“Amma! What?”
She slapped him again, so hard that it echoed around the kitchen. “You think your mother is so, so stupid? That I can carry you in my womb for ten months, ten months, and not know what you are thinking, what you are doing, every minute of your life?”
“But what did I—”
His head jarred with the force of another slap, this time on the right side. He felt his eyes begin to water. Her nail-tips had caught on the edge of his ear: Jesus Christ that hurt. He should have known not to interrupt.
“You think, after I gave birth to you, almost dying with the agony, you can stab me in the heart like this?”
He kept his eyes on the scrubbed pine of the kitchen table, resisting the urge to put a protective hand over his ear. Mum sure hadn’t lost her touch. And she’d been wearing her rings too. His right ear and the back of his head burnt and prickled. He had a vivid mental picture of a few strips of his skin sitting curled around the raised stones of the eternity ring Dad had bought her when he’d seen Mrs. Darby’s.
“You think you are so modern, with your dirty habits? You think I know nothing of what used to happen between the men, out in the fields in my village? You, you Anglo-Desi to think that all such things are only invented by you!”
Jesus Christ. Had she seen him with Denny? His stomach dropped.
She started to cry, big gulping sobs, but when he turned his head toward her, she screamed something unintelligible and reached out to slap him again. He fell onto his knees and tried to touch her feet, but she backed away.
“I’m sorry, Amma. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
She bent to push his shoulder, hard, as if he repulsed her. He felt his face twisting into a grimace, like a child with a skinned knee, his eyes welling up. Anything but this. Not Mum. She walked to the kitchen window, then turned back. He sat on the linoleum, his tears falling now, and stared at the red hem of her sari, at her feet in worn leather sandals, too far away to reach.
“Please forgive me, Amma. Please. I can’t bear this.” His throat felt like it was closing up, and he choked out the last words. “You know I’m nothing without family.”
“Your father, your poor father . . .” Mum took a deep gulping breath, blew it all out and spoke in a tone that was lower but still dripped with anger. “You know nothing of married life, what it is to see all sides of a person. That person is you, their faults are your faults. His sorrows, his pain, are mine also. I know him like I know myself. I know him in all his ways.”
She lifted her sari hem to her eyes and wiped them hard. “Your father, you have broken his heart.”
It was so quiet in the kitchen now. Tariq could hear the kitchen clock’s regular tick, and beneath that the dull accelerating beat of his own heart.
“Your father, you do not understand . . . He came home from the university yesterday. They took his job, you know.”
“What?”
“They will pay him still, but that is not . . .” She picked up a large saucepan from the draining board, and Tariq flinched. “He did not even eat his lunch, all his food that I had ready. All this time, when you are out so much, always with your friend, he is needing to be with his son, to talk with him. But, no, you have more important things to do. So now, this morning, he goes through the Park to give Munni her tiffin, as his son is out, again.” She walked to the counter, banged the saucepan into the sink as if she were hammering a nail, and turned on the tap. “He sees you.” The water roared in, splashing the floor. “He finds you . . . with that boy.”
Tariq rocked forward and bowed his head to the linoleum. “Oh god.”
“He came back, he could not talk, not at first. He could not even eat his food. He said, ‘I have nothing now, nothing.’” She gave a series of hiccupping sobs and started to swirl the rice in the saucepan, around and around.
He slowly got to his feet and backed away from her toward the table, feeling old and tired. “Where’s Abba now?”
“And Richard Bourne came to dinner last night, while you were in visiting Oxford. For Munni. I am the only one trying to fix this family—I am the only one. You, bloody idiot, you just break it more.”
He reached for a chair and sat down at the kitchen table, put his head in his hands. He had ruined everything. He should have just stayed on in South Africa, accepted his exile.
Dad’s cup of tea was sitting on the table in front of him. Mum must have made it just before Tariq came back, not put the milk in yet. He pulled it closer and wrapped his hands around its warmth, the way his father would have done. Mum was still at the counter, half turned away, peeling a clove of garlic with her thumbnails. All the comfortable kitchen sounds were there: the hiss of the gas flame under the rice, the fizz and plop of boiling water, the rustle of Mum’s sari as she shuffled between sink and stove. Only he was different. Everything had fallen apart, not because he was absent, but because he was here. Here and being himself.
He wished that he was seven again and his biggest worries were the kids at school, or homework neglected. That he could bury his face in Mum’s sari, or cuddle up next to Dad on the couch. How had things gotten to this, despite all his efforts to plan and control things? What did that say about his fate, the trajectory of his own life?
He looked down into the cup. Some fine golden specks rested on top of the tea: pollen from the jar of flowers in the middle of the table. He brought his head closer. Although the tea had settled, the fine golden specks continued to move: a quivering, seemingly random dance across the liquid’s surface. Brownian motion, he remembered it from school. The pollen’s movement was the result of the accumulation of multiple blows from forces too minute to detect, from objects too microscopic to see.
