Ode to Lata (9 page)

And when we were finally inside a club, only an hour left before that fateful two o’clock, the symphony in us resonated still; resonated in spite of the dance music compelling everyone to gyrate shirtless on the dance floor, to find someone to go home with.

While the crowd grew more frantic with the last call for alcohol, or last call for ass-a-hole as the inebriated ones called it, we remained calm in the knowledge of a little flask nestled in my back pocket.  Our eyes smoothly surveyed the room rather than darting around in a panic.  We felt good.  We felt right.  No more standing on the edge of the dance floor feeling like we didn’t belong just because we hadn’t spent hours in a gym and the shirts still cloaked our slender bodies.  No more guilt for abandoning those that had been consigned to AIDS.  No more searching for Richard and trying to sabotage whomever he was planning on fucking that night.  No more holocaust of the heart.

If the eyes were mirrors to the soul, then both Adrian and I felt that anyone who looked at us was being treated to a truly rare splendor.

LITHMUS TEST

Salman calls me.  He’s terribly upset because he thinks he’s been disinherited.

“Bitch sister!” he keeps saying.  “She’s making my life pure hell,
kutri sali!
Total control queen, just like my mother.  Well, to hell with them all!  I just don’t give a shit anymore.  Let her control all the finances – and I hope she screws them
all
one day! 
Hunh!
  Wait till my mother gets a load of my answering machine.  She’ll get a heart attack when she hears the greeting, I swear it!”

On it, he has the campiest song from one of Hindi cinema’s classics,
Pakeezah.
  Meena Kumari starred in it as a courtesan, lip-synching to Lata Mangeshkar’s “Inhi Logo Ne,” declaring how she had been exploited by every man from the postman to the policeman.

This should have been the litmus test for any Indian parent to discover if a son’s homosexuality.  The infamous
Pakeezah
song.

THE ART OF WAR

I remember my grandfather teaching me how to make ice popsicles in the scorching equatorial afternoons of Mombasa.  Under a towering ylang-ylang tree, which provided some shade and perfumed the air intoxicatingly, Bapa would crush the ice in an old rag, insert a stick from the
fagia
before balling it up and then dip it into a cup of rose sherbet syrup.  Sometimes he sat back on the cement bench and supervised my attempts at this miracle; but when my small, maladroit hands fumbled to affix the stick, his shaky (sober) hands would take custody of our project.  After a little fiddling, a perfectly globular, smooth popsicle would glisten under the merciless sun.

But no sooner had I taken hold of this crimson treat would we hear the angry screams of everybody, from my grandmother to my aunty, accusing him of attempting to make me sick due to my chronic tonsillitis.

“What are you trying to do now, you
chodu?
  Are you trying to kill him?” They would holler and yank me in from the verandah.

Ice popsicles were prohibited, just like ice-cold sodas and sun dried shreds of mango called
achari
, playing in the sun for too long or swimming in the ocean because I could drown just like that little boy in our community fifteen years ago.  And my grandfather was definitely up to no good, even when sober.

“Why don’t you just get lost instead of destroying everyone’s life,
hunh?”
my grandmother would say, slapping her forehead in disdain.

He would curse back sometimes, and sometimes he would leave home and go on a drinking binge until he came back swaggering at the end of the day, his pants wet with urine.  A neighbor would spot him, passed out by the bus shed in some part of town, and bring him home out of a sense of communal obligation.

My grandparents quarreled constantly, cursed each other mercilessly. Looking at their stoic black-and-white studio wedding picture, it was hard to imagine that they had ever spoken to one another in any way civil.  Or that they had once been in love and had ever been intimate enough to conceive three children.  Stranger still seemed the fact that they had been divorced nearly forty years and they had continued to live under the same roof.  Somehow they had forgotten to move out.  Whenever one questioned this arrangement, my grandmother would throw her hands in the air with pure resignation and say, “I came home one day and he refused to leave.  Slept outside in the verandah.  I had no choice but to let him back in.  He’s been here ever since.”

When Bapa was dying, I flew back to Mombasa.  Standing by his emaciated body, I held his frail hand and tried hard to smile, horrified at how much weight he had lost, and how he had shriveled into a look-alike for an unwrapped mummy.

I tried to forget about the times when even as a young child I had joined the family tradition of hurling insults his way and the times in my teens when I’d been tempted to hit him. That was just the vernacular we had always employed in that house.  Instead, I thought about how handsome he looked in the wedding picture that hung over his bed, the picture he had refused to dislodge. I thought about his musical talents, his ability to play the harmonium, and his singing.  How he had always been invited to perform at the music parties that were often hosted on the terraces of Tudor flats; many even begged for a cassette recording of his performance.

His hand barely a feather in my palm, my grandfather told me that he had been waiting to see me.  His only grandchild.  He knew he was dying and was afraid of it and didn’t want to.  I tried to console him with the notion that sooner or later everyone’s time came and hated myself for doing it.  I thought I had steeled sufficiently until, like a perplexed child, he had looked at me quizzically and asked, “How did I get this sick, Ali?  What happened to me?”

Tears welled up in my eyes, and I fought them back so that he wouldn’t see me cry.  He couldn’t comprehend how any of this had happened, and the irony both astonished and pained me.  All that drinking.  He honestly couldn’t see a connection.  He was entirely taken aback by his destroyed liver and his ailing health and now sounded like an infant who had played with matches only to be absolutely shocked by the burn.  “I don’t know how this became of me,” he confessed, shaking his head slowly.

I patted the back of his hand and simply nodded in agreement to his sentiment.  “I know, Bapa,” I said.  “I know… ”

What do you say to him at such a moment?  What can you say?  That you did this to yourself?  That this is the result of all that damned boozing?

