Ode to Lata (18 page)

“
Hanh, hanh,
I know,” she said, nodding apologetically.  “I just want to give you this.  Dry yourself before you get sick.”

I sighed with exasperation, more loudly than was necessary, and practically snatched it from her extended hand.  “Just…can you give me a moment, please?”

She disappeared into the living room without saying another word and I shut the door after her.  As I rubbed myself dry, my body covered with goose bumps, I looked down at the soaked gift-wrapped CD on my bed and I thought about taking it back to the store the next day.  I thought of the music that Nelson and I had heard together and the Nancy Wilson song that he had played for me on the phone while I had been at work.  How I had tittered and resolved to always think of him when hearing that particular song again. My eyes started to tear, and my body convulsed to shake the feeling off me.  I wished my mother wasn’t waiting for me in the other room.  I wanted her gone. Back to Kenya, far away from me so I wouldn’t have to hide my pain from her, so I could just mourn openly.

I was being cruel to her, but I felt impotent to do anything about it.  My alienation of her made me feel wretched, but something about rekindling our intimacy terrified me.  It was as if she might somehow propel me back into dependency.  I calmed myself with the thought of calling Nelson the next day.  He’d have a logical excuse for not showing up, and there would be no need to return the CD.  I would repackage it, maybe even get him the whole Miles Davis anthology instead.   

When I walked out into the living room in sweats, she was back on the sofa looking up at me. Her face quivered as if she was on the verge of tears – that look that mothers have a patent on and can speak volumes – making it clear that I had succeeded in hurting her.  For the last several years, continents had separated us and afforded us a dialogue of, at best, perfunctory niceties.  It was the language of a relationship forced to thrive on echoing long distance phone calls where the expense of each ticking minute and crossing wires riddled with the tidbits of someone else’s conversation had mercilessly kept us from significant topics. But suddenly there she was, the landmass between us swallowed as if by the earth itself, yet our hearts were worlds apart.  There was no escaping her.

Reluctantly I flopped onto the sofa and curled my knees up to my chin, my eyes fixed on the television set where a commercial for Nyquil promised relief from every thinkable ailment.  The headache and the heartache medicine, that’s what Salman called it.  Just a few capfuls and goodbye to every kind of shit!  I thought about the stiff cocktail that I never got. My eyes flirted momentarily with the half bottle of Scotch on the coffee table.  It angered me to think that she probably held me responsible for driving her to drink.

I could feel her eyes resting heavily on me, and I wished she would say something.  Anything.  Ask me to charge more of the miracle cures she’d been gullible enough to believe in; give me the lowdown on Brook Logan from
The Bold and the Beautiful
; tell me that she hated me.  But she remained silent, martyred, humiliated in a way that hollered at me louder than her words ever could.  I grabbed the remote and killed the TV.

“I can’t handle this right now,” I said finally, starring at the lacquered screen faintly reflecting us. “I can’t handle this whole…silent-treatment thing, okay?”  And then, when she still said nothing, “I can’t pretend to be happy just to spare your feelings, Mum.”

“Don’t worry.  You won’t have to for much longer,” she said. “You see, I can’t handle this either.  I don’t have the strength, you know.”  She started to cry.  “I’m not going to stay around and watch this.  So you can call the airline tomorrow and change my dates.  If you’re going to destroy yourself, you’re going to have to do it without an audience.”

I tried as hard as I could to hold my own tears back, but I could feel them mounting within me like a mad, violent flood. “I’m sorry, Mum.  I didn’t mean for it to be like this.”

“Who
are
you?” she asked, her face contorted with pain. “I don’t even recognize you anymore.  What happened to my son?  What happened to my little Ali?”

I looked the other way and squeezed my eyes shut.

“You know, day and night I pray for God to keep his hand over you because I’m too far.  Because I can’t be here with you.  ‘This poor child has nobody else,’ I keep telling him.  ‘You have to look after him.’  But seeing you like this…do you know how it makes me feel? Where did I fail in my prayers?”

I covered my face in my hands, tears filtering through my lashes, screaming in my mind,
Oh, God…I don’t know, Mummy.  I don’t know.  I’ve lost Nelson.  I’m alone again…Why do you do this to me, God?  First Richard and now Nelson.  Why must you bring them into my life only so I can lose them?

