Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  It seems a cruel travesty that the only man here is Fiaz—and who is he to Seema, anyway? The gratitude that you felt toward him just a little while ago turns into resentment, as though he has usurped a place in your daughter’s life that rightfully belongs to someone else.

  Meanwhile, the sonologist moves the probe around to locate my heart, and the image of my chest on the screen pulses with my heartbeat. He announces that my heart rate is exactly what it should be, twice my mother’s. More readings from various points on the globe of my mother’s belly help him estimate my weight, my volume, and the volume of the liquid I’m enclosed in.

  “He’s a big baby, bigger than your average South Asian baby. But everything looks fine,” Dr. Connelly says. “The amniotic fluid seems adequate. The baby is in position and shows no signs of distress. All we can do now is wait.”

  Seema struggles off the table awkwardly, triggering your natural instinct to go to her aid, but you’re paralyzed by spasms of censure cramping through you: This is surely Seema’s fault. It’s her fault that there’s only this motley group to depend on—a couple of friends, inexperienced and uncommitted, a distant sister, a dying mother—and no husband, no father. It’s her fault that your grandson is to be robbed of a father, a grandfather, and a full and fulfilling childhood. It’s her fault that you too were robbed of your full family and a fulfilled past.

  And, as though your heart and mind—revolting against being asked to withstand the extremes you’ve swung through the last few minutes, from boundless affection toward Seema to censure—have released some check on your body, the pain from earlier this morning comes surging back. You begin to shake uncontrollably.

  Seema has left the room with her friend and the doctor before your distress is noticeable. Tahera and Fiaz surround you.

  Ammi? Aunty? What’s happening? Are you okay?

  You clench your jaw and breathe out—I’m fine, I’m fine. You don’t want to make a scene. Already the sonologist is gaping at you, unease on his face. You grasp Tahera’s hand to steady yourself and ask her to lead you out of the room. Fiaz and Tahera assist you back to reception, the pain pulsing every step of the way. Fiaz eases you onto a seat, and Tahera sits beside you, stroking your still-shuddering shoulders and chest.

  Fiaz hovers about with questions: Shall I get her some water? Should we call someone?

  The receptionist makes as if to hurry toward you, and you wave her back. “Where’s Seema?” you pant. “I don’t want her to see me like this.”

  “Don’t worry about Seema,” Tahera says. She rubs your palms and blows into them, as you’d done to her many times when she was a child, in a futile attempt to ease the pain.

  You’d been caught off guard by the suddenness with which it returned. You know its course, its peak and gradual ebb—you’d like to be alone with it. “I want to leave. Everybody is staring at me.”

  You try to push yourself off your seat. Fiaz lends you his arm.

  “Ammi, stay here till you feel better. It’s raining,” Tahera says.

  Yes, outside everything is a blur, only smudged shapes visible through the raindrops that break against the glass and speckle the window.

  “We can wait in the car,” Fiaz says, responding to your tightening grip on his arm. “Leigh is with Seema. She’ll take care of her.”

  You hobble past the receptionist, holding tightly on to Fiaz’s arm. Downstairs, you wait on the steps under the glass canopy for Fiaz to drive his car up to the entrance of the hospital. You ignore Tahera’s pleas to take a seat in the lobby inside or to at least take her arm for support.

  She is distraught. “Ammi, why won’t you listen to me?”

  Because: this pain is an appropriate punishment for your unforgivable anger toward Seema. How could you start blaming her, like her father and sister? Instead of making amends, your visit to San Francisco is now tainted. Clutching the ends of your shawl to your chest, you huddle in your misery and your suffering. “Leave me be, Tahera. Nothing can be done.”

  The spasms in your legs make it painful to stand, and you know you should take the arm Tahera has offered, but you can’t ask for it now. “You can’t help me, Tahera. If you want to help me, there’s only one thing you can do. Help your sister.”

  You lean back on the front glass wall of the lobby. Tahera begins pacing the length of the shelter, her jilbab swirling. But you have nothing to offer her, you know only what you need from her.

