Beloved Strangers (16 page)

I am tired of remembering my father in the context of his circumstances. I am tired of the mystery and silence shadowing his very image. I wish to see him without the burden of his life, without his successes and failures and responsibilities, without his rituals and beliefs. I wish to meet him again, as I would a stranger. Sometimes when I enter a restaurant or walk down the street and I catch a glimpse of a curly head with a gaunt face, I turn sharply in the hope of receiving a further sign. A smile perhaps, a meaningful look, an absurd but familiar gesture – anything that will signal to me that my father has returned to reveal himself to me, to bridge the gap that kept widening between us when he was my father and I his daughter. In this new meeting, all that exists between us is the present moment, bubbling with the urgency to know each other.

Deep End

Lead my mother to an overflowing bathtub and she will shriek. Pretend to push her into a swimming pool and she may never speak to you again. Take her for a boat ride in the middle of a choppy ocean and she will faint from fear. My mother has severe hydrophobia and to make sure that her children were not afflicted with the same condition, she sent us for swimming lessons.

Two afternoons a week, Naveen, Tilat and I turned up for our lessons at the Dhaka Women’s Sports Complex. The large, outdoor swimming pool was a courageous choice for a women’s facility in Dhaka, given how our open-air frolicking was daily witnessed by varied audiences with their noses pressed against their windows. Though it upset our swimming coach, some of the older women refused the slightest exposition of skin and therefore any kind of swimsuit and instead dragged their fully clothed bodies into the pool. When they swam, their long loose tunics ballooned above and around them, making them look like freakish, menacing water creatures.

I loved the water and I learned to float and swim quickly, that is, until it was time to tackle the deep end of the pool. I swam vertically across the pool, staying close to the wall. As soon as I sensed proximity to the deep end, I bobbed my head out of the water and grabbed on to the wall, refusing to swim any further. My coach was frustrated. She assured me, repeatedly, that she would never let me drown, that she was following right behind me. But my body was more stubborn than I. Before the final act of suspending myself over a depth that I could neither feel with my feet nor assess with my eyes, I was overcome by a fear that was, perhaps, no different from my mother’s.

‘I am ready to give up,’ announced the coach. ‘What will it take for you to just let yourself go in the deep end?’

I thought about it. In order for me to let loose in deep water, a place which my cells are preconditioned to flee, I would have to forget the weight and feel of my own body, would need to disconnect from the thrumming of my heart and the buzzing of my brain. But how was that possible? And yet, how was it that I had floated, in perfect safety and serenity, in the first waters of my life, tucked inside a pear-shaped organ for nine nourishing months? How was it that in those unknown waters, survival was never a question and fear never a hindrance?

I had thought, wrongly, misguidedly, that overcoming fear was a kind of self-deprecating act. I didn’t see then, as I do now, that fear doesn’t always hold us back from good things, it also warns us against the bad.

And so, in the beginning, the trepidation that overcomes me at the sight and sound of Yameen makes me think that it is simply my fear of the unknown – an irrational and conquerable fear. My first conversation with him takes place by pure accident, if there is such a thing as an accident. Yameen knows my college roommate Lyn and calls one day to say hello to her. I, who have been sitting at Lyn’s desk casually munching on cashew nuts and gazing at the fine spring morning, happen to pick up her phone. Yameen and I exchange polite introductions and I offer to take a message for Lyn. The same evening he calls again. This time Lyn answers and he asks for me. Both Lyn and I are puzzled. ‘Do you know him?’ she asks. ‘Because I barely do.’ I shake my head vigorously but curiosity gets the better of me. For the next five months, Yameen calls me several times every day.

I do not know why I speak to him any more than he knows why he calls but I am dimly aware of a tug, a pull. There is something manic about the nature of this pull. My conversations with Yameen are strange, dreamy and vaguely unnerving. I regard the strangeness and the discomfort as necessary parts of the beguiling whole, the
whole
being romance. After all, no one expects love to be ordinary, familiar. Associated with the ‘fall’ of falling in love are the promissory qualities of surprise and serendipity. We expect the interior of love to be laced with unknowns, pleasurable ones, which we will discover, bit by delicious bit.

