“As-salam alaykum,” I greeted him. I would be polite.
“Wa alaikum salam. Have a seat.” He gestured to the seat across from him. I walked over to it and sat down.
“How are you doing? How is all?” He asked me, and I wondered how I could articulate for him all that had happened in the last fourteen years in a way that he would understand.
“I am well. How are you?” is all I said, because I couldn’t gather myself to say, “Your actions really impacted by life, you know?” And, “I did think about everything we talked about, even years later,” or, “I just needed guidance and support, but not to be pushed away, demonized the way I was,” or, “It’s true, I was stubborn, but I’m that way about the things I believe in, about protecting the people I love. I suppose the passion runs in our blood,” or, “I have forgiven you, even though I haven’t forgiven the action you took, despite you believing it was for my own good. Will you forgive me, too, if I’ve hurt you?” and, “I’m afraid, though, that I can only be myself. I’m afraid, I can no longer apologize for this.”
“So, you came here for Maryam’s wedding. Wasn’t it a beautiful wedding indeed? You see, you have to marry right,” he said.
I nodded. My conversation with Boro Mama didn’t last beyond simple formalities, despite all that was simmering in my heart.
I accepted this because I knew that there was so much about the world that drove people to do terrible things for the best of reasons, and the best of things for the most terrible reasons. I knew that I was not responsible for all of it, other than my own actions. I still believed in holding people accountable, the ones who inflict harm on others. In this situation with Boro Mama, I had decided to leave it up to God.
When it was time to take my leave, however, he stood up and looked me directly in the eyes. His own were of pure surety — the way they had been when he saw me off at the airport, when I was emigrating to Canada. He said, “You are an intelligent woman. I trust you and the decisions you’ll choose to make. I hope to hear lots of good things. Please, come visit me again. Now, you take care.”
I left the place, and there was something so pure about the liberty I suddenly felt as I made my way back to Sweety Khala’s red car, her driver turning the wheel, stepping on the gas pedal, the teal-painted iron gate opening, us driving out into eventful streets.
Boro Mama passed away on November 2, 2020. When I found out, the pink petals of the carnations on my espresso-brown bookshelf were dried and falling off. The stems were wilting, just at the glass vase rim. By the vase was the poetry book I had been reading, Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition. A poem each morning.
That afternoon Ammu had texted, “Boro Mama died,” after calling a few times when I had been preoccupied writing.
When I first read it, it’s as if gravity itself wanted to punish me. As if all my blood had gone to my feet, and the floorboards of the building had collapsed.
“How?” I texted Ammu back.
“A heart attack.”
To which I thought, The part of people he wished to quiet seems to have sought its vengeance.
I shook my head. Astag furallah, I shouldn’t think such ways. Keeping bughd (hatred) out of my heart, for him and others, was important. The only thing to do was to wish others well, even if I was in pain.
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon,” I said. I loved my dear uncle; he was once my friend. May his soul be at peace.
And there I was, standing over my carnations, placing my palms over the hardened petal fibres.
I ripped the petals off their stems and threw them everywhere, because sometimes when I’m alone I express a dramatic flair. I had wanted to have a heart-to-heart conversation with Boro Mama someday, when we both could be open. I wanted to talk to Nani, too. And now this could never happen.
Forty days later, December 12, 2020, I was in my kitchen preparing my cha. I was having it black. I stirred my tea with a silver spoon, which clanked against the cup. I dropped three brown sugar cubes in, bubbles forming and swivelling like clouds of a hurricane. I thought I heard someone pass by. Somehow, I smelled petrichor. A thousand fragrant flowers that unravelled their petals at the same time. Roses, lemons, cedar, and something more tonic seeping into the soil is what I whiffed. The same fluid found in the veins of Greek gods. Survival.
Who is there?
It is said in Islamic faith that when the soul is separated from the body after death, it visits its family on the seventh day and on the fortieth day. I sit on my wooden chair, disappearing behind the fumes of frankincense.
