by Ami Rao
David and Ameena
Ami Rao
Fairlight Books
First published by Fairlight Books 2021
Fairlight Books
Summertown Pavilion, 18–24 Middle Way, Oxford, OX2 7LG
Copyright © Ami Rao 2021
The right of Ami Rao to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Ami Rao in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, stored, distributed, transmitted, reproduced or otherwise made available in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Quote from Miles Davis, copyright © by Miles Davis. Used by permission of
MILES DAVIS PROPERTIES, L.L.C. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
ISBN 978-1-912054-15-2
www.fairlightbooks.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Designed by Nathan Burton
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.
Miles Davis
Contents
Author’s Note
presenting the composition
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
1.10
1.11
1.12
1.13
1.14
1.15
1.16
1.17
1.18
1.19
1.20
1.21
1.22
1.23
1.24
1.25
1.26
1.27
improvising with love
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8
2.9
2.10
2.11
2.12
2.13
2.14
2.15
2.16
2.17
2.18
2.19
2.20
2.21
2.22
2.23
2.24
2.25
2.26
2.27
2.28
2.29
2.30
2.31
2.32
2.33
2.34
recapitulating melodies and mistakes
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
3.7
3.8
3.9
3.10
3.11
3.12
3.13
3.14
3.15
3.16
3.17
3.18
3.19
3.20
3.21
3.22
3.23
3.24
3.25
3.26
3.27
3.28
3.29
3.30
3.31
3.32
3.33
3.34
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Author’s Note
While David himself is entirely imagined, virtually all of David’s music in this novel is directly or indirectly inspired by the music of American jazz pianist Aaron Goldberg. Aaron’s ‘real’ music across his six solo albums and multiple collaborative projects can be found on his website www.aarongoldberg.com. A heartfelt thanks to Aaron for his jazz – the magnificence of his art makes mine look half-good.
A number of paintings that Ameena interacts with are inspired by real works. The painting she sees on her first visit to the Suzy Lipskis Gallery is in the likeness of an untitled work by Georgiou Apostolos from 2014. The actual painting is as captivating as Suzy suggests. The enigmatic piece she views at the Met of the man without a face is based on a watercolour on YUPO called In Shine Mirror painted by the late George James. Ameena’s own watercolour of the woman in the blue dress was inspired by a painting of a woman in a red dress called Michelle by Scott Burdick. In the real painting, the author was struck by the look of anticipation on the subject’s face as she half-rises from her chair and the idea was to capture the emotion in that precise moment in time. Ameena thought a blue dress would create a more dramatic backdrop to the sunset-hued studio in the dilapidated apartment in New York’s West Village, where she tells David to go to hell. When Ameena is in one of her scary moods, the author thinks it best not to argue.
presenting the composition
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Walter Horatio Pater
1.1
David and Ameena were two people with nothing in common except for the city that they lived in and the dream that lived in them.
It seems only fitting then that what happened to them happened, because ultimately it was the city that brought them together and the dream that tore them apart. Or maybe it was the dream that brought them together and the city that tore them apart.
But besides the city and besides the dream, no two people could have less in common than David and Ameena, if you considered the matter. And if you did consider the matter, you would realise quite quickly, and perhaps with some astonishment, all the different ways in which they were different. A thing of some wonder was that most of the ways in which David and Ameena were different happened to be phenotypical – a result, in a manner of speaking, of the accidents of birth; the remaining handful were also accidents of birth, only in a different, invisible, way, and as it turned out, happened to be the most profound things, as profound things go, that David and Ameena didn’t have in common.
But all that would reveal itself later.
In a city that has grown vertically since its inception, and at one time, which was a time before David and Ameena met, boasted two of the tallest buildings in the world, scraping the sky at the imposing heights of 417 metres and 415 metres respectively, it is ironic then that David and Ameena met 55 metres below the ground, on the 1 train at the 191st Street stop at Washington Heights.
They were sitting at opposite ends of the compartment with – a rarity for this city – no one in the middle. It was quite late at night and David was returning home from a jam session with similarly musically inclined friends at a club near Yeshiva University. Ameena was returning home from a party at her editor’s boyfriend’s house, an event that was held rather ritualistically on the last Wednesday of every month and involved wine, which Ameena enjoyed; oysters, which she did not; fashion types, a group she felt strongly that she didn’t belong to; and literary types, a group she felt, less strongly, that she did. But of course, David and Ameena didn’t know all this about each other. In fact, they didn’t know anything
about each other. Come to think of it, they hadn’t so much as noticed each other because they were both engrossed, heads down, eyes lowered, in their respective books rendering the very act of noticing a logistical improbability.
