by Ami Rao
Ameena rolled her eyes. ‘Alright Ammi, I’ll speak to you later, okay?’
‘My grandchildren won’t love me,’ she howled.
‘Who?’
‘My grandchildren won’t love me. I don’t think Kareem is ever going to meet any decent girl – he is all the time with those hooligan friends of his gallivanting here and there. You were my only hope for loving grandchildren, and now even that is gone. Gone and dead. Dead, dead, everything dead. I may as well be dead too.’
‘Mum. Seriously, you’ve got to stop this.’
‘But my grandchildren…’
‘Okay, I need to go to work now.’
‘What is his work, this David?’
‘His work? Oh. He works for an advertising agency…’ she hesitated. ‘He’s also a musician, a pianist. He plays jazz.’
‘Jazz?’ Zoya repeated the word blankly as if she was hearing it for the first time in her life.
Ameena sucked in her breath. ‘Jazz, Mum. Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie…’
‘These are his friends? He is friends with Duke and Count?’
‘Oh God, Mum. No. Forget it.’
‘Okay, send me photo.’
‘What?’
‘Photo. PHO-TO. Are you deaf now? Send me the photo of this Jewish David.’
In New York, Ameena didn’t tell David about the conversation she’d had – there hardly seemed any point. He came back from his run, energised and happy, his cheeks flushed with the early-morning cold, and they both sat down at the breakfast bar, the smell of toast and coffee in the air, and she asked about his run and he told her about bumping into their neighbour – a silver-haired woman who wrapped her dog in a tartan blanket and ‘walked’ him every morning at 6am in a child’s pram – and she laughed and felt a great love fill up in her body for him, a kind of billowing – like she had missed her footing off a cliff and fallen into the sea and her skirt was billowing in the water, and far away the sails were billowing in the wind, and the sea itself was billowing, by the power of what she felt – for the decency of his face and the openness of his laugh and for his honesty and his earnestness and his dreams – and it filled her with a lightness and a freedom.
In Manchester, it was raining. Ameena’s mother put the phone down with a weight on her heart. She felt her chest tighten, but it was not only a physical discomfort that she felt, it was something else – a precise, familiar pain she knew only too well. She knew what it was like to be in love. She knew that feeling well. And she knew another feeling. She knew what is was like when that love went away. The unbearable loneliness, the excruciating ache of separation. She knew that feeling too. She did not envy her daughter. She did not envy this boundless optimism that young people had, this exuberant belief that somehow things had changed in the world, that things would be different and better for them. No, she did not envy that. Nor did she envy what would follow – the enormous crushing disappointment when they realised, as everyone eventually did, that nothing was different, nothing was better, everything was exactly as it had always been – and that life, in the end, when you tallied up the score, was nothing but one tremendous compromise.
2.19
The last of autumn sprinted by in blazing red and passed the baton to winter.
Winter in New York, Ameena thought to herself as she wrapped her deep purple scarf around her face so only her eyes were visible, was a different kind of entertainment altogether. Wintertime was wet in Manchester, and perennially dark, and damp and windy, and the sky turned a particular shade of very-sad-grey, and there was frost, sure, and hail and other such handouts from heaven, but all that compared to this was small-time, a laugh, an insult even – for this here was cold, true cold, pukka winter, where your lips turned blue (actually) and your fingers might fall off if you foolishly left your gloves in the pockets of a different coat – which authenticity didn’t change the fact that she dreaded every minute of it.
Ah, but we’ll always have Fifth Avenue, she thought with a smile, as she walked down the broad sidewalk, lit up like a fairyland. And then she thought – exactly as she had done the previous year around this time – that they really did buy into the spirit of the season in this place.
The shopfronts had been transformed, everywhere was covered in garlands and twinkling lights and glowing balls of glitter and snow-powdered sparkly stars. It was really quite dazzling, she decided appreciatively, and probably exactly the kind of energy recharge that she, like so many other weary people, needed, as yet another year drew to a close.
This was the thing: in America, someone always bought what someone else sold.
Ameena had spent the last four hours in the apartment, painting a piece for her next show – a painting called The Headdress, an idea that had gestated within her for weeks, and that she had finally been able to transfer, with some (limited, she thought) success, to paper and when it was done, she felt both joyful and drained, as if everything she had within her, she had given to the piece, and now she was empty, her reserves exhausted, a camel without water.
She needed replenishment. And so, she’d come out to seek it. Even if it was from the inhumanely cold wellspring of New York City at Christmastime.
David was at a session at a friend’s place in Brooklyn. He had called her earlier to tell her that Hershel had given him the afternoon off – an uncharacteristic move that David preferred not to jeopardise by trying to question. Instead, he’d accepted the gesture gratefully, if not with some slight suspicion, called a musician friend to see if he wanted to play, and the friend had invited him over to his home. Ameena knew him, the bassist from Brooklyn, originally from St John, a highly functioning, incredibly dexterous, intuitive jazz player.