  “Ammi, why do you say such things? Is my presence here no help to you? And am I not helping Seema already?”

  “Promise me you’ll continue to help her after I’m gone.”

  “Why do you only think about Seema, Ammi? You never think about me.”

  One side of Tahera’s hijab and jilbab is wet from the sudden downpour curtaining the canopy, but she’s oblivious to it, merely dashing away the drops of water dripping down her face. The rain has become as vehement as in Chennai during the monsoons. You remember how Tahera would run up to the rooftop to catch the first shower every year, despite your admonitions, returning drenched and shivering but elated. You would wait with a towel and, if you’d made some that day, a hot glass of the peppery rasam she liked.

  “Tahera, you know that’s not true. I think about you all the time. I worry about Seema—” If there is a question, it’s only which daughter you have failed more.

  Fiaz’s car pulls up and he jumps out. “You’re getting wet, Aunty. Please get in.” He looks at you both, perplexed. Tahera’s standing at the other end of the steps, her face papery pale in the dark silhouette of her attire. “Tahera, you’re shivering. Why didn’t you wait inside?”

  53

  Fiaz texts that her mother and sister are with him in the car. Seema assumes this is to give her time alone with Leigh, who reports that she finally understands Seema’s reluctance to introduce her to her family.

  “They’re both so intense. Like they have tempests bottled up inside them. Your mother was literally shaking after seeing the baby pictures. But I’m glad to have met them. And I’m so happy to see baby Ishraaq curled up inside you.”

  Leigh’s previous resentment seems to have evaporated, and Seema is relieved. “Thank you, for being here today. The pelvic exam would have been an ordeal.”

  Should she say it now? I can’t imagine going through the delivery without you! She wants them both there, Leigh and Tahera.

  She pivots instead to the dinner party, thankful that her mother had insisted on it. “Just you and Fiaz. I thought, you know, a good opportunity—”

  “No Divya?”

  “Divya? No! Why?”

  Leigh shrugs, and although they continue to hold hands as they leave the clinic, and even manage to steal a few kisses in the elevator, some of Leigh’s earlier restraint has returned.

  There’s a light drizzle outside, and Fiaz offers to drop Leigh off at her office, so Leigh squeezes into the back of the car with Nafeesa and Tahera. Both mother and sister appear withdrawn, Tahera especially, staring out at the rain through the window, barely acknowledging the others, while their mother sits rigid, as if to not impose on Leigh either in space or in spirit. Even Fiaz is curiously quiet.

  Seema feels the need to fill the silence with chatter, launching into a description of her first view of me three months earlier, with the same 3D ultrasound technology, my face visible then. “I wish you could have seen his face today, Ammi.”

  “I can wait,” Nafeesa replies, still stiffly. “It’s only a few more days.”

  “Leigh was there, too,” Seema makes it a point to mention. “You thought he looked adorable, didn’t you, Leigh?”

  Leigh merely nods, and Seema has to shift around to read her response. She notes the three women sitting remote like Easter Island statues, something vital missing. “Hey, where are my lilies?”

  “I gave them to your mother to hold.” Leigh looks for them in the back seat.

  Finally shaken out of her inertness, Nafeesa rushes to apologize. “Oh, I forgot the
m when we left. I’m so sorry. It was my fault. They were so lovely.”

  Her mother is visibly upset, her face almost crumpling in remorse—much more than the lapse warrants. Leigh’s disappointment is palpable too, even as she turns down Fiaz’s offer to drive back to the hospital to pick them up.

  But Fiaz does anyway, making a swift U-turn. When he pulls again under the canopied entrance, Leigh dashes out and returns a few minutes later with the lilies, panting. She hadn’t waited for the elevators.

  “What good friends you are to Seema,” Nafeesa exclaims. “You both take such good care of her. I hope you’ll always do that.”

  Her mother’s gratitude toward her friends is encouraging. Her mother has accepted Leigh as important to Seema’s well-being, even if not yet as a girlfriend, and Seema is touched. She’s touched, too, by the solemnity with which Leigh presents her the lilies the second time, as if responding to her mother’s stated hope with a promise—of forgiveness, of faithfulness.

