Beloved Strangers

by Maria Chaudhuri

  ‘Did you?’ I asked. ‘But you told me you shaved my head seven times in the hope that my hair would grow more straight.’

  ‘When did I say that?’ Mother looked piqued.

  ‘You told me that every time I asked you why my head was being shaved.’

  ‘I don’t recall. It must have been due to the heat!’

  ‘Mother, it is always hot in Dhaka.’

  She sighed, then whispered a prayer under her breath and blew into the hollow of my neck for good luck.

  In the dressing room, minutes before the show was about to start, I sat with the other dancers, feeling conspicuous in my overdramatised make-up and glaring silk costume. I kept biting off bits of my freshly painted nails, something I’d never done before. One of the girls came over and placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Nervous?’ she smiled. I told her that my mother was out in the audience, waiting to see me dance for the first time.

  ‘You’ll make her proud,’ my friend said, gently.

  It struck me then that I didn’t need my mother to be proud of my dance. I needed her to be proud of me, me as I was, behind the make-up, under my skin. Waiting in the darkness of the wings, trying to keep still so the bells on my feet wouldn’t jangle, I was overcome by a sudden compulsion. I wanted to quietly exit the wings, slip off my silk costume, discard my heavy silver jewellery and scrub my face clean of its garish make-up. Without the protective mask and shield of my dancing gear, I wanted to approach my mother and rest my tired head on her lap. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t want to dance, not even for her. But the curtains lifted, the MC spoke into the microphone, the stage filled with light. I whirled out of the wings, trying to summon the rage of Shiva’s tandava. On the third row, I spotted my mother. She was leaning noticeably forward in her seat, her shoulders rolled frontward with tension, her hands tightly clasped under her chin. She looked as if she was ready to catch me, should I fall. I didn’t quite fall but my eyes glazed, my head reeled and my lumbering feet felt heavier and more awkward than ever before. I knew this was my worst dance to date but I didn’t care. This was not my tandava, it would never be. The only universe I had ever created with this dance was a fallacy, a complete fiction.

  If my mother thought my dance was awful, she never said a word. Not that I had expected otherwise. I was well acquainted with her reserve on matters that most required her attention. We went out for Mexican food afterwards and she lavished praise on the chicken and spinach burritos. In the dim light of the restaurant I saw shadows dancing on her heart-shaped face. I can never forget her face that night – so familiar, so appealing and so inscrutable – the face of a beloved stranger.

  On Report Card Days I wake up without the aid of an alarm clock. Despite the gusto of the ceiling fan, the bed sheets cling to my hot, clammy skin. I can still feel the sharp sting of nightmares behind my eyelids. The grey and white school uniform, starched and ironed, lies across the chair in threatening silence. I have nowhere to hide. The first person I see when Father and I walk in through the school gates is my friend Nadia. On Report Card Days, Nadia’s tall frame stands taller, a huge grin across her usually serious face. She clutches the Report Card to her chest like a newborn baby. This is her day and the Report Card is her badge of honour, written evidence of her worth.

  For me, this day carries the horrors of Judgement Day, just the way Hujur had described. I run for refuge, but find none. It feels exactly as if I am disintegrating but not quite dying.

  ‘She just doesn’t seem to get numbers,’ says my maths teacher, ‘She’s doing well in other classes . . .’

  ‘But a failing grade?’ my father gasps.

  ‘Yes, she’s in trouble, no doubt,’ my teacher confirms.

  I see the slash of red ink across the white Report Card. Red indicates a failing grade but it fails to make an impression on me. What draws me is the story behind that number and how my teacher cannot see that story. I’m looking through the exam papers – there they are, the heavily marked sheets where I had walked along parallel lines, danced around in circles, climbed up the sides of triangles, slid down the slopes of hexagons and landed squarely on my face. Even infinity is a loop, it has no opening, no pathway to freedom. Enclosed spaces. Claustrophobia. Doors closing. You’re a girl. You cannot sing. The shapes entrap me, the numbers limit me; I desperately want a way out. How can I explain this to my father?

