Ode to Lata (4 page)

He mumbled something about having to drive back to Anaheim and thanked me for everything.  I was curt to the point of being cruel.  Adrian said something about it being a long drive.  He offered his number.

“Adrian, can you just take care of it?” I slurred.

They left the room and I started to feel relieved.  I knew that I had been insensitive and had probably made him feel like trash.  But what was I supposed to have done?  We had met in some dark corner at a sex club where he could barely have made out
what
I was.  I might have even seemed Latino to him at some point.  But now, with daylight intruding through the blinds, and him showered and satiated, he might have seen me for the South Asian I was.  And that would have been embarrassing, wouldn’t it?

All those images of 7-Eleven salesmen and heavily accented, singsong dialects would have come flooding into his mind and maybe he would have cringed.  He’d realize his exotic passion flower was just the basis for a
Simpsons
character.  Seen my typical South Asian features and realize that I looked nothing like him.  Large, dark eyes.  That long bumpy nose, thanks to a deviated septum.  Skin, dark not from tanning on the beach, but from birth.  And then what if he had felt cheated?  Defiled?

And what about my body?  How, in this culture of gym-bodies would he have felt about having had sex with someone whose body didn’t look like he spent at least two hours daily in a gym.  The thought that he probably didn’t care about all this or that he already had a pretty good idea about it after fucking me all night hadn’t even entered my mind.  It was the visual that worried me.

Swathed in my sheets, now that neither the night nor his lust could have obscured me, I found solace in being ironically passionless and cold to him.  Turning into a typical, cold queen just to keep him – after all this – from rejecting me first.

Was this not the curse of every South Asian whose standards of beauty were in conflict with his own appearance? 

No, no, he couldn’t see all this.  I couldn’t have let him see that I was Indian.

THE LADDER

I can’t seem to remember exactly when it all started.  This shame.  All I know is that it must have happened a long time ago.  Long before I knew what was happening or had any control over it.  Perhaps it’s the result of being born in the shadows of colonialism.

Imagine growing up in a country where being white automatically meant that you were entitled to the privileges that everyone else had to struggle for.

Even the South Asians and the Africans who warred against each other with class and economic prejudices cast everything aside to act as subservient as they could when the
goras
or
dhorias
came into view.  There were many of them, the white people, some of them expatriates who had had to unwillingly relinquish the luxuries of colonial, pre-independence Kenya, but had decided to stay on, others who had come back with the hope of educing anything reminiscent of their golden era.

I remember how excited my mother was at the prospect of taking me to see a
dhorio
doctor by the name of Dr. Jewel, who had his office in another very tall building in Mombasa island, all fifteen stories of it.  He was by no means inexpensive and had expatriated from England, so naturally he
had
to be the best around.  He would perform virtual miracles on me since his knowledge of medicine had to be superior to any colored doctor.  The women in her community circle would raise their brows and drop their jaws because they would be so impressed that Parin had taken her son to none other than
the
Dr. Jewel.

“He looks
just
like our
Hazar Imam
,” she would enthuse, referring to the spiritual leader of our community, and inexplicably feel more comforted by the resemblance to his accent and Caucasian appearance.  Ironic as it was, even the spiritual leader believed to be the direct descendant of the Holy Prophet, the very man who most in my community regarded to be God’s very incarnation on earth, looked nothing like his followers and more like the intimidating white man that commanded such awe-inspiring respect.

It was no wonder then that by the time we had ridden the elevator up those fifteen floors for me to stand in front of Dr. Jewel in my underwear with a thermometer in my mouth, both my mother and I felt as if we were standing in the presence of God himself.  Moses had found the burning bush.  We had found Dr. Jewel.

As
muindis
we learnt to live by certain principles.  Imported was always better than local.  Ready-made was always better than tailor-made because it came from abroad.  A four-week vacation in London or Canada (always pronounced
Cay-nay-da
), two of the most popular travel destinations, was enough justification to come back with a ridiculously self-imposed accent so that we sounded more like them and less like ourselves.  The ruling principle was, of course, that a fair complexion was always more desirable than a dark one.  That was obvious from the class structure that had based itself through centuries on how light or dark-skinned you were.  Even religious conversion into the Muslim faith could not completely eradicate the traces of this predominantly Hindu belief.

Remember Shehnaz, who lived in the same flats as your family?  Everyone always referred to her as
masoto
or dirt-rag?  Your grandmother had often mentioned to you that her family had descended from a sect of “untouchables,” a lower-class people in India subjugated to serve the others. 
Shehnaz
masoto
they had called her.  The snooty women in the community would often grimace behind her back when considering her eligibility as a daughter-in-law; but to her face, they would give one of those superficial smiles.  No teeth.  Just upturned lips stretched thin in an effort to be civil.

It was no wonder that mothers were constantly urging their daughters not to stay out too long in the sun from fear of turning dark. 
Who will marry you if you turn as dark as coal, stupid girl?
There’s a reason why Fair & Lovely and Pond’s Vanishing Cream – and not suntan lotions – were Asian bestsellers.

But most important of all, despite the alarming similarities in both races, we learnt that we were always better than the
golas
or blacks.  The darker the
masoto
, the lower your class.

No question about it.  Simple law of nature.  An apparent hierarchy of pigmentation had been a fact of life difficult to miss.  The
dhorias
were the top rung of the ladder.  The
muindis
the middle.  And the
golas
right at the bottom like the dirt they resembled.

CUT THE CORD

My mother called me from Kenya.  There was an echo in the connection, and she acted like she was stuck in my answering machine and was trying desperately to get out.  The notion that the machine was on because I would not or could not come to the phone never entered her mind.  So she continued to call out dramatically, pleading to be recognized.

