21. IF ALIENS
ARE WATCHING US
HOW COME
WE DON’T HEAR
THEM GIGGLE?
“The
actions speak so loud I can’t hear a word,” thought Z as she went over in her
mind the fragments she’d heard about HWMBF over the year. “One can only make so
many assumptions based on next to nothing so one ought to forget all about
trying to read two tea leaves to decode a lifetime.” The Voice and Ma had been
silent the rest of the year after a few spectacular prophecies.
Home
for the summer she began looking for employment and was not very happy with the
job she’d found. And she couldn’t find another so she stayed with it. Family
was beginning to get on her case a lot lately. Aunts told her she’d better get
used to the real world. It shows one ones real worth. She did not look the part
to secure a halfway decent job or snag a rich husband. There was no real hope
for her future so she ought to appreciate all the comforts at her father’s
house before she left it for good.
Life
was a drag but there was the paycheck and the company of friends and the
feeling of security being “home”.
Something
had changed - it was perhaps the way the wind blew or the way the river flowed
or the point in the horizon where the sun rose or the mirror in her room that
had cracked from side to side or the one in her mind that she carried around
everywhere she went. In the vast extended family of fifty or more blood
relations that lived near one another and visited each other all the time she
was not good enough for anybody she met from the time she woke up in the
morning to the time she went to bed. The subjects she’d picked at college would
make her an unemployable waste of space for the rest of her life she was told.
Her temperament, she was told, as well as her complete lack of talent and
perseverance, would ensure she’d get fired the first week of work. If she ever
did get married he’d probably be struggling all his life to put food on the
table so she’d better get used to wearing plastic flip flops all her life. And
with that face and ratty hairdo and excess weight and no sense of what to wear
she’d be lucky any one would look at her long enough to marry her or even
notice her in the first place. Daddy did not think very differently either. He
even went so far one day, sipping a ♫ rum and Coca Cola ♫ to tide him over a
dark phase dealing with some ♫ shame and scandal in the family ♫ of his new
in-laws or outlaws as preferred to call them, to tell her,♫” If you want to be
happy living a Queen Life marry a man uglier than you♫. Better safe than
sorry.”
“Queen Life
indeed,” thought Z. ”This stinks. Ever since Daddy‘s linked his lot with that
Mrs Malaprop his syntax and grammar are shot. You can always tell a man by the
books he reads and the company he keeps.”
The saddest change
that had come about in Daddy was that he no longer saw himself as a part of the
extended family, hated the kids, cast aspersions on the capabilities of the
boys in the family, lost no opportunity to question the morals of the girls in
the family. It was getting rather difficult to just be in the same room as him.
Auntie S thought
the world of her but she was a person who was born to be a mother and loved all
the children in the family the same.
It
hurt at first but then it began to make complete sense. Ma left. HWMBF did not
know her name. All her family was a chorus. Her boss hated her. An aunt went,
“How will you ever attract a man with that long hair and 1950’s figure? Girls
these days are very slender and have short hair and are tall. Look at my
daughter. That’s how you should look. Let’s go get you a real hair style,” and
drove her to three hair salons all of which refused to cut Z’s long hair
anymore than just a trim because they said a lot of people come in wanting a
drastic change but regretted it right away and wept or raged or sued. They
asked her to go short in five or six instalments over as many months. Even with
all the running around, dance lesson and practice included Z would never be
slender. She was born to have curves. And an extra cup of popcorn or an extra
piece of candy magically morphed into an extra pound on her which she found
completely maddening. Z hated herself in the mirror by now. All she saw was a
pudgy tired slob who needed to shave her legs just like her aunts did. Her
aunts never missed the opportunity to point out a stray hair or two on her skin
anytime they were within pointing distance. All those years of taunting had
added up to a hefty sum of loathing, with Z being who she was, directed inward.
Ma had been a poor role model in this that she had not known how to see through
attacks such as these and nip them in the bud. Z might have learned this
elsewhere given how gregarious she was but somehow she never picked up on that
little survival skill in all her interactions with a million people. She had
been told to respect her elders and just did it without checking first to see
if they had earned it. Little did she know that giving useless people power
over you makes them go insane and murderously dangerous. Snow White’s step
mother wanted her killed as soon as an inanimate object declared her more
beautiful than the Queen. Hello!
