Ode to Lata (19 page)

I would not hold her.  I would not console her. I had to be firm.  She had to realize that manipulations could not rescind anything.  My coming out to her would not distance us but, much to my own revelation, just might bridge us. 
I am doing this, mother, so that we can return to that place where we can talk again.
Where, having cast hybrid expectations aside, we can go back to being real with each other.  Not like a child that cuts his parents out of his life because he can no longer talk to them.  Because he is afraid they will not understand or accept. 
I never wanted it to be that way between us, mother.  I don’t ever want it to be that way between us again.

Her body had turned away from me.  She heaved and leaned against the door of my room for support.  Slowly I put my hand on her shaking back but she didn’t turn around, inconsolable.  “Mum,” I started to say softly.  “Please, can’t you just let me lead an honest life?  Do you really want me to be like those other people?  You know them,” I said, squeezing her shoulders.  “There are so many in Mombasa who just went ahead and got married but still continue to fuck around with little Arab boys and prostitutes behind their wives’ backs.  Is that what you rather I did?  To be like them and trap some poor woman into thinking I’m something I’m not?”

She turned around.  “No, no, I don’t want that.  But how long can you go on like this,
hunh?
  And what about those diseases?” she asked, her eyes widening. “What about this AIDS?  What if you catch that, then what?”

“Oh, Mum…”

“You know, they say this is a disease that the gay people get, you know? Because of, you know, the…” her hand fluttered nervously, “the, you know, the way they do it.  What if it happens to you?”

Suddenly the roles had been reversed, and I had become the educating parent. “Mum, it’s not that simple, and you have nothing to worry about.  I’ll explain it all to you.”

“Who is going to look after you,
hunh?”

“Who’s looking after me now?” I asked.

“When you’re older, I mean.  When you’re older and I’m no longer around?”

She seemed to have forgotten that I had been managing without her for the last eight years.  Without the haven of her arms, the smells of her cooking. In her mind her prayers had sustained me like an invisible paladin, over freeways and streets, at work and at play.  Even physically removed, she had managed to stay by my side through her meditation, by coaxing divine intervention into substituting for her.  She was probably right.  She was worried that the God she prayed to was a hungry one.  Once she was gone, there would be nobody to feed his appetite for adulation, to appease him into protecting me anymore. 

“Mummy,” I said, lifting her face gently in my hands. “Your God will look after me, don’t worry.  Isn’t that what you’ve been praying for? Isn’t that what you keep telling him?  That I have nobody else but him?”

She sunk her face into my chest.  “I’ve suffered all my life – enough, I hoped, for both of us.  If you don’t reap the fruits of happiness, then who will?”

I enveloped her into my arms and held her there with all my strength, and she mourned for me: the comforts of family which I would never know; the nurturing a traditional Indian wife may have been able to give me; and the sons and daughters that I would never hold up in the air.

SHUT UP AND BEAR IT!

Many times that week, I called Adrian to ruminate over Nelson, to try to make some sense of his rejection of me.  I called to cry to him, dejected since Nelson wouldn’t speak to me.  Nelson, who wanted to take care of me and purge me of all my pain, who gave me his cock and claimed to have given me his heart, was now acting like he could live happily for the rest of his life without speaking another word to me.  I was told I wasn’t good enough anymore, not for a relationship and not even as an instrument of sex.  My God, I wasn’t even sure that I really wanted Nelson, but I could not understand the wall he had erected.  I wanted Adrian to tell me something, to help me rationalize the situation as he had done so many times before with Richard.  As if there are any words, any explanations, that can make rejection more palatable.

Tell me something, I implored Adrian.  Why is he treating me this way? I droned on.  But this time, Adrian reacted differently.  I got the feeling that even he, my link to a sane world, had crumbled under the weight of my venting.  I could hear it in his voice; I had begun to grate on his nerves with the litany of my latest doomed affair.  I had become chronic, just like those clients who have a penchant for screwing up their bank accounts; the same ones who charged into my office, statements clutched in their hands like emancipation papers that would liberate them from some elaborately designed scheme to keep them in the red.  I was like them, always an ill-fated love affair to grieve over, always deserted, always freshly confounded.

