Beloved Strangers (2 page)

Ironically, my curiosity to know God was often frowned upon. Twice a week, Hujur, our Arabic tutor, came to teach us how to read the Holy Book. The Arabic words rolled along my tongue in an alluring tempo, inviting me to discover their meaning, but Hujur never explained the verses. When I dared to ask, he boxed my ears and said that the important thing was to recite the Holy Book in Arabic and to believe that every word in it was true.

‘But I don’t even know what I’m reading?’

‘No questions,’ he growled, ‘just have faith.’

But I continued to ask Hujur questions. ‘Where does God live?’ I asked.

‘He sits up there in Seventh Heaven, atop seven layers of sky,’ replied Hujur.

‘Does he ever come down from there?’

‘He came down to the peak of Mount Surma once but his
noor
was so strong that the mountain burnt to ashes.’

‘What is
noor
?’

‘
Noor
is Light. Noor is Him. He has no form.’

‘Then how do we know God is a He? It’s just light, isn’t it?’

‘No more questions!’

I clapped a hand over my wretched mouth but it wouldn’t stop.

Hujur mopped his brow with a cotton handkerchief, unable to quench my thirst for answers but he did try his best to instil the fear of God in me. He hoped, perhaps, that my fear would mitigate my curiosity.

To make sure that I was amply familiar with this aspect of fear, Hujur sang for me a special song. His song took pains to describe to me the images of Hell and Judgement Day. As his quavering, nasal voice rang out into the evening, I saw before my eyes great fires and devastating floods; naked human bodies being skinned alive and the sun, barely a foot above people’s heads, melting their brains as they ran for their lives. If there was one thing Hujur did not tire of discussing, it was the wrath of God and the torture of Hell. That was the only time he willingly translated all the words from Arabic to Bengali.

I’m no longer sure whether it was the image of Hell or my desperation to please my father that urged me to kneel down and pray. I didn’t always know what I was praying for but often it was for God’s forgiveness. The winter I turned ten, I came to know of God’s disdain for liars and it filled me with foreboding. Hujur came earlier than usual one evening. He had a thick black scarf wrapped around his neck but he looked cold in his white cotton tunic. He parked his rickety bicycle on our balcony and announced that he wanted to get back home before the fog came down hard.

‘Caught a bad cold. Ask the cook to bring me some hot tea,’ he said gruffly.

I was furious. I didn’t care if he had pneumonia! All day I’d been waiting for the six o’clock WWF wrestling match. It promised to be a stunning battle. Big Daddy was going against Lex Luger. No one in my family understood why I loved these wrestling matches, I just did. I was thoroughly fascinated by those big, strong men, the precision of their fists, the friction of their bodies against each other, the wildness of their punches.

I cried helplessly as I washed myself with cold water and covered my hair with a scarf. My face was still dripping wet when I sat down in front of Hujur. I kept thinking of Lex Luger hurling his lithe body against Big Daddy’s mountainous frame. I kept imagining the moment when Big Daddy would raise his towering girth, pick up Luger with his bare arms and twirl him above his head before throwing him out of the ring and on to the laps of screaming fans. Each new image brought fresh zeal to my whimpers until Hujur could no longer doze in peace and he held up a hand in an angry gesture.

‘What is the matter with you, child?’

I stared at the floor.

‘I asked you a question,’ he repeated.

‘Nothing, I’m fine,’ I said meekly.

‘You’re lying. Why do you lie?’

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s time you learned about the Angels of Death,’ he said, shifting in his chair. ‘After death, the two angels Munkar and Nakir come to visit the freshly deceased to test their faith. Whatever they ask, you must answer correctly. One small lie and those angels will make your grave grow smaller and smaller until the earth crushes your body so hard that even the mother’s milk from your infant years will be squeezed out of you.’

I stopped whimpering.

‘You see, child, if you lie in this life, you will lie in your grave,’ said Hujur.

That night I dreamed of Munkar and Nakir. They were two ghastly little figures, dark and sleek with horned heads and hooves instead of feet. They had cloudy goat eyes. They grinned as they hopped from one grave to another until they found mine. I held my breath and burrowed deeper into the earth but they found me anyway.

‘Do you believe in your Creator?’ they asked in perfect unison.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you believe that He is your saviour?’

‘Yes.’

‘You lie,’ they cackled. ‘You lie, you lie.’

I lay there, unable to protest as the walls of my grave closed in on me from all sides. Just then, a thunderous noise bolted through the harrowing darkness. I saw Big Daddy scoop up the two scrawny angels in the palms of his giant hands and fling them across the expanse of the graves. They bounced off the stone edges of the old graves, yelping in pain to the brittle crunch of their bones. I tried to raise my body from my rapidly shrinking grave but it was too late. I only had time to look into Big Daddy’s kind eyes for a moment before the earth squeezed in from above and below and flattened me to a pulp.

The next morning, I longed to tell my father about my dream. What did it mean? Was God going to punish me for all the small lies that had ever escaped my lips? My sister told me there was nothing wrong with white lies. For instance, if I felt upset and someone wanted to know why, I didn’t have to tell them the real reason because it was my secret. The problem was, I didn’t always know how to differentiate between a white lie and a real one.

I fiddled with my toast and kept my brimming eyes on the table, hopeful that my father would notice my silence and ask me what was wrong. He never looked up from his newspaper. In the end, I decided not to tell my father about the dream or my fear of being punished for all the lies I had ever uttered. I knew what would please him more was if I just knelt before God and asked for His forgiveness.

