Ode to Lata (26 page)

“And what about – what about telling Riyaz that I called him a pathetic drug addict?”

“You
did
call him a drug addict,” I said.  “And what’s the big deal anyway?  We
all
call him a drug addict! It’s practically his nickname! For Chrissake, Farida, why is this suddenly such a big deal? You know it doesn’t mean anything.”

She sighed.  “I’m just really hurt.  I mean, I just got off the phone with Salman and Riyaz and I just… I just can’t believe that you had such nasty things to say about me!  For your information, I
do
have better things to do with my life than be a mother to all of you and call ten times a day!”

“But we all say these things about each other, don’t we?” And then, “wait a minute – you were just on the phone with them?”

She hesitated.  “Yeah, they were just telling me… everything.”

“
They
were telling…You mean you were telling each other about all the nasty things that Ali has been saying about each of you.” 

“Ali, I really can’t…”

“You know what, Farida, this is all just fucking bullshit!  I can’t believe that we’re all grown ups and we’re dealing with this ridiculous situation, this nonsense!  How did it get to this point?  We’ve all talked about each other and it’s always been innocent.  You talk a lot of shit about Salman and about Riyaz and I’ve
never
told them any of it.  They both talk a lot of shit about you, worse than you can ever imagine, and I
never
came to you and started poisoning your mind!”

“I need some time,” she said out flatly.  “I just, you know, need to take some time off from everyone.  Not just you.  There’s a lot I’m going through, and I really can’t deal with all this right now.”

“What you mean is you don’t want to deal with
me
right now.  None of you do, is that right?”

“Look, maybe you need to talk to them, you know…”

“For what?  I’m talking to you!  What exactly am I defending here?  I haven’t even done anything that you haven’t done yourself!”

“Ali, I really don’t know what to say, alright?  I don’t hate you or anything.”

“Well, I’m certainly being made to feel like you all do!”

“Just give it some time.”

“And what the hell am I supposed to do while you all boycott me?  You’re supposed to be my friends but you’re all acting like some jury trying to convict me!”

“Look, you have other friends too.  Why not hang out with them for a little while?”

I felt like she’d slapped me.  I was being told that they didn’t want me in
Saath
.  That they wished I would just get the message and leave them alone.  The reason for this was unimportant.  Just from talking to Farida, it was obvious that even she couldn’t completely justify the charges because we were all guilty of the same treason.

“You’ve been spending time with Adrian lately, haven’t you?” she continued in my silence.  “I suggest you just spend some more time with him.”  And then she added, “I’m sure he won’t call you ten times a day and get on your nerves!”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this, Farida.”

“Believe it,” she said.  “Just believe it.”

Part of me wanted to laugh at her, at the sheer absurdity of the situation.  The other part of me felt like crying but couldn’t because I felt drained.  Beaten up.  I felt like I was ten-years-old again, devastated because nobody wanted me on their team. No one would talk to me.

After that conversation, I feared I’d never be able to get a hold of any one of them.  Before I hung up the phone, Farida, brushed with some compunction, assured me again that it was only a matter of time before the whole thing dissipated.  Then perhaps we could all go back to being friends again.  To the way it used to be.   

I sat on the edge of my bed, feeling dazed.  This is impossible.  How can they do this?  Salman and I had practically created
Saath
, for Chrissake.  Who the hell were they to excommunicate me from it?  Nobody, only Salman could do that.  Only Salman.  Salman.

It became clear. Everyone in
Saath
was following a command.  An edict dispatched from the top. The rest of them were much too complacent, far too simple minded to use such cunning.

Oh, God, why was Salman doing this?

THE MEANING OF DREAMS

Draped in a printed sari of ochre and black, she stands elevated with her gaze fixed sternly upon me, assuming the capacity of my mother though I know she is not.  My mother never wears a sari nor her hair knotted behind her head in a traditional bun.  My mother doesn’t even remotely resemble this woman’s austerity and is certainly not as dark in complexion.  Yet this woman addresses me as beta.  I feel the urge to strike her, to demand that she refrain from calling me this at once. 

Behind her, several Indian women form a filigree of performers costumed in traditional Indian style.  Among them I think I also see the faces of the clerks Salman and I have approached on outreaches.  Some of them move animatedly to
filmi
music and others just sing.  This time, the music doesn’t sound sweet or resonate melancholy.  The roiling of tablas and the frantic strains of its exigent strings form an unbearable cacophony.  The voices are more ululation than song.  Any grace in music or dance is deprived by the overwrought melody and discordant choreography.  Chaos.

If this woman, standing in the forefront, is bothered by them, it is not apparent.  In fact, she seems oblivious to them and appears to be part of the assemblage.  When she calls me by name, I feel temporarily relieved because I know she’s made a mistake.  I sigh with relief and tell her that my name is not Salman, it’s Ali.  But it’s as if she doesn’t hear me.  She looks at me with conviction, and I look around to see if perhaps Salman is somewhere close.  But he is nowhere around and when I look back at her, she is still focused on me. 

“But I’m not your son! I’m not Salman, you’ve made a mistake!” I cry.

Her face hardens.  She raises her hands up to her breasts and without another word, starts to massage them.  I am bewildered.  With her eyes shut, she throws her head back and allows an orgasmic gasp to escape her parted lips as her hands knead the mounds of her chest more rigorously.  Horrified, I beg for her to stop. She hears me.  Raising her head back very slowly, she looks at me but her hands remain on her breasts as if priming on a weapon of torture. It’s made clear to me by the unflinching stare, the almost demonic glint in her eyes that if I ignore her or continue to deny being her son, she will advance into a variety of obscenities purposed at inciting fracas in me.

