Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  In your defense, Grandmother, you’ve had only a few hours to digest the reality of what your elder daughter is asking of you for the second time.

  “I’d rather have no daughter,” her father had proclaimed the first time, during one of their many rancorous fights on Seema’s last visit from England, “than one who makes me hang my head in shame.”

  “I cannot lead a life of falsehood,” your daughter had declaimed in reply, “just to save your face.”

  What life she wanted to lead, you didn’t ask then—because you couldn’t imagine that life as being anything other than impossible, unhappy, fruitless. Even the words to describe it—homosexual, lesbian—have sibilant, sinister overtones. You refused to use the words and dismissed the matter as another of Seema’s attempts to shock you. You reproached her for her willfulness, you begged her father for forgiveness on her behalf.

  Even on the morning you found Seema gone—her room bare, her clothes and suitcase missing, pale rectangles on the wall where her favorite photos used to be—you didn’t take her seriously, thinking it a ploy to bring her father around. You thought she’d gone to your sister’s house, where she’d been spending a lot of time during that trip. Only when you learned she was not with Halima did you start panicking.

  You’ve seen today—finally, at the dinner with Seema’s partner and friend—the contours of the life Seema could lead. But you’ve not been given time to grapple with the knowledge; you’ve once again been asked to pick sides, this time between the two daughters you’d hoped to bring together as your last act of motherly consideration. The rift you’d come to heal has ripped open wider than it had been before.

  You want some time alone with your sorrow—your multiple failures as a mother—before you face your elder daughter again.

  Presently you rouse yourself. You press the buzzer and speak into what looks like the intercom. Still no response. You’re more irritated than alarmed—Seema has locked herself in her room and perhaps can’t hear the buzzer. You know none of the neighbors; you gather your courage and buzz the floors below and above. A man responds to your second attempt. He grunts at your flurried explanation of being locked out and buzzes you in.

  At least the apartment is open. The smell of biryani overwhelms you as soon as you enter. You look into the kitchen: dishes and plates as they were left, remains of an unfinished dinner. You cannot bear to see these signs of a ruined evening. You had such hopes.

  You clear the table, scrape the food off the plates into the garbage. As for the dishes and the biryani—will anyone have the desire any longer to eat them? Still, you can’t throw them away. You make space for them in the fridge.

  Only then do you knock on Seema’s bedroom door. First timidly, then peremptorily. You rattle the doorknob, you push against the door. It won’t budge, and there’s no reaction from inside.

  Now you’re frantic: you call out her name, hysterically almost, a heavy hand squeezing your heart.

  What are you to do? You are alone, thousands of miles from anything you’re familiar with, with no idea how the world works here, no knowledge of its rules and protocols. Whom to call?

  Tahera may be at the airport already, and it would take her a while to get back, and—yes, Fiaz, but alas, you don’t have Fiaz’s number. You do have Bill’s number though.

  Your hand trembles as you fumble for it. You pray that he will pick up, that he will listen to you, despite what happened yesterday. Was it only yesterday? The first ring, then the second, then the third cut short as Bill answers, and before you hear his voice—

  “Son, son,” you sob in Urdu, because for what you have to say, and even for what you can’t find the words to say, it’s the only language that moves your tongue at this moment. But, of course, he doesn’t understand you. You panic that he may hang up, you force your tongue slowly around words that feel foreign to it now, you force yourself to give voice to your fears clearly and specifically.

  Yes, Bill says, yes, he will be over, they should call 911, call an ambulance, he’ll call them, what’s the address again, is there anyone else in the building to help, he’ll be over, don’t worry, it will be all right, it will be all right, it will be all right.

  You want to believe him.

  How do the next minutes go? You must have run upstairs to the neighbor who let you in and somehow convinced him to help. Did he try to break the bedroom door down before the ambulance arrived? He must have tried, he must have given up. Did the ambulance come screaming down the street pulsing blue and white? You must have been watching out for it on the fire escape, you must have run down to meet the two paramedics stepping out of it. You must have shown them the way up. The three of them—the paramedics and the neighbor—must have forced the bedroom door open. Someone must have turned the bedroom lights on.

