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This story begins when Z is eight years old, then moves very rapidly on to the high school and college years, and on.
This is a story of one who is a product of displacement and acculturation, but then who isn't a product of displacement and acculturation? In the strangest of ways we are all wayfarers, walking a lonely path, in an unknown country, making friends as we go along, picking up some gravel in our shoes, traveling by boat sometimes, sometimes by train, sometimes taking the high road, sometimes not. It is also a treasure hunt. I hope you will find all the book titles, movie titles, and song lyrics woven into the text.
Z is a Bangladeshi-Indian-American version of "Everywoman." She is first cousins with Ankita(the LP of American Desi Girl) from "Bloom Where You Are Planted." Mama is her favorite aunt. Z's Daddy and Ankita's Papa are brothers.
Hope you enjoy reading her story.
This is a story of one who is a product of displacement and acculturation, but then who isn't a product of displacement and acculturation? In the strangest of ways we are all wayfarers, walking a lonely path, in an unknown country, making friends as we go along, picking up some gravel in our shoes, traveling by boat sometimes, sometimes by train, sometimes taking the high road, sometimes not. It is also a treasure hunt. I hope you will find all the book titles, movie titles, and song lyrics woven into the text.
Z is a Bangladeshi-Indian-American version of "Everywoman." She is first cousins with Ankita(the LP of American Desi Girl) from "Bloom Where You Are Planted." Mama is her favorite aunt. Z's Daddy and Ankita's Papa are brothers.
Hope you enjoy reading her story.
1. DESTINY’S
CHILD
There
was much ado about nothing in Z’s eyes as the family quarreled over protocol
at Uncle L’s wedding. “How does it matter who sits where at the dinner table?
What a tempest in a teacup,”thought Z.
But
families are funny things. Siblings meet after twenty years sometimes and
behave like little children again confusing the next generation. This was the
twelfth night at uncle L’s place, getting ready for what would be the last
wedding of the generation, and everybody was here, decorating, cooking, making
phone calls, and so on, labors of love, with their baby brother finally getting
hitched.
The
children slept in the attic all ten of them, a slumber party to remember. There
were the scary stories, family folklore, and baseball card trading,
bond-building, and such.
Z
was falling asleep sitting on the floor leaning against her bedroll, admiring
the strings of lights all aglow and some twinkling around the skylight window
in the attic. There were lights all over the house, the house having been
decorated the way homes in Calcutta or Dhaka are adorned for a wedding. Z was drifting thinking,
♫” You would not believe your eyes if ten million fireflies lit up the world as
I fell asleep. It's hard to say that I'd rather stay awake when I'm asleep
because my dreams are bursting at the seams.”♫
At about three in
the morning she woke up or imagined she did to the sound of something rustling
outside in the yard. Then she saw a glow outside the window. The window was too
high to look out of but she could see the sky at a certain angle if she tried.
A blue shimmer appeared on the ceiling and said,”Hi Z.”
“Hi”, replied Z, fascinated by this
creature.
“Love it here?”
“Yes I do.”
“Life isn’t going to be one long
party you know. There’s school again in the fall, then winter, then spring. Summer
won’t come around again for a long time.”
“I know.”
“Enough about that. I’m really here
not to chitchat about the weather but to ask you a very important question.”
“And what might that be?” asked a
nervous little eight year old Z.
“Would you like to be happy in the
first half of your life or in the second half?”
“What a stupid question,” thought
Z. She said, ”All my life, please.”
“Now that is not the right answer.
You can only pick a half.”
Z thought for a
second, always having been taught by Ma against her own judgment, that dessert
must be eaten after dinner, deferred to the implied lesson and said, ”Second
half. All’s well that ends well.”
“It shall be as you like it. The
first half won’t be so bad though so ♫don’t worry. Be happy♫. It’ll be a comedy
of errors rather than a true blue tragedy. See you around.”
The
following morning Z woke up and put that down to a surfeit of candy saying,
“This was just another midsummer night’s dream. I’m reading fairytales all day
long and eating too many sweets. I wonder if I’ve caught fairytalia?”
2. PAPER BOATS
Yesterday
was Sunday, a beautiful sunny sunshiny Sunday. The family went on a picnic to
the park, parents, cousins, uncles and aunts. When they had eaten and were
gloriously full, Uncle N started making a little paper boat with a page he tore
out of his magazine. He set it in the still waters of the little lagoon by the
grassy knoll they sat on, away from the drifting water of the stream. But as if
by magic his little boat caught the wind or the wave and was drawn to the
faster flowing water and went downstream anyway.
By
and by, Auntie M made a boat that had a blue and yellow sail and a hull made of
fine print. Cousin Z was transfixed by her Ma’s boat as it went downstream
rather quickly and disappeared round the bend. Uncle N’s boat was right off the
mark a quick one too but it got caught in the tangle of overhanging branches of
some willow trees. The wind in the willows set the boat loose. It started to
spin as it reached midstream and disappeared out of sight.
Cousin
Z decided to make her own boat. She thought it would be like Ma’s or Daddy’s
but it turned out quite differently. It behaved differently too. She set it on
the water’s edge, a little red white and blue boat that smoothly glided to the
middle of the stream and sped away.
3. COUSIN Z
Z (the family called her so because they
hardly ever saw her awake) would walk home from school every day with her
friends. They’d stop at the curb and talk and laugh and carry on about the
happenings of the day. Then at five o’clock they’d head home. Z would spend an
hour answering her Ma’s query,”How was your day?” while she served herself some
supper and then put herself in bed promptly at seven each night. That was when
her Daddy got home from his woodworking shop with a big smile and a loud
guffaw. Ma’s weak smile would meet Daddy’s big smile and the two would
awkwardly fall to the floor as they had unwittingly collided.
All
evening in the sitting room Daddy got louder while Ma got quieter until
dinnertime at nine. Then Ma would come to life again, serve a lovely meal,
clear the dishes, and get to bed.
Everyone
slept peacefully for a few hours until at four, quiet as a mouse, Z arose to
brush her teeth and start the day with homework, while she looked every now and
then for the line of light on the horizon promising dawn.
4. Z AND HER FIRST BRUSH WITH FEMINISM
After
school, just where the sidewalk ends, a huddle formed as it did every evening,
consisting of Z and her friends X and Y who were sisters, close enough in age
to be best friends and to hang out with the same group of friends, and W.
W
was steaming mad over some issue in the newspapers where women were being
treated unfairly and condescendingly, for being the “fairer sex”.
“I’m
a feminist,” she declared after a long, mostly incomprehensible, and loosely-
connected-pieces-of–poorly-organized-logic speech.
“Why
are you a feminist?” asked X, the oldest of the band of sisters, a very
glamorous, amorous, recently broken up diva.
“Because
women are equal to men and the men need to be informed of that.”
“Don’t
bother dear. It’s a waste of time. He has just one thing going for him, you’ve
got three. It’s no contest. Women are not equal, we’re superior.”
Z
about fell on the pavement laughing.
5. PLUMAGE
It
didn’t happen often that the LP would have an emotional meltdown. Being on the
spot on a regular basis had toughened her up over the course of her young life.
Today was an exception. She fretted and fumed and refused to eat lunch until Z
took her aside and asked what the problem might be.
“I
did something so stupid I should crawl under a rock and hope to die.”
Z,
always fastidious about language said,” It’s either ‘crawl under a rock and wait
to die’ or ‘cross my heart and hope to die’.”
“Whatever
Zeee. You know what I mean.”
“What
eating you?”
“Can’t
tell.”
“That’s
helpful.”
And
they fell into sister shorthand but to no avail.
After
a while Z gave up prying and said,” Whatever it is, imagine that a great big
Regret Egret gave you a gift, a single feather, a reminder of what you did
wrong. When you’ve figured out what the best resolution might have been for
that situation, kiss the feather goodbye and let it go.”
“What??”
“Listen
to me now and believe me later.”
“Where
do I keep that feather, for now?” asked the LP finally buying into that story.
“Night
stand, desk, under the mattress, any old place you’ll remember it each day.”
“Do
you have any egret feathers with you?”
“Oh,
yeah.”
“How
many?”
“A
whole boa.”
6. BEFORE THE SNOW GLOBE EXPERIENCE
Writing college acceptance essays was a particularly daunting task. The topics were –
‘The Stupidest Mistake I Ever Made’
Z, ”Now who would want to publish that?”
‘Euthanasia’
Z, “Morbid.”
‘Terrorism’
Z, ”Scary stuff.”
‘Ten Best Inventions: A Personal Perspective’
Z, ”Ten? How about five?”
‘Heritage’
Z, “Could write about my family’s history.”
‘A Year of Challenge’
Z,
“Okay, that last one is easy to write because three terrible things
have happened in the last six months alone. A few impressive quotes and
I’ll have a good looking essay.”
She
picked up the book of famous quotes hoping to make a grand opening
statement. She found one – Tolstoy : ”All happy families resemble one
another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Z,
”Woe is me. We have been terribly unhappy, and with the doctor having
said Ma is very, very sick, we have been feeling even worse. We had the
huge chemical spill in our town killing eight people. I can still feel
fumes scorching my throat when I remember that day. But I still need a
few high impact quotes for good measure.”
She
resumed reading and as if by magic one line picked itself and suspended
itself in the air above the page for her to read – Einstein : “Any
intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the
opposite direction.
“Okay, okay, I get the sign. Let’s put things in perspective without trivializing them.”
She wrote an essay a lot less lachrymose than she had planned.
“Heritage” was her next choice.
“Daddy, tell me something about the town you grew up in.”
“We moved a couple of times but we always lived in a town adjacent to
Lake Woebegone,
where all the women were strong, all the men were good looking, and all
the children were above average,” said Daddy and gave a great big
guffaw. “And when we messed up we said,”So what?”
Ma looked wan, weary, and distant, and said, ”You are growing up very differently from the way we grew up. Times have changed.”
Z
sat, pen poised over paper for an eternity and no words came forth. ”Is
this writer’s block? Feels more like blocked wisdom. I feel like I
haven’t grown since the eighth grade and yet I feel profoundly tired.”
Ma
said,”Show me what you’ve written. I’ll help you with your essays,” and
was happy with the one Z had written. Daddy and Z read a novel each by
Wodehouse while Ma napped to fill the hours.
7. THE SNOW GLOBE EXPERIENCE
This
was a bleak period in Z’s life. Their castle and moat sank and shrank
to give them a snow globe to live in, a little plastic deal with fake
water, fake snowflakes that glittered and swirled when shaken, and a
little crystal palace. Amidst a grand party for the world at large it
seemed to Z the little world of Daddy, Ma, and Z was cold and
oppressive.
Z
cried herself to sleep every night and couldn’t fathom why. She didn’t
know, or rather hadn’t understood very well what the doctor had meant
when he said that her Ma was very, very sick. She just imagined it would
take her a very, very long time to recuperate. Within a world that was
alive in vibrant colors and happy music, Ma, Daddy, and she lived in a
grey and yellow world and were mute.
There
was just one bubble of air in this world, at the top of the snow globe
to which they could rise to socialize. On a sojourn to that little
bubble where the thick fake water in the snow globe could no longer
distort her view of the world she looked toward the window in the east
hoping to catch a glimpse of children playing in the warm golden
sunshine, and green grass, to cheer herself up. She saw instead an
unfamiliar and shimmering world that she had no passport to and was
tantalized by it. One part of her said she belonged in that world, but
the other said not. She did not have the reserves of trust and humility
to ask for anybody’s help or good counsel so she turned away hoping life
would find a way of getting things right for her. Somehow something did
not feel right.
On
a sad, sad day Ma slipped away to Heaven and left them looking on
helplessly unable to follow or to pull her back into their grey and
yellow world. So like a mermaid she dove back into the depths of her
thick ocean while her Daddy remained in the bubble flailing his arms
against the plastic that held him captive in the saddest part of his
life attempting escape.
Her
mother, her best friend, her philosopher, her teacher, had all been
taken away for ever and she wept tears that got lost in the thick fake
water amidst the fake snowflakes. And as if that wasn’t bad enough she
threw a spiritual tantrum abandoning prayer. Her life had begun showing
the effects of being under siege but no one seemed to have noticed.
“Grace under fire is what the world expects from you and anything less gets trampled underfoot,” she surmised.
Compassion not given, not received, became the redundant currency in her grey and yellow world.
The
snow globe seemed to close in on her as she sat alone at its bottom
grieving, crying, ranting, and trying to make sense of it all. It was
all so useless she gave up the struggle and became very quiet. She
accepted that perhaps her whole life until now had been a sham and felt
better. Her little crystal palace under the ocean imploded quietly. She
hoped someone had notified her Daddy of this catastrophe. She remained
so still she hardly knew she was alive.
Into
the cramped space, through the thick fake water a gentle glow appeared
as the sun rose and peeped into the room. Accustomed to the half-light
and the confines of her few cubic centimeters of fake water the light
meant little to her but as if by some natural instinct she moved toward
it. Divine intervention that surely must have been for she walked
through the plastic like a heroine in a sci-fi movie and then through
the grille on the window in the east into the real world with real
people, with real hopes, real dreams, real goodness, real flaws, real
hurt, and real decisions to make each day. This world demanded real
forgiveness and real change.
8. ACHILLE’S HEEL
High
School was nearly over. Her yearbook all signed, phone numbers of dear
friends in her diary, Z began to get serious about moving out of the
house. Daddy would be remarried sooner or later. She wasn’t sure which,
sooner or later. Other than that life had been a colorless blur. She had
been slow in sending out her college applications and was now paying a
price for it. She still didn’t know where she was going, but she knew
she was on her way.
After
school she sat in her room one day at the bottom of the snow globe,
minding her own business, when SUDDENLY, a dark shadow appeared before
her. It was a FRIGHTENING FACE, an old crone in a dark scarf in a dark
mood in a dark voice cackled as she saw Z startle. Z was screaming under
water now. No one heard her scream. That seemed to have propelled the
crone into action. She picked up the snow globe and gave it a good shake
and she mumbled with satisfaction as she saw the insides swirling. Z,
sadly for herself, never lost consciousness even when she bumped her
head a million times as she swirled with the water. Each bump and bruise
felt new and she felt it in its full force.
