“You don’t look too well.” He wrapped his wool jacket around me and took me back inside his friend’s home, where the social gathering was still going on. My eyelids opened and closed, closed and opened. I heard Bhav in the next room after, with the other people. I couldn’t make out the speech; there were whispers and then laughter. Who was there and what were they saying? Suddenly the tan walls of the living room pushed in and against my lungs. “Stop!” I yelled, and he came in running.
“Nothing is right,” I said.
“You’re safe,” Bhav said. “I’m here, I’m here. We will make it.”
I thought, I’m not the same. I’m not the same.
On our drive back, I did not say much, just looked out the passenger window at the bleak roads. Then the strangest thing happened. I saw a floating ball of light in my periphery. It beckoned me to follow it across the road and I wanted to. If I did, I would gain access to a certain truth. I felt so close to it yet so far, as if it just slid through my fingers before I could clutch it.
“I thought,” I heard Bhav say, “that you would have fun. Be happy. You just always seem down.”
His voice interrupted my concentration on the ball of light. It went away.
“I don’t know what it is. I just feel sad,” I replied. I didn’t go on to explain any more than that.
Bhav and I knew we still owed some money to the High Commission of Canada, but we hadn’t received any instruction. So, Bhav wrote them a letter:
From:
Sent: December 7, 2005, 11:04 PM
To:
Subject: Important
this is , I recently opened a case for Sumaiya Matin she was in Bangladesh and in need of the embassy’s services to get her to a safe place. She stayed at a hotel and we owe you guys around 2600.00. I spoke with a few weeks ago and she said she was going to mail me a bill indicating the remaining funds we owe and how to pay it. It’s been at least 2 weeks now and I haven’t received anything. And today Sumaiya has told me that her house received a phone call of someone saying we owe them the remaining funds … we are both worried that interest is being added on and we can’t make payments because I haven’t received any bill.
I will also forward you the letter I sent on November 23.
My address again is .
My cell number is
Sumaiya’s Cell number is
Can you please look into this for me and please email me back as soon as possible?
From:
Sent: December 8, 2005, 2:34 PM
To:
Subject: RE: Important
Dear ,
Thank you for your e-mail. I am aware of Sumaiya’s situation and the outstanding bills. I will speak to our accounts section right away and advise they contact you directly. I will also ensure that phone calls and bills are not directed to Sumaiya or her home, but to you at the mailing address provided below.
Sincerely,
We waited tensely. Neither of us had the money. I strived to keep much of this away from Ammu and Abbu for fear of further stressing them about the situation. The distance I espoused may have felt like a coldness, but that was what we needed to establish a boundary; me around my faith in particular and how it was interwoven with my individuality.
Then and beyond, I began a deep quest, learning about all religions and the ways that people could extricate themselves from the world, which, to me, seemed temporary and added to the sneaking discomfort that wouldn’t quite go away. I also began hopping houses, living in different places, staying in the homes of friends. Eventually I contacted the university administration to discuss my situation and intention to get into graduate school. I was able to live in residence for about six months, and to pay for living expenses I worked multiple jobs: teaching, research, and legal administration.
It was during this time, as I tried to put my life together, bring about a certain stability in the present while focusing on my future aspirations, that I watched as I took care of myself as if my survival depended on it. It sometimes took me longer to discern more clearly what I had seen or heard. To feel safe, protected. There had been an injury, and I was coping.
The High Commission of Canada got back to Bhav and I. Apparently there had been some sort of a mistake in our payments.
ATTN:
Below is the receipt Sumaiya received on January 20th 2006. I think I may have miss lead you when I told you Toronto passport office … I checked the website just now and she actually went to the North York office located at Suite 380, 3rd Floor
Joseph Shepard Building, 4900 Yonge Street. I’m really sorry, I said Toronto, I’m just so familiar with it I assumed it was the only one in Toronto. I think that’s why you didn’t see a record of payment.
