#talkmag

The tattooed man laughed. “We don’t get a lot of parents that want their kids having nose rings here. Please lie down and feel free to close your eyes. Mom, you can take her hand so she doesn’t get too scared.”

Farhana felt her body seize up as the needle went through her nose. Her face got very hot and she gripped Amma’s hand tightly as the jewelry squeezed its way into her open puncture. She refused to open her eyes, even after the tattooed man said he was all done.

“See? Ek second, dui second and it’s finished. Not too bad looking at all,” Amma said, her voice swelling with laughter and pride.

She opened her eyes and was handed her a mirror to see the piece – a rich gold nose hoop that wrapped its way around her left nostril like an equator line. Amma gave her a thumbs up in the mirror and Farhana returned a lopsided smile.

Her mother paid the man as he gave her cleaning information and they stepped out into the brisk November air. Farhana brought her hand up to her face, bumped against the new piece of jewelry and instantly regretted it.

“It’s going to be sore for a few days, Shetu.” It took her a moment to realize that Amma was speaking to her – she hadn’t heard her dak nam very often since she came to college two years ago.

“I just don’t want it to get infected.”

“You worry too much about these things. When chachi pierced my nose, they put shuta in there and that was much more gruesome than this beautiful thing. It won’t get bothered as much either.”

Farhana shuddered at the thought of pulling a bloody cotton thread through the hole in her nose each night. She was grateful that Amma hadn’t insisted on piercing it herself.

Farhana rolled her eyes. “Let’s get something to eat, and we can go back to my dorm.”

“Sure. Meat is ok with you?”

“Why are you even asking?”

“So many of your friends have become vegetarian these days, I just wanted to check.”

“Well, thank you, but just because two of my friends are doing it doesn’t mean that I am.”

“Several people have thought I am a vegetarian. If you refuse pork, people really start asking this question.”

Amma shook her head. She was simultaneously considerate and clueless. Farhana decided not to tell her about the students at school that had insisted she cook them something Indian after a club meeting the week before.

They reached a café that promised “gourmet New York cuisine” and shared a small corner table, soaking up the heat of the nearby kitchen as they waited for their food.

“Do you remember when you were in high school and Baba always said that you would run away to the big big city? I never believed him, of course, but now look at it.”

“I’m not that far from home.”

Amma clicked her tongue. “If we miss you this much when you are three hours away on the train, I don’t know what will happen if you go more far.”

“Farther. And you can come visit me more often if you really miss me that much.”

Amma clasped her hands on the table and the waiter set down a basket of bread for their appetizer. Farhana wished she could pull the statement back into her mouth – it was yet another glaring example of how she could never be a full adult with either of her parents. The pair ate in silence for a few minutes until Amma’s cell phone buzzed and she slipped out the front door to take the call.

Farhana watched her as she paced up and down the sidewalk, gesticulating wildly to whoever was on the other end of the line. Amma had a booming voice that embarrassed her whenever they were in public – she had started asking her to take her calls outside during the middle of high school and, with some gentle reminders, her mother had complied.

“After we’re done here, you’ll have to go back to your room by yourself for a little while,” Amma announced when she came back inside, “Baba wants me to check on some things that will be boring for you.”

Farhana put on an inquisitive look but didn’t ask any questions. She had been in the wrong enough times today to know that it would only make things worse. When their food came, they made small talk in between bites and soon the moment was gone.

***

Farhana dreamed in abstract colors and shapes. When she woke up, the room was cold and white; the window shade was pulled up to expose a thin layer of grey clouds blocking out the sun. Amma had left her some biryani in the refrigerator and she heated it in the microwave before digging in with her hands. The meat was lukewarm but the rice was soft and perfect and she shoveled it into her mouth like a starved rat. She left the bowl on the counter and headed into the bathroom, washing her hands with a thin layer of soap. The nose ring was healing slowly. She prodded it with a q-tip and came away with blood and, following her mother’s advice, applied some rubbing alcohol to it and squeezed her eyes shut as it burned in her nostrils.