‘Why do you keep calling me?’ I ask him.

‘Because I want to know you.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s not a convincing answer.’

‘I feel that we have a connection.’

‘We haven’t even met.’

‘I know. I cannot explain it. Can you always explain everything you feel?’

I am fascinated by the way he implicates the two of us in a budding relationship based on one fated call. What is romance, if it doesn’t leave us open-mouthed, wondering from where it came or how then to proceed? Think of the sudden gust of wind romancing through a peacefully sunny day, lifting the hats and newspapers off unsuspecting heads and hands. Think, too, of the unfathomable romance between the poet Rumi and his Beloved, the Beloved he never saw, except in his own heart.

Is it possible that the persuasion of Yameen’s words lie not in their construction but my conception of them? Because, in later years, no matter how much I will try, I will not find a trace of the old vigour and furor in him. Do I attribute these qualities to our conversations out of my own need for them? Has he become for me Rumi’s God, the Divine Lover, who can do no wrong, whose cruelty is a cause for rejoicing? I check out four volumes of Rumi’s poetry from the library and pore over them. When I find what I am looking for, I type them in bold and pin them above my desk:

Oh friend, seek no joy when the Beauty desires

heartache, for you are prey in a lion’s claws.

Should the Heart-ravisher pour mud on your

Head, welcome it in place of Tartarian musk.

But am I willing to surrender or am I looking to devour? The tug I feel is of this deep and ancient hunger. I have felt the plunder of this hunger before, rolling on the floor of my room during long days of fasting. It told me then as it tells me now of its insatiable nature. I am the true Heart-ravisher. I look to ravish my own heart and then some, so large is my appetite for this Thing. The Thing. Is it romance? It is more than that. It is satiety itself, a kind of jigsaw-puzzle wholesomeness when all the pieces are aligned. It requires divination because nothing will ever present itself in perfect form. I will make my lover divine through voracious devotion. Eager to spur this sublimation, I let Yameen convince me of the inevitability of our match. I let him speak of our union as a matter of time not chance. Smart as a whip, he guesses my bait and reels me in, slowly, salaciously.

‘If I can want you so much without seeing you, imagine how much I will want you when we are together,’ he whispers.

‘You could be disappointed too,’ I say.

‘Not a chance.’

‘You never know.’

‘One always knows – if only one allows oneself to see.’

‘And you see what?’

‘In you, I see everything.’

His words, whether premeditated or chosen carefully on the spur of the moment, hurtle through me, bullet-like, past the years, and detonate my truest desire. The desire to be seen, to be heard, to shed my invisibility and abandon my hiding places. No wonder my wish to believe him is far stronger than his wish to be believed.

Is it a surprise then that on our first date, I am disappointed to see Yameen in the flesh? By this I do not mean the way he looks but the fact that he has a body, with a specific shape and size. A body, that circumscribes his limitations and contains his impact. To me, he has been the limitless, amorphous voice who speaks to me about love. His voice has been my guiding light to The Thing. To see him standing before me, so human, so measurable and distinct, so bound by dimensions, is to admit the death of a magical voice that alone can promise magical things.

He takes me to the top of the World Trade Center where we sip grass-green mojitos and look down at the sleepless city twinkling below. Awkwardness blots the air between us. What now? Are we to continue our fantasy discussions or dance the night away? We find a way to mask our unshakeable discomfiture. We drag ourselves from bar to bar as if it is our sole mission for the night. I am not sure how much time passes before we end up at a bar called Odeon in Tribeca, with a big blue neon sign outside. I am starting to feel ill.

‘No more bars,’ I say out loud, the first one of us to succumb to reality.

‘We must end the night with a cosmo,’ he says. ‘It’s a New York thing.’

I end up having seven.

Why has he never mentioned before his wild years as a student at Columbia and afterwards in his hip, L-shaped apartment on the Upper West Side?

