Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

  Ali shouted, You could not get her on a plane? You helped her!

  No, Abbu, she wouldn’t stop shouting. She was crazy. It was terrible. The whole place was silent. When the Americans and then a Canadian questioned us I told them she was going home to help Ammi, like you said, we all said that. Daadi started to argue with them, saying it is our family matter and they had no right to interfere, he’d sue and all kinds of threats. When he started talking like that the official got angry. He said, Your granddaughter has told us you are taking her against her will. This is an offence. She is of age. I will release you only to take your flight. I recommend you do not miss your plane, sir. It will be preferable to dealing with the authorities here. He told me to go home too. Abbu, he was very angry. There was nothing we could do. I slept in the airport and took the first flight back. After security we never saw her again.

  Ali shouted, Gaddha! If I had been there.

  He grabbed a ceramic lamp and smashed it against the fireplace. Sparks scarred the air. He spat at me, Kutti!

  Our family became a snarling, weeping many-headed creature in the time it takes to turn a shirt inside out. Ali shouted at me, Does a father not have a right? Tell me where she is.

  I do not know.

  Mera laan choop!

  Ali! Stop!

  Ali said, Call that woman.

  Slowly I dialed Katherine, looking at Asif’s eyes to see what he knew, but our son was terrified. I misdialed, put down the receiver, said, Wrong number.

  Ali grabbed the phone and said, Tell me her number.

  You can’t call now.

  He said to Asif, You know the number. Dial it.

  Asif took the phone, saying, Stop, Abbu, stop, and he dialed and I heard Katherine’s sleepy voice say hello.

  Ali grabbed the phone. Where is she?

  Who the hell is this?

  Ali held the receiver to my mouth between us and said, Tell her.

  I said, Katherine, Lai’s disappeared. Did you hear from her?

  Ali shouted, Where is my daughter?

  I don’t know what Katherine said.

  KATHERINE

  It was a damned mess. Lai had already made up her mind to go west to study. I told her to come to my apartment for the night but she was afraid that Ali would find her. Bea and I went out to the airport and helped her organize her flight to Los Angeles and to Vancouver from there. She said, I’ll sleep here. Bea stayed with her. I needed to get home and get some sleep and call the understudy and rehearse with him to perform the last two nights. It was a damned soap opera.

  I was done. I wanted to get on the road again. I wanted to know what silence is, how the dead live inside it. I don’t know why the hell she stayed with him. I wouldn’t have stayed.

  The tour got off to a rough start. Cecil booked us into the Trout Forest Music Festival in Red Lake without telling me.

  I said, Cecil, I know this is about a girl. You go and see her and meet me later. There’s nothing but mosquitoes up there.

  He said, Kat, I’ve never been above 109th Street alone, and that girl invited me. Come and play one night with me. I want her family to know I can play. It’s all set.

  Who paid the air tickets?

  I did.

  Cecil, we’re going on a big tour and you’re pulling stunts before we even start.

  Just this one thing.

  How’d you meet her?

  She was at the Blue Note. You don’t know about love, he said.

  We ended up on a float plane flying over a thousand miles of bush and lake, his double bass laid across our knees. We checked ourselves into the red-roofed Norseman Inn and I picked up a telegram from Sean, Good luck on your tour. No word from Mahsa, but I didn’t expect any. We were a sight in that tiny place, big powerful Cecil hauling his double bass around, and me in my hat and veil.

  The young woman in question appeared in a four-wheeler with her boyfriend who had Paul Bunyan–sized scarred arms. The boyfriend said, I told her no New York souvenirs but there’s no plane till morning.

  The festival organizers found me an electric keyboard and Cecil and I joined the opening night with a group called Big Boogaloo that played rock and roll and Latin. Red Lake had never heard the likes of us and most of them dug it. At the end of the night I said to the settled-in crowd, This last piece is dedicated to my ma who died this year.

