Beloved Strangers

by Maria Chaudhuri

  In time, the prayers became more frantic and specific. Please, God, can you give us our dream home by the end of this year? By the time I was thirteen, it was a weekly ritual to crowd into our old white Toyota Corolla and drive to the other end of town where my father planned to build our house. Baridhara had been a poor and underdeveloped neighbourhood until the government bought the land and decided to sell it at subsidised prices. Huge bungalow-style mansions were constructed next to shanty homes facing inevitable demolition. Foreign embassies moved their offices to Baridhara, making it a highly secure zone. A winding strip of green with stone benches was fenced off for the classy new residents to enjoy their leisurely strolls around Baridhara Lake where dhopas had washed clothes not too long ago. My sisters and I had memorised every detail of every house in the neighbourhood and we discussed at length how our own house might be even better. My father never spoke much. He wove the car slowly through every street until it grew dark and the windows of the enchanted homes lit up, one by one, like bright stars on a clear night. Reluctantly, he would turn the car around, shaking his head as if he was waking from a marvellous dream.

  Ours was a three-storeyed building; the first two floors comprised a beautiful, nine-room duplex and the third floor was a more modest, much smaller apartment. We lived on the third floor, which only deepened the regret of not being able to live in the duplex as had been originally intended. Halfway through the construction of the house, Father’s resources had become dangerously depleted. He had not anticipated the loss of his job and although he found other work it was never good enough to restore him to his former glory, financially or emotionally. But the house, a skinny skeletal edifice pushing up under the fragrant shade of a kodom tree, begged for completion. For three long years my parents visited the skeleton every day, gave it their love, pumped their blood into its rock-solid heart and held its hand through every stone and brick and pillar. Those were long years for us. The mantra of our home had changed from surrender to sacrifice.

  It was during those unfortunate years that I took it upon myself to demand a bicycle and, thus refused, never again found the spirit to master one in later years. Holidays were already denied to us, but now we lost the annual winter trips to Bagh Bari as well as the numerous treats that Father used to bring back from his trips abroad. At first I felt a sense of duty and did the due diligence that was required of me to take part in such collective sacrifice. As one could only have expected based on her stellar academic career, Naveen received a full scholarship from Yale and left for college soon after construction began on the Big House – as we had come to refer to it – and three years later, when the Big House was almost ready, it was my turn to fly the coop. The very foundation of our family continued to change and yet my parents’ only dream was to erect a grand mansion that would keep us together for ever.

  So, bit by painful bit, the stone skeleton gathered flesh and came to life. A magnificent white structure now towered above the kodom tree, gleaming under a fluffy autumn sky. And, as always, the Big House put its creators to the test. With a huge bank loan over his head, one daughter in college, three others in school and zero savings, it was quite impossible for us to move into the Big House. To do so would mean living hand to mouth each day as well as jeopardise our school and college prospects. The only thing left to do was rent out the Big House rather than move into it.

  I’m not sure whose idea it was to take a further loan from the bank and build the third-floor apartment. It was decided that we would rent out the Big House for a few years and when some of the loan had been paid off and some savings restored, we would move in there and rent out the smaller flat. The decision made no real sense, even to someone as mathematically ungifted as myself. But it was as if both my mother and father had their feet firmly rooted on the very earth that held the founding pillars of their precious home. Father’s bank loan increased, tenants moved into Mother’s dream home and the six of us moved into the haphazardly designed apartment from where we could peer down at what was but would never be ours.

  In time we grew fond of the tenants. Tarun and Lalita were Indian Bengalis who had just moved to Dhaka. The success and glamour of their young lives were apparent in the way they decorated their new home and the grand parties they hosted. We were always invited to their stylish soirées, where I soon discovered that Tarun’s eyes were not entirely fixed on his pretty wife. At seventeen, I quite enjoyed the attention, offered over a forbidden glass of wine, and even Mother was charmed by Tarun’s sharp humour and Lalita’s excellent hospitality. Most of all, Mother was at once incensed and mollified by how beautiful her home (she still called it her home) looked in the company of perfect strangers.

  My father still sat in his white cane chair but it had been placed in one corner of the living room, since the balcony in the new apartment was too tiny. With the loss of a sizeable balcony, we lost the orange-feasting rituals on wintry mornings. We might have forgotten about the very existence of the balcony had it not been for the few pots of herbs that Mother had placed along the black iron banister, and only when the evening breeze carried in the enticing scents of basil and mint were we drawn to the little balcony which was but a mockery of the long and expansive terraces of former years. What we missed most, each one of us, was the promise and anticipation of something great, something better. Perhaps we had all hoped, in our own ways, that moving into the Big House, where every object and pattern had been hand-picked by us, would somehow redesign the blueprint of our relationships and restore our faith in what the future held.

  ‘This is what I’ve lived for? This joke of a home?’ came Mother’s voice that evening, sharp and sneering, geared to offend.

  ‘People live in worse, much worse conditions,’ replied my father, coldly.

  ‘Well, I’m not those people and to think I poured three years of blood and sweat and money into a home where someone else gets to stay. Is there nothing you can do right?’

