by Minal Khan
When exactly the change came about, Alia knew not. All she recalled was that when she was four years old, she remembered vaguely her mother in silky, flowing trousers and starched shirts. After a few years, during which her parents had heated fights, she recalled seeing her mother only in traditional national costume, the shalwaar kameez. And with the change in her dress had come a complete change in personality.
When Alia told me this, I couldn’t help but wonder: every time Alia’s father threatened her mother, yelling, “You and your children would be on the street were it not for me,” every time he cursed her and her position, did she regret having succumbed to the will of her family and abandoning her dream? Did she ever wonder what it would have been like had she ignored her bitter relatives, joined the textile industry, and let her career flourish? When I looked at her tired face during my visits to her house, I wondered whether it had even occurred to her.
So when Alia heard that I had had a conversation with a stranger, a boy, all alone, unaccompanied, she was scared for me. It was clearly unthinkable for her, unless she lied to her parents and planned extensively in advance to make sure she would not get caught. “Are you sure no one saw you?” She asked me again. When I assured her that there really was no one there, her tone gradually changed. She then became giddy and gleeful. “What a romantic setting—sun, sea, chirping birds! You’re in love!”
“I am? Nah.”
Of course Alia didn’t believe me. When she finally dismissed the topic, I brought up the mysterious bride who had visited the other day. “I want to know everything about her,” I said. “I don’t know why, it’s a sudden urge.”
“What are you going to do once you find everything out?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t even really spoken. There’s nothing I can really say to her.” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to help her, to talk to her, to become her confidante, or simply to meet her. But whatever the urge was that welled up inside me, it was not just one of curiosity.
“Are you going to make her the subject on one of your paintings?” groaned Alia.
I laughed. “No. Weirdly, though, I do feel kind of inspired by her. By a girl in chains. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t even know what she’s like! But she’s so sincere about everything she does that I just can’t help but be drawn in, and want to know more.” After a moment of silence I added, “I sound crazy, you can say it.”
“Hmmm. I’d be drawn in too, I guess. I can see it. Just don’t pick a fight with her mother-in-law, okay? That woman sounds like a piece of work.”
We spoke for a little longer about school, homework, friends, and deadlines, the usual, when all of a sudden Alia sprung up, “So here’s a question: if you were given the chance to meet again with either one of them, would you choose to meet the boy at the beach or the mournful bride?”
“You claim to know me,” I replied. “Why don’t you answer for me?”
“Okay,” she said quickly, as if she had been meaning to all along. “And there’s no need to feel guilty about it. You’re a teenager, it’s natural to be taken away by the opposite sex—”
“Oh my God, please spare me, Alia.”
“Ahh, fine!” she sighed. “You want to meet the boy.”
I thought about it. “So even if that’s true, it’s not going to happen,” I said. “I have no idea who he is. No phone number, nothing.”
“I think you will,” said Alia. I could hear a smile develop on her face. “I feel like there’s no such thing as a chance occurrence. You met him on the beach. It was destined to happen. If it happened once, it will again.”
“No way,” I said. “What are the chances! There are twelve million people in Karachi. Most of the city is just numbers to me, not faces.”
“He might be one of the next familiar faces you run into then. I mean, you never thought you’d see that bride again, did you? But you did. At your own house! It was for a reason.”
“Alia, it’s never going to happen. Not with this guy,” I insisted. “We are not going to run into each other again.”
~
But, of course, we did. I saw him again, a few weeks later. It happened when the memory of the strange boy on the beach had ebbed away, like the spring had. The memory appeared in brief spouts, usually at night when I lay awake, unable to go to sleep, picking at the threads on my carpet. On those nights, I would try to relive the scene again, then drift off to sleep with the sound of doves and, somehow, the taste of salt in my mind.
It happened during a long, tiring week. On Monday, I had told my art teacher I didn’t have a painting for her. She had done everything but yell at me and walked away.
My mother had hired a new cook who knew nothing about cooking. My mom spent many days trying to teach him to make biryani—saffron rice—and telling me the cook wasn’t really that awful and she didn’t mind “working on his potential talent.”
On a day during the monsoon season, rain seared the moist air. I had gone out to get my cell phone fixed. It had been switching on and off at its own will for months now. I was driven to the cell phone shop far, far away, in Old Clifton. My phone was wrapped in a nylon cloth, much like a sick animal being taken to the vet. The store was in the midst of a noisy, crowded street. The sound of the honking buses rung out as they sped by. Everyone was busy; workers had places to go, books and watches to sell. Children were selling bags of popcorn outside the shop, discreetly snatching a few pieces from the bags to nibble on.
Inside the store, I showed the shopkeeper the phone. He stopped chewing his tobacco paan to tell me that I was foolish to have waited so long while it was in clear need of repair. “You’ll get it back within three days,” he said gruffly.
“Three days?” That seemed far too long, when I knew the most he had to do was tug at a circuit, or something similar.
“Yes, this will take time,” he said in English, looking hopelessly at my cell phone. As he talked, I could see the orange stains of the chewing tobacco paan dabbed all over his teeth.