  Big Boogaloo stepped back and Cecil’s low, low tones felt like old spirits moving on the face of the Shield rock in the crisp northern night. The audience was with us, and then the music disappeared into forest and sky like a last breath. Ma, I was picturing you sitting in the doorway in the basement of the Connaught, smoking and bouncing your foot, listening to a girl playing scales on an untuned piano.

  At the end of the night, the young musicians asked us, Wanna go out? We’re heading to Howey Bay Lounge beside your motel.

  Cecil was eager to be anywhere but his room so I said, I’m crashing. You go if you want but I do not want a beat-up bass player down on that dock in the morning no matter how much you drink. I need your hands and ugly mug in one piece for my tour.

  They all laughed and moved on and a man with destroyedlooking eyes and red drinker’s flesh on the heels of his hands stepped out of the darkness.

  I liked your last piece, he said. You leaving on the morning plane?

  Yes.

  Do you want to see our art gallery?

  It was two in the morning but I let him take me to Red Lake’s main drag and he opened the gallery with a key on a strip of leather and flipped on the lights. The walls were hung with four enormous canvases of great-eyed creatures connected to each other by black lines, animals and earth and water and sky and the round-eyed ones he called fish-people. He offered me a cigarette and I turned in the room slowly and studied the paintings.

  Yours?

  Yup.

  Is this about the spirit world?

  Some people say that.

  Where my mother went.

  Or where she’s from.

  His lips twitched back and he flicked ashes on the floor. The skin of his face was heavy with pockmarks and a scar up his left cheek. He looked like one of his own creatures. We sat together on the floor in the middle of the room and smoked another cigarette.

  I asked, Does that door lock? and he nodded and locked it and turned off the lights. He was tender and laid out his flannel shirt on the floor for us. Near dawn, he drove me back to the motel, and Venus was a single bright point in the northern sky. I never saw him again but I saw his art. Back in New York, I saw a new canvas with a tall, black-haired woman connected by those strange lines to something bright at the top of the frame. I like the people and the chance things that happen on the road. I like the pursuing.

  MAHSA

  I should have felt complicated, full of turmoil. But I did not. I felt whole. Who I most am. Some water fills locks, emptying with the sluice gates. Some water rises from springs and flows freely in clean, open streams. If the love is true, it is not wrong. Love has many forms.

  For days Ali would not look at me. Then, one night, he came into the kitchen, sat on the edge of a chair. He said, Ammi is disappointed. My father does not speak to me. I have been sick, Mahsa. You will help me fix this. I know you know where she is.

  With Lailuma gone, my days were even longer. I sometimes met Kamal in the mornings. As soon as I crossed his threshold I pulled off my niqab and before my coat was gone, his arms were around me. We made love, and we were easier together, not sleeping, but quiet.

  He asked, Why do you wear it?

  I shrugged.

  Why?

  If I am discovered, I will be like the amputee outside the grocery store, not a leg to stand on.

  Jokes like ice, meant to soothe. The world shifting forever begins in small ways with little words. I finally said now to Kamal. All my life I have said for now to survive. I left Pakistan for now, kept making my marriage work for now, kept my daughter safe for now, put off playing with Katherine for now
. I loved better Kamal’s word—always. He said, I have always loved you. He said, I always think about you. He said, We always did this first.

  Lai finally telephoned and asked, Mor, why? I never did anything. I was good.

  There was no answer. Sometimes a fox is in trouble because of its own pelt.

  She said, What did I do, Mor?

  You did nothing wrong, Lailuma. We knew this might happen. Where are you?

  I promised Katherine not to tell. She said it’s the only way to be safe. We don’t know what Abbu might do.

  So, I was to remain invisible.

  I talked with her for a long time, did not want to hang up. I imagined her across the continent in a place of dark trees and totem spirits and free jazz.

  I was so afraid at the airport, Mor. I did not know if they made me go what Daadi would do to me. He would never let me go out alone. I don’t know where anything is in Karachi. Daadi tried to push past the security people at the airport when they were taking me away. You should have seen Asif’s face.

