Tanya Tania (5 page)

Peace,

Tania

July 2, 1991

Karachi

Dear Tania,

I don't know how to say this nicely. YOU CANNOT GET MARRIED.

a)
You're sixteen and this is illegal. I looked it up. The legal marriage age for girls in India is 18. It's 21 for boys.

b)
You can't be okay with his stealing a ring.

c)
You have to go to college.

d)
What does Nusrat think?

Best,

Tanya

July 14, 1991

Karachi

Dear Tania,

What happened? Why are you angry with Arjun? Did he have to give the ring back to his Mummy? Haha. On a more serious note though, I do hope you're over the engagement fantasy. It's a terrible idea. Just trust me on this.

Your family sounds quite different from mine. No one shouts here. It's quiet.

I thought about what you said about my using Choti Bibi. I disagree. I see it as symbiotic. I am helping her get a better life and she is helping me get a better life. What's wrong with that?

Today I asked her to write an essay on any topic that she wants. Since you love her so much, here's what she wrote. I translated it into English for you.

What I want to be as an adult

I want to be a maid and look after children in Karachi when I am an adult. I can also be a cook in Karachi when I am an adult. I can also be a gardener in Karachi when I am an adult except I don't want to wear gardener uniforms because I have never worn trousers.

I don't want to get married when I am an adult. I want to bring my baby brother Mohammed to Karachi and make him live with me when I am an adult. When I am twenty, he will be eight years old. I will save up all my money and put him in the best school and he will be very clever and he will come first in class and he will only want to eat the food that I cook.

I also want to have seven different outfits when I am an adult so that I can wear a different outfit every day.

Yours sincerely,

Ruksana Mohammed Jamal

She actually wrote yours sincerely in English and without a single spelling mistake (although her e's are a little hard to decipher). But there you go. That's your beloved Chhoti Bibi. It took her two hours to write this. She's nineteen.

Best,

Tanya

July 20, 1991

Bombay

Dear Tanya,

I don't give a shit about Chhoti Bibi, I was just pointing out that you were using her. She sounds like a total retard. She probably loves that brother of hers because her mental age is the same as his. She will probably be sold off into someone's house and be made to work like a dog and never get to go home and see her darling brother who will probably die before he grows up anyway like everyone does in our stupid beggar countries. She's so stupid. Seven outfits for seven days. She's dumb.

Most people are dumb. My parents are dumb, my friends are SO dumb.

I've decided I'm not going to college in America. I'm not going to tell my mum but I'm just going to do really badly in the SAT and send in crappy essays.

Today I was really mean to Neenee. Even for me, I was really mean. She didn't even go to the bathroom to cry, she just started crying in front of everyone. It made me hate her even more.

Remember being ten years old? We used to go down to play with water bottles and five rupees to buy spicy sev puri outside the gate of the building which was as far as we were allowed to go. I used to run faster than anyone else and sometimes even after I had caught everyone I used to go on running, running, running. And the wind would be in my hair and the sweat ran down my back and nothing else mattered because I was the fastest runner in the world and I could outrun anyone.

Except of course I didn't. You can't run away from growing breasts and pubic hair. You can't run away from becoming a girl. I hate being a girl. Before we became girls and they became boys it was just about running. You either ran fast or you didn't run fast.

You want to know what happened? Here's what happened. Arjun forced me to go down on him. For twenty minutes. He had promised me after the last time. But today again. Twenty minutes.

Tania

3

March 1, 1996

New York, NY

Dear Tania,

There is a poem by T.S. Eliot that we had read for the A Levels. It started,

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

But you know, I think March is the cruelest month. January and February are beautiful. Endless flakes that start silently and go on forever. Like magic everything turns slowly, uniformly, anonymously blank. Let it snow, snow, snow until I turn softly invisible.

But by March, the snow is gone and the mud is here and everyone is resentful. The earth is tired of being invisible, we are all tired of winter wool and chapped hands and the five o'clock dark goes from cozy to encroaching.

