by H. M. Naqvi
“I’m sorry I haven’t called, Ma,” I began, hoping that she would interrupt me. “But … well … things have been hectic.” It was a sorry excuse articulated particularly unconvincingly. I listening closely for some softly uttered word, a muted bromide, a sigh even, but Ma steadfastly maintained radio silence. “Are you there?”
“Haan, beta.”
“Ma, I’m very, very sorry.”
“Shehzad,” she finally said. “It’s been exactly ten days since I heard from you. You have not told me about what is happening over there, so I will tell you what is happening over here. It has rained for weeks. There has been some flooding. The other day I slipped on the stairs outside—”
“Ma!”
“Don’t worry, beta. I’m all right. I’m not dying, I’m not ill. It’s just a sprain. I wouldn’t have even mentioned it, but I do now because … well … as I was sitting with my foot in ice water, I thought, surely my son could find the time to ring for one minute, just one minute, just to say a quick hello-how-are-you, for no other reason except that he knows it would make his mother happy. So I sat by the phone, waiting and waiting, hoping you would ring, but you did not. So I did. I rang many, many times, and when I didn’t hear back, I began to get worried. I thought, maybe something’s happened to him. These days, with all these terrorists running around in America, you don’t know. So I rang your work number. I know, I know, I’m not supposed to—you’ve told me never to call you there—but I had to hear your voice. Instead, a recorded voice told me over and over, Please check the number and dial again. I began ringing here and there; I must have spoken to ten, fifteen people. Then somebody told me that your number was disconnected because the building you worked in had collapsed several weeks ago.”
Closing my eyes, I held my forehead and was suddenly the little boy who had broken the expensive crystal vase, hoping, wishing that when he opened his eyes, things would be different, like they used to be. The vase, of course, had been replaced; life had continued as before. When I opened my eyes, however, perched on the edge of Mini Auntie’s four-poster, the room remained the same, still and oppressive, and Ma was saying, “I told myself, be calm, there must be an explanation for this. I called Mini, and she told me she hadn’t heard from you or Ali. I didn’t want to frighten her so I acted casual, but I was very frightened, I’ve been very frightened. I haven’t slept for two nights.”
The line crackled, prompting me for an explanation. The moment of reckoning was finally upon me, and it wasn’t as if it was unexpected; it had been a long time coming. I wanted to say that I wished I were with her, pressing her feet, applying Tiger Balm, that I had never wanted to leave in the first place, but the moment demanded truth, not sentimentality.
Just as I began to explain, however, Mini Auntie marched in to change into her sneakers and collect her large black Mary Poppins tote and slim cell phone, which was fixed to a socket beside me. “Still on the phone, child?” she asked, crouching, unplugging the device. “Tell Bano everything’s going to be all right.”
“Everything’s all right, Ma.”
“Is that Mini?” Ma asked.
“Um, yes, yes it is,” I replied, uncoiling the receiver.
“Can I talk to her?”
There was no defensible reason why Ma could not chat with her old friend, except, of course, that her old friend would tell her exactly what had transpired. With Mini Auntie in earshot, I chose my words carefully: “I’m actually over for dinner, Ma.”
“Oh. Acha. Mini must be busy. Well, give her my love.”
“Can I call you from home?”
There was a pause, a second or two of deliberation, before Ma said, “Yes, that’s okay, that’s fine.”
“I love you, Ma—”
“Beta?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“I don’t want to be a bother, but you know … I need to bother you once in a while … I need to hear your voice. I need to know you’re taking your vitamins—”
“I know, I know—”
“I need to know that your office has not collapsed in some terrorist attack.”
“I’m fine, Ma. Don’t worry about me.”
“And beta?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Please say your prayers. You need to thank God that you’re alive and happy.”
“Yes, Ma.”
