When I walked back, my throat felt like it had a rope tied around it. The old Italian had limped out into the back alley and was looking at the ring of blood on the cement. The horrible feeling in my stomach felt like vomit. He looked at me, and the concern left his face. It became filled with the look I saw from all the other Italians. A look of hate.
Then I knew they were right. We were bad. We were as dirty as all the old Italians said. We didn’t know how to take care of life. We didn’t know how to grow anything, and when we touched the world it died.
VARIATIONS: A STORY IN VOICES
Hima Raza
Hima F. Raza (1975–2003) was a poet, critic, and academic. She was born and brought up in Lahore and graduated from Kinnaird College, Lahore. Abroad she earned degrees from The University of New South Wales, Australia, and the University of Sussex, UK. Raza taught English literature and creative writing at universities in Lahore and London. She published two collections of experimental poetry: Memory Stains (Minerva, 2000) and Left-Hand-Speak (Alhamra, 2002). The latter forged new directions in Pakistani English literature with the bilingual poems “Us in Two Tones” and “In Translation,” which employ both English and Urdu as integral parts of the text. In 2003, she was killed in a car accident in London.
“Variations: A Story in Voices” is one of Raza’s few short stories and develops the themes of duality, distances, and thwarted love, which run through her poetry collections. The use of three voices, as well as poetry and prose, accentuate the sense of a collage, built layer by layer. Raza’s portrayal of unrequited love is intertwined with themes of exile and the idea of occupying “the spaces in-between”: Even the jamun berries that she refers to have an indeterminate taste—neither sweet, salty, bitter, nor sour. She knits together Britain and Pakistan with ease, while acknowledging the ambiguities of identity. One character’s muddled liberalism provides a humorous sidelight to the often painful dilemmas of Raza’s immigrant characters.
• • •
VOICE I: SUSCEPTIBLE
THE FARAWAY FACTOR
A friend who lives far away from Lahore’s brief winter calls me out of the blue to talk about homesickness. He does not miss that city of smog and choking sunsets per se; only the four walls that mark the compound of his parents’ house. I am intrigued by this nostalgia and ask him to divulge more. The list is something like this. The sound of his two-year-old German Shepherd’s scratching at the verandah door, the purple aftertaste of jamuns, the smell of August rain, his mother’s voice. I point out that at least half his list is made up of generic items—the monsoon spreads its wings over most of the country and jamuns are not confined to his address—but he remains unimpressed, resolutely wistful. I ask whether he knows the English name for jamuns, oval shaped berries usually consumed with salt, which makes the insides of the mouth pucker and the salivary glands work overtime. He doesn’t think there is an English translation for this fruit or the experience of eating it. We both agree it’s better this way.
That night I repeat the conversation in my head and keep stumbling over the word “home” in two languages. Something broken, unhappy, to be kicked in the teeth and run away from, to miss from a distance, to dream about in black ’n’ white. I cannot bring myself to image it any other way. At least not yet. Home wavers between silence and schizophrenia, holding back, biting tongues, locked doors, and the season of sad questions. I am a stranger here, a tentative observer of the stories that seep out from the edges of this frayed metropolis.
You shared a wise insight with me one night—“Never date someone who lives more than five miles away from you.” The simple assurance of knowing that your lover’s touch and smell is a short drive away is enough to keep you there, sometimes long after “the thrill is gone.”
I watch you woo them, win them, and worship them. I watch the tables turn and see you left behind, licking your wounds while they mysteriously fall out of love, follow the urge to try other flavors, and transfer you into the new best friend. It would be nice if I could simply fall out of love with you.
Over the years I have cherished quite a few. Wrong ones, weak ones, well-intentioned but confused ones, and every time I’ve had to negotiate a man, he came with the distance tag attached. In fact the only instance when boy and girl lived in the same vicinity was at age seventeen. He was my first and least complicated love. I was bored senseless in six months.