I asked him in Urdu, “And how much will it be?”
“Three hundred rupees.” He continued to chew his paan loudly.
I knew I was being taken for a ride, but I didn’t know what to do. My mother would have feigned shock and burst, “You’re crazy! I’ll give you a hundred rupees and no more!” But my native-spoken Urdu was very weak. I knew I’d stutter and blubber my way through the sentence, making it impossible not to laugh. And then, it was really stuffy in that little shop, with the tiny hand fan in the corner weakly churning out air. I said “okay” and quickly hurried back out.
Exactly three days later, I went back to the shop. My mother told me to go dressed as simply as I could: “If you wear nice clothes, these shopkeepers will think you’re rich and charge you soaring prices.” So I went in my oldest white shalwaar kameez. It had yellow stains on the sleeve and a tiny rip at the leg. I made sure not to carry a purse; only a small pouch with Daisy Duck imprinted on it—a childhood present. I was happily convinced I looked penniless. I also felt I had the will to bargain now. I had practiced what I would say over and over in my head. I would look that shopkeeper in the eye, unwavering, and say, “One hundred rupees and no more.”
He handed me my phone back proudly, gleaming and recovered. I smiled at how shiny and black it looked; no thumbprints or scratches. Almost brand new. I wondered if maybe he deserved those three hundred rupees after all. Well, okay, two hundred was better.
I didn’t quite know how to put it to him. After all, I had agreed to the three hundred the first time. I fumbled in my pouch, trembling and produced two crumpled one hundred rupee notes. I put it on the counter, without a word, and waited.
“It’s three hundred rupees, madam,” he said carelessly, putting my phone into a plastic bag. He must have thought I had just made a mistake.
I didn’t know what to stay. All my resolve shattered. “I … I don’t have any more money.” I lied quietly, my entire negotiation strategy gone out the window. I
wanted to run out of the store, away from the silence. The pause was torturous; having to wait for a response in that stealthy room.
He gave me a pained look. His tobacco-chewing ceased for a moment and his jaw suddenly relaxed. Of course he didn’t believe me. He finished wrapping my cell phone into the bag and handed it over, without a word of argument. I felt relieved to be out of the store as soon as I stepped out. What a painful ordeal! I hoped I never had to do something like that again.
I came home and undid the bag restlessly. It had been so long since I had last touched my phone. I ran my fingers over its sleek cover, wondering what he had done to it to make it look so brand new. I switched open the phone and ran over its keys. But something was different. The background had changed. It was a picture of a grasshopper on a brick, one that I assumed had been taken from the camera phone. I opened the list of contacts. They were all unfamiliar. This wasn’t my phone!
I shuddered at the thought of going back to the store again. And facing him. I considered sending my driver. But then he wouldn’t understand, or recognize my actual phone. I would just have to bite the bullet and do it again.
The next day I went back to the store. I tried to look nonchalant, guilt-free as I went in. The shopkeeper looked anything but pleased to see me. He chewed his tobacco fiercely, slish-sloshing it noisily around his mouth. I explained the situation to him, trying to sound pleasant.
“Oh!” He took the phone and tut-tutted to himself. “I must have mixed the phones up. Very sorry. Many of my customers have given me the same phone to repair. It causes a lot of problems for everyone.” I silently agreed in my head. “Well, anyway your phone is fixed.” He fished around in a cupboard at the back of the store and brought out my original phone. For the first time I gazed warmly at the two scratches on the screen and the rough, faded color. Pleased at the familiarity.
As I sat in the car to leave, I switched my phone back on. The screen froze. This time I was truly livid. Would I never wash my hands off that little store and its keeper? I marched back towards it fiercely. I opened the door of the store, sweaty and exhausted, wiping my face against the sleeve of my kameez.
There was already a customer in the store, his back toward me. He was tall and lanky, wearing denim jeans and a black T-shirt. From where I was standing, I could see tiny beads of sweat at the nape of his neck. His shirt was stuck to his back.
I knew it was him before I saw his face. The memory of the beach awoke from somewhere in the corner of my mind, fresh and alive. The shopkeeper was handing him back a phone that looked like mine. With a grasshopper on a brick in the background screen.
“So sorry, sahib,” the shopkeeper was saying, in a much more pleasant voice than the one with which he had addressed me, smiling happily to reveal his orange, tobacco-stained, chipped teeth. “These phones always get mixed up. These days everyone has the same phone.” The boy smiled. And that’s when he noticed me standing quietly in the doorway, in my yellowing white shalwaar kameez, and with my now very red face.
“Hey!” The boy’s eyes crinkled in happy confusion. “I’ve … I’ve seen you!” A very different reaction to my mute one.
“At the beach,” I murmured, my hands loosening around my Daisy Duck wallet.
The shopkeeper gazed at us, confused, and then busied his hands unwrapping a new piece of tobacco paan.
The boy then walked up to me. “You look so different,” he said, but not in an unkind way. He seemed quite confused, actually. A little more chit-chat and then he said, “You know, I never knew your name. It was silly of me not to ask!” He laughed. I was reminded of that day when he had grinned at me, his camera resting softly in his hands. He had become slightly darker since I last saw him. He also seemed a lot taller than he had that day. But he had that same grin I so strongly remembered, when his dark eyes crinkled, setting his whole face alight. Like a little boy, I thought.