‘It was easy to pick up both cocaine and women back then,’ he says, not noticing my faint frown. He explains what it means to be an old-school roller skater on Sunday afternoons in Central Park. ‘Kids these days don’t know how to roller skate. They just try to look cool,’ he sniggers and then sighs. ‘New York has changed so much. You can’t even buy weed at the corner of 116th and Amsterdam any more.’

I am not alert enough to ponder why a twenty-nine-year-old reminisces about a New York from before his time. I do not wonder why he looks so sober after three hours of non-stop drinking. Instead, I allow myself to drown in the memories of our impassioned telephone musings on love and commitment. I see now how desperate I was to love what seemed impossible to love. It proved some kind of unmatchable victory to me that made little sense in the context of normal victories. But back then, I believed what I had been taught – that life was a test, a mountain, and the steeper the climb the better the view on top.

I glance up at the illusive Manhattan sky before getting into the back of a yellow cab with Yameen, feeling sick to the stomach. Is there a low moon floating behind one of the skyscrapers or am I hallucinating?

He is asking me a lot of questions. I nod and nod, hoping to stop the torrent of questions. Where are those ever-convincing whispers now, lilting lullabies across the miles between our phones?

‘Are you sure?’ I hear him say. He looks uneasy. I am about to tell him that I have no idea what he is talking about, that I am sure of nothing at the moment, but my chest heaves, an avalanche of bitterness floods my gullet and I lose consciousness.

The next morning when I wake up on an old mattress on the floor of a dank Jersey City room, my first instinct is distrust. All around me are signs of decay: filthy, misshapen blinds on the windows, the painting of a woman hanging crookedly on the wall and gathering dust, a chipped nightstand with no handle. The floors are strewn with junk mail and dirty laundry. In one corner of the room, cardboard boxes are stacked as if no one has ever found the time to open them. In the insalubrious interior of this home, if it can be called a home, my resolve for romance begins to disintegrate. I gather up my things and scramble down the stairwell, hoping not to run into the man from the night before. But I find him outside, sitting in the shade with a beer in his hand, two empty bottles at his feet. ‘Wait,’ he says disquietingly, ‘you’re not leaving just yet.’

Being with Yameen makes me feel heavy, as if I am wading through water with stones tied to my ankles. The rapture of the phone conversations is long lost, scraped clean from the bond we attempt to recreate with our flesh. The effect he administers on me, since our meeting in New York, is that of a sedative. As if I am a person who needs to be put to sleep, he obliterates all activity from my life. He hardly lets me visit him in New York any more. Every weekend he rents a car and drives up to my college to see me. If we leave my room at all to smoke joints and eat cheap Chinese take-out, it is because we run out of food or my stash of candy bars and potato chips. Other than Lyn, who already knows him, he refuses to meet anyone else. He does not let me give him a tour of my campus, nor does he accompany me to the little cafe where I like to sit and read. He tells me he is not interested in my dance performances.

The commonalities in our backgrounds do not bring us any closer. Yameen was born to Tanzanian parents who moved to America when he was a child. He too, was born into a Muslim family. Later I find that his family is large like mine, as well as loud and chaotic. The only difference is, Yameen stands outside of their chaos. He withdraws from them, as he withdraws from me, and as he teaches me to withdraw from everyone else.

But if Yameen sedates me, if he hoists my unconscious weight on his shoulders and carries me to isolation, it is only because I do not kick and flail during my undoing. The teetering isolation I had imposed on myself through dancing and by forsaking music is simply solidified by the segregation that Yameen commands. I let him do it, finding twisted comfort in renouncing a world I am already barred from – the world of music. The soporific lull of our strange relationship only wears off if I mistakenly try to reach out to him. His eyes blaze with malice if I ask him about his family, his friends or his past, stopping me in mid-sentence. If I tell him about my own family he indiscreetly turns the other way. Foolishly, I let myself find comfort in this too. Maybe I am enough for him, I reason. Maybe all he cares about is
me
, outside of the context of my roots, my past, my future. But how can I think this possible? What dislocation of body and spirit has allowed me to feel that I exist without the impact of my birth and history?