  Seema is on the floor beside the bed, lying on her side. Her head is raised, propped up at an unnatural angle in the niche between the bed and the dresser, her eyes closed. One hand is thrust up, as if trying to hold on to the side of the bed. A dark red smear on the sheets trails off at the edge of the bed where her fingers curl. Under the curve of her belly, which looks enormous, as if she were pregnant with a lifetime’s worth of babies, a thick wide pool glistens red-black against the hardwood floors. Merging into the pool of blood is a colorless pool of water, with scattered flowers—the calla lilies—lying in it, among shards of glass.

  You stagger back to the splintered door, unable to stand any closer, unable to take your eyes off her, unable to watch. The two paramedics bustle around her, setting her on a stretcher. They call out to each other instructions and observations that you can’t comprehend. They ask questions that you don’t realize are directed at you, because they’re looking at your daughter. The neighbor repeats them to you, nudging you out of your trance.

  You must have tried to answer their questions. They tell you that your daughter’s pulse is present, though weak, since she’s lost much blood. They think they can still hear my heart beating. They won’t know for sure until they get to the ER. You clutch at the small glimmer of hope their words give you.

  They must have carried the stretcher down. You must have remembered to grab Seema’s maternity bag before you followed them. You don’t remember locking the apartment but do remember noticing for the first time the color of the carpet that covers the stairs—crimson—and the dark mahogany-red stain of the handrails.

  Bill must have arrived by then. You feel relieved: you’re no longer alone. At least there’s one other person to share the unbearable weight of this moment with you. You embrace him, grateful he’s here. Bill must have asked what he can do to help.

  Call Tahera, you tell him. You must have been able to recall Tahera’s number. You wish you had Fiaz’s number, and Leigh’s, too. You wonder what your husband is doing right then.

  One of the paramedics says you can ride with them. Someone must have helped you into the ambulance and handed you Seema’s bag. Bill says he will follow in his car, he must have found out where they were taking you.

  The ambulance screams through San Francisco’s streets to the hospital. Yet how long the ride seems to last. The inside of the ambulance is lined with equipment of every kind but apparently none that can help your daughter. Was it only two nights ago, that dinner on the rooftop beneath that full promising moon, when you’d declared with so much certainty, “Nothing will happen”?

  You imagine her calling out to you as her blood began to spill out of her body. You recall that day from long ago—the day your newly menstruating daughter bled uncontrollably—when you attempted to soothe her fears as she lay crying, her head in your lap. Both these daughters, the past and present Seema, lie on the stretcher beside you now, as do all your imagined versions of me, and you would give anything—your blood, and your life, too, for what use is what remains of your life anymore?—anything to keep us with the living.

  Coda

  1

  At his home in Chennai, a husband, father, gr
andfather is busy with his daily correspondence. There are decisions to be made: Which proposals to support? Which speaking engagements to accept? Which invitations—to meetings, dinners, and receptions—to decline?

  He has a routine he adheres to religiously since his wife’s departure. After waking up, he goes for his morning walk in the park around the corner, stopping first at the neighboring restaurant for his morning cup of tea. On his way back he picks up his breakfast from the restaurant, his usual order kept ready for him: two idlis and two vadas, the sambar and chutney packed in small plastic bags. He shaves and showers, dresses, then eats his breakfast reading the newspaper. When the maid arrives, she’ll clear the table, wash and put away the plates and dishes he’s used, then sweep and clean the house, while he works in his study.

  Now he consults his calendar and makes plans: he has a full day, ending with the keynote speech he’s to give at the Indian Medical Association’s annual convention. When the maid is done housekeeping, he leaves the house and won’t return until bedtime. He looks over the speech, about the responsibilities of doctors in the twenty-first century, and makes a few final edits.

