by Ali Sethi
I ignored him.
Later, in the car, he said, “Why you acting all weird like that? You shouldn’t be so oversensitive.” It was an apology, and a prelude to asking again about the ball.
“Where is this ball?” said Isa.
“Somewhere,” I said. “I was invited so I’m going.”
Moosa wanted to know who I was going with.
“You don’t know her,” I said.
Moosa was defeated.
“You shouldn’t keep secrets,” said Isa, and stayed quiet for the rest of the drive.
“Samar Api?”
She hummed.
“Who all knows?”
“About what?”
“You and Jamal.”
She was lying on her bed and looking at the invitation cards—squares of glossy paper with small black writing. She had written her name on one and mine on the other.
“Nobody,” she said. “Just you. And Tara.” Her face soured at the memory. “But other than that no one.”
“Do your new friends know?”
“Not at all. I can’t tell them, Zaki. It’d be all over town in a day.”
She said it as though Lahore were a movie town with small cars on smooth roads and medium-sized houses that sat behind fences, with identical mailboxes outside and small garages inside, and triangular wooden roofs with chimneys. The new friends went around this town in a car, stopping outside the houses to write Samar Api’s name on the walls, and in the morning, when the residents awoke, they were shocked to see the writing, because in a movie town everyone knew everyone.
“Look,” she said, and held up the two cards in the lamplight. “Nice, na?”
She tried on the outfit that night. She produced it from a box and carried it into the bathroom. But the attempt was unsuccessful: the outfit was tight. She had not reached her ideal weight.
She decided to combine the Liquids Diet with exercise. The Jane Fonda videos were excavated from my mother’s room. Samar Api stood on a stool and retrieved the tapes from the uppermost shelf in the wardrobe, her face gently smothered by hanging nightgowns.
The video went into the VCR, and whined and grunted as old links were re-established. At first the image was absurd: three Jane Fondas appeared instead of one. They were frozen in a back-arching posture and shivering. Samar Api rewound the tape but it made a sound; she took it out and spat on the reel, then wiped her finger along it. The reel shone; the finger was black with filth. She returned the tape to the VCR, and now beheld the restored Jane Fonda with the burst of warmth that receives a long-departed relative.
Come on everybody! Can you feel it?
The results came quickly. Samar Api’s jeans were suddenly loose. Her eyes were enlarged in their sockets, and a vein began to show at each of her temples. One morning she awoke to find a pink burning on the side of her stomach. When she returned from school it was red. And two days later it had turned into a settled silver streak, crawling upward like a snake.
“It’s a stretch mark,” she said. “It’ll fade with time.”
At night she wore the loosened jeans with a belt and stood before the mirror to enact mild variations on a scenario: a girl, ridiculed, retreated from the world. She stood before the mirror to identify her flaws and found that they were overcomeable. Her eyes became inspired; she removed her glasses and opened her hair. And time, so still and heavy in sadness, became light and quick in self-discovery, and passed in a rush of uplifting songs that were performed always, for some reason, by ecstatic black voices that were otherwise absent from the scenario. Time passed and the girl continued to change. And then time came to a momentous halt. The girl found the boy. Her legs went up to him. The legs became the body and the face. Heads turned. And in that charged moment, when he begged to have her back, she, who had changed, refused.
“Samar Api,” I said. “What if he says sorry?”
“He will.” She was sure of it.
“I know, but then what?”
And she produced it as if from a hat. “Then I say it’s okay. Obviously, Zaki. I love him.”
11
The day of the ball passed quickly. At school there had been lessons in the classroom and then games and fights in the grounds—things had happened at their usual paces, without the wayward pull of anomalies. At home in the afternoon our excitement, checked by secrecy, had developed an aspect of forced containment that had led in turn to restlessness. Samar Api went in and out of her room. She settled on the sofa and changed all the channels on the TV, then returned to her room and locked the door. There was music.
Daadi asked her to switch it off. She was going to say her prayers now.
“It’s so irritating,” said Samar Api. To pass the time she brought the clock into her room and settled it on the bedside table.
I offered to try on the suit.
“Don’t,” she said. “They’ll get all suspicious-type.”
She brought out her books and tried to read.
“Samar Api?”
“What?”
“When should we change?”
She looked at the clock. “When they’re going to sleep, Zaki. You’ll have to wait until then.”
But the passage of those hours was slowed inevitably.
First the taking of tea was lengthened by a visit from Suri and Hukmi. They arrived at dusk and sat in Daadi’s room through dinner, watched songs on the Indian channel and ate their food, then asked for green tea, which was prepared in the kitchen and brought to them on a tray. They consumed it unhurriedly; they were complaining about money, embittered by the results of a ladies’ lottery that had failed to yield their names. It was a little after nine when they left.
“Thank God,” said Samar Api.
In her own room my mother was talking on the phone.
“See in the kitchen,” said Samar Api.
Naseem was clearing up.
“It won’t take her long.”
