what about the nonverbal? how we spoke before words and sounds were formed, bengali syllables resounding of my roots, their many origins and places beneath chocolate soil. so much is unspoken; even the body silences itself, a pig plugged up with cool mud, unexpressed.

how far back into sound, into color, into flavor, will this tongue take me? how deeply are these roots enjoined in earth’s crust? there is a ball of blue light stuck in my throat; sound is absorbed there, disallowed exodus. i feel it spinning, tossing, bouncing against my vocal chords, rolling over all i was told not to say. like yarn, the unraveling is slow, unpredictable.

i take one end of the yarn, the one loose end i can find, pull it from my mouth and see its electric blue between my fingers. tie it to the base of an orange tree, walk away from the grove in which i was born, leaving a thread of cotton memory behind me.

© 2009 tahminah zaman

i walk east on macarthur boulevard, retracing my steps over places i’ve been loved. embraced. made love to. the memories thick under the soles of my sneakers. the moments that made wrinkles in the concrete. remembering, being, loved.

i check the eyes of everyone i pass. is it you? comes the convulsive question from way in the back of my head, where the tears don’t reach. & sometimes i think i see a flash of him. lanky, leggy, slender light brown man in subtle plaid & white new balance shoes. his aging face, his many expressions. cockeyed. confused. concentrating. the hundreds of tones of his voice, gentle, angry. impatient. unsatisfied.

the confidence & urgency in his stride. his tall back & gemini elegance. the way he could talk anyone up or bring anyone down to a depressive state in a few sentences.

are you him? rings between my ears when a flicker of recognition arrives. a familiar stranger like a mirror. who are you? each brown, male face a citation of his bengali features. someone’s laughter the sound of one of his lighter moods. now that he’s pushing 70, his fugues of mania & depression are longer than a few months each, like when i was growing up; he’s had some mellower years. but he’s never been well. never been stable. never had a proper diagnosis. my father never took his prozac because as long as he lacked a diagnosis, he didn’t feel the problem was real.

i always wanted to diagnose him. i needed to name what made my family strange, because my friends’ fathers never acted like him. they went to work, cooked for their kids, happily chauffeured them everywhere. came to their advisory meetings with teachers & school counselors. my mother always did those things; my father did them sometimes, & begrudgingly. often he hadn’t showered for weeks & had spent all his time on the couch vegetating in front of a blue-shadowed TV. he couldn’t hold a job partly because of his depression, partly because of his field.

the most money my dad ever made was estimating the costs of earthquake damage in southern california. he swindled people out of money with his independent engineering projects. he would take me & my sister, amber, with him to negotiate contracts & pretend to oversee the contractors’ progress. my much-older sister, shampa, 15 years my senior, told me he had an honest, successful business once, in oklahoma, where amber was born, before the white man took him down. he thought the multiculturalness of california would be better to him. he was wrong.

bipolar disease. when i was a kid, they called it manic-depressive disorder. over the years, it became one of my names. his variant moods, fugues, cycles, swings of inexplicable behavior remained predictably chaotic throughout my childhood. he was controlling & impatient, a terrible math tutor who pecked & clucked over imperfection and loudly disapproved of my less than perfect understanding of algebraic operations.

he was also prone to flight & traveled overseas indefinitely at a moment’s notice for no reason. this wacky behavior made us financially unstable, too. when i was 15 he stole the rent money my mother had saved & boarded a plane to bangladesh, unemployed, to claim my mother’s inheritance. a few days later, my mother, my sister amber, & i moved to las vegas to live in shampa’s converted garage.

chemical imbalances, it was explained to me. over the first 19 years of my life, i was steeped in it, sickened by it. i was a depressed teen, only happy at school. i’d watch the commercials advertising depression meds, the ones that listed all the symptoms, & i’d panic. crying daily? feeling alone? occasional suicidal ideations? the depression synched up with my cycle & slowly became more predictable over the years. when the opportunity came at 20, i used the certainty of my father’s illness to catch & stop the erratic bouts of depression. i gulped prozac for a year, then decided on psychotherapy for life in an attempt to avoid becoming my father–or being with someone like him. my partner of 2 years had just knocked me out. i saw bright white stars when he hit me. clearly, something needed to change. “chemical imbalance” or not!

the truth about his condition didn’t surface early. i was 23 years old when, during my mother’s last year of life, she told me that my father had been raped, molested as a child. he was born in rural bangladesh & staying with another family was his only chance at an education. so he did. that’s where it happened.

there were other details about my father in exile from his family. a dead man inexplicably hanging from a tree on his way to school. the combination of homelessness & ambition that drove him to the new world.

my mother married my dad to get revenge on her father, against my grandfather’s intuition. she was angry at him for remarrying after the early & unexpected death of her mother, the grandmother i never met.

immigration & my father got her hooked on nicotine. but the year my parents broke up–the year my father went to bangladesh & stayed away–my mother’s heart opened up. surgeons & scalpel & hammer performed a quadruple bypass that, along with medication, kept her alive for nine more years. four of those years were nicotine-free & quiet. then my parents decided to live together again. i was 19 & realized my mother wanted misery.

