The World We Found

by Thrity Umrigar

  The door opened and Ferzin let herself in. The girl walked through the hallway that led to the large living room with her head down so that she startled when she looked up and noticed the adults staring at her. “Shit,” she said under her breath. And then, noticing Kavita, “Excuse me. Hi, Kavita auntie.” She turned toward her mother, not bothering to keep the accusation out of her eyes. “I thought you all were going out tonight.”

  “We changed our mind,” Adish said casually. “How come you’re home so early?”

  Ferzin took another step toward the group and Kavita noticed that the girl had been crying. Her stomach dropped. Laleh had mentioned earlier that Ferzin was out with her friends. Something must’ve gone wrong. “We really should be going,” she said, throwing in a yawn for good measure. She nudged Ingrid as she got to her feet.

  “Oh, no, don’t leave because of me. I’m just going to my room.”

  “It’s okay. We were leaving anyway.”

  “What’s wrong, beta?” Laleh asked.

  Ferzin stared at the ground. “I’m just tired,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

  “At least say hello to Kavita’s friend,” Laleh said. “This is Ingrid.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise.”

  There was an awkward silence and then Adish said, “Righto. Well, let me get my car keys. Be right back.”

  “Excuse me,” Ferzin said, managing a smile. “Good night, everybody.”

  Laleh pulled on her lower lip as Ferzin walked toward her room. Ingrid came up to where she stood. “Is she okay?” she asked.

  “I have no idea.” Laleh sounded puzzled. “Usually, coming home this early on a Friday night is a death sentence for her.”

  Ingrid laughed. “I thought only German kids couldn’t stand to be around their parents.”

  “Don’t you believe it.” Laleh smiled at Ingrid. “This was such a pleasure. Hope to see you again.”

  “Oh, the pleasure was mine.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” Adish said, jiggling his keys.

  “Bye.” Ingrid gave Laleh a brief hug and then followed Adish out of the apartment.

  “This was wonderful,” Kavita said. “ I’m so glad we did this.”

  “Ingrid’s great, Ka. I’m happy for you.”

  “Thanks, Laleh,” Kavita said softly. “You have no idea how much your accepting Ingrid means to me.”

  Laleh cocked her head. “What the hell does that mean? You don’t just accept Adish, do you? You like him, right? I like Ingrid. It’s as simple as that.”

  Kavita could hear the elevator doors open as she and Laleh walked toward the front door. “Love you, Lal.”

  “Love you, too, my darling. Call me tomorrow. We need to start planning for our trip.”

  Laleh knocked on Ferzin’s door and when there was no answer let herself in. As she had expected, she found her daughter fully clothed and in bed, the tip of her nose a telltale red.

  “What happened?” she asked as she sat on the edge of Ferzin’s bed. “What’s wrong?”

  A storm of sobs was the answer she received, as Ferzin half rose and threw herself into Laleh’s arms. Laleh felt a pinch in her heart. Did children have any idea how much their tears hurt their parents? she wondered. She had heard her daughter cry a thousand times—over bad grades, parental injustices, unreliable boyfriends—and still it tore her into pieces, made her think that if she was granted one wish, it would be for Ferzin and Farhad to never be sad again. “Beta, what is it?”

  “Tanaz won’t speak to me.”

  Tanaz and Ferzin had been friends since they were seven. “Of course she will. You two fight and make up all the time.”

  “No, Mummy, this is serious. Honest.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, Zarir asked me to go on a date with him last week. And I knew that Tanaz likes him, also. So I didn’t tell her. But she found out anyway. And now she’s accusing me of betraying her.”

  Despite herself, a string of impatience cut through Laleh’s earlier sympathy. Why did Ferzin’s crises always involve boyfriends and sulking friends and juvenile misunderstandings? She remembered what she’d said to Kavita recently—that she was sometimes ashamed of her children. Loved them to pieces but was embarrassed by the lightness of their lives.

  She waited until the judgment left her voice before saying, “And what do you think, darling? Do you feel like you did something wrong?”

