I was touched by his words.
“Too bad the weight has not caused my eyelids to permanently shut,” I joked, sipping my chai latte.
“Don’t talk like that,” Zaki chided, pushing his muffin away. “I admire you. You know exactly what you want in life, and you go after it. There is no indecisiveness in your soul, no regrets.”
That part wasn’t true. What I wanted in life I would never get while I lived, and I preferred to keep my regrets to myself.
“Tell me about yourself.” I was eager to shift the focus of the discussion away from me. “What drives you?”
“Necessity, for the most part.” He laughed and then paused. His face grew a bit serious. “Some days, you!”
That caught me off-guard, and I looked away in a hurry. I was uncertain about Zaki, but I enjoyed his company. In his mind’s eye, Zaki had already laid the foundation of our relationship. What he was doing now was building the house. I was still wary of the groundwork itself. To me, it did not hold much concrete and was pretty shaky. His urgency in taking the liaison to the next level made me very anxious since I was uncertain that there would ever be a connection beyond a platonic friendship. I asked myself a million times why I was so unaccepting of new relationships. Over the years, there were many who had tried to set me up with friends, brothers, distant cousins. They all had one argument: You are young; how will you go through life without a companion? I didn’t blame them. For the longest time, I, too, had thought of the world as both my grave and my existence, a vertical tombstone. I considered myself dead by association, knowing that I belonged to a society where women lose more than half of themselves when they lose a mate and nearly all of their worth.
I had loved and felt incapable of ever loving again. Raian filled my life to the brim; any more and my cup would no doubt spill over. I cradled my two worlds—one with a degree of confidence and one that I was less vested in, hesitantly.
“Arissa, I want to be in your life,” Zaki was saying. “I want us to have a life together.”
What did I want?
Not that. Never that.
Although I promised him that day that I’d think about it.
I did for ten days.
And finally, I went over to his place and told him it was too soon. He suggested we take the arrangement up a notch and feel it out. Perhaps it might feel right.
I suggested we take a walk.
The evening was breezy yet warm. After a walk of half a block, I felt my thin red shirt cling to me from sweat. Zaki glanced over at me and put his arm around my waist. For once, I let him. We walked around the lake near his house, where sprinklers were sloshing water around the landscaping, leaving the air refreshingly misty. He was wearing a white hooded sweater. I tried to rest my head against his chest, but it wasn’t quite comfortable and I moved away. He caught my hand and brought me closer to him again. I almost stepped on his toe and murmured an apology that somehow got lost in the siren of a fire truck in the distance.
“You need to make some decisions in your life, Arissa,” I heard him say. “You can’t keep running away. It’s your life, but do you really want to go at it alone?”
Yes, my mind said. I didn’t think I could, but lately I had started to accept the idea. I didn’t answer him though, and he sighed.
“I need you, Arissa,” he said softly without meeting my eyes.
Yes, but do you really? I willed his brain to answer. Can you accept me with all of my crazy obligations, my tattered life? My son? Especially him? I sat down on a rock, suddenly tired. I looked at the fountain shaped like a unicorn shooting out water. I threw a rock in the lake and watched it create a few imperfect semicircles that faded away quickly.
“Trust me, you don’t want me in your life,” I finally said. “My life is complicated. Yours is not.”
The meaning of my words was not lost on him. He crouched near me, and I felt his gaze burn my face.
“Do you know how different your life is when your child is not normal?” I continued. “There are challenges on a daily basis. Allowances you make, things you let go off so you can devote more energy to your child.” I looked at him wearily. “Why would you want us in your life? Why us? Why now after all these years? You have two wonderful children. You raised them very well by yourself.”
He came closer. “But then you came along and life for me will never be the same again.”
I breathed in his cologne. Our noses touched, and I stood up to resume walking, spoiling the moment.
“It’s not as simple as that, Zaki. My life isn’t my own—”
He cut me short. “Do you feel anything?”
“About what?”
