“Here.” He handed one to me. “Let’s make wishes together. Because, you know, we’ll make it.”
I reached my arm out to grab the penny, but instead pulled his hand and brought him closer to me. I dug my face into his chest with force, mussing my hair. He returned the embrace.
“Would you consider therapy?” I asked Bhav.
“Okay, I don’t know who your friends are these days,” he replied.
“What do you mean?”
“You sound whiter by the day. Therapy? I don’t need to pay a stranger to tell me how to live my life.”
I thought, I’ll do anything to make things right again.
It was important for me to become more of an agent in my own life.
I made my way to therapy, all the way from St. George and Bloor, passing all the cafés, alternative health stores, independent video and record shops, and vintage clothing swaps. When I passed Koreatown, whiffs of japchae, bulgogi, and hoeddeok overtook me like a spell; I, immersed in my solitude and its irresistible taste.
The name of the therapist I was going to see was Amna, and she was of South Asian descent and Muslim. It was possible she had Indian or Pakistani heritage. I never asked. She specialized in brief treatment modalities, including grief recovery, which she paired often with psychodynamic, open-ended psychotherapy. She was not new to the field, nor was she a veteran.
When I reached her office, I took a seat in the waiting room. I sat on a wooden chair with uncomfortable padding and stared at the corkboard ahead of me. I read the text on the pinned business cards and on the flyers, all advertising programs and services to unlock a better life. Beside me, there was a soggy mat with a pair of boots. I imagined it belonged to Amna’s other client, the one whose murmurs I could hear from down the hall, on the other side of the closed office door. I looked at my watch and tapped my fingers on my thigh.
When I got inside, Amna welcomed me in. I said my pleasantries, as did she. We did our introductions. After which I poured out everything and concluded with, “The thing that stands between him and I is his manhood, you know, his silence or maybe his pride. But I can tell he is suffering. How can I help him and help him help me if he won’t even let me and just blames me for everything?”
Amna, in her therapist chair, nodded away.
It became a ritual, two times a week, taking this walk along the road, finding myself plotted on Amna’s grey couch, telling her everything. About Dhaka, and about Bhav and I. I had found her name on the internet, and as a brown Muslim woman, I thought she would understand. Low-pitched in tone, and gentle in her movements, there was a tranquility about her that allowed me to believe everything was manageable.
Whenever I stood on the prayer mat — the one I had was made of velvet, black and gold, rather symmetrical, and with the mihrab sitting neatly at the top, pointed toward Mecca — my toes would sink into the warp and weft, and all else would fade. And in sujud, when I brought my forehead to the ground, a sense of calm would wash over me like a lavender shower, loosening my muscles, relaxing my breath. I would think then how grateful I was to be alive, to be safe again. There must have been a purpose — and not just for me but for everyone else.
However, as the months passed I sometimes could not help but ask, How could You let this happen? On the prayer mat, when I stood, my eyes closed, I almost fell over. In sujud, with my forehead on the ground, I could only hear the grinding of my teeth.
I wondered if Allah truly did love me, for some tribulations seemed far too long or great. However, I didn’t want to be severed from what I innately knew, despite the spiritual abuse I had both witnessed and experienced. I remembered Iblis, who closed the chambers to his wildfire heart. For me not to end up the same way, and feel Allah’s love as unrequited, I had to try harder to remember all the ways I had been blessed, privileged. I was alive, I was breathing.
“And I’m sorry,” I told the sky, “for the times I may have forgotten you, or didn’t trust you. For the ways I may have wronged, despite having the best of intentions.”
It was hard to say these words; they gnawed my teeth as I released them, and the soot that had begun cloaking my heart crawled into my throat. However, something deep inside told me that I should try my best to surrender to what was happening. As I stood on the velvety fibres, the white rayon curtains with royal-blue floral print fluttered, and the scent of tulips and lilies crept through the room. I breathed it in with the morning sun. The floor’s mahogany wood blushed a deeper tone. The room was smitten by the sun’s morning flirt.
