Oh, no.
I put the groceries down on the floor and looked at Raian in absolute calm.
“Please stop,” I signed, slowly. “I love you. Please come here.”
Raian struggled for a few minutes to release his hands from Zaki’s grasp and then stopped. Zaki loosened his hold on him.
“I don’t like him,” Raian signed.
I sighed. I regretted leaving them alone to go out for groceries. I had run out of Pediasure, and that would have meant one meal that Raian wouldn’t eat. He strictly followed his routine. At lunch, he expected Pediasure; if it wasn’t there, he refused to eat.
He came to me and sat down on my lap.
“I let him do it,” I said in an even tone to Zaki.
“What?” His tone was almost accusing.
“The doctors say that the repeated behavior helps him deal with anxiety.”
“But he was hurting himself,” Zaki argued.
“I know,” I replied calmly. “I still let him do it for his own sanity.”
Zaki got up from the floor and shrugged his shirt straight and then stuffed it back in his trousers. “He is your child, but one day he might seriously injure himself.”
I feared that too, but I didn’t want to be judged. Not after what Raian and I had been through together.
“That is how I…we deal with it, Zaki.” To my own ears, my strident words sounded final, almost damaging, like I was past the point of caring.
“Fine.”
I didn’t walk Zaki to the door that day, and he didn’t wish us goodbye.
“I don’t want to be judged, by him or anyone else,” I complained to Ann Marie over coffee. “No one’s in my shoes.”
“Then shake him free,” said Ann Marie. “Why be in a dead end relationship?”
Am I that afraid of being alone? I wondered. It troubled me how clearly the woman saw through me. It was as if instead of ribcage and skin protecting my heart, I held it exposed, just for her, separated by a see-through curtain.
“He talks well,” I offered, lamely. Ann Marie did a thumbs-down gesture.
“That fact alone wouldn’t win me over,” she said. “How is he in bed?”
“Ann Marie,” I punched her in the arm.
“Okay, then tell me why is it that he does not complete you, does not make you feel good about yourself or the work you are doing and yet you hang on. Clearly he has some quality you admire.”
I mulled over her words but could not come up with a decent
answer.
“I think that if a relationship isn’t naturally growing, it has no chance of survival,” Ann Marie continued. “You just can’t force it.”
Why was it so hard for me to admit that my life, my son fulfilled me and there was room for little else in my life?
“I have to go,” I said to Ann Marie. I had to think some more, by myself. I had to be with Raian, near my reality.
At home, Raian sat cross-legged on the floor, keyboard on lap. His eyes were closed as he played imperfect notes to nothing in particular. To my ears, however, it was beautiful melody. The three fingers of his left hand rested on the speaker. I sat down next to him as he opened his eyes and lifted his fingers from the speaker to my heart.
“Do you feel that?” he asked in his silent way. His eyes were bright with excitement.
I nodded. It was time for me to find my own rhythm.
There was no denying it. The plateau had come and gone, and now Zaki and I were on the downward slope of our short union. The disturbing thing was that neither he nor I was willing to do a thing about it.
Our words brought the distance between us in perspective. We threw in useless conversation as filler, sweetened like jelly on bread to hide the blandness of our relationship. The gap between us widened, and when I finally saw it, it was a big relief to me. I realized it in a second when I had missed nearly all the cues for the longest time.
We were at Souper Salad for lunch. My attention had already wandered off from Zaki’s conversation to Raian, who had disappeared under the table where he sat munching on a slice of cheese. I still monitored him closely when he ate, and his unique placement was making it hard for me to see him. I tried to reason with him to come out, both of us signing furiously, him shaking the table with his irritated gestures. From the corner of my eye, I saw Zaki glancing around in a state of frustration to see if anyone else was noticing the silent commotion at our table, and a realization struck with the intensity that made me tremble with rage. He is embarrassed by us, I thought. The clarity blew me away. It was so obvious, so in-my-face. How could I have missed it? The signs were all there: the first time in the waiting room when he’d turned his head around to check the reaction of others noticing Raian; the bored looks he wore when I patiently did the ritualistic signing for my son a hundred million times; the faraway expressions he got when I talked about Raian’s appointments, Faizan’s book; and how he almost always steered the conversation back to the present when so much of what I did and said was a product of the past. I lived among ghosts and I liked that arrangement.
