Beloved Strangers (22 page)

Had my great-grandmother truly felt redeemed after she had proved the absolution of her love for Sohrab Hossain? Was my grandmother so cryptic in her revelations of conjugal love because she had never even grasped its essence? And was my mother, perpetually starved for something or another, the perfect example of a woman wanting of love?

Up and down we bounce, from one love to another. From the flowing, unconditional sustenance of the amniotic waters to the toughening, challenging love of our fathers to the warm, unburdening love of siblings to the bittersweet love of a lover to the indescribable love for our children to the untenable love of ambition to the exhausting love for our work to the unfathomable love of God. But where are
we
in all this? Where is the
I
in the
you
and
me
?

If I think back to the origin of the feeling, I see that my eagerness has always trumped the experience. One of the first and most frequently repeated stories I heard from my mother was about her miraculous ability to incite love in the heart of whoever happened to lay eyes on her. The love letters started pouring in from the time she was thirteen. Anonymous notes were tucked into her schoolbag, some were pressed into her startled hands and, every once in a while, one happened to fly in through an open window, tied to a stone. Whatever the method of delivery and whoever the writer, the letters carried the same content. They were endless monologues on her beauty, on the helpless nature of the letter-writer’s feelings and on the undying hope of being united to the object of their love. Mother grew up, fattened by the richness of unbidden admiration. Even as a young girl, with no real knowledge of the opposite sex, she lived the victories of a desirable woman wielding her power over men. Without ever asking for it, she found, constantly, the one assurance we all need once we are out of the nursery and out of our mother’s all-encompassing arms – the assurance that we are, indeed, worthy of someone else’s love, the assurance that we may share with someone else the unparalleled sense of oneness that only a mother and infant share. But infancy is as much a curse as it is a blessing. We start life with the notion that our mothers will for ever preempt our falls, wake up to our cries and rock us into oblivion. For someone like my mother, who found a loving embrace never that far from reach, no matter how old or young she was, it must have been both easier and harder to cope. Easier when she basked in others’ adoration and drew from it the strength and confidence she needed to come into her own. Harder when she expected others to forever cushion her falls far beyond her infant years. Either way, Mother was spared a free fall. She stumbled and rose, stumbled and rose.

I, on the other hand, tumbled out of the sweetness of my mother’s arms and into the panic of my being in one fluid motion. As soon as I learned to understand her language, I knew that Mother was bidding me farewell, setting me on the stage of the world to play my part. You’re no longer a child, she repeated like a mantra. Can’t you grow up faster! When will I ever be free of you? I’ve done my dues – what else do you want from me? It unhinged my mother to think that she was to dole out affection rather than reel it in. She saw herself, forever young and exquisite in the love letters of her girlhood, while her children’s raucous demands for her love left her anxious, gasping for breath.

I wonder now if my mother had sought from her music the same satisfying flattery that she was used to receiving from her admirers. She wanted music to make her famous, to give her the recognition and praise that so sustained her. But what was she to give to music? When was she to prove to music her love and devotion? Flabbergasted by the changing currents of fate that turned her from being the sought to the seeker, my mother declared herself to be a martyr. At least in her martyrdom, she could still see herself being pursued by woe, by cruel gods who conspired to bring her misery. Oddly, it was her self-imposed martyrdom that finally brought her the courage she needed to shed some of her self-pity.

‘I don’t care any more what anyone says,’ she says bitterly these days, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want.’

‘As you should,’ I say.

‘Oh I will,’ she threatens.

And she does. She changes the upholstery of the living-room furniture into a bold zebra print and replaces the off-white curtains with sheer gold ones. She paints her room a luminous lavender and makes a resolute attempt to keep her matching bedspread smooth and unruffled. The dining room is slathered in vivid yellow and a red and green batik print of a humongous lobster is placed on the wall. But when she stands back to survey the changes, the zebra print seems too busy, the gold curtains are too transparent, the lavender in her room is suddenly more pink than purple and the dining room looks like a giant lemon about to be consumed by a monster bug. My mother is puzzled.