“About me? For me? For God’s sake, do you feel anything?” His voice rose in pitch. I didn’t hesitate.
“I care for you, but only as a good friend.” I was in no position to lie.
His face grew grim and withdrawn. “Let’s head back.”
“Zaki!”
He laughed a hollow laugh. “It’s not enough. I’ll always want more.”
Dead leaves crackled under his feet as he turned back. He pushed a forgotten bicycle out of his way, almost flinging it in impatience. I stood like a waif, an orphaned soul, and then followed him.
“It’s too soon,” I pleaded.
“Six years.” His voice thundered around me. “Six full years! How much time in hell do you need?”
I was speechless.
“It’s useless.” He shook his head. “I can’t compete with a ghost.”
I stopped in my tracks. He was right, I thought, as I watched his receding back and his hunched shoulders. No one can fight with the memory of a ghost. I had raised Faizan to the pedestal of perfection. No one will ever match up, and the sad thing is I didn’t want anyone to.
I was scared of losing a friend, though, so I did something I should not have.
“I need some more time,” I pleaded again. “Maybe I will be able to see things differently in time.” The words spilled from me like an overturned bowl of beans, together and in a hurry—a last-ditch attempt to save a doomed friendship. The suggestion lent a false sense of hope when I knew there was none.
He turned around sharply in disbelief, eyebrows raised, and then nodded with a sigh. I stumbled over a rock, and he held out a hand to steady me.
In the next few days we each receded within ourselves to the corner of our own sanities, knowing that whatever we did or said would widen the rift between us. We held on, unable to let go. We met for coffee at our usual time but weren’t sure how long we could do that without answering the inevitable question. Somehow we were both reluctant to disturb the arrangement.
In a burst of creative appreciation, Zaki bought some of my paintings that I had wanted to get rid of for awhile.
There was not adequate storage room in the little apartment, and two of those paintings reminded me too much of my life with Faizan. The memories were sealed so deeply in the colors and composition that I couldn’t bear to look at them without the context and history. One was of kissing figures and the other was the painting of the white roses against a fuchsia backdrop, the one I’d painted the year I got married. The other two were my least favorite: A twisted torso of a woman with a child around her ankle and the dreaded one of red magnolias oozing blood.
I had painted the kissing figures the day Faizan and I finished decorating the den—actually the second bedroom of our Jackson Heights apartment—in our second year of marriage. Painting was a hobby that offered me release, ruled and driven as it was by an extremely crude and undisciplined obsession that you couldn’t make a living from. That is why I chose business writing as a career. I can be balanced and objective in words. I paint only when I am seeking a release. When I see a blank canvas, something inside me twists, like a demon rising from sleep.
Faizan had partitioned the den into two parts: one that contained the tools of my trade—easel, paints, brushes, smock, rags, bundles of newspapers to spread on the floor—and the
other where he had his tower of books. It literally was a monument. He had run out of space on the bookshelf and started building a tower of books alongside it on the hardwood floor. It amused me that he always wanted to be near me when we were home. The partitioned den was his idea so that we could be together. That day, while I painted, he had his eyes glued to Madman by Kahlil Gibran as he sat cross-legged on the floor. Notes from Ustad Amanat Ali’s ghazals carried through the den from the stereo in the living room: Inshaa Ji utho, ab kuch karo, is shehr main ji ko lagana kya. Rise up, Inshaji, and leave, there is no sense lingering in this town where there is no fulfillment.
Before he had created that space for me, he always got a bit frustrated when my half-day art projects ended up being five days long. He loved and respected my work but wanted his wife by his side when he came home. Although we both knew that when the fiery inspiration took hold, we shut the other person out and disappeared for hours at end, him in his writing, me in my painting. During those moments when the muse struck, even when we were together, we were elsewhere, dream dancing our projects in our minds, carving new lines and waves of color into a canvas, writing inspiring dialogues in a chapter. The midnight muse was the worst, and we always laughed about how our thoughts escaped from us like fleeting fireflies even before we opened our eyes—our most brilliant ideas lost to the night.
