by Kim Echlin
I called to tell Mahsa.
She said, Ali’s parents will be here.
I said, Four years, Mahsa. I haven’t seen you for four years. It is time. The charts are in the mail. The performance is only three nights. Your kids are fine now. We record opening night. Get yourself down here. I’m going on tour to Asia after but next time I want you to tour with me. The most radical thing a woman can do is live.
Harvey brought in dancers from one of his high school programs and when I met them I asked, So you are the high-risk kids? I stage-whispered, What they don’t know is that we take high risks.
They danced till their feet ached. We did blind casting and everyone had a chance to perform. The lovers were Hispanic, black, Asian, white. Bea asked me where I got the idea and I said that it came from Mahsa.
Bea said, I think you’re writing about Gran.
If it was her story, we wouldn’t be here.
I thought, It is time she knows about her grandmother, and so I told Bea how Ma was arrested for being incorrigible, about a morality so cold that fathers imprisoned their own daughters. I said, Baby Bea, Gran was in a reformatory and I was taken away and she had to fight to get me back. She was still a teenager. When she got out she was frightened to be married to a Chinese man so they never lived together. The last blow was years later when she found out he had another wife.
Bea was quiet for a long time. She said, You could have told us.
That was that. The last shreds gone. Ma, I kept your secret from my kids until I did not have to anymore. They heard the story as sad and unjust, but also as quaintly from another time, a time when girls wore white gloves and filled up hope chests to get ready to marry. Ma, your grandkids grew up half black when people marched and protested and burned cities and died so we could all go to school together and sit on the bus together and live in the same neighbourhoods. Ma, your grandkids loved you with your silly rhymes and old songs and handing them hundred-dollar bills on the street and telling them you didn’t want to go to heaven. They loved you, and found it a curiosity that a woman could be arrested for following her own desire. We were all fine. Blemished, imperfect, but fine.
MAHSA
Katherine and I played parts of “New Thing” on the telephone to each other every day. She described the choreography and practices and said, You should see how well they move to your “I Miss You, Mor,” it is very emotional.
After the months caring for her mother, I felt her intense energy. I so wanted to see her again. In the mirror I saw a woman losing her freshness, and when I looked down on the keyboard the veins pushed up from under my skin in little rivers and mountains. My breasts were less taut, a thing I noticed with Kamal in the strangeness of us remembering our bodies in youth. What had I done in all the years? I had tried to make a marriage work, raised two children. I had lived in a clay shell that was now cracked and falling away. I wanted so much to play this concert. And so, I begged Ali, Let us take your parents to New York this summer. You have been sick and it is a chance for us all to be together. I felt my stomach clench, waiting for his impatient No, and I had planned that whatever he said I would go and take Lailuma with me. The perversity of who I had become was that I continued to try to please him. I was placating and I sickened myself. But he surprised me, said, Perhaps you are right.
Soon Ammi-jaan was phoning to ask how long was my concert and how many days to rehearse and how long would I be backstage and where would we stay. I wanted to scream, How would I know? I have hardly been out since you kidnapped my daughter. She asked what hotel would we use and would I take her shopping and were there some restaurants where Daadi could find plain rice, and preferably rice porridge in the mornings. I reassured her that I would have lots of time to show her New York and she sent me a lovely shalwar kameez richly embroidered in greens and yellows, made of fine silk, expensive and exquisite, and wrote on the note, This is for your show.
What a fool I was.
She phoned and said, I have found a husband for Lai. He is educated and has already worked with Ali. He might be pleasing to Lailuma, I think quite handsome. He has worked in London, but Ali could find him a place in the business in Canada. Would we not be happy to see her settled? We can introduce them, we must not wait too long. I worry so much about Ali’s health.
Nothing they were afraid to use to have their way.
He was fifteen years older than Lai. Ali said, It is decided. It is my greatest desire to see this for Lailuma.
I said, Ali, let her take her scholarship, finish her education. She is too young and will be difficult.
Even when I have been sick, you resist me, he said. She can go to school after she is married. She herself has not seen him to decide. I agreed to you playing the concert. Always you want more.
She does not want to marry. She wants to study.
It is time for her, he said. What is wrong with getting married?
KATHERINE
It was so good to see Mahsa. I pulled her close to me. She was thinner and in each other’s eyes we saw the recent years of struggle. I said, Let’s play. You start, I’m going upstairs to listen. I watched her settle in and touch the keys of one of the Bösendorfers and I leaned over a front balcony above to hear how the sound resonated up there. An open grand looks like a harp tipped on its side from above. I love the acoustics at BAM. Mahsa was nervous like a little racehorse ready to burst out. I called down to her, You sound great, wait, I’m coming to play with you. On the way down I listened to her still feeling for the sound she wanted. I love empty concert halls. It was so damn good to be with her. I sat down and we looked at each other across the spruce cabinets and soundboards, and we were young and playing together side by side at the Surf Maid again and we listened to the rims begin to vibrate, piano wire resonating under our fingers and we were swinging together in one string hammock, the shining wood reflecting our faces.
