Beloved Strangers

by Maria Chaudhuri

  One of Nanu’s special recipes consisted of a mouth-watering concoction of fried red chillies, onions and coriander leaves. She called it pora morich bhorta – it felt like a ball of fire in my mouth, especially with steaming hot rice, but I loved it. I waited for Nanu to visit so she could make this spicy delight for me. During one such visit, I came home from school to find that lunch was being served but there was no sign of Nanu’s morich bhorta. I threw my backpack on the floor and ran to find Nanu. She was busy talking to Mother. She swatted away my queries distractedly and when I persisted for her attention, it was my mother who answered me.

  ‘Stop this nagging,’ she ordered. ‘It’s too late to make morich bhorta now. Wash your hands and come to the table.’

  I turned to Nanu, desperately pleading. I knew she could make the bhorta in less than fifteen minutes if she wanted to. I had seen her do it a thousand times. I knew the steps by heart: briefly heat the chillies in a low fire before frying them in mustard oil, chop the onions and coriander and mix them all together . . . I couldn’t think any more. I licked my lips, still sure that Nanu would save the day. I waited for her to tell Mother that it was all right, that she would make the bhorta. But Nanu seemed unsure, uncomfortable. Her silence filled the room.

  ‘I said wash your hands and come to the table,’ bellowed Mother.

  ‘No!’ I screamed, with all my ten years of might. ‘I will not wash and I don’t want to eat!’

  Nanu cringed and finally opened her mouth to say something but Mother was already pulling me towards the bedroom. I, kicking and screaming, tried to wrench free from her painful grip, bumping against walls and furniture as she yanked me forward relentlessly. She released her iron grip only when she pushed me into the room. ‘Stay here and go hungry if you like. That’ll teach you.’

  I crawled under the covers and cried, feeling angrier at not being able to fight the overwhelming tears. Even as I wept, a part of me kept waiting for someone to come and find me and lead me back to the dining table where I could hear everyone sitting down for the meal. I could hear their conversation and the tinkling of silverware. The familiar scents of daal and curry and rice made me almost faint with hunger. Had everyone forgotten me?

  In truth, no one had forgotten. And it wasn’t that no one cared about me either. Everyone kept their distance, because I was undergoing the all-too-important ritual of righting the wrong. I was being punished. Punishment, whether big or small, was my biggest constant in an otherwise unpredictable world. I was all too familiar with it. I had to pay my penance for desiring the wrong thing at the wrong time and then lashing out, when denied. I ought to be ashamed and I was. What I didn’t understand was why it was so wrong of me to ask for what seemed like such a simple thing. The world was becoming an increasingly complex place, where even the smallest pleasure came at an enormous price. That night, Nanu made her famous morich bhorta. She made a big bowl of it and smiled at me encouragingly. For some reason, I cannot recall whether I ate any of it. But I remember that my appetite for anything spicy changed from that day onwards. It was as if my tastebuds held their ground in quiet protest while I slowly conformed into an obedient child. Or perhaps it was my body’s way of punishing itself for lusting so shamelessly after such a banal pleasure. Either way, I have not been able to savour or stomach anything hot and spicy since that day, least of all, that delectable morich bhorta of my childhood.

  Years later, in college, my friend Anna asked me why I was always so punitive towards myself. ‘Why do you always sell yourself short?’ she asked, accusingly. ‘You’re always second guessing yourself and you cower in silence even when you know you’re right. You’re so damn apologetic!’

  I had never thought of myself like that. I came from a world where apologies were a way of life. The most special ones were reserved for God, then your elders, then your teachers, then those peers who were better than you at something or another (and there was always someone better at something). You apologised because you weren’t good enough and, if you were, you had to aspire to be something even bigger and better. The gratification was not so much in being something as it was in trying to be something else. But now I was in another universe. Perhaps, this was my chance. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I hadn’t realised—’

  ‘Stop!’ Anna held up a hand, a smile breaking across her lips. ‘Start over. This time without an apology.’

