Subhanaj

There's a teenaged boy with a blog and a cell phone who lives in the small town Liam was born in. Found him in a search a few days ago, and now we're chatting daily, though it's about exhausted its natural life and will end with the next round, I think. His English is good enough to communicate but not good enough to communicate with tact: his local biases and prejudices come through loud and clear. He doesn't know I'm a woman, I can tell. This is how people go away and return to find they're strangers even if they don't want to be: we're trained like animals by our surroundings. No helping it: everyone needs a particular place to stand.

I think of Bill Cosby's comment that black people have no business buying expensive cars before they buy themselves a home. First things first, he figured. I can't fit a cell-phoned teenager with what I thought I knew about this village; my measures don't apply. Does Subhanaj live in one of the thatched houses we've seen in photos of this place? (I've been calling it a village. More ethnocentric-talk. He calls it "a nice small town in India." I live in a nice small town in the US.) Is he wearing shoes? Does his home have glass windows, to keep out the malaria? (He told me they don't have diseases there anymore. Health inspectors did away with it years ago, he said. Health inspectors, he said, did away with club foot. Quite a trick.) Where is the computer in his home? What do his parents do? Do they care that he's corresponding in English with a perfect stranger? Do they know about perverts online? Does he?

I didn't ask any of that. I only asked what the town was like, and what people do for work, and what life was like for children. He skims, and his answers have no detail; short attention span, maybe, like teenagers everywhere. He knows "bat out of hell." Like a bat out of hell--that's how he tells me he tries to avoid the rains in monsoon. A bat out of hell.

Liam came home today, and I had my first opportunity to wait for him at the airport. I had butterflies in my stomach; I missed the kid. I used to know how to fill my time, before kids. Movies, books, wine, pot. I wouldn't know where to get pot anymore, but I tried all the other things, and more, and nothing beats kids--the way they run up to you and grab your neck and fall apart because they feel at home in your arms. What could be better than being somebody else's safe place?