“We would like to leave,” I declared to Zaki. It wasn’t presented as a request. He looked at his half-eaten Asian salad and pushed it away, nodding. I opened my purse, took out a twenty-dollar bill, and flung it on the table. He raised an eyebrow but knew that gesture meant his exclusion from the word “we.” Without a word, I dragged my screaming, convulsing boy out the door without looking back.
I avoided Zaki’s calls for days, not because I didn’t want closure but because I was just so angry—at him, and even at myself for letting someone who was actually ashamed of my child get that close. I cuddled Raian a little longer at night and made extra special treats for him, trying to make up for what I imagined I had put him though. He seemed unharmed, although he thrived on the extra attention.
Zaki showed up at my work. I was startled to see him in the lobby. We never met at the office. I tried to steal away, but it was too late. He had seen me. His face was ashen, his anger like a pierced boil. In two strides, he was beside me and grabbed my elbow.
“If you want this to end, have the decency to say it to my face,” he said, his rage spewing all over me.
I released my arm from his grasp and faced him calmly. “I have nothing to say to you.”
“Sure you do.” His voice was trembling with fury. “You’re too weak-willed to admit it.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It’s what I know. Ever since…that one event in your life, you have lived like a sacrificial victim. I am sick of the emotional baggage you carry around. You behave like some sort of a martyr. You still compare me with…with him. I can never match up, no matter how hard I try.”
I was furious at how much a dead man got under his skin.
“How hard have you actually tried?” I asked, crossing my arms across my chest. “You can’t even stand having a disabled child by your side in public.”
The shock on Zaki’s face astounded me. Had he not been truthful to himself either?
“So that is what this is about,” he finally said.
“Is it not true?”
He didn’t meet my eyes and seemed at a loss of words. It dismayed me to learn that what I suspected was indeed true. I saw Cyma dodge around us and head toward her office, realizing something monumental was unfolding between me and Zaki. I started to walk toward the lobby door, not wanting to prolong the spectacle we had created.
“What do you want to hear?” he asked, impatience softened by sorrow, “I am not ashamed of Raian, but it’s not easy being around a child who is so different. I admit I find it a bit overwhelming at times, but it’s not something I can’t work on.”
It could work except that I didn’t have a lifetime to wait.
“And you, what about the way you clam up when a conflict arises?” he started again. “Shouldn’t you be willing to work on some of those issues, too?”
I took a few steps closer to Zaki and looked into his u
nsure eyes. “I would if we had a future, but what’s the point?” My voice was unusually steady. “The truth is, Zaki, we are misfits. We’re two booties with totally different colors and sizes.” I ignored his clueless look. “We were never meant to be together. We forced the relationship. There never was one.”
Zaki stepped back as if slapped.
“I did love you, Arissa,” he said at last. Past tense had crept in at the mention of our relationship. It had finally expired. The fact was strangely consoling to me.
“It was not enough. I would have always wanted more.”
That night I put Raian to bed and pulled out the two blue booties from my bureau drawer. I cupped them in my palms and kissed them. They had acquired a little aroma from being nestled under my clothes—the heady fragrance of Pleasures with a hint of Amarige D’amour. I set the socks on the bed and looked at them closely for a long time. They were not mirror images of each other; one was slightly plumper than the other, the other a trifle longer—perhaps the one that Baba had created with his limited knitting skills. They were imperfect, but they worked well together. No one could say they weren’t a pair. I saw a thread coming out of the longer one and tugged at it lightly. The booty unraveled in my palm.
I dropped the blue thread that was once a sock and stepped back in horror.
