The Hidden Light of Objects (7 page)

“My mother?” Mina would always ask at this point.

“Indeed, your mother. My youngest and” – he would whisper in an aside to his beloved granddaughter – “favorite. I had wanted to name her Mina but was not allowed to on the obstinate authority of your grandmother. So when you were born, Mina, I insisted that your mother give you the name I had chosen especially for her all those years ago. And she did, my darling daughter. So, here you are Mina, Mina, full of my dreams, full of my love.” Those last words he would often chant to her playfully but also, she thought, with nostalgia. “Mina, Mina, full of my dreams, full of my love.”

*  *  *

While Mina consumed books with hunger and without discrimination as a child, it was on the edge of young adulthood, with the books earnestly selected for her by a fawning teacher, that words began to seep into her living moments. Sometimes there was confusion.

Tuesday, January 1, 1985. I must create a life to look back on, a life I can search for in the future, time now that will inevitably be lost only to be found once again. I must live my life then write about it. Or maybe I should write my life then live it.

Like her grandfather before her, Mina felt the restless urgency to move, the longing for travel. But Mina was much younger than her grandfather had been when he sailed away romantically on a handmade dhow in search of adventure. Plus, she was not an Arab man but an Arab girl, and trouble was inescapably enfolded in the pages of her wayward desires.

It was the year of the carefully selected books that Mina began to craft encounters. One morning in winter, she jumped out of her bedroom window and hitched a ride to the sea in the truck of a mildly shocked but mostly amused Bedouin man. He told her that his own three daughters were never out of his sight and wouldn’t dream of being in a car with a stranger.

“But they’re out of your sight now.”

“Yes, but their mother is with them.”

“What if she isn’t?”

“She must be.”

“But she’s out of your sight too.”

“Yes, but I can see her in my mind’s eye.”

“But can that eye really see?”

“It sees what’s important.” She gave him the last word but he seemed less amused. Mina noticed that he had a sharp frown crease cutting into his brow. She had made him uneasy. He dropped her off where she asked, mumbled something unintelligible, and drove off. The rocks where she sat were warmer and lonelier than she had expected. She noted this in the diary.

Then there was the boy she would run with who kept a mysterious, small leather pouch in his pocket. She would wait for him to walk in through the school gates. He would see her, peripherally, but pretend he hadn’t. He would normally arrive seconds before the bell rang; she wished he would come earlier. One afternoon, during lunch break, she ran and he gave chase. She flew into the boys’ locker room. It was empty. She dashed into the showers and stopped. He bumped into her from behind, lifted her up, put her down again. They looked into each other’s eyes.

“What’s in the pouch?”

Instead of answering, he bit her arm hard, like he wanted to take a bite out of it. He ran out. She rubbed the spit left behind into her skin.

Later she invented reasons for why she had a bruise in the shape of teeth on her arm, one for each person who asked.

“I bit my own arm in my sleep because I had a toothache.”

“My cousin has a monkey that bites the arms of girls who don’t wear gingham dresses.”

“An accident with a plunger.”

Everything but what had really happened, which belonged, in part, to the diary.

Sometimes, instead of spending the night at her best friend’s house as she had told her parents, she would skip off to one of the weekend parties thrown in inexplicably empty villas with designated floors for drinking and dancing, a policeman guarding the front door. Mina would try to take furtive photographs. She got the idea at a party once after noticing flashes that could have been lightening but were more likely something else. It was not risk-free to take pictures since, like her, many weren’t supposed to be at these parties and certainly wanted no material evidence that proved otherwise. In the middle of dancing she would pull out her little camera, raise it above her head, aim it downwards, and snap phantom photos. Usually people were too drunk to register the sudden flash in the dark or, if they did, couldn’t figure out what it was.

One night, Mina found herself on an undesignated floor. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, unusual for these parties. The area was unlit, but it looked like an extremely narrow corridor led from the top of the stairs to an open door. Mina felt her way along the corridor. She began to hear a distinct scratching and clicking sound. At the end of the corridor, she poked her head through the door and made out a wide figure huddled in the dark, completely still but for her hands.

“Who are you?” Silence. Mina asked again in Arabic.

Though she was sitting only about a meter away, the old woman’s voice echoed as if from across a wide valley. “I have to finish removing the stones from this rice. It must be ready in time.”

“In time for what?”

“In time for lunch. The men will bring the fish. Fish out of water must be plunged immediately into pools of rice.”

“But do you live here? Who are you?” Mina noticed that the scratching and clicking came from the woman’s fingernails running across an empty tin plate. There was no rice in the plate and no discarded stones either. She took photos of the absences so she could write about them later.

*  *  *

Mina had always been fascinated by her grandmother’s collection of birds. Her grandmother had only agreed to leave India to return with her husband to his Arabian land on the condition that she be permitted to bring along her birds, each and every one. If Mina’s grandfather’s quarters were clouded with suspended book and projector dust, her grandmother’s quarters were strewn with floating bird feathers. Screaming greens and shiny blues, upbeat yellows and fancy pinks, Mina felt like she had stepped into a conjuror’s box of tricks whenever she made her way through the room. Her grandmother spent her mornings in private, drinking tea, milky and sweet, and talking to the macaws, the mynas, the rose-ringed parakeets, the cockatoos, each in turn. Mina would listen through a small crack in the door. She would catch fragments of sentences in her grandmother’s lilting voice. Did she hear her grandmother tell the birds that madness ran in the family like an ostrich through the savanna? Was that why she had decided to escape India? Could the murmurs about her own children be true? Only in the pages of Mina’s diary did her birdwoman grandmother take flight. As far as everyone else was concerned, she was a no-nonsense old lady who happened to like birds.

