by H. M. Naqvi
“My name is Tanya.”
“Tanya,” I repeated. The name not only worked on either side of the civilizational divide but possessed a pleasant resonance. “You know,” I said, “you have a really lovely name.”
Grinning ear to ear, Tanya gamboled over, laying her hands on the armrest in a gesture of good faith. We discussed which cartoons she watched—Pokémon, Tiny Tunes, Bugs Bunny, in that order—and which school she attended, and I correctly guessed her favorite color. In a matter of minutes, we became the best of friends. As I chatted with her, I realized I had not interacted with a child since leaving Karachi. In fact, I had not attended a baby shower or funeral for that matter. It was, in some ways, a strange, disconnected existence.
When Mrs. Abdul Karim returned balancing a tray of chai and vanilla cream wafers artistically arranged around a lemon tart, she found Tanya perched on the armrest, legs kicking the air, holding forth happily on this and that. “Are you troubling the guest?” Mrs. Abdul Karim asked, setting the things down. The reality could not have been more different: Tanya had been roused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of me.
The child hopped off the armrest and darted to her mother’s lap to burrow her face in the folds of her dupatta. I used to do the same when I was her age and wished I still could. “Now you go do homework,” Mrs. Abdul Karim instructed. “I will come soon.” It was either the appointed time for homework in the Karim household, or I was unsavory company. Returning to her parents’ bedroom, Tanya turned up the TV to what sounded like Tom and Jerry.
“You have a lovely daughter, madam,” I remarked.
“She is the apple of her father’s eyes,” she said. “We are living for her only. She will have good life here. It is too late for us.”
The thought made my heart sink as I burned my tongue sipping the piping tea. After some time I asked, “Where is Tanya’s father?”
“He is trying to release the cab. I am worried all the time. If there’s no cab, there’s no job, and if there’s no job …”
The worry was infectious. When I offered to help, Mrs. Abdul Karim pinned me with a look that made me feel sheepish and small like a barefooted child wielding an unwieldy musket. Downing the milky, saccharine chai like medicine, I understood that the best service I could offer was to leave the family alone. I also understood that my brief but eventful career as a New York City cabbie was over. I laid the keys on the footstool.
Before I could be escorted out for the second time that afternoon, I screwed up the courage to ask Mrs. Abdul Karim for a “small favor,” and though she met the request with an understandable sigh, I persisted: “This is going to sound a little strange—and you can say no if you want—but may I, um, use your ironing board?”
Mercifully, Mrs. Abdul Karim agreed.
16.
When my father returned from work, I would observe him wash up, change, take his tea, and watch the evening headlines on PTV. Then as Ma prepared dinner, he would mount me on his shoulders, and we would embark on our customary stroll to the nearby mangrove park. On the way, we would pass the open-air barbershop under the cedar tree and the family cobbler on the corner. We might pick up a couple of spiced charcoal-grilled corns on the cob or a packet of steamed water chestnuts. And my father would point out passing cars, motor cycles, bicycles, and the odd donkey cart, as well as the neighborhood flora and fauna, from jasmine bushes and bougainvillea vines to crows and mynahs and white-tailed kites turning languid circles in the sky. Everything, I learned, had a name, and every name held meaning. Bougainvillea is a flower. Mynah is a bird. There was, I learned, a scheme, an order to things, to the world.
As soon as we would arrive at our destination, my father would put me down so that I could jump, run around, or roll on the grass. There were no swings, ladders, or monkey bars back then. The topography of the park encouraged grown-up activities: after-meal strolls, newspaper reading, cigarette smoking, contemplation. The area was divided by a narrow pebbled path lined with palm trees that had been painted red and white to deter termites. On one side there was an esplanade, and on the other a swath of reeds. I stayed clear of the mangrove brush. It stirred with movement. On occasion, we spotted a mongoose or a feral tomcat within the grassy interstices, creatures that populated my earliest nightmares.
Exhausted after displays of great athletic prowess, I would join my father, who would be enjoying a cigarette on one of the two functional concrete benches. Then, when the evening call to prayer would resonate from tin loudspeakers, he would return me to my perch and we would make our way back. I would run my hand in the hairy gyre of his crown, and squeeze his rubbery ears, and we would continue our discourse.
