Beloved Strangers (7 page)

I could not turn the pages any further. Bablu did the job for me. One by one, he showed me the pictures in the newsprint leaflet, displaying the animal business of naked bodies, and I, looking on in the purplish light at those strange men and women, wondered whether there was pleasure or pain in those peculiar-looking, almost grotesque acrobatics. I could see Bablu’s eyes gleaming. Part of me was intrigued by his audacity, part of me was repulsed by it. Part of me wanted to look through every picture again and part of me wanted to tear the book to shreds. Part of me wanted to rip my dress and show him where that red-circled spot existed in a real girl and part of me wanted to push him off the ledge.

Bablu put his hand over mine and moved closer. I smelled his breath. Did he really smell like frogs? A big, fat drop of rain fell on one of the lascivious pages. Seizing the opportunity, I looked up at the sky and yelled, ‘Look, it’s about to rain!’ Bablu jumped, the moment was broken. He dropped my hand, snatched his precious pages, climbed off the ledge and disappeared.

It rained that afternoon and the inflamed earth cooled its sore and tired body. From the next day onwards, Bablu the Imitator of Frogs was back at his tank but we never renewed our brief alliance. Every time I passed by him I cringed at the vision of a despondent face, staring up at me through an upside-down V.

The same year I parted ways with Bablu the Imitator of Frogs, Mala came to work in our house. Tiny Mala, the first adolescent girl who worked for us, had a big-hearted understanding of the universe. She did not begrudge it anything. She prattled continually and laughed even more. For reasons unknown, the mere act of carrying heavy bucketfuls of water sent her into peals of laughter. If a man leered at her on the street, she spat at him and scampered away, giggling. When we returned from school she would be squatting under the midday sun, washing clothes in the little cement basin on the roof and the sight of us would make her bob up and down with joy, sending soap suds and frothy water flying above her sprightly head. She accepted my old discarded clothes as if they were priceless pieces from fashion collections.

Not even the barriers of language held Mala’s vivacious spirit in check. She watched English television shows with us, grunting and nodding at all the right cues. After watching
The A-Team
, she ran her fingers through her thick hair and expressed, rather seriously, the wish to get a Mohawk like Mr T. Her admiration of him was partly due to her conclusion, that Mr T, with his excessive collection of gold chains, was the richest man in the world.

Mala came to me one day and made an earnest request. ‘Will you teach me how to read and write?’ she asked.

‘Do you want to go to school?’ I responded, a bit perplexed, as no other maid in our home had ever made such a request.

‘No, I just want to read books.’

‘What kind of books do you want to read?’

‘Historical ones,’ she said, ‘about kings and queens.’

I agreed to teach Mala. I had noticed her in the mornings when we wolfed down our breakfast before school. Mala hovered in the background with a mop, her eyes lingering on our schoolbags, trailing our steps as we dashed to catch the schoolbus. I knew how much she would have loved to climb into that bus with us, just to see if everything she imagined about the world of books and kings and queens were true.

The lessons began and my student had more to say than I had bargained for. Why do people speak in different languages? Why don’t animals speak? What language will we speak after death? I assumed a contemplative persona in the hope of fooling her about the extent of my own knowledge.

‘Read,’ I told her with great solemnity, ‘and the answers will come to you.’

I could not have known that the pretence of such solemnity would break down one quiet afternoon, when Mala appeared a half hour early for her lesson and discovered me poring over a lingerie catalogue I’d stolen from my mother’s dresser. Without hesitation or permission, she yanked it from me and held to her face the picture of a buxom blonde, breasts spilling out of a sheer pink bra. I tried to snatch the magazine from her but Mala moved away just in time.

‘Wait,’ she said with unusual sobriety, ‘why are you looking at this?’

Why
was
I looking? How could I tell her about my meeting with Bablu, the thrill and the horror of it? How could I tell her that to erase the disturbing images of those ravaged bodies in the magazine, I searched for bodies more temperate and tender, swelling with the possibility of something more mystifying? How could I explain to her that which was not entirely clear to me?

