Beloved Strangers

by Maria Chaudhuri

  His visits to Jersey City started casually at first – perhaps he had been in Princeton to visit his sister and wanted to drop in, or he was coming into the city for some business and thought he might pass through Jersey to say hello. He was always careful to visit when Yameen was there and brought something with him each time. Often he stayed back for Indian take-out and beer and crashed on our unsightly green couch. He was as gracious a guest as he was a host. He always left before we woke up, his blanket neatly folded into a square on one corner of the couch, the dirty dishes from the previous night washed and stacked by the sink. I counted the seconds till his next visit.

  It was Alan who suggested that I assist him in his new job. He was always looking for new projects and finding them without much trouble. His latest project required him to haunt different bars and lounges in Manhattan and promote certain brands of liquor. Why he needed an assistant for a job as ridiculously easy as that, I need not have asked. I had to wear a yellow and red T-shirt with a tight black skirt, set up a table on one side of our chosen bar with sample items and drinks and then simply coax drunk men and women to try our free samples. After work, Alan and I put away our table of samples and danced the night away. In the early hours of dawn Alan would drop me home, where I slept till evening when it was time to be with him again.

  While my mother complained incessantly about the indeterminate quality of her life, trapped between her dreams and her destiny, I felt that my life had never been better than when it was in perfect limbo, between reality and fantasy. I was back in the pink bathroom of childhood, simultaneously performer and audience, and there was no incorrect move. The city now was no longer an apparition from my kitchen window. I roamed it freely in the dark, holding Alan’s hand, slinking up to the unknown, attractive faces on the sidewalk and dance floor with complete ease. Yameen came to join us sometimes but he always left in a drunken daze halfway through the evening. Perhaps he felt left out. There was nothing I could do for him. He was the Heart-ravisher that I had created. And now that he had ravished my heart, and all the love in it, I had nothing else to give him. Often he barked at me, speech slurred, ‘I know you, I know what you’re doing! I’ve always known you!’

  It wasn’t until a few months had passed and I was heartsick from the sexual longing between us that I realised just how religious Alan was. I caught whiffs of his religious sentiments when, in moments of weakness, he revealed his need for intimacy followed immediately by self-debasement. One day, after we kissed, he leaned back into the soft leathery coolness of the couch we were sitting on at a club called Cream and let out a long, meaningful sigh. Silver strobes of light from the dance floor zigzagged across his face and as I brought my still-warm lips closer to his mouth again, I caught the chill creeping into his features. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, reaching for his hand.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, tenderly pushing a strand of hair from my eyes, ‘I was just thinking about marriage, how some people stay happily married for ever.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ I asked playfully, still unaware of the despondency behind his words, ‘To be happily married?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I had my chance with someone a long time ago and I blew it. But ideally, two people in love should be married, yes. That is the right way, the way God intended it to be.’

  My heart twisted with wariness. The sweetness of the kiss had passed and I was left with the old, familiar feeling of being caught in an act of treason. Still, such moments were rare, at least in the beginning, and Alan’s natural countenance was so much the opposite of judgmental that I found it hard to remember them afterwards. If he did manage to upset me with one of his views on good versus evil or sin versus virtue, he immediately compensated with an outpouring of apologies and assurance and loving embraces. If there was one thing that Alan did for me more than anyone ever has, it was the task of reading every single emotion that ever appeared on my face. He knew every smile, every look, every sigh, every turn of my head. He knew so much of me and about me and I so little about him. But I know that he fought with himself, with his innermost impulses, which, sadly, separated his passion from his piety.

  I have no true way of guessing, even to this day, what drove Alan to make love to me for the first time. Perhaps he was unable to resist his desire even though he considered it sinful, or maybe he chose to be with me because that night, that one night, everything other than the two of us seemed truly irrelevant to him. Perhaps my disdain for religious rigor made it momentarily possible for him to overcome his own reservations. The God of my childhood was a punitive figure who hid amidst prayer mats and holy books and repetitive rituals and dispensed punishment at the slightest sign of non-compliance. But the God of my adult life was increasingly different, still only partially visible but gaining definition with time. This new God was more humorous, less masculine. This God had me placing a lonesome rose underneath my father’s photograph on the anniversary of his death rather than visit his grave to pray for his soul. My mother didn’t understand it, but this God did. This God had me smiling with gratitude when I found myself, finally, mercifully, in Alan’s naked arms.

  We parked his car around my block in the last hours of the night and undressed ourselves in the pallid pre-dawn light. We were hardly bothered by the cramped interior of the car or the faint comprehension that anyone looking in from outside might easily have seen our every move through the car’s windows. The pleasure I felt was timeless, pronounced, exceptionally calming. I was twelve years old again, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as Shonali dragged me and Naveen out of bed to join her for an early morning walk. Shonali insisted on those daily walks and her primary objective was to pick the fallen shiuli flowers along the silent alleys we passed, before the city came alive and trampled the tiny flowers to extinction. There was nothing sexually suggestive about those walks but something about the sight and scent of a shiuli, all creamy white petals and delicate orange stem, quietly releasing its sensuous perfume, heightened my senses and made my skin tingle.

