by Sabyn Javeri
I still remember the hurt look in her eyes when she showed up unexpectedly one night at my house and found me getting ready for a date.
‘But you can’t,’ she cried out, a piercing shrillness to her voice.
I turned around to look at her devastated face and knew instantly that this had gone on far too long. Her neediness was appalling.
Cruel as it was, I knew what I had to do next. ‘Kill your darlings’, an expression I used in my creative writing classes when telling students to cut out words that didn’t fit into the story, came to mind, as I walked up to her. I held her firmly by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘Now look, Saira,’ I began, but what happened next shook me to the core. It was over in a flash but there was no mistaking the touch of something wet on my lips as Saira leaned into me.
The kiss lasted barely a second. I stepped back. I had taken her neediness as a longing for something maternal. It never crossed my mind that the touching could have been sexual. Saira took my surprise for disgust and ran into the night, almost tripping over her long black cloak. Her face, I noticed, was still uncovered.
Though I still met the guy I had hooked up with on the dating app, my entire being felt numb. I kept forgetting his name, was restless, and the whole date was over in less than an hour. If the evening was a disaster, the night was even worse, for I kept thinking about the softness of the encounter, the unexpectedness of it all. But I suppose what was really bothering me was that I was considering the possibility.
I had trouble concentrating the next day, too. Everything irritated me. I couldn’t wait for the day to be over. I went through the motions, teaching as if on auto-pilot, coming home, watching EastEnders robotically, going through the pretence of dinner, till finally I couldn’t take the deafening silence any more. I dialled her number.
Correction, I kept dialling her number.
Without Saira and her flowing black cloak, her curious eyes barely visible through the thin slit in her veil, the day seemed long. I hadn’t noticed how habituated I had become to her presence. I missed her. If only to have someone to talk to. Or rather someone listening to me talking. I walked by the café, the library, searched for her face – her veil, rather – in the classroom. But it was as if she had never existed. In fact, it was almost as if I had made her up. Had she really existed?
It didn’t help that there was no record of her at the girls’ dorm. Just when I was about to admit she had been an imaginary friend, I managed to get her real address from the admin office. But once I had it in my hands, I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t thought it through. No, I admitted, as I looked it up on Google Maps, I had no idea what I was doing, for wasn’t the intention to roll back? To have less of her in my life? Less, yes, but not complete desertion, I argued with myself. I remember pausing at the bus station and wondering if I would have felt the same way had it been me who had cut off all contact with her.
As I stepped onto the bus heading to her neighbourhood, I convinced myself that it had nothing to do with the kiss. Lately, I had become pretty good at that – convincing myself otherwise, that is. Guess it comes with practice. The word ‘self-denial’ didn’t even cross my mind. I told myself that I just needed to make sure she was okay. The girl was confused, I assured myself as I rang her bell.
I looked around as I waited on the porch. The neighbourhood she lived in was at the edge of town, completely ethnic, and I felt almost foreign as the only white female and that too in a skirt.
There were skinny brown children playing in the yards, and the houses had open windows from which wafted smells of curries and freshly made chapattis.
My stomach growled and a bearded man passing by stopped to look at me. When I smiled and said hello, he hurried away almost as if I had made a pass at him. I rang the bell again. This time leaving my hand on the buzzer for a good one minute.
After much knocking – I don’t know why I was convinced she was home – the door flew open. An angry Saira stood in the doorway, her head uncovered, her face in a frown and, most shockingly, her feet bare.
‘What do you want?’ she said, her voice low and gruff.
‘Why are you missing class?’ I placed my hand firmly on the door, in case she intended to slam it on my face. ‘Look, if it’s because of me,’ I continued, ‘then really, don’t do this to yourself.’
She continued to stare sullenly at her feet.
‘Look, Saira, can we talk?’
She let out a long, slow breath. ‘Come in,’ she said, and padded inside. I followed.
