Beloved Strangers (19 page)

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 uncompromising 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.

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.