The Sitar Read online



  The Sitar

  Rebecca Idris

  The Sitar

  Rebecca Idris

  Copyrigh 2012 Rebecca Idris

  For Nobo, my eleventh hour sitar

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 1

  The sitar lay next to the Pink Paper, like Ghandi conversing with the embarrassing flamboyant indignity of Gok fucking Wan. They lay awkwardly atop the multi-coloured, mismatched bedspread of a one Jaya Lubaba Chakarbatti, daughter of Abdul Malik Chakarbatti, an immigrant from Bangladesh, who chose to rear his family in the respected and modern establishment surroundings of the West Midlands, London.

  1967, Dhaka, Bangladesh:

  Dadoo Chakarbatti: “He is going to become a Londoni, maa, going to London just like those Londoni’s from Babloo’s house”

  “…where in London will you be settling Abdul?”

  “Coventry”

  “Oh yes, one of my niece settled in London now. He lives in Manchester.”

  “….whereabout in London is Manchester?”

  “North.”

  Jaya, who at this moment was sculpting her quiff to aesthetic perfection, was a junction. A jostling spaghetti junction of tangled bloodlines, conflicts, colonies, boundaries, tube wells, affairs… so dense that they made her blood thick, so linear in improbability that her mismatching bed set, with its cacophony of boisterous colours, was inadvertently the perfect place to harbour all the changes that beds often do. Atop this one then, lay two objects: both made from a tree. One hollow, but self-importantly heavy, one flimsy, easy to discard, but full of tasty titbits.

  But ambiguous metaphors will never do. More literally, there stood another tree-derivative in the corner of the room. Tucked away on the bookshelf was Jaya Chakarbatti’s Quran, still, wrapped in silk, always there, handed down from Chakarbatti to Chuck-your-Batty; like the black box of a plane, absorbing everything, not useful until the end, but useful for the end. When everything crash lands.

  Jaya hummed a dance track from the Ministry of Sound mp3 she had (illegally) downloaded, absentmindedly, oblivious to the fact that almost 5,000 miles away in a mud hut in rural Bangladesh, where bridges were made of a single bamboo trunk, Akram Kashif, who seemed to have two first names, was towing a cart of saffron through the woods, which he had (illegally) obtained from Mr Jyoti’s crocus processing factory. The front wheel of his cart came flying off when he hit a tree stump. He cursed various peoples’ mothers for not seeing the offending stump, oblivious to the fact that the stump was there because its flesh had been cut down to make cheap Sitars for export to London… one of which lay atop Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty’s bed… whom Akram would later…

  The saffron spilled gloriously across the stump, covering it in a rich, blood red blanket, blended indelibly with the dirt and grit. As a result, his mother’s pilau rice suffered, which meant the suitor’s mother who came later that evening to consider Akram’s sister for marriage, turned up her nose and refused the match, because, naturally, a mother who cannot prevent dirt from entering her pilau, surely cannot prevent dirt from entering her daughter.

  “Fakkin’ ho yeah? Ho‘s wot she is. Ho boat, cha. Here man, take a drag. We got some samosey in dat cupboard yea? …Facking sket.”

  Kulsuma Begum belied her wholesome middle-class upbringing in Hodge Hill, Birmingham, very much in B36. She flicked the ash off her Mayfair cigarette and threw a look of lust towards Jaya, intently bent over a cluster of computer wires.

  “All she did was kiss him, Kully-”

  “Which far-kin dykette scrapes the bottom of the barrel so hard that she goes for a guy, man?...” Kulsuma’s thunderous look of disgust scared all of the girls in the room. A feeble whimper rose from the corner.

  “She’s been praying recently. I think it’s her first step towards-”

  “Sucking cock, yea,” Kulsuma took a cancerously long drag on her cigarette which, despite her propounds, her fingers clutched stiffly.

  O the annihilating whirlpool of distractions that racked Kulsuma Begum’s mind! O ineffable concoctions of hatred and wisdom and fury! The stale odour of BO hung about her cluttered rammed jammed room, old farts and dadi amma’s peanuts, musty, thick musty, and pure, like the inalienable opposition of the clean ‘tring’ of a ricksaw wallahs bell and the choking smell of his sweat. Now 23, Kulsuma embraced the clutter in her room, defining herself, and defying the birth order by falling solidly on a 6 in the Kinsey Scale. The old kettle, arthritic fold-out coffee table, yellowing calendar featuring Mekkah, plastic gold and velvet tissue box, pile of Jamdani sari’s, empty Patak pickle jars, the forgotten brass tap… under which Shilpi Begum crouched, quivering, during the 1947 partition… upon which the Bangladesh Liberation War was reflected in 1974…

  Atop the pile of Jamdani sari’s was, however, a very deliberately placed copy of Orwell’s ‘1984’. Placed pleadingly there, directly in Jaya’s eyeline, militarily angled to hit her retina, and only hers, as she sat at the computer stool raised above Kulsuma’s discarded heritage. ‘1984’, a disciplined white rectangle on its pedestal of busy gold swirls and luminous green scratchy cotton. Kulsuma Begum knew that Jaya had studied it during her impossibly respectable English degree. But Kulsuma Begum didn’t know that Jaya once described it as the bible for the ‘faux intelligentsia’. O Jaya! O the Urban Maharani of Kulsuma’s barren coital lands! O the purveyor of sustenance to her fierce lustings!