After bidding her khuda-hafiz, I returned downstairs. The guests had dispersed apace, save a gangly, unassuming “uncle” whom I had met once chez Mini Auntie and once outside Chirping Chicken. One of the most sought-after corporate lawyers in the city, Mr. Azam was accompanying Mini to the Metropolitan Detention Center, presumably for moral support and legal firepower. “Chalo,” Mini Auntie said, flicking the hall lights and wrapping herself in a beige pashmina. “Cha-lain,” chimed Azam.
As we walked to the corner to flag a cab, I repeated my plea to tag along, arguing that I was “in a way indispensable” because I knew the “ins and outs of the place,” which was, of course, one hundred percent baloney; I didn’t know how I got in or how I got out.
Kissing me on the forehead before climbing into the cab, Mini Auntie said, “Get some sleep, child.” Then she waved, and I waved back. I watched the cab careen down East End as if watching a departing locomotive train leaving behind clouds of nostalgic smoke. Lighting the depleted, lipstick-stained cigarette, I then ambled up East 86th like a free man.
12.
Any volume on history in AC’s extensive library could attest to the fact that over the millennia there have been those who have made a living interpreting dreams—shamans and hucksters, prophets, poets, and psychoanalysts—and although I might have needed to see a shrink at that delicate juncture of modern history, I did not need anybody interpreting mine. They were, from beginning to end, semiotically straightforward.
In halcyon times, my dreams were suffused by a healthy, balmy sensibility that produced images of winged lemurs or igloos wrought of mango mousse. One fine afternoon while dozing in the Great Lawn the summer before I began work, I had dreamed of a busty and decidedly Punjabi mermaid batting her eyelids while bobbing in the frothy wake of the Hudson. It recalled the Hughes verse that went,
He found a fish
To carry—
Half fish,
Half girl
To marry.
Lingering like the faint echo of a bubblegum hit, the signified and signifier returned to me throughout the day, refrain by refrain, and at these junctures, I would catch myself smiling and yearning like a hopeful romantic.
In the latter half of 2001, however, my dreams had turned to shit. I suppose everybody’s had. I was haunted by earthquakes measuring a full ten on the Richter scale, corpses in a chorus line, by bugs with forty blinking eyes, by pestilence and other signs of the times. And of course from time to time a vivid specter would visit me during my waking hours—as I fed my soiled laundry into the washing machine or bit into lunch—imposing itself on my state of mind and coloring the remainder of the day.
The night I returned from prison, however, I didn’t dream. Ensconced in my apartment on the hand-me-down futon, I closed my eyes, attempting to sleep, but like a child in a thunderstorm, I couldn’t. There were great matters on my mind—how to break the news of Jimbo’s incarceration to the Khans, what to do about the threat of imminent deportation, and how to make amends with my poor, neglected mother—but it was the picayune, the trivial, the stray Gold Toe sock on the floor that ultimately kept me up. I might have been suffering from Baby Bear Syndrome, convinced that somebody had been in my apartment, and though I saw no empty porridge bowls, I found the chairs suspiciously rearranged in a triangular scheme and the toilet seat mysteriously upright. It would have been different had the place been spectacularly broken into and turned upside down, but the evidence was thin, as if the saboteurs had connived to wreak only psychological damage. The strategy worked. Through the witching hour, I tossed and turned, finding meaning in the secret order of household artifacts.
(1) Go to Khans to break news re Jimbo
(2) check w/Mini re AC
(3) return Abdul Karim’s keys
(4) get job (OR GET DEPORTED!)
(5) call Ma
(6) buy TP, hand soap and other supplies
At seven I called the Khan residence to check if I could drop by later that morning, only to get Amo on the line, who cut me off, saying, “Can’t talk now right now,” which was weird, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time. And afterward I tried Mini Auntie, but she wasn’t home or wasn’t picking up, so I left a rambling message punctuated by pauses and apologies. By eight, tasks (1) and (2), despite my best efforts, remained incomplete and unchecked, and I remembered why, as a rule of thumb, I have avoided drawing up to-do lists: to-do lists delineate failure in black and white.