Streetlamps, I learned, would be lit only on the walk back. “The world is always turning, Betu,” he’d say. “Now the sun’s on the other side of it.” In this way, my father introduced me to the Copernican model of the solar system, the Food Pyramid, the Karachi Art Deco movement. Legs dangling, I’d take it all in.
One evening in autumn ’85, Ma told me that my father had gone on a trip abroad, and that I would be spending the night at the neighbors’ house. As she packed an overnight duffel bag, combed my hair, and dabbed my face with cream, I remember asking her, “When will he come?” He will be gone for many days. “But who will take Chuck to the park?” Somebody will take Chuck to the park. There will always be somebody who will take Chuck to the park.
Central Park is heavenly in the summer: golden pools, dandelion spores carried by the breeze, monarchs aflutter, wet dogs, angels in unfastened bras, open shorts, baring their pink limbs. On Sunday afternoons, a jazz ensemble gets going outside Strawberry Fields, and down the road, throngs of Rollerbladers attend the Roller Disco. They spin round and round like dervishes, like there’s no day, no night, no today, no tomorrow, just the Beat. I’d aspired to join the movement, to get a pair of blades and spin around, but never had the time, and then when I had nothing but time, I found I had no inspiration.
After soaking up the music, you can head north, circumnavigating the Lake, to soak up some sun at the Great Lawn. Along the shaded asphalt path, there will always be a couple of kids dipping makeshift fishing rods in the water, fashioned from sticks, string, and paper clips, and though there were plenty of meaty worms and beetles in the topsoil, what they caught with them, God only knew. On occasion, I would pause in wait for the Big Catch but never saw anything happen. I suppose I did not possess the temperament of a fisherman.
There are two routes to the Lawn from there. You can hang a right and take the scenic route through the labyrinthine dirt paths, schist corridors, log bridges, Kentucky coffee tree arbors, and thickets of wild blackberries that is the Ramble, where at dusk you may happen upon fumbling lovers, a gay tryst; or if you are inclined to believe that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, you would follow the drive past the Tavern on the Green to the Delacorte Theater. In the morning, you happen upon hundreds of dedicated tourists and Shakespeare enthusiasts snaking up the hill in the back for tickets to the evening performance, some of whom, having camped since dawn, breakfast, play Scrabble, or bird-watch. I had lined up twice in vain for a production of A Winter’s Tale—if I’m not mistaken, starring Balki from Perfect Strangers—without breakfast or board games or binoculars. Serendipitously, however, I was offered scalped tickets for a nominal five bucks a pop by a German au pair in the Ladies Pavilion. It was a spectacular show.
Beyond the Delacorte, the great sprawl of the Great Lawn beckons. As you approach it, you can see kites in the sky, Frisbees tossed in the brilliant sunshine. You can see the red uniforms of weekend softball players, the white wedding gowns of the lean Taiwanese catalog models posing by the willows. On a summer afternoon in the park, you can feel the intimation that God is in Heaven and all is well with the world.
But all wasn’t well in the world. When Mini Auntie called at the crack of dawn, I knew something was wrong. She sounded choked up, like she had caught a cold overnight, and p
roceeded to mumble an apology for not getting back to me. “That’s okay,” I replied, “that’s fine.” It had been a mere twenty-two hours since I had left her a message. When I asked, “Is everything okay?” she delivered the following news concerning my best friend in a whisper: although the terrorism charges against AC were dismissed (the bomb-making manual and the sinister Arabic literature turned out to be The Anarchist Cookbook and Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, respectively), the authorities found four and a half grams of cocaine on his person. “The penalty for possession in New York is the same for second-degree murder …”
When I put the receiver down, the walls of my apartment closed in on me. Fifteen years to life, I mumbled, gobsmacked. Fifteen years to life. I needed to get out, get to Mini Auntie’s. Racing out in my pajamas, cowboy boots, and hunting hat, I figured I would cut through the park to the East Side. I sprinted two and a half blocks crosstown, a desperate, flailing two-hundred-yard dash, until I could feel my lungs constrict and my legs turn to lead. Bleary-eyed and nauseous, I stumbled past the Natural History Museum, entered the park, and considered collapsing on the undulating green. Instead I found myself drifting.
