Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  And Tahera shudders, ambushed by the dying tremor he imparts to that last word. A shiver of recognition runs through her body—the thrill and promise of dying—but until now she’s never found words to capture that feeling. Her heart executes a neat little leap, even as she despairs she’ll never be sufficiently moved that her heart would leap. Even now she’s unaware that her skipping heart is doing precisely that.

  The winners have been decided, and Naeemullah brings his speech to a close. Old Sister Camilla, their English teacher, reads out the names. He shakes hands with each, before handing their prizes over—books he has selected himself—remarking on the titles and what delights await the winners. The school photographer’s flash freezes the smirking girls beside a benevolent Naeemullah.

  Now Sister Camilla calls out the winners in Seema’s grade, third place to first. Seema is not named for the lesser two prizes. “And the first prize goes to—” Sister Camilla pauses, her leathery walnut face cracking in a wide grin.

  Tahera closes her eyes and prays, the suspense unbearable.

  What does she pray for? Of course, she wants Seema to win. No other thought occurs to her.

  “—Seema Hussein, daughter of our own respected chief guest, Dr. Naeemullah Hussein!”

  Tahera claps hard, as though single-handedly she must ensure the auditorium echoes with the sound. But tears prickle her eyes as Seema walks up to the stage and shakes hands with Naeemullah. He draws Seema to his side, and the two smile widely, posing for all the world to see, as the photographer clicks a second photo. If only it were she on the stage with their father.

  Afterward, a proud Naeemullah leads both daughters by the hand, stopping many times along the way to accept congratulations. Sister Camilla detains them at the school entrance.

  “Child, if you hadn’t been so much better than that second-place Anjali girl, we couldn’t have awarded you the first prize, lest people think we’re playing favorites!” Sister Camilla laughs, a rich bray that along with her protuberant eyes and permanently surprised eyebrows has earned her the nickname Sister Camel. Normally Tahera would join in Seema’s barely suppressed mirth, but today she looks away.

  At the ice-cream parlor around the corner from their home—Naeemullah has promised Seema two scoops if she wins—Tahera holds back. She doesn’t want any ice cream today, she says. “I too will take part next year and win.”

  “Yes, but we’re celebrating your sister’s performance,” Naeemullah replies, pulling gently at her plaited hair. “And you can have two scoops as well.”

  Seema already has her heaped cone—two moons of peach tutti-frutti!—and makes slurping sounds to tempt her. Tahera succumbs. But she limits herself to one scoop. And, even as she frantically licks the cone to keep the melting ice cream off her pinafore, she repeats her vow: She will take part next year and win.

  She pesters her father almost immediately for a poem to begin practicing. He’s delighted: He has just the right poem for her! He needs to change a few words, but he’s sure she’ll like it. He sets up his electronic Remington typewriter, and pounds away at it, consulting a book. He doesn’t allow her a peek until he’s done. The poem is skinny but long, covering two full sheets. A poem by John Keats written especially for her! There was a naughty girl, a naughty girl was she—

  (“But I’m not naughty.” “Yes, you are, look how you pestered me all week.”)

  She must learn it by heart first. In a week she can even recite it half-asleep. The evening she’s ready, the door of the study shut behind them, his eyes fixed on her as they’ve never been before, he says, “Show me what you’ve learned.”

  What comes over her? It’s a slight poem—Seema derides it as childish, with silly rhymes and a sing-song rhythm. Seema’s mockery is still strong in her mind. But there are other impressions too: her father coaching Seema, patiently coaxing sounds out of her, their lips and mouths in articulated synchrony.

  Or—let—me—die!

  Tahera recites the poem as she never will again, no matter how hard she tries, no matter how many times her father makes her repeat it, each time with different instructions. That first time, the poem is both old and new, she is swamped with both fear and excitement, she feels the pull of both the ridiculous and the heartbreaking. Her voice contorts to include her sister’s derision, her father’s control, her own desperate yearning. By the end, she has briefly intuited the poem’s secret heart that her sister has been blind to: That the naughty girl in the poem runs away with her knapsack only to find little difference between her origin and destination, between where she started and where she ends up. That the ground is as hard, that a yard is as long, in both places.

