The large living room shows similar signs of care. The furniture is old but classic. The silk upholstery has a delicate blue and white floral print that is fading but the wood has been polished to a noticeable brilliance. More family pictures are displayed in colour-coordinated frames and an elaborate flower arrangement rests in the middle of the coffee table. A heavy crystal chandelier hangs directly above it. I am getting anxious to see Yameen’s room.
After mentioning it several times, Yameen leads me to his room with reluctance. We go down to the basement, walk through a laundry and storage space and stop in front of a small dark room. A narrow bed is covered with a ragged-looking brown quilt; next to it stands an old battered dresser. A half torn poster of Pelé is plastered to the dirty wall and several pairs of old sneakers are lined up against some storage boxes on the opposite wall. This room resembles the Jersey City room; it has the same aura of pure desolation. Why has he been given this dungeon of a room in this big, handsome house? Is this where he spent all his time, like an unwelcome guest, cut off from the rest of the family? He reads my mind.
‘My father thought it was best for me to have more privacy.’
‘Why?’ I ask.
He shrugs.
‘Let’s go,’ I say, taking his hand. ‘It’s too dark in here.’
Yameen’s words leave me with a portentous chill. Something in the way he says ‘my father’ invokes loss, too great to acknowledge. So I let it go as I try to shush the little voice in my head telling me never to return to that house.
I do not know where my first year with Yameen rolls away, bringing me close to my college graduation day. It had been the most consequential and yet the most listless year of my life. I receive in my mailbox a sheaf of envelopes that reflect my academic achievements but I feel hollow, uninformed and unprepared for anything outside the classroom. Mother comes to attend my graduation and I agonise over the prospect of her meeting Yameen. With characteristic directness, she observes, shortly after her first encounter with him, ‘He is twenty-nine years old, you say?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Because he isn’t.’
‘Mother!’
‘Trust me, he is not twenty-nine. Have you seen his passport or driver’s licence?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Then you should.’
I decide not to contradict her, not now, when I stand on the brink of a new chapter in my new world with my new lover. The old world is far behind and what Mother says sounds bizarre enough to ignore. Besides, both my mother and I are so much better at leaving things unsaid. Mother is polite to Yameen. She smiles and speaks in her usual charming manner. I see through her act, I see the suspicion skulking under her smile, and I prepare myself for further accusations. I am still at the bottom of a cavernous sleep, my subconscious waiting for an alarm clock to jolt me out of its numbing depths. But she never brings it up again. More surprisingly, she sleeps arduously through the entire trip. All day long she sleeps, waking up for dinner, before retiring early. I jot it down to jetlag, trying to overlook that, unlike jetlaggers, she never wakes at improbable hours. Around Yameen her eyes shine with distrust though her lips remain sealed. She had already spoken and I had not listened.
After graduation weekend, the three of us drive back to New York together. As soon as we’re there Mother stops sleeping all day, as if a curse has been lifted off her. We shop, eat out, visit parks and museums. We pretend that she never met Yameen until I decide she should meet his parents. My proposition makes Yameen unhappy and Mother uncomfortable but they both agree, albeit grudgingly. His parents extend an invitation for lunch.
On a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, the three of us meet near Grand Central Station to catch a train to Scarsdale. Yameen offers to show my mother around the area. We walk past the famous Chrysler building and buy coffee and smoked almonds from a vendor. My mother, an infatuated shopper, wanders into every store in sight. An hour passes. Yameen seems in no hurry to head back to the station.
‘Why don’t we walk to Bryant Park and show her Fifth Avenue on the way?’ he suggests.
‘What about your parents? We don’t want to be late for lunch,’ says Mother.
‘Don’t worry, they wake up late on Saturdays. They asked us to take our time.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive.’
We kill another hour before making our way to the train station. The shades are drawn in the living room of his parents’ home although it’s only two in the afternoon when we arrive. The house is horribly quiet. Mother and I sit uneasily in the living room while Yameen disappears inside.
‘You’ve met them before?’ Mother enquires.
‘Yes, once.’ I do not tell her about the appalling sight of Yameen’s dingy basement room.
When Yameen’s parents arrive, it is obvious they have just been woken. They look dishevelled and yawn as they shake our hands. His mother offers to put some water on for tea and arranges a plate of crackers. The five of us exchange awkward tidbits about the weather and sports. How much time passes? It is hard to tell with the heavy drapes blocking daylight. Even after several cups of tea and many cumbersome pauses in the conversation, no one mentions lunch. I have no choice but to take Yameen aside and demand an explanation.
‘I thought this was a lunch invitation?’
‘So did I.’
‘Did they actually invite us or did you make it up?’
‘I think they did . . .’
‘You think?’
‘It wasn’t supposed to be formal.’
‘There is no lunch, formal or informal.’
I know Yameen will not confront his parents. Had I known, too, the unavoidable haplessness of such a meeting? How can I blame this man before me when I can so well understand the physics of his self-effacement?
Yameen ambles back to the living room and cheerfully announces that he is going to order some food from the local Indian restaurant. His parents immediately say they are not hungry.
‘We usually don’t eat lunch on Saturdays, we just have an early dinner,’ says his mother, unfazed and detached.
