Beloved Strangers

by Maria Chaudhuri

  ‘No,’ I said, equally animated, ‘Where? Where? Show me!’

  But Naveen was already pulling me away from the sight of the Naked Ghosts. ‘They’re not ghosts, you idiot,’ she wailed, ‘they’re human beings. And we should be ashamed of ourselves for staring at them.’

  When Shonali wasn’t smoking bidis or ghost-hunting, she turned her attention to Amol the cook. She cracked jokes to make him laugh and made up all sorts of affectionate pet names for him. She sat on her haunches while he worked, telling him long, painful stories of her childhood in the hope of gaining his sympathy. Amol routinely rejected her warmth, engaging her in fights more readily than conversation. We were used to their daily scuffles but one day I chanced upon an unusual scene.

  I strolled into the kitchen to find Amol sitting on a wooden stool clutching an untouched plate of rice on his lap. His eyes protruded out of their sockets, the veins on his temples throbbed. Not four feet away from him, stood Shonali, hands on her hips, her face an unfathomable mingle of outrage and amusement. She was screaming obscenities at him and there was an undertone of anger in her voice. It sounded as if Shonali’s words, though coated with rage, were driven by a more poignant urgency. Amol, of course, didn’t understand the cause of her ire, as was clear from his expression. His breath came in short, heavy puffs as he cursed at her. For a time, neither of them acknowledged my presence and it took considerable work to find out what had passed. ‘She farted on my food!’ spat out Amol. ‘As soon as I sat down to eat, she hitched up her sari, revealed her hideous bottom and farted on my food!’ He shuddered.

  I turned to Shonali, fully expecting her to defend herself against such an implausible accusation. To my disconcertion, Shonali began to giggle, then chortled and finally let loose great guffaws, doubling over. Betel juice and spit dribbled down her chin as she threw her head back, flashing her black teeth and tongue. Her laughter soon turned into spasms of cough that suggested a deep, glutinous congestion. And the tremendous effort of laughing and coughing at the same time produced an outpouring of farts, a long, successive line of small explosive bursts that smelled like rotten eggs. The farting brought forth further entertainment for her, initiating the laughing-coughing-farting cycle all over again.

  Amol seemed to teeter between horror and resignation. He settled on horror, flung his plate aside and fled from the kitchen. I waited until Shonali’s convulsions came to an end. She wiped her mouth with the edge of her sari. An uncharacteristic calm settled upon her features as she slowly prepared a plate of food for herself. With great satisfaction, she climbed on to the deserted stool and started to eat. It occurred to me that Shonali had bared her bottom to Amol to justify being rejected by him. Her retaliation was an act of validation. She wanted Amol to bow down to her ugliness if not her appeal. Unlike me, she had no shame; she refused to be invisible.

  On the first floor of our building, there was Bablu, the Imitator of Frogs. So well could he imitate a frog that the first time I heard him, I thought we were being invaded by frogs. From my window, I watched his spiky head bent over a cement water tank where plastic cars and boats floated amidst small fish and turtles. He spoke to the fish and turtles in his frog voice and occasionally, when he sensed my presence, he glanced up to nod at me. Sometimes, when I saw Bablu sweating in the roiling heat, speaking the language of frogs, I envied the way he seemed so sure of his occupation. I longed to learn the language of frogs but at twelve, I was too shy and tongue-tied around boys to approach Bablu.

  Then came the week of praying for rain. Heat rose from the earth in dry vapours but the raindrops clung like festering pustules inside the greyish clouds. Bablu stood by his water tank and looked at his dejected turtles, motionless from the heat. He scratched his head and looked up, asking suddenly ‘Hey, do you want to come down here?’ For the first time, I heard his normal voice. How unsure it sounded without the hoarse frog-like baritones.

  ‘Why don’t you meet me at the ledge on the roof?’ I said.

  I had recently learned from an informative teen romance series that if a boy were to propose something, the proposal must be accepted on slightly different terms. Bablu didn’t seem to mind. He found me lying flat on my back on the precarious ledge of tin and cement, strictly prohibited to all the youngsters in the building because of its unstable constitution. We huddled in my little corner where I’d lined up a few old gift boxes, some paper and pencil, a flask of orange juice. I offered Bablu orange juice. ‘No, thanks. Do you want to smoke? I have a cigarette,’ he said. I had never smoked a real cigarette. Silently I received my first cigarette from him, a wrinkled, slightly damp Star 555, the same kind my father smoked.