  ‘Yes, this is all my fault,’ Father said after a long pause. There was a dangerous flatness to his voice.

  ‘Everything in this family is your fault. You are incapable of making us happy.’

  Although I had witnessed their arguments throughout my life, something about Mother’s last words made me catch my breath. I couldn’t see their faces but even from a distance I could feel the heartbreak those words were meant to cause. I felt my father flinch and snap. I felt Mother’s victory and remorse all congealed into one festering wound. And then I heard the shattering of glass. Before I knew it I was standing before them and I saw my father kneeling at the edge of the bed gasping for breath as he clutched his chest. A few feet across the room Mother stood still, unable and unwilling to traverse the path of splintered glass left by broken tea cups and saucers, the length of the massacred floor distending between them like a bloodied battleground.

  We never did move into the Big House, even after Tarun and Lalita left. The black, red and white kitchen with shiny marble-top counters – modelled after one of Mother’s home-decor magazines – was buffed and polished for many more tenant families until it began to lose its lustre and newness. The long stretch of balcony where Tarun and Lalita had hung a hammock under our envious eyes grew dark patches on its milky white cement floor with each passing monsoon. More and more high-rises sprang up around our neighbourhood blocking the golden morning light streaming in through the white French windows of the Big House.

  From the night of their wedding my parents had been chasing a candlelit room, a beautiful home from where to bring forth the perfect start to their lives. Every time they got close the room vanished, the house crumbled. And they never could begin their lives. So there they were, constantly fighting to get back to the beginning when all they were really doing was stalling the macabre end. For Father, the end came with the final and irrevocable accusation that he could never make us happy. He surrendered to the terrible absolution of this verdict in complete silence, with a perpetually bent head. At all hours of the
day and night he slumped in his cane chair or on top of his prayer mat, waiting, always waiting to be released from himself.

  On the day of my father’s funeral, I learned a curious thing. We took his body to the cemetery just before sundown to bury him before the evening prayer call. Friends and relatives pooled into several cars to join the funeral procession. At the entrance of the cemetery, my cousin’s husband stopped us.

  ‘This is as far as women can come. No woman can be present at the burial site,’ he said. Astonished, I turned to Mother, expecting a scathing response from her, but she was backing away, slowly, obediently. I looked to Naveen and Tilat for support but they turned their faces away.

  ‘Why can’t women be at the burial?’ I asked, at last.

  ‘It’s bad luck,’ came the firm reply.

  We stood outside in the gathering murk, my mother, sisters and I, together with a few other women friends and relatives. I watched helplessly as distant relations and veritable strangers accompanied my brother Avi to perform the last rites for our father. As the men disappeared with Avi, I knew what I had been denied. I’d been denied the last tears – the slow, satiating pain of a final touch, a final word, a final look, a final goodbye. When the prayer call rang out from the city’s mosques, we knew that our father had been put to rest in the freshly dug earth. I gazed up at the pink sky, as I had done so many times before, hoping to see the open doorways of Heaven beckon its wandering souls back inside. The other women immediately pulled their dupattas over their heads and cupped their hands in prayer. I wanted, more than anything else, to utter a last prayer for Father. All my life I had defied his wish to see me succumb in ceremonial prayer. And I couldn’t raise my hands now to summon a single syllable that was worthy of a last sacrament for him. I watched the intent faces of those whose eyes were still closed in quiet supplication, the sorrow and reverence in their hearts finding form and release in the act of prayer. For the first time in my life I felt the need to be quiet, to pause and fill myself with a presence that was bigger than me. It was a peculiar sensation, euphoric yet calm, searing open a space in the middle of my chest that remained ajar and alight. In a quick and deliberate flash of memory I saw my father, slouching on his prayer mat, tears on his cheeks, eyes far away, lips frozen in a faint smile. Then the image was gone, along with the sensation. Complete darkness descended upon the cemetery and there was not much sound except the intermittent buzzing of crickets.

  Later I was told that women were not permitted to be near a burial for two reasons. One was based on the belief that women could be polluted by menstrual blood, which might draw evil spirits near the dead. The other reason struck me as a more arresting one: it had to do with a woman’s alleged lack of control over her grief. If she broke down and exposed her deepest sorrow to the departing soul, she made it hard for the soul to leave earth.

  I wanted my father to reach whatever destination awaited him after death. I wanted him to find his home in the next life. If there really was another life out there for him then I wanted him to be happy in it, happier than he had been in this one. At the very least, I hoped that death would complete the circle of his life rather than rob him of its meaning. But even if death completed a circle for my father, it only decapitated our family further, decimating the idea of our home.

  More than twenty years after all our earnest prayers gave birth to the Big House, I am still in the dark about what home had really meant to my father and mother. Was it simply the amalgamation of a city, a neighbourhood, a street, a few rooms and a garden? Was it only a structure of steel and concrete or was it a gateway to something beyond? And without even fully understanding it I had smeared myself with their restlessness, assigned myself the same thankless task of finding and creating a home that would hide the clutter of my life in its gracefully organised rooms. Worse still, the restlessness slowly turned into a cold determination. I vowed not to let myself get attached to the idea of a home. I sought a kind of homelessness – not the kind to land me penniless on the sidewalk – but the kind that would constantly keep me on the move, making it impossible to build a home, to nest, to grow roots. I would spend my life travelling, wandering, moving in and out of new towns and cities.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever return home?’ friends have asked me. The question annoys me, mostly because I do not know the answer to it.

