‘I don’t care any more what anyone says,’ she says bitterly these days, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want.’
‘As you should,’ I say.
‘Oh I will,’ she threatens.
And she does. She changes the upholstery of the living-room furniture into a bold zebra print and replaces the off-white curtains with sheer gold ones. She paints her room a luminous lavender and makes a resolute attempt to keep her matching bedspread smooth and unruffled. The dining room is slathered in vivid yellow and a red and green batik print of a humongous lobster is placed on the wall. But when she stands back to survey the changes, the zebra print seems too busy, the gold curtains are too transparent, the lavender in her room is suddenly more pink than purple and the dining room looks like a giant lemon about to be consumed by a monster bug. My mother is puzzled.
‘Go for lighter tones,’ I suggest.
‘It’s not the colours, silly,’ she says, recovering her pride. ‘It’s the light in the rooms. The architecture of this flat is all wrong. It’s not like the Big House.’
I remind her that the light comes in from the same direction for both the Big House and our flat.
‘Oh, who cares about the light,’ she waves me away. ‘If I had the right amount of money to spend on this flat, then I could really do what needs to be done.’
‘Then do it slowly, room by room,’ I persist.
‘Oh, to hell with it,’ she cries. ‘The kitchen is beyond redemption. The bathrooms need complete makeovers. I don’t care any more!’ Her voice is starting to quiver, she is losing her composure.
‘What you’ve done isn’t so bad,’ I try to assure her.
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s your time now. You’re young and life awaits you. You should be doing all this, not me.’ Her eyes flash and the curve of her neck is tense.
Why is Mother not as relieved as I had always expected her to be now that she is on her own? In her quest for freedom had she completely missed its shape-shifter spirit? Had she worked towards a vision which, upon closer look, was the opposite of freedom?
And is it only now that I see the martyr I have become, setting myself up for sacrifice, again and again, at the altar of music, of dance, of love? If I never could hold on to love, or the things I loved, it was only because I was too impatient to snatch at what I thought I needed, too keen to create for myself the ideal scenario. The sweetness of the experience eluded me because I was too busy apprehending its outcome. Just as my mother can never be free of her compulsion for freedom, I could never perfect my image of perfection.
Mother goes shopping again for materials. She sifts through the myriad of colours, never finding exactly what she needs but never admitting that no matter what she picks, it always seems to be a different shade of the same colour. Finally, tired of refurbishing and redecorating, Mother wants to sell the very property on which our home stands. It is not the loss of the land but the thought of demolishing the Big House that turns the conversation sour between us. Though we both know that we will never live in the Big House as a family, the mere fact that it is there, solid space that encases the vision of a beloved home, provides more comfort than I had ever admitted. At moments like this, I am confronted by the fragility of my life, its futility. On and on we dream, we wish, we love – no matter that the dreams come to an end, the wishes evolve or that love dissipates like dust in the wind. Perhaps, what matters only is that we have lived long enough to dream, hard enough to wish and indisputably enough to love.
Tonight I stand before a picture of myself in my mother’s arms. I am a month old in the picture. My mother holds me up for the camera as I open my mouth in a broad, toothless grin. She peers from behind my infant body, proud and happy. Through the black and white of the picture I can almost discern the rosy glow spreading across her cheeks. I can feel my own body relaxing into the protective grip of her hands. I can sense the tight embrace that will reclaim me after the camera has flashed, the hot kisses that will cover my little face, the soft baby talk she will coo into my ears when she cradles me to sleep. Then I see it – the two long tears forming a lopsided cross upon the picture’s surface. Someone had cleanly ripped the photograph into several pieces, which were now glued back in place.
‘Who did this?’ I ask my mother, outraged.
‘You did. Don’t you remember?’ she says, as if I ask a rhetorical question.
‘But why?’ I am surprised because I have no memory of it.
‘I don’t know. You were upset about something, I presume.’
Had she never asked me why I was angry or did she just refrain from mentioning it now, lest she unleash some unpleasant memory between us? I lie awake trying to recall why I had torn the photograph and it finally comes to me. I was furious to find out that this was the only baby picture of myself with my mother. The next picture of me was on my second birthday and the one after that when I was five years old, both of which were group pictures. It was as if no one cared to capture my childish feats but dutifully recorded a few nondescript pictures of a family around a cake or siblings playing together. They were hazy long shots, where I deciphered neither the expressions on my face nor the language of my body. And my mother? She was nowhere near me.
I looked through the old family albums again and again. Countless pictures of my brother and sisters stared back as I frantically searched for ones of me. There were thoughtfully arranged pictures of Naveen at various ages, sitting naked in a baby tub, crawling, and learning to pose with her Bugs Bunny. There was Tilat, a moon-faced baby, traced through the years as she grew into a slim, beautiful child. And there was Avi, the apple of all our eyes, giggling from babyhood to adolescence with characteristic joyfulness. I was not there, not even as a shadow in the peripheral vision of the camera, not until I was much older and had learned to nimbly wedge myself into the shots. In jealous rage, I had picked up the singular black and white infant photograph of myself and tore it into three pieces. I wanted to destroy the one image that offensively alluded to all the other unrecorded ones.
