by Ami Rao
‘Hi,’ she said, as she sat down.
‘Hi…’
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to… sorry, I was just… I was thinking.’
‘Thinking’s good. What about?’
‘That you are more beautiful today than you were yesterday and how, therefore by that logic, it would be great to see you tomorrow.’
‘Flatterer. Who taught you your pick-up lines?’
‘No one. I came up with them myself. To impress you. Are you impressed?’
‘Very,’ she said, and she smiled, and he noticed in the candlelight that she had talking eyes.
When the waiter arrived a few minutes later with the wine list, David said, ‘Oh, my… uh… the lady doesn’t…’
Ameena said, ‘I drink.’
David looked mortified at his own presumptuousness but said nothing and Ameena looked more amused than anything else and said, ‘I’m not really fussed, but I have a small preference for red, especially in this place.’ Then, she looked up at the waiter and as if to relieve David of any more embarrassment on her account, said, ‘May I have a glass of the Malbec please?’
Which seemed to work because David quickly regained his composure and amended the order to a bottle, and then when the waiter was out of earshot, he said, ‘I’m so sorry, I should have asked instead of assuming.’ And she replied, ‘No need to apologise at all. My parents don’t drink and neither does my brother, but my great-grandmother, I’m told, drank like a fish.’ Then the waiter returned with the bottle and opened it for Ameena to taste and then, that done to everyone’s satisfaction, poured them their glasses and left, and when he left, she looked at David and her eyes sparkled. ‘I guess,’ she said, as she raised her glass, ‘I take after her.’
‘Cheers to that,’ David said.
‘Cheers to that,’ she agreed.
And when, a few minutes later, they looked down at the food menus in front of them, and without even opening them both exclaimed ‘Big Mama’s Meatballs!’ in the same breath, they laughed at the coincidence – but not really – of that, and so naturally they ordered the meatballs and also some linguini and some vegetables, all of which they partook of with great pleasure and David noted, with some relief, that Ameena seemed to enjoy her food, though why this made him relieved he wasn’t quite sure.
‘So, what do you do?’ she asked conversationally.
‘I work in branding, you know, advertising…’
‘Cool…’
‘…by day…’
‘Uh oh. Sounds dangerous.’
He smiled. ‘I play jazz by night.’
‘You’re a musician!’
He shrugged. She was watching him, he noticed, with a very intent expression. ‘An aspiring one, I guess. Jazz is the only thing I’ve ever been truly passionate about. One day, I’d like to ditch everything else and just work on my music full-time… creating great music… playing with all the genius musicians out there… getting better at coming up with my own stuff, taking more risks with my instrument.’
‘Wait, what instrument?’
He smiled. He had, she noticed, a deep, honest smile. ‘Piano. I play piano.’
She nodded thoughtfully. ‘An ad man by day, a musician by night. Interesting,’ she said. Then she looked at him, and he could sense her curiosity – he had touched it, now it was unfurling.
And then, as if by some cosmic desire to prove him right, she said, ‘And the ultimate ambition is?’
He laughed. ‘Ha! Why not ask the hardest question upfront! The ultimate ambition… wow… okay… I guess, just to get better artistically, really. Play more, play better, work on my chops…’
‘Chops?’
‘Oh sorry – that’s skills – the ability to improvise well.’
‘And then? When you’ve done all that?’
‘Ah, but you see, you’ll never ever have done “all that”. It’s infinite.’ He paused and his eyes widened momentarily as if he himself was marvelling at that, at the very fact that it was infinite. ‘But, let’s see, what else do I think about? Film scores? If that opportunity ever arose? I’ve always been interested in that, you know, the relationship between storytelling and music, so… coming up with the right music for the different scenes, thinking thematically about harmony and mood and things like that, that excites me.’
‘Like, composing? You compose?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, but spontaneously. That’s what jazz is all about. You know much about jazz?’
Ameena shook her head.
David smiled. ‘We’ve got to change that. So, a jazz tune is literally one moment in time.’ He snapped his fingers once. ‘It’s one of the few arts in which creation and performance happen as one, and you do this together with the people you play with, a kind of endless exploration. That aspect of jazz is what makes it magical for me, why I fell in love with it in the first place. So, yeah, all the time, all the time in my head, I’m making music.’
For a second, it was only that, an imperceptible second, she said nothing and there was between them a silence. Then she smiled, but still said nothing, and he couldn’t be certain, but he thought he saw a small hint of something pass over her eyes, a shadow or a distant memory or a frisson of sadness.
But apart from those few moments of silence brought about by shyness or else the impulse one feels on a first date to create some sort of impression, hopefully good or at least not explicitly bad, so that there is, at the very least, the hint of an allusion to the second date before the first date has officially ended, they found that they could speak to each other comfortably and that the conversation mostly flowed.
