Ode to Lata (6 page)

Wiping the tears from my eyes, I began to smile.  Everything would be alright.  He had said so himself.

Thank you… Thank you…
 

The Richard who showed up at my doorstep was different.

I’m not quite sure what I’d been expecting.  Maybe a Richard that was ingratiated and expected me to feel indebted to his mercy.  The Richard that had made me suffer.  Resentful.  Unyielding.  Begrudging.  But this Richard looked down at me tenderly when I opened the door.  I threw my arms around him and tried hard not to cry. 
I must act composed.  Everything has to appear normal.  Must make it fun for him to be here with me.  Regain some of my integrity so that I don’t appear completely worthless to him… .

Here came the calm after the storm.  The best few hours we would share.  The ones that would comprise our most intimate memories in the future.  We had paid dearly for these moments.  Lacerated each other.  Now, as had been anticipated, came the sweet rewards to revel in.

What had just happened here?

What had we been trying to do to each other?

  Questions raced through my mind unanswered.

Nothing seemed to make any sense anymore.  I’m not sure if we even wanted to make any sense of it.  The important thing was that we had reached such moments of kindness after we had wounded each other.  Neither one of us, it seemed, knew of any other way to get to this place.

During the movie he held my hand.  And when we walked back to his car, he held me close to him without a care as to who might have been watching in Westwood village.  I felt like a baby that had been pacified by his parent.  His solace came from the knowledge that he had hurt me and successfully managed to reclaim my devotion by taking the pain away.

When we lay in my bed, with only the moonlight illuminating us, he started to cry and I was confounded.  I asked him what was wrong.  He kept saying that he loved me and promised to treat me better.  “You’ll see,” he said, sliding his arms possessively under me and kissing my forehead gently.  “You’ll see how different it’s going to be.”

Can’t say that I really believed him.  But at that moment, with his surrender so complete and his eagerness in such garish contrast to his earlier mood, I would have accepted any promise, heard any confession, absolved any sin. There was such an innocence about him, he became like a rebellious child who had realized his belligerence and returned to the comforting bosom of his parent.  Our roles were constantly being turned inside out and backward.

We held each other so tightly that it hurt.  I found it difficult to breathe, his body compressed against mine, my rib cage encased by his strong arms.  It was in the fervor of this embrace that I sought my hope and sensed his apology.  Here was the completion, the consummation that went far beyond that of sex.  We were mending each other, dressing the wounds we had been condemned to inherit by those who had borne us, and the ones we had inflicted upon each other.

Yes, we had injured each other as carelessly as our parents had one another, but we would make up for it more quickly than they had and make promises that would prove true only to the moment.  Never to inflict such injuries, cause such pain.  He would make up where our fathers had left off – abandoning, betraying and being absent.  I would make up where both our mothers had tried – forgiving, enduring and perhaps even preventing him from straying again.

The fact that we never went any further than making glorious promises and holding and kissing each other started to matter less to me as time went by.  I never stopped wanting him, though.  Craving him inside me.  In fact, it was the image of him hungrily taking from others what he refused me that would play in my mind when, after moments of such close physical contact, I would be left alone to find myself helplessly masturbating.  It was the scent of his deodorant as I stood sniffing at the counter of some supermarket that evoked sensations and liquefied my stomach.

I don’t want to jeopardize our friendship… It’s just not what I want from you, Ali.
… And I would be left to contend with intimate brushes against his body and caresses that titillated but never quenched.

That was just the “Ali-Richard” relationship.  There was no changing it.  Too much time had gone by and there was no chance of crossing that line.  We had become “snuggle buddies.”  A kind of relationship, we both discovered later, that was not uncommon in the gay culture.  You fucked around with everyone and to them you gave your body and your cock.  And sometimes you had that one person to whom you gave your sweet moments and your grief, not much else.  Often two people, driven by different emotional needs, found themselves dependent on each other for the kind of loving that, for at least one half of the pair, precluded any kind of sexual compulsion.  I told myself that there were ties more binding, and more lasting than those built around sex.  And this, I was determined to believe, was one of them.

When Richard broke away from our embrace an hour later and smiled sheepishly for pardon, I composed myself, still glowing from his touch.  In years to come, the memory of accepting such charity would repulse me.  But not that night.  That night I had gotten more than I had dreamt possible.  Injected with my favorite drug, I knew I could confidently bear whatever came my way until the shakes came again.  I could go to sleep now, safe in the knowledge that I had not been shunned.  That I was still loved.  That nothing I had done had alienated or driven him away from me.

Soon he would be gone, and I knew I would have to employ the memory of that hour we had spent together to satiate myself.  But that mattered very little now.  With a satisfied smile on my face, and a glow emanating from inside me, I kept telling myself over and over again that sex was such a trivial omission from our relationship.  Who needed it when there was so much sincerity, such genuine caring?  You can’t have everything and this is so much more substantial than
that
.

Richard ran his hand through his tousled black hair as he stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at me.  He buttoned up his shirt and tucked it back into his pants and said that he had been glad to be able to spend that very special evening with me.  “I love you,” he said again.  “And don’t you ever forget it.”

“Don’t you ever let me,” I said, smiling.

He glanced at the wristwatch I had given him for his birthday and shook his head at the time like it was late. It was 11:30, and luckily he wouldn’t have to drive too far from my apartment.

Louis lived only a few streets up and had promised to wait up until at least midnight.

ROPE OR RAT POISON?

Beware of the “
bankra
committee!”  Once your name ends up on their shriveled lips, even the world’s best selling tabloid cannot accomplish what a clump of tongue-wagging, trudging-along-with-a-walker, matriarchal types can.

