Chapter 12
There were four generations living on the Chakarbatti estate; the largest house belonging to the Chakarbatti brothers of whom Jaya’s father was the eldest, and resided in now by the paternal but mischievous Imran Chakarbatti of Mastermind Metals & Co, Hardware Store (toilets and padlocks), whose wife was a jolly fat woman who spent most of her time lying on her side, propped up on her elbow on the king size falong overseeing the sweeping, cleaning and scrubbing of her vast domain with a look of passive amusement.
Their three children, who bore the permanent paunch the Chakarbatti genes rightfully commanded, spread their own brand of vastness in their given quarters: the eldest, Shawqat Malik Chakarbatti, spotty faced, bespeckled and never wearing anything besides beige military shirts and courduroy trousers with chunky leather sandles, would spend his evenings drinking tea in his father’s shop, and his evenings in front of his computer Photoshopping pictures of himself outside the Big Ben or the Statue of Liberty. He looked like a bookish boy, but did not waste his time substantiating the image.
The middle child, Shimu, waddled about the house wearing the trademark loose fitting cotton salwar kameez with mismatching scarf draped across her chest, her eyelids lazily drooped across her nondescript dark brown eyes, a freak mess of tightly frizzed black hair sprouting from her scalp which no number of foreign imported straighteners could discipline. She could barely be bothered to speak and only grunts would leave her throat should the situation elicit it –she was mainly left to go on educational trips to the local and highly respected Shah Jalal University premises to meet with cousins, where she would wile away long nights smoking hashish with college friends and taking bets on what would be the frivolous cause for the next national strike (yesterday it was the death of a banker’s clerk, before that it was the injured ankle of a ricksha-wallah).
And the youngest who was shockingly fat for an 11 year old, one of the few caught by the obesity epidemic which had managed to cross the waters. Egged on by the various grandparents and in-laws who thought a child who had never seen his own toes was cute, Iqbal Chakarbatti lolled about in front of the flickering television, demanding cups of raw eggs and salted shrimp, which he elegantly consumed after being informed through various international cooking programmes that these would turn him in to a big, strong man. The layers of blubber choking his vocals made him a gently spoken boy, whose favoured spot in the house was equidistant from his mother and the kitchen.
The presence of two neatly tucked-in-at-the sides British girls arriving at the Chakkarbatti campus every summer, therefore, always caused a ruffle. Simmering away beneath the squashed eyes and layers of thin cotton sari’s there was a resentment that it was Imran Chakarbatti who was left to oversee the estate and its affairs in Bangladesh. The question had been whispered in the past; why couldn’t Imran switch his 40 acres of land, his domestic palace and an unlimited supply of toilet cisterns for a terraced house in Coventry?
But the kind charm and naturally entrepreneurial pizzazz of the chosen Londoni Saahib Mr Abdul Chakarbatti kept any evil eyes at bay; during his stay, he would buy all the grocery shopping for the entire colony of Chakarbatti’s: everything from fresh fruit to peanuts, from ilish fish to gaggot, from hutki to hatkhora. Unfortunately, he thought that the consumption of lobsters was a luxury in the country and like an out-of-touch parent, commanded the servants to curry it with their best spices. Unbeknownst to him however, the shellfish (which was two-a-penny at the local fishmongers) was received by the family with bafflement as a foreign bottom-feeding luxury which, unlike Pringles and Corn Flakes, were not catching on in the same fashion.
The verandah this evening was being used a sort of middle-man’s purgatory, where relatives were gathering not to confess their own sins, but those of their neighbours. Old men sat in their vests and lunghis, one knee hitched up, draping their arms across their knees and slowly chewing on pan like a cow slowly chewing grass, the inevitable and consistent movement of their jaws seemingly detached from the rest of their face which animatedly reacted to the unfolding gossip. The heat of the evening was heavy, and insects gathered in clumps around candles or lamps placed outside the gates so the only light getting through cast a dim light on the crowd. The women chattered away a few feet further away, under the stars, in a cluster of chairs in the middle of the estate, being fanned by the servants who were weighed down with sleep. Even the mosquitos were drained by the evening heat, resting lazily in the wet nooks of the onsite abattoir.
