by Sorayya Khan
“There are going to be royits, and you’re sending me to school?” I pressed on.
“Aliya!” my mother chided me.
“You’re going, and that’s that,” my father insisted. Almost immediately, he called for Sadiq to notify the driver. When Sadiq came running, the sleeve of his kurta clung to his forearm, where a reddish-brown stain had set, and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before.
In the safety of my father’s official car, through the tinted windows in which the city sped by, the day was no different than any other. Bicyclists, buses, and cars wove in and out of lanes, children walked to school holding hands, shopkeepers rolled up their shutters. Mushtaq, the driver, didn’t say much, and we neared the American School of Islamabad before he initiated our habitual license plate game. When we passed a car with a diplomatic plate, we quizzed each other on the country that corresponded with the number. Mushtaq had memorized them all.
“You think there are more CD62s or CD64s on the road?” I asked him that morning.
“Too many Russians, too many Americans,” Mushtaq joked before finding a CD49 on the road. “You know that one,” he urged. I always remembered too late that CD49 belonged to the Philippines.
I was two hours late to school, but when I arrived, the first thing I did was buy a 7UP I didn’t want from the snack bar in order to further delay the start of my school day. I managed only a few sips before returning the bottle to the cashier, who insisted on refunding my money. I worried I’d been spotted by teachers and decided I had no choice but to get a late pass.
“It’s not like you to be late, honey,” the secretary said while she marked my attendance in the school roster book, as her husband, the principal, watched from his office.
I started across the quad again on my way to class, but I paused halfway across, plopping down in the sunken concrete star and allowing the burning heat radiating from it to overwhelm me. A low hum from above broke the silence. I stared at an airplane crawling across the endlessly blue sky, and I pretended it was a military transport airplane transporting the prime minister southwest to his grave.
The Pakistani field hockey coach, Mr. Farid, called out my name. He was always friendly, because for years Lehla had been the captain of the team. When he smiled, I covered my eyes to protect them from the glare of his perfectly white teeth.
He waved his hand toward the sky as if he’d read my thoughts. “Maybe they’re flying him home.”
“He was buried before the sun came up,” I corrected him.
“You’re late,” he said, gesturing at the pink late pass in my hand and sitting down beside me. When I didn’t move, he said, “I don’t want to be here either. You couldn’t stay home?”
“My parents wouldn’t let me,” I replied.
“Mine neither,” Mr. Farid teased me as the bell rang announcing the fourth period of the day. I took my usual seat in science class next to Lizzy, and I sat through the entire hour ignoring every word that was said. No one mentioned the news, but it didn’t have to be spoken out loud. The prime minister’s death was like having another person standing in the cafeteria line with us or blocking the basketball during gym.
“Are you OK?” Lizzy finally asked when school was over and we were walking to the buses.
“Why? Because the prime minister was hanged today?” I replied, and just like that I violated my father’s request that I not talk about politics.
Lizzy was confused before she finally said, “No, because you didn’t take notes in any of the classes.”
“I didn’t need to today, that’s all,” I said as I spotted a beige, nondescript sedan with the unmistakable black license plates of a local vehicle. Unlike the drivers of other waiting cars, who wore uniforms and sported caps embroidered with embassy insignia, Mushtaq stood beside our car wearing a wrinkled shalwar kameez and simple sandals. I was confused to see Sadiq in the passenger seat, for I could not recall him ever being on the school premises. But at that specific moment, more than being alarmed at his unexpected presence, I was relieved that I would be spared the afternoon’s spitting games.
“You’re not taking the bus?” Lizzy asked me.
“I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Moody.” I lied about an orthodontist appointment because I didn’t want to give Lizzy a ride home. For that day, at least, it was important to me to keep my school life separate from my home life, and no matter what, Lizzy was my school life, and my father’s official car belonged to my home life.
“Today? Didn’t we schedule appointments at the same time next week?”
“Emergency appointment. A bracket broke,” I said, touching my braces and continuing to lie.