Growing up in the equatorial heat of Mombasa island, in the bosom of the Ismaili community, it has always been evident to me what a woman’s role is.  Most of my knowledge on this subject was derived from the Hindi films that dominated our Sundays – and every day, religiously after the popularization of VCRs – and from the chatter of the women from the “
bankra
committee.”  The rest of it came from observing my mother.

Bankras
are the benches that skirt the mosque grounds.  Most of these women were ailing from arthritis or old age and were unable to climb the flight of stairs leading up to the mosque.  The impending elevator that had been talked about for the last few years had yet to be installed.  So they just sat around on the
bankras
and pretended to observe the prayers that were being cast out over the P.A. system while avidly discussing the state of community affairs.  Their bodies had given up on them a long time ago.  But their faces were like operas.  Completely animated.  Eyes squinting.  Frowning.  Brows arched up in exaggerated shock.  Mouth gasping away.  And their hands, that was another thing, they were always in motion.  Like they were creating, molding in the air.  Gesticulating.  Slapping their foreheads.  Jabbing and pointing.  It was as if their bodies were the instruments giving song to their words.  They sat there, on the
bankras
, conducting each other with exaggerated gestures in a symphony of infamy and ruination.

It was through them that I learned of the tragic circumstances of Gulzar aunty’s death.  She was of no relation to me, but in a small community every older woman was your aunty and every older man your uncle.  Hence Gulzar aunty.  After arthritis rendered my grandmother incapable of climbing the stairs to the mosque, she unwittingly became inducted into the committee and, although reluctant at first, trotted home with a fresh installment of the daily
panchaat
for us.

A close friend of my mother, Gulzar aunty – the same one that had given me that beautiful blue tote bag from KLM where she worked – had hung herself.  Depression is what they’d called it at first.  Just some hormonal imbalance that aging women go through and doctors can’t remedy.  All those valiums that she constantly devoured.  But some time later the rumors surfaced through the committee. 
He had been seeing some Arabi woman, that husband of hers! Chii! Chii! They had been fighting all the time!  Bechari, no wonder she couldn’t bear it any longer!
remarked the women in the community during their ritual gossiping.  In a town like Mombasa, talk about “other women” spread like wildfire.  

And now, what about their poor eleven-year-old daughter?  What will become of her?  Men!  They are such dogs, I tell you!  She should have left him a long time ago, the bastard, but instead what does she do?  Hang herself!

And Shainoor? 
Yah, Khudda!  Alnoor and her had been high school sweethearts, imagine that!  Do you remember how beautiful that girl was?  That long black hair all the way down to here!  Tsk, tsk, tsk….beautiful fair complexion….And that magnificent voice when she sang at all the music parties!  And such a bhagat!  She attended mosque daily!  Such a pleasant girl.  Truly, she was the pride of the community…
Rat poison!  That was her response to his infidelity.  Not a separation.  Not a divorce.  Not to wager him with her own affair.  But to drink up poison.  Rat poison, no less!

I wonder if any of them had had a choice, really, being in love and bound to their traditional notions of love as they were.  What could have been expected of them?  To endure faithlessness from their husbands would have meant to have hope.  A light at the end of the tunnel.  These women had been driven to the point where both entrance and exit appeared barricaded.  To have an affair?  Every woman who had rebelled and indulged in an extra-marital affair, regardless of what had driven them to it, had ended up dubbed as the community whore.  Soon, everyone’s husbands called with lucrative offers to spend a night at some beach hotel.  Many even gave in, unable to ever absolve themselves from such a reputation, a kind of death in itself.

I’ve known, much to my dismay, that in situations both turbulent and trivial, I’ve always played the role of the victim, the heroine in plight.  It’s what has kept me from telling Richard to fuck off, turning around and walking away
first
for a change.  I’ve listened to the ramblings of the “
bankara
committee” and I’ve avidly watched the melodrama unfold in Hindi cinema through my youth.  Mourned with the community over the suicide of some beautiful irremediable woman and jumped on top of my seat to jubilate the formulaic success of a struggle in love.  And now my life has become just that.

Images from these Hindi films often flashed through my mind.  As I waited for Richard to satisfy himself with yet another trick and to return to me, spent but just little more tender, I became Jaya Bachhan in
Silsila
, lamenting in song until tall and handsome Amitabh comes back to her from carousing with his mistress… Faces of actresses whose names I knew so well.  Scenes from movies, the titles of which are long forgotten… And those songs.  Yes, those
filmi
songs with the poignant lyrics that epitomize the suffering of love and which only Lata can sing.

They are all there in their pomp and melodrama.  Directing me.  Reminding me.  Unfurling within me in their systematic chaos.  How can I help but heed to their instinctual direction? It’s a hopeless situation.  Just like scores of Indian women who have learned to identify with the martyred heroines of the Hindi film, I’ve also learnt to relate to them instead of the independent, free-spirited hero.  It’s not my role to realize the error of my ways and return to the one I love.  Mine is to love unconditionally, shed the perfunctory tears and wait for dawn.  It was in waiting patiently as he caroused, in having the opportunity to be there upon his return, to forgive him and take him back in, that I had to find my meaning and validation.  Any good, traditional Indian woman knew that.

I don’t burst out into song and dance but I’ve come to believe in this melodrama.  That good has to win.  Patience is a virtue that always pays back.  And that those who love the most, and are willing to suffer for it, always get the object of their affection to realize that they belong together.

Penance is a prerequisite to romantic fulfillment.

Life without the one you love quantified death.

Men could leave.  But if you had the misfortune of being a woman – or relating to one – the respectable thing to do, the right thing to do, was staying.  How else was love for an Indian homosexual who grew up in a gilded world of cinema – one who related to the psyche of his dramatic Indian mother – meant to be?