  Back at home, Seema places the flowers by her bed, adjusting the stems so the cupped openings would curve toward her sleeping self, the three lilies arcing gracefully over the vase’s tear-shaped rim.

  54

  It is afternoon in San Francisco, and the two sisters are confined to the living room. Their mother rests in the bedroom after the morning’s exertion. A soft mantle of rain cloaks the city, insulating them from everything outside. Not only has their sense of place been blotted out but also their sense of time, for the drizzly day appears at a standstill. Seema complains of aching feet—swollen these last weeks of pregnancy—and Tahera offers to massage them.

  A surprised Seema accepts, and Tahera starts self-consciously, seated on the floor with Seema’s feet in her lap, the massage at first perfunctory. But as she presses her knuckles into Seema’s feet, Tahera adopts the fervor of her seven-year-old daughter, kneading her sister’s skin and flesh to the very bones inside.

  Then, time doubling back on itself, she slips into an old ritual from their childhood: cracking toes, tugging on them with a quick jerk and snapping them up or down, to the satisfying accompaniment of a pop.

  “I can’t remember the last time we did that.” Seema winces in enjoyment. “It must have been a day like this.” A holiday spent indoors, sitting on a damp windowsill with Tahera, cracking each other’s toes to pass time, watching the rain and praying it would stop or at least lessen by the evening so she could persuade their father to take them out, perhaps to the bakery or a movie. She detested the monsoon season, for the claustrophobic powerlessness it stirred up in her, with its cloaked skies and smothering rain. “But, Tahera, you liked rainy days.”

  “I still do. I miss the monsoons. It never rains like that in Irvine.” Tahera recalls with a pang what she liked most about them: the long weekends forced to stay indoors, she and Seema lying side by side in bed, heads on the same clammy pillow, reading aloud to each other, and nights spent huddling under blankets against the nippy tentacles of the monsoon chill. “But I hated that moldy smell in our clothes from drying inside. And our shoes and socks would be caked with mud.”

  “Remember how Ammi would scold you for getting wet? You kept losing your raincoat at school until she—”

  “Let’s not talk about Ammi.” The morning’s wretchedness is too fresh. There’s clearly not much time left for their mother, and much of what’s left is to be consumed by pain. The worst of the morning is the memory of her trying to force her mother to apologize for wanting to ease her heart’s worries about her other child. Why fault Ammi, when she herself cares for Arshad and Amina so differently? And as for Ammi’s behest: If you want to help me, help Seema . . .

  Seema senses Tahera’s ache. Unlike the previous times when Tahera rebuffed conversation involving their mother, her current tone doesn’t signal a rebuke. Soon, when only reminiscences will have the power to bring their mother back to some semblance of life, who can they talk to about their mother but each other? And how are they to do that, without reopening old wounds, reliving old griefs?

  As if not knowing what to do next, Tahera starts massaging her feet all over again. “Stop, Tahera. My feet have had enough, thank you.”

  How to comfort a sister she hasn’t comforted in so many years, or perhaps never? She’d like to touch Tahera’s bent head, to stroke her hair, but though she has accepted Tahera’s attentions of the past twenty-four hours, she’s unsure how Tahera might react to her overtures. You couldn’t be bothered with me, Seema, Tahera said only yesterday. Reclaiming her feet from Tahera’s lap, Seema manages to find her voice. “Tahera, can I ask you something?”

  Tahera stirs, but she doesn’t look up. “Is it about the guardianship? I haven’t spoken to Ismail yet.”

  “No. Can I ask—what happened? After I left?”

  “What happened?” Tahera rises abruptly. “You really want to know?”

  Seema nods, unsure if Tahera’s question is merely rhetorical. Her sister is a hazy vision standing by her side, her face a blur Seema is glad she cannot read.

  “Here, let me give your shoulders a massage too,” Tahera responds gruffly. “Ammi says you were complaining about a backache.”