Mala, however, had more clarity than I, on the subject of bodies. ‘I have seen many naked bodies,’ she said. ‘They didn’t look anything like this.’ Haltingly, she described to me a little village, a one-room shack and five bodies in it – herself, her parents, her brother and his wife. At the end of the day, everyone in their tiny cabin laid down their straw mats wherever they chose on the mud floor and slept next to each other in the unpartitioned room. In the darkness, made partly visible by moonlight streaming in through the thatched roof, Mala had watched the shadowy figures of men and women engaged in acts of love. She had seen her brother rip off his wife’s sari as she writhed underneath him, their bare chests heaving. She had watched her own father make love to her mother. In the morning, everything was normal when the sun rose in the eastern sky. Everybody casually rolled up their mats, drank tea in a cosy circle and went about their day. New babies were born into these cramped habitats and they too grew up with the same uncensored view of love.

I was mesmerised by her stories, and then, as if moved by a magnetic force, I was drawn to her face, her milky brown skin, the concave space below her neck. Or was it she who looked at me like that?

I had never touched anyone in an intimate way. Instead of the man’s face I had always imagined in my fantasies of intimacy, here was a young girl my own age, with wise eyes and a wicked smile. My own body was betraying me. A touch, a caress, was all I wanted. My hands reached forward with dizzy longing. I felt the warm cotton softness of her skin. A silky sensation spread through me. I felt no shame, only pleasure at the unfamiliar touch. I wanted nothing more than the moment to last. That was precisely when Naveen walked in. Both Mala and I recoiled with sharp intakes of breath, a lowering of our eyes. The wanton blush spreading across my cheeks was mirrored in Mala’s.

What would I say to Mala if I saw her now? Would I ask her if she lived in a one-room shack with many others? Would we be so bold as to discuss that extraordinary moment we had shared? Or would we politely greet each other then turn the other way? I do not know. But I know that seeing Mala again may disturb the delicate stance of the memory I wish to keep intact, the memory of my first erotic touch, its incipient joy quelled as quickly as it had bloomed.

Gowsia Market was the most sensory of Dhaka experiences. I loved it and I abhorred it. My mother shopped there for uncommon paraphernalia and she loved to take one of her children along as company. There was nothing we couldn’t find in Gowsia Market, which teemed with hosts of hawkers selling everything from bobby pins and buttons to hundreds of varieties of dress materials, laces, saris, multi-coloured glass bangles, earrings, necklaces, precious jewellery of gold, silver and diamonds, toiletries, cosmetics, perfumes, shoes, home decor, curtains, flowers, dinnerware, pots and pans.

Some stalls were mere squares, held up by four sturdy poles, covered above and on three sides by a patch of tarpaulin, under which unsteady cardboard shelves displayed miscellaneous items. The bigger shops had clear glass cabinets with neon lights casting a harsh glow on the displayed goods. Adolescent hawkers carrying large wooden trays hung around their necks with dirty cotton slings followed customers like pesky flies. They sold things like safety pins, cotton balls, mothballs and handkerchiefs.

Crowds gathered each day at Gowsia like a swarm of bees around a honeycomb. They pushed their way through vigorously to avoid being brutally elbowed, shoved or trampled.

One section of the market was lined with food stalls choking the air with the zest of smoked meats, fried dough and burnt oil. The wooden benches in front of each stall were always bursting with people taking a break from shopping to gorge on chotpoti, bhelpuri, phuchka, fried chicken, French fries and kebab rolls. One of the best parts of our Gowsia trips was when my mother and I took a snack break. She would lead us to the Phuchka House and order two flaming hot plates of phuchka with extra chilli and tamarind sauce and steaming cups of oversweetened, overmilky coffee. Each burning bite of the chilli-stuffed phuchka was followed by a deliciously painful sip of scalding coffee.