  “That’s just it,” Ferzin wailed. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think Tanaz has the right to tell me who I should go out with. And I had to lie to her because I knew she’d—”

  “Wait a minute. You lied to her?”

  Ferzin bit down on her lip. “Well, yeah. She asked what I was doing the evening I was meeting Zarir, and I just made up some story. I had no other choice.”

  And just like that, Laleh was back in a bright, sunny morning in August almost thirty years ago. The day of the march. Her mind played out the scene as if it were just happening: the vast crowd of protesters, and then, piercing the crowd like an arrow, a sweaty Adish running up to her. She had opened her mouth to thank him for picking up her migraine pills when he’d said, “You have to come home. Your mother’s ill.”

  Beside her, Armaiti had gasped. “Oh, no. What’s wrong?”

  But Laleh had been suspicious, made uneasy by Adish’s awkwardness, his strange demeanor. Why wasn’t he looking her in the eye? Why was he shifting from foot to foot? “Adish,” she said, “tell me the truth. Is Mummy really sick?”

  Armaiti made an exasperated sound. “For God’s sake, Laleh. Does it matter how sick your mummy is? The main thing is, she’s asking for you. So go. We will manage without you.”

  And that’s how quickly it had happened, the betrayal. Even today, she wasn’t sure what she’d known, how much she’d understood, to what degree she was complicit. The only thing she knew for certain was that once she’d gotten over the shock and outrage of knowing that Adish had lied to her, that he had cracked like a stone pot under her father’s pressure, and that once she’d been prohibited by her father to leave the house and follow Adish back to the march, a feeling of relief had seeped through her body like water through dry earth. Her worst fears would not be realized. Instead of spending the night in a filthy jail, she would sleep in her own bed.

  “Mommy? Do you think I was wrong?”

  Laleh blinked, brought back to the present by the plaintiveness she heard in her daughter’s voice. Ferzin was hurting. She had to help. This is what she was put on earth to do—to comfort her children, to salve their wounds. But also to teach them something about living the kind of life that wouldn’t require thirty years of soul-searching.

  “Listen,” she said. “I want to tell you something. About myself.” She made a wry face. “Think you can listen? Or will it be too boring?”

  She saw a look of surprise cross Ferzin’s face. “No, Mommy. What?”

  “Well, once when I was about your age, I did something that I’m ashamed of. To my friend Armaiti. Well, not exactly to her.” She shook her head abruptly. “Forget it. It’s too hard to explain.” She smiled at Ferzin’s serious face and stroked her cheek. “What I’m saying, darling, is this. Two things make us do bad things in life—fear and pride. I did my bad thing because of fear. I’m not sure what made you lie to your best friend, but here’s a good bet—it’s pride that’s keeping you from apologizing to her. So don’t sit on your pride. A good friend is worth more than that.”

  “But I’m not the one who said she never wanted to speak to me again . . .” Ferzin stopped and then frowned as a thought struck her. “Did you and Armaiti auntie ever fight?”

  Had they? She couldn’t remember. If they did, it certainly wasn’t over some skinny young boy. “I don’t think so. Anyway, it was different between us,” she muttered.

  “So how come you lost touch after she moved to America?”

  A cold wind blew across Laleh’s heart. She stared at her da
ughter wordlessly. Do you talk to your liver every day? she wanted to ask. Send love letters to your feet? Write an ode to your femur? Send a birthday card to your Eustachian tubes? That’s how it is with Armaiti and me. She lives on my skin. She is part of my heart. So why did I need to acknowledge her presence every day? She opened her mouth to tell Ferzin this, to argue her case, and just then a voice in her head which sounded suspiciously like Adish’s spoke an emphatic Bullshit! She had let Armaiti drift out of her life out of sheer laziness. What happens to a letter not mailed? To a phone call not made, an e-mail composed in the head but never written? What happens to a friendship that is not nourished?

  But was that all it was? Laziness? Procrastination? The simple passage of time? The slow drift?