“You must not fight me,” she says gravely, a perverse smile extending on her face.  “I’m stronger than you.”
 

In life, as on stage, we need props in order to enact the roles we are required to play.  The people we surround ourselves with are sometimes the most elaborate props enhancing our drama.  For Salman, I began to think as the gulf widened between us, I’d been the essential prop in the homosexual phase he was now renouncing.  In his life now, peace had been made with the matriarch of the Surani family, and as such, the Salman who had strode admirably across the formalin of gay life had scurried away like a roach, back into the cracks of sexual anonymity.

In my mind, the days that had turned into the weeks when we didn’t communicate felt more like an overnight lacuna during which he’d gone and transformed himself completely, as if by some mythical prowess.  Isn’t that how we often see people?  That they change overnight when in fact they drop little clues all along?  The Salman who had struggled to reach out to other Indians to educate them about HIV and AIDS, albeit in his semi-closeted and sometimes impractical way, the same one who had even convinced me to obey the beckon of cultural obligation, had suddenly retreated under the bulwark of breast cancer and diabetes.

Even in his most conservative phase as a homosexual, during the first few months of our acquaintance, Salman had felt passionate about getting Indians to identify with AIDS.  “These
chodus!”
he would curse, his hand shooting out as if it were being extended for an inopportune handshake. 
“Nah, nah,
this Aids has nothing to do with our community!   When will they wake up, these backward people?  Don’t they realize even Indian grandmothers in their musty
chadars
are getting it!”

But all that would cease to matter to him now.  Everything had to change.  It didn’t serve Salman to be the spokesperson for such a taboo disease.  A disease that the Indian community at large had still consigned to the rest of the world.  Not if he wanted to be the beneficiary of that Surani inheritance.  The rebellion was over.  The prodigal son had been granted permission to come back home.  The only priority now was not to develop outreach strategies, but to secure precarious inheritances by championing more acceptable causes.  A disease that did not imply anything sexual.  Any distraction from this newfound path would have to be eliminated.

It was time again to assume the role of the obedient son, not the family faggot.

I spent the day haunted by my dream.  It was plain to see that losing Salman’s friendship was taking me for a loop.  Out of superstition, or habit, I went straight for my old dream dictionary. Most of the time, it defeated me with its rigid list of symbols – who ever dreamt of a lily or a goat, anyway? This time, wedged between dreams of a moth and a mouse, the old book authoritatively indicated that a mother reflected guidance and care.  A symbol of nurturing and shelter.  No more.  Scoffing, I threw the useless tome back into the closet among old forsaken tapes and books. There was no way I was going to find any book to interpret dreams of somebody else’s mother enthralled in masturbation!

Many times throughout the day, I found myself struggling to not pick up the phone to call Salman at work.  I felt that if I could only corner him in person, grab him by his shoulders and shake him a little and remind him of how close we used to be, he would end this ridiculous plot to alienate me.  If I could only tell him how painful this whole thing was for me and that I didn’t understand the need for such a drastic course of action, he might come to his senses.  Pieces of the dream filtered in and out of my consciousness, along with the image of this woman’s face, now dissolving with the burdens of my awakened state.

When the day was over, I jumped into my car and drove to his house in Beverly Hills, only to find that no one home.  Peeking through the windows I looked into the kitchen where, drinking vodka, we had cackled away about this and that.  Where he had wickedly confessed about the hassles of living with his lesbian, film-industry roommate who required constant validation for the “pretentious artsy projects” that only graced foreign art-house theaters.  On the dining room table, where we’d gorged on
samosas
and chai, I saw the tuberose he bought weekly, craning up from the crystal vase.

I had no clue what I would have said to him had he been there.  Maybe I would have told him about how someone who appeared to have been his mother had come into my dreams, mistaken me for him and then started to knead her breasts while I watched.  I’d brought with me an old soundtrack and a novel by Vasanji that he’d lent me a while back.  But he was probably out with the rest of the group and I couldn’t help wishing I was with them.

Dejected at not finding him, I reproached myself for behaving compulsively and drove back to Santa Monica, my bizarre dream in focus again.  Who was that woman, anyway?  In my mind, she was Salman’s mother.  The one person I was apparently holding accountable for Salman’s sexual repudiation.

A mother is, after all, the universal being who is both nurturer and tyrant.  She is creator and destroyer.  The molder of a child’s life.  Mine had, in her own complex way, taught me acceptance and forgiveness.  What had Salman’s mother, perhaps even without meaning to, imparted to him? 

In an attempt to understand why he’d felt the need to abandon our friendship, I had summoned in my dreams the one woman who is inextricable in all our lives.  The woman whose rejection had fueled his rebellion toward his family in courageous acts of a homosexual. Perhaps she had sanctioned his return and demanded his rehabilitation.

The cruelest endings are those without good-byes, without explanations, just the slamming shut of a door, the startling thud of a book closed in mid-chapter.  Bereft, and without the closure that only a dialogue could’ve provided, I was set adrift in a sea of imagined reasons as to why Salman didn’t want me around.  I wondered what a conversation between Salman and his mother might have been like.  Or if there had been one. I imagined she would have launched into the community angle first – as my own mother had – and then, after he had defended his right to live honestly, progressed to finding some kind of middle ground; marry, according to custom and into a family of our choosing, and carry out your private shenanigans with discretion and without witnesses or cohorts. 
In return, Salman, you will be welcomed back into the family and never have to beg from your bitch sister ever again.

Not a bad deal considering Salman was never the full-time homosexual who wanted to live, work and play in WeHo.  His sexual pleasures had been stolen ones, and by their very nature, he indulged in them sporadically and with compensated fervor.  He could continue to do that, if he chose, just not with a partner-in-crime like myself.