She moved slowly toward the utility shed at the far end of the roof, softly closed the door and locked it.
“My uncle’s handyman lives up here. He would freak out if he saw us.”
Nasreen laid out the towels across the terrace floor, knelt down, and removed her salwar shirt over her head then scooted out of her pajama bottoms. In her black panties and bra, she positioned herself on the towel and closed her eyes.
“Ah, this feels great. Sunbathing in Pakistan,” Nasreen moaned happily. “You should write about this in your journal.” She smiled with her eyes still shut.
Kate peeled off her jeans and shirt that clung to her perspiring body and looked at the locked door, nervous for the man inside.
“Won’t he get hot in there?”
“It’s just for a few minutes. He is probably sleeping now anyway. It’s midday after all.”
Kate scooted onto the towel next to Nasreen. The sun was scorching, but the air was fresh.
“I have gained weight,” Kate sighed.
“I know. Me too.”
“We can run up and down the stairs.”
“Great idea.” Nasreen fanned her dark curls across the towel. “Later.”
Kate lay back and let the sun warm her thighs, midriff, and breasts until her face started to burn.
“I may be a tomato in a few minutes, you know.”
“Well, it will add some color to your white skin,” Nasreen teased.
“Funny,” Kate said as she slid her T-shirt over her eyes and nose for protection.
Her shirt smelled like fried samosas. She closed her eyes again and imagined herself at the beach and Tariq applying sunscreen to her skin. She felt his wide hands move across her back. In her daydream, he brushed her hair across one shoulder then kissed her neck.
“I had a dream about Tariq,” Kate blurted, the hairs on her neck prickling.
Nasreen made no response.
“I dreamt we were riding an elephant down Michigan Avenue, sitting high in the howdah. I was holding onto him for dear life, and the Chicago taxis were weaving about the elephant’s legs and honking incessantly,” she said, giggling.
“A bit absurd, but very funny,” Nasreen remarked.
“When he looks at me, it’s like his eyes pierce through me.”
“Really?”
“If Aunty Samina and Nanima want to marry me off while I am in Pakistan, I vote for Tariq,” Kate laughed aloud.
“Not likely.”
“That’s mean,” Kate sneered.
“Well, it won’t happen,” Nasreen insisted. “I am just trying to save your feelings from being hurt.”
“Maybe it can. Maybe he will fall in love with me. There is always the future. A different time and a different place.”
“You are not Muslim.”
“So?”
“His parents will only approve of a Muslim as his wife.”
Kate peered over at Nasreen and scowled. Nasreen’s words burned and hissed in her ear like sweat hitting the hot terrace.
“It’s me, Nasreen,” Kate defended.
“I know. So, you understand.”
Kate waited for Nasreen to say something more, to say she was kidding, but Nasreen remained motionless on the towel. Her eyes closed.
“Did you talk with Anees at all in India?” Kate asked with spite. “He seemed quite preoccupied.”
“About what?”
“Uh, gee, I don’t know, his engagement. Isn’t that why we are here, in Pakistan?”
“We are here for Rahim’s wedding,” Nasreen asserted.
“What does Anees think of his fiancé?”
“Rayah? I don’t know. I don’t think he has met with her much in private. The whole thing has been a little rushed. I guess Aunty Zehba is eager to marry both sons off.”
“Did she know?” Kate asked and sat up. “About you and Anees?”
Kate’s T-shirt slid off her face, and she squinted in the fierce sun. Aunty Zehba had been critical of Nasreen throughout their time in India. She complained that Nasreen’s ankles showed too much, that her makeup was too heavy, that her hair should be covered…then again, Aunty Zehba was critical of everyone.
Nasreen opened one eye and looked up at Kate.
“No,” she answered. “Not to my knowledge.”
Kate lay back down, flipped the shirt over her face, and refrained from asking more. She stared at the orange glow under her fried-samosa-smelling T-shirt.
