Beloved Strangers (5 page)

‘What on earth is going on here?’ my father asked, stepping into our room and switching on the light.

He followed my gaze and in the bright light all our eyes widened to see the cracked and broken section of the window grille that the burglar had been trying to hack away, presumably with a hammer. He must have used a ladder to get up on the ledge right under the window from where he stood and tried to undertake his very unfurtive operation. Not that we felt any less shaken by the whole episode, but the thief was clearly a person of little intelligence. In fact, the more we discussed it the next day, the more we were intrigued and entertained by the sheer folly of his ingenuous plan. Even if he had somehow managed not to wake us with his pandemonium, how on earth was he planning to squeeze through a small grille-less portion of the window? In the days to come, our favourite game was playing ‘burglar burglar’ by reenacting that night’s series of events. Even little Avi cackled every time Tilat banged on the window with a pretend hammer made out of a pencil box.

But one thing remained unsolved despite the comicality of the night’s affairs. How had my father turned up at the exact moment we sought him?

‘Did you hear a noise? Is that why you came to our room?’ I asked him.

‘I didn’t hear any noise,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I had a strange dream. And when I woke up I felt I needed to check on you kids.’

I found it impossible to believe that my father had been woken by a dream at the same moment when I was instructing Tilat to fetch my parents.

‘What did you dream?’ I asked, hesitantly.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said gruffly.

‘I asked Tilat to run to your room when I heard the noise but before she reached you, you magically appeared!’ I confessed, overwhelmed with awe and gratitude. I wanted nothing more than to bury my head in my father’s chest and have him tell me that he would always be there when I needed him.

‘There is no magic, dear,’ Father said calmly. ‘Only God.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Did you say your prayers before bed?’

‘Yes and also when I heard the noise.’

‘See? It was God who protected you. I was merely an excuse. And if I hadn’t been there, you would have found another way out of it.’

I lowered my head, not wanting to hear any more. Not because I didn’t want God’s protection. But because I was losing, for the millionth time in my childhood, the chance to see my father as my protector, my hero. In my father’s denial of his personhood, of his role as my guiding star, there was the gallant notion that he had placed me in the care of a Supreme Custodian, whose guardianship was matched by none.

‘Oh, and you should always bolt the windows at night,’ he added after a moment’s thought.

There was nothing more to be said. In my father’s systematised universe, there was no place for parental intuition, reassuring fatherly embraces or even a child’s wonder. He was always careful not to reach down and touch me or sit me on his lap or explain anything beyond the necessary, lest he shatter the glass wall through which I saw him, every day. In his mind, he didn’t need to do any of those things. Ultimately, we were all the children of God and, as an earthly parent, my father’s only duty was to guide us towards our
real
, heavenly Father.

Fallen

I learned the word ‘shame’ in kindergarten. Mrs Lohani, with the triangular face and the huge mole on her nose, administered the word to me. If we became too rowdy in class, she banged her wooden desk loudly with the blackboard duster, wrinkled her nose and chirped ‘shame-shame’ in a sing-song voice. ‘You are big boys and girls now. How can you be so loud and unruly? Shame-shame,’ she’d say. Thus, shame came into my life with its twin, shame.

Mrs Bashir, my first-grade maths teacher, continued the task of shaming me. I struggled in her class the most. My mind muddled over additions and subtractions; it divided when asked to multiply. The morphology of numbers was lost on me – why did they have to come together only to transform into something else? Mrs Bashir’s small and wriggly handwriting made the numbers look like little white worms inching their way up the blackboard. She regarded us sternly, proclaiming every day, even when we were quiet and peaceful, what an unruly, spoiled group of children we were. I found myself looking out of the window and daydreaming as soon as Mrs Bashir walked into class. Invariably, Mrs Bashir would fling my lesson book across the classroom, grab me by both ears to pick me up and place me, red-faced and burning, on the ‘shaming bench’ outside the classroom. There I remained until the noonday sun baked my skin dry. As the energy seeped out of me in streams of sweat, it took all my strength not to faint.

