By Maria Chaudhari
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing India
ISBN: 9789382951773
Price: Rs. 399.00
On and on we dream, we wish, we love—no matter that the dreams come to an end, the wishes evolve or that love dissipates like dust in the wind. Perhaps, what matters only is that we have lived long enough to dream, hard enough to wish and indisputably enough to love. One of Maria’s early memories growing up in Dhaka is of planning to run away with her friend Nadia. Even then, Maria couldn’t quite figure out why she longed to escape.
‘Let’s run away to New York! I have an uncle there.’
‘So you’ll come with me?’
‘I could.’
We both remained silent for a moment, contemplating the feasibility of the plot.
‘What about our parents?’ I said at last.
Nadia frowned and I immediately regretted my query.
‘They will forget about us,’ she concluded with a slight twitch of her lips.
‘You’re right.’ I agreed.
My friend nodded, linking her arm through mine. ‘We could become actresses and get our own house. A big house with a red-tiled roof.’
‘Or we could be detectives, like Nancy Drew and solve mysteries all the time.’
We looked at each other and giggled. We were inside our plot now—we were characters moving the plot forward. And we got into it so much that it became our daily after-school ritual in first grade. We spun the same reverie of escape and I left us breathless with excitement every time. Even as adults, we never really asked each other why, back then, it was so important for us to plan on running away.
Maria Chaudhari shares about her plans to run away with her friend Nadia in her book Beloved Strangers: A Memoir.
With a mother who yearns for the mountains, the solitude and freedom to pursue her own dreams and career and a charismatic but distant father who finds it difficult to expresses emotion, they are never able to hold on to happiness for very long. Maria dreams, like her mother, of unstitching the seam of her life. It is her neighbor, Bablu, the Imitator of Frogs, who both excites and repulses Maria by showing her a yellowing pornographic magazine, but it is Mala, a girl her own age who comes to work in their house, whose wise eyes and wicked smile makes her dizzy with longing.
Maria Chaudhari who is raised in Bangladesh, is a graduate in Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Religion from Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, Vermont. Her essays, features and short stories have been published in various collections, journals and literary magazines. She resides in Hong Kong.
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