By
the time the water became still again Z had crawled back to her rock
and had been sitting there as still as the water a very, very long time,
holding tightly to a cut on her arm that bled and stung if she let go.
She had probably cut it on debris from the previously imploded crystal
palace but she wasn’t sure. It did not really matter to her as to how
she was hurt. The why was a question too large and distorted from her
point of view to even begin to attempt to answer.
Dulled
by the aftermath of pain she lost her concentration and let her grip on
the cut slip. A plume of bright red blood floated up and like a smoke
signal sent out a message ‘Calling All Predators’ far and wide. She saw
the gusher and put her hand over the gash tightly again and darkness
fell. She fell asleep.
9. THE NEBULOUS MUDDLEMESS
It
had been several months since Auntie M had passed away. Cousin Z was
graduating high school and the LP, Mama and Papa were invited to attend.
Mama picked out a beautiful heart-shaped pendant for Z and promised to
take her shopping for a prom dress. Back at Uncle N’s after an
exhausting day of trying on clothes and shoes and hairdos they were
sitting together in the den after dinner, relaxing. Z looked very mature
with her hair pinned up and her pj collar slipped down to simulate the
neckline on her gown to show off her new pendant and chain. They
switched off the T. V. to go to bed.
As Z looked at the dark screen she saw herself and burst into
tears sinking into the armchair her knees drawn into her chest as she
rocked and cried. Mama put her arm around her and a few minutes later Z
pulled herself together, dried her eyes, sat up straight, and said,”I’m
sorry I bawled. Ma would have loved to be here today but she can’t.
“But she is. Please believe that she is with you every day and wants very much for you to be happy always.”
“I try, I try, and sometimes I fail. And I stupidly ask ‘How dare you die?’ ”
“It’ll get easier as the years go by. Live up to her dreams for you and make her proud. In fact you already have.”
Z
started to tear up again so Mama just held her hand and said a prayer
for her and said to Z, ”There’s magic in those words if you’ll say them
everyday.”
“I
know what I have been doing wrong. I have refused to pray and have lost
my only source of peace. I have put the pieces back together on the
outside but there is a nebulous muddlemess inside of me that needs
attention. Thank you for helping me in so many ways.”
10. ON THE AIRPLANE
On
an airplane leaving home for college many miles away, excitement
successfully replaced trepidation. Cousin Z noted the uses of a
flotation device, the exact location of the emergency doors, and was
stunned by the fact that the flight attendant had just said that an
adult sitting next to a child must wear his or her oxygen mask first and
then put one on the child’s face.
She
knew Ma would have put the mask on her first and then attended to her
own. “What a metaphor! If only Ma had known that you can’t give away
what you don’t have.”
11. WWMS
Sitting
all alone in her dorm she surveyed the accomplishments of the weekend.
Friends made, closet organized, desk arranged, it was time to leave for
the very first class. “I wish I knew what to wear; to do; to say; to
think; to not think. I miss Ma’s wisdom even more now. What should I do?
What?”
Her
eyes strayed over the books on the bookshelf and their titles seemed to
speak to her. She laughed out loud and decided she would ask the most
fashionable lady on the shelf for fashion advice, and would consult Ms
Post about the avoidance of social potholes, and ask Shakespeare and
Einstein and Emerson to help out with the rest.
This
Council of Elders would have to stand in for her after-school hour of
“What would Ma say?” As for Ma’s love and affection that was missing
from her life, she would have to find them in her own heart.”
12. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
The
first weekend at college well spent Z took heart being so far from home
and all things familiar for the very first time, believing that this
was where she was meant to be. It just felt that way. The place felt
just right as did the people.
Monday
night after dinner she and her new friends walked along the road
flanked by oak trees hundreds of year’s old, spooky looking things like
sentinels to a history that had sometimes been dark, with their limbs
dripping cobwebby moss. The crickets got louder as did the frogs. And
did she hear cicadas? She wasn’t sure nor was any of the other four in
the group who all grew up in places that hosted no cicadas. In the
fading light she saw through the bars of a narrow wrought iron gate a
statue that looked a lot like Annie in a long dress holding two bowls,
perhaps filled with birdseed for birdies coping with ♫the hard-knock
life♫, in her hands in the walled garden of a southern mansion. A board
nailed to the wall said ”KEEP OUT”. Her thoughts ran wild. “This would
be just the kind of place Boo Radley could live in. It’s such a shame to
kill a mocking bird. Or maybe this was the garden of good and evil.”
They
entered the building and each went her own way. Z reached her door and
found a strange sight. A pair of work boots, rather big ones, stood in
the hallway a wee bit closer by her door than her neighbor’s. She didn’t
know what to think of them so she ignored them and went inside.
Next
morning her neighbor said hi, looked at the boots and at Z, back and
forth, a rally that lasted all of fifteen seconds or so, then picked up
the boots, continued the chitchat about the weather and abruptly said
goodbye. The exact same thing happened on Tuesday. On Wednesday it
happened again. Z thought this was a friendly and talkative soul, and
just a little strange around work boots. Why did she hug them so? Dirty
muddy things that she should not be leaving outside her neighbor’s
thresh hold in the first place. Instead she ought to clean them up and
keep them in her own room. They probably were her boyfriend’s since they
were huge. Maybe he should clean them up and keep them in his room in
his dorm.
No
boots the next two days, so Z forgot all about them. She had the room
to herself for the weekend and looked forward to listening to music as
she pleased without worrying about bothering her roommate. Nice girl but
valued her space and had a completely different idea about what good
music sounds like. They promised each other they would only listen on
headphones to keep their friendship in good repair.
The
day went by exploring areas of the town within walking distance, a trip
to the ice cream shop, laundry and trying to recall classmates’ names
as she met them in places other than class. People look different in
different surroundings she thought, having difficulty matching names and
faces correctly. The boys, many of them, were going berserk, being a
threat to themselves and to property and innocent bystanders, on this
post high school, totally unsupervised sleepover a whole weekend long.
Her
neighbor knocked on the door late Saturday night while Z sat alone in
her room. Z opened the door to a shirtfront. She was very puzzled
because she had heard her neighbor call her name. This was a big burly
man a foot taller than her, and she began to realize this was her
classmate, the older guy who had come back to get his degree after a
hiatus of five years, her neighbor’s fiancé. Her neighbor peeped from
behind him and said ,”He’ll borrow your Yeats for the night. I’ll give
it back to you in the morning.” Z wondered how they knew she had a Yeats
but she picked out the book from the pile on her desk to give to him
and turned around to see he was cracking up silently laughing and her
neighbor had shut the door on the pair of them. He did not take the book
from her and left like a phantom slinking away into the darkened
hallway. Z was puzzled by the strange behavior but thought they must be
high on something and put the matter to rest in her own mind. The next
day she saw her neighbor wearing a long gingham dress going from room to
room except she wouldn’t look Z in the eye. The talk at lunch was how
this neighbor had gone telling everybody in the dorm how lucky she was
to be with the man she was with because she had this litany of health
issues, divulging unnecessary details of her feminine woes, but he loved
her so deeply he did not care.
Wednesday
morning, the class of eight filed into the professor’s library to read
aloud their first papers of the year, on Yeats, in a very quiet space,
the stage having been set for quietness by their still and somber
teacher. Some of the papers were really, really good. “We’re going to
have to work here to stay afloat,” thought Z. At the end of class the
professor, a man of few words and measured tread, Ivy Leaguer, three
solid publications to his credit, looked Z in the eye and said,” Miss Z,
hear me out. You could be making money selling fashion instead of
paying me to teach you something you will very likely never need and
never use.” In that moment was born a little neon sign on her mental
landscape that said, ”You will one day ask me to send my papers for
publication.” He then turned to her neighbor’s fiancé, the one of the
work boots fame and said, ”So what are you, a professional student?” The
only two comments in a classroom where eight papers had just been read
may or may not have been heard or understood by all the students there
but they would prove to be blimps on a future radar screen in Z’s life
way downstream. At that time Z was too miffed at the seeming insult to
her intelligence to think of anything but writing a paper to die for in
the very near future.
Z
would get wind of strange goings on in the room next door and it would
take her years to put the pieces of that puzzle together. She did see a
pattern emerging over the next couple of years that got entrenched
perhaps over the next two but Z had stopped seeing them folks with
seeing eyes after a while. It was easier to paste on a fake smile and
walk on by like they didn’t bother her. The pattern of her neighbor’s
life was thus, every few weeks, when the weather was good, there was an
orgiastic episode in the room next door. Strange people showed up.
Strange sickly sweet and rancid smells emanated from there. The voices
sounded like they were coming up a shaft from the netherworlds in tones
and pitches that were never heard elsewhere. Music, soft and sensuous
played all night. In exactly forty-eight to fifty-two hours there was
heard the deep throated sobbing of a woman, accompanied by the sounds of
spoons and books and odds and ends being flung across the room. Her
boyfriend would leave a half hour after the sobbing ended. She’d wash
his shirt in the sink and hang it out to dry.
The
first time Z heard her crying she ran to the other end of the dorm to
fetch her neighbor’s only friend. The friend waddled down the hallways
reluctantly and left as soon as she saw the work boots at the door
saying this was none of her business. Other people curious about the
crying looked at the door and walked away. Z thought about it off and on
and wondered what woman would love to live that life when life had so
much more to offer. Because, make no mistake, her neighbor was very
happy and very content. It was her boyfriend who wasn’t making the
grades he could’ve, having worked as a successful entrepreneur in the
publishing world without a college degree for five whole years. He was
always stoned when came to class, which was only occasionally. Z, in her
own convoluted way decided it was phallic women who thrived on the
energy of the hookup but the real women just sorta died. Z especially
missed one of her favorite people among the first years’, a kindred
spirit in many ways, a girl who’d read the same books she had, been
raised a few miles from where Z grew up, and who experienced the world
in a way similar to the way Z did, through the lens of an artist as a
young person, both having grown up around several artists in their
families. They talked in a code that siblings developed over years right
away. This girl stayed on the straight and narrow just long enough to
become one among the band of sisters and then missed a lunch date here, a
manicure date there, and then went underground altogether. For most of
the year she was somewhat sick and only came to class until noon. After
which Z would have to bring her lunch to her room and then dinner or she
wouldn’t eat. She refused medicine. She said she was doing great,
usually through a thick fog of smoke and past some strange man lounging
in her room. Sometimes she’d say to Z, ”You have no idea what life
really is about, do you? You know, people can take away everything from
you, everything, but they can’t take away the love that you share with a
man even if for only fifteen minutes.” She left end of the year. She
could not figure out the blokes though. They looked happy enough for
now. Having seen the men and women who came and went from that
ignominious room she just thought she’d remember all her life what they
looked like progressively, over the four years that she saw them off and
on, portraits etched in her memory that she couldn’t put names to, not
even make-believe ones. Not that she never their names, she just could
not remember them for very long. Note to self, on the hookup circuit,
the female of the species is deadlier than the male. And the same ten
people hook up with the same twelve people.
13. COUSIN Z IN THE ZONE
This
world was too fresh for her to make sense of it yet. Bacchanalia and
austere penance coexisted in this world as did deep unselfish love
alongside hatred and intolerance. There were the extremely wealthy and
the extremely poor, and then there were the multitudes between them.
There was comfort to be found in conformity, anonymity, and mediocrity
for a while.
She
was ashamed to have felt so sorry for herself. She had shed copious
tears for Ma’s unfulfilled dreams as well and now realized how blessed
Ma’s short life had been. She looked upon children who had nothing, no
hope, probably no parents, and were starving, naked, homeless, begging
for the basics and not having their needs met. Thankfulness for plenty
was due.
With
her lot in life put in perspective she got to work. Affection,
blessing, accolades all came her way and helped her forge a new
identity. Often people surprised her with comments like ”Don’t hide your
light under a bushel”. Some looked to her for strength or leadership.
Then there were those who thought she was naïve or hateful. All this
attention was confusing. Disheartened at times, and feeling invincible
at times, she wondered how long she would be able to put one foot before
the other contentedly.
The
newest, most frequent comments from her associates were of the nature;
”You look like a cat that has just licked cream; “You look like a kitten
on a hearth on a cold day in that that shawl reading your book.”
“Who, me? Cat?…Cream?...Kitten?
14. CELEBRATING THE ZONE
A
new and unfamiliar world arose to beckon her. Z looked to the left and
to the right and saw nothing else that seemed like a path out of this
wasteland of driftwood and dead trees overrun by vines that strangled
them. She looked to where she had come from and the bridges had fallen
away. Not her fault, not anybody else’s, just Time that takes a toll on
all things living and dead. So she put one foot before the other and
trudged to that world, the only world that seemed inhabitable and cast
away her mask, her veil, her mantle, and the chip on her shoulder.
“Nothing
could have been better,” she told herself. She had done what Life her
commanded her to do. That, she believed, was the right thing to do. She
had not experienced comfort and abandon in years and hoped she would
find that innocence again, that happiness again.
“Is this too good to be true? Will this last forever? Would life be a Shylock?”
All doubts quieted Z began to celebrate her new world.
15. A WALK
THROUGH THE WASTELAND
Having
walked through the minefield for a while she now walked in it with aplomb,
recognizing a detonating device from a mile. She had, along the way, made up
her mind that her happiness was her responsibility and that no one was going to
take it away from her. She put one foot before the other and the mines lost
their power over her. But this was new territory. The topography surrounding
her had changed. There was no grass, no trees, forget flowers, just dry cracked
earth. Clods to trip over, no stones to rest upon, just dry cracked earth.
She
considered Eliot’s question, ” Who is the third who walks always beside you?” ,
and hoped she had seen a shadow. She hadn’t heard yet of the second set of
footprints that proved that the One had borne the other in His arms through
times of insurmountable grief.
She
felt a nervous-resigned-preordained calm. She hadn’t yet fallen out of love
with the world and hoped she never would. She waited patiently for ‘Shantih’
the peace that passes all understanding.
16. FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Z
had settled in, and found life sorrowfully incomplete without music and looked
for a music school in the area hoping to learn something new. All her life
she’d been drawn toward blues and jazz but her staunchly classicist music
teacher forbade even listening to “pariah” forms of music so she had resisted
the urge to partake of such art forms hitherto. College had brought with it a
sense of freedom so she felt daring and ready to break out of the schoolgirl
mold she had lived in all her life. She found a place right outside the campus
grounds that taught music but as luck would have it they only taught piano and
harp in a paint-by-numbers format. However, they had a new dance teacher with a
fledgling class of three who taught Irish step dancing. Out of sheer
desperation to be near music again she signed up for dance lessons for she was
mesmerized by the Celtic music they danced to.