  Her voice became lighter. She said, Mor, it was sort of great. When the officials told me I was of age and free to go I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know that I was of age. Why did you not tell me?

  I had not known it either. Why had I not found out these things and talked to her?

  She asked, What if they had forced me to go?

  She described flying west alone and she said, Mor, the money you gave me was enough for the tickets. I always thought you were crazy giving me so much money. What if I had not had it?

  She told me how she had carried it in a waist belt she made herself and that in high school she was always afraid of losing it. She told me how much she missed home and she asked, Will Abbu hate me forever? In the background I heard someone playing Bach. I recognized that touch. Match. I said, Lai, a broken hand can work but a broken heart cannot.

  She said, Mor, I don’t want Abbu to hate me.

  Your Abbu loves you.

  She said, Well I better go. And then she said, Nice way for Abbu to show it.

  I watched leaves twist in funnels outside the window and listened to the winds. The djinn who imprisoned a woman in a glass coffin held fast by four steel locks kept her under the sea because he loved her, but still she managed to escape. Back in the world, she took a ring from each man she seduced and when she met two wandering princes, her ninety-ninth and hundredth men, she took their rings as trophies. She said, Men should not lock their wives in glass coffins because it only teaches them cunning.

  Who condemned me to live with honour but without meaning? To keep peace in my family? I could have left, but Ali was having treatments again. How could I leave him with no one to care for him? Where love and duty wrestle there is no joy in the victory of duty. In my dark and lonely moments, desire pulled at me with a pulse eternal as the night sky full of dead and living stars.

  When I could finally talk with Match again, she said, Do not worry, I am helping her.

  How’s married life? I asked her.

  I like it very much, she said. I will soon have a baby. And I am teaching piano. Classical.

  Across the wires I felt the hope and energy of young women and I wished I were there with them.

  One night Lai dared to call the house when she knew Ali would be home. She said, Happy Thanksgiving, Mor. Ali heard me talking and he asked, Is that her? I turned from him but he took the phone and said, You’re dead to me.

  Ali grew thin. He forgave Asif and trained him to take over the business. He said, Family is a torment to be endured. Ammi-jaan called, How is Asif? How is Lailuma? as if nothing had happened. The holidays were lonely, Christmas, Eid and the sad, sad Easter spring. My home was still and empty. I drove Ali to his appointments. We spoke of the weather. Somewhere in London there was a woman who had loved him longer than he had known me. I taught again. Then came the moment when he began to truly die.

  He pretended things were all right. One evening, he asked, Is Lailuma not almost finished her studies? She should come home for the summer.

  I do not think she will, Ali.

  She is still promised.

  I know.

  You must persuade her.

  I stayed with him because I could not bear to be the last blow that would finally break our cracked family apart. It was not love. In the place where I was born it might be called honour, and here it might be called loyalty, but these words do not describe the flesh feelings of a woman who has taken care of a man and borne his children whether she wanted to or not. Perhaps I should have been more ruthless. I could have gone to New York. I could have gone west. I had spent my marriage veiling my heart, and the price I paid was a life imprisoned.

  KATHERINE

  That tour with Cecil was a blossoming time. He rocked his bass. We were playing very free, and teasing each other on the stand, and bringing each other out, and soon we were making love after the shows. I liked the feeling of those big bass-player hands on my back. The lover-bed felt good after all the years of making it on my own, and my god, what a good time we had. Sweet sex. Happy sex. Blowing-off-steam sex. Tired-andfall-asleep-almost-in-the-middle sex. All of it was fine with me. Fine with him too.

  He joked, Since I do not have a girlfriend in Red Lake anymore.

  I felt like a kid. My mother was dead and my kids were grown and I was fetterless. I improvised like crazy, played night after night through Japan and Indonesia and India. Our last stop was Pakistan. We were exotic in most places we went, and our music swung. My brain was fully lit on all sides. Home was wherever I was. What a good time we had.