But something happened one day to break the familiar tempo of our Gowsia trip. My mother and I had just finished our phuchka and plunged back into the hive of people, moving shoulder to shoulder. She moved expertly forward, pulling me by one hand, while I tried to keep up with her. We were tightly wedged inside the heart of the crowd when I felt a sweaty, hot palm slither up my childish frock and grip my bottom. I was astonished. Had a small animal crept up my thighs? Was someone groping for a lost partner’s hand and mistakenly come to settle upon my bottom?

Although I still held my mother’s hand, her face was not visible to me. A lady in a blue cloak had lodged herself between my mother and me and all I could see were the backs or sides of people bunched together like sheaves of coriander. Taking a deep breath, I used my free hand to reach behind and grab the misbehaving hand but just then it pinched my bottom hard. The stinging pain made me turn around sharply in an attempt to find my offender. I barely managed to catch sight of a middle-aged man with a large moustache, standing directly behind me, holding a child in one arm, while using his other to fondle me.

He was sucking his teeth, face tensed with concentration. As soon as he caught me looking, his expression gave way to a stunned discomfort and he hastily released my bottom. There was not enough space for him to move away so he stared stonily ahead, pretending to be just another body in the slow-moving swarm. Being only nine years old, I struggled for an appropriate retaliation. As my mother pulled me away, all I could do was look back at that abominable man and whisper, ‘Shame-shame.’

Somewhere in my soul is a little girl, still waiting for forgiveness, be it God’s or my father’s or mother’s; somewhere in me is a feeling of guilt, of shame, so ingrained, I can almost touch it. When I peer into my childhood, I never see a child. And even if I do, I never feel the child’s innocence or exuberance. Rather, I see a child who is trying hard to grow up before her time. I see a child who senses that curiosity is sinful and defiance is unpardonable.

I remember myself at nine, in the dark under the blanket. I am running my fingers up my thighs, hesitantly finding and stroking a spot, pushing and probing further. Warmth and wetness; tingling and tension. My small body grows taut. I increase the friction between my skin and finger and reel from pleasure. Then the darkness is invaded. My mother lifts the blanket and lets out a horrified yelp.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she growls.

I blink at her, confused. Have I done something bad? She never says. Never has to. I already know from the disgust spreading across her beautiful features, from the sharp sting of her palm across my cheek, the pearl and gold ring on her index finger scraping the bridge of my nose.

Birth is as much a disembodiment as it is a compilation, a conformation. As the umbilical cord is cleaved, once and for all, the separation and disconnection that make each newborn wail in anxiety seem unpreventable. Nature, in its complexity and effectiveness, prepares us for what is ahead. As we slide down the dark passage of our first shelter, helpless against the expunging currents of a suddenly rough sea, we may apprehend that we are merely passing through the eye of the storm. We emerge on the other side, no longer attached to another being and step into the world as one body, one mind. It is a consciousness that is unique to ourselves and that we will define now on our own. And the beginning of consciousness was, for me, the awareness of everything that was wrong.

One of Nanu’s special recipes consisted of a mouth-watering concoction of fried red chillies, onions and coriander leaves. She called it pora morich bhorta – it felt like a ball of fire in my mouth, especially with steaming hot rice, but I loved it. I waited for Nanu to visit so she could make this spicy delight for me. During one such visit, I came home from school to find that lunch was being served but there was no sign of Nanu’s morich bhorta. I threw my backpack on the floor and ran to find Nanu. She was busy talking to Mother. She swatted away my queries distractedly and when I persisted for her attention, it was my mother who answered me.

‘Stop this nagging,’ she ordered. ‘It’s too late to make morich bhorta now. Wash your hands and come to the table.’

I turned to Nanu, desperately pleading. I knew she could make the bhorta in less than fifteen minutes if she wanted to. I had seen her do it a thousand times. I knew the steps by heart: briefly heat the chillies in a low fire before frying them in mustard oil, chop the onions and coriander and mix them all together . . . I couldn’t think any more. I licked my lips, still sure that Nanu would save the day. I waited for her to tell Mother that it was all right, that she would make the bhorta. But Nanu seemed unsure, uncomfortable. Her silence filled the room.