Tea was being served; oversweetened, made from a special concoction which included fresh cows milk and raw egg white. Served in frustratingly tiny cups which kept the servants awake from their necessity of needing to be constantly refilled, it was the lifeblood of this estate. Any familial issues, any scandal, any adolescent dramas –all would be responded to in the same way: Let us sit down over a cup of tea and not talk about it.
But today, there were tantalising snippets of another type: the Chakarbatti’s, the landowning overfed religious humble gritty Chakarbatti bloodline was gathered on this night to talk about a marriage. A young, fledgling romance that was so brand new and so utterly approved of by every generation that no amount of naughtiness could match the serotonin levels that surged in their minds as they giggled and grunted and reminisced: it was the marriage of the young Londoni, Jaya Chakarbatti, 21 years old, BA educated, with a fair complexion and a slim build and a keen interest in cookery and prayed her five times namaaz, of course what did you expect she is a Chakarbatti how can they say no.
What started off as trickles of a conversation about a potential attraction between Jaya and a vague idea of a boy who lived somewhere, soon turned in to a fully blown, all-out raucous hind-leg-kicking negotiation of marriage rites and who should buy which presents and whether or not the bride should wear a sari or a lehnga. Would they serve curried fish-balls, as was the townie tradition, or would that make Mr Ahmed the villager from the rice-stall uncomfortable?
‘It should be done in the most religious way of all; just two witnesses?’
‘But a better religious way is to invite everybody, that way they get the most prayers,’
‘But Baba, that is unnecessarily ostentatious,’
‘The town expects nothing less from us,’
‘And Dada would have disapproved, being the thrifty genius he was, Allah rest his soul!’
‘And who from them will buy our girls the presents? Isn’t he from a poor family?’
‘So much the better, we can accept only humble types in to our estate, no vulgar-‘
‘No, no he is not poor he is a rich man, better for us, no loss to the enterprise,’
‘Do we know what he does?’
‘A military man,’
‘What what? A man of fighting?’
‘Yes, none of this sitting in front of a desk rotting away, he will be fit to protect the estate, we need more of those types,’
‘Won’t he be hot headed?’
‘Who can beat us at the boiling blood? Ha! But no one!’
And on and on they went, planning and cutting down and scissoring out and razoring away and hacking at the idea of Akram and Jaya’s marriage and how to accommodate a new person in their chain-linked heritage, full of stone-anchored community figures and men who still wore skullcaps and did business in their kurta’s and bought land for their servants, and savagely guarded their rights to do so, and for whom any business deal was not worth doing if it delayed prayer time.
Mrs Chakarbatti sat back with her feet nestled inside the layers of her sari, watching with a satisfied smile as the duty was taken over by the family of her husband who, it seemed, after all these years, had finally accepted her.
Mr Chakarbatti felt uneasy watching the fits of passion people were having over a girl they barely knew; his daughter; his little girl who questioned the world and sought advice from him, even though he had always felt inadequately educated for any of her queries. His little girl whose tiny hands had poke
d around his nose in fascination when she was born. His youngest daughter who had seemed so distant from the world, so preoccupied with thoughts in her mind and the broken links of society and the confusing trail paths of emotional integrity. And when she was older, even though he could say with absolute certainty which position the sun would be in for an accurate prayer time, he could not say the same for the wherabouts of his teenage daughter. But she would return; every weekend from university, not falling for the fleeting fakery of her peers and curious about her heritage with no prompting needed from him. Her pain which he daren’t ask about, which seeped in to the tea she made him, surely could not be fixed by this A-Team of marital organisers swarming about in front of him, who had no idea that she couldn’t wear a lengha because of the uncomfortable scratchy bits which she always picked off?
Shouts emanated from the majestic coliseum of bungalows and soon enough, the servants carried the gossip to the neighbouring colonies where whispers began too. They servants came outside to take their meals tonight, squatting against the limestone walls that were pock-marked with the dark green spots of humidity and cracks of ageing, that made Sylheti houses look hundreds of years old when in actual fact most had only been built in recent years.
