Short Story
The Beauty of Belonging
artwork by apurba kanti das
Is this what it's like to lose yourself in Dhaka, in kissing, in the dark of your skin the deep of your voice, your writhing thin slower (I whisper) faster (I fall) the winter is holding its breath as you call you're coming (say it) you're coming (say it) you're coming in darkness, in traffic, in lamplight, I kiss you, my mind in motion, my body in bliss full abandon, there's only one thing I miss time (what's yours) time (what's mine) the winter is digging its grave as I find a way to see (tell me) to free (tell me) to stay Any addict worth his sugar will tell you that you don't pick drugs to match your mood. I mean you could try, but it's a hopeless task. Drugs, life, magic, God, sex, whatever you want to call it, figures when it will pick you up and where it will set you down. I'm telling this pretty bit of junk to the Dhakaite girl that Dokhin has brought around to mine. This one is good looking, like all the rest. A little bit edgy but not so much it looks as if she's trying. Spiky hair, no lipstick, expressive hands. A black and white photograph. As long as she knows how to inhale, I don't care. Actually Dokhin's last paramour was sweet, though my ceiling got the best high ever with all the honey she let escape. You'd think there wasn't anyone left who didn't know how to suck a rolled-up bill. There was that girl in Cox's Bazaar who thought the Bongo way was ghetto. Aluminum foil and lighters? We just pop the whole pill, she had drawled. Americans. No romance in their bones. And where's the love if it isn't in the going? When you're gone, you're gone after all. The beauty of belonging isn't that it lasts forever, but that you think it will. Acid was the drug that taught me patience. You can't not stay in the now, on acid. It won't stop if you want it to. That's the way it is. The present moment swells, neon stains the past, swallows the future whole. Dokhin's girl, Ina? Dina? interrupts me. Or maybe she interrupted my train of thought. My blood is sped up enough that I can't remember whether I had been talking out loud or inside my head. She's actually more than good looking. Her eyes glitter in this way that I can't take, so I avoid making eye contact. Why do some girls insist on boy mannerisms like arguing loudly? Though it means she's not shy, and I like not shy. But then she asks me what my favourite drug is. Typical business weekend partier question. As if it has anything to do with drugs. I wish I were back in Cox. Near the sea. The summer I spent there, I filled up pad after pad with water colour smears I thought were divine at the time. Divine at the time! I didn't have a single visitor that Cox summer except for Dokhin one hazy fortnight, when we went through more pills than I can count. He went into spasms in the end and even the sea turned gunmetal in my mouth. I had warned him, but that boy never understood the power of waiting. He's like my brother that way, only better because he's not an ass-kissing self-serving prick like the blood version. When I got kicked out of my house, thanks to you know who, it was Dokhin who saved me, found me a place to crash. I had just met him at some fancy Dhaka do, and frankly, I hadn't thought much. Far too well dressed which only meant he thought far too much about it all. An Indian with impeccable manners, in Dhaka for a season of businessing. Fresh meat, thought the scene. Freshly irritating, thought I. Until I met him at the IC bar days later. I try not to go to these places as they are either overrun by expats or the Dhaka elite or sometimes, horrifyingly, both. Actually then, it's almost amusing, like watching two vapid and varied still-life scenes, each group stoic in their armours, jeans and shiny tops on one side, zealously ornamented saris on the other, glaring down each other's earnestly arrhythmic dance moves. Dokhin is pouring himself another dull gold tumbler of Black Label. He loves the stuff, though I can't understand why. It's what he drinks all the time. It was what he was drinking at the bar at the IC the night my kutti brother convinced my dad I needed tough love. I don't know why he cared about what I did. I wasn't working in garments, true, but I wasn't painting either, which he never thought was much of a hobby, let alone a profession. I was basically sleeping all day, staying up and out all night. He told our parents that throwing me out was the only thing that would teach me my ways. His ways rather. My mom, she nearly cried her eyes out. I'm the only one who can usually calm her down, but this time, I didn't. At first. But there was something hysterical about the way she was going on. So I tried to get her to stop, and that's when I realised that she was genuinely afraid for me. As if leaving home was some death knell. My foolish over emotional family. I had been going straight then for a year, bound by an insane promise to Juthi, and it was driving me dumb. Of course, my paintings followed pandering suit. But none of the New Yorker turtleneck f***s had the balls to point it out. Instead it was all genius decompressing, oil-based discontent, rewired and reverberant, and other ridiculous shit I can't deign to reproduce now. Every last one of my paintings went for some outrageous price. I reneged on each sale by giving my paintings away in Prospect Park one pastoral sunset, one by one, to whoever looked the longest. I'll never paint again. But I won't tell anyone that because I know never will always come back and rub itself all over your stupid face. The truth is I went to Cox to escape Dhaka. Dhaka and its tired trinkery. Dhaka and its faded winter, its melodramatic summer. Dhaka drowning me in Juthi's love. That's the real deal. I was running away from Juthi. Oh yeah, she said she had nothing left to give me. But I know what she meant. That she had too much to give and it was spilling over my edges, costing her karmic energy by the second. That Art of Living talk kills me even though I know it's not all crap. Or maybe it's just Juthi's friends and their overly happy voices. I can't take it for very long. The first time I saw Juthi