Free Beloved Strangers by Maria Chaudhuri

ever apologised to her father or mother for not being exactly the way they had imagined she would be? I wanted to ask her if doubt and guilt clouded her every thought so that silence was often a better recourse than words. But I knew that asking her these things would simply give her a skewed view of the other world where I grew up. The world I still loved and was trying to escape from. The world that was now a shadow – faceless, blurry, yet always with me. A world that came to me in contrasting shades of mortification and solace. A world that was seldom exonerating but hardly indifferent and never ordinary. I cared for it in the same way it had cared for me – with utmost devotion and an utter lack of understanding.

Beloved Strangers
    The room is square and semi-dark; heavy curtains block the sunlight. There are two single beds joined together to make one large double bed where I sleep with my sisters. Two wooden dressers, one black, one brown, stand on either side of the bed. Through the crack in the door I can see the leg of my new Barbie on top of the brown dresser. I also see my mother sitting on the bed with her harmonium, flipping through sheets of music. Her guru sits across from her, cross-legged, humming and tapping his fingers on the polished surface of the instrument. I want my doll but I dare not step inside the room. When my mother practises her music the world is her enemy.
    Until she was six years old, my mother lived in the tiny, sleepy town of Comilla, about a hundred kilometres south-east of Dhaka. Then her father died unexpectedly from kidney failure at the age of forty, and his passing left my grandmother a widow at twenty-four. My grandmother moved into her brother’s family with three small children of whom Mother was the second. From then on, they moved from one town to another due to the nature of Mother’s maternal uncle’s work.
    Mother spoke of her uncle with a rare fondness. He had loved her like a father, pampered her more than his own children and made sure that, despite the frequent relocations, Mother was not deprived of what pleased her most: music. Wherever they went, he found a music teacher for her, and by the time she was a teenager, she had won a number of trophies and certificates for her musical talent at school and other local functions. At the end of high school, when most of her friends left their small town to go to college in the big city, my mother didn’t care. She was absorbed in her music, ecstatic that the local radio stations had started to schedule her for regular appearances.
    The first time it was ‘arranged’ for my father to see my mother as a prospective bride was during one of her weekly radio programmes. The two families thought it best that my father should see her from afar, without her knowledge. Meeting face to face, even if chaperoned, was not considered proper. So my father turned up at the radio station, stood outside a glass-enclosed studio and watched a skinny nineteen-year-old singing in a voice so mesmerising that he forgot why he was there.
    My father went home to tell everyone he had found his bride. My mother went home, completely unaware that her song had led her to her future husband. Though Mother knew she would have to consider marriage sooner or later, given her mother’s exhaustive search for a groom, it did not stop her from feeling a jolt of panic when my father, eager and smitten, asked for her hand. She was hesitant to leave the uncomplicated rhythm of her life where music was her only partner, but how much longer could she continue to refuse her suitors? Had she chosen to refuse, however, deciding to pursue music instead of marriage, her uncle and grandmother promised to stand by her. But Mother agreed to the match with an unexpected ferocity. ‘I’m ready,’ she declared, ‘start the preparations right away.’ I presume she wanted to put an end to the constant reminder that she was her widowed mother’s last burden.
    Once she