Beloved Strangers (18 page)

Jess pops her head back into my cubicle around 5.30 p.m. to say goodbye and, as soon as she leaves, I turn off my computer and walk out into the biting winter evening. I decide to walk through the theatre district. I enjoy watching throngs of excited tourists crowding into the local bars to get a little tipsy before going to their favourite Broadway shows. I stop under the half-nude Calvin Klein model in Times Square and watch the street performers move to their funky beats. They bring soul to the plastic flesh of Times Square.

Soon, too soon, I am waiting for my bus back to Jersey. When I get off at Thorne Street, I walk down the dark sidewalk, praying that this terrible, frosty loneliness is just a figment of my imagination. I pray that when I walk in through the door and step into the cracked, crippled apartment I call home, I will not notice the shabbiness, but instead, will run straight into the arms of the man I claim to love. This never happens. I always smell the stale furniture and note the peeling linoleum kitchen floor. I know the reason I notice these things. It is because I try not to notice the man I live with. Every day I think of what it would be like to turn the clock back to two years ago. Like my mother, I too dream of unstitching the seam of my story. Just like Mother, I keep staring at life, wondering when it will gratify me.

‘We cannot sponsor you for a work visa,’ says Jim, the head of the equities department. ‘You have a degree in Philosophy and Religion. How will that justify your work as an insurance broker?’

I usually like Jim’s no-nonsense straightforwardness, but this time I balk at his words before reminding him that I had been hired based on those very qualifications, thought to be ‘well rounded’ and ‘diverse’ at the time. I had also done fine work for almost a year, with whatever knowledge my degree had proffered on me.

‘Jim!’ I say, accusingly. ‘This means I may have to return to Bangladesh. Without my work permit I cannot stay and there is no time to find something else.’

‘You have a few months before you have to leave . . .’ Jim tells me, calmly.

The problem, however, isn’t Jim. It is Immigration and Naturalisation Services. I stare at Jim’s clean-shaven, square-ish Korean face. What he proclaims about the company’s inability to draw a credible connection between my work and my education may be true but someone must have known that at the time I was hired. I want to ask him about Beth from Iowa, also a Religion major, who sits in the cubicle next to mine. She has worked for the company for five years and is about to be promoted. Then there are the Art History and English majors from Long Island and Alabama, whose jobs do not seem to be on the line.

So why, I ask Jim, did the company hire me in the first place? Am I simply an error in their massive chain of operations? Is my name a small number that doesn’t add up and needs simply to be deleted from the balance sheet before the new fiscal year starts? The interview, hardly a year old, is still fresh on my mind.

‘I can adapt to new environments well,’ I had said with great confidence. ‘You see, I’ve lived away from home for four years and have had to adjust to many changes.’

Pens clicked furiously; heads bobbed up and down in sympathy.

‘I grew up in South Africa. I know how hard it is to start a new life in a new country,’ said a thin girl with brown hair.

Everyone sat back and let me impress them with promises of some exotic strength, the strength to forsake and build anew, to start over. A strength I seem to be lacking at the thought of returning to Dhaka. Why is it I feel unhinged at the thought of returning to the home of my childhood?After all, I don’t even like my work. Deep inside, I am grateful to be released from the morose routine of my life. But what am I to do in Dhaka? The question poses an insurmountable void, a black hole of uncertainty.

‘What are you so afraid of?’ Yameen asks. ‘You’re only going home.’

Home. The home I left behind five years ago has changed. My father is dead, Naveen has married and moved to a different country, Tilat has married and moved to a different house, my mother has finally immersed herself in music the way she had always dreamed of doing, and sweet, spirited Avi has turned into a reclusive young man I hardly recognise. Without all the members of my family under one roof, without the old kinesthesia of our beings against each other, I cannot decode the vision of my home, abounding in its sights, sounds and smells. The body of my home is the conflation of six bodies, those bodies now scattered across the continents, consumed by their ownness, in this life or another. I cannot gravitate upon the surface of such a barren and unfamiliar home. I float above it, like an aircraft caught in a blinding storm, hovering over safety but unable to get to it.

