Saffron Dreams

by Shaila Abdullah

  I didn’t realize I was being stared at until I stepped back and almost collided with the man behind me. A flyer on a pole had captivated me. It was of a young man with glasses. Something about him reminded me of Faizan. Perhaps it was the hopeful quality of his face or was it the boyish smile that left a permanent imprint on his face?

  “Pardon me,” I apologized, adjusting my veil.

  The man frowned and looked away. There it was again, judgment by association. He seemed to be in his fifties but held a cane in his hand.

  “This one’s mine,” I pointed to the flyer of the young man. I have no idea what made me say that. “Which one’s yours?”

  He stared at me in disbelief. “None,” he said finally.

  I turned to leave.

  “I am sorry,” I heard him say but I could not stop and answer. My scab had been scratched again and I was too busy bleeding.

  TWELVE

  There is something so ironic about death, I thought to myself as I ran my fingers over the picture frame on my nightstand. It makes your appreciate what you lost even more. The trouble is you can’t take death away and restore life.

  The photo in the frame was taken my first week in New York as a married woman. I was laughing alongside Faizan, awkwardly clenched in his embrace, still not used to the idea of being affectionate in public. He was smiling—an expression frozen in time, his body bathed in sun, almost fading away. Now a dimension away. Somewhere he existed although my mortal fingers couldn’t reach him and my words couldn’t recall him. I winced as my finger touched the lower left corner of the frame, where the glass had chipped. I looked on in a foolish fixation as a drop of blood stained my stomach in the picture. I was reluctant to rub it off. Over time, it would dry and become a permanent fixture on the frame. It also became a symbol of many things for me: the clot that forms a baby, Faizan’s life lost for an unclear and deadly cause, my own bleeding heart at the knowledge that I had traveled through time to return to the state in which I had entered the world, wailing, alone, exposed, and covered in blood. Faizan’s half of the picture, on the other hand, seemed to fade every time I looked at it. Was it my imagination, or could it be that my healing had finally begun?

  It didn’t seem like it from the shaving foam on the countertop that I refused to remove, his towel that still hung on the rod where he’d left it after his last shower, a faint waft of his aftershave preserved in its careless folds. I used his hairbrush to comb my hair daily and watched in a senseless absorption our entwined locks caught in its teeth; we would never be that close again. I recalled a date on the calendar stuck to the fridge. November 29. It was circled, and “Faizan’s eye appointment” was scribbled underneath in a familiar handwriting, an event that would never happen. Should I call the doctor?

  I looked down at the clothes on the bed—Faizan’s and mine—and felt a deep sorrow uncoil like a serpent from within and twist around my innards. How do you weigh loss? Define a lost love? I grabbed Faizan’s blue shirt that held many memories for me and clutched it close to my heart. I had taken it out of the hamper the morning he shifted worlds, and slept with it for many nights. How do you fill a void? Kill an emptiness? I moved it down between my legs, but I could not invoke the memory of his touch, not even hear a sigh caught between the walls, no whispered word from the past carried through the wind. I imagined Faizan’s hands on me, making every cell come alive in my body, the way they did the very first time he ever touched me. Before we were even married. There was total silence within and around me. With my lover gone, it seemed like the one inside me too had passed.

  Faizan had picked me up one night to go visit his parents, days after our engagement. We drove to a Pizza Hut that had recently opened in Karachi, ordered a medium pizza, and brought it back to his parents’ house. It was my first visit to their two-story Bath Island home, with its red brick exterior and walls all around that were twice my size, prison-like, punctuated at the top with strategically-placed triangular chunks of glass to keep intruders out. It seemed very quiet when Faizan parked his father’s silver Land Cruiser outside; even the lights inside were turned off. Surprised, I turned to Faizan.

  “Do you think they have already gone to sleep?”

  He smiled and shook his head. He used his keys to unlock the door.

