by Jacob Ross
Riley and her Mumma turned their backs on Glendon and began walking slowly towards Hunt Road.
Styling-it-out.
HANA RIAZ
A CARTOGRAPHY OF ALL THE NAMES YOU’VE EVER GIVEN ME
1.
when it ached, it ached the wrong way. i did not go home and set myself alight with the burning of your things; i did not misplace my name in another lover’s mouth; i did not let my body hunger into rot; i did not cut off my hair or change my skin; i did not take to drink and let it sink into everything we had; i did not collapse into a pile of bones; i did not say no to love or anything after. i did not.
i just started to lose things. it started with my train pass and then i was late for everything. even my sleep was festering, a cesspool of delayed dark. the summer became just heat and no longer desire. i could not sing any of my favourite songs without words escaping. soon i lose remembering you, how it was to love you, what it was to feel my whole body alive, how i died for you, how i died: the slow letting loose of blood that had nowhere else to go. but with the winter, you never came back.
2.
my brother has the type of light-skin that can almost pass and he spends his life trying to. it starts with a girl. his first lover is strawberry-blonde with all that frail up her skirt and each summer i count how many boys in the class try to hold her tight without breaking her.
it is the august of his thirteenth birthday, baby-blue eyes and a voice that soon echoes our father. she finally notices his height and this, he’s sure, is what will make him into a man.
they use the summer making out where the park is a sea of unruly bushes, until everyone finds out. the first day of school, under the easy september sun that has left his skin a heavy golden, the boys line him up against the back wall of the gym building.
“you fuckin dirty paki, leave our women alone. my dad will make sure you go right back to where you came from if you ain’t fuckin careful.”
the threat swallows him in his sleep.
two weeks later she has a new boyfriend, two inches shorter than him, complexion milk-bottle white, transparent even. he spends the winter scrubbing his skin, praying the melanin out of himself.
3.
i realise i am not good for you.
on mondays you visit with a bottle of wine and an old hema malini film that plays grainy on the television screen. you fall into my lap waiting for me to succumb to the mounds of flesh i often hide beneath whatever oversized things i wear. on tuesdays we take the cab home and you are brave on the back seat, hands in hands.
by wednesday and thursday we are hiding in the dark, the rain taking all signs of laughter out of the sky. you on the kitchen counter watching the neighbours undress the gloom, me in the bathroom staring at my body.
fridays and saturdays are for letting loose, taking the entire week out of ourselves, you and the way you scrunch your face up at me when you ask me to bring you home to my parents’ house and the sigh that settles deep into my guilty chest when i do not. after one too many drinks we ease up, here in soho. i lay claim to all my secrets. i can love you here publicly, openly. i can love you until early sunday morning when you are too tired to fight us anymore and surrender to your own apartment.
4.
there is a point when tired becomes more than just an exhausted body. it becomes the experiences you no longer want to have, the stories you are beyond wanting to make sense of.
my father comes home with a black eye, front tooth missing. his knuckles are swollen and he sits quietly in the chair he has sat in everyday for the last thirty years. ammi brings him a tea towel filled with ice and a cup of chai.
“bas, today is enough,” he says, looking at nobody in particular. “i did not come here to be called paki this, golliwog that. we fought the british… we fought the british and then still left home for this.”
a silence as long and as uncomfortable as this colonial history seeps from the walls of the room. looking at my brother, he continues:
“beta, see these people… you cannot trust them. they cheated us out of our country. see how they keep our crown jewels in that museum. they will say ‘oh i am not racist, see my friend is tariq’, or, ‘look my neighbour is this man from nigeria’. they will all say this until like today one of them beats the jaan out of you and then nobody will say anything, nobody.”
my brother looks up, looks at his hands, looks away, looks everywhere but into the face of the man that his body now replicates – brown dewy skin and all.
5.
and then you, beloved – the first time i saw you was the first time my body unpacked longing, how it rang right through to the core of me. i had always been devoid of desire up until that moment, awkward in my body, awkward about love, awkward about whatever those things meant.
you were standing in the common room, tattoos crawling up your thighs and your laugh was so wild i was afraid the room would catch fire. i couldn’t help but watch you, how your slight fingers would wrap around the coffee cup, those thick braids running down your beautifully brown, brown back.
for weeks i saw you everywhere: in the quietest part of the library stuck into your books, in the smoking area, in the shared bathroom, in my sleep – but it wasn’t until you joined the same class that you pulled up a chair right next to me. it was a gender studies class and you were vocal, ferocious in your challenges. Our white tutor looked overwhelmed, but you were unafraid and called her out knowingly. i came every week eager to hear what i might know from you, things that for once were as dauntingly familiar as my skin.
the class before christmas we were grouped to make a presentation. you asked me to go for coffee so we could work together and we ended up in a little café filled with mismatched antique furniture just behind angel station, where they played charlie parker into the brink of eve. i slowly eased into you and there was a strange shedding about the un-date that it was. my quiet turned into bold confessions, your mind peaked passionately and honestly. here and then and there, i became convinced that you, unlike everyone else, could – for once – hear all of me.
three days later, you grabbed me in a corridor and reached for my hand as you pulled out an orange-covered book from your bag titled Zami.