The first day of dancing was a life altering
experience. She felt she had wings. The little class of four was an anomaly, a
miracle, a flock of Jonathan Livingston seagulls, a diamond in the rough. And
their teacher, barely out of college herself, was a master craftsman and a
Chiron of a guru. She felt she had been to a little corner of heaven and back.
♫ “If you walk the footsteps of a stranger you'll learn things you never knew
you never knew”♫, she sang to herself walking back to her dorm.
It
didn’t seem right to have to get through eight hours of lessons to get to the
one hour when she felt truly alive. She had hoped “a fine education” would do
as much, but here was the truth of her present day life. She went to college
full time to wait to dance an hour at a shabby little studio every day. And why
not, for that hour put her in a frame of mind that helped her through
academics, she reasoned with herself. Because suddenly she began to understand
concepts before they were fully taught. She wondered for a moment or two what
exactly was happening here but lost that train of thought very quickly as
laundry, term papers, money management and sleep deprivation took precedence
over such unusual questions.
On
Wednesdays, she was told, the local pub hosted musicians and raconteurs and
comics and other talents. It was the place to be between seven and ten. The
patrons and performers were mainly from the university. She made up her mind to
be there. It would take her fifteen minutes to walk from the studio to the pub
so she’d be late. She told her friends to save her a seat and left for the
studio.
At
dance they wore a school dress, and the hard shoe, and for the sake of
uniformity, their hair in two braids in ribbons. So here was Z, going to the
pub, feeling like she’d like she’d love to wear a raincoat and galoshes over
the prep school talent show look. And her long hair in ribbons was so middle
school it was hilarious at nineteen. “First impressions are everything in
college” she’d sadly learned by being burned a few times. “But I’ll be very,
very late, so I’ll take the chance on going unnoticed by every cute guy in the
pub, because as we all know you don’t matter when you look fifteen while the
other girls are looking age appropriate. I’ll sit in a corner in the dark. That
is if I don’t get turned away by the doorman for being underage while carrying
a fake ID.”
She
walked in with no questions asked and started to sprint toward the stairway as
she heard applause and then an announcer hoping to be seated before the next
performer came on. She was so intent on not tripping on the carpet in her tap
shoes she forgot to look where she was going and stopped about a foot short of
stepping on a pair of black shoes and moved left hoping to let the pair of
shoes pass. She forgot she was supposed to stay to the right in such situations.
Confusion ensued, mainly because she could no longer tell between left and
right.
“Faculty spawn.
Whose I wonder”, she thought she heard him think as he finally walked past her.
“The stupid school
dress made me do it”, she tried to kid herself as she finally made her way up
the staircase. She felt an inner calm she had never experienced before.
♫Strangers in the night♫, like those proverbial ships in the night, don’t have
that effect on you, she knew that much. “Most unusual,” she thought to herself
but was quickly distracted by the hubbub of the crowd and she looked for her
roommate.
17. A
TANGLED TALE
Z
sat by her roommate through the evening sipping a root beer float. Her friend
was completely besotted by her new cellular phone and kept talking to her
boyfriend two time zones away and paid no attention to any one or anything
around her. Z looked down at her relatively new dress and noticed a string of
fake pearls dangling from the hem and proceeded to slide down her chair to look
for escaped pearlized plastic in as dignified a manner as she possibly could.
Hiding under a table in two braids in ribbons and a stupid frock would just
about kill her social future at college so she swore to herself she’d wear high
heels and lipstick and Ma’s pearls to next Wednesday’s event to erase the
damage she was causing her reputation on this given day.
She
found a couple of escapees and saw another three feet away as she felt a tap on
her shoulder and a clear and authoritative masculine voice in her head, ”Stop
that. That is not important. Look up. Do you recognize him?”
She
slid back onto her seat. She had been listening to this joke about a drunk and
a cop all wrapped around a traditionally sad song while she was fake pearl
scavenging but she had been under the table all the while. She looked up and
did not understand the question because there was a band setting up to play in
the middle ground of the stage while the raconteur was to one side using the
announcer’s microphone and dais and ‘him’ could mean any one of the six people
on stage. Having received the gifts of obedience and task-oriented-ness from
the good fairies at birth she did not stop to ask this Voice who he might be
and why he was being so bossy. A figure of authority was not to be questioned in
her immature mind. And give the girl a job to do and she’d get it done.
She
took a few moments to run each face through her face recognition software and
came up with no results. “Which one? ” she asked confounded.
“The
one on the microphone.”
“I
don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. I’m not sure.”
“Well
then remember his face, for you will fall in love with him but you are not
getting married.”
“Whoa, thanks for
telling me. You’ve saved me a lot of trouble. I’ll make sure I do not fall in
love with him or any one else until I walk to the altar. I’ve seen people make
fools of themselves falling in love and I so don’t have the time to be a fool.”
And in that moment she had a memory from the deepest quietest coldest waters of
her subconscious surface and gasp for air. She knew she recognized him alright.
She then felt an invisible blade of steel go clean through her heart. A shroud
of tulle descended over her. She had seen this happen to other people and never
believed it would happen to her but here it was, her story unfolding, she knew
what was happening but she couldn’t do a thing about it.
As the raconteur
finished and accepted his applause and started to leave the stage the announcer
called him back to give him a token of appreciation that was given to each performer,
candy, and so now she knew his name.
She observed him as
he took each step going down from the stage into the darkness below, and that
was him, in profile, the one she had seen suddenly in a cloud of light when she
was very, very young, perhaps six years old. Now she saw him in a gegenschein,
a gentle glow in the darkness made more pronounced by the floodlights up on
stage.
Z was ‘confuzled’
Pooh bear might have said, but not for long. She had the facts of the story
straightened out in her head in a few short minutes. “If signs and premonitions
are to be taken seriously, he is The One but we’re going no where, so let the
matter rest.”
Z
walked with her
friends back to the dorm and went about her rituals of getting ready for
the
morning, filing away notes from the day, checking the schedule for the
following day, putting her earrings away, brushing her hair, and as the
place quieted down and the
lights went out one by one a voice filled her head. She could hear every
word
of the drunk and cop joke as it had been told in a bemused rich
baritone, and
was baffled by the experience.
“I so need to
remember to forget,” she reminded herself and fell asleep.
18. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
OF THE THIRD
KIND
Not
a science fiction buff, nor an irrational being, Z took a series of
experiences in her stride that would
most certainly beg the question ”WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?????”
She
never thought of sharing these experiences with any body. It simply was
something she thought was normal for her even though she had never before had
any such thing happen to her. She had heard of perfectly reasonable people having
premonitions so she thought it was just one of those things that simply happen
to some unsuspecting beings and she just happened to be one of them.
She
thought nothing of The Voice with the message that had found her sitting under
a table. She thought nothing again of being at the pub on a Wednesday night as
usual, examining her customary root beer float, a habit acquired from spending
too much time with Dennis the Menace who had left her with a lifelong love of
root beer and a particular philosophy of life, and looking up from it to look
for the first time into a pair of eyes she knew she had never looked in before
but paradoxically had cherished forever. She thought nothing of the fact that
one day at noon she was sitting outside her classroom and she thought she heard
a thought ♫“You’re beautiful”♫, and looking up from her reading she saw the
receding silhouette of He Who Must Be Forgotten. “Nah, he does not even know my
name,” she said and promptly went back to her bookmark.
This was becoming an increasingly confusing
time in her young life, being besieged by conflicting messages from her head
and her heart. One hot humid night in June she sat on the parquet floor in her
dorm lulled by the hum of the fan. Out of the blue she heard her soul scream –
a piercing, chilling, plaintive, involuntary scream – “I’ll die without you”.
For the first time in months something as unusual and as life endangering as
that actually grabbed her full attention. She could no longer ignore the toll
this unacknowledged feeling of panic was taking on her. And from that moment on
the panic grew to a crescendo until the week before finals were to begin.
To
celebrate the
end of school year various club had organized events. She went to a
bunch of
them and amused herself with soulvaki, dolma, tejano music, and even
tried to
dance the conga and meregue but this straitlaced girl had her arms glued
to her
sides and her sides stiff as cardboard, so she gave up after a feeble
attempt
or two. The last of the lot was a cultural show, featuring south asian
bands
playing sufi pop, techno lavani, disco dandia and such. Multilingual,
fluent in
Hinglish and ‘indi and a smattering of bangla, ever the cultural
ambassador Z
wore her long hair loose and Ma’s rich silk laal paar, something that
she had
simply had to bring with her to college like a security blanket, she
found
herself a place on the floor in front of the stage because that had now
become
the front row and being fifteen minutes late as usual that was the best
seat in
the house that she could find as usual. Into the second set she felt
eyes at
the back of her neck she couldn’t ignore. Turning around she spotted
HeWhoMustBeForgotten(HWMBF) sitting with some one not from his usual
group of buddies but this boy she had
seen about campus that reminded her of a pet chameleon named Iago her
fifth
grade science teacher kept at school for lessons on reptiles,
adaptation,
camouflage, coldblooded-ness and such. She turned back feeling a fear
she had
never before felt at the fleeting glimpse she had had of cruelty in his
eyes
she did not think he was capable of. “That was perhaps a misjudgment on
my
part,“ she thought as she saw him again at the end of the evening
walking up to
the stage to offer a vote of thanks looking disturbingly handsome in
ethnic
threads. “You’ll play roles in life I will never have the privilege of
seeing
you in and the loss is mine. I’m happy I have this to remember you by. I
know,
I already know that this wish has a snowball’s chance in hell, but
please do
miss me and come back to find me.”
She thought
nothing of the fact that later that day she’d clearly heard Ma’s disembodied
voice, ”Z, go to the window, will you, and look outside.” She did and she saw, of the fifteen thousand
people on campus, HWMBF walking by the window in her room, strolling along with
an older gentleman, also uncommonly tall, a relative perhaps, or a teacher, she
didn’t know. She shook her head and thought it was mighty strange she should
see him here. He had noticed her face in the window and smiled. Ten minutes
elapsed. It was Ma again, her voice again, ”Go to the window again Z and see
him for the last time.” Z who had never disobeyed Ma except for the childish
things like not putting away her toys when she was very young obeyed without
thinking to question her seemingly nonsensical commands. There, walking past
the window again was HWMBF all over again. And he noticed her again. He did not
seem happy about being stalked thus and his eyes held an expression of “Leave
me alone” that would bore through her soul and never leave her consciousness.
Panic had no place in her life from then on.
It had been replaced by a feeling for which there was no name in the English
lexicon that she knew of. Unable to define this feeling, she experienced it as
sadness to which she could not ascribe a single logical reason, yet could not
ignore because it had found its insidious way into every single cell in her
being. The lack of logic complicated matters to a point where it made no sense
to share any of it with another human being. She’d heard this word in Hindi
that she knew translated to “unmeaning” the original being “anarth”, and that
little word was the closest match she could find to describe what she thought
of the strange events of the day.
She kept her
smile, her commitments, her friends and her enrollment in the quest of learning
but all else had disappeared under the cloak of sorrow.
Over the days that followed she blurred every
little detail of her freshman year beyond recognition but she could not let go,
not even for a fleeting moment, the sadness. She used every rational argument
known to humankind and every shred of her willpower to let go of it but it
colored every detail of her life and grew a little each day. She looked at
faces every where she went and asked each face silently, ”Does each of you walk
about the earth carrying sadness around like I do?”, “Do you know what wrong I
have done to deserve this pain?”, “Do you know what I could’ve done
differently?”, “Do you know, do you know, do you know…..?” until one day she
couldn’t ask any more questions.
And when she
stopped asking those questions she stopped recognizing pain in herself and in
other people, and the questions that brought it on. There was a world to
explore and it was best explored with no extra baggage.
Just when she
succeeded at rationalizing her emotions someone else would start asking her
unnecessary and uncomfortable questions. There was a turntable in her life
populated with these question askers whom she could not possibly shut out for
they were people she saw everyday or almost. They each asked as often as
circumstances permitted if she knew some one by “that” name, or if she knew
what “he” did for a living in such and such town, or if she knew so and so who
met HWMBF last weekend. Her answer, truthful more times than not, was always
no. He had told her to leave him alone and if that was what was going to make
him happy, by all means she’d leave him alone, even if it meant voluntary and
selective amnesia.
19. FRACTURED ADAMS
Out
for a breath of fresh air and dying for some sign of normalcy in this world Z
found herself standing in front of a children’s play area at the edge of campus
where faculty rented apartments. She had to drop off some books at a teacher’s
and then get back to dinner and then she would have to read for the last of her
finals. Freshman year had been an amazing year in many ways but right now she
had tunnel vision so all she could see was darkness and the first year of
college almost completed. She knew that that would have to be everything that
mattered for now.
She
felt a little tap on her shoulder and a soft, ”Boo.” It was the teaching assistant’s wife whom she
knew from back home. Delighted to see a friendly face she spent some time
chatting with her, and the lady invited Z to dinner the day of the last of her
exams.
Freedom!
Almost a sophomore! Z wore the most traditional of her Punjabi suits and said
goodbye to her friends and went to an enviable dinner in the best of moods in a
long time. Another young family who had just moved into the area had also been
invited, so the TA, his wife, their three year old son, and the guests made a
party of seven. Conversation flowed and small talk flowered as hors d’oeuvres
were served. Z almost dropped her plate of onion pakoras when she heard the TA
telling his friend who was new in town that HWMBF now lived in New York. The gist of it
was he had graduated, or defended his dissertation successfully, been offered
two jobs, one in New York, the other in Los Angeles. He’d picked
NY. The three year old who had been walking in circles around the coffee table
sampling munchies and ignoring his mother’s reproaches about ruining his dinner
seemed to have been taking in every word that was being spoken. He paused at
Z’s knee, oily little fingers staining her purple and turquoise salwar, and
with the most earnest little face she had ever seen, said to her, ”He
congratulated college. He’s gone to New
York. He’s never coming back. He told me to never
forget Confucius said genius is the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts in
one head at the same time.”{The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability
to function. ~ Scott Fitzgerald - paraphrased and misattributed to Confucius.}
“How
sweet,” she thought, ”to take the time to get a little three year old to
memorize that mouthful. And such a pity that I can never live in NY.”
