I looked at her questioningly and then realized that she meant me. I shook my head, trembling at the credence of such a project. “I don’t feel adequate to handle—”
“But you must!” Ma pleaded, holding both of my hands in hers, squeezing them together. My ring grazed the fingers next to it, and I tried not to wince. I shook my head. The papers were once again strewn all around us.
“You have to piece it all together,” Ma said, looking at them. “You have to give it life so he can live in these pages.”
I was surprised by the passion in her voice. It was as if for days she had been losing herself piece by piece and had just realized how to put herself back together again.
“Promise me!” Ma yearned, her eyes wild as she shook me by my shoulders. “Promise me, Arissa!”
And wretched woman that I am, I could not even give her that. I could not even lie.
She matched my stubbornness.
And so began our days and nights with just one debate.
You can do it.
I can’t.
Yes, you can.
No, I can’t. I won’t.
You will. Just watch and see.
How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn’t there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own?
It’s ridiculous, I told myself, I cannot finish his work. His words had an ethereal quality, placed on a pedestal very far from my reach. How could I even think I could do this? The work was not mine to finish. My words wouldn’t compare to his. They would lack the perfect lilt, the flawless pitch, the faultless tone, the right humor, the creative flair for changing scenes. How could I match his skill?
“You’re right. You can’t,” said Ma, always the wise one. “But think of it this way, what is the worth of his work if it is not finished? It will never bring any good to anyone. And who better to finish it than another writer? Faizan would have said that, too.”
“I am a business writer,” I reminded Ma. “I write boring corporate stuff!”
Would Faizan consider me a good enough writer to finish what he was certain would be his masterpiece? Wasn’t he the one who had tons of things to say about my work whenever he reviewed something for me? Not enough zing, too many adjectives, mixed metaphors, wrong use of commas, verbs not at par with their subjects, shifting tenses, unparallel sentences—the list was endless.
All the same, he was the one who once said, “Next to me, I would say you are a darn good writer.”
Modesty was never his virtue. Neither was clarity.
I was snuggled on the couch, in the middle of my fourth reading of Soul Searcher. It stopped at page 110, leaving many questions unanswered. I sighed and leaned back against the silken dupioni pillows that I had planned to crotchet and bead one day. The little packet of yarn and hooks sat forgotten in the kitchen drawer and in time had slid under the many books of recipes I owned. It seemed like such a bad idea now. The pillows seemed grotesque and misplaced against the wide back of the oversized couch, too big now for just one person. What were Faizan and I thinking when we bought it from Pier One?
I suddenly had a fresh view of the accent wall where the fireplace was situated. In the excitement of moving in, I had painted it a screaming burgundy and then sponge-painted it with splotches of blue and yellow. That was another bad decision. I remember Faizan being pleased with the wall, but I hated it as soon as it was done, even before I’d put all my supplies away. A framed painting of mine with two sunflowers and a rose on a stark white background served as a focal point. The painting was one of my favorites.
Ma came into the living room and dropped something in my lap.
“Look what I found.”
They were two identical ocean-blue booties, perfect with little
zig-zaggy crochet trims and bobbing snow-white balls hanging from a white thread.
“These belonged to Faizan when he was a baby.” She came around to settle down beside me and fingered the socks lovingly. Her breathing was uneven. In time I learned that she got that way when she was particularly zealous about something.
I cupped the booties in my palms and buried my face in their soft wooliness. They lacked the fragrance of a young baby but had eons of history within the fibers.
“I started knitting these seven months into my pregnancy, and in the last two months, my fingers were swollen twice their size and I couldn’t knit anymore. At that point, I had just finished one.”
I looked at her, long and hard, tearing my eyes away from the little socks. What was she getting at?
“Your Baba finished the other one. He had never knitted before, but he learned for my sake and for the sake of our unborn child.”
I saw Baba enter the room and tower above us before moving away to the kitchen with heavy feet. He opened the refrigerator door, and the light from within illuminated the tears on his face before he slapped it shut.
Ma lifted my hand and placed her palm against mine. I turned my attention back to her.
“This is how couples who are in love fit, like two identical socks, like a pair.” Her voice was breaking but avid. “Where one leaves off, the other picks up and finishes the task. For love, for the sake of the other. That’s how God made us. In pairs, so that we complete each other.”
And then he snatches one away, I thought, and makes us realize that we’re dispensable mortals. Alone we come, and solo our return.
Without voicing it, we both knew Ma had won that round. We embraced and held each other. We had no more tears left. There was nothing left to discuss. This was our closure as well as our new beginning. Together, we would create a lasting legacy for Faizan. She with her selfless support, me with my pen.
I waited for the computer to purr to life and hungrily scanned the documents folder for the manuscript. I saw a folder titled “SoulSearcher-drafts” and my clammy fingers almost slipped off the keyboard. The most recent file in there was dated 09-07-2001, four days before Faizan was snatched from me. I opened the file to the title page. It stated simply, “Countdown to completion: 70 days.”
