Tanya Tania Read online

  During the monsoons, I like to ask Salim Bhai to drive down that road on my way home from school, even though it is not on the way at all. He parks near the beach and switches off the engine and we sit there, the rain like a drum on the roof of the car. The windows become opaque and disappear. The sand and the sea merge. I sometimes think this must be what taking a drug is like. To be violently distracted. To not exist momentarily.

  You think I am not cool but I am. I always have been but it’s only because of my golden hair and white skin which is not even mine, it’s my mother’s. It’s much worse than not being cool because you’re plagued by thoughts of how you should be a lot cooler given the deadly ammunition of being white in brown people land but at the same time, you are terrified of waking up one day looking as ordinary as you actually are inside.

  People think I’m pretty because when I play hockey my face flushes. My hair shines in the sun. Boys have crushes on me because of it. I just feel hot and silly. As if I’m watching it happen to someone else. Is it not better to be poor but have a space in the world that’s meant exactly for you?

  You don’t have to tell me it’s pathetic. I have never been this way. I just need to get out of here so badly. I have nightmares of not getting into college in America and I have nightmares of not getting a full scholarship. I can’t afford to go otherwise. Do you understand that kind of pressure? How can you.

  I know what people say about hormones and teenagers. But what if it’s not hormones? What if we are only just realizing that this is how the world is and that’s it, we have to live in it? Half the time I want to stop feeling the things I feel and half the time I’m terrified of what will replace them when I grow up. Of becoming one of the people I see around me, ambling along, blind and deaf to everything that is wrong, everything that can’t be explained, everything that is bad and hurts.

  Nusrat’s story makes her place in the world so very clear. I don’t know my place in the world. And I’ve never understood whether that’s because of me or because of the world.

  Best,

  Tanya

  June 15, 1991

  Bombay

  Dear Tanya,

  Dude, that was super intense. Nusrat says to tell you she thinks you’re a good writer. I think your sentences are too short and not like pretty. Don’t get mad, I’m just being honest.

  But I have something super, super important to tell you! Like the most important thing ever! Arjun gave me a ring! Like a real ring! I think it’s made of gold. It’s got a big diamond. He said it’s like a pre-engagement ring because he wants to spend his whole life with me. It was super romantic. We were in his car and it was late at night and it was raining and we were like hugging in the backseat (I had quite a lot of my clothes on) and he just took it out and gave it to me and I started crying and I think even he teared up although I couldn’t tell because he’s going through this phase where he wears sunglasses all the time. It is the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.

  I have to hide it from my parents because they’d flip out. And I can’t wear it to school because rings are not allowed which really sucks because I’m dying to like literally rub it in everyone’s face but I can’t because he made me promise not to show it to anyone. Haha, he may have stolen it.

  Do you think we’re like engaged?

  I’m going to post this right away so you’ll get it faster.

  Love,

  Tania Malhotra nee Ghosh

  PS—Do you think we should meet before I get married?

  June 26, 1991

  Bombay

  Dear Tanya,

  I told you Nusrat doesn’t like Arjun. I told you that. You don’t listen.

  Today I had a really deep conversation with Anahita Boriwala. Did I tell you she has no friends? We talked about suicide and parents drinking and wanting to shave off all your hair like Sinead O Connor. She wears two plaits, you know. Even if she hadn’t been fat and ugly those plaits would make her ugly. I told her at the end of our conversation that we should talk more but I didn’t mean it even in the second when I was saying it.

  You’re thinking I’m a bitch. Except you’re the one using Chhoti Bibi to get into college.

  My parents had a big fight today. It sounds like such a cliché but they really have been fighting a lot. I mean, there’s always a lot of yelling and shouting in my family but lately it’s gotten out of control. My mom says it’s because we’re intelligent people who enjoy debate but I know she’s not talking about me. I’m not intelligent.

  I mean she doesn’t say it but when she’s super mad at me she can’t stop herself and she says stuff like she doesn’t know what she did to get a daughter like me.

  Then my dad gets really mad at her and starts yelling at her and then they forget about me and I go to my room and call Arjun from my own phone line that my Dad got me for my sixteenth birthday. Which my Mom says was with her money. She keeps threatening to disconnect it.

  Sometimes when they fight a lot my dad sleeps outside on the couch and sometimes I go and sleep next to him. He puts his arm around me and even though I hate the smell of whisky on his breath, I love how it feels. His stubble tickles me and his arm around me feels like nothing can get to me.

  But the last time he made me go back to my bedroom. He said I was getting too old for this. What is ‘this’?

  My mother locked me into my room which sounds awful but it’s such a joke because I can climb the railing of the window and slip out over the top. That’s the great thing about being skinny. Other than of course being able to wear whatever I want without bras.

  I’m sitting outside right now, writing this. I have Arjun’s cigarettes and I am going to smoke all of them so that the box is over because right now the only person I hate more than I hate my mom and my dad is him.

  Peace,

  Tania

  July 2, 1991

  Karachi

  Dear Tania,

  I don’t know how to say this nicely. YOU CANNOT GET MARRIED.

  a) You’re sixteen and this is illegal. I looked it up. The legal marriage age for girls in India is 18. It’s 21 for boys.

  b) You can’t be okay with his stealing a ring.

  c) You have to go to college.

  d) What does Nusrat think?

