Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  But Ammi said, “I still have the saree. I saved it for you, for whenever you wanted it.”

  The heft of Ammi’s gift, like the saree’s weight which belied its delicate Banarasi weave, settled like a rock in her heart. It was a more precious gift than she’d any right to expect. Ammi had accepted news of her impending marriage quietly, as if too grateful to ask questions. Since then, their conversations have become more frequent, almost weekly, though her mother still calls from outside the home, either from Halima Aunty’s or from an ISD booth. Ammi’s call today had been reassuring. She’d have been disappointed, even distressed, if Ammi hadn’t.

  “I’m just happy you called,” she’d said. “Do you want to speak to Bill?”

  Ammi first demurred but then asked to be put on the speakerphone. “I wish you both a long and happy married life.” Then to Bill: “Please take care of my daughter.”

  And Bill took her hands in his and raised them to his lips as if for Ammi to see. “I will, Seema’s mother.”

  I don’t need anyone to take care of me, she’d wanted to object. But she was silenced by the memory of all those times she’d witnessed—with anguished longing—mothers enfolding their daughter’s hands into the groom’s with the same tear-strained phrase.

  Now waiting in the ceremony room, a pang of bitterness: if only it had been possible for her to be seated here, decked in Ammi’s saree, with her groom beside her, resplendent in a sherwani—why does the gender of the groom matter?—and flanked by her parents. She’s suddenly reminded of Reshmi, Prince Salim to her Anarkali, the day of the play—the closest she has come to such a configuration. Wherever Reshmi is now she is surely married and probably already burdened with several kids.

  In the confines of this small bare chamber she casts the other occupants—the brides in white, carrying bouquets of demure calla lilies—in a pallor. All light in the room is drawn to her. Her scarlet dress seems to swell and pulsate, a flame of a flower, more brilliant than mehndi on any bride’s hands, more fierce than any red wedding saree she could drape herself in. The registrar’s gaze keeps reverting to her, even as he officiates for the couple ahead, as if no eye can resist her, no will can ignore her. She can almost imagine that Bill’s tight hold on one hand and Fiaz’s arm threaded about her waist are both needed to keep her seated, to stop her from whirling around the room, the scarlet swirling and flaring, even as the marriage-equality rally outside cheers, still audible over the registrar’s spiel—

  Do you, Seema . . . ?

  I do. Qabool.

  16

  When Seema is fifteen, she tapes the first telecast of the movie Mughal-E-Azam on the only channel—Doordarshan—then available on TV. My grandfather has just bought his first VCR and is excited to put it to the test, while his eldest daughter is excited to acquire her own copy of the movie. She’ll finally be able to summon at her pleasure Anarkali, or rather the actress Madhubala who portrays Anarkali with such tragic glory.

  For Seema, Madhubala rules the movie, as the dancing servant girl. “Why be afraid when I merely love?” Anarkali challenges Akbar—Pyar kiya toh darna kya?—when he orders her to forget Salim under threat of imprisonment and death. “I’m not veiling my love from the Lord, why then veil for mere mortals?” she sings, her skirts swirling, her eyes snapping. Madhubala’s lissome figure whirls in the thousand mirrors of the Sheesh Mahal, her lips curling in a mocking smile as the emperor sits frozen, only jowls shaking in anger. The scene is one of the few shot in Technicolor in the otherwise black-and-white movie.

  When the movie ends, Naeemullah says, “No one can ever match Madhubala. What beauty, what grace. There will be no one like her again.” Madhubala died young, succumbing to a congenital hole in her heart that brought her soaring career to a halt.

  Does my mother, at fifteen, question her fascination with the movie and its heroine? Consider the complications: there’s the legend of Anarkali and the legend of Madhubala; there’s her father’s stamp of approval on both the movie and its heroine. How easy it is, then, to confuse desire for Anarkali with desire to be Anarkali, desire for Madhubala with desire to be Madhubala, to be Madhubala portraying Anarkali.