20. A HOUSE
DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF
The
reality of her new life started to make its presence felt early next morning.
Nature abhors a vacuum they say, and they are right. It takes the container
holding that vacuum some time to understand that. The mind is slower than the
body after all these years of evolution. Every cell in her body knew that there
was a vacuum where sadness and hope used to be. They had both slipped away
while she slept through the night. What came flooding into that vacuum were
equal parts the urge to live life to its fullest and the knowledge that it
would never really matter. It did not help to know why not. It wouldn’t matter
no matter what. This was a body at war with itself. The soul set itself apart
from this drama and watched silently too lost to know what to do.
By the following
day she felt lazy, too lazy to finish packing to go home, but her ticket was
paid for and she had to go. A neighbor in her wing at the dorm helped her pack,
get dinner, and call a cab. She took the redeye and then a cab because she had
not wanted to disturb her already vexed and flippant Daddy.
She
let herself into the house quietly. Once she made it to her room she crashed in
a heap on the bed and try as she might she couldn’t cry nor sleep nor read.
Oceans of will power and its negation raged inside her, wave against wave, tide
against tide, with nowhere to go. Memories of happier times came charging at
her. The loss of childlike faith hurt with a brutality she had not expected
from a loss not quite corporeal or quantifiable. Despite of all the dysfunction
in her life when Ma was alive, it had been what one might call a life. What
would one call this existence in a twilight zone? Living life in two time
zones, trying to collate the images of Ma and Daddy as “her parents” with the
images of her step mother and Daddy as “her parents”, attempting to superimpose
the concept of “Daddy that was” over the concept of “who Daddy is now”, and
much else in the same vein, was very difficult.
By
five she was asleep. At nine Daddy came barging into her room demanding why she
hadn’t told him she was coming home. If he had known he would’ve sent a limo to
the airport. Her eyelashes had unfortunately gotten glued together over the
last few hours and she struggled to look at him, and ended up plucking out a
few hairs in her frustration and was in a lot of pain. Her face felt swollen
like she had the hives.
“Something wrong
with you?” he asked. And as he touched her brow he said, ”You need to take
something for that fever.”
She got better by
and by and swore to make her health a priority. Being sick is NO fun at all.
A liberating sense
of numbness slowly replaced the raging war within. It empowered her like
nothing else had ever before. In her bravado and loss of direction she said,
”Bring it on Life. Let’s see what you have in mind for me.”
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 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.
22. SPARTA
TO ATHENS
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 sense of Time Space Self and Other all shattered and
tessellated into a pattern of something she no longer recognized as her
reality. But perhaps this was her new reality; her new normal. She just wasn’t
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?
26. ROWING TEAM
Monday
morning, the first day of sophomore year, Z having gotten used to late nights
and late mornings through the previous year was blinking at the sunlight
flooding into her room. Someone knocked on the door. A disheveled Brit kid was
looking for tea bags and had been directed to her room. She had arrived the
previous night and was jetlagged and hung over and needed black tea, lots of
sugar please. Z was quite sure some tea was in order and asked her to sit,
introduced herself, was delighted to hear her name repeated back to her with perfect
enunciation, and the British import introduced herself while Z made tea,
literally. This girl was chockfull of words and details even while hung over
and about the funniest person in the world. Z was amazed by the flow of
language and ease of communication and the complete transparency this girl
embodied. This girl was all the Britcoms on PBS fast forwarded to here and now.
It was a treat to gather the first fruits of culture shock this teenage sage
was experiencing. She, like most people who come to America
for the first time, found it a place so far removed from the America of her imagination she was
rattled, no matter how witty she might otherwise be. The Brit wit was clearly
out of her comfort zone. Tea downed she ran off to get ready for the day. She
was a first year on scholarship studying among other things landscape
architecture, hoping to work for a movie house or a fashion house some day. She
knew what she was doing, for in her three waking hours on the vast American
landscape she had noticed the lay of the land from air and on the ground, the
placement of buildings, the styles of architecture, the color of sunshine, the
age of the mighty oak trees, the French sounding names of the streets. If you
can do that at eighteen straight out of high school it bodes well for your
future as a set designer perhaps on a Spielberg movie or something.
Z
took pause for a moment in the middle of getting to breakfast to think how the
mention of tea had sent an unknown quantity to her door. Racial profiling worked
for once. One time Ma had sent her to the local grocery store for milk, garlic
and parsley. The checkout lady giggled as she corrected her entry, saying it
looked a lot like cilantro so she hadn’t realized it was parsley. “Ya, you
could make some serious mistakes in life putting racial profiles above all
else. It has its place in the world at this time in history but it will
completely stop working in a few hundred years, if the species survives a few
hundred years,” Z thought as she got herself a not so clean bowl to eat her
cereal out of with an, “Oh well, dorm life.”
Z
and the Londoner crossed paths a few times through the week exchanging a
sentence or two. Then Saturday morning at breakfast time eating the customary
cold cereal Z realized a lot of people were looking her way, or just above her
head, looking in disbelief, the girls looking in disbelief, the boys in awe. Z
thought she might want to think she had a halo around her head being such a
good girl all week, as she had seen it happen in cartoon shows. Then she heard
a soft British accent behind her, “Z, may I borrow your jacket for a wee bit?”
“Sure,”
said Z thinking perhaps the girl had spilled something wet on her shirtfront
and needed cover to walk back to the dorm, and that probably explained the
ogling males.
“Thanks
a million,” the girl said as she slipped on the jean jacket and ran.
A
little later Z found out that on her first weekend in America the European had made the classic mistake of
thinking no one wore restrictive clothing on weekends in the land of the free
and the home of the brave, especially not since the feminist movement, surely
if they did not back in old fashioned Europe. It took a little while to bring
her up to speed. This was the deep south. The Bible belt. Moreover nowhere in America
did one walk about without wearing restrictive clothing. And bras were never
really burned by feminists, not in the sixties, and not since. And to not
worry. She wasn’t the first to make that mistake and would most likely not be
the last.
Over
the course of the next few days the Brit kid had hauled back several boxes of
snorkeling gear, down parkas, snow shoes, skis, rappelling gear, from the UPS
store across from the library. Her Mum had shipped them to her as she didn’t
want her buying a whole new set with American money. The girl was ready and
eager to re-conquer America
from sea to shining sea. She’d put up a calendar on her wall with all holidays
and off days highlighted and a map of the USA. She had frequent flyer
accounts set up with a couple of airlines, the Greyhound and the Amtrak. She
was asking all around if anyone wanted to go to Lake
Pontchartrain for the weekend. That explained, in a quaint way to
Z, why the sun never set on the British Empire
for years and years and years.
“Man,
and we never left Fairview
unless a relative died or got hitched outside city limits,” thought Z.
And
so, even though the dissimilarities were many, the group of girls that spoke a
similar language, one of sisterhood and the pursuit of excellence, became a
sorority with no name. One was Catherine, Catherine the Great they teased her
for her expansionist attitude and Russian ancestry, because she always forgot a
book or her shoes or scarf or something in other people’s rooms. Her roommate
had thirty percent of the room only by the end of each week because Catherine
would’ve spread her stuff too far and too wide. Guilt would take over and she’s
clean up and apologize every single week. Julie was Chinese. She came to the
sorority by way of violin and Shakespeare. She was a lot like Midori but hated
the reference so they spared her feelings. Iravati was the other Indian kid in
the wing who, over a period of time gravitated toward the group needing a
common wavelength for social interaction to be meaningful. Melissa played chess
with Catherine sometimes and took the same classes as Iravati (often shortened
to ee-ra), math and science. Clare, the British girl hung out with them even
though she was a year younger and a freshman. She might just’ve been the
smartest of the group, finding her way through the world both feet firmly
rooted in reality and greeting the world with a confident smile.
27. FEAST OR
FAMINE
Sophomore
year began to sink in bit by bit about ten days into the year. Z was surprised
by the ease of these ten days as compared with the first ten days of freshman
year. She had fallen into the swing of things in a minute. What a difference a
year can make. And a new fact began to make itself known to her. The
empowerment she had experienced from going numb had a new ally. Her head had
turned into a machine. It floated a bit above her shoulders defying all norms.
It was a work of intricate wheels within wheels with a face to one side. It had
its downside though. Messages from the other senses took a while to go through
the new and overly sophisticated routing system and often got lost. The bugs
had not been worked out of its programming yet.
‘Divide
and rule’ was an apothegm she’d heard thrown around a lot but did not recognize
it as it manifest itself in her own life, in her own person, her own psyche.
The
eyes saw everything through a film of gel. If she woke up in the pitch dark of
night she’d pinch herself to be sure was alive and not dead. If she looked in
the mirror it was to check for evidence of good hygiene and general
presentability. She stopped seeing Z in there so she was afraid to look too
closely at the stranger in the near distance in her room fearful of whom she
might find.
The
nose was getting sharper however.
The
ears stopped hearing the melody so much and turned themselves more toward
semantics.
The
taste buds were fried.
She
had lost the ability to tell between hot and cold like a leper.
CRACK!!! The fractured pieces of Self
Other Time Space cracked once more into littler fragments but with a
difference. Half the fragments were bright and half were dark. They tessellated
into a harlequin pattern. The big fatuous ugly wanton agnostic genderless hairy
disembodied Hand of Fate had rearranged them so, so she could no longer tell who
she really was, or for that matter tell accurately what time it was, or where
exactly she was, or with who.
The
pattern must have had a subliminal effect on her for on a whim she wore a dress
with a harlequin pattern on it, looking like a maid-in- waiting or she-jester
to a queen of diamonds in a pack of playing cards. Conquered people tend to be
witty. And highly suggestible.
The
conquered are controlled through fear and
confusion. They cannot tap into their strengths for they do not
recognize their
strengths when they see them. They have, by now, been ridiculed for
their
strengths, their strengths turned inside out, and held in contempt for
their
failings so many times they have little self worth to lean on. Beaten
yet again
they learn to fear and trust those they perceive as more powerful and
more
knowledgeable than they. As the master’s gaze lands on something, the
slave’s
gaze follows there too. The eyes follow the eyes, the footsteps the
footsteps,
the ears the ears, always a little behind and in the spirit of service
and
obedience. They live to improve themselves and to please the eagle-eyed
and the
very discriminating master, in awe of the powers of discrimination and
self-assuredness. And thus they learn to focus on their limitations.
Given their ability
to burn things with focus, as they turn their candent gaze toward the
perceived
and real flaws in their make up they end up burning a hole in their own
protective outer shells letting the world in, letting all and sundry
look into
their souls. As more light from within shines through, more limitations
are
slapped upon them.
As
the limitations go on mounting, they are convinced they are not this and they
are not that; they cannot do this and they cannot do that; they can never be
this and they can never have that. They hear their Masters’ voices in their
heads all the time. Eventually they own their blots spots scars and dark pasts
and presents and futures. The evil ones steal their power as easy as they steal
candy from babies. Mark my words, they do steal candy from babies. And
shoplift. And fudge on their taxes, cook the books, whittle away from the
family coffers, tell lies with a hand on the holy text, so on and so forth.
The balance of power shifts to the one who
can inveigle better. It is all perception, baby. Never fact. Mainly fiction. Or
rather, facts rearranged to present a reality that serves the Master and
enfeebles the enslaved. And Z, who had patterned her personality after her
mother’s, had never even heard the words ”Shut up bitch” or she might’ve said
them to the Queen of Diamonds when her self control was flagging. She was so
tired by now, her emotional reserves spent completely, her self control was
teetering on the edge quite a bit these days.
The fear the Transparents carry about is
obvious to the world at large. Little do they know in this
world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength. God, our Creator,
has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and
ability. Prayer helps us tap and develop these powers. But then this someone in
a jester suit had abandoned prayer for a while now. The God who had served her
up this smorgasbord of defeats in life could not possibly care for her, could
he?
Mid-terms came and went. Julie transferred to Julliard with a
promise to be back for Spring Break. She had to pick between accounting and
music and the brave little girl picked music in the face of hostile criticism
from family. She said she’d have time to work on an accounting degree in the
evenings, and would they please send her a little money for those evening
classes.
The
new addition to the sorority with no name was Rachel, a Gweneth Paltrow waiting
in the wings. Until she met Bill, a strategist waiting in the wings. But that’s
another story. A nice one too.
In
the winter break Rachel asked Z and Melissa if they would like to help with a
minor political campaign in Olympia,
Washington. It was just something
homely, her parents were working on it, it should be fun, and a nice change
from the Bayou. They both agreed. Iravati was going to Pennsylvania to her Uncle’s place. Catherine
had a baptism and a wedding to go to. Clare was going spelunking in the Lost
World caverns in West Virginia.
“In
winter??!!” they asked.
“The
price was just right,” she replied. The girl knew no fear.
And
so Z saw Washington
state for the very first time in her life. It is so beautiful you almost have
to close your eyes. The break was refreshing beyond belief. Rachel’s parents
were the best, Mommy and Daddy, away from Mommy and Daddy. You could fall apart
in their backyard and they would give you no grief over it. And they fed the
kids rather well. They knew exactly what balance to strike between being parent
and being friend to the adult child. The parent was protective, firm, clear,
saw things from the perspective of who has given birth, and knew where to draw
the line; the friend was a homie. It was probably a reflection of the balance
they had achieved in their own personalities. You felt completely at ease with
yourself when you met them, even if you were a painfully awkward youth so tired
of struggling with your own concept of your own self, you hadn’t exactly had
the time or the energy to figure out the world.
Political campaigns are a lot of fun. You
needn’t know a thing about them but like a football game you’ve been watching
for a while you get drawn into them against your will. And then there are the
personalities. Muffins they were not. And thank goodness for Rachel’s parents’
standing in the community, nobody dared breathe a word out of place around
these young and impressionable girls. There was a pouty Miss Ouri who griped
about the rain, the glue on the envelopes, etc., etc., etc. She presided over
the girls’ activities, simple craft projects, for the first couple of days. She
was niggling about the pieces of the banner that didn’t connect, ”I cut them to
perfection. You did not put them together just right.” Another time a porcelain
vase broke in the room. Must’ve cost $4.99 at the most, but she had to gripe
about it for hours, until Melissa said, ”Why? O, Ming pottery that must’ve
been,” and ended the sniffling. They began a little of the real campaign work
like making phone call, telemarketer stuff. Then it was three days off during
which they went through a whirlwind of Christmas parties. There they met Bill.