  I had to smile.

  ‘Consider yourself great at everything, Maria,’ Anna said. ‘You should wake up every morning and give yourself at least one compliment before you start your day.’

  ‘C’mon, Anna.’

  ‘Why not? My mom told me to do this when I was going through a hard time in high school.’

  I stared at Anna. I wanted to ask her if she had ever prayed for forgiveness without even knowing why she needed to be forgiven. Had she ever apologised to her father or mother for not being exactly the way they had imagined she would be? I wanted to ask her if doubt and guilt clouded her every thought so that silence was often a better recourse than words. But I knew that asking her these things would simply give her a skewed view of the other world where I grew up. The world I still loved and was trying to escape from. The world that was now a shadow – faceless, blurry, yet always with me. A world that came to me in contrasting shades of mortification and solace. A world that was seldom exonerating but hardly indifferent and never ordinary. I cared for it in the same way it had cared for me – with utmost devotion and an utter lack of understanding.

  Beloved Strangers

  The room is square and semi-dark; heavy curtains block the sunlight. There are two single beds joined together to make one large double bed where I sleep with my sisters. Two wooden dressers, one black, one brown, stand on either side of the bed. Through the crack in the door I can see the leg of my new Barbie on top of the brown dresser. I also see my mother sitting on the bed with her harmonium, flipping through sheets of music. Her guru sits across from her, cross-legged, humming and tapping his fingers on the polished surface of the instrument. I want my doll but I dare not step inside the room. When my mother practises her music the world is her enemy.

  Until she was six years old, my mother lived in the tiny, sleepy town of Comilla, about a hundred kilometres south-east of Dhaka. Then her father died unexpectedly from kidney failure at the age of forty, and his passing left my grandmother a widow at twenty-four. My grandmother moved into her brother’s family with three small children of whom Mother was the second. From then on, they moved from one town to another due to the nature of Mother’s maternal uncle’s work.

  Mother spoke of her uncle with a rare fondness. He had loved her like a father, pampered her more than his own children and made sure that, despite the frequent relocations, Mother was not deprived of what pleased her most: music. Wherever they went, he found a music teacher for her, and by the time she was a teenager, she had won a number of trophies and certificates for her musical talent at school and other local functions. At the end of high school, when most of her friends left their small town to go to college in the big city, my mother didn’t care. She was absorbed in her music, ecstatic that the local radio stations had started to schedule her for regular appearances.

  The first time it was ‘arranged’ for my father to see my mother as a prospective bride was during one of her weekly radio programmes. The two families thought it best that my father should see her from afar, without her knowledge. Meeting face to face, even if chaperoned, was not considered proper. So my father turned up at the radio station, stood outside a glass-enclosed studio and watched a skinny nineteen-year-old singing in a voice so mesmerising that he forgot why he was there.

  My father went home to tell everyone he had found his bride. My mother went home, completely unaware that her song had led her to her future husband. Though Mother knew she would have to consider marriage sooner or later, given her mother’s exhaustive search for a groom, it did not stop her from feeling a jolt of panic when my father, eager
and smitten, asked for her hand. She was hesitant to leave the uncomplicated rhythm of her life where music was her only partner, but how much longer could she continue to refuse her suitors? Had she chosen to refuse, however, deciding to pursue music instead of marriage, her uncle and grandmother promised to stand by her. But Mother agreed to the match with an unexpected ferocity. ‘I’m ready,’ she declared, ‘start the preparations right away.’ I presume she wanted to put an end to the constant reminder that she was her widowed mother’s last burden.

  Once she gave her consent, my mother refused to discuss the matter any further, letting her family busy themselves with the minutiae of the wedding. Finding her in bed in the middle of the day, while the house bustled with wedding activity, her grandmother approached her quietly.

  ‘Are you well, dear?’ she asked Mother.

  ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘Don’t you at least want to know what he looks like?’