I was back in Los Angeles when he died two weeks later.  On the night of his passing, I dreamt of a newborn baby.  It kicked and threw its fists in the air, remonstrating with all the anguish of birth.

After his burial I heard from my friend Zul, who had taken my place in performing the last rites, that nobody had been more distraught than my grandmother.

Her question: “What will I do without you now?”

Who would sit next to her in one of the two large sofas that sat like old dowagers in front of his bedroom window and argue the afternoons away?  Who would she hold responsible for destroying her life, and who would curse back at her?  Who would keep her company for all the hours her children were away at work?

She had wanted him to get lost, and now, much to her chagrin, he had gone and done just that.

Nobody could have doubted that they had loved each other profoundly.  Not if one took the time to search beyond the combative guise of their interaction.  Through the years that they had endured each other, they had reinvented their relationship. Although their language had been replaced from one of civility to that of offense, they had nevertheless chosen to communicate.  They had begun a war and each had found comfort in hiding behind their armor.  The art of war had become for them, the art of loving.

Yes, I choose to believe that they had loved each other profoundly.  Forty-three years of any kind of liaison should be proof of that.

INVOCATIONS

When I called my mother in Mombasa, our conversation started off typically enough with her clucking ruefully and telling me how much she missed me; how, strangely enough, she had been thinking about me just moments before the phone rang – making my call seem like a telepathic response to her invocation.

“You’ll be here soon enough,” I said, suddenly without the ire her impending visit had provoked in me just days ago. “But right now, I need you to do me a favor.”

“What happened?  Are you okay?  Are you sick?  Did something happen?” she said, without pausing for even a breath of air.  I could feel her trying, wanting desperately to squeeze herself into the mouthpiece and through the cord so she could emerge on the other end, here with me.

“Yeah, I’m fine.  I’m okay,” I said.  “It’s just Richard, Mummy.”

“Richard?”

By now she had heard his name several times and if anything, it had been taken as a rejection of her:
I can’t talk to you right now, Richard’s on the other line; I have to go now, Mummy.  I’m meeting Richard; Richard will be here any minute, I have to get dressed. 
And now, if after avoiding her for who knows how long, Richard had also motivated my reaching out to her, there was no doubt in her mind as to the stature he occupied in my life.

“He’s sick, Mummy,” I said, trying to throttle the tremor in my voice.  “I don’t know what will happen to him.”

“What’s the matter with him?” she asked.

I cut straight to my purpose. “I want you to put a
Satado
in the mosque,” I said, referring to that most potent of prayer rituals in the community.  No Ismaili was to request this weeklong observation for trivialities.  An impending catastrophe or great crisis that involved either the entire community or one of its own was the only justifiable basis to undertake this vow.

“
Satado?
” she said, incredulous.  “But, you know, he’s not even an Ismaili, Ali!”

“What difference does
that
make?  He’s a human being, isn’t he?” I said. “I mean, you would do it for me if I was in any kind of trouble, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, but, you know, that is differ—”

“Just think of him as your son, then.  You must do this for me, Mummy, please.  You have to!”

I must have sounded as completely possessed by my fear as I was. I felt her acquiescing even through her concerned reprimand.

“Ali, what the hell is the matter with you?  You know, I’m not getting any younger here, and you know, one of these days these antics of yours are going to drive me into the ground, I swear it! You
must
stop feeling this way about that boy!  What kind of spell has he put your under,
henh?”

“I’ll let him go, Mum, I promise.  I just want him to come out of this alive and then I’ll distance myself from him.  But I need your help.  I don’t want him to die,” I cried, verbalizing my deepest fear for the first time. “I won’t be able to bear it.  I won’t be able to bear it if anything happens to him… ”

“Ali, don’t be silly now.  Nothing’s going to happen to him, okay?  Why must you think of the worst things?”

“Maybe because he’s in the damn I.C.U.!”

“Oh,” she said. “He will be alright, just you wait and see.”

“I need you to do this, Mum.”

“Okay, but what is he suffering from, Ali?  Did he get into an accident?  Is he—”

“I don’t know.  Nobody knows…they’re running tests…I don’t know…”

“So listen, you know,
you
can also go to the mosque and put this
Satado
, you know?”

“I can’t go there!” I said.

“Why?”

“It’s just not the same here.”

“What’s not the same?”

“It’s different,” I said.  “They’re completely different here.  I can’t even relate to them…”

“What is different?  Who is different?  What are you saying,
hunh?”

I didn’t know where to start. Unless she lived here, it was difficult to explain the differences between Ismailis from East Africa and South Asia – not because there were so many of them but because these differences could be subtle.  It wasn’t just their mannerisms in prayers –
ginans
had the same lyrics but a different tune when coming from a Pakistani, preventing me from joining in.  It was also the ingredients used in traditional viands that struck a different and irritating note on the palate.  When I eagerly bought a plate of
biryani
from the food auction that took place after the prayers, I ended up dumping most of it into the garbage – the excess of cinnamon in lieu of cumin deprived me of nostalgic fulfillment.

Most striking was their interpretation of the faith itself and their secular view of living in an adopted homeland.  Many of them, especially the migrants, segregated themselves from the world at large, the community setting the perimeters of both their spiritual and social realms. Stalwart in the crucibles of the faith, it was clear to see that they considered themselves as the guardians of tradition or
tarika
; where the East African Ismailis, who dynamically tried to integrate into modernism, came off looking more like the infidels that represented everything that had gone wrong with the community.  Earlier dislocation – their motherlands of India and Pakistan had been left behind generations ago – had already sharpened their survival instinct and compelled them to forge an identity based not only on distant Hindu roots and the Muslim faith, but also on their nationality as Africans.