  I asked to be booked at the Beach Luxury Hotel for our last stop to see where Mahsa came from. In the closets were prayer mats and Qurans. On the desk was a metal arrow pointing to Mecca. But it was not Mahsa’s city anymore. It was a place of slow-motion violence, months before Operation Blue Fox. The leaders were already talking openly about cleansing anyone in the Mohajir Qaumi Movement. I hired a car to take me around the city, to see the Jinnah Tomb, the camels on the beach, the snakes in the markets. There were guns and army and food carts and wandering musicians. There was a transvestite begging in traffic. Veiled women walked in small groups, while others with uncovered heads wore Western heels. Shipping containers blocked roads to slow the traffic. Hotels and shops were swaddled in barbed wire.

  We played in a little club called the 007 at the Beach Luxury and a guitarist called Norman D’Souza showed up with some Goan musicians and jammed with us. They knew old rock and roll songs, and we ended with “Love Is All Around” which Cecil did not know but was easy for him to follow. I wrote Mahsa a postcard from the hotel in the morning: Look where I ended up!

  Cecil sat up in bed and handed me his coffee cup.

  I said, One of the waiters thought I was playing a rhythm from a folksong in his home town. How do you think it got there?

  I picked up Dawn and looked at the newspaper’s daily city map of the previous day’s shootings and bombs, like New York in the seventies.

  Through your skin, Kat, said Cecil.

  I thought how little I knew about Mahsa.

  Cecil lay naked under the sheet, loose, relaxed in the heat. We’d worked hard. He said, Last day. I don’t wanna go back.

  I knew what he meant. I could have gone on forever. I said, When I was a kid I went to the corner store for smokes for my mother. I saw two hitchhikers from South America. They were carrying backpacks and wore red and yellow and orange scarves around their necks. As soon as I saw them, I felt I belonged with them. I’ve wanted to be on the road ever since.

  I drank Cecil’s coffee and nudged him over and said, In wandering cultures they shared their wives.

  Right.

  The Inuit. If a woman offered sex to a visitor it was all right with her husband.

  Think if I went down the hall and knocked on a door and said I was a visiting man?

  I laughed, Go try.

  They get jealous?

  I don’t know. The husband c
alled the visiting man an aipak, his other-me.

  Cecil took my hand and pulled me to him. That solves a whole lotta problems, he said. Tonight’s the last night, Kat. Day after tomorrow we’re back in Manhattan. You gonna go back to your other-me?

  MAHSA

  Always Ali had strong hands. When he was well he raised his arms to make himself bigger, and when he judged me his hands were fisted and hard. He would open his right hand and point to the front door with a thumb raised and the index finger straight to tell me he would be late. These gestures he was not aware of. I felt his decline in his weakening grip. Now I needed him to hold me so I could shift him in bed. He was less and less able to move himself, to slide his buttocks and legs so that I could raise him. They say in English, dead weight. This is accurate. Are you in pain? I asked. As long as I don’t move, he answered. And so, to change the bed, to keep him clean, to raise him for a sip of water was ordeal for him. The body does unnerving things. Does not give up easily. After he was catheterized there was little movement. That is a final turning point. A marriage like ours is a constant denial of something missing. The easiest way to live with such absence is to never, ever acknowledge it. The months of caring for him felt long in the same way that a dream can feel long even when you are dreaming it. I left the room when the palliative nurse came each afternoon or when Asif sat with him in the evenings. I moved a cot to the foot of his bed and slept, listening for any change in his breath as I used to listen through sleep for the changing sounds of my newborn babies. His body shrank and aged and he looked uncannily like his father. When Ammi-jaan and Daadi came for their last visit with him, we moved through the rooms quietly, and Ali took solace in the hours with his mother who wept each time she left the room. Ammi-jaan sat at the kitchen table with her tea and said, He wants Lailuma. You must bring her home.