Ode to Lata (20 page)

Once, when trying to forge his features from the defeating memory of his infrequent visits, I looked up at the night sky – because the sky was where God and all that have returned to him are mythicized to thrive – and thought,
Well, your son turned out to be queer after all, Dad.  After all your attempts at disciplining me, using your hands to strike me and your strength to shake me, your son has turned out to be a faggot as big as the macho man you were. Now that you’re up there, and I hope not burning in the fires of hell for being the cruel son-of-a-bitch that you sometimes were, I hope you understand.  I hope that from up there you’ve gained some perspective and are finally able to accept me and not be ashamed.

MAKING CHAI

There were tears in her eyes, but this time I knew they were not for dramatic effect.  In about an hour, she would be flying back to Kenya.  I sat next to her at the boarding gate to the flight that would take her to London and then, after an exhaustive eight-hour wait in transit, back home.  As I watched other planes bellies regurgitate frazzled passengers, I started to wish I could have spared her the tedium of her journey; to have been able to not only pay for her trip, but also to have afforded her the comforts of first-class seating and a quick, painless layover.  She struggled through a steaming cup of tea, crumpling her face in distaste.

“Is this tea?  How can you just stick a bag in some hot water and call it tea,
henh?”

I smiled at her, noticing her sarcasm was eclipsed by the poignancy in her eyes. “What do you want them to do, Mum?  Boil you
chai
at the airport?”

“Ah!  These people don’t know the meaning of tea,
henh!”
she renounced.

In the past week, alongside baring our feelings and making our peace, she also taught me how to prepare tea the traditional way.  How to add the pinches of
masala
and bruised pods of cardamom before the tea reached its boiling point and then pour cream into the bubbling lava and watch it dissipate like a placated volcano in a pot.  I would look forward to making tea her way when she was gone, and I would enjoy it with the
halwa
she brought me.  I would miss her terribly now.  I wished she could stay longer now that the pretending was over.  Now that I could go back to employing her wisdom with the emotions that ebbed inside me, emotions that perhaps only she could help explain. We had been mother and son first, then unyoked and at war and now finally friends.

Mummy rejected the remainder of her tea to contend with her rosary of marble beads.  The focus of her worship, a photo of
Hazar Imam
carefully encased in plastic, was lying in the handbag on her lap.  I knew that as soon as I left, she would bring it out and immerse herself into his image.  She had left me another one; a larger, framed photo that now hung on my bedroom wall, replacing the one that I had knelt in front of when begging for Richard.  She insisted I offer my prayers to it when I woke up in the morning and went to bed at night. Her pact with God could only be implemented if I too contributed to the worship.

I tried to make small talk and asked her if she was ready to go back home.  I thought how funny that even after all these years I still referred to Kenya as “home.” 

She managed to smile and told me she’d had a wonderful vacation, playing the perfunctory part of every visitor, and that she was glad to have lost some weight.  She wouldn’t admit the fat loss pills didn’t live up to their promise.  The calcium tablets she’d decided to experiment with had made a considerable difference in her osteoporosis, and she couldn’t wait to show off all the clothes she’s raided from the malls.  But I knew her stay was long and painful, thanks to me.  She visited close to three months, and I got the feeling that she would’ve stayed even longer to regain some harmony between us.

“You know, I’m just so happy to see you finally settled in your own apartment,” she added. “But please, Ali, try not to spend too much money, okay?  You know, you spend money like water!  You have no
keemet
of
paisa!
No value!”

“Alright, alright, don’t worry, I know.”

“Yeah, yeah, you know everything! Do you know how much one dollar here is worth in Kenya shillings?”

“Mum, please, I’m not living in Kenya.  I’m living here, so I can’t be thinking that way, okay?”

“Haya,
fine!” she sighed. “But please promise me you will look after yourself.  You know, if anything happens to you, Ali, it will just kill me, I swear it!”

“Mum, nothing’s gonna happen to me,” I begged for her to stop.