Then I grunted sardonically. “Maybe he isn’t listening.  Maybe we should’ve stopped praying a long time ago.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense!  Who do you think has been looking after you all these years? You know, God is not some bank you make withdrawals from.  He gives us whatever we need.  Sometimes it’s strength.”

I don’t want his goddamn strength.  I don’t want his anything!  I just want the guy at the airport with the red rose.  I want someone to be him…

“I don’t need that crutch anymore,” I said.

“Don’t speak that way, Ali.  Look,” she said, wiping her tears on the edge of her sleeve.  “I’m not going to live forever, okay?  So just bear with me for now.  From the time you were a little baby, I have tried to move heaven and earth to make sure that you have everything.  Everyone told me, ‘Parin, you are spoiling this boy
too much
,’ but I never listened to them, you know.  ‘You will both regret it one day,’ they kept telling me. ‘The world out there is not going to give him any special treatment,’ but I just ignored them.  But now…Ali, there isn’t much more I can do, and it breaks my heart to see you suffering like this.”

I shrugged.  The most ludicrous thought went through my mind: what if I had Mummy call Nelson?  Maybe he would be more responsive; after all, he’d been dying to meet her.  And then I realized with some sadness how, when heartbroken, we all became like children, needing to clutch that index finger that would guide us out of the mess we’d gotten ourselves into.

“You’ve made your own choices in life, Ali.  Maybe you can turn all this around,” she said, touching my shoulder.  “It’s not too late, Ali.  It’s not too late.  Look at all your other friends.”

I groaned and leaned away from her. I knew where this was heading: her son’s much anticipated prodigal return from the deviant ways of the West, where innocent, wholesome children had picked up all these horrible, aberrant perversions – from those immoral white people with their drugs and drinking and spiritual bankruptcy.

I could see in her face that my mother was perched on the edge of wining her son over in this most desperate of moments buy I thwarted her budding hopes, more comfortable pirouetting on the glossed-out floor of a West Hollywood nightclub than the consecrated grounds of the mosque she hoped to see me married in.

“Let me guess,” I said, steeling up. “You want me to go back home with you – to that hellhole – and – you want me to get married and have children, right? That will solve everything!”

“Yes, but don’t you think—”

“God, you just don’t get it, do you?”  I sprang off the couch, suddenly unable to bear sitting in the same spot as her.

“What’s wrong with that?  Why can’t you just give up all this craziness and be like your other friends, Ali?  Settle down. Find a good girl who will look after you.”

“I’m not like them, mother!  Jesus, are you daft? Don’t you get it?”

She remained calm, shook her head and smiled sadly. “You know, I go to mosque everyday, and I too want to be proud and boast about my son when everyone speaks of their children.  Your friend, Karim, you know, he got married and your friend Salim, even he got married to that girl he was dating, remember?  And now, you know, they are even expecting a baby!  What can I talk about?  How can I share my stories with them?  What do I tell them when they ask me about you?”

“So that’s what matters more to you?  Trading stories?  Contributing to their gossip?”

“No, no, Ali,” she moaned and rose to her feet.  “It’s just that as a parent I have dreams too. You have left that world behind, but I’m still very much a part of it.  Everybody remembers you, asks about you.  ‘How is Ali? Are you going to see him? Are you going for his
sagaai?’
And what do I do?  I keep my mouth shut, make some excuse, tell them you are still trying to, you know, establish yourself.”  She looks up at me.  “I don’t know how to handle this.”

I felt the urge to say bitterly,
Then why don’t you pray a little harder?  Maybe that omniscient God that you claim has knowledge of every trembling leaf on each branch – that same one that permits it to skitter onto the ground where it is crushed and turned to dust – the God who you claim created me and, so I have to believe, my sexuality, maybe he can tell you why he has deprived you of the chance to compete in the community chatter and fall short of being a proud parent.
  Instead, I said coldly, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you there,” and walked away from her to my room.

“Wait a minute,” she said and charged behind me, pushing my door open.  “Don’t you walk away from me!  I’m your mother! We have to talk about this!”