Sumaiya is going to make another 1000.00 payment this Friday February 3rd at the same location. They told her to tell the guard that she has to make a “repatriation payment” and the guard will direct her. I hope that everything is ok now; once again I’m really sorry for saying Toronto.
From:
Sent: January 20, 2006, 23:09
To:
Subject: Our First Payment
Hey it’s again, today on January 20, 2006 Sumaiya went to the passport office in Toronto and made our first payment toward our bill. We made a payment of 1000.00 dollars and they told her that they don’t know when you guys will get the money but we made the payment today. Sumaiya received a receipt and I will feel more comfortable faxing you a copy is this fax number correct
They also said that they wouldn’t be able to tell her the remaining funds next time we make a payment they told her that we’d have to ask you to find out the remaining funds. We plan to make 500$ payments every 2 weeks, my concern is that as of tomorrow interest will be charged and we are worried that we won’t know what exactly we’ll have to pay because the interest will be added on. What’s the best way for us to make payments and know our remaining?
Thank you for everything,
We were informed that the debt we owed was around $2785. It was our utmost priority then to pay it all off. Gathering the money and making the arrangements to pay was an inconvenience to say the least, but we were grateful that we had had the help of the High Commission of Canada, that I had made it out of Bangladesh safely. That was really all that truly mattered. During these challenging times, I often found Bhav distraught, despite his having it together for the most part.
One night, he called me in the middle of the night. It was from somewhere where there were a lot of people outside. It sounded as if he was maybe on his knees, fighting the urge to throw up certain parts of himself.
“Today I had a fight with my brother. I broke his chin, because I couldn’t break anything else.”
I was under the duvet and using the new cellphone I had purchased. It was noisy. The wall clock ticking, the slight buzzing of the electric table alarm, the wind hitting the window.
“And you, well, I want to see you planning for our future, as if you want to be my wife. But you’re still crying about the past. Just move on from Bangladesh. Fuck!”
As Bhav yelled into the phone I could only see a snapshot of that moment: me, under my duvet, and Bhav, in some park, a drunken mess. I couldn’t connect this snapshot to events of a few months ago, or even a few years. If I tried, I would certainly get a headache. I longed to just feel like a whole person, to follow my string of experiences to a place that made sense or was somewhat grounded. But there was no string. I was floating, hearing the pronounced wall clock ticks and the slight buzzing of the electric table alarm.
“Okay,” I said.
“I went in front of a mosque today. I yelled, ‘Fuck all religion!’ I hate these jihadis and bombers killing people and fucking up the world.”
Perhaps I should have felt something more in response to these words Bhav spoke, but somehow I’d understood this would happen, and to an extent I could comprehend why he said what he did. I, too, hated the bombers who killed in the name of religion, but it wa
s the thought of Bhav tying this to what had happened to me that blanketed the rest of my mind in a cold chill. As if the reason jihadis killed people was the same reason my wedding had occurred, as if violence were somehow implicit to Islam, which it was not. I needed him to see faith separately, the way I did. I hoped he’d understand my Muslimness, and not just tolerate it. Whatever it meant to me, that was.
I imagined Bhav wiping his mouth with his sleeve. On the other end of the phone, I heard the clanks of bottles. His drinking was becoming increasingly intolerable. I had never been comfortable with it; it was always something distant from my world but somehow deeply associated with his. I could see he was in pain, like I was, but I asked myself what I was supposed to do — acquiesce, ignore, or more clearly name that what was happening was not okay? It was clear: we both needed help.
As I listened to his heavy breathing on the other end of the line, I heard the echoes of Sweety Khala’s voice in my ears. “Punjabi men like to drink. What if he becomes an alcoholic?” I shook my head at the stereotype, and now, I shook my head to get rid of her I told you so voice. Voices merged onto a single plane and I heard them all at the same time.
