As Time Goes By

One of the many things that I find charming about Latin American social life is how people remember little details about you even when you have forgotten them. It never ceases to surprise me.

I often enjoy the company of kids far more than that of adults. So when this extremely sweet girl - with cheeks so red you would think they have been painted – slowed down her bicycle and started talking as I was walking from one building to another, I couldn’t help extending the casual conversation. What I didn’t know was that she would touch me in a special way!

Her name is Estafani (Latin version of the Anglican Stephanie), six years old. She told me about her mother who is in Mexico City and her dad who is in Italy and she lives with her grandma on the film school campus. She must be feeling terribly lonely here and I start feeling sad for her but she wasn’t sad at all. She strikes up conversations with students and teachers everywhere and all of them seem to love her. I was missing my own son very much and so spending time with her was a kind of emotional substitute as well as a way of refreshing myself with her beautiful innocence.

In the evening, I found her playing with her grandma close to my apartment and I realized that she is the granddaughter of someone I know for many years. The kid’s grandma, who is now in her late 70s, remembers clearly till this date that I had taken a photo of her ballerina daughter (Estafani’s mom) twenty years ago in the swimming pool and had sent it back to my family in Calcutta as a (biased) sample of how Cuban girls look like and everybody had gone gaga over it. So it was a pleasant surprise that this little girl is the daughter of someone I know. What does her mom do now?

The ballerina mother continues with her career in dance but as the trapeze dancer in a circus in Mexico. How time passes! The grandma is visibly proud of her daughter and granddaughter.
“Her mom is as beautiful as she was 20 years ago and this kid is an image of her mom, isn’t she? She is so friendly that she can strike a conversation with anyone and so intelligent that she asked me, ‘Can you imagine what it feels like when the president of a nation is thrown out of his own country?’ ”

She was referring to the incidents following the military coup in Honduras which has shaken the whole of Latin America for the sheer barbarity of the act. The Miami news channels are playing hourly updates on it. But I am more interested in the story of the mother. How does a beautiful ballerina dancing to Bizet’s Carmen become a trapeze dancer in a circus? It confuses me because in my mind, ballet belongs to high culture and circus belongs to the other extreme in the hierarchy of cultural forms of entertainment. This can only happen in Latin America!

I also suddenly remember something and that fascinates me further. I had indeed seen a circus playing while in Monterrey in Mexico two years ago and someone said that the circus is of a very high standard, specially the dancers. I wanted to visit it though it was very expensive but my friends discouraged me firstly because there was no time that I could take out of the conference to go to a circus and more importantly, they all thought I must grow out of my childhood fantasies.

Estefani’s mom had married an Italian and migrated to some Italian city and the child was born out of that marriage. She subsequently divorced the guy and married a Mexican businessman and migrated to Mexico, travelling with the circus while leaving the daughter back in Havana with the grandma. The mom calls the kid every few days just as much as the dad calls from Italy.


Catching up with people after so many years is like following the characters of a novel and seeing in a few moments of storytelling, what Time does to people. Divorces and separations are rarely seen as tragedies in this part of the world. When women tell these stories, they sound more like stories of liberation and triumph. Many years ago I had seen this septagenerian grandma getting married on the campus for the fourth time in her life at the age of 50 or so. It was a hugely memorable event with Gabo (ie, Gabriel García Marquez) playing her godfather and Fernando Birri (the ‘pope’ of Latin American cinema) as the priest substitute. I overheard her boss, a woman, saying, ‘At last she has found the great love of her life’. As I followed the atheist rituals of the event with wide-eyed wonderment, it felt like a thrilling tragi-comic idea to find the great love of your life at the age of fifty.

So now I ask her what happened to that man.
‘I got rid of him’, she said. ‘He migrated’.
No more men in your life after that?
‘No. Enough with men. Now I have my granddaughter. I live for her’.

I didn’t realise that the kid thought I was a native Indian from some part of Latin America.
‘But you don’t look like that. You dress differently.’

I explain to her about the silly mistake that Christopher Columbus made five hundred years ago, leaving all of us confused about ‘Indians’. He wanted to find us (India) but instead took the opposite direction and ended up finding you’ll (Latin America) and the guy didn’t even realise his mistake. He started calling them ‘Indians’ and that continues to this day!

‘Five hundred years ago?’, the girl murmured to herself in amazement.

Actually, more than that.

‘My friends also create so many confusions in class.’

She takes me to show something in the garden – the design of the shrubs. I am enjoying being with her but some people call me to a van which is waiting for me to get in. I have to tear myself away from her.

The next day, I go to the office of the director in search of some documents I need to sign and there was the grandma there who works as the director’s secretary even at her age. Suddenly the sweet little girl comes out of the door and hugs me intensely as if I am her father. I almost reciprocate the emotion but I have to hold myself back with a sense of adult guilt. It is not a good idea to develop emotional bonds with kids when you know you are going to leave within a few days/weeks. For me she is just a substitute for my own kid and for her, I am just a substitute for her father whom she must be missing deeply.

Adulthood has also taught me that loving anyone involves certain consequences, certain responsibilities that we must be ready to embrace, and embrace them with joy but what do we do when what we stand to lose is far more than what we gain?

On the final day of my stay in Cuba, I ask Estefani to speak to the camera while I record her standing at the landing of the staircase. She tells me, ‘Mom said yesterday she is coming to Havana in December and will stay here for the next two years. Why don’t you stay back till December? Then, you will get to see her’.