But today, my eyes widen in surprise as I begin to notice something else. How had I missed the fine and careful effort with which the torn pieces had been glued back in place? Someone had put the pieces back together with delicate precision. The work of those fingers belied a purpose far beyond the immediacy of the task. Even the glue had not left any marks in the white back of the photograph. The cross that now remains across the picture’s front is just a faint mark, like a long strand of dust waiting to be blown away. How could I have failed to see this labour of love?
And how could I have missed my mother’s laughter all these years? A sweet, rumbling sound fills the room when she laughs. Did she not laugh as much when we were young? I remember her frustration only too well. Creasing her forehead in horizontal lines of consternation, she always regarded the four of us in terms of all the work that needed to be done rather than all the work she had already accomplished. Mother was not a slacker, but the idea of work tired her as much as the work itself, leaving her prematurely exhausted.
‘What am I going to do with you kids? I don’t know how to raise you into proper human beings!’ she lamented to no one in particular. She’d groan and grumble about how old and withered she was going to be by the time we grew up and went our own ways. On the best of days, mother regarded her burden with a touch of self-satisfying irony. ‘At least I should not want of care in my old age, after raising the four of you.’
There were also the fits of rage that left her breathless. I remember watching her from a distance, her body quivering, sweat glistening above her lips and on her brow. During such fits she constantly moved things within her reach, without really noticing them. Once when she had a fight with my father at the dinner table, she snatched my plate away just as I was about to bite into a gravy-covered potato. Another time she absently tore up an important school notice that Naveen had left on the coffee table.
In her wrath, Mother plucked the leaves of potted plant
s, poured half-finished tea out of still-hot cups and turned off the television in mid-show. It was as if by reconfiguring the world of matter around her she could redirect her inner energies. And when she yelled she did so with great intention, using the force of her voice rather than words. She wanted to convince the world with the sound of her pain rather than an explanation of it. She expected us to prostrate before her anger and concede that there was no reason to question her.
Even in those circumstances I was drawn to her, awed by the strength that drove her, commanded by her expectation to be loved and obeyed despite her unbecoming attributes. In no less part was I lured by the unsavoury promises of adulthood. I wanted to master that kind of crude command over those around me. In a way, I began to appreciate how I was always being told ‘You will’ and ‘You must’. Clearly, I was seduced by the darker side of things and for this I fault no one.
Because, for all the fires I recall my mother lighting in her younger years, I also recall when my mother conducted herself with perfect grace. A few months after I married Yameen and moved back to America, she came to visit me. In the late afternoons I sat at the kitchen table and read while my mother cooked dinner. On one such occasion, she was frying butterfish with red onions and garlic, absently humming under her breath. The aroma of spicy fish coupled with her gentle humming transported me to another time when I used to perch at our dining table with my schoolbooks, listening to Amol singing above the sizzle of the frying pan. My father sat at the other end of the table, poring over his work, a glass of single malt by his side. From Naveen’s room floated the faint notes of Chris de Burgh’s ‘Fatal Hesitation’. Every time our favourite lines in the song came up, Naveen and I chorused to them together, she from her room and I from the dining room. Father would raise his head for a second and then look back down at his yellow notepad. I realised, suddenly, that this sequence of events were repeated evening after evening, but Mother had always been missing from the routine. Where had she been?
I raised my eyes to look straight into my mother’s. Mine were searching, hers reaching out. I’m right here, her light-brown eyes seemed to say. I saw her then, a woman alight but not burning, absent but not quite gone, demanding but only of those she loved.
A few weeks later, after my mother left, I opened the kitchen cabinet to grab the coffee jar and found a blue sticky note pasted on the inside of the cabinet door. It said:
You are the best of all
Always remember that
I think my mother meant to say ‘You’re the best’, in a casual American way, but by attaching the last two words – ‘of all’ – to her first sentence, she belied her recently acquired Americanism and confirmed her instinctive capacity to leave her own, loving, inimitable mark. For all the times you burn her to the ground, she will rise from the ashes. For all the times you chase her shadow, she will reveal her light to you so generously that you may live in the aftermath of its brightness. For all the times you wait for her to see you, she will turn to catch you at an odd second, when you stand with your heart exposed, unprepared for her kindness. That is my mother and, just like love, she is best preserved if you let go of her.
As I tuck her note into the kitchen drawer it dawns on me that it was only natural that Mother was missing from our customary evening ritual. If she had been there, ‘Fatal Hesitation’ would never have made as much sense as did it to Naveen and me back then and for the rest of our lives. It was all there in the words of the song, which we knew by heart.
To this day, when I thrum the tune of ‘Fatal Hesitation’, the lyrics form themselves into the image of a woman, lost and lonesome. She is walking barefoot on white sand, along a stretch of blue-green ocean, foamy frolicky waves teasing her toes. But every time she comes closer and I try to catch a glimpse of her, she looks away and all I can see is the curvaceous outline of her face, fanned by long, windswept hair. And though I can never see her face fully, I know exactly what she looks like.
