Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  He has asked the friend accompanying him to buy him some laudanum for seasickness—a drink of that could put an end to his suffering. Who would have thought the human heart capable of containing so much misery?

  The sea outside, the very air, heaves and strains.

  9

  In the basement of a church in Oakland, a to-be father who will never know his son serves a much delayed breakfast to hungry children. There are three tables, each with twenty kids, and they’ve been waiting for food the last thirty minutes. They’ve been led in their daily pledge already—I pledge to develop my mind and body to the greatest extent possible; I will learn all that I can in order to give my best to my people in their struggle for liberation; I will discipline myself to direct my energies thoughtfully and constructively rather than wasting them in idle hatred—and one of his Panther comrades has given them an impromptu lecture on resistance and history, but they have less than half an hour to get to school, and they are restless and ravenous.

  He arrived at the church early that morning only to find the storeroom ransacked—the flour strewn around, the fridge emptied, the eggs smashed, the milk spilled—and one window busted open. There had been little time for anger or investigation, but he’s sure he knows the perpetrators: the pigs in uniform.

  He’d immediately set about trying to forage supplies for some kind of breakfast to feed sixty hungry kids, leaving his comrades behind to clean up the mess—he refused to even consider turning the kids away. He stopped at the pad to scrounge for whatever cash he could find and managed to procure grits and sausages and a few cans of orange juice concentrate.

  He’s in the kitchen dishing up the next batch of plates, listening with pleasure to the laughter and joking in the next room that returned once breakfast was announced, when there’s an abrupt silence. And then the bellow: Who’s in charge here?

  Sounds of a scuffle, chairs and trays being shoved aside, shouts and screams, the whimpering of kids, the protests of his comrades. He rushes to take a look, finding trays on the floor, an orange-yellow mess of grits and juice. The children cower in their seats, their faces frozen in fear. His two comrades are lined up against the wall. Covering them, with guns out, are three White cops, weaving and blustering, while a fourth stands guard at the entrance to the basement.

  Instinctively, he darts back into the kitchen and picks up the pistol he keeps hidden behind the fridge, in anticipation of such occasions.

  10

  At the airport, some passengers notice a woman hurrying away from the departure gate. This wouldn’t have bothered them except that she’s wearing a hijab and is covered from head to toe in a dark-brown gown. She looks frantic, almost disturbed. They debate whether this is cause for concern and decide they’d rather be safe than sorry.

  They inform an airline employee, who passes on their concerns to a security agent, who after some consultation institutes the following precautions: the terminal must be thoroughly searched for any unattended baggage; all carry-ons must be examined manually on every flight leaving the terminal; all flights with possible Muslim passengers must be flagged and delayed till the agents are able to identify the fleeing woman.

  Many passengers—some frustrated, some scared, some angry—call friends, family, lovers to advise them of the delay, and to hear their voices for what could perhaps be the last time.

  11

  In the Castro, a lover returns to his apartment earlier than expected and finds it empty. Not wishing to spend the rest of his evening alone, he sets out in the hope of locating his boyfriend at one of their usual haunts. But repeated text messages go unanswered, and after checking bars for some time, he gives up and returns home, changes into pajamas, and climbs into bed. He gives a friend a call to check on her, to offer and seek sympathy, but gets no answer from her as well. He’ll eventually fall into a fitful asleep. Later, he’ll be vaguely aware of another body joining him under the sheets. He’ll turn automatically to his side, so that the length of his partner’s body is pressed against his, comforting, the way he likes it.

  In Oakland, in her small tomb-like studio a lover lies awake in her bed, dry-eyed, alone. When the phone rings, she springs to answer, but it’s not her girlfriend, and right now she doesn’t want to speak with anyone else. Her mind replays the evening, reenacting the moments so it doesn’t end the way it did: banished from the only world she wants to inhabit, the enveloping warmth of partner and child. She’ll drift through the night, waiting for the phone to ring.

  12

  In Washington, D.C., a president who’d once proclaimed the virtues of hope has woken up in the middle of his sleep, despondent. His party is poised to be trounced in the upcoming midterm elections, and with the House passing into opposing hands, he may not be able to achieve anything more before his current term ends. He may even be denied a second term.

  I am firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings—justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings—are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.

  He’s feeling a little sorry for himself: his opponents are proving more adversarial than expected, united in the goal of denying him any success, viciously rooting for his failure. He’d tried working across the aisle, as he’d promised he would, wooing them with concessions and compromises, which they’d rejected, rousing their base against him.

  He’s a little bitter too: his own supporters seem to be turning against him as well. They already seem to have forgotten that he inherited an economy on the brink of collapse, a military mired in two wars, a nation under terrorist threat. Instead of having his back, they take pride in whining about how disappointed they are, condemning any compromises, and protesting pragmatic steps as too little, as if perfect failure were somehow more admirable than imperfect success.

  All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort to find common ground.