Or rather, Bill tripped over Rachel’s dress or shoe, crashing onto the chair
next to hers, apologizing profusely, and laughing a lot. Fireworks are hard to
miss and hard to conceal. We’re talking Monte Carlo
pyrotechnics. By the end of winter break every body knew. She had hoped to keep
her parents out of the loop but that was so not happening. On the last day
there the girls cooked dinner for the family and Bill, lamb shanks with oregano
and wild rice with mushrooms. It was too late to be shy Rachel had surmised.
Her sister had just come home. It was time to make introductions. She was at
William and Mary. Land
of Nod was beckoning at
ten. Nessie was on the Discovery Channel. They served some Baked Alaska for dessert
and Melissa and Z made their silly little goodbye speeches and withdrew to let
the family have some alone time. They flew back to their routines the next
morning.
January
consisted of exams. February was only twenty eight day so it helped. And there was
the mystique of the world famous mardi gras. The previous year Z had ended up
holed up in her room during mardi gras owing to some poor choices in food and
sleep patterns and the awful feeling of the possibility of running into people
she knew from campus at the parade. How disgusting to come face to face with a
teacher on Bourbon street.
This
year she was celebrating a birthday on Fat Tuesday. How bad could it be? She’d
be with her friends, sample some gumbo, try the king cake, make certain the
girls didn’t have one too many Sazeracs. She hadn’t counted on Clare saying,
“Look, Z is sampling the soup and licking the cones for once.”
“It’s
my birthday, moron.”
Nobody
ever gave Ira any trouble over her asian weirdness. They declared open season
on Z. Iravati totally knew it. She had this masterful knack of going from
social butterfly to fly on the wall in a nano second. She ducked all the
teasing, a smile on her face, enjoying the spectacle of Z’s mind becoming
playground for the sorority on brew. “That”, thought Z to herself, ”is my goal
for this year of my life – to learn to fly under the radar. It must be soooo
peaceful under there.” Z had, since she was born, been a human magnet for
bouquets and brickbats. She elicited a response no matter what room she walked
into. And hated it.
No
one had informed her yet that choices made under duress are usually bad ones.
March
was ho-hum, April, more of the same.
In
May the plans for the end of the year celebrations were advertized. Somewhere
in there was HWMBF’s name. She thought it might be a flyer recycled from the
previous year and the corrections were not made for the here and the now, but
who knows. It did leave something to be looked into, when the time came around.
There were exams to study for. The end of the year came along. It was time to
go home.
28.. CLARITY
Z
sat in the library a late wintry afternoon too tired to study, reading yet
again some Charlie Brown, when her eyes were drawn toward a bound publication
by the University Press lying face down on the table among a scattering of
magazines and books some sloppy brat had left behind. She reached for it for no
reason except to close it, help out the library help who would be doing so
after a long, long day. She almost jumped out of skin as she dropped the book a
few inches onto the table as it shut giving her the briefest look at the page
it had been left open to. She knew who that name belonged to. Her fingers
trembled as she feverishly looked for the page again. Mysterious and invisible
lenses creating major distortions had begun floating before her eyes as she
glanced at each page completely forgetting there was such a thing as a table of
contents. As her breathing returned to normal and her heart slipped back down
from her throat into her thorax she stopped the insanity and looked in the
right place and proceeded to the page in an orderly fashion. It was an article
on something she knew little about but she read it any way, a letter at a time,
her eyes moving attentively over each curve each straight each junction each
squiggle of every letter. She was completely besotted by the clarity of thought
and expression. She understood completely every thing she read. It was like the
five pages in question were illuminated. And somehow that had helped her gain
access to their meaning. She sat down, shut her eyes, and felt her mental
furniture rearrange itself in her cranium, windows being opened, fresh air
wafting in scented and healthful, sunshine too, a clock chimed in the room, she
had been transformed, born again, a new and improved Z, a more adept at
understanding the written word than ever before Z.
She
had never guessed at this in a year and a half. HWMBF had brought into her life
a certitude and a clarity born of it. It had happened so slowly she hadn’t realized
it was happening. If she so much as breathed a word of this to another living
or even non-living thing they’d think she was crazy so she never did share this
revelation with any body. It just amused her and intrigued her by turns. She
tossed it around in her head and studied it. And wasn’t quite sure what to do
with it. It was like she had found a magic toy part prism part periscope part
magic brush part golden compass part telescope part microscope part spaceship
part deck of magic cards and so on. This was fun. By and by it became too much
fun to keep under wraps, so in the most socially appropriate way possible she
began sharing it, obliquely, in metaphors, via analyses of whatever it was that
was the topic of discussion or food for thought. Denied the emotional aspect of
the experience, given her disposition, her decisions, her premonitions, and the
heavy duty grieving post loss of Ma and Kaku and home, she put her all into
teasing out the intellectual aspects of love, loss, hope and healing from what
was given to her. Good choice? Bad choice? No one really knew. She was often
told she was cold and emotionless and needed to cry. But if the tears don’t
come should you chop onions? She tried. Didn’t work for her. Thomas Hardy
couldn’t make her cry! The Blues had no power over her. Alcohol made her sick,
REALLY sick, from her one experiment with it, albeit a forced experiment,
having to guzzle down some beer to make her very sweet and kind neighbor happy
who had been more of a mother to her than anyone else in the weeks following
Ma’s passing.
Z’s
voice began to change. Very perceptibly. Her speaking voice grew old and weary.
Her singing voice got very finely tuned, smooth, mature, in emotion-rich in sound, and sparkling.
Suddenly she knew what the words meant and why they were strung together the
way they were and why a note followed the one before. She had been allowed into
the hallowed space of creativity that resides in the artist. That was a divine
space and she dwelled in it in awe and thankfulness. She couldn’t understand
what good she had done to deserve this blessing but loved it and accepted it
whole heartedly. Her fingers touched the violin and it sang, soared, danced,
like it had a life of its own. Her art had surpassed her and she stood in awe
of it. She knew she was an instrument of peace and accepted that responsibility
with genteel humility, not knowing again why she had been chosen but felt good
about it.
This
wouldn’t last forever but three years of this magic filled her with love and
awe and wonder enough to see her through plenty. Of course she did not know now
but this was a bounty. She, a green stick split down the middle, would bloom
where she had been planted, two branches reaching for opposite directions an
illustration of the dualistic nature of life, giving shade bearing fruit, the
Giving Tree, eventually.
A
year and a half from that day in the library there would come a day sitting on
the patio at a dear friend’s house when she would find this thing this awesome
clarity magnified manifold if only for a few fleeting moments and once again it
would come seeking her out on a cold winter’s day bright with sunshine and
laughter many many years from this day. It would come after her mind so murky
it had become dark as pitch and devoured all hope all happiness all capacity
for attaching right value to people and events everywhere. That kind of
confusion is so thick you lose all instinct for self-preservation and walk into
death traps if you are asked to. You have no idea when your dignity is being
assaulted. You lose your ego to a point you could be convinced of anything by a
little fudging a little conniving. The world joins in this game of minimizing
brutalizing testing ridiculing you and you are so past caring you don’t know if
you are dead or living. It is one of the saddest things that happens to people.
Maybe we are born trailing clouds of glory. In
this life we have to relinquish the old to be ‘born again’ and relive some of
that magic that came with the stork flapping his wings. Just don’t be embarrassed
about needing to learn to walk again or speak again. It will all be good.
29. TO SHATTER
THE SKY
Decorated war hero
who is mentioned in many history books for his bravery lay dead on the living
room floor, three of the four Sorbitrols he usually carried in his pocket still
there, his last conversations with family about how much better he’d feel dead
than alive. He was home alone at the time, the T.V. was on, he’d been watching
“Amistad” while drinking a cup of tea, the newspaper was next to him as usual,
and he’d rented “An American Tale” for his sons. The family was just plain
angry with him. Why did he not look for a cause to believe in? Was he not happy
they would have a daughter soon, Tsangpo, once the papers were done? He’d
promised his wife every time she was pregnant that if they’d have a daughter
he’d buy her diamond earrings but they ended up with double trouble and he
never did buy her any diamonds. He would’ve soon. Why did he not advance in his
career? Why did he make every mistake in the book and out of it? Why would he
not look at the glass as half full? God had given him so much, so much of
everything most people can only dream of, so why did he hate his life and drown
it in alcohol and smoke? Why did he walk about this earth like a soul lost in
the desert? WHY?
Why did we, his
family, who professed our love for him by berating him every time we saw him
for drinking too much and smoking too much never stop to ask him why he did
what he did? Why did we never let him speak for himself and listen with the
“love” we professed? Why did his “friends” egg him on to his worst escapades
knowing full well what it would eventually do to him and his children? Why were
we so mean to him? He was never mean to us.
Each question
burned a hole in her consciousness as she prepared to go home to the funeral
the family had known was coming but was nevertheless shocked at its coming so
soon. All those buddies who had poured him drinks, double with ice, after they
had been told that the doctor had said it was poison for him were there to sing
their eulogies and to pay respect to the surviving family. His sons were trying
to be men in their preteen years. His mother was inconsolable. His wife looked
lost, never one to make wise choices, needed help with little everyday choices
now. Z saw herself in the boys’ faces and knew how useless words would be at
this time and place. This moment was what it was and had to be accepted for
what it essentially was – an end of an era and the beginning of another. She
just hoped the world would be kinder to them than it had been to her. They were
very much younger than she had been when she had lost Ma.
But the world will
be what it is. Vultures will look for the wounded too young or too weak or too
stupid to move to a safe place. Vipers will nest where eggs are for the taking.
The Good Eggs never have the instinct to hatch in time. And so goes on the list
of the bad things that would follow in the dead Hero’s wake. He had lived the
life journey of Hercules of the Greek tradition, his labors completed, his
sacrifices made, his mistakes made, his accolades won, he had worn the shirt
dipped in poison and we all knew it now for sure. This is just how this story
plays out with the Herculeses of this world, give or take a labor or two.
That’s how the wheel of time had turned again. And yet again we watched and
waited. Just a little late we found him lying on the floor. He had been all
alone smoking his last cigarette. Once again we forgot this is not the dress
rehearsal, but this is real life. We watched him drowning and yelled at him
then for not knowing how to swim. He watched us too through the frayed veil of
tears and self-deception that was giving way to complete despair.
“If only we had
figured this out just a little sooner we might have saved his life,” thought Z.
”We’ve lost so much in losing him we’re
afraid to even think what might have been if he had just survived this darkness
that had taken over his life.”
The buzz among the
shloka spouting faction of the family was that her little cousin R had been
born on janamashtmi, Lord Krishna’s birthday, and had hence caused Kaku’s
untimely demise, the rationale being that those born on this auspicious day
carry a curse that causes the maternal uncle’s early death, just as Krishna had
killed his barbaric uncle who was a monster.
Z remembered one
night the summer before when he was very drunk yet very lucid and calm he had
said to Daddy, his big brother,”I know why bhowdi died. You killed her. I will
die too,” and he smiled a sad knowing smile. He knew that that remark had made
its mark. Then he saw Z was in the room so he smiled at her and asked, ”How is
aamaar shonaar Bangladesh?
Studying hard? You ought to.”
The family was
doomed to repeat history. Why? WHY?? WHY DIDN”T WE SEE IT COMING??? ARE WE
BLIND??? ARE WE EVEN HUMAN???
Z took the boys
under her wing all summer and saw to it they had someone to talk to when they
were feeling emotional, and did her best to help them catch up with their grade
level in reading and math. She found they gave her so much more in return than
she could have ever given them. They made her sit in the sandbox against her
will. They made her watch the stupidest movies ever and the laugh track they
provided could’ve been bottled and sold as an antidote to the worst case of
sadness ever for millions. They made up words every time they played scrabble
and awarded themselves made up scores. They taught her to laugh, to live, to
lighten up, and helped her lose a lot of the gravity that had kept her from
being her age. She’d begun to feel she was eighty-seven and a half before the
boys snapped her out of that mindset and reminded her she was of their
generation. From then on she resolved to deal with life with a sense of humor.
On the day of her cousin’s birthday she invited his friends and all the
children in the family to a surprise party and was most surprised herself when
the elderly couple from next door walked in unannounced to bless the boy on his
birthday and then turned to Z, ”Beti, life is a series of adjustments and you
are in charge of your own happiness. You will succeed in life. Tum koi maamuli
cheez thode hi ho.” That piece of
encouragement found a special place in her heart and was almost a motto for the
years to come. It would take a very resolute entity to kill her laughter or her
love of life.
Thaakumaa had
regressed into her youth and childhood it seemed for she much preferred the
company of her grandchildren to that of her children and the neighbors. Z and
her cousins loved that about her. She told them funny stories of the old
country. She shared their every joy and pain. She taught them all to sing “Tumi
Ekla Cholo Re”, and “Aamaar Shonaar Baangla” which made Z sad sometimes because
her uncle had called that ever since one day, when she was three, he had caught
her singing that in front of the mirror. She’d hated it then but now she missed
that.
