Trespassing

‘It’s your weak morale that will tear us apart, Ghulam,’ said another, a Hyderabadi with dark, pockmarked cheeks. ‘You mustn’t let your sons see you this way.’

‘But Ghulam is right,’ said a third, from UP. ‘Things are only getting worse. At least once we had a great university in Aligarh. Now what is there? Will we be forced to send our children away from us?’

‘We have nothing to fear,’ declared a Punjabi. ‘Islam unites us.’

‘That’s exactly what the Prime Minister wants us to believe,’ cautioned the doctor. ‘Why else is he suddenly supporting the Islamic groups? Why else are all the liberals in exile or in jail?’ He pointed to the waiter circling them with a tray of drinks and demanded, ‘Is this to be my last public beer?’ While the waiter poured, an argument erupted.

Amongst the women, the topic ranged from births to beauty parlors to who had been seen at the last grand luncheon where exactly the same three subjects were discussed with equal zeal.

‘You should try Nicky’s instead of Moon Palace, darling,’ said the Hyderabadi wife to the Iranian wife. ‘She gets the curls just right.’ Looking disdainfully at Anu, who wore her hair in a frizzy bun, she sniffed, ‘That is, if you want to stay in touch with things.’

‘Mah Beauty Parlor is far superior,’ said the wife of the Punjabi. She was from Bangalore, and in the past, had confessed her husband couldn’t stand her for it. She was pregnant with their third child. ‘I had my hair set there just yesterday. And you won’t believe who was having hers done beside me!’ She looked around expectantly. ‘Barbara!’ While gasps and exclamations issued, the woman continued, ‘And I found out that her grandmother was my grandmother’s neighbor’s khala’s mother-in-law’s best friend’s sister!’ More gasps and exclamations.

The wife from Delhi, whose husband had taken the doctor’s warning to heart and was on his third beer, piped, ‘I believe it’s her daughter who recently had twins.’ She was not a popular woman. In her absence, the others declared she always overdid it. Anu had to concede they had a point. Today her hair had taken coils to new limits.

But Anu remained silent. Wanting in names to drop, she was fundamentally awkward in high society. She had not been born into it. Nor had the doctor for that matter, nor many of those present, but somehow she alone showed it. She was twenty-three, married at sixteen, educated only till class nine, clever enough to understand English but could speak it with an accent that was hateful to her in English-speaking company. Besides, she would only ever have one child. Soon after Daanish’s birth, her ovaries had had to be removed. It seemed that in her presence, the women always took particular pleasure in repeating the names of those who’d better proven their reproductive worth. But they would never have the pink bloom on her cheeks that her pure blood gifted her.

Across the table, the increasingly incensed doctor was saying, ‘What is the point of banning horse racing? I tell you, people will continue to do as they please but under the table. The Prime Minister is sowing the seeds of corruption with one hand and buying off Islamists with the other.’

‘We’re heading for another military coup,’ sighed the Iranian. ‘Another US-backed martial regime.’

The meal arrived. Hers was placed before her: stuffed shellfish. She disliked eating fish. She preferred them drifting between her ankles, at the mouth of the cave. They were silver and gold then, but cooked they simply stank.

‘Don’t use the fork,’ the doctor leaned across and whispered.

What was she to do, eat with her fingers, here? She flushed. Some of the others heard and laughed – at her.

‘The spoon,’ he urged.

She glanced nervously around the table, and her worst fears were realized: all eyes rested on her plate. She broke the cheese crust with the end of a spoon. It was surprisingly cold. Scooping up a small morsel she began nibbling miserably. Then she noticed something like a bullet where the fish’s belly must have been. She did not want any more.

The doctor boomed loudly, ‘Don’t you like it?’ Laughter.

‘Not hungry,’ she muttered.

‘Just two more bites,’ he urged.

She picked up the spoon again and probed around the bullet. There was another one. And another. Her face would explode with the blood rushing into it. Giving her husband a last, desperate look, she plucked out the first lump with her fingers. Seven more rose with it. The crowd gasped: she held a string of gray pearls.