I find myself increasingly drawn to babies, buttery masses of flesh and soft folds, unquenchable wells of thirst and desire from the moment they are born. Love, love, love, is all they ever want. Mouths agape, fists balled, their curled toes flail the air for more love. I think of my frail mother, manhandled by sixteen limbs, and I cannot resist smiling at her youthful consternation.
‘You need to have a child,’ Mother reminds me frequently nowadays.
‘Why? You certainly never wanted to.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ she laughs nervously, not quite poised for a fight.
‘Didn’t you always say so?’
‘I did not.’
‘But you did!’ I cry.
‘What are you saying, exactly?’
‘I’m just wondering if having a child is worth the trouble,’ I say.
She bristles with irritation, her jaw tightens. This is when she will say exactly what she means not to say.
‘This is just the kind of nonsense one has to deal with as a mother—’ she stops short, checking herself in time.
‘Don’t worry, Mother. I might have a child if I find the right man.’
‘Ha! There are millions of men, just pick the right one.’
I don’t know what Mother guesses from such flippant discussions, but sometimes I do dream of being a mother. The age-old cycle will start again in me, filling my veins and organs with the promise of new life and love. We will play, my child and I, a new game of give and take, speaking a new language of right and wrong; we will laugh and cry, we will hug and part, we will doubt and share, but at the end of it all we will ask each other the same question that separates and unites us: Do you love me? Was it worth it then, the push and pull, the sweetness and the bitterness, the inevitable descent from womb to breast to lap to hard, unyielding ground?
Dhaka afternoons are as warm and tumescent as ripe gold olives. The tropical sun roasts the city and its dwellers into a caramel exhaustion. The rickshaw pullers lean against their parked vehicles, salt crystals gleaming on their strong brown backs. The crows flutter about impatiently, searching for food droppings. Young mothers in colourful saris throng the school gates as the last bell rings and children stream out, uniformed armies with heaving backpacks, faces alight with the arrival of freedom. The street children or tokai make a final push to sell their remaining merchandise of popcorn, balloons and flowers, before scampering off to roadside dhabas for the afternoon meal, stray dogs following at their heels.
At home, Amol rushes to perform the alchemical ritual of lunch, slicing the afternoon air with the six most reassuring smells of my life – onions, garlic, ginger, turmeric, chilli and coriander. I kick off my school shoes and enter the kitchen. I tug at my mother’s sari as she bends over the stove, making my presence known, taking in the smell of her coconut shampoo and soap. Naveen pokes her head in next, Tilat and Avi follow and soon there are too many of us in the small kitchen. Carrots are jabbed, greedy fingers dip into curries, drumsticks jump out of a pot. ‘Get out of here!’ Amol swats at us like flies but we swarm around him, buzzing with demands. My mother laughs. ‘They’re hungry,’ she says tenderly.
We were hungry, but not just for food. We were hungry too for the delicious stretch of afternoon that spread before us, those gold-green hours of secrecy and silence that broke up the day into three essential parts, leaving the middle part for all things magical. In the dreamy olive shade of those afternoons, unburdened of morning’s duties and unoccupied by evening’s demands, each of us went our separate ways. In those sumptuously private hours, we found our own meandering paths to love, suffered our shames, lived our fears and forged our faiths.
But what made the afternoons perfect was the knowledge that at the end of our romps and gambols through those pre-twilight hours, we would come together again in a fire-flied dusk, to reconvene in the same, singular act of loving and living, together, as one entity.
Epilogue
On a cool September dawn, I awake to the promise of a new beginning. I am gettin
g married a second time, three years after the end of my first marriage. I wake from a dreamless sleep and greet the brisk summer morning. I see the women who have come to scrub and polish me with their selection of unguents and bathe me in boiling hot water but I turn away from them. I will not allow them to paint my face into a glittering mask of red and gold. Luxuriously, I lather myself with Mother’s coconut soap, letting the cool water wash away yesterday’s scents. Standing before my mirror, I tuck fresh jasmines into my own hair, place a red bindi in the centre of my eyebrows and carefully smudge kajal under my eyelids. After I finish, I linger by the mirror, studying my reflection. I am looking for signs of fear, for shreds of doubt. The woman who stares back at me is neither apprehensive nor giddy. Calm and expectant, she basks in the lucidity of this moment. I open the door and let everyone in.
‘Answer each question loudly and clearly,’ says the kazi, stroking his grey stringy beard.
‘Are you at least eighteen years of age?’
‘I am.’
‘Do you accept this Nikah which is sanctioned by law and deemed holy in the eyes of God?’
‘Yes.’
‘Miss, I cannot hear you. Speak louder.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you accept Asif Ahmed as your lawfully wedded husband?’
I close my eyes.
‘Miss, would you answer the question?’
‘Yes, yes I do.’
‘Do you have any other reservations at this time?’
‘I do not.’
‘Then please repeat the word kobul three times to indicate your consent.’
‘Kobul, kobul, kobul.’
‘Will the witness please come forward to sign the Nikahanama?’
My grandmother’s older brother steps forward.
‘What is your name, sir?’
‘Saidul Hossain.’
‘And the name of your father, sir?
Beloved Strangers Page 17