Beloved Strangers (15 page)

We never did move into the Big House, even after Tarun and Lalita left. The black, red and white kitchen with shiny marble-top counters – modelled after one of Mother’s home-decor magazines – was buffed and polished for many more tenant families until it began to lose its lustre and newness. The long stretch of balcony where Tarun and Lalita had hung a hammock under our envious eyes grew dark patches on its milky white cement floor with each passing monsoon. More and more high-rises sprang up around our neighbourhood blocking the golden morning light streaming in through the white French windows of the Big House.

From the night of their wedding my parents had been chasing a candlelit room, a beautiful home from where to bring forth the perfect start to their lives. Every time they got close the room vanished, the house crumbled. And they never could begin their lives. So there they were, constantly fighting to get back to the beginning when all they were really doing was stalling the macabre end. For Father, the end came with the final and irrevocable accusation that he could never make us happy. He surrendered to the terrible absolution of this verdict in complete silence, with a perpetually bent head. At all hours of the day and night he slumped in his cane chair or on top of his prayer mat, waiting, always waiting to be released from himself.

On the day of my father’s funeral, I learned a curious thing. We took his body to the cemetery just before sundown to bury him before the evening prayer call. Friends and relatives pooled into several cars to join the funeral procession. At the entrance of the cemetery, my cousin’s husband stopped us.

‘This is as far as women can come. No woman can be present at the burial site,’ he said. Astonished, I turned to Mother, expecting a scathing response from her, but she was backing away, slowly, obediently. I looked to Naveen and Tilat for support but they turned their faces away.

‘Why can’t women be at the burial?’ I asked, at last.

‘It’s bad luck,’ came the firm reply.

We stood outside in the gathering murk, my mother, sisters and I, together with a few other women friends and relatives. I watched helplessly as distant relations and veritable strangers accompanied my brother Avi to perform the last rites for our father. As the men disappeared with Avi, I knew what I had been denied. I’d been denied the last tears – the slow, satiating pain of a final touch, a final word, a final look, a final goodbye. When the prayer call rang out from the city’s mosques, we knew that our father had been put to rest in the freshly dug earth. I gazed up at the pink sky, as I had done so many times before, hoping to see the open doorways of Heaven beckon its wandering souls back inside. The other women immediately pulled their dupattas over their heads and cupped their hands in prayer. I wanted, more than anything else, to utter a last prayer for Father. All my life I had defied his wish to see me succumb in ceremonial prayer. And I couldn’t raise my hands now to summon a single syllable that was worthy of a last sacrament for him. I watched the intent faces of those whose eyes were still closed in quiet supplication, the sorrow and reverence in their hearts finding form and release in the act of prayer. For the first time in my life I felt the need to be quiet, to pause and fill myself with a presence that was bigger than me. It was a peculiar sensation, euphoric yet calm, searing open a space in the middle of my chest that remained ajar and alight. In a quick and deliberate flash of memory I saw my father, slouching on his prayer mat, tears on his cheeks, eyes far away, lips frozen in a faint smile. Then the image was gone, along with the sensation. Complete darkness descended upon the cemetery and there was not much sound except the intermittent buzzing of crickets.

Later I was told that women were not permitted to be near a burial for two reasons. One was based on the belief that women could be polluted by menstrual blood, which might draw evil spirits near the dead. The other reason struck me as a more arresting one: it had to do with a woman’s alleged lack of control over her grief. If she broke down and exposed her deepest sorrow to the departing soul, she made it hard for the soul to leave earth.

I wanted my father to reach whatever destination awaited him after death. I wanted him to find his home in the next life. If there really was another life out there for him then I wanted him to be happy in it, happier than he had been in this one. At the very least, I hoped that death would complete the circle of his life rather than rob him of its meaning. But even if death completed a circle for my father, it only decapitated our family further, decimating the idea of our home.

