Welcome To the Jungle

I went up to my aunt’s room. I needed to be alone for a while. The family was still congregated downstairs; wailing, sobbing and reminiscing. My mother was the most hysterical one out of the group. I don’t blame her, but at the time I felt like she was being louder than she needed to be. I could hear her from outside the house. She was screaming her lungs out and I don’t blame her; she saw him die. All the old aunts in the family tried to surreptitiously give her muscle relaxant pills to calm her down. She ended up nearly overdosing, but she still didn’t calm down.

It was in October of last year, in Pakistan; I’m not sure of the date. I can never remember numbers, but I think it was around the twentieth. He had been sick for a few weeks with gastroenteritis. I thought it was just a bad case of diarrhoea. I never realized how serious it was. Sure, he was ill-very ill- but I never expected the illness to take him from us.

I was never very close to him, but I can still remember the last hug I gave him. He was very tall, the only tall person in my family. I called him Nana, which was the traditional Pakistani term for a maternal grandfather. He used to love buying DVDs and playing them on either his TV or his computer, every Sunday when I visited him. He lived with my aunt and my grandmother. I used to love those Sundays. He would cook too, different things every week. I remember how excited he was when he brought home squid from the market and cooked it. It was a little tough, but it was still delicious. He loved to take pictures of his beautiful garden on his digital camera. In a particularly hot, arid region of a hot, arid country, his garden was radiantly green, vibrant and bountiful. There were beautiful birds that used to come and sit on the bougainvillea that framed the garden. It was small, but had that cozy peeling to it. He used to love sitting there, in his lawn chair, drinking tea.

I never knew that much about him. I knew he had worked in England for a while, where he met my grandmother, and he worked in insurance. I knew he had suffered from racial problems in the sixties when he, a Pakistani man, married a white woman, and had a child with her. I remember hearing of instances where he was prohibited from places, due to the color of his skin. However, that was all gleaned from a conversation I had with my grandmother, a while before he passed away. I never really discussed his past with him, and I regret that now; I wish I had known my Nana better.

My mother was there with her father when he died, and I wish she hadn’t been. She was already an alcoholic, but then she became a belligerent alcoholic.

She told us everything she saw, many, many times. She must have repeated that story at least sixty times, in the first two days after his death. She was providing him company as he was getting his treatment at the time for his kidney failure. She constantly emphasized the fact that he did not want to go to the bathroom, I’m not exactly sure what happened then, despite the constant retelling, but somehow, from what I understood, he just collapsed and stopped talking. She tried to find a doctor but couldn’t. Black blood started to come out of his mouth. I can barely imagine how horrifying it must have been for her. For some reason, she was still in the room when they tried and failed to resuscitate him. Every time I talk about it, I can’t help but think that she shouldn’t have been there. She shouldn’t have been there in the first place; somehow, she was.

I can still remember seeing the open casket being brought in. I didn’t want to see him. I wanted to remember him as he was when he was alive. My mother, however, dragged me into the room where he was.

“You have to see him, you have to see him, YOU HAVE TO SEE HIM!”

She was convinced that the sight would be good for me in some way, but I did not wish to see him. I saw him for a second- no, half a second, but I remember that half-second as vividly as if I had seen him for hours. His mouth was open, along with his eyes. His face looked like he was in pain. He was wrapped in white. It was horrifying.

I cried then. I hadn’t cried throughout the funeral services. I didn’t cry when I first heard about what happened. I didn’t cry when his body was brought in; when I saw him, I cried. It’s not that I didn’t feel anything. I just can’t usually cry when I’m sad.

I guess my mother did all the rest of my crying for me.

I spent most of the week worrying about her. One night she really frightened me. She was into a lot of New Age things at the time, such as “Reiki”, which was a form of healing based on “universal life force energy”. I considered it to be fantastical rubbish. I believe she had alcohol poisoning that night as well, since she had consumed a few large bottles of straight vodka. She had all the symptoms of it; hypothermia, mental confusion, and vomiting, but to this day she insists they were stress induced. She also had a vivid hallucination. She had been to the graveyard, since it was the day of his burial, and she seemed all right at the time. That night, though, she started shrieking for no apparent reason. She was convinced that all the spirits in the graveyard were coming to her, asking her to help them, and she was frightened. She wanted them to go away. She was shaking and screaming. She described some of the spirits to me- a little girl in a blue dress, an old feeble man with a cane. It frightened me. I didn’t know what to believe. I don’t usually believe in ghosts or spirits, but she was so convinced the spirits were real that I became frightened myself. My aunt called a doctor and told me to leave my mother alone for a while, but I was afraid to be in a room by myself.