This David felt, from instinct or experience or a bit of both, boded well, just like that first intimate encounter with someone, for there was infinitely more to first times in half-light than just first times in half-light. Lovemaking, to David, was a skill, a kind of alchemy that if done right, entailed an exchange of energy, a coming together that was much more powerful than the sum of its parts; it was more than just a thing people did, he viewed it almost artistically, a beautiful act of one-ness created intuitively, emotionally and freely in the dynamic plane of the present. Like jazz, in many ways. Yes, first times in half-light, David believed, could be wonderful, powerful, meaningful...
He had barely got this far in his head when he chided himself for thinking sexual thoughts so early into meeting this girl, but then, he told himself, he wasn’t exactly thinking sexual thoughts about this girl, he was merely drawing a comparison between two first-time experiences, and that the point was that the conversation between himself and Ameena mostly flowed, and that this fact made him happy.
While David was thinking these thoughts, Ameena was thinking thoughts of her own, about dancers and pianists and fingers and feet. They were uneasy thoughts, not altogether pleasant and a little bit dark, and so she was more than a little relieved when David broke the silence.
‘I didn’t ask what you did,’ he said, realising suddenly that he hadn’t.
‘No, you didn’t,’ she said affably.
‘Well…?’
‘We-ll… like you, I do something, and I enjoy it, sometimes more than others, but I guess that’s with any job. But it’s not what I really want to do. Speaking of ultimate ambitions and all. I mean, it’s all very far-fetched and fantastical, but I have this… I don’t even know what to call it! Passion? Desire? Dream? Dream, I guess, I have this dream.’
He smiled. ‘Don’t we all?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling back, ‘I suppose we do. Well, anyway, I work for a fashion magazine, I write for them… it’s a lot of fun… but I paint… for myself… when I can… in my spare time. And like you, I’d like to do more of it. I’d like to tell stories – with my art.’
‘A writer who wants to be an artist! I knew you were a
creative type!’
‘Really? How?’
‘The eyes.’
Ameena obliged by rolling her eyes theatrically and they both laughed. David wanted to ask what kind of stuff she painted but also felt that this was the sort of thing that people tell you themselves when they are ready to tell you and so he thought it best to save it for the next time they met, the likelihood of which he now felt cautiously confident about.
They both declined dessert but ordered coffees and when they arrived, Ameena said, ‘Isn’t it always a nice surprise when the chocolate sprinkles on the cappuccino are really, really good?’ And David said, ‘You know what, I’ve never really thought about that, but you are absolutely, one thousand percent, impressively right! I guess – putting my branding hat on now – you aren’t really focused on the chocolate… as long as the main event is okay, you’re happy, but yes, these sprinkles are really, really good and it is nice, like… like some kind of unexpected treat.’
‘Yeah...’ she said, spooning some of the chocolate-dusted froth into her mouth in a way that David thought was incredibly sexy, though why spooning chocolate dusted froth into one’s mouth would be sexy he didn’t know, but it was the particular way in which she did it, he decided, was what made it so, ‘…exactly that.’
After dinner, he offered to walk her home and she said she preferred he did that another time, so they said goodbye outside the restaurant and he asked if she would like to meet again and she said yes she would like that very much, and he said that was great in a very composed manner, but privately he whooped, and then he kissed her on the cheek, just very quickly, and she left, and as David walked home he thought about Ameena and that her sort of beauty was altogether different than any of the girls he had encountered before.
Overnight, New York went, as it had started to do with alarming regularity in the past few years, from winter to summer.
Just like that.
No gradual waning of the cold air and the frost and the darkness.
No gentle waking to the song of the blackbird or the slow metallic lightening of skies.
No butterflies and no bees and no red-breasted robins with their chests puffed out.
No daffodils.
None of these things Ameena had grown up with in England.
No spring.
No prelude.
No such thing.
No, David and Ameena arrived home that night after dinner at Valentino’s wearing their woolen winter coats, and left for work the following morning in short sleeves and cotton, as though they had been transported somehow, in the course of the night while they were still asleep, to a different city.
For the streets they walked on had been transformed, the same streets that for months now had been dark and grey and caked with grime now seemed alive, jumping with streaks of sunlight that made them appear cleaner and brighter and more hopeful. The streaks, golden and thick like honey, didn’t stop on the streets, but climbed audaciously upwards, up people’s feet and their legs and their bodies, ultimately reaching their faces, their eyes as they squinted into the sun, and the sun changed those faces, lighting them and lifting them, both the faces and the spirits within.
David and Ameena felt it too, and felt changed by it, the heat from that honey like a kind of tingling on their skin.
And with that, winter was done.
On that morning, the morning after their first date, David leaving his home, and Ameena leaving hers – though ten minutes apart, which led to them taking different trains, for the subway is efficient at that time of morning – both considered this, and believed that this also, was an unexpected treat, like a particularly nice kind of chocolate dust atop one’s cappuccino.
1.8
Ameena’s parents – Yusuf and Zoya – had been united by means of an arranged marriage as per the prevailing custom in Lahore at the time they got married, and still prevailing for that matter at the time Ameena would have got married had she also been in Lahore.
The marriage had been arranged by the elders of both families – specifically by Ameena’s father’s grandmother and Ameena’s mother’s grandmother, two notoriously rebellious ladies as rebellious ladies in Lahore went, in that they were the kind that drank whisky, smoked cigarettes, played cards and wore designer shalwar kameezes with bold and colourful prints that teetered on the edge of risqué.
