The World We Found

by Thrity Umrigar

  “Let me call Dr. Cassidy’s office.”

  She was about to refuse when she saw the pleading look on her daughter’s face. “Okay,” she said wearily. “If you like.”

  Chapter 8

  You’re doing this for Laleh’s sake, Adish reminded himself as he pulled into a parking space. And Armaiti’s. But his movements were sluggish as he reached into his leather briefcase and fished around for the business card Laleh had pressed into his hand this morning. After he found it, he sat studying it for a moment, adjusting the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. Ahmed Electronics. Adish thought he knew the narrow little gully the store was located in.

  He got out of the air-conditioned car with a sigh. The things a man does for love, he thought, smiling to himself. But then he remembered how Laleh had grown more agitated with each passing day that she had been unable to reach Nishta, and the smile turned into a grimace. Truth be told, he, too, was worried about the fact that Nishta had never answered her phone since the day of Laleh’s visit. And there was that weird incident from last night. After dinner, Laleh had dialed Nishta’s cell phone as she’d taken to doing several times a day. But this time, instead of a recording stating that the phone was turned off, a man had answered. “Please don’t call this number again. Nishta isn’t here anymore,” he had said after Laleh had identified herself. It was Iqbal who had answered, Laleh surmised. She had spent the next two hours pacing the apartment, her face tight with worry as she parsed his words. “What does he mean she’s not here?” she’d said. “Has he killed her or something?”

  “Lal. Get a grip. You’re not making sense,” Adish had said.

  But her agitation had not diminished. “Why won’t he let her come to the phone? What is he afraid of? And why does she allow him to treat her like this?”

  “I don’t know,” he’d said, putting his arm around her. “But if we’re to get any sleep, you have to calm down, okay?”

  He was aware of how she tossed in bed and muttered to herself all night long. So he wasn’t too surprised when she placed the card in his hand the next morning with a request. “Go talk to him, janu. If anyone can knock some sense into Iqbal’s head, it’s you.”

  “Laleh, I can’t,” he’d protested. “I can’t just barge into his life after all these years.”

  “If you don’t go, I will.”

  “Don’t you dare. In any case, Sarosh is expecting you in his office in two hours. You’re getting the permanent crown put on the tooth today, remember?”

  “I don’t care about the bloody crown. . . .” Laleh snapped.

  He was about to respond sharply when he stopped himself. Things had been so tense between them of late. First, the scene at Girish’s party and then Laleh’s ridiculous accusation that they, somehow, were responsible for Armaiti’s illness. Maybe his meeting with Iqbal would appease her.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll go see him later today. Satisfied?”

  She eyed him suspiciously, not trusting his sudden capitulation. “You promise?”

  He sighed. “Yes, dear. I promise.”

  And maybe he owed Laleh this much, Adish thought, as he sat sipping his tea, while Laleh bustled around in the kitchen making him breakfast. To make up for that day from his youth, when he had cracked under pressure from Rumi Madan, Laleh’s imposing, patrician father. A day he had believed they had tucked away, like an old letter in a shoe box, until Laleh had dug it out again.

  The morning of the march, Laleh had phoned him from Kavita’s home and requested him to stop by her house on his way to the demonstration and pick up her migraine medicine. Adish had readily agreed. He was waiting in the living room for Laleh’s mother to return with the pills when a glowering Rumi had strode in, waving a crumpled, discarded, hand-drawn map of Bombay University, and demanding to know what trouble his idiotic daughter was getting into now. “I know you youngsters are up to something,” Rumi had thundered. “I won’t rest until you tell me what you’re plotting.” Under Rumi’s relentless questioning, Adish had revealed their plan—a march followed by a forced occupation of the university chancellor’s office. He and the others had spent so much time perfecting their plan that it had lost its novelty. And so Adish was unprepared for the older man’s reaction—Rumi’s face had turned beet red, his eyes had bulged, and in the booming voice that had struck fear in many a criminal in the courtroom he had delivered his ultimatum—that Adish deliver Laleh safely home within the hour or accept the fact that he would never see her again. Adish went to the march, sick with worry at what he was about to do. But a small part of him was also relieved that Rumi uncle had given him an out. Two days earlier, Laleh had sheepishly admitted to him her terror of spending a night in jail, and this knowledge had haunted him, aroused his desire to protect her. Now he could.

