The Shaytan Bride

by The Shaytan Bride (retail) (epub)

  “I’ve come here almost every week of my life,” Bhav confessed. “It’s my favourite place. I come whenever I need to think. Like when I was younger, and my mother and father fought.”

  The timber boards creaked. My ankles rubbed against the inside of my boots. A lingering aroma of damp dirt and cedar.

  Bhav went on to tell me that his father often hit his mother, and that this was very hard to see growing up, that they fought quite a lot, and were now separated and not speaking, despite living under the same roof.

  Bhav looked down at the copper penny in his open palm with the small, hard callus. He shut his palm tight. He hunched over the bridge rail. I imagined him then, the little boy, standing in the corner of a room watching his father raise his hands in the air over his mother and the terror in his mother’s eyes. I imagined Bhav still, just whimpering in the shadows.

  “That must be so hard. How could they live under the same roof but not speak?” I asked.

  “It is, but you know, they can’t actually separate. It’s not something we do in our culture. And you know, they’re both older. Where would they go? We don’t have any family here.”

  I nodded, then said, “I could never imagine living with someone, seeing and hearing them, but not acknowledging their existence or them acknowledging my own. It would be a type of eventual disappearance, a burial while still being alive, wouldn’t it?”

  I didn’t know then what I would learn later, that in the coming years, despite all the technological devices that would be developed to bring people closer, many would wonder if they truly were seen. That love was just as complicated as it was simple, and it was expressed in a multitude of ways, and sometimes not at all, despite it existing. That a simple change in circumstance, however trivial or tragic, that could leave two lovers riven.

  At the time, I only thought, I will never let this happen. No, not with someone with whom I had made a commitment. Just of optimism and anticipated endurance.

  “Also,” Bhav continued, “our parents need their sons.”

  I moved in front of Bhav to where I could better read his face.

  He told me then about the cardboard boxes of rotten avocados and tomatoes, kept for days, just in case meals were no longer available. The tattered dusty sweaters folded square and stacked in every corner, just in case it got cold. The dusty glass shelves that held twenty, thirty, fifty ceramic figurines like precious moments that lingered on for so long they were no longer precious. His mother hoarded these things. To throw away her objects was akin to her disintegrating until she ceased to exist. To Bhav, however, the objects obscured her existence and signalled, to his horror, that it was as if she were slowly becoming the objects while simultaneously ceasing to be his mother.

  “It’s her mind. She forgets things, doesn’t process things, she doesn’t throw anything away. I can’t control it. I can’t fix it. She won’t accept my help.”

  I speculated, Maybe this is how she copes with —

  “I’ll share another secret.” Bhav interrupted my thoughts. “Something more interesting. Did you know I’m a deshi?”

  “A what?’ I asked.

  Bhav told me about all his karate lessons. My eyes travelled to the silver kara dangling on his arm, the marker of a warrior, and a gift from his father.

  “It’s about the mind more than anything. Cultivating a higher level of human character to prevent an attack before it actually occurs,” he explained — I wondered whether to me or himself.

  I asked to see his moves. He contracted his chest and narrowed his eyes. A deep bellow, his exhale and vocal cords married at the right time. He brought his right elbow to my face ever so seriously, then pulled it away in a roar that shook the leaves of surrounding trees. I watched it all happen, then laughed along with him.

  Bhav reached out for my hand, brought me closer to the rail of the bridge. “Let’s make wishes together,” he suggested.

  He closed his eyes, his dark-brown lashes twice the length of mine. He blew onto one penny and I blew onto another. We threw them into the half-frozen water. I didn’t ask him what he had wished for. I just looked at the side of his face, noted his attention drifting with the cascades. He wasn’t thinking of himself. His mind was at his home with his mother and her terrible mausoleum of superfluous collections. I didn’t know then this was Bhav’s greatest gift, to be thinking of others often and how he could be of service of them. I moved in closer to his body, which was trembling, just slightly.

