Beloved Strangers (6 page)

So when Mother caught Naveen making eyes with the same boy again, her maternal heart grew apprehensive with dark thoughts. Why was Naveen being so reckless? What if the chap was a street hooligan? There were stories in the newspapers of young girls being abducted, raped, or defaced with acid.

In a moment of well-meaning weakness – but weakness nevertheless – my mother went to Moinul, who was smoking on the steps, and sought his help. ‘Moinul, would you tell that boy not to stare at my house or send my daughter notes? Don’t be too rude to him, you understand? Just tell him to scoot from here – firmly but nicely,’ she asked.

Moinul quietly finished his cigarette, taking time to snuff it beneath one, boot-clad foot, caked with mud. Then he sauntered out to the soccer field. From a distance, it seemed like a polite chat ensued between Moinul and the young chap. To our surprise, the fellow followed Moinul back to our house.

‘Auntie,’ Moinul addressed my mother, ‘I just wanted to know a little more about our friend here and thought it might be better to chat inside than in the middle of the street.’

‘Oh I see.’ Mother was looking uncomfortable. Naveen had disappeared.

‘Auntie, let me take him to my room to ask him a few questions. Don’t worry, it won’t take long.’

‘Moinul, wait. Why don’t we all talk here?’ my mother suggested.

‘Auntie, I told you I’d take care of this. It’ll just be a man-to-man chat. You relax,’ he smiled sweetly.

Feeling increasingly puzzled, I went to look for Naveen and found her lying face down on her bed, her arms wound tightly around her pillow.

The next thing we heard were loud, dull thuds as though heavy sacks of rice were being unloaded on a hard cement floor. We heard the beginnings of screams, hastily muffled. My mother, Amol, Naveen and I rushed to Moinul’s room but found the door locked. In between our frantic banging and screaming, we could hear a tedious thump thump thumping followed by the thwacking of Moinul’s big black boots. Occasionally, Moinul would cry, ‘I’ll kill you, sisterfucker. That’ll teach you to write love notes.’

Moinul opened the door only when my mother threatened to call the police. He charged about the room, snorting like a bull. He was a hungry carnivore, interrupted just before the kill. Given the opportunity, he might have cut anyone’s throat right then.

‘Moinul,’ screeched Mother, ‘where is he? Where is the boy?’

Before Moinul had a chance to answer, my mother pushed me back towards the door. I wasn’t allowed to see the gory scene inside Moinul’s room, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask Naveen if she had seen it either. I will never know who carried the limp and bleeding body out of the house, but I will always remember the thin, bright trail of blood left behind. I also recall a long, rasping sound, like someone trying hard to breathe through a crushed ribcage. As they carried him away, the rasping blended into the susurration of a quiet, breezy evening.

Moinul left us the next day. He disappeared into the morning haze and we never saw him again. My father mumbled something about the inconvenience of putting up a houseguest for too long. But even after Moinul was gone, his venom remained with us for a long time. We stopped talking about the events of that dreadful afternoon but we could not forget about it. Every time our eyes fell on an empty spot in the vast soccer field, we deftly averted our gazes.

While none of us felt singularly responsible for what had happened, what we did feel was a kind of collective shame – shame for witnessing a wrong, for not being able to prevent it, for trusting someone’s life with Moinul, for being human. In the wake of what we had experienced, we’d all been diminished in different ways, yet none of us dared to say it lest we broke the fragile peace that hung over our household. After that fateful day, if my mother caught Naveen or me leaning over the balustrade and staring down at the street, she’d pause for a second and then quietly turn around. Naveen seemed quieter too but in a hardened kind of way. The taut lines on her face were defence lines that no one dared to cross.

I wasn’t really sure what I felt except a gnawing sense of discomfort that I couldn’t shake off.

It was the nature of shame: it never left me because I never allowed it to. I held on to my shame, tightly, desperately, afraid that if I revealed it, I would fall further into its abysmal pit. Shame urged me to grow inwards, to become invisible. And I learned that if I stopped noticing myself, others did the same. If I didn’t feel my body any more, then it stopped taking up any space. If I stopped listening to my feelings then I could no longer hear the toll of shame. People saw me as shy, quiet, introverted. But I wasn’t as shy as I was invisible. Not as quiet as I was keen on not being heard. Words gurgled up to my lips but I pushed them back down, refusing to give them shape or form. For I chose to remain invisible.