  She stood in her shoes and she wondered—

  When Tahera finishes, she notices the surprised elation in her father’s eyes, which she’ll search for in every subsequent attempt, during every competition, no matter how many prizes she wins.

  34

  Nearly thirty years later, Tahera is propelled from Seema’s bedroom doorway by the very same lines ringing in her ears, threatening to remake her into the girl her nine-year-old self had been. She knows she should simply banish the poem from her mind, as she’d done the previous day when Seema brought it up, to keep the past safely locked away, as she’s so far managed to do. But some elusive lines nag like gaps created by fallen teeth.

  The Keats book lies where Seema had discarded it, on the floor, under the chair. Tahera flips through and finds the poem, reads it standing, once through. Her father had chosen well—it’s exactly the poem to lure a nine-year-old deeper into his thicket of poetry.

  And the book has so many poems she’d fallen in love with, the ones memorized and recited repeatedly, sometimes under her breath while walking to school and back, sometimes sitting on the veranda watching vendors push their carts by on holidays, or treading her bicycle around the compound outside their house. She skips from poem to poem, here a line, there a stanza, each triggering a memory of the circumstances surrounding its discovery. Racing to the lighthouse on the beach. Reading by candlelight during power cuts. Crushing on her neighbor with the curly hair and white teeth. Watching Ammi tie Seema’s first saree. Standing in Abba’s study.

  “Land of milk and honey, halfway across the world. What an adventure! I’d have sacrificed anything for the chance when I was younger. They have your favorite season, too, only they call it ‘fall.’ Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness—” That’s how Abba put it, as she stood before him in his study, summoned there as though she were still nine years old.

  But she’d neither asked for the chance nor wanted to marry someone halfway across the world. Abba must have known Seema had moved to California, from the cards and letters Seema kept sending—addressed to him only—all those years. He’d opened none—they still remained unopened, Tahera knew, for she’d found them the last time she visited Chennai, the envelopes faded and fraying, stashed in the overstuffed drawers of the walnut table in his study, under clippings of his letters to editors published over the years—and their postmarks surely told Seema’s story. Yes, he’d known where Seema had moved to, and in his continuing duel with her, best-loved daughter now fallen out of favor, he’d determined to send his secondary daughter there. Not as an ambassador but merely to proclaim his dominion, much like emperors established outposts. As though he’d no use for Tahera by his side.

  She forces herself to take deep breaths, to curb the dizzying rush that is overpowering her. For a moment she’s not sure where she’s standing—neither Chennai nor Irvine, but in some foreign land, barren, shadowy, and chilly. There’s little in this apartment to secure Tahera to the woman she is now: beloved wife, loving mother, skilled doctor, respected member of her community. She senses the weight of her entire past pressing, the floodgates buckling.

  She flings aside the book, the poems that have brought her to this brink of fracture, and seizes and unfurls the janamaz in the middle of the living room. This is what she should have done earlier. The past
, the poetry—beauty and love, joy and despair, anger and sorrow—what place do they have in her life anymore?

  In the bathroom, she affirms her intention to perform wadu. Merely washing her hands before touching the Quran seems insufficient today. The cold water stings as she splashes her face. She runs wet fingers over her hair, keeping her head down. It feels important to avoid looking at herself in the mirror, as though she’s a portal for everything unclean and needs to keep herself at a distance. Finished with the wadu, she places her wooden rehal on the janamaz. She unwraps the quilted maroon cover that protects her Quran and takes it out. The book opens at the marker, where she’d left off reading the previous time. She lowers it gently onto the rehal.

  Seated on her knees, her covered head bent over the book, she reads without pausing to think, her marker tracing each line, skimming the surface of the text. She has read the Quran many times, has memorized many surahs and ayats, though she understands only a fraction of what she can recite. Through familiarity and practice she scurries through verse after verse, pausing only to turn a page before hurrying on. She purses her lips, so the words may be contained within her—outside, just a mumble, like the buzz of a bee, but inside the poetry resonating in her body, reverberating in her bones and organs and flesh. She has always found this sensation hypnotic and soothing.