  Some instinct warns her that she risks rebuke from her mother if she indulges further her preoccupation with Anarkali-Madhubala. To persuade her mother to permit further viewings of the movie, Seema announces a plan to write a play based on it, for her school’s Annual Day celebrations. And, in a shrewd move, she disarms her family by inviting them to participate in the effort.

  Naeemullah pronounces it a capital idea. Father and daughter watch parts of the movie many times—with Tahera crouched by the VCR, operating it at their command—translating as best they can the poetry of the movie from Urdu to English. But the Urdu they speak at home, the Dakkani dialect, cannot compare to the purity of the courtly Urdu spoken in the movie. Urdu, Naeemullah proclaims, must be the language of love’s rituals: English, even under the Romantic poets, cannot match Urdu’s intricacy and intimacy. “Ask your mother,” he says.

  By then Nafeesa has lost her fluency in chaste Urdu. Her initial translations are feeble and hesitant, so mother and daughter pour over a dusty Urdu-to-English dictionary they find in Naeemullah’s library, a relic dating from Nafeesa’s college years.

  The play slowly takes root, sprouts, and flowers, tended to and watched over by the entire Hussein family. Anarkali is pomegranate blossom.

  When the play is done, and typed up by Naeemullah, with carbon copies for good measure, Seema and Tahera succeed in cajoling their parents into staging a reading at home. There’s no need to discuss roles—Seema will obviously be Anarkali, Naeemullah is Akbar, Nafeesa is the queen mother Jodha Bai, trapped between loyalty to her husband and love for her son, and Tahera gets to play Salim and other minor characters.

  The evening begins lightheartedly, with laughter and fits of giggling, none of them, not even Naeemullah, able to keep a straight face at first. The dialogue, dramatic in Urdu, appears overly florid in English. But as they respond to Naeemullah’s coaching, something surprising happens.

  “Say it like this,” Naeemullah urges, lending nimble voice to the words, transforming himself from a fiery Akbar to a dulcet Jodha Bai, from an unwavering Prince Salim to a passionate Anarkali, and the words no longer seem extravagant. His wife and daughters are forced to concede the truth in his tales of excelling in amateur theater during his years of medical college. His zeal rubs off on them. Laughter is forgotten.

  Seema herself is an ecstatic Anarkali.

  “Not the rose, but its thorns—” she exclaims, in something approaching rapture. “Yet I do not fear the pain, for my love cannot wither.”

  The next step is to convince Sister Agnes, her eleventh-standard class teacher and English teacher for three years, to agree to produce the play for the school Annual Day. But after reading the typed manuscript, Sister Agnes says, “This is beautifully written, very poetic, Seema. But it’s not appropriate for a class play.”

  Seema has thought of herself as Sister Agnes’s favorite student. Two years earlier, Sister Agnes cast Seema in the lead role of Portia in a twenty-minute adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, a privilege that should have gone to some girl in the eleventh standard.

  But Seema holds a trump card: next year she’ll be in the twelfth standard and can’t participate in the Annual Day play since she’ll be preparing for her final public exams. She says, in her most wistful voice, “Sister, this is the last play I can take part in for Annual Day.”

  Her voice quavers with a quiet distress, perfected under her father’s training. But to her surprise, her throat actually catches and her eyes prickle. This will be her last year with Sister Agnes; next year, she’ll have the headmistress as her English teacher. Sister Agnes has been her champion these many years, and her merry eyes, wimpled face, and the long steeple-shaped mole by her upper lip have been a source of almost daily communion. The loss signals many forthcoming changes.

  She sniffles and t
urns away from Sister Agnes, who catches her hand and says, “Come, child, don’t cry. What’s there to cry about?”

  Seema’s face is glassy-eyed and trembling. For a fleeting moment she unconsciously mirrors Anarkali-Madhubala, her eyes pooling with unshed tears, tragically brave and lovely.

  Who can resist that look? Sister Agnes’s eyes moisten in their turn. She promises to reconsider and later returns the manuscript with a few changes and cuts.

