“I carried wood,” he said.

He was an avid reader in Pakistan, he continued. Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet. He was familiar with them. He’d analyzed them, too—if you can call stumbling over them in breathless urgency a form of literary scrutiny.

So as soon as he enrolled he knew what he’d do: Recite these verses aloud. Act.

“I’m sorry, honey,” the director told him after he auditioned for the lone play produced that semester. She was a little shocked at this brown, middle-aged man saying eagerly, but in broken speech, that he wanted to be the beast. Or, at the very least, Maurice.

“We can’t have you in a lead.”

But he came back the next day. And the next. For callbacks he was never called to participate in.

He lingered, sitting and listening and miming the words delivered by blonde and brunet, hazel and blue-eyed men, whose great-great grandfathers had suffered and thrived and eventually arrived at an unwelcoming island so their great-great grandsons could open their mouths. And speak.

“Fine,” the director said at the end of casting week. “You can help with equipment, handling shit behind the scenes.”

So he did.

“I memorized more play than real beast,” he insisted. “And Maurice.”

And I’m sure he did.

I’m sure that this was some sort of retelling.

I’m sure that this added a few lines to his script, or mine, or some other one; a meta-narrative encompassing all the rest, interwoven with dialogue from here; a plot resolution from over there; a scene in which I’m sitting and listening and hearing in my dad’s words that together we’ve been writing a large and scrawled “fuck you” to the South Asian trope, to the immigrant family trope, to all fucking tropes. That together we’ve been fucked up by writing, ours and that of others, too.

I’m sure that this was long overdue, this beautiful and beastly and intergenerational cyclicality.

I’m sure that me writing this is some sort of retelling, too.

Of a lingering pain from my fractured, but mending, relationship with my dad; of a lingering need for aesthetic validation in spaces meant for unrestrained creation. Of a slow but steadily evolving dream.

Aisha Y. Bhoori ’18 lives in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.