With every passing Christmas, my sons and their families spend less and less time in the house before hurrying back to their own homes. I will not see them again until the next Christmas, when they will reluctantly come again to honor the childhood promise that they made on their mother’s deathbed: to always keep in touch. Only then will the house see some life, this big empty house that they’ve given me so they don’t have to live with me.

They bring a turkey for the dinner, and their wives peel off the store wrapping and the price sticker. It looks like chicken, only much too big, and even after all these years, I couldn’t get myself used to it.

“It’s just what people do here,” my eldest Daud, who now calls himself David, would say. He wouldn’t elaborate; it’s how he signals that he doesn’t want to talk. Not many do. When it’s time for us all to sit at the table, the wives would make conversation just to be polite, and the children would whisper and giggle only with their own siblings. The sound of cutlery does little to mask the silence that I don’t know how to stop growing between us.

As I take my place of loneliness at the head of the table, year after year, I find myself gradually returning to a particular memory of a different Christmas, when my grandmother showed me how to slaughter a chicken for the first time. The blood had spilled over the edge of the chopping board in a slow, mesmerizing way, before pooling into the patterns of the bathroom floor tiles. I hadn’t expected it to smell tangy, like sweat after play, yet sweet, like old books. She poured a bucket of water onto the floor, washing the dark blood, so that when it reached my feet and lapped in the spaces between my toes, it was pink and almost clear.

That year my parents had put me on a flight to be with my grandparents in North Sumatra as they were finalizing their divorce. They told me it was just for Christmas. I hadn’t known that I wouldn’t see home again until February. I was reeling from the rare separation that I didn’t say a word to the stewardess assigned to sit next to me. When I’d finally landed at the airport in town, and the stewardess was no longer by my side, I felt suddenly and truly alone, abandoned, in a place so far from and so unlike home. Then I heard my grandmother’s voice calling my name. She kissed me and held my cheeks and pretended not to notice me wiping away the tears that had gathered.

“How old must you be, now?” she asked.

“Six years old, oma,” I answered. Her face softened, and she sighed.

“Poor dear,” she said, without really looking at my eyes.

She had very good eyes, my grandmother. She could read things from far away when a lot of other elderly people wore glasses. She never had any need for false teeth or a walking cane, and her hair was thick and black, cut short like my mother’s, without any white strands that I could see. Still, she had those brown spots dotting her hands and arms, and I wondered if there were any on her face, underneath that white powder and red lipstick.

My grandfather had stayed home alone. When we came into the living room, he was in the middle of rising from the armchair, as if just woken up by something. The cushion was imprinted with the shape of his body, the depth made clear by the light coming from the TV set. He called me over and embraced me, pressing my cheek against his, engulfing me in bristles and that smell of his, of smoke and tobacco.

“Do you remember me?” he said, from behind thick glasses that were yellowed from the years. I studied the brown spots on his bald head, the cigarette holes in his sleeveless shirt. When he spoke, his voice was hindered and he cleared his throat often, but he tried to keep it quiet. My grandmother was only a few years younger than him, but he looked so much older than her, older than he was supposed to be. I thought this might be because of the way he looked tiredly at whoever was talking to him, or how he’d drift to sleep so easily when there was no one to talk to.

He and I talked alone in the living room while my grandmother busied herself elsewhere in the house. He asked the usual questions, and I told him what grade I was in and how well I was doing, that my mother was fine, and that my father was also fine. Each time he would ruminate on my answer, running his tongue over his gums, until we both fell to staring at the TV. It was tuned to a local channel that I’d never seen in Jakarta, but it helped fill in the silence.

A call to prayer from a mosque resounded in the streets outside; it was already evening. My grandmother came in, wearing different clothes now. She glanced at my grandfather who was now asleep and asked, in a low voice, if I was hungry. I nodded — I hadn’t eaten anything on the plane. Then I followed her to the kitchen, into the little bathroom in the corner, and watched her slaughter a chicken on a wooden board on the floor.

“This is how we do it in the mountains,” she said, satisfied with my silent wonder.

My grandmother and grandfather were mountain people. And for a while, my mother had been, too. She would tell stories about the naturally cool air, the white mist crowning the peaks of Borneo, steam wafting from your mouth as you speak — all the things that sounded so wonderful and unobtainable to a boy growing up in the city. But she couldn’t tell me much more than that, because when she was little, my grandfather had sold everything they had and brought his family down from the mountains to this town, so that his only daughter could go to school.

At my grandparents’ kitchen table, I spent most of dinner watching mosquitoes fly around the lightbulb. The chicken curry turned out to be too spicy to eat, but my grandmother had already ladled a big portion onto my plate. The rice became soggy from the thick, red soup. I drank a gulp of water with every bite and soon I was sweating hard, sniffling, panting. My grandfather, barely feeling the heat, suggested if I wanted something else to eat, but I was already full from all the drinking.

