Lakshmi

Photo by Jairo Alzate on Unsplash

My family hails from the Bay of Bengal. The floods are so devastating there that if you can’t swim, you die. My parents wanted me to be far away from that life, so they studied hard, obtained visas, and worked as engineers in the oil sands on the great Canadian prairies, where there’s not a lick of ocean spray to be found.

I grew up among the tall grass. I never learned how to swim. But my parents couldn’t protect me from the perils of open water forever. At summer camp when I was ten years old, I waded further into a river than I should have, slipped on a rock, and was swept away. I kicked and punched, trying to keep my head above water, but it was no use. The camp counselor dove in and brought my rag-doll body back to shore. I had no pulse. She did CPR. After spitting out about a gallon of water, I could breathe, but it was faint and irregular, and I remained unconscious. I was flown by helicopter to the nearest hospital and lay comatose for a week. The doctors later told my parents that I’d barely avoided brain hypoxia. They had initially mistaken me for dead.

My skin, normally a stubborn shade of brown, had turned blue when I was brought to shore. The other kids had always teased me for not sunburning like them. After nearly dying, I was finally treated like everyone else.

The next week, my story was published in the local newspaper. I’d answered the journalist’s questions as best I could, but I’d clearly disappointed him. What did it feel like to drown? Did you see darkness? Did you see the light? Did you see God? I couldn’t remember; I had blacked it all out. In the years that followed, I was scared of water. I avoided pool parties and beach trips, especially after my newfound celebrity fizzled. Luckily, we were in Alberta, where there was nothing to see but dense bushland and open plains.

But a decade and a half later, the memory of drowning came rushing back in. It was the night I was forced into the back seat of my date’s car, after he’d held my mouth down to the perforated leather upholstery and boxed my ears until they were filled with blood. What little I could hear of my own voice in that moment was dull and ambient, just as it had been when I was screaming for life in the river.

I was named Lakshmi after the goddess of wealth. It’s meant to be pronounced Lok-khi, but when my name’s pronounced in English, all I hear is “Lack”-shmi. This only reminds me of how I always felt lack-ing, of how, though Lakshmi is meant to bring abundance, I was so cavernously hollow. This empty sensation grew tenfold after my assault. I was the discarded skin of a snake. A snail gutted out of its shell.

I’d believed that my parents named me Lakshmi because they were greedy and self-serving. They’d left their country and our family behind to chase the riches of the Western world, and they