The Falling Chronicles

I find my bed precariously balanced at the edge of the roof of a skyscraper.  I am still lying down, but as I look down on my side, I see a modern day canyon of high rises.  The bed, a four poster one that once belonged to my grandparents and on which my father was once born, is enclosed on three other sides with walls that have crept up to the bed itself.  I try to peek out,  and see walls running around the corner, so I cannot put my foot across the wall and creep up on the adjoining roof, because there is none.  The only way out of my bed is down, almost 40 or 50 stories down

 I panic at my own entrapment at such lofty heights.

 Momentarily I am engrossed by the streaks of lights way below caused by the headlights of cars, like a long-exposed photograph.  Everything is in slow motion, like the page of a surreal calendar on cityscapes.  I eventually resign to the inevitability of the situation, move towards to the center of the bed so I won’t accidentally roll over and decide to get some sleep.  Instead,  in one of those James Steward moments from the “The Rear Window’, I turn around and decide to check out the windows of the high rise across the canyon.  Now I am empowered with super vision, able to peek and peer without a telescope.

 I see a couple dressed in black and with flashlights breaking into a safe…

I see someone engaged in an intimate embrace on top of a desk, passionate and kinky…..

A child, a boy at that, holds a Barbie by it’s hair and threatens to drop it on the street below, while another girl, presumably the sister screams her head off behind him…..

A couple is sitting on a tattered sofa watching a rerun of Casablanca on TV….

My eyelids get heavy, I pull the duvet over and succumb to my sleep.

I wake up, momentarily gripped by panic as I begin the process of putting my feet down on the floor.  Instantly I am assured by terra firma below me and I go through the recollection process of the dream on the roof top.  I usually cannot remember the sequences later in the day.  This, however,  is not the first time I have found myself confined in my dreams.  This time, I have decided to go back to sleep, but usually I wake up, covered in beads of sweat, momentarily paralyzed, with my heart racing so fast, I would be afraid that it might stop.

The shrink makes me lie down on that uncomfortable divan of his and makes me go back and recount the dreams, most of which are sketchy.  Many of these consist of going back to places where I was relatively  happy, but surprisingly devoid of any populations……stark, surreal landscapes full of classical and modernist landscapes, almost like an actual version of DeCirrico landscape.  He is concerned that I am increasingly hiding into the fantasies of my head.  I tell him that I don’t mind.  They are much better than falling off tall buildings from my bed. 

He thinks I am an escapist.

 I concur.  Yes I am.

 Reality is stressful, full of coincidental situations, and uninteresting.  I jokingly tell him to hypnotize me so that I can go back to those surreal worlds and explore more.  I am a trained urban planner with no scope here, I tell him.  Let me go back to the perfectly built city of mine, so what it has no people?  They would have trashed it up, covered it with fumes, and the wear everything down.  The places I visit have perfect one point perspectives in every direction.  It has buildings with beautiful sand-stoned facades and hotel complexes that cover the entire length and breadth of the slope of a hill…the whole promenade is full of steps and escalators, boutiques and restaurants, and surprisingly, museums.  

This very morning, I tell him, I had gone back to the city of my graduate school.  I left the campus holding the hands of this Greek girl who I was very close to and walk off to the city center.  Instead of the chaos, we are greeted by a sunset that is stuck on the horizon, the city center has become a series of hillocks, each perched with a classical Palladian mansion, all surrounded by a park.  The two of us go up and discover a tree house that is connected with a walkway to the next hill.  My friend smiles and disappears somewhere, whereas I undertake the journey.  She turns out to be waiting to be next hill already and decides to go for some adventurous shopping.  We walk into a men’s boutique, and I ask this cocky girl with a long pony tail on top of his head to show me something for ‘a collage kid like me’.  She keeps chewing her gum, looks up and down. ‘You are surely not a college kid, but that is what you want to think of yourself, come this way’.  I am surprised at how I can be deflated in my own dreams.  What I remember next, I am on this huge patio surrounding on three sides by rolling plains, intersected by a highway.  The hustle and bustle of a busy residential district is behind it.  Somehow, I am singing the praises of this property to an ‘acquaintance’, a former friend, and now a recovering drug addict.  I show him the façade on the patio, a French style, with tail turrets on two ends.  Somehow I am still stuck in that permanent sunset and the lights coming out of the windows, the sheer curtains billowing on the breeze, with the dramatic sky of clouds illuminated in pinks and reds from the setting sun gives a enchanting outlook.  The building is owned by a Bangladeshi, who has obviously made it big in the west and the friend is sarcastic in his opinions of him. Yet there I was, defending and praising this nouveau riche monstrosity.

The shrink is not impressed.

You are regressing, he insists.  I have no problem with that, I counter.  I have not shied away from the responsibilities of the daily world.  But, he argues, the shocks of your business and family life has pushed you to the brink, like you on that edge of the bed, and one of these days, you will fall off.  He makes it sound like he is putting a curse on me.  I think you are  supposed to listen, not pass judgments on my predicament. 

The session ends .  He keeps telling me to keep a dream journal.  I am supposed to write down and note the vision of the night before they disappear in the course of the first few hours of the morning.  The last thing I want to do is to scribble right after I wake up.  I wake up at 5:00 am on the dot every day, yet don’t leave the bed till it is almost 7, forcing myself to go back to sleep so that I can re-enter the world in my head.  And every day, that endeavour fails miserably, and I finally leave the bed more tired than the night before, with every edifice in my body crying out to be let go.

Then that day, it was the worst of days, my behind glued to various seats, benches, and stools of multitudes  of government offices and companies waiting for various signatures to happen, and they don’t.  The MD of this have been ‘on his way’ for more than two hours, but he never does.  That lofty civil servant goes off to lunch at noon and does not get back till three, but conveniently gets a call from his minister in his chamber.  The bank calls and lets me know that one of my client’s cheques have failed to clear and as a result, a whole series of cheques that I have written against it will now bounce too.

I need a drink, desperately.

The path to my nocturnal hours is also frought with land mines of the familial kind.  An SMS arrives from the MidEast, where this rich uncle lives and have earned million apparently.  He is asking for a loan to salvage his father’s estate.  My grand-uncle, a property magnate in his days, have traces of grandeur and wealth all over the city to be squabbled over among his 8 siblings.  No one has taken charge and the choicest pieces are up for auction thanks to the failure of paying taxes on time over the years.  Why me?  What happened to his swiss account?  Another uncle arrives, bringing in news of the squabbles over properties of a demented uncle and his ex Slovanian wife.  Mother dearest wants to go on a pilgrimage of family shrines and estates of distant satellites of the southern sea-boards, preferably the next day, which is not going to happen.  I have three cards waiting. More wedding s of the mass feeding frenzy, I realize.  I just have to make sure I am photographed by the society photographer-cum ex-banker-cum restaurateur to be published  in Facebook to have my presence verified for eternity and move on to the next event, eventually to end up in my room, curled up with either a book or my IPad and pretend the world outside does not exist except through the screen of the pad.   To make a perfect ending to my sarcastically perfect day, the cook burns the pot pies and still has the audacity to put them on the table calling them ‘Cajun Style’.

 Cajun my foot, burnt is burnt. I opt for some home- made pasta instead.