Now there was only one. One sock to do the job of two.
It wasn’t the call I was expecting but in my hurry to answer, I forgot to check the caller ID. I winced at the familiarity of the voice at the other end.
“Arissa, bayta, how have you been?” It was Ami.
For awhile I forgot to breathe. I pictured her at the other end, twisting the cord around her index finger, a nervous gesture of hers. For an instant, I was tempted to hang up but something stopped me.
“I’ve missed you.” There was a pause. “Terribly.”
I stayed silent, watching the clock ticking away, minutes growing awkward as they lengthened devoid of words.
“There is no easy way for me to start over,” Ami was saying. “There is always the fear of failing the second time around as well.”
Her words searched for mine. I realized with a start that for once there was no pain in my heart, no sorrow of missed opportunities. Over the past few months, I had developed a greater tolerance for people’s failings as well as a need for letting go of unimportant associations in my life. Clearly this was one.
“I always loved you but could never become closer,” she said. “I regret that in many ways.”
Ma’s words from the past came to mind and I said them out loud. “You need to leave the guilt behind, Ami. It has no room in your life. Yours or mine.”
“What does that mean?”
I inhaled deeply and plunged right in. I had rehearsed this forever in my mind. It was important to my sanity that we stop this cat and mouse game with our relationship.
“You will realize the true worth of these words some day and it’s not very easy for me to say this,” I began, “but you need to let me go. We can’t mend the past and I don’t think it’s fair for us to repair something that has such a low probability for survival.”
There was a gasp at the other end. “What are you saying?”
“That I free you of all obligations toward me.” Somehow my own voice sounded strangely foreign to me.
“What? Are you insane? Have you completely lost your mind? I am your mother…you can’t—” There was horror in her voice, obviously slated by fear of losing her firstborn. “I’ll always be your mother You just can’t…that’s impossible.”
“It’s really not, Ami. It’s a relationship that has never been nurtured and now we are just picking at straws. You know that and I know that.”
“I am family, you can’t just cut me loose,” she was screaming now, hyperventilating. “You can’t discard me like day-old trash. I deserve better than that.”
She fell silent and I could hear heavy, jerky breathing. I waited for her to compose herself, feeling sorry for her but yet surprised by my own self-control.
“How can you want something like that?” she asked at last in a broken voice.
I sighed. “Ami, you know the answer to that.”
I didn’t put down the phone until I heard the soft click at the other end. She didn’t fight that battle hard enough, I thought to myself and then chased that reflection away. It was time to move on.
I was inside the plot. It thickened and thinned out. It pulsated, it throbbed. It weakened, it strengthened.
My fingers had a life of their own as they typed. I was amazed at what appeared on the screen in front of me. I was giddy with the power that words gave me.
But for the protagonist, there was no closure.
Day dawned and the sun set without a change in his circumstances. The pain subsided––for awhile—and then returned with a vengeance, gashing wounds deeper than before. No bang or a ping, no jolt or push advanced his cause. Surprisingly, the nervous energy of my failed relationship gave birth to new ideas and thoughts in my mind. The boy became a man and was reduced to a boy at times. How will he reconcile his affairs? Will he even find fulfillment in his lifetime? And what about the people in his life? Like feathers, they got further and further away the more he reached out to them––the father, the lover, the sister. They had different names and roles at various junctions in the novel—the adversary, the naysayer, the demon. Perhaps they should all meet a similar fate, I decided finally, wearing the protagonist’s hat and shuddering with the weight that decision carried. I sat back as if pushed and counted the seconds. At twenty, I turned back to the screen and started typing away furiously. Don’t look back now, I remembered thinking, and then I retained nothing of that night until morning struck me with the force of a slap. It was the day of our anniversary––Faizan’s and mine. The sixth one without him. The sixth one with Raian in my life.