We warmed up with “Two to Love,” and then I said, Let’s play it straight through, and she nodded and waited for my opening bars. Her head and shoulders were bent forward over the keyboard and she had taken off her jacket and was wearing a light shirt and she closed her eyes. She knew the music perfectly and when I stopped to work at our dynamics, she could pick up anywhere. We played as if we had never been parted. The score was on the floor beside her. I love playing with Mahsa. At the end of the third movement we stopped on the same breath, a single hand smoothing the sheets.
There was a hell-bent feel to her touch that I had not heard before and I said, You’re playing strong, and she said, It’s your music, and I said, And yours too.
Ali came in to watch the end of the rehearsal, stood arms crossed, leaning against the wall inside the back doors. He wore his expensive suit casually, and though Mahsa had told me he was sick, I saw a man accustomed to taking up space. He strode down the long aisle, introduced himself charmingly and said, Mahsa has spoken of you so often. Can I bring you anything? I said, We should relax before the performance. I wondered, fleetingly, if Mahsa had been afraid of nothing all these years. He was urbane, worldly. When he left, Mahsa sat down again and played for fun a blues bit that she often played when we were young. She always called it “Karachi Baby” but I think it was an old Beatles tune. I watched her shoulders start to move, her body get loose, and when she finished she looked around happily and said, I feel as if I am on my own brink again. That always happens to me with you.
Me too.
Then she dropped her hands to her sides and swung around on the bench and said, Katherine, I’ve got this bad feeling.
It’s jitters, I said. You haven’t performed for a long time. Let’s get something to eat.
A few hours later the auditorium was full and the dancers were behind us and she was performing like her hair was on fire.
MAHSA
On stage, dressed in black, Katherine looked like a tall, elegant man wearing a woman’s hat, and the fine silk of my shalwar kameez shimmered against her suit. The opening twelve bars of “
New Thing” were hers and then the second piano came in as the lights came up on the dancers. We got to work. No intermission. Straight through. One moment. One story.
The lovers wore bodysuits under their wedding clothes and during the violent slow-motion attack scene in the second movement, the young woman’s fancy silks were torn off as she was pulled away by her brothers. Her lover was left holding a scrap of her torn dress, his own clothes also in tatters. That movement ends with the chorus, faces covered by veils, dancing to “I Miss You, Mor.” Before the allegretto, Katherine looked across the piano at me ready to complete the long unbroken piece.
The final tableau is my favourite part of the dance. The first piano answers the second. On the bare stage the ghosts of the lovers dance a passionate pas de deux of lost love. They move in and out of unmoving pools of blue light. I had been preparing to play this moment with Katherine from the time I first sat beside Abbu on the piano bench as a small child.
When it was over, in the dark, on stage, Katherine hugged me, said, We played well.
I knew we had.
I’m going to check with the recording engineers to see if they got it, she said. Go and enjoy the party, I’ll be there in a minute.
I was not aware that he had come until I was off stage and saw him standing half-hidden near the door in the hallway to the green room. Kamal. In New York. A group of young dancers jostled by the door, running with great excitement in and out of their change rooms, and a student who was amiably drunk, a dancer’s boyfriend, stumbled between us. He looked from Kamal to me and asked, Sorry. Is this your guy?
No.
The drunk looked at me in surprise, as if I had tried to tell him that the earth is flat, said, Then do you wish he was your guy?
I laughed as I used to with drunks in the hotel bars and said, I’m just getting my sweater.
The drunken young man moved along and I whispered to Kamal, I have to go. Even a drunk can feel us.
Kamal said, Not yet.
I have to get my things.
In the dressing room were empty water bottles, dancers’ bags, coats in a pile on a couch. When I turned, Kamal was standing inside the door and we were alone.
Mahsa, you played beautifully.
Kamal, thank you for coming.
We heard people in the hall and I moved away from him and he slipped into a side room as a stage manager showed Ali in.
Ali said, Mahsa, you know I am waiting. What are you doing? Who was that?
One of the theatre staff, I said.
Come, I have someone waiting to meet you.
At the reception, I felt the unpleasant confusion I used to feel with people after performing. Ali guided a French-Canadian businessman I had met several times in Montreal through the crowd to me and he said, Mahsa, it was magnificent. Then to Ali he said, Where have you been hiding her? He pulled in a young man and said, This is my son Sebastien. He wants you to play at his boîte, Nuage bleu, when you get back to Montreal.
Ali said, Of course she will play for you.
Where were Asif and Lailuma?
A mandala of light bulbs was strung over the tall windows of the Lepercq Space. Along the walls of the cavernous room were risers and scaffolding and the centre was set with round tables and a long bar and candles and big trays of food that the dancers wheeled around like small flocks of starlings. Some were wrapped in scarves and heavy leg warmers and others wore light silk camisoles and their parents approached, to tell me they’d never heard two pianos, that their children had been inspired by the work. Katherine brought Harvey, who wore a plaid jacket and a black fedora, to see me. He wanted me to meet people from the school board. I had not imagined how many people Katherine knew, or what this production meant. Finally I made my way back to Ali and asked, Where are the children?
