by Minal Khan
“You bought a picture, huh?” Shahaan said. “Who is the lucky artist?”
“I never found out,” Alia shrugged.
“Good thinking,” Shahaan said, looking at her through the rear-view mirror. “If you like a painting, it doesn’t matter who made it. How you felt about it is all that matters. And you look happy.”
“So how many pictures of yours sold?” Alia asked casually from the back. “Or is that too personal a question?” Shahaan shook his head. “Not at all. I sold four altogether; three small frames and one large one. The painting that you liked,” he turned to me, “that got sold. So, that’s not so bad for a launch. I’m pretty happy.”
“You should be,” we both said, nodding. We were on our way to Alia’s house, to drop her off first, after which I would get dropped off. I heard a comment on the weather on the radio and fumbled around with buttons, trying to turn the volume up.
“You just turned the AC off,” laughed Shahaan. “It’s the dial underneath that.” He directed me. I found the right dial and turned the volume up. As I withdrew my hand, I accidentally opened a tiny compartment underneath the volume button. It was the slot that served as an ashtray. “Sorry,” I said, trying to close it. I saw little clusters of scattered ash. It looked like mixed salt and pepper. But there was something else in there, inside a tiny packet. It was a lump of brown, like a clod of clay, wrapped in a little plastic bag and wound together with a rubber band.
The air suddenly filled with a strong, grassy odor. Next to the brown lump lay a few cigarette filters, and some tobacco. I silently stared at the items, not knowing what to say. I finally took my eyes off them to try to close the compartment. But the door didn’t shut. Shahaan didn’t seem to notice; his eyes were on the road. Alia heard my struggles and jumped forward from the back seat. ““Oh, for God’s sake. Let me just do it.” She inched her neck forward to get a good look, and froze, the way I had, when she saw what I did.
“Is everything ok?” Shahaan looked in our direction momentarily, and then gazed at what we were both looking at. “Oh,” he said, dumbfounded. He paused. “Sorry, I didn’t mean for you to see that. But I guess you two would eventually find out.” He made no attempt to shut the compartment.
“So what is this?” I was the first to speak up. My voice trembled slightly. “Hash, marijuana?”
“Horse tranquilizer,” he said gravely. Our heads spun to him in shock and then he grinned, “No, don’t worry. It’s just some pot.”
At this point in my life, I had never had drugs. I had one or two friends who drank occasionally, and another handful that smoked. I looked at Shahaan in his smooth shirt and tie. I had never thought that he …
“You two look like you’ve been kidnapped,” he said finally. He seemed carefree, as if we had just found out that he ate Cocoa Krunchies for breakfast.
“No, it’s just, surprising,” I said quietly, “You don’t really look the type.” I know I sounded foolish, not knowing what that meant.
“Does Bill Gates look like a billionaire?” he replied.
“No, I mean, I don’t know. It’s totally fine, really,” I said, meaning it. I looked back at Alia. She had been unusually silent the whole time. I had expected her to ask him giddily, “So what does it feel like? When did you first try it?” But she was looking out the window.
“So let’s change the subject,” I said. “Umm, how’s school?”
“I don’t know,” he chortled. “We’re in the middle of summer holidays,”
“Right, right,” I said quickly, feeling stupid. We had stopped at a traffic signal on Zamzama Street, very near to Alia’s house. I heard cars honking noisily all around us. I gazed at the timer above the red traffic light. There were forty seconds left till the green light.
A young boy, no older than thirteen, suddenly crouched over the windshield. I couldn’t see his face in the dark. He began cleaning the windows with a dirty rag cloth and some damp water. Shahaan sighed and gestured to the boy to stop. The boy went on, regardless, watering and swiping, watering and swiping. “Fine. Let him see if I give him any money now,” Shahaan said gruffly.
