Ode to Lata (22 page)

No, this was definitely different, I told myself.  There is a big difference between picking up some stranger and having a ménage à trios and Adrian sleeping with my lover behind my back.  What Adrian had done was wrong, I decided.  We must not take that which does not belong to us.  Especially not from those we call our friends.  Those whose kindness we depend on during date-deprived weekends and midweek lulls when no one else cared about our lives.  Even if, by some small miracle, it became available to us, we must not take that which is not ours.

Adrian started to cry in remorse.  He told me how Nelson had pursued him – showed up at his place of work and the local bars, called him relentlessly at home, even cornered him when we had all been out together –  until he had given in.  As if that made it more excusable.

“Oh, God, Ali, I don’t know what came over me…I’m so ashamed of myself,” he blubbered.  I had never seen him look like this – my pillar of strength dissolved into a puddle of shame. “He means nothing to me, I swear it, Ali. Nothing.  There is nobody I care for more than you and I…I don’t know what came over me…”

Strange, I thought.  The two people who claim to care about me more than anything in the world went and fucked each other.

I looked at him without a hint of emotion on my face, my thoughts far from his act of contrition.  Nothing that he said could erase his misdeed and because he was sensible enough to know at least this much, he let his words fall off and resolved instead to display his grief only through tears.

I had considered eliminating him from my life.  I had considered punishing him by committing some kind of revengeful act.  But then Mummy’s words about forgiveness had gone through my mind, their validity, their wisdom being tested.

Would she have found this forgivable?

I began to realize as I watched him sob that I loved him dearly.  The feeling saddened me, as if luminesced through this catastrophe it had confirmed my emotional fatality.  Earlier in the day I had begun to see Adrian not the innocent light I had always seen him in but the surreptitious, self-serving shadows of his personality.  Now, I saw Adrian in his entirety, as if for the very first time, with his weaknesses and faults prominently attached to his limbs like the rest of us mortals, who, instead of wings, had our imperfections weighing us to the ground.  He had been the rock of Gibraltar in my sea of fleeting obsessions.  The one who kept me from coming apart at the seams when Richard had pulled out every thread.  Still the only one I considered extended family, and there were no crimes unforgivable when it came to family.

But I will never be able to look at your face again and think only of compassion,
I thought. 
Thank God, at last, you have been humanized. 

The chance to play the bereft victim was tempting, but I dispelled this notion.  I began to appreciate that now, at long last, there was no more debt for me to repay.  The ledger of his favors ran long, but by committing this single act, Adrian had equalized us in a way that only an extensive roster of reciprocated kindness or an abominable breach on his part could have accomplished.  He had made us even.

I had to prove to myself that this friendship, which had prevailed for eight years and now stood on the verge of an evolution, was stronger and more significant than Nelson.  The true test of any relationship was the capacity for forgiveness in its failing.  I had to, as I suspected Mummy would have condoned, forgive my dearest friend for betraying me.

I reached over the table, over the plates of china, and beckoned for Adrian’s hand.  Still shaking, he took his hand away from his tearful face and placed it hesitantly into mine.  I looked at the back of his hand studiously.  It was as pale as mine was dark.  There was no hair on it, and the pink of his knuckles was more obvious than mine would ever be.  My fingers clasped around it, and I asked him to stop crying.  “Everyone, Adrian, is entitled to one major fuck up,” I said.  “You just got yours.  We’ll try never to talk about this again.”

“I promise you, Ali, I’ll try to deserve your friendship from now on,” he sniffed.  “I took it for granted, but now I’ll do everything to deserve you.”

I smiled faintly, feeling knighted in spite of myself.  “It..
this
can never happen again, Adrian.  I don’t need to tell you that.  A man should
never
come between us.”

He nodded fervently, using his other hand to wipe his tears.  “Never.”