This time, I am sitting on the perch of my bed, dangling my calloused feet on the edge of the canyon.  The confined four-poster is no longer intimidating.  I know I won’t end up as road kill down below, I will simply glide though.  I am actually surprised at my own audacity of courage and the lack of fear.   My phobia of heights is not prevalent whatsoever.   I am looking at the crimson sky at the horizon, which gradually darkens to pitch black, but speckled with stardust and the iridescent green  trails of jets crisscrossing the vastness of that blackness.   I am whistling a tune, which to my own disgust, turns out to be Justine Beiber’s ‘Babe, babe..yeah’.  I stop right away, embarrassed.  Even in this surreal alternate reality, Justin Beiber is not supposed to be in my radar.  Then of course I realize that my niece earlier was wearing a Beiber t-shirt and belting out in her whiney pre-teen voice till my mother had earlier told her literally to shut up.  I try to focus on one of the windows and I am delighted to see that I have developed zoom vision, just like a digital camera more pronounced than before.  I look into the window right across the canyon from my bed and zoom in.

I see a cadaver, grey in colour, wrinkled from old age and dehydration, with its stomach slit open and its entrails wrapped around the body whole, as if demarcated.  The person overlooking the body is dressed in a black overcoat, with intoxicating kohl lined pitch black eyes, intense, passionate, oozing sexuality, fluorescent crimson lipstick covered lips, translucent skin, pale to the point where I can see the minute veins crisscrossing her cheeks, giving them the rosy colours of a distance.  The head of the corpse turns towards her and says in an extremely husky and hoarse voice, ‘I am ready now.’ ‘Not yet’, the lady replies in a voice that gives away the fact that she is a woman in her prime.  The heavy gold chain that cascades around her bosom slightly glints from the light of one the stars.  She gently puts her right hand inside the cadaver and starts caressing the area where the heart is supposed to be.  The cadaver lets out a subtle ‘aaaaahhh’.

I subconsciously clutch at my own chest and find a black thread dangling to the fabric of my t-shirt.  I look up again and see that the rim of the fabric that woman has wrapped around her face,  is frayed and that black thread on my chest is connected across that concrete canyon to her face. 

My own heart skips a beat.

I close my eyes, squint really hard and open my eyes again.  It works.  Like a TV set, I have changed the scene of the window.   I see my own father, lounging on an easy chair, a old hookah set next to it, dressed in linens like a prophet and yet clean shaven, making gurgling sounds as he puffs on the end of the tube.  The tube itself has the texture and colour of a python.  A bridge table with a set of cards is his scene, not this, I tell myself.  Spying on my own father, I zoom in.  I see a dark gypsy woman with wrinkled skin with a bandana and bright red skirt sitting on a chair next to him.  She reminds of an aged Frida Kahlo.  Next to her is a sprightly Rottweiler, young, full grown, vicious, with bared fangs and hazel eyes looking straight into me.  The lady and my father give me a synchronized wink.

I am disgusted, appalled, and angry. 

I squint again, and this time I see a grand cityscape unrolled before me.  The skyline is interspersed with mountain peaks topped with pagodas and spires of splendid skyscrapers with croens like that of Chrysler and the Empire State.  A full moon, very large and very close to earth it seems, washes the entire landscape with a golden hue.  In a distant,  there is the backdrop on an ocean, where mammoth waves are raging and the crests of which catch the moon rays and create a glittery effect.   I am looking at the perfect city laid out in front of me, with bits and pieces of laughter, music, clinking of glasses, and Ella Fitzgerald wafting up the streets.

I feel ecstatic at the sight of this magnificent cityscape, a mixture of Hong Kong, San Francisco and New York put together in a grander scale.  I start scratching and look at my right arm.  It is flaking like a severe case of Psoriasis, but more intently.  I realize I am disintegrating in the air in a thousand million specs of dust, as if I am being removed for interloping at this visual feast.

I squint again, but this time I keep my eyes shut for almost a minute to purge the previous moments of my own disintegration. 
It works.  The black skies speckled with stardust areback.  However all the windows are dark.  Zooming in, they all reveal empty rooms.  Eventually I am bored at the lack of any activities or any sign of life.  I also realize that the crimson sky is slowly surrendering to the blackness.  Restless, I decide to explore the canyon and push myself from the perch of my bed into the void ahead.

To my horror, instead of that dreamy ability to glide through and be a voyeur, I am plunging downwards, till my hands make contact with water and my entire body feels compressed with the weight of a thousand gravities.  I think I am on the threshold of crossing some kind of a physical reality, with every part of my body screaming to explode into a thousand million atoms.

I have finally landed on the street below.

That building across looks awfully familiar, like the door of that old almirah in my room.

I see the water on my hand turn yellow, then orange, then blood red.

I realize I a m actually bleeding profusely through my nose and my body is an absurd angle on the floor.

I have broken free from the confines of the four-poster, drenched in my own sweat and blood……

I have woken up.

DID YOU HEAR THE MAYNA BIRD SING?

‘What is with your face this morning?  Didn’t you sleep?’

Mayna smiles at her neighbor from the next shack.  She had in fact slept very soundly indeed.  She had put her head on her husband chest and listened to the rhythmic beat of his heart all night.  She felt secure and comforted like a baby.

Yes, it was an unusually calm, peaceful night indeed. 

Most nights are different.  Her husband Hassan comes every night somewhat intoxicated, with only a few takas in hand and demands food.  She has also come back after working on the road side construction jobs, toiling under the hot sun, underpaid, underfed.  Eventually and inevitably the discussions will turn towards food or rather the lack of it.  On most evenings, she would also be ridiculed and put down for being barren and childless.  Both know that the lack of a child is an economic blessing and yet both feel less of a human because of that.  Hassan feels that his manhood is ridiculed and Mayna feels that the right to motherhood is being denied to her. 

Yes, she slept.  She came out of her shack right by Gulshan lake and take in the view.  Surrounded by immense wealth, fashionable morning-walkers , and  foreign joggers, she makes her way to the sacred bush at the end of the lake, demarcated for women.  Usually most women have finished their bodily chores, but she was late this morning.  She wanted to crawl right back to her shack and lie down on the floor, put her head on his chest ,take deep breaths, and take the day off. However reality beckons.  If she is not on the construction site for her brick chipping job on time, some other lady, any lady, even her neighbor will take her job for the day. That means she has to starve tomorrow.  She takes a deep breath.  In spite of two incomes within their meager household, meals are rare, spartan and day to day.

They have been married only 11 months.  She used to live in the shanty town of Agargaon behind the huge edifices of government buildings there.  Hassan used to ply the Mirpur Shymoli by-roads for his fares and used to end up in front of the tea stalls located by the shanty.  Her uncle owned one of those stalls and she used to come by there occasionally,  in the hope that he would give her a free biscuit every now and then, which he did.  In those days, she also has started earning, as a ‘Chuta Bua’ in one of those flats in Shaymoli, wiping floors, washing clothes, and helping the mistress of the house in the kitchen.  Unlike the stories she used to hear from other girls, of mistreatments, scolding and beatings, and even sexual harassments, her mistress was a kind one, occasionally giving her old clothes and cosmetics and always some tidbits to take home.  She had come from work and was hanging out by the stall and her Uncle blurted out, ‘By the way Mayna, will you not get married?’ .  If the truth be told, she did not think about it seriously.  She wanted to become a ‘garment girl’ in one of those factories in Mirpur with a steady income, movies once a month and dress up with her coworkers on holidays and hang out. 

