2006 December 22 « Ramblers’ Guild

This is a monologue masquerading as a short story. I tried using the “upload” feature this time, but the story just disappeared somewhere into the vast and confusing world of this blog site. Bilal, we need your superior organizational skills to save the day (see! the guild is already turning you into a superhero of sorts). Enjoy!

Men

Men. Those self-proclaimed saviors and sons of bitches.

I’m lying in a hospital bed, in a room with puke green walls, in a suburban New York hospital, alone for the first time in days. It was a man that put me here, had me convulsing in pain for twelve hours before I received any medical help. It was a man who operated on me, his hands wrapped in latex, his mouth masked in white tissue, the front half of his body hidden in a green cape with arms – an alien, for all I knew.

Lying on a mechanical bed that I seesaw at will by the press of a button, I’m in this half-conscious, half-paralyzed state. At peace, yes, but the thoughts in my head running, twirling, crashing into each other at random, confused, bruised, picking themselves up only to crash again into the outer walls of my brain, specifically at the spot above my ears and in line with my eyes, the corners of my forehead, my temples. They’re battling each other like male soldiers competing for my attention.

Talal had said my father called from Pakistan to see how I was doing and would try back later. My father fit many labels. A retired professor of English Literature, an immigrant who’d returned to his homeland, a divorcee, a recluse, living in a house too big for him on farmland, growing his own vegetables, spawning his own pond fish, cooking his own meals, and writing – I hope writing – in an Internet-free house because, of course, he refused to have anything to do with that modern day contraption that had taken all the dignity and charm out of writing: the computer. When I was five years old, my father would read Shakespeare to me in lieu of bedtime stories. As I grew up, he would discuss with me his philosophies of life, from everything to American and Pakistani politics, the approaching apocalypse, and the immigrant mentality in South Asian diasporic literature, to how to pick a good apple from a batch that are misshapen, too soft, too hard, pockmarked, riddled with holes, or even, just too damn perfect to be true. He was basically a good man, my father; not quite ambitious enough for my mom, not 21st century compatible enough for this world, and not nearly cool enough for me, with his leather elbow-patched blazers, the large tortoise shell eyeglasses that drowned half his face, and his Clarks loafers, the same ones he’d bought in London during his university days and kept alive for 30 years. I guess I should be grateful though. I was an only child, his son and his daughter, and he placed me on a sacred pedestal, high above, where I could see clearly his bald patch and the disapproving look on my mother’s face because, “You’re going to spoil her. She has to be made of tougher stuff to survive in this world. God knows, I am.” And with those words, and the sound of her heels clicking against the polished wooden floors, she left us. But now I’m getting ahead of myself; my mother left when I was in college, spewing hateful propaganda about the male species just for my benefit, all the while packing her life into the two suitcases allowed on the flight back to Pakistan.

When I was nine years old, I already had a boyfriend, Murtaza. Well, not exactly a boyfriend, more like, a friend who was a boy, but it was all so mixed up at that age. Murtaza was a lanky, brown-haired eleven-year-old, skinnier than me, his voice higher pitched than mine, love of my life that I constantly insulted and ignored unless we were playing Nintendo or pretending to be ghosts in the graveyard behind his house. Of course, I didn’t know I loved him till he was gone. Always at each other’s place, our parents, best friends, so close, laughing and joking all the time, until one of the men started flirting with the other’s wife (specifically his dad and my mom). Their family was conveniently transferred to another country and I never saw my Murtaza again. Afterwards, I’d replay the moment when we shared our last game of “Life” together; he’d asked for my hand and held it, inching it slowly closer to his face before I squealed and pulled it back. “What are you doing?” he asked. “I swear, I won’t hurt you. Just give me your hand.” So I gave it back to him and allowed him to hold it ten centimeters away from his lips before I squealed and pulled it back again. “Oh, forget it, you’re such a scaredy cat.” And I thought later, that could have been my first kiss. Kiss on the hand at least, but it would have been something to tell at slumber parties to my White schoolgirl friends who went to summer camps away from home and were already pretty qualified in the art of mouth-to-mouth. Then again, he might not have been planning to kiss me. Maybe he was going to plant a spider in my palm at the last minute and watch with malicious glee as I jerked around like a possessed spirit being exorcised.

Then came the string of White boys. Jordan, Jason, Jeremy, Jimmy. They were all Jewish, which I knew because they’d often gossip about the goings on at Hebrew School and I’d mentally compare this to the Sunday School lessons I was forced to attend at our local Islamic Center. No gossip there. Just me, squirming in my chair, surrounded by all these Brown kids of various shades and mother tongues, with the occasional White child of course, and the fear developing inside my loins (why my loins, I’d later wonder, during guilt-ridden episodes of “touching myself down there”?). The fear of God, literally. Of His Wrath on the Day of Judgement, of the Hellfire where I’d surely burn for eternity because I spent my time fantasizing about kissing Jewish boys. As the tallest girl in my class however – thanks to an early encounter with Mother Nature that made my stomach cramp and grew hair on my arms and legs – I started to shrink into myself. I spoke up less, I praised others often, I slouched, much to my mother’s chagrin, and just generally did everything in my power not to be noticed as different. The Brown thing had never bothered me before, but this was a whole new life experience I wasn’t prepared for.