I raised myself from my chair and walked around to embrace him, to reel him back into the grace that he so desperately sought.  As he buried his face in my stomach, I felt like a sick man who had lightened the situation by being stronger than the visitor who came to lend him support.  With my hands on his head, I looked at the Picasso print behind him, at the woman looking into the mirror.  To me, the painting was transformed into a depiction of Adrian and myself.  Two figures locked in a convoluted embrace through realms and dimensions.  One of them stood expressionless, touching the other whose cheek bore the mark of what could be a tear.  I remembered how Adrian had helped me, lugging the frame atop of his Acura, our gripping hands securing it through the sunroof.  I realized that I had no other choice but to forgive Adrian.

I had what was essentially a lonely life littered with encounters of casual sex.  The men who sojourned in my bed were weeks later reduced to nameless ghosts.  My friends were the only corporeal and consistent thing about it.  Without them, I was completely and utterly alone.  I was the lone migrant without a family in America.  A statistic of the millions of multicultural orphans of this city.  My friends solidified my identity.  Here, you needed someone who really knew you, someone who through the years might let you down, but truly understood you.

For someone like me, loving unconditionally in L.A. was more than just a matter of virtue.

It was simple practicality.

HOME AGAIN

We watched Farida pluck a sizzling morsel of charbroiled steak straight off the skewer, dip it into a puddle of tamarind sauce and toss it into her mouth.  Salman looked at me anguished and muttered, “How many times does she have to eat the
mishkake
before making sure it’s ready for the rest of us?”

I was already laughing when Riyaz said, “Maybe she’s starving us on purpose and hoping we’ll get desperate enough to eat her pussy instead!”  The soda sputtered out of my mouth and sprayed Anwar and Anil who were seated around us on the porch.  Farida, still gnawing away at a mouthful, looked at us with narrowed eyes, her heft swelling ominously in the accommodating widow-black frock she was wearing, and prodded at us with the now stripped skewer in the air. 
“Ey, ey,
what are you bastards talking about.
Henh?”

“Nothing,
mataji
,” Salman struggled to say between his laughter. “Just contemplating the exotic menu.”

“Yeah, come here and I’ll give you one
thapar
and everything will start looking exotic to you!”

“What about Chastity?” I asked in hushed tones, referring to Farida’s Latina girlfriend who was conspicuously absent from the barbecue.

Riyaz threw his hands open and gave us that weary look.  “They’re having a little cat fight again!”  Then he meowed meekly and scratched the air.

Salman watched the pounds of meat being burnt to cinders, as if his whole life was being immolated on a pyre, and resting his chin in one hand pronounced with a cluck, “Oh, we’re definitely being starved.”

Such was the general atmosphere of the Indian get-together.  Juicy gossip, loud pumping remixes of nostalgic
filmi
songs, the precious camaraderie that we all sought in clubs but never found and, if we were lucky and Farida was getting laid, some edible food as well.  After what had transpired between Adrian and myself, I started to spend more time with Salman and his gang of South Asian expats.  My temporary drift from Adrian had not been intentional; we had both meant to use the incident to create an even stronger bond, but we began to realize that this would take some time.

For the first time in almost the decade that I had been in America, I became reacquainted with my own people.  We called ourselves Indians, although the term would not have been politically applicable considering we all came from different countries, including Pakistan and even Sri Lanka.  In the end, as only total displacement and a greater love for the things that bound us than those that separated us could ensure, we just thought of ourselves as Indians.  The bunch that I was introduced to by Salman became, in time, everything that I missed about my friends back home.  Chatting away in an orgy of different dialects – Kutchi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu.  An acceptance of speech that doesn’t require correct grammar or an explanation for the pauses in between words.  The sweet exaggerated vernacular of the Indian culture with its opera of gestures and expressions.  The sardonic appreciation and extraction of camp from the world of Hindi cinema.  The nostalgic, melancholy strains of
filmi
music and the evergreen voice of Lata Mangeshkar.