I fix my eyes on the red and green carpet, not daring to meet my mother’s questioning ones. When the delivery man brings our food, we eat, only because eating eases the onus of talking and looking at each other. We have run out of things to say about the weather and Yameen’s father is now fixated on the sports channel, blocking everyone else from his vision. Their relief, when we get up to leave, is painfully conspicuous. On the way back from Scarsdale, no one utters a word. My mother sleeps through the entire train ride.
The day my mother leaves, I accompany her to the airport. We both know I am going to move in with Yameen after her departure. She does not dare say what I dare not ask. We sip cappuccinos at the airport Starbucks, the air between us as it always is – an unsung song.
A year later, I find Yameen’s passport discreetly hidden under a pile of old papers, shoved to the back of his closet, next to an empty bottle of tequila. He is seven years older than he claims to be, which would have made him thirty-six at the time he said he was twenty-nine. I had been waiting for a grand rescue, for my mother to declare her sweeping objections to my lover that would open my eyes and end my anguish. But she had, in the most ineffective of ways, given me an effective clue. Neither of us had ever been able to let ourselves go at the deep end of things. We were accustomed to passing our days in a comradeship of forced peacefulness. So, also when it came to love, we could not look each other in the eye. I was fifteen, when Mother had discovered a boy under my bed. It was not so much the terrified youngster under the bed as the sight of the rumpled bed sheets that sent her into a fit of rage and she told me that the foulness of my choices would continue to haunt me as a woman.
‘You disgusting little creature – to give your body to a boy at your age! What will you have left to give to a man by the time you are a woman?’
Was she hesitant now to chastise me with the same convi
ction because I was older or because she had already made her prediction years ago? Still, as Mother walked away from me at the airport, pulling her worn suitcase along, her pace noticeably slow and tired, a part of me sensed her defeat.
‘You fell in love with my music,’ she always used to say to my father. Did she really mean to say that he had never fallen in love with her?
We both thrashed about in shallow waters, my mother and I, while the truth sank to the bottom.
The view from the window hardly ever changes. Young Puerto Ricans and elderly Indians hoist their overloaded laundry bags across littered sidewalks. A few androgynous looking teenagers dressed in oversized T-shirts and denims saunter by, callously flinging their cigarette butts and crumpled soda cans on the street. The paraplegic old man next door sits on his porch, staring dismally ahead. The little Russian lady, a dirty blue scarf knotted under her chin, tip-toes up to my herb garden and starts ripping out bunches of coriander, oregano and basil. This is my neighbourhood in Jersey City, a place whose spirit bears no buoyancy. This is a place of cheerless cohabitation, a mangled place, licking its wounds and regarding the rest of the world through suspicious eyes. Like Yameen.
By eight in the morning, I run out of my apartment to catch a bus into Manhattan. The bus I am on is not really a bus. It is half the size of a regular bus, carrying less than twenty people and driven by unlicenced Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. They drive at the speed of light and the passengers are expected to sacrifice their safety for the lowered fare they pay. I see an aisle seat and race for it, hoping to stay away from the window seats to avoid rubbing up against the grimy, sweaty vinyl interior of the van. My triumph is short-lived. As I settle into my seat, a huge woman lumbers into the van and comes straight towards me.
‘Move,’ she growls, without looking up from the message she is typing on her phone.
I scoot over to the window. I am burning up in my winter coat but there is no room now to stretch my arms and take off my coat. I don’t want to antagonise this hostile woman in her oversized fake fur coat, clutching a paperback between bright red nail extensions, a glossy, pink phone studded with shiny rhinestones, dangling from her wrist.
Forty minutes later, I am standing in front of the coffee vendor. I buy my usual large Colombian coffee with extra sugar and two glazed donuts. I justify the decadent breakfast by reminding myself of the bundle of energy I will need to get through the day. By the time I make it to the forty-fifth floor of the shining black high-rise in the middle of 6th Avenue, I am already beat.
My boss Jess, who is five years older than me, pops her head into my cubicle and snorts at my donuts. She has dropped me enough hints about good gyms in the area where I can take advantage of our corporate discount policy. Jess is tall, thin, blond and vastly irritating. My co-workers call her ‘The Clit’, presumably (I never confirmed) meaning she resembles a clitoris. I also never know which they mean to insult more, Jess or the female labia. This morning, Jess wants to sell me her blue couch because she is moving into her fiancé’s apartment in Jersey City. I don’t want her couch, or anything else that has come into intimate contact with her flat bottom, but it gives me considerable pleasure to think that she is giving up her life in Manhattan to live in the tri-state area’s most depressing corner.