“Look here,” she said, resting her hand very gently onto mine. “You have already told me everything about your lifestyle and now that I know, I have accepted it, okay?  There is nothing I can do about it, right?  I know that.  It breaks my heart, Ali, believe me it does, but you know, the most important thing, I tell myself, is that you are happy.  You go ahead and live your life the way you want.  I’m not standing in your way, but please don’t abuse yourself, you know?  That’s all I’m asking from you.” 

I squeezed her hand, careful not to encourage her getting emotional.  Parting was always difficult even without wedging the breadth of entire continents between us, when calling one another would be confined to off-peak times when the rates were lower, when accord had been reached but time had run out.  She’d need be to strong when she boarded that plane, I told myself.  It would not do for her to unravel into tears again.

“I’ll look after myself, Mummy, don’t you worry.  I have a reputation for being self-indulgent,” I said with a wink.

“Try, Ali, not to expect too much from people.  It never got me anywhere.”

“Me? Expect too much from people?” I narrowed my eyes.  “Nah!”

“I’m not playing,” she maintained, her voice somber.  “Just listen to me, really.  I have spoiled you, we all have, and you know it.  But it just does not pay, believe me.  Your friends, your… lovers, even your own family can let you down, and sometimes you just have to learn to forgive them and not be so sensitive.”  Despite myself, a sadness begun to shroud me, and the muscles in my face started to droop.  I knew that her advice was being prompted by my situation with Nelson, and was reminded again that despite numerous calls, a couple of which had been forlorn messages and the others just hang-ups, he hadn’t bothered to call me back.

“You are just like me, Ali,” she said softly now, her other hand touching my face as if she were wiping the dust off a mirror.  “You feel
too
much.”

I grunted.  “For people who feel too little.”

“Why?” she asked me.  “If you must be with someone, I don’t care who it is, Ali, why find someone like that?  First that Richard boy, and now this…this other one,” she said contemptuously, refusing even to utter his name.  “All of them, the same person.  Why are you creating this same situation
over
and
over
again?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Mum.  Maybe I’m trying to succeed where you failed.”  She looked away from me, obviously bruised.  Her hand slid away from mine and fluttered onto her handbag.  “But don’t worry.  I’m learning, Mum.  I’m learning,” I said, quickly withdrawing the sting from my sarcasm and finding her hand again with mine.

“I’ve tried my best with you.  I really have.  I don’t know what I could have done differently, Ali.”

“Mum, this is not a result of anything you did.  It’s not something you could’ve prevented.”

“Your father… ” she sighed.  “Sometimes I can’t help but think that maybe it’s better that he’s gone.  Things would only have gotten more… difficult, you know?”

Yes. Things would have turned out differently had he been alive.  Perhaps it was better that he was dead.  How could he, this womanizing, macho figure, have embraced his son’s homosexuality?  Memories of his fury – him striking her to the ground, his hand lashing across my face and inflaming my cheek as a means of nullifying her coddling of me – flashed through my mind.  It must have been at those moments, when I saw him unfurl into this tyrant – bullying us both with his strength, smashing his hands into us at will, calling me a girl – that I must have decided I wanted to be more like my mother and nothing like this man I called father. Yes, perhaps it was better that he was dead.     

“And,” she said. “You promise to be careful about the AIDS?”

“First of all, it’s not
the
AIDS, and yes, I will be very careful, don’t worry.”

“Ali, try to focus on your reading, on your prayers, go out and see good movies, you know?  You don’t have to go out all the time and be marching on the streets with
those
people!”

“What – marching?”

“I have seen
them
,” she said, her hand jutting up in the air. “Marching, marching, marching, down that… that Santa Monica street, doing all those… strange things!”

