by Minal Khan
I had expected the specimen to be a frog; bisected into two, and stitched down to the tray on all four corners, as if crucified. Others vouched that it would be a kidney; apparently that was far easier to slice. Finally, we went in to the labs, single file. The air smelled chemical. We lined up to use hand sanitizer.
I wished that they had given us gloves.
No one had thought that it would be a heart. It just felt much too soon for that. For the first few seconds, we sat, wide-eyed, in front of our specimens, trying to figure out what it was. It was just a lump of murky brown. If someone had put it in a wine glass, smeared some chocolate syrup over it, and laid it down before me, I would have thought it was custard. I had thought it was a kidney at first; small, plush, covered in lubricating fluid. But then my eye caught the thick, muscular tube running out from the top right-hand of the organ; it was the unmistakable aorta.
I picked up the scissor and tweezers. Right, I told myself. Let’s cut this up nice and quick. Foolishly, I had thought that I could perform the entire dissection without getting my hands dirty. I held the forceps firmly in place and cut the muscular wall open. Ah, things were beginning to make sense now. There was the right atrium—it seemed so much smaller than in the book—and here was the tricuspid valve, held in place by the unmistakable chordae tendinae, thin and firm, like the strings on a harp. For a few seconds it had stopped becoming a heart to me, and more a cluster of terms and tissues. I looked up for a moment. There were thirty-two students in the lab. Sixty-four hearts in the room, altogether. Half had had their rhythm abruptly cut short. Half were beating much faster than usual.
I looked down at the specimen, and suddenly felt it quiver in my hands. Something twitched for a split second. Alarmed, I paused and looked at it closely. When the heart had been ripped out from the goat, or sheep, or whatever it was, there was still blood in it, ready to be pumped off. That blood had been released now, onto the metal tray underneath, now with nowhere to go, as if it had boarded an airplane only to realize that there was no destination. The organ was sitting in a pool of plasma—waiting for the next flight? The composure with which I had performed the necessary dissection had all but vanished.
There was blood in my hands.
I tried to pry open the pulmonary artery with the scalpel, and my fingers shook. I withheld too quickly and the scalpel cut through my finger. I put the scalpel down and watched it silently. There was a brief pause, after which my blood seeped out; transparent, like red paint that had been mixed with too much water. My blood ran down my finger with the animal’s blood in a steady stream. Like two tributaries finding their way to the larger, more assuring river.
~
The time had come for Alia to go to Malir. I tried calling her on her land line again, but no one answered. Would I ever be able to talk to her again? I thought in exasperation. I watched movie after movie, read one book after the other, tried to occupy my mind.
Shahaan was the first to call me, to check up on me. “How have you been?”
“Just okay. Coasting.”
“Have you heard from Alia?”
“No. Not anything.”
I couldn’t gather the energy to engage in conversation. I said something about my mother calling for me, and quickly got off the phone. I felt horrible about this, guilty. But my mind just wanted to be solitary. I will make up for this someday, I said to myself.
I often felt hungry in my room. I knew there were chocolate chip biscuits and salted cashew nuts in the kitchen cupboard next to the micro-wave in the kitchen. But I couldn’t go there. He would be there. His glances seething into my skin and spreading.
And then there were the times when I couldn’t help but wonder about Alia. What was she doing now? Was she feeling the same way I was—lost, unable to do anything? I started to remember this one girl in our ninth grade class. We were all told to write a poem on the subject of our choice and then read them out in front of the whole class. One girl, Sasha, had written a poem on life. A clichéd title. “Life is a Marathon Race,” she said. “Each of us races forward, competing with others to reach to the end. We endure pain, sweat, and tears. But soon everyone reaches the finish line: death.” The class fell silent for a while, and then broke out into snickers. Alia and I included. A boy had piped up, “Well I guess that means everyone wins the marathon!” We all laughed. We didn’t want to face the reality of what she had said.
Why was I thinking about this now?
