Free Beloved Strangers by Maria Chaudhuri Page B

middle of the war.
    The officers came during the day, when my father was at work and Harun had gone to the market. The ayah was playing with Naveen. My mother opened the door. ‘They were very tall,’ she said. ‘Tall in that Pakistani way.’ Their eyes swept over her slim body. She was small, like most Bengali women. They were polite, even when they walked into our living room, uninvited. They didn’t raise their voices or utter obscenities. They walked in as if they were always going to walk into our house, as if our house was not the sacred body that gave us shelter but a profane body that could be entered by anyone. My mother didn’t try to stop them. She stood near the door and watched. Then they heard my sister’s voice, chattering away with the ayah. A child? A girl? They must see her, immediately.
    Things were shifting, happening too fast, as if in a disjointed dream. The ayah stifled a scream as one of the officers took Naveen from her arms. The next second, her jaw dropped as the officer hugged Naveen to his chest and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘I have a daughter, just her age,’ he said. The officers gave my sister a small piece of candy before they left.
    The war ended in a year. East Pakistan gained its independence from West Pakistan and Bangladesh was born out of the dismemberment. Outside a beautiful bungalow on a hill, on quiet afternoons, sat the solitary figure of a young woman, her spirit moving above and beyond the mountains.
     
    My mother is afraid of time.
    Instead of eating her fruit, she has the unusual habit of rubbing their slimy insides on her face, neck and décolleté. Each morning at the breakfast table she amasses piles of fruit skin on the side of her plate while she rubs the sticky flesh on her skin. Bits of papaya, avocado and grapefruit jiggle on her upper lip as she schools us on the different minerals and vitamins present in each fruit. Papaya tightens the pores. Avocado replenishes the natural oils in skin, giving it a plump, youthful look. Grapefruit hydrates the epidermis, smoothing lines and wrinkles. It seems that each different property she mentions is important for the fulfilment of only one desire: remaining young.
    ‘I want to be twenty-five again,’ she says so frequently it’s almost as if she believes she can make it happen by sheer force of will.
    In her own way, she does make it happen. My mother refuses to reveal her age to anyone. She reddens with indignation if the rest of us reveal our real ages, giving people a clue as to how old our mother might be.
    ‘You’re not thirty,’ she says to me firmly on my thirtieth birthday, ‘You’re twenty-eight.’
    ‘I’m thirty, Mother.’
    ‘You’re twenty-eight,’ she repeats, outraged.
    So diligently has my mother played hide and seek with her age that I can no longer be sure, on any of her birthdays, how old she is going to be that year. For someone who finds time to be so precious, my mother wastes it lavishly. She is the most unpunctual person I know. Hours pass before she realises she has missed an appointment but the realisation leaves her unflustered. In her everlasting lateness, she presumes that time has not passed, that it is waiting for her.
    ‘Why do you want to be twenty-five?’ I ask Mother.
    ‘Because it’s the perfect age. You’re neither young nor old, neither naive nor jaded. You have an idea of who you are but there’s still so much left to discover,’ she replies.
    ‘But Mother, even if you were twenty-five again, everything would still happen all over again. Time wouldn’t just stop.’
    She gapes at me, silent and aghast, as if the thought has never crossed her mind.
    At moments like this, it strikes me that what my mother wants, time and again, is not to replay or freeze her life, but to change its course. Like the times when we went to visit her best friend, Auntie Irene. Auntie Irene lived in a spacious, red-brick house by the lake with her husband and two sons. The furniture