He helped her wipe them, then fell into a lengthy description of the rarity and size of Tahitian pearls. ‘I’m afraid the meal is uncooked,’ he said more to them than her. ‘I couldn’t possibly have had them bake it!’ Uproar. Applause. Her hands and clothes a sticky mess, smelling putrid. Her insides as hard and lifeless as the gems. He couldn’t afford this. She’d tried to tell him as much each time he gave her gifts. So now he performed in public.

‘How eccentric!’ a sophisticated wife shrieked, eyeing the doctor with a mixture of fascination and horror.

‘How lucky,’ the one who overdid it whooped.

And the one who met the film star at the parlor declared, ‘What an entertaining husband he must be!’

As their enthusiasm grew, she understood they expected her to wear the necklace. She left for the toilet, returning with the polished stones around her neck. Even when dessert arrived no one noticed she had not eaten a thing, though her neck was the object of the ladies’ minute, chilling study, and the doctor of their coquetry and awe.

But then the following morning, optimism returned.

The six-year-old Daanish was in the television lounge with the doctor. She worked in the kitchen, preparing a picnic for the cove. Woozy with the heat, she decided to carry the small tub of lentils she was washing to the breezy lounge. On the television appeared a dusty old white man. His fingers and face were chafed beyond any others she’d seen in his race. Nor did his voice carry the smooth, metallic timbre typical of goras. Most amazing of all was what he did with his hands: exactly what she did! He dipped a crewel-like pan into a river, brought up sand, and sifted – but for what?

‘Gold,’ the doctor explained to Daanish. ‘He’s content to live a life waiting for the odd nugget to fill his cup. Though he’s spent over half a century doing it, he’s still as poor as the dirt that hides his fortune. Some men won’t give up.’

Well! thought Anu, her fingers pausing in the yellow-tinted water. She studied the prospector’s sturdy, startling blue eyes and ropy physique. She followed the cracked gray mouth as it spewed strange, chewy sounds. Her fingers idled pensively. She smiled. For a brief, exciting moment she connected with a man. Not the one stretched across most of the couch (who’d still not noticed her bunched at the end) but the one from a different world. The one who understood that it was the spirit with which she waited that made the effort worthwhile. That commitment itself was reward.

A commercial break. A cheerful Anu packed the lunch and tea. The prospector was a sign of better things to come.

It was time to go to the beach. On the way out, the doctor asked her to wear the pearls. Her face fell. The shame of yesterday threatened to rekindle. Should she ignore him? Deciding against it, Anu hurriedly clasped the string around her neck.

At the cove, the doctor and Daanish cleaned their masks, adjusted their snorkels and were gone. She settled in the cave with her lace, working today on a tablecloth. Once again, she wondered what they would see. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine it. But something was wrong. Her sewing was uninspired. The cave, instead of being the respite she’d known it to be, felt alien. The giant’s foot pressed even closer to her head. She knew what it was. She was feeling the weight of the pearls. They circled her collarbone like lead pellets, each to her what it must have been to the crustacean itself: a blemish, a pustulate growth. Sand in her rediscovered joy. Cysts on her ovaries. She tried focusing on the salt blowing on her lips that was always strangely healing, and on the guipure in her hands, but neither offered any comfort. She thought of the prospector with hands like hers, always sifting, searching. But even he eluded her now. She put away the cloth and began laying out the sandwiches.

Daanish returned, shivering, shrieking, ‘The water’s getting cold!’ She warmed him with a towel. At the mouth of the cave, the doctor dried himself in the sun. Daanish joined him.

‘Come and drink your milk,’ she summoned Daanish. To the doctor, she announced the tea.

He stayed outside. So did Daanish, who began lifting stones, peering into tide pools, digging.

‘You don’t want sand to dirty your milk, do you?’ she called.

He looked at his father, awaiting his direction. The man gazed moodily away.

She repeated, ‘The tea will get cold.’

For a moment, nothing. Then an impatient, ‘Can’t you see I’m not ready yet?’

She waited.

In amongst the neritic clutter around the doctor’s hairy legs the boy declared he’d found a prize. He presented it to his father, who held it up. From inside the cave Anu could see the shell was thin and petal-shaped. The sun filtered right through. It shimmered like a translucent slice of skin.

