Two Versions of the Airport

"What was it like," my wife asked, "the night you left India?"

She asked it on a Sunday video call. The laptop was balanced on a cushion on the couch, my mum was on the screen from India with her balcony plants behind her, and a steel tumbler of filter coffee was going cold in her hand. Our four-month-old sat on my wife's lap, working hard on the corner of a muslin cloth. It was meant to be small talk. My wife had heard pieces of the story over the years, but never from both of us at once.

Both of us answered in the same breath.

"Fun," she said.

"Awful," I said.

The baby stopped chewing. Even he could tell that was not a matching pair.

*

Here is the part we agree on. I left India to study in New Zealand. The flight was late at night. Mum came to the airport. I had two heavy suitcases and a box of sweets she had packed herself, wrapped in so much tape it could have survived a war.

Everything after that is in dispute.

Her version first, because she would insist on it.

In her telling I was cheerful to the point of embarrassment. I bought a packet of chips at a kiosk and announced that it felt like a school trip. I joked with a stranger in the queue about how much of my luggage was books and how much was pickle. I pushed an empty trolley between two pillars like a boy on a go-kart until a security guard frowned and she pulled me back by the sleeve, both of us trying not to giggle. She remembers the departure board as entertainment, a row of cities flicking over like a game show. She remembers a quick, hard hug and a wave, as light as if I were off for the weekend.

"You were laughing," she said on the call, pointing at the screen with her tumbler. "I have never seen you laugh so much in a public place."

Mine keeps the lights colder.

Fluorescent tubes hummed overhead. The place smelled of floor cleaner, and one trolley wheel squeaked somewhere behind us like a worried bird. I remember Mum standing a little apart from the crowd, next to a pillar, while the queue slowly swallowed me. She fixed my collar twice. Then she couldn't find anything else to fix, and she looked at the floor.

She did not cry. That's the part that stayed with me for years. Tears I would have known what to do with. A face that had decided not to use them, I had no idea.

No chips, either. What I remember is a sweet from her box that I wasn't supposed to open before security, sticky on my fingers, because I opened it anyway to give my hands a job.

"Quiet," I told the screen. "You were quiet like someone carrying a full glass across a room."

Mum closed her eyes for a second. In our family that means the matter is closed and no further questions will be taken.

*

Even the small details refuse to line up, which is almost funnier than the big ones.

Take the box of sweets. She says she carried it to check-in. I say I did, and she kept reaching for it like it might be safer with her. She says she waved until I turned the corner. I say I looked back and she wasn't waving at all, just standing with both hands on the strap of her handbag. She says the flight left on time. I remember a delay, because I remember thinking every extra minute was another minute she had to stand there.

This argument has come up before. On birthdays. On long phone calls that started out about something else. Once in a parked car in the rain with the engine off. Each telling ends with the other person sighing in exactly the same way, which is the one thing we clearly got from each other.

Married into this argument without any warning, my wife asked the obvious thing. Why had we never settled it.

We tried, I said. Every time, Mum says "I remember packing," and then she asks if I'm eating properly.

*

Our neighbour, Mr. Mummu, once went to collect a friend from Auckland Airport. He made a sign, laminated it at the library, and stood at international arrivals for forty minutes, holding it up to every tired face that came through the sliding doors. His friend had flown in from Christchurch. He was at the domestic terminal, eating a muffin, sending texts that said "here". Mummu sent "here" back. They swapped "here" eleven times. When they finally found each other, on the footpath between the two terminals, each was certain the other had gone to the wrong airport.

"We were both at the airport," Mummu told me later over the fence, still a bit offended. "Just not the same one."

That's us. Same night, same flight. Two terminals. And for years we've been texting "here" at each other across them.

*

Memory, I've come to think, keeps whatever lets you get through the night.

For Mum, the leaving had to be a beginning. She had to go home afterwards to a quieter house and put the kettle on the next morning like a person who was fine. A son who laughed his way to the gate is a son who'll be all right. That version let her sleep.

I needed the quiet to be real. If she was cheerful, then my homesickness in those first months looks a bit ungrateful, a young man with a new country complaining that he missed his old kitchen. If she was quiet, then somebody else felt it too, and I wasn't being soft.

Neither of us was lying. We were both editing so we could keep going.

None of this can be proved, by the way. I was there and I still can't prove it. That's the trouble with being the only other person in the memory.

*

On the call, Mum went quiet for a while, the real kind. Then she put the tumbler down carefully, the way you put down something you might need again.

"I laughed because I was frightened," she said. "Laughing was the only face that fit in a public place."

Then she told me two things I had never heard.

At the pillar, she had been counting me. One. Then she'd lose me behind someone's luggage and find me again. One. She said numbers were safer than sentences. If she started a sentence, she might ask me not to go, and she had already decided that asking would be cruelty dressed up as love.

And she did wave. She waited until I'd turned the corner, until I couldn't possibly see, and then she waved. For quite a long time, she said. A security guard asked if she was all right.

So we were both telling the truth. I looked back before she waved. She waved after I'd stopped looking. We had each been standing at our own end of the same minute.

Just then the baby hiccuped, loudly, which ruined the moment in the best way. My wife laughed. Mum wiped her eye and blamed the onions she was apparently cutting off screen. I didn't feel like I'd won anything. It felt more like someone had finally switched on the lights in a room I'd been walking through in the dark for years.

*

About those sweets. They were pootharekulu, the paper-thin ones that shatter if you look at them sternly. By the time I unpacked them in a cold student room on the other side of the world, they were mostly crumbs. I ate the crumbs with a teaspoon over about two weeks. In her version the sweets are a joke about my sweet tooth. In mine, they were the only thing in that room that tasted like home. Both of those are true at once, and neither of us has to give anything up for the other to be right.

*

After the call, Mum sent a photo she'd found in a cupboard. It was taken that night by the stranger in the queue, the one I'd joked with about the pickle, so at least one detail of her version turns out to be real.

There I am in the photo, looking up at the departure board. Mum is looking at me.

My wife studied it for a long time. "You're both right," she said. "You just weren't looking at the same thing."

It went on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a kiwi. Some nights, walking past it on the way to the baby, I check which way she's looking. She's still looking at me.