by Ami Rao
But no, it was definitely her mother calling.
She frowned.
She was already running late for a meeting with Whitney.
‘Mum, this is a really bad time,’ she began testily, feeling instantly remorseful even as the words escaped her lips.
‘It is a bad time for us also, Ameena.’
Her reaction was swift. Death. When one has ageing parents and they talk of bad times, it’s got to be death. She felt her pulse quicken. It never failed to amaze her how physical it was, this fear. Palpable and frighteningly audible – her heart was thumping. ‘What do you mean – bad? Where’s Dad? Are you okay?’
‘Yes, we are okay.’
Relief. They aren’t dead. Not yet.
‘Kareem? Has something happened to Kareem?’
‘Kareem is okay. But… Ameena, something happened to all of us. Few days back. We did not want to bother you. But now, we – your Abba and I – we feel you should know about it. Kareem did not want us to tell you. He tries, you know, he wants to protect you… but we felt…’
‘What’s going on, Mum? Can you just tell me what’s wrong please? And for once in your life can you stop going around the whole bloody world in circles, and get to the point, it’s really early in the morning and you’re driving me bloody batty.’
‘Ameena, don’t use such language. It is not like-lady to use those words.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, you have your own problems, all alone like that in crazy, foreign place.’
‘You know what, Mum, I’m late for a really important meeting and I am going to hang up if you don’t just tell me why you called instead of telling me why you shouldn’t have called.’
A loud intake of breath. A crackle on the phone line. An immediate sense of the physical distance between them.
‘They threw pig’s head into the house.’
‘They threw… what? Who did?’
‘We don’t know…’
‘A pig’s head? What do you mean, a pig’s head?’
‘Pig’s head, Ameena. Suar ka sir. They wrapped it in plastic, and they threw it into the house, while Abba and Kareem were doing their evening prayers. They smashed the window. There was glass everywhere.’
Ameena felt the bile rising in her throat, bitter and acrid. She forced it down. Behind her somewhere a car beeped, setting in motion a whole sequence of beeps of varying degrees of pitch and volume, like an out-of-tune orchestra. Just another morning in Midtown. Ameena winced.
‘Have you told the police?’ she said raising her voice to be heard over the commotion.
‘Yes, yes, police are aware.’
‘And what are they saying, Mum – who did this?’
‘We don’t know. They don’t know. They are trying to find out. They are asking everyone if they saw something funny. Also, the butcher. They asked him because it must have come from his shop, the pig you know, the way it was cut…’
The bile. Sloshing around.
‘…it was very professional. But no one is saying they saw anything.’
‘Mum, this is a…’ she paused before she uttered the words, as if the weight of the words demanded a pause, you couldn’t possibly utter such words without pause, ‘…this is a hate crime.’
‘Yes, yes, we know. Police people also said same thing. That is what we don’t understand. Who would hate us? Your father, he is the kindest man in this place, too kind sometimes, he lets too much go, a wonderful man he is, a good man.’
Despite herself, Ameena smiled. Her mother had never spoken about her father in those terms before, certainly never to her.
‘Ammi,’ she said softly, ‘were they hurt, Abba and Kareem?’
‘No, they were not hurt, it was miracle they were not hurt because the glass fragments, they were everywhere. I am still finding small pieces even after I cleaned the whole area myself so many times, with Hoover, then with mop, then on hands and knees. But mentally they are very injured Ameena, this disrespect… it is…’
Her mother sighed, a kind of deep, sinking sound. A sound you make when there is no word for whatever it is that you want to express.
Ameena looked at her watch. She was ten minutes late. And somehow the lateness made her angry, as if her anger needed something normal and unremarkable for it to emerge, an irritant, irksome yet easily explainable. Like lateness. The pig’s head? That wasn’t explainable, no. That didn’t deserve anger. What did it deserve?
‘Mum,’ she said, finally, ‘we can’t just let this go.’
‘The insurance company will send someone to repair the window. This week they said they will try.’
Ameena shook her head impatiently. ‘God Mum, I don’t mean about the window! How’s Dad?’
‘Your Abba is very confused. He cannot understand.’
‘And Kareem?’
‘Beta, Kareem is angry. You know what he is like when it comes to anything against his family. Such a short fuse he has. Him and you both. I don’t know from where you two got your quick temper, only thing you have, both of you brother and sister, in common. Anyway. I am sorry we had to tell you.’
‘Don’t be silly, Mum. Of course, you had to tell me. I need to go, I’ll call you tonight.’
Ameena arrived, embarrassed and apologetic, nearly twenty minutes late for her meeting, but in truth, she was neither embarrassed nor apologetic. She was furious, the anger that had only minutes ago been born now taking shape, growing inside her, filling her up.
‘We need to make sure,’ Whitney was saying, looking around the room, but it seemed to Ameena as if she was looking only at her, ‘that the designers we are showcasing are not simply hustlers for couture but real people; people of intellect, of creativity, of ambition and character.’