  But why is she slowing down? Why does she feel as though her lungs are about to burst, as if she’s been breathing in verses instead of air? Her body is trembling again. She presses on despite her confusion—what’s happening to her?—but the words lift off the page, the black print and white paper fusing to a foggy gray. Something strikes the open page and lies there perfect as a raindrop on a leaf, its surface quivering. Through it, the blurred outline of a letter shimmers, refracted beyond recognition.

  It takes Tahera a few moments to understand she’s crying.

  Forgive me, she prays, cupping her eyes to prevent the drops from further defiling the Quran. Her shaking hands struggle to wrap the Quran back in the cover. But she continues to sit, still on her knees, head bent before the wrapped Quran on the rehal, as her tears now strike the janamaz, in splotches growing darker.

  This isn’t the release she’d hoarded her tears for—the tears she’s refused to shed since seeing the ones clinging to her sister’s eyelashes, the tears she’s been unable to shed since learning of her mother’s diagnosis. Every time she’s seen her mother’s eyes sparkling the last two days, she has willed her mother to let the tears flow. She would be redeemed if only Ammi would shed a few tears, showing Tahera she cared, showing she knew Tahera was a good daughter doing the best she can. Then Tahera too could join in. Their tears would reunite them in ways words and actions could not, washing away the guilt and resentment built up over the years.

  She tries to stifle her sobs, so she won’t wake her sister and mother, sleeping heedless in the adjacent room, hands clasped in each other’s. But she also can’t stop wishing that they were roused to check on her, to find her distraught and destroyed, to join her in consolation, even Seema, so they could grieve together for everything they’ve lost, for everything they’re about to lose.

  She rises, eventually, as if from under anesthesia. In the bathroom, she examines her face. It’s puffy, her nose runs, eyelids droop over reddened eyes. She massages her cheeks, then presses fingertips against her eyelids, pushing the offending eyeballs deep into their sockets—as she’s seen Arshad sometimes do—some physical sensation to prod her out of stupor. She has admonished Arshad many times against the practice of inflicting pain on himself, but she understands now why he persists—the pressure steadies her, and as she continues to press deeper, a universe explodes into existence, a kaleidoscope of glow and shadow that comforts, delights, mesmerizes. When she finally lets go, the bathroom rocks back into place in a brief disorienting burst of light, her face in the mirror staring back at her—grave, like the face Arshad shows her when she yanks his fingers off his eyes—the pain quickly fading.

  How resilient the body is, she thinks. How much pain the body can handle, how well it repairs itself, by Allah’s design. Such must be Allah’s grace and mercy. Allah wouldn’t impose on His followers more than their bodies or minds can bear.

  She washes her face, rinsing her mind of its haze. The living room is as she left it, the Quran on the rehal on the janamaz. She puts away the Quran and the rehal. The Keats book lies on the futon, benign now, spent. She flips through its pages for the second time, feeling stronger for the cleansing she’s just been through. The words have indeed lost their potency. These are merely words—even if beautiful—words and phrases concocted by mortal men aggrandizing themselves, seeking to lighten their own insignificance.

  She shuts the blinds, and the city outside disappears. Rearranging the floor lamp, she settles herself to read, surrounded by the half gleam and shadows of the room.

  She reads critically at first, dispassionately evaluating each line for accuracy and truth. Some of it now seems ridiculous—Keats’s obsession with ancient Greek mythology, for example, with its drunken, depraved gods and goddesses. And hyperbolic—that comparison to sighting a new planet or ocean on reading Homer! How could anything composed by a human compare to the glories of Allah’s creation? And Keats claims to be overcome by a mere translation. No translation of the Quran could affect her the way reading the original does. The mystery, the awe, is lost without the sonority of the Quran in Arabic, the way the words flutter in her throat—how could the flapping of the crow’s stubby wings compare to the blur of the hummingbird’s? She smiles to herself: now she’s imitating Keats, fabricating her own poetic conceits. She regrets she has little time to learn to recite the Quran like Arshad.