By virtue of belonging to a similar socio-economic class, and thus having common friends who also belonged to that same socio-economic class, the two ladies were members of the same ‘kitty party’ – a monthly, women-only affair involving lunch, gin, gin rummy and gossip – and, on account of their mutual propensity to do ‘naughty’ things, were drawn to one another, and became over the years firm friends.
When Yusuf’s grandmother then spotted Zoya – a young, slender thing with thick, black, wavy hair down to her hips, and large, kohl-lined eyes – at a wedding, and realised upon enquiring after her that she was her great friend’s granddaughter, she clapped her hands and laughed in glee, for what could make an already strong friendship stronger than by cementing it with marriage.
The following month, on a Wednesday, at the kitty party hosted by one Mrs Mallik – the wife of a powerful opposition party politician – over peas pulao and some delightfully tender mutton kofte – Yusuf’s grandmother proposed the match to Zoya’s grandmother. Ages and qualifications were discussed and details swapped (Yusuf: 29, BA Engineering; Zoya: 21, B.Ed.) as were subtler considerations, specifically relating to the girl’s ability to nurture, nourish, maintain a happy home, be of sound mind and good disposition and have the capability to take care of her future husband and all his present and future needs. Mutually satisfied with what they had gleaned about the young people, the old ladies grabbed each other’s hands, kissed each other’s cheeks, downed the last of their whisky-sodas and, over a particularly delicious badam kheer – rice pudding with almonds and raisins and spiced with saffron and cardamom – agreed it was a match.
Yusuf’s parents and Zoya’s parents were each separately informed of this auspicious and highly desirable proposal for their respective children’s marriage. Then, Yusuf’s parents informed their son and Zoya’s parents informed their daughter of the fact that they were each to be imminently married to the other. That done, the imam, who quite propitiously happened to be a friend of both families, was consulted, and with much fanfare and celebration a date was fixed.
While all this was happening, Zoya was secretly seeing someone at the university at which she was studying to complete her B.Ed. degree. The someone she was seeing was a professor of English and Comparative Literature, and the reason it was secret was because he had a wife, three children, and was nineteen years Zoya’s senior. The professor claimed he loved Zoya with a gripping, consuming passion and no longer loved his wife, and yet at the same time hadn’t left his wife, although he had been promising Zoya to do so for the better part of the previous twenty-two months since their affair had begun. This seeming inability to action his words had been causing a steadily building tension in the relationship, like the pressure in a pressure cooker that builds silently but steadily, until it finds release in that first screaming whistle.
When Zoya was informed of her upcoming marriage, she arranged to meet the professor on a sultry evening at Racecourse Park, where under the shade of a peepal tree – the very type of tree where roughly around the fifth century BCE, some 1,287 kilometres away in the state of Bihar, which was in the eastern part of the neighbouring country of India, the Gautam Buddha had attained enlightenment – she informed the professor that if he didn’t leave his wife by the date fixed for her marriage, he would never lay eyes on her again.
‘I cannot be without you,’ the professor pronounced, his voice thick with emotion.
They walked a while. The sun had set, the crowds had thinned. With darkness came a stillness and a coolness that hung above th
em, suspended in those evanescent moments between dusk and nightfall. Zoya shivered slightly and the professor put his arm round her as they walked past the lake and when they crossed the flower beds, suddenly everywhere was filled with the heady smell of roses. ‘I know,’ Zoya said and she was clear-eyed.
Possessed at once by an almost sickening desire, the professor grabbed her arm and dragged her across the grassy expanse to the far side of the park. It was cooler here, darker, dense with trees, their trunks, thick and gnarled and encircled with roots twisted together like millions of crawling snakes. Here he stopped, still holding her arm, his grip so tight, she would still see the mark of his fingers on her wrist days later.
Then, passionately, he took her against the ancient trunk of a nearby willow tree under its swooping canopy of neon green leaves, hard and deep and with a need so acute she felt powerless against its force, and then he turned her round to face him and pressed her against him, so tight as if he wished her body to be subsumed into his own.
Their goodbyes that evening were unusually brusque and almost cursory, as is often the case when lightness secretly masks heaviness; the weight from knowing what neither was brave enough to admit. Once again, the professor promised to leave his wife, but a month passed, then four, then six and the wedding date drew nearer and still he didn’t.
Zoya did not tell anybody about the professor until her wedding night, when Yusuf lifted up her heavy pink and golden wedding lehenga and pulled down her white cotton panties and then whispered in her ear, ‘I’ll be gentle, I promise not to hurt you.’
At which point Zoya looked him in the eye and said, ‘I am not a virgin.’
It took a long while for Yusuf to accept this truth. But he was a religious man who believed in forgiveness, and by and by he came if not to accept, then at least to forgive. For he realised that the arrangement of an arranged marriage meant that she couldn’t possibly have told him any earlier and that really, if she had wanted to, she needn’t have told him at all.