The ghostly spectre of Boro Mama’s physical absence in my life and maybe soul presence on this fortieth night reminded me that our histories could still haunt us. But when the frankincense smoke enveloping me like a container slowly started to dissipate, I remembered that change was always possible.
I sipped the tea; the sugar storm clouds were now in my mouth.
I gulped them down. “May you rest in peace. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon,” I said again.
During the two weeks I had remaining on my 2016 trip to Bangladesh, I visited the Shah Jalal Dargah, home of the Hazrat Shah Jalal, a Sufi saint of Bangladesh. Although it isn’t clear, many scholars think Hazrat Shah Jalal was born in Turkey and raised by his maternal uncle in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He knew the Quran by heart and spent years learning Islam and meditating. Ammu, my two paternal Chachis, a few cousins, and I drove for over a day to visit this dargah in Sylhet and pray. Sylhet, from the Arabic term Serhad, meaning central town, is a city in northeast Bangladesh, sitting on the bank of River Surma.
Our journey started in Dhaka. We took the Dhaka-Mymensingh Highway, including Airport Road, to Uttara, a suburban area of Bangladesh bursting with educational institutions, shopping complexes, and a string of homes running through relatively quiet roads. I sat in Choto Chacha’s white BMW, which he drove himself to take us to his home. Choto Chacha was Abbu’s younger brother. We were going to pick up his wife, Choto Chachi, as well as his daughter. Before Uttara, Choto Chacha lived in New York. He had moved back to Dhaka because to him it felt more like home. I recall looking through his car window to see heaps of garbage lining the edges of the road, almost like a fort around the city. The feeling of being startled when I saw the pollution — so stark, so unheeded — never got old.
My hands shook a bit, and I felt a heavy weight, like the anchor of a boat sinking deep into the water below. This thought kept resurfacing on this trip: What have I really done to help the country of my birth? I thought at the time about the climate change issues in the context of Canada and their neglect — both countries, in their own ways, running toward the future without nurturing the conditions that would take them there.
When we arrived in Uttara, though, I discovered how quiet and capacious it was. I likened it to Mississauga or maybe Vaughan, or perhaps another small town or city in Ontario.
Choto Chacha’s flat was spacious. Beside his balcony was a sturdy tree with almost-ripe mangos, which I ogled from afar. Choto Chachi, who was bubbly with beady eyes, followed my line of sight to the tree and then disappeared into another room. When she came back, she had a net attached to a long stick, which she gleefully used, rather patiently, to reach and yank a couple of the mangoes from their source. When she caught one or two, her son and daughter, and Ammu and I, yelled in elation, “Success!” She cut the mangoes up into a few slices and we suckled them as we sat on the balcony. It was a wonderful welcome indeed.
The next evening we set out in a big black van from Uttara to the Shah Jalal in Sylhet. We headed farther and farther northwest. Since we were travelling at night, we saw not much other than the pitch-black night holding us, rocking us gently as the sounds of Hindi melodies reverberated through the van speakers. We sang loudly together, then separately under our breath, the tunes and words adding to our personal inner stories. I slept only for a couple of hours, revelling mostly in this sensation of being somewhere new and seeing some
thing different, being together.
Soon the sun rose, cascading red, orange, and gold hues washing over our van. I looked around at the unbound pastures: small, tall trees of a thousand kinds, and peeking floras embellishing select branches and bushes. I saw also women making their way across the hilly terrain like floating dots, and two men on a tractor steadily driving along the dirt paths.
“We are in Srimangal now,” the driver told us, and it was perhaps the first time I had heard him speak. A few of us first opened our eyes to his shrill voice, and then looked around to see the tea plantation.
“These tea gardens are remnants from the days of the British Raj. They were started by the British. Do you see those white timber bungalows over there? The managers live there,” the driver continued to share.
