In his narrow room in Sharjah, they lay entwined in the sheets, wrapped in each other’s warmth and contentment. Maleah was talking, Gyanu was caressing her hair. On their days off, he loved to lose himself in her words, to swim in the swirl of the sea in her stories and drift in the melody of her voice. When Maleah stopped talking he murmured, “Tell more, meri maya.”
She smiled. “What more you want me to tell, mahal?”
“Tell me: the men who catch fish.”
“You always want to listen about the Philippines.”
Maleah nestled in closer and told him about her father and brothers going out on their nightly excursions. Gyanu could see the lamps glinting off the water as the trawlers receded into the night. He could hear the roar of the sea in her voice, he could taste the saltwater in his mouth. The trawlers returned at sunrise as lorries rumbled into the village, setting the day in motion. The tuna catch was transported to a cannery, from where it was shipped to towns all over the South China Sea.
Some of the leftovers ended up in the village homes. “Every day we eat fish, depends on the season,” Maleah said. “There is rice and plantain, my mother cooks that first. My father and brothers come back, then she cooks” – and her English fell away – “Bilong-bilong, apahap, kabayo, lapu-lapu.”
She often cooked sea bass for Gyanu, infusing his room with the aroma of coconut, lemongrass, lime leaf: evocations of her fishing village. Usually they shared leftovers from Five Spices, though when there was time, Gyanu also cooked: he made meals flavoured with fenugreek and mustard, turmeric and fried chives, the hard rock and soil of his childhood in Nepal.
He found escape from his past in Maleah.
He wanted to know everything about her. He knew she’d married young. At sixteen she’d run away with a boy from town called Ramon. Ramon kept bad company, but he was tender to her. She was happy till his body showed up in the cannery garbage dump. Their son Crisanto now lived with his grandparents. “My anak will never know his father,” Maleah had once said, and her sadness had unlocked Gyanu’s.
Maleah was talking, now, of happiness: the meals her mother used to cook as she and her father and brothers sat around the kitchen, waiting to eat. “There was nothing,” she said, and he felt the innocence of childhood: a feeling of plenty. “There was no big house, no fancy furniture, no nice clothes, no money. But there was love, so there was everything.” She turned to Gyanu. “Like when you were a boy, mahal?”
He nodded. He still remembered the day Ma brought him to the village by the blue hills, to the house of the stranger who would become his Ba. Gyanu was fortunate. His stepfather was a kind man. After Sapana’s birth, the scandal around Ma and Ba’s marriage subsided, and their family was whole, till encephalitis took Ma.
Now cancer was sapping Ba’s life. The last time Gyanu called home, his sister had said their father was asking for him: “Ba needs a son to light the funeral pyre, Dai. And he wants to see you one last time.”
Maleah noticed his silence and asked, “You talked to your sister, mahal?”
“My father will not live long, meri maya.”
“You booked the ticket?”
“I booked it,’ he said.
He hadn’t, however, asked Shantanu Kumar for leave. The manager of Five Spices was fond of Gyanu; he called him his Nepali Beta, his Nepali son; but Gyanu knew that no one was indispensable in the desert. He’d learned this over his years as a busboy at the Al Majaz in Abu Dhabi, a kitchen hand at the Safeer Café in Sharjah, and as a mess chef in the Ramla Restaurant in Burj Khalifa. Only when Shantanu Kumar hired him as a sous chef at Five Spices had Gyanu found stability. It worried him to have to risk it.
He didn’t say more on the subject, and neither did Maleah. They were accustomed to living in uncertainty in this land where they could never settle. Maleah had come here on a two-year contract. One of her roommates had trained as a child minder to work as an au pair in Europe. Another was looking for new options.
Maleah was enrolled in an English class and had convinced Gyanu to do the same. She sometimes talked about moving. She wanted to live with Crisanto somewhere, anywhere, where she could give him the kind of full, free childhood that she’d had.
For now, she gave Gyanu all her love.
Their few hours together always raced by. It was already quiet next door: the Tamil construction crew had left for the day. The neon sign at the Al Faraby Hyper Express blinked on as the dusk deepened. Maleah would have to leave soon.
Gyanu propped himself up in bed and looked at her. Maleah Balana. He’d seen her one Sunday while accompanying his roommate Jairus to church: her head bowed, her face framed by lace. “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” He’d heard her whispered incantation. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
How had he won her love, how was he going to keep her? Moving his hands over her shoulders, he felt the grace of her in his life. He removed the sheet and took in the sight of her paleness against his dark skin. They’d been lovers for a year and he couldn’t envision a life without her.
“Mahal,” she whispered.
“Meri maya.” My love. He leaned in to kiss her and she arched her back, drawing her legs up to close him in to her.
Excerpted with permission from All Of Us In Our Own Lives, Manjushree Thapa, Aleph Book Company.