And then the day finally came. I checked my e-mail inbox and saw a message from Alia. My mind skipped with joy as I waited for the page to load. My excitement faltered when the page opened. The mail was brief. A mere four lines.
Hi, I have to make this quick—my mother will be back from my aunt’s house soon. I’ve messed up—I’ve really messed up. I don’t know what to do. I can’t explain here. I can’t believe what’s happened, what’s happening. Call me on the number written below at exactly 7:45. My mother will leave the house to go visit my Aunt. Don’t call any sooner. Alia
I stared in consternation at the words. I couldn’t understand what she meant. Had Alia been caught smoking? It could only have been that. But why couldn’t she have just said so? I waited anxiously until 7:45. Time inched along slower than ever before. At 7:40, I couldn’t contain myself and rang her. The phone was ringing but no one answered. I tried again at 7:45. This time she answered.
“Hello?” her voice was uneasy, breathless. I had almost forgotten how she sounded.
“Alia?” My voice shuddered as well.
She let out a sigh and said, “Yeah, it’s me. “My mother was just leaving when you called first, so I couldn’t answer. H-how are you?”
Terrible. The last few weeks have been hell. “Fine,” I answered. “But how are you? What happened?”
Alia’s voice became muffled. She was speaking very, very low. There was probably somebody nearby. “I … oh, I don’t know how to say this. So much has happened. I …” She sounded weak, tired.
“Alia,” I said soothingly, “It’s okay, calm down. Everything’s okay—”
Alia smirked bitterly. “No, no, it is definitely not okay.” The line was crackling slightly now. “You’re going to hate me,” her tone had dropped into a soft wail. “You are really going to hate me … I …” There was a bigger crackle this time. The line went dead.
I called again. And again. There was no tone. I frantically redialed the number automatically. After the twentieth time, I gave up. How would I reach her now?
It had never been this way with me and Alia before. She seemed so far now, so out of reach. I e-mailed her and then shut my computer. I tried to read a book but couldn’t concentrate. I just had to know what had happened. There was a chance, I thought to myself, that Alia had called Shahaan too. Maybe she had told him something. It seemed highly unlikely that she would have rung him before me, but what had I to lose?
I rang Shahaan at a quarter to twelve. He answered immediately. “Wow,” he said when he picked up. “Is it my birthday? I don’t think I’ve ever been this spoiled.”
I chuckled obediently. I then asked him if Alia had gotten in touch with him.
His tone changed and became graver once I mentioned her name. “Oh, so she told you.”
My mind throbbed with angst. Alia had told him before me? I put aside my hurt for the time being and said, “No, she was about to tell me, but the phone went dead. Will someone tell me what’s going on, for God’s sake?”
Shahaan paused to consider and then said, “I really don’t know if I should. I don’t know the whole story, anyway.”
“Just tell me what you know,” I said impatiently. Another pause.
“I hate having to relay information between you two like this. Okay, I’ll tell you. But you have to keep calm.” He sighed. “A few days ago, I received a call from Alia. This was two days before she was leaving for Malir. She sounded really upset. I felt like she was trying to act normal but she just didn’t sound like herself.” He p
aused. “She asked me for some hash.” He breathed.
“Is that all?”
“No. Okay. Please don’t freak at what I’m about to say next. She wanted more.”
“What exactly did she want?”
“Opium.”
“Is this a joke? You have opium? How? And how does she know?”
“She knew because I guess her cousin, my buddy, told her I had some. I have a friend who gave some to me at a party. I never tried it. Just kept some with me because—I don’t know—I felt like it might be valuable. Who knows how much it costs? I don’t know. But basically, I said no to Alia, right? No way am I going to give someone opium when they’ve never even tried drugs before. Just a bad idea. So I said no.