At the end of each
day they all they all went their separate ways to deal with the darkness alone
each in his or her own way. Thaakumaa prayed and cried and talked to herself a
lot awake and in her sleep. They boys fought violently at times. Z cried and
sometimes she couldn’t. Daddy drank like there was no tomorrow and spoke
nothing to them that they wanted to hear so at the first sight of him returning
home they’d slink away to other rooms. If Z said one word to him about anything
that needed to be done, he’d ask her to take care of it. If she did, the step
mother would say, ”Live like a guest. You are a guest in this house.” If she
did report anything of this to her father, he’d wince, then smile, “See how
tough she is. She will make it impossible for you to come out of your room.” Z
had been watching the business come apart as the step mother completely
sidelined daddy and took over the reins. Daddy reported to her every minute
detail of every interaction he had with family, customers, and persons he
should not be interacting with, like a child reporting to his mother the
details of what had happened that day while she listen very carefully. It was
obvious she had cut a deal with him, and there was something very strange about
this woman, or what woman would lap up the sordid details of her husband’s
misdoings with such unusual interest. And just how weird was Daddy to choose to
be with a person like her? She took control over the employees who were hired
for reasons other than their talent for selling wood and treated them like
chattel. Ma had been such a contrast, looking out for the employees and their
families like they might be her own, helping with doctor’s bills, books for the
children, and such necessities. When Daddy said his new wife was entitled to
her bad behavior she knew exactly what he meant. In his third year of marriage
now he drank most of the day. It was difficult to find a good time to talk to
him because he never was completely sober. Relatives and friends took Z aside
and advised her to jump off this sinking ship. There was trouble brewing big
time. The boys were not cared for at all. It was a good thing Aunty S and Uncle
V decided to adopt them. It would take Z a good part of the year to stop making
excuses for Daddy, to see him for who he had become, realize the father she
knew was dead, accept and grieve that, and move on to seeking a life without
the first family.
If only Ma and Kaku
had known they’d shatter the sky as they left earth behind them they might’ve
felt differently about dying. But the uninitiated knows only so much. Pain like
love conquers all.
30. WORDS ARE
SILVER
Mama
had a little accident working in the kitchen, a little fall on a wet patch on
the linoleum, and was told to rest her back. Z being in town was the LP’s
chauffer two weeks. Rink side was an awesome place to be. The LP was working on
a routine set to a Strauss waltz. This was quite an experience for Z. There’s a
certain something in the air around people who are on a mission. This was a
group of people dedicated to their craft and it was in some way like watching
Degas painting ballerinas or perhaps Strauss writing his music. Z had her
gloves on, a wool jacket on, and was still a bluish shivering version of her,
thrilled to be there. The LP was a consummate performer. All those years of
practice showed in the first fifteen seconds, and now Z knew why she and her
parents had given their all to this endeavor, in the face of intense criticism
from the extended family. There had been the ignoring, the ridicule, the harsh
indictments, and this family had dealt with all of that with a smile and a nod
and a “pleasure to have met you”.
Just
when the LP could do no wrong in Z’s eyes, something happened. Z heard, albeit
a tired and wrung out LP since her mother had been unwell for ten days, offer
something like a rebuttal to one of the coaches’ corrections. The coach looked
sad and tired and did not persist.
When
they got out of earshot Z said, ”Do you ever think before you talk?”
“You
just talk. Why do you have to think before you talk?”
“You
sincerely mean you don’t think before you talk? Is that why you were so rude to
your teacher? You might want to apologize soon. Here she is trying to help you
and you are talking back to her?”
The
LP had by now realized she had made a booboo. “It just happened. I wish it
hadn’t. Sometimes this just happens to me. And she the kindest person this side
of the Mason-Dixon line.”
Z
thought to herself, “In our family it’s encoded in our genes. We succeed at
work and fail at life, all because we’re running our mouths.”
After
a while Z thought she’d give the LP a little gift of a didi-ism, a little
mental gimmick that she’d devised one afternoon when a very sagely friend in
high school, Nalini, had asked if thought preceded speech, or vice
versa, in her life, leaving her with a quote from some where “Do not speak
unless you can improve the silence”.
In Z’s imagination
a nice little box took shape. It was studded with gems and lined in black
velvet. She dropped every word that crossed her mind into it and the words
landed softly as silver coins. She closed the lid, waved a wand over it, and
then opened the lid again. If the coins remained there, she said what she had
planned on saying. If they had disappeared, she imagined they had turned into
golden silence.
31. JUNIOR
When do you know you’ve been moved from one room to another while you were sleeping? When you wake up. Duh.
Something
along those lines had occurred at Z’s home during the summer between
sophomore year and junior year. She was in unknown territory. Nothing
fit.
She
was biding her time. It wasn’t worth getting into fixing things any
more around here. Uncle E had said it, “The (saand) bull had destroyed
the china shop. No amount of glue is gonna take care of that mess.”
But
then Z had had two years to get used to the facts on the ground, so
what if she floated about on a cloud in the aery faery world of long
forgotten music and centuries old stories for the most part. There’s
something magical about 24 months, especially when it comes to adapting
to sea changes. It was a little over 24 months since Ma had died, just
under 24 months since Daddy remarried, and just under 24 months since
she had left for college. She was beginning to grow up, get comfortable
with traveling on her own, going to the bank by herself, getting a grip
on the various structures of community at large, so on. Disillusionment
with the world and family was the only unfortunate byproduct of this
process, but just how long do you wish to worship false idols???
The
curriculum had fallen in place for Z like a little bit of magic. Every
course was designed just for her it seemed to her. She took to academics
like a fish takes to water. Or a duck? Whatever the real phrase might
be, you get the point. By Thanksgiving she had arrived at a very
important decision. She would no longer go home and get sick to the
stomach. Instead she’d find a place to stay, and live in the library
until they threw her out. Her morale and her health improved
dramatically every time she left Fairview so
why get sick on purpose? Of course it had taken 24 magical months to
get to that realization/decision, but better late than never.
The
year saw all of the Juniors come into their own as individuals. Or
perhaps Z began to see them that way. The sorority definitely was more
mature and serious now. New York had
made quite an impact on Julie, they noticed right away. Her
understanding of the world of music had always been something to marvel
at. Now she talked like a virtuoso. She played like one too. She had
touched the soul of Music and you could see what magic that had done.
Rachel was hardly a giddy girl anymore. She saw herself more as the
other half of Bill who was a lawyer and political strategist in
training. She spent an awful lot of time with him and his parents at Georgetown.
That one fact now a year old had turned a very giggly gangly Rachel
into someone you could trust to give you sounder advice than your
grandmother could, now with her new perspective on Life. Iravati had MIT
on her mind a lot. Clare had set foot in all the time zones of U.S.A, Hawaii included,
as well as the MGM studios, also Universal and Nickelodeon. She had
plans to see the locations where Mystic Pizza, and Driving Miss Daisy
had been filmed. Melissa was toying with the idea of transferring to
Stanford where her twin brother was, if they’d accept her.
Melissa’s
twin brother had surprised her one day showing up at dinner time while
they had been eating beef stroganoff. He was a character. To him the
sorority was an extension of Melissa. There were just more Melissas to
harass. He had a week off so he decided to spend it with Melissa but he
wouldn’t say he missed her. The twins had never been apart for more than
two weeks at a time before they had left for college. While she was at
class he wandered about blending into the crowd and regaled them with
stories about his day in the evenings. His most favorite character in
this parade of characters in his stories was an older unavailable ‘Miss
Kegel’. That was most likely not her real name. She was with, according
to him, ‘Mr. Legally Blind’. Somewhere along that storytelling hour of
the day he had figured out Z never fully understood his jokes, not for
24 to 48 hours at least. He, however, had a Marauder’s Map (Harry
Potter) of her mind so he knew where the blind alleys and blind corners
were. He’d pitch his stories at just such spots much to his and the
sorority’s amusement. Z, who prided herself on decoding people’s mental
grammar within five minutes of meeting them felt very humiliated. Her
head was getting transparent she was sure. People who have recently lost
someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have
seen that look on their own faces. The look is one of extreme
vulnerability, nakedness, openness. And this transparent person can see
things no one else can, like they can see Thestrals now, and cannot see
things most everybody else can. It is a pretty unfortunate situation for
the bereaved.
On
Saturday they walked down to the ice cream parlor. Outside, waiting
perhaps for other people, were ‘Miss Kegel’ and her ‘legally blind’
significant other, Melissa’s brother pointed out to them. Mr. Legally
Blind was hot. He was nothing like the doddering persona with a cane
that Z had imagined. Her first impression of him was a tauter, bronzer,
smarter Gilderoy Lockheart. Miss Kegel was older than she had thought,
with tightly wound boxes where her biceps, behind, and calves should’ve
been, that made you want to scream, ”Lay off the HGH sister.”
“I thought you were jealous of Mr. Legally Blind,” said Z.
“Because
you, Z, are legally blonde,” said the Jewish brat to the Indian girl
and laughed so hard he walked into a lamppost.
That night they went out to a traditional Louisiana dinner
and then walked the French Quarter, playing host to their out of towner
guest, enjoying the change in perspective that comes with such an
excursion. They each knew they wouldn’t be here for ever. The time for
leaving their home away from home was getting closer each day. Z watched
the rising crescent ♫moon over Bourbon Street♫ and vowed she’d always
cherish the happier moments savored in this city.
The
year brought lots of fresh ideas, new ways of bending ideas, new tools
for breaking open ideas, and such. Z felt like she was on a thrill ride
in a carnival intellectually. She met new people who introduced her to
new people and suddenly she found herself surrounded by an amazing group
of some very sharp minds. Her waking hours were filled with sudden
newness like spring showers after much aridity. For the first time in
her life she saw the fabric of life interwoven with art, science,
history, geography, religion, politics, and all of human striving and
human consciousness.
32. SOLAR ECLIPSE
Z
set aside her comic book and tired of ♫chasing pavements♫ took the
nicest path from the library back to her dorm, a green mile -- grassy
knolls, manicured lawns, sidewalks covered with clover, vacant lots
between buildings draped with kudzu – for your walking pleasure if you
were willing to hop step jump detour duck etc. It brought perks with it –
a little pond with algae and a water lily or two, low hanging wisteria
for the picking this time of the year, dandelions to play wishing games
with, four leaf clovers for the lucky ones, and a short stretch of an
almost yellow brick road. If only she had those magic slippers.
This
last year of college behind her she would be ready for the real world.
Being a real person in training can get very tiresome, even boring, and
embarrassing, by the time one turns twenty three, like having training
wheels too long. Gung ho about doing job interviews she had to rein in
her mind and keep it on the page before her nose.
She
looked up at the blank blue wall in front of her and saw HWMBF sitting
on a white chair, a little table with a black rotary telephone on it, a
young lady she recognized from years ago in elementary school seated on a
divan, and to her utmost surprise she heard her own name being spoken!
She blinked, many more times than two or three, and resumed studying.
A
fortnight or so passed. It was afternoon again. She was slaving at her
test prep again. And a swarm of angry little miniscule insects jet black
and shiny showed up in front of her and spoke to her in a voice as
commanding as the Snow Queen’s that she recognized right away after all
those years, “Z, let him go.” Z replied, “I have. I will,” and followed
through.
Z
could no longer understand the words on the page so she put her head
down on the desk and said to herself, ”So this was why I needed to see
that -- to put the matter to rest and seal the hushed casket of my
soul.”
Once again after many long years she felt the light in the sunlit was simply not enough to live by. When the lamp is shattered the light in the dust lies dead. And that which is dead feels nothing.
33. MISPLACED PACKAGES
Z
would be flying home with extra baggage if she carried all her things
with her so she decided to ship the books and clothes she didn't need
and to that end was to be found waiting in line at the post office. In
walked an old friend who was so completely out of context she took an
extra second to say hi, what with the sunglasses and visor and all. He
was leaving for Fairview that afternoon having attended a conference in
town over the week. He asked if she knew his polo playing buddy just got
married?
Z said, "Of course."
"Who told you?"
"I must be psychic," she said.
"No, seriously," he laughed,"who told you?"
"No one did."
"Ah,
okay," he seemed to accept the fact Z was not willing to disclose her
sources, not for a moment suspecting Z was perhaps telling the truth.
"Honestly!" insisted Z.
He said the bride was from Fairview.
And that confirmed to Z she was in fact not "seeing" things.
She asked him the bride's name.
"We went to the same kindergarten school,"said Z nonchalantly.
Her friend nearly jumped out of his skin,"You know her??"
"Why, yes. We sat together first semester in kindergarten, until the homeroom teacher decided it wasn't a very good idea."
"I can imagine," he laughed heartily.
"She's pretty," said Z.
"Some might think so," he said, he said, looking very concerned.
"You know Z, I think you had a narrow escape."
It was Z's friend's turn to go to the counter. It was almost closing time. They said goodbye, and see you in Fairview.
When
Z put her pen to paper she realized her home address had become so
alien to her it took her a moment to recall the street number where her
house stood.
Z
had stashed away some cash from her summer jobs and as a present to
herself took a trip to Colorado with her roommate and a few friends to
“just get away from it all” there being a two week period of nothing
between exam date 4 and exam date 5, a scheduling error overlooked for
too long, and could not be remedied at this late hour. Back at their
dorm she found a small package, her mail, and a note from her friend N
the TA’s wife, waiting for her in the lobby. The note simply said, ”Call
him.”
“What
does she know??” thought Z to herself. Then she opened the package from
her step mother and found some homemade “imperishable” snacks in
ziplock bags, and two letters from aunts who lived in the old country, a
birthday card from a friend from high school, and an invitation to a
wedding back east she couldn’t possibly attend.
The
biggest shocker for the day was that she has assumed incorrectly the
date on the wedding. She knew she had lied to her friend from Illinois and
that was why. But she really had had no idea one little white lie,
simply going from the present tense to the past, can affect a person’s
reality so vastly. ”But what of that? What’s decided is decided. N knows
about the matter. How does she?? “
Curiosity
got the better of her and she called N and asked. There was no
mistaking what N knew and what she thought of it. She was plainspoken
always and now she was as direct as anybody could possibly be.
“Call
him. Tell him what you just told me. It seems very likely he does not
know half of what you just told me. See what he thinks of it. I know you
think it might be too late to call but give life a chance to surprise
you. You could always say you called to say goodbye. There is something
called closure that people need before they can move on to the next
chapter in life. You and I, because of our cultural heritage, sweep
these things under the rug but it never works. Call him now before it
really is so late it becomes inappropriate to do so.”
Z
was horrified at the thought of having to do this, as much as she was
torn by the need to just talk to him. Realistically, she’d look like a
crazed idiot, so calling was pretty much out of the question. N was her
friend and firmly believed the situation merited at least a phone call.
The dilemma in Z’s head resolved itself with a, “How can I possibly say
goodbye to someone I have never said hello to?”
“Sorry I forgot you have no heart.”
Stung by those words Z sat on the floor and after a long pause said, ”My heart refused to cross the mighty Mississippi so
I left it there on the riverbank and came here by myself because the
rest of me has to carve a life out of what I have been given.