My dreams at night had become much more frequent, and somewhat terrifying. In one of them, I was walking through a yard. There was an orchestra of crickets surrounding me. Against the night’s light, everything looked like charcoal etchings, even the fireflies passing by. I came to the middle of a field, about eight feet long and three feet wide, bordered by albino redwoods.
I fell onto my knees, then started digging into the ground with my nails, which felt like claws, with a hostility I’d never experienced before, tasting the flying dirt that landed in my mouth. When the hole in the ground was large enough, I toppled over and into it. I shut my heavy eyelids.
“What’s your name?” I heard but I could not answer. I believe I was about to climb out.
I thought the answer was easy, yet I couldn’t quite recall. A thousand pins in my brain hitting nerves, a sharp then dull sting, then the lightness of heavy fog.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The albino tree branches caved in and swayed. I felt hair strands across my face.
This is how I awoke, my forehead warm and my hair tangled. I tiptoed out of the room, squinting the whole way, searching for specks of light, arms outstretched to befriend objects, walls, people, really anything in the way. I woke up in the living room, where I found Rayleigh hues splattered across the grey canvas of the sky: reds, blues, yellows, and oranges. The sun commanding everything as it rose.
One day Bhav was driving, and I was in the passenger seat. He gripped the steering wheel tight with his left hand, his right laying loosely on his thigh. The road we were on was made of bumps and holes. My whole body juddered as I looked out the passenger seat window: streetcars with red-and-white markings, swarms of people in lines and crowds holding coffee cups and clutches, buildings old and new, reddish-brown or pewter hues, other cars, some bikes. A whirlwind around us.
We were having the same conversation we’d had many times before. You’re just not the same anymore.
I could tell Bhav was distressed. He had lost his job and was going back to school to start a completely new career. His mother’s mental health was also getting worse. However, these were all things he could express only through a short temper, which reminded me not just of Boro Mama, but the anger in me that I had disowned.
“So,” I asked again, “can we please try to talk?”
Bhav’s nonresponse filled the car.
“Please tell me,” I pleaded.
He clutched the gear tightly. The flames in my core rose up to my throat and I remembered again what it was like to not be heard. In that moment, perhaps I didn’t care whether or not the car crashed at all.
“Listen to me!” I shouted.
He lifted his hand from the gear and pushed my head. My face hit against the window. It didn’t have to hurt physically to hurt. On the other side was still an inappropriate normality: streetcars with red-and-white markings, swarms of people in lines and crowds holding coffee cups and clutches, buildings old and new, reddish-brown or pewter hues, other cars, some bikes. A whirlwind around us. Car horns honking, tire wheels screeching, people shouting. On my forehead, a tender patch. The passing thought: Who are you?
“Take me home,” I demanded.
When the car stopped, I kept looking at his profile, a cut-out from the background of a dark evening. He turned from ahead to my face with a drilling stare. I quickly shifted my line of sight to my lap. I squinted as I looked up.
Then I saw the two sides of his face split apart and come together again like a double exposure photograph. I blinked with the suddenness of a camera shutter. How strange it was, to see him this way, divided, and in between there was a kernel of truth. Had I been seeing him accurately all this time?
It is said that one form of sorcery is trying to break two lovers apart; making a person think their lover has become someone else. Suddenly, they don’t know who the person is anymore. Their face changes, as does their nature. The person can no longer feel love, just a sudden estrangement and a little bit of fear. Had Shoaib or Boro Mama or some other person in Dhaka who had felt betrayed put a curse on mine and Bhav’s future? Were there ill-intentioned jinns interfering? The thought crossed my mind, but I pulled it back. It wasn’t that, it was something else, and I felt I should find out. How was it that a person so close could suddenly become a stranger, and just like that?