“But she got on my case. Like really got on my case. She kept saying, ‘This is the one thing I’m ever going to ask of you, Shahaan.’ I told her she needed to calm down, take a few breaths, just relax. Eventually, she got calm, we talked for a couple minutes, and hung up. I didn’t hear from her for a while. A few days go by and then she calls me out of the blue, and says, ‘Can we meet? I just need someone to talk to.’ I hear her crying on the phone. So I thought to myself, okay, my friend needs me there. I drove to her house and picked her up. She tells me she wants to go to a convenience store. She asks me if I will buy her some cigarettes, while she waits in the car. So I went. I got her a cigarette pack. I left the car for maybe five minutes.
“When I come back, I hand her the cigarettes. She suddenly says she wants to go home. It was weird. I said are you sure you don’t want to talk about what’s happening? And then she finally opened up. First she said she had just recently found out she got accepted into college in America. New York University. And that she was scared. Because she didn’t think her parents would let her go. Something about her mother wanting to arrange her marriage with someone.”
“Wait, what? Arrange her marriage?”
“Yeah. I just didn’t get it. But she wouldn’t elaborate. She just said her mother introduced her to some guy. And her family wants her to marry him. When she said no, her family flipped on her and now she’s confined to the house. Can’t go anywhere.”
“This is not happening.” I closed my eyes and sat down, defeated.
“Yeah, but that’s not the end of it,” Shahaan said. He cleared his throat. “I dropped her home, and on the way back to my house, I opened the cigarette compartment to my car. You know, where you guys saw some hash once?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“All my hash was gone. Along with some other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
Shahaan paused. “The opium. I had only gone to the party a few days before, so it was still in my car. It’s gone now.”
“Are you kidding me?” I didn’t know what to say. There were no words to say.
Silence stood between us stealthily. Finally Shahaan said, “The point is, Ayla, the only person who could have taken everything was Alia. And she stopped returning my calls. I’d have gone to her house again but her parents will kill her if they see me.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” I tried to keep my voice calm.
“I wasn’t sure when, and how, to tell you. I thought if there was some way I could get them back without you knowing, it would be better for all of us.”
“That was dumb.”
Shahaan didn’t reply. “I got an e-mail from her today.”
“What did it say?”
“You sure you want to know?”
“Yes!”
“Okay. Just … just listen first. She said she was sorry she stole everything from me. And that she seriously regretted it. Because apparently the same night, she locked herself up in her bathroom, and smoked the hash and opium sitting on the side of her bathtub. Together. Her mother banged away on her door, and when no one answered, she got worried, and opened Alia’s door with her spare keys. She found Alia lying dazed on the bathroom floor. At first she thought Alia had slit her wrists. But then she saw a cigarette filter in her hand and some tobacco lying on the tiles.”
I almost forgot that it was Alia who Shahaan was talking about. As he went on and on, it seemed all the more unreal to me. Had things really come to this—where Shahaan had to convey to me that my best friend had tried drugs and had almost become unconscious? The agony of not knowing anything myself, of being so distant, numbed me.
“Are you there?” Shahaan asked.
“Mmm hmmm,” I said.
“Are you okay?” His voice was soft, concerned.
I didn’t know. I remembered the first time Alia and I had tried cigarettes, on a very hot, moist day in sixth grade. We had stolen some from Alia’s father’s study and hidden in her basement, giggling. The cigarette felt quite big in my small hand. It may have even been as big as my hand. Alia had twirled it between her fingers, remarking how it looked like a yan yan stick. We had filled our pockets with butterscotch sweets, in case the taste of the cigarettes was bitter. “It has no taste, silly,” Alia kept telling me. But I stacked up on candy anyway. We sat in her basement and I inhaled on the filter deeply, thinking that I wouldn’t really feel anything unless I did.
Alia was right. It didn’t taste like anything. It was just a hollow feeling, like you were swallowing emptiness. When I told Alia this, she puffed and said slowly, “You have just swallowed death. What does it taste like?” The smoke breezed out of her mouth as she laughed. A thick blanket of smoke hovered around us, encircling us, ready to feed on us. In the end, we emptied our sweets from our pockets and devoured them. Sweets were better than cigarettes any day, we had both decided.
I had so many questions that I wanted to ask Shahaan. But I wanted the answer from Alia. “Did she tell you when she was coming back?” I asked him. He replied no. All we could do now was wait. Wait for some news.