  ‘What’s the point? I’m still going to marry him,’ said Mother.

  ‘You don’t have to marry him if you don’t want to.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘Fine, tell me what he looks like,’ my mother said in a resigned voice.

  Her grandmother brightened. ‘Oh he’s very handsome, more fair-skinned than any man I’ve seen. His skin is so light you can see the veins underneath. Such white-white children you’ll have!’

  The faintest smile flitted across my mother’s face. Her grandmother sighed and placed a gentle hand on her granddaughter’s head.

  The wedding took place in Comilla, and on the night of the wedding, Ismail the servant boy fell into a cauldron of boiling milk and went half insane. Later he confided that the djinns had come to him when everyone was busy with the festivities. They came in the guise of three exquisite and identical young women. In the smoky kitchen, a horrified Ismail recognised their unblinking stares and backed away from them until he fell into the drum of scalding milk. He never heard the message they had come to deliver. The sounds of firecrackers and wedding music drowned his screams for help.

  That same night, my father was to take his new bride and make the three-hour journey back to his Dhaka home. He had instructed his best friend to convert his small bachelor pad into a bridal suite, replete with flowers, candles and a heavy lace bedspread. A table was laden with trays of multi-coloured sweets and tall pitchers of almond and coconut milk. His friend waited to receive the exhausted bride and groom. But once the bride and groom were on their way, the driver turned around and announced that he was taking them to my father’s sister’s house.

  ‘Why?’ asked my bewildered father.

  ‘It is your sister’s order,’ the driver shrugged.

  My father opened his mouth to say something then closed it again. His older sister was not someone he could easily disobey. They reached her house well after midnight. Lifting the pleats of her heavy red sari off her dainty feet, my mother wearily made her way up the dark, cramped staircase. The maid sleepily warmed up some leftover fish curry from the night before. After dinner, my parents spent their wedding night in a tiny, airless room that had been hurriedly cleared for them, while, in another part of the city, a fragrant room with a dreamy white bed glowed softly until all the candles burned out.

  In 1971, a year after their wedding, my parents lived in a bungalow on the top of a hill in Chittagong, where my father worked at the head office of the Bangladesh Tobacco Company. My mother stayed at home with one-year-old Naveen, an old Nepali ayah and Harun the cook. The garden was the best part of their sprawling colonial-style bungalow. Huge red dahlias and bushes of wild tulips sprung robustly out of the mountain earth. When the midday sun grew softer, the ayah took Naveen out in a stroller for long walks. My mother sat in the secluded garden and sipped cup after cup of tea. But the nights were bad. The sound of gunfire, sirens and hand grenades pierced the dark. Every once in a while, screams floated up the lonely mountain roads. Or did she imagine them? Once my mother woke up in the middle of the night and her heart caught in her throat at the sight of a malevolent face pressed against the windowpane. In the morning she found a bird, half-eaten and caked in dried blood, just outside her window and realised it had only been a fox. She must have been lonely, in that strange city, away from her family, in the middle of the war.

  The officers came during the day, when my father was at work and Harun had gone to the market. The ayah was playing with Naveen. My mother opened the door. ‘They were very tall,’ she said. ‘Tall in that Pakistani way.’ Their eyes swept over her slim body. She was small, like most Bengali women. They were polite, even when they walked into our living room, uninvited. They didn’t raise their voices or utter obscenities. They walked in as if they were always going to walk into our house, as if our house was not the sacred body that gave us shelter but a profane body that could be entered by anyone. My mother didn’t try to stop them. She stood near the door and watched. Then they heard my sister’s voice, chattering away with the ayah. A child? A girl? They must see her, immediately.

  Things were shifting, happening too fast, as if in a disjointed dream. The ayah stifled a scream as one of the officers took Naveen from her arms. The next second, her jaw dropped as the officer hugged Naveen to his chest and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘I have a daughter, just her age,’ he said. The officers gave my sister a small piece of candy before they left.