  “Should I go upstairs and see where they are?” I asked, a little worried, slipping my leather sandals off near the door as was customary. A daughter-in-law visiting her future family for the first time is considered a big event in many households. It troubled me that no one was around to welcome me. Was it an omen for the future?

  I started to move toward the stairs, but Faizan pulled me back and enveloped me in an unyielding hug.

  “They’re not here,” he whispered hoarsely against my cheek.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’ve gone to Hyderabad to visit some relatives.” He took my hand and put it on his chest as he pulled me around to face him. He was wearing his signature smile, a feature I had grown to love in just a few days. “Arissa Amaan, do you realize that you ask too many questions?”

  I heard a ringing in my ears. His heart sounded like raindrops landing on a pond, rhythmic and hurried. My knees quivered, and he embraced me again, my palm still against his heart. He cupped my chin and raised my face. I was too shy to look directly at him. The world around us took on a new flavor. The hum of the refrigerator sounded like a serenade to my love-stricken ears. When his lips caressed mine, I leaned up on my tiptoes as my naked feet sank deep into the tribal rug on the floor. My very first kiss! It was a little brush at first, and then with his lip, he rimmed the edges of my untrained mouth open and started kissing me openly, passionately, finally free from all barriers that had kept us apart. My heart was like a hunted animal’s, thumping and throbbing.

  “Don’t leave me ever, Arissa,” he moaned against my lips, and I quieted him with another kiss, surprised by my own passion. The fluid sounds of our excitement for the most part were contained within our throats; we were still too frightened to voice them lest the walls had ears, lest they had voices to alert the world.

  “I can’t believe we are finally here,” Faizan whispered. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “I came back and waited for you but you never came.”

  “I was afraid.” He kissed the top of my head.

  “Of what?”

  “Of myself. Of you. That perhaps you wouldn’t feel the same way.”

  “I think I did,” I said, looking in his eyes. “Although I didn’t admit it. Not even to myself.”

  We were silent for a minute, swaying against each other, reflecting on God’s strange ways of bringing people together. The tradition of arranged marriage had done just that in our case.

  His fingers were moving down my body, exploring slowly and then quickly. Every pore in my body hungered for his touch; his hand was a flaming torch that left my body ablaze, tingling. Like a drummer, his fingers invoked a stimulating rhythm without ever touching the surface. The melody that rose in my mind had a haunting tune; I closed my eyes and slipped into a different dimension, where barriers are dropped and shame has no place. We were in no hurry, and I wasn’t about to end whatever it was that was happening to me. Not even when I felt his hands slide under my long shirt and unhook my bra. Not even when he pulled my kurti off by slowly raising my arms. Featherlike, his fingers walked over the tight muscles of my neck and then slipped to my breasts, as my nipples quivered and came alive, surprised by their own maturity and eagerness to bloom. I didn’t stop him even when his hands slid down further toward my navel. The sensation felt both foreign and familiar to me as my protesting hand gripped his fingers and then let go as gently, but firmly, they traveled even further. I felt my trousers slip down my legs and bunch up around my ankles. I shivered as the cold air touched my naked body invasively. I realized with a start that throughout it all, his fingers had barely come in contact with my flesh.

  I was quite taken aback
when his hands stopped suddenly. My body rebelled at the abrupt end to its exploration, and my eyes flew open. I found myself standing disheveled and shocked in front of a wall-sized mirror in the hallway that was stained to look antique. I was completely naked save for a silver watch on my wrist in front of a person who was not even my husband. The watch was his gift to me.

  He was right behind me, his expression a strange blend of yearning, surprise, and pride as he brought his lips against my ears and moved his mouth to the back of my head, leaving the wetness in my hair.

  “I just wanted to look, Arissa.” His breath was a caress and his next sentence almost a moan. “You’re beautiful, and God, you will be mine one day.”

  His heart was thudding against my back, and I could tell that it took every ounce of his willpower to not cross the barrier that society had set between us. His body protested. I knew because I felt him come alive against me.