“Aunty Zehba would never approve of me marrying Anees. I am too American.” An ugly scowl reared across her face. “She wants traditional Pakistani brides for her sons. And Anees will marry only whom his parents approve.”
Kate didn’t know for how long Nasreen and Anees had kept their infatuation a secret, a year maybe. Anees arrived in the US for college two years after Rahim and shared the small apartment with his brother in a middle-class neighborhood close to the university. On school breaks, Rahim and Anees drove to visit their Aunt Laila and enjoy traditional Indian meals before heading back to student life. Sometime during the visits and the home-cooked meals and fresh-smelling bedsheets, Nasreen and Anees, to Kate’s disbelief, became lovers.
Kate thought how lucky Nasreen was that she had not gotten pregnant.
“You cried all the time,” Kate remarked, sitting up again. “I didn’t know what to say. I mean, what do I know? I’ve never had a boyfriend. I learned about love from a girl forbidden to date!”
Nasreen snickered.
“It’s not funny.” Kate looked toward the shed annoyed and wondered when the handyman would realize he was locked in a sauna.
“I’m sorry. I was depressed,” Nasreen said, shrugging her shoulders. “But what’s done is done. I am over him.”
“What if you had gotten pregnant?”
Nasreen sat up abruptly, rage reflected in her eyes.
“It didn’t happen! Don’t speak of it!” she screamed.
“But Nasreen…”
Suddenly a loud pounding came from inside the utility shack.
“Out, out! Please! This will be the death of me!”
“Oh, no! The handyman!” cried Nasreen. “Hurry, get dressed!”
The girls tripped and stumbled to the door. Nasreen fiddled with the lock, covering herself with the towel.
The door swung free and opened wide, and the handyman burst out shielding his face with his salwar shirt so as not to glance at them. He bolted to the door on the opposite side of the terrace and disappeared down the stairs.
“What would be the death of him, the heat or seeing our skin?”
“Both!” Nasreen answered, the girls breaking into laughter.
“Come on! Aunty Zehba will be looking for us. Pray the handyman doesn’t rat us out because she will lock us away!”
“She would do that?”
“Yes! And that will surely end any chance you have with Tariq!”
Chapter 17
Second Chances
Chicago 1998
With a whirl, Kate’s body somersaulted, cutting through the water. She forced air out of her nostrils in two thunderous streams. She flipped, planted her feet against the pool wall, and sprang from the surface, her toes pointed as they left the wall and her arms outstretched. She glided long and soundlessly; the water flowed over and under her slender body, carrying her. As her lungs expanded, burning slightly, she turned her head, breaking the surface of the water and gasped, slowly drawing the air back into her lungs.
In the early afternoon, Kate had the lap lane to herself at the university pool. She lost count how many yards she had swum. With each flip turn, she crushed the stress of the morning against the tiled wall of the Olympic-size indoor pool.
After returning from her detour to Texas, her advisor seemed suspicious. During the lab group meeting, she was ruthlessly grilled about her recent results and relatively unprepared to answer the questions thrown at her like darts at a dartboard.
Her advisor reminded her, dwarfed by his office chair, that she needed
his signature on her thesis to graduate. He mumbled something in German.
You’re such a manipulator! she wanted to scream at him.
Instead, she stood stonily staring at the silver Mont Blanc rollerball pen set.
She ached to speak with Nasreen. But Nasreen was still in Pakistan, nearly three months trying to adopt the twins, with no set return date.
“She is having issues obtaining the baby girl’s US visa,” Mustafa explained.
She called him every week to get an update on Nasreen’s return and got the sense that Mustafa and Nasreen were not speaking to each other very often.
“I’ll call as soon as she books a flight home, I promise you, Kate,” he consoled.
She thought of Nasreen playing with her adopted Pakistani babies, the aunties fussing about them, passing down the teachings to ensure the natural order of raising a son and a daughter. Most likely there was an endless stream of visitors to celebrate the baby boy and welcome the baby girl.
