Beloved Strangers

by Maria Chaudhuri

  ‘We should start thinking about marriage,’ I say to Yameen, as I start the preparations to return to Dhaka. The words fall off my mouth like reckless mountain jumpers willing to risk any peril in the name of their obsession.

  ‘Really?’ Yameen sounds incredulous.

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Sureness is no longer a reasonable expectation.

  I marry Yameen more than two years after we first meet and only six months after I leave New York and return to Dhaka. The decision is made after a long bout of squabbling and bickering with each other. Every single time we fight we buy a cheap bottle of vodka, drink ourselves silly and broach the subject of marriage. Instead of bidding each other the goodbyes that are long overdue, we hold on to each other in fierce desperation. We are two valiant soldiers, weary from battle but determined not to lay down our arms.

  When I get to Dhaka, I confide in some friends about my apathy for my husband-to-be and my doubts about the imminent wedding. They laugh and pat me on the back and tell me that married life will be wonderful. Having been away for five years, I cannot discern the thin line between politeness and sincerity. My mother, now inside the solid armour of her life, finds her voice. With the confidence of a queen she declares that all marriages are bland. It is up to the woman to choose the flavour she adds to it.

  But the talons of despair dig deeper and deeper into me and I find myself waking up earlier and earlier in the mornings, long before the sun appears and the day disappears into yet another chasm of wedding planning. These pre-dawn moments are all I have to myself. I huddle in one corner of the little balcony among the overgrown basil and mint plants and stay there until I hear my mother and Amol calling me to breakfast.

  I met Jeetu during those bewildering days, when I lived every moment in the eye of a storm. He thundered into my life with the speed of lightning from the moment we met at a friend’s backyard barbeque. Jeetu’s longish hair, loose white shirts and inexhaustible appetite for all things prohibited often reminded me of the young Jim Morrison whose music he so loved. He turned up at our doorstep one evening, muttering something incomprehensive, sweating profusely, his white shirt covered in pink lipstick stains. I held his hand and led him to the roof, placed him in one of the green plastic chairs and gave him a glass of cold water. Almost every night since then, we sat together on those hideous green chairs, late into the night, tied in a kind of doomed solidarity. If Jeetu’s wife ever questioned where he was, I presumed he never answered her truthfully. For although Jeetu and I were friends of a kind at heart, both our bodies were trained for forbidden pleasure. We kissed and petted and fondled each other without much thought. It was mostly a way of making sure that we were still alive and breathing despite the chill in our souls. Sometimes, when Jeetu softly hummed the notes of ‘Light My Fire’ or ‘Riders on the Storm’, I wondered, fleetingly, if I could ever fall in love with him or he with me.

  The more time Jeetu and I spent together, the less we comforted each other. He told me he had married the woman he loved and I told him that I was about to marry a man I didn’t love. But I didn’t understand his distress and indiscretions any more than he understood my self-inflicting pain. He proclaimed a passion for living that was continually betrayed by his destructive lifestyle. I waved my life away with casual abandon yet tried desperately to inject it with clarity. Jeetu had no interest in my books, in travel or philosophy or history; he filled his cup with his own muddled existence and was perplexed, every day, at how much there was to consider. My need to tear an idea to bits, to chew on words and belabour my thoughts was lost on him.

  We sat facing each other across the luminous night sky, wishing we could help each other. Sometimes we went for aimless drives along the city’s deserted outskirts, Jim Morrison blasting through the stereos, the wind whipping our faces red. Sometimes I accompanied Jeetu to an empty apartment that he kept as a music pad and he beat wildly against a drum set while I sat in a barely furnished room with a bunch of strangers and drank vodka from a paper cup. We never had long discussions or arguments or even much small talk between us. We knew the important details of each other’s lives but left the rest to chance. We simply sought to be in each other’s presence all the time and were both astonished at how our hearts stopped racing as soon as we were within a few feet of each other. He was my magic potion and I his.

  Jeetu and I should have kept our doomed solidarity intact, within those puzzling, clandestine, rooftop meetings. Where there is odd chemistry and inexplicable charisma, sex itself is often not as satisfying as its anticipation.

