Beloved Strangers (14 page)

I must have fallen asleep. Amol’s voice comes from far away as the squeaking of his rubber slippers halts directly under the ledge. If he hauls himself up to the ledge he will see me lying there, shivering under a full moon. I stay still, wondering which of my parents Amol has brought to my secret hideout.

‘Your father is not well,’ he says quietly, ‘you should come down now.’

The scratchy material of the straw mat under me bristles through my dress. I look up at the diseased moon, its luminous belly bulging with infection. I force myself to sit up straight. As I make my way down the stairs, I hear the sirens of an ambulance.

To anyone looking in from outside, my father, forty-seven years old, fit as a horse, smart, successful and mild-mannered, was not an obvious candidate for an early aneurysm. But nobody knew just how fragile he was, until the stroke made it evident. The brittleness of his nature surfaced sometime after he was fired from the company he had dedicated himself to for ten tireless years. The same company that had robbed us of our family holidays, demanded that Mother’s music remain a hobby and left us children feeling as if we were always on a wild goose chase for Father. How many Eids had passed with Father at the office, the white Toyota resting in the garage, and us, sparkling in our new clothes but stuck at home because Mother refused to put on a new sari or take us anywhere without her husband. We would plant ourselves by the window, taking in the festive flow of cars, baby taxis and rickshaws on the street below. Eventually we’d get tired of pretending that we too were going somewhere and settle in front of the television, new clothes neatly folded away. How many birthdays and school plays and summer holidays had passed without a sign of Father? He was always at the same place, devotedly stationary, but never where we needed him to be. This company, the faceless monstrosity that loomed in our lives every day, decided one day to withdraw its trust and dependence from its most faithful member. We heard Mother and Father whispering late into the night. At ten years of age, it was the first time I heard the term ‘office politics’. After about a week, my parents stopped whispering and spoke openly of the terrible betrayal that my father had been a victim of. Mother mourned luxuriously and at length. For months on end she deliriously chanted the names of every colleague who had possibly plotted against my father and cursed them wholeheartedly. Then came the season of sorrow. Tears were shed at the drop of a hat, regret and loss oozed from her skin, each day was a painstaking eulogy to the death of a man who was still alive. But she lived her pain, no matter how unbecoming it was. With each lament and every slander, she retrieved her strength and sanity.

Two weeks after Father lost his job, my friend Saba informed me that her parents were about to invite mine to one of their famed social events. These parties hosted the elite of Dhaka – small, close groups of people who clung to each other for reassurance. It had been about a year since Father’s company had promoted him to the highest position in all of Asia. The news of his success had travelled beyond the professional realm. Acceptance into and by an inner circle of the city’s successful men and women had arrived in the form of a much-coveted invitation.

‘You should come along,’ said Saba. ‘We have so much fun. The parents just sort of forget about us . . . and we’re allowed unlimited Coke and Pepsi. Wear something nice!’

I wasn’t so excited about drinking Pepsi and my wardrobe was still wanting but it never crossed my mind that the end of my father’s height of success also meant the end of our social selves. Mother politely turned down the invitation and then sternly instructed us not to disclose anything to anyone about our great misfortune. ‘When your father finds work again, people will know he changed jobs. Until then, no one must know of what happened.’
What
, indeed, had happened? I had not quite come to grasp how Father’s achievements, his very image, defined me in others’ eyes. Until then, I had only been aware of how he saw me and what he wanted me to be. Who was I supposed to be now that my father was no longer what he had been?