  That heady scent from long ago flooded my memory and filled my breath on that morning with Alan and it was the first time in my life that I saw myself through my own eyes while in the act of lovemaking – as curious and open as I had been on those shiuli-picking mornings. How dreamlike the world had seemed in those torpid hours, how mysterious the houses in our neighbourhood, how surreptitious yet inviting the shadowy lanes. And how ironic and yet how necessary that I should find that fragrance and that mystery again in the filthy streets of a strange foreign neighbourhood, in the arms of a lover I was not to have.

  It was so much harder for Alan. His joy, though genuine, was somehow furtive, finite, as if he needed to return what he had only borrowed. What invigorated my faith in myself, in my ability to laugh and love, only depleted his confidence in himself, in us. Wide-eyed I watched myself come alive in Alan’s presence but realised how he was unaware of the lasting imprint he left on me. I tried, for Alan’s sake, to restrain my elation, to bring to our relationship the quality of suffering I knew would ease his torment. But I had little control over the person I was becoming. I had worked too hard and too long to contain myself. My mind now was disinclined to remain subdued, my body unobligingly demanding. Alas, what was my transformation was but a painful transgression for Alan. He went through different stages of guilt even as he succumbed to the experience.

  ‘Doesn’t it feel right at all?’ I asked him when he buried his head in my lap and sobbed or moped for days.

  ‘Of course it does,’ he answered.

  ‘Then why so guilty?’

  ‘How can you be so simplistic? Feeling good is not the same as being good.’

  But wasn’t it? And why couldn’t it be?

  Unknowingly, Alan voiced what I had always feared. It was the one fear I’d kept running from, the one true God who had ruled my being. But with Alan I was heedless of this God. For once, I had felt no need to run or deny or hide or prove or create or destroy. For o
nce, something was just happening to me without censor or ceremony, without prospect or purpose, without shame or pride. It was too uncontainable to be friendship, too instinctive to be an adventure and too harmonious to be love. It begged to find its own way.

  If only Alan could have done without answers. He came by in the afternoon sometimes when Yameen was at work but these visits were awkward, unsettling affairs unlike his buoyant, amicable visits from the early days. In broad daylight, he was careful not to touch me and jumped if my skin brushed against his by accident. It was almost impossible to imagine that a few hours later, sheathed by nightfall, loud noise and large crowds, Alan and I would be inseparable for most of the night. He would wrap his long arms around my waist and whisper to me his most private thoughts and I would feel his words stoke a fire somewhere deep inside me like they always did. I began to dread his daytime visits because I knew they were his attempts, however unconscious and hapless, to make sense of our love, to see if indeed it still felt like love without the mask of darkness. The hardest part was to try and answer his questions; questions that sounded valid but felt insubstantial. Was I happy with him? What did the future hold in store for us? And how could he live with himself? I stood facing him in the suffocating brown kitchen, distraught, diminished by his guilt. Mother’s accusing eyes hovered above us, as if to say, Is this what I have taught you? After all that you have seen me suffer, is this the best you can do for yourself? Not knowing what else to do I followed the lead of her accusing eyes and reproved Alan for his weakness.

  ‘You don’t love me,’ I retorted. ‘If this was about love, your guilt would not have stood in the way.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ he pleaded. ‘You know I love you. But you are married to my friend.’

  ‘I didn’t want to marry him.’

  ‘But you did, didn’t you?’

  Much like a bystander, I watched Alan thrash about in his doubt and remorse. For the first time ever, I was free of those insidious elements, and despite my love for him, I did not want to reach out and soothe his sores, lest they rub off on me. The nights we worked together were infected with his growing affliction. He avoided my eyes, languished and sulked in my presence and went to great trouble to keep me at arm’s length until, one day, I stopped going to work. It must have been what Alan had hoped for, because shortly thereafter, he stopped his visits to Thorne Street.

  I hadn’t seen him in weeks when he called me one night and I could tell he had been crying. ‘I made a confession in church today. Then I called Yameen but he wouldn’t talk to me,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want to tell Yameen?’ I asked.

  ‘That I’m sorry. So very sorry.’

  ‘And you think that’ll make it better?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have to try . . .’ he couldn’t finish his sentence.

  Just like that, we had come to an end. Words had run out, love had receded and memories too would pale, no doubt. How I wished my first taste of love had not ended with an aftertaste of atonement, a petition for pardon.

  ‘Good luck then,’ I managed, unable to say goodbye.

  At last, I was truly alone in that decrepit flat. I was barred from entering the bedroom where Yameen slept alone. During the day he locked the bedroom door and took the key with him to work. I moved my possessions into the guestroom, the only room in the apartment, which had been painted a canary yellow by Yameen’s former flatmate. A real bed had finally been purchased for the bedroom, and with my shift to the guestroom I was forced, once again, to sleep on the rotting futon. I slept fitfully during the nights and, if I happened to wake before sunrise, my mind came undone in the darkness. I wished for the frigid draft pushing in through the window to turn into a warm midsummer night’s breeze. I strained to hear the harsh cawing of tropical crows signalling daybreak. I could smell a rain-soaked Dhaka, spicy, earthy, beguiling in her freshness. The kodom tree at the entrance of our house would have bloomed by now, its musk extending beyond its shade. Shonali, devoted lover of flowers, used to pluck the bald-headed petalless flowers and stick them haphazardly in a vase in the centre of our living room. No one liked to look at the oddly shaped flowers but each one of us was drawn to the living room by their unique scent.