  Seema doesn’t demur. Standing behind Seema, Tahera sinks her fingers into muscles tense from holding extra weight, growing pliable in her hands as she digs into them. Her posture, the pressure, the concentration, is familiar to Tahera from childhood massages practiced on her parents and occasionally even her sister. From there, it’s a small step to another more frequent childhood ritual. “Your hair’s all tangled, let me fetch a comb. Single or double?”

  A single plait, like when they’d do their hair in college, twin plaits like they remade for each other every morning before school.

  “You choose.”

  Tahera passes the comb repeatedly through Seema’s hair, her sister pliant, not protesting even when her head is yanked back at a particularly difficult tangle. It’s only then that Tahera is able to speak. The act of disentangling Seema’s hair has freed something knotted inside her as well, the act of gathering tresses and weaving them together has brought some order and calm to the snarl of memory.

  “I missed you, Seema. I would lie in bed and wonder what you were doing. How you were spending your days, who you spent them with. It was very lonely after you left. Ammi became quieter, speaking only when she had to—a shadow of herself, slinking through the house. Abba remained Abba, of course. Only now he bullied us more often. He became very upset if we so much as mentioned your name. He’d stop speaking to us for days at a time.”

  Tahera’s fingers are nimble. Their rhythm lends a cadence to her speaking, easing her hesitation when seeking words or phrases, their assurance lending her self-control. It helps that Seema can’t look at her, that Seema remains silent, that Tahera can pause as long as she wants to, pretending she needs to run the comb through Seema’s hair again.

  “We went out less, afraid of having to face questions about you. If someone inquired, Abba would say you’re doing fine. But he’d lock himself in his study after. We stopped visiting relatives. Our world shrunk around us. Only Halima Aunty called. She never cared what Abba did.”

  What Tahera remembers, but cannot speak about: How it was then, when she’d been searching for some escape from a life that seemed to be closing in upon her, when even the poetry she turned to for solace seemed tainted, bearing the imprint of a father who’d promised the world to his daughters yet sought to impose his will on them, she’d discovered the comforts of prayer, Halima Aunty’s quiet faith and rituals providing a refuge she could lose herself in. And the more her father mocked her transformation, the tighter she pulled its protection around her.

  Seema focuses on the steady tug as Tahera pulls her hair tight, even welcoming the sudden jerks and the attendant snap of pain. These allow her to momentarily forget the hurt in Tahera’s voice, to believe that she’s experiencing Tahera’s pain herself. Her mother has never mentioned any of this, and she has not thought to ask
. Never caring how it will affect others—Tahera’s charge from yesterday stings, for there’s truth in it.

  Tahera finishes with the braiding and, with that, her account. Seema examines Tahera’s handiwork: two plaits, expertly braided, exactly the way Tahera used to do them years ago. Daily gestures of sisterly affection that Seema had taken for granted, then completely forgot. She can’t trust herself to say anything.

  Thankfully, Tahera too seems anxious to forestall a response. “Do you have any hair bands?” she asks, already halfway to Seema’s bedroom.

  “In the dresser. Top drawer.”

  Tahera must flee the living room immediately, for she sees not Seema of the last week, nor the sister who abandoned her years ago, but the sister who held her hand as they walked to school, taught her to climb trees and ride a bicycle, whose capers charmed the most dreary days into promise and delight.

  She fumbles in the drawer for the bands. The bedroom is dark, and she needs light, but her mother is sleeping. She pulls out a handful of elastics to select a pair by the window. Her mother is curled up on her side, legs drawn in, face calm in the soft curtained light, no traces showing of the morning’s suffering. Some afternoons, finding their mother napping like this, Tahera and Seema would unbraid her single plait and rebraid her hair into twin plaits, like the ones they sported. Ammi would scold them when she woke up, though she wouldn’t undo their work. How young the twin plaits made Ammi look then, just like how young Seema looks now and how Amina will look in a few years.

  A mother for whom time will soon cease, a sister recovered from the mists of time, a daughter whom time is changing too rapidly.

  Yet, do not grieve. She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love and she be fair—

  “Did you find one?” Seema asks as Tahera hurries back to the living room with the clutch of bands.