I told Amna, “If I express my anger, it comes back to my own shortcoming. And if he is angry, he says it’s because I made him this way. Why can’t I be angry at him? Why can’t I be angry, period?”
I rubbed my eyes. The office was like a nineteenth-century apartment: semi-dark lighting, an ivory carpet patterned in Bakshayesh Herati, replicas of Victorian artifacts, cherry-oak shelves with dozens of books, and a feathery fern enclosed in a Wardian case. Amna herself had matching black-rimmed glasses and a dark-brown bob. The ambience of sophistication in the lap of comfort.
“We were so attuned once, as if he could often read my mind. Now there’s estrangement,” I told her.
“The ruptures we feel in our relationships, when abrupt or strange, leave us struggling to make ourselves whole again. They take a big toll,” she replied. “Do you think you are seeing who he is now?”
I looked down at my feet. Underneath, I thought I saw tectonic plates shifting and the flames of the Darvaza crater, rising up to me.
“Well, do you feel safe with him? Do you want to be with him?” Amna raised one eyebrow, her thin lips like pungent red chili.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s hard for me now, to feel safe. And who he is now — it’s disappointing. After everything we have been through, after the way I had longed for him.”
I fixed my gaze on the white wall behind Amna and did not move or say anything for a minute. I was stock-still, like the woman I had met in Bangladesh.
Then, I blinked, and Amna leaned in, pulling me back into her face as she said, “Tell me what he means to you, as a lover, and nothing else.”
One night I called Bhav. Told him I needed him as my whole body rattled, my head in my hands.
“It’s this feeling I get, as if I’ll be left in a dark room with no way out. And I can’t see anything.”
“Again, this Muslim thing,” he shouted.
It hit me then that perhaps I had relied on him too much, to the extent that my yaqin had diminished.
∞
“Your sadness and tears seem to mourn the loss of something very important to you. They express the yearning for what’s gone to come back.” Amna handed me a tissue.
I wiped my eyes.
“I believe you sought your father in him, when your father withdrew his love. Then your mother in some ways. You were left with a very strange choice. You could have your mother, or your father, or him, but not all. Perhaps, as you’re seeing yourself more for yourself, you’re also seeing more of who Bhav is.”
One day Bhav called me and said he really wanted to talk. I remember the mist on the car window; I dragged the tip of my finger across it. And then I saw on the other side of the smudged window, dancing glittery graupel.
This meeting wasn’t too long after the day I tripped and fell on the downtown Toronto pavement. I had called Bhav to tell him I had just gotten into graduate school. He yelled so loud all the passersby could hear.
“We are supposed to get married and just move on, like everybody else.” He sounded like Boro Mama, stern and disappointed that I wasn’t moving in the direction and at the speed he saw fit. “If I’m not in your future, then you can fuck yourself.”
I wanted to tell him then that I felt vulnerable in my womanhood, that I needed to experience its strength before I could relate to him again. Something about it had been deeply endangered, almost taken away, like a poached pearl. I wanted to protect myself because I w
asn’t sure a man really could.
I opened my lips to tell him, but it was right about then that I fell on the pavement, the phone still in my hand.
Bhav laughed, then said nothing. I thought, I mustn’t ever show him any weakness at all. That’s how it began, the heart closing, and my commitment to not let him become the reason for the full extent of my happiness.
But then, on that foggy night, he said, “It’s just that I tried my best to fix you, but I couldn’t.”
I finally saw it: Bhav’s mouth forming the same shapes, his fingers fidgeting, and his distant eyes as if he was looking at someone else. I thought, You’re talking about your mother, aren’t you? Everything you said.
Bhav was fighting the urge to rescue me, and then, right then, I was certain that I didn’t want to rescue him, either. We both needed help that we couldn’t give to each other. Even if we were both already whole, fully realized adult human beings, we needed to find it for ourselves independently. My journey was mine alone, however much I loved Bhav. And I did love him.