Adrian made that sound – a kind of exasperated exhale – and said simply, “Well, I really don’t know what to tell you.”

“But you must,” I insisted.  “What do
you
think? I mean, if you were in my place, what would you do?  How would you think?”

Adrian sighed heavily.  “Ali, I…really, I wish I could help.”

“He won’t even return my calls, Adrian!  I don’t know what I’ve done.  Why does he hate me?  I wish he would just talk to me.”

“Yeah…”

I could hear it in Adrian’s monosyllabic responses…
Oh… Yeah… Well… Did he?  Really?  Hmmm…
They spoke a language of their own.  A hollowness, a distinct detachment, that left me scalded.  Adrian was always so compassionate, if contrived at times.  The kind of friend from whom an honest opinion might not be possible but the comfort of hearing what you needed to could always be expected.  I could hear the words that he wouldn’t say –
I don’t want to hear about your pain.  I’ve grown bored of your pain.  Don’t you see?  It won’t diminish your pain to share it with me.  Don’t tell me anymore.  Always who hurt you and who did what to you.  Just shut up and bear it.  Just don’t talk to me about your pain anymore…

THOSE DAYS

Mohammad Rafi’s elegy of lost love from
Heer Ranjha
–
“Yeh Duniya, Yeh Mehfil, Mere

Kaam Ki Nahin” –
was one of my father’s favorite songs.  My mother had told me this many times, as if to explain the tragic complexion of his love.  Like the many songs I’d heard my parents play, its melody had been branded in my mind and its lyrics easily retrieved from an archive deep within.  When singing them, I found myself elated in a way that Streisand would never be able to evoke.  While Mummy packed a cassette I was innocently playing came to that song.  She launched into tears from where she sat on the couch and asked, “Why do you do this to me,
henh?
  I really can’t bear to listen to that music, you know?  It reminds me so much of your father and
those days
, my God!” 

Those days.  The way she said those two simple words conveyed an awe-inspiring epoch of inexpressible anguish and passion.  But she did nothing to terminate Rafi’s lament.  When I’d reached out to remedy the situation and change the music, she said through glistening eyes, “No, no, you don’t have to stop it!  It’s okay, you know, just let it play,” and retreated to the tormented memories of her one great love, clucking ruefully.  “Those days… Those days… ”

Sometimes I became confused as to whether Mummy was referring to the time that she shared with my father or the years following his death.  I imagined that she probably coalesced both periods together and reflected upon them, mournfully, as her youth.  The part of her life she had given to him with reckless abandon; the part of life when she’d finally lost him and somehow, with child in tow, had to forge through decades of questions that would remain unanswered; the years that had ravaged her and, in turn, earned her the wisdom of her later years.

“Yeh duniyah, Yeh mehfil”
took me back too, but to a time far less painful than my mother’s.  My own memory of what she refers to as “those days” was different.  A time without any formal discipline or paternal scrutiny.  Instead “those days” transported me to finally ending the waiting game for Daddy and an era of drive-in cinemas in Mombasa.

As a child, I often saw the movie that bore this tune and so many others like it at the drive-in cinema.  This was the Sunday ritual.  The entire Indian community of Mombasa, would prepare for the excursion as early as noon by packing tiffins of Indian viands –
kachodis, samosas
, fried chicken, kebabs and thermoses of hot chai.  Come four o’clock, a procession of cars would cause Mombasa’s Indian merchant district to become a virtual ghost town, all of us on a pilgrimage through the oceanic smells of Changamwe to patiently await admittance in a serpentine queue for the extravaganza of Bollywood films.  Once admitted into the cinema, kids played and people strolled and met and played cards on
sadhris
.  They chomped on cumin-infused potato dumplings, memorized dialogues spilling out between mouthfuls; every Indian’s eyes were glued to the expanse of that vibrant cinema screen.    