At first, Mina didn’t realize she was crafting encounters, and even after it began to dawn on her, she wasn’t quite sure why. It was only at the end of that year, when the boy with the pouch revealed its contents to her, that she began to understand. All along, she had been crafting encounters that would make good stories. Stories to keep you up all night reading them as they helped put you to sleep. Stories you wished would never end as they pushed you to finish. Stories that would leave holes in you even as they provided plugs. Stories for only some to believe and even them only sometimes. They were the kinds of stories Mina had been writing in the diary all year without realizing. The diary compulsion had become overpowering, impossible to fight. It wasn’t just the absurd or atmospheric that would be recorded. Everything – every conversation, every experience, every thought, every feeling – was filtered through the diary lens. From the loss of religion to the loss of virginity, the diary was a testament to the life of a young girl living at cross-purposes with a crusty society. Mina was protected from the potential crush of its wrath only because she was discreet and because few could be bothered to investigate the incessant scribbling of a child. Though she was changing no faster than the desert landscape overrun by petrodollar construction, it was too fast for the self-appointed guardians of customs and traditions in whose name all manner of things were kept in check. Unless there was money to be made.

The diaries took over Mina’s room. Notebooks and scraps of paper to be transferred into notebooks were stashed in every available corner. Under her bed, between her bed frame and mattress, behind her dresser, among the books on her bookshelves: diaries. This awkward stashing was her feeble attempt at secrecy. She told herself she didn’t want anyone to read her words but would sometimes relish the thrill of imagining what it would be like if curiosity got the better of someone. What would they think about her narrow escapes, her hits and misses, her nows or nevers? She often wrote with imagined eyes hovering over her shoulders but registered those eyes as a dare rather than a threat. She could not predict that when the imagined happened, when hovering eyes landed, there would be no pleasure in it, no thrill, nothing but a vortex of shame and guilt.

It wasn’t until two years later, at the end of a summer filled with clandestine car rides and music played late into the night in other people’s rooms, that the first horror occurred. Mina came home one scorching afternoon to find her diaries in tidy piles all over her room. It was a New York City of notebooks, paper skyscrapers forming a grid across the floor. Her mother sat silently on the bed, Mina’s most recent diary butterflied open on her lap. It would be too easy and not exactly accurate to describe the look on her mother’s face as shock. It was more the look that follows shock. Her face was as still as a Himalayan mountain top, as if the nerves under her skin were no longer capable of accepting or responding to stimuli, her blood cells unable to advance single-file through her capill­aries. Her mother did not move as Mina walked into the room, but her exhausted eyes looked into her daughter’s, searching for something familiar.

“Are these words true? Are these terrible stories about my family true? Have you really done such reprehensible things?”

Mina found it impossible to slice her own silence with any plausible explanation. How, with the evidence set before them in its grid-like glory, could she explain that the truth could be stretched in more than one direction at once, that it wasn’t for her to say whether or not the words that emerged out of her pen, the words she had never thought to restrain, contained such a thing as truth? If anything, the diaries had always been a place for the dissolution of truth, where the truth could be picked apart and left to reassemble differently than it did on the outside. But it wasn’t Mina’s place to explain such things. She accepted the guilt implied by her silence. She accepted the tears that her words had caused to stream down her mother’s face as a judgment worse than any that could be meted out by an unforgiving and merciless God she didn’t believe in anyway. Mina would never be able to put together her mother’s broken face, at least not in her own mind’s eye, an eye, as it turned out, as focused as the confident Bedouin had once claimed.

As far as Mina could see, the only solution was to burn everything. To burn every notebook, every piece of crumpled paper, every word on every scrap was the only way to rub out the betrayal and scrape the shame. Mina brought in large, black trash bags that smelled of petroleum, opened them wide, and started to layer the doomed lot one atop the other. There were exactly one hundred notebooks, all black, all with red corners and binding. She did not allow herself to think for too long about the contents of her one hundred notebooks. Her mind was like a huge desert moth with furry wings. With every downward flap, the unraveled coil in Mina curled tightly up inside her once again. This was the cost of betrayal, the price of atonement. If Mina had known that death would come anyway, sooner than either she or her mother ever would have believed, that survival could be stolen in a flash, would she still have burned the notebooks? Probably.

The ensuing bonfire was celebratory. The stinking smoke of plastic bags and raped language did little to diminish this festival of imagined rebirth. Mina invited her sad mother and bewildered father to join in the late night merriment. Her mother acknowledged the gesture with a gentle hug. Her father, oblivious of his wife’s recent discoveries, wondered why this was happening. Nobody, not even Mina, could explain, and he quickly decided not to probe. The next morning, Mina could not get out of bed. Outwardly, her body registered a fever. Inwardly, it felt like her lungs and stomach had been scooped out. The violence of what she had done the night before hit her full force, and she didn’t think she could survive the realization. She felt herself deflating, becoming smaller and smaller, as small as a tadpole in a rotten swimming pool. She whimpered all afternoon.

A tidy life was what Mina led after the big explosion of 1987. She continued to keep a diary but no longer crafted encounters or wrote stories. Her new notebooks contained mostly stolid accounts of the day-to-day, with hidden sparks. She invented a code so veiled only she could crack it, though not without fail. It was always possible that after a few years or hours she would lose the key.
Wednesday, April 19, 1989. Interesting class on Romantic poetry
could simply mean that she had enjoyed the class or that she had slept with the boy in the fourth row with the blazing gaze.
Tuesday, May 29, 1990. Vanquishing desire
could mean that she was clamping down on the unpredictable little eruptions of yearning that would suddenly scramble the surface of her complacency or that she had had an especially enjoyable breakfast.