The World We Found

by Thrity Umrigar

  She would write to her mother from America. Tell her everything. Ask for forgiveness—and also offer some. Most likely Mama would return it unread, as she often did. But maybe she’d open it, once she saw the foreign postmark.

  In order to take her mind off what had just happened, she picked up the letter on the coffee table, twirling it in her hand. For a moment she was tempted to slit open the envelope and reread the note, which she had written hastily this morning. She had written it as a kindness to Iqbal, to spare him the terrible unknowing, the blind, aimless searching for his missing wife. But now she wondered if she had revealed too much, had tipped her hand too much. She shook her head. By the time Iqbal read the letter, she would be on a plane. Mumtaz was right—worrying had become a bad habit.

  She rested the envelope against the brown bowl and bit her fingernails, glancing up at the clock. A moment later, she leapt up from the couch and dialed Adish’s phone. He answered immediately. “We’re about fifteen minutes away,” he said. “That gives you enough time?”

  “I’m ready,” she said, willing Mumtaz to make her way down.

  “No worries if you’re a few minutes late,” Adish said. “I’ll just circle around. Chalo, we’ll see you.”

  “See you,” she repeated, and saying the simple words made her feel better, made what was about to happen seem real. She had expected to be assaulted by a battalion of emotions—sadness, guilt, regret—as she readied to leave, but all she felt was a jittery anticipation. All she wanted to do now was put the simple plan that Mumtaz had devised into action, to slip unseen into the backseat of a car being driven by Adish. She realized that she had exhausted all the other emotions she had expected to feel. The sorrow she had expected to feel at so momentous a step had been used up, had dissipated under the weight of Iqbal’s numerous humiliations. Now there was just the lip-chewing anxiety about avoiding her mother-in-law’s omniscient gaze, and making the drive to the airport uneventfully, and the eagerness to find herself safely ensconced in a plane, strapped in her seat, her best friends on either side of her.

  She heard the door open and Mumtaz walked in. “All done,” she grinned. “Zenobia is doing her homework. Ma is enjoying her cup of tea on the balcony.” She pulled off her pink burkha as she spoke. “Did they phone?”

  “Yes. Five minutes ago. They will be there soon.”

  “Okay.” She tossed the burkha over to Nishta. “Put it on.”

  As Nishta made her way into the bedroom, she heard Mumtaz say, “I had one more idea. We can’t take any chances. You know how sharp Ma’s eyes are when you don’t want her to see something.”

  “What’s the idea?”

  “We’ll exchange handbags. That way Ammi won’t notice the difference.”

  Nishta swallowed the quick pang of regret she felt at losing the leather handbag she had owned for over twenty years. Iqbal had bought it for her, at a shop in Colaba. “Okay,” she said. She eyed herself in the bedroom mirror for a quick second, and then, shaking her head at this ridiculous vanity, stepped into the pink burkha.

  The contents of Mumtaz’s purse were in a pile on the coffee table when she returned to the living room. “I’ll arrange it later—after you’re gone,” Mumtaz said. “But just check you have everything. Passport? Money?”

  “It’s all here,” she said dully. Now that the moment of departure had arrived, her movements were heavy and slow. She stood in front of Mumtaz, taking in the beloved face that so resembled Iqbal’s, her brain struggling to comprehend how to say goodbye to the woman in front of her, who had risked so much, for reasons she still didn’t quite understand. How to say goodbye to this cramped, gloomy apartment that she had despised since her first day here but which was still one of the few things in the world that belonged to her? How to take leave from her life with Iqbal? How to bid farewell to the memory of the young couple who had once believed that the forces that destroyed millions of others—religion, parental opposition, money issues—would not destroy them?

  “Bhabi, you must go,” Mumtaz said, giving her a gentle push. “They will be waiting.”

  “You will be safe, yes? Promise me you’ll leave before Iqbal comes home?”

  “For the millionth time, yes. I will.” Mumtaz gave a sudden grin. “Who knows? Maybe after you return we can tell Iqbal the whole story. About how I helped you, and all.”