  He ponders for a moment whether he should call his wife. But why should he? They should be the ones calling him.

  2

  In Irvine, a father watches his daughter fall asleep. She lies in his bed, the side where her mother usually sleeps, whom she’s cried for all evening. She is silent now, but her face, even in repose, is tense. He strokes her hair, waiting for her body to slacken, and studies in the half gloom the worried creases of her forehead, the tight thin lines of her lips.

  Eventually, when she has slipped into a sufficiently deep slumber, he lifts her into his arms to carry her to her own bed. But he pauses by the door of the children’s room, suddenly reluctant to enter. He turns and carries her back to his room, her body a comforting weight against his chest.

  Later, he’s ashamed: Is he afraid of his own son? He lies awake in bed pondering, then persuades himself to return to check on the boy. His son is sleeping peacefully, his chest rising and falling with the grace of a bird riding a gentle breeze, his face serene, lit by Allah’s own words and the ceiling’s glowing universe.

  3

  At the San Francisco International Airport, a daughter, sister, mother waits by the departure gate for her flight to Dallas: she has bought a ticket on the last flight leaving that night.

  When her phone rings—displaying a San Francisco number—she’s quick to answer, on the hope of hearing her mother’s voice again. But it’s a voice she hasn’t heard before, a man claiming to be her sister’s ex-husband. He tells her that her mother asked that she be informed about her sister: bleeding, emergency, ambulance. He gives her the name of a hospital and is in a hurry to hang up.

  But she needs to be at home, by her children’s beds, looking down at their sleeping forms. Hasn’t she been punished enough for her decision to abandon her son and daughter? She has her boarding pass in hand, her luggage has been checked. Surely her sister will be all right—

  She remains rooted to her spot.

  4

  In the halls of a hospital in San Francisco, a wants-to-be father paces the marbled floor, one end to the other, spinning visions of the future: the joys of accidental fatherhood, perhaps even an unexpected restoration of his ruptured family. Any doubts he’s harbored have been replaced by the simple longing to hold the baby, and the mother, in his arms, even if he has to—as he will, as he wants to—accept the inclusion of a fourth into the family.

  He’d never really believed life capable of granting him this. But now he feels a strange stirring of hope, of pride almost, of attaining some kind of happiness. Like the day two years ago when a man in his image was elected president of his country.

  Surely it is a sign that he’s been called to be present here today. He has declared himself the father of the baby to be born; he neglects to correct the nurses when they refer to the mother as his wife.

  He’s not unaware of the dire peril to mother and baby. A nurse has tried to reassure him: they’re doing everything they can. He has willed himself to believe the doctors capable of miracles.

  5

  In one unlit corner of the waiting room, a mother, wife, again-to-be grandmother stands with her back against the wall. She feels safer in the relative shadows, away from the light, as if by doing so she can escape the malevolent attentions of the universe. Every time someone—a doctor, a nurse, an orderly—enters, she shrinks a little as if to render herself invisible, preferring ignorance to bad news about her daughter and the baby.

  But as the minutes pass uninterrupted, a slow anger builds: Will no one—no doctor, no soothsayer, no god?—reveal to her the outcome of this waiting and free her from this particular hell? She’s been patient long enough. The time allotted to her is even now running out.

  Until then she’d accepted her impending death with resigned equanimity, much as she’d accepted everything that happened as simply how the world worked. But now she wants more than just the knowledge of the well-being of her daughter and her baby:

  She wants to hold and coddle her grandchild, to be there when he takes his first steps, when he utters his first words. She wants to teach him Urdu, to sing him Urdu lullabies and ghazals. She wants to see her daughter settle down with her partner; she wants to cook for them the most delicious meals they’ve ever eaten.

  She wants the world—for herself, for her two daughters, for all her grandchildren—more fiercely now that she’s confronted with a world slipping away from her.

