David and Ameena

by Ami Rao

  While before she screamed at everyone and everything, now she would speak to him sparingly; not much, no more than a few words here and there – How are you? How was your day? Good morning, good night – uttered with a disinterest that made him wince, and he felt, in a strange and shocking way, that sometimes he preferred her storminess to this coolness. The storminess was familiar, it came with Ameena, the flip side of her passion, but this? He found that he was wary of this, this shadow, of its unfamiliar shapes, its darkness.

  But he held on. Why? He would wonder years later, when he thought back to this ‘phase’ in their lives, why had he held on when the easiest thing for him to do would have been to cut loose and run?

  ‘Timekeeping began with the observation of the heavens,’ David’s father used to say when he was teaching the boys how to tell time, ‘a profound awareness of the fact that the sun sets, only to rise again.’ Perhaps it was that. Hope. That silent resilience that flows through the progeny of survivors. When you come close enough to tasting death, they say, you experience the urgency to live. There is a hunger in them, in people whose people have breathed in the air at the edge of the world, a hunger and a doggedness, to never give up, to live – to experience life in all its whimsical incarnations to an extent that might seem foolhardy to the traditionalist, idealistic to the cynic or martyrdom to the never-oppressed. What then, in the face of all that, is a mere lovers’ quarrel?

  But perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps it wasn’t about hope or heart.

  Perhaps it was jazz; the evanescent, viscerally uplifting quality of it.

  Live in the moment, says jazz. And when it’s gone, it’s gone, let it die. And a different version will be born. So, let it go. Give it wings, set it free, let it fly. Feel the flow, start afresh, make something new, improvise, improvise, improvise. Don’t look back, release yourself, just let the music be. That is the magic of it, of its existence, never constant, always changing, morphing, shifting, discovering. Being worked out in the moment. Pleasure masquerading as pain; pain masquerading as pleasure. The impermanence of both. The resilience of what endures.

  You can take away our instruments, but you cannot take away our souls.

  But perhaps it wasn’t about jazz either.

  Perhaps it was about faith.

  Ameena had said about Manchester once, ‘It’s the only other city I love. Outsiders may not understand why, and I get that. It’s wet, dark, industrial. You have to look hard to find its beauty. But it’s there. I see it.’

  Perhaps David saw it too. Her beauty. For we find beauty in everything we love. Whether in cities or in people. And when we find it, we forgive. We forgive everything of those we love.

  So perhaps somewhere in him, he knew that it was there. Lurking beneath the shadows, surfacing gradually, like the rising sun. And perhaps he also knew that when the sun did rise, he would be there to receive its warmth and its light, because that was part of the deal wasn’t it, to embrace her when she was ready to be embraced, for being without her seemed unthinkable to David. He had become acclimatised to her now – to her inquisitiveness and her passions and her vulnerabilities and her strong opinions and her fierce, protective love – and he loved her back, even for all her flaws, he loved her, for who in this world is without flaws anyway?

  So, he held on. He waited, patiently and without complaint.

  You cannot force someone to return, he knew that – one of the oldest laws of the universe – just like you cannot force someone to stay.

  3.11

  For David, the world is jazz.

  Some nights ago, he’d been playing at a club he hadn’t played at before when the drummer walked up to him on a break – I know a guy who knows a guy, he said with a straight face.

  And David laughed, but he took down the details.

  A few days later, he agreed to meet the guy, an unknown twenty-five-year-old television director about to shoot his first theatrical feature. They met at a bar on Jane Street, and over a bottle of whisky, the young film-maker said that he had listened to David’s version of a classic jazz tune and he wanted a similar-sounding soundtrack for his feature debut, an interracial love story set in 1970s Harlem.

  ‘Your music is forward-thinking, yet conscious of its roots. I’ve heard that tune before of course, but then I listened to you play it your way and you changed it for me. I was humming it in my sleep,’ he told David after the first glass, ‘so then I had to meet you.’

  ‘I don’t have a fucking clue,’ he confessed after half the bottle, ‘where this is going to go. It’s an experiment really, but then so is life isn’t it, one giant experiment? You take all these chances and you muddle through them and hope something good comes of it in the end. So, I thought, if you’re up for the ride, it could be, you know, fun…’

  Drawn in by the romance of the script, and also something about the director – his enthusiasm and his boyish charm – David had agreed to explore where the partnership might take them.

  Those were the days when Ameena shunned his company, expressing her displeasure (Was it disgust? Disdain? Disinterest? David found it hard to distinguish sometimes.) when he was around the apartment, as if his very presence was proving irksome to her existence.

  And so, David immersed himself in his music, toiling late into the night, grateful for the work that served to fill, or at least distract from, the Ameena-shaped void in his life.

