“Cared too much about your own self?” I finished for her.
Arissa, I chided myself, you are not helping. I had vowed I’d make the visit as pleasant as possible, and I wasn’t living up to that promise.
Ami’s lips were so tightly pressed that her cheeks were gaunt from the effort. “I didn’t know how to love in the conventional way.” She exhaled and walked over to a jar of cookies, unscrewing the top. She peeked inside and picked out my favorite: butter pecan. “Arissa, can we not start over? I have many regrets, and I live with those thoughts every day. They haunt me, taunt me—”
“You didn’t come,” I cut her short, my anger now boiling over, “I needed you, damn it, and you didn’t come.”
“I am sorry, I am…I wanted to. You know that.”
“No, I don’t!”
Ami staggered away and collapsed on the couch.
I flung the washcloth on the counter and stormed after her. “What do you want now?”
“I want us to be friends.” Ami looked up, trembling arms outstretched.
Friends? The word hit me with the force of a wet towel on my face.
“Okay,” I agreed, turning away from her embrace. “Like Juhi.”
Ami looked at me blankly.
“A friend who is there but doesn’t have to be and has the choice to leave whenever he or she wants, right?” My voice was dripping with sarcasm. “With no tangible ties like blood to be a barrier? That is smart. Very smart. A good escape route.”
“That’s not what I—”
I turned away and walked toward my room. I locked it from the inside and slumped against the door. The visit was over as far as I was concerned.
The break in the light underneath the door revealed that Ami was standing on the other side. She didn’t knock, but I felt her there. Breathing. Silent. I put a shaky hand on the door to feel her presence. How I wanted her to love me. Love us. Oh, the many doors that would have opened for her had she knocked, even once. But as always, she lost the opportunity. The light corrected itself as she moved away. Why did I always expect her to do something that was just not in her nature?
I heard her let herself out after fifteen minutes. I wondered what she was doing in the apartment for that long. I found my answer in the lingering stench of smoke and the stubbed-out cigarette in the sink.
SEVENTEEN
Juhi carried a box of books to the end of the hall and collapsed on a nearby stool. She was two months pregnant, and in between helping me pack and move boxes despite my protests, she managed to puke in the bathroom every two hours. She looked pale in the cropped gray sweater she wore over a pastel shirt and cargo drawstring pants.
“Stop lifting boxes,” I scolded. “You are not doing anybody any favors.”
She made a face at me and hurled a pillowcase at my belly. “Look who’s talking,” she jeered. “Miss Fat Princess herself.”
I ignored her and taped up the box labeled “miscellaneous.” Packing boxes in the eighth month of my pregnancy had not been easy. I was a trifle nervous that all the boxes I had labeled since this morning—a grand total of 10—were all tagged the same. The ones that Ma had packed were more carefully named: “clothes/Baba,” “kitchen utensils/top shelf,” “painting supplies/Arissa.” What had happened to the planner in me?
I missed Ma already. She had gone to Atlanta to assist in the postpartum care of her niece, who had delivered twins a weekend ago. Ma’s sister lived in Pakistan and had been denied a visa to come help her daughter. Ma had assured me she would be back in time for the move. I couldn’t be selfish, although I was already missing my own cherished aloo paratha squares in the morning; the tea slowly steeped to murky perfection; samosas, the meat-filled deep-fried wraps; bhajiyas, the mouth-watering fritters; and the never-ending list of magical items that appeared on my table at each meal time.
Ma had left me in the able hands of Juhi. A few hours after she left, Juhi turned to me and said, “Guess what?”
Her eyes had the glimmer I had learned to dread. It usually meant some new dead-end boyfriend’s emergence in her life.
“I’m pregnant.”
I nearly dropped the vase I was wrapping in a white sheet. I wasn’t expecting that.
“What?”
“Yes. I found out yesterday.”
That probably explained the dark circles under her eyes, the fatigued look. I looked at her in shock.
“Who, I mean—?”
“Raj. Rajesh. But it doesn’t matter who, really.” Juhi waved her arms.