My grandmother smiled. “You look like the people who live close to the peak. Their cheeks would puff up red like that, from the altitude. Right, honey?” she said, turning to my grandfather.

I slept without the blanket, since I was still sweating and the AC wasn’t working that well. Nights were always warm when it didn’t rain, but it was much warmer here, in this town. It wasn’t like in the city. I tried counting how many days there were until Christmas, wondering if I would get used to all this before then — the dead silence at night, the strange town, being away from my parents.

That night I dreamt my parents were descending the face of a mountain, carrying me and all of our things on their shoulders as lava flow crept down behind us. I woke up in the middle of the night with a deep sense of longing in my chest, wishing I’d looked back.

The mornings were paradoxically cold, especially before sunrise. My grandmother boiled some water in the morning for me to wash with. Standing in the bathroom, naked and shivering and half asleep, I stared for a long time at the steaming bucket before me, trying to figure out where I was.

“Let him decide,” I overheard my grandfather’s voice coming from the living room. There was coughing.

“And put himself through all that? He’s only a boy,” my grandmother answered.

“They’re not getting a divorce,” he said. “We can’t be certain.”

My grandmother then replied in a language that I couldn’t understand. I’d heard my mother speak it when she was upset, the words and intonations that put me on my guard. She would mutter them under her breath if I’d been bad, or shout them at my father, who would shout back in words that everyone else knew. It was the language that the people in the mountains spoke, where she grew up. Whenever my mother spoke in this mountain language, it was as if she was keeping a secret from us, something that we’d never understand even if we knew the words.

“Fine. But if he wants to go home, we don’t stop him,” my grandfather said.

I just stood there, nailed on the bathroom floor, now wide awake and feeling strangely calm. I’d heard that word come up sometimes, ‘divorce’, and after each time it grew less frightening, less real. And my parents were so far away from here, their voices must’ve been muffled behind so many closed doors between us. Things would quiet down as they always did after a fight. In a few days it would be as if nothing had happened. In a few days, now, it would be Christmas, then I would be home.

I found my grandparents sitting in the living room. My grandmother was already in her going-out dress, her hair shiny and her face made up. She pulled me down and made me sit on her lap. Her thighs were skinny and uncomfortable to sit on.

“Do you like it here?” she asked.

I nodded, because that was the polite thing to do, but I wasn’t dishonest. Everything around me still felt strange, the different air and furniture, but I couldn’t dislike it.

“You want to stay with opa and oma?” she said.

I nodded, because I didn’t want to be alone again, like the way I had been at the airport.

“We’ll go out when the sun calms down a bit, okay?” she said.

While my grandmother talked to me, my grandfather lay in his armchair, a newspaper spread open over his belly. He sat there watching me, listening and sometimes smiling. Then he’d stare at the TV before turning to me again, as if he’d forgotten something important. He didn’t get up when my grandmother and I left a little before noon; he only said goodbye as I closed the door.

My grandmother took my hand and we walked under the scorching sun. Her umbrella didn’t help much. I kept having to wipe the sweat off my face with my free hand. Dust rose up after every passing vehicle and settled on my shoes and socks. Our shadows pooled close around our feet, under the umbrella. Whenever my arm jutted out of the shade, the skin would sting in a thrilling way.

She took me through a maze of alleyways packed tight with people’s homes, sometimes converted into corner stores. Through the fences I saw clues to the lives within: salted fish drying on the porch, school uniforms and underwear hanging from clotheslines, people behind the windows staring back at me until I had to look away. We gave way to passing motorcycles, squeezing against the concrete walls, careful not to fall into the gutters where tadpoles darted around.

The faint sounds of traffic became loud and real when we found the main road. At the big intersection, my grandmother approached a group of men and started arguing with them. Moments later, one of them led us to his rickshaw and we climbed on. He started pedaling, and I felt the push and the roll and thought he was going to take us up to the sky.

My grandmother pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed her face with it, carefully, but she accidentally rubbed some of the powder off, revealing a few brown spots on her cheek. When she saw me looking, she folded the handkerchief into a small square and put it away. “I’ll take you up and show you where the mountains are,” she said, “would you like that?”

“The mountains?” I asked.

“Absolutely. But first we need to do some Christmas shopping.”

Could the mountains really be so close by? I looked left and right but couldn’t see anything behind the buildings in the streets. The rickshaw driver let out a grunt; we went swinging past a red light, leaving cars honking behind us. Had I seen any mountains from the plane? I wished I’d taken a look out while I was up there. Maybe the tops would be white, powdered with snow all year long, and the peaks would burst through a layer of clouds, which would turn into mist that you could touch every morning.