More than twenty years after all our earnest prayers gave birth to the Big House, I am still in the dark about what home had really meant to my father and mother. Was it simply the amalgamation of a city, a neighbourhood, a street, a few rooms and a garden? Was it only a structure of steel and concrete or was it a gateway to something beyond? And without even fully understanding it I had smeared myself with their restlessness, assigned myself the same thankless task of finding and creating a home that would hide the clutter of my life in its gracefully organised rooms. Worse still, the restlessness slowly turned into a cold determination. I vowed not to let myself get attached to the idea of a home. I sought a kind of home
less
ness – not the kind to land me penniless on the sidewalk – but the kind that would constantly keep me on the move, making it impossible to build a home, to nest, to grow roots. I would spend my life travelling, wandering, moving in and out of new towns and cities.

‘Do you think you’ll ever return home?’ friends have asked me. The question annoys me, mostly because I do not know the answer to it.

‘What is home?’ I snap. ‘Especially in this day and age? Look at this global world we live in.’

‘Ah, but everyone has a home . . .’ some of them persist, with a touch of pity in their voices.

So I devised, very cleverly I thought, a response to the question of where home might be for me, one that spoke of no partialness to one place or another. Playing on the trendiness of being a truly global citizen, I’d say, with great affectation, ‘You see, I want to live in a place that’s a perfect blend of the East and the West.’ Grunts of sarcasm usually followed such a chimera of implied largesse, though curiosity welled at the thought of this cosmopolitan utopia. ‘And what place is that, for you?’ Of course I did not know. If I knew, I’d have lived there. I liked the sound of it, could intuit the philosophy of it, but I was only Alice in the Wonderland of my own naiveté. What I really meant to say was simply this: I knew of no place where I wanted a home because I didn’t know what home was.

A year after Father’s death, the pined-for family vacation happens at long last. We gather in Turkey where Naveen now lives and is expecting her first child. As we march along the streets of old Istanbul, donning our hats and cameras, it feels as if we have done this many times before. We mount a ferry on the Marmara Sea, crossing over from the Asian side of Istanbul to the European side, the geographical attribute that denotes the region as Eurasia. From the deck of the ferry I stare at the famous Bosphorus Bridge connecting the two sides and I cannot help but marvel at its significance. If you stand right in the middle of the Bosphorus Bridge you stand in the centre of the space that is neither Europe nor Asia. There is great debate among geologists over the formation of the narrow channel of water that connects the edges of Europe and Asia in the body of their gracious host, modern-day Turkey. Thousands of years ago, the Black Sea disconnected from the Aegean Sea which split up the land spaces of Greece and Turkey as we know them today. In around 5600
bce
, the Bosphorus appeared as an outcome of the great Mediterranean floods, to reconnect the severed seas and therefore the severed lands by way of the Sea of Marmara (which is connected by the Dardanelles to the Aegean Sea, and thereby to the Mediterranean Sea). It was because of the Bosphorus that Constantinople was built as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and because of the Bosphorus that the Ottomans were able to take it over in 1453. Governments have fought over the Bosphorus forever, because of its strategic importance, and the world wars, like all other wars before them, misused the space of her charitable body which wants nothing other than to connect.

Today, the Bosphorus Bridge is a lure of hip tourism, the means of crossing over from Europe to Asia without leaving the country. As I cross it myself, my Turkish brother-in-law points out with pride, ‘Now
this
you will not find in any other country.’ What boggles my mind, after spending three months in beautiful Turkey, is how the people, passionate and warm, cleanly separate their Eastern values from their Western ones, as if the Bosphorus Bridge itself is invisibly suspended in their minds.

As everyone settles into a balmy evening of barbecue on the patio of our villa, I search online for more Bosphorus-related trivia. On 15 May 2005 at 7.00 local time, US tennis star Venus Williams played a show game with Turkish standout Ipek Şenoğlu on the bridge, the first tennis match ever to be played on two continents. The event was organised as a promotion ahead of the 2005 WTA’s Istanbul Cup and lasted five minutes only on the north side of the bridge. After the exhibition, both players threw a tennis ball into the Bosphorus.