“What do you want me to say?” I faced her menacingly. 
“Hunh?
  What?  What do you want from me?  To live a lie?  To be a hypocrite just so that you can hold your head up in the community?” I waved a dismissing hand at her and turned away. “I’m not going to deal with this shit!”

“You’ll have to deal with this!” she said, pushing herself in front of me. “Do you have any idea what this is putting me through?  Haven’t I been through enough in my life to have to endure
this
now?”

“This,” I hissed, “isn’t about you!  This is about my life, you hear me?  My life!”

“And your life has nothing to do with me?” she asked. “I’ve raised a son, given him every ounce of my being and now what?  I’m supposed to turn to stone and feel nothing?  I have no right to find out why he’s so determined on destroying himself?  Why he’s turned into this…this…”

“Monster.  Say it!”

“This stranger,” she cried.

“You want to know why you don’t recognize your son?” I asked.  “Why he doesn’t call, doesn’t keep in touch?  It’s because of all this bullshit you keep expecting from him.  It’s because he can’t tell you who he really is when all you see is the man you want him to be!” 

She shook her head and smiled as one would at a petulant little child. “Oh, Ali.  I know my son even better than he knows himself.  And I don’t need this…” she pulled a gay porno tape from the closet, in all its orgiastic glory, to my embarrassed face. “I don’t need to see
this
to tell me who you are, okay?”

My gaze fell to the floor.

“You know, all your life, I’ve seen you go through this with boys,” she said, placing the cassette gently on the bed. “You think I’ve forgotten?  You remember the time with your friend, Amin?  When you used to come and sleep next to me and tell me how it was hurting you here, deep inside your stomach?  I’m not stupid.  I remember all that.” Her hand touched my abdomen. “I gave life to you. I just want to keep you from destroying it.  I was just hoping that by now, that pain would have stopped for you.”

No, I wanted to tell her.  It has only worsened, Mum.  Only now I can no longer seek solace in the folds of your skirt or excuse myself as being naïve. With time, the only things that seemed to have changed in this game are the locales and the participants; the heart seems to have an ineffectual memory of the pain that should keep it from gambling again.

“If you were at least happy,” she said.  “Then I could go back there and face…whatever and still be okay with it because I know that you are not suffering.  But all I see it that you’re unhappy, you’re alone, you’re lost.  You’ll never know, Ali, what it’s like to be in my shoes.”

I wanted to tell her that I empathized with her pain. The pain of someone that had been left behind to contend with both private and public expectations.  With having to confront her own fears at first and then having to yarn excuses for the rest of the Ismaili community.  But I said nothing from the fear that if I opened my mouth, I would break down.

As her crying deprived her of breath, she hiccupped, and I felt the urge to take her into my arms and give her everything she desired of me.  This woman who had been through so much, I reminded myself.  This petite little woman with a size four shoe and who still had a milk tooth in her mouth, this woman who prayed fanatically for me and strayed only for a drink of Scotch.  I mustn’t underestimate her because she knew what it was like to love like I did, to feel the gamut of emotions that I thought others incapable of, and had survived unspeakable tragedies.  I wished I could give her all that other parents took for granted in their offspring.  I wished I could have shown her a framed photo of some amiable young girl leaning promisingly onto me at a dinner table instead of the one with the fag hag who blew an outrageous kiss into the camera.  I wished I could have done that instead of telling her that she would never have a daughter-in-law.  That there would be no grandchildren for her to dote on, to carry on the family name, that the tree stopped here.

I could not give her any of this.  I knew that nothing I could do or say at that moment could prepare her for when she returned to Kenya, loaded with the knowledge of what she had only suspected, but had now been confirmed – that her son, her only child, was a homosexual.  The world would always be there in places where I could not be.  In community functions, dinner parties, family weddings.  She would have to face them alone, armed only with the hope that perhaps her son had found a way to educe some happiness from a lifestyle punctuated by loneliness.  She would have to accept the reality of the situation, that she was powerless against what she saw as this demon that had possessed her only child.  The apple of her eye, wormed, rotting from some vile infection.  Everything she had lived and worked for in the past forty-eight years was standing before her.  Flawed.