‘Oh, and you should always bolt the windows at night,’ he added after a moment’s thought.
There was nothing more to be said. In my father’s systematised universe, there was no place for parental intuition, reassuring fatherly embraces or even a child’s wonder. He was always careful not to reach down and touch me or sit me on his lap or explain anything beyond the necessary, lest he shatter the glass wall through which I saw him, every day. In his mind, he didn’t need to do any of those things. Ultimately, we were all the children of God and, as an earthly parent, my father’s only duty was to guide us towards our real, heavenly Father.
Fallen
I learned the word ‘shame’ in kindergarten. Mrs Lohani, with the triangular face and the huge mole on her nose, administered the word to me. If we became too rowdy in class, she banged her wooden desk loudly with the blackboard duster, wrinkled her nose and chirped ‘shame-shame’ in a sing-song voice. ‘You are big boys and girls now. How can you be so loud and unruly? Shame-shame,’ she’d say. Thus, shame came into my life with its twin, shame.
Mrs Bashir, my first-grade maths teacher, continued the task of shaming me. I struggled in her class the most. My mind muddled over additions and subtractions; it divided when asked to multiply. The morphology of numbers was lost on me – why did they have to come together only to transform into something else? Mrs Bashir’s small and wriggly handwriting made the numbers look like little white worms inching their way up the blackboard. She regarded us sternly, proclaiming every day, even when we were quiet and peaceful, what an unruly, spoiled group of children we were. I found myself looking out of the window and daydreaming as soon as Mrs Bashir walked into class. Invariably, Mrs Bashir would fling my lesson book across the classroom, grab me by both ears to pick me up and place me, red-faced and burning, on the ‘shaming bench’ outside the classroom. There I remained until the noonday sun baked my skin dry. As the energy seeped out of me in streams of sweat, it took all my strength not to faint.
The shaming continued until it became clear that I would not make the same mistakes again. I stopped making mistakes because I stopped being able to add or subtract at all. On one occasion, Mrs Bashir was perplexed when she opened my lesson book to see that I’d neatly copied the assignment but left it entirely undone. Concluding that the shaming had been inadequate, she dragged the red bench, which had stood just outside the classroom window, inside, and placed it next to the teacher’s desk so the victim could squarely face the gleeful spectators of her torture. Saved from the tropical sun, my skin began to recover its natural tone again but my six-year-old heart was broken. As my classmates looked on mockingly, I hung my head and wished I would faint after all.
At the time, I didn’t wonder why Mrs Bashir simply didn’t inform my mother of my numerical deficiencies. It would have been quite natural for her to inform my parents, given that rigorous punishment had not cured me of my shortcomings. Except that the same fact also made her prickle with indignation, suggesting her methods had failed. Gritting her teeth, she boxed my ears extra hard one day and accused me of feigning innocence. ‘You devious, lazy child,’ she shrieked, ‘I know what you’re doing. You’d rather stand in the sun than do your work, so you pretend you can’t do it. And you think I will eventually take pity on you and stop the punishment? Well, I won’t!’
If Mrs Bashir had been intolerant of my mathematical weaknesses, she was livid at the thought of my slyness. Every single day, for the span of the school year, I was a circus freak, hauled up to the red bench for an open exhibit of my deformities. My ears were always red, either from the constant grabbing and twisting or from the constant shame I felt.
That was when I invented the odd game with numbers. I ran up and down the shapes of their horrid bodies, hid in their nooks and crannies and refused to hear anything they might have to say to me. I fantasised chopping them into edible bits and gobbling them up, once and for all, so they’d leave me alone. No matter what I tried though, they stayed with me. They greeted me every morning from the pages of my books, cooing incessantly in my head, ‘Shame-shame, shame-shame, shame-shame . . .’