I seek out these specimens. The ones who live at least an ocean away, the ones you can miss so beautifully without ever having to really know them. The ones who allow you to fantasize for a month, or even a year, and sometimes the wondering is worth it. Then there’s you. I have imagined your smile from a different time zone, from next door, walking behind you, lying next to you . . . and you have no idea.
I know how distance becomes engraved in the hand and eats you up from the inside. The space between us—I can trace its structure with my eyes closed, can hum its tune while painting my toes, and then pretend it doesn’t matter when you walk in the door. Just like that.
Masks.
She suffers from unreasonable expectations and operates in the hypothetical; creating alternate endings, erasing beginnings. A woman somewhere between young and old but age, like reason, is a relative thing. She has ten fingers and ten toes. The rest is a jumble of fluctuating dimensions. She’s not good at keeping up with changes . . . they simply drag her along most times.
She talks about a hundred things, except the maddening beauty of a particular name that drowns in her eardrums and reemerges through her eyeballs, in a hopeful wetness.
It’s not fear but foolishness that holds us down.
Us,
Just a collection of other peoples’ words, stories,
Mostly incomplete, not thought through.
When will I stop measuring my life against you?
When will I hear your voice like a distant waterfall
But not move toward it?
Men find comfort in the familiar. I know you like Diet Coke better than most beverages. You take your whiskey with water, your coffee with sugar, chilli sauce with almost anything. I pay attention to the details and memorize them but I don’t know any intimacies. Are you a good kisser? Do you hold your girlfriend’s hand for no reason? Are you tender when it matters? The things I’ll never know and can’t properly imagine with you.
As a recurring symbol, the telephone suggests that you are holding an intimate confidant one step short of total trust . . . using a cellular phone implies that this problem travels with you (the online dream dictionary).
I was trying to call him but the signal kept breaking up. Later, in the same sequence, he materialized on my doorstep and we played with a dog. Can’t find the interpretation of “oversized golden labrador” anywhere. Clearly there is a plan but I am not able to understand its workings. Clues come in the shape of coincidences, dreams, instincts, vague ideas that can mean everything and then only as much as we want them to mean.
THE GAMES BEGIN
“I can’t say no to you,” he said earnestly enough, quite out of the blue. And with that single, simple declaration, undermined my oh-so-subtle attempt at being wondrous, flirtatious, mysterious under a blazing sky, the music of flies, the threat of watching eyes.
Not the most romantic setting, you understand.
Tried a different approach the following day. Tried to tell him about the positive and how he helped me accentuate it. About windfalls and him being one. That was so subtle, even I lost the point midway.
Hello, Mr. Congeniality.
Mr. Hook-me-up-with-a-jazz-CD,
a jog in the park, a shag in the dark,
the element of surprise backfired (again).
Did he get it?
Almost . . . but I helped him overlook it.
I’ve been waiting for a long time. Four failed relationships later I’m still waiting, except my patience is running thin, my temper is quick and I’m tired of having to explain it. At almost thirty, I’m le
ft with pretty slim pickings—middle-aged males see me as “viable game” and even most of them want college girls . . . I have three words for you, pal: dirty old man.
I’m in a tight spot here and it’s not going to get any easier as gravity does its thing on my body and cellulite appears in all the wrong places and suddenly people don’t turn around to look when you walk past them.
Damn.
The things women do to impress men include the usual list of stupidities related to physical appearance: four-inch stilettos so he’ll forget you’re a borderline midget, and push-up bras that feel like the crucifixion and make you look like Pamela Anderson’s almost-sister. But there are other idiocies also embraced by women in their attempt to “fit in,” to make the men they covertly woo think that they are really “like one of the guys” (chilled out, laid back, generally unflappable) with the added bonus of possessing feminine wiles. . . .