Then there was The Teacher. College professor, actually, of creative writing. By that time, I’d learned to speak up just a tiny bit, but he offered me his arms and pulled me out further; he heard everything I said in class and probably all the things I didn’t say, too. I was writing. I was talking. I was happy. I guess, at some point, the adoration in my eyes must have gotten to him. He said to me one day: “You are a blessing.” It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me. He was telling me I was a blessing. This man, who was young, passionate, and inspiring. Who was my blessing. That’s when the pedestal came back to haunt me, though, because he placed me so high on top, that the inevitable plummet down was cry-for-two-months painful. Hurtful. One day, he was sincere as can be, favorite teacher of the year, “We’ll stay in touch, right?” and the next, emails, phone calls, no reply. He vanished. He never got back in touch and, with his silence, in effect, he told me: “You hold no significance.” That jackass. I refused to martyr him as an angel who’d worked his magic on me and then, poof, disappeared, like the doctor who’d miraculously cured my mother of a mysterious illness a few months into her marriage and then vanished without a trace when she went to thank him. No, I refused. So when I saw him again after several years, at a literary festival in the city, I hid and stubbornly told myself to ignore him, to pretend like he was nothing more than dust from my past. When he finally saw me and smiled, with the warmth of a man being reunited with his long-lost friend, I forgave him. Just like that. Disappointed with myself for being so easily swayed, I realized I loved him too much to hate him, and felt my face glow in the angelic light of his smile.

My version of dealing with my post-graduation depressive slump was to lock myself in my room and explore the virtual world of online dating. It was meant as a joke at first, a way to make fun of desperate girls on the verge of becoming ‘old maids’ in their last ditch efforts to find husbands, until one day, I realized, I was one of those girls. I’d briefly chatted with the likes of PakiHunk420, LahoriLoverboy, and KashmiriStallion. With Omer, I’d gone to the next level, giving him my phone number and talking to him for hours about our romantic ideals, about God and rock’n’roll, my desire to honeymoon in Greece and become a writer, his determination to leave the corporate world for architecture, and our common loathing of all things fake – me referring to my ex-bestfriend who’d whored her way into a marriage of convenience, him referring to his ex-girlfriend’s sizable breasts. We were soul mates. We were perfectly in sync with each other and already considering what color to paint our bedroom walls once we got married, when we finally decided, it was time for us to meet. So he hopped on a plane from LA to NY and made all the right moves: dinner at a pricey Italian bistro, the most luscious, long-stemmed roses I’d ever seen, a solid gold pendant in the shape of a crab; he was Cancer. He was my soul mate. There was only one problem: I wasn’t attracted to him. I’d seen photographs before, yes, and it wasn’t that he was ugly, but still, nothing to get excited about. I tried, I really did. We kissed and made out, but I came away feeling disheartened, not because I’d indulged in the sin of pre-marital actions-that-might-possibly-lead-to-sex, but because his lips were constantly chapped and rough, his tongue too eager, his teeth crooked, and his body (gasp) flabby. I broke up with him after three days and knew, right then, that I was the lowest person in the world, unworthy of any decent man.

But decent man I still got – Talal, my husband, in whose path my mother pushed me at some random wedding, after whispering in my ear, “Investment banker.” We met several times before approving the match. And it was thus that I joined the ranks of those who turned to the age-old practice of arranged marriages, albeit the modern kind.

Talal and I bought an apartment in the heart of Manhattan; of course, I could afford these things now as the wife of a banker who I only got to see an hour a day. Out went all notions of newlywed romance, just long, lonely days of writing for me, and hurried early morning snatches of sex, or the sleepy languor of making love at midnight. Talal was a mother-in-law’s wet dream: high salaried with a handsome face and polite manners, eager to settle down and lead the typical life of an elite, second generation American family. His biggest challenge to attaining that goal was me. No babies, no peace, only melodrama and mood swings until he fulfilled the faintest whim of a man hopelessly in love. Enter an Exhausted Him presenting me with yellow roses (didn’t he know yellow roses signified friendship, not love?) and serenading me with a tuneless rendition of the love song, “More Than Words”. Picture a Jaded Me, taking all that he had to offer, pulling it close and wrapping myself around it, experiencing physical pleasure and emotional pain at the idea that, somehow, this was the end of my life.

As predicted, I soon became pregnant. I prayed for a girl and found out it was a boy. I vowed never to become one of those over-indulgent mothers who paid more attention to her son than her daughter, who had double standards, allowing her son to stay out late and go to the prom, while her daughter’s every move was restricted, her reputation daily at risk just because of her XX gene factor. I refused to be that woman.

And now. I’m here in this hospital bed, a stitched up whale with elephantine feet and hands, a circus freak after a C-section. They’re handing me a bundle wrapped in blue. This is it. The moment. I must be strong.

But he’s so tiny. I give him my finger; he wraps his reptilian clawlings around it. His eyes are open, awe-struck, gray. He looks just like Talal in his baby pictures. That’s when I realize, this creature, this thing, has bound me to my husband in an irreversible way. I can no longer deny the truth I’d been hiding from, for fear I’d find myself somehow content with life. I was attached to this man, this man with the God-awful obsessive-compulsive need to be clean at all times and live in orderly surroundings, who divided his morning excretory ritual into two parts, one before and one after his daily cup of tea, whose eyes welled up at the end of Indian movies, and who, even now, was looking at me with dewy eyes which held a secret message I could finally decipher: “I am yours. And his. Entirely.” And I knew, against my better judgment, that I was giving him the very same look.

I gazed down again at Faiz, our son, this real person that had erupted from within me like all the beauty and potential and love I’d been holding in all this time. I felt an overwhelming relief. “Thank you, Faiz,” I said. Thank you for saving me, for validating me, for being the love of my life. And the next thing I said was: “Fuck it.” Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it all. I will be the world’s worst mother who will probably fit all Freudian stereotypes and love her son with a ferocity, a purity, a humility and worship unknown to man. This was my son. I placed him before me on a pedestal made of crushed diamonds and gold, and cranked it up as high as it could go, until he could touch the clouds. I lay there beneath him, a boundaryless safety net, so that when he failed, when he realized that clouds were just visions without substance, when he reached too far and fell, I would be there to save him.