by Bina Shah
We usually cook for ourselves in the Panah. Diyah’s invitation to share her vegetable-and-lentil broth is a welcome one; I can’t resist the idea of someone nurturing me for a change.
It’s strange, but over the years I’ve memorized the recipes in the cookbooks Ilona Serfati left behind. Lin says she was a great cook. I never met her, but from her food, always lighter in spice and oils than the rest, I can tell she was a woman of some discernment. When I found the cookbook, its spidery, ethereal handwriting already fading from the pages, I wanted desperately to save its contents, if not its form. Our mothers, aunts, grandmothers live only in representations of their lives as we, their daughters, try to re-create them.
Lin’s agents procure all the food we need, getting it across to us in secret deliveries every two months, but there’s always a musty smell and taste to contraband food, duller and less intense than the bold flavors and strong aromas of the gourmet meals that Joseph cooks for me when I go to him. My mouth feels covered in plastic, a film that filters out the intensity and flavor of anything I eat in the Panah. Joseph’s meals are seductions in their own right. And I still remember the thrilling taste of that black champagne … I haven’t told anyone, not even Lin, that I drank it.
I can talk with Diyah about this and that, nothing to do with Clients or the Panah. She’s good, chatty company, a fearsome mimic with a roguish smile that she flashes at me behind everyone’s back, when I’m trying to be at my most serious. Right now she’s telling me about a movie she’s seen on her device, an ancient Bollywood film with many spirited song-and-dance routines. She gets up from the table to show me the old-fashioned moves.
“See, she goes like this—” Diyah thrusts her hip up so violently that I hear her joints cracking. “And then she does this!” She drops her hip and pulls an exaggerated sexy face, pushing her lips out in a duck’s pout, and rolling her eyes until I scream with laughter. If I laugh enough, I don’t think about my meeting with Joseph tonight—our fourth in the last six weeks.
We look to see Rupa standing in the doorway, watching us, her lips twisted in amusement. I glance at her, then quickly look at our food, not wanting her to assume we’ve been discussing her. Rupa’s so moody that you never know if she’s going to greet you with a kiss or a slur.
“What are you talking about?” She sits at our table and pours out a bowl of soup from the pot without asking. She begins to eat, every movement sensuous and feminine. The spoon to her full lips, the tip of her tongue snaking out to taste the soup that Diyah’s cooked. “Oh, this is too sour,”
Diyah laughs good-naturedly. “Put it back, then.”
“No, now I’m eating it.”
It’s easy to chafe each other in the Panah. Seeing each other for hours and days on end, the closeness breeds an impatience we can’t help displaying from time to time, rolling our eyes at each other’s stories, finishing each other’s sentences. I feel so much for Rupa, who chose me out of all the others to share her secrets with, but there are still moments when she truly irritates me.
“You were talking about something. What was it?”
“A dance,” says Diyah, returning to the table and sitting next to Rupa. “I was just showing her an old dance. From Bollywood. My grandmother’s time.”
Rupa glances at me, flashing a saucy smile. “Sabine’s not very good at dancing.”
“Oh, please, Rupa.” I mop up some of the broth with a piece of flatbread. If my mouth is busy, I won’t respond to her, which always turns out better for me.
“I like to dance,” Diyah says, “even if I’m no good at it. It’s a relief not to have to be good at everything.”
“Maybe your Clients would like it,” says Rupa.
Diyah tries to sound serious as she admonishes Rupa. “I’m not there to dance for them. They can go downtown and find the dancing bots if that’s what they’re looking for.”
Rupa reaches out for a piece of bread and pops it casually in her mouth. She chews, swallows, finishes. “Girls who dance well are the best at sex. That’s what one of my Clients told me.”
Diyah clicks her teeth, and my insides tighten unpleasantly, as if someone’s reaching in and wringing them like wet washing. Really, this is too much, even for Rupa. “Don’t talk like that, Rupa,” I say.