  The war ended in a year. East Pakistan gained its independence from West Pakistan and Bangladesh was born out of the dismemberment. Outside a beautiful bungalow on a hill, on quiet afternoons, sat the solitary figure of a young woman, her spirit moving above and beyond the mountains.

  My mother is afraid of time.

  Instead of eating her fruit, she has the unusual habit of rubbing their slimy insides on her face, neck and décolleté. Each morning at the breakfast table she amasses piles of fruit skin on the side of her plate while she rubs the sticky flesh on her skin. Bits of papaya, avocado and grapefruit jiggle on her upper lip as she schools us on the different minerals and vitamins present in each fruit. Papaya tightens the pores. Avocado replenishes the natural oils in skin, giving it a plump, youthful look. Grapefruit hydrates the epidermis, smoothing lines and wrinkles. It seems that each different property she mentions is important for the fulfilment of only one desire: remaining young.

  ‘I want to be twenty-five again,’ she says so frequently it’s almost as if she believes she can make it happen by sheer force of will.

  In her own way, she does make it happen. My mother refuses to reveal her age to anyone. She reddens with indignation if the rest of us reveal our real ages, giving people a clue as to how old our mother might be.

  ‘You’re not thirty,’ she says to me firmly on my thirtieth birthday, ‘You’re twenty-eight.’

  ‘I’m thirty, Mother.’

  ‘You’re twenty-eight,’ she repeats, outraged.

  So diligently has my mother played hide and seek with her age that I can no longer be sure, on any of her birthdays, how old she is going to be that year. For someone who finds time to be so precious, my mother wastes it lavishly. She is the most unpunctual person I know. Hours pass before she realises she has missed an appointment but the realisation leaves her unflustered. In her everlasting lateness, she presumes that time has not passed, that it is waiting for her.

  ‘Why do you want to be twenty-five?’ I ask Mother.

  ‘Because it’s the perfect age. You’re neither young nor old, neither naive nor jaded. You have an idea of who you are but there’s still so much left to discover,’ she replies.

  ‘But Mother, even if you were twenty-five again, everything would still happen all over again. Time wouldn’t just stop.’

  She gapes at me, silent and aghast, as if the thought has never crossed her mind.

  At moments like this, it strikes me that what my mother wants, time and again, is not to replay or freeze her life, but to change its course. Like the times w
hen we went to visit her best friend, Auntie Irene. Auntie Irene lived in a spacious, red-brick house by the lake with her husband and two sons. The furniture in their home was big, plush and shiny. There were Victorian-style silk curtains, Persian rugs and sturdy glass cabinets full of expensive-looking china. The drone of their air-conditioner never stopped and the entire house smelled like Cadbury chocolates. They were the only people we knew who had a real swimming pool in their backyard. Every time we crammed into our old white Toyota and pulled away after a day with Auntie Irene’s family, Mother made it a point to sigh heavily, conspicuously. ‘That’s the kind of home I always thought I would have,’ she’d remind us in her most plaintive tone. ‘Beautiful, so spotless and stylish, like something out of a magazine.’ Each of us, especially Father, was careful not to respond to her laments, because whoever did would immediately be held accountable for her unfulfilled dream. And yet, I had never seen my mother pick up a dust cloth or arrange a vase of flowers or fluff out the pillows on her perpetually unmade bed. Mother, in her characteristic wishfulness, expected the very earth to shift and shape into what her heart desired. And when it didn’t, she’d go back and harshly rewrite her life a hundred times, sure that the real source of her sorrows lay in her past and not in her present. How many times had she said that if she had married later in life, or become famous like she was meant to, or had fewer children, or even if her father had been alive, everything else would have clicked right into place, like pieces of a puzzle. She walked into each room in our dishevelled home and imagined what it would be like if she could just replace the curtains, discard the furniture or change the colour of the walls. But never, not once, did she stand back to take a good look at what was already there, at what might already have been beautiful had she stopped to notice.