And the prediction came true: Naseem stacked the dishes in the kitchen sink and left them there. She was tired and it was late; she would wash them in the morning; she locked the cupboards and switched off the lights.
“Good,” said Samar Api.
We waited in her room.
“It’s almost ten,” she said. She was worried about the ricksha driver, who had been told to collect us from outside the gate at ten o’clock and had also been told on the phone to desist from honking or ringing the bell in case there was a delay. “If there’s a problem,” Samar Api had said, “one of us will come outside and tell you. But you shouldn’t do anything on your own.”
Now she wanted me to go outside and lure Barkat away from the gate.
Barkat wasn’t outside.
“Where is he?”
He was in his room.
“Oh, good,” she said. “Very good.”
In Daadi’s room the TV sounds had died. For some moments the light lingered; then it died too.
I went into my mother’s room and found the book in her lap, its pages fanned out. Her eyes were shut and her mouth was open, her forehead still furrowed in concentration.
“Hurry up,” said Samar Api.
We changed our clothes separately and met again in the dressing room.
“How do I look?” She made a presenting gesture and twirled.
“Nice,” I said, and it was the only word that came then, one of many jammed superlatives that could all have been held out and would still have failed to touch her beauty in that moment, one of fragility and hope, and of the sadness that seemed to wait behind her in the mirror light.
“Your tie,” she said. “It’s not tied properly.”
She began to tug at it frantically.
“O God, Zaki, how do you do this? Didn’t anyone ever teach you?”
By saying it she had said that my father was dead.
“Look,” she said, and her hands were on my shoulders, “we can tie it later. Please let’s go.”
She went to the mirror and puffed out the
perfume and grabbed her handbag and stopped.
“How do I smell?”
“Amazing.”
“And how do I look?”
“Amazing.”
“Why, thank you,” she said, feigning courtly surprise, and slid her bare arm into mine.
The ricksha boy had not honked. And he had parked the ricksha intelligently: it stood two houses down the lightless street, under the shadow of a large tree. The driver was standing outside, leaning with his elbow on the tin exterior.
He saw us and became formal.
“Salaam, baaji,” he said.
Samar Api asked if he had rung the bell.
He placed a hand on his heart and said he hadn’t.
Samar Api was sparing. “What’s your name?” she said. She had asked him earlier too.
The boy said his name was Altaf Shah.
His clothes were puffed with starch.
“Altaf Shah,” she said absently, and climbed into the ricksha. It came alive now, chugging and trembling with revived energies. “Old City,” she said. “You know where that is?”
Altaf Shah thought about it.
“You don’t know the Old City?”
He was thinking.
“Where the Fort is, where the Mosque is.”
And at once he understood. He nodded enthusiastically and looked sideways, and tilted the ricksha away from the empty street. He said they called it the Inner City.
“Same thing,” said Samar Api in English.
Altaf Shah said nothing.
Samar Api laughed.
And he laughed too, a self-mocking laugh propelled by new discoveries. His mood had changed. “We will be there in twenty minutes, baaji. Inshallah, no problem.” And the English of these last two words was an act of daring.
“For some reason I highly doubt that!” said Samar Api in her own English, which was exclusive and impenetrable, and came with an exclusive and impenetrable English laugh.
The ricksha took us past the canal, its banks illumined at night, past the withdrawn foliage of GOR, the neighborhood where the civil servants of Lahore lived in old whitewashed houses built by the British. And then we were on Mall Road. The traffic sped past the shops and the buildings with their hooping lights, the neon signs and the food vendors standing on the roadside, a world kept busy this late at night by the electric efforts of its aspirants. We passed the old mansions and the old government buildings and came at last to the postmaster’s clock. Here we turned right. And now the road was less defined, the world beyond was a haze, and the cars and buses were negotiating passage with wild lurching wagons and horse-drawn taangas and impulsive undaunted pedestrians who were continually crossing the road. We had left the new city behind, the place where we lived, a place whose newness had emerged only now, in relation to this, brought out with the loss of definition and the broadening out of the road’s boundaries.
The ricksha drove on, one of many now; the walls of the Old City were nearing. We had turned and were tilting in a lane that led along the wall of the mosque, and then into smaller alleys; to our left and right were shops and balconies. Women stood in the upper windows and stared.
“Prostitutes,” said Samar Api. “This is their area.”
I turned to see but the ride had gone on and left the women behind.
The ricksha slowed down and sputtered along on an incline. The cars here were parked in no particular order; guests in dark clothing were stepping out and walking on. Two women in shawls, with bare legs underneath, were walking ahead with two tall boys in jackets. The boys stopped at the large open entrance and spoke authoritatively to a man with a notepad. The man flapped away his pages and nodded. The boys gestured at the girls, who had been standing quietly behind them in the shawls and now became alert and went in.
“Stop it here,” said Samar Api.
She didn’t want to show the ricksha.
“Here?” said Altaf Shah.
