FICTION

After the River

By Sumita Mukherji     VOLUME 58 No. 1

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The hated ritual arrives again. Muggy in her periwinkle sundress, seven-year-old Sona sucks in her cheeks as her father tosses out her red, orange, yellow construction paper, a crumpled rectangle of aluminum foil used to cook last night’s tandoori chicken, and an old tube of her mother’s magenta lipstick.

“Wait—let me use those, please,” her mother shouts, her voice a mixture of hard Bengali and Boston accents.

Her father pauses mid-action, Sona’s used sketchbook in hand. “If you insist, Arpuna,” he says. He puffs his stubbled cheeks into a facsimile of a smile.

Sona’s mother, her waist-long, black braid swinging behind her, spreads newspapers along the kitchen linoleum and sets a standing writing desk on top. After placing a bottle of Elmer’s glue and a pair of scissors on the desk, she plucks the discarded items from the garbage can. With the foil, her broad hands sculpt a shallow bowl. After cutting the paper, she glues red, orange, and yellow squares into a 3D pyramid and stripes it with the tube of lipstick. Sona twists the hem of her dress and hopes that for once the sculpture will be for her instead of her father.

“What do you think, Srikesh?” her mother asks, and Sona tucks her fists beneath her chin. “Is it a good beginning? Do you like it?”

Her father glances at the sculpture, then looks past her mother’s face to the tan sectional he snoozes on when Arpuna asks too many questions. “Yes, I like it.”

Sona lets go of her dress. Her hand feels heavy, useless, a disappointment.

Her mother steps closer to her father. She could enfold his shoulders, but she pins her arms to her sides. “But . . . do you love it?”

At this, Sona’s father opens his mouth and closes it. For a minute, his mouth remains in a straight line. Then in a flash, it trembles. The silence reminds Sona of dawn, when she awakens and creeps into the hallway, willing her parents to stir.

“Well?” her mother asks, crossing her arms and digging her fingers into her flesh.

“What’s going on?” Sona asks, but neither parent answers.

“Arpuna,” her father says, pocketing his fists. “I know what you are doing. Must you use the word love?”

“Let us go upstairs. Sona, you stay,” her mother says as she rises and lumbers out of the kitchen. Her father hesitates then follows, his tread as hushed as a stray cat’s.

As she sneaks to the foot of the stairs, Sona hears a muffled argument. She can’t make anything out until her mother bangs open the bedroom door and yells, “That I cannot abide.”

“What does abide mean?” Sona asks as her mother rushes down the stairs.

“I am going out for a walk,” her mother responds. “Do not bother your father. He is . . . quieter than usual and needs silence.”

“Where are you going?” Sona asks.

“Please, Sona. Just stay out of trouble. Okay?” Holding open the front door, her mother waits for Sona’s acknowledgment. The carved rectangles on the front of the mahogany door seem sharper than usual, as if they’re waiting to injure someone.

As Sona’s toes curl inward and cramp, she nods at her mother and raises her eyebrows, her idea of what grownups consider a serious expression.

Her mother pulls the door shut and locks it. With the door’s exterior rectangles gone, the interior side is revealed, an off-white color. Maybe the inside of the door had been snowy white once and with time the smudges from all their fingers, the dirt from Sona’s summer dresses and hands, left the door a sad, graying mess.

Sona straightens like a toy soldier, stiff and with locked knees, and waits. At any moment, her mother will come back. But she doesn’t. This must be a joke Sona doesn’t understand.

In the foyer, Sona sits on the slate-gray tiled floor and tries prying her toes from their stuck state. They don’t budge. She sits cross-legged and chants, “Sa, ta, na, ma . . .  ” over and over, the way she learned at school.

Her father pads down the stairs. The sound is familiar, melancholy, puzzling, like an only child yearning and not yearning for a visiting friend. Sona’s lips quiver.

“Where is your mother?” her father asks.

“She went out for a walk.”

“Did she say when she would be back?”

“No,” Sona says, looking down at the floor, ashamed that she didn’t think to ask that question. “She left and I still don’t know what’s going on.”

Her father nods curtly. “Do not worry,” he says. “I will find her.”

“Is she lost?”

“No. But I know where she might have gone.”

Sona jumps up. “Can I come with you?”

Her father tells her no. He heads to the phone and calls their neighbor to watch her. Mrs. Trimble arrives so quickly that Sona thinks her father performed a magic trick. Her father points out leftovers to their neighbor and leaves as wordlessly as Sona’s mother did. Sona kneels on the floor again, sure her toes will cramp forever.

Mrs. Trimble speaks up: “Get up, Sona. Kneeling won’t help anyone. You might as well help yourself and have some dinner.”

Sona bites into a leg of tandoori chicken, tangy and lukewarm, and a ball of clumped rice. Mrs. Trimble didn’t heat the leftovers long enough. As she chews her dinner, she hears the front door unlock, and she runs to the foyer. Her mother stands expressionless before her, soaked, her hair disheveled from its braid and dripping. The smell of sewage radiates from her.

Sona inches toward her shivering mother, unsure whether she is real. “Why are you wet?” she asks.

Her mother’s eyes turn glassy. “I wanted to swim in the Charles River,” she says, kneeling now in front of her daughter and blinking her eyes rapidly. “And for some reason, I went with all of my clothes on. Can you believe it, Sona? Is it not funny?”