Since the thought of coming clean with Abdul Karim was so distressing, I skipped task (3) altogether, attempting task (4) instead, an even more daunting prospect: (4) get job (OR GET DEPORTED!) I had four days to secure employment, four days to find an employer willing to sponsor a work visa—a tall order in the best of times, next to impossible during a financial bloodbath. One day, I reminded myself, had already elapsed.
When I returned the call from the boutique research house that had contacted me earlier, a lady at the other end put me on hold playing some grave symphony, Bach, maybe Beethoven, the telltale theme music of rejection. As I waited, as a familiar sense of dread mounted, the standard industry refrain resounded in my head: We appreciate your interest in the position but there were many highly qualified candidates at this time. Instead I was informed that I had qualified for a final-round interview. “We’ve been trying to call you for days,” the lady said. “Today’s the last day of the search process. We can squeeze you in at four.”
Putting the receiver down, I pumped my fist like Starks after swishing a three-pointer over the outstretched fingers of Pippen. Perhaps the tide was turning.
But back then, bad things happened on good days. I was out the door when the phone rang. I was expecting Mini Auntie or even Abdul Karim, but it was Amo. “Shehzad Lala?” she began breathlessly and, I thought, somewhat anxiously.
“What’s wrong?”
“D’you know where I can find Jamshed Lala?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Why?”
“Baba’s had a heart attack.”
I imagined poor Amo finding Old Man Khan slumped on the kitchen floor, dialing 911, attempting coherence between sobs. “Is he—”
“Barely—”
“Where are you?”
“Christ Hospital, Palisade Avenue.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said. “Everything will be okay.”
Rushing out, I calculated that the jaunt to Jersey would take over an hour by subway—that is, if the trains were running on time—but would be less than thirty minutes in outbound traffic. The problem would be flagging a cab, as it was prime time on Broadway. Besuited men and women lined either side of the street at regular intervals, arms in the air. Jogging a five-block stretch, I scanned cabs for heads in the backseat, but there wasn’t a single free taxi visible.
Suddenly, the bald-headed profile of a passing cabbie sparked a thought: Kojo! I thought, I’ll call Kojo! Muttering a prayer that he would be close by, I dialed his cell from a phone booth. As luck would have it, Kojo was picking up a ride on Central Park West, the canton he liked to patrol because of “da rich and da famoos.” When I told him what had happened, I heard him tell his passenger, “Is emergency, madame. Def in da famalee.” Before I hung up, I could hear a woman in the background crying, “You can’t do that! You won’t get away with this! I’ll report you, pal!”
Deaf to the threats and bound to duty, to the cabbie brotherhood, Kojo extricated himself in record time, appearing four and a half minutes later, honking a shave and a haircut. With one arm dangling out the window, the other loosely perpendicular to his chest, he reclined in a beaded seat cover sporting an elaborate earpiece and a crisp crimson bandana worn like a crown. “Thanks so much, man,” I panted, hopping in. “Is no problim, man,” he replied. And we were off.
When I told him that he was looking good, “looking prosperous,” he ran a slow contemplative hand over his shapely head and replied, “You know, Chuck. I wok haad. I makes good monay. I send it to my fada … All my life, I take. Now I give.” He had a way of effortlessly and artlessly breaking it down.
Glancing at the molten Hudson, I said, “I know what you mean, man.”
Zipping down the West Side Highway, however, with the windows down, the stereo on, the sun in my face, I temporarily forgot my anxieties. Kojo had jacked up a mixed cassette of Pepe Wembe, Papa Kalle, Kanda Bongo Man, Amadou et Mariam, and sundry Afropop sensations—the variety of sound that Jimbo would, in better days, cut, polish, and string into coherence. Bobbing to the syncopated rhythms, Kojo and I recalled stories about Gator and the backbenchers and swapped anecdotes about our experiences as bonafide New York cabbies. I related an abridged version of the VP episode. In turn, he told me about the night he found himself in Bush-wick with a flat: “Is dark, like Kivu. Any minit, I think, Mai-Mai is comen.” Cutting the air with a karatelike chop, he added, “But I was ready, like Bruce Lee.”