At about this time, the door from the adjoining compartment on David’s end opened, and a youngish Caucasian male wearing grey sweatpants and a matching grey hoodie that obstructed most of his face – possibly by design, but possibly not – entered the space where David and Ameena sat. He stood almost exactly halfway between them, staring at the floor for a while, then turned his head in Ameena’s direction and spoke in a low, gravelly voice. ‘Hello beautiful,’ he said, ‘where are you from?’
Ameena started in her seat and looked up from her book, but then out of experience or inexperience – it could have been either – looked back down and chose to ignore him.
‘Oh,’ the hooded man sneered, ‘you don’t speak English!’
Ameena still said nothing.
David still didn’t look up.
The train pulled up on 168th Street. The doors opened, and an armed policewoman walked in and through the compartment. She glanced at all three commuters nonchalantly in the manner police officers do when they are mentally evaluating you and your scope for making mischief, and satisfied with her visual assessment of the situation, left before the doors closed. Those same doors were already sliding shut when the youngish male in the grey hoodie made a sudden move towards them, twisting his body sideways to fit through the rapidly closing gap, but not before he gave Ameena another lustful look, and, curling his lips menacingly, snarled, ‘Go home!’
‘I am home,’ Ameena said quietly, too quietly perhaps for the hooded man to hear her, but loud enough to catch David’s attention. And surely enough, David looked up.
The two made eye contact.
David looked apologetic, and his eyes were bright. Ameena shrugged and her eyes were cold.
It was back to being just the two of them in the long carriage and therefore it was appropriate, David felt, to say whatever had been on his mind: ‘Probably stoned,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Amazing how many crazies run rampant in this city. When a decent, solid home would do them such good. And apparently, you’re the one who is supposed to go home. How illogical,’ he continued with a thoughtful look on his face, ‘is that logic? I mean, what I’m trying to say is that just because you’re not interested in flirting with the kid doesn’t mean you’re not home…’
Ameena nodded at the logic of the illogical logic but said nothing.
‘Or that you can’t speak English,’ David repeated, almost to himself.
‘I suppose not,’ Ameena replied in her perfectly English English, but chose not to elaborate further.
‘Oh!’ David exclaimed, with some surprise, possibly but not conclusively, at the perfectly English English.
And they both went back to reading their books.
At the next stop and the stop after that, the train started to fill up and David could only see Ameena if he either craned his neck all the way forward or retracted it all the way back, both of which left his neck in a distinctly uncomfortable position. And so, deciding to do neither, he simply focused on reading his book. A few pages later, he had mostly forgotten about her.
At 96th Street, a tall, incredibly beautiful man with matted hair and torn clothes entered the compartment with a money collection bowl, cleared his throat and started to sing. Only people with a fairly good knowledge of music (which David had and Ameena didn’t) would have realised that not only was he singing in a voice so smooth it could well have caused the earth to slip off its axis, but he was singing a song that was known, rather definitively, to have marked the beginning of soul music. A few faces here and there looked up and started to take notice, but not that many. Which wasn’t unusual given that when people who look like the man do things in public places for money, it is easier for everyone else not to notice, even in some cases when the people doing those things happen to be doing them exceptionally well.
Ten blocks down, on 86th Street, a smartly dressed white man carrying a cello on his back entered the train. A few seconds later, he closed his eyes and nodded his head and tapped his feet and clicked his fingers, as if to make sure he had placed the groove correctly in space and time, and once he had established that indeed he had, he picked up the correct note and, without missing a beat, opened his lungs to sing.
Suddenly, a hush descended.
It was an unusual occurrence you see, even for this city, in which unusual occurrences are rarely unusual. But this occurrence – specifically one in which at approximately a quarter past eleven at night, on the 1 downtown train, a well-groomed white man and a beautiful, homeless one just happened to be singing Ray Charles together in the moment, in a breathtakingly magical a cappella composition, more breathtakingly magical in fact than most people on that train would ever hear again for the rest of their lives – was extraordinarily unusual.
David and Ameena were each deeply moved.