By the time Shahaan and I had finished speaking, it was a quarter to two in the morning. Surprisingly, I slept soundly. It was a dreamless sleep, not plagued with fearsome thoughts like I had expected. I had to go to yoga class the next day. I saw it as a welcome relief. The worst thing for me right now was to stay at home and spend my time worrying.
I reached Ghazal’s house fifteen minutes early. I performed my positions more keenly, trying to make my body relax where my mind couldn’t. I knew Tanzeela had arrived when I saw her reflection in the mirror in front of me. For the first time ever, she looked frayed. Her hair was open and uncombed, her eyes heavy with bags, and her laces were untied. After class, when we met at our usual place beside the speakers to sip water, I asked her what was wrong. “It’s just so … complicated,” she heaved. I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.
“So it doesn’t look like we’ll be going to the café today,” I grinned and offered her water. She didn’t smile back. She was looking away.
“You don’t know what it’s like, Ayla. If only you could understand. I can’t blame you for not. The thing is, there are times when I feel really trapped.”
There it was. What I had been waiting to hear for weeks now. “Tanzeela,” I said softly. “I think we should talk.”
She looked worried. “I wish we could, I really do. But …” she glanced at her watch as if it were a signal wringing out her death sentence. “I have to go,” she said reluctantly.
“Why?” My question came out harsher than I had intended it to.
“I need to get home,” she answered.
“Why do you need to get home? What’s the urgency?” I needed her to tell me. I knew the answer, but I just had to hear her say it.
Tanzeela looked quickly around the room, her long eyelashes quivering wherever her eyes moved. Everyone else had moved out and we were now left alone in the room. “I can’t come here anymore.” She started rubbing her hands together in her lap, unable to meet my eyes.
“Tanzeela,” I said again tenderly. “What is really happening? Is it … is everything okay at home?” I tried to look into her eyes but she had lowered them. I looked down to her lap, to h
er fumbling hands. That’s when I saw it. There was a brownish bruise on her wrist, teeming like a large, hideous scar. Her hands trembled and then her lips followed. Slowly her whole body started convulsing and she bent over my lap, crying. I waited for her to release her pain, stroking her hair while she sobbed. Finally, I asked quietly, “Did he do this to you?”
Tanzeela stopped crying, her body steady now, and looked up at me dazedly. “Who?”
I looked at her, as if my gaze enough would convey the obvious. “Your husband, Amar.” I felt like I was in some horrible game show; I was being asked questions without knowing for certain the answers.
She looked confused. “Why would you think that? Amar has been anything but harsh with me.”
I felt a sick feeling at the base of my gut. She was defending him despite what he had done. Was it that or was she in denial? “So Amar has never raised his hand to you?” I asked. “You don’t have to defend him. Or deny it if it’s true. What he’s done to you is horrible. I just knew something was wrong.”
Tanzeela blinked at me as if I were mad. She remained speechless for a few seconds and then seemed to understand what I had said. “It’s not Amar,” she said, more firmly this time. “He has never raised his hand to me. It’s his mother.”
The room became stark silent, as if a gunshot had just sounded. “His mother has made life burning hell for me.” Tanzeela wasn’t crying anymore. Her voice was solid, and full of bitterness. And then, while I sat there like a suspended Greek statue, my expression unmoving, Tanzeela told me everything; how her mother-in-law had restrained her freedom since the day she had stepped in into her new house. When she had first entered, a new bride, Tanzeela said, Amar’s mother had been particularly kind. She had told her over and over how happy she was to have Tanzeela around; she had never had a daughter. She had tried to make Tanzeela’s stay extra comfortable, laughingly telling her not to worry about cooking and cleaning; that they had more than enough servants to take care of that.
Then the day came for the couple to leave for their honeymoon. Amar wanted a picture of Tanzeela and him together before they left for the airport. Shumaila Aunty told them not to hold hands or lean on each other while she took a photo of them in the front yard.
