Tanya Tania (17 page)

Isn't depressed just a big word for sad?

It's not like my parents have been fighting about your mom. Exactly. I think my mom is worried about your mom. And I think my dad feels like my mom should be worried about him.

He doesn't say that but she applied for a visa to go visit your mom in Karachi without telling my dad and he's mad about that. He says that that's lying. He also thinks it's a bad idea for her to go to Karachi because of all the violence in Pakistan. He thinks that it's not safe and all that. And he says she's being irresponsible because of what would happen to us if anything happened to her.

And my mom got all bitter and was like, you're just worried about where the money will come from.

And my dad got silent like he does when my mom brings up money.

What I don't understand is that if my mom wanted to be with someone who would make a lot of money then why did she marry my dad? My dad's not ambitious. He's not one to charge ahead and stand up for things. My dad can't even decide what shoes to buy without my mom.

You're selfish for wanting to go to Pakistan when things are dangerous there.

No, you're selfish for not caring about Lisa. You've never cared about Lisa. You've never cared about anyone in my life, not my parents, not my sister, not my friends.

Your sister? What about the time when she was living in our house for nine months?

So what if she did? She's my sister. She can stay with us for nine years if she wants.

Yes, I'm sure you would have loved it if my parents had lived with us for nine years.

I TOLD YOU YOUR PARENTS CAN LIVE WITH US! I told you! You said you didn't want it!

You didn't really want them here, they could tell. You don't speak to them in Bangla.

I grew up in Bombay! How can I speak Bangla? And all the things I did for them, none of that matters right? Changing the toilet seat so it doesn't hurt Baba, getting soft mattresses, getting a second driver to come in the evenings for them, cooking mutton without garlic and onion….

Yes thank you Sraboni. Thank you for the supreme sacrifice of giving up onion and garlic in your mutton curry.

Oh please Shayon, you don't see the hypocrisy? Your parents are the only Brahmins who eat mutton without garlic and think they're saints.

Don't you dare call my parents hypocrites!

You're right, you're the real hypocrite. Forcing your son to do a racist, fascist ceremony.

I didn't force him to do the thread ceremony. Sammy wanted to do it.

He was ten! You bribed him with a new bicycle!

It went on for a while. I've personally heard them go round and round Sammy's thread ceremony at least twenty times.

Somehow it came back to your mom and my dad was screaming about how both my mom and I are more interested in what's happening in your house than in our house and how the last phone bill was insane and how he won't have it. So then it went back to money. And I went into my room and shut the door.

If money is so important to my mom how come she wants to spend loads of it to send me to college in America?

Arjun finally called yesterday. But then he said he had to go and he hung up in a few minutes. But if you're right and he wants to break up with me, how come he hasn't done it yet?

You know, my father is always the person to go after my mother to make up after a fight? Every time. I used to wonder that it doesn't make him feel bad but I think it actually makes him feel good. He'll go to her and she'll ignore him at first. And then he'll try to hug her from behind or hold her hand or something. And she'll still ignore him. And he's already looking happy you know, like a kid playing a video game he knows he's going to win. And slowly she'll start talking to him and he'll keep saying sorry sorry sorry and then finally her hand is in his hand and her fingers are holding his and my father looks like he has won a race.

They haven't made up yet from yesterday's fight. These days it takes them a lot longer to make up. What will happen if my dad stops going to my mom to make up?

I miss Nusrat.

Love,

Tania

July 14, 1992

Karachi

Dear Tania,

Why do you miss Nusrat? I know I should respond to your letter, especially about the fight at home but I can't. Not right now. Something bad has happened. My teacher's husband was shot. He's dead.

Mrs. Iqbal is our Chemistry teacher. She is also American. She is young and very thin. She wears long skirts with loose tops so that when she walks, the smallest breeze wraps her clothes all the way around her. Her collar bone is prominent, like a necklace she cannot take off. When she first moved to Karachi, my mother had invited her over for tea a couple of times.

We had Chemistry lab first thing this morning. We were studying the properties of hydrochloric acid today. What does it do to chalk. What happens when you add impurities. What happens when you crystallise it.

Mrs. Iqbal had written out the questions on the board and was sitting at her table watching us. Unlike other teachers, she never does other work in class with us, no correcting of papers, no filling out attendance registers. She just sits at her desk and watches us.

Rumour has it she was doing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in Theoretical Physics. Mr. Iqbal was doing a Master's degree in Political Science (on a full scholarship). They fell in love. He moved back to Pakistan and he convinced her to marry him and move back with him. She gave up her PhD, married him and moved to Karachi.

There must be something about Pakistani men, don't you think?

I was partnered with Sohail for the experiments. I was looking at the flame and thinking about how blue it was against the flash of its yellow heart when there was a thud. When I looked up, Mrs. Iqbal had fallen to the floor, her chair overturning behind her. Father Thomas, our Principal, had come in when I wasn't looking and was now standing next to her, looking down at her aghast.

Everyone looked at each other. Someone dropped a set of test tubes.

Father Thomas motioned to one of the boys and together they picked her up and carried her outside. I saw her face jerking over Imran's shoulder, her eyes wide open as if she recognized us and could do nothing about it.

