by Nawaaz Ahmed
Over the next few days he gives in to temptation and reads all the letters. A sense of betrayal unsettles even his sleeping hours. But who has been betrayed—he himself, his father, Grandpa and Mame, or even Seema? And who has betrayed whom?
He thinks he understands now why Mame always left him behind with Grandpa when she went to church, thinks he understands, too, Seema’s reaction, knowing her severed relationship with her religion.
He waits for Seema to call, respecting her wish for space but desperately craving her return.
10
Reading Bill Sr.’s letters immediately recalls to Seema’s mind Tahera—the same controlled grace in penmanship concealing the same force of passion. But had their handwritings been totally unlike, the contents of his letters would still have triggered a memory of the last letter Seema received from her sister.
It was in response to Seema’s overture to Tahera after her marriage. Seema, of course, hadn’t been invited to the wedding. In fact, her mother had only informed Seema of the event after the fact. Remembering the weddings of their childhood, the glitter and gold, the frolic and festivities, Seema’s sense of loss at the belated news of Tahera’s wedding had been acute and unexpected. The much-anticipated biryani cooked by bawarchis in enormous dekshas that could fit both sisters comfortably, with a taste and aroma unmatched by even their mother’s most delicious version. Her yearnings as she and Tahera insinuated their way to the bride’s side, so they could hold up the translucent gold- or silver-trimmed red maizar and the strings of jasmine and roses that veiled her, a ringside view of the shy bride’s face as the nervous groom bent down to take a peek after the nikah and, later, of the bride’s tears as her family gave her away during the jalwa.
Still, she accepted the distress and regret in her mother’s voice as apology enough. She wasn’t entitled to much more, anyway.
When she’d left home without saying anything to her mother or sister, she’d assumed the parting was temporary. Her father’s implacability and her ensuing fall from grace shocked her into stunned shame and despair. The star of the family, and her light so swiftly snuffed out.
Her despair was misplaced in Tahera’s case at least—her sister’s letters clearly showed she wasn’t aware of the real reason behind the excommunication. But Seema couldn’t bring herself to come out to Tahera, to open herself up to the humiliation of further rejection, from someone who’d looked up to her all her life. Their father, who always supported Seema, had forsaken her. Their mother seemed more interested in having her return to the fold than in supporting her. How could Tahera come to understand? Especially when Tahera was poised to supplant her as their father’s favorite.
Seema didn’t reply to any of Tahera’s letters. In time, Tahera’s letters ceased.
A year after Tahera joined her husband in Irvine, their mother gave Seema Tahera’s phone number and address, expressing a forlorn wish that the sisters look out for each other, both dwelling apart on a distant continent.
Seema was thrilled: far from their past in Chennai, thousands of miles away from their father, perhaps it was possible to reconnect, to reclaim their past sisterhood. But what was she to say about her precipitous disappearance and silence and the subsequent life she’s carved for herself, now with Ann by her side? She knew through her mother that Tahera was no longer in the dark about her sexuality, yet it took Seema weeks to gather the courage to call.
The phone was answered by Tahera’s husband, and she was forced to wait, ruing the mischance—she’d counted on the tide of surprise to carry the conversation through. When Tahera finally came on the line, her voice was a studied formal monotone: “Assalamu Alaikum?”
“It’s me, Seema.”
“I know.”
“Ammi gave me your number.”
“She gave me yours too.”
“You’re in Texas. You’re married.”
“Yes, his name is Ismail. He works for a computer hardware company.”
“I heard the nikah was grand.”
“Alhamdulillah, it went well.”
“Congratulations. And celebrations!”
But not even the reference to the Cliff Richard song they used to sing together at weddings elicited an echo of the sister she knew.
“Thank you. It’s as Allah wishes.”
The exchange couldn’t last much longer. Tahera had transformed into an impassive stranger. Even more shocking, she was now mouthing religious phrases with no apparent irony, phrases they would mock particularly sanctimonious elders with, behind their backs. She wielded these like charms to ward off Seema, to prevent her from even thinking about sharing the details of her scandalous life. Seema ended the call without mentioning Ann.