‘We should start thinking about marriage,’ I say to Yameen, as I start the preparations to return to Dhaka. The words fall off my mouth like reckless mountain jumpers willing to risk any peril in the name of their obsession.

‘Really?’ Yameen sounds incredulous.

‘Yes, really.’

‘You’re sure?’

Sureness is no longer a reasonable expectation.

I marry Yameen more than two years after we first meet and only six months after I leave New York and return to Dhaka. The decision is made after a long bout of squabbling and bickering with each other. Every single time we fight we buy a cheap bottle of vodka, drink ourselves silly and broach the subject of marriage. Instead of bidding each other the goodbyes that are long overdue, we hold on to each other in fierce desperation. We are two valiant soldiers, weary from battle but determined not to lay down our arms.

When I get to Dhaka, I confide in some friends about my apathy for my husband-to-be and my doubts about the imminent wedding. They laugh and pat me on the back and tell me that married life will be wonderful. Having been away for five years, I cannot discern the thin line between politeness and sincerity. My mother, now inside the solid armour of her life, finds her voice. With the confidence of a queen she declares that all marriages are bland. It is up to the woman to choose the flavour she adds to it.

But the talons of despair dig deeper and deeper into me and I find myself waking up earlier and earlier in the mornings, long before the sun appears and the day disappears into yet another chasm of wedding planning. These pre-dawn moments are all I have to myself. I huddle in one corner of the little balcony among the overgrown basil and mint plants and stay there until I hear my mother and Amol calling me to breakfast.

I met Jeetu during those bewildering days, when I lived every moment in the eye of a storm. He thundered into my life with the speed of lightning from the moment we met at a friend’s backyard barbeque. Jeetu’s longish hair, loose white shirts and inexhaustible appetite for all things prohibited often reminded me of the young Jim Morrison whose music he so loved. He turned up at our doorstep one evening, muttering something incomprehensive, sweating profusely, his white shirt covered in pink lipstick stains. I held his hand and led him to the roof, placed him in one of the green plastic chairs and gave him a glass of cold water. Almost every night since then, we sat together on those hideous green chairs, late into the night, tied in a kind of doomed solidarity. If Jeetu’s wife ever questioned where he was, I presumed he never answered her truthfully. For although Jeetu and I were friends of a kind at heart, both our bodies were trained for forbidden pleasure. We kissed and petted and fondled each other without much thought. It was mostly a way of making sure that we were still alive and breathing despite the chill in our souls. Sometimes, when Jeetu softly hummed the notes of ‘Light My Fire’ or ‘Riders on the Storm’, I wondered, fleetingly, if I could ever fall in love with him or he with me.

The more time Jeetu and I spent together, the less we comforted each other. He told me he had married the woman he loved and I told him that I was about to marry a man I didn’t love. But I didn’t understand his distress and indiscretions any more than he understood my self-inflicting pain. He proclaimed a passion for living that was continually betrayed by his destructive lifestyle. I waved my life away with casual abandon yet tried desperately to inject it with clarity. Jeetu had no interest in my books, in travel or philosophy or history; he filled his cup with his own muddled existence and was perplexed, every day, at how much there was to consider. My need to tear an idea to bits, to chew on words and belabour my thoughts was lost on him.

We sat facing each other across the luminous night sky, wishing we could help each other. Sometimes we went for aimless drives along the city’s deserted outskirts, Jim Morrison blasting through the stereos, the wind whipping our faces red. Sometimes I accompanied Jeetu to an empty apartment that he kept as a music pad and he beat wildly against a drum set while I sat in a barely furnished room with a bunch of strangers and drank vodka from a paper cup. We never had long discussions or arguments or even much small talk between us. We knew the important details of each other’s lives but left the rest to chance. We simply sought to be in each other’s presence all the time and were both astonished at how our hearts stopped racing as soon as we were within a few feet of each other. He was my magic potion and I his.

