That Thing We Call a Heart

by Sheba Karim

“Sorry, but they’re sold out. A lot of customers were in the mood for lemon this morning,” Dino told him.

  As my mother and Dino chatted and my father figured out what he wanted, I scored my favorite table. The card players weren’t there today, their table occupied by an Asian woman with adorable twins, moving seamlessly in and out of a language I guessed was Korean as she talked to them. I wished I could do that with Urdu. Farah could burst into it at will, but when I spoke I had to think first, proceed with caution.

  “I’m going to put a song on the jukebox,” I told my parents.

  “Don’t you get sick of listening to this band?” my mother asked. She wasn’t that into music and couldn’t understand how it could affect my mood, my emotions. In the car, she turned the volume low, so it wouldn’t distract whoever was driving and we could hear each other talking. Except that was part of the point, to stop talking, to let your mind go, to feel.

  Though once in a while, she’d sing along with some old Bollywood song and rock her head a little and you knew she felt it, too.

  “I do listen to other bands,” I said, “but I will never get sick of Radiohead. It’s not like all their songs are the same; in fact, it’s the exact opposite.”

  My father had already gobbled down his donut, and was eyeing my mother’s.

  “Eh?” my mother said, moving it toward her. “You think I can’t see you?”

  My father frowned. He looked over, debating whether it was worth getting up and standing in line. Laziness prevailed, and then Dino miraculously appeared with another. “Since we didn’t have lemon, try this new flavor—blackberry jam.”

  My dad looked like his head might explode at this merger of his favorite dessert and favorite fruit.

  “Any funny stories today, Dino?” I asked.

  Dino scratched his salt-and-pepper chin. “Not today, ah, but yesterday. This lady comes to the shop, smart, educated, expensive handbag type. She asked me where I was from, I said Bosnia. She said, ‘Bosnia? I didn’t know Bosnia had pastries. How interesting. Is it very advanced?’ We had Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984, but I could tell she was imagining only shepherds. And name me a country with no pastries!”

  “Papua New Guinea,” my father said.

  “It was a rhetorical question,” I said.

  “No, it wasn’t,” my father objected.

  “Irfan, let him finish,” my mother admonished.

  “The end of the story is that she ate one donut and then ordered a dozen,” Dino said.

  “Of course she did,” my mother said.

  After Dino politely excused himself, my mother declared, “Such a nice man,” before returning to the condition of the pie shack. “Are you sure you want to work there? How about something in the mall, where it’s air-conditioned? I worked in the mall the summer after high school, at Merry-Go-Round.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Cheap, trendy fashion,” she replied. “You know, all the latest fads.”

  My mother moved to the US when she was seventeen and did her last year of high school on Long Island, which was why she thought she understood what it was like to grow up here, except our experiences and attitudes couldn’t be more different. She actually had two boys ask her to senior prom, and politely refused, because her faith forbade it, while I couldn’t even imagine having two different guys ask me out, much less saying no to both.

  “I’ll be fine at the shack, trust me,” I said.

  “Wah! Phenomenal donut,” my father exclaimed, looking down at his last remaining bite as he licked jam from his fingers.

  “Hey, speaking of blackberry, have you ever read the poem ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ by Robert Hass?” I asked him. I’d Googled “blackberry blackberry blackberry” after meeting Aunt Marianne and found out it was a phrase from this poem.

  “I have not had the pleasure of reading it, if it is indeed a pleasure,” my father replied. “I often find Western poetry lacking in heart.”

  “That’s ironic,” I said. It went past my father, but my mother shot me a be nice warning look. “I liked it but I don’t think I really got it. I printed it out; I can give it to you if you want.”

  “Of course,” my father replied. “Who could say no to a poem?”

  Six

  THE FIRST DAY OF work, I arrived early, sitting down on a bench across from the shack. I’d brought Midnight’s Children, another one of Farah’s favorite books, to read, but I was too nervous to focus. After rereading the first paragraph several times, I gave up. A couple in a sundress and tuxedo walked by hand in hand, followed by a photographer. Lots of couples had engagement and wedding photos taken in the park, especially on the stone bridge.