There were, nevertheless, some people who were close to God in ways that the rest of us could never hope to be. The pir sahib, for instance – the old man with an uncomfortably long beard who came to our house every year. My father and mother would rush to the door and kneel at his feet, nudging me to do the same. My father explained that he was a holy man with special powers. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to perceive this singular camaraderie between the pir and the Almighty. What I saw was a gnarled old man whose eyes preyed on his surroundings like a hungry animal on the prowl. I sensed a deep rumbling inside him, like the earth heaving before an earthquake.

Every time I went near the pir sahib he tried to catch hold of my hand and asked me to scratch his back. He would shout out my name and claim that he had a story to tell me about my namesake, a certain Maria al Qibtiya of Egypt.

‘Come to me, my little one,’ he’d repeat incessantly. ‘Let me tell you a story about your name.’

I’d try to hide behind my mother but she would push me forward until I fell at his feet, touching withered yellow skin, for blessings divine. The pir’s words, his touch, his very presence would heal me, my mother said. Heal me from what?

Everyone around me seemed to be in dire need of healing. While the pir slept through the long afternoons, hordes of people poured into our small home in the hope of touching his yellow feet for a split second, to heal their wounded souls. Men and women of all ages, ayahs carrying crying toddlers on their hips and little girls and boys dressed in their best, packed themselves like canned sardines into our living room, spilling out of our kitchen and veranda. They waited tirelessly, their reveries of divine awakening broken only by the tinkling of china as Amol served them cup after cup of lukewarm tea.

Only when the dusty curve of the afternoon had bent around an orange dusk would the pir wake to sit up on his bed and bellow, ‘Bring me hot water for my wazoo.’ And right there, in our living room, a stampede would break out. A multitude of bodies would compete for the task of fetching water to wash the old man’s blessed limbs and prepare him for an exclusive communion with God. As the entire house full of people bustled to join the pir for evening prayer, I’d run up to the coolness of the roof and stare hard at the pink evening sky. My grandmother said it was in the moment between twilight and darkness that all heavenly creatures left their earthly sojourns to fly back up to the heavens. The pink streaks in the sky were Heaven’s doorways, flung open for the return of its inhabitants.

I was always hunted down before the multi-coloured easel of a sky had coagulated into a deep charcoal. Despite all protests, I was always dragged downstairs for the communal prayer.

No one really knew if the pir learned about the future from those long one-on-one communions with God or whether he was born with his powers. But no one doubted him when he assured my mother that her third child would be a boy.

‘Sister, your time has come to bear your husband a boy. I can see it with my eyes open.’

He tied a special talisman around my mother’s neck, a square silver amulet hung from a black string that she wore for nine months. She also drank three drops of holy water every day from a bottle that he sealed with a special prayer. No one was allowed to drink from that bottle except my mother. A few weeks before she was due to give birth, the pir sahib touched her belly, muttered something and blew on it, his saintly breath pledging the imminent arrival of a boy.

So when my little sister kicked her way into the world, a wobbly seven pounds of female flesh, there was only a boy’s name waiting for her. After three days had passed and there was still no name for the little girl, my grandmother named her Tilat. The pir came to our house to bless the baby and my mother confronted him with an ominous silence.

‘Don’t look at me like that, sister,’ he said. ‘God changed his mind at the last minute. I saw it happen. Did you go to another pir?’

‘Of course not,’ she protested.

‘Think,’ he urged. ‘Think hard.’

My mother stayed up all night, thinking about how she might have jeopardised the pir’s charms. At last it came to her. In the final weeks of her pregnancy, she had found an old almanac among her grandmother’s things, a useful handbook that contained specific prayers for specific situations. Hours had passed as she read about which verses to chant to cure an adulterous husband and which to recite in case of a fire. There was nothing that couldn’t be warded off or heralded by the power of the holy verses. There were prayers for each and every problem. Then she found it, in bold letters, the prayer that would hail the birth of a baby boy. Why not add it to her repertoire of prayers, she thought.

When she told the pir about her little transgression, he was livid.

‘Well, that’s it!’ he said, ‘I knew you had done something to diffuse the effect of my methods. Did you not have enough faith in me?’

‘I did,’ my mother sobbed. ‘I just didn’t see the harm in repeating one more prayer.’

‘You silly woman,’ squawked the pir. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of the saying that too many cooks spoil the broth?’

While my mother howled, I made a mental note to myself not to pester God beyond a reasonable limit. I would make my request to Him and then I would leave Him alone. He was a busy man. If I made unfair demands on His time, maybe I would have more to lose than to gain.

The mishap of my baby sister’s birth thus explained, the pir sahib continued to visit us with his probing eyes and empty promises for the future. I managed to stay out of his way until one sweltering hot afternoon when his gaze firmly settled on me. He had dozed off after lunch and my parents had gone to buy some fish for dinner. The pir liked fish. He gobbled up whole pieces of fish, including the bones, and bared his crooked dentures afterwards in a gesture of triumph. He dipped fish heads into soupy daal and slurped at them surreptitiously, letting the yellow liquid stain his white beard.

I didn’t want to be left alone with him. I had pleaded with my mother to take me with them but she felt that the fish market was no place for a child. Besides, what if the pir needed something?

No sooner had my parents left than the pir started shouting my name. There was an urgency in his voice, a sharpness. Had he really been sleeping? Even as I walked over to him, I debated if I should pretend not to hear him. I reached his bed and looked down at him. He peered up at me through his ancient eyes, thin slits under a white canopy of eyebrows. His long white hair lay in limp strands on the pillow.

‘Do you need something?’ I asked.

‘Sit,’ he said, patting the bed. ‘I have a story to tell you.’

It was the story he had been trying to tell me for years, the story of my namesake that defined me in his eyes. I didn’t want to hear it. But he had insisted for so long now. Would he leave me alone if I let him tell me the story once and for all? I sat down. He looked pleased and cupped my hands in his. They were unusually warm.