‘Go for lighter tones,’ I suggest.

‘It’s not the colours, silly,’ she says, recovering her pride. ‘It’s the light in the rooms. The architecture of this flat is all wrong. It’s not like the Big House.’

I remind her that the light comes in from the same direction for both the Big House and our flat.

‘Oh, who cares about the light,’ she waves me away. ‘If I had the right amount of money to spend on this flat, then I could really do what needs to be done.’

‘Then do it slowly, room by room,’ I persist.

‘Oh, to hell with it,’ she cries. ‘The kitchen is beyond redemption. The bathrooms need complete makeovers. I don’t care any more!’ Her voice is starting to quiver, she is losing her composure.

‘What you’ve done isn’t so bad,’ I try to assure her.

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s your time now. You’re young and life awaits you. You should be doing all this, not me.’ Her eyes flash and the curve of her neck is tense.

Why is Mother not as relieved as I had always expected her to be now that she is on her own? In her quest for freedom had she completely missed its shape-shifter spirit? Had she worked towards a vision which, upon closer look, was the opposite of freedom?

And is it only now that I see the martyr I have become, setting myself up for sacrifice, again and again, at the altar of music, of dance, of love? If I never could hold on to love, or the things I loved, it was only because I was too impatient to snatch at what I thought I needed, too keen to create for myself the ideal scenario. The sweetness of the experience eluded me because I was too busy apprehending its outcome. Just as my mother can never be free of her compulsion for freedom, I could never perfect my image of perfection.

Mother goes shopping again for materials. She sifts through the myriad of colours, never finding exactly what she needs but never admitting that no matter what she picks, it always seems to be a different shade of the same colour. Finally, tired of refurbishing and redecorating, Mother wants to sell the very property on which our home stands. It is not the loss of the land but the thought of demolishing the Big House that turns the conversation sour between us. Though we both know that we will never live in the Big House as a family, the mere fact that it is there, solid space that encases the vision of a beloved home, provides more comfort than I had ever admitted. At moments like this, I am confronted by the fragility of my life, its futility. On and on we dream, we wish, we love – no matter that the dreams come to an end, the wishes evolve or that love dissipates like dust in the wind. Perhaps, what matters only is that we have lived long enough to dream, hard enough to wish and indisputably enough to love.

Tonight I stand before a picture of myself in my mother’s arms. I am a month old in the picture. My mother holds me up for the camera as I open my mouth in a broad, toothless grin. She peers from behind my infant body, proud and happy. Through the black and white of the picture I can almost discern the rosy glow spreading across her cheeks. I can feel my own body relaxing into the protective grip of her hands. I can sense the tight embrace that will reclaim me after the camera has flashed, the hot kisses that will cover my little face, the soft baby talk she will coo into my ears when she cradles me to sleep. Then I see it – the two long tears forming a lopsided cross upon the picture’s surface. Someone had cleanly ripped the photograph into several pieces, which were now glued back in place.

‘Who did this?’ I ask my mother, outraged.

‘You did. Don’t you remember?’ she says, as if I ask a rhetorical question.

‘But why?’ I am surprised because I have no memory of it.

‘I don’t know. You were upset about something, I presume.’

Had she never asked me why I was angry or did she just refrain from mentioning it now, lest she unleash some unpleasant memory between us? I lie awake trying to recall why I had torn the photograph and it finally comes to me. I was furious to find out that this was the only baby picture of myself with my mother. The next picture of me was on my second birthday and the one after that when I was five years old, both of which were group pictures. It was as if no one cared to capture my childish feats but dutifully recorded a few nondescript pictures of a family around a cake or siblings playing together. They were hazy long shots, where I deciphered neither the expressions on my face nor the language of my body. And my mother? She was nowhere near me.