The rickshaw stopped. We got down at the gate of the old shopping mall, all grey concrete and dusty windows. Inside, there were people everywhere I looked. How many of them had seen the mountains? I followed my grandmother as she cut through the crowd and made stops at different stalls. Most of the time she moved on right away, but every now and then she’d stay and argue with the vendor. There was grotesque meat hanging from hooks, chili peppers as big as bananas, bottles of soy sauce filling up the wall. In the stalls on the upper floors, I saw radios and SIM cards, oil paintings in huge frames, Kodak rolls in little boxes that looked like medicine.

At one point my grandmother found a shopkeeper who also spoke the mountain language. With him, her tone softened. There was an instant kind of familiarity there, a relieved, almost desperate intimacy. I watched from the side as they talked like lost siblings who found each other.

In the end she left the stall carrying a big bundle of cloth under her arm. It was covered with stitched on patterns and looked very itchy on the skin. “He’s also from the mountains,” she said. “His parents still live there and he sends them money. What are the chances?” I pictured the vendor scaling down the mountain, like in my dream, and that longing feeling returned momentarily before fading away.

We took escalators until we reached the uppermost floor of the building, where the food court was. The late sun was pouring strong through the big windows. The place was already teeming with people waiting to break their fast, anticipating the call to prayer on the intercom. My grandmother couldn’t find a table anywhere, so we had to go over to where people were sitting on the floor. They had brought mats to sit on, Styrofoam meal boxes set out and untouched.

There was a free spot under one of the windows. Nobody had taken it because it was right in the sun. I felt eyes following me as we picked our way through the crowd, carrying with us not iftar meals but these bulking shopping bags that had felt ridiculous.

We put the bags down, but my grandmother made no motion to sit.

“I’ll show you where the mountains are,” she said.

I was confused. “Where are they?”

“There,” she said, pointing out the window. “Look hard in that direction, and you’ll see it.”

The mountains were very high up, she said. It would get so cold that even the men had long hair to stay warm. In the mornings, the fog melted so quickly that if you cupped your hands facing the sunrise, you could collect the dew and drink it. We never had to buy water, she said. Springs flowed into streams that ran through the village, down the valley. The valley carried sounds far away, so if your friend lived way down there you only had to shout his name. That was why mountain people could be so loud sometimes. Shame that mommy never taught you the language, she said. Church songs, when they were sung in the mountains, sounded very special. And the bell’s echoes through the valleys, you’d never forget the sound once you knew it.

I shielded my eyes against the glare and pressed my face on the dirty window, trying to catch a glimpse of a mountain that was in Borneo, across the sea, a thousand miles from where I stood.

“I can’t see it, oma.”

“It’s there. I know it’s there,” she said. “You just have to look harder.”

But all I ever saw that day was the edge of the town fading on the horizon, disappearing in smog and the coming nightfall.

“Why don’t you let the kid stay home today,” my grandfather said on the morning of Christmas Eve. I’d been told to wake up early today, but I overslept. Outside the living room window, it still looked like night. The bathwater was ready — my grandmother was already in her dress.

“But he wants to go see the pigs with me today,” she said, then turning to me, “don’t you, sweetheart?”

I didn’t answer. I had promised her earlier to go choose the pig for the Christmas roast, but she had been taking me on errands nearly every day, and I had gotten tired of walking in the heat.

“He doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to,” he said.

“Oh, you grumpy old man. You’re just bitter we didn’t bring you along. You sour lime.”

They looked so different from each other. My grandmother, standing bright and tall in her going-out dress, bending down to plant a kiss on my grandfather’s bald head, with the brown spots, who looked up a second too slow to catch the kiss. I thought that they looked like nurse and patient.

When she closed the door behind her, my grandfather sank back into his armchair. He lit a cigarette. I sat on the couch beside him, still in my pajamas, filled with secret and guilty gratitude for his intervention.

“Thanks, son. Appreciate the company,” he said.

We watched TV together. The news woman briefly reminded us that Christmas and Eid both fell in December this year, before she got interrupted by static. At this hour the TV would just be old commercials and static, but my grandfather kept his eyes on the screen, not once touching the remote. I thought maybe those glasses made him see like my grandmother, and he could see things that I couldn’t. Or maybe he was just trying to think of what to say, like I usually did sometimes.

Then I thought that maybe he was shy, and I remembered that horrible stifling feeling that I had when I sat next to the stewardess on the plane, how I wished she would say something to me first.

So, I said to him, “Do you like it here?”

He turned to me, and said, “Here?”

“Or do you like the mountains better?”

In the silence that followed, I studied the faint white hairs on his scalp, the veins branching in his hands, the way his dirty singlet fell on the curve of his belly. A thin screen of smoke rose between us; the smell was sharp and it made my eyes water. He cleared his throat, then he was coughing, bent double, the bumps of his spine showing underneath the thin fabric. I tried to imagine what he had looked like when he still had long hair, before he moved down here and had to shave it off.