She had given her Uncle a blank look, at which he exploded, ‘Dhangor  Maiya ek-khan’.  Embarrassed by the public ridicule, she meanders through the maze of her slum and enters her shack, shared by her mother and a younger brother.  Mother gives her a stale chapatti with sugar on top and asks her coyly’

“Did your Mama say something to you?’

‘He scolded, why are you smirking Amma ?’.

‘Shona, a proposal has arrived via your uncle’.

Hassan has noticed her a couple of times at her uncle’s teas stall and had breached the subject with him.

There was none of the romance or courtship dancing in the rain in a wet sari like Sakib and Sabnoor in one those movies.  It was just a somber affair of a red sari with gaudy gold trimmings, a thin gold chain, 1,500 taka cash, and distribution of sweets to the neighbors.  The local Imam was given 20 takas to officiate and that was it.  She was put up in a rickshaw while her mother and brother bawled, Hassan wearing his starched pagri, and they were brought to the lakeside of Banani , overlooking Gulshan. 

Mayna loved her new surroundings right away.  The slum was cleared by the police only weeks ago and was slowly creeping back.  It was sparse, empty, almost luxurious after the crowded mini-city of squalor of Agargaon.  Hassan’s distant relative of sorts from the same village has helped him put up a few discarded corrugated sheets and covered it up with plastic.  True it was cramped inside, there was no way of standing up straight inside the shack, unlike her old quarters, which were more like corrugated huts. She has her own man now and her own room to share him with.  That was enough.

After a week or two, it was casually suggested that she should look for work.  Among all the rich households, and with her domestic background, finding work should not be a problem.  However, it turned out, Gulshan and Banani was not Mirpur and Shyamoli.  Getting to the front door was not a possibility.  It was all through referrals.  Garo girls dominated the scene.  Those who were hired, were hired from other households, an incestuous cycle of referrals.

The honeymoon ended violently.

Hassan came home one day and demanded a bowl of rice.  She herself had starved all day and there was none.  She was eagerly awaiting his return with some money.  She would rush over to the Banani Bazaar, get some rice, lentils and spinach, and cook up a meal.  The hearth was all ready with firewood, and the few utensils were scrubbed and cleaned.  She smiled and put her hand forward.

 ‘Give me a few takas’.

Hassan simply lost it that day.

‘ I toil the streets all day, sweating from hand to foot.  Cant even expect a bowl of rice to quieten the growl in my stomach.’

Shocked, Mayna slowly retrieves here hand.

 ‘So what can I do?  These rich people won’t even let me get through the front gate’.

Instead of a sympathetic ear, what she got a loud slap on her left cheek.  Then Hassan took hold of a tuft of her hair and started shaking her violently.

‘One Beyadop magi you are, You surely know how to eat though.’

The ordeal of that day ended because of the Hassan’s cousin from two shacks down came over.

‘You brought her not only four weeks ago, and already beating the crap out of her?  Let me tell you, this one will leave too.’

This one?  There were others?  Mayna, swallowed her shock and finally took a 20 taka note from her husband, knowing very well what meager provisions she could be purchased with that amount.  She assumed that there would be more beatings and she assumed right.

Yes there was another wife, two in fact, the cousin next door filled in the next day.  The first household was established in the guard room of a house in Kalachandpur.  The landlord evicted them due to their constant fights and beatings and the pair went their separate ways.  The second one was a cook in one of those ferangi  households.  For Hassan, it was the perfect marriage.  He got to sleep in a proper quarter, they both earned aplenty she as a cook, he as a gardener, and the shahibs would send down tasteless but fulfilling dishes every now and then, which her wife would turn into spicy casseroles.  However, he was literally caught red handed by the shahib with his hands in the liquor cabinet.  Given the choice of eviction or keeping the job, the second wife promptly and wisely evicted her husband with a verbal divorce and kept her job.

After wandering listless for a few weeks, he finally managed to hire a rickshaw on a daily basis.  It would take months of hard labour and near starvation to accumulate enough to be able to pay his mahajon on time daily.  Nowadays, when he shows up in the warehouse, no questions are asked and a richshaw his allotted to him for the day right away.  He missed the company of woman.  The floating girls of the streets took care of his lust and occasionally his wages , but he longed for permanence, household, and his own family.

When he spotted her at the tea shop, she was wearing a plain salwar kameez and had kohl in her eyes.  She wasn’t skinny like the rest either, rather curvy, and luscious, and perfect for plucking. Tea and biscuits became a regular habit at the end of the day.  On rainy days when passengers were few and far, he would even skip the afternoon meal and spend the savings in the tea store.  Most days he was not disappointed.  Her mistress of the household would let her go right before the Maghreb azan and she would stop at her uncles’s shop to say hello, pick up a thing and two and disappear inside the maze of huts.

One day he mustered enough courage and asked the shopkeeper.

 “Know that girl?’

‘Which one?’

‘The one who just left.’

‘Why? ‘ The Uncle was  all alert and suspicious.

‘What is your intention?’

‘No  no, no bad intentions at all.  As I was saying…..Uncle, you know that I am a rickshaw puller.  I am tired of living by myself.  You know what I mean……’

The shop keeper smiles finally, “That’s my niece, very very nice girl indeed.  A real Lokkhi….Whats your story?  No other wives?’

Taken aback with the directness of the question, there is a small moment of silence.

’  What are you saying?  No no, never married.  Just saved enough now…’

There are further questions about kins, home districts, relatives close by, …..all kinds of questions.  Mynah’s family, also eager to pass off an eligible girl and a liability did not dig further. 

Once the first barrier of hitting her has been crossed, it became a regular affair.  Too little rice, too much salt, not enough gravy, the water glass half empty….one trivial issue after another.   The beatings stopped when she found the job of braking bricks but eventually it crept back.  He would even take her daily wages away.  She countered that by spending her money in the bazaars first.  Slowly but surely, the tables turned. The husband became her kept.  He no longer contributed to anything.  Yet the beatings did not stop.  He picked up or rather resumed his habit of taking all kinds of intoxicating spices and condiments.

That night he came quite late, high on bhang and low on patience.

 ‘What are you looking at, you barren whore?’

 Maynah, numbed over the months by his constant verbal and physical abuse could not care less.

Incensed by the indifference, he screamed,

 ‘Gone deaf I see, lay out the food.’

 It was past twilight, with light of the houses shimmering on the waters.  She actually loved this play of light and shades after the first moments of sunset.  She had also forgotten the oil for the lamp.  It was not a priority for her, or most of the neighbors on the row for that matter.  In spite of the fact that they lived right in the middle of a teeming metropolis, their cycles of lives were still very much dictated by sunrises and sunsets, just like their parents back in the village.

Hassan was in cloud nine that night.  The shimmering lights of the lake, fueled by the narcotics in his blood, turned him amorous.  He started caressing her in the hut, but at some point the foreplay turned violent. She felt being bitten with such harshness that she wanted to scream but he had covered her face with one of his hands.  Finally at one point she grabs one of the small botis neatly stacked on the side of their tiny linear hut and hits him on his back.