Once I understood shame – a lesson that had begun with my attempt to understand God – I realised that it was all around me, either trying to hide, or waiting to be noticed. There was Lima, for example, who suddenly turned up at our doorstep one day with amber eyes full of mortification. Uncle Karim, my mother’s youngest brother, brought Lima to our home. As soon as they came, my uncle took my mother aside and whispered something in her ear. I saw my mother’s eyes soften as she greeted Lima and took her hand in hers and I sensed that something of an alliance was formed. It was different from the way she greeted a regular guest. Lima started visiting us daily with her eight-year-old daughter Faiza, who was the same age as me. In the beginning, Lima sat in our living room, sipped lemon tea from gold-rimmed bone-china cups and spoke to my mother in hushed tones. I was asked to play with Faiza. My heart remained in the unheard conversations of the adults. I knew it would not be long before my mother would repeat the story to my father or grandmother, simply overlooking my presence. Adults, it seemed to me, were punctilious with ceremony but artless when it came to strategy.
As anticipated, Lima’s story was revealed one Sunday in the environment of domestic chit-chat, exempt of censorship. It turned out that Lima had a husband with three vices, all starting with an A: alcoholic, abuser, adulterer. Years of his betrayals had ground down Lima and Faiza but the final blow came when her husband decided to leave them for another woman.
Soon Lima’s visits were no longer relegated to the living room. She usually ate lunch with us, then spent the afternoons quietly lying on my bed, reading magazines. No one bothered her. Faiza was as quiet and immobile as her mother. She sat staring blankly at the toys I shared with her. I sensed a torrent of questions behind her blankness. She knew I didn’t have answers and I was certain she would never ask. But I was anxious to know the reason behind Lima’s long and languorous afternoons on my bed.
In three months’ time, when Lima’s stomach grew large and tight like a watermelon, I was even more confused. By now, she was a permanent part of my bed, a gargantuan specimen hidden under a pile of nonsense magazines, while an entire household of people she hardly knew went about their business. After a few more months, when I could no longer bear to have my bed dominated by a bloated stranger lying belly up and mute, I decided to withhold my dolls from Faiza. Childishly vengeful, I hoped my rudeness would make them leave. My reprisal had no effect on Faiza, who remained as stoic as ever. Her life had taught her exactly what she needed to know in order to survive. She sat alone on the floor, resignedly doodling on a piece of notebook paper. Not once did she look up at me and, if our eyes met by accident, I could read nothing in her vacant stare.
Frustrated beyond words, I went to my mother and demanded an explanation for the intrusion.
‘Because she is our guest,’ replied my mother, cautiously.
‘But other guests don’t come every day to sleep on my bed.’
‘Well, Lima is pregnant so it’s hard for her to move.’ Mother paused and sighed. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, ‘Lima is going to have a baby but she’s very worried because she doesn’t know where the baby’s father is.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re too young to understand.’
‘Tell me, please, I can keep a secret,’ I insisted.
‘It’s not a secret, sweetheart. It’s just very complicated.’
‘Are you helping her find the baby’s father?’
‘Yes, I’m helping her. Please try to understand, my love.’
I didn’t understand much about the baby’s father’s disappearance or how my mother could help. But I understood the crushed look on Lima’s face as she lay helpless on my narrow bed, recognised the humiliated contours of Faiza’s neck and shoulders when I snatched my dolls away and left her to play alone. They were both signs of shame, the same kind of shame I had felt before the p
ir, or standing on the red bench under the sun. Suddenly I knew exactly how Lima and Faiza felt – though I didn’t fully fathom the reasons behind those feelings. Suddenly I could see the tension roiling beneath the unmoving planes of their faces, could see right through to their ebbing spirits, trying hard to stay ashore. I started sharing my dolls with Faiza again, though she had noticeably less interest in them now, as if she knew that dolls merely replicated the futile structure of human relationships. Some afternoons, as we played on the floor, Faiza and I could hear Lima sobbing softly, though we both pretended not to hear.
Lima extricated herself from our lives as suddenly as she had appeared. Even Uncle Karim didn’t know exactly what happened to her. He had heard different rumours through friends about Lima giving birth to a boy and moving to a different city, while others thought her husband might have returned to her.
I can still visualise her defenceless form on my bed; I can still feel the weight of her deprecation. And I can taste her shame as I nurse my own.