Whether they were moved by the music itself or by the sight of so anomalous a duo creating art so sublime, it was impossible to say. But the fact remains that they were so moved that they couldn’t possibly just sit there, unmoving.
A kind of curiosity gripped both at roughly the same time, and this compelled them to stand up, to facilitate a closer look at the two people responsible for the extraordinarily unusual occurrence.
And so, David stood up on his side of the compartment.
Ameena stood up on hers.
David didn’t know that Ameena would stand up and Ameena didn’t know that David would stand up, but when the two stood up, they realised straight away that it was the extraordinarily unusual occurrence that had elicited this response, independently, from both.
If they each had a mirror in front of their faces, they would see that despite the many different ways in which they were different, the expression on their faces was exactly the same. But they didn’t have a mirror, and yet they seemed, somehow in the way that people know these things, to know this.
So, they looked at each other. Ameena nodded and David smiled.
1.2
Ameena Bano Hamid, eldest child and only daughter to Yusuf and Zoya Hamid, grew up in a moderately religious Muslim family from Lahore, by way of Pakistan International Airlines and Manchester.
She was shy but strong-willed, and as children who are born into moderately religious families often tend to be, she was also moderately religious. Until the day she wasn’t.
This day came rather unexpectedly when she was eleven years old.
Ameena’s parents lived in a converted split-level flat on Chapel Road – the upstairs level comprising one large and two small bedrooms and a bathroom, the downstairs level consisting of a second bathroom, the kitchen and an oddly shaped half-hexagonal room with three windows that looked out onto the street, and served as the room for everything except cooking, toileting and sleeping.
One evening, it was in this oddly shaped half-hexagonal room that something happened, something hardly unusual in itself, but one that elicited in Ameena a kind of feeling deep inside her chest that she had never experienced before.
That evening, as was their customary way of spending most evenings, her parents, her brother Kareem and his friend Faisal, who seemed to be in their house so often that Ameena had come to think of him as part of the furniture or indeed as a second brother, were sitting on the L-shaped burgundy faux leather sofa that took up most of the room. Ameena was squeezed in between her two brothers, on the long leg of the L, her parents were sitting side by side on the short leg, and they were all watching the BBC and eating her mother’s special shammi kababs – sautéed ground mutton, tenderised and spiced with chillis, coriander and black pepper. It was here on the 8pm news – which, along with a few select cooking shows, also on the BBC, Zoya never missed, come rain, heavier rain
, or typhoon – that Ameena saw an attractive blonde woman in a green dress report that earlier that afternoon a sizeable number of Palestinians, among them young children, some much younger than herself, had been shot dead by Israeli forces firing live rounds.
Nobody thought to say anything further nor to turn the TV off, despite the rather graphic nature of the footage being aired, and when she asked why what had happened had happened, her mother left to bring more shammi kababs from the kitchen, her father looked troubled and her eight-year-old brothers looked angry, and when she persisted with that line of questioning, everyone told her it was because that’s what Jews did.
She accepted the explanation quietly if somewhat sceptically, but only weeks later, something else happened, something hardly unusual in itself, but one that elicited in Ameena that kind of feeling deep inside her chest that she had experienced only once before.
On this evening, they had been sitting in the same oddly shaped half-hexagonal room on the same L-shaped burgundy faux leather sofa, Ameena squeezed in between her two brothers, on the long leg of the L, her parents sitting side by side on the short leg, all watching TV and eating her mother’s special nihari – slow-cooked shank of beef infused with curry leaves, cinnamon and cloves – when on that same infallible augur of all things bright and beautiful, the BBC, she saw the same blonde woman, looking equally attractive, this time in a blue dress, report that earlier that morning, a sizeable number of Israelis, among them little children, some much younger than herself, had been stabbed to death by Palestinian militia.
Nobody thought to say anything further nor to turn the TV off, despite the rather graphic nature of the footage being aired, and when she asked why what had happened had happened, her mother left to bring more nihari from the kitchen, her father looked troubled, and her brothers looked smug while they helped themselves to more rice, and when she persisted with that line of questioning, and still nobody said anything, she wondered if a little Jewish girl somewhere in the world was being told it was because that’s what Muslims did.
That was the day she stopped believing in the concept of a benevolent God – although she would fully understand this only much later – because she thought if an all-powerful being such as that existed, neither would the Palestinian children have been killed by the guns, nor the Israeli ones by the knives.