She’d been more disappointed than she cared to admit. Somewhere in the depths of her consciousness, she’d already picked up the snapped threads of their relationship. But how could Tahera have changed so much? Was it the husband’s influence? And why had their father chosen such a husband?
Later, Seema learned from her mother that Tahera had taken to praying five times a day even while living at home in Chennai, and she insisted on marrying a committed practicing Muslim, adamant against their father’s wishes. Seema found this hard to believe, even envisioning strategies to rescue her sister, until the day—a few weeks later—she received a letter.
In her sister’s elegant handwriting, flowing yet precise: Seema is living in sin and must beg Allah’s forgiveness for her dissolute past. Seema has neglected namaz and has pursued illicit desires, and she’s bound to Jahannam unless she repents, believes, and practices righteousness. Allah is most merciful, and He would surely forgive and accept Seema back. Tahera is available to help only if Seema acknowledges the error of her ways and with true repentance intends to follow the ways of the Prophet.
Seema read the letter with the shock of betrayal, for there’s no mistaking the conviction in the words. Reading Bill’s father’s letters, the betrayal felt raw again. She’d cheered his unequivocal condemnation of White America, but the letters ultimately recalled the rhetoric her sister had used.
Islam alone can save the Black community, Islam alone can reform their people’s morals and protect them from the evils that blight them—lawlessness, drug addiction, alcoholism, fornication, adultery, degeneracy. His parents are misguided in remaining faithful to a religion that keeps them enslaved.
After reading the letters, Seema insisted Bill take her home. It was only afterward that she felt ashamed for not considering the effect of his father’s letters on him. But Bill doesn’t call, and with each passing day it becomes harder to reach out to him.
Perhaps this is the sign she’s been waiting for, about whether to end it with Bill, and when, for she knows she’s pretty much set on the offer to join the Dean campaign and move to Vermont. She’d been clinging to fantasies of mutual comfort and support, even a kind of love, concentrating on Bill’s many virtues and attractions—including having a revolutionary for a father, except that the father had turned out to be not a martyr but a fundamentalist like her sister.
But later that week, in the run-up to the Iowa caucus, Howard Dean’s lead in the polls shrinks considerably. There’s a panicked call for an all hands to help stem the bleed. With a relief that she doesn’t pause to examine, Seema rings Bill up to ask if he’ll fly with her to Des Moines.
11
January 2004, Iowa: Seema, with Bill in tow, is immediately pressed into supervising sundry initiatives—volunteer training, phone-bank shifts, door-to-door canvassing. She’s a natural at this. Her allure is immediate, her enthusiasm infectious, and she projects assurance and authority.
From the very first day, they put in long hours—returning at night to the twin room they share at a motel on the outskirts, only to sleep, shower, and change. Bill is familiar with this pace from his long workdays at the start-up, but Seema shows surprising stamina. She’s up before him, as fresh as the day before, and he rarely sees her flagging.
He marv
els at the effect she has on the other volunteers and campaign workers, reviving their energy and spirits. By the end of the first week she’s made herself essential to the Des Moines operations.
This is Bill’s first experience of winter and wide white landscapes, and his first time in the heartland, in an overwhelmingly White state. Everywhere they go, he and Seema stand out. They are confronted with looks of surprise, bemusement, and even overt distrust. Bill has never felt more self-conscious, the awareness sharpened by everything he’s discovered over the last year. It forces him to question, as he’s never done before, every interaction. Is it wariness he encounters, or calculation, forbearance, impatience, evaluation, condescension? The strain is wearying.
Seema has adapted well to this scene, suppressing talk of her usual grievances. “Do you see anyone else around who can defeat Bush? I’ve got to work with what I have.”