The story is never as simple as the plot. The plot has a beginning, a middle and an end. The story continues, spilling in all directions, drowning the plot in its tidal wrath. As far as the plot goes, my father loses his job, injures his pride and disappoints himself. Eventually, he finds other jobs, takes care of his family and the rest happens as it might have, under any circumstances. We continue to live in the same house, go to the same school, eat the same food. Inside our story, this is not the case. Inside our story, time is no longer linear, space is no longer tangible. Father’s job was his soul’s sustenance; the small, square space of his office his only real home. So even though Father met his fate with a dignified silence on the surface, an incurable malignance brewed underneath. It struck me that my father, seemingly patient and self-restrained, had always worn his heart on his sleeve, so much so that it never stood a chance in the face of adversity. Reeling from his loss, we turned our home into a mourning chamber. Like ostriches, we buried our faces in the ground and hoped that no one would notice. Mother stopped throwing dinner parties and we never invited friends over during school breaks in case they saw Father at home in the middle of the day. We did get better at concealing our unspeakable secret. After a few months, if someone called on us, unannounced, the smiles easily rose to our lips, the conversation never missed a beat. But we should not have mourned with such ceremony the loss of Father’s worldly feats when in fact his biggest disadvantage was an incapacity to adapt to the world.

As the years went by, my father’s elegant persona took on an aura of melancholy; the strength and precision of his ambitious mind swerved out of focus; the purity of his filial love was obscured by undue expectation, embittered by subsequent disappointments and fuelled forward by duty alone. If my childhood was ablaze with my parents’ fiery disputes, it was their mutual, cold and bitter discontent that hung like an ashen haze over my adolescent years.

The year before I left for college, I sat with the humongous SAT prepbook every evening and diligently plodded through the practice tests. Usually, my parents maintained a respectful distance during these sessions. After all, studying was comparable to an act of worship. But that evening, I heard their voices loud and clear, travelling all the way from their bedroom to the dining room where I sat. We had just moved into our own house, a house that my parents had built, brick by brick, with their entire lives’ savings, the house that had been among the top three items in the prayer list my father had made for us a very long time ago. Back then, I hardly understood the larger implications of my (forced) daily imploration to the Almighty; what spurred me to pass on the request in the first place was the pledge of a big and majestic home. Of course I wanted my own room, my own bathroom, and yes, a garden too. Spellbound by storybook fantasies of a kingly abode, it never occurred to me – until much later – that for my parents so much more was at stake than mere space and sparkle.

In time, the prayers became more frantic and specific. Please, God, can you give us our dream home by the end of
this
year? By the time I was thirteen, it was a weekly ritual to crowd into our old white Toyota Corolla and drive to the other end of town where my father planned to build our house. Baridhara had been a poor and underdeveloped neighbourhood until the government bought the land and decided to sell it at subsidised prices. Huge bungalow-style mansions were constructed next to shanty homes facing inevitable demolition. Foreign embassies moved their offices to Baridhara, making it a highly secure zone. A winding strip of green with stone benches was fenced off for the classy new residents to enjoy their leisurely strolls around Baridhara Lake where dhopas had washed clothes not too long ago. My sisters and I had memorised every detail of every house in the neighbourhood and we discussed at length how our own house might be even better. My father never spoke much. He wove the car slowly through every street until it grew dark and the windows of the enchanted homes lit up, one by one, like bright stars on a clear night. Reluctantly, he would turn the car around, shaking his head as if he was waking from a marvellous dream.

Ours was a three-storeyed building; the first two floors comprised a beautiful, nine-room duplex and the third floor was a more modest, much smaller apartment. We lived on the third floor, which only deepened the regret of not being able to live in the duplex as had been originally intended. Halfway through the construction of the house, Father’s resources had become dangerously depleted. He had not anticipated the loss of his job and although he found other work it was never good enough to restore him to his former glory, financially or emotionally. But the house, a skinny skeletal edifice pushing up under the fragrant shade of a kodom tree, begged for completion. For three long years my parents visited the skeleton every day, gave it their love, pumped their blood into its rock-solid heart and held its hand through every stone and brick and pillar. Those were long years for us. The mantra of our home had changed from surrender to sacrifice.