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” I looked at her in confusion.
“I think it’s really exciting,” Juhi continued, ignoring my question, putting a small box full of crystals in a slightly bigger carton to prevent breakage.
I turned her around by her shoulders to face me.
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” I asked again, a little more slowly this time.
Juhi sighed in mock sadness and touched my cheek. She had a red bandana on her head that made her look unusually young. “Poor Arissa, always the worrier. Perhaps your aura needs adjusting?”
I shrugged her patronizing hands away. “Juhi, do you even realize how big this news is?”
“Of course I do,” Juhi said in exasperation, walking over to the stove to check the pot. She lifted the lid and peered in. She sniffed at it and then clutched her abdomen and raced to the bathroom. I stood outside listening to her retch.
“Are you okay?” I called out.
“Oh, just heavenly.” She emerged from the bathroom with an annoyed look on her pink face. “In case you didn’t know, the only time a person is throwing up over a toilet bowl is when he or she is not feeling well.”
I handed her a wet washcloth and studied her while she wiped her face.
“Have you told Rakesh?”
“Rajesh. And no.”
“He has a right to know.”
“No, he doesn’t. He made it perfectly clear at the beginning of our relationship that having a family was not in his plan. Besides, we aren’t seeing each other anymore. It’s just as well.”
“So what are you going to do?”
She looked at me as if I had just grown a second head.
“I’ll do what you did,” she said. “I’ll build my life around my child.”
I felt very tired and sat down on the couch.
“It will be hard without someone to share the burden.” I studied my ring finger that still had a ghost-like band encircling it. Juhi laid her hands on my shoulders and started massaging them.
“You don’t think I know that?” Juhi asked softly. “I want a baby. I’m 41 years old. Even I know that a special someone is hard to find.” She came around to face me. “And equally hard to lose.”
I looked away. Juhi had no idea what she had just done to her life. It could be the most perfect thing for her or just the opposite.
“It would’ve been nice if you were here,” Juhi said, sitting beside me. “Our children could become friends. We could move in together. Maybe even become lesbians.”
We giggled. Somehow I could not picture our children playing together. Whenever I thought of my son, I always thought of a severely challenged child, barely able to walk. I had the image of the worst possible scenario stuck in my mind. I figured if I allowed myself that, having a marginally disabled child would be a tremendous blessing and a boost at the same time. No, it was easier to remove myself and my child from the present. Being near Uncle Rizvi in Houston would be better.
“Why do you do that?” Juhi’s voice broke into my thoughts.
“Huh!”
She had moved on from the subject and was now holding a painting in her hand that I had not finished packing. The painting was an awful one with a beggar woman engaged in a bloody fight with a little boy, fire dancing in her eyes. I had tried to tell Juhi about the woman who’d brought us the prophecy of firedancer, but I could never bring myself to relate that story to anyone. It seemed that if it was untol
d, I would allow it lesser power to affect me, although lately the woman had started appearing in my dreams. I put the painting face down on the floor and walked away from it.
I sometimes forgot that Juhi was an art instructor. We never conversed about art much. To her it was a career; to me it was not. It just wasn’t a factor in our relationship. I had been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her once, a year ago. We never could see it all. The Islamic art section had enamored us the most, especially the Turkish Tughra, a handsign of Sulaiman the Magnificent with its bold calligraphy. We had laughed about how we wanted to have such elaborate signatures on our immigration papers.
“It would drive the officers insane,” Juhi had said, laughing. “We would insist on signing with gold ink.”
We had made plans to come back and finish seeing the museum. We never did.
“Your themes were subtle before,” Juhi was saying. “Like that sunflowers painting you have in the den, and the girl reading a book that you gave me for my birthday, and the abstract that reminded me of a peaceful ocean with seagulls flying above that your Abu took with him last spring.”
I didn’t know how to answer that. My subject matters were never hidden, but since Faizan’s departure they had become more intense, almost fiery, invoking disturbing feelings in the onlooker—red magnolias oozing blood instead of nectar, a man in his last dying moments with his killer, a mother holding a dead infant.