  Soon the rehearsals start. The parts have been cast. Seema is Anarkali, of course. Akbar is to be played by Madhavi, an eleventh grader from a different section, with her shot-putter’s build and strapping voice and the beginnings of a mustache. Plump, voluble Preethi is the queen mother, Jodha Bai.

  As for Prince Salim: Who better to play that part than Seema’s best friend, Reshmi, lanky, reserved Reshmi, taller than anyone else in class, fleet flat-chested Reshmi, faster than any other girl in school, her face angular, ascetic, noble, with knife-edge cheekbones, her hair so soft and weightless it appears molded to her skull, her voice—

  It’s a voice that Naeemullah has wished for his daughters! It’s a voice trained in the Hindustani vocal tradition, robust yet agile, capable of both sonorous lows and ringing highs. It’s a voice Seema never tires of hearing, that sends Seema’s heart tripping, especially when it’s inflected with the giddiness that is reserved for her alone.

  Seema has given this voice only a few lines in her play. But there are benefits to this—what else does Reshmi have to do now while Anarkali spars with Akbar but hold her hand? Reshmi has little to do but gaze into Anarkali’s eyes while Anarkali recites couplets of love. When soldiers are ordered to seize a vocal, unrepentant Anarkali, they first have to tear her away from Reshmi’s arms. It’s as if Seema, though herself prepared to play the part of the doomed Anarkali, would rather Reshmi play no other part than herself.

  The next year my mother will finish her higher-secondary schooling and will leave for Bangalore to do her bachelor’s in English at St. Joseph’s College. She’ll have chosen a college in a different city so she can stay away from home. Three years later she will leave for even farther away, to Oxford, England, for a master’s. And from there to New York, abandoned by her family and leaving her first lover behind, for a fellowship at Columbia University in communication. She’ll jump at the chance of staying in the United States a year later, accepting a fortuitous offer of a marketing job in a Silicon Valley just beginning to bubble up then, midnineties, excited and anxious to leave her past completely behind, seeking once again a new beginning.

  17

  The newlyweds have agreed that Seema should quit her current job and work for the Obama campaign. Bill will continue at the health insurance company he’d joined and will maintain their finances and benefits while volunteering on the side, at least until the fortunes of the campaign became more apparent.

  Seema hopes that the contacts she made while volunteering for Dean will give her an in and lead to a job handling public relations or new media for the campaign. She writes to everyone she knows, and many promise to pass on her inquiries. She waits to hear back, spending spring and summer 2007 holding house parties and fundraisers, like she did for Dean.

  Obama is the underdog in the battle for the Democratic nomination. He’s deployed to crisscross the nation, speaking wherever he can, whipping up visibility and enthusiasm, his speeches at turns funny, self-deprecating, earnest, moving, inspiring, galvanizing. He’s always charming and effortlessly likable. Obama fever catches on and spreads like wildfire through the progressive corners of the country.

  But as summer advances, Seema has yet to hear back about a job. She complains that the campaign is closed off and unapproachable.

  Bill consoles her: Obama must be flooded with applications from more experienced professionals.

  Seema has other suspicions. The inner circle of staff Obama has hired is very White.

  She’d been accepted by the Dean campaign, Bill scoffs, which was as White, if not more. Obama must hire the best if he’s to have any chance of victory. Isn’t she aware of the political landscape?

  “But Obama is Black. And he’s supposed to be different.”

  “He hasn’t even started, for God’s sake. Give him a chance.”

  This is the first argument in some time that Bill is unwilling to end, let alone concede, even when Seema throws up her hands together as if in prayer—a gesture that Bill usually uses to give in when Seema gets very heated, picked up for its absurdity from watching the occasional Indian movie.