  I was bright with excitement when Jeetu arrived one evening. Something in the way he moved and talked told me it was going to be different that night. My sisters had invited all our cousins to help them paint the invitation cards for my Holud, the Bengali equivalent of a hen party. Jeetu peered over their shoulders and said something that made them all laugh. I stood in the doorway watching his silhouette; he turned and smiled and I knew what he wanted but I didn’t know it was the last time he would smile at me like that.

  In his own way Jeetu was trying to be kind to me that night. We sped through the city streets and up the three flights of stairs to his empty music pad until we stood, breathless and naked, before each other. And then we were stuck, prey to the quicksand of our sudden vacillation. I covered my body with my bare arms and turned away. He pulled me into his arms, stroked my cheeks and gently reminded me that I must start married life without guilt. I was touched by his tenderness but the fact that we never made love despite our deep kisses and warm caresses left me suddenly clairvoyant. Jeetu, dear friend and antidote to my gloom, could no more save me from myself than Mother or Father or anyone else. He withdrew his magic at the cusp of salvation. If only he had allowed me to feel that what was forbidden could also be unforbidden, with just a touch, a look, a whisper. If only he had allowed himself to see that neither love nor its absence was something to be ashamed of.

  A month before my wedding, I have a dream. I see my wedding party taking place on an unusually warm January afternoon. All the guests perspire in their winter attire and one old man suffers a heat stroke. We move to the garden in the hope of a cool breeze but the sun beats down, hot and bright. Everyone is given a cool glass of lemon water but soon the liquid dries up in our glasses. The rivers, streams and ponds begin to dry up. Pleading eyes turn to the sky to pray for rain but the sky has dried up too.

  I bolt upright in bed, dizzy, feverish. I have to remind myself that I am in Dhaka, where my wedding preparations are underway. I call Yameen.

  ‘Please, we have to call off this wedding,’ I say, without preamble.

  I brace myself for silence, shock, rebellion, confusion or even plain disbelief. Anything but the reaction I elicit. I hear a whining sound, starting low, then gaining momentum and turning into a demented yowl. He cries, every day, until my doubts give way to delirium. In the end, it is not that he cries or forces or begs. The loneliness we have shared and his subsequent misery at losing our inchoate bond, leads me to consent that our separation is not possible without the final despairing consummation, which is to be our marriage.

  On the morning of the wedding the sky is sapphire smoke and there is a citrus fragrance in the air. I am soaped, scrubbed, bathed, brushed, powdered, blood-coloured wrapped in sheaths of chiffon and held in place by jewelled chains of gold. There is music everywhere, flowers and sweets and precocious little girls with glitter on their cheeks. I sit alone. I cannot feel my body, I am jumping off the deep end. No one pays attention to me. Any moment I expect to disperse into nothingness, leaving behind a jumble of red and gold, a cornucopia of glass, metal and fabric. By the time they place a long rectangular yard of shiny material above my head and walk me to the bridal stage, I am gone. What they see is the illusion of me, the way you see the light of a star thousands of years after it has died.

  I sit on the stage and smile blankly at everyone below. At the other end of the
long room, looking straight at me, stands Jeetu. His brown eyes are full of nostalgia. I close my eyes and seal an image of him in my memory – a gentle face pressed against mine, lips curled in inconsummate longing, the everlasting moment before love.

  We are gathered in the kitchen of the Scarsdale house. I watch my husband finish his second bottle of wine and pop the cork of a third. His lips are a lush purple, his fingers tremble near the smudged rim of his glass. His father insists that we spend the night. I start to protest but realise that Yameen is in no condition to drive home. Both his parents retire early and Yameen falls asleep holding an empty wine bottle to his lips like a baby peacefully sucking on the nipple. I step outside into the late spring night. A half-moon laughs sideways across a star-spangled sky. I think of sleeping on the cool, moist grass, under the stars, away from the desolate house, completely unaware of the pair of eyes watching me, willing me to go back inside.

  By the time I return, the house is completely dark. Someone has even switched off the light in the hallway. I have no wish to see Yameen’s drunk, lifeless form in the living room where I’d left him so I turn towards the guestroom. I fumble along the walls for the light switch, my hands bumping against picture frames and coat racks. I shuffle clumsily along, freezing, as my fingers touch warm human skin.

