Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  When Naseer got to the door the house was dark, yet he could see the TV’s staccato flicker in the living room through the opaque windowpane. At his knock the TV was switched off. Khaleel took his time to answer the door.

  “Oh! It’s you. I thought it was Baba come back from Madras early,” Khaleel said, wiping his palm down the front of his shirt.

  Khaleel’s father had a twenty-year-old property dispute that came up for a hearing every few years and took him away from home. The old man’s tenacity had become a joke in the family.

  “I rented a VCR for the day—thought I’d watch some films. You know how Baba is so strict and all, not allowing us to do anything.” Khaleel moved aside to let Naseer in.

  “All the women kissing men in broad daylight in front of the children, this TV sheevee will destroy the country yet . . .” Naseer mimicked his uncle’s disgruntled old man’s voice.

  Khaleel didn’t laugh as he usually did.

  Looking at his cousin now, Naseer thought, as he had many times before, how strange it was that all the men in his family were short and wiry and bearded.

  “So what’re you watching? Anything with Amitabh in it?” Naseer loved the actor. When Sholay had been released, he had seen it five times.

  “No,” Khaleel said. “Come on in and see for yourself.”

  When Khaleel switched on the VCR, there were two foreigners on the screen—a woman and a man. The man lay on the bed and the woman knelt between his legs. White skin, golden hair, smooth nakedness. She bent down. Then she opened her mouth over him. After one frozen minute of incredulity, everything inside Naseer contracted. He put his hands over his stomach as if to contain the faint tremors he felt starting. He watched the woman, her movements sometimes languid, sometimes frenzied, her cheeks working. It was unbelievable that any woman would admit a man inside her face, to touch her tongue and her teeth and the inside of her cheeks. The two of them seemed bound together in some extreme ecstasy, the man watching the woman looking at him. They took a long time to finish. Watching the man as he arched on the bed, Naseer felt as if he was about to lose control and slide off the chair trembling and moaning—right there in Khaleel’s mother’s living room with its bright blue carpet and showcase filled with the ceramic dogs her daughter had sent from Dubai.

  Naseer got up abruptly and mumbled something to Khaleel about coming back another time. Moving toward the door, Naseer saw himself reflected indistinctly on the TV screen, his shadowy form moving closer as he neared the set. Khaleel barely acknowledged his departure, and his eyes, glittering in the blue light, remained riveted on the screen.

  Outside, Naseer leaned against the wall and breathed deeply. He could feel the rough stubble of its surface pressing against his shoulder blades and back through the thin muslin of his kurta. The wall was uncomfortably warm.

  He couldn’t bring himself to walk just yet, not with this hot weight in him, as if everything inside had descended to settle around his lower stomach and thighs. It was almost pain but not quite, he thought, shocked at the great scrabbling need that stretched down his middle. There had been a time when he was twenty-three and just married to Rasheeda when he could go four times a night. The greediness of a recent virgin—that’s what it had been. The need had been a constant unfulfilled thrum in him. Now here it was again, as if someone had plucked hard at a taut string that ran from his head down to his toes.

  When he finally pushed himself away from the wall and started walking home, he felt grateful that the old men on the stoops had gone inside to their dinners. He had heard the boys who hung around the college cafeteria snicker about things like this a long time ago, but it had always remained some mythic thing that occurred elsewhere, not in a home, not on an ordinary bed.

  Back at home he found Rasheeda in the bedroom getting fresh nappies for the baby.

  “Oof, oh! Husband! Stop it! Everybody’s waiting for their dinner downstairs and you’re doing nonsense things,” she laughed, brushing him aside, a little surprised at his sudden ardor. Then she hurried away, the cloth triangles swinging from her hands.

  He stood in the middle of the bedroom, reluctant to go down and face the clattering crockery and noisy children in the dining room. What if he rented a VCR and the film himself and got Rasheeda to watch it with him? No. It was impossible—the only TV they owned was in the living room and his mother watched Understanding the Koran on it in the afternoons, her silver head nodding sleepily, her fingers slipping now and then off her prayer beads.