  Creatively, he found the work unexpectedly gratifying. The challenge of the speed and productivity required, combined with the unpretentiousness of it all, made it surprisingly contiguous to David’s improviser’s temperament. At the same time as experimenting with the score – a labour-intensive, solitary task – David craved the social, almost-spiritual element that jazz offered, and he found himself at the piano almost every night. There were things about playing with other people that stirred in him an absence of self, a non-self, that he had never perhaps felt as acutely before. At the highest level, he knew bands operated subconsciously to find that singular artistic voice, and that the interaction between the different members of the band was happening at the level of the instant, much faster than the conscious mind could hope to keep up. And so, he found himself reminded – compelled to remember – that there was a great beauty in making music with other people, an act of unification, a finding of synergies, a mind-melding experience that allowed the music to be created by the product of many minds working in harmony without any awareness of self.

  Ultimately, this would be what saved David, for although the culture demands of us to put all of our belief into the individual, ultimately it is always other people who save us.

  3.12

  It had to arrive, sooner or later, and then it did.

  A magnificent summer’s day. Incredible, when it happens. Incredible, every time.

  On the eve of one such day, when David walked into their home, he saw her with her hair up, a bright blue apron tied round her waist, cooking in the kitchen. She hadn’t stepped into the kitchen in weeks.

  ‘Hey Piano-man,’ she said brightly when she noticed him.

  ‘Hey…’ he began carefully.

  Trust in the moment, one of the greatest lessons of jazz: When in doubt, trust in the moment and go for it.

  ‘Man, Ameena, that smells heavenly.’

  ‘Goat biryani. Mum makes it to celebrate things. Birthdays and Eid and exam results and things.’

  She said this conversationally, cheerfully almost, and David, like a good musician, took his cue. She was offering him a chance to play; he was going to take it. Another jazz lesson. Playing with others. Remember: they show their love for you and you show your love for them.

  He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. ‘Honestly, that must be what heaven smells like. It must! It must be what all the fuss is about!’

  Ameena smiled. And the smile awakened in David an aching desire, a yearn
ing for something that had been unreachable to him all these weeks. He felt it touch him, and he felt mildly annoyed by it, by this offending need he seemed to carry for her even in the most inopportune of times.

  But she seemed not to notice. ‘It’s the spices, you see. You cook the rice with saffron and whole spices, cloves and cinnamon and cardamom – here, smell.’ She crushed a small, green cardamom between her fingers and held it up, so David could breathe in its pungent, nutty aroma.

  ‘Ummm,’ he said.

  ‘Lovely, no?’ she agreed, then smelled it herself, before she threw it into the pot.

  ‘And then,’ she continued, ‘I cooked the meat separately. Then I layered them, meat and rice in alternating layers, meat at the bottom, rice on top, and then I steamed the whole thing! My mother would be so proud!’

  Her cheeks were flushed. She looks so youthful, David thought, so childlike.

  He smiled. ‘I’m sure she would.’

  ‘Yeah man. No shortcuts. I even went to the Pakistani butcher in Little India.’

  ‘That’s actually very funny.’

  ‘Well, considering there isn’t a Little Pakistan in Manhattan, I guess that’s quite a logical place for him to be. In any case, I think the Indians and the Pakistanis tend to be friends, outside of India and Pakistan, that is.’

  ‘So, you went to the Pakistani butcher in Little India…’

  ‘Yup. It was great fun, we spoke Urdu, he told me how happy he was to sell me his meat, then he said I reminded him of his daughter, and he gave me lunch.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She nodded. ‘I offered to pay, and he said with great indignance,’ – Ameena put her hands on her hips in an exaggerated mime – ‘he said, would I even think of paying my own father for lunch?’

  David laughed. ‘Looks like you’ve had a good day.’

  ‘I have.’

  David caressed the top of her head, where her hair was tied up in a bun; he did this swiftly, guardedly – a door that’s been opened, but only an inch. She looked up at him, and when he held her gaze, she undid it – for him – and it fell down her back in soft black waves. That yearning again.

  But, ‘I’m glad,’ was all he said.

  There was a silence then for a while, not the uneasy silence that had lingered between them these past weeks, but a different one, as if they had tacitly crossed over to the other side of the angry river – there was no wading into it, no swimming, no walking through, only leaping across. And knowing this privately, individually, they had both leapt across and found the other on the other side. And so, there were no words and no sound but for the clattering of the pot, the slow sizzle of the flame as she turned it up.

  ‘So,’ he said after a few minutes, ‘if this is a celebration dish, then what are we celebrating?’

  ‘Should we eat first?’ she replied. ‘It’s ready…’ Her eyes twinkled humorously. ‘Unless you’d rather wait. For background and context…’

  ‘Are you kidding? I would wrestle you to the ground for some of that, Miss Ameena! Context can wait.’

  She laughed, and it seemed to him that she had laughed after a very long time. They sat down next to each other on the bar stools they had bought together at Bloomingdale’s the weekend after they’d moved in. He’d wanted white, she’d wanted cream – it’s not a footballer’s house, she’d said pointedly – but they’d settled in the end for a chic, modern grey. They had placed these bar stools along the inside length of the kitchen counter, even though doing so encroached upon precious kitchen space, but it seemed worthwhile, they agreed, to do this, for it allowed them to gaze upon the river while they ate, a beautiful affair, especially in the evenings when the sun went down and the lights came on and the bridges sparkled like jewelled hoops reflected in the water like that.