“Ayla.” I said. He repeated my name slowly, as most people did when they first heard it. But it sounded so different when he repeated it, as if it was new to me. “And yours?”
“Shahaan.” I felt a sudden relaxation within me once I heard his name. A face without a name was almost not real. I finally knew who he was now; the mystery had been partially revealed.
The shopkeeper interrupted us finally. He handed back Shahaan his cell phone, wrapped in a bag.
“How much does this come to?” Shahaan asked, reaching into his pocket to take out his wallet.
The shopkeeper smiled graciously and gestured for him to stop. “Not a paisa, boss. It was nothing. And you are our old customer, as it is.”
“I can’t believe he let you off but charged me three hundred rupees!” I said hotly to Shahaan as we got out of the store, explaining how I had been charged three hundred rupees. My initial shyness was wearing off. When Shahaan heard, he laughed and shook his head.
“And see how nice he was with you! Even though I did give him two hundred in the end.”
“You know he wasn’t that way with you because you gave him less money, right?” Shahaan said. “It’s because you lied. I know it sounds absurd, but sometimes these little things mean more to people than money, even to strange shopkeepers.”
I felt embarrassed, unsure of what to say.
Thankfully, he changed the subject. “So which high school do you go to?” I told him. And he told me his. As we continued talking, I realized that this was the conversation we should have had when we had first met. But we had crossed the polite trivia-seeking boundary and spoken about everything else. Did he even remember that day? How he had seen my painting be dragged away into the sea, and had let it go? From the formal way he was talking to me, I wasn’t sure if he recalled at all.
Before leaving, we exchanged numbers. It seemed like the right thing to do. And now that I knew which school he went to and where he lived, it didn’t seem to be dangerous.
I called Alia as soon as I reached home and told her. She was at a family function, and couldn’t talk openly. I could hear an impatient voice at the back asking, “Who is it?” I quickly told her to call me back and hung up. I hoped she hadn’t gotten into trouble for that.
Alia called me back an hour later. “Sorry, I was at my grandmother’s house. She has a really high fever.”
“Oh, is everything okay?” Alia’s grandmother had always been nice to me. She cooked chocolate custard for me and sat with us for a while every time I came over. “How bad is it?”
Alia shook it away. “She just had some bad food. It will be all fine in a few days. Now tell me what you were talking about.”
I told her everything. I could hear her laughing before I had even finished. “What did I tell you! It wasn’t an accidental meeting. It was destined to happen. You had his phone for days! And speaking of which, did you manage to find any incriminating info on it? I can’t believe that you didn’t go through it.”
“Well, there were no messages. Just a few pictures of different things: a shoe, a mug, a butterfly. It seems to make so much sense now.”
“What did you say his name was?”
“Shahaan.”
She thought for a moment. “His last name?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“I think Hassan might know him. He goes to the same school.” Hassan was Alia’s older cousin. “I’ll ask him who this Shahaan fellow is. And don’t deny your feelings for him,” she told me matter-of-factly. “I always knew you fell for more than just the sunset and the sea breeze that day.”
It was Friday now. Ma had talked me into going to another wedding. The whole time I was there, I kept a firm look-out for the bride—not the bride at the wedding, but the one I was interested in. But she was nowhere to be seen.
“Does she ever get out of the house?” I asked my mother in the car on the ride back.
Ma sighed pitifully, as if I had told her a baby tiger had died at the zoo, and said, “It’s so sad, you know. What a waste of her skill. Shumaila married young and trapped herself,
and now her daughter-in-law has, too. It’s become a family tradition, hasn’t it! I had expected her and her husband to come to this wedding. They’re newlyweds, they need to mix around and be seen! But, well,” she added as an attempt to redeem them, “Not everyone likes to be under the spotlight. Let them enjoy a private life if they want to.”
And that’s when an idea came to me. It struck me so fast I had no time to form the words in my head before I asked, “Why don’t you call them over to dinner again?”
Ma looked puzzled. “Who?” she asked, as if the occasion had been entirely erased from her memory.
“The young bride. You can ask the couple over for dinner this time.”
“What? Tanzeela? But they only came here a month ago! I’m sure they have other things to do.”
“Like what?” I burst. “The husband is a money-making machine, and the poor wife—almost my age, is sitting at home in a wreck. He wouldn’t even let her come to a wedding! And as you told me before, they haven’t even been on a honeymoon. They need some enjoyment in their lives!” A deep breath and then I said, “They need your dinner, Mom!”
Ma was both amazed and confused. “I don’t understand you.” She turned away from me and looked straight ahead. I smiled to myself. The matter had been settled. I knew she would call them that night.
9
“Well I suppose you’ll be happy to learn that Tanzeela and her family will not be able to visit today, but they’ve invited us to their house. Tomorrow.” My mother announced on a Saturday morning, entering the kitchen as I was having my morning coffee.