  At dinner Rasheeda caught him looking at her as she returned from the kitchen with a refill of the kababs and smiled absently in his direction. The oil from the biryani had left her lips slick and shiny. The older children, who had been fed earlier and sent into the living room, fought for control over the TV. Today was Wednesday and that meant Baywatch. Naseer knew his brothers would join the kids to watch the serial after dinner.

  “Bhai-jaan must have snacked at Khaleel’s—he’s hardly eating anything at all,” Nusrat announced archly. Everyone turned to look at Naseer and he had to nod yes and scramble to name a snack. He got up hurriedly from the table. Farhana stumbled up behind him and stood clutching desperately at his legs for an instant before plopping down onto her behind. She drew breath to wail. He picked her up and went into the living room to order his sons up to bed—he didn’t want them watching half-naked women cavort on the beach.

  The children bribed and nagged into going to bed and alone with his wife at last, Naseer could feel Rasheeda’s pleased astonishment at his impatience.

  “Wait, wait, let me turn off the light,” she said, reaching for the lamp.

  “No. Wait,” he said. He put his hands on her hips and pulled her down with him on their bed. Then he pushed himself away from her and took a deep breath. “I saw this video at Khaleel’s,” he began and stopped. He wanted to say the words carefully, lucidly, even though whole sentences and phrases had jostled in his head all through dinner and the interminable conversation with his brothers afterward. “It was foreign and they were, you know, doing it.” He felt embarrassed but determined. This had to be said.

  “Allah! Cheee! Toba toba, so this is what you were doing,” Rasheeda looked at him, her mouth contracting in disgust.

  “Listen, I have never seen anything like this . . .” He pressed on. He told her about the video, about the woman and what she had done for the man. Just saying the words excited him. He felt relieved. Now she knew too. The knowledge of this disturbing, fascinating new thing was no longer in his head alone.

  Rasheeda moved away and watched him gravely, warily, as he struggled on, trying to explain the moment, the things he’d felt.

  In the end, his telling ragged at the edges, he blurted out what he wanted. He knew, even as he stumbled over the words “me” and “mouth,” that they came out all wrong, as if they were not meant to be said aloud between them there in their bedroom of fifteen years.

  Rasheeda’s face contorted in shock and she jumped off the bed as if the sheets were on fire. After a first strangled sound of surprise she stood silent.

  “No.” She said it quietly. Just that one word, thrown down firmly in front of him without any explanation attached. “No,” she said again as she lay down heavily and turned her back to him, her nightdress rustling in the dark. Then, after a long silence in which he willed himself to calmness and was about to fall asleep—“Never.”

  From then on it had been the same story—every night a repetition of tonight. Her “no” was all-encompassing, leaving him without space to maneuver or argue. All she gave him was that word, and it stood steadfast against all his attempts to wear it down, as unassailable as a mountain made of glass.

  Yet every day in his head the blonde woman’s mouth stretched itself wide and pink over him and would not let him rest.

  Sitting behind his counter in the hardware store, Naseer looked at the men who came in asking for hinges and light fixtures and wondered if he was the only man in the world who had spen
t all these years so pathetically ignorant of this pleasure. Surely all sophisticated men enjoyed it. It was his father’s fault for forcing him to marry at twenty-three.

  Naseer had wanted other things. Nodding over his college books through the long, humid nights, he had imagined himself, standing bareheaded under a pitiless blue sky, building the dam that would put sweet water in the earthen pots of the villagers and green their fields. Just like Dílíp Kumar in the movie Naya Daur. But he was the eldest son, ordained to carry on the family business, and Naseer couldn’t bring himself to break his father’s heart. So, instead of Naseer, his brothers had become engineers. They were the ones who sat in high ceilinged government offices, dusty with stacks of forgotten files, and approved plans to build other buildings exactly like the ones they worked in. Now, with his father gone, they accorded him the respect they would have given his father. It made him more distant than ever from them.