  Thankfully, there’s soon news that there are to be camps to recruit and train volunteers to create field organizations in each state. They attend Camp Obama in San Francisco, led by a team of experienced organizers, including a professor from Harvard, over a weekend of communion with other like-minded activists. Bill and Seema are assigned to a leadership team for their congressional district, tasked with recruiting more volunteers and building capacity for voter registration, phone banking, canvassing, and getting out the vote in the California primary that February, less than six months away. Bill is to be their team coordinator, and Seema will be in charge of volunteer recruitment.

  Raring to get started after a summer of passivity, Seema immediately hands in her resignation at her firm and embarks upon a grueling schedule of recruitment meetings wherever she can hold them, in cafés, in libraries and bookshops, in bars, in community spaces.

  She has rehearsed her story of the self, taking naturally to the technique the Obama camp has promoted as a means to convey personal values and build connections to potential volunteers and voters, by appealing to emotion through the story of her life and why she feels called to volunteer. She declaims about being a Hussein in America, a Muslim, an object of suspicion and derision, an outsider who has to prove herself loyal all the time. A win for Obama—the skinny kid with a funny name, with a Hussein in it as well!—would mean there is a place for her, and every outsider like her, in America. Her story resonates among the immigrants and the new arrivals to San Francisco, appeals to its liberal and progressive base.

  She has also begun conducting her own training sessions. Word spreads, and she’s quickly in demand, invited to coach new volunteers all over the Bay Area. Between her frequent trips crisscrossing the bay and Bill’s day job and evenings spent coordinating the team’s activities, they sometimes see each other only in passing during the week, or at team meetings.

  Meanwhile, the roller coaster that is the primary season starts. To Seema’s great relief, Obama opens the year with an upset, besting Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, astounding America—she’d feared he’d be snuffed out like Dean in the white winter of Iowa. But he promptly loses in New Hampshire and Nevada, only regaining momentum by trouncing Clinton in South Carolina, with only days left to the California primary.

  The approaching Super Tuesday takes on the frenzied excitement of a dream. The nation is at fever pitch: more than twenty states will be voting in a few days, perhaps determining the presidential nominees of both parties. Obama and Clinton, and their surrogates, jet around the country holding huge rallies to energize their bases. Yes we can! has become the rallying cry of the Obama supporters: “When we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can,” Obama had declared in a speech to motivate his supporters after losing the New Hampshire primary. “It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.” This has gone viral; a black-and-white music video featuring clips of this speech has become an internet sensation, Obama’s words echoed, repeated, and riffed on by celebrity singers, both Black and White.

  Yes we can! Heads down, their team shifts from organizing and building capacity to getting out the vote to capitalize on the late surge of support for Obama after the South Carolina victory. Come Super Tuesday, Seema casts her vote for Obama with
a sense of accomplishment—it’s the first vote of her life: she’d been too young to vote while in India and had naturalized only the year before in the United States.

  But the results turn out mixed. Their work pays off in San Francisco, which Obama carries comfortably, but Clinton still wins California. Nationwide, wins are offset by other losses.

  Still, the Obama campaign claims victory: they’ve picked up more delegates than Clinton, establishing their lead, and they’ve managed to disrupt the media narrative of Clinton’s inevitability. The media declares Obama the front-runner. The San Francisco teams celebrate, having helped limit Clinton’s haul of California delegates. But at the after-party, Seema is unable to join in wholeheartedly: she’d have preferred the vindication conferred by an outright win. Despite Bill’s reassurances, she cannot shake off the feeling of being let down, as on that dismal evening in Iowa four years ago.

  She’s beginning to fret that the campaign is not doing enough to refute the conspiracy theories intensifying on the internet: that Obama is Kenyan and not eligible to be president; he’s a secret Muslim, a member of the Nation of Islam; his real father is Malcolm X; he considers himself the Black messiah; he’s a socialist, dedicated to expanding the welfare state and adding to entitlements to enrich his people; he’s an unqualified affirmative-action candidate. With its own nominee anointed—John McCain—the Right has begun its offensive to discredit the likely Democratic candidate. The allegations first crop up in minor right-wing sites and then are amplified in the echo chambers of conservative media. Some rumors are even given credibility by desperate Clinton supporters.