnic blankets.

Now, with decades and distance, Asha glanced at the same pages that had felt that breeze, hoping to help the girl she had been; the words did not yield, though. As Asha closed the book, it weighed in curiously; she felt hope in her hand.

Instinctively, Asha reached for her cellphone and tapped on “Mom and Dad” under “missed calls,” not knowing that this would be her last chance to speak with both her parents on her birthday. After letting the phone ring an unrealistic number of times, she hung up.

Leaning on his cane in Asha’s old room at that moment, Mohan wished the phone would stop ringing. He was trying to remember, and he was already tired from the trip upstairs. The question he had wanted to ask his daughter had slipped away again.

“Did we see the fireworks?” Mohan grabbed onto the question as it resurfaced without realizing he had uttered it aloud. A memory seemed to be hiding from him behind the teenaged daughter he saw in this room, a book in her hand.

“Who are you talking to?” His wife’s response meant that he had been caught once again in a place that no longer existed. The present moment did not seem to want him around anymore, so he was hesitant to return. With damp eyes and stiffened limbs, Mohan started the journey to the room’s door, his cane tapping the floor, shaking the hunted memories from their hiding places in time for him to capture them. 

Mohan had paused at the doorway as Asha sat in her bean bag chair, asked her what she was reading, then switched on her desk lamp as the muffled cannons of fireworks hung outside, a gesture that made Asha smile. Although he hadn’t seen his daughter open her gifts following tea with birthday cake, he had watched his wife wrap the book hastily that morning as she explained that she had bought it for herself at the university bookstore’s sale after she submitted final grades, but just realized that she had not gotten enough gifts for today.

On her first evening as a teenager on this American holiday, his daughter sat reading a book once assigned in a college classroom, a gift not really intended for her. 

If they leave now, he had thought, they could get to the top of the hill at least, perhaps be able to see the town fireworks from the car. She was smiling though, seeming to enjoy her new book safely in her room. They would have to rush and then just as quickly turn around, wary of drunk drivers coming back from a long day of outdoor reverie. Worse, they may need to drive closer to the field, perhaps having to park and join the fray, his daughter running toward a classmate she spied.

He had let the plan go, wishing he could at least explain to his daughter the fear that kept them home on this holiday. However, that would require him to reveal the sidelong glances he silently absorbed as they walked into a store or the occasional restaurant, the malevolent stares he had deftly blocked from the children’s view at the Route 20 ice cream stand where they had stopped on a rare Sunday drive. Sharing these secrets would betray the hope that had brought them to this house, the hope this country proudly displayed on its Independence Day, the hope which he wanted his daughter to hold without question.

Like most of her birthdays as a wife and mother, Asha’s birthday would end at a reserved table on a Malibu restaurant patio, with a waiter serving a piece of cake that was lit with a single candle and surrounded by a chocolate-drizzled ”Happy Birthday” garnish. Fireworks would crackle in full view from the family’s comfortable seats, but after making a wish, Asha would hold her eyes closed for a moment longer. Avani would point to the houses lit up on the other side of the Pacific Coast Highway and say how lucky they were to be able to watch the fireworks from home. 

A memory lost in the hoard of her hurt and disappointment that nested under her parents’ roof would fly back to Asha. Grass tickling her ankles, a book still in her hand, standing on the slope of the backyard’s border between her parents. Her mother had told her to come quickly to the backyard. Sparkles of fireworks from an unknown source glistened just above the treetops. She had closed her eyes to make another wish then. Now, she made a plan. She would call her parents again in the morning and ask if she, Dan, and the girls could visit home in August.