And what she has, an exotic glamour, she plays up subtly. Bill can’t say exactly what’s different about her in Iowa, but whatever it is, it’s working. The newer campaign workers, young and barely out of college, vie with each other for her attention, readily submitting to her leadership. Media events and interviews are enlivened, Seema bringing to them the feisty vitality of a hothouse flower. The senior campaign staff, overworked as they are, are grateful, even if they sometimes resent being crowded out of the picture. It usually falls to Bill to soothe their ruffled feelings, a task he’s good at.
“Remind me again what’s in this for me?” he asks Seema.
A joking voice but a nagging question since he allowed himself to be persuaded to join Seema on this trip. She’s taken three weeks off from work, feigning a family emergency. He has no one to answer to, and no job lined up yet, but he’s not the driven supporter of Howard Dean she is, nor is unseating George W. Bush his most burning desire. What’s he doing here then? To say he’s here for Seema, to say he can’t abandon Seema: how foolish, how foolhardy.
His last relationship—which ended a year and a half ago—was with Vanessa, a tax attorney, a Black Latina whom Josh had set him up with. And then had come Mame’s death, driving out any thoughts of dating, until he’d met Seema. Since then, Bill can count on one hand the number of times he’s had sex, each time with women from the neighborhood sports bar that he sometimes visited late Saturday nights when he was too wound up to sleep. And each time he’d felt guilty; whether Seema was sleeping with anyone, he didn’t, couldn’t, ask.
Just as he can’t ask about what he’s hearing now from the campaign staff, that Seema is likely to join the national headquarters in Vermont after the Iowa caucus. If that were true, the days of Seema’s withdrawal following the discovery of his father’s letters will have been a mere taste of the days to come.
But there’s little time for repining. If Seema had been pushing herself and Bill hard before, with caucus day approaching they’re working almost without rest. The overextended days are a refuge: he has little time to wallow in the guilty hope that a Dean loss in Iowa would somehow secure him Seema. For, in the days immediately before the caucus, Dean’s popularity takes a further dive. His opposition to the Iraq War has been turned around to paint him as inexperienced in foreign policy and incapable of keeping America strong. Seema dismisses the polls. Dean will win, if only by the smallest of margins—surely the passionate labor of the thousands who’ve followed Dean here from all over the country can ensure that. But Bill has his doubts. Iowans appear weary of their pervasive presence, considering them outsiders interfering in their state: the orange beanie that constitutes their uniform has become a target of ridicule in local papers. And the headquarters has become increasingly disorganized and dysfunctional, riven with indecisiveness and internal disputes.
Caucus day whizzes by with the surreality of a time-lapse video. It’s morning, it’s noon, it’s evening, time lurching forward, each new assignment so clamorous in its importance and urgency as to displace all memory of the assignment just completed. Bill and Seema step out only after the caucus commences, and there’s nothing more that anyone can do. They’re famished, they bolt down an untasted meal, and still bruised from the day’s battering, they make their way to the ballroom rented for the after-party to await results.
The ballroom is swarming with a thousand exhausted but exhilarated troopers. But the mood soon turns somber as the results begin to trickle in. Dean has slipped to third place, and a distant third at that. Bill senses the struggle with which Seema controls herself, but he doesn’t presume to offer comfort or hope: she has retreated to the remote self he knows to leave alone, though they sit side by side. To have worked so hard, and fallen so short—he aches to console Seema, to assure her that the effort is not all wasted, but of this he’s not sure.
He takes her hands in his to massage them to warmth, even as a slow chill steals into him. Had the results been closer, he could have expected Seema to double down, convinced the defeat could be reversed. But with little chance of recovering from this debacle, Dean will be forced to end his campaign, perhaps even tonight. Seema would surely take this as further proof of her—and Bill’s—insignificance. And she could withdraw completely, shunning anything that reminds her of today—including him.
When Dean comes out on the podium, the ballroom is still grieving. But Dean knows how to fight: he rolls up his sleeves and gives an impassioned speech, promising his followers that he’s not giving up, that he’ll lead them to victory through every remaining state primary to the White House.