  “No.” Her voice was sharp. “You must promise never to reveal your role to Iqbal. No matter what. If he asks about the passport, just say I told you I needed it to open an account or something. Make it sound like I tricked you, also. That I casually asked you to look for it in Ammi’s safe when you went to borrow the jewelry.”

  “Okay, Zoha, just relax. . . . ”

  “Mumtaz, this is not a joke. Promise me.”

  “God. You are so intense. Okay, I promise. Happy?” Mumtaz took a step toward Nishta and caressed her cheek. “You enjoy your time with your friends, okay? And return home safe and sound.”

  It was a good thing she’d sealed the note before placing it on the table this morning, Nishta thought. She took Mumtaz’s hand in both of hers and kissed it before holding it up to her eyes. “Khuda Hafiz,” she said.

  “Khuda Hafiz, bhabi. God be with you. Bon voyage. And remember my jeans.”

  Nishta collected Mumtaz’s handbag and lowered the hood of her burkha. She stepped into the darkened hallway and then deftly made her way down the familiar stairs, stepping carefully over the broken one at the bottom. She exited the building and stepped into the street. The evening market rush had begun as housewives and office workers vied to buy the day’s last produce for their dinner. She didn’t turn to wave to Ammi as she usually did. She remembered to pull herself up from the waist and tried to imitate Mumtaz’s jaunty walk. She swung her handbag loosely from her wrist as Mumtaz had done earlier today and resisted the urge to look back to see whether her mother-in-law was watching her from the balcony. Please don’t let Ammi recognize me, she prayed.

  She got to the end of the street and just before turning onto the main road, swung around to wave goodbye to her old life. It was safe at this distance, she knew—even her mother-in-law’s vision was too weak to spot the difference between her daughter and daughter-in-law.

  Nishta turned the corner and then she was free.

  They drove for about two kilometers in silence, Nishta sandwiched between Farhad and Kavita, and then Farhad said, “I’ve never sat next to a lady in a burkha before.” Adish guffawed and the others joined in, until Farhad finally grew uncomfortable and said, “What? It wasn’t that funny.”

  Nishta tossed the hood of the burkha over her head and turned toward Farhad so that he could see her for the first time. “It’s not you, sweetie,” she said. “We’re not laughing at you.” She reached over and took his hand. “I’m just so pleased to meet you finally. Laleh’s son.”

  Adish cleared his throat. “Ah, excuse me. I had a little something to do with the creation of the boy wonder also.”

  “He’s right,” Laleh said promptly. “He had a little something.”

  And just like that, the years fell away and they were back to the old days of joking, teasing each other, talking over each other, their voices loud and clear, their laughter strong and uncomplicated.

  Farhad looked from one to the other, his eyes wide. “You guys are crazy, yaar,” he finally said, shaking his head. “I’m glad I didn’t know all of you when you were in college. You all must’ve been wild.”

  Chapter 24

  Wait here,” Iqbal told the taxi driver as he pulled up in front of his building. “I will be back in less than five minutes. Just have to change out of these.” He pointed to his white pants, which were torn and muddy near the knee.

  His right knee was beginning to ache by the time he climbed the four flights of stairs. If only he’d had time to chase after the bastard college boys who had pushed him onto the railway platform as the train was coming to a halt. He had intervened on behalf of the young Catholic woman
they had been harassing during the ride, and this was their childish revenge—giving him a shove as he leaned out of the open doorway, ready to disembark as the train pulled into the station. He had broken his fall with his open palms but had landed on his right knee, hearing the thin cotton pants rip as he hit the concrete. He rose almost immediately, saw the grinning face of the ringleader as he melted into the crowd, and was about to give chase when he remembered. Today’s was not just a regular weekly meeting. The imam from the main mosque was gracing them with their presence, Allah bless his soul. He couldn’t afford to be late tonight.

  Usually he walked the half-mile from the station to the mosque. But eyeing his torn pants, Iqbal had made a quick calculation—if he jumped into a taxi, there would be enough time to go home and change and still get to the mosque on time.

  Iqbal tried to look at his watch in the dimly lit hallway. Maybe he could take a few minutes to have Zoha put some iodine on his knee before he left again. As he removed the keys from his pocket, he grinned at little Murzi, who was tearing down the hallway in his tricycle. “Salaam, Iqbal uncle,” the boy yelled, and before Iqbal could respond, he was gone, his fat little legs pedaling away. Grinning to himself, Iqbal inserted the key in the latch, turned it, and let himself into his flat.