  How nice to believe this. The tragic but inevitable unraveling of a friendship. How comforting, how blameless such a scenario would be. And untrue. No, the truth was harder than that. Going home from the march was the first secret she’d ever kept from Armaiti. The sad part was, Armaiti would’ve forgiven her immediately, would’ve even defended her stoutly and loudly, if she’d simply confessed to her moment of weakness. But the secret festered. It bound her to Adish and pulled her away from Armaiti. It made possible her future with Adish by severing her ties with Armaiti. And it proved to her that her dedication to the movement was not limitless after all, that she was a creature of creature comforts, that she was, ultimately, as her father always said, a middle-class girl playing at being a revolutionary. And the same turned out to be true for Armaiti: first, the disillusionment after she returned from that trip to Czechoslovakia, and later, the ultimate rejection—the move to America, the despised country of naked militarism and capitalism. If only we could’ve admitted our limitations, our humanness to each other, Laleh now thought. As it was, they couldn’t. And it was embarrassment—embarrassment at their inability to live up to their own dream of themselves—that had made them drift apart.

  “Mama, I’m not trying to be mean. I know you love Armaiti auntie very much.”

  Laleh smiled at the self-recrimination she heard in her daughter’s voice. “I didn’t think you were.” She squeezed Ferzin’s arm. “Call Tanaz and apologize. It never hurts to take the high road, beta.”

  “It’s too late to phone . . .”

  Laleh suddenly felt exhausted. She rose from the bed. “Okay. Your decision. But remember . . .”

  “I’ll just text her instead,” Ferzin continued. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” Laleh went to the door and then looked back and grinned. “And make sure you grovel a bit. A little groveling never hurt a friendship.”

  Chapter 16

  Eleven o’clock and still she couldn’t get out of bed. Nishta was awake now but too listless to start the day. At least she didn’t have to cook lunch for Ammi today. Before he had left for work, she had requested Iqbal to drop off last night’s leftovers for his mother. I’ll make her a nice dinner, she’d promised. He had nodded and asked her to take care of the cold she’d told him she was nursing. Before leaving, he had come over and stood at the edge of the bed, a watchful expression on his face. Ever since he had slapped her, she felt his eyes on her at all times, the guilty eyes of a dog who had stolen his master’s dinner and expected to be caught at any moment. And indeed, Nishta now thought, Iqbal had stolen something from her—stolen her last illusion, the story that she had told herself that had made these last few years bearable. For the past decade she had lived within the folds of self-delusion, continually making excuses for Iqbal: Yes, he had turned his back on the social movements that had once buoyed them, but in his telling, Islam supported the same goals of justice and equality that the movement once had; yes, he had forced her to wear the burkha, but he claimed it was for her own protection; yes, he had grown increasingly distant over the years, but at least he had never hit her.

  The last thought made Nishta leap out of bed. Had never hit her? Had her expectations of her husband really become so insultingly small? Had she broken her parents’ hearts only to settle for these morsels? The estrangement from her family had carved a hole in her life so big that she had to will herself not to fall through it. And Iqbal’s parents had never stepped in to fill the void. She knew that they had only accepted her because to do otherwise would have meant losing their son. It wasn’t their fault, really. The divide between them and her was simply too great to bridge. The early years, in particular, had been very difficult. Coming from an affluent, high-caste Hindu family, she had always taken certain privileges for granted. But Iqbal’s family was poor, and there were constant reminders of this: in the way her mother-in-law doled out her money, carefully, painfully, as if a rupee note were a nugget of gold; in the fact that Iqbal’s family ate the government-sold rice and not the expensive basmati rice that Nishta had grown up eating; in the fact that her in-laws never “squandered” money on taking a cab or eating out. The cultural divides were even less bridgeable: Iqbal’s parents could never watch television or follow the evening news without instinctively looking for the slights and slurs that they believed were leveled every day against Muslims. Watching a cricket match, which had always been a source of innocent fun, now assumed a new weight if the Indian team was playing the Pakistanis. Nishta could see their divided loyalties playing out in their conflicted faces.

