Tanya Tania (19 page)

The two boys in my class are Humayun and Mohammed T. Humayun has been in my class since nursery school. He's not very clever but he's very, very sweet. I don't know Mohammed T very well but apparently his family is “involved” with MQM. He's flying out immediately. He doesn't even have a school to go to in America. He's going to go stay with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey and apply from there. I wonder how this will affect his college applications.

I did something bad today. I destroyed Navi's squash racket. He left it on the stairs again and I picked it up, took it to my room and cut the strings. I've told him many times not to leave his racket on the stairs. My mother doesn't really look where she's going. I don't want to imagine what would happen if she tripped on it and fell. She has no meat left on her body.

When Navi saw the cut strings of the racket, he grabbed my shoulders and shook me so hard I bit into my tongue. I have welts on my arms. I love looking at them in the mirror. Dark blushes slowly turning purple.

But I hadn't known that Navi has a club championship coming up. If only I had money, I would buy him a new racket. I'll ask Ali to look in their sports room. Can you believe they have a whole room filled with sports equipment? There's a brand new scuba diving outfit in there. Every time I go in there I wrap the arms of the suit around my head and smell the rubber. It always smells new and promising.

I fought with Ali today. He won't work on his college applications, he won't take the kidnapping threats seriously, he barely takes me seriously. He and Chhoti Bibi have taken to playing cards together although they use beans instead of money because Chhoti Bibi says gambling is un-Islamic. Today neither of them even looked up when I came into the room. I asked Chhoti Bibi to make me tea and she looked up and said, ‘Now?'

Can you imagine?

I said, ‘Yes, now.'

She got up and left in a huff. Then Ali said to me in a grieved tone that I was not being cool.

Not being cool, I snapped at him. What's not cool is for my boyfriend to come to my house and hang out with my servant.

He just got up and left. He didn't take his stuff and didn't even wear his shoes. He just left. Who leaves without shoes?

I felt bad immediately. As soon as I had said that to him I felt bad. And I felt bad for making Chhoti Bibi go and make me tea.

But I wanted tea. Should I not ask for tea because she's busy? Bibi should have said something to her. Should I say something to Bibi?

Now Chhoti Bibi is not talking to me. She came with the tea, saw that Ali had gone and stormed out. With my tea.

I feel like I'm losing her. She isn't studying at all. Whatever little attention I had before is gone and that I can lay at Ali's door. He laughs at me when I try to get her to study. Why are you forcing her to study, Tanya? I want to play cards with her.

And she sits there grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Ali doesn't understand. He could go his whole life without lifting a finger and it wouldn't matter, he would still have his big houses and servants and tickets to London on demand.

It's not like that for Chhoti Bibi. I'm trying to give her a life and she doesn't even understand it. Her world right now has only one door and she has already stepped through it. But what if there is another door? What if she does really well in the exam and gets into college?

You and I are both living with the choices our mothers made. You don't have to worry about which college you go to, you ask for a phone in your room and you have it, your brother goes to Princeton, paying full tuition and flies home twice a year. I have nightmares of not getting financial aid and I've said no to two birthday parties because I didn't want to ask for money to buy presents.

Ali can't sway me but he sways Chhoti Bibi. She is dazzled by his attention, the way he has of interacting with every single person as if there are no strings, no tags. She looks different with him than she does with me. As if she is a friend.

He has left behind his college applications. Deadlines are coming up and he hasn't even started his essays. His mind is not wired differently, it's not wired at all.

Love,

Tanya

September 1, 1992

Bombay

Dear Tanya,

Did you know my mother used to smoke? And play tennis? There's a picture of her and your mother in bikinis. They're at a pool and it's sunny in the picture and they're laughing at something we can't see.

Some of the stuff in your letters I don't get at all. It's like a movie. And then there's other stuff that's like from my life. I broke something once.

It was a prize my brother had won in an inter-school debate competition and I just hated it so much. It was an ugly blue plate and it said his name on it in big letters, even bigger than the name of our school. Anyway, it wasn't even a first prize, it was a third prize. One night, when my mom was yelling at me because I got a C in Geography, I picked it up and threw it against the wall.

Man she was mad! She just kept yelling and yelling. That's the worst when she does that. The WORST. Her face gets red and her voice is louder than everything else. The plate was sitting there smirking at me. It was almost like self-defence. I picked it up and smashed it.

It felt awesome and I don't regret it one bit. I wish I still had the plate so I could smash it again and again and again. But man my mom lost it that night. A piece of glass from the plate nicked her face and there was like a small drop of blood. She just lost it. She started hitting me like a crazy person. And shit, my mom knows how to hit. My dad had to drag her off me and almost like carry her into their bedroom.

So I get why you cut the strings on your brother's racket. I totally get it.

Anyway so today my mom hit me again. I mean I knew it was coming because I was going to tell her that I refused to write the applications to go to college in America. So I knew she was going to hit me. I was like prepared for it.

And the weird thing is that I am just so damn tired of being sad about Arjun that I was almost looking forward to it. Like if I could stop thinking about Arjun for even a minute, it would be a good thing. He keeps going away and away and away and there's nothing I can do and I've tried like everything. He just keeps leaving.

So yeah I was kind of like looking forward to the fight. I even wanted her to hit me so I'd feel something else.