  “Pause,” the photographer called out. She was really petite, with a huge camera. “Now turn your head toward one another, and look back at me. Good. Smile!”

  The couple smiled broadly. They were young and cute and happy. When they first met, they’d probably known nothing about each other, and now here they were, secure enough in their relationship to hire a professional photographer to commemorate it. How did you get from there to here? I’d never even been on a date.

  “Greetings.”

  I’d been so caught up in the couple I hadn’t noticed Jamie approaching from the other side of the hill.

  “And a good day to you, Mrs. Joan Milton,” he added.

  One thing that made me feel a little less nervous about Jamie, aside from his overt friendliness, was that he sometimes said weird stuff, too.

  “Who?” I asked.

  He gestured at the bronze plaque nailed to the bench. “In memory of Mrs. Joan Milton, devoted wife and mother, 1924–1973,” he read.

  “Oh. I didn’t even notice,” I confessed.

  He sat down on the bench, ankle on knee. Both his Converse were duct taped at the toe. He slowly drummed his fingers against his thigh, his foot shaking at a much faster rhythm. It impressed me that he could fidget at two speeds at once.

  Jamie pulled out a silver pocket watch, flicking open its engraved lid with his thumb. “We’ve got a little time,” he said.

  “Nice watch,” I said.

  “Thanks. It was my grandfather’s. I never met him, but this was his prized possession.” He draped his arm along the bench, the pocket watch dangling from his hand. His jeans were rolled up again, and I noticed how his light brown leg hair started in a neat, even line above the ankle. Nothing about my body hair was that civilized.

  “I never got to know either of my grandfathers,” I said.

  “Where are you from?” Jamie asked.

  “My parents are from Pakistan,” I said.

  “Ever been to K2?”

  “No. Never been to Pakistan and anyway, I don’t like heights.”

  “It’s easy when you’re climbing something. Don’t look down, or even too far ahead. Focus on where you are in that moment.”

  “Well, if I ever decide to climb the world’s second highest mountain, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  As Jamie laughed, he tossed his head, his sun-kissed hair flying off his forehead. Only a few minutes in and I’d already made him laugh. Yes!

  “Are you going to go one day? Pakistan, I mean, not K2,” he clarified.

  “I doubt it. My dad’s parents are dead, and my mom’s parents lived here before they died, and I only have distant relatives left in Pakistan. And a few in India, apparently, who didn’t migrate in 1947.”

  “What happened in 1947?”

  “The British partitioned India into India and Pakistan. Well, into what was then East and West Pakistan, but anyway. It was the largest mass migration in history. Fifteen million people displaced, one million killed.” As I said this, my voice became a little deeper, more inflected, an unconscious imitation of Mr. Blake.

  “Killed by whom?” he said.

  “It’s complicated, but it was kind of everyone killing each other.”

  “Cool. I mean, not cool, obviously,” he said, blushing a little. “But your
family was okay?”

  “Well . . .” The aftermath of the Chotay Dada story had made me uneasy, like I’d violated his privacy, even though no one who’d heard it had any idea who he was. I’d never imagined I’d tell it again, but I saw how Jamie had turned to face me, one leg up on the bench, his duct-taped toe almost touching my thigh; eyes, body rapt by my promise of a story.

  I remembered something Mr. Blake had said once in history class—to paraphrase Frank Herbert, whoever controls the story controls the universe.

  How could I deny him now? How could I deny this guy anything?

  “Well, my great-uncle, I call him Chotay Dada, he lived in Delhi, and Hindus and Sikhs were coming from what is now Pakistan, and the Muslims were fleeing to Pakistan, because if they stayed they’d be murdered, and Chotay Dada’s whole family left, but he refused to go with them, because he was in love with this Hindu girl.”

  I told him how the girl’s family threatened to kill Chotay Dada, about the attack on the train.

  “Man, he must have had some serious survivor’s guilt,” Jamie noted.

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “So what happened to the girl?”