I dated a skater when I was thirteen. It lasted two weeks because I got tired of scraped knees and bruised elbows. At that age similar interests simply equaled affection, and while we’d like to think that people outgrow this trait as they mature, our instinct remains to seek mates who are mirror images of ourselves in one way or another. In this particular case vanity got the better of me, and I decided that the sweat of trying to win the skater’s affections was not worth the hassle. But most women display a lot more spunk than me in this regard.
Take Leila for instance, an old chum who has totally lost her marbles since becoming infatuated with a “biker boy” half her age. Last weekend I saw her hanging on for dear life, perched on the back of this young man’s latest toy—a monstrously large red motorcycle that seemed capable of breaking the sound barrier. In all the years I’ve known her, Leila has never gelled with automobiles of any shape or size. After failing her driving test thrice she declared she was “not meant to drive but be driven, darling!” So imagine my shock at seeing Leila’s attempt to descend from her beau’s bike in the style of an action hero—except Leila’s athleticism failed her at the worst possible moment and she almost cracked her skull on the pavement. Naturally she did not admit to injury at this point and leaped to her feet a little too quickly (she was seeing stars) to announce, “Absolutely fine, darling. Just lost my balance. When can we do this again?”
[What Leila really thought but would never say in front of the biker boys of this world is this: “I just broke a bloody nail and feel I cracked a couple of vertebrae as well! Time for tranquilizers and a back brace. Can I have this fool put away for reckless endangerment?!”]
WO/MAN BLUES
My brother came by today to tell me his woman’s left him. Again. It’s the third time in as many months. Get a clue. He says he’s not ready to let her go. I’m a little tired of providing tissues, tea, and sympathy. Last time he took to the bottle and ended up with liver damage. This time he’s busted his kneecap. The correlation is dubious; unless self-loathing resides in the patella.
In my mind love is the talent of acceptance. When someone’s annoying idiosyncrasies either suddenly or slowly turn endearing, then you arrive at a place that is bound to teach you a few unpleasant lessons in self-preservation.
Not that she’s a slow learner, not that she lacks common sense or initiative, simply a sense of survival. That has to be it. The reason for this strange flippancy, her heart-on-sleeve behavior.
This is how she pictures it; a man, a woman, an undisclosed location, no sense of time or space to fill in the gaps, nothing but two people who say only this to each other.
Man: you know who I am?
Woman: the reason I am.
(But this is how it is)
He calls her his sister and his heart in one breath.
She wonders what it means, now that he’s squeezed her heart dry.
(Just because it’s unrequited, doesn’t make it any easier to get over.)
Truth is
Overrated
Not sugar-coated
Inappropriate
Flippant
Transient
Matter-of-fact,
Takes a minute to swallow
And a lifetime to digest.
VOICE II: SIMPLE
DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY
Sara calls me late one evening as I plod through an unending pile of grading exams. I haven’t heard from her in a few weeks and I presume it is because she’s still trying to break up with Sameer, her boyfriend of three years.
“Next time around, I want to be able to say no without feeling guilty,” Sara sounds weary, frustrated, in need of reinforcement. “To draw boundaries between his demands and my needs without feeling like I’m a bad person for having needs in the first place. It makes me a bad person, doesn’t it?”
“No Sara, it just makes you real,” I try not to sound as irritated as I feel—this is going to be a long phone call and I’m already behind schedule on marking. I figure it’s best to let her vent and keep my advice to a minimum, since she never listens to it anyway.
In a nutshell, the reason for Sara’s current melancholy is this: After having worked three weekends back to back, the girl finally managed to schedule a Sunday afternoon of serious pampering. A ninety-minute deep tissue massage with Rainbow Light, the miracle masseur at Sara’s health club, who appears once a week to tend to massage therapy addicts like my dear friend.
On her way home from this feast of lavender oil and the expert touch of Ms. Light, Sara got a call from Sameer asking her to drop by his place with much-needed nourishment. (Did I forget to mention that the boyfriend in question is also the laziest man on earth?)