She only got worse from then on. Even after the funeral ended, she continued to drink, and her mind was nothing like it had been before Nana’s death. I had always had problems with her, but these had been normal problems that teenagers have with their parents. However, I don’t remember seeing her once for the rest out that year not in a violent, drunken stupor. If I asked her to drink less, she would attack me. She even beat my frail little grandmother once. She started spreading rumors throughout the family and family friends that my grandmother and aunt were trying to take supposed “millions” from her that she was “meant to have inherited”. She was manipulative, violent, contriving and attention seeking. She was out of control. I couldn’t take it. I had to leave.

I remember the song I was listening to when she came in to my room crying and told me he was dead. It was an Iron and Wine song, “Muddy Hymnal”. I was practicing singing that song for a school talent contest. I never did manage to enter that contest.

I usually define events in my life by the music I listened to at the time. When I was a happy-go-lucky five-year-old, my favorite band was Ace of Base. When I was eight or nine, I listened to banal pop music- Britney Spears and the like. When my parents divorced, I turned to rock. At age twelve I was the one of the biggest Nirvana fans around. Around when my grandfather died, I listened to melancholic music such as Elliott Smith, Radiohead, Muse and Coldplay. I stopped going out, I stopped having fun, and I stopped caring. I was almost a hermit. I couldn’t leave my room, because leaving my room meant facing my mother.

I finally told my father what was going on at that point. I hadn’t told him before, because I didn’t want to worry him. He was all the way over in England, where I had been born; where I grew up; where we all had lived before my parents divorced when I was eleven. He couldn’t do anything. Besides, he was preoccupied with his impending move to America. I wanted nothing more than to be with him and move with him but I had no chance. My mother had custody of me. So I moved in with my paternal grandfather, who lived with my aunt, uncle and two cousins. I didn’t speak to my mother for two months. Life suddenly became so much more tolerable. I was living with people who actually had a grip on life; sane, rational people who cared about living things other than themselves.

I still wanted to live with my father, though. Ah, America. At that point in my life I wanted nothing more than to leave Pakistan altogether. I hated it. I only lived there for two years, but I really hated it. I hated its people, closed minded, bucolic and backward as they were. Take the most extremist rednecks you can find in the South and convert them to Islam, and you have the average Pakistani. I hated its traditions. I hated its weather, constantly hot and dry and nothing in between. I missed England so much, but I knew that living with my father meant living in America. I was fine with that. England was so Americanized anyway, I surmised, it wouldn’t be that much of a change.

I stayed in my grandfather’s house while my dad prepared for me to move with him. They placed far more emphasis on academic results than I was used to, but they pushed me and I worked hard. I started going out with my friends again, and I was relatively happy. I avoided calling my mother. I hated her calls; she would always call up drunk, belligerent and screaming about her nonexistent “millions”. Mind you, I didn’t hate her. I loved her. She had raised me. She just wasn’t herself right now, I reassured myself. I hated the way she was acting. This was not the mother who used to cuddle me every night. This was some other woman.

I flew to America a month after ninth grade ended. My mother thought I was on holiday, scheduled to return in two months, as I had done every year since the divorce. I was determined never to return, at least not to live there. Greenville, South Carolina, a city I could barely find on a map of the USA, was to be my new home. The people there were so different. These were people who understood me when I spoke, persons who could think for themselves, and people who didn’t gasp in horror when I wore a sleeveless T-Shirt. I’m not saying that you can’t find people like that in Pakistan; however, those mortals only make up about zero point five percent of the population.

It was actually her idea, me going to boarding school. She was screaming at me one night because, once again, I insulted her precious vodka.

“I’m going to send you off to a boarding school! At least then I’d be rid of you, you little brat! I don’t need you anyway; I don’t know what I was thinking when I kept you, you little witch!”

It was such a good idea. My life started to look up right after she said that. I discussed it with my father, but he’s always been overprotective of me and didn’t want me to go. I convinced him in the end, though. We started looking on the Internet for boarding schools near his house in Greenville, and, well, here I am.

It’s so green here, like Nana’s garden; like England. I haven’t spoken to her in five months. I don’t want to think about what she might say. Apparently she’s told everyone that my father kidnapped me so he wouldn’t have to pay alimony any more. I guess nothing’s changed. She knows I came here by choice. My grandfather spoke to her, and I hear she’s fine with me going to school here.

I miss her. I hope she’s doing okay.