The weather has been morose since dawn and I have watched it sulk through the window. I have a paper due tomorrow but I can't focus. My mother is not having a good day.

My friends say there is a winter Tanya and a summer Tanya which is their way of saying they aren't so fond of winter Tanya. I don't blame them. Summer is so much easier with the sun and the holidays and the new green boughs of trees rubbing up into each other for the first time like new lovers. Isn't it funny that when we lived in similar places I hated summer and you loved it and now I love it and you…hate it? Love it? Are indifferent to it? It amazes me how much I hate not knowing Tania because the entirety of our relationship was really just eighteen and a half months. February 14, 1991 to December 9, 1992. Sixty-seven letters. And yet, your absence like a death.

Hey Tania, remember that night you had written to me about when your parents took you and Neenee to buy kebab rolls for dinner and then you drove around Marine Drive afterwards? You pretended to be asleep and your parents held hands.

It wasn't all bad. That's the thing with March. With the gray and the cold and the slush creeping slowly into your boots, you remember more the bad parts. But I want to remind you: it wasn't all bad.

Love,

Tanya

July 30, 1991

Karachi

Dear Tania,

I've thought about it a lot and I don't know what to say. But for some reason, reading your letter over and over again reminded me of something that had happened when we had just moved to Karachi.

Navi and I had just turned six. My father decided that we should go to Karachi Preparatory. My mother wanted us to go to the American school. But we couldn't afford it so Navi and I both started at Karachi Prep. I'm still at Karachi Prep. Navi was switched to the American School when we were eleven.

Anyway, it's strange what we remember. I remember nothing at all about school. I don't remember Ali, for example, even though he says we were in the same class. I don't remember any of my friends. And yet, I remember clearly that when we came home from school, we used to take a nap in my parents' room which was the only room in the house that had an air-conditioner. We used to wear shorts and nothing else. And even then our skin turned red with heat rash. I remember how the rash looked on my skin. I remember waking up and drinking tepid milk in horrid, dull steel tumblers that had ornate handles with grime on the undersides. I remember picking at the grime and dropping it in my glass so I would fall sick and not have to go to school the next day.

I hated going to school because we were really behind in Urdu even with a tutor coming home to catch us up with the rest of the class. Navi didn't seem to care. But I hated Urdu class. It felt like being deaf, dumb and blind—the script on the blackboard, the drone of poems being chanted that I did not understand. Paeans to Pakistan. It made me feel like a plant. Insensate, stuck in a pot in the corner.

Anyway, one day I was playing around with my tumbler of milk and I spilled it all over the table. I remember it so clearly: the chocolate-coloured milk an expanse of swiftly spreading grey on the glass table and quickly coming to the rim and dripping down onto the floor in loud, fat drops. I remember hating all of it—the table with its stale odour of dirty washcloth, the steam rising from the milk and the drip drip on the floor.

My mother must have heard the tumbler fall because she rushed to the dining room. She saw the mess and—I remember this so clearly—she stepped backwards to the wall and banged her head against it. Once. Hard. Navi and I sat in our chairs and looked at our mother, not crying, not speaking, her head rolling back and forth against the wall, her eyes everywhere but on us. We were six.

I don't know why your story made me think of this except that when I read your letter it took me back to that minute when my mother began to cry. I felt like a clock whose hand had just ticked over and I was irrevocably a new person, a different daughter, a different sister, a different Tanya.

It makes me angry now to remember my mother crying. I was six. Your letter makes me feel the same way. Angry. Helpless.

I don't know if you understand this letter. I'm not entirely sure I do. I know it seems as if it is about me. It's not though. I promise.

Love,

Tanya

PS—I once saw a movie on TV at my grandparents' house in America where the man was pushing down the woman's head, lower and lower, out of the screen. I couldn't tell why she didn't get up and move away. Tell me. I won't say the things you think I am going to say. I really won't.

PPS—I have an update on my leg but we don't have to talk about it right now.