On the crowded streets of Karachi, it was common to see young boys, penniless, waiting at traffic lights, and then lurching towards cars to clean windowsills while the cars were stopped at the red light. It was a way to claim money without “begging.” The boys were illiterate, poor, and desperate, but also quick and nimble. They were also usually always silent. They never offered services; there was no exchange of a verbal “yes” or “no.” They just cleaned. Once they were done, they stood outside one’s window, small-limbed hands outstretched for money, change, or any coins one had time to give them before the light turned green and they were on their way. Their eyes were always hungry.
The boy came over to my window, as expected, to claim his money. None of us budged.
“I told him to stop,” Shahaan muttered self-righteously.
But the knocks on my window grew louder and more urgent. I fished out a ten-rupee note—a tenth of a dollar—from my bag, anxious to end this awkward confrontation, and turned to the window, ready to confront a scruffy boy with large glassy eyes and an expectant face. I stumbled, however, when I found that the boy’s hand was not empty. The coin fell from my hand as I looked.
I was face-to-face with a large black gun, an inch away from me, pointed at my head.
My heart and senses were numbed. I didn’t even see the boy motioning, with the gun, to roll the window down. I heard Alia gasp, “Oh my God! Oh my God, oh my God,” behind me. It sounded so distant, faint echoes from the bottom of a well. Shahaan eventually rolled the window down.
The boy with the gun mumbled something which I didn’t hear. I could tell he was nervous because his fingers kept fumbling as if to hold a firm grip despite his sweaty palms. Shahaan had heard him. “Ok, we’ll give you everything.” He tried to sound calm, but his voice was shaking. He was flipping open his wallet and taking out cash. I didn’t do anything at first. I just looked at Shahaan. My numbed brain then registered that I should do the same.
I fumbled in my purse, with cold hands, and took out everything; cell phone, wallet, pearl earrings that my mother had bought for me last Eid. I saw Shahaan picking at his watch and undid mine. Alia handed over her necklace, her Ipod, a few thousand rupees and a diamond-encrusted watch that I knew she had just bought in Dubai.
While this was happening, I found myself absurdly and absentmindedly gazing at the mammoth-sized billboard above us; a woman was smiling down at me with her glass of fresh, OLPER’S MILK. Aao kuch naya kare. “Let’s get together and start something new.”
I turned to the boy to hand my things over. My eyes met with the rough gun barrel, inches away from my mouth. The boy collected the heap of the items, put the revolver inside his pocket, and walked away. I hadn’t even seen his face.
All was still around me. There were several cars behind us and to our right and left. A man in the car to the left looked at us momentarily, then quickly back to the road, nervous. No sound of policemen yelling and chasing after the thief. No sirens, no women screaming from their cars or children wailing into their mother’s chests. No one around us said anything.
Not one honk.
None of us spoke. All I remember hearing was the silence; like the stealthy silence that followed when a heartbeat suddenly ended. I looked at the timer over the traffic light. Now five seconds left. Everything happened in less than thirty seconds. The light flashed green and we went ahead with the sea of traffic.
It wasn’t even real to me until I looked down at my empty wrist.
13
I told my mother everything; about Shahaan, the exhibition, how he had given us a ride home from the hotel. I came home on the night that it happened, and instead of running to my mother, frantic and shaken, I rushed to my bedroom. I locked the door and fell down on my bed. But I felt so scared under that cover, all alone in the silence. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep in my own room.
I crept into my mother’s room at one in the morning. My father was away in China on a business trip. I felt like a thief, trying to tip-toe noiselessly to the bed, without touching anything. She hadn’t heard me come in.
I crept into the bed beside her and raised the blanket over my head till it covered me entirely. The AC fuse tripped after a few minutes, and it became hot and stuffy in the room. But I refused to lift the blanket from over my head and go switch it on. I was afraid to move, to make a sound. I sweated under the suffocating blanket. But I didn’t budge. I liked the darkness underneath the covers. Who said darkness was frightening? Darkness is the most comforting of all; you can’t make out shapes, or figures in sheer black; they are indistinguishable. Almost … not there. It is in the day that the dark and menacing are in clear view; the day, where evil has nowhere to hide.