wearing a sari, I immediately wanted to bed her. In that post colonial, back to your Tantric roots, brown erotica, woman worshipping Western ways (no, I want you to come first), slipping into Eastern clothes (sorry, you were too much for me, premique, next time?). The problem is that you can't love and leave very often with brown girls. Even if you leave their bodies flushed and pulsing, which I do, thank you very much. I'm not one of those boys. Of course, you can't f*** and run in Dhaka, but even in the mutinous underground bars of New York, you get that rep. Whether or not you make it perfectly clear from the beginning that all you ever wanted was love, without the strings. It's the strings that f*** things up. Bind me to you, and I'll show you the surest path to flight. It's true, Dokhin tells me, but don't talk about strings now. She'll be back soon. He cocks his head towards the bathroom. Besides, we need more ice. Can you get some from your upstairs neighbour? You're the one who needs more ice, bhai, I say. I can't drink that shit, ice or no. We can't all have your high class tastes, Dokhin says, swigging the last of his whiskey. F*** off, man, I say. At least I knew what it was like to be middle class. We both laugh but we know who's older money. Dokhin's family is one of Kolkata's bastions of wealth, going back generations. My pops only made his money in the last couple of decades. And seeing how my brother uses his slimeball connections to grease things, I don't know how long the cash will last. I believe in karma as it turns out. One bad turn for another. On my way back from the neighbours, I stop in the loo. Seems Inadina doesn't believe in locking doors. She's sitting on the toilet but waves me in. I only need to shake out the ice crumbles at the bottom of the bag into the sink but when I glance into the mirror, she's watching me. I leave the bag in the sink and turn around. As I lean down slowly, I can see her legs closing into a dark velvet upside-down V. The oldest mystery of them all. I have an urge to paint. Her. On her. A standard tired overdone O'Keefe image comes into my head. What the bleeding edgers don't understand is that we create those standard tired overdone images even when there's something pure driving us. We do it because of that purity. All the ways to jack it up, splatter it, deconstruct it, build it back, they're all just ways to get back to the original feeling, at best, foils at worst. That's why I love you means something even now. Juthi was the first Bangali girl I loved. Hell, the first brown girl. Before that was a string of white girls. Even when I came back to Dhaka, it was easy finding them. A new crop of NGO-ers every season. But Juthi with her Krishna dark skin and undulating hair got me for some reason. I couldn't stop touching her. I couldn't stop painting her. No drug ever felt as good. Drugs and Juthi together would probably blow my mind, but for reasons both logistical and perhaps lucky, I never had the shot. When Juthi found out about my habits, she got me to swear I'd never do anything when I was with her. At first, that was easy enough. But then it got harder. I saw Juthi less. She doesn't realise it but how often I see her means nothing. How little we talk means nothing. When she's around, the world shrinks and fits into my heart. When I'm gone, I shrink and disappear into the world. I'm so close to Inadina that I can squint the glitter of her eyes into pinprick stars, growing, falling, fading. A living painting. A painted life. I clap suddenly between her legs and look at my palms. F***ing mosquito. Black ink fairy imprint across the lines of my hands. I grab the bag of ice and bang out of the bathroom. Welcome, Dokhin smiles. Or is it welcome back? I have long since stopped being surprised at his knowing. I know my internal monologue's f***ed sometimes. As in I don't know when it's internal and when it's aloud. But even when I've made a ludicrous leap of imagination, Dokhin somehow follows. When Inadina enters, she goes straight to Dokhin's side and sits neatly beside him as if bidden. I don't know if it's the light but her eyes look darker, and I can barely see past her lashes. Dokhin seems oblivious. He's in the Matrix, working the strip of aluminum foil, pressing it, stretching it, running the lighter flame along it. When he's placed the little red pill on the edge of the aluminum, he hands me the lighter. For all his suave ways, Dokhin can't keep a lighter lit while he inhales so I always do the honours. The rolled-up 100 taka note is sitting on a box of cigarettes. He puts it in his mouth and waits as I hold the lighter under the silver strip. A second later, a tendril of smoke is born. As it widens and wends, Dokhin's breath calls to it. I trace the lighter under the path of the pill as it smokes and slides down the strip. The smoke is now entering me, that familiar metallic tang girding my lungs. Inadina's whole body, not just her eyes, in darkness now. Dokhin a silhouette, then a shadow, then nothing. I am alone. As I breathe, each rib contracts under my muscles, under my skin. I can see the building of my Cubist body. It slowly becomes. F***, there is nothing like it. This understanding of why we are. This joy in being. Itself a reason. It's why I still pop, inhale, shoot, chew, lick, snort, suck, absorb all of it, despite the steel pincers flexing on my brain some nights, most nights, every night. I know what I have to do. The thing that always belonged to me. The way anything belongs to you in the moment you engage. I pick up my paintbrush. A second later, a lifetime later, I feel Dokhin shaking me. His voice fades in and out like a pirated soundtrack. He's telling me something absurd. He's telling me not to die. Juthi wavers like a flame into my candlewax mind, midnight skin and midnight hair. I'm not in my room anymore. A bumper car world resolves. It grumbles and shakes around me. It pixelates. Fluorescence in my eyes. Juthi wavers out. Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi-American writer currently in Dhaka on a Fulbright award.
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