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What
my father didn’t tell me was that the years away would leave me stifled by
silence, a stranger in my own country. My words halt and stutter, my
childhood vocabulary unfit for newly adult questions. Not that I know
what to ask, really. What I really want to know is why I’m so lonely
and why the children whisper as I pass. Dhaka at dusk is a mystery, a
graveyard, a newborn baby. My grandparents’ pond settles into a still
mask, and underneath the lily pads I imagine a tumult similar to what’s
happening inside me, my skin camouflaging livid veins, moulting heart.
I don’t know what’s betraying me. I am wearing their clothes (my
clothes), I’m speaking their language (my language), but somehow, they know
I’m not from here. Can they smell it perhaps? The sweat that
issues too easily into the little hand towel clutched damply in my
fingers. Or maybe they see it in some unlikely angle, some betraying
hunch or arch in my body.
There are times when I feel at home. Wearing the
light blue shalwar kamis that has slowly become my favourite because
of its easy folds, its washed-through thinness; sitting under the fan
whirling at just the right speed to juxtapose the unbearable weight of heat
and the snap of cooling wind, teetering between the two like the satisfaction
of tears; and playing Speed Trump in my father’s village home with my
cousins, the card game we are obsessed with. Driven by language barriers and
a need to relate, we call our bets, throw down our trumps, and nod
knowingly. In the midst of that, I feel comfort that is only more real
because of its fleetingness. It disappears with the last slap of the
cards when we all awkwardly disperse to get ready for dinner.
It’s hard to imagine that my father grew up
here, nothing but emerald rice paddies and fruit trees for miles and
miles. I watch the half clothed little boys play soccer in the
water-logged fields with an old acquaintance of my father’s.
“We used to play here when we were children,” he
says smiling. His remaining few teeth are stained red with paan,
the national tobacco and betel leaf addiction. “Not your father
though. We asked him, but he was always studying. He said he was
going to America for University. We didn’t believe him. We didn’t
even believe in America.”
I can see why. I can hardly believe in America either from where I’m
standing. Even though I know my father’s relentless iron determination
firsthand, it’s still difficult to see how he left this place.
Most of the time, I am suffocated by the
silence. My mother and I have never known how to talk to each
other. For all the conflict between my father and me, we at least can
present our cases, however polar, shout out our logic, no matter how
dichotomous, and reach our own separate and tragic conclusions.
We’ve communicated, to some degree, even if there’s no trace of
nuance, complexity, or emotion. It’s all black and white and right and
wrong. Feeling, my mother’s greatest gift, has always been the first
casualty.
My mother has had allergies all my life. Here in Bangladesh, she seems to be better, the heat blooming in her cheeks,
her motions easy and practised. I used to think that her bloodshot eyes
were a sign of weakness. Perhaps that’s why she asks her questions so
plaintively, because she can sense my disregard.
Listen, she says. I want to tell you something
important, and I want you to listen carefully, ok?
It’s as if she doesn’t realise that I always listen, that I always have, and that
I remember every last thing she’s ever said. She’s so careful and yet
so careless with her words, and of course, I can’t see that it’s all
consistently about feeling. Instead I focus on her watery eyes, her
thin eyelids, and they remind me of every goddamn time I’ve loved her, so many
times I could die from the counting.
Listen carefully, ok? Her voice
upturned, but still dignified. Something important.
And sometimes I want to burst out and say, really,
the only important thing is that we’re alive, but (immigrants being prone to rhetoric or silence, and I’m no
different from my mother in this one respect) I can’t remind her of that,
not now, with her bloodshot eyes and almost tears. I always imagine something
else just underneath, instead of only the dust.
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