The
newest bogey men being sent to Z to send shivers down Z’s spine were, “Who will
ever marry you if they find out if your mother wasn’t quite Bengali, her mother
a Brahmo, her grandmother a Pir Ali Brahmin. Girl you are barely a Bengali,
more a mongrel, and with your grandmothers being sisters you are born of
incest. Then your mother had to go die of a dirty rare disease. Anybody who saw
her like that would never marry you for fear that you and your children might
carry that gene.” Z forgot to ask them if they were born of the same mother as
her father why they weren’t mongrels as well. Both aunts had married into
families where it was the norm to marry first cousins and their in-laws were
all related by blood in complicated connections only they could understand. It
was the norm in southern India
to marry one’s uncle, or maternal aunt’s son. People had done that for
centuries. Their kids were fine, Z’s precious cousins, smart strong healthy
beautiful exceptionally talented kids who with a little nurturing would blossom
into great athletes, maybe movie stars, industrialists anything. This was a
bright wired bunch. The potential was there. If only their parents could see
it. She had not learned to question authority yet. And might they not also be
carrying the gene for scleroderma? The most unkindest cut of all came from
Daddy, “The puppies this year at my friend’s kennel are not quite healthy or
good looking so he’s trying to give them away for free. I asked him why that
had happened. He said, too much incest, “and smiled as Z cringed and the step
mother smiled broadly, both enjoying Z’s heartbreak. The aunt with the hair
obsession chimed in with, “Why have you not learned to give yourself to a man?
That just hasn’t flowered in you. You have to show society you are warm blooded
and welcoming or you look cold and frigid. No wonder no man wants to marry
you.” Now that drew some ire from Daddy. He glowered at his sister and changed
the subject. These were the very same sisters who had lived in a home built
mainly out of Ma’s inheritance and been married with the same money, trousseau,
jewelry, pomp, priest, banquet all.
The
tribe in their tribal wisdom born of fear and hatred had found the poison for
their peach, the cancer for the cure, the sacrificial lamb who had volunteered
to wash their sins with her blood, and had with astounding success most
perfectly matched the hex and the single girl who had only asked if she could
possibly, if time and circumstance permitted, please, O pretty please with
sugar on top, be told the meaning of life.
One
evening as always, while the elders of the tribe segregated by gender, the
males drinking an upgrade of hooch, and smoking several upgrades of the rolled
up tobacco leaf talked each other down, and the women toiled in the kitchen and
played their own version of Chinese Whispers with a twist that involved salad
knives and the occasional steak knife, Z was left in charge of her little
cousins. They played Cowboys and Indians until each little one hungry and tired
went up to his mother and asked for supper or a cookie ♫and then there were
none. ♫
With a little time and space to herself and a
bowl full of mixed nuts to assuage the growl in the pit of her stomach, the
fire in the belly, she observed the happiness quotient of this enactment of
communal harmony. “I hope I find a better way,” she thought to herself. “And
truth be told there is nothing to learn here anymore. I can run a house and
climb trees as good as any in here. All I really needed to know I learned in
kindergarten. Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them.”
If
she had gotten up and looked she would have at least found the one little lamb
that was being fattened for the sheesh kabobs the tribe was craving. Yes Virginia , it is possible
to be so dumb you can’t find your own backside with your own bare hands.
A
mythic chasm had started to open under Z between who she was and who she really
wanted to be, and what she wanted her life to look like and what it really
looked like. She put all her trust in this thing called Life and got busy
everyday doing this and that and loved the results.
The
chasm got wider and deeper all the while and Miss Elastigirl stretched further
and further to bridge the gap. Until one day she decided to explore the chasm
and see what was in it. The first thing out of her mouth was a four-letter
word. She covered her mouth reeling from the sound of profanity that she had
despised all her life. Her face stung with shame but her body felt a surge of
power that surprised her. She felt…good?? A sly shy smile came over her lips.