One summer Amol hung a nylon rope swing from the rungs in the partial ceiling of our veranda. Naveen and I swayed for hours and stared out at the sprawling soccer field across from our house. Sometimes I noticed a young man standing at the edge of the field, staring in the direction of our house. When I told Naveen, she smiled shyly and told me not to look at him. Around that time, Moinul came to live with us.
Moinul, a distant relative from my grandmother’s town, was disturbingly tall, but more disturbing was the rumour we’d heard about him from our mother. Moinul, who openly claimed to hate his entire family, had threatened to kill his youngest sister by slitting her veins in her sleep. Naturally, we were afraid of him, but my mother reassured us that Moinul was trying to find work in Dhaka and would only stay with us for a short while. At first he seemed harmless. When he wasn’t out looking for ‘work’ (though what kind of work he was suited for, none of us knew), he sat on the steps outside, smoked and munched on betel leaves. If he saw any of us nearby, he’d pull out some ancient-looking candy from his shirt pocket and offer them to us. One day he grabbed my shoulders and squeezed my cheeks hard. He told me that I was growing as plump as a football and that soon he would have to carry my ovoid form to the soccer field for a few kicks. My feelings towards him solidified into resentment.
One afternoon Moinul came home early. I was on the swing and Naveen leaned over the balustrade, staring out at the soccer field. Mother must have come up behind Naveen and noticed the chap she was gazing at. I didn’t know it, but my parents had already discovered the suggestive exchange of looks and smiles between Naveen and the soccer-field chap. When questioned in private, Naveen had revealed that the boy had sent her some sort of love note which, of course, she had not kept. My father was furious enough to pick up a slipper and whack Naveen’s twelve-year-old face. He threatened to discipline her much more severely if she continued the misconduct.
So when Mother caught Naveen making eyes with the same boy again, her maternal heart grew apprehensive with dark thoughts. Why was Naveen being so reckless? What if the chap was a street hooligan? There were stories in the newspapers of young girls being abducted, raped, or defaced with acid.
In a moment of well-meaning weakness – but weakness nevertheless – my mother went to Moinul, who was smoking on the steps, and sought his help. ‘Moinul, would you tell that boy not to stare at my house or send my daughter notes? Don’t be too rude to him, you understand? Just tell him to scoot from here – firmly but nicely,’ she asked.
Moinul quietly finished his cigarette, taking time to snuff it beneath one, boot-clad foot, caked with mud. Then he sauntered out to the soccer field. From a distance, it seemed like a polite chat ensued between Moinul and the young chap. To our surprise, the fellow followed Moinul back to our house.
‘Auntie,’ Moinul addressed my mother, ‘I just wanted to know a little more about our friend here and thought it might be better to chat inside than in the middle of the street.’
‘Oh I see.’ Mother was looking uncomfortable. Naveen had disappeared.
‘Auntie, let me take him to my room to ask him a few questions. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.’
‘Moinul, wait. Why don’t we all talk here?’ my mother suggested.
‘Auntie, I told you I’d take care of this. It’ll just be a man-to-man chat. You relax,’ he smiled sweetly.
Feeling increasingly puzzled, I went to look for Naveen and found her lying face down on her bed, her arms wound tightly around her pillow.
The next thing we heard were loud, dull thuds as though heavy sacks of rice were being unloaded on a hard cement floor. We heard the beginnings of screams, hastily muffled. My mother, Amol, Naveen and I rushed to Moinul’s room but found the door locked. In between our frantic banging and screaming, we could hear a tedious thump thump thumping followed by the thwacking of Moinul’s big black boots. Occasionally, Moinul would cry, ‘I’ll kill you, sisterfucker. That’ll teach you to write love notes.’
Moinul opened the door only when my mother threatened to call the police. He charged about the room, snorting like a bull. He was a hungry carnivore, interrupted just before the kill. Given the opportunity, he might have cut anyone’s throat right then.
‘Moinul,’ screeched Mother, ‘where is he? Where is the boy?’
Before Moinul had a chance to answer, my mother pushed me back towards the door. I wasn’t allowed to see the gory scene inside Moinul’s room, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask Naveen if she had seen it either. I will never know who carried the limp and bleeding body out of the house, but I will always remember the thin, bright trail of blood left behind. I also recall a long, rasping sound, like someone trying hard to breathe through a crushed ribcage. As they carried him away, the rasping blended into the susurration of a quiet, breezy evening.