“Ali, are you there?  It’s Mummy.  If you are there, Ali, can you please pick up the phone?  Ali!  It’s Parin!  It’s mummy!  Ali? Ali?  Are you there?”

This went on for a couple of expensive minutes until she resigned herself to the purpose of her call.

I continued to lie in bed, recuperating from a terrible hangover. I didn’t feel like talking to her.  Hardly ever did these days.  She and all the rest of my family possessed the unique talent of driving me up the wall by repeating everything they had to say until I wanted to shut my ears and scream,
I heard you!  You’ve said if fifty times already!  Just stop bloody nagging me!

Then naturally I’d hurt their feeling and they’d claimed I didn’t give a shit about them anymore and perhaps they shouldn’t have bothered to call to begin with.  Enter guilt and feeling like crap.

Groaning, I covered my face with a pillow and turned away, trying to block her out. “Oh, just shut the fuck up already!” 

It was as if she was able to detect this; she began to speak even more loudly so that her voice took on a surround-sound quality. I thought about yanking the telephone cord out but then she would have called back and started all over again.

She confirmed the dates for her upcoming trip to Los Angeles.  As I listened, I wasn’t sure that I wanted her to come.  Apprehension filled me.  I just didn’t think I could deal with her.  Once that voice had meant so much to me that I had broken down crying every time we spoke.  That was when I had first come here.  How miserable it had made me feel to be away from her.  All I wanted to do was run back home and be rescued from the demons of this city.  Lay my head in her lap and be calmed by the familiar scent of her White Linen perfume.  But that was so long ago.  Before I developed this love-hate relationship with L.A.  Before I had allowed the city’s material abundance to spoil me, to let the freedom of lifestyle make me fear returning.  So I had learnt to detach myself from that need.  One tends to do that after missing someone terribly, and after all those years, I had finally extricated myself from the umbilical cord. Framed it between my own teeth and gnashed until it was cut.

Now here she was, making plans to come and see me.  Trying, albeit in futility, to tangle me back into dependency.  How could I accommodate her in my life as it precariously stood?  Where in between Richard and drinking would she stand?

Where was there any room, any need, for yet another to identify myself with? 

SISSY

In thinking of Richard, I think about all the other men who have drifted through my life. All created from the same mold it seems.  Having successfully auditioned to be the able benefactors to a hungry dysfunction, they had somewhere along the line ceased to be individuals and had become the sludge of a distinct personality instead.

It was different with Richard only because, in exorcising his own ghosts, he had decided to stay.  Most had been in too much of a hurry to stick around long enough to burst the bubble themselves.

Maddeningly unstructured, it was within the pockets of such precariousness that we found the fuel for everything that attracted and eventually repelled us from each other.

Passion thrives on many annihilating emotions.  It’s fueled by catalysts so fickle, so fleeting – the promise of lasting love is never one of them.  Richard’s affection for me bore such fugitive traits.  Unpredictable.  Capricious.  Ephemeral.  It swallowed me alive.

Little in my life has come close to being as passionate as this indefinable relationship.

Except perhaps my relationship to my father or his with my mother.

Who knows what experiences in early life form the indelible scars that sear in the years to come?  Propel us into recreating the familiar scenes that have an uncanny ability to convince us that this time we would have control in manipulating the outcome? Often we start out with almost mythical bravado and end up as pawns instead.

My earliest memory of being in kindergarten is not of childhood bliss on the playground or of finger painting.  It is one of deep yearning.  It’s of myself running behind some five year old, calling him, inexplicably, by the same nickname my mom had for my father,
Shila
.  That’s what she called him.  Why I was calling Munir or Sandeep (both confounded at being expected to respond to another name) by this nickname as I chased one or the other relentlessly around slides and seesaws would have given any psychotherapist a multiple orgasm.

It seems there was always someone I was trying to keep from leaving.  Always someone without whom it just didn’t feel right.  On the playground.  In the classroom.  At home.  In life.  Somebody should have seen it then.  But my mother was too busy making a living and smothering me during the little time she could spare, and my father too busy being unfaithful to her and countering her affections with his wrath. 
Don’t treat him like a girl, for God’s sake!  He’s a boy, can’t you see that?  You are bringing him up to be a bloody sissy!  No son of mine is going to grow up to be a bloody sissy!

My grandmother,
mama kuba
, tried even harder to make up for the anomaly of both her own life and the absence of my feuding parents, only to exacerbate the belligerent convictions of an only child in the most tempestuous of surroundings.  In her later years she often told me of how, as a child, I had never crawled on account of her fear of me bruising my knees.  I had gone straight from her arms to learning how to walk, my hands carefully held up by her own.

She told me about the ordeal she had to undergo whenever it was time for me to bathe.  Having spent the afternoon playing tea party – I wouldn’t have been caught dead jostling through a soccer field with the boys – I convinced all my neighborhood girlfriends to escort me home.  There, as my grandmother bucketed warm water over my head, I stood in all my naked bliss, a six year-old exhibitionist in all his splendor.  I simply refused to take one unless they gathered and watched.  She would laugh and say that I had needed an audience even then.  Adrian says that I might have been too afraid to let them out of my sight lest they disappeared and didn’t come back.

It was no surprise, therefore, that when my father left to end matters with his mistress in Nairobi and promised to come back but wound up being stabbed, his blood splattered all over her room instead, I was determined that nobody would ever leave me again.  The consummation between father and child that comes from spending intimate moments that last more than a couple of hours every few weeks never came.  Teaching me how to water paint as I sat in his lap and then disappearing for months at a time suddenly became a mercifully acceptable notion compared to not being able to see him again.