The shaming continued until it became clear that I would not make the same mistakes again. I stopped making mistakes because I stopped being able to add or subtract at all. On one occasion, Mrs Bashir was perplexed when she opened my lesson book to see that I’d neatly copied the assignment but left it entirely undone. Concluding that the shaming had been inadequate, she dragged the red bench, which had stood just outside the classroom window, inside, and placed it next to the teacher’s desk so the victim could squarely face the gleeful spectators of her torture. Saved from the tropical sun, my skin began to recover its natural tone again but my six-year-old heart was broken. As my classmates looked on mockingly, I hung my head and wished I would faint after all.

At the time, I didn’t wonder why Mrs Bashir simply didn’t inform my mother of my numerical deficiencies. It would have been quite natural for her to inform my parents, given that rigorous punishment had not cured me of my shortcomings. Except that the same fact also made her prickle with indignation, suggesting her methods had failed. Gritting her teeth, she boxed my ears extra hard one day and accused me of feigning innocence. ‘You devious, lazy child,’ she shrieked, ‘I know what you’re doing. You’d rather stand in the sun than do your work, so you pretend you can’t do it. And you think I will eventually take pity on you and stop the punishment? Well, I won’t!’

If Mrs Bashir had been intolerant of my mathematical weaknesses, she was livid at the thought of my slyness. Every single day, for the span of the school year, I was a circus freak, hauled up to the red bench for an open exhibit of my deformities. My ears were always red, either from the constant grabbing and twisting or from the constant shame I felt.

That was when I invented the odd game with numbers. I ran up and down the shapes of their horrid bodies, hid in their nooks and crannies and refused to hear anything they might have to say to me. I fantasised chopping them into edible bits and gobbling them up, once and for all, so they’d leave me alone. No matter what I tried though, they stayed with me. They greeted me every morning from the pages of my books, cooing incessantly in my head, ‘Shame-shame, shame-shame, shame-shame . . .’

Once I understood shame – a lesson that had begun with my attempt to understand God – I realised that it was all around me, either trying to hide, or waiting to be noticed. There was Lima, for example, who suddenly turned up at our doorstep one day with amber eyes full of mortification. Uncle Karim, my mother’s youngest brother, brought Lima to our home. As soon as they came, my uncle took my mother aside and whispered something in her ear. I saw my mother’s eyes soften as she greeted Lima and took her hand in hers and I sensed that something of an alliance was formed. It was different from the way she greeted a regular guest. Lima started visiting us daily with her eight-year-old daughter Faiza, who was the same age as me. In the beginning, Lima sat in our living room, sipped lemon tea from gold-rimmed bone-china cups and spoke to my mother in hushed tones. I was asked to play with Faiza. My heart remained in the unheard conversations of the adults. I knew it would not be long before my mother would repeat the story to my father or grandmother, simply overlooking my presence. Adults, it seemed to me, were punctilious with ceremony but artless when it came to strategy.

As anticipated, Lima’s story was revealed one Sunday in the environment of domestic chit-chat, exempt of censorship. It turned out that Lima had a husband with three vices, all starting with an A: alcoholic, abuser, adulterer. Years of his betrayals had ground down Lima and Faiza but the final blow came when her husband decided to leave them for another woman.

Soon Lima’s visits were no longer relegated to the living room. She usually ate lunch with us, then spent the afternoons quietly lying on my bed, reading magazines. No one bothered her. Faiza was as quiet and immobile as her mother. She sat staring blankly at the toys I shared with her. I sensed a torrent of questions behind her blankness. She knew I didn’t have answers and I was certain she would never ask. But I was anxious to know the reason behind Lima’s long and languorous afternoons on my bed.