  Naseer told himself he was deeply unhappy. The craving wouldn’t let him be and he felt betrayed by this discontent. He had struggled to be pleased with his lot over the years. Even when he was forced to take on the business, he had taught himself to find satisfaction in the idea of some unknown house, somewhere in the city, growing older, held together by his hinges and latches and nails, the doorknobs pushed open day after day by children and the children’s children, the curtains pulled back on his curtain rings. There was a kind of immortality in it. Now Rasheeda had spoiled it all. Why couldn’t she behave as wives should?

  Rasheeda started sending his breakfast out of the kitchen with Aliyeh, the youngest sister-in-law, who kept her sari-covered head bowed respectfully as she quickly set his omelet down on the table, poured his tea, and scuttled back into the kitchen. As if he was a guest who had overstayed his welcome, thought Naseer.

  Ever since his mother had ceremoniously handed over the keys to her after Siddiq was born, Rasheeda had run the household. She had slid expertly into the role of matriarch, although she’d been barely thirty-one, as if she had practiced running a household of seven adults, five children, and three maids secretly over the years.

  Nowadays, as she walked past him pretending to be busy with the children, he resented that she could always find things to do in the confused bustle of communal living. With his brothers, their wives, or the children always around, he could never get her alone. At night, he was usually asleep by the time she finished ironing school uniforms or discussing tomorrow’s menu or whatever it was she did down there to delay coming upstairs.

  Some nights he stayed awake, fighting sleep. But the more he tried to persuade her, the more adamantly she condemned this ungodly practice, vociferously calling upon Allah to intervene. Naseer couldn’t stop asking either, couldn’t just let it be. It’s like an unending game, he thought. Only whatever move he made Rasheeda was already there, anticipating him, ready with her defense.

  At mealtimes, Naseer imagined he could feel the eyes of the other women on him. Could Rasheeda have dared tell them about what was going on between them? She wouldn’t, would she? Violate the quiet yellow warmth of their bed, throw it open for all to peer and comment? His thoughts brought on a great, bursting pressure in his chest.

  Yet in the evenings he couldn’t wait to get back home. It was a relief just to have Rasheeda somewhere nearby where he could at least watch her face. And her mouth.

  When his parents had found him Rasheeda, he had said yes without a demur. It was his mother who had asked the marriage broker, “Do we really want such a highly educated daughter-in-law?” She had been uneasy with the fact that Rasheeda had passed high school. But his father had surprised him by insisting on the match.

  Naseer saw Rasheeda on the evening of their wedding only after the Kazi, his interminable mumbling incantations finally done, decreed he could see the bride.

  He had gone into the zenana, the women’s hall, where she sat surrounded by her relatives and friends, the women whispering and shimmering around him in their yellow and green silks. One of Rasheeda’s oldest aunts held a long-handled mirror under her bowed head, carefully angling it inside her dupatta so that he would see only her face and nothing else. He never forgot that first glimpse of her face framed by the veil, the mirror filled suddenly with large sloping eyes and pale pink mouth. Clumsy as he bent over to peer at the mirror, he had stepped on her skirt, and she had put her hand out quickly to tug the material away. Her hand had lain there for an instant, white and forlorn, before it retreated under her heavy, embroidered shawl. A faint, damp mark was left behind on the rose silk where she had touched it, and he was overwhelmed by a sudden compassion. He had wanted to tell her then not to worry—everything would be all right.

  Sometime during the all-important first night, Naseer asked her to stand next to him and was surprised to discover that he was only half an inch taller than she was. In spite of her nervousness, she had laughed. The rest had come slowly, in awkward fits and starts. He was gentle with her and she patient with him. Just as he mapped her body, he cataloged her peculiarities—the faint, fair down on her legs, the way her arm pressed the pillow to her face in the morning, shutting out the day for a few minutes more.

  Then the children arrived. First Adnan, then Siddiq, and the last one, Farhana, a wriggling, big-bottomed baby girl. Over the years they fit into each other. Now when he reached for her at night it was like driving down the road to the store. He knew when to take the curve, which pothole to avoid, and where to stop. He hadn’t wanted much more. Until the woman in the video opened her glistening mouth.