There was a story Abbu told me often. Folklore, if you could call it that. It was the story of two young lovers, a village girl and a village boy. The young girl told the boy to prove his love, and he responded that he would do anything. The girl decided to test him, so she asked him to rip out his mother’s heart and bring it to her on a platter. The boy contemplated her request for a couple of days, for he was conflicted. His mother would only live for a few more years, but he could have a whole future with the girl.
One day his mother found him at the gates of their straw hut looking distraught and distant. She asked him, “What’s wrong, my son?”
The son looked up at his mother’s concerned face.
She continued, “You know I love you more than anything in this entire world. Whatever it is you need I will give it to you. Tell me how you are doing, because you seem distressed these days.”
The young boy didn’t respond at first. He looked at his scrawny feet, now muddied. “I am fine,” he muttered.
That night, in the midst of villagers’ snores and howling animals nearby, he tiptoed out of his bed and across the yard to his mother’s hut, where she lay in sound slumber. He towered over her. She was an angel wrapped in her white cotton sari. She didn’t have a husband. The boy didn’t have a father. Mother and son had raised the animals and crops on their farm together. Her cheekbones carried a sort of defiance — defiance of a world that denied her joy merely because she was a widow. She was like the character Bali from the renowned book Choker Bali written by Tagore. Bali was a widow who had taught herself to read English, despite her lower position in society. Similarly, this boy’s mother nurtured joy despite her fate, like she did the farm, with her son by her side.
The young boy imagined his mother dreaming of corn fields underneath a blazing sun — a life of abundance. Then, slowly, he drew out the butcher knife sitting between his belt and bare back. He wished that she remained in her peaceful state permanently and then uttered, “I’m sorry, Mother.”
With that, the butcher knife came raging down into his mother’s chest. The sacrifice would be like the sacrifice of Prophet Abraham, except that he would do it for the love of a woman, who he then saw as God.
The next day, he found his lover by a willow tree, carving her name in the bark. She turned to look at him when he entered with a silver platter covered with a red cloth.
“What’s that?” she asked.
The boy removed the cloth to show his mother’s now dark violet-red heart sitting at the centre of the silver platter.
The young girl gasped in terror. “What did you do?”
“I did this for you,” he explained.
“I don’t want you. I was only joking.” She strutted away.
“Wait, you said that you would —”
He ran after her, and she yelled, “Murderer, murderer!”
He lost her, but then later found her at his doorstep with other villagers. They all dragged him out, including her, and then shoved his head through looped rope. The boy was hanged.
The boy had lacked empathy for his mother. He focused instead on how the girl had betrayed him. As if all of his actions were predetermined by women and he had no free will.
How I left Bhav was gradual and sudden. I felt we had already left each other by the time I finally forced myself to do it, by moving to another city, as everything reminded me of him. It was the only way to make peace with this decision I had made, based on the realization of what I already knew: my faith was integral to me, and so was my self-respect. These things I could never compromise, no matter how alone I felt. It would only hurt him and I to hold on. Like I walked away in Dhaka, I’d walk away again, however excruciating, to live by the values, the principles that made up who I was. It was a vow I made to myself.
In the new city, away from every familiar face, it was still a tug of war getting myself on the prayer mat some days. One of the mornings, just a few minutes after fajr prayer time started and the room was still a pitch-black, I woke to the sudden feeling that someone was standing over me. My heavy arms and legs were being pulled off the bed and onto the ground. It wasn’t a sinister presence, no, just a gentle observance and perhaps reminder. I thought then, I should get up. So, after wudu, I found myself on the prayer mat. I said, “Dear Allah, he is gone, as are so many other things that I thought perhaps would stay the same. Dear Allah, if there is one thing I wish, it’s to have you in my heart always and to never leave, to strengthen my ability to intuit the signs of what I need to do.” I rested my head on the mihrab, deducing that our desires in life are never stronger than what Allah wills.