For a moment, she considered going down there to listen to them. None of the guys David played with seemed to mind the few occasions when she had tagged along, sitting on the floor of wherever they were playing, knees up under her chin, watching them, loving their music for loving’s sake, but she knew David wouldn’t answer his phone in the middle of a session and she didn’t like showing up unannounced; a childhood habit, she had always hated being interrupted when she was focused on something, even if it was reading a book, and therefore assumed that everybody else also shared that particular preference.
And so, she decided to walk the length of Fifth Avenue instead, past the extraordinary neo-Gothic façade of St Patrick’s Cathedral, past the laughing ice skaters at Rockefeller Center, past the shop windows all decked out for Christmas. It’s so funny, she thought, that someone took all that trouble over shop windows, so strange that we would even think of doing something like that, dressing up buildings and windows and trees in all this tinsel and light.
She stopped outside one of the big, famous department shops, almost unrecognisable in its festive holiday makeover. Like Cinderella, she thought, in crystal slippers, all dressed up for the ball.
A group of Japanese tourists were taking pictures, their voices high-pitched, full of excitement, thrilling endlessly, it seemed, to the idea of storytelling windows.
‘You’re always in a hurry,’ she had remarked to David all those months ago when they first met. ‘Why, may I ask, are you always in a hurry?’
‘I don’t know,’ he’d replied, bemused by the question. ‘Am I? I guess it’s a New York thing.’
‘Well,’ she had retorted adamantly. ‘I love New York, but it’s never going to become my thing.’
But no, she thought with a sigh. She’d been wrong. For Ameena, even in the past year, time had taken on an urgency she’d never experienced before in her life and before she even realised it, it had become her thing.
Cities are like that. Cities change you.
Ameena turned towards the shop then, almost on principle, as if it would be some great English betrayal if she didn’t make use of this present luxury of snatched time. She pressed
her nose up against the glass and peered through the shop windows, one by one. The theme for that year seemed to be snow globes, the windows all showcasing wintery scenes through the lens of these big, perfectly round spheres of glass. In the first window, two polar bears were exchanging a special moment in a celebratory high five, the second one showed a starry night set against NYC skyscrapers, a third was the elaborate set of a vintage circus, next, a woodland wonderland and then, the grand finale – Santa in a red suit inside a snow globe, looking into his own miniature storified snow globe.
It was completely mesmerising, Ameena had to admit, so detailed and ornate – and so imaginative, those vignettes.
She stepped back, took one last longing look at the complete display, and walked on, feeling, once again, intrigued by the very concept of window decorations, the care that went into creating those little details. There was something both baffling and beautiful about the pointlessness of it, she thought, a kind of giving in to something, like the act of a child throwing an elaborate tea party for her dolls.
She thought then of Denise Richards, her friend at home, whom she had known since she was five, whom she still kept in touch with, who seemed to be constantly in and out of love, believing everything, giving into everything.
Same sort of thing really.
Walking alongside her on the broad sidewalk, a tall lady held the stripy gloved hand of a little boy. They were both wearing woolly coats and scarves, and something about the woman, her height or maybe it was the elegant manner in which she carried her ankle-length black coat, or maybe it was just the protective way in which she held the little boy’s hand, made Ameena stop and notice them.
‘Mommy, is Santa just the tooth fairy dressed up like a fat man?’ the boy wanted to know.
‘Is Santa what? No, Jake! Santa is not the tooth fairy.’
He nodded. Then, ‘Is Santa real? Is the tooth fairy real?’
‘Yes, of course they’re real,’ his mother prevaricated with the rehearsed expertise of a parent.
Am I going to die? Ameena had asked her mother when she got her first period at thirteen. She’d been the first of her friends to get it. She’d never been told about it at home. They didn’t talk about such things in her family. The birds and the bees and other such instructive material, that she found out later all her white friends had been proffered, was not something her family believed in discussing.
‘Don’t be so stupid Ameena,’ her mother had replied impatiently, ‘you’re never going to die.’
On Fifth Avenue, it started to snow.
‘But are they Two. Separate. People?’ the boy persisted.
‘Jake, look at that beautiful Christmas tree on the sidewalk,’ his mother said, trying to change the subject, another prerequisite of effective modern-day parenting.
‘That’s not a Christmas tree. That’s a bush with lights around it.’
Ameena stifled a laugh. How wonderful it must be, she thought, to say it exactly as it is.
The boy noticed her suddenly and she realised that she must look very odd to him, with her face all covered up in her scarf like that – a fuzzy purple head with eyes popping out like Barney!
On a whim, she unravelled her scarf, wrapping it round her neck instead, and smiled at the boy, but he only stared back at her, his eyes serious and unsmiling. She was just starting to wonder if the old ‘don’t talk to strangers’ had evolved into ‘don’t even smile at strangers’, and if so, how sad, even the idea of a world in which children no longer smile freely – when she saw that they were about to turn off onto one of the side streets. On an impulse she made a face. The boy made a face back. She smiled. He didn’t. Standing on the street corner, waiting for her light to change, as the snowflakes – so perfectly symmetrical, they seemed almost unnatural – fell from the sky, Ameena saw the boy turn round a few more times to look at her, but he never smiled, not once. And then he didn’t turn around any more.
