Saffron Dreams

by Shaila Abdullah

  “Kitne ka diya, bhai?”

  “Das rupiya, Saheb.”

  Faizan reached into his pocket and held out a ten rupee note. He bought two bracelets for me. He knew my weakness for those. A beggar woman in tattered clothes limped in from the side, as soon as he paid the man and started to roll up the window. She looked inside the car and pushed down firmly on the window with two grimy fingers, stopping its upward progress. Her expression was macabre, face caked with grime. I panicked.

  “Firedancer! There’s misfortune in your fate,” she said, looking directly at Faizan. Her voice was eerily unreal, her gray eyes blazing with angry passion. She glanced over at me. “Giant flames will be his blanket one day. Tantalizing, scorching flames will chase him.” She raised her index fingers in the air and twisted them around in a strange and maddening dance. “Like this, he will dance with fire one day, but he will not win.”

  The light turned green, and Faizan pushed the accelerator hard on the floor as the car shot forward, tearing the woman’s hand away from the window. I didn’t dare look back, and I couldn’t look at him either. I had plucked every petal off my bracelets by the time he dropped me home and discarded them in the trash can almost as if they were somehow tainted.

  She didn’t ask for money, I remember thinking. I refused to let my mind go further than that. The event found its way into one of my compositions much later. By then, the firedance was long over.

  EIGHT

  September 2001

  New York

  When I felt the slight brush of a kiss on my forehead, I didn’t want to open my eyes. My dreams always threatened to flee if I opened my eyes too quickly. I wanted to remain in this one for as long as possible. I was inside a beautiful rainforest with butterflies flitting around, busy and focused in their quest for nectar. There were some horses grazing in the distance. A koyal chirped in the trees, giving out the mango call. Occasionally squirrels dashed near my feet. Suddenly, I spotted a snow-white lamb escaping through an open gate, and I rushed to close the gate. Pregnancy dreams were great––vivid, colorful, and totally out of control. Most of the time I was able to recall them completely upon waking up. I had even started to maintain a diary for the ones I could pen down. There were others too erotic for me to even share with Faizan. They embarrassed me, even in sleep.

  “Goodbye, Jaan!” Faizan was saying, and I mumbled a response although I am not sure what I said. Faizan left early most weekdays for his job at Windows on the World. I loved it when he called me jaan, the traditional name for a sweetheart. I turned and went right back to sleep, trying to find the place where I left off, but the dream was gone. There was no sense chasing after the lamb. I slept fitfully the rest of the morning.

  Somewhere from deep inside the building, I heard a little scream but attributed it to my cloudy state of mind. The paper-thin walls in the apartment complex in Jefferson Heights hid nothing. Couples fighting at night usually wore sheepish expressions the next morning in the elevator, certain that their voices the night before had carried through the walls. Lives weren’t private; marital problems were out in the open, bare before the public.

  I tried to snuggle with the body pillow on my side. The early fall New York mornings were so harsh. All I wanted to do was lie in bed until the sun came up. After the fifth month of my pregnancy, I could no longer sleep on my back and had started using a giant pillow for comfort. This meant that Faizan got cheated out of his half of the bed, but he seemed not to mind. Some mornings, I woke up to discover guiltily that I had hogged the entire bed as well as the covers and Faizan had slept on the floor at the foot of the bed with only a thin blanket.

  I decided to ignore the urgent knock at the door. It’s probably a salesman, I thought. They snuck up easily when the gate downstairs opened as people left for work in the morning. The knocking grew more insistent, and I got up and looked around groggily for a gown. My feet landed on some papers that I’d worked on the night before, freelance work for a beauty salon’s newsletter. I slept in the nude most days. I found the heated apartment too hot and sweated profusely during the night. Faizan liked to snuggle up to me when I slept in that state. That was the extent of how close he could get to me these days.

  I made my way slowly toward the door in my nightgown and opened it. Juhi stood there. Her eyes were glazed over and swollen. Juhi and I had been close friends ever since I knocked her down the first week I moved in the building as I was coming down the hall with my big laundry hamper. We struck up a conversation and found out that we had many common interests. I liked the frizzy-haired, dimple-cheeked, easygoing woman with a penchant for dry humor. She was an art instructor by day at Queensborough Community College and an Iyengar yoga instructor by night.