“That is not what happened,” her father says, standing at the open door and closing it, a note of gloom in his voice.

“What really happened?” Sona asks.

Her mother stares at her as if she’s calculating some formula.

“Why did you go into the river?” Sona asks.

“Because it was there. Because it was inviting me. Because of your father.”

“What do you mean?” Sona asks.

Her mother doesn’t say. Her father grunts a sound somewhere between frustration and disgust. Gooseflesh prickles Sona’s neck and back, and she doesn’t understand why. Her father softens and reaches out to cup her mother’s shoulder, but before he can do so, she twists away. He shudders and stares at the front door, lost on some private island that Sona can’t reach.

Sighing, her mother stands and embraces her father in a way that she never has for Sona. “I hated you, but you saved me,” her mother says. “You called me to come out of the water, and I did. I will repay you one thousand times, and you will be forever grateful.”

During the embrace, her father stills like a river freezing over.

Sitting on her heels, Sona draws her finger through a puddle on the floor. The water feels gritty with dirt, unfriendly and unlike water from the ocean. “I should clean this up,” Sona tells her mother. She runs to the kitchen for a dishcloth. Mrs. Trimble is there, wiping down their counters with a sponge.

“Let me help you,” her mother says when Sona returns.

“No, don’t,” Sona says, pressing the dishcloth onto the floor.

“Then let me hold one of your hands,” her mother says, her voice breaking, then righting.

Sona lets her. But indifference, cold as a desolate suburban night, emanates from her mother’s palm, and her mother loosens her grip. Sona curls her hand around her mother’s index finger. Mrs. Trimble tsks and collects dishes from the table. Though Sona and her mother stay like that until her father escorts Mrs. Trimble out of the house, Sona expects her mother to drive her away at any moment, as if Sona were a down feather, nothing special and only worth brushing off.



The text comes at midnight on Wednesday while Sona rearranges the few possessions in her half of her sophomore dorm room. Thankfully, she has the room to herself. Her roommate spends her nights at her boyfriend’s dorm, though the school frowns on this, so soon—just a couple of years—since the beginning of the pandemic. Sona ignores the text’s ping and shifts her laptop to the center of her desk, straightens her framed photo of orange tulips in Boston’s Public Garden, and places a few packages of black KN94 masks on an empty bookshelf. She’s been rearranging for a couple of hours. Each time she moves an object—her worn copy of The Master and Margarita; a Magic 8 Ball that her mother inexplicably gifted her at high school graduation; a small rubber statue of a green alien meditating—she sees its afterimage in its previous location and feels the absence. With drowsy eyes, Sona observes her work. She can’t tell if this arrangement is better than any of the others, but the orderliness and attention to safety will please her mother, who will arrive after breakfast. Happily, they’ll spend Sona’s Thanksgiving break road-tripping from Berkeley back to Cambridge, her mother’s favorite lavender perfume permeating the car. It will be the most time they’ve spent together since Sona’s infancy. Her mother has mapped out an itinerary listing all their hotels, restaurants, and rest stops, and how long they’ll spend at each location, down to the hour. Maybe they’ll have time to clink glasses of red wine. Maybe she’ll mention Josh from her chem class, her latest secret crush. Maybe she’ll wax poetic about running through Berkeley’s city blocks, even though she’s only done this twice. If they keep on schedule, they can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday.

Another ping. It’s her mother:

“SONA. GOING TO PSYCH FACILITY IN MORNING. 3 DAY STAY. DO NOT WORRY :D BUT I CANNOT MEET U AS PLANNED”

“WHAT!” Sona texts. “HOLD ON”

After fumbling her phone, she calls her mother. No one answers. Sona texts again:

“WHATS GOING ON WITH U? PLS TELL ME WHATS GOING ON. WHEN WILL I SEE U”

An ellipsis appears and disappears. Sona hooks her thumb in and out of the waistband of her jeans while her other hand trembles. She bobs her ankle and flip-flop and waits. But no response comes. She sends another text:

“HAVE U BEEN SEEING A THERAPIST?”

Sona lies on top of her bed and curls on her blanket. She runs her hand along her rumpled sheets. She had planned on making her bed in the morning, pulling the sheets taut. Now there’s no point.

“YR NOT NEAR THE RIVER ARE U???” Sona types out then deletes.

Dawn edges in. Sona hears her fellow students padding down the hallway to the showers. She checks her phone for the hundredth time. Nothing. Sona sends her mother yet another text:

“WHERE ARE U GOING?”

Sona closes her eyes. The familiar drone of leaf blowers beneath her window reminds her of an airplane engine. She jolts upright. Typing typos and rewriting words, Sona searches for flights from San Francisco to Boston. She buys a one-way ticket for a plane that leaves in a couple of hours, even though the price takes up half the credit on her card. After dragging her suitcase out from under the bed, she throws in jeans, shirts, underwear, bras, her lone sweatshirt, and two pastel cardigans. She finds her boots in a corner of the closet. With one hand, she requests an Uber, and with the other, she zips her suitcase closed. Sona texts her roommate to let her know she’s leaving, that she doesn’t know when she’ll come back.

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SUMITA MUKHERJI’s work has appeared in Grist, Witness, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College, and her work has been supported by a Bread Loaf scholarship. She is working on a novel. Find out more at sumitamukherji.com.


VOLUME 58 No. 1