Rupa winks at me, expecting a response, the diamond in her nose glinting, her nostrils flaring slightly. She’s extraordinarily beautiful with something animal and capricious about her. She’s selfish, too, a captive to her own needs and wants.
“You’re so prissy, Sabine. You probably would have made a perfect Wife. No frolic, just work. All those procreation charts would probably make you so happy. Look whose ovaries have the most eggs!”
I shake my head, hoping that Diyah will catch my glance. Rupa’s in one of her tempers again today; it’s best not to engage her when she’s spoiling for an argument. I’ve never spoken to Diyah about Rupa, but I know that what Rupa went through before coming here has loosened something inside her, unleashed a false bravado in her, a flag she needs to wave at us—challenge and recklessness hiding the fear beneath. And the anger. Always there. Here, in the Panah, and only here, is where she feels safe enough to show it. With us. To us. It’s exhausting, but my heart breaks for her all the same. She has a wound that never heals.
“I’m happy where I am, Rupa,” I say.
Inexplicably, tears spring to her eyes, two patches of wet dark velvet fringed by thick eyelashes. She cried like this when she told me how she came to the Panah, in the first few days after her arrival. I think I fell in love with her a little bit then, or at least I understood how a Client might desire her in a way very differently than how he sees me. Nobody could resist Rupa in any of her moods. Her girlish tantrums would provoke any man into making wild promises, oaths of devotion, utterances of love. The illusion that she isn’t strong enough to resist comes off her in waves. And that’s what makes her, in turn, irresistible to those men, no matter how powerful they think themselves in life.
“Happy where you are? What a good little Wife you’d have made. I bet you’ve memorized the entire Handbook. Do you kiss it goodnight before you go to sleep at night?” I say nothing. She’s like an angry child, talking nonsense. I know she doesn’t mean it. I must not let her words cut me open.
She’s said before that I lack the urges and feelings of a normal woman. They probably all believe it—Mariya, Su-yin, Diyah, maybe even Lin. And maybe Rupa is right. If I have those urges, I’ve never felt them; they’re buried in me. Perhaps I’ll never learn how to feel, how to be a woman, how to surrender. Whom do I tell that I never feel anything beneath my waist, though? Apart from the usual aches and pains of menstruation, or the occasional morning when I wake up stinging or hurting, chafed by the cups we use for our flows, I don’t really know what sexual desire feels like. That part of me is no more special or different than my arm or my nose. I almost feel, sometimes, as if I just want to erase it. Is that really my fault, though? The way they trained us in Green City, to only think of sex as a means to repopulate a broken city, why would I long for physical contact? The idea of it fills me with misgiving.
I’ve come close to feeling desired, of course, in a Client’s bed at night. But it’s not about his face or his body, or how he looks at me. I don’t spend as much time preening in front of the mirror as Rupa does, imagining how my breasts or my hair arouses his astonishment. When I’m with a Client, there’s a moment where we switch roles: I become powerful and he grows vulnerable. My presence leads to his eventual emotional surrender; it’s a far more dangerous transaction for him than me. It’s my own decisiveness, not a Client’s desire, that turns me on. Rupa, operating on the level of the body only, can’t understand it. I’ve never told her how I feel. Rupa is too volatile to trust with my secrets.
As if she realizes she’s gone too far, Rupa suddenly looks thoughtful, maybe even pained. “Sabine,” she goes on w
ith surprising tenderness, “I’m sorry. I mean, I actually feel sorry for you. You can’t sleep, you can’t let go of yourself. And maybe you just can’t fall in love.” Rupa grows quiet for a moment; her face softens, her hands come up to stroke her own hair unconsciously, naturally. “But don’t you ever think about what it could be like, if a Client fell in love with you? Don’t you ever think about what it could be like if you could marry and live in Green City normally again?”
Diyah puts her hand on my arm, either as comfort or warning, I can’t tell. I shrug it off. “I never think about that,” I mutter. I can’t explain why I become so nervous listening to Rupa. Does she know something about Joseph and the way he acts around me? I’ve only confided in Lin about his behavior. The last thing I want is for anyone to believe that I provoke his obsession with me on purpose. “Neither should you. It’s impossible.”