He’d been so careful, until today, only seeing Denny at night or when his parents were busy. Tariq considered the accumulated effect of all the different forces that had led him to the Park, then the river, then Denny. Of being seen at that particular moment, and by his father. Yet that dirty episode last Sunday with a drunken gora wife, only meters away from her husband, his parents and a whole roomful of people, had been suspected by no one, spawned no consequences for anyone concerned.
“Amma . . .”
Her wooden spoon smacked down on the table next to his hand, sprinkling rice water onto the tabletop. He jumped and almost spilt the tea.
“Don’t you think that this stops you from being part of this family, of being a man for this family, for your sisters!” She hissed into his sore ear, her betel-breath hot on his skin. “You will marry. You will marry a good girl, if it kills me. If it kills you. If you do not, you are no son of mine.”
He clutched his cup and stared into its depths. What she wanted was action, not remorse. Mum moved away, and he could hear the rice being stirred vigorously. Even now that they all knew, there was no escape.
“Where’s Abba?” He had spoken more loudly than he intended, the sudden clarity of his next step lending strength to his voice.
She stopped stirring, and he realized that she had been expecting him to beg her for more time, or to intercede for him. The realization made him repeat his question.
“Sitting room,” she said eventually, then held up her hand, her voice almost soft. “Wait. I will make more tea.”
She whisked about and presented him with a small silver tray holding a cup of fresh tea and a roll of paan. He took the tray, and she held the kitchen door open for him to walk through, but he did not hear it close behind him. Of course: Mum would be down the corridor to listen as soon as he was in the sitting room.
When he entered, he could see the top of Dad’s head in the wing-back chair that had been swivelled to face the view of the Abbey. He advanced cautiously, put the tray down on the ottoman and went to shut the door. He thought he heard a small, stifled gasp of annoyance from the hallway as he closed it, but could not be sure.
“Abba.” He wal
ked to his father’s chair, knelt and embraced his ankles, putting his head on his father’s feet.
His father said, did, nothing.
“Please forgive me.” He kept his head down, felt his father try to pull his feet away, and held on more firmly. “Please, Abba. Please.”
There was a silence that stretched on for some time. His father hurrumphed.
“Please, Abba, I know I was wrong. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
Dad cleared his throat again, blew his nose. He spoke quickly, as if rushing through a prepared speech. “You have cast great shame on this family, great shame: you, the eldest son, the protector of your sisters. And caused great shock and sorrow to your mother. Your devoted mother.”
“Please, Abba. Forgive me. I know I am not worthy, as your son, but please . . .” He held on desperately to his father’s feet. Tears rose, his voice cracked, but no more words came out.
After some minutes his father spoke. “We are men, made in Allah’s image, made to . . . to procreate, to take a wife . . . We have duties . . . so that we are cared for in our turn . . .” His voice faded to nothing, and he stared out the window again.
Tariq felt adrift. Where was the shouting and beating? Had what Dad saw earlier broken him, on top of what had happened at Oxford? Had he done that to his own father? He sounded so distressed and confused, so lacking in anger. Or direction. Tariq couldn’t bear the silence, the sense of multiple sorrows. He opened his mouth to beg for forgiveness again, say something to bring on the necessary beating.
But his father forestalled him with a hand raised, palm upward. “To be a man . . .” he began, but stopped on a slight quaver. “When I was younger than you, I came here, to this country. I was on my own. I knew no one. There was no community in those days. You know the Rhodes then: no one could be married. I had to live in single-men’s digs. No one visited me.”
His father tucked in his outstretched feet and picked up a silver-framed photo from the side table. Tariq recognized it. It held an old black-and-white photograph of Dad in his then brand-new doctoral robes, arm-in-arm with Clyde Royston, his doctoral supervisor, taken outside the Sheldonian Theatre. It usually sat in pride of place in Dad’s study. In the photo, the two men were laughing, heads tilted back, eyes half shut against the sunshine. Clyde had a bottle of champagne tucked under one arm.
“I had no friends. For days I would speak to no one. Your mother did not join me for almost six months. Clyde was like a brother to me, when I had no one else.” He rested the photo face-down on his chest and sighed deeply. Then he seemed to recollect himself and jabbed his finger at Tariq.
“You were never so alone, never so lonely. You have no such excuse.”
Tariq stared at his father, wondering when the world had been turned on its head.
“Marriage is a duty, my son. The Qur’an makes that clear. I, er . . . When you are away from home, many things are different. Islam is a compassionate faith, hence the doctrine of necessity. Now, but now, you must do as we all must do.”
Tariq swallowed, tried in his surprise to halt himself, but the words and the tears came out in a flood, a rush of feeling and truth as he bent to touch his right cheek to his father’s slipper. “I can’t, Abba, I just can’t. I thought for a long time that I could—it’s why I came home—but please forgive me, I can’t. I’ll never leave you again, I’ll be a good son to you, I’ll do anything you ask, but please don’t ask that of me. Please, I beg you, I can’t.”
He looked up to see his father staring at him, right hand splayed over the picture’s back as it lay across his heart, and there was nothing but truth in both their gazes.
With a rattle of the door handle, Mum swept into the room and fetched up against the ottoman. She stretched her right arm toward her husband and spoke in a strangled voice, part rage, part desperation. “Make him, make him. You must make him.”