I looked through the old family albums again and again. Countless pictures of my brother and sisters stared back as I frantically searched for ones of me. There were thoughtfully arranged pictures of Naveen at various ages, sitting naked in a baby tub, crawling, and learning to pose with her Bugs Bunny. There was Tilat, a moon-faced baby, traced through the years as she grew into a slim, beautiful child. And there was Avi, the apple of all our eyes, giggling from babyhood to adolescence with characteristic joyfulness. I was not there, not even as a shadow in the peripheral vision of the camera, not until I was much older and had learned to nimbly wedge myself into the shots. In jealous rage, I had picked up the singular black and white infant photograph of myself and tore it into three pieces. I wanted to destroy the one image that offensively alluded to all the other unrecorded ones.

But today, my eyes widen in surprise as I begin to notice something else. How had I missed the fine and careful effort with which the torn pieces had been glued back in place? Someone had put the pieces back together with delicate precision. The work of those fingers belied a purpose far beyond the immediacy of the task. Even the glue had not left any marks in the white back of the photograph. The cross that now remains across the picture’s front is just a faint mark, like a long strand of dust waiting to be blown away. How could I have failed to see this labour of love?

And how could I have missed my mother’s laughter all these years? A sweet, rumbling sound fills the room when she laughs. Did she not laugh as much when we were young? I remember her frustration only too well. Creasing her forehead in horizontal lines of consternation, she always regarded the four of us in terms of all the work that needed to be done rather than all the work she had already accomplished. Mother was not a slacker, but the idea of work tired her as much as the work itself, leaving her prematurely exhausted.

‘What am I going to do with you kids? I don’t know how to raise you into proper human beings!’ she lamented to no one in particular. She’d groan and grumble about how old and withered she was going to be by the time we grew up and went our own ways. On the best of days, mother regarded her burden with a touch of self-satisfying irony. ‘At least I should not want of care in my old age, after raising the four of you.’

There were also the fits of rage that left her breathless. I remember watching her from a distance, her body quivering, sweat glistening above her lips and on her brow. During such fits she constantly moved things within her reach, without really noticing them. Once when she had a fight with my father at the dinner table, she snatched my plate away just as I was about to bite into a gravy-covered potato. Another time she absently tore up an important school notice that Naveen had left on the coffee table.

In her wrath, Mother plucked the leaves of potted plants, poured half-finished tea out of still-hot cups and turned off the television in mid-show. It was as if by reconfiguring the world of matter around her she could redirect her inner energies. And when she yelled she did so with great intention, using the force of her voice rather than words. She wanted to convince the world with the sound of her pain rather than an explanation of it. She expected us to prostrate before her anger and concede that there was no reason to question her.

Even in those circumstances I was drawn to her, awed by the strength that drove her, commanded by her expectation to be loved and obeyed despite her unbecoming attributes. In no less part was I lured by the unsavoury promises of adulthood. I wanted to master that kind of crude command over those around me. In a way, I began to appreciate how I was always being told ‘You will’ and ‘You must’. Clearly, I was seduced by the darker side of things and for this I fault no one.

Because, for all the fires I recall my mother lighting in her younger years, I also recall when my mother conducted herself with perfect grace. A few months after I married Yameen and moved back to America, she came to visit me. In the late afternoons I sat at the kitchen table and read while my mother cooked dinner. On one such occasion, she was frying butterfish with red onions and garlic, absently humming under her breath. The aroma of spicy fish coupled with her gentle humming transported me to another time when I used to perch at our dining table with my schoolbooks, listening to Amol singing above the sizzle of the frying pan. My father sat at the other end of the table, poring over his work, a glass of single malt by his side. From Naveen’s room floated the faint notes of Chris de Burgh’s ‘Fatal Hesitation’. Every time our favourite lines in the song came up, Naveen and I chorused to them together, she from her room and I from the dining room. Father would raise his head for a second and then look back down at his yellow notepad. I realised, suddenly, that this sequence of events were repeated evening after evening, but Mother had always been missing from the routine. Where had she been?