“I’m not ashamed of it,” says Rupa. “You can’t choose whom you love. I never thought this would be forever, anyway.” She waves her hand, taking in the room, Diyah, me, the Panah. Everything Lin’s done for her, everything we’ve been through together means nothing to her compared to the mirage of departure she’s designed in her own mind.
“You can’t get out of here, unless you leave Green City for good,” I say. “There’s no way you can float around outside. They’ll find out about you, capture you, and you’ll be declared—”
“I’ve got Clients who can fix the records,” Rupa interrupts, raising a hand haughtily, like a traffic warden stopping my voice.
I laugh. “Nobody’s ranking goes high enough that they can fix the records. Change things, fudge them, hide things here and there, but erase them forever? Not possible.”
Rupa fixes her eyes on me. There’s a strange light in them, and I wonder for just a second if there’s something to all her braggadocio. “Sabine, my Clients are more powerful than you can even imagine.”
I push away my broth half finished and stand up from the table. The bowl clatters, soup spilling out on my fingers. I don’t flinch, don’t grimace, don’t let out a sound. I keep my reddened hands at my sides and turn away from her pretty, sulky face. I’m not going to argue with her to provide entertainment on another boring afternoon. Finally she gets up and stalks out of the room. She slams the door when she goes.
I sit back down.
“Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m not normal. Maybe I am a freak.”
“She’s not right about you. Or about love,” Diyah’s calm, cool voice brings me back to shore. “That you can’t choose. You do choose. You choose every day.”
“How do we …”
“I mean you, Sabine. It would be so easy for all of us to become bitter, to hate what we do, where we are, like Rupa.”
“She can’t help herself.”
“Yes she can. She could be more like you. You wake up every morning and you decide to put your energies and attention into making our little world a little better. You put fresh flowers on the table so that it looks nice. You always have time to listen to us when we have problems. You even laugh at my jokes!”
I’m embarrassed by Diyah’s reassurances. All the years I’ve been in the Panah, I’ve thought of living here like putting currency into an account. I’m stuck, so I have no choice but to invest more and more of my heart and soul into it. And the more I invest in it, the more difficult it becomes to hate it, or hate anyone else who lives here with me. Rupa resists even now, making an already difficult existence even tougher to bear. She still dreams of escape, while I only dream of survival.
I lower my voice and lean close to Diyah’s ear. “It sounds like Rupa’s in love with one of her Clients.”
“I think it’s more than that,” whispers Diyah grimly.
We look at each other nervously. We don’t dare speak our fear aloud. If Rupa’s been having sex with a Client, she’s truly lost her mind. Lin would throw her out in an instant. But then if that happened, Rupa would be dangerous. Who knows where she’d go or what she’d do, released from this sanctuary?
“I just can’t figure out who she would let …” continues Diyah.
“Not an ordinary Client.”
“No. Someone really big. She said so. Someone high up. But who?”
Words stop coming into my head for a minute. I don’t know what to do with this sudden burst of information from Diyah.
Everyone seems to like telling me their secrets. My sleeplessness sets me apart, like a temple virgin. When you’re deprived of your most basic needs, you live on a different plane, as if your atoms are vibrating at a different frequency. Or maybe I draw their secrets to me like magnets because I’m made of darker matter than they are.
Diyah stirs her spoon inside her empty bowl, tapping it to emphasize her words. “If Rupa says she loves a Client, it’s because she’s chosen to love a Client. Because he’s her bridge to another place. She can say she’s attracted to him, she wants him, she can’t help herself.” Her voice is soft, hypnotic, as if she’s talking to herself more than me. She seems to stare at something very far away, something only she can see. “Rupa thinks she’ll get away from here through love.”
“Or sex.”
“Sex is love, if you do it right. But Sabine, men aren’t doors to escape through, or even mirrors to find ourselves in. We’re fooling ourselves if we think they can help us.”