  The first thing he noticed was the darkness in the living room. He frowned, puzzled. Was Zoha out? Upstairs at Ammi’s place? But then he saw the light in the kitchen and made his way toward it. He was about to part the curtain that led from the living room to the kitchen when it was pulled back from the other side and he almost collided with someone hurrying out. “Zoha,” he gasped, afraid that he had scared her with his early homecoming and then gasped again as he recognized Mumtaz.

  “Sister?” he said. “What’s wrong? Where’s Zoha?”

  He watched in puzzlement as Mumtaz’s face convulsed. An icy feeling filled his body. “Is Zoha not well?” he said. What else could explain Mumtaz being here at this hour?

  Mumtaz looked at him blankly, as if he were speaking to her in a foreign language. As his fear grew, he resisted the urge to shake her. “Choti,” he said. “What’s wrong? Why are you here?”

  And now his mind registered what had been there all along—Mumtaz was dressed in a burkha. In Zoha’s blue burkha, as a matter of fact. A raindrop of suspicion fell onto Iqbal’s mind. His hand involuntarily searched for the switch on the living room wall and he flipped it on. In the light, he saw that what he’d mistaken for blankness on his sister’s face was something else—Mumtaz looked scared, and trapped, and—guilty. Her dark eyes searched the room, and she was making small, almost imperceptible movements away from him.

  The fear in his chest was so sudden and viselike, it felt as if a large animal had placed its front paws on his chest, choking him, making it hard to breathe. His eyes swept around the small living room for more proof of Zoha’s absence, but what he saw was the blindingly white envelope that sat upright against the brown bowl on the coffee table. He looked from Mumtaz to the envelope and saw that she had seen him notice it. He opened his mouth but no sound emerged, and yet she flinched, as if he had spoken. His fear grew even larger, curling like hot smoke from his chest to his stomach. Extending his hand as if to hold Mumtaz in place, his open palm facing her, he backed away, his eyes still on his sister, until his calf bumped into the coffee table and then he turned a bit and reached for the envelope.

  He had almost torn it open with his index finger when he heard Mumtaz say in a flat voice that made his hair stand, “She’s gone. Nothing you can do to stop her.”

  “Gone where?” he asked but then he was reading the short note Zoha had left for him, explaining her need to see Armaiti once again, accusing him of destroying something that had once been precious and alive, telling him she would always love him but didn’t know when she would see him again.

  He looked up from the note, his eyes bloodshot, feeling orphaned, widowed, and childless all at once. A tiny muscle twitched painfully in his left cheek. He had never felt this lonely or naked or bereft. Despite the ugliness that had flared between him and Zoha on occasion, he had never doubted that they loved each other, that they would remain woven into each other’s lives like old trees that grew around and through each other. How many times had he thought that the words of that old song—Zindagi kuch bhi nahi, teri meri kahani hai—were about him and his Zoha. Life is nothing but the story of your life with mine. And now he was holding a note that told him that he would have to live out the rest of his story alone. He would not know where her story had taken her, which new characters would enter it, how long each chapter would be, and whether he would be reduced from hero to villain. Because Zoha had left him. Zoha, whom he had loved from the first day they’d met, who had made it impossible for him to ever seriously look at another woman, for whom he had snapped his mother’s heart into two like a cheap pencil, for whom he had borne a thousand insults that cut like barbed wire—that Zoha had left him.

  And Mumtaz had helped her. That much was certain. Mumtaz, his blood, the colicky baby sister he used to sing to on hot nights when she couldn’t fall asleep, the toddler for whom he had purchased her first set of crayons, the adolescent whom he used to painstakingly tutor in geometry and science, the ruined young woman whose life and reputation he had saved by marrying her off to a wealthy and powerful man, this Mumtaz, this poisoned blood, this snake, had driven Zoha away from him. The two women he had loved above all else, yes, even more, Allah forgive him, than Ammi herself, had conspired to destroy his home, his izzat, his family name, had smeared shame upon his face like feces.