That manuscript had 65,000 words. I quickly calculated that the hard copy I had discovered in our closet days after Faizan’s demise wasn’t the most updated version. I devoured the pages for the additional words. That was it. It was almost finished but not quite. How did he want it to end? I pondered over that unanswered question. How had the author imagined it? I wished for the hundredth time that Faizan had talked more about his project or that I had been a bit more relentless in my queries.
The novel was about a Pakistani tiffin wallah, a lunch carrier named Yavar. Following a hundred-year-old tradition in South Asia, the lunch carriers delivered hot prepared lunches from people’s homes to offices. Wives of working men diligently prepared elaborate meals and stacked them in cylindrical aluminum containers for delivery. In the novel, Yavar goes through a rough childhood after he loses some family members in a mysterious fire. His father, who survives the disaster, is devastated and becomes a beggar, leaving Yavar to fend for himself. Yavar ends up becoming a street child of Karachi, making a day’s living by polishing boots and carrying loads, trying to keep away from the many vices prevalent on streets like drugs and the sex trade. In time, a cleric and his wife take him in and raise him as their own. Yavar grows up to become a tiffin wallah, also becoming a friend and confidant to many clients. In time, too, the truth about his past surfaces, and he is able to piece together the events of the unfortunate night when he lost his family. The truth he uncovers, however, is worse than not knowing, and he struggles with how best to direct the course of his future.
The room was extremely quiet; I could hear the drone of the fridge in the backgr
ound, the ticking of the clock in the hallway. Ma and Baba had gone for a walk to a nearby park and were going to take the bus and buy some groceries on the way back. We were running low on dal. Faizan had never been a big fan of that dish and I had been slow to replenish our supply of lentils.
And then it came to me, an idea so brilliant that I almost fell off my chair in elation. I steadied myself and looked at the papers on the desk and then at the words on the screen. It was perfect. It meant rewriting the whole manuscript, yes, but in the voice of another—the disembodied voice of the protagonist’s dead mother. The narrator would be the person like my Faizan who had passed on. It would take longer, of course, but it would be worth it.
I lit some floating candles in a pan, which I carried to my bed. I gazed at the surreal, distorted forms the objects took on behind the flames until my eyes grew blurry from not blinking. I watched the candles burn out one by one throughout the night until there were none left. Then I turned around and went to sleep. I had paid my respect to the lifework of a man.
It was the seventieth day since September 7, the day Faizan had intended to finish his work. I had been unsuccessful in getting it done in time, but I renewed a promise to complete it. When, how, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to set a time to it, only a goal. I wanted inspiration and his spirit to guide me, to fill my thoughts with what he had envisioned. I wasn’t certain he would comply. He had not been good at making contact since crossing over to the other side.
THIRTEEN
I made certain promises, and I assigned them numbers. If it isn’t drawn or written in ink, I can’t focus, and the nagging worry in my heart keeps me anxious until I cave in and devise a plan.
The first task was the toughest, and carried many consequences, but I wasn’t sure for whom. Losing Faizan, the attack at the subway station, the ultrasound afterward—they all were collectively responsible for that decision. My world was not mine anymore and was soon to be inhabited by another human being, helpless, disabled, and totally dependent. His comfort came first of all. My decision to let go of an integral part of my life would only offer him one less chance of being singled out. That resolution would also offer him an opportunity to mingle and fit in better. I was certain there would be plenty of times when he would be regarded differently, and the least I could offer him was one less deviation from the norm. Assimilate and accept it all, I decided. Only this society can give my unborn child what my own can’t—a chance for a better life and abundant opportunities that he could seize and avail.
“You can do anything you set your mind to,” Faizan had said once, “with or without me.”
I had swatted him with a paintbrush, leaving a fiery red mark across his cheek, and he had laughed and taken the brush from my hand and marked an “A” across my chest. Ironically, after losing him, the veil that I had worn since the day we got married had performed the role of that scarlet letter he’d marked on my chest. The one that shouted, “Look at me; I follow the same religion as the one who harmed you.” I would have liked to add, “Please don’t rush to condemn me,” but a veil is only supposed to convey so much. Lately it had transcended into another role: the wearer was associated with supporting the acts of the attackers.
Was the decision easy for me to take? Of course not. It was my dead husband’s wish that I was negating, but it was time to let go of that desire and nurture others. But how do you let a tradition go or justify it to people? Some choices are never yours; your life’s events choose them for you, and you merely obey, whether you agree or not.
There was someone who needed to know my plan of action.
I suggested to Ma that we take an excursion to the 500-acre urban park in Brooklyn, the one famous for its scenic lake, its landscaping, and its forest. She raised an eyebrow, unsure of why the invitation was not extended to Baba.
“Go ahead,” Baba said before she could respond. “I have some paperwork to handle this morning.” He looked at me. “Make sure you bundle up well.”
I nodded at his concern. He was very perceptive and perhaps sensed that this excursion was something other than just a random outing.