I paused briefly and wiped my brush on a baby-oil-soaked rag hanging on the easel and went to the kitchen to attend to my cooking. Being a bachelor who had been on his own for so long, Faizan was the one with the culinary skills. In my own house back home, our many helpers had reigned supreme, rendering the other members of the family virtually useless in the kitchen. For Zoha back home the tradition had continued, but I had made the mistake of moving abroad. In the beginning, I learned many recipes from Faizan, but somehow in preparing them, we discovered another hidden talent of mine: the rare gift of burning even scrambled eggs. There was either too much spice in the vegetables I prepared, or too much oil. Or both. Kabobs hardened to the point that a hammer was required to break them, cakes were too crumbly, bread pudding reeked of eggs, chicken curry had too much turmeric and not enough flavor. Often I made a desperate effort to fix some dishes by pouring in ketchup or any other condiments I could find in the fridge. Faizan would have been the perfect candidate for Fear Factor. He consumed those experiments without complaint and often with a knowing smile on his face, perhaps realizing that one day it wouldn’t be so bad, that there are only so many bad meals a woman could cook. I often felt like smacking him. I would’ve liked it if even once he had said, “It’s awful, Arissa. How can you even expect a human to consume it?” By the second day, the leftovers almost always ended up in the trash can.
Over time, my cooking skills started to improve. The project of the day I started my painting in the remodeled den was karahi chicken. I poured in a tablespoon of oil and slowly sautéed green chilies and ginger. Next I added the diced tomatoes and chicken to the sizzling combo, feeling more confident by the minute. I turned around and nearly jumped when I saw Faizan standing there, arms crossed over his chest, looking at me intently.
“You look so beautiful when you are engrossed,” he remarked, glancing inside the pot and nodding his approval at the sight.
“You scared me.” I frowned at him, mildly irritated. He didn’t realize what an effort cooking was to me and how seriously I took it. I didn’t have lofty goals of perfection, only a desire to create edible meals. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
He came near and stroked my cheek with the back of his hand. His eyes penetrated mine, but it seemed that they went much further. My breasts breathed into his chest as he came closer. The aroma, the spices from my cooking, had settled on our hair, our clothes. “Yes,” he whispered against my shaky lips. “I am doing it right now. Watching you.”
I still remember what I painted much later that day—a figure sitting in a wicker chaise. But when examined closely, you could see that the figure was actually two figures entwined—half of a woman’s body, joined by half of a man’s body. Their hands clasped each other, their lips fused in rapture.
It was one of Faizan’s favorites and spent a long time in the den, hanging over his desk, enclosed in a cherrywood frame.
The burnt karahi ended up in the garbage that day.
In retrospect, I wasn’t certain which one of us made the first move.
I was helping Zaki figure out where to hang the paintings he had bought from me in his living area. The room had unusual and hard-to-work-with elements. Its pale yellow arches at the entrance were split in the middle and oddly reminded me of the openness of labia, I thought with a rush of blood to my face. As soon as you entered the room, the dark walls sucked you in.
“If you move the pedestal with the jade stone bowl on one side of the entry way, maybe you can make your fireplace area the focal point of the room by dressing up the mantel?” I suggested, moving the pedestal to demonstrate my thought. “Perhaps the painting of the kissing figures can go up there since the colors are so rich in that composition. The white roses can then replace the oriental rug on the wall next to the window.”
I paused to gauge Zaki’s reaction. He stood next to me, nodding and reflective, the soft scent of his aftershave lingering in the room. He took my breath away when he suddenly turned to me and enveloped me in a hug. Against his chest, I felt the uncertain thudding of our hearts. I wanted to move away but my body wouldn’t let me. We didn’t speak; words had never resolved anything between us in the past. I let him lead me gently to the couch across the room.