  “What is it?” I grabbed her hand to escort her inside. Was she in trouble? “Is Surinder back?” Surinder was the abusive man she had been dating awhile back. It had been a disastrous relationship that she had ended weeks ago.

  She shook her head and went to turn on the TV. Yoga instructor Maria Jimenez was leading her group through some breathing exercises. Frantically, Juhi grabbed the remote and changed the channel to CNN. “Breaking News” was written across the top of the screen, and the image below showed thick bellowing fire coming out of a building.

  “What…what’s going on?” I tried to squint at the screen and reached for my glasses on the coffee table. It was the North Tower of the Trade Center. The world as we knew it was crumbling down in front of us, glass chunk by glass chunk, metal piece by metal piece, floor by floor. It was 8:55 a.m. I had slept through the moment that would forever alter my life.

  Faizan, my silent mind screamed. Juhi came around and grabbed hold of my shoulders and sat me down on the couch. My body was shaking uncontrollably, and her hands kept slipping off. I blinked back tears and watched with blurry eyes as people, dazed and bloodied, passed by the camera: a man’s arm at a crooked angle, a woman’s terrified face covered in blood and grime, panicked firemen looking for comrades, saving lives, losing their own, running toward the smoke-filled hallways to save one more life, never to return. And as we watched transfixed, another plane crashed into the South Tower.

  Together, we screamed. Abramovitz’s Satan had delivered its blow.

  “He doesn’t have a cell phone! I need to reach him!” I screamed into the faces of the friends surrounding me as I started to get up. I remember seeing Joe, the building manager’s face in front of me. He gently pressed down on my shoulder and pushed me back on the bed. Juhi sat next to me, spent from crying. They had all trickled in like ghosts in a matter of minutes after the news broke, the people in my life, blending together into a sea of faces that I can hardly recall now, some taking charge, some treading past me carefully and taking over my other needs, heading to the kitchen, keeping the steady supply of tea and coffee going, moving life along.

  “You need to stay here, Arissa,” Juhi said, holding my hand in hers.

  I looked at her but I didn’t see her.

  “I have to get to him. You don’t understand.”

  I got up and this time shoved the persistent hands aside and rushed to the phone. “I can call the restaurant,” I said to those gathered around me, their eyes full of sadness and pity. I laughed hysterically. “Don’t look so stricken. He’s probably okay. My Faizan, he’s a fighter.”

  My trembling hands misdialed the restaurant a few times before getting it right. The phone kept ringing; there was no answer. I slammed down the phone and raced to the closet. In front of dear friends who had never seen me out of my hijab, I peeled off my nightgown and put on a pair of jeans and a red shirt, my modesty of little importance to me. I saw some avert their gaze and some look on as if spellbound. As an afterthought, I picked up the neatly folded veil from the top shelf.

  “I need to find him,” I pleaded to Juhi, and she nodded.

  “Then I’ll come with you,” she said.

  The scream that reached my ears stopped me dead in my tracks and sucked the air right ou
t of my body. But only for a minute.

  Even as far as Hudson Street, the smoke and the smell of burning metal and sulfur were suffocating. I tried to block my mind and concentrate on my steps. One. Two. Three. Faizan, I am coming. The closer I got, the faster my feet moved. I didn’t know if Juhi was still behind me, and I didn’t care. As I made my way down the street, the temperature rose and the air thickened with smoke and dust. The dust clouded my vision, blocked my breathing, but I kept going. As I neared Liberty Street, I caught the first glimpse of the six-floor-high flaming pile of debris: glass, steel, concrete and metal that were once the towers that defined the New York skyline blown away by raging swords of fire.

  Wretched terror spoke of death in my ears and sickened my soul. The ground slipped from underneath me, and I went down on the slick street. This was too big for us, too big for me. This cannot be a part of our lives. We live a sheltered existence. I said that a couple of times under my breath as it gradually became my mantra. We live a sheltered existence.