She shrugged. Oh well, she thought, can’t win ’em all.
Come to think of it, she’d never been told about her period, even after she had got her period that first time. She’d never, for example, been told that it would happen again, the following month and then every month after that forever and ever. Well, almost that.
She’d been told a few other things though. That first time she found the hideous brown streak on her panties, she’d been told that it was a good, normal thing to happen, and that it was part of becoming a young woman – a virtuous, responsible Muslim woman.
And so later, when Denise got it too, and then Katie after her and Roshni and Alison and Jane, she had been surprised, because she thought it was only something that happened to good Muslim girls, that made them turn into good Muslim women – a kind of coming of age exclusively reserved for people like her.
So then, when she got it the second time, she was convinced she was going to die. Because she’d never been told there’d be a second time. She’d only been told that she was never going to die. And even then, she hadn’t believed it.
All around her, the world turned white.
2.20
‘What are you working on?’ Ameena asked when he got up to get a drink. David had been engrossed for hours on his piano with his headphones on and Ameena could tell there was something different about his body language – he was always so relaxed when he was working on his music. This time there was a stiffness about him, his posture, the worry lines near his eyes, the way he ran his hand through his hair repeatedly, as if he seemed troubled, anxious about something.
‘Oh… stuff…’ he said vaguely, filling a glass with ice up to the very top, a very American habit, she had come to realise.
‘What kind of stuff?’ she asked.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. There’s this guy, Bennie, heard me play at the club the other day, wants to see some of my work…’ He frowned. ‘And it’s hard. I’m not used to the idea that the thing I just played is worth writing down and keeping as the definitive measure of a song as opposed to the thing I might improvise five seconds later. It kinda requires an attitude that’s a little different from the attitude of, okay I’m going to make up the best thing I can in the moment and then I’m going to make up something else one second later.’
‘He wants to see your work, meaning like a tune? Your tune?’
David shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
‘That’s not nothing, that’s amazing!’
David started to pour orange juice into his glass. He had only filled about a third of it when he realised – with some surprise it seemed to Ameena – that the carton was empty. He swore softly under his breath and as Ameena watched, he crushed the empty carton, put it in the recycling bin, opened the fridge once again and, without any visible qualms, filled the rest of his glass with apple juice.
‘Ameena, there have been other guys in the past… nothing’s ever come of it so I’m not jumping yet. I jumped the very first time, a little too high, didn’t really land on my feet…’
‘But you’re so talented.’
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She noticed the faint outline of a tiny frown above his brows, a slight, imperceptible hardening of his handsome, masculine jaw. Then he took a long sip of his serendipitous fruit cocktail. It was then, in that moment of watching David perform this innocuous and irrelevant task of drinking what she imagined to be a truly awful and vile concoction, in a way that did not seem to him to be awful and vile at all, that the realisation came to Ameena that no matter how significant she was to him or what superior significance she might attain in the future, for David, in his life, she would always come second.
This realisation of Ameena’s was not conscious but subliminal, happening inside of her, microscopically, and what was surprising was only that it did not, as she would have expected, terrify her or make her sad, but filled her with a sense of calm and purpose as if a great anxiety that had
been stalking her all this time had now been removed.
But all this was happening on the inside. On the outside she appeared unchanged and normal, just the way she always was, even perhaps slightly on edge given what he was saying.
‘Well,’ he was saying, ‘it makes me very happy that you think so, but the reality, as you know, is that I can’t really focus on my music while coming up with tag lines for instant coffee. It can’t work like this. If you have respect for the art – and I do – I’m going to have to make a choice. Talent is great, but it stops being about talent after a point and becomes about work, commitment and getting a break.’
‘Yes, but I got a break.’
David flicked a curl off his forehead. His lips twitched.
‘Thanks to you, of course,’ she added quickly.
He shook his head. ‘You know, this isn’t me asking for gratitude or anything so old-fashioned but to get your first art show in a dog-eat-dog city like New York without even trying doesn’t just happen. You just happened to meet me, and I just happened to know Suzy, and she just happened to own a gallery. That’s a terrific number of coincidences and I’ve always had a view on coincidences – when you have a whole bunch of them that make something happen or not happen, that has a name and it’s called luck.’
‘Wait, what is that tone? Are you mad at me? For the success of the art show? Are you advocating that ridiculous romantic notion that I’m not a true artist if I don’t suffer for my art?’
David smiled at her trademark excitability and shook his head. ‘Not at all. I’m telling you that the plural of anecdote is not data. And I’m also telling you that first chances are rare, second ones rarer.’
He kissed her on top of her head.
‘So, I guess I am telling you not to screw it up.’
2.21
‘I worry about Kareem,’ Yusuf said to Zoya with a sigh as he put his book down on the small metal stool that served as his bedside table. It was a book about a Formula One driver who had literally crashed and burned and then made a miraculous comeback to win. Yusuf liked survival stories.