  ‘This is why Krishna played his flute under the kodom tree,’ Shonali told us gravely, running her fingers lightly above the spiky, egg-headed flowers. ‘Because he too was ugly, like the kodom flower. But the sound of his flute, like the smell of kodom, was sweeter than life.’ Inspired by her own sombre theory, she would break into a melancholy tune about Radha–Krishna’s tragic love story.

  I yearned for Shonali’s wisdom on those lonely nights, craved her callused fingers rubbing oil into my scalp and missed, terribly, her gruesome humour. I missed seeing the first sign of an approaching storm in the sudden and drastic disappearance of the sun, the earth’s sublimation from a hot, diaphanous liquid into a cool, dark piece of chocolate. I missed Mother’s insufferable presence, where I felt safe if not free. I missed the Big House and the herb-filled balcony of our smaller one. I missed oranges and spices and the cacophony of too many voices speaking at once. I missed even the ubiquitous God who had disciplined me as a child. Entrapped by the sickening yellow walls of a noiseless room, I missed being watched, followed, scrutinised. Never before had my adolescent years seemed so alive, so palpable and fiery as they did from where I lay, etherised, on that stinking mattress. What if my father were to ask me again to never leave Dhaka? What would I say to him this time? Would I stay? Or would I make again this long and arduous journey only to find that it was I and only I who was standing at the end of it?

  The paraplegic man across the street is not in his usual place today. His chair sits barren, purposeless. In every other way, it is morning as usual on Thorne Street. From my position by the window, I see cars zooming by like flashes of lightning. The little Russian lady is tip-toeing her way into my herb garden, an attempted replica of Mother’s work. Should I run downstairs and tell her that she need not sneak into my garden any more? Should I, perhaps, ask her if she would, from time to time, water my herbs so they may continue to live after I am gone?

  Standing next to me, Yameen is drinking an opaque liquid from a large mug. This is not the first time he has drunk in the morning hours but I have rarely seen him drink so fast. In his agitation, he consumes the strong-smelling liquid as if it were a life-saving remedy. A white truck pulls up at the kerb. I tell Yameen the movers are here.

  ‘So you’ll come back in a few months?’ he asks dully.

  ‘I’m taking all my things,’ I reply gently.

  ‘I’m not asking about your things, I’m asking about you.’

  I remain silent.

  ‘You told me you just need time to think,’ he says, edging on despair.

  ‘It is time to go,’ I say.

  Sluggishly, painstakingly Yameen plods back to the couch. He sits there, unmoving, eyes glistening, lips curling with the impending threat of tears. All those tears. I stare at Yameen and for a moment, I wonder if that’s how my father had felt – waiting, helplessly waiting – for my mother to step into his world and into his heart. I stand paralysed, until one of the movers breaks the onerous moment.

  ‘Are these boxes coming too?’ he asks, pointing at Yameen’s old boxes.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Those will stay.’

  Sweet, Sour and Bitter

  Green and yellow patches of marshland glisten in the morning sun, giving way to narrow lanes winding around low white-washed tenements, that eventually merge into bigger and busier streets crawling with buses, trucks and the sheer mass of human bodies. All of this shrouded and trapped under a stagnant blue-grey cloud of smog. This is what I see as the aircraft begins its descent towards Zia International Airport. The woman next to me is furiously patting her chocolate-brown face with chalk-white powder as her husband tries to calm their small son. The little boy keeps trying to grab at his mother as she pulls one atrocity after another from her handbag
to make herself presentable for the imminent reunion. She now slashes her lips with a deep maroon lipstick, the colour of clotted blood, and finishes off by slapping hot-pink blotches on her cheekbones. The aircraft makes a final swoop and the child begins to wail. As soon as the stewardess unlocks the cabin door a surge of heat brings with it a rush of smells: sweat, aerosol fumes, old leather and urine. As they hit my nostrils something in my gait changes involuntarily: a subtle shift in my posture, a familiar repositioning of the angle of my spine. I am readjusting, realigning, rearranging into my other self. I am in Dhaka.

  I am back at my grandmother’s house, the same house where I used to spend a few weeks of each summer as a young girl. The once-white walls are a jaundiced yellow, peeling, exposing large grey blocks of cement. I stroll through the front yard, pausing at the locked entrance of what we used to call the abandoned garden, inside which is a burnt-down shack, untended mangroves and stubborn weeds. There I had played for hours until my grandmother came to drag me back to the house, gasping at my arms and legs that had been bitten raw. Every day my grandmother warned me not to play in the abandoned garden, she told me the shack was haunted and spirits lived among the wild thickets. I went back again and again, in search of the poor spirits, waiting for them to hit my face like a gust of hot wind as my grandmother had described. ‘I’m warning you, if that bad wind hits your face, you’ll go insane,’ she would caution. I wished.