The Naked Ghosts were discovered by Shonali, our one-eyed ayah. Shonali, who had been with us since I was a baby, wore her blind, bulging blue eye as a mark of her supernatural wisdom. With her blind eye she claimed to see things that a normal eye could not. There was one corner of our roof where a mango tree leaned forward to create a cool green shade. There Shonali squatted every evening, sucking on a bidi, betel juice dripping from her mouth, while ghosts galore visited her. Some of them were torsoless, mere heads floating about aimlessly and some had Himalayan forms reaching the skies, their eyes as big as headlights. Despite the terror they provoked in us, we loved listening to Shonali’s descriptions of those visiting spirits.

One evening she detected, through the dense foliage of mango leaves, a pair of
nangta bideshi bhooths
– the naked ghosts of a white sahib and memsahib. This piqued our interest immediately. Naveen and I joined Shonali in the shade of the mango tree every day after dark in the hope of seeing two naked white ghost-bodies. Shonali was aghast to find that they did not return, not even for the benefit of her prophetic blind eye. ‘I saw them I tell you,’ she protested, ‘the memsahib had breasts like long thin mangoes and the sahib, oh my God – sweeties, promise you won’t tell your mother – the sahib was hung like a bull!’

Naveen expressed her disgust, ‘Watch your mouth Shonali, what kind of talk is this!’

I secretly wanted Shonali to continue. What else had she seen? Did ghosts copulate?

A few weeks later, when the foreign ghosts still failed to appear, we lost interest and left Shonali alone. But she hadn’t lied to us after all. Months after she had first located the
bideshi bhooth
couple, she came running to our room and urged us to follow her to the roof. That night, we finally saw the mythical Naked Ghosts.

Naveen and I strained to see through the gaps in the leafy darkness. A young white woman with short blond hair, completely naked, leaned over what seemed like a table and appeared to be chopping something. A man came up from behind her, also completely naked, and handed her something which she added to her preparations. What Shonali had not perceived with her one-eyed vision was the shape of a window, framing the young couple cooking in the nude. What Shonali had seen, correctly, was the sahib’s bull-like endowment. ‘Do you see it?’ she cackled demonically, unperturbed by the fact that her ghosts had turned into humans. ‘Do you see how his manhood sways and swaggers?’

‘No,’ I said, equally animated, ‘Where? Where? Show me!’

But Naveen was already pulling me away from the sight of the Naked Ghosts. ‘They’re not ghosts, you idiot,’ she wailed, ‘they’re human beings. And we should be ashamed of ourselves for staring at them.’

When Shonali wasn’t smoking bidis or ghost-hunting, she turned her attention to Amol the cook. She cracked jokes to make him laugh and made up all sorts of affectionate pet names for him. She sat on her haunches while he worked, telling him long, painful stories of her childhood in the hope of gaining his sympathy. Amol routinely rejected her warmth, engaging her in fights more readily than conversation. We were used to their daily scuffles but one day I chanced upon an unusual scene.

I strolled into the kitchen to find Amol sitting on a wooden stool clutching an untouched plate of rice on his lap. His eyes protruded out of their sockets, the veins on his temples throbbed. Not four feet away from him, stood Shonali, hands on her hips, her face an unfathomable mingle of outrage and amusement. She was screaming obscenities at him and there was an undertone of anger in her voice. It sounded as if Shonali’s words, though coated with rage, were driven by a more poignant urgency. Amol, of course, didn’t understand the cause of her ire, as was clear from his expression. His breath came in short, heavy puffs as he cursed at her. For a time, neither of them acknowledged my presence and it took considerable work to find out what had passed. ‘She farted on my food!’ spat out Amol. ‘As soon as I sat down to eat, she hitched up her sari, revealed her hideous bottom and farted on my food!’ He shuddered.