I moved my right hand to the car door and floundered with the knob; it was stuck. My other hand sat composed, delicate on my lap, within the creases of my scrunched yellow skirt. The rest of my body inert. The air in my lungs travelled up and then down again, stuck midway. I needed to get away from him. Who was he to me anymore? He was the same as all of them, my family, the people at my school, the government, everyone. I pushed the door. It flew open and I jumped out of my seat. I ran for two blocks without looking back. Quicker and quicker, my boots clickety clacketing, matching the panting of my breath.
The leaves on the big trees appearing vacant, as if the green had been sucked out and all that was left was a vague greyness, the lights of the houses dimming, the world slowing. The night wanted to sleep. I could no longer see. I didn’t know where I was at all, on the side of some nowhere street.
I eventually stopped running and found myself on the bench of a nearby park. I lay on it, sinking into a fetal position, my spine curved forward half-moon, knees up, two arms together against my chest. I tucked myself into the blanket of darkness.
I was back here with him, the man I had longed for for months, and who had helped me back to safety. But he seemed like someone else. The realization that filled me with a desperate, yearning sadness and a very specific kind of grief. I no longer wanted him.
In the weeks that followed, I saw Boro Mama again, not in my nightmares but as a memory that insisted on inserting itself into every thought I had throughout the day, as if my mind instinctively understood his authority and committed itself to carrying out his bidding. When his image conjured itself, I, too, scrunched my eyebrows like his, clenched my teeth just the same. I tried at times to walk like him, too, wide strides. As if all space, any space, was mine to take. I pulled my shoulders back, raised my chin, raised my two arms above my head, to grab the anger, which followed me like a cloud everywhere I went. I grabbed it because I could, because in his hands anger was exalted, in his hands it was dignified. Whereas in mine it was out of place. But I was now him.
As I took my steps like his, I mimicked his words, “These are the rules.” I laid down the rules with my hands out on the wooden table, then pounded it, as if not to care that anyone heard. Then I’d thrash the same table against the wall with a deafening scream. The chair’s spine would crackle into smithereens. Ha, I thought, and without any consequence. Like him, I also lit a cigarette, held it between my fingers, angled it to the ground, let the smoke fill the space. Then I broug
ht the cigarette to my lips.
How did Bhav feel about it? Perhaps confused. He was more careless with his words, negligent even, but yet couldn’t seem to fathom why I was so immersed in myself, my every thought and emotion no longer focused on catering to him. He missed the girl who saw him as the beginning and the end of all matters of the heart. How great it must’ve been for him to see himself through my youthful eyes. And then I started wearing the shortest halter dresses I could find, open back, barely reaching mid-thigh, stilettos that added three or four inches to my height, and painting my lips blood red. When music came through the speakers, I pointedly swayed my waist recklessly to the bass. I was suddenly overcome with a ferocious desire to test the limits of my very own mortality, to live uninhibited. This was how I was supposed to free myself, apparently, as a woman. Yet, despite the thrust of activity, of taking every opportunity, of trying to think differently, I still felt uncured. So, on a trip to Italy, at the Piazza del Campo, I sat with the blue- and green-eyed people who were all bare-backed and pouring wine. On the red brick pavement, I looked up at the vast sky and Tuscan landscape and thought, Where within me is home?
Later, in a bar in Italy, I sat at the wooden table with a glass of water in my hands. The girls I met on the trip were also students, curious, carefree, and smart. They left the place late, walked the dark alleyways, found their way to the hotels of their new lovers with little help. I remained there, soon after dancing, Italian music blasting and overtaking my body like the darkness of the night outside of the sienna pub walls. Did Bhav know the British boy I danced with wasn’t the one I wanted? I pulled away, he pulled me back again, and I stormed out, bewildered by what I had done.
After I flew back to Canada and agreed to meet Bhav at our usual bridge at the Getaway, he asked, “How could you betray me?”
“Like your words did,” I searched his eyes to find the part I still knew, but instead found my own reflection. I looked different.
We both turned our faces to the cascades before us. I could see the traces of tears on his face, and he saw mine, too. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out two pennies.
The Shaytan Bride Page 24