You would think Sara’s reply to this request would be, “I’m on the other side of town, Sameer. Why don’t you order takeout or go to the deli around the corner? I’ve just had a long massage and want to go home and take a nap.” Instead Sara finds herself taking a fifty minute detour to Drummond Street where she buys enough biryani to feed a baraat (“because he loves Indian food”) and finally trudges to Sameer’s apartment who receives this culinary gift without so much as a proper “thank you” (a grunt is meant to suffice) before getting down to the business of filling his belly.
I listen to Sara’s narrative and roll my eyes at least half a dozen times during the span of this story. She’ll never learn, he’ll never know, and I’ll remain stuck in the middle of this shit.
“But where are you from originally, mate?” Simon asks the minicab driver in a curious display of friendliness, and accompanies the question with a hearty laugh meant to suggest camaraderie. I cringe visibly at the remark but hold my tongue. Simon is a well-traveled Englishman, genuinely interested in “other” cultures (perhaps that’s why he’s dating me), but after a few pints on a Friday night his politics become skewed, his tone can be patronizing. If Simon were simple I’d let it go, brush it off, move on to the next remark, but somehow his inability to sense the cab driver’s hesitation, his disregard for the man’s indignation, make me feel like I’ve failed to sensitize Simon to anything other than his own pallor. I catch the cabby’s expression in the rearview mirror and quickly look out of the window to avoid his gaze. I can hear him thinking, “Who are you to ask me where I’m from, mate? Acton, Lewisham, Brixton, High Barnet . . . but you want to hear that tone which creeps into my voice when I say the word Morocco, right?”
There are three kinds of migrants. The apparently assimilated who secretly yearn for lost home/s, the truly assimilated who deny their cultural origin to some extent, and, finally, the unassimilated migrants who recreate the most consumer friendly aspect of their estranged culture and market it as fried food or ethnic clothes on the local high street.
For now I dwell only upon the in-between subject. The assimilated migrant, also known as the bounty bar—brown on the outside, white on the inside—the man who looks like he should understand me but in effect has no clue about my position because his cultural values are entirely alien to mine. A particularly dangerous kind of man because he’s unaware of his dual ap
peal; white girls go his way to score a piece of exotica, and brown girls make the effort because they think they’re getting lucky with one of their kind. It’s all very complicated, and you should ask me because I have fallen for many bounty bars in my time, only to see these relationships turn into a sticky mess in my hands.
How It Is
Once the discrepancies slap you in the face
there isn’t much left to do but walk on by,
to the next potential stimuli.
When Sam eventually got dumped he watched TV for thirty-two consecutive hours, drank too much beer, didn’t shower all weekend, and lay on the couch like a beached whale. When Sara arrived at the brink of distraction, she did four loads of laundry back to back and scrubbed the bathroom until she could see her sobbing reflection in the floor tiles.
So many plans and change of plans; yes I will, no I won’t, maybe I should . . . like a guinea pig stuck in a weird science of my invention, waiting for something big to happen.
I am alone because I fucked up. I am alone because I am too scared to change the pattern. I am alone because I don’t know how to let go of imagined ideals.
I can convince myself of anything. Even things like I never really loved you. And here I am, without you; alive, around, dazed.
VOICE III: SASSY
BACKGROUND GOSSIP
More than I can handle at present. Maybe you’ll call me bitter but the abominable colleague has just returned from his honeymoon, and despite having shut my office door I can hear him whistling through the wall. It would all be hunky-dory if he wasn’t my least favorite human being; short-tempered, hormonally unbalanced, no sense of humor, balding to boot, so don’t ask me how he has managed to bag this sweet, intelligent woman as a wife.
Maybe he’s great in bed. Maybe deep deep down, he’s an angel. Maybe the world makes no sense. See, I know I’m sounding jealous and I’m not. Not of him or her, or even the situation. I don’t want marriage per se, but I want to walk into my office with a smile on my lips and a whistle in my throat, and I want it to be because I’ve found the closest thing to perfection in the opposite sex.
And the World Changed Page 33