  Yes, he’d campaigned in poetry and is governing in prose, but surely adapting to the way the world actually works is the only rational thing to do: he has no power, after all, to compel the world to comply with his wishes.

  We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning.

  He must continue to hope.

  13

  At the airport, the woman weaves wildly through the passengers heading in the opposite direction, indifferent to the startled eyes trailing her. There are no taxis waiting outside the terminal—she’s on the departures level. The few cabs dropping passengers off don’t stop for her, despite her frantic waving. She must seem hysterical, she imagines, a tiny woman running toward them with her hijab fluttering, her jilbab billowing in the cold Bay Area breeze.

  In desperation, she darts in front of a cab speeding away. It swerves to avoid her but does come to a stop. She clambers in, breathlessly announcing her destination, hoping the driver knows where the hospital is. The driver begins to protest in his gruff Russian accent, but something in her demeanor must be convincing of some emergency, for he nods and turns the meter on.

  She’s riding the same route she’d taken scarcely a week ago, except this time she’s alone. But not entirely, for the ghosts of her mother and sister accompany her—a mother abandoned, a sister spurned. Sitting on the edge of the seat, she keeps her eyes fixed on the road ahead to avoid the sight of the empty seats beside her.

  When the cab climbs up the final hill into San Francisco, she can see very little, the hilltop blanketed by a fierce swirling fog. When the taxi crests and swoops down the hill, she is dizzy, as though she is falling off a cliff whose base is hidden somewhere deep in the clouds of fog rising to meet her.

  The city has been obliterated, erased with some vicious white marker, and in its place is a smoking void. Only occasionally the billowing fog parts enough, to reveal at times feeble pinpricks of house lights, at times glowing
rivers of headlights like molten lava overrunning a hillside.

  Somewhere in that are her sister and mother. It strikes her now that she’s riding into its fiery ruins for some definite trial and sentencing. For doesn’t the Quran warn of grievous penalty when the sky issues forth a smoky mist to envelop the people?

  Perhaps her punishment is to be that her sister and mother are forever lost to her, erased from her life. She recalls that evening decades earlier when she’d walked into her sister’s room, only to find it bare, stripped of every sign—her sister disappeared with meticulous care. And—Allah forbid!—if something were to happen to her sister or the baby now, her mother would never forgive her. As she would never be able to forgive herself.

  She’d allowed herself to behave hatefully. What had gotten into her, she who has always prided herself in her righteous ways? Her son’s face rises before her eyes—she imagines it at the moment the rock flew out of his hands, the set of his jaws, the line of his brows—but no, she cannot blame her son for her actions this evening. She sees it clearly now—whatever hurt, whatever anger, whatever hate drove him to such an act, it surely also belongs to her.

  For a brief urgent moment she contemplates asking the driver to turn back to the airport: she needs to be in Irvine right away, something hanging there in the balance. Otherwise she may be too late, returning to her son only to find every loving trace of him erased. Hadn’t her husband spoken of whisking her son away? But then there’s the threatened erasure, too, of her sister and mother. Why is Allah forcing these dilemmas on her?

  The cab is hemmed in by the traffic brought to a crawl by the fog, too far from the airport to make it back in time for her flight. Surely Allah knows best: He is, after all, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. She can only hope she’s being led to some sort of redeeming test, her son’s and her sister’s fates somehow linked and connected.

  Allah, she prays, Allah, spare my son and my sister, let nothing happen to them.

  The driver turns a startled face toward her: she has spoken the prayer out loud. Please hurry, she tells the driver, please hurry—

  The car revs and lurches forward into the fog, the pale nebulous light opening and closing around them. And the car swings and zips down blurred streets lit by milky lamps, past drowsy traffic lights, past phantom buildings, through the ghostly remains of a shrouded city.

  All the while she repeats the prayer under her breath, sitting on the edge of the seat and rocking herself back and forth, the way her daughter sometimes does. It’s a child’s prayer, repetitive and insistent—she’s slid back into a practice of praying from her childhood days, unmediated by a surah from the Quran or a dua, unmoored from regular offerings five times a day, from a time when prayers were part entreaties, part demands, part inveiglements, part threats, part negotiations, scripted by the needs of the hour and whispered over and over again to the universe.

  She includes in her prayer everything she is in danger of losing: Allah, give me back my sister. Allah, give me back my son. Allah, spare my mother pain. Allah, protect my daughter from harm. Allah, secure my husband’s love for me. Allah, save my sister’s son. This is all I ask from you. You have to hear me this one time. I’ll never ask for anything else ever again.

  The cab glides to a stop in front of a shimmering building that extends into the hazy heavens like a portal.

  14

  In Irvine, in a still-possible future, a brother says to his sister: Come, I’ll show you something.

  He looks excited, and his sister drops what she’s doing and follows him. He leads her down to the garden, away from the house, and picks up the hose lying there.

  She’s wary but goes to his side: Bhaiya, don’t get me wet, I just got ready for asr namaz.

  It’s an afternoon in late fall, a limpid sky stretching across their heads. The sun shines above their rooftop, above the treetops, behind them.