  I took Faizan’s shirt back to the closet to tuck it in amid my clothes on the shelf. Something on the top shelf of the closet caught my eye. It was a green manila folder jammed with papers. I opened it and felt the earth slowly shift underneath me. My knees felt weak and wobbly as I made my way back to the bed. It was Faizan’s dream project. Soul Searcher, it said in big caps, by Faizan Illahi. Countdown to completion: 143 days, it stated in a small font at the top. He even had a completion date in mind! My hands grew clammy, and the folder fell from my hands, the papers landing in a pile on the floor. Brushing away tears, I sat back on my haunches and started sliding them back in the folder, putting the pages back in order.

  Soul Searcher was Faizan’s novel in the works, the one he had mentioned to me the first time we’d met. He had shown it to me only once, when we were engaged and he was two chapters into it. You’re the author’s soul, he had told me then, insisting that I inspired him to take the novel to a whole new level. I thought his writing was beautiful. I had so many questions, but he was evasive about answering them.

  “You will get to read it all once it is finished,” he had said simply. “You have to be patient. Good authors take time.”

  There again was that self-assurance that had attracted me to him in the first place. “Perhaps we should just dedicate one weekend where we can sit down and discuss your greatness.”

  But the truth was that the work was good, flawless from the beginning. The characters were perfectly composed, the scenery was balanced—it had just the right texture and flavor to render it unforgettable.

  I opened the manuscript to page one and traced the words that had been etched in my mind ever since I read them a few years ago.

  I am their conscience; I am their eyes. I am the one who puts the fear of God in their hearts. They think to themselves, the tiffin wallah knows. We cannot hide from him. You see, it’s because I am an arm’s length away, lurking just around the corner. My senses are eager to grab hold of any tidbit for my memory book, which I neatly file away in the three compartments of my mind. The biggest one is the section of sins, gunah, the chamber of the landlord where all things evil exist. Then there is the pure, milky-white chamber of love I call Barsa. The third is a place for repentance that is home to Baba. They are the chambers of secrets, of untold stories that have not been checked out yet.

  From the very start, Faizan presented the protagonist as a person you felt empathy for without making him too black and white. There were enough gray areas in the character to make him a living, breathing person, prone to confusion, prone to mistakes. Faizan never showed me any future drafts. Perhaps he felt that I didn’t ask the right questions. He always reiterated that he would feel comfortable sharing when he was close to finishing. He never reached that point. Or was it I who failed to reach that point in his eyes?

  I was picking up the folder from the floor with the reverence of a holy book when Ma entered. I quickly shoved it under the pile of clothes on the bed.

  “Arissa bayta, lunch is ready.” She sounded hoarse; the voice of a woman who had cried many nights by herself but always woke up with a vow in her heart to be a healing balm to others around her. She held my hand through my rough time, her grief secondary to mine, as she took over the housework and the apartment, leaving me free to figure out my life, my future, and that of my unborn child. But the leisure time let me grieve more and heal less, and in her kindness, my mother-in-law had given me the freedom of coming close to lunacy.

  The days after Faizan’s death were a blur to me. Relatives and friends from all over had gathered to help and support me, overwhelming at times and much needed at others. Then, like fall, they started to disappear leaf by leaf, going on with their own lives and work, until only two remained: Ma and Baba. I felt I could snap like a twig most mornings, just as Zoha and Sian suspected before I chased them away, Zoha back to Karachi and her children, Sian to Ohio where he was studying public administration at Ohio University. Abu left before any of them to go back to his new family, people who were real to me only in pictures, the few I received of a wife, who often looked bored, and her son, who was seven and whose smiles always revealed a few missing teeth. He was adorable, though, plump-cheeked like his mother. My stepmother.

  Ma was silent as she looked around my room, nervously eyeing Faizan’s clothes on the bed.