‘A paper nautilus,’ said the doctor. ‘Aristotle called it an argonaut. I’m uncertain why. Perhaps it had something to do with Jason and the Golden Fleece. Do you know the story?’

Of course not, thought Anu. When it came to questions, the doctor heavily favored the rhetorical kind. Daanish blinked at him lovingly. The child had buried himself in the sand. A hint of his red swimming trunks poked through. He’d washed the nautilus clean with the water in his pail. It glistened like a ribbed eggshell. He took it back from his father gingerly, as if afraid it would slip from his fingers like sea foam. ‘No,’ he whispered, afraid his breath might blow it all away.

‘The Argo was the name of the ship that carried Jason. Those who went with him were called Argonauts – sailors of the Argo.’

Explain, explain. That’s what the doctor loved to do. But only she knew the things he could not explain.

‘And if you look at it this way,’ he plucked it again from his son, who licked his sandy lips nervously, ‘with the narrow end down, then, it looks like a billowing sail, doesn’t it?’ Daanish winked, trying hard to see it. ‘The animal that makes it is an octopus. Riding along with it in her arms she must look like a sailor. What do you say?’

Daanish clapped his hands with delight. ‘Yes! She’d have her own boat!’

The doctor laughed, thumping him lightly on the back.

In the cave, Anu poured out the tea. The pearls around her neck were cold and ravishing. Tears, as large as each stone, welled in her eyes.

He continued explaining. ‘Strictly speaking, this is not a shell. It’s a nest made by the octopus, and it’s at this tapering end that she pockets the eggs and carries the whole thing with her – a purse, cradle and ship all in one.’

‘What happens when the babies are born?’ Daanish asked, his eyes wide with anticipation.

‘Good question. When the thousand little baby argonauts hatch, she rejects the cradle, so children like you can have them. It’s a miracle, isn’t it, that something as flimsy as this can survive the thrust of the sea and surface unharmed?’

The child nodded fervently. Behind her tears, Anu’s guipure blurred into spray.

‘Argonaut,’ the doctor continued, ‘was also the name of those Americans who went West in search of gold. That fellow we saw on TV just this morning could be a descendant.’

Ah, thought Anu, here he was again: the prospector. He’d appeared like a sign to give her hope, but how naïve she’d been! Well then, she would no longer count on signs. If she continued waiting for the doctor, she’d be left behind both him and Daanish.

When they got home later that evening, she took off the necklace and left it carelessly in the hall. He carried it to her saying she did not appreciate the shape of his love. He was suddenly and inexplicably enraged. ‘It may not appear as you want to see it,’ he shouted, ‘but if you weren’t so blind, you’d see it exists!’

Curiously placid, she wondered where. In the trips to the South Seas and places she couldn’t even name?

Where? In his study? Anyone could become an expert just by reading. But she didn’t need a single page to tell her why he never discussed anything he read with her. It would thin his expertise. It would fatten hers. It would mean that she too could explain things to Daanish.

Where was his love? In all those high-society parties he dragged her to, just to embarrass her?

In the food he never liked?

The conversation he never made?

Her lineage? His want of it?

Or in her only child, whom she knew even then would be sent far away, for, pah! education.

Coolly, she fingered the pearls strangling his strong, healer’s fingers and brushed his large pink nails with her own. ‘Give it to the one who sees where. Tell her I send my love. I’m sure she’ll understand the shape of it.’

His mouth opened in momentary shock, snapped shut, and then he was off on an unconvincing tirade. He stumbled and once even stuttered, not having had the chance to look up counter-arguments in a book.

She turned, delighted with the audacity she’d never known herself capable of. She was riding the roiling sea, a panner of gold, a sailor with eight long silvery arms and a purse with Daanish kicking inside.

She had learned how to swim.

Anu walked back to Intensive Care. Still no news. The doctor’s brothers too had arrived. His sisters continued to sob and exchange stories from their childhood, all of which proved how they knew him better than she did – the woman he’d wedded, by their own arrangement, twenty-three years ago. She shed no tears. She pictured her son bending over his books in America, his thick brows slightly furrowed, turning page after page, getting excellent marks on every test. He was so bright. He must have put on weight in that land of plenty. She’d memorized every photograph he’d sent, but he’d been clad in so many layers it was impossible to detect any changes. He looked just as sweet and loving as ever. He was going to be a great man.