  He stands flattened against the wall. I can only make out his silhouette but I recognise his strong whisky breath.

  ‘I thought I heard someone,’ Yameen’s father says calmly.

  ‘Yameen is in the living room,’ I say.

  ‘He drinks a lot, doesn’t he?’ whispers his father.

  ‘I guess so,’ I’m trying to sound nonchalant.

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘That’s no good.’

  I do not answer.

  ‘Come here, let Baba give you a hug.’

  ‘Baba,’ I say, ‘I’m tired. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  I have various fantasies, one in which Baba actually gives me a fatherly hug, another in which I move away from him in time, and yet another when Yameen’s mother arrives on the scene and switches on the light, thus saving me. In reality, Baba leaps nimbly forward, wraps his huge arms around me and forces his mouth over mine. He manouevres his tongue into my mouth, swirling it around rapidly. With his arms, he holds mine down. I try to curl my own tongue in withdrawal and move my face sideways but he is too strong and too close.

  The struggle goes out of me. My limbs turn flaccid. Only my voice comes out in a whimper, a muffled sound that collides threateningly into the hollow darkness. My torturer looks at me for a split second before slithering away like a creature of the night, unable to ensnare his prey. He disappears as suddenly as he had appeared.

  I never mention it to Yameen. I cannot. What am I afraid of? That it will destroy our sham of a marriage? That he, the very concealer of all truth, will deny me my credibility? In truth, I am afraid that he will hear only the sound of his own heart fracturing, not mine.

  One morning I wake up on the mattress on the floor of the Jersey City bedroom and a burning smell hits me. Yameen is sleeping next to me. Is there an intruder in the kitchen? A fire? An electrical short circuit? Did I leave the stove or the iron on all night? I sit up in bed with a jerk. Groggily, I try to contemplate the potential danger of the moment. I remember Yameen dismembering the smoke alarm when we lit joints the weekend before. I think of waking him but a colossal wave of sleep washes over me. I cannot fight this sleep, this heavy, cloying, numbing sleep. Weakly, I lie back on the pillow again. Is there an incandescent purple glow in the air? Do I really smell something stronger than scorched skin? I must wake up, I command myself, just before falling into a bottomless sleep.

  I dream of a sea of flames, the sea bed ablaze with red-hot coals. I stand at the edge of the sea as the ends of my long hair catch fire and begin to burn. Someone is pushing me forward. I stand firm, planting my feet into the earth, trying to grip the hot, wet sand with my toes. But I cannot endure the final push. I stumble forward and feel a searing pain cut through my side. Opening my eyes, I stare into Yameen’s round face above mine.

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ he cries. ‘You left the gas on all night. We could have died.’

  My head reels. Shall I tell him that I had smelled the smoke and gone back to sleep? Does he think that I tried to kill us? I would never do that, would I?

  I say nothing. We turn away from each other.

  At about 11 a.m. on 12 September 2001, more than six months into our marriage, Yameen and I walk out of our apartment to go to the grocery store around the corner. The Jersey sky is dangerously hidden behind a thick suit of black smoke. Like all the others on the street, we walk in horrible silence, our heads bowed. Everyone is grieving and each hideous moment expands with the accretion of a collective sorrow. We are almost at the end of our block when a woman stops directly in front of us. She is a tall, stocky white woman with a shock of brown hair. She moves towards me with purposeful strides, stops less than two feet away, looks straight at me and speaks out loud.

  ‘Go back to where you came from, you filthy foreigner. You don’t belong here.’

  It is the first time anyone has said anything like this to me. I am shocked, of course, partly by the lack of outrage I had expected to feel if so heinously attacked. I know the woman’s words are not original; it has certainly passed through the minds of others since the planes hit the World Trade Center and for centuries before that. Still, I would have thought that when the time came for some misguided soul to unleash their hatred on me I’d leap at the great injustice of it. I would retaliate and stand up for myself and show them how wrong they were.

  But all I feel is an initial jolt of surprise followed by embarrassment.