  On the floor, Smita Chandrashekar sat with her knees up, her grey skinny jeans stretched tensely over her dark, light-absorbing skin (which had caused another argument with her mother this morning, leading to her sitting so forlornly against Kulsuma’s wall, next to the folded up bedsheet on which Shilpi Begum had engaged in fumbled illicit sex with General Davies on the even of Partition):

  “Somebody jacked my jhuttiya from the mandir this morning,”

  The words fascinated Jaya’s ears, and the smallest smile curled her lip. Kulsuma burned inside; trifles light as air, are, to the jealous mind…

  She indignantly stubbed out her Mayfair and had no sooner lit up another that Mrs Amina Latiful Begum’s voice, like the crack of a hunting whip, sounded up the stairs:

  “Aiiiiiiiii Kulsumaa! Nomaj forr, joldiii!” A screech for prayer in the vulgar diction of Sylheti, discarding the caressing Arabic azaan… ‘come to success, come to triumph’…

  “For fuck’s sake, man. Come on, let’s get to the scene quickly.” Kulsuma handed her cigarette to Raj Dhokia cramped between a pile of Maya Begum’s marriage jewellery and a hookah pipe Maya had acquired in 1952. Raj stared at the cigarette for a little while, thinking it would be sad to waste a solid object that was handed to her gratis. She stubbed it out and placed it carefully in her pocket, hoping that later on tonight, in the thudding basement of DV8 nightclub at the heart of Birmingham’s floundering gay scene, at Saathi club night, a beautiful gaysian girl would ask her for a cigarette, and Raj Dhokia would have the perfect pulling tool. She hoped her facial hair and the slight whiff of Dabur Amla would be masked by the overbearing influences of curry and vodka.

  Jaya Chakarbatti had grown up always wanting to be somewhere else. In her head, where she lived while growing up, she wasn’t sitting in Nawaaz Balti in the dinghy part of Coventry. She was in somewhere respectably white, somewhere where music tinkled, somewhere where waiters didn’t serve semi-erections with the parathas… somewhere like Harvester. Or, when she was faced with a threat to her heritage, she was in a fetis
h-ised scenario in Bangladesh, where the heat was sweltering and the nights were balmy, where the palm trees rustled in the breeze around the large inherited estate, and where the sexual tension between cousins was enough to keep the parents wary but happy. Now, as she drove her selection of Lassi Lesbians to a nightclub where the clientele thought ‘degrees’ were a pathway for the New World Order and nothing to do with education, she was already in the club. She knew it wouldn’t satisfy her; her belly was full of fire! Always, so full, so full of fire, like the unfulfilled potential of a self-destructive young man, bursting shurshting, led by his ego and his phallus and his mother.

  Jaya knew that if she didn’t have her slender fingers running through the (long, cascading) hair of a girl tonight (whose own Sitar had come from the same stump… which Akram had…), then she would be miserable and empty. Unbeknown to her though, she would compromise her status within her group. Her elevated, untouchable, mercilessly enigmatic position within her gaysian group. Ironically however, that was one place which, for some cosmological reason, had never existed in her head.

  1957, Dhaka, Bangladesh:

  Abdul Malik Chuck-Your-Batty (as his children would later be known) was crouched in the wheat field, squatting over a patch of mud, the colour matching his malnourished faeces he was contentedly squeezing out. He could hear the shouts of his cousins a few metres away, scuffling for the football he had made out of balling together dozens of plastic bags with a lime brick at its core. The few minutes he had taken out filled his head with thoughts he hadn’t been prepared for: who would make the footballs if he ever made it to London? To whom would his father turn for all-encompassing discussions on the world and all it contained, in the face of his absence, and the stupidity of his brothers? Who would be his substitute for his mother’s reversed Oedipus Complex? Who would Bilal the GollKipper push his body against when he thought they were all asleep? Who would carry the fish to the rooftops for sun-drying? No, no, he thought, it would not do. His fantasies of marrying a British bride were ultimately going to come to nothing.

  He wiped with a rock, pulled his shorts up and ran towards the game.

  Kulsuma knew that tonight was the only chance she could conceivably have with the ineffable Jaya. She sipped determinedly on her Snakebite, and watched Jaya’s every movement through narrowed eyes. The fact that one day, Jaya would be forced to fill her sacred crevice with a man’s genitalia pained Kulsuma like she was already in the hell which her grandma so vividly drew up. Kulsuma had a very graphic image of hell, which was full of Sikh people and chocolate with white powder on it. She wondered if Jaya would mention Kulsuma’s strategically placed ‘1984’, of which she had Googled the synopsis before placement. She had a restless feeling in her tonight; she was feeling selfish, she was feeling entitled. She hurt.