Soon we touched the tea leaves with our own hands, when we wandered out of the van and onto the dirt-ridden path. We followed this path deeper into the interior of the gardens, until I was immersed in a botanical heaven. Suddenly I remembered what it was like, sitting in the storage closet in my Boro Mama’s home fourteen years ago, just desiring to be shielded by the mountains of suitcases and buried in dust.
Now, I stood between the leaves, breathing in Bangladesh, my feet grounded in soil that seemed safe once more.
Ammu appeared next to me and pulled her arm around my mine.
“How are you?” she asked. “Isn’t this beautiful?”
Later, when we hopped back into our van, we headed to a nearby café for some Sylheti tea. It was a cute little place, with a roof made of straw. Out front was a little stall with savoury and sweet snacks, and inside, just a metre past the entrance, a man with a full head of hair and glossy skin. His head bobbed up and down as he took notes on stained lined paper on the shop’s latest sales. Behind him were stacks of colourful packages which read “Famous Sylheti Seven Layered Tea.” Ammu, my two paternal Chachis, my cousins, and I found ourselves a mid-sized table from which we could see the open parking lot that had in it a couple of scooters, our van, and a motorcycle. We sat there agreeing on the surrealism of the tea gardens.
“This must be why Sylhet is known as the spiritual capital of Bangladesh,” Boro Chachi said. Her slender fingers were covered in jade, and she had shiny cherry-red nails. She smiled often with her eyes, bashfully yet invitingly, and when you looked at her it was as if you were on the Mediterranean Sea, whiffs of sulphur and jasmine combined, a briny sweetness.
We all sat there, sipping the warm black cha that had just been served.
Ammu watched me watch my two Chachis, as they shared stories of their childhood and experiences of similar places they had visited. Ammu pulled up a chair beside me and said, “I’d like to sit beside my own daughter from now on.”
What made Ammu long for the daughter she had almost lost? Over the recent years I had seen this longing grow. It matched my very own longing for a mother I had almost lost. The more I had dug and dug and dug to find the voices of women within myself, the more I started to see behind Ammu’s tough love. Suddenly, my heart just warmed toward her, like years ago when I was a child. After all the coldness, some distance, and my continual discovery of womanhood and how uniquely it was experienced by every woman, I was more able to come closer to Ammu.
I thought about that feeling, of women sitting together like this, having cha while sharing stories. I longed to be surrounded by these women and other women like them in Canada, congregated, banded, undivided by the race of who had the most material goods or status or opportunity or love, or even safety, in a shifting world captured through screens and ordered by stock markets. Undivided by the colour of their skin, how they practised organized religion or dressed, whom they loved. Talking about how to harness their own power, help other women harness theirs, creating a new world order.
And when we finally got to the gates of the Shah Jalal Mazar Sharif, coloured a capri blue and white, I walked toward it slowly, bringing my light-gold orna over my head. As I entered through the arched door, I saw a wide-open space and what seemed to be marble floors. Quickly I removed my sandals from my feet and held them in my hands. First and foremost, we decided we would pray. So I walked alongside Ammu, my two Chachis in front of us. We looked for the sisters’ entrance. We found it soon; it was an adequate space and the women in it — heads draped in hi-jabs, ornas, and abayas — stood in rows, some with hands on their hearts, others flipping through pages of the Quran or making duas. Congregation of women together, meditating.
I sat next to Ammu and I felt her rock me gently from side to side. I joined her. That day we both had the same prayers in her our hearts: May I find peace, and may I find the love for me who is meant to be, safety and protection, and Allah, your guidance forever.
We were near a window with iron bars. On the other side was an empty corridor with seafoam-green walls and what appeared to be cedar floors. The footsteps of the many visitors before who came to decant their souls, soft treading at the base of my ears. Had they found their resolve?