  Father is talking to my maths teacher, Mr Hossain, jotting down his address. Mr Hossain will coach me over the weekends to rescue me from the deep well of ignorance I have fallen into. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that between the measured spaces of those shapes, lines and numbers, I see the shadowy pauses of my life: my father, sitting cross-legged, shoulders slumped, stale blue smoke stagnant above his head; my mother, young, fiery, a bitter song on her lips; my father sitting at his empty desk stunned that he has been fired; my mother forcing a smile; my father lying on a white hospital bed, half-paralysed, my mother arranging the rows of medication on the nightstand; and myself, unsure, lurking, looking for a glimpse of light that might end these shadowy pauses and play our lives forward again. In these spaces we are stuck, all of us, the angles of our hearts at odds with each other. The red ink on the Report Card is bright as blood, and beneath it, the stories of battles fought and lost, wounds open and raw. It is simply the story of my life written in red.

  On the way home, I am waiting for my father to take a closer look at the Report Card, to see the small victories that were there too. I see his eyes scanning the piece of paper. I want him to tell me what he is feeling, even if it is only disappointment. I want him to tell me I am neither stupid nor lazy, want him to hug me, to scold me and to let me hide my head in the musky warmth of his chest. I want him to look at me and see me – undefined by those numbers and marks and grades – me as I am, my body, small and thin and crouched in fear. But just like Mother he looks through me and says nothing. His eyes grow cloudy, his lips droop and his cheeks sag. He hands the Report Card back to me and rubs his hands together as if they hurt.

  When I was in fifth grade, my efforts to please my father on Report Card Day finally bore some fruit. I came third in my class and won an obese paperback edition of the latest Oxford English Dictionary as my prize. The first and second prizes were storybooks but I was secretly more pleased with the dictionary since I had no shortage of books. Besides, it would only be a matter of time before I’d be reading those very books, since my friend Nadia (who was in first position again) and I swapped books on a weekly basis. We lived just a block away from the school at the time, so I shoved my dictionary into my schoolbag and sprinted home to share the news of my accomplishment. Father was sitting on his cane chair in the balcony, reading a copy of Newsweek, holding a mug of tea in his free hand. He looked up and I held out the dark-blue and green striped dictionary on outstretched palms. He took the book, flipped open the front cover and read the designation: Third Prize/Maria Chaudhuri/Based on Meritorious Academic Performance. I held my breath for the embrace or the exclamation that would surely follow. I squeezed my eyes closed and opened them again just in time to catch the veil of disappointment that darkened my father’s brow before he caught himself and turned it into a wan smile.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘but this means you can do even better. If you can be in the top three, you can be at the very top.’ He handed the dictionary back to me and went back to his reading.

  Slowly, I walked back to my room and placed the dictionary on the topmost rack of the book shelf. I couldn’t bring myself to break its delicate spine, to disturb its beauty and solitude for the mere purpose of finding the meanings of words. For me, that dictionary preserved more meaning than words ever could. Within its untouched pages it hid both my pride and my shame – an intense burst of childish pride forever tarnished by the all too quick onslaught of an insurmountable shame.

  My father and I never really spoke about the pulsating tension of those Report Card Days. If he spoke to me at all it was usually to enq
uire about schoolwork. This hardly led to full-fledged conversations though sometimes Father decided to turn his enquiry into a lecture about my sister Naveen’s superior academic performance. Baffled and resigned at the news of yet another mediocre grade from me, he’d ask me, ‘You are sisters, born of the same parents, nourished with the same love and care. Then why is it so hard for you to achieve what she does so easily?’

  I turned to Naveen for answers. After all, she was smarter than me, she would know what I didn’t. ‘What do you think I’ll be good at when I grow up?’ I asked her coyly.

  ‘How should I know?’ she said, shrugging. ‘Maybe gardening?’

  ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to say? That you’ll grow up to be a scientist?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll be a singer, like Mother,’ I retorted.