After years of denial, of severing myself from the tribalism of Indians, I returned to them under Salman’s care and started to feel a sense of peace.  There was no sound sweeter than that of being chided in Gujarati.  No melody more stirring than the swoops and tumbles of the strings to a
filmi
song, accompanied by tablas and haunting vocals.  And so began my incorporation back into a world where Burman and Kalyanji-Anandji claimed joint custody on the stereo with Ennio Morriconne and John Barry.  Where Lata Mangeshkar ousted Barbra Streisand and poorly mastered soundtracks of old films and the digitized sounds of newer ones competed for shelf space with Western music.  In the bathroom,
Stardust
shared the magazine rack with
Vanity Fair
and I wondered when
Filmfare
had grown from its little
Reader’s Digest
format into looking like the rest.  Fewer nights were spent at Heaven and Oasis to accommodate yet another barbecue for
mishkake
and Coca-Cola on Farida’s patio.  Taped episodes of
Melrose Place
were dislodged from the VCR for three hours of a wacky, over-the-top, melodrama from Bollywood, with singing and dancing interpolating every turn of the formulaic plot.  Imagine Ralph Fiennes lip-synching Michael Bolton when carrying his dead lover out of the cave, only to be met with the rest of the cast and every possible extra, equally bereft, in a full production number. That’s Bollywood.

So seamless was my return to the members of the Indian community (some of whom had also immigrated from East Africa like me) that I wondered why it had taken me so long to come to realize that no matter how convinced any culturally reared Indian was about his faultless integration into the West, he was only deluding himself.  Having been cultivated in the opulence of his own culture, in the nurturing folds of its familial and emotionally alchemized way of life, it would prove difficult to feel complete without some kind of continual connection to it.  The West, with its dazzling shopping malls and technical luxuries, its societal messages of independence and its reproval of codependency, would never succeed in eradicating the
desi
in me.  These traits were inbred.  The passion with which I pursued both love and life, the very quality that my American friends found so remarkable in me, was in my blood and could be traced back to my Indian heritage.  The lyrics to
filmi
songs that my parents had played during my childhood miraculously found their way to my lips after more than a decade of not hearing them – a testament of my unbroken ties with India.  The way in which my American accent easily fell off to allow the singsong cadences when conversing with other Indians reaffirmed that the Indian was still very much alive in me.  Like furniture that emits the sterile odor of disuse over the years, Salman and the bunch of Indians had removed the covering and shaken the dust off me.

I blanketed a morsel of steak in warm
naan,
sat under the virtually starless sky of Los Angeles – the same firmament under which somewhere else bodies were being traded in the commerce of nightly sex – and listened to a boom box on the windowsill.  It unleashed a new breed of Indian musicians who had ambitiously remixed the standards of
filmi
music to a house beat.  Salman would tease Farida that she had contracted “laveria” (an acronym of malaria and love) over Chastity or, depending on the circumstances, that he was sure Chastity was feeling suicidal and would call any moment.

I felt as if I’d gone back in time, like I was sitting outside in the verandah of our flat in Tudor.  There were little children concentrating on striking marbles into a cleft in the sand, others playing hopscotch, all of them unsupervised from the dangers that make such a carefree childhood impossible here.  In the grips of nostalgia, I was back there.  Salman and Farida and the rest of the bunch were still with me, and they continued to chatter away between mouthfuls of
mishkake
, but we were facing those little children playing in the dust instead of the houses cloistering us.

It felt, at least for those few uncanny moments, like home again.  

BROTHERHOOD AND BLOODY MARYS

Cameras snap and roll.  We march at the helm of UTSAV, the South Asian delegation at San Francisco’s Pride festival, the streets transformed into a moving river, bodies of all colors and shapes rippling under banners and confetti.  Others form spectatorial walls of cheerful support or silent reprobation on the curb.  From windows men, women and children sprouted – witnesses to the one act of solidarity that wondrously managed to cast aside our own prejudices to combat those of the heterosexual world.