She stepped backward then, as if suddenly horrified by her own temerity.
Keeping a protective hand over the photo, Dad cleared his throat again, in an extended kind of way. “This catarrh, so troublesome. Always when I least expect it.”
“As I am the mother of your children, he must, he must be made to.”
His father gave an excellent imitation of puzzlement, with a slightly defensive edge. “What, what?”
“Your son. He must marry. I have the ceevees. If he does not, he is no longer my son, I am no longer his . . .”
Dad’s hand rose up, and Mum stopped with a kind of gasp. Tariq realized that he had been holding his breath and tried to exhale in complete silence. Dad, very deliberately, brought the photo frame to arm’s length, looked at it, and placed it onto the occasional table so that it faced out to them all.
The silence continued. Mum did not move a muscle.
“So, you say he must marry?” his father said musingly, as if this was an interesting academic point raised by an undergraduate. “Or, if not, he must leave your home?”
Tariq had a sudden sense of how his father’s tutorials must have been conducted, with the leisurely teasing out of arguments and drawing together of threads of reasoning. Plenty of pauses for thinking time. How pleasant to have been in one of his classes. Not that he’d ever wanted to back then.
Dad steepled his fingers and looked pensively at them. No one spoke. Tariq considered breathing, but it seemed like bad luck. Not that there could be anything but one outcome to such a conversation. Asian men married, or they were not men. Asian men married, otherwise their families could not advance in the community, their future was not secure. Everyone had to marry.
His father spoke at last. “Well, that then is a sad conundrum; a number-one Gordian knot that cannot be untied. For you see, Mrs. Begum, whichever way he turns, the boy stands to lose one of his parents forever.”
Dad stared at her with such directness that she dropped her eyes and pulled her pallu across the top of her head, as if meeting him for the first time.
“For I say to you, wife and mother of my children, that if the boy does marry, then he will no longer be my son.” He gave a little dry cough, the lecturer’s modest epilogue to an outrageous, revolutionary analysis, and Tariq half expected him to say quod erat demonstrandum. Perhaps he had, for Tariq could not quite believe his ears. He looked at his parents for guidance, but their faces were blank, neutral, as if they were now dealing with a situation, with emotions, that had no precedent.
Then his mother raised her head and, almost as soon as she had, she was a whirling dervish of rage and scorn. No man, no head of a family would behave this way, no son would be so ungrateful. No one knew what she went through. This family was a sinking boat, and she was the only one trying to save it. How could they behave as they had? But at the same time, she seemed to know that she had already lost, and why. Something had wakened between her husband and her son that had not been there before, and she knew she could not win against this new alliance.
She disappeared out the sitting-room door. Perfect quiet reigned, although Tariq was still having trouble with his breathing. What force had accomplished this impossible thing, that his parents now knew his true self? That he was not doomed to fight a losing battle against wife and children and be trapped forever?
“Abba?” Tariq whispered, still kneeling.
“Hmm?”
“I was thinking of going to mosque today, in Swindon. For Jumma, Friday prayers.”
Dad gave no sign of hearing him. Pots banged in the kitchen, louder than usual, and he wondered if he could smell burning, or whether that was his imagination.
His father spoke as if to himself. “Hmm . . . perhaps it would be politic to be in absentia for a while.” He stood, glanced in the mantel mirror, smoothed his hair, and only then seemed to notice that Tariq was still on the floor. “Get up, get up. Perhaps we will eat in Swindon as well. Make a day of it, as it were.”
—
The head imam came to him afterward, wreathed in smiles, and grasped his hand and elbow in greeting, clearly grateful that, after the unfortunate radical connections of recent years, this mosque was again to be patronized by the community’s intellectual elite, its forces for moderation. Dr. Choudhury gave a dignified nod and introduced his son and graciously acknowledged the imam’s admiration (partly concealed but obvious enough) of such a fine young man, and an Oxford graduate too. So wonderful to have your son back now. For good? Of course, of course.
A late lunch in one of Swindon’s finer Bangladeshi establishments, with a son as tall and good-looking as Tariq, was similarly punctuated by the smiles and greetings and respectful questions of other members of the community. Dr. Choudhury’s son has come home. A good boy, going to Jumma with his father. What a distinguished pair. He knew how these people thought.
After lunch, they strolled down Cricklade Street to ponder an interesting renovation being carried out on the Gilbert Scott–designed Christ Church, then drifted toward the shops. Dr. Choudhury could not remember a more pleasant afternoon. The slight excess of emotion that he intermittently detected in his son, he put down to similar feelings. What a relief it was to speak what was in one’s heart, however obliquely. And that meal had been excellent. He could not recall Tariq wanting to spend so much time with him since he was a teenager.
Relief and pain were enthroned together in his heart. What Clyde had meant, still meant, to him, he had never thought he would be able to say to anyone. And now he saw that same secret pain in his son.
He gave a contented sigh. “To think that I am now a man without a profession. Life is full of surprises.” He snuck a glance at his son’s face and was pleased to see his remorse.
A Matter of Marriage Page 32