  “What girl?” I said.

  “The girl that Chotay Dada loved. Did they ever get together?”

  I’d never considered the fate of their romance. “She . . . she figured out he was on the train, and when she heard everyone on the train died, and that her own brother was part of the mob, she killed herself by jumping into a well.”

  “Into a well?” Jamie repeated.

  “Yes. She was devastated, and . . . pregnant.”

  “Man.” Jamie touched my shoulder for a brief, wondrous moment, and I thought I’d kill a whole village if it made him touch me again.

  “Did Chotay Dada know she was pregnant?” he asked.

  “Uh, no . . . not at the time. But before she died, she wrote a letter to him, telling him she was.”

  “Oh. But you said she thought he was dead,” Jamie said.

  He was a good listener, and my lie was becoming too tangled. “She wrote the letter before she heard he was dead, and gave it to someone who was going to Pakistan so they could deliver it to him. And he did get it, eventually, but by the time he got it, she was already gone.”

  Jamie exhaled, running his scarred hand through his hair. “That’s some story.”

  “It’s only one story of a million,” I said solemnly.

  “Fascinating,” he declared.

  Shabnam Qureshi, Partition Ambassador to White People.

  “Why are you smiling?”

  I covered my mouth, embarrassed. “Nothing.”

  Jamie checked his pocket watch. “We should move.”

  I followed him down the path to the small parking lot, where Jamie slapped the hood of a black, boxy Dodge minivan, a flashy red stripe down its middle.

  “Thirty-one years, 185,000 miles,” he said. “She may look old, but she’s forever young.”

  “Wow,” I said, as if I knew anything about cars.

  In the back of the van were lots of bamboo steamer baskets. He handed me a stack, and we took the shortcut to the shack. Jamie bounded up the grassy hill, waiting for me at the shack’s side door. On the way down, I took careful steps and he flew, arms spread wide. When I arrived at the minivan, he was holding two dandelions.

  “I got you a wish,” he said.

  I wished for Jamie to like me, and blew. Jamie demolished his with one powerful breath, but in spite of my best effort, a few stubborn seeds still clung to mine.

  “Airplane!” Jamie cried.

  As I looked up, he yanked off the remaining seeds.

  I smiled. “Isn’t that cheating?”

  “The rules of dandelion blowing are made to be broken,” he informed me solemnly. I giggled, though I wasn’t sure if he was being funny or serious, but then he winked. “Let’s keep moving.”

  By the time we’d brought up all the pies, I was sweating. Jamie and I opened all the baskets and lined the pies on the display case shelves, their crusts so elegantly braided and lattice tops so perfectly woven they could have graced the cover of a gourmet food magazine.

  “Smells good in here now, doesn’t it?” Jamie said. “This is my smell of summer.”

  “Do you do this every summer?”

  “Usually I come for a few weeks before, help Aunt Marianne get going. But the woman who helps her bake has bad gout, so I offered to stay till the shack closes.”

  One month. Four weeks. In Bollywood films love blossomed in the course of a single song—a chase, a dance, a kiss. Surely, by that perspective, four weeks would be long enough for a kiss.

  “You’ve got that secret smile on your face again,” Jamie said. “What are you thinking?”

  “Sorry,” I replied, embarrassed, but also pleased that he was paying so much attention.

  “Don’t be. You’re beautiful when you smile.”

  Of course, this made me smile more.

  He was the first boy to call me beautiful, and now he’d done it twice. You wouldn’t repeat a compliment if you didn’t think it was true.

  As I squatted next to Jamie in front of the display case, I tilted my head in an attempt to get a discreet whiff of my pits. Definitely not beautiful. I pressed my arms into my sides.

  “So, in case you can’t tell what kind of pie it is, each one has a sticker on the pan. These are b, for blueberry. These are p, for pecan, not her famous chocolate pecan, which would be cp. These are sr, strawberry rhubarb. What else . . . every day you should write the kinds of pies on this big pad here, prop the pad up on the stand, and sell ’em till they’re gone. You can leave the proceeds in the money box, me or Aunt Marianne will collect it later. When the pies sell out, clean up, lock up, and you’re done.”

