Free Beloved Strangers by Maria Chaudhuri Page A

gave her consent, my mother refused to discuss the matter any further, letting her family busy themselves with the minutiae of the wedding. Finding her in bed in the middle of the day, while the house bustled with wedding activity, her grandmother approached her quietly.
    ‘Are you well, dear?’ she asked Mother.
    ‘Yes I am.’
    ‘Don’t you at least want to know what he looks like?’
    ‘What’s the point? I’m still going to marry him,’ said Mother.
    ‘You don’t have to marry him if you don’t want to.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
    ‘Don’t say that!’
    ‘Fine, tell me what he looks like,’ my mother said in a resigned voice.
    Her grandmother brightened. ‘Oh he’s very handsome, more fair-skinned than any man I’ve seen. His skin is so light you can see the veins underneath. Such white-white children you’ll have!’
    The faintest smile flitted across my mother’s face. Her grandmother sighed and placed a gentle hand on her granddaughter’s head.
    The wedding took place in Comilla, and on the night of the wedding, Ismail the servant boy fell into a cauldron of boiling milk and went half insane. Later he confided that the djinns had come to him when everyone was busy with the festivities. They came in the guise of three exquisite and identical young women. In the smoky kitchen, a horrified Ismail recognised their unblinking stares and backed away from them until he fell into the drum of scalding milk. He never heard the message they had come to deliver. The sounds of firecrackers and wedding music drowned his screams for help.
    That same night, my father was to take his new bride and make the three-hour journey back to his Dhaka home. He had instructed his best friend to convert his small bachelor pad into a bridal suite, replete with flowers, candles and a heavy lace bedspread. A table was laden with trays of multi-coloured sweets and tall pitchers of almond and coconut milk. His friend waited to receive the exhausted bride and groom. But once the bride and groom were on their way, the driver turned around and announced that he was taking them to my father’s sister’s house.
    ‘Why?’ asked my bewildered father.
    ‘It is your sister’s order,’ the driver shrugged.
    My father opened his mouth to say something then closed it again. His older sister was not someone he could easily disobey. They reached her house well after midnight. Lifting the pleats of her heavy red sari off her dainty feet, my mother wearily made her way up the dark, cramped staircase. The maid sleepily warmed up some leftover fish curry from the night before. After dinner, my parents spent their wedding night in a tiny, airless room that had been hurriedly cleared for them, while, in another part of the city, a fragrant room with a dreamy white bed glowed softly until all the candles burned out.
     
    In 1971, a year after their wedding, my parents lived in a bungalow on the top of a hill in Chittagong, where my father worked at the head office of the Bangladesh Tobacco Company. My mother stayed at home with one-year-old Naveen, an old Nepali ayah and Harun the cook. The garden was the best part of their sprawling colonial-style bungalow. Huge red dahlias and bushes of wild tulips sprung robustly out of the mountain earth. When the midday sun grew softer, the ayah took Naveen out in a stroller for long walks. My mother sat in the secluded garden and sipped cup after cup of tea. But the nights were bad. The sound of gunfire, sirens and hand grenades pierced the dark. Every once in a while, screams floated up the lonely mountain roads. Or did she imagine them? Once my mother woke up in the middle of the night and her heart caught in her throat at the sight of a malevolent face pressed against the windowpane. In the morning she found a bird, half-eaten and caked in dried blood, just outside her window and realised it had only been a fox. She must have been lonely, in that strange city, away from her family, in the