  The first inhalation made me gaze up and down with light-headed amazement. The rain clouds moved above us, blocking the orange sun and casting a purplish hue across the thirsty grey sky. Down below, the street was an uprising of sound and sight. A vendor selling spicy rice puffs rolled his cart along, shrieking out the names of his goodies to potential customers. A procession of female factory workers made their way home in a noisy cluster of colourful saris and ribbons. Rickshawallahs zoomed by with their empty vehicles. Was the street always this active? Why hadn’t I noticed before? Euphoria flooded me as the tobacco hit my head, followed by a bout of coughing. Bablu patted me on the back. I had forgotten he was there.

  ‘I’ve never smoked before,’ I apologised.

  ‘It’s all right, don’t be embarrassed. Um . . . may I share something else with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  From the folds of his shirt, he pulled out a tattered-looking pamphlet.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a book . . . with pictures. Take a look,’ he replied nervously.

  He handed me a yellowish, moth-eaten newsprint copy of a pornographic magazine. On the faded cover was the picture of a naked woman, bent from the waist, her huge bare bottom revealed to the beholder. If you looked closely, you could see that she peered back up at you through the inverted V of her legs, wearing a look of utter despair on her face. Bablu had made a tiny circle on the woman’s exposed privates with a red marker. He pointed at the circle and gushed, ‘Is that it? Is that where it goes in?’

  I could not turn the pages any further. Bablu did the job for me. One by one, he showed me the pictures in the newsprint leaflet, displaying the animal business of naked bodies, and I, looking on in the purplish light at those strange men and women, wondered whether there was pleasure or pain in those peculiar-looking, almost grotesque acrobatics. I could see Bablu’s eyes gleaming. Part of me was intrigued by his audacity, part of me was repulsed by it. Part of me wanted to look through every picture again and part of me wanted to tear the book to shreds. Part of me wanted to rip my dress and show him where that red-circled spot existed in a real girl and part of me wanted to push him off the ledge.

  Bablu put his hand over mine and moved closer. I smelled his breath. Did he really smell like frogs? A big, fat drop of rain fell on one of the lascivious pages. Seizing the opportunity, I looked up at the sky and yelled, ‘Look, it’s about to rain!’ Bablu jumped, the moment was broken. He dropped my hand, snatched his precious pages, climbed off the ledge and disappeared.

  It rained that afternoon and the inflamed earth cooled its sore and tired body. From the next day onwards, Bablu the Imitator of Frogs was back at his tank but we never renewed our brief alliance. Every time I passed by him I cringed at the vision of a despondent face, staring up at me through an upside-down V.

  The same year I parted ways with Bablu the Imitator of Frogs, Mala came to work in our house. Tiny Mala, the first adolescent girl who worked for us, had a big-hearted understanding of the universe. She did not begrudge it anything. She prattled continually and laughed even more. For reasons unknown, the mere act of carrying heavy bucketfuls of water sent her into peals of laughter. If a man leered at her on the street, she spat at him and scampered away, giggling. When we returned from school she would be squatting under the midday sun, washing clo
thes in the little cement basin on the roof and the sight of us would make her bob up and down with joy, sending soap suds and frothy water flying above her sprightly head. She accepted my old discarded clothes as if they were priceless pieces from fashion collections.

  Not even the barriers of language held Mala’s vivacious spirit in check. She watched English television shows with us, grunting and nodding at all the right cues. After watching The A-Team, she ran her fingers through her thick hair and expressed, rather seriously, the wish to get a Mohawk like Mr T. Her admiration of him was partly due to her conclusion, that Mr T, with his excessive collection of gold chains, was the richest man in the world.

  Mala came to me one day and made an earnest request. ‘Will you teach me how to read and write?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you want to go to school?’ I responded, a bit perplexed, as no other maid in our home had ever made such a request.

  ‘No, I just want to read books.’

  ‘What kind of books do you want to read?’