I remembered the last time I’d seen Dr. Moody. The electricity had been out, and he’d pumped the foot pedal with great effort to adjust the chair’s height. Slipping on plastic gloves, he’d run his forefinger over my braces and I almost bit him trying to swallow. “It’s all right,” he’d reassured me kindly. I suddenly wondered if Dr. Moody had said that to the prime minister when he examined his abscesses for the last time.
“Liya! Call me later, OK?” Lizzy yelled from the bus steps.
Mushtaq locked the car doors. He drove slowly through the open gates, where a uniformed guard sat dozing on a chair, his arms crossed at his waist and an unloaded rifle propped between his legs. Sadiq didn’t say a word, so I practiced Urdu numbers with Mushtaq, and by the time we reached the first bend in the dirt road, he had me adding two digits. Normally, doing math in Urdu was too difficult for me, but that day I was happy to be distracted from life beyond the car windows.
My father was wrong. Perhaps people were angry, but they hadn’t gathered in the streets or anywhere else to demonstrate against the general. There were no royits, not even mini ones like the one at my home. If countries could be people, Land of the Pure was standing tall, wrapped in a green-and-white sari-flag, no midriff or cleavage showing, not a hair out of place. She’d hardly noticed she’d been violated.
THIRTEEN
Late April–May 1979
I stood across the street from my house, waiting for the school bus, wishing I’d worn different clothes. For one thing, it was so hot that my underwear was sticking. For another, I was wearing a red sundress that Anne Simon had made for me, and I was embarrassed that my shoulders were bare. The hemline was shorter than it had been, and the elastic bodice was tighter than when I’d tried it on at Lizzy’s house. My father hadn’t helped my confidence when I’d kissed him good-bye, and he’d casually remarked that my dress was too short. I’d appreciated my mother’s irritated “For goodness’ sake, Javid!” but standing on the street as bicyclists and pedestrians went by, I worried he was right.
Waves of heat rose from the asphalt and the road appeared to move. I shifted from foot to foot in my sandals, impatient for the bus to arrive. A man began to walk up the hill, and from the moment he appeared, he stayed directly in my line of sight. The closer he came, the more space he seemed to fill, and eventually, the bottom of the hill disappeared behind his immense form. His clothes hung loosely on his body, as if they were meant for an even heavier, larger man. I couldn’t tear my eyes off him, although I knew I should. As he neared, I could see folds of his baggy shalwar pooled on his sandals. He was fidgeting with his shirt or trying to retie the string of his shalwar. Now he was close enough for me to see he’d tucked the bottom of his shirt in his armpit and was using both his hands to play with the fabric of his shalwar. Suddenly he dropped the shalwar and surprisingly kept the pants from falling to the ground. His hands were buried in the mass of dark hair between his legs, rubbing the layers of skin from side to side and up and down. Without warning, his pace became urgent until he stumbled and let out an uncontrolled groan. He was so close to me that I could see there were gray hairs on his unshaven face.
“Amrikan,” he said. His voice was rough, but not loud.
Sweat rolled down my back, and all at once hundreds of pins pricked my scalp. I crossed the road without
looking and grabbed the gate. I didn’t dare turn around and couldn’t know for sure if he was following me, but there was an unfamiliar smell hanging in the air, and it made me certain he could have touched me with his dirty hands if he’d only tried.
I fled down the long driveway past my father’s empty office car and almost ran into Mushtaq and Sadiq, who were chatting away. Rushing into the house, I collided with my mother, who scolded me for leaving a mess in my room. Gripped by fear, I rummaged through my desk, pretending to have forgotten something, burying my flushed face in a drawer. A minute later, Sadiq came in to tell me the bus was waiting, and he picked up my book bag. He slung it across his shoulder as if he were going to school and lifted the heavy latch I’d had trouble with and easily swung open the gate. The man had vanished. All that waited was the big yellow school bus.
I regretted not changing my clothes. In my bedroom, panic rising in my chest, my mother a few steps away scolding me, I hadn’t even thought of doing so. Now I yanked the elastic bodice higher than it was supposed to go and slipped my book bag onto my back. Lizzy was wearing a sundress identical to mine and didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable.
