Love,
Tanya
November 15, 1991
Bombay
Dear Tanya,
Whatever man, I’m like super traditional. My mom only wears saris, did I tell you that? I mean a lot of moms only wear saris but most of those moms have always only worn saris. My mom used to wear shorts and bikinis and now she only wears saris. Weird right? Do you think she’s going to want me to wear only saris when I’m her age?
My brother called early this morning so everyone’s in a damn good mood. He said he loves Princeton and was telling me about his eating club which sounds pretty gay to me but he says everyone does it and that it’s like a fraternity. Frats scare me. The thought of all those white boys with blonde hair and beer. What would it take to make them like a brown girl?
You know, this is the first time my brother has called that he sounds like his old self. It has taken a year.
Last night, Neenee came over and we all went for a drive on Marine Drive. First we stopped and got frankies which are the most awesome kebab rolls except they don’t have kebabs in them. We ate the frankies in the car and then after dropping Neenee home we went for a long ride in the car. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. When we got to Marine Drive, my dad stopped the car and rolled down his window and bought cigarettes for my mom. My mom only smokes when she’s really happy and she thinks that no one can see her.
My dad switched on the radio to a station that plays old Hindi movie songs. They both love old Hindi movies. My mom put her hand on my dad’s leg and my dad put his hand over hers. After a while the traffic died down and you could only hear the music and the sound of the waves outside. If they were quiet all the time they would never fight.
I haven’t told my brother about Arjun. He doesn’t think I should have a boyfriend even though he has always had a girlfriend for as long as I can remember. I really liked the last one but he broke up with her before going to college. She should have tried harder.
Love,
T
November 25, 1991
Karachi
Dear Tania,
A lot has happened. I don’t even know where to start. Two boys in my class got kidnapping threats.
I know both the boys quite well. One is the younger brother of a boy I know well, Mustafa; we call him Musti. The other is not in my class but I know him because we did inter-school debates together.
Musti is the class clown. He is perpetually on the brink of failing out of our class altogether. He is one of those people who has been part of the class since lower KG. He is in all the birthday party pictures from way back when the boys used to wear tight shorts and the girls wore frilly dresses in green and pink and cream.
I called Musti. He didn’t sound scared at all. A bunch of the boys were over at his house and I could hear them laughing in the background as if it was a big joke. I asked Musti what was going to happen to his brother but he didn’t know.
The worst part is that Ali is in London. He has been gone for a week. A show his parents are producing. It took me an hour to get Ali on the phone. He hadn’t heard the news. I guess it’s not big news in London. He has missed a week of school and his family just doesn’t seem concerned. I am keeping notes for him and I’ve arranged for Shaishta to keep notes for him for the two classes I don’t have with him but even though he said thank you very nicely I don’t think he really cares.
The thing is, Ali’s family is very rich. Richer than anyone else I know. They have a house in London and a house in New York and many houses in Karachi. His parents do theatre and film and are very intellectual. I guess they can afford to be because both his parents’ families own most of Pakistan. They spend their summers in London. Now they’re thinking of moving there. I don’t understand families like that. How do you just decide to move to London like that? How can it be so easy? Leaving Boston was the biggest thing that has ever happened to my family. We still haven’t recovered from it. But Ali’s family is like that. They are all very vague. Maybe his father thought Ali might get better music there. Maybe his mother thought British school uniforms are better looking. You never know with Ali’s family. They’re vague.
They don’t even have bodyguards. People who are far less wealthy keep bodyguards. Why can’t they be like normal rich people and have bodyguards?
I know you think I am cold and calculating. But Ali has to come back. When he smiles everything is fine even though I know that his smile is not just for me.
I told him he has to come back. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll come back.’ But that sounds ambiguous. When will he come back? Will he come back for good or just to get his things? I was too scared to ask. He said I was stressed and played me a song on his guitar that he had heard someone play on the street. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it and now it is playing in the back of my head, insistent and soft and impossible to trace.
Love,
Tanya
4
March 23, 1996
New York, NY
Dear Tania,
900 people died in the Bombay riots between December 6, 1992 and 19 January, 1993. Two years ago, 800,000 Rwandans died. 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. 3 million people died in the Bengal famine of 1943. 20 million Russians died in World War 2.
900 people.
This feels like old times, though, doesn’t it? Taking pen to paper, saving up what to say and then parsing carefully so that only the best remains. Did you know that every letter I wrote to you was first written in draft sometimes twice, even thrice? The final I would write with a beating heart on letter paper stolen from my father’s study. And then I’d get your letters, scratched out words and overwritten sentences with arrows pointing to corners of pages where you had another thought. Fido Dido and Donald Duck idly leaning on the edges. Your first letter was on the back of a grocery list. I know it by heart. Two kilos of potatoes, one kilo of tomatoes and one kilo of onions. Cornflakes, baking powder and repair Shayon’s Titan. I spent hours imagining what a Titan could be (sword, armour, breastplate) until Mala told me it’s a brand of wristwatch.
