David and Ameena

by Ami Rao

  She didn’t know when David came to bed, but he was still asleep next to her in the morning when she woke, his face peaceful, his hair falling in a lazy curl over his forehead the way it did, and when she stepped out into the hallway – tiptoeing like a burglar in her own home – she realised when she peeked her head through the open doorway that the sofa-bed in the spare room had been perfectly made, the bathroom had been left spotless, and Abraham had gone.

  2.23

  Why, Ameena had asked him some time ago, if you came from a musical mother, didn’t you become a full-time professional musician to begin with? Didn’t you think, as a boy, that that’s just what one does when one grows up?

  David had told her that he never thought he was good enough to afford the art the respect it deserved. To many others, accustomed to a less oblique conception of work, this might have seemed an odd response, but she had only nodded. Of course, she understood.

  He had lied.

  Not of course, that he believed he was good enough.

  Which creative person, even if considered a kind of prodigy by others, believes, in their own mind, that they are ever quite good enough? This is the maddening thing about art, though admittedly, the very thing that keeps people like David going, the substrata of dissatisfaction that hooks them like a drug, the awareness that they are trying to get somewhere they know they will never reach.

  But in answer to her question, that was not, strictly, the whole truth. That truth lay, as it usually does, in some other obscure place.

  The truth lay in history.

  The truth lay in circumstance.

  It lay in being the older son of nervous immigrant parents who desperately wanted him to become somebody so that he would fit in with everybody, who clung to the idea that conformity was the best antidote to bigotry, who clung to the ideal of eventual equality in an unequal world, who clung to the belief that power could be earned and shifted, who clung to the hope that economic stability would lead to respectability, which in turn would lead to the eventual demise of the ghosts of the past that had followed them around for over two thousand years like a constant darkness. Who clung to all this like a lifeline.

  The truth lay in his name.

  As a young boy, he didn’t ever get as far as the fear of failure. David Greenberg could not even have imagined it.

  2.24

  And then… Yusuf thought, waiting for Zoya to bring him his evening tea…

  And then, there was Ameena.

  A strong-willed and independent girl who had always known her own mind. She had assimilated admirably into this unknown, unfamiliar Western world. In fact, it was largely on account of her misery that they had stopped their annual visits back to Pakistan. There’s nothing to do here, she would complain, only grown-ups drinking tea all day long. Nobody understands my accent, they keep asking me to repeat the same thing a hundred times. Which is fine because I don’t really understand anything any of them are saying either. I’ve read all the books I brought with me from home. Mum says I’m not allowed to paint here. Kareem spends all his time playing cricket with those other boys on the street outside the house and they won’t let me play because I’m a girl – they even told me that, can you believe it! So sexist! Seriously Abba, it’s so unfair. It’s so hot. It’s so dirty. It’s so crowded. It’s so lonely. It’s so boring. It’s so strange.

  Eventually they had decided to stop going. Especially after his and Zoya’s parents had died. After that, there seemed to be nothing left for them back home, barring a kind of forced sentimentality. Plus, there was always trouble at the immigration desk on the way back. And so, he and Zoya had made the joint decision one day in the taxi back from Manchester Airport after they had been detained for hours in a little windowless room for no apparent reason – when it’s more trouble than it’s worth, it’s better to stop. So, they had stopped, and no one had been happier than Ameena. Ameena was that way. She spoke her mind. Not a girl who believed in keeping things to herself. It was good, Yusuf thought, healthy, to let it out like that. Keeping things inside could make you sick, kill you slowly. At least in her own way Ameena had figured that out.

  Kareem was different. In Kareem, there was a certain unflinching loyalty. And a sense of honour. And a quiet, repressed anger if his morality stood in danger of being violated. Yusuf saw Zoya in him. That’s why he loved his son the way he did. He saw the boy’s mother in the boy. Mirror and reflection. All her imperfections, all her flaws. And Yusuf loved his son in spite of them. Or maybe, he thought with a small smile, it was because of them.

  And Ameena. He loved his daughter with all his heart, the kind of pure, boundless love that made him want to shield her from harm, to protect her from everything, including, if it came to that, from her own destiny. Uncanny though, between his two children, she was the more unpredictable one. She could express herself easily, but you never really knew what she was going to do next, what set her off. With Kareem, he believed what he believed. It might be frightening, what he believed, but at least you knew. You never really knew what Ameena believed. If she believed in anything at all.

  This happened occasionally, he knew that, even in good, decent families – one child who worships a different god, speaks in a different tongue, dances to a different beat. She had flipped around, his daughter, even in the womb, head up, legs down, ready even before birth to jump out and run away. Yes, he thought, Ameena had assimilated well into the West. But then he sighed. Too well perhaps. Which showed a different kind of naivety. Did she realise that reciting Keats and moaning about the rain was not enough to become English? He didn’t think she did, the foolish girl.

  He looked down at his hands folded neatly on his lap. They were large hands, the brown skin starting to wrinkle in places, dark veins rising across them, easily traced. Not quite an old man’s hands. Not yet.