  “Are you cleaning up?” she asked, voicing a bereaved mother’s silent fear that perhaps her daughter-in-law was getting rid of all signs of her son and yet knowing in her heart that the world does move on. It had just been sixty days. Sixty days without the love of my life. I was not a widow in iddat anymore, but I couldn’t let him go. Not yet.

  “Yes, just organizing a little bit,” I replied, frazzled. I decided to change the subject. “What’s for lunch?”

  I chided myself as I ushered her out of the room even though she was not done answering. Why did I not try to assuage her fear, the woman who lived completely for me and put her life on hold to piece mine back together? Why did I have this constant need to hurt people? Was it because I myself hurt in so many different ways? What was that thing Ami had said to me once when I hurt my knee as a child, “I’ll feel sorry for you if you want me to”?

  That need had not gone away.

  I was an ungrateful brat.

  And an inconsolable widow.

  That night, I opened the manila folder again after I did the dishes and escaped from the kitchen. The apartment was silent. Ma and Baba had retired to bed. I traced the text without reading the content. I imagined the pages in Faizan’s long hands as he turned each page lovingly, cradling them as only a mother would.

  I read all night and did not know when dawn broke the night’s back and pushed forward into a brilliant sky. Faizan’s work was his passion in life—beautifully crafted, words like gems beaded together into a sturdy necklace.

  Under the sweltering sun of the Karachi summer, a panting rider on a bicycle was making his way up the road, meandering through autos with blaring horns and red-tongued rickshaw drivers chewing tobacco and shouting obscenities at the same time. Nothing fazed the young rider. His shirt was drenched at the armpits with sweat that had seeped down both sides of his body. The city was a splattered mess of life. The buses that zoomed past him and at times forced him off the road were muddy and unabashedly adorned—the groomless brides.

  I did not realize that I was crying until the pages in my hands curled from wetness. I was the groomless bride, a baywah. I cried for Faizan’s unfinished work. I cried for the child he would never see, for the wife he’d never hold. It seemed debilitating to sense the loss from his perspective.

  Ma walked in with a cup of tea. I did not sense her presence until I felt the bed slump on one side from her weight. The rustling of pages informed me that she had discovered my treasure.

  “This is—?” she asked, her eyes hopeful and sad at the same time.

  I nodded. “His work.”

  She breathed in and picked up some more pages. Her hands trembled.

  “Did he—?”

  “No, it’s not
complete,” I answered before she finished her thought. She looked at me and then turned toward the window at the sound of a common grackle that had just landed on the ledge, its purple velvety surface shiny with the promise of a new day. Ma stood up to turn the light on in the room. I blinked several times and still my eyes hurt.

  “He invested a good number of his days in this project, didn’t he?” Ma turned her attention back to the pages in her hand. She lifted a handful close to her face and inhaled deeply. “It still has his scent.”

  I sniffed at some pages, too, and we both laughed. We hadn’t laughed in days.

  “I used to hold his shirt when I slept on days he was working late,” I admitted, curling my fingers around Ma’s, stroking the calluses that strayed down her palm. “He never understood why.”

  “When he started sleeping in his own room at age two, I used to take the shirt he wore during the day and sleep with it,” Ma replied, patting my hand and kissing the tips of my fingers, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. “He was such a good baby. Slept all night from the start. I had to wake him up to feed him.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling, lost in memories.

  “We have to keep him alive in our minds—in this baby’s life!” My statement came out like a plea.

  “We will, Insha Allah.” Ma nodded, and she seemed grateful. I was surprised how little we mentioned God lately. It was as if we felt that He had wronged us. I was thankful that Ma didn’t ask me to let go and live my life as other people had done. But maybe it was important for her to keep the memory of her only son alive. Through me, through my unborn child.

  “But to fulfill his dream, his work has to be finished. It was such an integral part of his life.” She looked at me and then her eyes brightened with a secret knowledge. “Who better to do it than his own companion?”