How, Ameena thought, how could someone be carrying a pig’s head down a residential road unnoticed? How? This couldn’t have been a random act of madness by a deranged person. It smelled wrong. She shook her head. No, this kind of thing was almost always premeditated and almost certainly involved more than one person.
‘Ameena, are you okay?’
‘Huh?’
‘Are you okay?’ A pointed question, razor-edged.
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine, I’m great. We have a cultural role to fulfil, I totally get that. Corporate responsibility. Ethical fashion. Yes. Couldn’t agree more.’
Whitney nodded and continued, but Ameena could still feel the other woman’s eyes on her.
‘Boys and girls,’ Whitney said, ‘at a time when print is seemingly waning with too many titles transitioning to digital-only, the success of fashion-based indie magazines like us needs someone like you, someone with a contemporary voice and a connection with our readers. Do I have your commitment to that idea?’
Everyone nodded.
‘Ameena?’ Whitney said, raising her eyebrows.
Ameena felt small suddenly, chastened, like a disruptive student in a classroom being called out for unruly behaviour. She swallowed.
‘Yes, yes. Commitment. Yes, absolutely,’ she said in a low, flat voice.
The editrix-in-chief showed her scepticism by only the slightest twitch of the upper lip.
When David got home that night, he found Ameena standing by the window in the dark, her face tilted downwards.
‘Hey beautiful, whatcha lookin’ at?’
‘The car lights. White on one side. Red on the other. We’ve created such order in the universe. It’s impressive.’ She sighed, then turned round to face him, her back to the window, leaning against it, feeling the coldness of the glass through her clothes. ‘I lost a glove today. I shoved the pair into my coat pockets and then my mum called and when I pulled the phone out from my pocket, one must have slipped out. On the street, just outside work. Looked for it later but of course it was gone.’
‘Sorry, sweet. Hate when that happens. Better to lose both glov
es than one, I’ve always thought. Get yourself a new pair,’ he said kindly, ‘nicer than the old ones.’
‘Oh, and also my family’s been subjected to a hate crime.’
David’s face didn’t change. He was so measured, she thought, always so measured in his responses to the world.
‘What do you mean by hate crime? Are they hurt?’
She shrugged. ‘Well, they’re not physically hurt, but no – they’re not okay. And I’m…’ she shook her head, ‘…I’m not okay.’
‘Ameena, what happened?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Maybe never.’
‘Okay.’
But she told him later that night. Later that night in bed, long after he had gone to sleep, she shook him awake to tell him. And then she sobbed uncontrollably, but she didn’t understand, she said, she didn’t understand why she was sobbing, if it was because such a thing had happened or that such a thing could happen or that she hadn’t been there when such a thing had happened, she hadn’t been there for her family.
And then he held her, just the way she was, lying there on her side, manoeuvring her body into his so there was no space between them at all, just a single, indistinguishable curve like a comma in the middle of the bed, and he comforted her, and eventually they drifted off to sleep like that, with her still shaking and with him rocking her to sleep, telling her to let it out, let it all out, because he understood, yes, he understood, and her nodding into the pillow that she had pressed her face into, because yes, yes, of course he did.
2.29
The bits left unspoken. The margins on a page.
The rest between notes.
The white space on a canvas.
Or
Between
Words
Stories
Histories
The pause. The breath. Caesura.
2.30
1. And then there was the time when David went to music class and a group of boys started singing ‘Hey Jude’ in unison and when he pretended to ignore that and walked straight to his desk, a boy who just happened to be walking past just happened to accidently move his arm in such a way that it just happened to brush against the books on David’s desk, dropping them all to the floor in a big thud-thud, and when David bent down to pick them up, he saw stuck on the underside of his desk a whole lot of yellow stars with thick black lines and the word JUDE scribbled in the middle. He was thirteen, the age at which a Jewish boy officially becomes a man.
2. And then there was the time when Ameena was asked by the other little Muslim girls in school why she didn’t wear the hijab, and those little Muslim girls, in turn, were asked by the non-Muslim girls why they did, and they replied that in wearing it they were being true to their faith and when Ameena came home that day and asked her mother why she didn’t wear the hijab when she – her mother – did, her mother said, you can wear it when you want to, I wore it when I wanted to, not before, so would you like to wear it now, and Ameena took the choice as it was offered to her and said, no, not yet.
3. And then there was the time when David saw Abe, he was sure of it, but perhaps he wasn’t so sure of it, on the road behind the school where the high stone wall blocked off any road access, and Abe was beating up a kid, it was a kid who’d yelled across the cafeteria at lunchtime that same afternoon, looking directly at some of the other Jewish kids eating their lunch, smaller kids than Abe, not nearly as strong-boned, if anyone would like their meat roasted, and that same kid was now backed up against a wall, and he was crouching and holding his stomach and Abe – David thought it was him but he couldn’t be sure – was beating the shit out of him.