  His mind wandered. Then there was Palestine. The asymmetric violence of it all. Only peripherally his concern until recently. World issues, he thought, the kind where you sit on a comfortable chair in your own home and make political discourse, take a moral stance, express outrage, in front of a television, in front of friends; all that takes on a different light when your own blood is involved. Then it becomes personal. Once again in the news today. More people dead. A baby, they said. A baby. And Ameena, his one precious daughter in the cave of the lion.

  He shuddered.

  ‘Zoya!’ he called impatiently across the half-hexagonal room to where his wife was in the kitchen. ‘What happened to my tea?’

  ‘What happened to your tea?’ she yelled back. ‘Nothing happened to your tea. Tea does not happen by magic. Be patient. It is brewing.’

  She arrived a few minutes later with a tray carrying two cups of tea and a plate of samosas, golden fried and crispy on the outside, stuffed with a spicy potato-pea filling on the inside.

  Yusuf felt his chest brim with tenderness and pride.

  ‘May Allah, Subhanahu Wata’ala, bless you, Zoya. How well you take care of me.’

  Zoya sniffed. ‘Nothing to do with you. My heart was craving for samosas. Remember the samosa stall on Lakshmi Chowk? Butt’s? He used to fry them right there in front of you, while you waited, piping hot and fresh. That first bite. Oof! The crunch of that first bite. It gives me the goosebumps, just thinking about it.’

  Yusuf smiled at the memory. Of course he remembered. Those cool winter evenings in Lahore after the strong sun had set and the mist had crept in, standing on that dusty street corner with Zoya, under the bright fluorescent lights of the marketplace stalls, film music blaring in the background, eating hot samosas off the same plate with the silent awkwardness of newlyweds.

  ‘Do you miss it?’ he asked, softened by the hypnotic whisper of hiraeth. ‘Home?’

  ‘Home? This is home.’

  ‘You know what I mean… do you miss Lahore? Do you ever… do you ever regret that we left?’
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br />   ‘No,’ Zoya said firmly. ‘Think of Ameena and Kareem, what kind of life they would have had there. Corruption, pollution, sanitation, every kind of shun. Whatever our problems may be here, they are small. At least here we get clean water to drink.’

  He nodded. ‘Clean water. Yes.’

  Then he said pensively, ‘Lot of problems in the world. Today’s news was not good.’

  Zoya nodded. ‘I saw. A baby. Kareem was watching with me. When they mentioned the baby, he just got up and left. Put on his shoes and his coat. Didn’t say where he was going, nothing. Just stood up and walked out.’

  Yusuf shook his head. ‘He cannot carry the problems of the world on his shoulders.’

  ‘Yes, but he cannot turn a blind eye either.’

  ‘That is a politician’s job, Zoya, not Kareem’s.’

  But Zoya only pursed her lips and helped herself to another samosa.

  Yusuf took a sip of his tea, perfectly brewed. Zoya, he thought, for all her strong opinions and quirks of passion, was a more righteous person than he. He found it easier to swallow certain things if it meant it would keep the peace. She stubbornly stood by her convictions, no matter the price to be paid.

  Also, the woman knew how to make a perfect cup of tea. She had been right, he realised, he should be more patient next time while his tea was brewing.

  Brewing. He considered the word. A versatile word. Equally applicable to both tea and trouble.

  2.25

  ‘Hello,’ cooed the voice in her ear and she almost jumped out of her chair. David was standing behind her, his lips resting on top of her head, hands massaging her neck in light, long strokes, kneading, slowly releasing the tension in the muscles.

  Hurriedly, she pulled down the lid of her laptop and swivelled her chair around, her hand brushing against the white, ceramic ‘I Heart NY’ coffee mug, making it spin frantically on its base.

  David reached out and steadied it, but she noticed how his eyes had narrowed ever so slightly.

  ‘Phew! Thanks,’ she said, ‘good save! You’re up early!’

  ‘What were you doing?’ he asked pleasantly, and she noticed how his tone was that little bit too perfunctory, and inside her, she felt a dull ache somewhere in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just reading the news.’

  ‘Oh? And what’s so secretive about the news that you don’t want me to see it?’

  She laughed, a high, false laugh.

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ she murmured, ‘how can the news be secret?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying too.’

  She sighed. ‘I guess you wouldn’t believe me if I said I’m having a clandestine online affair with one of the male models I interviewed for the CK briefs piece.’

  He smiled but shook his head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘I’m usually a good liar.’

  ‘You are usually a good liar.’

  ‘Just not this time?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Calm. So calm. So conversational.

  She took in a small, shallow breath. ‘Okay, I really was reading the news.’

  ‘Forgive me, but I feel like we’ve just been here thirty seconds ago?’ David said, and she felt her breathing go quicker.

  He hated confrontation; she knew that. Sometimes she took advantage of it, that quality in him that hated confrontation. But he was holding his ground this time, surprisingly, he was digging his heels in.

  She exhaled, then looked up at him, purposefully, in the eye.

  ‘David, I was reading the news, that wasn’t a fiction,’ she said, and then swivelled back round the other way to open her laptop. ‘Breaking News’, screamed the BBC headline in red and white and bold black typeface: ‘Gaza’s deadliest day of violence in years.’