Suddenly there was a frenzy. Nurses were in and out of the room. She asked why and demanded to see her husband but they brushed by her. She peeped inside the door but was swiftly ushered back. She saw him briefly on the bed beneath a forest of tubes: silver hair, ashen cheeks, thin, wrinkled eyelids. He’d been unconscious now for over nine hours.

‘What did you see?’ demanded his sisters. ‘We should know.’

Perhaps she’d been too harsh that day. She saw the pearls in his fingers. He’d not even looked at her for the following two excruciating weeks, till at last she’d begged for his forgiveness. That was the last time, sixteen years ago, that she’d ever answered him back. Earlier today, when he called her, she’d simply run away. Now she was left alone with the tortuous guilt of watching him die. No, she wasn’t even allowed to watch. Sitting down heavily beside his sisters, she held her head in her hands.

Another nurse stepped out, followed by Dr Reza, a distinguished colleague of the doctor’s. Dr Reza was exhausted and did not have to say anything. The sisters began to howl. So he had died, as he had lived: outside her presence, in another place.

She shut her eyes, resolving to grow no older waiting for Daanish to return.

3 Girls MAY 1992

It was almost noon and the house had filled with mourners. Daanish had still not awoken. It was time to take a break from the Quran reading. Anu brought out tea and sweets. Several stylish wives were present. Many of them, she knew, could not read the Quran. She watched their lips move, feigning recitation, and wondered if the doctor saw it too. She still felt his presence in the house, absurdly, more even than when he was alive. He had probably watched while she finished re-furnishing Daanish’s room. Had probably frowned when she took away all the books he’d given him, right down to the shelves on which they rested. Would he come down from his new other place to stop her? She believed if God disapproved of her actions, He would tell her. But the doctor was rather powerless now.

All he could do was watch her next move.

While the mourners refreshed themselves with tea, she climbed up to Daanish’s bedroom. He slept, as always, on his stomach. A white sheet covered him from the waist down. His suitcase remained unlocked but on the new white rug she’d thrown next to the new bed lay the few things unpacked from his carry-on: dental floss, a razor, socks, underwear, a novel, a ballpoint pen. The bag was unzipped. She snooped around inside it. Another book; the doctor’s Kodak camera that he’d passed on to Daanish; a lovely eggshell and lacquer box the doctor had brought back from his last trip; an envelope. On the new bedside table lay Daanish’s shell necklace. Anu fingered all his things, trying to understand what they meant to him. With some – the necklace, camera, lacquer box – she knew already. But not the books and envelope. She read the covers: Edward Said, Kurt Vonnegut. She’d not heard of either. Anu mouthed each name several times, softly. The Said had been heavily marked.

She opened the lacquer box. A label in block letters read, BIVALVES. There were a dozen different brightly colored shells, some smooth, others furrowed. Daanish’s note was dated June ‘89 – two months before he’d left. Sheer muscle power. By snapping its two valves, a scallop, for instance, can swim many dozen feet per bite. At the cove one day, Aba first told me about giant clams. ‘Four feet long!’ he said. ‘They live right here, in our very own ocean.’

Anu quietly shut the box.

Next she examined the envelope. It contained letters from the doctor and herself and a stack of photographs. She glanced at Daanish: he neither snored nor stirred. The boy would probably not wake up till evening. Settling on the rug, she began looking through the pictures.

The first few were of Daanish and a very handsome boy with golden hair in a beautiful garden. In some pictures the garden was covered in snow. In others it was ablaze with color. She smiled at her son lolling on the grass, frowned that in one he seemed to be smoking, and panicked when in yet another he appeared to be in a tall tree, balancing the way he always had on a bicycle: standing, and with hands in the air. But always, though dark, he was so good-looking: tall, with his father’s wide amber eyes and his suddenly boyish disposition.

Resisting the urge to wake him up with an embrace, Anu continued on. There was the golden boy with a pretty girl. Then there were girls with no boys. Then there were girls with Daanish.

Anu backtracked.