As I was quick to point out to folks, painting was not a career––if it were, I would be out of a job. I painted to liberate the thoughts and images within me. I merely provided them release.
As a young child I'd entered many art contests and never won anything. Impressionism with a unique blend of postmodernism, that is how an art teacher had once described my work, his glasses balancing on his long nose that looked like a cliff with a steep fall. I had quickly realized it was his way of being nice and to get me off his hands quickly. I barely passed his art class.
My work had few admirers. In time I realized it would never become a career, not a successful one anyway. Abu enrolled me in a painting class one summer when I was in my teens. The instructor was a cheery guy in his early forties with a goatee and sideburns, and that summer of Ramadan, I was his only student. Most of his paintings, being of intimate and nude subjects, were draped over in respect for that month. The instructor had a strange habit of sidling up to his students and making them jump. By the next summer he was all over the news. Jilted by his lover, he had gone on a shooting spree in a co-ed college and killed several students. The thought that I had been in such close proximity to a madman sent shudders through my body.
I wondered if all gifted folks are slightly mad. Would my challenged child be gifted in some way? I believed that in life, we all make an impact somehow. Some with brush strokes, some with keystrokes. Still others with their genuine hearts.
“I’ll miss you.” Juhi came around and stood in front of me, her eyes brimming with tears. “Who will I do laundry with now?”
I was speechless. I had no words to describe what she had been to me and what I would miss the most.
When I put my arms around her and hugged her, she smelled of cinnamon and warm summer.
After Juhi left, I picked up a book that had fallen to the floor from an overfilled box I had marked “miscellaneous.” For awhile, I couldn’t move. The book, titled Surviving Susan, a shoddy Victorian romance novel, had seen happier days and was responsible for some of the lighter moments in my life. Half of its cover was torn off, and the bosomy lady in the arms of a dark man had lost a breast. It seemed that the man was about to drop the woman on her head. It was pretty comical, but my heart did a flip when I reminisced about the novel’s presence in my brief married life.
Faizan and I had found the book by accident. When we moved into our apartment, abandoning Faizan’s bachelor pad, we had discovered a box of books left behind by the previous owners. The box contained romance novels, a genre Faizan and I didn’t care much for, but this particular book was different. Something about the art of the cover was so side-splitting that when we gave the box away to a library, we kept that book. It offered us many laughs for its author’s ludicrous way of writing love scenes. The writing wasn’t that great, and every chapter had at least one sex scene. It became a bedroom study for us, and we frequently acted out scenes from the book. Somehow, despite the bad writing, it almost always got us in the mood. One particular day when we had just finished cleaning house and were lounging in the den, I saw Faizan pick up a seemingly tedious report by Amnesty International on Pakistan. At once, I pulled out the novel and flipped it open.
“‘She looked at him with her forest green eyes,’” I read aloud. “‘There was passion in them.’”
I saw Faizan put the report face-down on the chaise. Mission accomplished. I smiled inside.
“Brown,” he corrected.
He moved down on the floor beside me.
“‘She looked at him with her russet brown eyes, large as potatoes,’” I began again, improvising this time. “‘There was passion in them.’”
I batted my eyes at him. He laughed and snuggled in closer. “Much better.”
“‘Her breath on his face was sweet like honey, and he wanted to drink from the source.’” I sniffed his face and then sneezed all over him before I could stop. He ducked and then came near again. I laid the book on one side, carefully dog-earing the page where we left off. Our noses and knees were touching. I kissed him.
The empowered female character in the novel fascinated us. She was the one who usually initiated the foreplay but disappointed us when she came to a certain point and then automatically slipped into the gender-dictated role of waiting for the man to make the final move, kind of like how we were.
“‘He circled his arms around her waist and pulled her on top of him in a primitive, almost animal-like force,’” Faizan recited from memory. He rolled over on the floor like a dog, panting, limbs in the air, and then grabbed me and brought me down on top of him. I giggled. Just then the phone rang. I started to get up and he groaned.