  The thought comes to her in that moment, the particular moment that her eyes and David’s converge together on that screaming headline, that the BBC and her coffee mug – the same one that David had rescued a few minutes earlier – have the same colour scheme. She finds this so ridiculous, that she would even think to link these two things, that for a second she finds herself terrified, not only of other things, of bigger and more significant things, but of herself, her own mind.

  David, looking at the headline and then at Ameena, is startled by the look in her eyes. Because it isn’t anger that he sees. Or sadness. It is fear.

  2.26

  A few hours later on that same day, Ameena was at her desk at work, in the middle of writing a column on the three things that make an ‘IT’ bag (simplicITy, practicalITy and universalITy) when her phone rang.

  It was one of those gloomy New York days, not unusual for late January, grey and dark with great big thunderclouds of rain that had been rumbling and growling since the early morning and then in the afternoon, they had finally burst, and the rain had come, hard and relentless. A couple of girls from the office had been soaked through on their lunch break, even just from the Jewish deli two doors down, and Ameena saw them tiptoe back to their desks, carrying the white styrofoam takeaway boxes of pastrami on rye, shoes off, feet wet, the ends of their hair stuck together and dripping. Ameena didn’t mind the weather so much; a part of her even privately welcomed it – it reminded her of home, that distinct smell of rain in the air, her mother rushing to shut all the windows in the house, the aroma of the hot, cardamom-flavoured milky tea that her father liked on a rainy day.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, cradling the phone between her neck and her shoulder as she typed up the last sentence of the piece.

  ‘You buy a handbag,’ she had written, ‘not only thinking that you will wear it now, but also that you are going to wear it in the future and that one of your daughters will probably steal it from your closet…’

  Ameena was writing not from experience but from imagination, for Zoya had carried (not ‘worn’) the same severe-looking black PU handbag ever since Ameena could remember. That bags could possibly serve an aesthetic purpose would be inconceivable to her mother, Ameena thought as she reread her sentence – Zoya’s face was her genetic gift to her daughter; handbags were meant for carrying one’s keys.

  ‘Ameena?’ It was Suzy from the gallery sounding strange, kind of breathless.

  ‘Suzy? Hi?’

  ‘Ameena, I managed to get him for your next show!’

  ‘Whom?’

  ‘Leo Ivanov.’

  A pause. Ameena uncradling the phone. Holding it in her hand. Saving the ‘IT’ bag piece on the computer. Turning away from the screen.

  ‘My next show?’

  ‘Your next show.’

  ‘Leo Ivanov! How in the world did you manage that?’

  The older woman laughed. ‘I told you, work hard and good things will happen! Well, this is a good thing, a very good thing.’

  ‘Suzy... wow! I mean, I don’t know what to say, how to thank you for this!’

  ‘Don’t thank me. Just make magic. Ivanov is not only huge, he is, like we say here in America, mega. He may be one man, but he is a mega-man. And Ameena…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘While you make magic, remember that Ivanov makes careers.’

  Ameena nodded into the phone. She understood implicitly what the other woman was trying to say, what great significance lay under her words.

  Ivanov, as everyone in the business knew, was one of the most influential collectors of Ameena’s style of work. So much so that along with a small and powerful coterie of others, he had managed to dictate taste through years of setting the trend and the price, with his eye – and also, his wallet. Artists died to have him at their shows, galleries hung on to his every word. This was a guy the critics followed.

  ‘We must get this right,’ Suzy was saying. ‘Perfect planning, perfect execution. When can you come to the gallery? Friday?

  ‘Yes, sure,’ Ameena replied,
‘of course!’

  ‘Okay, we meet then,’ Suzy said.

  ‘Great. Have a good week,’ Ameena said. ‘…And Suzy…’ she added softly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Then, like a little girl who couldn’t possibly contain all this excitement inside her without exploding, she decided to call David to share her news but instead, heard on the other end, his beautiful voice: ‘You’ve reached David’s phone...’ he said, informing her of a fact that she already knew.

  2.27

  In the evening, when Ameena returned to the apartment, she found there was still no David. Only a handwritten note on the breakfast bar with a single long-stemmed white rose.

  Ameena,

  I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to you at the lighthouse, and I never will.

  I love you.

  D

  P.S. At Mezzrow till late, if you want to come…

  In her head, she heard her father’s voice, slow and measured: ‘Ameena, I would advise you against all this. The world is not kind to those who make such choices…’

  Terrible handwriting, Ameena thought, staring at the note, blocking out the voice, how could anyone have such bad handwriting?

  Then she tore up the note and picked up the rose, inhaling its complex, deliciously distracting fragrance.

  2.28

  It was several weeks later, on a bright, cold Thursday morning, that her mother called just as she was entering her office building.

  It took her a few seconds to process that little event, even in itself. Her mother never called. Neither did her father for that matter. Her parents seemed trapped in a different era when it actually cost money to make international calls. In that, as in many things, they hadn’t appeared to keep pace with the rest of the world. Instead they would text – sparingly and for very specific reasons – ‘Ameena please can you call us when free,’ and she would call.