  He found Laleh in the throng of students beginning to gather for the protest and told her that her mother was ill and was asking for her. Laleh left the march with him. So that she was safe at home when Nishta and Kavita were arrested. And when Armaiti landed in the hospital after receiving a vicious blow on the head from a baton-wielding policeman. Laleh’s outrage when she found out about Adish’s perfidy appeared genuine. But he also sensed that part of her was relieved to have escaped jail. It made him think that he had not imagined the look that had passed between them when he’d told Laleh about her mother being ill, that she had half-known he was lying. It broke his heart to see the great, indomitable Laleh like this, caught between her honor and her fear, because he knew how important it was to Laleh to always do the principled thing. And the fact that she had wavered, just this once, made him love her even more.

  What he had not counted on was the fact that after all these years Laleh had not forgiven either herself or him for that one moment of weakness, Adish mused as he handed a twenty-rupee note to the parking attendant. How absurd was that? He should’ve reminded Laleh that the only reason that Armaiti had escaped with just a concussion was because of him. He had returned to the march after taking Laleh home, and when the police had opened their laathi charge, he had fought off the two policemen who were attacking Armaiti. He had been too late to prevent the blow to her head, but he had grabbed Armaiti’s arm and pulled her away from the dangerous, violent streets and toward safety. When they had finally stopped running and Armaiti had not recognized him, he’d assumed that she was joking, and then, when he realized that the amnesia was real, he panicked and called Laleh’s father. Acting on the older man’s advice, he’d taken Armaiti to the hospital. So it was bullshit, really, what Laleh had said a few days ago, about complicity and guilt and sin. And how far-fetched, how unscientific, to think that a blow to the head would flower into a brain tumor thirty years later.

  And yet, here he was, walking under a blazing sun, looking for the store where Iqbal worked. Mr. Fixit, charged with a new mission. He had no idea what he would say to Iqbal or how Iqbal would feel about him showing up at his place of work after all these years.

  Ahmed Electronics, when he found it, was exactly as he had pictured it—a long, dark, narrow strip of a shop that was crammed fuller than a magpie’s nest. Customers stood on the pavement in front of it and called out their orders. Adish waited as the man ahead of him purchased two AAA batteries and paid for them. He peered inside the shop, searching for someone who looked like Iqbal. The burly, bearded shopkeeper who was handing the customer his change certainly wasn’t him.

  Now the shopkeeper was looking at him. “What can I get you, sir?” he asked.

  Adish took a step forward. “I’m looking for someone. Iqbal Ibrahim. Is he in?”

  “Iqbal? He’s my nephew. A minute ago only he was here.” The man turned around and yelled into the tunnel of the shop. “Iqbal? Hai kya? Someone looking for you.”

  A door slammed in the back and a thin, lithe figure dressed in all white shuffled out of the shadows and toward the front of the shop. “Kon hai?” the figure said.

  Adish took in the salt-and-pepper hair and the a
lmost-white beard and was disappointed. A part of him had been looking forward to seeing Iqbal after all these years, he realized. “I’m sorry . . .” he began.

  The shopkeeper pointed at Adish with his chin. “This gent wanted you,” he said. He looked from one man to the other.

  The man in white stared at Adish blankly for a second and then a slow recognition spread across his face. The look was followed immediately by another, as if the man couldn’t decide whether he was happy or angry at the sight of Adish. But it was that first expression of recognition that triggered a reciprocal recognition in Adish. “Iqbal?” he said incredulously. “Saala, is this really you?”

  A look of annoyance flitted across Iqbal’s face. “Hello, Adish,” he said. “What brings you here?” He asked the last question as if he already knew the answer.

  Iqbal’s uncle was still staring at both men. “Can we go somewhere where we can talk? Maybe for lunch?” Adish asked quietly.