my father’s rape. it explained the dissociation between his various moods, his many faces, the extremity of his behavior. there had been a careful cover-up. a guarded secret & the secret cause of everything. the chaos & instability. it screamed of my family’s repression—our inability to communicate, to overcome difficulties together, to accept ourselves & one another. it explained the need for silence around my father’s mental illness.

my mother was the only one he ever told.

i don’t keep family secrets very well. i told shampa, who had no idea. who didn’t know what to do. she may not believe me. she didn’t want to hear that they were my mother’s own words. same thing with coming out to my crazy family. my sisters refuse to believe that my mother accepted me. which she did, privately.

i’m still seeking my father in the wood of my earrings, the metal of my cell phone. in the lines of hands & beneath the fingernails of the men i call lovers.

in the leaves of magnolias. the petals of garnet trees. between squares of dark chocolate. bags of tea stacked in tin. are you there? the echo. my voice stalking his. i recall a peal of his laughter. i see his mood brighten before me.

i still seek him. an insistence i can’t explain. a tugging desire. not quite nostalgia but the anxiety from which nostalgia springs. the psychotic space of separation from our origins. the dark path leading back to where i was born. to where the answers to all these questions are waiting.

i let myself be filled by this void. a place where the futility of words makes itself painfully known.

i am listening for my father’s voice in the sound of clock tower bells clanging against downtown oakland streets. in the sound of rain. naked in bed, beside a sleeping brown man who doesn’t love me, i measure my cinnamon limbs, tensed & exhausted, for sameness. check for my father’s lanky looseness. are you here?

© tahminah zaman 2008

my sister, amber, & i are upstairs. my mother is yelling for us to call the police.

amber picks up the phone & calls our neighbors instead, a filipino family four doors away.

nobody knows what to do. i wonder if my father has a knife in his hand. my mother sounds scared. she sounds angry. she doesn’t know what to do. she is trapped there. we are all trapped in this house.

my father moves in a daily kaleidoscope of depression, rage, & sorrow. my father doesn’t know what to do about these feelings. until he explodes like a volcano, hurting my mother & ignoring us. disappearing into the couch for months on end without a shower or decent meal. without a word to anyone.

my mother is screaming for us to call the cops. we don’t move. amber is holding my hand & talking to our friend who lives four doors away.

it is summer. the year 1988. we live in rowland heights, california.

i am 7 years old.

yes or no. go. stay. don’t call me. why haven’t i heard from you? i think he’s depressed. his friend killed himself at this time of  year a few years ago. he’s upset. it’s winter. he’s not noticed that it’s been weeks since the lastime we spoke. months since we saw each other. & he calls me a “friend.”

i’m glad i never fucked him. he’s unstable. unavailable, they’d say in 12 steps. he doesn’t care about anything but getting sex on demand–on his schedule. he doesn’t care to send anything better than mixed messages.

 it doesn’t matter. you want a bengali husband? the Universe said & laughed. Her laugh was playful, sinister, knowing. let me show you your bengali husband.

he’s 28. saturn return. his saturn must be in one of those unbalanced signs. scorpio, leo, gemini. aries. violent, ambivalent. addicted.

he resents his parents. his features take after his mother.

why did he even seek me out? he asked me out, kissed me, got in bed with me & said he wasn’t looking for anything. liar. he cooks dinner for me once & shows me his short temper. repressed rage misdirected at the one who requested him. who prayed for a lover whose skin matched her own shade.

be careful what you beg for. you’ll get it.

rare, sparse conversations full of tension & doubt. you never opened up, let me enter, all because flesh was off limits. not a shred of willpower remains. we can never talk again because if we do, my words will be, “bring some condoms over.”

the ribbed kind.

he wouldn’t tell me when the last time for him was. i’d been celibate for 8 months when we met. he hid everything from me, knowing i’d be disappointed & move on.

let go. leave it behind. it was a good try. but it’s gone as far as it could. i got fucked & left again but this time, no sex to speak of.

i know where my feet are. right here. across the water of the bay, you’ll stay oversexed & underpresent. there are many others. other women who won’t ask where your dick’s been.

breath is even until i forget to keep it going. force myself to relax, to let go.

yeah. i thought i was ready, too.

the first male skin i touched in years. the first lips i kissed after an eternity of silence. when i say goodbye you will play ambiguity, ignorance. those masks that don’t fit me anymore.

the silence has lived too long. no phone calls in months. & the lastime i saw you, i hated what i saw. what i heard. a voice angrily raised above mine; over nothing. a shallow conversation about whether the masa you made tamales with were truly vegan.

you scared me. that’s when i really knew. because i said nothing to put you in your place. because you would have called that “processing.”

mixed messages. silence. a weak excuse. how many months of this?

breathe. exhale him out of my system. see, it’s easy. it gets easier.