  ‘Historical ones,’ she said, ‘about kings and queens.’

  I agreed to teach Mala. I had noticed her in the mornings when we wolfed down our breakfast before school. Mala hovered in the background with a mop, her eyes lingering on our schoolbags, trailing our steps as we dashed to catch the schoolbus. I knew how much she would have loved to climb into that bus with us, just to see if everything she imagined about the world of books and kings and queens were true.

  The lessons began and my student had more to say than I had bargained for. Why do people speak in different languages? Why don’t animals speak? What language will we speak after death? I assumed a contemplative persona in the hope of fooling her about the extent of my own knowledge.

  ‘Read,’ I told her with great solemnity, ‘and the answers will come to you.’

  I could not have known that the pretence of such solemnity would break down one quiet afternoon, when Mala appeared a half hour early for her lesson and discovered me poring over a lingerie catalogue I’d stolen from my mother’s dresser. Without hesitation or permission, she yanked it from me and held to her face the picture of a buxom blonde, breasts spilling out of a sheer pink bra. I tried to snatch the magazine from her but Mala moved away just in time.

  ‘Wait,’ she said with unusual sobriety, ‘why are you looking at this?’

  Why was I looking? How could I tell her about my meeting with Bablu, the thrill and the horror of it? How could I tell her that to erase the disturbing images of those ravaged bodies in the magazine, I searched for bodies more temperate and tender, swelling with the possibility of something more mystifying? How could I explain to her that which was not entirely clear to me?

  Mala, however, had more clarity than I, on the subject of bodies. ‘I have seen many naked bodies,’ she said. ‘They didn’t look anything like this.’ Haltingly, she described to me a little village, a one-room shack and five bodies in it – herself, her parents, her brother and his wife. At the end of the day, everyone in their tiny cabin laid down their straw mats wherever they chose on the mud floor and slept next to each other in the unpartitioned room. In the darkness, made partly visible by moonlight streaming in through the thatched roof, Mala had watched the shadowy figures of men and women engaged in acts of love. She had seen her brother rip off his wife’s sari as she writhed underneath him, their bare chests heaving. She had watched her own father make love to her mother. In the morning, everything was normal when the sun rose in the eastern sky. Everybody casually rolled up their mats, drank tea in a cosy circle and went about their day. New babies were born into these cramped habitats and they too grew up with the same uncensored view of love.

  I was mesmerised by her stories, and then, as if moved by a magnetic force, I was drawn to her face, her milky brown skin, the concave space below her neck. Or was it she who looked at me like that?

  I had never touched anyone in an intimate way. Instead of the man’s face I had always imagined in my fantasies of intimacy, here was a young girl my own age, with wise eyes and a wicked smile. My own body was betraying me. A touch, a caress, was all I wanted. My hands reached forward with dizzy longing. I felt the warm cotton softness of her skin. A silky sensation spread through me. I felt no shame, only pleasure at the unfamiliar touch. I wanted nothing more than the moment to last. That was precisely when Naveen walked in. Both Mala and I recoiled with sharp intakes of breath, a lowering of our eyes. The wanton blush spreading across my cheeks was mirrored in Mala’s.

  What would I say to Mala if I saw her now? Would I ask her if she lived in a one-room shack with many others? Would we be so bold as to discuss that extraordinary moment we had shared? Or would we politely greet each other then turn the other way? I do not know. But I know that seeing Mala again may disturb the delicate stance of the memory I wish to keep intact, the memory of my first erotic touch, its incipient joy quelled as quickly as it had bloomed.

  Gowsia Market was the most sensory of Dhaka experiences. I loved it and I abhorred it. My mother shopped there for uncommon paraphernalia and she loved to take one of her children along as company. There was nothing we couldn’t find in Gowsia Market, which teemed with hosts of hawkers selling everything from bobby pins and buttons to hundreds of varieties of dress materials, laces, saris, multi-coloured glass bangles, earrings, necklaces, precious jewellery of gold, silver and diamonds, toiletries, cosmetics, perfumes, shoes, home decor, curtains, flowers, dinnerware, pots and pans.