  A figure approaches, haloed under the light, unearthly, otherworldly. He’s a doctor, a healer—like her husband, her daughters’ father, but not him—and as he draws nearer:

  Oh, what comfort does he bring?

  6

  Inside an operating room, a not-to-be mother is laid out on a table under the cool annular brilliance of surgical lighting, her domed belly exposed.

  She’s unaware, of course, of where she is. Her heart continues to pump what feeble blood it can. Her lungs continue to inhale and exhale a straitened air. She’s hooked up to machines that monitor her body for signs of life, to tubes that dribble into her the blood and fluids her body has lost and the anesthesia that will deaden her to any pain her mind can still acknowledge.

  Around her assemble doctors and nurses, their hair covered, faces masked, bodies gowned, hands gloved. Scalpels and scissors, forceps and suction tips—these are the tools at hand for these robed figures: inadequate, but the best they have. A scalpel slits through the skin and fat covering her belly and slips into her womb.

  Blood seeps out of her like a spring. Gloved hands probe the interior of her split womb, seeking to lift out her blood-smeared baby. The umbilical cord connecting her to the child is snipped. Her body struggles to hold on to the wispy flame of life still flickering through it. Others bear the child away.

  7

  Here I am, breached into this world, all twenty inches of me, all seven pounds, with all my features and appendages in their place. The downy mammalian hair that once covered my entire body is gone. I’m fully and independently human now, even if I haven’t yet taken my first breath.

  To think that only nine months ago, I was a mere leech, the size of a grain of rice, clinging to my mother’s walls. And then a lump of flesh, pea-sized, formless and shapeless, just a week later. I was an inch, head and heart in place, limbs budding, when my mother decided to keep me. My urogenital folds had fused and extended out to form the spongy shaft of my penis, clarifying my boyhood, by the time my father rejected me. I was beginning to make my presence known, pushing out against my mother’s abdomen, when she first met her current lover.

  Two days earlier, when my mother’s sister accepted guardianship of me, I was ready—my intestines already functioning, fashioning and storing what will be my first stool, black and tar-like, while my lungs, the most developed of my organs, lay compressed but ready to assume from my mother’s lungs the task
of providing oxygen. I was as prepared as I’d ever be to leave behind the three shells that had protected me from the world’s harsh brilliance: the placenta that nourished me, the uterus that harbored me, the body that housed me.

  When I emerged from my mother’s womb and the umbilical cord was severed, a reflex triggered by a hunger for air should have made me gasp, and I should have taken my first breath. My lungs, until now a crimped-up mass of solid tissue, would have then expanded with their first taste of air, and my blood would have begun to flow through them, to be renewed there. The respiratory muscles that line my rib cage and diaphragm would have become engaged, forcing me to take my second breath, and then my third.

  But I don’t respond this way, and someone slips a suction tube into my mouth to clear my windpipe and induce me to start breathing. Someone else wipes me clean of the blood and mucus smearing my face and body. They thump me on the back—part encouragement, part prod—to shock my body into responding. My collapsed lungs resist, and someone places a mask over my nostrils to force air into me. My stubborn lungs strain with the pressure, but even as I convulse and splutter, they expand only slightly.

  As if, by some grace, I’ve been given the power to choose whether I wish to enter this world or, by holding my breath, forsake it.

  8

  On a ship sailing from England to Italy, a poet despairs—a storm rages outside, and a storm rages within. He’s confined to his cabin in this wooden coffin taking him away from everything he loves. It’s not fame he lusts after anymore, nor the moon’s otherworldly beauty.

  His friends and supporters have chipped in generously to finance this convalescence in Rome, in the hope that the merciful Roman winter would grant him a reprieve, allowing him to return to his world—to his fiancée and friends, to his poetry. But he knows there’s to be no return from this journey. The symptoms are recognizable—blood, phlegm, a wasting away, a hollowing of chest and body. Hasn’t he nursed and lost his mother and brother to the disease’s ravaging clutches?