In an instant she knew why Ma couldn’t face life and Daddy was robust despite
all his misfortunes and ungoverned habits. The secret was concealed in the gaps
between the one vowel and three consonants of a very special word. “But I can
tell no one. I’ll keep this to myself and it’ll be my silent solace when I’m
angry or surprised, bothersome times that always catch me off-guard. I’ll never
be a sailor mouth like Daddy. Like Ma, when things get really, really hairy,
I’ll say, ‘Oh dear.’ Classy Ma.”
In
the abyss she found she had one guiding light, and just one, motherhood or the
hope of it. “But I have things backwards here. ♫First comes marriage, then the
baby carriage.” ♫ She couldn’t believe she was thinking what she was thinking
and had this vision of herself watching herself thinking. She knew she had to
snap out of it and get to dinner if she didn’t want to eat alone.
Miss
Z couldn’t sleep that night. She had a mythic abyss to explore that contained
unusual monsters and treasures in unexpected places. Morning happened and off
she went to class. About noon in a hallway in the English Department she was
waylaid by the Colonial Studies teacher demanding, “So how many weeks is it
going to take you to pick up Vaidehi and Ashaad Ka Ek Din? They’re cluttering
up my desk. Your paper’s due in five days.” Z had been avoiding writing this
assignment while looking to find something else to write on, but here she was
face to face with a formidable guru. The gift of obedience not gone to waste Z
took the materials, bowed obsequiously, and left too embarrassed to accept an
invitation to a homemade lunch of khichdi.
The
abyss was her favorite place to be after a day of studying. Among other things
she’d figured out in her nineteen years was that life wouldn’t begin in another
four years, nor would it end in another four, this was a long haul, one that lasted
as long as you could breathe. It was going to be fairly important to figure out
how she would like to spend all of her waking hours. “You’re asleep for a third
of your life anyways, you get through the business of living for roughly
another third, it’s the leftover third that you have to consciously make up
your mind up about. You had better be doing something you feel like doing or
you’re dead. In the darkness of this abyss lies the path to that third, the
all-important third of my woebegone life.”
Friends invited
her on their capers but she said she felt she was drunk enough on life itself
and needed no upgrades at this point. She got some plenty ribbing for
that,“What are you, a Spartan
nun?” The boys she met quickly fell into one of four categories – brothers,
buddies, mentors and GBF’S. They treated her like one of the blokes and gave
her the respect they’d give a lady, never crossing the line on any count. She
had found a band of sisters as well, as she had in school. She found out in the
very first week that on the hookup circuit, however, the female of the species
is deadlier than the male and was sickened by the observation. Why had Ma
neglected to inform her of this dangerously important stuff? She knew she was
headed for college. Maybe she didn’t know. ♫ Only the good die young. ♫
Z, never one to
call her constantly irritable Daddy with little complaints or “Hello, how are
you’ s” because he did not really like
to hear from her, having a lot of trouble adjusting to his new marriage, she
refrained from talking to him about ’what next?’ Her friends had all pretty
much figured out their way through life and she did not really learn anything
about how they had arrived at their personal conclusions because it seemed to
her things just fell in place for each one. Once again she trusted Life to do
the same for her.
Finals were at
hand and a fever had gripped the university. Stress was showing up in strange
masks. The scariest was one evening at seven walking back from the studio a
group of very drunk boys in a convertible drove too close to her laughing like
hyenas as she balked and jumped. When she finally calmed down it was
nine-thirty and out of a real need for reassurance, Daddy being hundreds of
miles away anyway, she called him hoping to hear him say he was concerned. His
reaction was,“ So why were you walking the streets alone after dark?” Click.
And with that
hurtful sentence a parent-child bond was severed.
Free of all
connections to childhood Z began to explore the abyss to see where it went,
further and further away from her childhood home back east that had morphed
into a monster house in a kingdom from where hearts had been banished. For now
it just went darker and deeper and she couldn’t stop walking, walking fast, and
then faster, as her need for speed in this zone of dragons and dungeons became
insatiable. She went sonic on her monster hunt doing away with the bugaboos of
the mind and developed a predilection for the loneliness of the long distance
runner, except she was a rebel with a cause. She fancied herself a seeker -
halo, heavenly sword and all - in a fable from the Brain Age civilization,
whose quest was for noesis as opposed to perception. She fell. Humpty Dumpty
was pushed. Her concepts of Self Other Space Time shattered and scattered in an untidy amorphous heap, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to her concept of reality unto this day. But perhaps this was her new reality, her new normal. She just hadn’t been
ready for it when it arrived.