Moinul left us the next day. He disappeared into the morning haze and we never saw him again. My father mumbled something about the inconvenience of putting up a houseguest for too long. But even after Moinul was gone, his venom remained with us for a long time. We stopped talking about the events of that dreadful afternoon but we could not forget about it. Every time our eyes fell on an empty spot in the vast soccer field, we deftly averted our gazes.
While none of us felt singularly responsible for what had happened, what we did feel was a kind of collective shame – shame for witnessing a wrong, for not being able to prevent it, for trusting someone’s life with Moinul, for being human. In the wake of what we had experienced, we’d all been diminished in different ways, yet none of us dared to say it lest we broke the fragile peace that hung over our household. After that fateful day, if my mother caught Naveen or me leaning over the balustrade and staring down at the street, she’d pause for a second and then quietly turn around. Naveen seemed quieter too but in a hardened kind of way. The taut lines on her face were defence lines that no one dared to cross.
I wasn’t really sure what I felt except a gnawing sense of discomfort that I couldn’t shake off.
It was the nature of shame: it never left me because I never allowed it to. I held on to my shame, tightly, desperately, afraid that if I revealed it, I would fall further into its abysmal pit. Shame urged me to grow inwards, to become invisible. And I learned that if I stopped noticing myself, others did the same. If I didn’t feel my body any more, then it stopped taking up any space. If I stopped listening to my feelings then I could no longer hear the toll of shame. People saw me as shy, quiet, introverted. But I wasn’t as shy as I was invisible. Not as quiet as I was keen on not being heard. Words gurgled up to my lips but I pushed them back down, refusing to give them shape or form. For I chose to remain invisible.
The Naked Ghosts were discovered by Shonali, our one-eyed ayah. Shonali, who had been with us since I was a baby, wore her blind, bulging blue eye as a mark of her supernatural wisdom. With her blind eye she claimed to see things that a normal eye could not. There was one corner of our roof where a mango tree leaned forward to
create a cool green shade. There Shonali squatted every evening, sucking on a bidi, betel juice dripping from her mouth, while ghosts galore visited her. Some of them were torsoless, mere heads floating about aimlessly and some had Himalayan forms reaching the skies, their eyes as big as headlights. Despite the terror they provoked in us, we loved listening to Shonali’s descriptions of those visiting spirits.
One evening she detected, through the dense foliage of mango leaves, a pair of nangta bideshi bhooths – the naked ghosts of a white sahib and memsahib. This piqued our interest immediately. Naveen and I joined Shonali in the shade of the mango tree every day after dark in the hope of seeing two naked white ghost-bodies. Shonali was aghast to find that they did not return, not even for the benefit of her prophetic blind eye. ‘I saw them I tell you,’ she protested, ‘the memsahib had breasts like long thin mangoes and the sahib, oh my God – sweeties, promise you won’t tell your mother – the sahib was hung like a bull!’
Naveen expressed her disgust, ‘Watch your mouth Shonali, what kind of talk is this!’
I secretly wanted Shonali to continue. What else had she seen? Did ghosts copulate?
A few weeks later, when the foreign ghosts still failed to appear, we lost interest and left Shonali alone. But she hadn’t lied to us after all. Months after she had first located the bideshi bhooth couple, she came running to our room and urged us to follow her to the roof. That night, we finally saw the mythical Naked Ghosts.
Naveen and I strained to see through the gaps in the leafy darkness. A young white woman with short blond hair, completely naked, leaned over what seemed like a table and appeared to be chopping something. A man came up from behind her, also completely naked, and handed her something which she added to her preparations. What Shonali had not perceived with her one-eyed vision was the shape of a window, framing the young couple cooking in the nude. What Shonali had seen, correctly, was the sahib’s bull-like endowment. ‘Do you see it?’ she cackled demonically, unperturbed by the fact that her ghosts had turned into humans. ‘Do you see how his manhood sways and swaggers?’
Beloved Strangers Page 4