She thought of Krishna searching for her soul in the printed photos strung across a dark bathroom.
She thought of her father.
“You’re stronger than you think, Kat,” his voice drifted through her mind.
She swam alone with just her swirling thoughts. She had been to the clinic, deciding to undergo the genetic testing. She thought she saw Dr. Khan among the doctors in white coats and felt a panic attack emerging in her chest, but she had imagined it. He wasn’t there. The nurses collected her samples and now she waited while the sequencing instruments printed the readout of her genes, good ones or bad ones.
The warm water rippled along her body as she pivoted her torso side to side. With each stroke, her hand slapped the surface. She stretched her right hand, curling her palm around the water, then pulled, thrusting herself through the pool. A dull pain spread through her shoulders as she pulled through the opposite stroke. The repetition of swimming released her mind to her dreams. She heard only the muffled roar of the water pushing against her and the echoes of voices at the opposite edge of the pool. No one could hear her even if she screamed into the water.
Kate stopped at the wall. She was panting, exhausted, and clinging to the pool ledge. Her limbs were cramping, and it felt as if a hot rod lay across her indecisive, heavy heart.
THE SIGN ON the door read “Biochemistry Office.” Kate walked by the chair of the department’s office every day on her way to the lab. Every day she wanted to barge in, insinuate that her advisor was insane. How does one explain the undermining manipulation? Students feared their thesis would be left unsigned, their recommendation letters for hopeful positions left unwritten. She felt she had to be obliging to his demands yet undermining to maintain control over her own destiny. She was exhausted.
She had only a few moments of fleeting courage, like that of sand in an hourglass flipped end-to-end, as she stood outside the office door. In the rippled glass pane, she could see the silhouettes of the administrators in the office as they shuffled back and forth between filing cabinets and desks. Undergraduate courses began in two weeks, and the office staff was busy.
Kate abruptly opened the door.
Karen, the head administrator, stopped typing and looked up. Her assistant swung around, causing the top folder in a thick stack she was carrying to slip from her arms and slap the floor.
“I’ll get that,” Kate said.
She picked the folder up from the floor, sliding the papers back inside. The assistant took the folder from Kate.
“I’m sorry, but Dr. Elber is not in at the moment,” Karen said. “Do you want to make an appointment?”
Kate thought for a moment, but the last few grains of sand had slipped through the hourglass.
“No, it’s fine,” she responded.
Kate turned to go and opened the door just as quickly as she had a moment ago. Dr. Elber’s large frame filled the doorway, and she almost knocked into him.
“Kate. Hello. Here to see me?”
“Yes, but I can come back later.”
“If you have come to see me, then I am sure it is important,” he said, winking. “Let’s go into my office.”
He stepped forward, and she had no other route but to step backward, turn, and proceed into his office.
Dr. Elber walked past her to his desk, unzipped his shoulder bag, and began pulling out its contents: a daily planner, lab book, and file folders.
“What can I do for you?”
Kate thought for a moment, turning over the hourglass in her mind one more time for another few moments of fearlessness. Her father’s words filtering through her mind: “Don’t give up.”
“I would like to request a transfer to another lab,” she said, her voice shaking with adrenaline.
“What?” Dr. Elber was still arranging things on his desk. “Transfer?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you want to start over in another lab, Kate? You are more than halfway through your PhD thesis.”
He let out a groan as he plopped into his chair and tapped on the keyboard to awaken his computer.
“This machine gets slower by the day. Like myself,” he chuckled.
“It’s either that or I quit.”
Dr. Elber stopped shuffling and tapping and looked up at Kate. He sat back in his swivel chair. The worn leather made a flatulent sound against his weight. He brought his interlocked hands to rest on his stomach.
“You can’t quit,” he said in a near teasing tone, attempting to gauge her seriousness.
She stood firm, pursing her lips to hide their quivering.
“You are a good student.”