I never thought I would live in Jersey City until Yameen convinced me to move in with him. After college, I had planned to move to New York and live in Manhattan. Manhattan is said to have something for everyone but my relationship with it is sensate. In this city, I am acutely aware of standing at the breathless, gaping mouth of a giant organism which inhales, drawing me into the conundrum of its insides and then exhales, spitting me out. I am especially baffled by how the city morphs between the hours of light and darkness. When the morning sun glints off the glass panes of the high rises, turning everything into a smouldering gold, I love standing way below to look up and see that ethereal glow sweeping the expanse of the city. Just then, Manhattan feels silken, serene, tranquil. But after dark, she becomes a criss-cross of secretive alleyways and backstreets, each with their own sass and savour: smoky jazz bars uptown, breezy Soho terraces, the blue-black and purple velvet of East Village haunts, the ersatz lounges of the meat-packing district, the lamp-lit windows of the elegant Fifth Avenue townhouses, and in each of these places, the sovereign quality is mystery. This mystery plagues me as I stand by my kitchen window in Jersey City from where I can just about catch a glimpse of the Empire State Building. Steeped in the stifling darkness of my surroundings, I think of men and women, delicate glasses in their hands, clinking them together late into a mystifying night. I strain to hear their laughter, their conversations. And I feel the pulse of that other world beating with the romance that is lacking in mine. I wonder at the nature of my life for it was not so long ago when I had fled from Dhaka, allured by the auspices of America. Now, here in America, I am no more grounded than I was, no closer to home. Once again, I find myself drifting between realities, unfastened from the one I am in, alien to the one I covet.
Jess pops her head back into my cubicle around 5.30 p.m. to say goodbye and, as soon as she leaves, I turn off my computer and walk out into the biting winter evening. I decide to walk through the theatre district. I enjoy watching throngs of excited tourists crowding into the local bars to get a little tipsy before going to their favourite Broadway shows. I stop under the half-nude Calvin Klein model in Times Square and watch the street performers move to their funky beats. They bring soul to the plastic flesh of Times Square.
Soon, too soon, I am waiting for my bus back to Jersey. When I get off at Thorne Street, I walk down the dark sidewalk, praying that this terrible, frosty loneliness is just a figment of my imagination. I pray that when I walk in through the door and step into the cracked, crippled apartment I call home, I will not notice the shabbiness, but instead, will run straight into the arms of the man I claim to love. This never happens. I always smell the stale furniture and note the peeling linoleum kitchen floor. I know the reason I notice these things. It is because I try not to notice the man I live with. Every day I think of what it would be like to turn the clock back to two years ago. Like my mother, I too dream of unstitching the seam of my story. Just like Mother, I keep staring at life, wondering when it will gratify me.
‘We cannot sponsor you for a work visa,’ says Jim, the head of the equities department. ‘You have a degree in Philosophy and Religion. How will that justify your work as an insurance broker?’
I usually like Jim’s no-nonsense straightforwardness, but this time I balk at his words before reminding him that I had been hired based on those very qualifications, thought to be ‘well rounded’ and ‘diverse’ at the time. I had also done fine work for almost a year, with whatever knowledge my degree had proffered on me.
‘Jim!’ I say, accusingly. ‘This means I may have to return to Bangladesh. Without my work permit I cannot stay and there is no time to find something else.’
‘You have a few months before you have to leave . . .’ Jim tells me, calmly.
The problem, however, isn’t Jim. It is Immigration and Naturalisation Services. I stare at Jim’s clean-shaven, square-ish Korean face. What he proclaims about the company’s inability to draw a credible connection between my work and my education may be true but someone must have known that at the time I was hired. I want to ask him about Beth from Iowa, also a Religion major, who sits in the cubicle next to mine. She has worked for the company for five years and is about to be promoted. Then there are the Art History and English majors from Long Island and Alabama, whose jobs do not seem to be on the line.
So why, I ask Jim, did the company hire me in the first place? Am I simply an error in their massive chain of operations? Is my name a small number that doesn’t add up and needs simply to be deleted from the balance sheet before the new fiscal year starts? The interview, hardly a year old, is still fresh on my mind.
‘I can adapt to new environments well,’ I had said with great confid
ence. ‘You see, I’ve lived away from home for four years and have had to adjust to many changes.’
Pens clicked furiously; heads bobbed up and down in sympathy.
‘I grew up in South Africa. I know how hard it is to start a new life in a new country,’ said a thin girl with brown hair.
Everyone sat back and let me impress them with promises of some exotic strength, the strength to forsake and build anew, to start over. A strength I seem to be lacking at the thought of returning to Dhaka. Why is it I feel unhinged at the thought of returning to the home of my childhood?After all, I don’t even like my work. Deep inside, I am grateful to be released from the morose routine of my life. But what am I to do in Dhaka? The question poses an insurmountable void, a black hole of uncertainty.
‘What are you so afraid of?’ Yameen asks. ‘You’re only going home.’
Home. The home I left behind five years ago has changed. My father is dead, Naveen has married and moved to a different country, Tilat has married and moved to a different house, my mother has finally immersed herself in music the way she had always dreamed of doing, and sweet, spirited Avi has turned into a reclusive young man I hardly recognise. Without all the members of my family under one roof, without the old kinesthesia of our beings against each other, I cannot decode the vision of my home, abounding in its sights, sounds and smells. The body of my home is the conflation of six bodies, those bodies now scattered across the continents, consumed by their ownness, in this life or another. I cannot gravitate upon the surface of such a barren and unfamiliar home. I float above it, like an aircraft caught in a blinding storm, hovering over safety but unable to get to it.
Beloved Strangers Page 13