 It works.  The sharp pangs of pain stops.  He slowly relaxes and slumps on top of her.   She feels her husband relax totally on top of her, taking deep breadths.  She also relaxes. It is one of those moments of marital bliss that may not come back.  She also passes out in a deep slumber, her momentary passage of contentment.

When she wakes up, it is dark.  Even the lights of the living and bedrooms of the households behind her has been turned off.  This is a good time to take care of the bodily function by the bushes.  Her husband is still on top of her, but Hassan feels a lot heavier. Cajoling him gently does not work.  He does not respond to her verbal request to get off her.  She finally manages to push him off, fiddles through the utensils and finds a stump of a candle and manages to light it. The view splayed in front of her in that tight confined space does not frazzle her one whole bit.  Hassan’s shirt is blood stained at the back, he seems to be breathing and putting her head on his chest, there is also a heartbeat it seems.  She doesn’t care.  She feels no compunction to call someone and ask for help.   The thoughts of law enforcements does not cross her mind even though she can see the police stand at the end of the line of shacks.

She just sits there, staring at  the semi cloudy sky.

She calls him, “Hassan, are you awake?’.  She calls him by his name only when she thinks he is asleep.

No answer.

She feels this calm like never before.  Taking a deep breadth, she pushes him more to the side, pulls out a bronze ladle, one of her very few prized possessions and starts digging.

The distant sound of the Azan for Fajr prayers  wakes her up.  She had layed her down on the mound of dry clay that her Hassan is covered in now.  After the ordeal was over, exhausted she had lied down and she was soothed by the constant beat of the heart.  It reminded her of falling asleep on the chest of his long dead father.  It was the safest place to be on the face of this harsh cruel world.

‘What is with your face this morning?  Didn’t you sleep?’

‘Hoi, I did. After a long time’

She had her gold necklace in her hand, the one given during the wedding which Hassan had forgotten about. 

Time to find a new place of work and a new address….

She starts following the path by the lake, covered in beautiful greenery, shimmering green water on one side, and rows of buildings on the other. 

She wonders if she will miss this neighborhood.

By The River....

‘Was that a bad dream?’ Khaled was stooping down on hers and was caressing her hair. She had woken up, with beaded perspiration covering her forehead, in spite of the four bladed fan going swish swish over their bed.

She just sighed, ‘I am fine, go back to sleep.’

Khaled turned around and slowly drifted back to his deep slumber but Arifa just could not.

Every now and then, she would reconstruct that fateful day back in Calcutta, when she saw a new dimension to the human psyche as the facades of her some of dear ones were stripped to its naked ugliness.

There had been a buzz in the air for days. There were talks of dividing the country into two, ‘partition’ they kept calling it. Stoked by both sides of the debate, things were literally heating up to enforce their respective agendas.

Arifa was oblivious to all that. There had been occasional discussions at the dinner table about moving to Pakistan to the east, possibly to Dhaka or to Chittagong, where they still owned property and where the family had originated from six generations back. To her, those places were beyond her grasp of imagination. Murshidabad, the seat of the Nawabs of Bengal and the place of her birth, and Calcutta, where she has blossomed through her schooling and it’s cosmopolitan trappings, was her world, her realm of existence, and hopefully her future. Her father had passed away twelve years back when she was only six, and her mother four years later, but her three brothers never let her or her two sisters feel their void. Within the realm of a liberal, educated, upper-middles class Muslim household, she had her freedom of friends, going to the cinemas and plays, going for drives with her bhabis around Chowrongee and the Gorer Math, and even the occasional renting of a small barge with all her nephews and nieces, her brothers and their wives, and sail down on the Hoogly and literally gawk at the monstrous Howrah Bridge from below.

Murshidabad was somewhat more conservative. The biggest event was the Nawab’s fete, Held on December 9th every year, her birthday, on the grounds of the Hazar Duari Palace. There the invites were treated to savories and chicken pieces coated in almonds, served in petit little forks. The rest of the year was spend within the confines of the Mussalman Para, a big chunk of which was owned by her Nana and majority of the occupants were tenants, called ‘Projas’. Between the idyllic settings of the palace grounds, her childhood home, the sandy shores of the Ganga, and her schooling in Calcutta, she had a perfect life. As soon as the schools and colleges would close, her family would board the train from Howrah and descended on Murshidabad till it was time to return. It was a time to reconnect with the extended chain of uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, near and distant cousins, childhood friends, and the best part was, there was a always a wedding to attend within these broods.

Now she was in Chandpur, a sleepy little town on the shores of the mighty Meghna, where the other side of the bank was visually non-existent. Consisting of a large number of bungalow type house with corrugated roofs, there were only a handful of pucca houses, one of which they now occupied. The branch of the newly established National Bank of Pakistan was located downstairs, while they occupied the two bedroom flat upstairs. It was what they called a ‘junction’ town, so access to Dhaka and Chittagong was not problematic, but she felt at piece there. Khaled was literally feted as a celebrity here, the handsome debonair banker who had been given the responsibility of opening a branch of one of the biggest banks of the country. As his wife, she was the centre of the social scene, albeit a very small one, that included the wives of two other bankers, the tax collector, and superintendent of the police. As per Dhaka, it was depressing in its totally provincial pettiness of scaled down amenities, Chittagong was pretty but it was nice to be out of the grasp of her Uncle-in-law Shahed Chacha, whose grounds her husband literally worshipped, Murshidabad had become a place across the border, and Calcutta, oh well, it had become a city of betrayal, a place turned out to be a another façade of sorts, hiding the ugliest of human emotions and prejudices behind the facades of its architectural grandness and intellectual hot air.

Elora was a dear, dear friend of hers, both in their first year at Lady Brabourne College. Seated on the bench coincidentally on the very fist day of classes, these two initially shy girls immediately took to each other. When it was ‘discovered’ that her mother was also originally from Murshidabad as well, the friendship was firmly cemented, to the point, her bhabis, specially the Calcutta born older one accompanied her to their places every now and then and the friendship had spilled over to familial terms. Elora had an older sister called Ajanta, already married, but since the husband was in ‘Beelaat’ to become a Barrister, she was back in her parents’ household for the time being. Kabita was the little darling who was only in class four but wise beyond her ages, and spoilt rotten by the two elder sisters, since there were none others, especially boys in the form of brothers to lavish their attention upon. Their house on the vicinity of Hazra Street was a semi-palatial one, which obviously had seen better days, now partitioned into three of their families, but none-the-less grand, with its marbled floors, Greco-roman columns and a vast inner courtyard that was used for everything from drying pulse seeds and rice, to airing the laundry to family get-togethers.

Elora had invited her over the next day to come spend the day with her. It was the 15th of August, Arifa remembered very clearly. The two spent hours on the college grounds chatting, and planning, and then someone had burst the bubble.

‘Baba is not sending me to college tomorrow. Something called the Direct Action Day and hartal. Baba said it may get out of hand.’ Upoma’s father worked in the Calcutta police department, therefore the source was reliable.

‘What then?’ Elora had grumbled. All her plans, including coaxing her father to take all the girls to the cinema was crumbling. She had her mind set on watching Subah Shayam and fantasize about her P.C. Barua.