There was a girl leaning against a tree. Red and yellow leaves scattered all around her. Against the strong colors of her surroundings, she looked especially pale, glassy almost, like a fish. A white fish with hints of yellow on its gills, poised before an orange brocade. Her head was slightly tilted to the left so her right eye seemed larger than the other. It looked directly at the camera, a bluish-green eye.

Anu skipped to a picture with the same girl and Daanish. They were seated around a table, at some party it seemed. Daanish held the girl’s waist with one hand and a drink with the other.

She stared hard at the picture, and neither an eyelid nor a finger moved. Only her mind worked. She backtracked to a picture of another girl. This one was almost his height and had stringy brown hair. She seemed to be dancing in a field of corn and was not as shapely as the other one. Anu skipped ahead: there was Daanish and another tall girl in a dark room with candles all around, and tinsel stars hanging from above. She sat in his lap.

By the time Anu had sifted through all the photographs, she counted six different girls in close physical contact with her son. She thought hard. And came to a conclusion: at least there wasn’t only one. He was distracted, but probably not yet committed. His bride would just have to handle that. After all, she had.

Anu collected the photographs, camera and lacquer box. She contemplated the shell necklace but softening, left it on the table. With the three items in hand, she returned downstairs.

As lunchtime approached, the mourners began to leave. Soon she was left alone to feed the doctor’s sisters. They began complaining that no fresh food had been cooked that day. Her son had come back just that morning, what did they expect? She left them grumbling in the kitchen. In her bedroom she regarded the objects fished from Daanish’s life in his faraway world. She did two things. First, she telephoned Nissrine’s mother to say Nissrine should hasten her arrival at the readings. Second, she returned the lacquer box to Daanish’s room, but with some unexpected debris inside.

4 Shameful Behavior

The following day, Anu wept proudly as Daanish came downstairs to meet the several dozen friends and relatives waiting to grieve with him. He embraced them all, quietly accepting their condolences, winning the approval of the stylish women who continued appraising him as he walked on. Nodding to each other they proclaimed, ‘A spitting image of the doctor.’ Since he’d left for America, these women had ceased snarling at her. Many had sons who’d not received a full scholarship, certainly not to any college as well-known as the one he attended. They knew this. It was the one aspect of her son’s going away that Anu enjoyed.

The men sat apart. Daanish snaked toward them, passing the girl Nissrine, her mother, and a friend of Nissrine’s called Dia. She was pleased to see Nissrine did not make eye contact with her son, but dismayed that the other girl examined him quite boldly. Even Pakistani girls were like that these days.

Anu watched as his bare feet padded over the white sheets. His toes had grown even hairier than before. He picked up a siparah, and settled down to read. His body began to sway with the rhythm of the recitation. Occasionally, he looked up and gestured reverently at a new arrival. Frequently, he caught her gaze and smiled ever so sweetly.

She knew he was not fluent in his reading of the Quran, and the three years away would certainly not have helped. She had wanted him to continue studying with a maulvi but the doctor had disallowed it after the boy turned twelve.

Now she watched as Daanish seemed visibly relieved when arriving at a familiar passage. She could feel it roll over his tongue smoothly like a jingle. At other times, his facial muscles tightened. It was the same with many of the women, including, to her dismay, Nissrine. She seemed quite hopeless really, her accent still British, her Urdu pathetic. But the family was a good one. There were rumors that her father’s business was dwindling but instead of returning to London, where it had thrived, the family was staying in Pakistan for the girls. Of this, surely the doctor would approve. He was probably chuckling as Nissrine struggled over a prayer for him. And what did he think of Anu arranging the meeting so soon after his death? Would he be surprised? Tickled? Was it eccentric enough for his pleasure or was that pleasure only to be instigated by him?

About one thing he would not approve: Nissrine was a distant relative of Anu’s, ensuring that Anu’s blood, not his, would continue. Her grandchildren would have the same fresh mountain glow on their brow as she did, not his swarthy, sea-faring pallor. And there was nothing he could do about it. Except observe.

Nissrine sat quietly with a pale peach dupatta covering her head. The color became her fine, white complexion, almond eyes, and rosebud mouth. She kept her head lowered. Surely Daanish would take to her. She was not blonde like that other one in the pictures, but she was graceful and demure. Every man wanted to come home to that.