During English, my first class of the day, she passed me a note.
What’s wrong?
I held onto it but didn’t answer until science, two classes later. Have you ever seen a man’s genitals? It was the first time in my life I’d used the word genitals in a sentence, and I’d scrawled it on the back of an old lab report that I almost didn’t give to Lizzy for fear the teacher would catch me and read it.
You mean, not my brothers’?
I nodded. The teacher misinterpreted it as interest in the class, and asked me the next question, which I could not answer.
Not your brothers’, I wrote back. Or your Dad’s.
No. Have you?
This morning.
What happened?
Broaching the incident, however cursorily, on a crinkled piece of paper, made it possible to describe some details later when I could talk to Lizzy.
“His pants were down, and he wasn’t wearing underwear. He was holding his, you know . . .” I started to say but stopped.
“No! Masturbating?”
“I guess,” I said, wishing away the word.
“Gross.”
“Gross,” I agreed, although I felt shame, not disgust.
“Should you tell someone?” Lizzy asked.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Your mom or dad?”
“My dad?” I said, shocked, recalling his comment about my dress, which seemed a warning now.
“Your mom, then?”
“No way,” I said and ended the discussion.
Lizzy was my best friend, but the whole time we spoke, I couldn’t share the most terrible part of the incident with her: He had called me Amrikan. Lizzy was American, I was not, and although I sometimes envied her because of it, the possibility that someone else assumed I was American suddenly horrified me. The word, Amrikan, was hurled at me like an abuse, a curse, and I wondered if the way I felt—small and dirty—was how regular bicyclists and pedestrians felt when they were hit with a spitball from the yellow school bus. Being labeled American also made me think of the prime minister, dead now, who’d yelled about Americans, calling them elephants in a long-ago speech, and I wondered where I fit in.
Every morning after that, I waited for the bus from inside the safety of our latched gate. Instead of staring at the hill until the bus appeared, I learned to recognize the sound of the engine and the opening and closing of the bus doors a street away. I would sit with my back to the gate on the edge of a low retaining wall, taking care not to look at anyone who passed by. I saw the man again only when he crept into my dreams and forced me to relive the shame of his accusation. I never told anyone about the taunt, not even my mother when she came to check on me one night after I’d cried out in my sleep.
“What was the dream about?”
“Nothing,” I declared.
“Nothing doesn’t wake you from sleep, Aliya,” my mother said skeptically.
In my dream I had argued with the man.
“Amrikan,” he had cursed me.
“I am not!” I wanted to shout in Urdu, but I always woke up before I finished the sentence, and I hated him all the more because I was cheated of completing my thought.
As time went on, I admitted to myself that the shame I felt at his curse was because there might have been some truth to it. What was I, anyway? Half Pakistani? Half Dutch? Half Austrian? And did my accent, the generic one American schools cultivated, make me part American, regardless of my protests?
Standing on the street—sundress tight on my budding chest, my knees and shoulders bare—what had I been thinking?
On Friday, without a bus to catch, I sat at a kitchen table strewn with egg-stained dishes, opened jam and honey jars, and empty glasses rimmed with the dried fragments of orange juice. I was eating a paratha, a Friday treat I looked forward to all week. I was wearing jeans and one of Amir’s old sweatshirts that was far too big for me and far too heavy for the hot day. Until Sadiq entered the kitchen, I had been preoccupied with what had happened earlier in the week. He’d wound a black-and-white pagri on his head and his clothes were ironed, but my first impression was that he was lopsided. I puzzled over this oddity as he moved about the kitchen. Was one eyebrow growing faster than the other? When had he shaved his eyebrows, anyway? Why was only one sleeve rolled up? Sadiq switched off the radio, which I hadn’t even realized was on, the background of newscasts and analysis nothing more than a stale hum these days.
I felt the presence of Sadiq’s secret fill a corner of the kitchen until the fact that he was spying on Anne Simon inhabited the entire room. I was always aware of the secret when I was alone with him, but it was unavoidable in a different way that morning, and I felt compelled to put an end to it. I ran to retrieve my new English-to-Urdu dictionary, opened it in front of Sadiq, who was watching a boiling pot of pasta. I found the entry for secret, pointed to the Urdu equivalent, raaz, and used it in my question.