“Do you want me to come over?”
“No. I just need some time alone. “
Memories of Colorado made perfect sense now. In the deep of REM sleep she had heard a whisper in her ear, “Wake up, will you.”
Not
quite awake and not quite asleep she found herself in a comfortable
space, like it might be the most natural place for her to be, that
wasn’t her home, nor her dorm, nor this hotel room, but a place where
she felt a sense of belonging.
The
exact same thing had happened the following day. The same wake up call,
the waking up to a beautiful place, but just so sleepy from the high
altitude effect she took a little longer to wake up. In five minutes the
replay was derailed. She thought she had done or said something wrong.
She started to drift back into the hotel room.
It
took Z a few moments to put things in order in her freshly woken up
head. She was wide awake now. She could see the outlines of objects
against the light from the city glare coming in the window. Her roommate
was snoring as usual. She could feel the textures on her quilt and the
headboard she held on to as she sat up. She heard, clearly,
unmistakably, the words, “Z, I don’t know why this has happened. I don’t
understand why I am doing this.”
Z
turned the lamp on and then turned it off again. Daybreak was hours
away. She had time to think, to reflect, to neatly package this memory
in mothballs and put it away. She had no earthly idea how her
interpretation of this moment would affect the rest of her life. As
always she had taken the blame entirely on herself.
“If
I do call now it would be weird to the max. I’d cry. I’d offer to fly
on wings to be by his side if he so much as suggested it. It would be
such a soap opera. After all the near misses this is the last one I
guess and it looks like I need to accept this just as it is. He had
three whole years to make this decision, and if this is his decision I
can accept it for what it is. It looks like the goodbyes, at least on
his part, have already been said. I’ve watched other people go through
this and I know I can handle it. If N wants to call him she can do it of
her own free will. If she does reach him and he asks to speak with me
I’ll talk, but not otherwise. Lack of protest on my part was
acquiescence N would surely understand. It’s a cultural thing. ”
A song floated about in the darkness in the distant future.
♫“If
I never knew you I'd be safe but half as real … If I never knew you … I
would never have a clue how at last I'd find in you the missing part of
me … If I never knew you I'd have lived my whole life through, empty as
the sky never knowing why, lost for ever. ♫
35. PROMISES PROMISES
Expected
to vacate dorm rooms the same weekend as exams ended Z had to find a
place to stay the extra week she had planned to stay to attend the
annual bluegrass festival the city hosted. It gave her a week to
transition between one world and another, college and home.
N
invited her to stay the week and Z gratefully accepted. She felt like
she could use a safe house to fall apart. N being the one person in the
world who understood and sympathized and seemed to have some idea of the
real world facts as well Z couldn’t wait to talk to her at length. Once
she got to her place however Z figured she wasn’t designed to have
meltdowns before an audience. She couldn’t fall apart, come unglued, let
her tears flow. She felt better just holding it all in. When N tried to
get her to talk she gave her the royal brush off.
She
had in her own mind pooh-poohed the Colorado incident and related
happenings as nonsense but she had to finally admit to herself she was
under so much stress she needed this break more than she had previously
imagined. Going straight home would’ve been like going from the beach
into a cryogenic pressure chamber so she might’ve gone into thermal
shock. Add to that the oddest question in the world - How do you accept
the fact that you are hurting when there is no logical reason to be
doing so? – and you have a situation. Your life is falling apart and you
cannot believe your life is falling apart. You cannot believe your life is falling apart. And you cannot believe that beyond the shadow of a doubt your life IS falling
apart. You are drowning in a desert; you’re screaming but not a sound
can be heard; you are praying but there is no God, or so it seems; the
emptiness is oppressive; you’re sensitive beyond imagination but you
don’t know if you’re dead or alive. And yet every minute comes and goes
on schedule. Small delights like the perfectly browned toast or
fireflies in the backyard must be honored. Daily routines must be
honored. People in your life must be honored. You imagine that when you
wake up in the morning this will end like a bad dream. Except this is no
dream. And this is not night going into morning. This is when the dark
night of the soul is just getting started. It’s about five o’clock on a
cold winter’s evening for your soul, except this is about the same time
as the summer solstice in the real world. And you are young and blessed
in the eyes of the majority because the majority see with just their
eyes. A few, a very small minority, of all the people you meet, see with
their hearts and know you are not. The incongruities never end.
There
was just one more thing that she couldn’t understand. N, who awoke at
four each day to get a few hours of reading and her hour of jogging done
before her son woke up, would hover around the couch where Z slept at
just about five thirty. As Z’s eyes fluttered open she’d say, “Z, when
he contacts you don’t respond. Promise me now you won’t. You know how
men are. I don’t want you getting hurt.” She’d repeat that again every
evening, just when Z would begin to drift off. Z marveled at N’s ability
to know exactly when she was waking up and when she was nodding off.
“Comes with the territory of motherhood I suppose,” she thought amazed
and amused in equal parts.
Z
humored her three days and then laughingly asked if she was programming
her using some technique she’d learned like sleepytime mind control or
something. N told her she was dead serious. That begged the question did
she know anything? N swore she had not heard of him since he’d left and
in fact she had never actually met him. Her husband knew him somewhat
because every evening when he took their son to the park HWMBF would be
walking to his apartment at about the same time. She said she just knew
it in her bones that one day Z would hear from him. It could be soon. Z
thought that was bizarre. Twenty days ago N had asked her to call him.
That Z had thought was bizarre. Now she was asking her to make this
strange promise over and over on a strict schedule and that was equally
bizarre, in fact more. All the same Z promised fifteen times over seven
and a half days she wouldn’t respond if he ever contacted her. “N is a
sweetheart but overprotective and just a tad soft in the head. How
silly. Why on earth would He Who Does Not Know My Name contact me, at
this time in his life??” thought Z to herself. “He might not know whom
to contact, logically speaking, since he does not know my name you know.
These thoughts, these feelings, the premonitions, N, were all stuff and
fluff. As far as I can tell nothing ever happened. All I have to do now
is remember that very important fact. Other than N nobody seems to take
it seriously. If they did someone might’ve actually said something that
made sense in all these years. The family found out God knows how and
just says mean stuff to hurt my feelings and get a reaction out of me
like they do with everything else. If I stop reacting they’ll stop
saying things. By and by every one will forget. I’m as silly as a bear
of very little brain. When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you
Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very
Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open
and has other people looking at it. So this will never get out into the open.”
The
day she was to leave N cooked them a traditional breakfast of idlis and
chutney which the four ate on the patio in the cool of the early
morning hours. N’s son woke up too to say goodbye to Z. They would drop
her off at the airport. Z would be on her way to another facet of her
worldly experience and be back for the very last year of a privileged
existence as student.
For
some reason undecipherable intangible indeterminate as Z saw it, she
saw her surroundings with a degree of clarity she had never before
experienced. The whites were whiter, the colors were brighter, the
patterns showed in sharper relief. The sun just rising from a point in
the horizon adjacent to the oak tree festooned with Spanish moss lit up
the world, and Z saw splendor in the grass, dewdrops afire, more
brilliant than the world’s most precious diamonds, dangling from the
most impossibly green grass of summer, and scattered among them a few
acorns adventuresome enough to stray so far from the tree. The two
little resin bunnies that sat by the patio had a visitor, a curious
young squirrel who had woken up bright-eyed bushy-tailed to explore his
universe, the ends of his fur and whiskers aglow in the morning sun like
an aura of the deified around him. N’s son had named the bunnies Peter
and Benjamin. Button mushrooms sprouted at their feet making them seem
very real and very at home.
Z
took it all in and savored it. She would always remember how good this
felt. N and her husband had cared for her like they cared for their son
and that had restored her in immeasurable ways. All it had taken was a
little love, a little nurturing, a little Zen, some Suprabhatam, some
genuine friendship, wholesome home cooking, a little fun, all at once in
sensible portions like a well balanced meal, even though this was a
very difficult time in her life, to fine tune a dial in her awareness,
even if for a few hours, to give her a glimpse of what was possible if
those conditions persisted. Unknowingly she internalized that newfound
knowledge.
So by and by Z forgot everything else, her promises to N, what people had said, what she had thought, what happened, her dreams – all were laid to rest. She’d made peace with them all. The clarity remained in areas of her life where love flowed freely, but in cold harsh hate-filled circumstances her eyes, her heart, her brain, her nose, her ears, all stopped functioning. She ached for a day when all would be well and tried to take the good stuff and sneak it, then force it, into the cold arid zones of her existence. Try as she might she always got beat back, with greater force and malevolence each time, over many years. Memories of happiness can warm your heart only so long. One needs real happiness to live by after a while. The hatred induced venom in her and it was spreading like kudzu and slowly choking her as she began to struggle to survive. She hoped Life would hurry up and show her the way to happier days. But Life, like rivers, knows this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day. All the strife and fear and stupidity and falsehoods would have to be leeched out of her before the good stuff could find a home in her awareness. Life had someplace to take her nice and slow without telling her where or why or exactly when. All the artifice in the world wouldn’t change a thing.
36. Z AND HER SECOND BRUSH WITH FEMINISM
Z
was Amtraking to a friend’s wedding. Bored with looking out the window
she pulled out a book and then put it away as the lady next to her
looked like she was about to start a conversation with her, and Z mostly
preferred chatting to reading when distracted and soooo did not want to
appear rude. Through the small talk (about Z going to a wedding) and
its meanderings she gathered that the lady and her friend were not
married but a couple, and would not marry since the institution of
marriage was suspect. Her boyfriend nodded in agreement with everything
she said. She said she had been raised to believe in equality and love
for all. Z began to really, really like the people. They were moral to a
fault about their vegetarianism which made Z squirm about being a token
vegetarian and essentially a bogus animal lover because she ate one
every now and again. They were so kind to her she felt weird having
gotten used to being the kind one in any interaction all of her life.
They were very knowledgeable, and had clearly defined ideas about life,
politics, and everything in between unlike our inadequate flaky little
dilettante who was always ‘one the one hand but on the other’- ing
anything of consequence. Z felt, by and by, like she had promises to
keep and miles to go before she sleeps, literally and figuratively. How
often in life do we have prophetic moments that we don’t know were
meaningful in any way at the time, let alone profound? ♫The answer my
friend is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind. ♫ The
beautiful couple had reminded her of a pristine innocence she had begun
to lose since the day Ma died. They had awakened in her a long forgotten
dream, a soulful song, an idealism, a can-do activism she greatly
admired but had not been able to cultivate in her own persona, a wisdom,
an extra special brand of humanism that was heady and sweet.
An
elderly gentleman sitting next to this wonderful man looked like he
should be wearing his shirt collar backwards but he wore the loudest
pink tartan shirt, blue jeans, sounded exactly like Dennis Haysbert and
made people around him feel they were in good hands. He nodded and
smiled and flicked off imaginary motes of dust off his saxophone in the
aisle and tolerated the young people.
The
lady excused herself to go to the smoking car. Z buried her nose in her
book. Just a few hours more and she’d be a bridesmaid with Rachel
getting married and most likely ditching college to move to another
continent to be with her war correspondent husband. Z thought Rachel’s
not getting that degree she’d worked toward for three and a half years
was silly but she was happy to see her so happy. Z wished she could be
half as happy.
The
elderly gentleman cleared his throat and struck up a conversation with
the young man. “Man talk,” thought Z and stayed out of the interaction.
But blowin’ on a wind came to her this astute observation by the younger
of the two men who upon being asked why he was ideologically opposed to
concept of marriage said, ”Now why would you buy the cow if you could
get the milk for free?”
37. THE BAKE SALE
Z
was very happy Aunty S, Uncle V and the LP would be coming to her
graduation. Daddy couldn’t come because they had already planned a huge
party for their fourth wedding anniversary and it was too late to
cancel, RSVPs having already come in by the dozens. “It would’ve been
nice to have Daddy here too and then go back to the big celebration at
home, since it was a catered event at a club anyways,” she thought. But
he said they had to be there to make sure the caterers got things just
right. So much for missed celebrations. She had missed every diwali,
holi, pujo, almost every birthday and wedding since she’d left for
college. Everybody does that. And valedictorians cannot, unless they’re
superhuman, be partying at school and at home.
This
last year of college behind her she would be ready for the real world.
Being a real person in training can get very tiresome, even boring, and
embarrassing, by the time one turns twenty three, like having training
wheels too long. Gung ho about doing the resume and pantyhose routine
she had to rein in her mind and keep it on the job at hand, graduate.
♫Graduation
Day♫ dawned hot humid hazy like a large pot of crawfish on the boil. It
was surreal. The graduates were deliriously happy and a little anxious,
or most were. Some kids just know how to navigate this world. They do
not get the willies. But then there are the multitudes who go through
life with varying degrees of insecurity slowing them down to varying
degrees. Some do a better job of concealing it, that’s all. Miss Z was
the kind who could hide nothing. Her jitters and her joy showed in their
full glory, mixed emotions sending out mixed signals. When most of the
population learns to get better at concealing their thoughts and
emotions and motives Z spent her youth becoming more transparent. Was
that good thing or a bad thing? Was this Existential Dualism at its
dysfunctional best/worst? You the reader are the judge of that.
The
party of four was making their way to the outdoor arena set up for the
ceremony. They were just a little late because the women had to share a
single hair dryer. So now they had to park several blocks away and walk.
Just around a corner they came upon a little group of people. They
thought it might be the place to pick up programs or water bottles but
it wasn’t. This was a bake sale. No ordinary sale too. It was Z’s first
sighting of a real bake sale of this variety and it did something to her
somewhere deep in her soul. Very quickly however, between her rational
self and her spiritual self there was a compromise she didn’t like but
accepted anyway. The loss of dignity her soul experienced was quickly
glossed over with an urbane “But this is the real world.” And she walked
on in her high heels, daring the muggy day and mortarboard to mess with
her hairdo. She’d sprayed it so liberally with Extreme Hold that it
stayed in place as good as Hillary’s. As her spikes sank into the soggy
lawn she had a song starting to play in her head. She couldn’t remember
where she’d heard it or how exactly it went, but the line♫ It suck to be
me ♫ kept coming back to her like a refrain when she really ought to
have been mentally rehearsing her speech.