We took the B train to Prospect Park station and followed the mix of locals and tourists with their many cameras, backpacks, strollers, and babbling children headed to the park, meandering down the path through the Cleft Ridge Span Bridge. We held our jackets close to us like our two worlds, walking like only veiled women do, protectively shielding our bodies from being touched—an instinctive quality we had developed by living in a society at war with itself. Mostly we looked at our feet and occasionally at the sights around us, avoiding the gaze of the men nearby. I did this more so than her, since I was in the presence of a watchful adult. I discovered that when I was with her, I was reduced to a childlike state, forever faltering, full of simplistic follies, unable to make correct judgments.
People nodded at us, and some stepped aside to let us pass. Many passed us by because we walked too slowly. The world around us couldn’t match our pace. Ma’s arthritis had been bothering her lately. I often heard her knees crack when she got up from a sitting position. A few days ago, she’d fallen in the bathroom and couldn’t get up. Baba and I aided her and brought her to bed. By evening, she was back in the kitchen despite our protests, still wanting to cook the lentil and spinach dish called dal bhaaji and a fresh batch of chappatis.
“Don’t stop me, please,” she pleaded. “I am fine, everything is okay.”
Nothing and no one was, but we left her statement unchallenged and backed off reluctantly. We all had strange ways of keeping our sanity. Ma found hers in the kitchen.
The view of the Prospect Park Audubon Center was breathtaking in its midmorning magnificence. It was a focal point for one of the most dramatic landscapes in the park with its slowly descending waterfall enclosed by a natural canopy, the serpentine paths, the carved bridges, and a beautiful view of the wide lake with its open mother-like embrace. We walked along the park’s watercourse, watching the boaters traverse the water. The excited shrieks of children and the wails of the very young symbolized that there was still hope in the world. How I wished Faizan was there to see this. We had always wanted to take this excursion. Around us, the sunlight beamed with a magical quality, wanting to envelope us in its shiny embrace. Instead, we looked for shade and put on our shades.
I handed half a sandwich to Ma from inside my bag. She took a bite and looked at it. It was a simple sandwich that echoed our lives: green chili paste on rye with cucumber, tomato, and a single slice of cheese. With regret, I saw the crisp fallen leaves on the ground. They will never find his body now, I thought randomly. Too much time has passed. I shooed the thought away.
“Ma, I have decided to let go of my hijab.”
I sensed her shoulders stiffen, but she didn’t look my way. A sigh escaped her parted lips.
“I have given it much thought,” I continued, studying her profile. “It isn’t easy for me either.”
Ma turned around slowly and then sat down on the blanket I had laid out earlier. I couldn’t read her expression, but tiredness oozed from her. I kept standing, unsure of what to do with the rest of my sandwich.
“I started wearing my scarf when I was ten,” Ma finally said, looking at me. “My grandfather, he was a strict man. When my sister and I were little and complained that after washing our hair our veils wouldn’t stay put, he shouted, ‘Drill it down with a nail. That’s no excuse for going around with naked heads.’ Our mother took pains tying our scarves down with bobby pins on both sides of our heads. After awhile, they did feel like nails burrowed into our skulls.”
I tried to search her face once again for emotion but found none.
“Times have changed,” she continued finally with a soft smile. “We have all changed. I am no one’s judge. There are things I am not proud of. There are things I am sure you regret as well.”
If only she knew.
“What I am saying is that, Arissa, it’s your life. I know why you’
re making this decision, and I am not the one to stand in your way. It’s always been a tradition in the family, but the tradition also was to live back home. We have modified our lives, and we do what we can do for those to come.”
“He wanted to move back,” I blurted out, unable to control myself.
Ma stopped and looked at me. She opened her mouth to speak and closed it again.
“He told me a month before…before—” I was unable to continue.
“You didn’t know,” Ma said simply. Her face was full of sorrow as she continued. “You couldn’t have known that—”
“But as a mother, doesn’t that make you—?”
We were unable to let each other finish our painful thoughts.
“Angry?” Ma concluded for me. “Who am I going to be upset at? You? The attackers who took my only child away from me? God? Where does it stop? The list will be endless if I let myself go.”
I looked at the woman before me in wonder. Why didn’t I have her ability to absolve others, her conviction, her clarity of vision? Does that only come with age?
“The truth is that there is a time reserved for each one of us. When it comes, we have no say, no power to stop it. No loved one’s pleas work. Prayers,” her voice broke, “fall on deaf ears, and the one who is to be snatched away will be plucked from this earth.” Overcome, Ma buried her face in her hands. “Allah knows I prayed for the safety of my child every day! I—”
A sigh caught in my throat. There was nothing more Ma could say. We clung together, heartbroken and lost for words. How do you bring back a promise that you thought had the span of a lifetime, but was looted by blazing wings of flying machines? Besides us a hawk swooped down, so close we gasped and pulled away. It flew off in a diagonal quickly and we caught a glimpse of what it had stolen from the earth—a tiny baby bird who was probably out for the first time, learning to fly. Nearby, its mother chirped in terror. For awhile, the feathered world around us went berserk, protesting at the injustice, angry at the perpetrator. They failed to realize that the hawk merely followed its nature—preying for food. It had no other means of sustenance, or the realization of another’s loss.
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