I was telling Jake about it. He has big shoulders and I tried having sex with him last summer. It was not great. My friend Jodie loves sex and she’s not making it up because I hear her through the wall. You loved sex too. I don’t understand it. Maybe it would help if Jake didn’t chew with his mouth open.
But still, it’s so different from what I had imagined, what I still imagine. I must be the only person in the world who enjoys the imagining of it more than the doing of it. Had I ever told you about the first time I fantasized? You will laugh because it was to a book. The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates. It was full of big breasts and cheery men and happy families. I rubbed myself against page 67. It was marvellous.
I know what you’re thinking: Adventures of Tanya the Boring Person. Say it. Say it to me. Call me on the phone and call me stupid, call me boring, call me cold, call me cruel, call me selfish, call me something, call me anything.
I sometimes imagine that I’m going to pick up the phone and call you in the middle of the night because that will be the only time to catch you before your morning classes and then I’ll tell you all about the sex I had last night and you’ll laugh at me and tell me that I should really let him do that because oof it’s so much fun if only I would stop being such a tightass about it.
I must admit that it’s nice to be held. I never had nightmares with Jake. He’s gone now.
Did you know that the Partition was the largest peacetime migration of people in the written history of the world? 12 million people crossed the border. 1 million died. 75,000 women were raped. I often wonder how they calculate these numbers. Did they go around asking the women? What do they ask? What are the words they use? Do they talk about shame?
Is that what drove you that day? The fear of men? The fear of shame?
I once had a toy camera on a keychain. It was one of those cameras where the pictures are pre-loaded and every
time you clicked a new picture would show up in the viewer. Except something was wrong with this camera. The moment you opened the fake shutter, it would just start clicking away by itself, picture after picture flashing and the whole thing would grow faster and faster until it’s just a whir and you can’t see anything. Click. Click. ClickClick. Cliclick. Cliclick.
It’s like that with me now. I see trains of dead people and pieces of bodies and staring, desolate women in white saris wandering through empty buildings. But how can it be because I was born 27 years after Partition. We never studied it in school. My father’s parents are both from Karachi. My family was not part of it, did not suffer. I never heard a single story. There is no reason for my nightmares.
If anything, the nightmares should come to you. But I’m sure they don’t dare.
Sometimes I think Pakistan is my mother, your mother, both our mothers together. Impossibly tender one minute, carelessly cruel the next. We talk too much, we talk about everything. We talk too little and we are silent. Words hurt and then the absence of words hurts. Everything hurts. Remember how we had talked about that? And we both thought it would be different when we grow up.
We come from a bullshit people. My therapist calls it transference but I’m not transferring anything that is not somewhere mine. It’s somewhere yours too, Tania. You can ignore my letters, you can ignore my phone calls like you ignored the phone call Chhoti Bibi made to you when I was in the hospital for mad people. But it didn’t just happen to you. It happened to me. It happened to me. You keep pretending like it only happened to you but it happened to me. It happened to me.
Love,
Tanya
PS—I might as well tell you. My other major is Political Science. I’m studying the rise of religious extremism in the sub-continent. My thesis is on the Bombay riots.
December 9, 1991
Bombay
Dear Tanya,
Wow. Your life suddenly got interesting. Kidnapping threats. Your boyfriend in a British school blazer. Sexy. When are you sending me his picture?
It’s so boring here. We don’t get any kidnapping threats. The most exciting thing that is happening here is that there’s a cross-country chariot race going on. Although I don’t see how it’s a race because there’s only one chariot and even that you can tell is really just a regular bus that they’ve made into a chariot.
I don’t even know why this is such big news because it looks like a comic book come to life you know—a lot of bright colours and people playing dress up and carrying around swords and spears and stuff.
But everyone is talking about it. That’s all you hear on the news. My parents’ fights have new life and they’re both full of energy and new information. Did you know Aurangzeb did this bad thing? Did you know Akbar did this good thing? Why are you so blind? Why are you so prejudiced?
There’s a guy called Advani and he says that we should stop apologising for being Hindu. He’s got a point, why should we apologise for being Hindu? I’m not going to. Except I’ve never actually heard anyone apologise for being Hindu.
I asked my mom why he’s doing a chariot race and she said it’s because he wants to destroy a mosque in a place called Ayodhya (which is where the god Ram was born and I thought it was made up but my mom says it’s a real place which makes everything about Hinduism so confusing.) My dad said that there used to be a really important temple there to begin with and that Babar had destroyed it and built a mosque in its place. He said that of course he can’t expect her to tell me the whole story and that she’s a pseudo secularist. He said that the Congress has destroyed the country and it’s time for new blood. My mother said that the BJP is only going to be good for rich people but she said it in an angry way as if we’re not rich. My father got up and left the table without finishing his dinner.
What does it mean to be pseudo secular? We say pseudo in school when someone is being fake. I mean my mom is fake about a lot of things like I’ve told you before. She says it’s the most important thing to be a good person but really she means a rich, successful person because otherwise she wouldn’t be so mad at my dad all the time.