  No use thinking about the past, Nishta scolded herself, as she splashed cold water over her face. But she was in a bitter mood today, and long-buried resentments kept bubbling up. How dare Iqbal make it sound like quitting the bank was her fault. She remembered how abruptly he’d broken the news to her at the time. They had just left a housewarming party for Laleh and Adish, and Iqbal had acted so strange and formal that evening, she had been relieved when he suggested they leave. She was two months pregnant at the time.

  “Did you see how they live?” he had hissed as they walked toward the train station. “These people who called themselves Socialists just a few years ago? Like bleddy colonialists or something.”

  “They’ve always lived like this. Laleh comes from money, and Adish, too. You know that. This is bullshit, Iqbal. And since when do we hate our friends because they’re rich?”

  “I don’t hate them. I just . . .” He looked away. “I resigned at the bank,” he said abruptly.

  “Very funny.”

  “Nishta. I’m not joking.”

  Her stomach lurched. “What?”

  He turned to face her. “I gave in my resignation. I’m leaving in two weeks. I’m going to help Murad run his shop. More money there.”

  She stared at him aghast. “Iqbal, are you mad? Murad’s shop is so tiny he can barely support his own family. There’s no place for you there. And now with the baby coming . . . My God, you could be branch manager in a few years. You know you’re smarter than anyone else at that bank.”

  “It’s already decided. I handed in my letter today.”

  It was a turning point in our lives, Nishta thought as she patted her face dry. Deeply religious, with a fourth-grade education, Murad was tickled pink at the thought of having his educated nephew working for him. He delighted in mocking Iqbal for his “English” manners, and told all their relatives that he had saved his nephew from destitution. A few times Nishta had tried to argue back, to deflate Murad’s growing sense of largess, but Iqbal silenced her. He needed the job, he said. So she bit her tongue and put up with Murad’s puffery. She also knew that Murad was constantly haranguing his nephew for being a nonbeliever and for not attending mosque, and that Iqbal sometimes accompanied the older man just to appease him. But she was not worried. If anything, the trips to the mosque only served to remind Iqbal of how different he and Nishta were from the people around them. What she didn’t foresee was that in time the trips would serve to remind him of how different he was from her.

  Nishta sighed. Here it was almost noon and all she’d done was nudge the past into existence again. In a few hours it would be time to walk Zenobia home from her class, and she still had to cook tonight�
��s dinner. Pulling her hair up in a bun, she glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror—and stopped. Her left cheek was still swollen from where Iqbal had struck it, and the area near her cheekbone was purple and sore to touch. Nishta shuddered. She saw her eyes, tired, unhappy, made dull with boredom and drudgery, and suddenly she wanted to leave this stifling house and run, kick open the door and run into the open streets, rip off her burkha, this costume of misery that Iqbal had inflicted upon her, and run. Run away from this life, to a place where he’d never find her. Her pulse began to race and her heart pounded, as if in imagining her escape she had actually begun implementing it. She walked out of the tiny bathroom into the living room, forcing herself to take deep breaths, to calm down. She went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and when the doorbell rang she ignored it.

  But it rang again, and then a third time, and, emitting a soft, frustrated ooof, she crossed the room and opened the door.

  “Zoha jaan,” a woman’s voice squealed. “What is this behavior? You’re a no-show to my party, and then I call and call but your phone is off. You were beginning to worry me, yaar.”

  “Mumtaz?” Her voice was tentative as her eyes adjusted to the dimly lit hallway.

  “It’s okay I stopped by, na?” Mumtaz pushed the door open further and breezed past Nishta and into the living room. “I wish you two hadn’t gotten rid of your landline, yaar. I left two messages for my stupid brother but of course he didn’t call me back.” She spun around to face Nishta. “Kya khabar, bhabi? What news?”

  Nishta ran her fingers across her hair. “Fine,” she said weakly. “And you? How are the children? And Husseinbhai?” She stopped abruptly, watching Mumtaz blanch. “What?”

  “Your face,” Mumtaz said. “All banged up. What happened?”

  “Oh, this.” She forced her mind to arrange a plausible lie. “It’s just . . . I walked into a door. The bedroom door was shut. I thought it was open.” But she had never been a good liar and her voice trailed off and to her disgust she felt her eyes fill with tears.