My mother found me trembling and sweaty next to her the next morning. She got worried and made me check my temperature. I was normal. But that didn’t convince her. I saw her running about and rummaging through her drawers for medicine, pills, water. And then I felt I just had to tell her. I burst out crying, and between my indistinct sobs, she managed to understand what I was saying. She didn’t interrupt me once as I told her about Shahaan, how he had insisted on dropping us, how quickly everything happened, between the changing of traffic lights. She saw the breathless state that I was in and tried to comfort me. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” she soothed, hugging me, “only material things; cell phones, money, it doesn’t matter. You are safe and that is the most important thing.”
How could I explain it to her? How could she understand that it wasn’t about what he had taken; it was that feeling I had at that very moment, that he would pull the gun, as if everything would just end in a second. The feeling of waiting, waiting for it to happen, for the trigger to go off, which was far worse than the end itself.
I wanted to call Alia and Shahaan, make sure they were all right. I was more worried about Alia. I didn’t know how she had explained the story to her mom; as far as her mother knew, she was at an exhibition with me, and it was me who had dropped her back. In light of what had happened, Alia must have had no choice but to tell her the truth. I imagined the pallor that would creep into her mother’s face when she realized that Alia had been lying to her; because worse than being seen with a boy was being looted with a boy. Would her pity supersede her anger?
I tried calling up Alia for the next two days. But she never came to the phone. The first time her maid told me that she was having a shower. The second time I was told she was out. I didn’t buy any of it.
I hadn’t heard from Shahaan either. It was as if that day had changed everything between us. At the red light we were carefree, jesting friends, and after the green light we were mute and distant, suddenly unable to recognize each other. It was like an island that had caved in from the center and dispersed into three, distinct land masses. We had just drifted away from each other.
On the third day after the incident, when I received a call on my house phone and saw Alia’s number in the screen, my heart thudded with joy. I answered the phone quickly.
“Hello, is this Ayla?” It was an older woman’s voice. Alia’s mother.
My throat went very dry. “Yes. Salam Alaikum, Auntie,” I answered, both disappointed that it wasn’t Alia and nervous of the conversation that would ensue.
“I would like to hear, in your words—because I don’t know whether what Alia is saying is true or an elaborate lie—what happened the other day.” Her voice trembled, clearly trying to control the anger within.
I repeated the entire story to her, calmly.
“This has all been a horrible episode,” she interrupted me. “I had never expected someone like you to lead Alia so astray. You two have been friends for so long … I had always trusted you, Ayla. And now you’re taking my daughter behind my back, encouraging her to lie to her mother and gallivant with a boy I don’t even know.” She wasn’t shouting; her voice was low, but indiscriminately bitter. She had never spoken to me like this before. Nasreen Aunty had only addressed me with the most courtesy and kindness whenever I had come over. When she didn’t allow Alia to go out, it was often me who managed to cajole her out of her decision. What was happening?
I remained silent while she went on about how disappointed she was in me; after she was through, she asked to speak to my mother. I called Ma and handed her the phone, saying nothing. I felt numb and unfeeling. Perhaps I should have expected this to happen. Sooner or later … it had to happen. I exited the room while they spoke; the last thing I wanted was to see the look of disappointment on my mother’s face when she found out. She hadn’t been pleased about Shahaan at all. But I hadn’t told her that Alia had lied to her mother in order to come out with us. It wasn’t as if I was trying to hide anything; I just thought it was unnecessary to bring up the trivial details at a time like this.
My mother did not think it was a trivial detail. She questioned me after she finished speaking with Nasreen Aunty. This time, she thoroughly interrogated me, asking for every single detail; the circumstances and the background. After hearing me out, she said that it wouldn’t be wise of me to meet Alia at this time. Nasreen Aunty was taking Alia to their farmhouse in Malir in two weeks. She thought that she needed a long break; a chance to straighten herself out. Inside however, I knew it was nothing more than a ploy to get her away from me.