23. ♫
I AM
WHAT I AM ♫
Clueless
about sexual politics, never having been allowed to date, as is the case with a
lot of south Asians, Z navigated the dating scene by using the politically
appropriate “my religion does not allow it” ruse and it served her well. She’d
watched older cousins get into scrapes she wanted no part of. The theatrics
made her sick. A broken heart was something she knew she’d despise so why
bother. Like Ma, Thakuma, Dida, one would just wait to walk around the sacred
fire seven times and then hand over one’s ticker. Simple plan. Couldn’t be
easier to execute. But then, we already know how useless plans are. She never
talks about that little episode of absurdity with another living soul but
somehow her friends are asking probing questions like, ”Is there someone in
your life?” or the even more bizarre,” Are you engaged?”, and it freaks her out
each time. She is afraid they can look inside her head.
That
actually had always been one of life’s most intriguing questions for Z. Ever
since she had watched her first movie, or tenth, she’d had wondered, if you
could plug a movie screen to a human head, what would you see??????
She
voiced that thought a few times shooting the breeze with friends and it earned
her laughs like no other joke ever did, not even the smuttiest. She never
really could understand why though.
Through
middle school and high school there was none of the pressure to impress or to
please a man and from the looks of it, her life was as simple as an abacus, or
the A B C’s as far as the romance department was concerned. It had left her
hours to read and to practice her music and yakity yak and stare into space.
One did not consider having a passing crush on a passing rock star a romantic
development, at least not to Z, or any of her sensible shipmates.
College
was a new deal. By the middle of freshman year she had hardly any one to hang
out with most evenings. The girls were either studying or spending quality time
with their significant others. She’d end up in the library every night with the
other studious types. Until one day she was dying to find some company to go to
the classical music extravaganza in downtown with. She found a kindred spirit
through some serious networking, a perfect gentleman, quasi genius, her first GBF.
They were peas in a pod whereas taste in music and literature were concerned.
It was five evenings of pure classical music
heaven. And she wasn’t afraid to take the train or bus or walk through dark
streets since she wasn’t alone. Her new friend and she had talked through all
the commuting like they’d known each other for years, with never an awkward
moment, except….
Like most
concerts, these concerts didn’t end until late into the night. As luck would
have it she’d lost the key to her room and hadn’t had the time all week to get
another. With her roommate being gone most nights she couldn’t get in her room
without the roommate’s key, which had to be left in a safe place. That safe
place, her roommate insisted, was on the nightstand of her lab partner, a very
butch, very out of the closet gal. Z was not prejudiced but just uneasy about
knocking on her door past midnight five nights in a row saying she was locked
out of her room. She needn’t have worried. GBF and butch gal next door knew one
another well, having woken up one another in the middle of the night a few
times before, for a quick loan of pot and paraphernalia. When she insisted he
wait until she had locked her door behind her he had given her a funny look,
like ,”How paranoid are you?” But when
she walked past her room up to butch neighbor’s door and stood there looking
pretty in pink pondering, “To knock or not to knock”, he asked what her
predicament might be. She said her roommate had left the sole key to the room
on ‘her’ nightstand. He was suddenly in savior mode. He took charge of the
situation and did the same the following four nights, never making Z feel
stupid. Over the course of the week they all became friends of course and Z
relaxed, and discovered she’d had a lesson in social niceties she had never had
before.
“If getting away
from home hadn’t included so many ennobling experiences I might not have valued
freedom as much,” Z thought.
24. KISS OF
DEATH
“There
are so many ways to look at the exact same thing. Can’t count the ways to skin
a cat, can we? We dressed in our renaissance look-alike peasant blouses and
jeans and curled our hair like Juliet’s to go to Shakespeare at the park, a
rite of passage I’m told, and came back having left something behind at the
venue, each of us of the sisterhood,” thought Z putting her bracelets and
earrings back in their boxes. Getting rid of the mascara was the next thing on
the list. “There’s no shame in crying when people die.”