When the smoke floated away, my grandfather had straightened his back and was sitting very still. He was looking in my direction. The glare on his glasses obscured his eyes, but I could feel that his gaze was distant, that he wasn’t looking at me but at something behind me, the way his lips quivered, on the verge of an answer.

He spoke a few words in the mountain language. I heard him say my grandmother’s name. His tone was like my mother’s tone.

Then he looked away, and said, “I did right by my daughter.”

He had confused me with my grandmother. I didn’t know what to do.

I wanted to get away from him. I wanted to get up from this couch quietly and go take a bath before the water grew cold and eat the breakfast that had been prepared on the table and maybe when I’d get back, he would be alright again.

But instead, I sat like a stone and heard myself say, “Are they really going to divorce?”

My grandfather jolted from recognition upon hearing my voice. When he turned to me, his face was no longer hard as it was moments ago. Maybe because he saw the tears rolling down my face. He rose from his armchair, slowly, and sat down by my side and took me into his great embrace. I buried my face in the smell of smoke and tobacco.

“Do you want to go home?” I heard his voice reverberate in his chest.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what the answer was.

At night, lying half asleep in bed, I heard my grandmother come through the front door. Low voices rose from the living room, her then him, alternating with long pauses between. The tones questioning, accusing, rising, falling. Then footsteps towards my room, and the creak of the doorknob.

My grandmother appeared in the doorway. She hadn’t yet changed out of her dress.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she said, “come talk to your daddy? He’s on the phone and he misses you.”

It was not yet first light and there were people coming down to the house, and naturally my grandmother was already up and around. They were going to slaughter the pig at sunset. Sounds of busy preparation came from the kitchen and the living room. The pig, which was kept in the back since yesterday, kept on squealing until I was wide awake, and I realized that it was Christmas Day.

I wanted to see the pig, but when I opened my door, I found a dozen people in the corridor, sitting on chairs that weren’t there the night before. They recognized my mother’s name and were all very happy to see me, patting my head, clapping my shoulders, explaining that they were my grandmother’s sister’s nephew or my uncle-in-law’s second cousin, making me promise to come visit someday. By the time it was over, I had ended up on the front porch, and I didn’t want to go through all that again just to reach the back where the pig was.

The living room and the armchair and the couch were overtaken by the noisy guests; I surrendered my bedroom to my newly discovered aunts so they could use the mirror. So, I helped my grandfather move the TV into the master bedroom, and we both silently agreed to spend most of our Christmas there. The AC made the room very cool, and I liked looking at the interesting things lying around — a little box that said black hair dye, a set of false teeth in a glass of water.

We were in the middle of watching a dubbed Hollywood movie when a knock came on the door. It was a man I’d never seen before. His hair reached down to his shoulders. When he opened the door, the noise of the festivities came rushing in.

“Excuse me, opa,” he said. “Kid! We’re sticking the hog soon. Your Oma’s looking for you, says you wouldn’t wanna miss it.”

“He’ll miss it if he wants to,” my grandfather told him.

The man laughed and closed the door, leaving us alone again.

An hour later, when the movie was over, my grandfather switched the TV set off. We sat on the bed listening to the sounds of the outside world, the snippets of conversations, the roar of laughter, recognition and reunion — the pitch and roll of the mountain language that used to put me at my guard but now sounded safe and inviting.

The mosque announced its call to prayer; it was evening. For a few more hours, it would still be Christmas Day. But my grandfather made no move. He sat there on the bed, in silence, and at the time I had thought that he simply didn’t like parties.

But now I understand that he had only wanted to avoid the loneliness that was out there, in the way those people spoke loudly as if they were still in a valley, in the elaborate patterns on their thick clothes as if they were still in the chilly heights. He had become a stranger to the mountains, yet still an outsider to the lowlands that he’d left his home for.

And I know this because I see it in the way my grandchildren look at me, at how I eat my carved-up turkey with white rice and not the mashed potatoes, how I use a spoon and fork instead of the knife, how I wear a jacket indoors at the dinner table because even after all these years I could never get myself used to this English cold. They would stare and quietly turn their incomprehension to their parents, and it makes me feel that deep, tearing longing that sometimes still wakes me up in the middle of the night.

Maybe that was the reason why my grandfather had stayed with me in that bedroom. Maybe he knew, somehow, that I would understand. Or maybe it was because I had no trace of the mountain in me, not even the language, that would remind him of what he had to leave behind. Or that he simply cherished my company, another who was also still getting used to this new place.

Because on that day, when I touched my grandfather’s arm and asked if we could go outside, thinking it a shame to miss the slaughter, he put his arm around my neck and brought his face close to mine. Now, without the TV glare, I could see clearly through his thick glasses, and I looked into his eyes, and I thought that those black irises seemed glad. He smiled, then pulled away.

“If that’s what you want,” he said, “sure.”