I drifted south, in the general direction of the Pond. It wasn’t to ponder the age-old question: where do the ducks fly in the winter? It wasn’t even winter yet, though the leaves were changing color. In another couple of months, everything would be black and white. Children were already being dispatched in woolen hats, the odd scarf, but they marched on unencumbered. They played in the leaves. They would play in the snow. When I was their age, I had played in the sand, building dikes and sand castles, digging tunnels, packing balls of silt. For a moment, I thought I whiffed salt in the air, realizing the morning breeze reeked of the sulfurous, rotten egg smell that suggests a fundamental imbalance in the stratosphere.
I drifted past Tavern on the Green, Strawberry Fields, the Sheep Meadow. The last time I had been to the Meadow, I had accompanied one Ali Chaudry. The week after I was fired, I holed up at my place for days. One fine day, AC showed up at my door in a beige safari suit, bearing two six-packs of Bud in one hand, and what appeared to be an aerodynamically compromised homemade kite, in the shape of a JF-17 fighter jet, in the other. “Get dressed, chum,” he said, “I’ve come to spring you.” I remember I was so excited to see him that I threw my arms around him, almost crushing the thing.
It was a hot, still afternoon, so he suggested that we suck down the brews first and shoot the shit before the breeze picked up. Perched on the shaded incline that overlooked the meadow, AC explained that the JF-17 is a third-generation fighter jet, coproduced by Pakistan and the People’s Republic, and that the kite was jointly invented in the fifth century by two Chinese philosophers, Lu Ban and Mozi.
“The Middle Kingdom,” he said wistfully. I nodded as if I knew what he was getting at, but didn’t, though it didn’t matter. “Back in the sixteenth century, a traveling Italian monk presented the old Mings with a map of the known world. At the time, cartography could be said to be, ah, sophisticated technology, like fuel cells, gene splicing, et cetera, et cetera, but instead of accepting the gift graciously, the Ming emperor threatened to disembowel the fellow.”
Naturally, I asked why.
“The map put Europe smack in the center, shoving China into the border and splitting the Pacific, when for the Chinese, China was the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom.” AC took to a frothy sip of Bud. “The emperor proclaimed he’d allow the monk to retain his genitalia only if he produced a more accurate representation of reality.”
When I asked if a more accurate map was furnished, AC replied, “The monk kept his yang.”
The episode might have suggested something about the construction of history, or the intimate connection between manhood and discourse, or something like that, but it did not really matter because I was four beers into the afternoon, and the afternoon was simply splendid. When the breeze finally stirred, I scrambled down like a child, circling and zigzagging barefoot on the grass before AC called after me, explaining that I had to be stationary to launch the kite. Taking the JF-17 from my hand, he began walking away, downwind, counting a hundred paces. “Now tug!” he yelled. I tugged. The kite rose like magic.
On the periphery of Cherry Hill, I had a brilliant idea. It was so brilliant that I slapped my head: I’m going to spring AC from prison. As I started to jog, I thought through the logistics of the plan. After fetching Jimbo from wherever he was at the time—the Ducks or Christ Hospital—I would stop by a hardware store for necessary supplies: rope, a roll of duct tape, Ping-Pong balls, aluminum foil, paper matches, a couple of cans of spray paint. I was thinking Anarchist Cookbook. I was thinking sabotage, acts of terrorism. We would arrive at the Metropolitan Detention Center after making an appointment to meet AC—people meet friends and relatives in prison all the time—and on the way up, we would make a pit stop at the nearest john. There we would detonate several rudimentary smoke bombs: pierced Ping-Pong balls wrapped in foil. Then the fire alarm would ring. There would be panic, pandemonium. We would take advantage of the situation. We would move in like ninjas.
That’s how far I got when I started to feel tired, really tired, faint, perhaps because I had run all the way from Cherry Hill to the Children’s Zoo, a distance of three-quarters of a mile if not more. When I began to see red and yellow dots like snowflakes, I parked myself on a bench outside the seal enclosure, slumped and swollen eyed. I felt the urge to retch, but the only garbage can being at least fifty yards away, I imagined myself spewing all over the place, scarring the early development of the children playing tag in the vicinity. Their mothers were already glancing at me over the horizon of their glossy magazines like Thomson’s gazelles. I was the spotted-back hyena in their midst. Except that hyenas are survivors; hyenas hunt in packs. I was tout seul.