  The panting next to me alerted me to Juhi’s presence as she scrambled to hoist me up. I pushed her helping hand away and stood up resolutely, edging my way past dazed and wounded men and women frantically rushing away from the mass of debris. A man with half of his tie blown away walked past me stunned, and I realized that he was missing an arm. He had in his other hand what appeared to be the remains of a file folder. We live a sheltered existence.

  The debris and smoke were getting heavier by the minute. I was running the wrong way, a few people stopped to explain. Safety lies the other way. Not for me. I came across human barriers, blocking my path. I struggled to push past, my paralyzed mind unable to process the directions that were being thrown my way. I can’t stop. Not now, my mind pleaded to them. My voice refused to comply.

  I started moving sideways, away from protesting hands stopping me from getting closer. I passed by some documents murky from the water on the street, a shocked man in a suit sitting on the curb with a bandaged head, an abandoned cell phone that was still ringing, a briefcase with combination locks. I picked up a black jacket with burn marks around the collar. It wasn’t Faizan’s. I let it go. He was probably wearing his brown corduroy jacket since his black one was at the cleaners. When was I supposed to pick his clothes up?

  It was then that I saw her, the woman on all fours, looking at a bloodied limb, with a wild expression on her face. She turned the leg around and around, searching for a familiar sign. Then she dropped it and stood up, almost colliding with me. Our eyes locked, her panic settled in my soul, my fear crept inside her eyes, and our hearts fused in our collective pain and loss, knowing without expressing that our loved ones were gone.

  I felt nauseous and sank down again. Nearby a child screamed, and an angry outburst ensued. Ambulances and fire trucks screeched, and police sirens sounded. I closed my eyes and tried to regulate my breathing, my lungs taxed from the heavy smoke. My baby did a somersault inside me, awake by now, its slumber disturbed from all the emotions inside me, from the smoke, the stench, from the sounds. The dust colored my hair and settled over my soul like a dense miasma that kept on building. I had aged gracelessly over a matter of hours.

  My stomach plunged as the magnitude of the situation sank in. It was over. He was gone. What chance did he have when 10,000 gallons of fuel moving at 470 miles per hour slammed into his space? He was a human, not God.

  Never again will I live the same way. We are sheltered no more.

  Years later, a little boy would ask where his father was. I would tell him that he sleeps with the angels.

  “Good,” he would respond by signing. “I bet he dreams about me.”

  I came home with something clutched in my hand that I wouldn’t let go. Juhi pried it open from my fist. It was a piece of charred document from the ground of disaster that I had picked up somewhere along the way—a signed lease for an office on the 75th floor of the North Tower. Over the course of a few hours it had been converted into a death certificate. I walked over to the bureau and picked up the beveled glass clock. I studied it for a minute and then laid two fingers flat against the hands of the clock, hiding them from view. I willed time to stop its clockwise journey, but when the errant hands moved in disobedience, I quickly turned the clock around and emptied it of its battery. Then I set the clock back on the bureau, now hollow and soulless, stripped of its functionality. I had stopped time. Now if only I could turn back time.

  I paced the apartment, restless and jittery, meandering in and out of hope and desolation. It seemed that my mind had accepted his loss, but my heart was in denial. I refused to sleep or lie down. I felt that if I did, I’d lose him forever.

  Every now and then, someone flipped open the phonebook. Every hospital, every morgue in the metropolitan area had been called. Friend after friend called long-distance, my quivering voice faltering with every repetition. Surely if a thing is repeated enough, it does not happen. That’s what the older generation said in Pakistan, but wasn’t it for good news?