  Naveen sniggered, then looked at me pitifully.

  Naveen was about to graduate from Yale with an impressive double major in Economics and Mathematics just as I was getting ready to graduate from high school. My days passed in constant agony over the prospect of not getting admission into an American institution like Naveen. I did not hope for Yale, nor did I want it. I wanted a clean slate. Though I’ve forgottenthe exact words, I wrote something to this effect on every college essay:

  What I want is a place where I can explore and discover and build my own dreams. A place to get to know myself. What I want is a new home.

  I sealed every application package with a heartfelt prayer, except the one for Yale. It was the one place where I could not start anew, yet it was the one achievement that might have redeemed me in my father’s eyes. It was a warm midsummer’s day when the mailman walked up our block with a large envelope from Mount Holyoke College bearing my name on it. I snatched it from his startled hands and ran to the bathroom. I hugged the envelope to my chest and breathed in the foreign smell of its contents. I pulled out the brochure inside and surveyed every picture in it. I imagined myself lying on the sprawling campus green, face up, taking in the vast New England sky. A week later, another admission letter arrived from the University of Chicago but I had already planted my heart in an idyllic little town in Western Massachusetts, tucked away by the Connecticut River. Though it fell outside the bounds of fact or logic, they were, in my mind, the first people to accept me as I was.

  Nothing could have prepared me for my father’s reaction to the news of my college admission. I had fully expected a disquieting speech on the ordinariness of my accomplishments in comparison to Naveen’s. Why even bother going all the way to America if it was just to attend an ordinary school? All non-Ivy League schools were ordinary in my father’s opinion. How many times had I heard him tell his friends, chest puffed out, eyes shining, that his eldest daughter was a Yalee? He had learned that swanky term and dropped it into conversations with casual abandon. But as he held my letter in his hands, inspecting it carefully, he neither smiled nor grimaced. When he looked up, his tone was soft, his shoulders stooped a little.

  ‘OK, you’ve proved that you can do it. Now will you stay here in Dhaka?’

  I gulped. What had I proved? Was he barring me from going to America because I had let him down yet again?

  ‘Where would I go to college?’ I was finding it hard to speak.

  ‘Right here in Dhaka. It’s not the end of the world you know. There are good schools here too.’

  ‘You don’t think Mount Holyoke is a good school?’ I dreaded the answer but I had to know.

  ‘Of course it is. That’s why I said you have proved yourself.’

  ‘Then why can’t I go?’

  ‘I didn’t say you can’t. I asked you if you might want to stay.’

  My apprehension was slowly turning into confusion. There was something different about the way my father spoke. There was a plea in his voice, a sadness in his posture. In the pale light of late afternoon, I could barely see his eyes but I thought they glistened with moisture. It took me way too many wasted years to acknowledge that exchange as my father’s first and last attempt to tell me that he loved me. However I was, whatever it was that I could never be, he still wanted me right there by his side, inside the circle of our family, within the four walls of our home, for as long as we were alive. That was love. But I didn’t allow myself to see it just then. Contrary to what my father thought, I didn’t feel like I had proved myself at all. I hadn’t even begun to. And I didn’t know then, but I would never have the chance to begin.

  Later, it was Shonali who described to me what had happened the night I left Dhaka. Upon his return from seeing me off at the airport, my father had gone straight to the roof where he sat down on one of the broken plastic chairs and waited alone in the dark. We lived close to the airport, so when the airplanes flew over our home, they were still low in the sky and easily seen, even their logos discernible on a clear night. I have no way of knowing whether it was really my plane or a different one that flew over our roof and found my father suddenly on his knees, his thin frame jerking spasmodically as he used the back of his palms to wipe away the tears that kept his eyes from following the last trace of the airplane.