Fevered whispers pinged off the walls the next day, and the day after, and it was when Akram came for his tenth visit to the house that he was finally allowed within a 10 foot distance of Jaya. He had been sitting politely taking tea with the family while they all strained the wicker furniture and she emerged quietly with her head bowed and bent down to put a tray of Bombay mix on the table. Their eyes caught and she smirked. He smirked back. It was a quick exchange and suitably futile given the number of barriers they were facing, and because it was another set of 12 visits before he was finally allowed to take her out (which wasn’t orthodox or even allowed; but Abdul Malik Chakkarbatti wasn’t about to allow his daughter to marry a military fellow without seeing how good he was in the outside world). So they were allowed, after all manner of risk assessment and moral symposiums, to go shopping for an hour at the Plaza, accompanied by an escort, to buy some material of Jaya’s choice.
The escort sat po faced between them in the baby taxi as they looked out not saying a word (luckily baby taxi’s had no doors). Akram was taken by her insistence that they take a taxi and not use the chauffeur he had hired for the day. Jaya say admiring the setting sun, the balmy evening and the random snippets of English-but-not-quite-English spoken at every corner of Sylhet. She wished desperately that she could have enjoyed all of this with Eleven. Her forearms missed her.
Young girls had arrived at the market in droves, crammed in to every tiny textile shop they could manage to squeeze in to; small shops with rolls and rolls of every possible combination of shapes and colours. Akram and Jaya were beckoned in to each one as they passed –‘Come Sir, Madam please! Hundred per cent cotton!’- and lured with offers of cold drinks –‘coldinx coldinx coldinx’.
Akram looked at Jaya.
‘I hope you don’t think this is terribly forward of me,’ he politely started in barely audible Bengali, ‘but-‘
‘Please sir come come come!’ Three boys tugged at the couple and led in to a heavily air conditioned room with stools placed in front of a stage that was laid thick with layers of material, surrounded by a wall that seemed to be made entirely of fabric rolls.
Two bottles of sweating cold Sprite were pushed in to their hands and three men –who seemed to materialise out of all the material- beamed at them.
‘A-yes madaaam, you liking the clothing’s? What clothing’s please?’
Akram laughed and looked at Jaya.
‘Well,’ she spoke back in Bengali, ‘I really just wanted some plain white cotton please-‘
‘Of coursings madaaam! We have all types of cottons, here-‘ and within a few seconds he had unravelled and thrown out on to the platform a shocking pink silk roll, a luminous green cotton roll, a peach polyester roll (‘marble schiffon, madaaam’) and a blue satin roll.
Amused, Akram sat back.
Jaya looked shocked. ‘Well, a white-‘
‘Simple madaaam of course we have simple clothing’s-’ and he triggered a cascade of unrolling more fabrics –crème, off-white, yellow, magnolia.
‘Something white, preferably-‘
‘White? Pure white? Blue-white shadings or green-white shadings?’ The beaming man looked back at her with teeth bright enough to be used as a shade comparer.
Without waiting for a reply, he continued bombarding her with a cavalcade of printed silk fabrics. They came one after the other, roll after roll, blotch after flower after stars after tie-dye… endlessly they were chucked and pushed and tugged and picked at in front of the couple, assaulting their eyes.
Jaya and Akram sighed in polite exhaustion.
‘It’s weird,’ Akram said, ‘I did a lot of my training in London and I noticed it’s a luxury over there to get tailor made clothes. It’s the complete opposite here.’
She nodded. ‘I think it’s because of the amount of time it takes to measure someone up. Plus the cost of material; and the idea of being felt up…’ She looked at him quickly (levels of appropriate conversation were usually best tested as quickly as possible, Abba had advised).
Akram laughed, handed over 50 taka to the men (‘sorry for wasting your time, bhaiya’, said with complete sincerity) and the two left to eat lentil paste in poppadom thimbles (Sylheti’s refused to call it what it was –fushka- for fear of evoking its true Dhaka roots).
Walking around the Number One American-style Air-Conditioned International Cosmopolitan Plaza (that wasn’t really any of those things at all) and eating ‘Chinese’ food for dinner (heavily laden with naga chilli and jeera), Jaya and Akram spent the evening hurtling towards the end of the hour. They spend the latter part of it browsing a book store, marvelling at the effort it must have taken for a team of people to photocopy such huge anthologies and make a an open business out of it. Entire encyclopedia’s and famous textbooks were squashed tightly on to bookshelves, their spines sewn, not glued.
