eyes, dotted my forehead with sandalwood paste and lined my tiny feet with alta, the red paste worn by brides. She carried me to the grove by the lily pond and tied me by my veil to a banana tree. She blew a conch, broke open a coconut, chanted prayers and sprinkled holy water, and left me there. A slanted drizzle fell straight through the afternoon. I was bitten by red ants and caught a death of a cold. I was discovered in the early evening by a neighbor.
My mother was also found at dusk, floating in the lily pond, facedown in the water. Her skin was waxy and cold, her lips blue, and her eyes had turned dull as mud. Her delicate hands bobbed by her side like the wings of dead birds. She had been dead several hours.
After my mother died, I was cared for by my maternal grandparents for a while and then I moved in with my great-aunt, Mitra Mashi, whom I called Mima.
Mima was a great big woman who wore her sari a whole foot off the ground, the tail end tucked into her waistband like a sumo wrestler. She was an earthy woman who laughed easily and was given to manly backslapping that made the elders cringe.
Mima stories abound in the family. My favorite one is about the time she laughed so uproariously that she accidentally swallowed a stinkbug. Another time she thumped an old uncle enthusiastically on the back and made him swallow his dentures.
To Dadamoshai’s great delight and approval, Mima earned a master’s degree and fought her way up the teaching ladder to become the first female vice principal of the most prestigious boys’ school in Sylhet.
Mima created a mild scandal when she fell in love and married the science teacher, Robi Das, a pigeon-toed young man with a nervous stutter, who was small enough to tuck under her armpit like an evening purse. She surprised everyone even further by giving birth to a healthy baby girl at the ripe old age of thirty-eight. Her daughter’s name was Moon.
Although Moon was only six months older than me, she was technically my aunt, a fact she rubbed in with exasperating frequency. Moon and I existed in the same house like two prickly cacti in a pot, too close for comfort, our thorns occasionally poking each other.
Moon had a round face and corkscrew curls that stuck close to her head, a gap-toothed smile and coal-black, starry eyes with lashes so thick that they jammed back into her eyes when she tried to look through her binoculars.
Moon took her profession as an explorer very seriously. She carried her binoculars around like a doctor carries a stethoscope and viewed the whole world through them. She studied the grass, the clouds, the fence and even her own shadow.
People stared at us both because we were so different. I was an oddity in our town of brown-skinned, dark-eyed people. I had delicate bones; dark, straight hair; and enormous, smoky, gray-green eyes that reminded people of sad, impenetrable things like forest fires and river fog.
Mima, on the other hand, saw no difference. She hugged and spanked us both at the same time. Mima’s policy was if one child was naughty, the other one got spanked, as well. It was a preemptive measure, a disciplinary vaccination, to ensure the misdeed did not reoccur in any shape or form. The same applied to hugs: always a double shot.
Mima’s child rearing defied all logic, but she had no patience for logic. “Everybody mind your ways, otherwise there will be trouble for all,” she would hiss fiercely, her eyes narrowed. Even my uncle Robi was terrified. He sat tucked into the sofa like a tiny brown cushion and looked at us sadly through his fat, foggy glasses. He was sympathetic, but of no help.
I fitted easily into Mima’s boisterous household and all its bosomy comfort. My tragic childhood was all but forgotten. Bits of my past emerged at times, pieced together by gossip and a significant amount of embellishment thrown in by Moon. She was fed stories by their garrulous housemaid, Rekha, a wisp of a girl with gap teeth splayed out like the fingers of a hand, through which the gossip of the entire neighborhood flowed.
“Your mother was a madwoman and you are a Banana Bride,” Moon declared. We were both around six years old and playing in the backyard. “I wish I could marry a banana tree,” she added wistfully, and then with complete irrelevance, “but I have a doll that vomits and you don’t.”
I did not care about being a Banana Bride, but I badly wanted a vomiting doll.
“You can marry a banana tree anytime,” I said. “Why don’t you?”
Moon sniffed with scorn. “Don’t talk like a donkey. Azzifff you can marry whomever you like. Your parents have to propose for you.”
“Then ask your mother to propose for you.” Nobody would dare turn down Mima’s proposal, least of all a banana tree.
“I told her I wanted to marry a banana tree and she got very angry. She wanted to know who had told me things about you. I said, ‘Rekha told me everything.’ Then Ma went into the kitchen and screamed, ‘If I ever hear you talking to the children about any of this, I will throw you out like a dirty rat and you can go back to your village.’ Rekha was crying and begging. Then Ma turned and yelled at me, ‘I will throw you out, too, like a dirty rat, if you tell Layla anything.’” Moon looked at me ruefully, absentmindedly pulling on a corkscrew curl. “I am not supposed to talk to you, about the banana wedding, your crazy mother, or anything.”
Moon was so enthralled with my tragic childhood that our favorite pastime became to enact the macabre little drama in all its gory details. Our favorite character was my mother. We took turns playing her, tearing out our hair and sneezing our brains into a handkerchief. Nobody wanted to play Baby Layla the Banana Bride, because all she did was sit under the tree and cry. Instead we dressed up Moon’s vomiting doll in a red dishcloth and stuck her under the banana tree while we concentrated on elaborate wedding rituals, throwing rice and pretending to make conch sounds by blowing on a rock. The doll was then made to switch roles and become my mother. We sneaked out the plastic bucket from the bathroom and floated the doll facedown in the water. Moon and I became the professional mourners, throwing ourselves on the ground, beating our chests and wailing.
Then one day we got caught like two stricken cockroaches under a flashlight. Mima came looking for the bucket and found us wailing and saw the doll floating in the water. She knew exactly what was going on and gave us both the spankings of our lives. She said she would throw us both out of the house like dirty rats if she caught us playing the game again.
Many years later, I realized that all that role-playing must have been cathartic at some level, because my real-life tragedy had become woven through with imagination, a colorful fable to be accepted, elaborated upon and embraced, until—to the wonderment of it all—I could let my past go and fly free.
* * *
Moon and I spent our holidays in Dadamoshai’s house. Every summer, Mima’s family packed up and took the ferryboat across the Padma River from Sylhet to Silchar. Here we stayed for two lazy, sun-dappled months in paradise.
We loved Dadamoshai’s huge, dilapidated house with its creaky, lopsided gate leading into a big, rambling garden with its birdbath, sundial and sleepy snails that waved their feelers up and down the garden wall. It was a peaceful time. Mima became cuddly and warm and threw discipline to the winds. She got foot massages and snoozed on the veranda. Moon and I climbed the mango tree, demolished anthills, mothered baby crows and challenged Dadamoshai’s brain with obtuse and difficult questions.
One year, two crow chicks fell out of the nest in the mango tree. Moon and I adopted one each. Two days later, Moon woke up to find her chick dead. She burst into tears, shoved me hard against the wall and ran howling through the house, looking for Dadamoshai. She found him writing peacefully at his desk on the veranda.
Dadamoshai