  He turned in a circle as he surveyed the shack, tapping his thigh, bopping his head to some internal beat. The shack’s interior was spartan: a small folding table, a metal money box, a metal stool splattered with white paint, a large, white drawing pad leaning against a stand, a stack of foldable pie boxes tied loosely with twine.

  “Yeah, I think that’s about it. Do you have any questions for me?”

  “Uh . . .” I grasped at one, not wanting him to leave. “Why is it called Andromeda’s?”

  “She had a happy ending.”

  “What?” I said, wishing I had Googled her before.

  “With Perseus. Well, being chained naked to the rocks was a bummer, but after that things went pretty well. Also, it was the name of Aunt Marianne’s favorite cat. She was pure white with a real grumpy face.”

  “The cat or Aunt Marianne?” I blurted, immediately regretting it. How could I crack a joke about his family on the first day?

  Thankfully Jamie laughed. “Aunt Marianne’s a sweetheart. It can take her a while to warm up, that’s all.” He hopped onto the stool, hooking his Converse underneath the metal bar. “Hey, did you bring some music? I have an old iPod and speakers in the car. You want them?”

  “Sure.”

  He returned a moment later, still not sweaty but definitely out of breath. After setting up the music, he stretched his arms above his head and cracked his knuckles loudly. When Farah did this, it drove me crazy, but with Jamie, I found it kind of sexy.

  “Shabnam—what does it mean?” he said.

  “It means morning dew,” I said.

  “Morning dew. I like that.” He picked up the garbage bag full of empty bamboo baskets, tossing it over his shoulder like Santa Claus. “Well, Morning Dew, I’m off. I’ll see you tomorrow. Call Aunt Marianne if you need anything.”

  It was 4:01 p.m., and when I lifted the shutter all the way there were already three people waiting outside. The pies sold out by 5:15. The most cumbersome aspect was folding the box for the pie, but once I got the hang of it, it took only a few seconds. Pie seemed to make people stupidly happy. It was an easy job, and I would have done it for free, just to hang out with Jamie.

  Tomorrow, though, I
had to remember to wear extra strength antiperspirant.

  Seven

  I WOKE THE NEXT morning to a letter slipped underneath my door, three legal size pages, front and back, covered with my father’s freakishly neat, perfectly proportional handwriting, the letters exactly even, the words evenly spaced.

  Dear Shabnam,

  Thank you for the poem. From what I understand, in his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” Mr. Robert Hass is addressing Plato’s claim that objects we can see and experience in this world, the world of bodies, as Ibn Arabi referred to it, are mere shadows of an ideal form that exists elsewhere. For example, the rose that you see in a garden, no matter how beautiful, is only an imperfect shadow of the Form of the rose, which exists beyond our reality, and is perfect and unchanging. Mr. Hass seems to be challenging both this Platonic notion and the concept that language is separate, and separates us, from the experience of an object, the notion that, as he writes, “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” I believe he means that, to the contrary, we can experience objects, and concepts, and perfection, through language, that language is not detached from experience. At least this is my interpretation. I also appreciated his choice of blackberries. There have been times when I have eaten a blackberry and considered it perfection indeed.

  One line from the poem was of particular interest—“Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.” Longing and the distance of desire is a central theme in Urdu poetry as well. In this vein, as you have given me a poem, I thought I would return one. This poem is called “Kya Karen” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the great modern Urdu poet, and the translation is by me. It is one of my favorite poems by Faiz.

  I have also attached some information to help you understand Urdu poetry, its basis in Islamic mysticism, etc.

  Enjoy,

  Dad

  KYA KAREN (WHAT DO WE DO)—Faiz Ahmed Faiz

  (translated by Irfan Qureshi)

  The hundred thousand waits that

  Are in your gaze and mine

  The hundred thousand wounded hearts

  In your body and mine

  All the pens weakened by the absence

  Of feeling in your fingers and mine