And it started just like I had imagined it. I went into her study and she was sitting at her desk, frowning at the computer. I told her I wanted to talk to her. She didn't even turn around. I told her I wasn't going to do the college applications because I didn't want to go to college in America. Then she turned around. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and said in this slow, clear voice as if I am a five-year-old child and that of course I am.

No I'm not, I said. I won't do the applications. You can't make me.

Then she began to yell. Still just sitting in her chair and yelling at me. How I'm stupid and ungrateful and don't know what's good for me. How I waste my time on sports and friends and Arjun and how she's worked so hard for me her whole life and this is how I repay her.

And I was like mom you don't work hard for me you work hard for yourself. You love your job!

And that made her even madder and she started on the Sammy train. Sammy did this and Sammy did that and why can't you be like him and why can't you work hard like him and why can't you why can't you.

I said Sammy is a selfish, boring prick and I don't want to be like him.

I think it was the word prick.

She came at me suddenly and gave me one across my head. Really hard. I fell.

And then suddenly there was a godawful noise which only I recognised as Nusrat screaming as we heard her flying across the house.

Man, that girl can run. She threw herself on top of me.

She covered my face with her hands and her body was on top of mine so that my mother couldn't hit me anymore.

My mom stopped. She just stopped. She stopped shouting and she stopped hitting me. I think she was embarrassed because of Nusrat. She just glared at both of us and then went away. I heard her bedroom door slam and then the shower come on full force. That's what my mom does when she's really mad. She cleans herself.

The funny thing is that Nusrat and I didn't get up. We just lay there on the floor. She was soft and warm on top of me. It felt really nice. It felt like peaceful. I get why little kids just lie down on the floor when they're mad. The floor doesn't say anything. It's just there.

I don't know how it happened but somehow Nusrat's arm was around me and mine was around hers. I could feel her breast under my head and it felt nice. So soft. She was stroking my hair and making weird little noises softly. We lay like that until it got dark and she had to go home.

My mom never came out of her room.

I want my mom to love me like Nusrat loves me. I don't want to have to be Sammy. I don't remember the last time my mom gave me a hug. When I was little she used to hug me all the time. She used to bathe me in her bathroom and I remember feeling so excited to be near her but also terrified of the shampoo going into my eyes. She would hold me between her knees so I couldn't move and there was the cold water of the bath and the hot water of my tears and my mom's hands big and strong on me. I used to feel like I had become part of my mom and even with the shampoo in my eyes I loved it.

How come Nusrat loves me and my mother doesn't love me? My mother doesn't even know all the bad stuff about me. She doesn't know half the shit I've let Arjun do to me. Nusrat knows everything and yet she loves me a lot. I think she loves me even more than her mother and even more than her father.

My mom hasn't spoken to me in six days. She doesn't even look at me. So it didn't really help to feel sad about something else. It's like double sadness.

I'm so tired. I'm so tired of being sad. I wish I could stop feeling. I wish I could just lie on the floor and become like the floor. Cool, silent. Impossible to hurt and impossible to be hurt by.

Love,

Tania

PS—Nusrat's hands are really soft. But her arms are very strong. Isn't that amazing?

10

May 15, 1996

New York, NY

Dear Tania,

It's spring! It's spring, it's spring! I cannot begin to tell you what it means to live here in New York and have it become spring. Interminable, hateful winter with its snowdrifts and insidious wind chills that creep around like snipers, taking aim and destroying what little warmth you've accumulated through the day.

Even my mother loves spring. The times she has been happy, really quite happy, have all happened in spring. Once it was when she was with Richard, a man she dated for a few months. But the other two times it was nothing specific at all, she was just happy. It was just spring

It has taken me twenty years to ask my mother how she met my father. I had gone to Boston for my twentieth birthday and she had taken me out for breakfast to her favourite diner. She was laughing over the seeds of the honeydew melon that had dripped by mistake into her coffee. I snapped a picture of her on my camera.

Her smile wobbled when I asked her and she looked out of the window at the newly budding trees until I thought she wasn't going to say anything. Then she said that they had been the best years of her life. When she had met my father and they had fallen in love and got married. Had Navi and me.

It's an ordinary story. They met at a friend's party. My father was the awkward, brilliant scientist about to graduate and go to medical college. My mother was the elegant, quiet summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, head of her class, on a full scholarship, first generation college-goer. Both of them only children of quiet, unambitious people who didn't quite know how to respond to their children's singular love and determination to be together.

My mother's parents hadn't wanted her to move to Pakistan of course. She had only been thirty-three years old. Thirty-three with a Pakistani husband and six-year-old twins moving to a new world. I wonder if she had thought it was an experiment.

I told her I think my father has Asperger's. She looked at me blankly and then laughed. ‘Your father is just a selfish man, Tanya.' When I was leaving the next day, she hugged me and said, ‘Don't worry, Tanya, there's nothing wrong with your father.'

But that's not what I wanted to hear. I wanted a secret that would make it all make sense. I wanted there to be a reason. Some brain asymmetry. The tiniest droplet of neurotransmitter going the wrong way, a childhood accident that damaged something deep inside the cranium where no one can see. Something outside of his control.

My therapist says I need to love myself before I can let anyone love me. But that's not strictly true, is it? From your first letter, I wanted you to love me.