Hazrat Shah Jalal himself held the soil he was given by his uncle in cupped hands, and travelled all over South Asia looking for a similar soil to settle and plant his love for Islam. He had ended up in Sylhet. I pondered then the extent to which human beings go to share their truths.
The treading footsteps called out to me, too, as if to say We have been with you. Suddenly, I felt overwhelming gratitude for the opportunity to have loved at all as well as to have lost. What followed was a thought, a reminder, that parked itself at the forefront of my mind: nothing was ever truly mine to begin with.
“Return us back to a place of peace,” Ammu said.
“Ameen,” I said.
When Ammu and I left the mosque we retrieved our shoes from down the stairs at its entrance. We looked across and ahead together to see the jalali kobutors, the pigeons descended from the pigeons gifted to Hazrat Shah Jalal by the Sufi Nizamuddin Auliya, whose dargah I had once visited in Delhi. These jalali pigeons were in a flock, fluttering their wings in unison, flying up into the air at the same time. Ammu and I had to started to become increasingly in union, not because I was her daughter and she my mother, but because we had started to recognize each other’s souls.
“My daughter,” she said, “that time we were here last, we didn’t know any better. We were just scared.”
I held her hand. Ammu and I would now share with each other everything in our hearts, so that the doors could never close, not even be left ajar.
“I want to see her,” I said. “I want to see the Shayṭān Bride.”
“Who?” asked Sweety Khala. She had one of her legs folded on the wooden base of her sharp boti, the other was outstretched. She was gutting a hilsa, running the boti blade through its middle, the metallic lustre of its scales appearing like diamonds in her hands.
I walked over to the counter and saw a burnt-umber notebook flipped open to a page with a hilsa recipe:
1 ilish (hilsa) fish cut into steaks
½ cup mustard oil
½ cup of mustard seeds (ground into paste)
6 whole green chilies
1 teaspoon red chili pepper
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
4 tablespoons ginger paste
1 large onion diced
salt to taste
“I won’t be needing that,” said Sweety Khala. “But tell me, what were you saying about a woman and a jinni?”
I looked around the room to also see two large red buckets with sizzling warm water. I walked past them to the little balcony, as wide as two human adult bodies. The balcony had a large faucet protruding from a wall in an open space for dishwashing. I looked over the railing to see, a few miles down, the colourful hoods of tents, jam-packed over muddy ground.
“The woman who wouldn’t marry. The one who sat in an unhinged marble state. Remember, she stared at the walls all day. She was numb, pale, and unmoved, often silent.”
Sweety Khala kept her eyes on her fish.
“The woma
n who people said had fallen in love with a jinni. Or had been a victim of sorcery.”
Sweety Khala was now washing her hands in the sink, the hilsa steaks a half to three-fourths of an inch thick. “Her. Yes, she went away.”
“To where?” And now I was on Sweety Khala’s tail.
“Somewhere in North America. She got married and left.”
A thick cloud of malaise suspended in the air, but also joy. I looked at Sweety Khala, who now poured fresh coriander and the juice of lemons from her morning Mohammdpur market run into the thick brown broth in the steel wok. She stirred the concoction with her wooden ladle while I conjured the strength to speak. How was the Shayṭān Bride so close but I did not know? I had wanted so much to have a cup of cha with her. Other than her lover and her marriage, I was curious to know what else made her who she was. There was much else that was just as important, that the people had forgotten to mention. What gifts did she bring into the world? What did she think was her life purpose, really? I wanted to share with her the new books I was reading or films I had watched, the adventures I’d been having, in new cities and close to home, the projects I had started, and the new people I had met. There was a lot to explore. Yet I was also relieved that she was gone. She had found a way, it seemed, to carry on.
“Who did she marry and how?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think she was happy about it. Here, why don’t you taste-test with curry that I made, and then tell me how it is.”
“Tell me the details. I want to know,” I said.
“Once a girl is married, no one really cares. Now, you go and get ready, we have guests coming over today.”
The Shaytan Bride Page 29