“… not like these silly white women we discuss in class,” you told me. “i think you’ll like her – a lot.”
6.
everyone thinks it’s a phase until it’s not. the week before ramadan starts, my brother brings home what we discover is now his fiancée. she is not unlike the others that have come over from time to time: tall, skinny; thin lips and a slightly upturned, pointed nose. they are polite but always uncomfortable.
my father as usual is lumped in front of the tv watching the cricket when she walks in. the whole house is filled with the scent of fresh biryani, the typical feast my mum spends hours preparing when guests come over. she forgets to take off her shoes and has already made her way into the kitchen. ammi tries to swallow her irritation and ignore this. the rule every elder and child has abided by for decades has been broken. she refocuses her energy by choking out her best english, a careful and considered pronunciation she is sure is reminiscent of the raj. she avoids turning the ‘w’ into ‘v’.
“wel-come charlotte, it is lovely to finally meeting you.”
“thank you mrs mir,” she pronounces mee-ur. “what a lovely home you have.”
dinner is quiet and cumbersome. my father, indifferent, leaves the spoon and fork laid out for him perfectly unused and takes to his hands. i join in with him, scooping up rice with ease, and although we all notice the ring on charlotte’s finger as she reaches for her first glass of lassi, nobody dares to worsen the discomfort.
halfway through the silence my brother breaks into the announcement we’ve been expecting.
“dad, mum, zara… charlotte and i came over to tell you we are getting married next spring.” he smiles proudly as charlotte attempts to lift her hand to show her ring. she bites into what she doesn’t kn
ow is a clove and her faces scrunches up – half smile, half sour. i smirk into my napkin.
“mubarak ho, mubarak ho beta,” ammi chimes in an attempt to cover up the confusion. “vhen will we getting to meet your family, charlotte?”
my father does not look up, he doesn’t even try to.
7.
i read Zami in a matter of days. impatiently, i fill my notepad with everything that mattered most, quotes that manifest like secrets, and wait out what feels like an endless minefield of weeks between us.
the evening before class you text me a passage from the book:
“i have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mama and father within/into me – to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.”
i respond, “how did you know?”
8.
after our first time making love, an ease descended into the new closeness between us. your dorm room was small. the moon made its way in through the fourth-floor window, spilling itself like exposed flesh.
police cars angrily rushed past at twenty-minute intervals but our calm remained undisturbed.
with your fingertips tracing something on my back, you asked me what made my body an enemy. for a moment i hesitated. this discomfort had consumed my barely adult body as a child and as a “woman”.
there was nothing to say, nothing i was ready to say, nothing i knew how to say yet. my eyes welled up.
“my brother’s marrying a white woman, you know?”
9.
the wedding is not the usual commotion. charlotte insists on wearing a white wedding dress but agrees to the nikkah. there is no bustle of the mehndi night, no preparation for the valima that we would have had to save up for to welcome her into the family. ammi insists on baba and i wearing traditional to showcase who and what we are.
as everyone settles into their pre-set seats, the room becomes a split down the middle. my teenage cousin umar jogs from the stage and falls into his seat.
“her family’s complaining there’s no alcohol apparently…”
“but they got to choose the food! so what are they even complaining about?” his older brother responds whilst picking at the white fish in some kind of cream sauce on his plate.
“it’s not like it’s the first in the family you know? ali got married to an english woman, so did bilal. all multicultural and shit now,” umar laughs.
“you’re a bit quiet, zara?”
“i don’t know… just… you know. it’s weird – all this. he’s not even wearing a shirvani and we do everything their way and they’re still complaining…”
“it’s not so bad, it’s like – whatever! these days. shows you can marry whoever you want now and it don’t matter, none of that arranged marriage bullshit. at least he’s found someone and he’s happy,” umar interrupts.
an aunty, the plump and sweaty kind with lipstick between her teeth, comes and squeezes into the seat next to him.
“this food is bad, so bland. english peoples don’t know about flavour.”
turning to me, looking me over like hammer to nail, she carries on like it is her duty. “beti, you should have lost some weight for the shaadi. these days the boys only like the thin and fair fair girls, you know?”
staring into whatever is left on my plate, i get up to leave. i grab my dupatta and head out for some air.
“can’t you even try to be happy for me even for one day?” my brother takes a long drag of his cigarette and i watch the smoke escape his body slowly.
“whatever. you’ve never needed my approval, as if you need it now…”
“oh fucking grow up, zara, it’s not like i don’t cover up the fact that you’re a bloody dyke! who the hell do you think i did that for? you can’t play the victim all the time!”