“Her rejection was like a germ that spread in his innards.”
He came after me on all fours as I dashed toward the phone, now taking artistic liberty with the author’s voice.
I picked up the phone breathlessly as Faizan wrapped his arms around me. “He yearned for her sweetness.”
It was Abu. I tried to pry Faizan’s hands away from my waist. He wouldn’t give.
“Her full breasts tormented him day and night, giving him not a moment’s peace,” Faizan whispered, trying to unbutton my shirt as I struggled to button it back. I mouthed at him to stop and twisted my body to get out of his embrace. Even when out of Abu’s sight, I couldn’t picture talking to him without a shirt on.
“How are you, Arissa?” Abu was asking. “What were you doing?”
That’s never an easy answer. The voice carried over into the room, and Faizan smiled at how flustered I was.
“Tell him we are making love,” he whispered in my other ear. “Ask him to leave us alone.”
I answered in monosyllables, letting Abu do the talking, very conscious of my shirt wide open as Faizan proceeded to lick his way from my bellybutton to my left breast.
“He drank from her nipples as if they contained nectar,” he breathed against my skin. “He wanted to squeeze and pinch them, to punish her for how she tormented him—”
I struggled to regulate my breathing.
“Is Faizan around?” Abu asked.
I thrust the receiver gratefully in Faizan’s surprised hands. I stepped back, buttoning my shirt, trying to keep from laughing.
He struggled to talk, mildly irritated by my trickery. I ran my fingers down his waist where he was the most ticklish. He swatted at my hand, brushing it away. Undeterred, I let my fingers trail to the other side of his waist and traced the contours of his side. For added impact, I nibbled on his left ear.
“Um….er…there’s some
one waiting for me. Can I call you back?” Faizan finally said. I fled to the bedroom.
“You’ll pay heavily for this,” I heard him say. Then he paused before adding. “At last she would pay for the torture she inflicted on him day and night.”
I held the book up to my ear. I willed for it to bring back the laughter it had once given us. I shook it, tugged at it, as if worrying it could give me back some past moments. I rubbed the soft cover, now aged and wrinkled, against my cheek, urging the lifeless piece to talk to me. It was just like praying to God. It probably answered in some way, but certainly not in a way that was to my liking.
What had attracted me to Faizan? It wasn’t only the way he knew all the right things to say to make me cheer up after a bad haircut (“Don’t worry. Your pretty locks are banned from public, and I don’t think your veil knows what is and is not fashionable”) or the way he taught me how to hold the spatula just right to flip the omelets (“Why do I have to do all the things around the house? Didn’t Mai Jan ever take a day off when you were back home?”). Perhaps it was how he always had plans for us for the weekend, most of them surprises, annoying me at first and then pleasing me by how perfect they were, or the many visits to the museums, retreats, and movies. Maybe it was how he never let me carry groceries myself, not even when I was not pregnant, always hauling the heavier loads himself. The things only he could say after lovemaking (“That’s amazing—remember that next time”). I forgave him even when he made absurd, unpardonable conversation about art; at least he tried to take an interest in what was a big part of my life. Perhaps it was the way his hand moved over my body and triggered just the right spots to make our union fit for historical records. He taught me to cross the bridge of bashfulness to love in easy strides. I shed the cloak of shyness and reveled in the glorious dangers of lovemaking. He taught me to burn and heal again. And then he burned me one last time and abandoned me forever.
“You can’t force a cow to smile.”
Faizan had the strangest phrases to offer in any situation. It seemed like he had his own dictionary of idioms. That or he enjoyed annoying me by distorting them. This was in response to a gripe about an old friend that I was reporting to Faizan. I had recently met a former classmate who had changed considerably to the degree of being standoffish. After having a short one-sided conversation with her, I realized she didn’t share my excitement at the meeting, and I was quite taken aback and offended by her formality and lack of enthusiasm.
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