4. And then there was the time when Ameena and Kareem were at a department store in Deansgate and the alarm went off and the police were in, within minutes, searching Kareem, not giving anybody else even a second glance, not even Ameena, standing there next to him, because whatever trouble looked like, Kareem was it, with his baggy shorts and his chunky gold watch and his oversized white trainers and his half shaved boy-band haircut, so they were only searching Kareem, stripping him down to his underpants, right there in the middle of the department store floor, searching, searching, then finding nothing and walking off without an apology, without looking back once, only looking annoyed, not because they had searched him and found nothing but because they had searched him and found nothing.
5. And then there was the time when David walking along the corridor at school passed by the staffroom and overheard the other teachers talking about the piano teacher and how she had spoken out against the school’s ‘overexuberant’ celebration of Christmas and how maybe it made sense, despite her obvious talent, to get someone more broad-minded and tolerant of other religions – after all, if Christmas or its celebration offended her all that much, she might as well go to a fee-paying faith school and move her boys there while she was at it. Besides, she smoked way too much.
6. And then there was the time when Ameena and Kareem and their mum and dad were at the trendy new restaurant in town, all dressed up for the occasion, and their father placed his order and the waiter asked him to repeat it three times before Kareem said with slow, cold anger in his voice, ‘What is it that you don’t understand, mate?’ And the waiter said jokingly, ‘Why don’t you do all the orders mate, because I don’t speak Paki, what your dad speaks, yeah?’ And Kareem banged the table with his fist and the water spilled everywhere and he called the waiter an ignorant racist fuck and a dick-shit faggot. And Zoya gasped, just a bit. And the waiter said, ‘Why don’t you stinking curry-faces just fuck off back to your country and clean the toilets there instead of taking our jobs and making trouble here?’ And Yusuf called the manager and the angry waiter was taken away and assigned to another table and another waiter brought out their order, but Kareem was not able to eat a thing, overcome by a seething anger, and Yusuf was not able to eat a thing, overcome by shock, and Ameena was not able to eat a thing, overcome by shame about the curry-faces thing. Only Zoya ate prawn linguine (with extra chilli) all by herself because she had heard it all and frankly didn’t give a damn.
7. And then there was the time when David and Ameena skipped lunch at that school friend’s birthday because the food choices on offer consisted of hot dogs and pepperoni pizza and because kids’ party food is kids’ party food, whether in Rhode Island or in Manchester, and David didn’t mind, and neither did Ameena, for why should they mind, they both thought, independently of each other, and with the Atlantic between them, why should anyone mind, when there is always cake?
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.
(You think?)
2.31
Night-time then, in Lower Manhattan; David and Ameena are in bed. David is fast asleep. Ameena is wide awake.
She had been up for most of the night, thinking about what had happened in Manchester. In her mind she replayed the conversation with her mother over and over, wondering yet again how someone could do something so principally wrong. And why. And the why bothered her even more than the how. She exhaled and held her palms to her temples as if, in doing so, she could squeeze the unpleasant thoughts out of her head. Then she forced her eyes shut, as tight as she could, but a few minutes later she opened them again, as wide as she could – a kind of private mutiny. Hilarious, she thought to herself, a class act, pure comedy, should sell tickets for this one-woman show.
Then she sighed. It was no good. Beauty sleep – much like its component parts – was the rare prerogative of a privileged few. Resigned then, to philosophical insomnia – surely, the worst kind of combination – Ameena turned on her back and forced herself to think about her art; a different kind of anxiety. The following evening, less than twenty-four hours away, they were going to put the art up on the walls in preparation f
or her second show. Restlessly, she began to think about the order in which she wanted the paintings displayed… which one should be front and centre, the very first the viewer would see? Was there a clear showstopper in the collection? Did the paintings exist in relation to each other? Or were they an entity unto themselves? Or maybe they were of a piece, telling a larger story? And so, would sequencing them in a certain way create the narrative thread that held all the individual stories together? And if this was true, how could she play with the arrangement to create an atmosphere of maximum drama?
At four in the morning she decided to give up answering the questions in her head. This was something that needed to be visualised in the actual physical space. And felt, she thought, sitting up in bed and placing her hand on her stomach, here. And so, she got dressed and left for the gallery, tiptoeing to the bedroom door, then turning round, looking at David fast asleep, looking at his shape in the darkness, then feeling for him a sudden swell of love, coming back to kiss him quickly, his forehead warm to the touch of her lips, before finally turning round and leaving.
She walked the twenty blocks to the art gallery in her boots, listening to the crunch of her footsteps on the pavement; there was still snow on the ground, and salt, coarse and pink, and the air was cold and damp, and the streets were quiet, lit only by street lamps and the headlights of the odd car that sped by – kindred New York souls, Ameena thought dryly, attempting to carpe the diem.
When she arrived at the gallery, she unlocked the door using the four-digit code Suzy gave all her artists, left her boots outside on the mat, turned on the lights and sat barefoot and cross-legged on the concrete floor, in the middle of the room. She sat like that, ankles crossed, knees up against her chest, staring at the walls, empty and glowing a bright toothpaste white, working out in her head what went where. It was Suzy’s call, she knew that, but still, she thought, no harm in expressing an opinion. Suzy liked her artists to be involved – it shows that one cares, the gallerist had told her once.