“Yes, just stop it. Buss.” She stepped out and spanked away the dust from the sides of her arms, spanked it off her knees, took my tie and rolled it up and dropped it in her bag. She stood me still and undid the topmost button on my shirt. She tweaked the collar ends, plucked them and pulled them down.
She turned this way and that.
“Very nice,” I said.
She took out the cards from her bag and handed them over. “Walk ahead,” she said, and began to walk behind me.
The mansion doors led from an old brick pathway to empty elevations, and then onto a vast open courtyard where, under the abrupt night sky, beneath the ivy that crawled out of old façades and wooden window frames and hung toward the end in little tendrils, there was a sea of tables in white dressing, white tablecloths and white candles and white napkins tucked pointedly into glasses. People sat looking about in chairs and were chatting. There was here and there the movement of jewels, a recurrent flash in the night, and the shimmer of fabrics as women arrived and settled and rose and walked on behind their men and between the waiters, who were also wearing white uniforms and wove hurriedly between the tables with trays on their palms. There was a clearing in the center of the courtyard, a polished wooden platform connected at each of its four corners to what looked like hanging string. And behind this was an elevated podium with a microphone attached to the top, the podium front bearing the colorful acronym for the charity organization that had arranged the ball.
Our chairs were at a table in a darkened corner. Two old women were sitting in two of the chairs; the rest of the table was unoccupied.
The women looked at us and looked away.
One wore a scaly green sari with the skin at her belly exposed, and sat with her arms folded haplessly in her lap, her neck turned away toward the sounds and sights at the entrance. Her face was powdered a ghostly white. Her companion, who was also silent, wore a dark and spreading shalwar kameez and sat similarly but without the expression of aloofness.
Samar Api stopped a waiter and took a glass of pomegranate juice. “Zaki?”
The waiter was waiting.
I didn’t want it.
“No, thank you,” she said, and watched the waiter walk away.
“Samina,” said the woman in the sari to the woman in the shalwar kameez. She was referring to someone who had just arrived.
They rose with their outfits and went away.
“Do you think he’s here?” said Samar Api. She was looking out at the sea of tables.
“Maybe. Should I go and look?”
“No, Zaki, please. Keep sitting.”
The chairs filled up. It was clear now that the podium had a purpose, and the guests knew this purpose and were prepared for it. A short, fat woman in a kaftan was floating around the wooden platform with the mobile microphone in her hand. She looked around and cleared her throat in it.
People sat and watched.
She turned and waved at the soundman behind her and tapped the top of the microphone.
“Hello, hello,” said the woman into the microphone. It echoed.
She looked at the soundman and shook her head.
The soundman made adjustments.
“Hello. Hello, yes. Yes, this is better. Leave it here.” She turned to face the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, and proceeded to welcome her guests on behalf of the organization and its friends. “At home and abroad,” she said, “you have helped us, over the years, to raise money for the blind.” At every pause in punctuation her head tilted to the other side. She went on to provide a history of the organization, described its fundraising procedures and some of the successful operations it had overseen. And she attributed the organization’s continued success to the continued financial support of its friends. “I am proud,” she said, “to tell you today that you are living proof of the fact that Pakistanis are the most generous people in the world.”
There was applause.
The woman now gave a short speech on the ethics of charity, using small pockets of opportunity to name the gener
ous couples and individuals and families that had donated most generously to the organization. Then she gave a summary of the night’s proceedings: there was dancing, dinner, an auction of paintings by some of the most promising young artists at home and abroad, and dancing again. As she said these last words the music started up behind her, and the lights dimmed down at the tables and became correspondingly brighter at the wooden platform, which rose now, generating a great mechanical noise, and revealed the wide wooden steps that led up to it.
Guests began to dance.
“You want to?” I said.
“Zaki, I have to know if he’s here.”
“So we can look from there,” I said, and pointed to the raised dance floor, which had a central view of all the tables.
She rose from her chair. She hadn’t come to the ball with the intention of dancing. But, as the dance floor neared and the music grew loud and the dancing people appeared, her resistance faded and fell away, until she was leading the way, her hand in mine, up the wide wooden steps and onto the floor.
We danced slowly, then freely and audaciously.
“O God, Zaki!” She was laughing. It was a new song with quick beats and frank sexual lyrics. The woman behind us was dancing alone, and with a strange intensity, her eyes closed and her shoulders shrugged and her hands pronged and shivering.
And the others:
A fat, balding man in a suit, dancing with his fists next to a tall, thin woman in heels.
A couple who were dancing together but looking around vacantly.
Four girls dancing in a circle that went round and fell back, and fell forward, and fell back again.
“He’s here,” said Samar Api. “Don’t look.”
She fell into my arms.
“Now throw me up, throw me up.”
I threw her up.
“Don’t look.” She was dancing, smiling and looking around and laughing too, but she was clenched with awareness.
“Where is he?”
“Behind me.”
I looked.
“Zaki, don’t look.”
We went on dancing.
“How am I looking?”
“Good.”
“Just good?”
“Very good.”