  It was the twelfth of June and Rasheeda’s birthday. It was time they solved this impasse, he decided. He called in the afternoon and told her he had tickets to the latest Aamir Khan movie.

  “How many?” she asked, her voice unsmiling on the telephone.

  “Just you and me,” he said firmly. On the rare occasions they went out to the movies or a restaurant, all the brothers and their wives would go together, piling into the old green van, everyone teasing Aliyeh, the youngest sister-in-law, forcing her onto her husband’s lap.

  When he went home to pick Rasheeda up, there were giggles from the kitchen. She sat quietly by him until he finished his tea and samosas. A woman’s love can be measured by how many samosas she urges you to eat, he thought. She did not force any upon him this time.

  “Good samosas. Okay. Let’s go, the movie begins at six thirty,” he said, all bluff and hearty, hoping she would play along, at least in front of the sisters-in-law, who looked over at them from time to time.

  “Why this sudden good mood? This movie and everything?” Rasheeda didn’t smile back.

  She must know that he was trying to get back to where they were, before she’d stopped talking to him, he thought.

  “Well, it is your birthday, isn’t it?” he said. He had bought her a present but didn’t want to give it to her in front of the other women. Nusrat would have had something catty to say for sure.

  Rasheeda didn’t answer, but she didn’t argue either, just got dressed quickly and walked out with him, flinging a stream of instructions over her shoulder on what to give each of the children for dinner. On her silk sari, flowers spread over her breasts like purple hands.

  The entire family came out, crowding around the gate to see them off. Farhana began to cry.

  “Enjoy yourselves,” Nusrat smirked. Aliyeh bent down and smoothed Rasheeda’s sari over her calves one final time.

  “It’s not as if we’re going away for three years, is it?” Naseer grumbled.

  “Shh, it’s okay. We don’t go out alone together every night,” Rasheeda said.

  Back from the movie, Naseer stood in front of the mirror in their bedroom and drew Rasheeda to him.

  “We still look nice, don’t we?” he said. In her high heels, she was slightly taller than he was.

  “I like your shorter beard,” she said, so he rubbed it against her cheek. His hands stroked her wide hips and pulled her against him.

  “I must do somethin
g about my weight,” Rasheeda said, but he shook his head.

  “Imagine if you were thin and bony like that heroine in the movie. I like large portions.” He slipped his hands under her breasts and hefted them in the mirror. Rasheeda’s hands came up to pull his away, but she was laughing, her face soft and forgiving.

  Later, Naseer did all the things she liked: rubbing her back in widening circles, dragging his thumb slowly across her armpit. He took his time, teasing her, starting her up and slowing her down and starting her up again, until she was desperate and insistent against his palm.

  Naseer lay awake for two hours after Rasheeda fell asleep. He felt hollow and dissatisfied. The lovemaking between them had been decent. But he couldn’t help wondering how much better it might have been if she had lowered her mouth to him, taken him slowly into her mouth. He hadn’t brought it up this time because he was afraid she’d stop talking to him again.

  Next to him Rasheeda shifted onto her back. A few minutes later she started snoring softly. Naseer smiled. She was always indignant when he told her she snored, as if it were somehow his fault for even bringing it up. He put his hand on her shoulder. A push onto her side always made her stop. Not that she’d know or wake up. His mother liked to say that Rasheeda could sleep through an earthquake. Yet when Farhana was younger, she’d scramble up even when the baby just burped in her sleep. It was amazing how women could switch themselves off and on like that.

  Rasheeda smacked loudly in her sleep and her mouth fell open. Watching her, Naseer felt himself become hard even before the thought was fully formed in his head.

  He slid off the bed, his heart pounding. He walked around to Rasheeda’s side, fumbling with the string of his pyjamas. Her mouth was slack and agape and she did not wake up even when he knelt awkwardly with his knees next to her face. He leaned far over her head and tried to direct his cock safely inside her mouth. His knees were trembling so hard that he had to grip the headboard with his other hand—even then he slid off the edge of the bed a few times. Then he was in. Was he touching the roof of her mouth?