“The sorcerer’s knots, you are bound by them,” he continued. “Someone close to you is holding you back from change, from movement. From love, from marriage.”
The words from his mouth tasted familiar in mine, and as his glower grew I stood there frozen. I remembered then the Shayṭān Bride, how she stayed stuck and could not move on.
It is true that I sometimes felt like I remained in the same moments, feelings, and thoughts, despite years having gone by. Every decision I took felt as heavy as the one I had made in Dhaka. I wondered, Where is she now, the Shayṭān Bride?
“What do I have to do? To untie the knots? To move?” I asked the stranger.
He took a moment to fix his paghri.
“Tell me when and where you were born,” he instructed as he ripped a white piece of paper from his tatty notebook and pulled out a ballpoint pen. “It will, however, cost you a few rupees.”
I scrunched the sides of my skirt. It wasn’t acceptable in Islam to have your fortune read by third parties. However, I was curious, so I agreed and handed a few rupees to him.
He accepted them with one hand while he scribbled with the other. He mumbled indecipherable words under his breath. After a few minutes, maybe five, he took the paper and folded it as if doing origami. Each fold left my breath heavier and back sweatier. I wanted to know the secret to truly moving in flow, like barakah when it touched a person.
He finally handed it to me and said sternly, “Do not open this.”
My eyes opened wide and I asked, “Why not? How will I know the answer?”
“Keep this for seven days, and without opening it. Then, on the seventh day, find a body of water, water that moves like a stream, a river, or the sea. Not water that’s held down in a perfect container by gravity. When you find the moving water, put the paper in it while reciting a prayer. Let the water take the paper away.”
I listened to him intently, nodded, then went away.
Over the next seven days, I thought of this paper that I carried in my purse. Conflicted, because I knew that no third party could necessarily know the truth of my soul, especially not a human, and that this would be considered shirk. I thought whether or not I should let the paper go, maybe fly away like the papers that flew around in the corners of Delhi slums.
I decided to bury it. One day as I walked over to and past an old lady who sat on the steps of Jama Masjid. I buried the paper in a small hole in the ground, then gave the woman, the witness to the act, a few rupees.
I settled my restless heart into her wrinkles when I asked her for her prayers; a respite for me at the time. I could have taken the paper with the prayers, found a way back to the Shayṭān Bride, and given it to her, but I didn’t. I thought perhaps what would be more important was the story I’d try to tell.
I didn’t know that only a few years later, India would pass a law that would discriminate against Muslims by granting citizenship to all religious minorities except them. I didn’t know that the United States of America, founded on values of freedom and opportunity, would do a similar thing, banning travel from Muslim majority countries to the U.S. Later I would wonder how my experience in India would have perhaps been different, knowing anti-Muslim immigration sentiments were rising even there. I would wonder if it was 1947 again. And I’d wonder again if we had come any way at all, in all these years. Still, I’d remember my conversation with the local store owner in Jaipur, and the mysterious fortune teller man. I’d remember the unique ways the architecture, customs, and languages had blended difference. The stories of Nana, Nani, Ammu, and her elder siblings swimming in the rivers to Malda, simply having fun.
Revolving Doors
It was a strange homecoming when I saw Bhav again, familiar yet as if I was meeting him for the first time. It was 2013, and I had just returned to Toronto after completing my master’s of social work in Windsor. The idea to reconnect came to me when I passed by the Getaway during a drive.
The last Bhav had crossed my mind was during the tumultuous period where my stored anger would erupt like lava — sporadic, scorching — flashbacks that would hit like meteorites, damaging whatever sense of normalcy I had. For years I remained angry at the strange situation I had been in: that in order for him to feel seen, I had to validate the pain he was expressing through abuse and, in doing so, minimize myself and normalize what was not right. This was not the face of love. I could no longer carry others’ feelings — I had to focus on mine. Perhaps I was expected to be selfless as a woman, but I hoped Bhav and everyone else around me could understand that my selfishness, my own self love, would be how we’d all survive through this. Loving myself would preserve the humanity we had left. So, this grief that I experienced like natural disasters was tied to difficult decisions that involved a disentangling of myself from all those I loved more than life itself. The boundaries I drew were important for containing the ghadab (intense anger) there was, the type that destroyed the highest of characters and damaged the best of relationships — which is what the Shayṭān probably wanted.
So, all this accompanied me while I gulped Red Bull into the late hours of the night as I was writing term papers and when I ran group therapy at a women’s shelter.
Just to say hello. I can see how he is doing, I thought. But why? I didn’t know.
We met at Tim Hortons. I waited at the window seat. I noticed it was raining outside. The ambience of the place was the usual, laid-back and casual. Stereotypically Canadian. Top-100 musical hits through the speakers, customers dressed in everything from sneakers to stiletto boots. People rolling up rims to win, biting into grilled cheese sandwiches, and sipping iced caps while they pressed on their laptop keys with haste. I perused the room until Bhav strolled in.
He looked as he always had, except with a few more lines on his face and pounds around his belly. He sat across from me. It was uncomfortably formal, considering all that we’d shared.