Inside, the walls were bare except for a few pictures of mosques. They were painted a dark greenish-blue with egg-yolk borders. The flaky and chipped paint made it seem as if you were underwater – drowning.
Depressing, I remember thinking.
‘So this is a little different than the girls’ dorm …’ I began, but seeing her stiffen, I realized how accusatory I sounded.
‘Saira, I just want to know what’s going on with you. All these lies…’
‘Get out,’ she shouted.
I stood still.
‘Okay, don’t tell me why you lied about where you live. Just tell me why you are not coming to class. Is it because of me?’
For a good five minutes, she said nothing and then suddenly a barrage of words flowed from her. ‘Look, the real reason I’m not attending class is because I want to go to Pakistan and get married.’
‘I thought you were from Iran?’ I asked, barely able to decide what took priority – the discrepancies and lies or the threat of an arranged marriage.
‘I lied,’ she said flatly. ‘My parents are immigrants from Punjab. I thought Iran sounded more exciting.’
I just opened and shut my mouth till, finally, I decided to focus on the issue at hand instead of the string of lies. I managed to say, ‘Are they forcing you into an arranged marriage?’
‘I wish,’ she laughed bitterly.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I need to sit down.’
‘Sofa ain’t got no spikes, bitch,’ she said with a shrug and all I could do was stare at her. Her entire body language, her demeanour, her speech, everything had changed. Who is the real Saira, I wondered, this girl in sweats who swears, or the veiled girl whose politeness is almost Victorian?
‘Fucking, sit down,’ she said as she, to my horror, lit a cigarette.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Quite a bit you lied about.’
‘Well, I didn’t lie about this,’ she said as she suddenly lunged at me and shoved her tongue down my throat.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I shouted, shoving her away, only to see she was in tears.
‘Saira, Saira, oh my dear,’ I said, sitting down next to her as her whole body racked with sobs. ‘Look, you are confused. It’s okay. We all go through these phases where we are confused about our sexuality. I think you are misinterpreting affection for desire,’ I said, patting her head gently.
‘I’m not confused,’ she said through the tears.
‘Look, I don’t think you are a lesbian, frankly. I think you are just confused. But even if you were, it’s okay to have feelings for the same sex, really…’
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘It’s not okay. It’s haram.’
‘Oh Saira…’
‘Just shut it,’ she said, putting up her hand. ‘You don’t understand. No one does. Even I don’t. I’ve…I’ve got feelings for other women. I’m…I’m a fucking freak. That’s why I want to get married. I want an arranged marriage. Back in Pakistan.’
I felt like a mother whose architect daughter had told her she wants to design dog kennels. ‘Why?’ I burst out. ‘Why the fuck do you want to throw your life away? Just because your bloody Islam doesn’t accept homosexuality?’
Then, seeing the look on her face as she crumpled the cigarette, I forced myself to calm down. ‘Look, Saira, I didn’t mean it to come out like that.’
‘I want an arranged marriage,’ she repeated like an errant child demanding a new toy.
I to
ok a deep inhale and said, ‘And what do your parents think?’
‘My mother doesn’t think much.’
I ignored the sarcasm and said, ‘Your father, then?’
‘My father left us way back.’
‘Oh.’ Suddenly, the neediness for acceptance made sense. As did her reaction to the break-up of my marriage. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘You never mentioned…’
‘That’s because you never asked. You’re always going on about your own bloody life.’
I felt heat rise to my face but swallowed my anger and focused on her. ‘And what does your mother say about the “arranged marriage”?’ I raised my fingers to quote unquote.
‘My mother thinks an “arranged marriage”,’ she raised two fingers to mimic me, ‘is too costly. She doesn’t have money for the dowry.’
The surprise on my face must have given me away, for she continued, ‘My mum works ten hours in the factory down the road. She says it’s too expensive to buy tickets to Pakistan, then get all the gifts for the relatives, find a match, and then pay for the overseas wedding. “Why can’t you just find a nice boy here and settle down” were my mum’s words to me, can you imagine?’