When Rupa first arrived at the Panah two years ago, she seemed more like a frightened eight-year-old girl than the sixteen-year-old woman she really was. At first, she didn’t talk to anyone, just kept to herself. Finally, Lin told me to keep her company, to sit with her on my free nights, when both she and I found we couldn’t sleep. Naturally, we forged a bond.
The first thing she confessed to me was how upset she was that Lin had made her take out her nose pin. But Lin had her reasons: a nose pin can set off alarms, trigger sensors.
“I know she’s strict, I know it’s for my own safety,” Rupa said. “Maybe I am cheap. I don’t know. I just loved that nose pin so much. My mother gave it to me. I used to bother her all the time for it, and she gave it to me just before I—”
“You’re not cheap,” I said, and drew her close for a hug to which she submitted to reluctantly at first. But then she clung to me like a limpet and cried into my shoulder.
“I miss my mother,” she whimpered.
They lived together in a small apartment in Qanna—Rupa, her mother, and her mother’s two Husbands, whose names she never told me. She only identified them as N and Z, who had both married her mother when Rupa was very young. N was older; he kept to himself, reading his device or listening to news reports late into the night. Z was almost young enough to be an older brother to Rupa. He gave her sweets when her mother wasn’t looking and helped her with her homework.
She told me this as she was massaging my head one evening in my room. She’d made up an evil-smelling concoction of sesame and mustard seed, a folk remedy for dry hair passed down through generations in her family, or something like that. She asked everyone if they wanted to try it, but they all groaned at the smell, except for me. Feeling sorry for her, finally I agreed to be her guinea pig. The oil stung like ant bites and I squirmed away from Rupa, but her slim fingers were surprisingly strong, keeping me captive in the chair as she rubbed the oil into my scalp.
“Come on, it’s good for you. My mother would hit me with a hairbrush if I complained.”
“It’s so messy! And it smells like rotten eggs,” I grumbled.
“But your hair will shine like glass when you wash it,” she said. And she was right. My hair was like moths’ wings, silky and smooth, when she’d finished with me. It made me go back to her again and again for the same treatment, which she administered to me, along with the unexpected pleasure of the scalp massage. I stopped complaining and learned to ignore the smell while enjoying the sensation of her fingers pressing at my temples and the nape of my
neck.
Slowly, over the next several months, she told me about her flight from Green City. At first she only revealed small details, like the fact that her mother was a Religious. “She believed in god, she taught me to fear him. I was afraid of god, but I never loved him the way I loved my mother.”
“You’re lucky,” I told her. “I can’t remember what my mother’s face looks like anymore.”
Rupa made a sound of sympathy. “You’re very beautiful. You must look like her when she was your age. If you want to remember what she looks like, all you have to do is look in the mirror.”
Next time, as she began to run warm water all over my scalp, she was like a little mother hen with her critique of my posture. “So tense, Sabine! Look at your shoulders, all cramped and stiff. You can’t be pretty if you’re stressed all the time.”
“Is that your secret?”
“Me? I was so ugly and scrawny when I was little, but my mother prayed for me every night to become pretty.”
“It worked!”
“Too well,” said Rupa with unconscious candor, and her hands suddenly stopped moving in my hair. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear the darkening in her voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Growing into looking better only took away my peace.”
Rupa eventually told me that when she came down to breakfast one morning soon after her fifteenth birthday, her family members stared at her as if she were a stranger sitting in their daughter’s chair. And her mother? “She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. She was so grateful, her eyes said it all. I’d make better marriages than she had, you see.”
Rupa confessed to being enchanted by her own loveliness. Her stepfather N treated her the same as before, an appendage of her mother, or a piece of furniture in the room that he’d gotten used to stepping around. Z made his usual jokes with her at the dinner table, slipping her sweets when her mother’s back was turned. But when he thought Rupa wasn’t looking, he would glance at her furtively, not just at her face, but at her body—legs, hips, breasts. And then he would break away and talk innocently to Rupa’s mother. It turned Rupa’s cheeks crimson, filled her body with shame.