“Then I deserve a system that works for me.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“I won’t be like Mei!” Kate blurted.
There were still sand grains left in the hourglass.
“She ran away just to escape the craziness! Who knows if she got a position she deserved or had to return to a country that she hasn’t lived in for a decade. Because why? Because our advisor won’t sign her thesis because he is…a…” she stopped.
The look of shock on Dr. Elber’s face made her rethink what she wanted to say. She swallowed the words, stood firm, and squeezed her hands into fists.
Dr. Elber grew serious.
“What do you want?” he asked pointedly.
“I want to transfer to Dr. Crone’s lab. I have already talked to him.”
“Why Dr. Crone?”
Dr. Crone was Scottish and had a crude and rather abrupt nature. But he was honest. Crassness, Kate could fight; belittling manipulation tore at her insides.
“I am more interested in his research,” she stated firmly. “It’s a better fit.”
“We will have to meet with the dean. Explain the situation.”
There was nothing else to say. Kate turned to leave.
“Between you and me,” Dr. Elber said as he stood and walked around to the front of his desk.
Kate turned back to face him. He leaned against the desk and folded his arms across his chest.
“Mei has a position out East. I want you to know. I gave her a recommendation.”
He pushed the button on the intercom.
“Karen,” he called into the device on his desk, “please set up an appointment with Dean Rowbottom at his earliest availability.”
Kate left his office as the last few grains of sand fell through the hourglass.
NASREEN RETURNED TO Chicago after four and a half months in Pakistan. The summer heat had evaporated. The leaves were turning colors and clinging to their branches, waiting to be blown away by the winter winds.
Nasreen opened the front door to see Kate on the doorstep. By the look in Nasreen’s eyes, Kate could see the toll the trip had taken on Nasreen and the process of adopting not one but two babies and bringing them safely and legally home. Kate embraced Nasreen as tightly as she did when she arrived in India, sweaty, dusty, and delirious from travel and desperate for familiarity.
“I really missed you,” Kate said, a sob swelling in her throat. “I’m sorry I was not here when you left. I really am. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.”
“I know. I am sorry too. I should have told you more. You would have listened. You always listen.”
In the time that she was away, Nasreen’s editor at the financial paper suspended her employment.
“After six weeks, my editor called me in Pakistan and fired me over the phone.”
Nasreen saw the positive in the situation.
“Now I can stay home with baby Mani and Sabreena.”
Nasreen’s in-laws had moved out temporarily and gone to live with Mustafa’s younger brother and his family in Santa Fe.
“The extra space right now will be helpful,” Nasreen rationalized. “Mustafa plans to work more from home now that the babies are here. Unless he is traveling,” she added. “Besides, it will be warmer through the winter for my in-laws in the Southwest,” Nasreen explained. “It makes sense. They will move back next summer.”
The fact that Mustafa’s parents were not there to welcome their new grandbabies when Nasreen returned home made Kate assume the reason was more heartbreaking, a rejection of birthright.
Nonetheless, Nasreen looked happy. She was dressed in a new salwar kameez from Pakistan, bright yellow to celebrate new life. She was softer and rounded; the aunties had fed her well.
The babies lay on a plush white blanket with blue moons and silver stars. Little Mani kicked his feet in the air and grabbed at his sister, who rolled toward her twin, stimulated by the touch. Both babies responded to smiles from Nasreen’s cooing friends. Sara, Mona, and Shabana kneeled before the babies, kissing their cheeks and feet and holding a pinky finger out for each to grab ahold.
“They are both too precious, Nasreen,” Sara squealed.
“Very, very cute,” agreed Shabana.
Nasreen smiled proudly.
“They were spoiled in Pakistan. My aunties fed them every time they cried. But they did help fatten them up.”
Kate watched Mani and Sabreena kick. They hardly looked fat and round like most babies did with chunky cheeks and rubberband wrists. The diapers hung loosely around their thin legs and shallow bellies.
Mehendi Tides Page 18