  He heard a strange sound in the room and looked up startled. Then he saw his sister’s eyes widen with fear and realized that the sound was coming from him, that he was growling, baring his teeth, like a mad dog. He saw that he was frightening Mumtaz, but the growling just grew louder and he felt his feet whisk him across the room, and then he saw two heavy hands land on Mumtaz’s shoulders and recognized that they were his. Then he was shaking her and he tensed as he waited for her to scream and after a moment, he knew that she would not. Instead, a curl of spit trickled down the side of her mouth and she said, “Go ahead. Hit me. You didn’t spare your biwi. Why would you spare me?”

  Inexplicably, his eyes filled with tears and as he blinked, he felt the rush of madness leave his body and felt himself become human again. He yanked his hands away from Mumtaz’s shoulders as if they were hot burners. “How dare you. I love Zoha. What do you . . .” He was close to crying, humiliated by Mumtaz’s words, the way in which she had expected him to strike her.

  There was iron in Mumtaz’s eyes now. “You have a funny way of showing your love to women, bhaijan. Slapping your wife, marrying off your sister against her will. Where does it stop?”

  He felt the blood rush to his face. “That’s what this is about? Revenge from so many years back?”

  She opened her mouth to reply but he shook his head, noticing the clock behind her. Time. Maybe there was still time. He had a taxi waiting downstairs—if the bastard cab driver had not left by now. “When did she leave?” he asked. “How long ago?”

  Mumtaz looked him in the eye. “It’s too late, Iqbal. They’ve probably reached the airport by now. Let her go. Her friend is dying. It’s only for three weeks, for God’s sake. You’ll manage. I’ll bring you home-cooked food every day.”

  He stared at her, wanting to believe her, but then he looked at the note in his hand. “Then why does she say she doesn’t know when she’ll be back?”

  He watched as the color drained from Mumtaz’s face. “What?”

  “This line,” he yelled, jabbing the letter with his finger. “ ‘I’ll always love you but don’t know when I’ll see you again.’ ”

  Mumtaz’s eyes went hazy with confusion. “I . . . don’t . . . she said she would be back. I gave her . . .”

  Her confusion scared him more than her bravado of a few seconds ago. Zoha was leaving India. Maybe forever. He felt a shaking start in hi
s legs and climb through his body. He willed his mind to focus, to think, to calculate the time it would take to reach the airport at this hour. His mind steered off course, drove him into a future unimaginably barren and bleak, careened into a past that seemed filled with failure and missed opportunities, until it came to a sudden resolution. He had to stop Zoha. Find her, before she slipped out of his hands forever. Do whatever it took to bring her back home.

  “Give me your cell phone,” he said to Mumtaz.

  “What?”

  He grabbed her roughly by her arm, dragging her toward the front door. “Give me your phone.”

  “Iqbal, for God’s sake . . .”

  He snatched the purse—Zoha’s purse, which he’d bought for her in a shop in Colaba years ago—from her hand and rifled through it. He pocketed her cell phone and then opened the front door. “You’re staying with Ammi until I get home,” he grunted.

  “Hussein is waiting for me, Iqbal. Don’t be crazy. He’ll be worried.”

  But they were already out in the hallway, Iqbal’s fingers boring into her arm. “You should’ve thought of that sooner. Before you poked your dirty nose into my business.”

  “I had no idea what Zoha was planning, Iqbal. Allah ki kasaam. Swear on God.”

  Iqbal flinched. “Don’t. Don’t say Allah’s name. I don’t like to hear His name in your vile mouth.”

  A few minutes later, he was racing down the five flights of stairs. His knee was throbbing still but he barely noticed it now. He was thinking of the startled look in his niece’s and mother’s eyes when he had barged in with Mumtaz and locked her in Ammi’s bedroom. He had given his mother a quick kiss on the forehead and said, “I’ll explain later. But no matter how much she shouts, don’t let Mumtaz out of the room. Understand?” He was out in the hallway before the old lady had time to nod.

  And now he was running out of the building and into the busy, noisy street, his eyes frantically searching for his waiting cab, his heart screaming a prayer: Please let the taxi still be here.