Oh no, Public Access.  Probably a rerun of the gay-pride march where the cameras captured only the most outrageous behavior: men clad in leather and chains flagellating each other on a float for some sadomasochistic club; butch lesbians roaring down the boulevard on their motorcycles with their tits hanging out in a revolt against feminine archetypes; drag queens aureoled in feather boas and sequined gowns paying homage to every diva from Judy Garland to Diana Ross while lip-synching “I Will Survive” as an anthem against discrimination.  These were overwhelming images even for me sometimes.  It must have terrified her to think that her little boy, the child she had tucked away into bed at night, left home on a Saturday night to pursue such overt modes of expression.

“Mum, not everyone is like that, okay?  There are different kinds of straight people and there are different kinds of gay people.  Some gay people don’t want to, you know, dress differently or behave like a woman or do anything that unusual.”

She hunched her shoulders, obviously feeling that she’d never know for sure about many of these things.  “Have you gone for a test?” she moved on.

“Mummy,” I said defensively and started to frown.  “I haven’t done anything that would… put me at risk.” 

“Still,” she persisted.  “You should get one, don’t you think?”

I nodded placatingly.  “I will, don’t worry about it.  I guess it can’t hurt.”  Oh, but it could, I thought.  I’m one of those people for whom ignorance, in this case, was bliss.  I wouldn’t tell her that getting tested was a notion that had emerged in my mind only to be promptly banished by terror.  That having come from such a hypochondriac family, resulting positive – even if the disease was benign, would induce psychosomatic reactions that would surely annihilate me long before the disease itself could.  I would just rather not know. 

“You know, I’m going to miss you terribly, Ali.”

“It’s Jerry Springer you’re going to miss terribly,” I said.  “We’ll be talking regularly now. We won’t lose touch this time.”

She leaned over and put her arms around me, her rosary still clutched tightly in her hand.  Her handbag almost slid off her lap but I caught it.  “You are all I have,” she cried wistfully.  “My only child.”

I patted her on the back, oddly reminded of the times my grandmother used to pat me as a child when I was ill.  I said nothing and continued to comfort her in my arms.  I felt the wetness of her tears on my neck and the shaking of her body in a final cry.  She whimpered and tsked away, as if cursing fate for taking me so far away from her.  In her mind, I was still the little boy she indulged every time I threw a tantrum; vulnerable and unfamiliar with the schemes of the world.  Not a man having sex, with an identity independent of his mother.  She could pray day and night, yes, but seemed embittered at having to rely on faith alone.

After about a minute, she disengaged from me and wiped her tears.  I handed her the paper napkin from her cup of tea, and she blew her nose into it, drawing my attention to her sparkling diamond nose ring.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she sniffed.  “I’m okay.”

I offered to get her some water or soda but she refused, telling me there was no need for me to wait with her any longer.  “You have to go back to work, don’t you?  I’ll be fine now.  You’d better go.”

I glanced at my watch and smiled at the thought of the time she’d been keeping.  For the past three months, her watch had been on Kenya time, a reminder that life went on somewhere else. She still had another hour to wait and I knew that she would spend it praying.  I rose to my feet, then leaned down to give her another hug.  “You’ll be back next year,” I said.  “We’ll make sure of it.”

“Yeah,” she struggled to smile.  “Who is going to buy me the ticket?  Your father?”

“Maybe I will,” I said gallantly and shrugged.

“Will you do me a favor?”

“What?” I asked, preparing for another haul of emotional allegiances.

“Please don’t forget to record
Melrose Place
and send it to me?  You know, we don’t get it there!”

THE CONFESSION

Mummy must be in London by now, I thought as I headed home at the end of the day.  And then I thought about what awaited me inside the apartment.  I knew exactly how it would feel now that she had gone back to a land that I continued to think of as home, even though I’d claimed this metropolis as mine.  It would feel bare.  Desolate.  Lonely.  Mummy – with her bubbling pots of chicken curry and cumin infused basmati rice, her meticulously swept Pine-Soled linoleum surfaces, her blush colored spectacles, the arduously worked rosary and tattered prayer book flagrantly mislaid on the coffee table next to my Herb Ritts book – was gone.