Amma hadn’t been telling her everything. Late last night, Farhana had heard her angry voice speaking on the phone with Baba about his family back home. They wanted him to come and stay with them or they needed more money or they wanted him to send them American visas so they could visit. It was always something, Amma had said, like they were raj and rani now. She had grown the most furious when Baba asked her to give up her jewelry for more funds; Amma was the eternal pragmatist, but those pieces carried too many of her memories to be given up. She had spoken in rapid-fire Bangla, tearing Baba down with insults Farhana couldn’t interpret. She could imagine her mother’s fierce hand motions accompanying her jittery feet as they paced over the living room floor.

After a few seconds, Farhana washed her piercing with water and returned to the kitchen. Her bowl was gone, already cleaned and on the drying rack. Amma was waiting in the living room, wearing a deep red orna wrapped around her chest like a small blanket. Her mouth was a thin hard line.

“Your father gave me this when we got married,” she said, pointing to the tiny gold ball jutting from her left nostril.

“Is something wrong?” Farhana asked, sitting down beside her on the couch.

“It’s getting old.”

“What did Baba say to you?”

Amma gave her a vacant stare. She and Farhana had had these conversations often when she was a child – they communicated on two different wavelengths, touching each other only for the briefest of moments.

“I have to take care of the house. Baba wants me to come home.”

Farhana’s body stiffened. “I can go with you.”

“I’m leaving you some more food in the refrigerator and we’ll get some winter clothes before I go. And then there’s the money that Baba wanted me to leave with you… I’ll get that today too...”

Amma stood up and started pacing back and forth across the room, making a mental list of all the things they would have to complete in one day’s time. She straightened out objects on the coffee table, picked up stray pieces of lint and hair, and readjusted her orna as she walked. Farhana kept her eyes trained on her mother’s back, watching her bend and then snap back up each time the orna began to slip off her shoulders, placing it back perfectly square over her body.

“Ma, I can come back home with you. I don’t have much schoolwork.”

“You’re not doing that, Shetu.”

Amma gave her a look that bore straight through her. Farhana looked down.

“Let’s get ready to go out,” she continued, “I have my train at six.”

***

When her mother’s train retreated into the distance, Farhana remembered the first time that Baba had left for Dhaka when she was a little girl. At the time, she could barely understand him leaving for the supermarket, much less an around the globe trip. She had bawled for nights on end and every one of the questions she asked her mother had ended in “Baba.”

She walked back towards the dorm building with the memory imprinted on her mind like a scar. Amma would placate her by saying “Baba’s doing big business over there,” and making air quotes around the words “big business,” which never failed to make her burst into giggles. When she was older, she finally could understand that “big business” actually was the nature of Baba’s visits – he would go to sort out the family finances and strike deals with dodgy landlords so that his sisters could keep their apartments in the big city. It was nothing like the occasional visits she herself had made there, where her family would throng around and ask her everything about American living, pop culture, and her Amma, who was always conspicuously absent. Farhana believed it was because she disliked the way Baba’s sisters acted towards her, even after so many years of marriage. Amma was too occidental for them – loud where she should be soft, lax where she should rule with an iron fist. She had always been in between worlds, she would say. She had a story she would tell to prove this.

“When I first came to this country,” she would start off, “I didn’t know how to dress for winter. Can you imagine? Bright green kameez and heeled sandals – in January! Baba shook his head when he picked me up. He had to buy me a coat right there at the airport. And of course I was wearing all my best jewelry too… well, I learned fast!”

Farhana dropped her bags on the floor and flopped straight into bed, fully clothed. The shopping bags she brought in toppled over from their own weight and spilled out everything from winter coats and gloves to grocery items for the rest of the week. The length of time before winter break never seemed so long as when she bought new items for winter. She thought of Amma crossing the border out of the city and into the suburbs, where time was not divided into semesters and breaks. She thought of Baba, leaving the country in as much time as it would take her to complete her last final exam and going to a place where time didn’t seem to matter much at all. She curled up against a pillow and, in the next moment, was asleep.