38. OH WHAT A FINE MESH I AM
Young adults have heard of identity and enmeshment and such but they are just too young to know what those words r-e-a-l-l-y mean. And so Z was completely stunned by the realization, now looking back at the last couple of years, that while she had fiddled, Rome had burned. Fumbling among the ashes she found just one surviving object, a fine mesh, through which she sieved the contents of her daily world, the words she spoke, the words people spoke to her, the news on television, the sun, the moon, the stars, everything....
Upon closer inspection she saw that the wires that ran cross-wise were her concept of herself, and her concept of HWMBF. Destroying it made no sense because, it was, like all psychic phenomena, indestructible. One could put it away though, like an old worn out something one no longer know what to do with. Some had happy memories, some had anger and bitterness, some hundreds of photographs and trinkets, some broken vows, and she had this fine mesh no one could see.
Upon closer inspection she saw that the wires that ran cross-wise were her concept of herself, and her concept of HWMBF. Destroying it made no sense because, it was, like all psychic phenomena, indestructible. One could put it away though, like an old worn out something one no longer know what to do with. Some had happy memories, some had anger and bitterness, some hundreds of photographs and trinkets, some broken vows, and she had this fine mesh no one could see.
39. ARE THE THOUGHTS BETWEEN YOUR THOUGHTS REALLY THOUGHTS ?
40. BILLS
All
packed and ready to leave for home she still had one favor to return to
an aunt, by way of which she had to go on a customary blind date with
her aunt's colleague's brother whose uncle knew her Daddy, a "nice fair
Brahmin boy", as her aunt had described him. South asians, by the time
we are twenty-two, master the art of meeting and greeting an assortment
of oddballs sent their way by well-meaning relatives. One more or one
less means nothing to us. It's the price we pay for fresh biryani and we
are okay with the trade-off. Not wanting to make it the formal occasion
families in India will turn it into bringing out the best china and
silver and silks Z's aunt decided they would meet at a restaurant, so if
things didn't work out, it would remain just another introduction,
rather than ending up on the chalk board as a strike out. She instructed
Z to meet him at a given time at a given place and so Z sat there reading a "Calvin and Hobbes" when he showed up. Z thought to herself, "Auntyji, not this one in a million years."
With
that decision having been made Z was completely at ease and made an
effort to help the poor unfortunate soul from Nebraska find his peace so
he could stop stuttering. Over the course of dinner he told her about
his family and asked her about hers. With a plane to catch in three
hours the meeting was hurried and Z got up to leave. He excused himself
to go to his car to bring back a camera. As he walked in the door Z
looked up and was startled to hear Da Voice again,"Whether you like it
or not, this is your husband."
Funding
for the arts had been cut so even merit scholarships in the field were
fewer than ever. Realistically speaking money was a necessary evil.
Daddy was not going to say no if she asked but would she want to ask for
two more years of college? And then there was this ultimatum from Daddy
one Sunday afternoon when he had come out of his bedroom, a gin and
tonic in hand, he had walked up to her as she sat at the dining table
eating her lunch alone after a morning out with friends, “Marry the
bloke from Nevada or else. He is my friend’s nephew. If you don’t,
expect nothing from me. You are on your own. You will not be married
from this house. I have done enough for you.” The unknown quantity from Nebraska was
suddenly the unopened unknown Christmas gift. At least one could hope.
Then there was the little matter of the pact she had made with herself
years ago, to ask God for nothing for herself. Following which a few
years ago she had left the dilemma of the ‘who’ and ‘when’ of matrimony
in God’s hands. Now, pushed to make a decision, she had given herself a
deadline as suggested by most of her family, her twenty-fourth birthday.
She made up her mind to accept as divine verdict that which came her
way by that hallowed day. And here it was, approved and stamped by the
family, most friends, and Da Voice. She was just being ‘selfish’ or
‘stupid’ or ‘swollen-headed’ if she was going to wait any longer. Then
there was the question, ”Do I go do the Greenwich Village thing or do I do the yuppie thing? Bohemia?
Academia? Suburbia? Which? Which witch is which witch? Dorothy was
confused. She had definitely strayed off the yellow brick road. Here
were no ruby shoes, no Toto, no body that understood the aftermath of a
tornado. The chorus at home sang sweetly of the luckiest girl alive who
had been blessed by the gods and her dead mother in spite of being so
spoiled and bratty. Hear again, hear again the Greek chorus speaking of
Z’s luck. In an effort to stay alive among other things she caved in and
went with the traditional wisdom of getting married “at the right time”
because her aunts were getting gray hairs worrying she’d be too old to
marry off once she turned twenty-five. The white picket fence and the
baby carriage had never before been such a source of angst and hope.
Academia could never provide enough distraction to take her thoughts
away from the thoughts of applesauce and lullabies. “Bobos in Paradise we shall be” was her new mantra. So one afternoon she picked up the phone and accepted the proposal of marriage from Nebraska.
Friends
would have to be informed, good byes had to be said, she wouldn’t be
able to meet them for cappuccinos at fifteen minutes notice any more.
She
received thirty five overwhelming be-knight-ments on the occasion of
her earning an Mrs., many more than she had received on earning her
baccalaureate and two scathing reviews. Two to thirty five the nays
lost. One from Rashmi, Rush Me, of the Rush Me and Slow Me duo from Ma’s
circle of friends, recently widowed after eighteen years of being
married to Mr. Chips. She predicted that with that kind of attitude
she’d last no more than six months in Nebraska,
so either her attitude had to change or her decision had to be revoked.
“Have you any idea how happy I was when I was engaged to be married?
Have you any clue how happy most any girl is at this time in her life?
You look like some one just died.”
“If happiness is an attitude and not an emotion,” thought Z, “ I can develop a happy attitude,” and left.
The
other nay came from Bill, Rachel’s husband, who had surmised she was
thinking about getting hitched eavesdropping on Rachel’s side of the
conversation so when he came to the phone he had a strategy forming in
his head, it became apparent to Z a little later. He made no attempts at
small talk, launching straight into, “Remember the after campaign party
before we were given the shove off and sent to the kiddie table. We
were at my parents’ table fifteen minutes. Every body who was at that
table wants to know what you are doing with your life. The Governor’s
wife asked if you’d read the Whitman book she asked you to read. She
told me to ask you. My father wants to know if you minored in music. The
new campaign in underway. My parents would be delighted to have you
travel with them. And Zach. Rachel does not want me to say another word
about it but now I will. She’s saying something about religious
convictions. What are you doing girl? What has happened to you in the
last six months? Have you lost your mind?”
“I have lost my way. This is my best hope yet. Ever body else, in my family, seems to think so too.”
“And you, what do you think?”
“I think I’ve made a good decision.”
“You didn’t tell me you had already made your decision, or I wouldn’t have said what I just said.“
“It’s
okay. Friends need to be honest with each other no matter what. Since
you’ve cut to the bottom line, to put your mind at ease I’ll tell you
the real story. I have a complicated set of convictions, part country,
part rock ‘n roll, between cultures, between generations, and what I
need most in my life right now to just stay sane and alive is the pitter
patter of little feet. If all else was pared away from my life I could
live with the loss, but this one thing consumes me day and night. I
won’t expect you to understand this if you can’t, but please just hear
me out. Your brother is one of the finest people I’ve ever met but he’s
as passionate about his beliefs as I am about mine, and let’s not
pretend that three of every four of our fundamental beliefs run contrary
to one another.”
As
she was talking she realized Da Voice had been right. She was doing
what he had said she would, and how. Things were falling in place
effortlessly. She was edging closer and closer to her new life and
didn’t know how.
She
had needed to know more about what her new life would look like, so
over fifty phone calls she figured she was to spend most of the day in
the wigwam, associate with academics, and get used to the new skyline,
which she knew from hearsay and T. V., was beautiful, remote, flat,
beautiful.
“Worrying
about the inevitable is the stupidest thing in the world so worrying is
not on my agenda. I’ll give it my best, and like anything else, when
you give something your best, it gives its best back to you, and so will
marriage,” she proceeded to sermonize to Bill.
“If
you were to bear witness with your own eyes, just once, the lives of
people here among famine and war you would change forever. You would no
longer have this skewed perception of life. I can try to talk my Dad
into getting you a hall pass of sorts but I doubt he’ll oblige. So
imagine for a moment you are not you, but someone documenting your life.
The first thing you’d do is stop feeling so f^%!^) sorry for yourself.”
“I’m not feeling sorry for myself.”
“You’re acting like you do. Victimhood has claimed you ha?”
Z
hardly knew what to say. She had been accused of pretty much everything
in her short life, but playing victim was something no one had ever
thought of accusing her of before. Here was Bill, in a war zone,
documenting the lives of children there, telling her over a satellite
phone she was playing victim. She hated him. She was “playing”? What
bullshit. He’d never understand so might as well let it go, get to
downtown for trousseau fittings.
She
began winding down the conversation to a farewell speech at the end of
which he said, ”You can be trusted to make the right decision even with a
gun to your head so I guess you made the right decision. Have a good
life.”
Z
decided that now that Bill and Rachel were living in a place where
people thought so differently from the way they did, by and by they’d
understand her decision and absorb the underlying principles behind
arranged marriages. They’d stop thinking she’d turned into this icky
mail order bride. With that she got up to check the to-do list for the
day and figured it would be best to take the train into town.
With
an hour to kill she bought the daily newspaper and opened it to her
favorite section. The bloke sitting next to her was surreptitiously
reading the headlines she gathered as she put the paper down to look out
the window and he tapped at the picture of carnage in a populous area,
and said, “Why does brother blow up brother in these parts of the
world?”
“Very
astute, very forthcoming, very American,” thought Z, and decided she’d
like that discussion. She knew she could pass for Arab with just the
right emphasis on her ‘kh’ ’s. Or Latina if
she pleased, but she decided to put away that childishness and act her
age. She didn’t say much except mirror his sentiment. She thought to
herself, ” These issues are waaaaaay toooooo complicated for a ten
minute discussion. Cain and Abel are still under scrutiny and no body
knows for sure yet why that whole sad story came about. If people born
of the same parents can kill one another what is to be said of
neighboring nations? And then there’s the problem of identity. Thakuma
gets so agitated hearing of the ongoing violence between India and Pakistan. Perhaps her identity includes both nationalities, having being born in Bangladesh. To her the division of India seems
a questionable decision in light of its aftermath. And all that
questioning comes from fifty years of being an American most likely. Yet
brother fights brother in every century in every part of the world.
Why? Why do people select one something from all applicable labels to
represent themselves? And go to war over it? If you ask Thakuma where
she’s from she says’ Fairview’ or ‘India’ or ‘Bengal’ depending on who you are. To a Bengali she’s ‘Baangaal’, meaning from the region now known as Bangladesh.
My violin teacher chose western classical music as her sole source of
identity and has no patience with any other definition of herself, and
that is after being Polish, Russian, German, Russian again, American,
atheist, agnostic, and a semi-believer exploring Judaism, Orthodox, and
Baptist faiths at subsequent points in her life, having lived in Minsk
for fifty years or more before moving to the USA. What if these two old
ladies met for tea? For a samovar and glucose biscuit summit?”
She’d reached her destination and it was time to ponder sequins and petticoats, and ask again,
- “Am I happy?”
- “Am I happy?”
“Yes I am. Rashmi, thank you for that.”
- “Am I a victim?”
“Not
in the least. I made a decision based on popular vote, and the
resounding applause thereafter, and that little oracle Da Voice.”
She
skillfully excised from her awareness the fact that those who had cast
their ballot in favor of this decision had never ever met the man they
had made the decision in favor of. They had spoken just once to a friend
of the family from the old country who had known the boy for three
months and decided that their daughter would be blissfully happy with
him despite her misgivings.
Like
the sands that slip noiselessly through the narrow waist of an
hourglass, Z slipped through the eye of a needle from one world into
another. “This is the real world, and in this world this is how the
wheels turn.” She had thought that thought a bunch of times ever since
Ma had died. That thought was getting as comfortable as an old shoe. She
lost sight of the larger perspective of the larger world and favored
the miniscule details of daily humdrum things.
Over
the years she would, every time she encountered an uncomfortable truth
about herself, excise it from her awareness and it would look an awful
lot like an eyeball staring into space so she’d feel all wrong about
throwing it away, so she’d save it in a jar filled with formaldehyde.
One day the jar would turn Argus eyed, a thousand watchful eyes staring
back at her, she who a thousand points of light had dwindled to a single
point of stillness.
She
had allowed the power of consensus and the power of convention to hold
complete sway over her individuality. She had surrendered her personal
vision to the care of those convention said knew better. That was
logical enough for now no matter how soul-killing that was. All her
failings had been pointed out to her so many times by so many people she
could not possibly be right about anything she imagined. If her whole
being was revolting at the thought of abandoning every hope she had ever
had of doing just a little more than housekeeping and such or of being
in a relationship she looked forward to, those hopes had to be quelled
into submission. Some one who could not even walk or talk properly
surely couldn’t do any thing of any worth in the real world, could she?
The voices of encouragement had been so few and so far between, the lies
she had been told by those she trusted so outnumbered the handful of
truths they had told her she was lost in the fog of falsehoods but
didn’t know it. She was tied up in knots like a contortionist gone to
seed trying to bend this way and that to accommodate each lie in her ken
and was told yet again she who knew not how to walk or how to talk
needed a man, any man, or she had no place in the world.
Not
designed to use force, not against something as tender and ethereal as a
dream, she did not beat her dreams into pulp, instead she took each
hope each prayer each desire she’d held dear to her heart since she
could remember, and set them free like a thousand butterflies. They flew
up to the sky and turned into a constellation of a thousand dimly lit
stars to guide her on her way. One came down, a falling star, and she
caught it, kept it in her pocket, saved it for a rainy day. The nine
hundred and ninety nine blinkers in the sky were deaf mute sentinels
that would stay awake with her all the years she couldn’t seem to find
any zzz’s. That constellation represented structure, permanence, design,
destiny, rationality, ethics, morals, values, and little angel eyes she
worshipped with every breath she took. Be sure the mind has a thousand
eyes and the heart but one. Shutter that one lazy eye and you’re doing
fantastic in the real world.
The real world
is a university apart from the educational institutions of this world.
It'll teach you things you never knew you never knew :)
The End
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