In three months’ time, when Lima’s stomach grew large and tight like a watermelon, I was even more confused. By now, she was a permanent part of my bed, a gargantuan specimen hidden under a pile of nonsense magazines, while an entire household of people she hardly knew went about their business. After a few more months, when I could no longer bear to have my bed dominated by a bloated stranger lying belly up and mute, I decided to withhold my dolls from Faiza. Childishly vengeful, I hoped my rudeness would make them leave. My reprisal had no effect on Faiza, who remained as stoic as ever. Her life had taught her exactly what she needed to know in order to survive. She sat alone on the floor, resignedly doodling on a piece of notebook paper. Not once did she look up at me and, if our eyes met by accident, I could read nothing in her vacant stare.

Frustrated beyond words, I went to my mother and demanded an explanation for the intrusion.

‘Because she is our guest,’ replied my mother, cautiously.

‘But other guests don’t come every day to sleep on my bed.’

‘Well, Lima is pregnant so it’s hard for her to move.’ Mother paused and sighed. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, ‘Lima is going to have a baby but she’s very worried because she doesn’t know where the baby’s father is.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re too young to understand.’

‘Tell me, please, I can keep a secret,’ I insisted.

‘It’s not a secret, sweetheart. It’s just very complicated.’

‘Are you helping her find the baby’s father?’

‘Yes, I’m helping her. Please try to understand, my love.’

I didn’t understand much about the baby’s father’s disappearance or how my mother could help. But I understood the crushed look on Lima’s face as she lay helpless on my narrow bed, recognised the humiliated contours of Faiza’s neck and shoulders when I snatched my dolls away and left her to play alone. They were both signs of shame, the same kind of shame I had felt before the pir, or standing on the red bench under the sun. Suddenly I knew exactly how Lima and Faiza felt – though I didn’t fully fathom the reasons behind those feelings. Suddenly I could see the tension roiling beneath the unmoving planes of their faces, could see right through to their ebbing spirits, trying hard to stay ashore. I started sharing my dolls with Faiza again, though she had noticeably less interest in them now, as if she knew that dolls merely replicated the futile structure of human relationships. Some afternoons, as we played on the floor, Faiza and I could hear Lima sobbing softly, though we both pretended not to hear.

Lima extricated herself from our lives as suddenly as she had appeared. Even Uncle Karim didn’t know exactly what happened to her. He had heard different rumours through friends about Lima giving birth to a boy and moving to a different city, while others thought her husband might have returned to her.

I can still visualise her defenceless form on my bed; I can still feel the weight of her deprecation. And I can taste her shame as I nurse my own.

One summer Amol hung a nylon rope swing from the rungs in the partial ceiling of our veranda. Naveen and I swayed for hours and stared out at the sprawling soccer field across from our house. Sometimes I noticed a young man standing at the edge of the field, staring in the direction of our house. When I told Naveen, she smiled shyly and told me not to look at him. Around that time, Moinul came to live with us.

Moinul, a distant relative from my grandmother’s town, was disturbingly tall, but more disturbing was the rumour we’d heard about him from our mother. Moinul, who openly claimed to hate his entire family, had threatened to kill his youngest sister by slitting her veins in her sleep. Naturally, we were afraid of him, but my mother reassured us that Moinul was trying to find work in Dhaka and would only stay with us for a short while. At first he seemed harmless. When he wasn’t out looking for ‘work’ (though what kind of work he was suited for, none of us knew), he sat on the steps outside, smoked and munched on betel leaves. If he saw any of us nearby, he’d pull out some ancient-looking candy from his shirt pocket and offer them to us. One day he grabbed my shoulders and squeezed my cheeks hard. He told me that I was growing as plump as a football and that soon he would have to carry my ovoid form to the soccer field for a few kicks. My feelings towards him solidified into resentment.

One afternoon Moinul came home early. I was on the swing and Naveen leaned over the balustrade, staring out at the soccer field. Mother must have come up behind Naveen and noticed the chap she was gazing at. I didn’t know it, but my parents had already discovered the suggestive exchange of looks and smiles between Naveen and the soccer-field chap. When questioned in private, Naveen had revealed that the boy had sent her some sort of love note which, of course, she had not kept. My father was furious enough to pick up a slipper and whack Naveen’s twelve-year-old face. He threatened to discipline her much more severely if she continued the misconduct.