  Yameen grabs my hand. ‘Just keep walking. She’s a nutjob.’

  The woman does not look at Yameen, not even when he starts to pull me away. She stands before me, a ghastly figure, her unkempt hair lifted by the wind, pale skin, eyes narrowed in spite. Every breath she takes, each minute movement of her body is willing me to crack or bend or break. It is exactly in this instant that I feel alive again. The air comes rushing back into my lungs as if I – the drowned – have been resuscitated. My skin, dry and neglected, tingles under the midday sun. I inhale deeply the stale, forgotten odour of Jersey City. That woman, that crazy, angry God-sent woman was so very right. I didn’t belong there, on the dirty sidewalk in front of a Shop Rite in Jersey City, holding Yameen’s hand. I didn’t belong there at all.

  The woman’s words – regardless of their worth – corners me into a stupefying concession of what has always eluded me – that I am living and unbroken, that even if I don’t, other people can see me as I am: whole, indivisible, breathing, and tangible. The woman’s castigation rips off my scabs and reveals fully the hollowness of my marriage, the concavity of my life, my attempt to be formless. By pointing her finger at me to banish me from her world, she shows me how I have been executing my own exile.

  But I cannot leave my marriage, not before I chance within its confines a sudden clearing, lucid, unrestricted, brimming with possibility. I first meet Alan in the Hamptons. He is an old friend of Yameen’s. He extends one long arm for a handshake while wrapping the other around a petite dark-haired girl. His red hair reminds me of a New England fall. Alan is the perfect host. He never sleeps, has his warm blue eyes on all of his guests and still manages to keep one arm around the girl. In the evenings he grills lobsters and burgers on the porch under the Amagansett sky while we drink beer and watch the stars come out.

  I have never understood the ease with which some people invoke pleasure. What I knew to be pleasure always came at a cost. You had to work for it. You had to earn it. And you hardly ever deserved it. Alan, it seemed, derived genuine pleasure from the most unexpected places. He was peculiarly fond of listening to my accounts of my childhood. Voraciously, he absorbed my descriptions of the Dhaka streets, the havoc, the monsoons, the uncompromis
ing heat. Somehow he found humour in all my misadventures; he lightened my misgivings with a broad grin, making me stop in mid-sentence, whatever sonorous tale I happened to be telling him. He felt that he knew my mother, wished that he had met my father and asked me again and again about my brother and sisters. He folded himself into the images of my past as if he had always been there in the backdrop, unnoticed but nearby. He drifted into my present, as light as a feather, lifted by a soft summer breeze. Perhaps he saw me as I was – a memento of my past, a shadow of my present.

  By our third visit to Amagansett, Alan’s dark-haired friend was no longer there. ‘Where is your girlfriend?’ I asked, coyly.

  ‘Who, Cynthia? Oh I’ve known her a long time. She likes me but she isn’t my girlfriend,’ he said.

  I caught the hint of a smile as he assuaged my suspicion and I warned myself to be more careful. But I was hapless before Alan; I lost all design and direction. We found ourselves lying on the grass, holding hands, walking along the beach. Our attraction to each other was neither sedating nor scintillating. It was a leisurely, weightless fall into a constant state of discovery. I followed him from room to room, as he lit candle after white candle for each room of the cottage in preparation for the evening’s activities. I was reminded, inadvertently, of the fragrant, candle-lit room that Father had once prepared for his wedding night but never got to see. I helped Alan clean up the empty bottles and cans and overflowing ashtrays long after all the guests had left and even in those ghostly hours of being alone together, we never kissed, never held each other close.

  By the end of my first summer in Amagansett, I felt a distinct change in me. I woke up one morning on the mattress in our Jersey bedroom and felt a small space in the middle of my chest pop open and crackle with energy. As the day progressed, the energy spread more evenly through my chest and down towards my belly and turned into a uniform warmth that shot through my muscles. It was a kind of sexual tension I had never felt before, the kind that precedes the predator, the prey or the kill. It kept my pulse racing continuously in the anticipation of deliverance. But summer had come to an end and Alan had moved back to Philadelphia where he spent the non-summer months. I bided my time, knowing I would see Alan again.