  During the six months after Bhav and I met, I found myself increasingly pleasantly surprised by his thoughtfulness. He showed up often to my school with an assortment of gifts, anything and everything he thought I might need or perhaps want: notebooks, electronics, shoes, books, food, flowers, chocolates. The list was endless, and even extended to my family and friends. The gifts always came with a note.

  Thought you could use this.

  Remember, you told me you were looking for …

  This might help you with …

  This made me think of you …

  I thanked him but also often declined, as I had been taught to refrain from taking gifts from men. Bhav, however, was impossible to escape, and it was true, he had become a good friend.

  On the days where I was able to meet him for a stroll in the park, or for lunch by the school, we’d often find ourselves immersed in a laughter so loud that for us it deafened the rest of the world. One day we found ourselves on a stroll at Earl Bales Park, not too far from Sheppard and Bathurst and intersecting with the West Don River. The park was once farmland, so as we moseyed through the vast green space, I imagined the animals that once roamed there. I looked for the ancient trees.

  “Look at those two. I wonder what they’re talking about. They seem so deep in conversation,” Bhav said, pointing to a man and woman sitting on a cart that was slowly moving through the field we were traversing.

  The cart was like a park ranger cart, cobalt blue, four-wheeled, two-seater with a pull-out back. I followed his eyes to the woman who was driving the cart with a zig zag line of sight, and the man next to her with pursed lips as if he was hyperventilating. This middle-aged couple were most likely park employees, although they weren’t wearing uniforms. Periodically, the woman brought her hands to the air with a toothy grin. The man then leaned in and grabbed the wheel. The woman pushed him away. They laughed, then, suddenly, they both shifted their torsos away from each other. The woman’s jaw thrusted forward. The man extended his arm to touch her hand on the wheel. Within the five minutes that we observed them, it seemed that so much had occurred.

  “Yes, I wonder, what could they be talking about?” I played along.

  “Well, since we don’t know, let’s explore the possibilities,” he proposed, then simpered in contentment.

  “Okay,” I replied. “I’ll be the woman, and you the man.”

  We spent the next thirty minutes continuing to observe the couple on the cart, inspecting every curve of their lips, swerve of their sight, and muscle twitch. We replaced their words with our own, role-playing various scenarios and using various accents, including our favourite to make fun of the British.

  “So, while we’re on this chin wag, I do have to tell you something,” I said, flipping my hair like the woman in front of us. “I did something terrible.”

  “What did you do?” Bhav asked, pretending to reach for the steering wheel. “Don’t give me any codswallop now.”

  “My prom date — she died,” I whispered. “It was gruesome. At the base of the pond, she was found.”

  “Blimey, you don’t say! Well, that date went all to pot. What a shame! How did it happen?” Bhav exclaimed, pointing his nose to the air.

  “They suspected she had some type of poisoning,” I said, waving my hands around.

  “Was it true? Had she been drunk and sick?”

  “No, just bloke,” I answered. “She was so boring, I just had to do it. Put it right in the wanker’s bottled water, then crushed the bottle af
ter she drank it and put the bottle in my bra.”

  “Well, I am gobsmacked!” Bhav exclaimed. “You’re a monster. So, what are you doing to do? Aren’t the police on your tracks?”

  “Bugger all. I’ll do bugger all. They’ll never suspect it’s me.”

  After this improv in our most ridiculous British accent, we dropped our bodies on the green grass field, holding our stomachs as we had laughed too hard. “Bloody hell!” “Brilliant!” “What rubbish!”

  Bhav and I spent most of our time trying on different accents and expressions. People-watching, wordplay, silly little things. We also had to see each other during carefully carved out segments of time, and often in secret. It would be trouble if anyone saw us. Those of the opposite sex were not supposed to spend time together, especially alone. This would make it much easier for the Shayṭān to intrude and influence them. Yes, our world was limited, but there was an abundance of ways we remained amused and content with each other’s company as friends. At Earl Bales Park, as we looked at the wide sky over our heads and raised our arms to it, it was as if the world beyond reach could actually be ours, not just in our minds, dreams, imagination, or wishes.

