Last night,I got the courage to finally attend a meetup.com movie event. I have procrastinated for a long time to see a movie with the movie group. I think this relates to my social anxiety. I thought no one would talk to me. I kept on RSVP saying “maybe” three times. However, I am in cognitive behavioral therapy for a reason and the reason is to conduct exposures.

I am so glad I went to see the movie with the meetup.com movie group.

I had a good time. I met the group at 6:15pm at the Canada Square Theatre at Yonge and Eglinton. Next, we saw the Chris Rock documentary “Good Hair”. I thought the movie was okay I give it a six out of ten. The movie focused on the fact black women use a hair relaxer to straighten their hair to fit into a Eurocentric culture.

The highlight of my night was talking to Rahi! After the movie one group member Rahi asked me “are you joining us for dinner at Boston Pizza?” I said “sure”. Rahi is really cute! Rahi is from India and he is a Hindu and Muslim.

Rahi has a very sexy voice! Rahi says he moved to Canada in the year 2000 from India. Rahi is gorgeous he has a nice brown skin, thick black hair, and he dresses nice. I don’t know Rahi’s sexual orientation but I would “love” to get to know Rahi better!

I thought some of Chris Rock’s jokes were mean spirited against black women. I also feel the documentary did not dig deep enough into the surface to examine “why” do black women wear weaves? The movie also ignored the fact white female celebrities such as Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton wear extensions. It’s not just a “black woman” issue. I also feel the movie would have been better if a black woman made it instead of a black man. One of the outrageous generalizations was that black men “can’t” touch a black woman’s hair that’s bullshit.

(It’s heartbreaking that when I remember this, I remember our conversations in English.)

I think back now to the two weeks I spent with my father’s family, the way love can rise up like that in a body and overwhelm you, love received and given. Everything becomes consumed in that: the searing heat of high morn on skin and under clothes, blinding you to your bones; the stars; the sound of the ocean; the language; fried fish and shrimp with rice; the power outages; milktea so thick with Ovaltine I couldn’t drink it; the wells; the government sedan too big for the village streets; the language; the stories. And the war, ebbing and waning in the background, history contained in the absences I’d never known as people, deaths I learned of children and teenagers, and shootings and disappearances and wedding buses set on fire. Love becomes a palpable presence within you, something your body knows and accepts into itself like an organ, pulsing alongside and separate of your heart, forming its own memory, devouring everything it encountered: the silences between adult sisters; the graveyard in the afternoon; TV antennas in the post-tsunami rehabilation camps; the children in class; the traces your parents left here; the smell of the sunlight; still water under the tallest palm trees you would ever see; the rice fields darkening as the sun set, mud and water seeping up your shalwar; the words aching.

I’m not sure what to tell you. Some of part of my heart snagged on the sight of those paddy fields, and I’ll never move again without feeling it tear.

None of that made me any less oblivous than I always am to the people around me. So when they told me that it would have made them happy to give me something, I thought they were merely being polite and refused in turn, impolitely. But it wasn’t about politeness for them. It really would have made them happy in some way no other way could have. Which transforms my rudeness into cruelty.

I should say Yes to people more often. Smile while I’m at it.

But on the last night, spent and bemused, I let my cousin empty a closet into my lap. I pulled a set of three interlinked bangles out of the riot of ballpoint pens and scarves.
“Those were your mother’s,” she said, and then paused, trying to remember. “She gave them to me before you born and said she’d come back to get them. But she never did.”

So I put on the bracelets and I didn’t take them off for the next two months, not until I moved to Vancouver.

In Toronto, in the living room of our still cramped apartment, as I unpacked my bags, I showed the bangles, dulling glintly against skin darker than anyone could remember it, to my father. “Jaysha gave me this,” I said. (And there was no need any more for internal translations, slow migrations between one language and another.) “She said it was Ummah’s and that she forgot them in Pottuvil.”

My father laughed, a soft exhalation of breath, and he looked at the three rings of metal like he couldn’t see my arm contained within them, like he was seeing something else on the other side of his eyes. He slid the bangles off my wrist and held them for a moment in his hand, callouses grey and peeling along the inside of his palms, and then he gave them back to me, saying nothing, an impossible distance lying soft on his mouth. So I watched my father leave me for a moment for some past I could never know, this story of my parents together, the convoluted meanderings of love between them, and I clung to the silver like its touch proved something to me, like if I watched my father’s face closely enough I could memorise that part of their history that had preceded me, the part that could explain to me why I had been so loved in that village almost wholly for having been their firstborn.

My mother, when I showed the bangles to her, laughed and said she had no memory of them.

I wore those bangles nearly every day of my last weeks in Toronto. Occasionally they’d be flanked and obscured by other shinier and prettier bracelets. They’re a dull silver, either tarnished or cheap, unimpressive and thin. I took them off when the babel of immediate life made them seem like a cop-out — a tokenistic peace offering worth nothing, an escape from the fact that I had learned from my parents all the traits that made being their daughter most difficult: a harshness around our edges; a certain dissatisfaction with the world, learned as fury from my father and intransigence from my mother; a commitment to goals often difficult to explain, let alone justify; the kind of love that turns futures into promises. Other lessons got warped. Courage became recklessness in me, and honesty self-obsession.

The other day I called home and my mother wanted to know if I had H1N1 and my father asked if I had any curry left, and I realised that when I had lived with them I’d never let myself notice the kinds of hours my parents worked. I put the bangles back on.

© fathima for run.ltw, 2009. | No comments
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