They decided to walk the route home, Akram showing Jaya the route to avoid the beggars (who had now learnt how to beg in English –onepowpliz, onepowpliz (one pound please)). Instead they walked along Housing Street occupied by the slow moving trains of exhausted school children moved along slowly, all with shiny creamed faces, freshly oiled hair, girls with two pony tails, in blue and white uniform, the older girls signifying modesty by wearing a white scarf that went in a neat ‘V’ down their fronts, covering each tit, anchored securely at their waist by a belt.
The street vendors were out in force, queues at those selling cones of Bombay Mix that was moistened with mustard oil, pepper, lemon juice, chilli, and whatever else the seller could find, children eating feverishly, knowing the vendor probably didn’t wash his hands after going to the toilets but eating his goods anyway, hoping the copious amounts of chilli would somehow kill any remaining bacteria, unable to tell the difference between the salt and the dust…
Peppered along the route home were relatives whom neither had seen before; Jaya touched the feet of the elderly ones (Shanyn: Why did you just touch your uncle’s feet? Jaya: Cuz he’s over 50, it’s kind of a default greeting for people that age). And it was these relatives who later entertained the couple and fed them til they were unable to move… who cooked dish after dish for their family and fed both the Kashif’s and the Chakkarbatti’s until year after year, the men’s stomach’s stretched an inch more while their hairlines receded correspondingly, and the women grew older and wiser and smelt more and more of mothballs and the insides of closets. And the youngsters would have to accept the food and destroy their figures and suffer indigestion for a while because in Bangladesh, allowing an elder to feed you was an act of giving, and their copious generosity was an act of them taking; taking some morsel of enjoyment from watching their youngsters flourish, multiply, in the hope that the arrogant fucks would do so
mething useful with their names.
Two weeks went by, and it was Friday evening when Jaya Chakarbatti sat on the balcony smoking her single-purchase Gold Leaf cigarette (3 pence) looking out and appreciating the pouring monsoon, when she received a text message from Akram:
‘Hey. I swear its raining much more at your house than anywhere else. I’m soaking. I can hear all your family on the porch so I sneaked in through the back gate. Do you want to come out and give me my jacket back?’
She laughed and threw the cigarette through the flower shaped grills. A spray of rain hit her face, and for a second she closed her eyes, not because of the dirt in the water, but for that moment, she felt light. University and debt and restrictions and insurance and pretence seemed non-existent. She grabbed Akram’s jacket (it smelt of aftershave and smoke) and ran swiftly out of the back door, in to the pouring swathes of rain and down the concrete stairs, across the yard, where he was waiting, beaming, every inch soaked, his hair plastered to his forehead.
‘Hey you!’ He shouted; the rain was loud and constant.
She laughed, looking at him. It was the first genuine laugh she felt she had had in a long, long time.
‘Well if this helps!…’ and she reached up and held the jacket over his head. His huge hands floated around her waist, and their smiles faltered. It was always a point of confusion later on as to who initiated this first kiss, which happened just then, but Jaya knew that if it wasn’t for the weather conditions it would have ended up a dry and awkward one. But there was something about monsoon weather that swelled the senses; the moistening heat, the crowded sound of rain, the blurry vision, the numb, droplet-pelted skin, not being able to feel one’s cold feet…
It was there that Akram Kashif from Bangladesh and Jaya Chakarbatti from Coventry shared their first liaison secretly for fear of being called insolent by the Elders, who sat on wicker chairs on the large coloured concrete porch with a flower pattern in the middle, enjoying the weather and remembering obscure relatives. The cogs of history, as was a habit on this estate –despite members living in far flung corners of the world- always started turning only a few feet away from the rest of the family.
A rickshaw bell rang outside the concrete walls.
‘My friends are waiting.’ Akram looked down at her, drops falling off his brow. He touched her face. ‘I’ll see you.’
She nodded gently, and he turned around and ran in to the rain and out of the estate boundary. She heard the crunching of thin tyres on the wet ground dissolve until all she could hear was rain and frogs.