  I had just started the tenth grade when the 9/11 attacks happened. After finding out in class as it was announced over the P.A. system, I emailed Bhav about it. At the time, he was skipping his college class to spend time with one of his friends. He read my email and suggested we meet to talk about it.

  I told him that when I navigated the hallways of my high school, I felt the layer between the inside and the outside of my body crack, leaving everyone to see everything — my organs, my psyche — and it was all spilling out, as if there were something physically in me to expose. The links in a chain connecting who I was to the Al-Qaeda that might and could live in me, like a secret birthmark or undiscovered genetic mutation. But, looking back, there wasn’t anything. I was just a teenager.

  “If that happens, they’ll see just how pure you are,” Bhav assured me.

  I told him about the rising tensions between the Jews and Muslims at school, the former being more predominant, and the friend from my middle school, originally a student at Forest Hill, who now also went to this high school and had warned and implied, while eating her mantu in the girls’ bathroom, that it was truly safer to be white. At the time, I had shrugged her off, but she seemed to have vocalized something that lay dormant in all of us. A particular framework of superiority and inferiority imposed on the world and over time; how things worked, apparently, according to white European men.

  Later that day, Abbu found me in my room listening to music. He sat across from me with a frenzied look. “What do you think about what happened?”

  I answered, “Nothing,” afraid any response of mine would affect him in some way, in this very challenging time.

  In the years to follow I’d increasingly see acts of violence, prejudice, discrimination, and hate toward Muslim people or people who were mistaken for Muslim. Irrational fears related to Islam as well as perception of people based on race, ethnicity, or physical presentation. I would begin to feel Islamophobia as something other than conceptual — a phantasmagoric force that I could simultaneously feel physically as an aspect of my body to overcome.

  In these years, there would be a lot happening in the world around me, both in Canada and abroad. I’d learned about the sacred spaces that were contaminated — garbage thrown, vandalism, a pig’s head left at a doorstep. I’d understand this when hearing the claim that Muslims were having children as demographic warfare, that Muslim women’s hijabs were being pulled off as they travelled down the street or boarded buses. The slurs, the names, and the disrespect and ridicule of religious figures and religious practices that were the centre of family unions, personal resilience, sense of spirituality, and life purpose. Detainment with assumption of guilt, security measures that displaced people and separated them from their families, biased immigration practices, and public debates about religious attire that women were wearing — as if to suggest that controlling women’s clothing and bodies would lessen the number of terrorists in the country. Having to let go of the essence of who you were in order to be welcomed into a country that had built its identity on inclusivity. The rhetoric, as well, putting Islam, religion of peace, before parts of words, names, and sentences that implied violence and human politics.

  As I thought about this, an entire galaxy folded inward into a speck of absolute everything compressed into nothing, and a memory came of a time where it wasn’t like this.

  Bhav and I spent days, weeks, months like this, as friends, until it came into my consciousness that perhaps what I was feeling was what they call romantic love, my first true experience of it. Was that what it was? I asked myself this question when Bhav visited me at school after a dance performance of mine. I was wearing my burgundy sharara, looking like a gerbera daisy, still sweaty from dancing. After watching the performance, he met me behind the school with a red rose in his hand.

  “Congratulations,” he said, handing me the rose.

  The rain started to drizzle on us both. He took my silk orna, curved it to a loop, threw it over my head. It slid down my waist and soon rested on my hips. With it, he tugged me forward to his chest, as if lassoing me like a cowboy, the way they did in the Bollywood films. When close to Bhav, I studied his skin, the hue of Jaisalmer sand, the muscles on his arms like the hill ranges of India, and the space between his shoulder blades the width of the Ganga river. My chin chaffed on the merino wool of his beige sweater. I whiffed myrrh, patchouli, and citronella. I savoured the shiny black beads trailing his jagged jaw. The goosebumps on his neck. His feather eyelashes and lava lips. The rain thrashed the rooftops of the surrounding cars. Waves ran up and down my body like musical notes on a piano. Bhav’s body near mine felt strangely familiar, as if I had known every inch without even having explored it.