He was quiet but vigilant, as he usually was, and I was curious, as I usually was. He fidgeted a little bit with his hands, which indicated that his thoughts were chronicling. I remembered that the last time I saw him, I feared him. But now he appeared to me quite unthreatening.
“It is good to see you again,” Bhav said. He was calm now, and settled.
I had already ordered my tea.
“You, too,” I replied. He nodded and said he’d get himself a cup.
I wasn’t sure what the purpose of our meeting was or what I thought I could get out of it. Our souls had been contracted for almost eight years. What could I want or need? Why was I there, really?
When he was back, he still had his black leather gloves on, the kind that showed the tips of his fingers. He pressed those fingers into the paper cup in his hand as he angled it closer to his mouth. I could taste the warmth of the coffee in my own mouth as he drank it.
“How are you?” he asked. “You seem well.”
Yes, I was. So, I told him about completing my master’s degree, something he’d originally contested because he wanted me to settle down with him. I told him also about the new person I was seeing, and that I was still writing.
“Well, I expected no less.” He looked around the room, then put his cup down. “But I have to say I am a little disappointed. You’re doing it again. The person you’re seeing. It sounds like trouble.”
I smiled at him smiling at me. “Things just seem to happen for me this way.” I followed up with, “And you?”
Suddenly his lips contracted and a blankness fell over his eyes. “Marriage is no longer for me.” And I thought that it was a shame because Bhav had one of the most loving souls I had ever met.
“Why would you say that?” I asked.
“Because you give, and you build, but then your castle falls down. People can change any time and decide to leave all of it. Life is far too short for pain.”
I thought then that this was true; the molecules of the cells in our bodies were constantly changing. Like these cells, we died and were rebirthed
throughout our life span. There would always be mourning, but also celebrations. Recalling this, I remembered Al-Wahhab, the continual giving of blessings without expectation or return. This remembering grounded me in the sense of it will be okay.
“There isn’t a restraint to love because it’s everywhere, it’s plentiful,” I told him. We sat quiet for a moment while Drake’s new song “Started from the Bottom” played through the speakers.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why are you sorry?” he asked.
I saw my reflection in his eyes, which appeared the same as the reflection in the cup in my hands, the one I saw past the rim: I was relaxed. He didn’t apologize for all he had said that had marked my soul, shaken my psychological, physical, spiritual safety. But that was all right. I believed he may have forgotten everything he said, but it didn’t matter. When I had arrived at Tim Hortons on that day, I had already forgiven him.
A few years ago, after a quarrel or disagreement, we’d sometimes be sitting in similar coffee shops. My body would be slouched, my eyes searching his face heedfully.
It was as if I was joined to him the way a woman would be joined to the rib of a man. As if my arms were twisted and my legs were intertwined, forming a shape similar to that of a snake, my entire body cramped in between his ribs, the bridge of my nose against the hard sternum. Perhaps it had been snug, and perhaps because of my position I had no choice but to see the world through his gaze. I couldn’t exactly feel my own body, the one I was then in.
Over the years with Bhav, my limbs grew and stretched. His chest cracked open and I walked out. He often used to say, “You made me this way,” after his outburts, and so it seemed he felt entitled to blame me for this separation, as if his rib was where I was always supposed to be.
In the Tim Hortons, I closed my eyes, sitting with this for a moment, drifting in and out of a fantasy where I saw the backdrop of Salvador Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus. On the dirt ground of this painted place, beside the mountain, the lake, and the sprouting flower emerging from the cracked egg, I saw the bodies of men sprawled out with their ribs cracking open, out of which climbed bare-bodied, long-haired women. In bands, they dragged the bodies of men to the lake, left them there, then walked away.
“You seem back to where you started. Calm. Alive. Happy. I’m proud of you,” he said.
I thought, I have my resolve, knowing I did everything I could. I wanted to tell him that he, too, didn’t have to lose hope. As much as the story of creation, as told in popular culture, blamed women for the original fall of humans, I knew innately that that was not how it was written. According to my faith, the two souls in any pair were equally accountable.
We spoke for a couple of hours. He held my hands in his at some point, leaning in closer then away. I felt nothing other than a tremendous amount of appreciation that he had once walked into my life. In seeing his fallibility unfold, I more clearly noticed my own, our deeply flawed selves — an enactment of pain from our childhood, our present, our human limitations, our misguided beliefs that we knew certain things when we really didn’t — that we just did not want to face.
I wanted to share with him a gift of some sort. I wondered if there was something I could do to make him change his mind, so that he believed he could love again. Forgive yourself, I had wanted to say. But not in self-aggrandizement or self-disdain. Just for being limited. Because I was, too.
That day I left the Tim Hortons remembering that when we first met, I had deduced that we were meant to heal each other. And although between the fine hairs of a second I felt an unsurmountable urge to once again do the same, I remembered that it was not my place.
The warm coffee in my hands had got cold, yet I took the cup with me when I left. It was a strange homecoming, that familiar smell of his cologne, the exact width of his chest, the beard stubble that now climbed past down his chin. His outer shell, the perfect shelter; under his sheath of bravado, against the storms. But now, in my body, I had found both. My very own.