Propping myself up against the wood armrest, I attempted to sit up but crumpled like a brown paper bag. I kept saying to myself sit up, goddamn it, sit up, the kids are watching, even though the kids weren’t at all interested. They were ruddy-faced with exhaustion and had started to play a new game that involved spinning in place, yelling “Sheep, sheep.” As I watched them with vicarious thrill, I figured that the only way to turn back time, to be a kid again, was to have my own. Of course, I’d need to get hitched first. Perhaps to Amo. We would make a good couple. We would have healthy, handsome children. We would bring them to the park on the weekends in carriages, in pushcarts, on our shoulders. Uncle Jimbo and Aunty Duck could join us. We would all saunter en famille, picnic, people-watch, feed the ducks. It would be grand.
While I entertained notions of becoming a family man, the famous musical clock above the northern entrance to the Children’s Zoo struck eight. Turning to watch the dancing animals atop, I noticed a short black female cop in the arch below. Although there was nothing unusual in her appearance, nothing threatening in her manner, I instinctively shrank within myself and looked away, looked at the sky. It was cloud-swept and gray, and since I hadn’t watched the weather forecast, I couldn’t tell whether or not it would rain. When I glanced back nonchalantly, I saw the cop making her way to me, gesticulating wildly. Then I saw the snowflakes again. It was a goddamn blizzard.
When I returned to consciousness, I was on my back with several diapers cushioned beneath my bruised head, surrounded by eyes bearing down on me belonging to one of the mothers, a brunette in culottes, an octogenarian in a Panama hat hunched over a walking stick, and the cop who had frightened the living daylights out of me. “You all right, honey?” she asked. I wasn’t all right. I felt panicky, paralyzed, and there was a ringing in my ears like rattling chandeliers. “You need an ambulance?” Shaking my head, I muttered, “I’m okay, I’m fine.”
You on drugs?”
“No ma’am!” I exclaimed with a start as if I were a Mormon. “I’m clean, I’m sober.”
“Well, you don’t look so hot, honey.”
Forcing a self-assured smile, I sat up and said,
“I … I get a little epileptic in the morning.”
Helped up by the arm, I dusted my clothes and fixed the hunting hat on my crown. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you for everything.”
As soon as they dispersed, somebody tapped me on the shoulder. “She wasn’t comin’ forya, Mac,” explained the old man in the hat. “She was comin’ for the kid.” He further clarified by pointing at a five-year-old with a runny nose prancing by, waving a twig like a conductor. The child did seem mildly menacing. “There’s rat poison in the grass. See the signs?”
It was later that I realized that I had been in the throes of some sort of culture-bound psychosomatic psychosis, like the hysteria in fin-de-siècle Vienna that had inspired the Great Quack, or brain fog in West Africa that periodically turned men and women into zombies, or anorexia and bulimia that ravaged prep-school and party girls in Manhattan. The authorities gave me existential heebie-jeebies. They had become what scarecrows or clowns were to some kids, tomcats or mongooses were to me, avatars of the Bogeyman.
At that moment, however, I already knew I couldn’t take a walk in the park, much less walk into a prison, with or without duct tape and a box of Ping-Pong balls.
17.
When I entered my apartment that afternoon, I didn’t feel so hot. I was trembling. The place was cold and dark, and I felt that damp, drizzly November in my soul. Suddenly I had the urge to escape, make a clean break, skip town. In the movies, people skip town all the time. You see recalcitrant teenagers, eloping lovers, ex-cons violating parole rattling drawers and armoires, scavenging for money—spare change, hidden wads of cash—in piggy banks, cookie jars, or under sofas and mattresses. You see them stuff attaché cases with undergarments, clothes on hangers, and cast one last glance upon the wreckage before dashing out. You see them sticking their thumbs up curbside or jumping into jalopies and heading out west or across the border, into the sunset.