When Ann Marie’s call came, I was halfway out the door, late for a meeting with a 35-year-old Pakistani-American entrepreneur whose two-year-old ad agency had a growth revenue of $9 million a year. The company had partnered with an art organization in Pakistan to promote its cultural heritage by showcasing music, art, theater, and film all across the United States. The agency pledged $20,000 to Chamak over a period of two years, and the magazine had decided to run a profile on the company in its summer issue.
I was delighted to hear Ann Marie’s voice. I hadn’t spoken to her in three weeks.
“I thought you fell off the face of the earth.”
“Not quite.”
I told her about Zaki and she seemed relieved that it had ended.
“There never was a future in that arrangement, I was always certain.”
I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her about Ami.
As the minutes ticked away, I stole a few glances at the flashing light on my cell phone that meant I had a message from someone. I didn’t have to take many guesses to know who it was—the appointment I had stood up.
“How’s the book coming along?” Ann Marie finally asked.
“Oh, I am just finishing up,” I replied. I paused as I felt a sudden rush of anxiety. That would mean the end of a very significant part of my life. What was next? A relationship that was dead and a legacy that was almost complete. That left just Raian.
“Arissa?”
I realized I had been quiet and had tuned out the last few sentences of Ann Marie.
“I know you. You are already obsessing about the future, aren’t you?”
“What is it you have?” I laughed. “A mind-reading radar that relays all information to you?”
“Arissa, you have to understand that we live in a world of lies,” Ann Marie’s tone was serious. “We are all taught to live for the next minute. As if the turning of time can bring us perpetual happiness. Doesn’t living for future rob us in some way of what we have now, at this minute? Why don’t you allow yourself to savor this instant?”
I pondered over her words as I hung up.
> My now was pretty packed, I realized as I went through some mail. I pulled out a letter from a bank and ripped it open. It was a credit card application addressed to Raian. Despite myself, I began laughing.
I was outside a bookstore, staring in a disassociated way at the poster in the window. I was aware of everything but it. The stop sign at a distance where a biker had braced himself on the handle of his bike to open a candy bar, the strong smell of coffee from within the store, the steady line of marching ants at my feet.
I jumped at the sound of a horn and looked at a woman who was entering the store with a reluctant child in tow. I turned to the warm inviting eyes of my husband in the poster, feeling strangely uplifted as if on a sunbeam. My sense of perfection was bothered by the fact that the poster was a tad lopsided. You would think they would be a bit more careful in handling a dream.
I sighed. So this was it, the end of my expedition. It scared me to have moved past that goal. I started to move as the store clerk came up behind the poster to straighten it. She looked briefly at me and nodded. She did not recognize me. She and I had met for two hours a few weeks ago. Many authors, many books ago. The veil would have made her remember me easier. The thought amused me.
I walked away carrying a sense of pride tinged by loss. This moment that has come after a million agonizing moments was mine. After that day, it will never be mine again.
That night I dreamt that my home was ablaze.
There was heat and darkness all around me, flames licking my body. I heard a chant of Al Mani echo around me, that verse again; there seemed to be many voices but only one that I could actually place. I saw Ma run in and out of the flaming walls of fire, her haunted eyes looking for something dear. I tried to follow her but stopped as I saw the entryway shudder and collapse before me. A moving ball of fire spun past it and headed my way. I stood paralyzed as it ricocheted off the walls, bounced off the ceiling and set the hallway drapes on fire. It was only when it reached me that I saw that the burning sphere was actually a suitcase. I sensed that there was something precious inside and tried to pry open the lock, flames scorching my impatient fingers. Inside there was an inert little body covered in a maroon blanket. I hastily pulled it out, warding off the fire. The baby wriggled in my arms, now awake, and then turned to me. It was my son as a baby. My breast tingled and cramped at the sight of him, and then milk flowed from me freely, drenching my shirt. I stood for a long time at the center of the inferno, letting my son suckle. I didn’t notice at what point the flames finally lost their strength and the warmth seeped into the floor. I felt my feet burn. Then there was nothing, only light and the smile of a mother who stood at a distance and watched us in silent pride.
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