  Best,

  Tanya

  July 14, 1991

  Karachi

  Dear Tania,

  What happened? Why are you angry with Arjun? Did he have to give the ring back to his Mummy? Haha. On a more serious note though, I do hope you’re over the engagement fantasy. It’s a terrible idea. Just trust me on this.

  Your family sounds quite different from mine. No one shouts here. It’s quiet.

  I thought about what you said about my using Choti Bibi. I disagree. I see it as symbiotic. I am helping her get a better life and she is helping me get a better life. What’s wrong with that?

  Today I asked her to write an essay on any topic that she wants. Since you love her so much, here’s what she wrote. I translated it into English for you.

  What I want to be as an adult

  I want to be a maid and look after children in Karachi when I am an adult. I can also be a cook in Karachi when I am an adult. I can also be a gardener in Karachi when I am an adult except I don’t want to wear gardener uniforms because I have never worn trousers.

  I don’t want to get married when I am an adult. I want to bring my baby brother Mohammed to Karachi and make him live with me when I am an adult. When I am twenty, he will be eight years old. I will save up all my money and put him in the best school and he will be very clever and he will come first in class and he will only want to eat the food that I cook.

  I also want to have seven different outfits when I am an adult so that I can wear a different outfit every day.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ruksana Mohammed Jamal

  She actually wrote yours sincerely in English and without a single spelling mistake (although her e’s are a little har
d to decipher). But there you go. That’s your beloved Chhoti Bibi. It took her two hours to write this. She’s nineteen.

  Best,

  Tanya

  July 20, 1991

  Bombay

  Dear Tanya,

  I don’t give a shit about Chhoti Bibi, I was just pointing out that you were using her. She sounds like a total retard. She probably loves that brother of hers because her mental age is the same as his. She will probably be sold off into someone’s house and be made to work like a dog and never get to go home and see her darling brother who will probably die before he grows up anyway like everyone does in our stupid beggar countries. She’s so stupid. Seven outfits for seven days. She’s dumb.

  Most people are dumb. My parents are dumb, my friends are SO dumb.

  I’ve decided I’m not going to college in America. I’m not going to tell my mum but I’m just going to do really badly in the SAT and send in crappy essays.

  Today I was really mean to Neenee. Even for me, I was really mean. She didn’t even go to the bathroom to cry, she just started crying in front of everyone. It made me hate her even more.

  Remember being ten years old? We used to go down to play with water bottles and five rupees to buy spicy sev puri outside the gate of the building which was as far as we were allowed to go. I used to run faster than anyone else and sometimes even after I had caught everyone I used to go on running, running, running. And the wind would be in my hair and the sweat ran down my back and nothing else mattered because I was the fastest runner in the world and I could outrun anyone.

  Except of course I didn’t. You can’t run away from growing breasts and pubic hair. You can’t run away from becoming a girl. I hate being a girl. Before we became girls and they became boys it was just about running. You either ran fast or you didn’t run fast.

  You want to know what happened? Here’s what happened. Arjun forced me to go down on him. For twenty minutes. He had promised me after the last time. But today again. Twenty minutes.

  Tania

  3

  March 1, 1996

  New York, NY

  Dear Tania,

  There is a poem by T.S. Eliot that we had read for the A Levels. It started,

  APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  But you know, I think March is the cruelest month. January and February are beautiful. Endless flakes that start silently and go on forever. Like magic everything turns slowly, uniformly, anonymously blank. Let it snow, snow, snow until I turn softly invisible.

  But by March, the snow is gone and the mud is here and everyone is resentful. The earth is tired of being invisible, we are all tired of winter wool and chapped hands and the five o’clock dark goes from cozy to encroaching.

  The weather has been morose since dawn and I have watched it sulk through the window. I have a paper due tomorrow but I can’t focus. My mother is not having a good day.

  My friends say there is a winter Tanya and a summer Tanya which is their way of saying they aren’t so fond of winter Tanya. I don’t blame them. Summer is so much easier with the sun and the holidays and the new green boughs of trees rubbing up into each other for the first time like new lovers. Isn’t it funny that when we lived in similar places I hated summer and you loved it and now I love it and you…hate it? Love it? Are indifferent to it? It amazes me how much I hate not knowing Tania because the entirety of our relationship was really just eighteen and a half months. February 14, 1991 to December 9, 1992. Sixty-seven letters. And yet, your absence like a death.

  Hey Tania, remember that night you had written to me about when your parents took you and Neenee to buy kebab rolls for dinner and then you drove around Marine Drive afterwards? You pretended to be asleep and your parents held hands.

  It wasn’t all bad. That’s the thing with March. With the gray and the cold and the slush creeping slowly into your boots, you remember more the bad parts. But I want to remind you: it wasn’t all bad.

  Love,

  Tanya

  July 30, 1991

  Karachi

  Dear Tania,

  I’ve thought about it a lot and I don’t know what to say. But for some reason, reading your letter over and over again reminded me of something that had happened when we had just moved to Karachi.

