Affirmation of the day: All I need is within me.
CANAL STREET, 6:00 P. M.
Our late afternoon assignations have become a regular thing. Today for a
post - coital snack we had barbecued Korean chicken wings and kimchi fried
rice. Ali scarfed down the food and then took a shower before he went
home, leaving a wet towel snaking across the floor. Clearly he grew up in
India like a little prince, waited on hand and foot by servants — and his
mom.
The wet towel irritates the hell out of me. I should pick it up, throw it
into the hamper, but I don’t have the energy.
I chose to live in Chinatown, in this overpriced two - room apartment, for
a couple of reasons: First, I can hear people all around me, and I don’t feel
lonely. Second, the place is tiny and must, at all times, be k ept immaculate.
There is simply no room for chaos. Everything in the apartment has its
place: Shoe rack by the front door. Dyson vacuum hanging on the wall of
the minuscule vestibule. Dish rack with space for two plates and two mugs.
No bedroom closet — instead I have a hanging rod on one wall, which holds
five outfits max. Minimalism as a response to loneliness, anxiety,
d epression: If I can control my environment, I can control myself.
Ali, big lug, messes up the invisible symmetries and arrangements that
hold my life together. At first, I found him charming. He’d come over here
grinning like a kid. Devour me. That was nice — but now he doesn’t want to
leave. Hangs out, pretends we’re a couple. And today, after we had sex, he
smirked and said, “Maryam is at the hospital all night. I can stay late. Isn’t
that great?”
I smiled brightly and reminded him that his houseke eper, Miss Ritu,
would notice his absence at dinner and r eport it to Maryam — and that we
didn’t want that, did we? Ali said, “Oh,” as if he hadn’t considered this
possibility, and I sent him on his way. Of course, before he left, he took a
long shower and left that damn towel on the floor. It’s still there, a reminder
of his lack of consideration.
Truth is that I can no longer spend the night with a man. Haven’t been
able to for years. I like the sex, of course — that nice, relaxed feeling
afterward — but having a man in my bed, snoring, mumbling, spreading out
— as men do — that’s not my idea of a good time.
I tried to explain all this to Dr. Bajaj at our therapy session yesterday.
Good old Dr. Bajaj with her crushed salwar kameez and blurred red lipstick
— she reminds me of a shrewd old Indian auntie. She listened intently and
then said, “Are you avoiding intimacy? Could your response possibly be an
issue with trust?” I r eplied that my apartment was just too small; it was a
matter of space. Dr. Bajaj changed the topic and said, “Is it possible that
you cannot share a bed with a man because you wake up at night
screaming?” I said hell no, I hadn’t had the nightmare in ages.
But I lied. Ever since I became in volved with Ali, the nightmare has
started up again. I wake up soaked in sweat, a scream dying in my throat. Is
it triggered by the stress of a relationship — even a limited one with Ali? The
effort in volved in pretending to be normal? Having to stash my pills before
he shows up?
I admitted to Dr. Bajaj that I was having the nightmare, and she said,
“Hmmm,” in that therapist - y way. “Perhaps it will help to write it down.
Dreams can reveal de ep patterns of wisdom if we unlock them.”
Okay, fine, maybe there’s something to what Dr. Bajaj said. So here
goes:
THE NIGHTMARE: I’m four, five years old, and everything is huge, distorted.
I’m peeking through a door left open just a crack into a large room with
yellowed walls. A plaster rosette in the center of the ceiling holds a huge
wrought iron chandelier, and a blaze of light illuminates the scene, casting
shadows under the nose and mouth of the woman lying propped up on a
high bed: pasty face, short dark hair, thick pale legs spread apart at ten and
two. Mouth gaping, glint of metal fillings, she’s screaming, but the dream is
completely silent. The woman’s open mouth is echoed by the opening
between her legs. She is arching her back, trying to force something out of
her body. Abruptly, a jump, there is sound: The woman is sobbing and
wailing, cursing in some strange language, and there is a gush of thick black
blood between her legs — and then? Someone grabs me from behind and
scoops me up. I fight it — I want to ke ep looking, but the door is slammed
shut in my face.