The last sentence makes me think. Why throw the tennis ball into the Bosphorus? What promise of friendship did two opposing parties proclaim through this act? Was the throwing of the ball a truce, an attempt at a civil relationship, despite the results of the match? Or was it something more? A gentle wish, perhaps, for a future world where territorial demarcations will not be necessary to define ourselves.

Indeed, there is a popular belief that if you make a wish while passing under the Bosphorus Bridge it will come true. What could have led to this myth? Could it be that the Bosphorus, bridging the gap between two remarkably different worlds, East and West, symbolises that real harmony lies in neither this nor that. Feeling at home, being at ease, achieving happiness, being fulfilled – call it what you will – is an Eternal Bosphorus that is neither here nor there but somewhere in between. Maybe the wise ones knew this; maybe they knew that the Bosphorus was the earth’s own conjugal point of oneness and harmony, because it urges us to dissociate, to step on neutral ground where we can face ourselves more candidly. So when we stand upon that place or pass under it, earth and spirit blend into a synonymous whole, commanding the right to a wish.

Pondering on the meaning of home on this July evening, in an old house in Istanbul, where I am vacationing with my family on foreign soil for the first time, I have never felt more rooted, more sheltered. Would Father have liked it here? I try to picture him sitting next to my mother on the spacious ottoman as she contentedly sips her Turkish coffee. I see him engrossed in his reveries, as he always was, contemplating the foamy outline of the Mediterranean Sea in the horizon. Would his presence, right here right now, have completed his quest? Is this what he had been looking for? As the Japanese poet Basho said:

The moon and the sun are eternal travellers. Even the years wander on.

A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years,

every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Though I am intrigued by the words, illuminated by their essence, I am not convinced by them and neither would Father have been, I suspect. If the journey itself is home, why do we so avidly await its end, so that we may return to where we belong – our home?

And now, sixteen years after my father’s death, I find that neither the completion nor depletion of his life matters to me. I find myself indifferent to his achievements, forgetting his shortcomings, turning away from the gloom of his last years and searching for something beyond. Who had he been, that preoccupied man, the youngest of six children, apple of his mother’s eye? He was born in the foggy mountains of Sylhet; his mother was an Assamese woman to whom I bear an eerie resemblance. My father’s father was a giant of a man who loved weapons and hunting. Elephant tusks, tiger skins and stuffed deer heads were strewn across the walls of my paternal grandparents’ sprawling townhouse. I never saw my grandfather. Other than the animal parts, an old hunting rifle rusting in our garage was the only memento we had of him. I vaguely remember my grandmother before she died. I was just five at the time. In her white sari, she was indiscernible from the huge white bed that was slowly swallowing her up.

‘Come, little one, come close so I can see,’ she’d say, reaching for me with a shrivelled hand.

‘No,’ I would reply every time, hiding my face in my father’s lap, ‘I’m scared of your wrinkles.’

‘Give Dadu a kiss,’ my father would urge, picking me up and putting me on the bed next to my grandmother.

He must have wanted me to love his mother. He once said she was his favourite person in the world.

I pick up bits and pieces of my father from his family and friends.

‘Your father was a mischief maker. He would just disappear for hours, making everyone very worried,’ says my aunt, showing me a picture of a twelve-year-old boy, standing barefoot on the grass, pristine tea gardens rising behind him.

I take a closer look at the boy in the photograph. He was very lean, bony almost, and his eyes sparkled with amusement. I am trying hard to remember the times I’d seen my father amused. Why is my memory failing me?

All these details I collect about my father seem increasingly useless as the years go by. They are nothing but fragments that fail to elucidate the whole. There was the wild, daredevil boy growing up in the mountains amongst deer and tigers. Then there was the dashing young man of later years, the man who broke a lot of women’s hearts before he fell in love with my mother’s voice. There was also the eccentric man who protected his car as if it was alive, the elegant and ambitious man whose work consumed him completely, and finally, the faithful soul who knelt in daily prayer in search of the peace that he could not, ultimately, find in his life. But where was
my
father in all of this? Why does he come to me only as a metaphor for some ideal, like ambition or devotion or duty? Why can’t I fill the ever-present distance between him and I with anything other than the longing to know more?