  “I don’t take lunch,” Iqbal said. There was a chiding quality in his voice that irritated Adish. He remembered dimly that even in the old days, there had been something about Iqbal, a delicateness, a quality of self-righteousness, that had bugged the shit out of him.

  Adish turned to face Iqbal’s uncle, an amiable smile on his face. “What is your capacity?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Sir?”

  He gestured toward the shop. “Your capacity. Inventory. I’m a real estate contractor, you see. If I placed an order for, say, a thousand sockets, can you provide?”

  The man’s eyes widened. Adish surmised that the shop didn’t sell this kind of quantity in a month. “I’m not for sure, sir,” the man mumbled. “But I can find out, quickly-quickly.”

  Iqbal opened his mouth to say something but Adish spoke over him. “Great. I will phone you in a few days to get your quote.” He smiled broadly. “In the meantime, can you spare this fellow for an hour or so? He’s an old friend of mine.”

  Iqbal was shaking his head no but his uncle was on his feet. “Of course, sir. This is family business, you see. He come and go as he wishes.” He turned toward Iqbal. “Go. Go. Your old friend has come to see you.” He gave the reluctant man a slight push. “For Allah’s sake. What you standing here for?”

  Despite the fact that Iqbal hadn’t said a word since they had begun to walk, Adish could feel him seething with anger. He felt a sense of disappointment at Iqbal’s obvious distaste for his presence. He could well understand his companion’s outrage at having been tricked into accompanying him. But Iqbal had not displayed the slightest pleasure at seeing Adish after all these years—and that stung. It made him question the years when they had all been so close. He remembered the night of Nishta and Kavita’s arrest, when a distraught Iqbal had knocked on his door and they had walked the nighttime streets for hours, both of them bound together by their love for women who barely acknowledged their presence in public. He remembered now that Iqbal had told him that night that he had asked Nishta to marry him and that he was willing to convert to Hinduism if it helped with her parents.

  “Wow,” Adish had said. “When was this? And what did she say?”

  “She said she’d talk it over with her three friends. And let me know her answer at an appropriate time.”

  They had looked at each other for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Could we have found two more difficult women to fall in love with?” Adish had said.

  But the man walking beside him retained no vestige of the openhearted, lovesick boy from that night. He had no idea how to talk to this man. Adish’s heart sank at the realization.

  Still, for Lal’s sake, for Armaiti’s sake, he had to try. “Iqbal?” he said softly. “It’s good to see you again, yaar. How long has it been?”

  He had misjudged the depth of Iqbal’s anger. He stopped walking and turned to face Adish. “What do you want? Why are you here? Why are you people interfering with my family?”

  Adish felt his face flush. Mortifyingly, he felt his eyes fill with tears. He looked away, embarrassed. He had always prided himself on being more practical than the others. Over the years, he had come to think of their college days as a spot of sweetness, when their youth had burned as bright as their idealism, but as a period that inevitably had to end. He had not remained stuck in the past as he sometimes thought Laleh and Kavita were and was proud of the fact that he had grown up and changed with the times. He had never shared Laleh’s romanticism about their socialist past, and as he’d grown older he felt he had a lot more in common with his father-in-law, the pragmatic, solid Rumi Madan, and less with Rumi’s impetuous daughter. He was often impatient with Laleh’s theatrics, the constant self-recriminations, her expressions of solidarity with the poor, even while she enjoyed the fruits of his success. He had come to believe that his way was cleaner, more honest, less hypocritical—yes, he had once believed in a different system, and then, when he’d seen the difficulty—the impossibility—of the path he had chosen, he had gotten off that path. When free-market reforms came to India, he had freed himself along with them, and when the old regulations loosened, he felt something loosen within himself. He didn’t believe for a minute that he had made a pact with the devil or sold his soul in doing so. That was the essential difference between him and Laleh—when she thought back on their college days, she saw them as a template for the rest of her life; Adish looked back on those days as a lovely dream from which it was difficult, but essential, to wake up.