And then? Nothing. Blank.
I’ve thought about it a lot. The setting seems like one of those old, oncegrand prewar
New York apartments. And the woman? Giving birth,
hemorrhaging? Had I taken a scene from a horror movie on television and
transposed it onto those crumbling apartment buildings Papa was buying up
on Grand Concourse in the Bronx? When I was little, Papa would take me
along with him to inspect them, and if he needed to have a confidential
conversation with the seller, I’d wait outside on a stair landing. Being alone
made me anxious: The ste ep, creaky stairs. The grainy light filtering down
from a dusty skylight. The smell of dust and boiled cabbage ...
The nightmare, when did it start? Hard to tell — because it has become
infused with the atmosphere of another terrifying occurrence, one which
had actually happened, in volving a boy I met at a bar in Queens.
I will try to describe it as best as I can.
THE BOY AT THE BAR: It was that strange summer after I was divorced from
Zafar and had returned to New York. Stifling hot, and the air - conditioning
in my apartment felt oppressive. My heart was very bad just then,
hammering away in my chest, and I could hardly sle
Ep I needed a body, a
warm body, rough, pounding sex to blank out the endless loops of worry
playing in my head. There were plenty of men available in Manhattan, but
the white finance bros who answered my personals ads acted like they were
doing a public service by fucking an Indian chick with a scar across her left
breast.
I needed to be back among my people, and there was this bar I had
discovered right under the elevated subway tracks in Jackson Heights:
Windows thick with grime. No air - conditioning — in summer, they left the
icebox open, let cold fumes waft out. A working - class South Asian crowd:
mechanics, pharmacists, salesmen. But also, on the weekends, boys — raised
in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Trinidad — now tasting illicit
freedoms. Boys with big brown eyes, thick eyelashes, skin smelling of
sandalwood soap. Mama’s boys. Many of them, surprisingly, virgins or used
to quick, fumbling sex in the back seats of cars.
In this bar, my light skin and hazel eyes drew comparisons to Bollywood
stars. Kareena Kapoor especially, I got that a lot. To these boys, I was a
goddess.
That muggy summer night — the bar door propped open, the air thick
with promise — I walked into the narrow room. I wore a hoodie and had
dark circles under my eyes, but it didn’t matter. A boy at the bar turned to
look at me: tight white T - shirt over bic eps, faded jeans, boots, head of curly
hair. Not Indian; some hybrid. He raised his beer in salute and then walked
over to me, cocky, grinning. I could already — even before he bought me a
beer — imagine his naked, tight, smooth butt, his arms corded with muscle.
After five beers with chasers of Jack, he invited me back to his place. A
basement apartment in one of those low - rise brick housing projects off
Roosevelt Avenue. Solidly South Asian, lower middle - class. He even had
his own entry, a set of stairs that went down into the earth. The boy didn’t
turn on the lights. A muscular boy, strong, and when he laid me down, I felt
the ripple of his back. He pulled my arms above my head, grinned, looped a
leather belt tight around my wrists. Said, “You okay with some play?” And I
was turned on, nodded yes. He smelled my armpits. Said, “White women
smell of milk, sour milk, cheese ... but Indian women smell fresh...” He bit
me, a little too roughly, on the thighs; I squirmed, and said, “Hey, hey, be
gentle.”
My eyes soon adjusted to the dark. The apartment was very neat with
little furniture, but the wall over the bed was covered with photographs cut
out of Indian women’s magazines: women in saris and salwar kameez,
women with their heads covered, women sashaying down fashion runways,
dupattas fluttering. An entire wall full of women, strangely truncated; their
arms and legs were lopped off, and some were missing heads.
It was hard to process all this because the boy had turned his attention to
my chest. Transfixed, he put his mouth over the cotton bra and sucked at
my nipples, and it hurt and aroused me at once. “Hey, gentle,” I said again.