The
kiss of death had left an impression no amount of washing would wash away.
Wishing did nothing either. A hush fell over the dorm despite being almost
Saturday. Not one of the Freshmen Five as they were known to the rest of the
dorm was asleep yet and one by one they gathered in the screened porch that was
a makeshift kitchen. Anyone paying attention would’ve noticed right away these
kids had wider eyes, ghostlier lips and paler brows now than all semester.
They
had bonded over late night pizza, manicures, spell-checking term papers for one
another, and Chuck Norris jokes, but something unusual had happened tonight.
Each had showed up almost by compulsion, like moths drawn to a flame, to be
part of this family far from home on a night when the tragedies of Romeo,
Juliet, Tybalt, Mercutio, Lady Montague, Count Paris and all those who grieved
them became too much to bear in the quiet of the night. The solitude of falling
asleep brings on angst tucked away in concealed places in the psyche on many,
many nights. Somehow on this night that angst was too much to bear alone. The
ones with a fondness for annihilation by spirits felt no pull toward the
refrigerator door to pull out a wine cooler or hops. This was something that
couldn’t be washed away, this mark from the kiss of death.
They
started talking about how cute Romeo was and how funny Mercutio was and by and
by they started to unravel from the depths of their souls the real reasons they
were here on this night. Death had touched every family at some point and left
its imprint in a unique way with each of its special kisses. Great grand
parents had passed on so had babies in the womb. Each had a story that brought
them closer in one night than a year of picnics alone would have, in a strange,
sad, wistful way.
Too
young to see dispassionately that dying is a part of life it affected them in a
raw, all the way to the marrow in their bones kind of way; a “something’s
rotten in the state of Denmark
kind of way . The stories are common enough in the larger world so they are not
for telling in this text. But to each young heart caught up in the limited
scope of its young life the pain was gruesome. Some knew the purpose of that
pain in their lives. Some knew more was on the way. Some knew how to deal with
it and some didn’t quite as well.
Z
had this cold awful feeling of seeing Death waiting in the wings. Soon after Ma
had died Thakuma had lost all three of her surviving siblings in a space of
four months. Why that must happen is a question no one can answer. “We’ll meet
again in another life”, she consoled herself.
Over
the year there would be a young friend and a favorite aunt who would choose to
make their exits on their own terms. There would be lives lost to reckless
behavior. One to irrational crime. “Why? Why can’t we just live normal lives?”
would be a question that would weigh heavily on her heart.
Too young again to
see death as a metaphor for change they took the sad, sad storeo of Romeo and
his girlio literally. Perhaps there was in that story not an irrevocable
finality but simply the ending of a chapter in the human experience. If there
is life after death maybe the bard should’ve left a couple of clues in the
closing scene about such a possibility.
25. ROOTS
Stepping out of the familiar zones
of family, home, hometown, classical music, had encouraged Z to be more accepting
of new thought, new horizons, new everything. And yet she wanted more than ever
to see how these new horizons had been arrived at. In other words, she was more
curious about her roots than ever before. In an effort to understand the
primordial soup aka the Indian subcontinent she joined the cultural association
of students run by students of Indian origin. She had noooooo idea that the
subcontinent was like a continent in itself. Forty different languages, five
distinct religions, several ethnicities, at last count, and she was amazed at
the diversity of India .
On her two trips to Calcutta and Dhaka this fact hadn’t made an impression on her. She had
been too overwhelmed by the heat and the crowdedness and newness, or too young,
or both.
Growing
up she had learned about Durga Puja, Mahalaya, the right way to make shandesh,
and all things Bengali and had been sadly tainted by the cultural elitism of
the nose-to-the-grindstone overachieving clan she came from. Satyajit Ray was
it, and Hrishikesh Da was as far as her family would venture into Bollywood.