It was during those unfortunate years that I took it upon myself to demand a bicycle and, thus refused, never again found the spirit to master one in later years. Holidays were already denied to us, but now we lost the annual winter trips to Bagh Bari as well as the numerous treats that Father used to bring back from his trips abroad. At first I felt a sense of duty and did the due diligence that was required of me to take part in such collective sacrifice. As one could only have expected based on her stellar academic career, Naveen received a full scholarship from Yale and left for college soon after construction began on the Big House – as we had come to refer to it – and three years later, when the Big House was almost ready, it was my turn to fly the coop. The very foundation of our family continued to change and yet my parents’ only dream was to erect a grand mansion that would keep us together for ever.

So, bit by painful bit, the stone skeleton gathered flesh and came to life. A magnificent white structure now towered above the kodom tree, gleaming under a fluffy autumn sky. And, as always, the Big House put its creators to the test. With a huge bank loan over his head, one daughter in college, three others in school and zero savings, it was quite impossible for us to move into the Big House. To do so would mean living hand to mouth each day as well as jeopardise our school and college prospects. The only thing left to do was rent out the Big House rather than move into it.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to take a further loan from the bank and build the third-floor apartment. It was decided that we would rent out the Big House for a few years and when some of the loan had been paid off and some savings restored, we would move in there and rent out the smaller flat. The decision made no real sense, even to someone as mathematically ungifted as myself. But it was as if both my mother and father had their feet firmly rooted on the very earth that held the founding pillars of their precious home. Father’s bank loan increased, tenants moved into Mother’s dream home and the six of us moved into the haphazardly designed apartment from where we could peer down at what was but would never be ours.

In time we grew fond of the tenants. Tarun and Lalita were Indian Bengalis who had just moved to Dhaka. The success and glamour of their young lives were apparent in the way they decorated their new home and the grand parties they hosted. We were always invited to their stylish soirées, where I soon discovered that Tarun’s eyes were not entirely fixed on his pretty wife. At seventeen, I quite enjoyed the attention, offered over a forbidden glass of wine, and even Mother was charmed by Tarun’s sharp humour and Lalita’s excellent hospitality. Most of all, Mother was at once incensed and mollified by how beautiful her home (she still called it her home) looked in the company of perfect strangers.

My father still sat in his white cane chair but it had been placed in one corner of the living room, since the balcony in the new apartment was too tiny. With the loss of a sizeable balcony, we lost the orange-feasting rituals on wintry mornings. We might have forgotten about the very existence of the balcony had it not been for the few pots of herbs that Mother had placed along the black iron banister, and only when the evening breeze carried in the enticing scents of basil and mint were we drawn to the little balcony which was but a mockery of the long and expansive terraces of former years. What we missed most, each one of us, was the promise and anticipation of something great, something better. Perhaps we had all hoped, in our own ways, that moving into the Big House, where every object and pattern had been hand-picked by us, would somehow redesign the blueprint of our relationships and restore our faith in what the future held.

‘This is what I’ve lived for? This joke of a home?’ came Mother’s voice that evening, sharp and sneering, geared to offend.

‘People live in worse, much worse conditions,’ replied my father, coldly.

‘Well, I’m not those people and to think I poured three years of blood and sweat and money into a home where someone else gets to stay. Is there nothing you can do right?’

‘Yes, this is all my fault,’ Father said after a long pause. There was a dangerous flatness to his voice.

‘Everything in this family is your fault. You are incapable of making us happy.’

Although I had witnessed their arguments throughout my life, something about Mother’s last words made me catch my breath. I couldn’t see their faces but even from a distance I could feel the heartbreak those words were meant to cause. I felt my father flinch and snap. I felt Mother’s victory and remorse all congealed into one festering wound. And then I heard the shattering of glass. Before I knew it I was standing before them and I saw my father kneeling at the edge of the bed gasping for breath as he clutched his chest. A few feet across the room Mother stood still, unable and unwilling to traverse the path of splintered glass left by broken tea cups and saucers, the length of the massacred floor distending between them like a bloodied battleground.