With nothing to do now, I tried to busy myself with different things. I remember reading until very late at night, often even after I heard birds chirping outside. I didn’t have a very large book collection, but I didn’t mind re-reading what I did have. Often, I’d look outside my window and see the first trace of morning while I was flipping through pages.
I thought back to the days when school was open; when Alia and I could meet first thing in the morning and relay stories of what we had done over the weekend, and groan about how much homework we had to complete. We only had world history together, and so that class became a refuge for us.
I thought back to the time that I had teased Alia endlessly about her red organizer. On our first day of school that year, Alia had come to class with a bag more full than expected. From it she had unleashed a jumbo, album-sized red organizer. She had made a resolution to be more organized that year. The album, or “plan-book” as she liked to call it, was as intricate and detailed as a telephone directory. There were so many different categories and time-slots, and fancy names for words like “date-book” and “events.” She used that diary incessantly for a month. She wrote down all her class notes in it (although I don’t know where she found the space on those cramped pages), she scrawled reminder notes on almost every page; she even made a special section for TV schedules. The planner was her bible; over time it became something of a sacred source of knowledge. If you wanted to know which episode of American Idol was next showing, it was in the planner. You wanted the different dates of the reigns of each of the Mogul rulers? It was in that planner. Wanted the number of that Italian restaurant which served the best fillet-o-fish in town? Yes, the planner.
And finally, like all people do of their hobbies, like clerks do of their jobs, like accountants do of paychecks, and refuse collectors do of refuse, Alia got sick of it. The planner was taking over her life. Now every time she thought of taking a shower or going to bed, she felt she couldn’t do so without consulting the planner. She couldn’t cope with the rigid schedule set down by it; over time she grew almost afraid to look at it, to know what all she hadn’t done, what she had put off, or failed to do. Finally, she conceded bitterly, “My parents are enough to remind me what a loafer I am; I don’t need a planner to do it.” So that was the end of the organizer. I actually felt sad when I saw Alia discard it in her top-hand, hard-to-reach shelf. “I’m going to throw some philosophical load at you, as you’re prone to do with me at times like these,” I said to her, diving at the opportunity. “If your life is already planned,” I looked heavenward, “then the o
nly thing you have the power to do is … live it.”
I thought back to those days while I lay awake at night, in my dark room. I wondered how long Alia’s mother would keep her from the city. I wanted desperately to talk to her, and to hear her say that her mother’s opinion of me would never change anything. Because deep inside, I was fearful that it wasn’t so.
Saturday arrived rather quickly and I had a yoga class to go to. I was looking much more forward to meeting Tanzeela now that I had very few familiar people in my life. Surprisingly, she arrived at Ghazal’s house before I did. There wasn’t enough space up in front so I had to sit at the back of the room, and hope that she had seen me. After the class was over, we met at the same spot by the speakers to drink water. “I have good news,” Tanzeela said, tilting her head back to take a swig. “My car won’t be picking me up until a little later. So we can get some coffee next door!” She looked at me for my response.
“That’s great.” I couldn’t have hoped for anything better.
When we entered the same café and took our seats, she began, “I felt really bad the other day, for dashing out of here like that.” I told her it wasn’t a problem. She seemed to notice my discontented mood. “Are you all right?” she asked, clasping both her hands together and placing them underneath her chin.
I didn’t wave my feelings away and shrug, saying “It’s nothing.” I hadn’t spoken to anyone about how I had felt after the episode on Tuesday. My mother knew the details of what had happened but there was no one I could speak to, not even Alia, about how I really felt. I needed to talk to someone.
I told Tanzeela everything. Her large, black pupils widened in shock when she heard how we had been robbed. I told her how hard it was, not being able to speak to Alia after the episode, being scolded by Alia’s mother like I was some kind of delinquent, and then, on top of everything else, not hearing a trace of Shahaan either. It was as if I had verbal hemophilia; my words came pouring out uncontrollably, and continuously, with little resistance.