When she left, the class descended into chaos. Someone said that Father Thomas had come in to tell Mrs. Iqbal that her husband had been killed on his way to the university where he taught Political Science. Later on I found out that he had been shot near the nallah right outside the road that leads to our school. He was shot seven times and his car drove into the water. I heard that his body was never found. I heard that the water stayed red for weeks.

But all I could think then, sitting in the old lab with newspaper-lined shelves of test tubes, is that maybe this is why my mother had gone silent. Maybe she has worried and worried about this moment happening to her and that one day the worry got too big, too heavy and she collapsed under it. Maybe that is what they talked about, my mother and Mrs. Iqbal when she had invited her over to tea. Maybe she had been warning Mrs. Iqbal that it was going to be like this.

The rest of the day passed in a daze. We had thought that we would be sent home but we weren't. The rumours began. He was with MQM and PPP did it. He was with PPP and MQM did it. He was a Baloch sympathizer and the government did it. He was a Kashmir sympathizer and the Indians did it. He was a spy and the Americans did it.

Throughout the day, I kept thinking about my mother. It had occurred to me that when she found out she would want to comfort Mrs. Iqbal. I imagined it over and over again. The phone ringing and someone telling her about it. Her hand going to her heart and tears coming to her eyes because a woman who cried over a dead plant would surely cry over a dead husband. I imagined her getting out of bed and phoning Mrs. Iqbal. I imagined her listening and making crooning voices on the phone and then going over to help Mrs. Iqbal pack to go back to America.

I almost ran home.

But when I got home, everything was exactly as I had left it. Bibi and Chhoti Bibi were in the kitchen. The door to my mother's room was closed. When I opened it, I could tell from the smell that she hadn't left it all day. She didn't say anything to me because she was crying, turned over on her side, her arms tucked deep into her chest. And I knew that she hadn't picked up the phone, hadn't left her bed, hadn't done anything else all day but cry at the red curtains she had made herself so many years ago when she had let me hem stiches into the lining and had laughed and laughed when I had stitched my dress into the curtain.

Mrs. Iqbal is not leaving. Pakistani men are persuasive. American women are foolish. But I, who come from both, am going to be neither.

Love,

Tanya

8

April 29, 1996

New York, NY

Dear Tania,

Can you believe that there are only two months left of college? Well, for me. Your college was three years, I know. You're in the real world already. What do you do now? Do you miss college? Did you make good friends there?

You would have loved the sports here at Columbia. I've enclosed some pictures with this letter. I just wanted you to see how pretty it is. Maybe you can send me some pictures of Xavier's? You don't even have to write me a letter. You could just send me the pictures.

I'm doing something quite peculiar. Well, peculiar for me. It's exactly what you would have done if you had come to college in America. Instead of going straight for my PhD, I've decided to postpone graduate school and go work in New York for a year.

I know. It's crazy.

My mother was surprised, I could tell. My professors are disappointed in me although they're all very polite here in America. Amrita asked me if I was sure. I almost said, no I've changed my mind, I'll apply for PhD programs in Political Science.

But my therapist has been talking to me about this. She thinks I imagine that I'm letting people down. I don't know how she can think that I imagine it because I've told her everything. Every single detail, Tania, I swear. But she's American. They don't get these things.

I'm applying for jobs in New York. Investment banking jobs. Management consulting jobs. Their salaries sound like lottery tickets.

You used to get angry with me for being so desperate to come to college here in America. Do you know that by the time I left for college, we couldn't even afford to pay Salman Bhai or Bibi? They just stayed on. Salman Bhai is still with my father. I don't know where Bibi is. I think of her much, much more than I ever thought I would.

There were people in Karachi who loved me. Ali loved me. Salman Bhai loved me very much. Bibi loved me.

Except I can't tell if it is out of love or if it is out of allegiance. The odd thing is that Bibi lived with us in Karachi for nineteen years but her mind never left the village. And Chhoti Bibi lived with us for six months but she left the village the day she arrived.

Amrita would say that is ethnocentric of me. To posit urban mindsets as more progressive, as better. But the truth is that Chhoti Bibi overtook me in days. It shows even in my old letters to you.

You haven't asked about her. I thought you would have. She's fine. Or at least she was three and a half years ago when I left. She stayed with me through the whole time at the hospital for mad people. That was when she called you and you didn't pick up. I think she called you every day that I was there. You never picked up.

After that she came to visit me once before I left for college. She had found another job in a house with a child in it the age of her brother, Mohammad. I wonder what happened to him. I asked for her address to write to her and you know what she said to me? She said no. She said she doesn't want letters from me and she doesn't want to write me letters.

Isn't it odd how I'm the one who has always been unsentimental and cold and yet it is all of you, who say love in the first letter, who hug and kiss, who spent hours braiding my hair, who move on without looking behind? And here I sit, unmoved, unmovable me, holding onto old pictures, re-reading old letters, living in an imaginary world three and a half years later in which you pick up the phone when I call you and write back to my letters.

What are you doing now, Tania? Are you in an office somewhere, looking out at the rocks by the sea? What kind of work do you do? What do you wear to work, Tania? Do you wear saris like your mother? Don't you ever think about my mother, Tania? Don't you ever think about me?

Love,

Tanya