No, I can’t, I almost said, as yet another stereotype of the Muslim immigrant was shattered before me.
‘Saira,’ I said as I put my hands on my knees to get up. ‘I think you really need to do some serious thinking. Please just promise me you won’t rush into anything. Life is not as black and white as religion makes it out to be. I’ve heard so many stories of disastrous arranged marriages…’
She got up so suddenly that I had to step back. ‘For you, everything is a bloody story,’ she almost spat out the words and I backed away further, frightened by this side of hers.
We stared at each other for a good few minutes before I finally stepped aside. Before leaving, I turned around and said, ‘You know, in some ways, yes, I do think that. Everything is a story. And we are all made up of stories. Stories that we tell others, stories we tell ourselves and stories that we don’t want anyone to know.’
She was quiet as she took it in and I took that moment to hug her. Her thin body felt warm. Warm and welcoming. For a second I was reminded of the smell of home, of wet earth, of the vibrant green grass after the rains, of talcum powder and the smells of freshly baked bread. I hugged her harder, and suddenly it felt as if I had stepped in front of a bus all over again. I breathed it all in before pulling away.
‘Goodbye, Saira,’ I said.
Of all the goodbyes I had to face recently, I knew this one was the most painful. And also the most necessary.
These days I find myself wondering if this is a story I want to tell or one I want to forget. I wasn’t proud of myself for walking away. But I also knew that it was dangerous to let Saira’s infatuation fester. It would have led to no good, I told myself every time something reminded me of her. Yet, I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if I had … if I had kissed her back. Why had I resisted so much?
The episode with Saira had made me more reflective. But also sedate. I didn’t lose my temper any more, but my lectures lost their spark as well. I went back to teaching the Dead White Males and their so-called classics instead of experimenting with world literature. It was safe. And I needed the safety of the familiar. I moved further away towards the highlands where sameness was cherished, difference feared.
Every time I saw a girl in a hijab, which was rare in those parts, I was reminded of Saira and her curious gaze, her simple ways. I often wondered why I had been so angry with her. Or so afraid of her. Of her sexuality. Of her beliefs. I had been so convinced that I was right, that my way was the only way. The digging in of heels seemed ridiculous now. Why couldn’t I accept that someone could want an arranged marriage, or that they can be happy veiled head to toe? Why was I so afraid to accept her as she really was? Or perhaps I was afraid to accept my own feelings for her. Maybe what I felt for her was just a little more than maternal affection. But I had chosen to block all feelings. To close off, abandon and desert. To run, to hide.
Had I really been much different from my husband in the way I had acted? What if I had sat down with her when she had calmed down? Would she have explained everything patiently in one of our late-night chats? Would I have listened? But it was too late now. I imagined her sitting somewhere in Pakistan, in a hut brimming with relatives, a little one on her knee, and I winced. But then I told myself, Saira was a survivor. Perhaps she had made peace with herself instead of with her headscarf.
I smiled. And somewhere across the ocean, I was sure Saira was smiling back.
Under the Flyover
It was a sight to behold. The half-constructed, half-demolished flyover on Sharah-i-Faisal looked as if it been bombed during an air raid, the iron spikes jutting out from the half-finished stretches on either side like the desperate outstretched fingers of two lovers reaching out to each other before meeting an untimely end. The broken columns on each end of the flyover pierced the sky with spikes that looked like thin needles gathering rust. And the blue sky trapped between these columns looked like an intruder who had been caught by the sun’s fierce glare. Creating this mental picture, Shahid stepped back, satisfied.
A few years ago, he would have whipped out his notebook or phone and jotted down these thoughts, but now … now things were different. He had responsibilities now. And thinking of responsibilities, he glanced at his watch. It was a quarter past five and Shumaila still hadn’t emerged from her office across the road.