Jeetu and I should have kept our doomed solidarity intact, within those puzzling, clandestine, rooftop meetings. Where there is odd chemistry and inexplicable charisma, sex itself is often not as satisfying as its anticipation.

I was bright with excitement when Jeetu arrived one evening. Something in the way he moved and talked told me it was going to be different that night. My sisters had invited all our cousins to help them paint the invitation cards for my Holud, the Bengali equivalent of a hen party. Jeetu peered over their shoulders and said something that made them all laugh. I stood in the doorway watching his silhouette; he turned and smiled and I knew what he wanted but I didn’t know it was the last time he would smile at me like that.

In his own way Jeetu was trying to be kind to me that night. We sped through the city streets and up the three flights of stairs to his empty music pad until we stood, breathless and naked, before each other. And then we were stuck, prey to the quicksand of our sudden vacillation. I covered my body with my bare arms and turned away. He pulled me into his arms, stroked my cheeks and gently reminded me that I must start married life without guilt. I was touched by his tenderness but the fact that we never made love despite our deep kisses and warm caresses left me suddenly clairvoyant. Jeetu, dear friend and antidote to my gloom, could no more save me from myself than Mother or Father or anyone else. He withdrew his magic at the cusp of salvation. If only he had allowed me to feel that what was forbidden could also be unforbidden, with just a touch, a look, a whisper. If only he had allowed himself to see that neither love nor its absence was something to be ashamed of.

A month before my wedding, I have a dream. I see my wedding party taking place on an unusually warm January afternoon. All the guests perspire in their winter attire and one old man suffers a heat stroke. We move to the garden in the hope of a cool breeze but the sun beats down, hot and bright. Everyone is given a cool glass of lemon water but soon the liquid dries up in our glasses. The rivers, streams and ponds begin to dry up. Pleading eyes turn to the sky to pray for rain but the sky has dried up too.

I bolt upright in bed, dizzy, feverish. I have to remind myself that I am in Dhaka, where my wedding preparations are underway. I call Yameen.

‘Please, we have to call off this wedding,’ I say, without preamble.

I brace myself for silence, shock, rebellion, confusion or even plain disbelief. Anything but the reaction I elicit. I hear a whining sound, starting low, then gaining momentum and turning into a demented yowl. He cries, every day, until my doubts give way to delirium. In the end, it is not that he cries or forces or begs. The loneliness we have shared and his subsequent misery at losing our inchoate bond, leads me to consent that our separation is not possible without the final despairing consummation, which is to be our marriage.

On the morning of the wedding the sky is sapphire smoke and there is a citrus fragrance in the air. I am soaped, scrubbed, bathed, brushed, powdered, blood-coloured wrapped in sheaths of chiffon and held in place by jewelled chains of gold. There is music everywhere, flowers and sweets and precocious little girls with glitter on their cheeks. I sit alone. I cannot feel my body, I am jumping off the deep end. No one pays attention to me. Any moment I expect to disperse into nothingness, leaving behind a jumble of red and gold, a cornucopia of glass, metal and fabric. By the time they place a long rectangular yard of shiny material above my head and walk me to the bridal stage, I am gone. What they see is the illusion of me, the way you see the light of a star thousands of years after it has died.

I sit on the stage and smile blankly at everyone below. At the other end of the long room, looking straight at me, stands Jeetu. His brown eyes are full of nostalgia. I close my eyes and seal an image of him in my memory – a gentle face pressed against mine, lips curled in inconsummate longing, the everlasting moment before love.

We are gathered in the kitchen of the Scarsdale house. I watch my husband finish his second bottle of wine and pop the cork of a third. His lips are a lush purple, his fingers tremble near the smudged rim of his glass. His father insists that we spend the night. I start to protest but realise that Yameen is in no condition to drive home. Both his parents retire early and Yameen falls asleep holding an empty wine bottle to his lips like a baby peacefully sucking on the nipple. I step outside into the late spring night. A half-moon laughs sideways across a star-spangled sky. I think of sleeping on the cool, moist grass, under the stars, away from the desolate house, completely unaware of the pair of eyes watching me, willing me to go back inside.