Sometimes the oddest of decisions are made at the rightest of times. Kulsuma’s future sat around her: 34 year old Husna Begum and her three little children –Reena, Beena and Heena- all with bald heads (‘shave shave shave! Its makes their hair grow back thicker!’) and snot pouring from their noses, their cotton t-shirts lank from dirt and sweat and with the vague smell of piss about them; 26 year old Ambiya Begum who sat mute and expressionless in the corner, numb from the anti-depressants and unable to process any more disappointed grumblings about being unmarried. Then there was the botanically exalted Shazna Begum who preached about how fat and hairy her lady fingers were while her 6 children, ranging from 30 to 7, occupied whatever nook they could find in the living room, bored to tears unable to say anything for fear of receiving an ear-twist. 24 year old Dilara Begum was primped and premed and frying samosas in the kitchen, wanting nothing more than the opportunity to be show cousin Jamaal that she could be the perfect wife. Staring resolutely in to his phone, away from the crowd, bottom lip jutting out and white foam gathering in the corners of his mouth, Nobil sat, disassociating himself from everyone else, breathing nasally, hating any girl, demeaning any peers and intent on proving to the cyber world that he and he alone could destroy 50 zombies in one Power-Up Punch, too afraid to let the phone screen dim to it’s usual black for fear of being confronted with his own reflection.
They were all a bunch of inconsequential, below-average, mundane, missed-the-mark citizens, rotting away in their decrepit shells. Nothing exciting would ever happen to them. This was it; they’d get together and eat some biscuits and tea –this was as high as any of them would ever get. They were the failures of life. Their blood was bitter.
Kulsuma sat quietly perched on the edge of the sofa, cradling her cup of tea, elbows tucked in, head scarf half-on-half-off. Her eyes scanned the room. It was a perfectly normal scene in her life, and it made no sense that in that moment, amongst all these heterosexual failures, Kulsuma Begum made the decision that she wanted out.
There was no change in her face, no hoo ha, and as was the case with most major changes in history, it was a quiet decision resolutely made in her mind. For all the fuss the government had made about social mobility, there was no chance at all that being a Bengali lesbian working in a textile shop in the middle of a Pakistani-majority city, would ever be an identity that could be shed, or climbed out of. And for all the lofty lectures Jaya made to her about fighting for her rights, the ugly fat limp Begums were stuck in their ways and caught irrevocably in the net of Time, tangled and opening and closing their mouths like dying fish.
(Yes, perhaps a member of her family had played their part in the guerrilla revolution of 1971, using his bayonet to carve out the intestines of one of the opposition, but it was down more to a moment of madness than a conscious decision.)
‘Mai, will you gather the plates and put them in the sink?’ Amma looked in to her tea cup as she said it, deep in thought over why her tomatoes weren’t growing as juicy as her sisters.
Kulsuma did as instructed, catching a glimpse of a text Nobil was sending. Boring. It was a boring, useless text about what he had downloaded. A stupid game for a stupid family.
She washed the dishes. The walls around her were grey and yellow. Everything smelled of onions. A brown canvas sack of Tollyboy EasyCook Rice 20kg peeped out from a gap between the cupboards, shoved in with the Henry Hoover, an orange net bag half full of onions, and an indeterminate number of empty Tupperware containers and Flora tubs. Thick blobs of limescale on the tap meant the lukewarm water tricked out on to the dishes, unable to penetrate the thick layer of ghee that was slathered on to them; it came off on her hands, under her fingernails, in the creases of her skin. Of course, by this time, she had already decided that she needed to get out of this life, so the ghee simply added insult to injury. It clung to her like the unshakeable odour of dairy.
Her face was mute, and her eyebrows were set straight. Her lips didn’t open. She blinked slowly. The theme tune of Hollyoaks blasted out of the living room and the washing up liquid refused to foam. She was breathing slowly and deeply, as though her body had already gone to sleep. She could hear somebody pissing in the toilet upstairs, interjected by the thin sound of some drops hitting the lino floor.
Jaya. Blissful Jaya. O, how privileged they were to know one of the greatest thinkers in life… How resigned Kulsuma Begum felt when thoughts of her would float across her mind… How taken aback she would get with thoughts of Jaya that she had to stop what she was doing and rest, take deep breaths. Yes… Kulsuma was tortured. Tortured by somebody who had managed to beautifully balance the pulls of Britain and the pulls of Bangladesh; she hadn’t ended up a vocally-challenged heavy-accented home-bred-freshie, nor had she ended up a bona fide coconut; no, she had done something that few had ever managed –in fact, no! She had added to that already difficult balance, she was juggling another aspect -she was gay. She was something so incredibly novel, so beautiful in its harmonic dealings that it made Kulsuma’s brain swell like an aroused clitoris. How could anybody be so enlightened? How could anybody smell so nice all the time? How did anybody have such a command over life? How could anybody articulate so beautifully what the rest of the world was thinking? And how could someone be so in tune with the world that everything she said sounded so familiar, so right?