  Some stalls were mere squares, held up by four sturdy poles, covered above and on three sides by a patch of tarpaulin, under which unsteady cardboard shelves displayed miscellaneous items. The bigger shops had clear glass cabinets with neon lights casting a harsh glow on the displayed goods. Adolescent hawkers carrying large wooden trays hung around their necks with dirty cotton slings followed customers like pesky flies. They sold things like safety pins, cotton balls, mothballs and handkerchiefs.

  Crowds gathered each day at Gowsia like a swarm of bees around a honeycomb. They pushed their way through vigorously to avoid being brutally elbowed, shoved or trampled.

  One section of the market was lined with food stalls choking the air with the zest of smoked meats, fried dough and burnt oil. The wooden benches in front of each stall were always bursting with people taking a break from shopping to gorge on chotpoti, bhelpuri, phuchka, fried chicken, French fries and kebab rolls. One of the best parts of our Gowsia trips was when my mother and I took a snack break. She would lead us to the Phuchka House and order two flaming hot plates of phuchka with extra chilli and tamarind sauce and steaming cups of oversweetened, overmilky coffee. Each burning bite of the chilli-stuffed phuchka was followed by a deliciously painful sip of scalding coffee.

  But something happened one day to break the familiar tempo of our Gowsia trip. My mother and I had just finished our phuchka and plunged back into the hive of people, moving shoulder to shoulder. She moved expertly forward, pulling me by one hand, while I tried to keep up with her. We were tightly wedged inside the heart of the crowd when I felt a sweaty, hot palm slither up my childish frock and grip my bottom. I was astonished. Had a small animal crept up my thighs? Was someone groping for a lost partner’s hand and mistakenly come to settle upon my bottom?

  Although I still held my mother’s hand, her face was not visible to me. A lady in a blue cloak had lodged herself between my mother and me and all I could see were the backs or sides of people bunched together like sheaves of coriander. Taking a deep breath, I used my free hand to reach behind and grab the misbehaving hand but just then it pinched my bottom hard. The stinging pain made me turn around sharply in an attempt to find my offender. I barely managed to catch sight of a middle-aged man with a large moustache, standing directly behind me, holding a child in one arm, while using his other to fondle me.

  He was sucking his teeth, face tensed with concentration. As soon as he caught me looking, his expression gave way to a stunned discomfort and he hastily released my bottom. There was not enough s
pace for him to move away so he stared stonily ahead, pretending to be just another body in the slow-moving swarm. Being only nine years old, I struggled for an appropriate retaliation. As my mother pulled me away, all I could do was look back at that abominable man and whisper, ‘Shame-shame.’

  Somewhere in my soul is a little girl, still waiting for forgiveness, be it God’s or my father’s or mother’s; somewhere in me is a feeling of guilt, of shame, so ingrained, I can almost touch it. When I peer into my childhood, I never see a child. And even if I do, I never feel the child’s innocence or exuberance. Rather, I see a child who is trying hard to grow up before her time. I see a child who senses that curiosity is sinful and defiance is unpardonable.

  I remember myself at nine, in the dark under the blanket. I am running my fingers up my thighs, hesitantly finding and stroking a spot, pushing and probing further. Warmth and wetness; tingling and tension. My small body grows taut. I increase the friction between my skin and finger and reel from pleasure. Then the darkness is invaded. My mother lifts the blanket and lets out a horrified yelp.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she growls.

  I blink at her, confused. Have I done something bad? She never says. Never has to. I already know from the disgust spreading across her beautiful features, from the sharp sting of her palm across my cheek, the pearl and gold ring on her index finger scraping the bridge of my nose.

  Birth is as much a disembodiment as it is a compilation, a conformation. As the umbilical cord is cleaved, once and for all, the separation and disconnection that make each newborn wail in anxiety seem unpreventable. Nature, in its complexity and effectiveness, prepares us for what is ahead. As we slide down the dark passage of our first shelter, helpless against the expunging currents of a suddenly rough sea, we may apprehend that we are merely passing through the eye of the storm. We emerge on the other side, no longer attached to another being and step into the world as one body, one mind. It is a consciousness that is unique to ourselves and that we will define now on our own. And the beginning of consciousness was, for me, the awareness of everything that was wrong.