“babe, are you okay?” charlotte interrupts. “i was about to send a search party out for you. it’s almost time for our first dance!”
he stubs his cigarette out, the silence broken only by the echo of his footsteps as he follows her back in.
i desperately want to lie down on the concrete and remember a time our names were just a thing we would call after one another across the house or in the playground. over time they become cartographies of everything we do not know how to inhabit.
my wrist sparkles under a streetlamp for a moment and i think only of you:
now tell me, what country can you build out of that?
10.
for two years it was almost perfect. you were a soft lullaby into morning. some days i prayed into the ether, unsure of what it meant to love a thing you could not fully understand, afraid it would leave. but it settled in so many ways and i thought my skin a new familiar under your breath, and it felt good. it felt.
what i liked about it was, there with you, i didn’t have to make sense of myself or my stories in a way that said sorry, i did not have to be forgiven for being myself. you held me and held all of me.
the last time we shared a bed, plates piled with rice and peas, ackee and saltfish and some fried plantain your mama made so good it haunts me, you wondered if this was as good as it could ever get, here in a world created by us, outside of everything.
after you’d long gone, i’d drive past your flat on the nights everything in me begged to come home to you, hoping to catch a glimpse of you on the balcony. the winter let nothing out, though, the curtains holding you in, my windows fogging over when i put them back up. and just as i’d almost given up, spring came and so did your new lover and freshly painted white walls. your balcony was now filled with things in full bloom.
11.
baba believed it to be betrayal and it sure was. my brother in that god-given body was a betrayal to all of us. i mean it started with each and every one of those girls, blonde without an accent, easier to swallow whole. nothing like our mama unfurling her tongue around a third language, nothing like our mama unable to hide what is left of the language you are forced to unlearn out here, nothing like our mama brown and thick-skinned, not like our mama that kept us going, kept us.
perhaps what both my brother and i were looking for was a way out – a way out of the cursed body and i wanted to forgive him. love will either bring you closer to yourself or push you further away – the kind of further away that falls, language-less, abandoning the light. forgiveness is then only ever a choice we make for ourselves when we want to go home, when we have the courage to.
my brother almost passed till the baby came. he descended into some kind of deep sadness the moment he saw that small brown head feeding on his wife’s pallid breast. for months he could not hold him, took to the drink the way he wanted to take to a knife. he was so sure this was meant to be different. all the whiteness he’d try to scoop up and stuff into whatever crevices that filled him all those years, in making love to that woman, was just a deceit he could no longer keep up. so his silence became long weekends, a house of just floors and walls.
that baby was something beautiful though: left out the blue eyes, did away with that blonde, let in the brown (nutmeg shell and all) and heavy-set brows. his skin was a testament to our history, just like my ammi’s accent, thick in the way honey preserves. baby kept the brown, kept the sindhi to show.
we grew afraid sometimes. would the baby follow his father, confuse his shadow for his reflection? still, we knew that you can leave nothing behind for very long till it catches up with you, till you have to accept it as a whole truth, as your own. and isn’t that something, when the melanin loves the man wherever he be?
SENI SENEVIRATNE
HOOVER JUNIOR
Catherine’s eyes flickered open as the drone of her mother’s upright Hoover Junior edged into her dreams. A shaft of sunlight pierced through a gap in the layers of net and floral print at the bedroom window. It was too bright so she turned over and dug herself back into the dim haven of sleep.
The Hoover Junior followed her. Its white metal casing an
d rose-pink dust bag loomed large and multiplied. She was surrounded by an army of them. Their flexes coiled together, their dust-bags swaying, they advanced in time to a threatening chant: “Hoover beats, as it sweeps, as it cleans.”
She crouched in a pile of dust, hoping it would hurt less when she was sucked up. The pink circles of the Hoover logos were like open mouths descending on her.
“Catherine… Catherine… are you up yet?”
Her mother’s shrill voice pulled her up, onto a ledge of semi-sleep. Catherine clung on there for a while, trying to gather some energy. Eyes still closed, her limbs began to drift back over the precipice and she stretched to save herself. Her bare skin cringed as it rubbed against the brushed nylon sheets. Her mind snatched bits of information from the room. Net curtains. Nylon sheets. Single bed. She was back home.
She heard the Hoover start up again. Its relentless motor made her stomach churn. She sat up and threw her pillow across the room, “That fuckin’ machine. Her damn useless cleaning rituals! Vile sheets! How did I ever cope?”
She looked around the tiny bedroom still steeped in her childhood. Dog-eared Beatles pin-ups mingled with framed school photos. They were almost lost in the gaudy wilderness of brown tulip wallpaper embossed on a background of clotted cream. Less than a child’s stride away, covered in matching counterpane, was another single bed. She knew the gap was this narrow because she used to dive across it in the middle of the night, looking for the comfort of her sister’s warm body.
It would be more bearable if Teresa were still at home. Teresa had been her anchor. Teresa always knew exactly what she wanted and steeled herself to get it no matter what the consequences.
“Born to be a lady, that one,” their mother would say, trying to hook Catherine onto her side in one of her many arguments with Teresa. “She’ll never lift a finger. Not like you, Catherine, you’re my right hand. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”