Duniya Ke Kone / Corners of the World
One day I visited the Chokhi Dhani Village in the pink city of Jaipur, India. I was volunteering at a local non-governmental organization that supported Delhi street children. On this particular day I was wearing a black-and-red ghaghra choli with shisha work, mica mirrors handstitched in cotton, which trapped with their specular reflection the evil eye of onlookers. On my arms were matching red bangles.
I had bought the ensemble a few days prior in a market in the city for a hefty price. The shop was owned by a local man who appeared to be in his late forties with rusty bronze hair and one bronze tooth. When I walked in he stood in the middle of the room, his two arms wide open, as if he’d just met his long-lost sister.
He walked me over to a stool facing multiple large wooden shelves standing side by side, with an assortment of garments folded and packaged in plastic. From the ceiling with the hasty fan hung a long rope, which spanned across the room. On the rope were sample garments for show: a caramel kameez zardozi, embroidered with gold thread and sequins, a fuchsia tie-dye sari, a long red cotton and silk kurta with patchwork techniques, and the black-and-red shisha ghaghra choli.
When I reached to touch the ghaghra choli the man said, “That’s a special one, to ward off the evil eye.”
I looked at the dress, intrigued.
“You’re not from here, are you?” he asked.
I told him I had come from Canada, to which he chuckled and said, “Then you definitely must not believe in what I just said. But the irony of it is, Westerners don’t know anything themselves.”
I smiled, then turned my attention to the royal-blue cotton crepe fabric spread across the bed-like cushioned structure on which the man stood.
“You could be right. It could be true,” I told him.
“Have you been, madam, to the home of Mariam-uz-Zamani? The wife of great Emperor Akbar. It is not too far from here.”
“Yes, I will be going there soon,” I told him.
“Their love, it was a grand story, the coming together of two cultures and two faiths, and it only benefited the Indian economy.” The man pulled from his shelves three or four plastic packages holding the sequined saris. He unpacked the saris and laid them on the bed. I placed my fingers over the Maharani sari, the peacock spreading its golden sequins plumage.
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“Sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way,” I muttered. “Anyway, I am sure it was also a political alliance that motivated the acceptance of that relationship.”
I was surprised at how jaded I sounded.
“The trouble with Westerners, they have such little faith.”
“Well, you’re open-minded. I didn’t quite expect that. What can I say? I guess I’ve just learned that it’s hard to build anything pure when the basis is bloodshed.”
“Are you talking about what the white people started?” he asked me.
“Oh, yes, but you know everyone plays a part. We’re all part of this mess now.”
I bought the shisha ghaghara choli from the insightful shop owner, who understood colonialism and imperialism without ever probably knowing any academic institution. I thanked him for his service and was on my way to the village of Chokhi Dhani.
Chokhi Dhani was rather touristy. Yet, I couldn’t help but revel in the Rajasthani folk dances. The women were also wearing shisha and had ornas draped over their faces. They swung their hips from side to side, performing Kalbeliya and Nagin dances. I revelled also in the brick masonry that enveloped me, made partly of traditional cow dung, and the murals that hung on the walls made of relief, stained in geru, ochre, and white clay. In the dining room, called chaupad jeeman ghar, I sat on a straw mat, saw palm leaves plastered on the walls. The roof was made of bamboo net. I rolled the dhaal soaked rice with my fingers on the palm leaf plate, the aromatic spice blend — cardamom, turmeric, cumin, and whiffs of ginger — soaking the roof of my nose and my mouth.
After the meal, I remember passing by the blue pottery Koftgari art and puppet making, until I saw a lone man sitting by a stall with barmeri cloth for sale. He gestured me toward him, and at first I avoided him, but then I was compelled to hear what he had to say.
“I have to tell you something very important,” he said. His moustache was black, the ends twirled upward. He was wearing a plain dhoti kurta and a multi-coloured pagri. With a rather pensive face, he investigated the curiosity in my eyes. Who was this person and what would he say?
The Shaytan Bride Page 25