  But the heart rebukes us as much as it gives us joy. It allows for only as much glory as can be countered by punishment. If my father could have cut his heart open, or even given me an itty-bitty slice of it, we could have had our glory and foregone the punishment. In subsequent weeks, when I picked up the phone and called my father across the Atlantic Ocean, his voice sounded flat, resigned. It reminded me of his drooping face as he handed me back my Report Cards. In the typical fashion of the previous years, our conversations settled into the dismal drill of exchanging information on my academic progress, the status of my bank account and tuition bills. As far as the mind could fathom, I was, to Father, a duty to be fulfilled, a duty he would never abandon, but a duty nevertheless.

  How I longed to tell him about all the new people I had met, the new things I was learning. Did he know I had signed up for a Religion class and was deep into the throes of a lifelong fascination with Buddhism? Should I tell him about the poisonous cafeteria food that had me on a staple diet of coffee and bagels? Would he perhaps care to know that my roommate from Kansas had locked me out of the room and reported me to the Resident Student Advisor because I invited too many boys into it? I searched my brain for things to ask my father. Did he still stay in touch with the pir? Had he visited his older sister recently, was she still in the hospital with kidney problems? But whatever question I came up with seemed paltry, unimportant. Had I never chatted with him? Certainly the need for it had not pressed down on us as hard as it did, when we sat restlessly mute, each at the receiving end of a voiceless machine.

  My frustration imploded in recurring nightmares in my sophomore year in college when my father suddenly passed away. I often saw him framed in a ghoulish light, pale with fury. With the speed of rage, my father chased me through dark hallways and deserted streets. His head seemed unusually large, his skin a withered grey and his teeth a sickly yellow. Sometimes he grunted like an animal when he got close to me but I always managed to escape him. Sometimes he didn’t chase me at all but sat at the foot of my bed and stared at me with red, accusing eyes.

  One night he brought his face close to mine as if to bite me and I woke up to the sound of my own cry. There was a pressure on my lower abdomen. I started for the bathroom and in the darkness I thought I saw a man’s silhouette, standing still, waiting. What was he waiting for? Rest in peace, Father, I said under my breath, please rest in peace.

  Sometimes my mother asked if I ever dreamed about him. I could not bring myself to tell her how frightful Father seemed in my dreams so I told her that I had seen him floating about in white garments, serene and stoic, like those in Heaven must be.

  ‘He is watching over you,’ Mother concluded.

  I did not know if my father was watching over me but I knew those dreams came to reconcile me with truths I had not accepted. My father was not coming back
to erase the longing he had left in me. And yet, I had withheld from my father the same assurances he had kept from me. He wanted me to summon the genie of the magic lamp and become a poster child overnight. No more the day-dreaming, bathroom-singing, novel-reading, number-hating, gawky child. He wanted me to perk up, focus, add up the numbers and get the answer right, because, to him, there was only one right answer. In my turn, I never did look him in the eye to tell him that I would at least try to do things his way. Perhaps, because, I doubted that I ever could.

  My father had a white car, a 1969 Toyota Corolla that he bought the same year he married my mother. Mother always said that the car was his first love and she wasn’t too far from the truth. There is an old sepia photograph of my older sister, ten months old, held upright on the hood of the car by a radiant Father. The car was then almost two years old but it looked brand new. Our patience and good feelings towards the car ran out about ten years after its introduction into our family. We wanted to live up to the times, keep up with the Jones’s. Not Father. He would not hear of buying a new car. ‘This car is in perfect condition,’ he insisted every time one of us broached the subject.

  Part of the reason the car was in such perfect shape was because Father hardly allowed us to use or even touch it. He laid down the rules: No leaning against the car. No eating or drinking in the car. No loud music in the car. Car would not enter any narrow streets or crowded areas (how was this possible in a city like Dhaka?) Car could not be driven above the speed of sixty kilometres an hour. Car could not be driven by anyone but himself and most certainly not by a paid driver. Rickshaws were to be used for journeys under thirty minutes and baby-taxis for longer trips. The last rule made Mother so angry that she often turned down invitations and refused to go anywhere. ‘What madness is this? Do we have a car or an invalid?’ she’d scream, and rightfully so.