She had loved “Apur Sansar” and “Chupke Chupke” among other brilliant stories
that they had told, but there was plenty to be said in favor of the Bally
Sagoo, Gurdas Maan, Runa Laila and Garba songs that were a riot at every Indian
get-together. Somewhere around that time she found a store that rented Hindi
movies and discovered Bollywood gems like “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron”, “Guide”,
“Aashirwaad”, “Baazaar”, “Mandi”, “Bemisaal”, “Jaagte Raho”, “Mera Naam Joker”,
“Teesri Kasam”, “Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak”, “Amar Akbar Antony”, “Chalti Ka Naam
Gaadi”. The variety was amazing. After years of getting her ears finely tuned
to the nuances of different languages and the music of the legends her ears
picked up on the simplicity of the three note “Hum the woh thi aur samaa
rangeen samajh gaye na, jate the Jaapaan pahooch gaye Cheen samajh gaye na.”
and the simplicity was exhilarating. She hummed that song until she thought she
was going loco. She needed a new song! But that would come after long silence,
expressing the inexpressible, looking for what was good and praising it.
Right
about then she was gaining a vocabulary on race, gender, class, hegemony,
macrocosms and such. Patterns began to hazily appear and disappear, and before
she could decide whether they existed or not, they were gone, subsumed by the
familiar, the dominant, the accepted version of things her generation had
accepted as reality. One thing remained, a faint feeling, that white people
were getting a bad rap for colonizing the world, using up other peoples’
resources and curtailing their freedoms, and dark skinned people were getting a
bad rap for being too close to nature, incapable of governing themselves as
modern man ought to be able to. To her it looked like over time there were good
results and bad results from the colonial period, depending on whether you the
judge are an optimist or a pessimist. There were atrocities. And there was
progress. “That is how history played out at that time and that line of
thinking has a legitimate place in the study of world history. The caste system
in the Indian subcontinent seems to have had similar origins. The imbalances
are correcting themselves, however slowly. So long as we are headed in the
right direction we’re doing okay. If you want to witness colonization of the
weak and a usurping of their resources and freedoms you could’ve come to my
home for thanksgiving and you would’ve seen it all in fast forward and in
monochromatic monolingual sepia. You’d see with your own two eyes ♫it don’t
matter if you’re black or white.♫ All that counts is whether you are filled
with love or if you are filled with hate. When are we going to take a step or
three in the right direction? In the last year my stepmother and a couple of
aunts have done just that to the rest of us. We are ‘less’ in everyway in their
nomenclature of us. They work no jobs, have no hobbies, no long term friends,
no laurels to rest on, a skeleton or two dangling in their closets, but as soon
as anybody enters the room, they hand out a compliment followed by a list of
inadequacies real or imagined. They taunt and scheme like Scar, and then cry
and howl at any insinuation that they are untruthful. They tell their lies a
thousand times until it becomes the truth, and parade their half truths as
facts. They identify and isolate an honest, decent, weak one like Simba, load
him up with guilt, shame, a muster roll of his powerful enemies, and a gross
magnification of his shortcomings, and a war of attrition begins. Those of us
who shun such behavior give up the fight and move on to some endeavor we think
is worthwhile. We look like losers and don’t even know it. Yes we ‘losers’ have
impeccable and inane reputations, ‘the pretty one’, ‘the talented one’, the
sweet one’, ‘the good housewife’, ‘power couple’, but we’re hurting like crazy.
They allocate status, money, time, affection as they please to the rest of us.
And if you look closely, the kinder, gentler amongst us are getting less and
less of a voice in group decisions, like to sell or not to sell the condos the
family owns. The bitterness generated by the cross fire between those who are
fair and those who want more than their fair share is eating away at the
foundations of this family. And all it took was one deceitful and greedy person
with no scruples and a strong will to step over the threshold. Deceit and greed
are replacing decency so fast, I wonder what winter break is going to feel like
at home? Maybe I should find me a job that keeps me busy all day long.”
The
loss of continuity caused by displacement, caused by simply going off to
college, or by becoming a Christopher Columbus headed for the other side of the
world, or by hitchhiking through the universe, or by being born among peoples
following antelope post an ice age, causes a shift in perception. The world
ain’t flat any more. Parallax becomes an issue, memory too, as are value
systems. One cannot erase ones history, only learn from it, first by embracing
it, then seeing it plain and whole. Simplicity is hard to master, even harder
to arrive at, in such impassioned ideals as identity, fairness, truth, honesty.
But in every muddlemess we all know whose heart is in the right place and whose
isn’t, don’t we?