  As she continues to read, she relaxes. These poems had supported her once, provided her with a metaphoric shoulder to lean on, and yes, to cry on as well—it surprises her now how dark her favorite poems really were, never joyous paeans, but the odes and elegies on loss and death and yearning. There could be no harm in these. Why had she felt the need to renounce them? Perhaps she’d simply been too busy, as mother, wife, and doctor. When had she performed this particular ode, which competition? She’ll have to ask Ammi or Seema tomorrow.

  An hour passes, and her eyes glaze over. There’s no sound from the bedroom; Ammi and Seema must be in deep slumber. How excessive her reaction to the sight of them huddled together. But it had led to the rediscovery of these poems. For that she must be grateful. Allah knows best, and everything serves a purpose. Allah will help her survive the coming days. Allah will help her decide how to respond to Seema’s request. She will perform istikhara later to ask for His guidance.

  She’s moved by a sudden urge to be outside, to feel the sky above her, the city around her, to feel small. She throws a shawl about her head and shoulders and, climbing through the window, lets herself out onto the fire escape. There is no sky though—clouds cover all of it, and a fine mist has descended on the city. She stands cocooned, disturbed only by the sirens and flashing lights of the sporadic ambulance or fire engine. A faint smell of rust and smoke envelops her. A chill wind grazes, and she laughs as she shivers, welcoming the tingling sensation of gooseflesh, as though the wind were scouring her skin of the layers the years have deposited. She lets herself enjoy the half-white darkness like her younger self would have. Her thoughts briefly wander toward Irvine. The fundraiser must be long over, her children must be sleeping. She should have called Ismail to find out how it went. Auzubillahi minashaitan irrajeem, nothing untoward should have happened. But she won’t think about it now, she’d like to savor a little longer this Tahera of old.

  When she returns to the living room, she hides the book of poems away, out of sight, in the bookshelf, behind the Quran.

  35

  Sunday morning, Irvine: Ismail wakes up for fajr to the shrill cry of the alarm clock. But today he’s not as irritable, even without Tahera’s gentle hands to shake him awake. He lies in bed basking in the memory of the fundraiser
—Masha’Allah, they had raised more than they thought they would.

  A bleary-eyed Arshad joins him in the living room, and they pray fajr together. After the namaz, Ismail is too energized to go back to bed, and he busies himself with spreadsheets on his computer, tabulating donations and expenses, starting the report he’ll share with the committee.

  It’s not yet seven when he receives a call from Imam Zia. He answers eagerly.

  “I’m sorry to bother you so early, Brother Ismail,” Imam Zia interrupts. “Especially after all your great work. But can you come over? There’s some trouble at the mosque.”

  “What trouble?” Ismail asks.

  “Some stuff on the walls. Not very nice. We should do something about it.”

  At the moment, Ismail is still floating high, and despite knowing Imam Zia’s tendency toward understatement, he assumes the matter is trivial, perhaps some child who’d splattered paint on the walls during the calligraphy competition. “Sure. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  He gives the children another half hour of their Sunday sleep, then wakes them and tells them to get ready. They’ll be back soon enough from the mosque, so no breakfast for now, and the kids only get their morning milk, strawberry or chocolate.

  The mosque is aglow in the golden morning light, the blazing green of the dome, the shimmering ivory of the stucco walls. A group of men stands on the steps of the main entrance, silhouetted against the lit walls, Imam Zia recognizable by his taller figure and turban. Ismail parks, and encourages the children to run toward the mosque. Striding toward the men, he feels elated and raises his hand in greeting. The sun is behind him, his long shadow ahead, waving in its turn. But the men don’t seem to notice him.

  He’s still some distance away when Arshad shouts, “Abba, look!”

  Arshad is pointing toward Imam Zia, who is rubbing at the wall of the mosque with the edge of his robe, and only as Ismail draws nearer does he notice the virulent red scrawl. From that detail his eyes pan to take in the entire red-stroked front wall of the mosque, which had until then been hidden by the red-blue-green striped canvas sides of the not-yet dismantled shamiana set up the previous day. It takes him many more seconds before he’s able to put the strokes together to form letters, then words.