‘Nothing to do then. Just have to do it another day’, the ever practical Arifa had responded,.

“Nah, you come this evening. Stay overnight.’

Staying overnight anywhere was not well looked upon under any circumstances. One advantage with this household was that, other than Elora’s father, there were no other male members in the household, which her Bhabi knew very well. Since she would be staying with them, convincing her to agree to the overnight soiree should not be a problem.

Boro Bhabi, as expected, agreed, but Boro Bhai did not. However, in all matters of the household, Bhabi had the upper hand, reinforced by her snapping remarks and her cascading voice that was tantamount to a shrill when she was contradicted.

‘Oh leave it.’ She had snapped over his ‘concerns’. “I know them, remember? Besides, it will be good for her to spend some time with those girls during the hartal instead of being cooped up right here all day. Elora is exactly her age and her mother is from Dokkhin Para for Murshidabad, your home….Didn’t I mention that before?’

Her Bahbi’s occasional outbursts would leave Arifa somewhat perturbed in favor of her brother, but this time it was to her advantage. She managed to suppress her smile which wanted to erupt from ear to ear.

So, after having tea with biscuits, a tomtom was duly summoned, and her Boro Bhai and Bhabi, their two children, and Arifa, with a small cloth bag, and her clandestine copy of ‘Chokher Bali’ wrapped inside her clothes, got on the car.

‘It is wise not to go to the cinema tonight.’ Elora’s father had opined, and therefore that was that.

The earlier part of the evening was spent gossiping about their class-mates, the upcoming marriages of some of them and their grooms, and of-course their matinee idols. Elora’s knowledge of the Calcutta drama scene was vast, and could recount in vivid details each and every scene, along with the features of the actor. The latest play to be witnessed by the family was Bijan Bhattacharya's 'Nabanna', and obviously it had left a mark on her psyche. When Arifa asked about it, Elora got all animated and explained how realistic the production was, away from all the over-dramatization that was synonymous with Bengali films and dramas.

‘Dhoor, I did not like it at all’, Kabita finally managed to pipe in within the exuberant description of the play.

After a lull of a second, Elora exploded. ‘See Arifa? This is why little babies like her should not be allowed to see these plays. A waste of a seat, that’s what it is, when more deserving people cannot even find tickets.’

Kabita’s eyes welled up, which irritated Elora even more. “Ouf, I cannot even say anything without the Ganga flooding everything. Just watch Arifa, she will start bawling and go to Maa, and Baba will descend upon me to save his precious youngest daughter.’

As predicted, Kabita started the motion of getting off the bed and dash towards the room down the hall where their parents were.

‘See, I told you.’ screamed Elora.

Arifa, seeing the situation getting out of hand, grabbed Kabita’s hand before she could slip away and held her back in a tight embrace. ‘Ahare, why do you say such things?’ She asked Elora.

Elora just winced, arched her eyebrows, and trying her best to sound as cold as possible asked, ‘So, do you want to hear about the rest of the play or not?’.

Arifa wiped away little Kabita’s tears and cheerfully said ‘Keep going.’

Eventually dinner was served in the room downstairs next to the kitchen and they were summoned. Professing modernity, the whole family dined every night on the huge marble top dining table with solid brass plates and glasses. About to enter the room, she noticed that one porcelain plate and a glass were being hurriedly replaced with the similar brass utensils. Mashi Ma was telling this elderly man, must have been be the Thakur, ‘Haven’t I told you a number of times that these things are not to happen in my household’? She had walked in just at that importune moment and she was somewhat embarrassed. ‘Come in Maa, just sit anywhere you like, except that one’, pointing at the head table. ‘Ajanta’s Baba will sit there’.

Arifa smiled. She knew exactly what had taken place prior to her entry in the dining room. The Thakur, the cook of the household must have been from the old school. Not willing to pollute the utensils with the touch of non-Hindu, he lad laid out a separate set of plate and glass just for her, which, she was sure, was kept in a separate cupboard all together. Her own Murshidabad household was no different. Her father also kept a set of plates for his pundit friends. Narayan Babu was a dear friend of her father’s, albeit from the old school, who, other than well versed in Sanskrit, had rudimentary knowledge of Farsi, in which her father excelled, and they would talk for hours. In fact, she as a child had to sit cross legged at his feet in their huge verandah downstairs along with her older siblings and learn the tenants of Sanskrit grammar from him. Every time he visited, her mother would ‘borrow’ the Brahmin maid from the household next door and food was served through her.

Mashi Ma was famous for her spicy fish cooked on open fire wrapped in banana leaves. In Arifa’s honour, the fete was repeated, which delighted all the women in the family.

Arifa for a few seconds contemplated whether to put the anchol of her sari over her head as a sign of respect for her elders as practiced at home. Usually whenever any older relatives visited, whether male or female, it was customary to do so. However, a quick glance around the table told her it was not necessary.

‘So Arifa, what has your family decided? This side or that side? ‘

‘Jee?’ She had put the first morsel of rice and fish in her mouth, which had exploded into a spicy explosion of taste and aroma and she savoring the whole essence of it.

‘I am just asking, if this Pakistan happens, your family will go in which direction? After all, what I know you come from an educated Muslim family. Both your brother and brother in law are Shibpur graduates; in my opinion this Pakistan thing is not for people like you. It is for those illiterates in East Bengal.. Let them have their Pakistan, and in five years they will want to come back into the fold.’

Arifa didn’t have an answer. Ajanta was busy helping her mom passing the vegetable dish, and Kabita was relishing her food. Elora looked absolutely uncomfortable, and after a quick glance at Arifa, tried to make eye contact with her mom to restrain her father.

“Aare, leave it. No partition fartition talk on this table. Don’t ruin my efforts with the fish by talking of all this rubbish. It happened in 1905 and see what happened? Just eat, will you??’

Relieved from being removed from the spot-light she complemented her on the fish. Eventually the talks moved back to the movies. Jathamoshai had gone nostalgic and was talking about the first film the family watched together. he ever saw, some film called ‘Niyoti’ back in 1939.

Mashi Ma started giggling. ‘He was more interested in Kamala Devi and Hena Devi. He even bought me a sari that was just like the movie…..’. Catching a glimpse of her husband, she stopped, aware that she had said a bit too much already.

Rest of the meal went smoothly, basically limited to conversations about the latest songs, followed by rosgoolas. ‘Not as good as Nabin Babu’s but not bad either……’ Opined Jathamoshai.

Ajanta, being married, had been assigned a bedroom of her own even though her husband was abroad. What was now Elora’s room was still shared by Kabita and tonight it would also be Arifa’s. There was only one toilet in the upper floor, and therefore there was a queue for toiletries. Arifa being the guest, she went last and came back dressed in a cotton sari with a simple golden zari edge.

Elora took a look and retorted ‘Bapre, you are becoming a Bairagee or what?’

Kabita was cajoled into falling asleep and eventually the copy of ‘Choker Bali’ came out. Both Arifa and Elora had both read the book at least a few times, but since they were both ‘forbidden’ to read the book, it had a cult status between them and her friends. To make matters juicier, Arifa had found this copy among her mother’s belongings in a trunk after she had passed away years later, with a scribbling on the front from her father to her mother.