He ends with a scream—“Yeah!”—from somewhere deep within him and electrifying, his fist smashing through the air as if he were crushing every obstacle in his path—opposition, destiny.
The speech revives the entire ballroom, as it does Seema. She’s restored to some measure of her customary animation, making plans for the future. Bill, too, is almost persuaded to believe in Dean’s continuing viability.
But the flame that Dean has reignited wavers as soon as they leave the ballroom. They crawl back to their motel in silence, undress in silence, get into their respective beds, turn the lights off.
Bill has never been back in the room this early before and with no concrete plans for tomorrow. Despite his exhaustion, he can’t sleep, unable to dull the consciousness of some inevitable change that day must bring. He lies staring at the window, at the icy white light leaking in through the curtains, ushering a desolate winter into the room.
“Bill, I can’t sleep,” Seema whispers. “I’m cold.”
“Me too,” he says, turning toward her.
“Can I join you?” she asks.
Should he have replied that it isn’t a good idea? That she might regret it the next morning? All he knows in that moment is his need. He’s able to stutter, “If you want to.”
And in reply, Seema slips out of her bed and into his, under his comforter.
How awkward that first coupling is, as if he’s never kissed before, never touched a breast, never gone down on a woman. His hands tremble. He’s never felt clumsier, all thumbs. His tongue seems swollen, his breathing is a wheeze.
“Relax,” she says. “I should be more nervous than you—I’ve never slept with a man before.”
But that only leaves him more shaken, as if he’s been given this one chance, and he’s squandering it.
“It’s okay,” she says. “Just hold me.”
Despite having desired this for so long, having dreamed of this the three weeks he’s spent with her in this room, he can find little comfort in Seema’s warm breath on his chest, the length of her body smoldering against his. All night—after she’s gone back to her own bed—he rehearses apologies, excuses. He alternates between blaming himself and blaming Seema for succumbing to the folly. He shames himself for performing so inadequately.
He wakes up no closer to knowing what to say to her. He goes for a walk to clear his mind, while she’s still asleep. The only sensible solution is to claim that the night was a mistake, that he shouldn’t have taken advantage of her vul
nerability. Perhaps their friendship would survive it. He returns with coffee and a prepared speech.
She accepts the coffee but, before he can speak, offers, “Maybe I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that last night. Maybe we can give it another try. That is, if you want to—”
And yes, my yet-to-be father wants to, wants to so badly that he suppresses all doubts that would have saved them both so much grief.
12
Here’s what happens next: Dean’s defiant speech is reduced, by a media gloating at his Iowa drubbing, to the final ten seconds of his roused red-faced scream. Overnight, Dean becomes fodder for late-night TV hosts and comedians—portrayed as too angry and pilloried as unpresidential. The clips go viral on the web, and Dean cannot survive the assault, falling victim to the very internet that had elevated him. Within a month, he drops out of the race.
Seema is furious and dejected; she’s back in San Francisco, having lost not only her lone champion against Bush but her ticket out of her current life.
Meanwhile, as if to rub salt into her wounds, San Francisco has erupted in jubilation: its ambitious new mayor, Gavin Newsom, beating Massachusetts to the punch, has ordered the city to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in defiance of Proposition 22. The city cheers as gay and lesbian couples queue in front of the county clerk’s office in lines that stretch around the block. Champagne flows on the steps of the city hall as newlyweds exit lip-locked and teary-eyed. The Castro transforms itself into a twenty-four-hour street party.
Seema rants to Bill: How is she to celebrate while America turns a blind eye to the pain and suffering of the Brown peoples it has invaded illegally and is dooming itself to four more years of a war criminal? The CIA had finally admitted, just the week before, that there had been no imminent threat from Saddam’s WMDs. How could queer America justify rejoicing at what is simply fuller participation in the imperialistic American Dream, while Iraq is rapidly sinking into further chaos, with car bombs ripping through Baghdad practically every single day?