He looked across the broken flyover towards the tall steel-and-glass building which looked as out of place, framed by rubbish and swarmed by flies, as he felt in his nine-to-five job. With his poetic sensibilities, he would much rather have led a life of poverty as an artist, but he knew that was not an option any more. Not when his parents had invested so much in his education, sending him to a private school instead of the local government school where his elder brothers had studied. As if that was not enough, they had paid hefty bribes to get him a job as a junior accountant in a private firm. No, he could not let them down. But he could let go of his love for poetry.
‘Hazaron khawahishein aisi …’ he sighed, quoting Ghalib, and then shook his head as a day-labourer stopped to ask if he was addressing him. He looked again at the beautiful, if misplaced, skyscraper across the road where Shumaila worked as a receptionist and then back again at his watch. ‘Aati hi hogi,’ he said again to no one in particular, as he climbed back onto his skinny motorbike.
Shahid watched the sea of vehicles crawl slowly under the blockage of the construction and remarked, ‘What havoc these flyovers have caused all over the city.’ A stray cat froze at the boom of his voice and ran off when he heaved an even louder sigh. The futility of these roads and flyovers, which creaked under the weight of Karachi’s ever-increasing barrage of cars, seemed to him a useless exercise. Like throwing good money after bad, he thought. They reminded him of the hordes of half-empty flats that dotted the city’s skyline, their construction halted midway because of some judicial stay order or the other. These flats with their hollow, glassless windows, reminded him of a vertically stretched skull with hundreds of dark empty sockets for eyes. He shook his head, reflecting that nothing in this city ever reached a conclusion. Everything was just starting out or being broken down. There was constant turmoil. ‘No planning,’ he said aloud to an imaginary audience.
‘No planning at all in this Karachi of ours.’
He shook his head as he glanced again at the still doors of the building. And then, as he waited for Shumaila to emerge, he thought this sort of short-sightedness and impulsiveness was not only the city’s character but also that of its inhabitants. He himself had jumped into this relationship without thinking. But was he solely to blame…
Before he could ponder more, he saw Shumaila finally exit the building. He watched her cross the road, dodging bikes and zigzagging her way through the slow-moving cars in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
He knew she would step onto the busy road instead of using the overhead bridge further down. That was another useless afterthought! Do the idiots in charge really think someone would climb two-hundred steps to get to the other side of the road when they could just squeeze through the gap in the fence separating the traffic? Shahid smiled at the thought.
‘They really don’t understand Pakistaniyat,’ he said, this time directly addressing the cat that had slowly inched her way back to the pile of rubbish next to his bike.
He got up abruptly, scaring the feline again as he began to wave vigorously across the road.
Shumaila’s hijab was tightly wound around her head and her dusty face seemed to sweat profusely, now that she was no longer in her air-conditioned office. But the scowl on her face was replaced immediately by a smile when she saw him waving at her. In the cloud of smoke and dust that arose all around her, Shahid thought she seemed almost like an apparition. The hour-long wait was forgotten and he geared up his bike, the broken flyovers and garbage around him replaced by flowers and Bollywood-style gardens in his imagination.
She climbed on shyly and they joined the swarm of vehicles on the road, zigzagging their way towards the park where they spent most evenings. Once they crossed Metropole, Shahid left the stream of traffic and parked in a narrow, unpaved alley, which seemed even more dug-up than the site of the half-bombed, half-built flyover.
Before getting off the bike, he pulled her close and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. Shumaila giggled and shrank back with a rhetorical, ‘Koi dekh lega’.
‘Let them see,’ Shahid laughed, even though his eyes darted about furiously to see if indeed anyone had seen them. The lane looked deserted. He grew bolder. He took her hand and pulled her close. But just as he leaned towards her, his phone rang.
‘Beta, ghar kab aao gey?’ his mother’s shrill voice rang out. He looked at Shumaila, who looked away, a sour expression on her face.