And I noticed something else: The boy must have been in the midst of
cleaning, because, oddly, in the corner of the bedroom was a box of heavyduty trash
bags, the big black ones — along with thick yellow rubber
cleaning gloves and a bottle of industrial disinfectant.
All this I saw in disjointed flashes, as the boy nuzzled my chest and
reached between my legs. I was aroused, already anticipating orgasm, and
the de ep sle ep that followed. Then the boy reached behind me, unhooked
my bra, pulled it away. He stopped, ran a finger over the ridge of scar
tissue, and whispered, “What happened here?” I didn’t want to talk, so I
whispered back, “Nothing. Heart surgery.” And he paused and thought — I
could feel him thinking — and he said, “A doctor cut you open? Touched
your heart?” And I was anxious to ke ep going, so I said, “Yeah, something
like that,” and wished he’d put his hand back between my legs
What happened next, I will never forget: The boy jumped off me and
shrieked, “Spoiled! All spoiled! No good!” He screamed, “You bitch, you
tricked me!” Slapped my cheeks hard. Ripped the belt free from my wrists,
kicked me off the bed. I scrambled up from the floor, tugged on my jeans,
my halter top.
He was a lunatic, and the mangled collage of pictures on the wall, the
cleaning supplies, took on an overpowering menace. The boy loomed above
me, punching me, yelling archaic abuse: “Whore! Harlot! Strumpet!”
He grabbed my shoulders, and I thought he was going to kill me — he
was that strong — but he pushed me toward the door. “Get out, get out!” I
ran up the st eps, holding my sneakers, and only stopped to pull them on
when I was in sight of the street. Luckily it was a hot night, and Indian
families were still out at midnight, reluctant to return to their stuffy
apartments. I hurried to the subway station, climbed the stairs, jumped onto
a train that was just pulling out.
What had happened? What had happened? All I knew was: The boy had
seen my scar and freaked out.
What was I to make of it? The boy, his barren apartment, the pictures on
the wall, the cleaning supplies, his panic at discovering my scar ... It was
surreal. It didn’t add up. An additional problem was that my childhood
nightmare started up, and the two events bled together: When I thought of
the woman lying on the bed, her legs spread, I smelled the curly - headed
boy’s sweaty, masculine odor — and the unreal atmosphere of the highceilinged room
with the metal bed se eped into that insane night in the boy’s
basement.
I increased my sle ep meds, tried to push the whole thing out of my mind.
I stayed in Manhattan.
A few months after my encounter with the crazy boy, the killings began
in Jackson Heights. Two Indian girls dead, and the press started writing
about the Jackson Heights Killer, “JHK,” but in my mind, it had nothing to
do with me ...
For years the nightmare haunted me. Then I scored some Klonopin, and
the drug blanked me out. It must have stopped working around the time I
met Ali, because now I’m having the nightmare again. Vivid, terrifying.
And you know what? Writing all this stuff down hasn’t helped a bit. Dr.
Bajaj was dead wrong.
I stare at the sopping towel left on the bathroom floor. Come on, Farhan,
get out of bed, pick up the towel. Throw the take - out containers in the trash.
Pull open the window, air out the bedroom.
Minutes pass, and I still haven’t moved. Outside, the traffic on Canal
Street has picked up: rush hour. Everybody heading home to wives,
husbands, partners. Me, I’m all alone. I am fucked - up because I think in
fucked - up ways. Like a snake eating its tail, my thought swallows itself.
Not helpful.
I pick up my phone and text Ali: ‘YO, DUDE. YOU LEFT A WET
TOWEL ON THE FLOOR. WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE? A MAID?’ It grows
darker, and I lie in bed and wait for my phone to ding.
Ali instantly texts me back a smiley face emoji with tears rolling out of
the corners of its eyes. Moron. But I can’t help feeling better. He may be
married to Maryam, but he’s emotionally attached to me.
I get out of bed and start cleaning up.