It had been a long time for both of us. I had forgotten what a man’s touch could do to a woman. I was shaky in his embrace; he was clumsy from having been without a woman for a while. The anticipation was more joyous and prolonged than the union itself, and it was over far too quickly for us. I felt invaded, violated by my own accord, but the arrow had left the bow.
Afterward, I was trembling and quiet when I went to get a glass of water from the kitchen, the sheet wrapped around me dragging on the floor in my hurry to get away. He didn’t stop me and turned his head the other way on the couch. In the kitchen, I held the glass with both hands, wanting to crush it and make myself bleed. I looked over at the sky outside and tried to wrap my head around my emotions. I would always compare the two men, I decided, on good days or bad. There was no way out of it.
After shedding the veil, it was interesting for me to see how easily I crossed the cultural barrier to accept another man in my arms. I somehow felt more connected with Ami in that moment than I ever had.
Zaki wasn’t an unattractive man. Yes, he did have a receding hairline, but that made him look even more attractive, mysterious even. His ex-wife was from Lahore, and they’d divorced when the children were four and six. Zaki had raised them single-handedly. It was most admirable and was an important factor in bringing us closer.
When we embraced, I always opened my eyes wide to look just once at the triangle formed between his head on the pillow and his shoulder on the bed by a patch of light from the lamp. To me, it was an escape route—a ray of light that brought back images of Faizan, a slow-moving film unreeling in real time where the players were switched. And then I shut my eyes.
“Open your eyes, Arissa,” Zaki would beg in the throes of passion. “Look at me.” And I stubbornly kept them closed, refusing to acknowledge the person making love to me, returning to my first love. From death, he rose and filled my arms. That’s how I kept my sanity. That’s how I lived, day to day.
I liked Zaki; I just didn’t enjoy sex with him. He was a good person, a compassionate friend. In any other lifetime, I am certain, he could rock worlds. But not here and not mine. His tenderness violated the core of my being. When I was with him, I could never shake the feeling that I was cheating on Faizan—never, not even on days when I was relaxed and actually enjoyed some of it. On cynical days, I likened Zaki to a nocturnal barn owl, oddly displaced in the light of the morning.
Ma stirred in a few strands of saffron to the rice pudding on the stove and stood back in satisfaction. I came into the kitchen carrying two teacups and lingered in the doorway. The voices of Baba and Zaki carried in from the living room. They were conversing on politics in America and the war on terror. Ma smiled at me and asked me to taste the kheer. I shook my head. The meeting was Zaki’s idea, and Ma and Baba were thrilled to learn about him. I led them to believe that we were so far just friends, although their hopeful eyes wished for more.
“He seems nice,” Ma offered.
I forced myself into a benign smile and lined up small chocolate-
colored bowls on a tray. Next I scooped some pudding into each and looked down at the browns, whites, and saffrons in my life.
“He is a good father and a great listener, but is that good enough?” I said more for my sake than Ma’s.
“Maybe it’s time you listened to your heart as well,” Ma said with a hug, “It can’t lead you wrong.”
With that she left the kitchen. How could I tell her that I had been silencing that voice for quite awhile? It had repeatedly told me to turn and walk away. I couldn’t understand what brought me back to Zaki over and over again––my own weakness and antiquated thinking of needing a man in my life, or an acute apprehension of losing a friend?
Zaki touched my upper back lightly as I walked him to his car after dinner, and I felt the square inch just below my shoulder blades burn as if touched by fire. I recoiled, and he stepped away, embarrassed. He knew and I knew without saying a word that publicly, I was not at that point yet. He was not one to back off easily, although he did for the time being. I was thankful for that but fearful of what lay ahead for me. For us.
Zaki didn’t understand my obsession with finishing Soul Searcher. To him, it wasn’t my project to end or begin. I had agreed with that thought once, but not anymore. I was far too vested in it to bow out this late. Loved ones depended on that work for their own healing, for the comfort of their passing days. Zaki felt that the world was already brimming with literature that already said everything that could ever be said. He wasn’t an avid reader, so his thoughts didn’t hold much weight in my opinion.
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