  And yet. Standing in the middle of a busy street, being bumped and run into by passersby, blinking away the tears that had inexplicably filled his eyes, Adish had to confront a new truth—Iqbal’s dismissal of him hurt more than it had any right to. Which meant that those college years and the friendship that had seen them through a thousand cups of tea and countless political discussions had meant something after all. That the years were not pieces of paper that one could ball up and throw away. And that Iqbal—Iqbal, whose faint air of superiority had always made him bristle—even Iqbal was dear to him, was a brother to him in ways that no other friend had been since—not his friends at the club, not his tennis partners, not the men who had sat on the same boards that he did. Laleh had known some essential truth about their lives that had eluded him until now.

  “I wish you no harm, Iqbal,” he heard himself say. “And I’m sorry if I—if we . . .” He shook his head impatiently. “Forget it. I told Laleh this was a stupid idea. Listen, you go back to work. I—I should get going, too.” He held out his hand. “Nice seeing you, yaar.”

  To his surprise, Iqbal took his hand. And held on to it. “Think I’m going to release you from buying me lunch that easily?” And Iqbal smiled, and even though his teeth were more yellow than Adish remembered, the middle-aged man in the pious garb fell away and in his place stood the long-haired, impish boy with the ever-present grin.

  Something tightened in Adish’s chest. He understood that Iqbal had noticed his hurt reaction and was trying to correct the situation. He suddenly felt crazily, triumphantly happy. But Iqbal was a feral cat he didn’t want to scare off with a sudden move. So his face was impassive and his voice neutral as he said, “Where would you like to go?”

  Iqbal shrugged. “I don’t care. Zoha usually packs my lunch. You decide.”

  Some instinct told Adish to steer clear of the expensive restaurants he normally patronized. “There’s a small Irani joint around the corner from here,” he said. “Shall we go there?”

  “Wherever, yaar.” Iqbal smiled again. “You’re paying.”

  Chapter 9

  They had finished lunch and it had been surprisingly easy chatting with Iqbal. I’d forgotten how charming the fellow can be, Adish thought. Iqbal had listened attentively as Adish had described his business, and laughed at the appropriate moments when he’d described the antics of his gangly, clumsy son. So far, Adish had shied away from asking Iqbal too many personal questions and had tiptoed around the reason why he had come calling. But now, looking at the big clock that
hung behind the cash register, he knew he didn’t have much time.

  He leaned back in his chair as he cast an appraising glance at Iqbal. “So, saala,” he said. “What’s with the beard and stuff?”

  Iqbal stiffened for a second and then broke into a faint smile. “You haven’t changed, Adish. As blunt as ever.” He waved away Adish’s apology. “No. It’s okay. I don’t mind. I’ve always liked that about you.”

  “Thanks.” The dimples widened in Adish’s face. He waited.

  Just when he thought Iqbal had forgotten his question, he spoke. “In 1993, I became a Muslim. A real one, I mean. Devout.” Iqbal waited, as if expecting Adish to react. When he didn’t, he continued. “My religion calls for all good Muslims to grow a beard.” He paused. “Muslim men, that is.”

  Adish smiled politely at the joke. He had the feeling that any wrong move on his part would shut Iqbal up, would make him withdraw into silence. But Iqbal didn’t seem ready to say anything more.

  Adish cleared his throat and started again. “So. I’m assuming that Nishta told you—”

  “Zoha,” Iqbal corrected.

  “Pardon me. Zoha told you that Laleh had stopped by your house?”

  “Of course.” Iqbal’s eyes were now shiny, attentive.

  “And she told you why?”

  “Yah. She wants my wife to accompany her to America.” Iqbal’s voice was flat.

  Adish felt a small wave of irritation. “Well, you know why, right? It’s because Armaiti is dying. And it’s her wish to see her friends before . . .”

  Iqbal raised his hand to cut him off. “Zoha can’t go.”

  Adish waited for him to continue. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, he said, “Bas? That’s all? No explanation?” He didn’t try to keep the incredulity out of his voice.