Up until the advertisements came on – a handful of regulars that we could now claim we’d grown up to and which had become the symbols of modernity and good living (Else Balsam shampoo from L’Oreal, glittering Seiko watches, Palmolive soap, Close-Up toothpaste) – we gathered on the canteen grounds. In spite of the amount of food we’d lugged in the car, we’d always buy crinkle-cut fries, or chips as we called them. After dousing them with salt, cayenne pepper and vinegar, so that they were converted from their crisp consistency into a kind of spicy, squishy mush, we’d devour them with ice-cold Coca-Colas.  It was a ritual like buttered popcorn and hot dogs.  Sitting around the canteen patio, waiting for dusk to sanction the celluloid drama, my family would sit in rapt wonder as I recited
shairis
, many of which I’d written myself.

“Wah! Wah!
Parin, your son is just going to kill me, I tell you!” they’d say, clutching their breast.  “Where, I ask you, did he learn to draw daggers like this? 
Wah! Wah!”
Among the congregation of avid listeners was my lesbian aunt Leila, who, snug with a flask of Johnnie Walker, tossed her head back for a healthy swig of it every time the punch line was delivered.  I liked her best then because it was the only time she didn’t scold me for walking funny or talking funny, and showered me with appreciative
“wah-wahs!”
 

Shairis
were mostly tragic, lilting stanzas about self-immolation and forsaken love.  Only tragedy elicited the enthusiastic, heartfelt
“wah-wahs”
that are the accolade of an Indian poet’s artistry.  An eight-year-old writing and reciting Hindi poems about love’s demise and the desire to kill himself didn’t strike anyone as even the slightest bit macabre in a culture where as many songs were about the succoring values of drinking as about the burning desire of loving the unattainable.  As an adolescent, all I proved to any of my attentive listeners when spilling out about the fatalistic nature of love and a bleeding heart was that I was exceptionally talented and appropriately schooled in the ethos of my culture.

Those days.  My mother’s long, black nylon slip, pulled over my forehead to imitate long, silky, flowing hair.  I leapt onto the bed positioned against the windowsill, a lustful cabaret song blaring from the 45 on the record player.  Pulling the curtains away from the window, I treated my neighbors – at first dumbstruck, then amused – to the spectacle of an adolescent’s vamp mimicry.  With no more than a dirty, black nylon slip from the hamper and a bed sheet knotted around my neck for a fashionable gown, I’d been transformed into glamorous Helen! 
Piya tu, aab to aaja…

They all had a field day, especially when my uncle came to yank me off my personal little stage, which also happened to be his bed, screaming and asking me what the hell I thought I was doing.  “What do you think you are?  A
chokdi?
Everybody’s looking at you! 
Be-sharam!
Get off that bed at once before I cut off your
taturi!”

Outside, the crowd was clamoring for more, and I managed at least once to free my hand from his grasp and bounce back on the bed.  There, I threw a couple more gyrations to my appreciative fans before being picked up and carried off the bed and into the other room where I would be disrobed off my glamorous persona.

There were also the long, hot afternoons when everyone was at work, and my grandmother was either resigned to impenetrable siestas or committed to a feud with my grandfather.  The audience may not have been as large, much to my chagrin, but the shows were uninterrupted and much, much longer.

Those days. The beginning of the discovery of my queer self.  Many times I’ve thought, my father must have been the only one who had seen it coming and been absolutely horrified by it.  Everyone else in my family acted oblivious to my burgeoning queer tendencies after the first few attempts at reprimanding me.  But to my father, that all-embodying paragon of masculinity, I must have felt like some kind of affront on his oppressive male persona.

My mother has often said, “Tsk, tsk, thank God, I’m telling you!  I don’t know what would have happened if he’d been alive.  I’m telling you, Ali, one of you would’ve killed the other, I just know it!  Do you think he would have stood for your lifestyle?  No way!  I’m telling you he would have
never
been able to accept it!  You guys would’ve
never
gotten along.  It would have been terrible!”  And a look glazes over her face as if she was visualizing some grand historic event that never took place.