From time to time, our conversation was interrupted by a sharp synthesized trill, which I initially mistook for a dance-hall touch to the kwassa-kwassa but turned out to be the refrain of the old rap single “Informer,” the ring-tone of Kojo’s space-age cellular phone. After a brief exchange of pleasantries in Lingala, Kojo cut off his compatriots, announcing, “Is life or def situation,” but as we passed beneath the river, he asked, “What is da situation, exactly?”
Angling my body toward him, I explained that I had received a panicked call from a close friend earlier informing me that her father had suffered from what I understood to be a near-fatal heart attack. I did not want to get into the mechanics of my relationship with Amo because I did not want to get into why her brother, my friend, was in jail. That might have led to the revelation that, until recently, I too had been a jailbird. The terrorism charges would take some explaining, even to Kojo.
“This Amo,” he began after mulling da situation, “she is your girlfriend?”
“No, no, no,” I replied, blushing for no good reason. “Just a girl who is a friend.”
“A girl. Who is a friend,” he repeated, varying both emphasis and meaning. “Is she pretty, this Amo?”
“She’s pretty, and intelligent,” I said matter-of-factly, in an effort to compensate for the color in my cheeks. “She’s studying to be an actuary.”
“If ha fada dies, she has som body?” With Jimbo incarcerated indefinitely, she’d have nobody. I shook my head.
When we arrived at Christ Hospital, Kojo asked whether I wanted him to wait, and for a moment I considered the offer, checking the time on the dashboard. It was just about eleven. I would have to leave Jersey by half past two to make it to the city in time for the interview. There was no way I could ask him to wait. “No, Kojo,” I replied. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure something out.” Thanking him profusely, I slapped his outstretched palm for a not-so-high-five and disembarked.
The sky above was cloudless and blue.
13.
Facing Jersey City on the west and lower Manhattan on the east, Christ Hospital is housed in a tall, gray, oblong building. Angular and clean from the outside, like a suburban three-star hotel constructed in the seventies, the place felt dank and oppressive inside; I thought I could detect the faint riverine smell of a cave as I entered, and imagined the air to be teeming with virulent bacterium, superbugs. I never liked hospitals. Although I had only been twice before—once at age four for a virulent outbreak of chicken pox that left a dent on my forehead, and the
n three years later for tonsillitis—and both experiences were sufficiently traumatic because I forever associated hospitals with needles and howls and the stubborn smudges and foul aroma of mercurochrome. At a tender age I had formed the impression that hospitals were populated by the dying and undead alike, that those who went in never really came out.
Such unformed and unfounded sentiments remained lodged in the recesses of my consciousness, but I marched right up to the visitors’ desk without betraying them, asking for Khan in the cardiology ward. I was informed by a long-faced octogenarian, “There’s nobody by that name in cardiology.”
The grim pronouncement could only mean that Old Man Khan was already dead, that Amo was somewhere, draped over her father’s corpse, bawling unattended and unconsoled because I was late and her brother was wrongly incarcerated. “Are you absolutely sure?” I persisted.
The man nodded once, slowly and deliberately, in practiced commiseration. “Okay, so where do they take the dead?” I cried.
“Downstairs,” he tragically replied.
Sprinting down a corridor, I navigated packs of doctors and nurses with tunnel vision and patients on stretchers and wheelchairs, narrowly avoiding what could have been a head-on collision with a rolling cart of stacked lunch trays. Somehow I found myself in a darkened room with a Chinese intern wearing a scowl. Outside I attempted to solicit more accurate directions from a heavyset black lady at the maternity clinic, who asked whether I had a twelve o’clock with a certain Dr. Kahn. “Kahn?” I repeated.
Then, following a sudden hunch, I retraced my steps, trailed by a pair of concerned orderlies, panting and sweating and cursing the milquetoast who had misdirected me. When I spelled out K-h-a-n, he mumbled that he had mistaken Khan for Kahn. I was informed that a Khan had indeed been brought into ER an hour earlier and subsequently had been transferred to the operation theater upstairs for an emergency bypass.