I’ve never really thought so much about religion. So I guess the BJP is good in that sense because they’re making you think about this shit. But I don’t get why everyone is so excited about the historical stuff. It’s pretty boring.
My mom is damn political. She’s always mad because we don’t talk about politics in school. Whatever, we’re like practical. We talk about money.
There’s a guy in school, Rahul, who is sort of my friend. He totally supports the BJP. He says it’s going to be good for business. I swear, when he’s not stoned Rahul sounds like a Gujju businessman. I mean that’s what he’s going to be when he grows up because that’s what his dad is. Thank God my dad never pressures me to become an accountant. The next time I fight with my mother, I’m totally going to say, ‘Dad never pressures us like you do!’ Ha. I can see her face now. Her mouth will be slightly open, her eyes will bulge a bit like they do when she’s angry. It will be AWESOME.
Anyway I’m all for a new party to be in power you know. It HAS to be better than what we have. You know apparently we were almost bankrupt over summer and had to send two planes of gold to Switzerland or something to beg for money. I never want to beg for anything.
My mom asked me yesterday what I want to be when I grow up and I said, rich. And she said that I have a much better chance of becoming rich if I go to Wellesley. If I told her that I wanted to marry Arjun and have babies she would tell me that going to Wellesley will make me better at having babies. I don’t think she thinks it’s possible for me to become a person without going to Wellesley.
How come your mom isn’t like that? I mean they are best friends. Did you see how they talked on the phone for like an HOUR last weekend? And I get lectured on the phone bill when I called Arjun when he went to see his dad in Delhi! I mean he was CRYING.
Things are really good with Arjun. His dad just closed a big deal so he’s like totally happy with Arjun which means that Arjun is totally happy with me. He gets kind of mean when his dad is mean to him. We had the best kiss ever the other day behind the school where the Siddharth College students go to pee. I told him I want him to kiss me like that at Nirav’s party and he laughed. Do you get the joke?
Do you think we should talk on the phone?
Ciao,
Tania
December 19, 1991
Karachi
Dear Tania,
I don’t think my mother even knows which year of school I am in. Do you know when my leg was broken she came to see me four times? Her bedroom is seventeen steps from mine. She didn’t come to the hospital when they were setting it. She probably thought my father was going to be there.
Navi says to leave her alone. She IS alone. She spends all of her time in the garden fussing over the orchids as if they are newborns. I didn’t know she had talked for an hour on the phone with your mother. I didn’t know she could talk for an hour. Are you sure it was my mother?
In case you haven’t noticed, your life is a little different from mine. While you sit around machinating and scheming about boyfriends and social power, the boys I have grown up with are getting death threats. In school these days, we all get nervous when a boy is absent. Musti’s parents have decided to send Musti and his brother to boarding schools in the UK. They are in the UK now, looking at schools. There are rumours everywhere.
No one can fully explain the kidnappings, although our political parties are blaming each other. Natasha said she is going to write her college essay about sectarian violence in Pakistan. It sounds like a good idea on the face of it but I think it’s too superficial. It’s like a black student in America writing about racism. No, I think they are looking for deeper thinking than that. But Natasha’s dream school is Carnegie Mellon so it doesn’t matter what she writes.
I almost got angry with Ali today. We were all at Fati’s house and he was playing Fati’s gu
itar in the balcony with a boy we don’t know, smoking expensive foreign cigarettes. Apparently Ali had brought him to Fati’s house. I asked Fati to say something but she just shrugged and said, ‘Chill.’
I dislike it when people say that. If you can’t say something useful Fati, it’s often better to say nothing at all.
I called Ali inside and spoke to him about it. He just patted me on the back and said, ‘Don’t worry Tanya. He’s not going to kidnap me.’
How does he know? As if kidnappers politely let you know their intentions in advance. Maybe we shouldn’t go to Fati’s house anymore. I want to tell Ali that but either he will laugh at me or he will nod with grave, sincere eyes and forget all about it the next minute.
Sometimes I think Ali only comes into our world some of the time. Even Chhoti Bibi gets impatient with him. Even when I talk about him to Chhoti Bibi I can tell that she gets impatient. ‘He started singing in the middle of class Baji?’ ‘He forgot to call you again Baji?’ ‘Did his parents decide about their moving to Ingyland Baji?’
I don’t know Chhoti Bibi! I don’t know! I really don’t know and the worst part is he doesn’t seem to care! As long as he has his beloved music and cricket I don’t think he would even notice if he got kidnapped.
I’ve sent off my requests for college applications. Ten. I’m going to pick six. It will be hard but I can do it. Have you sent off your requests for college applications? You better do it soon. The other night I dreamt that Harvard had forgotten to include the application and I discovered it the day before I had to send it.
Are we going to tell each other which colleges we are applying to? I will if you will.
Love,
Tanya
PS—I can’t call you. It’s too expensive.
December 28, 1991
Bombay
Dear Tanya,
You know, every time I begin to like you, you bring in all the college stuff. Can you like not do that? You’re a bit obtuse about taking hints. I’m telling you as a friend.
Tanya Tania Page 5