It’s 2020 and the entire world is in the middle of a pandemic. Covid-19 has taken the lives of many people. I’m in a condominium at the intersection of McCowan and Highway 401, looking out into the deserted streets.
My editor, Julie Mannell, has informed me that the missing piece to my manuscript is the story of Bhav and myself. She tells me she needs to know who Bhav is, and I think this may be as challenging as undoing world wars, because I had tried very much to bury him in order to survive.
I’m tapping my ballpoint pen on the hardcover of my journal. I’m sipping my fourth coffee. I’m taking a break to fiddle with the keys of my new harmonium, brought in from India. I’m listening to the late Tagore’s Majhe Majhe and eating a box of Ferrero Rocher to soothe my melancholia.
Why aren’t the memories coming to me like when a word lost in your memory returns to the tip of your tongue? No, the memories are lost somewhere, and hence so is the awareness of certain parts of me that have grown into something else.
I flip the pages of my journal open, a fresh, crisp page, and I try to capture what I can remember. How did our story start, Bhav and I? How did we meet? Who was he to me?
My brain is foggy. I rip up the page. I get up and blast Punjabi music to maybe be reminded of him. I sway my hips, I twirl, I raise my hands to the sky and then down as if it’s garba night. Nothing comes.
I will find, maybe, an old photo of him or an old email, I decide. But I don’t have any photographs of us together. They are all stored in my old Hotmail account titled Shahrukh’s baby something. Yes, what a ridiculous name, and how unoriginal. After a Bollywood star, of all things. I shake my head. The hardcopy photographs are with Bhav in the many albums with narratives I had created. He had asked me to pick them up from him, I remember, when he was distraught and wanted nothing but their burial, but I had ignored the plea. What had he done with them?
I open up Internet Explorer on my laptop and type hotmail.com in the address bar, but I am redirected to Microsoft Outlook. I try Google and type in “How to retrieve a Hotmail account” in the search bar. It tells me to enter my username and password.
Okay, this is useless, I think. How can this even be considered an option if I don’t have any of this information? Furthermore, why is it that most South Asian women through the generations have experience with some form of love letters that eventually become inaccessible? Letters lost during the war, letters hidden by family members, letters diverted from their destination by purposeful plotting of enemies. And now Snapchat messages that can be deleted within a span of six seconds. Did such fate only serve to confirm that sentiments are meant to be passing illusions or dreams never lived out?
I put the laptop away. The deadline to submit my manuscript is in few days. I am pacing back and forth.
Traces of touch arrive and leave my skin. I forget him again.
I think, I must bring the dead back to life.
I’m looking at my cellphone. A missed call from Ammu, and a text message, too. How are you feeling? she is asking.
I stare at the keypad and think, What is his number again? I lie to myself that I don’t know. I have it memorized, and why wouldn’t I? All the calls I made to him before and after I came back from Dhaka, and from Dhaka, too. Calls about our dreams or our agony or just simple greetings. There were many. It was possible, however, that the number had changed. I dial it, anyway.
The phone rings twice, and then I hear him.
“Hello?” His voice sounds the same.
I hang up. This is just too strange. I am not even sure what I will say.
I drop the phone by my pillow and just lie on the bed. I stare at the ceiling. A sense of déjà vu washes over me.
My cellphone is ringing. I’m looking at the screen. It’s Bhav. “Hello?” I answer.
“Sumaiya?” he is asking.
“Yes.”
“You called?”
“Yes, that was me. Just, you know, wanted to see how you were doing.”<
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“Okay.” He sounds a little flabbergasted. “You remember my phone number.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, I just called, you know, to say hi,” I tell him.
“I am well, and you?”
“Fine. Is this a bad time?” I think I hear a woman’s voice. “No, I can speak. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I repeat. It feels impossible to continue the conversation without sharing the purpose of my call. In fact, I feel almost sly. “Well, I’ll just tell you. I’m a writing a book about what happened to me in Dhaka. A memoir that captures that time of my life. As you know, that time of my life includes you.”
“Oh,” Bhav is silent. “Well, I am not surprised. You always loved to write, and that story is very important to share.”
“Yes,” I sigh with relief. “There are gaps in my memory about us, before Dhaka happened. Would you be willing to help me restore those memories? A walk down memory lane?”
Bhav laughs. “My memory is not that great, either, but we were something.”
“Yes,” I say. “Will you help me? I will understand if it’s too strange for you, to do such a thing.”
“No,” Bhav says. “I will help, but let me first ask my girlfriend. If you’re with someone, you should perhaps ask them, too.”
“Oh,” I say. The last time we met, he was single, and I had encouraged him to find love again. I’m not hurt but I do feel a little strange, as if I just stepped onto a whole new plane and I’m trying to orient myself to a new scale of gravity.
“I did always like that about you,” I tell him. “Your loyalty, and your consideration.”
“But,” he continues, “I am not sure where that is going.”
I don’t know what to do with this information, so I say nothing, other than, “Okay, please do get back to me.”
The Shaytan Bride Page 26