Both fell asleep after reading aloud from selected sections of the book.


Next morning, they were woken up by Ajanta who brought in two cups of sweet tea and a plate full of hot steaming luchis into the room. Since Fazlul Haq had already declared the day to be a holiday ahead of the hartal, a leisurely pace seemed to have resumed. Arifa came out of the room into the balcony facing the inner courtyard and saw Mashi Ma sipping tea on an easy chair. She smiled and gestured Arifa to come forward. Very gently she took hold of her hand and asked ‘Did you sleep well, Maa?’

Arifa swallowed hard and nodded. She was at a loss of words. Her mother used to occasionally use exactly the same words.

The rest of the day was a mild cacophony of sounds. Songs blaring on the All India Radio somewhere, vendors screaming their wares of vegetables, one or two singing beggars, the occasional horn and the ringing of the tom-tom bells, with the girls splayed out on the beds with various books and magazines, but after lunch there seemed to be an eerie silence. Ajanta worked on her cross-stitch, Mashi Ma busied herself in the kitchen to see what was in the works for supper, and Kabita, after busying herself with hopscotch with her cousins in the next wing, came back and fell asleep on the bed.

What transfixed the household was a faint ‘Naraye Takbir’, followed by ‘Allahu Akbar’, followed by screaming at a distant, eventually dieing out. Jathamoshai came out of somewhere and announced, ‘No need to go out today. The whole city has been engulfed in a danga.’ Now Arifa was worried. Her Boro Bhai and Bhabi were supposed to pick her late in the afternoon.

By the time night descended, in spite of the relative silence of Hazra Street, all kinds of rumors were coming in. Stories of outright butchery, of throats being slit, of people burnt alive or cruelly beaten to death, of Hindus torching shops in Muslim neighborhoods and vice versa…..Arifa and the girls were forbidden to go outdoors and even to downstairs. They were also told to stay away from windows lest they were ‘observed’ by someone.

Compared to the relative joviality of last night’s dinner, this night’s was a dark somber affair. Thanks to the black out, a kerosene lamp was put at the centre of the table on top of old tin of English biscuits so that the whole table could be illuminated. The ghostly shadows it cast on the faces was even more eerie. The meal was finished without a word exchanged. Because of the stifling heat, eventually the household help was instructed to lay out the charpoys on the roof. That turned out to be another depressing experience altogether. There were ambers glowing in a distance in every direction, fires and remnants of fire were evident all around.

The next morning, Jathamoshai was devouring the paper over the cup of tea and biscuits. The headlines said it all. The photographs printed showed bodies lying on the streets. There were also reports of police inaction and a picture of Suhrawardy talking to reporters. It was obvious that the reports were going to fuel more agitation and retaliatory actions between the two communities now.

Arifa desperately wanted to be home. There was no sign of her Boro Bhai since yesterday. He had not been able to come and pick her up for obvious reasons but she also could not but help being accusatory towards him.

The tension in the household was visible. No one was talking much except for Kabita, who, initially ecstatic about not having to go to school, but by noon was bored to smithereens and wanted to go. Ajanta was busy with her mom in the kitchen while the two of them was idling away on the verandah as usual with fans in hand and sipping tea.

Their uncle from the next wing paid a visit.

‘Dada’, he came straight out to Jathamoshai. ‘Just heard that you have been a keeping a Musaalman girl in the household. Is it true?’ The conversation taking place downstairs was very audible in the verandah upstairs.

“Yes, Elora’s friend from college is here. They are very close. You have seen her before……”

‘SO IT IS TRUE’. He bellowed. He did not let him finish the sentence. “Has your head gone totally malfunctional? I see that you are reading the paper. What is going on, have you no clue? If some of the people in the Para find out that there is Musallman girl in the house at a time like this, do you know what kind of danger our household will fall into?’

Elora grasped Arifa’s hand and pulled. “Arifa, come into the room.’ But she took her time to un-wrap her hand and go though the motion of putting her sandals on. She wanted to hear more.

‘Either someone will torch us for harboring her or some Musaalman gundas will do the same in the name of saving her. Dada, think. And send the girl home.’

‘How will she? The situation in the city……’

‘I don’t know and don’t want to know. Get rid of her somehow. Just remember, you have three young girls in your own home and you have other nephews and nieces in this house as well. Think of them, will you?’ And he was gone.

Arifa could feel her ears turning red with an acute burning sensation. At the end of the verandah she could see Mashi Ma biting into her anchol, and Ajanta with her hands on her mother’s shoulder. They took a quick glance towards her and quickly disappeared into the rooms.

Elora was pulling her again. ‘Come inside, will you?’

Arifa looked at her friend’s face, whose eyes were welling up with tears of embarrassment. Arifa tried her best to put on a brave face and tried to smile to reassure her friend.

‘Kobita, where are you? Can you ask your father to come upstairs?’ Mashi Ma was calling from that room.

Diligently Kabita reappeared from somewhere and bellowed out, ‘Agge Maa, going..’

Elora’s father duly appeared upstairs, clutching a corner of his dhoti in his hands.

‘Don’t take any of that to heart. My uncle is somewhat like that. Nothing will happen, just wait and see….” Elora was trying to reassure Arifa. But she didn’t have any idea how or what to respond to. She took one of the magazines lying in bed and started fidgeting with it.

Meanwhile the conversation two rooms down between Jatha Moshai and Mashi Ma was becoming audible due to the rising octaves.

‘What he said, was is true? There are three young girls, do you hear me, three….girls in this household. If anything happens to them, I will…..’ Mashi Ma was saying.

‘Maa, will you stop? They can hear you.’ It was Ajanta.

This time it was Arifa whose eyes were welling up.

A few seconds later Jatha was in the room and found his second daughter holding her friend in a tight embrace, with both girls sobbing.

“Maa, as I was saying,’ Jatha Moshai was obviously addressing Arifa. “Your brother was supposed to pick you up yesterday. Is there any way you can contact him to pick you up? As you can see, the situation in the city is quite dangerous. You should be home with your family’.

‘Baba, how do you think she will go? Her Dada obviously could not come yesterday. I am sure he will come once it is safe.’

‘Yes I know….’ he was avoiding all eye contact and was rubbing his head with hand. After a quick glance at the girls, he made his exit.

Mashi Ma was just outside the room. “What did she say?’

‘Aha…will you please be quiet?’ The girls could hear the pair of them going down the verandah.

A few seconds late Mashi Ma's voice was loud and clear. “Elora, come to this room, right now!’

Once Elora made it there, there was no holding back as far as voices were concerned.

‘Who told you to ask her to stay over? You and your ideas from college……Why did you dig a canal and bring that alligator right into our house?? Ajanta’s husband is in London and there are still the two of you to think off. No matter how, all of you make some arrangement to get her out of this house. Did any of you hear me?’

Meanwhile Arifa had come out of her room, holding on to Kabita’s hand and had proceeded to the door of the room. She just wanted to reassure her hosts that hopefully she will go as soon as her brother showed up, but she didn’t get a chance to say anything.

Mashi Ma took a look at the two of them and addressed her youngest. “What are you doing out there?’ She yanked little Kabita out of her hand and slammed the door shut.

‘Maa…..’ it was Elora inside the room, sounding totally grief-stricken and alarmed.