  At some point around midnight, someone popped a Valium in my mouth and I swallowed hard, my throat feeling like there were a handful of pushpins in my throat. In a short while, my feet gave away from under me and gravity sucked me downward. Unblinking, I curled up in bed and closed my eyes. In my pill-induced haze, I felt that I was spiraling to the bottom of the stairs. I saw Faizan at Windows on the World in his burgundy and gray steward uniform with the epaulets and gold-striped sleeves. A maroon napkin rested on his right shoulder as he looked at a giant plane flying toward him through the glassy barrier of the restaurant. He turned around as I screamed his name, warning him of the danger. With a wave, he smiled and raced toward the open embrace of the giant wings. The flames caught him mid-air. Firedancer. A sound from the past reverberated inside me. I lost my voice as the whiplash hit, radiating from his point of departure, a coil of flame and fury. It slammed me into one corner of the room as the ceiling started to crumble and the floors buckled underneath. The building rocked like a ship in crisis, flailing and powerless. I felt the baby inside me cry out, a high-pitched screaming that went on and on. Why doesn’t Faizan listen?

  I woke up to Juhi restraining me on the bed as I thrashed my arms around. The scream had been mine.

  “I have to see him, to say my goodbye,” I wailed. “I have to find him.”

  Friends held me and grieved with me.

  There are moments during that agonizing time that I remember with amazing clarity, but some days I have lost in their entirety. Valium helped me for days afterward when I couldn’t stop watching the news. My throng of friends dwindled down as my family formed a protective and loving shield around me. As soon as air travel resumed, Abu flew in, and Ma and Baba came a few days later. Sian and Zoha arrived soon afterward, along with some other distant relatives. There was one I knew who wasn’t there and should have been—the woman who’d given birth to me.

  Waking was a nightmare, a realization of a life stretching before me without a partner, holding a baby made by two but who will be brought up by one. I was grateful for the senseless bouncing of my mind that ensued from taking the pill, the haze desensitizing my ability to think. Adrift, afloat, I was the only one with wings. I lived for those anxiety-free moments.

  When a friend asked for a distinguishing mark to put on the missing person’s poster for Faizan, I rambled on and on about the birthmark on his jaw as if it was the most important thing. I knew in my heart it was a futile effort. The poster would only serve as an obituary. I went along with it so they wouldn’t think I wanted him dead. A grieving widow is closely watched. She didn’t grieve enough. I was wary of those hushed judgmental whispers in shadowy corners. I gave power to those voices in my mind, and when I got it all together, I hushed them all up, one by one. The voices in my mind often asked me to do things I didn’t want to do. Kill yourself, they would say, and I stared them down through the mirror. Scream and don’t stop. I obeyed and screamed inside. Most days, I ignored the voices, refusing
to empower them until they all quieted down, muffled at first and then gone.

  When I close my eyes and think back I still see and feel the smoke and ashes falling over my head in giant loads, trapping me below, and I open my eyes just to block those images out. But even then, I can’t stop seeing the image of the woman who’d paused near me and nodded a silent admission of our loss.

  NINE

  I got off the northbound No. 2 IRT and found out almost immediately that I was not alone. The late October evening inside the station felt unusually weighty on my senses.

  The tired commuters had long reached home, back to the busy scuffle of an ordinary life—home-cooked meals, irritable kids, TV time, nagging spouses, and overdue bills. For me most things had a dismal film attached. My rose-colored lenses had been stolen. Time was the thief. It wasn’t an ideal time to travel, Faizan always admonished. But he wasn’t there anymore to have his say unless he woke up from the grave to give me a lecture on safety.

  I heard heavy breathing behind me. Angry, smoky, scared. I could tell there were several of them, probably four. Not pros, perhaps in their teens. They walked closer sometimes, and other times the heavy thud of spiked boots on concrete and clanking chains receded into the distance. They walked like boys wanting to be men. They fell short. Why was there no fear in my heart? Probably because there was no more room in my heart for terror. When horror comes face-to-face with you and causes a loved one’s death, fear leaves your heart. In its place, merciful God places pain. Throbbing, pulsating, oozing pus, a wound that stays fresh and raw no matter how carefully you treat it. How can you be afraid when you have no one to be fearful for? The safety of your loved ones is what breeds fear in your heart. They are the weak links in your life. Unraveled from them, you are fearless. You can dangle by a thread, hang from the rooftop, bungee jump, skydive, walk a pole, hold your hand over the flame of a candle. Burnt, scalded, crashed, lost, dead, the only loss would be to your own self. Certain things you are not allowed to say or do. Defiant as I am, I say and do them anyway.