  Ameena served him some of the biryani and then served herself. They ate together, looking at the dark swirls of the river, rhythmic in its flow, a seemingly effortless fluid grace. Mesmerising, just to look at.

  ‘This is just phenomenally good,’ David remarked appreciatively.

  ‘We are celebrating the fact that I love you,’ Ameena said, answering his question from before.

  Love. She said the word fiercely. And David’s heart leaped. She’s back. There was nothing unfeeling, David knew, about his Ameena. Ameena, like jazz: passionate, inquisitive, emotional, intuitive, necessarily flawed, histrionic, joyful – and largely lost when translated into words.

  Not like the girl he’d been living with these past weeks, a clever impersonator, surely, a charlatan. He grimaced inwardly at the thought. No, Ameena was Ameena, in all her fullness of love and life – when Ameena hugged you, she hugged you so tight it almost hurt. He had learned this about her, that her love was as fierce as her hate.

  ‘Okay,’ he nodded, ‘that’s worth celebrating.’

  ‘And…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that I’m sorry, David, for my extraordinary solipsism.’

  He smiled, a small, sad smile, but he said nothing.

  ‘And the unimaginable hurt that’s caused you… it’s unforgiveable…’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not.’

  ‘Let’s forget about it,’ he said.

  She shook her head, but her eyes were steady, looking straight into his – a question.

  David looked directly back at her – an answer.

  She nodded then, gratefully.

  This is their private language, a mode of communication they have established between themselves a long time ago that helps them negotiate each other even in difficult times. They have learned the meaning of each other’s faces and they need nothing more.

  ‘And?’ he prodded softly, sensing there was something else.

  ‘And… that I called Whitney. She’s happy for me to come back from my… break. I didn’t think she’d be quite so generous, but…’

  He nodded. ‘That’s great,’ he said, ‘that’s so great.’

  ‘And, David…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I found someone. This guy. He curates. He’s young, just starting out. Nowhere nearly as established as Suzy, not even close. There’s probably no money in it at all. Or fame or any of that. But I don’t need all that. The important thing is that he’s willing to help me. The thing is…’

  She hesitated. And when she spoke again, he felt the catch in her voice pull at his heart.

  ‘…I want to start painting again.’

  He nodded. He understood how hard this whole ordeal had been for her, how it took a certain honesty for her to have said what she said, even to herself.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know you do.’

  Their sex that night was serious and intense. At one point he stopped moving and just looked at her, his face so close above hers. ‘Wow,’ he said with genuine wonder. ‘Wow. I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you are.’ At another point later on, she gripped his shoulder blades and let out a low, raspy moan. Her eyelids fluttered, and her face changed. He knew that face. He knew all her faces.

  After they had finished, she had fallen asleep almost instantly. And now she was lying there next to him, flat on her back, arms outstretched on either side of her body, face serene, those same eyes closed shut. It made him feel almost guilty, looking at her that way, watching her small face, her chest moving peacefully in tune with the shallow, steady breaths, a kind of survivor’s guilt, a realisation that when a certain type of hand is dealt, some of us fold quicker than others.

  3.13

  There is a particular memory from Ameena’s childhood that holds for her a certain significance. It is one of her earliest lucid memories, its meaning as clear and as convincing to her adult self as it was unsettling and ambiguous to her child one; an example, she considers, as good as any, of the futility of hindsig
ht – that infuriating, retrospective habit of the mind which allows us to uselessly understand now what would have benefited us to understand then.

  In this memory, she is very young, a little girl, but she can’t remember how old she is, she can’t remember exactly. It is morning time. She is upstairs in her bedroom in the house on Chapel Road. The walls are painted pink, the exact shade of itch-relieving calamine. Apart from the colour, itself an indulgence, the walls are bare – posters of pop idols or movie stars are frowned upon by her mother. Ameena is standing facing the small oval mirror that hangs at a crooked angle on the wall above a clever Ikea creation meant for small spaces – dressing table and study desk rolled into one. Her mother is getting her dressed for school. She is already in her uniform – pleated grey skirt, red t-shirt, grey socks up to her knees. Her mother is braiding her hair in front of the oval mirror; two fat braids that fall all the way to her waist, tied at their ends with plain black elastic. She remembers that, and also that it was raining heavily, she remembers that too, she remembers it clearly, a kind of psychedelic haze outside her window blocking out all the familiar discernible shapes.

  ‘What day is it today, Ammi?’ she asked.

  ‘Day? Today is Tuesday, naturally,’ Zoya replied, suppressing a yawn.

  Ameena nodded. ‘On Tuesdays,’ she enquired, ‘do I stay for a half day or a full day?’

  ‘Full day,’ her mother replied, ‘Tuesday is full day. Every Tuesday is full day. You already know this.’

  ‘Am I having lunch there?’ Ameena asked.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Zoya said tetchily. ‘What is it with all these twenty million questions so early in the morning? Today is Tuesday, every Tuesday is full day, and you will have lunch in school, like you always do every full-day Tuesday.’

  And with that final, unambiguous confirmation, to Zoya’s bewilderment, Ameena burst into tears.