Kulsuma dropped the dishes in to the drainer. She placed the raggedy sponge back in its place
on the windowsill, and she walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs and in to her room and closed the door and sat on the bed and wept. Her body shook with each wave of sobs, her tears falling in big droplets down her face and jumping off her chin. Snot clogged up her nasal passages. She sniffed and sniffed, and cried more as she heard herself, so helpless, so depressed and so angry.
It took only one generation of immigrants to push the boat so far out that there were bound to be a few casualties. She knew she would forever be stuck in this area; the graffiti on the wall would probably be the last thing she’d ever see, the alleyway here would be the death of her. She was stuck in this cycle and there was no chance at all that she would ever break out –no misguided, ill informed newspaper reader that was born in to a free-thinking family could persuade her otherwise. Their shit-for-brains hippy consensus with their sympathetic eyes and false sense of intellectual anarchy would, after all said and done, come to fuck all in her day to day life. Having a father who was concerned about nothing but his own survival, and a mother who knew, quite frankly, absolutely nothing and didn’t care about anything, at all, ever, other than minor things like her family and her husband and…
Kulsuma stopped crying. Wait a minute, she thought: what was wrong with the fact that her family were concerned with their own survival? Isn’t that what every group had to do at some point? Who told her it was wrong to be selfish about survival? Wasn’t it a rite of passage, embedded in to the immigrants’ psyche during the transition period, that they take care of themselves before looking outwards?
Yes; that was it. But she was being dragged back in to the transitional period when she was mentally graduated of it, forced to bear the shackles of the generation before her, bound to be a representative for those with whom the rest of the world could not communicate and alas, the messenger was being lined up for the killing. And she, and maybe even her children, would forced to live here, in this economic dumping ground, laughed at by the pasty white faces and looked pitifully down on by the tanned ones. Some of the messengers would probably cash in on their status, like she saw so many did, abused like a foreign plaything, chained to the bed and fed at regular intervals and fucked at will. And all she could see for the course of her lifetime was the fight between perceptions: the duty-bound brown skinned barbarians with their strange smells Vs the morally inferior, pasty skinned drunkards who slept around a lot.
Stuck in the middle was she; being drip-fed the crap that dripped off the higher-ups in each of her specialties; the racism from general society; the depravity of her locality, and the rejection from the gays for having the wrong skin colour and for not buying in to the commercial, monopolised crap they touted in the gay magazines full of effeminate men with baby soft chins or short-haired man-hating militant bra-burning dykes.
Or perhaps she had unwittingly bought in to it; perhaps, as she started sobbing again, she had formed an image of a glossy, exotic lifestyle that may have been consciously blocked out, but formed a silhouette on her real life; a strong outline of what could have been –a hole shaped like Jaya and magazines and parliamentary debates that she didn’t understand. She had chased it as far as she could without even realising; she had done her time sitting in fashionable bars and she had gotten pissed and kissed roughly in a toilet cubicle; hell, she had even indulged in some underground pretentious London cocktailery.
Is this all there is? ran through her mind over and over again, clambering around in her head. She had seen the lies; she had read internet forums, she had even read books and YouTube’d deep in to the night watching the little-known academics and social anarchists warn her of the monopolistic news barons who starved out the truth from the public memory. She had seen the bullying tactics of the American Islamophobes on the British government and she had seen the helpless coalition couple, Cameron and Clegg -who looked to her like two gay antiques dealers- pander to the US’s every whim and echo every meaningless statement made over any aspect of international importance. They had ignored protest after protest, just like the Prime Ministers before them, and the whole country seemed to be run by a bunch of pretentious knobs who had only the gift of the gab and nothing else. Smoke and mirrors; masters of deflection. Perhaps they had succeeded in something: making the public apathetic. An apathetic public whose support they claimed had gotten them in to power.
So here she was, in her room, part of three different ‘publics’ who didn’t give a fuck about what she needed. She didn’t feel indignation; she felt anger. She couldn’t voice how she felt; she didn’t know the avenues. And the world could fuck off if they thought she was about to spend time and energy in finding those avenues, which she knew would only lead to a dead end. The world had a right to treat her like shit; she had a right to walk away.