“Do you have a secret?”
“Do you have a secret?” he promptly countered, correcting my chronic misuse of the formal tense in his presence, replacing the respectful aap with the informal tum.
We studied each other, equally intent on eliciting a response when my mother burst into the kitchen and admonished Sadiq for overcooking the pasta.
“What are we going to do with you?” she demanded, while removing the pot from the burner. A few droplets of boiling water splashed on the dictionary. “A kitchen is no place for books,” she added, glaring at me.
Sadiq got to work scrubbing spinach leaves in the sink, furiously scattering water in all directions. A little while later, I returned to the kitchen with my dictionary lodged under my arm, and Sadiq was drying the spinach leaf by leaf with a kitchen towel.
“I have a secret,” I said again. “Do you?”
Sadiq narrowed his eyes into slits that matched the thin lines of his new eyebrows.
“No,” he said with conviction, and for that single moment it didn’t matter that I knew otherwise.
It was hard to invite Lizzy to my house after I’d read the settlement papers, but after discovering Sadiq loitering on Anne Simon’s street, it was almost impossible. I tried to keep in mind my mother’s words, specifically that what had happened had nothing to do with Lizzy and me or our friendship. I didn’t know how long he’d been spying on her or how much he’d seen, but he knew Lizzy was Anne Simon’s daughter. How could Sadiq see Lizzy as anyone other than Anne Simon’s daughter? Inviting Lizzy home meant betraying Sadiq, pure and simple. Also, I was worried for Anne Simon and Lizzy. Not that I thought Sadiq would ever do anything to harm them, but because spying on Anne Simon made it seem he could. I made up all sorts of excuses not to invite Lizzy over, and the few times I did, I made sure it was during one of Sadiq’s infrequent absences. Even then, it was excruciating because all my
energy was spent worrying Sadiq might suddenly appear.
During one of her visits, when it was still cool, I asked Lizzy if she was warm enough so many times, she asked me to stop.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she’d said, pointing to her chaddar on the back of the chair, assuring me she would put it on if she were not.
“This isn’t like your house, that’s all,” I feebly answered.
“Right. This is a real house,” Lizzy answered a little wistfully, which made me like her even more.
During her visits, I watched my mother closely, eager to see if she had difficulty hiding what we knew. She was always friendly, driving to United Bakery to pick up a sampling of Pakistani croissants and donuts, and making sure bottles of 7UP were in the refrigerator before Lizzy arrived. “If there’s anything you’d like, just let me know,” she would tell Lizzy. Then she would ask about the twins and Anne Simon, once drawing out details from Lizzy about her grandparents’ town in upstate New York. “Cazenovia,” Lizzy said, and my mother tried the word, counting the syllables with her fingers. “Five!” she exclaimed before inquiring, “And how close is that to Lehla in Syracuse?”
I was much more comfortable spending time with Lizzy at her house. One Friday afternoon she taught me to make Rice Krispie Treats. We emptied a jar of marshmallow creme and several cups of Rice Krispies into a pan with melted butter and took turns stirring the mixture. While we waited for the treats to set, Lizzy’s mother returned from her walk drenched in sweat and poured herself a tall glass of ice water.
“I love your country, Liya, I really do. The mountains, the people, the city, the food . . . But you’d think the men have never seen a blonde before!”
“Before you?” Lizzy asked.
I giggled to hide my discomfort.
“They think you’re beautiful, Mom,” Lizzy said and winked at me. She wrapped her arms around her mother, and she was right, her mother was beautiful.
Anne Simon drank her water and smiled broadly. She picked at the empty jar of marshmallow creme and half joked that she couldn’t exercise without feeling watched. Take today, for example, when there was a man in a turban lying under a tree, pretending to take a nap, and he was in exactly the same position when she left for her walk as when she returned. His gaze followed her all the way up the street and, forty-five minutes later, all the way back.