  Navi and I had just turned six. My father decided that we should go to Karachi Preparatory. My mother wanted us to go to the American school. But we couldn’t afford it so Navi and I both started at Karachi Prep. I’m still at Karachi Prep. Navi was switched to the American School when we were eleven.

  Anyway, it’s strange what we remember. I remember nothing at all about school. I don’t remember Ali, for example, even though he says we were in the same class. I don’t remember any of my friends. And yet, I remember clearly that when we came home from school, we used to take a nap in my parents’ room which was the only room in the house that had an air-conditioner. We used to wear shorts and nothing else. And even then our skin turned red with heat rash. I remember how the rash looked on my skin. I remember waking up and drinking tepid milk in horrid, dull steel tumblers that had ornate handles with grime on the undersides. I remember picking at the grime and dropping it in my glass so I would fall sick and not have to go to school the next day.

  I hated going to school because we were really behind in Urdu even with a tutor coming home to catch us up with the rest of the class. Navi didn’t seem to care. But I hated Urdu class. It felt like being deaf, dumb and blind—the script on the blackboard, the drone of poems being chanted that I did not understand. Paeans to Pakistan. It made me feel like a plant. Insensate, stuck in a pot in the corner.

  Anyway, one day I was playing around with my tumbler of milk and I spilled it all over the table. I remember it so clearly: the chocolate-coloured milk an expanse of swiftly spreading grey on the glass table and quickly coming to the rim and dripping down onto the floor in loud, fat drops. I remember hating all of it—the table with its stale odour of dirty washcloth, the steam rising from the milk and the drip drip on the floor.

  My mother must have heard the tumbler fall because she rushed to the dining room. She saw the mess and—I remember this so clearly—she stepped backwards to the wall and banged her head against it. Once. Hard. Navi and I sat in our chairs and looked at our mother, not crying, not speaking, her head rolling back and forth against the wall, her eyes everywhere but on us. We were six.

  I don’t know why your story made me think of this except that when I read your letter it took me back to that minute when my mother began to cry. I felt like a clock whose hand had just ticked over and I was irrevocably a new person, a different daughter, a different sister, a different Tanya.

  It makes me angry now to remember my mother crying. I was six. Your letter makes me feel the same way. Angry. Helpless.

  I don’t know if you understand this letter. I’m not entirely sure I do. I know it seems as if it is about me. It’s not though. I promise.

  Love,

  Tanya

  PS—I once saw a movie on TV at my grandparents’ house in America where the man was pushing down the woman’s head, lower and lower, out of the screen. I couldn’t tell why she didn’t get up and move away. Tell me. I won’t say the things you think I am going to say. I really won’t.

  PPS—I have an update on my leg but we don’t have to talk about it right now.

  August 9, 1991

  Bombay

  Dear Tanya,

  I guess I was like the girl in the movie. I don’t know man it is so hard because you love him so much and really want to make him happy and yet it feels so terrible, like something awful has happened to you. And yet it’s not like he hit me or tied my hands and forced me. His hand was on my head and he was gripping it hard. But that’s bullshit really because I’m like stronger than him I swear. He’s a skinny little piece of shit really. So I do
n’t know. I don’t know I don’t know. I love him. He loves me, I know he does. Not in school and not in front of people but in private he really loves me. He got me all these condoms the other day you know all in like different colours and said I could pick the one I wanted for when we have sex. He’s really sweet like that.

  I don’t want to talk about it any more.

  Love,

  T

  PS—I didn’t mean the things I said about Chhoti Bibi. I hope you didn’t tell her.

  PPS—I haven’t told Nusrat.

  August 20, 1991

  Karachi

  Dear Tania,

  My mother came to see me yesterday. She sat with me for a bit. We talked about Chhoti Bibi. She agreed that helping Chhoti Bibi get a diploma would look good on my applications. I thought I should mention this.

  You haven’t told Nusrat. Interesting. I was wondering what she would think about it. And no, of course I didn’t tell anyone. Do you think I read out your letters at the dinner table?

  We don’t actually have a dining table anymore. Or rather, it’s there but we can’t use it as one because it’s full of my father’s books. He had stacked them there ready to take to his office in the hospital but five months ago, construction stalled.

  My father spends a lot of time at the hospital. It’s his pride and joy. I think he thought it was going to be all about medicine but from what I understand it’s more about money. My father doesn’t have much of it. He works very, very hard though. Stays late every night and sometimes he even sleeps there. On weekends I sit with him for breakfast. We don’t talk or anything but he reads his paper and I read my book and he lets me serve him his tea.

  I don’t actually know when my mother eats dinner. I should find out. She has become very thin lately. But she has always been rather slender so maybe I’m just noticing it now since I don’t see her every day. You know, because of the knee. Tomorrow I’ll find a way to go to her room. I won’t be able to ask Chhoti Bibi because of something that has happened but I have resolved to not talk about myself in this letter so I’m not going to even though it was a pretty big thing that happened. A significant thing. A very significant thing. Let me put it this way. School started this week but that is nothing compared to this significant thing.