  ‘What is home?’ I snap. ‘Especially in this day and age? Look at this global world we live in.’

  ‘Ah, but everyone has a home . . .’ some of them persist, with a touch of pity in their voices.

  So I devised, very cleverly I thought, a response to the question of where home might be for me, one that spoke of no partialness to one place or another. Playing on the trendiness of being a truly global citizen, I’d say, with great affectation, ‘You see, I want to live in a place that’s a perfect blend of the East and the West.’ Grunts of sarcasm usually followed such a chimera of implied largesse, though curiosity welled at the thought of this cosmopolitan utopia. ‘And what place is that, for you?’ Of course I did not know. If I knew, I’d have lived there. I liked the sound of it, could intuit the philosophy of it, but I was only Alice in the Wonderland of my own naiveté. What I really meant to say was simply this: I knew of no place where I wanted a home because I didn’t know what home was.

  A year after Father’s death, the pined-for family vacation happens at long last. We gather in Turkey where Naveen now lives and is expecting her first child. As we march along the streets of old Istanbul, donning our hats and cameras, it feels as if we have done this many times before. We mount a ferry on the Marmara Sea, crossing over from the Asian side of Istanbul to the European side, the geographical attribute that denotes the region as Eurasia. From the deck of the ferry I stare at the famous Bosphorus Bridge connecting the two sides and I cannot help but marvel at its significance. If you stand right in the middle of the Bosphorus Bridge you stand in the centre of the space that is neither Europe nor Asia. There is great debate among geologists over the formation of the narrow channel of water that connects the edges of Europe and Asia in the body of their gracious host, modern-day Turkey. Thousands of years ago, the Black Sea disconnected from the Aegean Sea which split up the land spaces of Greece and Turkey as we know them today. In around 5600 bce, the Bosphorus appeared as an outcome of the great Mediterranean floods, to reconnect the severed seas and therefore the severed lands by way of the Sea of Marmara (which is connected by the Dardanelles to the Aegean Sea, and thereby to the Mediterranean Sea). It was because of the Bosphorus that Constantinople was built as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and because of the Bosphorus that the Ottomans were able to take it over in 1453. Governments have fought over the Bosphorus forever, because of its strategic importance, and the world wars, like all other wars before them, misused the space of her charitable body which wants nothing other than to connect.

  Today, the Bosphorus Bridge is a lure of hip tourism, the means of crossing over from Europe to Asia without leaving the country. As I cross it myself, my Turkish brother-in-law points out with pride, ‘Now this you will not find in any other country.’ What boggles my mind, after spending three months in beautiful Turkey, is how the people, passionate and warm, cleanly separate their Eastern values from their Western ones, as if the Bosphorus Bridge itself is invisibly suspended in their minds.

  As everyone settles into a balmy evening of barbecue on the patio of our villa, I search online for more Bosphorus-related trivia. On 15 May 2005 at 7.00 local time, US tennis star Venus Williams played a show game with Turkish standout Ipek Şenoğlu on the bridge, the first tennis match ever to be played on two continents. The event was organised as a promotion ahead of the 2005 WTA’s Istanbul Cup and lasted five minutes only on the north side of the bridge. After the exhibition, both players threw a tennis ball into the Bosphorus.

  The last sentence makes me think. Why throw the tennis ball into the Bosphorus? What promise of friendship did two opposing parties proclaim through
this act? Was the throwing of the ball a truce, an attempt at a civil relationship, despite the results of the match? Or was it something more? A gentle wish, perhaps, for a future world where territorial demarcations will not be necessary to define ourselves.

  Indeed, there is a popular belief that if you make a wish while passing under the Bosphorus Bridge it will come true. What could have led to this myth? Could it be that the Bosphorus, bridging the gap between two remarkably different worlds, East and West, symbolises that real harmony lies in neither this nor that. Feeling at home, being at ease, achieving happiness, being fulfilled – call it what you will – is an Eternal Bosphorus that is neither here nor there but somewhere in between. Maybe the wise ones knew this; maybe they knew that the Bosphorus was the earth’s own conjugal point of oneness and harmony, because it urges us to dissociate, to step on neutral ground where we can face ourselves more candidly. So when we stand upon that place or pass under it, earth and spirit blend into a synonymous whole, commanding the right to a wish.

  Pondering on the meaning of home on this July evening, in an old house in Istanbul, where I am vacationing with my family on foreign soil for the first time, I have never felt more rooted, more sheltered. Would Father have liked it here? I try to picture him sitting next to my mother on the spacious ottoman as she contentedly sips her Turkish coffee. I see him engrossed in his reveries, as he always was, contemplating the foamy outline of the Mediterranean Sea in the horizon. Would his presence, right here right now, have completed his quest? Is this what he had been looking for? As the Japanese poet Basho said: