Riffat too was a widow. She too had suffered, and Dia did not ever want to be the cause of more suffering. As her mother’s sweet, sleepy chit-chat blew in the dark rooms Dia’s stomach clenched. Both she and Daanish betrayed their mothers.
She wondered if, like her, this bothered Daanish more because his father was dead. And whether he’d give anything, even his time with Dia, to have him back again. Just once. Would she?
Riffat said, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Well,’ replied Hassan, ‘we can always avail ourselves of the scrumptious food in the refrigerator. The functioning refrigerator.’
Dia exhaled loudly, enough to let him know he was a pompous beast.
‘It’s sort of like sleeping over at the farm,’ Riffat continued. ‘We could have a picnic. Sandwiches and lemonade …’
‘Warm lemonade,’ Hassan interjected.
‘… It’s been so long since we had a picnic.’
‘Eating in the house you’ve lived in all your life,’ declared Dia, ‘isn’t exactly a picnic. Lights or no lights.’
Inam Gul drifted by again, still spooked. The soles of his rubber slippers squeaked and he spun around, spooking himself. He tried to settle quietly beside Dia on the damp rug but quickly jerked up again, ready for battle.
Dia clicked her tongue once more. ‘What’s the matter with you, Inam Gul?’
‘What irks you, darling?’ Riffat called from inside her room. ‘You’ve been rather sullen lately. Is it still Nini?’
Dia blinked back tears. She rose, took a candle from the shelf, and without answering, walked into the dining room. She stared at the telephone, the one that had transmitted her first conversation with Nini about Daanish. She moved quickly to the bathroom and locked herself in.
Setting the candle down near the soap dish on the sink, Dia unhooked her shalwar. She didn’t really need to go – these days most of it was sweated out. But she lingered on the toilet seat, glad for a quiet moment alone. The yellow tiles of the wall were dotted with moisture, and a tiny mushroom spore was beginning to form. It held her attention for several minutes before she forced herself back out.
In the kitchen, Inam Gul was squeezing two lemons while Riffat opened a tin of cheese. She sliced and arranged it between pieces of bread. Hassan had already begun on a sandwich. Between great mouthfuls, he reported how dry they were. Then his chatter turned to politics, over which he and Riffat always disagreed.
There was talk that the President would depose the Prime Minister again. ‘The army should do it,’ he proclaimed. ‘It should just take over.’ Inam Gul handed him lemonade.
Riffat, her back to him, said, ‘Will we ever have a civilian government for more than two years? Generals and presidents have to let elected leaders run their course.’
‘You can hardly call them leaders,’ he chewed. ‘And who knows if they were really elected.’
‘Ditto for the generals.’
‘They might bring more peace at least. Fewer strikes and riots. God knows Karachi needs a break from that.’
‘Imposed peace is not peace. People will only simmer more.’
‘Simmer,’ Hassan nodded, ‘but at least not boil.’
‘If elected leaders could complete their term,’ Riffat insisted, ‘the anger would boil away.’
‘Eventually, maybe. But after how much more bloodshed?’
‘You forget,’ said Riffat testily, ‘the bloodshed began when a general ruled.’
Such references were the closest Riffat ever came to discussing her husband’s murder. Hassan understood this. So did Dia, standing in the darkened doorway.
‘That was,’ Riffat continued, ‘during the third military rule. How many more do we need to understand our mistakes?’
Hassan, though mouthy, was by temperament skittish. He shrugged, and attempted to get out of the question by teasing Riffat. ‘You just want to see our poor, martyred, “daughter of the east” back again, don’t you, Ama? You’re Sindhi to the core.’
Riffat, exasperated, answered, ‘I just want to leave politics to the politicians. God knows from whom you inherited your coup mentality!’ She sat down, adding, ‘There’s biscuits.’
Dia entered the kitchen.
‘There you are,’ Riffat looked up.
‘We’re having a gala time.’ Hassan champed on a second sandwich, speaking with moist cheese on his tongue. ‘I know someone who said you submitted your exam blank.’
‘Oh?’ Dia pulled out a chair. ‘Did that someone tell you she cheated?’
‘It was a he. And no, his sister did not tell him she cheated. Not all sisters do.’
She glared at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’re right, Ama. She’s very cranky lately.’
‘I didn’t say cranky,’ Riffat gently interceded. ‘I just think something’s bothering her.’
‘Do I have to be referred to in the third person when I’m at the same table?’
‘You see,’ Hassan nodded.
Inam Gul coughed in the dark. He ate alone in a corner, listening.
‘Well, the last time I addressed you,’ Riffat said, ‘you walked away. So I didn’t want to chase you out again.’ She watched closely while nibbling cheese.
Dia tried to eat.
Riffat pursued, ‘What happened at the exam? I saw you studying. Was it hard?’
Dia peeled off a slice of the bread. There was too much butter and Hassan smelled bad. ‘I just didn’t want to be there,’ she replied. ‘Everyone was making me feel ill.’
‘Oh, poor baby,’ cooed Hassan.
‘You didn’t have to focus on them.’ Riffat’s tone was neutral. Not accusing, but not sympathetic either.
‘I don’t want to talk about this.’ Dia stood up.
As she left the kitchen she heard Riffat call, ‘You’re going to have to some time, Dia. Because I want to know why a brilliant girl like you …’
She drifted back through the room where the telephone beckoned, hesitated, then wound around to the front door. Here her father’s portrait met her. The portrait she hated. The one that did not capture what she’d known of him: the soft jowls shaking with laughter as she read to him; the tattered, cotton banyaans and coconut oil; the heavy, ungainly walk in contrast to Riffat’s vixen trot; the tree-climber. Her fat, agile father was turned into a still life in a suit with a gilt frame holding him in, forcing those eyes to stare in horror at the future looming close.
Holding a candle up to his face, Dia peered, as she had so many times before, for something familiar. But the only thing that was common to both the person and the portrait was that she couldn’t see a trace of herself in it. Where did her large, amber eyes come from? The deep dip between her nose and upper lip? Dark complexion?
She blew out the candle and pressed deep into the portrait. In the dark, she could believe he was as he’d been when she’d read to him almost every night from her Book of World Fables. They carried pillows up the mulberry tree, a light (it had to be electric, dias were too flammable), and in the still, dry months, paper fans. While she read, he enjoyed the pictures. His breath smelled vaguely of brown sugar, and his arms of milk bread. She did not know it at the time but the crafty pages of the book were trapping his scents, blending them with their own old, ligneous sigh, so she was left less with the stories, and more with his vapor. She had to work hard to conjure up solid memories of him, but Dia felt her father everywhere.
To have more than this, to have him back even once, could she really give Daanish up? To go back to the night before his death, before Riffat huddled with her children, muttering, I shouldn’t have told him. To have a different branch of the river flow into the sea, not the one that had swept her alongside Daanish. To be, instead, sitting with her family in the kitchen, watching a mother and father who were strangers, not lovers, yet loving them both. And back even further, to whatever it was her mother shouldn’t have told him. Before, before, when she was just a tiny mulberry knot, slipping howling into the
world. Before the lines on her palm were even scratched. Before she must choose who she wanted to be.
DAANISH
1
News
AUGUST 1992
Anu was the only one delighted with the intensity of the rains. It didn’t matter that the electricity was out for seven or eight hours at a time, that she was stuck in a sweltering kitchen without even a pedestal fan, or that the house she spent so much time complaining about aged considerably with every storm. Inclement weather meant her son stayed home. Their barely functional, twelve-year-old excuse for a Datsun was entirely nonfunctional now. The day Daanish turned the ignition and it clicked dead, she’d beamed.
If he hated her for smothering him, the next minute he grew so guilty he loved her more. If he loved her more he spent less time shut in his room and more time shut in her love. But that made him hate her more. He remembered her often as she’d been the day he arrived from the airport: standing at the front door with arms open wide, firmly positioned between him and his aunts, his things, his past. She rolled comfort and isolation into one soft embrace. The fact was, he wanted both.
When not with Dia, lethargy steeped him. He woke in a stupor, gazing out at Karachi with narcotic dullness. The air was a whirlwind of opium-thick grime and smog – it latched on to his collar and screamed: Stop! Rest! Do nothing at all! And when he tried to fight, he only sank deeper in inertia.
He’d sit with a pencil and pad in his room and try to order his disorder the way he’d once classified his shells:
1. Aba’s absence
2. Anu’s presence
3. Heat/humidity
4. Noise. Always noise. Construction, neighbors, children on the street, generators, loudspeakers. Never a moment of natural silence, the kind in the sunken garden. Or the cove.
5. Dia
He’d throw the piece of paper away. All he’d written was trivial. That was the problem. His problems were not tangible monsters. They were tiny invisible bacteria. The monsters were the strikes in the city, journalists killed, burgeoning beggars. Recently, a devoted social worker had fled because his life was being threatened. No one had ever threatened Daanish’s life. Shantytowns were mushrooming. He had a house. In that house, the closer life pressed against him, the more he could think only in headlines. And in a city of eleven million, life pressed very, very close.
There were roaches bending backwards in the shower drain. Crickets chirping under the no-longer-pristine white rug. Dia had told him an interesting fact about crickets: not all of them could sing, and the ones that did sang with wings. They rubbed these together in a dance and the dance sang. Crickets with no rhythm pretended otherwise. They hung around the dancers and when the latter drew mates, they sidled up to female crickets and said: ‘Hey baby, I’m the singer in this band!’ Some singers never got a girl, and some liars did. And some crickets amplified their song by dancing in a burrow. The hole became a trumpet, like loudspeakers in little underground mosques. Daanish entertained himself for hours picturing maulvi sahibs rubbing wings together in a dark tunnel. It was either that, or the big picture: toppling governments, ethnic hatred, foreign aid, sanctions on Iraq, eighty per cent of the world’s wealth in the hands of fifteen per cent of its people.
What could he possibly do about any of that?
Was he to become a journalist in America, a country that taught students of journalism not to unearth the big picture, only to come back here and find he too needed a cleaner, less overwhelming truth?
Was that his filthy truth?
There were ants on his toothbrush. So the ad had lied. The product did have sugar. The toilet paper plugged the toilet. The tanker did not show so there was no water to flush the toilet with anyway. And when the rain fell and the power shut off, there was no fan to air out the stench in the toilet. It drifted all the way down the hall. It crept under his door and under the rug where the dancing crickets sang. Could crickets smell human shit?
If Daanish had a filthy truth, he hoped Dia could save him from it.
One day when there was a break in the rain the postman rode his bicycle through the flooded street, dropping a bundle of mail in a puddle by the defunct Datsun. In that bundle there was a letter from Liam. It was on top of a pile of bills and didn’t get too badly soaked.
Dear Daanish,
It’s been two months since you left, but no news. Didn’t I tell you not to be a stranger? So what’s up, man?
I’m at Iris’s house for the week. Her folks are real cool. They’re building this house in the woods in N. Vermont, real close to the Canadian border. It’s just about complete. There’s pine trees and elms, and days are in the mid-60s. Not another house for miles but we do have visitors: bears! It’s like living like Grizzly Adams, man (and Grizzly Iris, no doubt). We’ve been eating more blueberry pie than we know what to do with, and Iris even tried making blueberry ice cream. Du-ude! Maple syrup flows like water around here. Iris’ mom makes bitching pancakes. I must have put on ten, twelve pounds. Although maybe not: I walk and swim and chop wood.
Her dad did a lot of the building on the house himself. He’s tight-mouthed and tough like a bull, but I think he’s finally warming up to me. Yesterday, when I was helping him lay tiles in the bathroom, he told me this joke and I think we really bonded. Then all five of us (Iris’ mom and sister too) went for a dip in a nearby lake. As her dad said, it was cold as a witch’s tit.
Iris is still my queen. She played again at a church and again had everyone in awe. We go into town alone sometimes. Catch a matinee, hear some tunes. Have lunch at this diner where she’s going to work for the next month before college reopens. And I’m going to have to go home to D.C. next week. But then she’ll visit some weekend.
Hey, I heard about the chaos in Karachi. What’s going on there, man? The television made it seem like a damn civil war? Give me your news, okay?
Stay alive,
Liam.
P.S. Iris’ dad’s joke: An 80-year-old man starts going out with a 20-year-old woman. The doctor tells him to be careful. It might not be good for the heart. The man shrugs, ‘Well, if she dies, she dies.’
2
Ancestry
MAY–OCTOBER 1991
In the weeks following the success of Operation Desert Storm and the television broadcast of the biggest ticker-tape parade in history, Daanish stopped writing in his journal. A silent terror seized him, leaving him incapable of articulating anything any more. He finally felt what he’d been meant to feel since the first air strikes: nothing. He really didn’t know if anything had happened after all.
Only once did something speak to him. He clutched it in his hands, words by Vonnegut about a previous conflict: The war was such an extravaganza that there was scarcely a robot anywhere who didn’t have a part to play.
He recited them while rinsing pots at Fully Food. There was Robot Wang who scraped ranch dressing and beef and rolls into trash bags that Robot Ron tied and heaved onto his back like Dick Whittington off to seek his fortune in a great city. Robot Nancy had simply quit. She was going to take parttime classes in a community college and work a real job. ‘Not like here,’ she said, ‘in the united fucking colors of Benetton.’ At the bus station, he gave her a robot kind of kiss and the next day, a robot from Trinidad replaced her. Daanish never bothered introducing himself, nor did anyone else.
It continued like that into the fall. He barely even wrote to his parents. Sometimes the phone rang in the hall and he heard a student pick it up and say, Who? Day-nish? He knew it was his father but didn’t answer when the messenger knocked on his door. He’d always remember that: he hadn’t answered all his father’s calls. The following year, he’d be dead.
Most of all, Daanish avoided Liam. The two had hardly spoken since their argument outside Hallmark, even though he’d gone to Iris’ recital. The notes had scraped his nerves and from the way Liam clenched his jaw Daanish knew he couldn’t concentrate either. Afterwards, they both congratulated Iris excessively an
d then Daanish took a taxi back to his dorm. It had cost everything he had, but he wasn’t going to wait for Liam to offer a ride.
Increasingly, Daanish retreated to his sunken garden to watch the season change. And to reflect on his friend. Looking up at an old oak, he remembered climbing it last fall, while Liam photographed him from below. He’d almost fallen off when Liam hollered, ‘Why do women have vaginas?’
‘No idea.’
‘So men will talk to them.’
Daanish snorted: ‘Not in my country.’
Liam guffawed. ‘You’re living in the wrong place, man! Here’s another one: why do women take so long to orgasm?’
‘Who cares?’
‘Oh, you knew it already!’
And in the winter, the two had come here often to enjoy the chilling silence, occasionally puncturing it with chatter. But they never discussed the war.
Eventually, alone in the garden, Daanish slowly began to feel his pulse again. The nuthatches were preparing for winter. So were the honeybees, circling around him less with each day. Petals curled and dried, and the color came early to the leaves. A tiny leg of sensation kicked inside him. After many months, he found himself compelled to again make sense of what had been effaced.
He enrolled in a journalism class with a different professor. But like Wayne, she steered discussion toward consumer happiness. If the public wasn’t getting the story it wanted, it was being exploited. She called the right story ‘soft news’ and showed videos of anchor personalities that made the softness the softest. Unlike Wayne, she asked for no journals.
Daanish never interrupted her but still continued his search in the library.
In a medical journal one day, he found a letter written by a conscientious objector, a Marine who’d spoken at protests throughout the war before turning himself in.
Daanish read the letter.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr are heroes but my greatest hero is Mohammad Ali. No politician or activist can understand the shame of being asked to serve your country but refusing. A man on a hunger strike feels cleansed. Maybe he sees God. But a man who says no to an oath feels like a coward. He feels like a wuss. Like no God could ever love him. He hangs his head and wonders if he’s a man or a sick nothing. Ali knows. And now look: people in every corner of the world are crazy for him.
Trespassing Page 24