Arifa all of a sudden could not feel her legs. She wanted to run, just anywhere, but preferably just run down the stairs and out to the streets and run all the way home if she had to. But her legs were frozen. Her mind was going numb to.

She just stood there, for what seemed like forever.

Elora burst out of the room, and took hold of Arifa hand and ran towards their room. Arifa noticed that eyes had already puffed up, with copious amounts of tears flowing down.

But Arifa’s legs remained frozen. She could not respond to Elora’s gesture and fell face forward on the verandah. All she could see was a dizzying array of stars followed by a throbbing pain on her forehead.

Elora turned her around and screamed, ‘Maago... .’. Once Arifa’s eyes got back into focus, she could see the look of total anguish in her eyes. Arifa could also feel something warm flowing down on her from around her forehead towards her temple. Obviously she was bleeding.

“Didi, Maa, Baba, come here quickly’, Elora was literally shouting between her sobs.

First to come out instantly was Kabita, who saw Arifa’s bloodied face and started crying.

She was followed by Ajanta, her Didi, who immediately came to Arifa’s side.

Her parents came out of the room in unison and looked down on the lying Arifa a very short distance away.

Now Mashi Ma had started bawling. Then all of a sudden she raised her right hand and brought it down on her forehead in a loud thump. “He Ram….save me. When danger comes, it comes in droves’. Jatha Moshai by this time was obviously coming to his senses. “Will you leave your drama behind and see if she is hurt?’. However Mashi Ma’s crying was accompanied by heaving bosoms, and a distorted face. In that state, she slowly turned around and went back to her room, continuing to sob on the bed.

“Ajanta, go see you mother, Kabita, hold on to Arifa’s hand and pull slowly….Elora don’t let go…pick her up slowly and take her to your room…..’. He was hovering over them, not sure whether to actually make any physical contact with Arifa, but seeing Kabita’s ineptitude, he finally put his hand behind the fallen girl’s shoulder and gently pushed her up.

What followed was a frenzy. Lying down in bed, Arifa could smell and feel the boric powder diluted in water on her forehead. Kabita kept massaging her hand for no particular reason, her father was frantically pacing up and down the room, and Elora kept mumbling ‘Arifa….Arifa….’ There were two or three unknown female faces in the room staring down at her from the door frame. One was nudging the other,’ That is that Musallman girl…….’ “Elora, I am sending you some bandages to dress her. Have to stop her bleeding.’ Arifa figured out they must have been Elora’s aunts from the greater household. Her mother was nowhere to be seen.

The bandages arrived and Elora with the help of one of the aunts, put Arifa’ head in few loops of dressing with cotton inside. A bit later, the area of the cut was saturated with blood and tuned a garish red, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. She just leaned her head on the wall and sat up on the bed. She desperately wanted to be in her room in her own house right now, and to be cared for by her bhabis and not this lot, to whom she had become a tremendous liability since this morning. She missed the touch of her own mother’s caring hands.

She started sobbing uncontrollably.

The aunts, having done their duty and somewhat caught in an emotional situation, quickly made their exits, both wiping away tears. Jatha Moshai also made his exit. Ajanta was fanning Arifa furiously. All Elora could do at this point was put her head on Arifa’s head and sob with her friend.

Boro Bhai finally came around six in the afternoon that day. The usually meticulous man with pomaded hair and pressed shirt had looked totally disheveled. He was told to wait in the formal living room as Arifa was sent for. Ajanta and Elora flanked her on both sides and brought her to the room. Bhai literally jumped out of her chair and rushed towards her, almost knocking Ajanta of from her side. “What happened to you?’ and turned on Elora,”What happened to my little sister?’ Elora has tremendous respect for Arifa’s brother, who sometime had also dropped her home from college.

‘Yes, I mean….’ Elora started, but by that time her father also entered the room.

‘Nomoshkar, Boro Babu’, he greeted boro bhai, whose name he didn’t know except that he was the oldest brother of Arifa’s. “Yes, your sister tripped on the balcony upstairs. You know these restless girls…..We didn’t get a chance to take her to a doctor…you know the situation outside…none of us have dared to venture out on the streets today. If you can, take her to one, on the way to your home’. He had emphasized ‘your’ home…

‘Bhiaya, cholo’, Arifa finally said, breaking the awkward silence. ‘Didi, so I am leaving for today?’ she addressed Ajanta, who barely managed a smile and nodded. She just gently touched Kabita’s cheek who responded, “Arifa Di, when will you come again?’.

‘Yes, I will’, Arifa said, and faced Jatha Moshai. She wanted to lean down and touch his feet to show her respect but as she leaned forward, her head started throbbing and she pulled up. ‘No No, leave it, Maa, no reason for that in this situation’.

Elora did not need to be addressed. She just patted her hand.

‘Bhaiya, cholo’, she had said again, and proceeded towards the door. No tom-tom outside but a rickshaw with a scrawny looking coolie was waiting. As her brother was helping her on the rickshaw, a female voice, that of the Mashi Ma’s came out. ‘Arifa, you and your brother didn’t eat anything. Have a cup of tea at least’.

Arifa’s stomach was churning with hunger. She had refused to eat lunch under the grueling emotional circumstances of the day, nor had the family pressed her to eat anything against her wishes.

Now Mashi Ma was coming down the stairs towards the rickshaw and had raised her right hand as if to touch Arifa’s forehead. “Mashi Ma, another day……’ and turned her face forward. Almost in a commanding voice that startled her brother sitting next to her, she addressed the coolie, ‘Cholo’.

That event seemed like it was eons ago….

Khaled had gone off to his bank branch downstairs, and after going through a few pages of ‘Golpoguccho’, Arifa decided to go for a walk. She had not slept well and was felling somewhat restless. There were still remnants of the monsoon clouds in the sky and there was a nice breeze flowing. She summoned her maid Majeda and proceeded towards the riverbanks, a barely fifteen minutes walk. Once there, she felt at peace, the wide expanse of the Meghna being a visual treat, with the sounds of the waves gently crashing on the shore complimenting that scenario. So different from the rivers she was used to, she thought. A small strand of her hair flicked upon her face and she raised her hand to put that back in its place. As she did that, the tip of her fingers felt the small bump created after that fall on that verandah just a few years back. She always took care to hide that with a gently curved strand of her hair. This time for a few seconds, the fingers lingered on it, feeling the small anomaly on the skin that had become permanent. She looked around, at felt at peace as the wind hit her face once again. Yes, it was so different here……

UNDER THE TREE

The following story got the first prize in the short story competition organized by Kalakahani of UK; the submitted stories had to be about the Asian diaspora based in East Africa......

Shefali wakes up in the sweltering heat and miss the refreshing chilled air that would have filled the verandah back there. Whenever she wakes up like this, she always seems to be filled with remorse, nostalgia…a kind of longing that is very discomforting. The girls, Maya and Nandita, have no interest in her previous life in the suburban hills of Kampala, the bungalow on the hill, from where you see the lake at a distance on a clear day……

‘It was cooler back there….’, she would say sometimes. Maya, the older one would scoff and retort…

‘Cooler?? Back there In Uganda?? It's Africa mom..!!!!!’