They went to the hotel with my parents to make a latenight celebration for you. We will meet them there.
I wanted them at the reception with me. I wanted to stay here all night with everyone else, to enjoy this moment.
Ali said, It is late.
I made my way round the party one more time and saw Bea who was excited about her first choreography and she asked, Where’re Lai and Asif? I haven’t seen them.
I found Katherine who said, Mahsa, this is the fun part. She turned to Ali and said, Stay a bit longer. Everyone wants her at the opening-night party.
He answered her charmingly, You’ll understand, my parents leave in the morning, early. Tomorrow night I hope you’ll allow me to invite you and your family to a postperformance dinner.
When I nodded Katherine shrugged and said, All right. Meet me here tomorrow at five thirty.
In the cab Ali said, I hate that kind of theatre.
I looked out the window at the Carnegie Hall tower with its glazed bricks. I thought, I won’t let him spoil my night.
Almost naked dancers, said Ali. This is the sort of theatre you choose. Hell is full of women.
Inside our hotel, under the chandeliers, walking over the thick carpet, past heavy wooden desks with fresh flowers, I still did not know. I was looking forward to celebrating with my children. I still did not know, walking down the long hotel hall, thinking about performing again tomorrow.
But I knew when I stepped inside the door and we switched on the lights, when Ali closed it behind us and swung the brass security bar across. I knew this kind of emptiness.
She’d never made it to the concert. No one had. Not Asif. Not Ali’s parents. While I was settling behind the piano on the darkened stage, while we played the first notes as the dancers appeared, they slipped away. They forced her. They forced her into a cab. The door to the cab closed. The car pulled away to the airport.
That is how fast a life can change.
KATHERINE
I was living with a new silence inside. After the party, I went home alone and played the whole performance through in my head. There was a fresh passion in Mahsa that I hadn’t felt before. I wished she could have come home and sat up late and talked like the old days. I thought I might change the timing of the opening of the second movement. I couldn’t sleep and I wished T had come. Ma was inside me in a different way now. Ma, I want to turn from you as from the cold ashes of a dead fire. But you burn like hidden embers. You would have liked that Baby Bea choreographed. I’m glad that I saw you with Sean. You were a woman who was loved. I am going on the road again because I have wanted to sleep in strange beds and to play for new audiences every night ever since I first got pregnant and gave all that up. I have new ideas for two pianos. One piece will be called “Bye, Stars.” I am hearing new sounds that begin with your Ma-filled silences. The longer you are gone, the deeper I feel you. Am I just beginning again? A woman becomes mustard seed light when her old and her young are gone. Is this how you felt when I left?
I heard my grown-up kids come in and sit at our kitchen table as I lay in bed. Now I had what I always thought I wanted, empty space and time to write real and true things. I was thinking about new sounds when I heard the telephone ring, and Bea answered and she listened for a long time. Finally she came into the bedroom and asked, Are you awake? Lailuma’s on the phone.
MAHSA
I passed ahead of Ali into the silent room.
Do not try to stop this, he said. I will divorce you. I will say the three talaqs and be done with you.
His eyes were black beads in his flushed, old skin. He seemed to me suddenly deformed, and a stranger.
Ali, he’s too old for her. Please.
They marry tomorrow. You and I leave for Montreal in the morning. We are all tired of your resisting.
I should have stayed in New York, should have played the last two nights with Katherine. All I could think about was getting Lailuma back, and so I left with him thinking I could do more from home than here. They count on that.
I saw the unlit cross against the late-morning light and I looked down at the great, wide river cradling the city. Though I have lived here longer than anywhere else,
the sight of forest from the air still seems exotic to me. Ali shifted in his seat and touched my arm and I felt revulsion. I pulled away and put my forehead against the small window. I would call Katherine, and then I would call Aunt, who I had not spoken to for years, to ask her to take Lai shopping and hide her. I would have to get out of the house to call. I could go to Jean’s, or Monique’s. I had to act quickly. We moved through the lines for baggage and customs and Ali showed our passports and when the immigration officer asked, What was the purpose of your trip? Ali said, Just pleasure. He looked at me and I nodded. He put our passports in his jacket pocket and then we took the airport express bus downtown and I was thinking, Where is Lailuma now?
Ali lifted his large suitcase up the steps to our door, and I had only my purse with no money inside. Ali unlocked the door and stepped ahead of me into the hall. He put the suitcase down and was removing his coat. Then he stopped and shouted at me, Lock the door. I was startled by this new rage until I saw what he had seen in the living room.
He yelled, What are you doing here? Where is she?
Asif stood up, pale, with black rings under his eyes. He hadn’t been to bed. A bedroom throw was lying in a heap on the floor beside the couch, and an empty plate. He said, She refused, Abbu. I could not make her. She made a terrible scene at the airport. As soon as she walked through the metal detector, she started shouting, They’re taking me, and she ripped up her boarding pass and dropped it on the floor. All the people in line were staring at us. Daadi could not get to her and I was still behind in the lineup and they blocked all of us. Security officers took her away. Abbu, we never saw her again. They took her into a closed room.