  This is the best time for this, he says. I’ll show you something beautiful.

  He points the hose in the direction of their shadows extending on the lawn in front of them. He turns the hose on: a fine sheet of water sprays out in a wide V shape from the nozzle and falls to the lawn in a graceful curve.

  Look, he says, and sweeps the nozzle up and down, as though he were washing the air in front of them. In the delicate scrim he creates from the water glinting in the sunlight, there appears—broken at first, and then more fully—a rainbow, large enough that it hovers like an arch made for the two of them, and near enough that they could easily leap through it.

  Bhaiya, it’s lovely, she exclaims, clapping. It’s like magic.

  Not magic, he explains: When the sun is behind us and low enough, some of the rays striking the water are reflected back from the inside surface of each droplet. But since different wavelengths of light are refracted a little differently, the light is separated, as through a prism. Depending on where we’re standing, only some of these rays reach our eyes, from droplets that lie in a narrow arc, the reds from the outside of the arc, and the violets from the inside.

  We’re each seeing a slightly different rainbow, he says. A rainbow, like beauty, is in the beholder’s eye.

  15

  At some point, when the hydrogen in its core is exhausted, the sun’s nuclear reactions will cease. The sun will have expanded to more than a hundred times its current size by then, engulfing the earth and its moon. Perhaps that is the description of the dawn of Qiyamah, the day of resurrection.

  But this is billions of years in the future, and the inventories of my own futures interest me more.

  In the normal course of events, this is what should happen after my lungs expand for their first taste of air: My vocal cords will quicken for their first cry. My lips will seek a nipple for my first suckle of mother’s milk. In a few hours, my bowels will move. In a few days, my stomach will increase from the size of a marble to the size of my fist.

  I’ll learn to recognize voices, faces, smells, in a couple of months. My eyesight will become capable of distinguishing primary colors, then the full rainbow spectrum, over a period of five months. I’ll sit up, then crawl, then take my first step, then walk, then run, over a period of two years. I’ll gurgle, then babble, then speak, first in words, then in sentences that will grow more confident, more complex, over a period of six years.

  My first set of teeth will erupt, then fall away one by one, to be replaced by a permanent set, by the time I’m twelve. Sometime around then my testes will increase in size, my scrotum will descend, the shaft of my penis will grow longer, thicker, and pubic hair will begin to sprout. My testicles will produce the first of the millions of sperm they’ll churn out over my lifetime. I’ll experience my first ejaculations. My vocal cords will shorten, and my voice will drop an octave lower, to my adult voice. I’ll be sixteen when these changes are complete. I’ll have grown from my current height of twenty inches to my adult height by the time I’m twenty-one.

  Meanwhile, the hundred billion neurons in my brain—formed during my first six months inside my mother’s womb—will form hundreds of trillions of connections with each other, rapidly at first, as my newborn brain responds to every attention and stimulation, then slower and slower, as newer experiences serve mainly to reinforce some connections, weeding out others.

  I’m a blank slate at birth, with an infinity of futures available to me. With each neural connection that is made, that my brain fails to make, that is pruned, the futures are whittled down, until if I were alive long enough, there’s only one life I could possibly live.

  Call it fate, call it destiny. Call it qismat, call it the will of Allah. Call it following the laws of nature, call it acting in accordance with our natures. Say it’s been decided by evolution; say it’s in our genes, in the secretions from our glands, in the pathways in our brains. Say we’re the products of our environments, our upbringings, our histories.

  Aren’t our lives circumscribed, in any case, by powers over which we have little control?

/>   16

  Seema, I held our son in my arms. They had swaddled him in a blanket, to keep him warm, so only his face was visible—your face: heart shaped, an obstinate set to his lips, his eyes tightly shut. But his hair was all mine. I wanted to hold him without the blanket but didn’t know how to remove it. I was afraid I would drop him if I tried to unwrap him with one hand.

  I asked a nurse to help. She looked at me oddly at first, as if she didn’t understand, but then she took him to the table and undid carefully the bundle of him. When she handed him back to me, holding him in one hand, with his body resting against her forearm and his neck supported by her palm—oh how tiny he was, how beautiful, blue-black all over, with just a hint of pink on his lips—I couldn’t figure out how to take him from her, how to hold him, with his arms and legs dangling and in the way.

  How easy she made it look. Like this, she said, hold your arms like this. She made me raise and hold one arm bent, with my other hand below it, palm facing upward. To support the body, she said.

  17

  Grandmother, waiting outside you’re unaware of what’s transpiring in this operating room, even though the force of your mind is bent here.

  Here’s how your elder daughter, Seema, dies: After plucking me out of my mother’s womb and handing me over to a nurse without even a glance, the doctor turns his attention back to my mother’s body on the table, attempting to stanch the flow of blood that is quickly draining her of life. But how to force the blood to remain in a body that seems intent on expelling it? He’s only human: he continues to try even after your daughter’s heart ceases pumping.