  ‘I really don’t want to be here,’ Jaya shouted in to the ear of Eleven O Clock, smiling. The girl smiled back. She had no idea what she’d just said.

  ‘Gosh, this place fucking stinks!’

  ‘Yea man!’ The girl beamed up at her, ‘It is sick! I love this place,’

  The colloquial dialect of Birmingham had equalised their conversation.

  Then, quietly, in Eleven O Clock’s ear: ‘I bet everyone here will be married with kids within five years.’ Aloud: ‘Who are you here with?’

  Eleven O Clock was a silly girl who couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw Jaya. She was fair-skinned enough for Eleven to act pretentious with her own friends when taking Jaya to meet them, yet earthed enough to charm if any of them got through her protective cage. Eleven O Clock was also married with three children, forced to marry at gunpoint in Hyderabad when she was 15, and a frequent adulterer with a skewed sense of loyalty.

  Kulsuma continued to burn. She watched Jaya half-heartedly talk to a girl, whose long hair annoyed Kulsuma to the point where she could conceivably put a match to it. She clutched her plastic cup and gulped down her drink. The surreal ambience of clubbing started to kick in. She felt naughty, she felt that if a 15-year-old Asian girl were to see her now, she’d pass as cool. She’d pass as modern. She’s pass as ‘safe’. But if they knew about her longing, her shameful, class-ladder-climbing, humiliating sense of need, then she would be classified as a fool.

  She stood up and started walking towards Jaya. She approached her outside of her peripheral vision, lest Jaya could detect the nervous wobble in her walk. The vacuum in her eyes. The film of sweat forming in the creases of her sockets. She knew about the element of surprise (as did General Davies on the eve of Partition) and she wanted to utilise it. She avoided the lined up hookah pipes, she walked over the damp tissues, she sidestepped the camp Pakistani boy who was willing to kiss anything tonight to just feel wanted. She could feel her breath getting sharper. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, that Jaya was a masterpiece that needed to be preserved, that Jaya didn’t need more desire in her life to prolong the ever-ominous date of inevitable marriage shackles loneliness oblivion. Would Jaya think of her when she woke up in the morning in Bangladesh, next to her husband, thousands of miles away from home, her husband still sleeping? Would she awake and sit up, and feel the blanket of isolation and never being understood? Would she feel utterly, completely, depressingly alone? Suppressed? Or would she meet Kulsuma, for a quick fix of ego? Or would she come home from work, walk in to her house, and hoard useless pieces of heritage around her, like a gatekeeper to her history? Would she take comfort in the romanticising? Kulsuma needed to give Jaya the key, the way out, the option, the ladder, the understanding emotion gravity.

  Jaya turned around and faced Kulsuma point blank in the eye. There was a century’s worth of sadness in her eyes, and a millennia’s worth of dread. It was duplicated in Kulsuma’s own eyes, when she smiled and walked right past her, to fill her plastic cup at the bar.

  It was a time where Sony Walkmans had ceased production and CDs were thrown away after use rather than resold. It was in the West Midlands, and discreet music players meant bored teenagers could pretend they lived somewhere edgier than industrial Birmingham by soundtracking their walk to school with The Kills (if you were white) or Imran Khan (if you were brown). It was the middle of winter; frosty, grey, depression-inducing kind of weather. Schoolgirls would dig their hands deep in to their Primark leather jackets, perfect manicures covering the haldi-stained nails from helping cook the dhansak last night, poker straight hair that was tinted copper with the smell of fried onions blasted out of it; perfectly groomed eyebrows which, if even one hair was let out of place, would give a shocking insight in to their hairy auntie-ji DNA which they would inevitably give in to at the age of 30.

  But for now, the facial hair was waxed, the eyes were smokey, the sexual tension simmered pleasurably in their bellys, and their grades were mediocre enough to secure a place to do psychology and media studies at the polytechnic college up the road.

  Balsall Heath Grammar School was nestled in between three areas, all of which the police has abandoned long ago; where the polite BBC local radio staff never cared to report on, and where discarded condoms and syringes were like debris floating in a sea of miles upon miles of cracked concrete streets. The girls were desperate and/or pregnant, the boys were comatose from cheap skunk, and everyone else was either a social worker or a zygote.

  It was natural then, that the school played host to all the congealed crap that trickled down from these areas.

  Ruby aka Rubina Ansari Khan was cold this morning as she walked to class. Her GHD’d hair was perilously close to frizzing which would do nothing to help her achieve the fuck of her life from Paul Gordon in Sixth Form.

  Paul Gordon’s father was a member of Combat 18, the cheaper, white-trash version of the BNP. After a night attacking brown kids and general racist-fueled merriment and splitting various lips, Paul knew his father would be shocked to know how he fiercely masturbated to mental images of a Pakistani girl in his school.

  It was why he never let the guys see his face as h
e raped yet another Fucking Paki they’d hunted down.