  If I stayed away, I would deny myself this. The yearning to unravel this great mystery of my heart started to take my sleep and sometimes my appetite. When alone, in the middle of conversations, or running to catch a bus, just a caress of the gentle wind against my cheek stirred in me an anxious fretting. When would I see him again? How could I shorten the minutes between now and then? In social gatherings, among family and friends, when my attention would drift to memories of one of our silly jokes, or the recollection of Bhav’s cologne, I would burst out in random laughter or a tender grin. To the outsider, I must have appeared as somewhat of a lunatic.

  These yearnings, they were indeed different. I tried to count my crushes, but they never quite felt like tangible possibilities as they fell outside the scope of marriageability. Bhav wasn’t Muslim but there was still some racial and cultural familiarity. For example, I sometimes compared Bhav to the Italian boy in my high school whose band played in the background while I read spoken word poetry. He invited me over and presented me with spaghetti and meatballs doused in marinara in his mother’s kitchen. Then, later, as I joined him in the living room, he took off his shirt to seduce me, except, upon seeing his pale-white chest and wiry blondish armpit hairs, I screamed and ran out the door. He followed, chasing me half-naked. “What did I do?” he yelled. He didn’t feel so much like a Bollywood hero, the way Bhav did, with a certain depth, foreseen commitment, and seriousness, out of both duty and self-inclination.

  When one of Bhav’s friends learned that he and I were spending time together, and said, “Oh, her, she’s hot; but be careful, that means she’s loose,” Bhav took the knuckles of his fists and pounded them on his friend’s face, warning, “Don’t you ever say shit about her character, or this friendship is over.” The bravery and pursuit of justice, despite any friendships or other affiliations, made me respect Bhav more.

  It wasn’t just because I felt Bhav’s actions were particularly tender toward me that I began to desire his constant presence. It was that I admired him. He could risk what was important to him or what he depended on to live by what was right, fair,
and compassionate. To me this signalled a type of integrity. The valour was not necessarily about physical strength but the strength in making oneself vulnerable to speak up, correct a wrong, or even face one’s own shortcoming in a situation. Apologize. It was as if he could die for a cause, and in that, I could live for one. Such was the intensity of the devotion I began to feel, a pull like no other, to be recognized and protected for the woman I was innately — the woman I would become.

  “You’re the eldest daughter. I know you don’t have an older brother, and I know you can’t always share everything with your father or mother, because you are afraid of disappointing them,” Bhav said. “It’s important to me that both you and the world don’t lose sight of who you are, which is innocent.”

  “Yes,” I replied. We were on the phone. Through the handset, his voice was cracking.

  I cried that night, hearing the echo of Bhav’s words, while wrapped in my fleece blanket. It was as if part of his life purpose had become to honour me.

  For a young woman who suddenly had to pay attention to her widening hips and developing breasts, what she had implied to this boy or that boy, or against which girl she was more or less, and all the other makings of adolescence, to have a protector who looked out for my best interests, was only a gift. So, I wondered then, Is it possible that Bhav is an angel sent down from Allah to earth?

  I often felt the presence of beings, neutral or benevolent, at the base of my feet and behind my head, as I slept or right before I woke up. In Islam, it is known that angels are often around, that there are particular ones that also take note of our daily behaviours and utterances, even thoughts. I wondered if Bhav was also an angel but just in human form. He wasn’t Muslim, but did seem to usher me onto a path that was more aligned with the vision he had of me, and the vision felt very much aligned with who I was at my core. I thought perhaps that he had a gift of foreknowledge, a third eye.

  So, six months later, we were both back at the Getaway standing on the bridge. It was the end of January and the edges of Bhav’s car windows were laced in snow. I took off the leather glove from one of my hands and brought my fingers to his pink nose. I wiped off the snowflakes.