There was no place in this world for someone like her.
Jaya Chakkarbatti from Coventry, London, partook in a mutual betrayal to one of her forged heritages –leaving behind the crop-haired dykes and the Lassi Lesbians, she married Akram Kashif in an unpretentious ceremony in Sylhet, Bangladesh. He would now have pride of place in her bed.
Muting her thoughts, Jaya did not talk much on the day of her wedding. Her eyes remain downcast and, as prescribed, she did attempt to cry, but nothing fell from her eyes. It was no matter; later that evening, she was asked to perform the small meeting of families who had gathered to watch the transferral of her duty from her father, to her new husband.
Burdened with the weight of her red and gold sari, that evening, after the wedding guests had gone, sucked the jelly out of the curried bones and bitten the marrow out of the chicken, Jaya stood facing her father, Abdul Malik Chakarbatti, and Akram Kashif. She would be required to touch her fathers feet, to show him gratitude and respect, as They had said, for his servitude. Then, after a quiet show of tears, she would touch the feet of her husband, to show that it was now his duty, his responsibility, his privilege, to serve her, as They had said. It seemed that They had said much, thought Jaya, as the instructions were repeated to her over and over again in the beauty parlour as they powdered her face with a foundation three shades lighter than her natural colour.
Refusing to look her father in the face, Jaya bent down and placed her palms on his feet. In years to come she could always pinpoint this moment as the one where she left her soul. It crashed through the polished stone floor, bent in humility and shame, that evening. Her head deeply bowed and covered by the headscarf of the sari and the gold head dressings, Jaya took a deep breath and clasped her father’s feet hard, as she clenched her teeth and concentrated on the sequins digging in to her shoulders.
Without standing up, Jaya –who had gotten lost in the lulls of cocaine and existentialism only a few weeks ago- was confronted with a pair of feet with hairy toes and gently cut nails. Without feeling them, she touched them, and as instructed, Akram feigned reluctance of the gesture of his wife’s humility, and pulled her up.
‘Shaabaash! Alhamdulillah!’ Claps and cheers come lightly from the crowd, as Akram hugs her, and she buries her face in to his shoulder.
Kulsuma Begum committed suicide in a warm bath, comfortably slipping in to a haze on the evening of Jaya Chakarbatti’s marriage. It was a trivial decision she had made and seemed, to all intents and purposes, to be the best one; a brave one, she had thought. This thought came just after her wonderment over Jaya’s hypocrisy, her cunning masquerade. She had said in her email -as an afterthought, slipped right in at the end- that marrying was her solution. Kulsuma had chuckled to herself as she died –yes, she thought: that was Jaya alright. Pulling out at the last minute, playing the game and putting up the pretence until the final moments; in the game til the 11th hour, in bed with 11 o clock.
It wasn’t with resentment that Kulsuma Begum left the world, but resignation, effective immediately, from a job she had never wanted in the first place, amongst people who had never really understood why she was there at all.
Ten years of marriage had seeped in to the bones
of Jaya Chakkarbatti who sat looking in to her mirror silently. Akram Kashif lay asleep on the bed behind her. The room was cold, the morning sun bringing with it no warmth at all. Her hair was perfect, her eyes were dead, and her full mouth was still. In the corner of the room was a bookshelf, crammed with all sorts of books now, but in the reflection, her eyes rested on the little black Quran pushed in to the corner of it. She watched it, as it seemed to watch her. She lay her brush down carefully and stood up, rushing to the window and breathing quickly; she often had these small episodes in the privacy of her own demons. It had been ten years, and she had been faithful; faithful to the years of blood that raged and boiled within her; the roots which seemed to her sometimes fetid but carried the heavy burdens of continuation, survival, estates. Vivid smells plucked the sides of her nostrils –smells of Eleven’s hair; thoughts of stolen looks and lassi’s on car bonnets.
She squeezed her eyes shut and ran her hands over face, breathing deeply. She opened the curtains and daylight flooded in.
Akram moaned quietly, but remained undisturbed, oblivious to anything that was going on around him. It seemed her episode, her murmurings, her movements, her slight episode of panic which encapsulated years of disturbance, had gone unnoticed. She had succeeded in maintaining the course of history, free to continue along its path, undisturbed.
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