Anther sigh...these kids…why don’t ever Google Kampala and find out about it? Africa is a huge place. But they won’t…not a bit interested…

Her father was a very well known trader there, a 3rd generation at that, originally from Surat at the turn of the century. Life was so different then, wasn’t it? It was a lively, closely knit community; her mom a 3rd generation settler herself spoke fluent Gujrati and Ganda with a smattering of English. There was never any scope of getting lonely….life centered around countless teas, kachoris, cholafali, ‘englis’ sandwiches and dinners and heartfelt ‘kamche?’ throughout. The men separated themselves after a while and brought out their cheroots and whiskeys and the women would, at least some, bring out their ‘paans’, preciously preserved and sourced all the way from Mombassa where they were probably ferried in clandestinely on dhows all the way from India. Tinkling of glasses, a shimmering of saris, a cacophony of mixed Gujrati and Hindi dialects and even a few ‘local’ friends, ‘Emerald’ in particular, whose presence in the house was always discreetly frowned upon by his father.

But here….the kids….they go off to school and she starts her routine. Washing dishes, vacuuming, occasionally a quick trip to Safeway and then to the Indian grocers for the assortment of vegetables and spices, and at noon sharp, parks herself in front of the TV to watch ‘All My Children’ and end with ‘General Hospital’. These characters from the series will sometimes take over her psyche and it will bugg the hell out of her. Then she will force herself to make a few phone calls, play canasta with the neighbors once a week, and late in the afternoon the kids will descent, followed by Rahul, her husband, a few hours later, again preoccupying her with the usual domesticities.

She had been unnerved to the core last week when Maya had a few friends over. One of them, Roberta, is a feisty Tanzanian student, who is at her daughter’s school on an exchange program. Her father is English and mother is from Tanzania, so technically she isn’t a full Tanzanian per se, and even more so, she was born in Brighton. Both of her parents seem to be highly educated, and both works for the UNHCR. What got her attention was that they have recently been posted to Kampala. Roberta was gung-ho about going there in the summer for the first time. They have been allocated a bungalow on the northern suburbs that was once built and owned by ‘Indians’ on Edwards Street, renamed Onyango Boulevard, and has a huge columned verandah at the front from where one could gaze at the vast expanse of Lake Victoria at a distance. The road is still called by the same old name by some.

Some of her acquaintances had recently been ‘invited’ back to Uganda and the stories they have sent back were simply depressing. Businesses ruined and properties in such dilapidated conditions that it took days for them to recover from the shock. Since her father, the original owner of their businesses was long dead and cremated in the UK, there was no documentation whatsoever for them to go back and claim anything. Her brother, born in Liverpool, had made the trip last year and apparently the situation was bureaucratic, but ‘promising’.

‘Can you call Roberta over for dinner one day?’ she causally says to Maya.

‘Since when did you start getting interested in my friends, Mom? What’s the agenda, hmmm?’

Shefali doesn’t have an answer right away. She stares at Maya’s cherubic face, thinking of an answer, since there was an ‘agenda’.

‘Talk to me’. Maya sternly tells her, taking advantage of the few second delay before she could speak up.

‘I was just curious about their house’.

Maya’s face changed immediately from curiosity to disdain. Caught between South Asian, East African, and now the identity of the American South, her daughters obviously are most comfortable with the American upbringing. At the same time, looking at the mirror, there is no escape from their Indian identities, so they play themselves up as these exotic Indo-American chicks, deliberately dressing up in embroidered blouses and skirts and the occasional 'bindis', to school. To introduce yet another identity and an African one at that, especially when there are so many African American students, it is convenient to discard that part of the heritage. It took forever to explain that both of her parents were actually ‘African Indians’ who had never set foot on the Indian subcontinent in the past three generations and were ignonamously expelled by a despot called Idi Amin. She was born in Bristol in the UK, a year after Shafali and Rahul got married, and the family finally migrated with the help of an uncle with a number of businesses to the fertile and humid plains of central Alabama with a substantial black population, and that was that. The second generation Indian kids already taunt by calling her and her sister ‘ABCDs’, American Born Confused Desis that is…and the sad part is she does feel confused. She and Rahul, also of ‘expelled Indian stock’, consistently talks of Uganda as ‘back home’ and even a road trip to Orlando or New Orleans will naturally evoke long winded memories of trips to the resort town of Butiaba up north or to the exotic mix of Mombasa in Kenya. Their Gujrati network extended all the way to Durban and Cape Town covering the entire eastern African coast and there was no end to the choices of places they could go for trips. Even a trip to Niagara elicited an innocent remark, ‘Oh, Victoria Falls was so much bigger than this’. Maya, her elder daughter was having none of this….nostalgia, African nostalgia at that……of her parents.

As for Shefali, how could she explain to Maya that at the age of eight, Shefali’s family boarded a BOAC flight out of Entebbe one sunny day, with her mom crying her heart out, sister Padmini in tow, and twenty English pounds in the pocket and a small suitcase for all four of them? Her dad ceremoniously kneeled down right before climbing the gangway, put his right palm on the tarmac, and when prodded immediately by the tip of a gun of a security guard by raising his palm and gently caressing his head with it. Those tumultuous times, preceded by a life of luxurious bungalows and chauffer driven cars and then immediately followed by a ten by ten room for all four of them in an Asian enclave of Liverpool, how would Maya relate to them? Her father would die four years later, totally shattered, broken and apologetic for not being able to provide for them. She was hastily married off to Rahul, two years older than her, right after her ‘A’ levels, started a family, and eventually rerouted herself to the US while Padmini an their mom stayed back.

Shefali however did not deal too much in those transitive ‘in between’ years. She dwelt on being woken up by Charity, her adorable Ganda speaking Bantu Amah, centering her life around these two sisters ever since they were born, their miniature park with a slide, swing and a see-saw at the back of the house, which was the envy of the neighborhood, the huge Edwardian doll house that was in their verandah, stuffed with miniature English furniture, and moreover Laxmi, their cook, who refused to cook anything that had any vestige of African ingredients of recipes in it. The day Shefali was born, her father had planted an Alphonso mango tree next to the playground at the back, which bordered her mother’s expansive kitchen garden. Eight years later, the tree was almost two stories tall, bore fruit profusely and was the pride and joy of their household. The evening before their departure, she and her sister had dug a small hole close to the roots and deposited their most valuable worldly possessions in it. Padmini had put in a small porcelain faced doll with gold hair and she had put in a penny, yes, an English copper penny with the silhouette of King Edward the Seventh… the King Emperor, inside the hall. Apparently her grandmother had clutched it in her hands when they were shipped to the east African coast and a few years back had given it to her before passing away quietly in their back room.

Somehow her childhood memories are still centered on that penny.

She wants Roberta to ask her parents whether the house was once called ‘Surabai Villa’, named after her great-grandmother and if so, is there a huge mango tree at the back? She is not going to ask about those pink curtains in her room, nor those wooden filigreed partitions in the living room. Looted, damaged or destroyed, it will be utterly foolish to spring those questions to a teenager who had never been there. Just what are the odds of Roberta’s parents being allocated the same house? If her brother, born in the UK two years later after landing there, ever manages to get their properties back, this house should be on the top of the list.

She is very tempted to ask Roberta to dig a hole around that tree and if possible, dig up that penny…..