I turned to Shonali, fully expecting her to defend herself against such an implausible accusation. To my disconcertion, Shonali began to giggle, then chortled and finally let loose great guffaws, doubling over. Betel juice and spit dribbled down her chin as she threw her head back, flashing her black teeth and tongue. Her laughter soon turned into spasms of cough that suggested a deep, glutinous congestion. And the tremendous effort of laughing and coughing at the same time produced an outpouring of farts, a long, successive line of small explosive bursts that smelled like rotten eggs. The farting brought forth further entertainment for her, initiating the laughing-coughing-farting cycle all over again.

Amol seemed to teeter between horror and resignation. He settled on horror, flung his plate aside and fled from the kitchen. I waited until Shonali’s convulsions came to an end. She wiped her mouth with the edge of her sari. An uncharacteristic calm settled upon her features as she slowly prepared a plate of food for herself. With great satisfaction, she climbed on to the deserted stool and started to eat. It occurred to me that Shonali had bared her bottom to Amol to justify being rejected by him. Her retaliation was an act of validation. She wanted Amol to bow down to her ugliness if not her appeal. Unlike me, she had no shame; she refused to be invisible.

On the first floor of our building, there was Bablu, the Imitator of Frogs. So well could he imitate a frog that the first time I heard him, I thought we were being invaded by frogs. From my window, I watched his spiky head bent over a cement water tank where plastic cars and boats floated amidst small fish and turtles. He spoke to the fish and turtles in his frog voice and occasionally, when he sensed my presence, he glanced up to nod at me. Sometimes, when I saw Bablu sweating in the roiling heat, speaking the language of frogs, I envied the way he seemed so sure of his occupation. I longed to learn the language of frogs but at twelve, I was too shy and tongue-tied around boys to approach Bablu.

Then came the week of praying for rain. Heat rose from the earth in dry vapours but the raindrops clung like festering pustules inside the greyish clouds. Bablu stood by his water tank and looked at his dejected turtles, motionless from the heat. He scratched his head and looked up, asking suddenly ‘Hey, do you want to come down here?’ For the first time, I heard his normal voice. How unsure it sounded without the hoarse frog-like baritones.

‘Why don’t you meet me at the ledge on the roof?’ I said.

I had recently learned from an informative teen romance series that if a boy were to propose something, the proposal must be accepted on slightly different terms. Bablu didn’t seem to mind. He found me lying flat on my back on the precarious ledge of tin and cement, strictly prohibited to all the youngsters in the building because of its unstable constitution. We huddled in my little corner where I’d lined up a few old gift boxes, some paper and pencil, a flask of orange juice. I offered Bablu orange juice. ‘No, thanks. Do you want to smoke? I have a cigarette,’ he said. I had never smoked a real cigarette. Silently I received my first cigarette from him, a wrinkled, slightly damp Star 555, the same kind my father smoked.

The first inhalation made me gaze up and down with light-headed amazement. The rain clouds moved above us, blocking the orange sun and casting a purplish hue across the thirsty grey sky. Down below, the street was an uprising of sound and sight. A vendor selling spicy rice puffs rolled his cart along, shrieking out the names of his goodies to potential customers. A procession of female factory workers made their way home in a noisy cluster of colourful saris and ribbons. Rickshawallahs zoomed by with their empty vehicles. Was the street always this active? Why hadn’t I noticed before? Euphoria flooded me as the tobacco hit my head, followed by a bout of coughing. Bablu patted me on the back. I had forgotten he was there.

‘I’ve never smoked before,’ I apologised.

‘It’s all right, don’t be embarrassed. Um . . . may I share something else with you?’

‘Of course.’

From the folds of his shirt, he pulled out a tattered-looking pamphlet.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a book . . . with pictures. Take a look,’ he replied nervously.

He handed me a yellowish, moth-eaten newsprint copy of a pornographic magazine. On the faded cover was the picture of a naked woman, bent from the waist, her huge bare bottom revealed to the beholder. If you looked closely, you could see that she peered back up at you through the inverted V of her legs, wearing a look of utter despair on her face. Bablu had made a tiny circle on the woman’s exposed privates with a red marker. He pointed at the circle and gushed, ‘Is that it? Is that where it goes in?’