***

Baba passed away in his sleep the night the world turned white. Snow blanketed the ground in drifts so high that schools shut their doors and both students and professors alike hunkered down in their beds, resisting the idea of work with their entire bodies. Farhana had woken up with the thrill of missing class, but now felt restless in her empty dorm room; she could not fill the hole in her heart with free time. Baba had passed into the hands of Allah and left them all waiting. Farhana stirred sugar into a cup of tea and picked up her cell phone when it buzzed for a second time that morning.

“I’m flying Baba’s body home.” Like a solid weight on her chest, her mother’s voice came through the speaker and made it hard for Farhana to breathe.

“I don’t think you should go by yourself,” she said in a rush, “I’ll go with you. I’ll take time off school.”

Even as she said it, she knew Amma would refuse. Farhana flipped through her mental catalog of family members, friends, anyone who could accompany her mother on the fourteen hour plane journey to the other side of the world. She started to think about the work she would miss and felt guilty.

“No.”

“You need someone to go with you. Baba wouldn’t want you to go back on your own just for his sake. And you know—”

“Shetu,” Amma interrupted, her voice wavering, “I’ve got all your papers in order here. Baba wanted that. You’re not going to come with me, and that is what I want. I want you to be an amazing brilliant girl here. You will visit me someday and tell me all about it.”

“Amma, what are you talking about?”

“I won’t be able to come back, ammu. When I go, they won’t let me come back.”

Farhana felt her body seize up for a brief sharp moment, then go completely numb. She remembered the long phone conversations Baba had, the covert conversations in fast Bangla that she could never fully understand. All the times her mother pretended she had lost her ID and her father paid for their big purchases in cash.

Amma was still talking when she came out of her reverie, “Baba made sure to leave you everything that you need, ammu. I just want you to remember to call me sometimes. Your aunties will give you the number.”

Farhana didn’t ask who “they” were. She didn’t ask when Amma would leave. She already knew. Baba’s body would thaw and rot if she didn’t go right away. She felt her heart beating its way out of her chest and willed it to stop.

***

Amma’s belongings came in several boxes on their doorstep; the deliveryman hadn’t even bothered to knock. She cut the tape and glanced at the items. There were pots and pans, some photo albums, a few discarded pieces of clothing that her mother would have no use for where she was going. Farhana dragged the boxes inside and left them near the entryway, open but untouched, for days.

It was raining outside on a Sunday morning when she finally gave them another thought. She heaved one of the smaller boxes onto her bed and dug into it. Her fingers connected with a smooth wooden object and she felt her arm vibrate when she touched it. She lifted out a dense wooden chest with a lock on it and a tiny key that still had its plastic covering. It looked new – like nothing she had ever seen Amma own, her Amma, the keeper of reusable items and cheap alternatives. Farhana took the key out and unlocked it.

Piles of gold jewelry spilled out from the top and across her bedspread. Rings and bangles in glittering green and fiery orange, dangling beaded earrings that flashed in the light, and delicate woven necklaces with tiny hook and eye clasps begged to be released from their wooden prison. The chest was endless. Farhana laid out each piece on the bedspread, smoothing them out with her fingers, and imagined her mother standing at the airport, waiting to board.

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While Gagosian praises Basquiat as a genius and visionary, the praise is grounded in the fact that he was outsider “making it” within--he is "within" because he is "without."

The turning point for me occurs in the way Basquiat critiques and dissects this position and condemns racist, classist, and colonial power structures through his work using text, figuration, abstraction, and materiality--he knows that he is “without,” will tell you why, and yet all the while will subvert the institutional discourse he is playing on. 

I could go on and rant and rant about this artist whose articulation of the  tenuous relationships between aesthetics and politics, power and culture, and high versus low art blew my mind, but I meant for this to just be a “Spotlight On” piece so I’ll stop it here. 

GO SEE THE SHOW! 

  The show runs until April 6th.

Gagosian is located at 555 W. 24th Street and can be reached on the C,E, and 1 lines. Hours are 10 - 6, Tuesday - Saturday.