David and Ameena

by Ami Rao

  Many years later, a truth would dawn on Yusuf. After Ameena had been born, and then Kareem after her, and Zoya had failed to retain – three times – another child in her womb, the couple had decided there would be no more children, and thereby implicitly, no more sex. It was at this time that Yusuf would realise that Zoya had only ever loved the professor, and that love for her was like life itself – something that only happened once, and that once it was used up, it was gone.

  But back then, in the weeks and months immediately following his wedding, when he had neither the benefits of experience nor maturity nor for that matter the mercifulness of lapsed time, he couldn’t get himself to touch her where another man had before him. Instead, he immersed himself in work – for you’ve got to put the pain somewhere – and just short of a year after the wedding, was offered an entry-level consultant position in his petroleum company’s UK subsidiary based in Manchester.

  On that same day at the very same time that this news was being communicated to him, a bomb went off some distance away from the office building in which he worked, the power of the blast causing the door of his boss’s office to shudder and shake. Along with many others, Yusuf and his boss walked up four flights to the flat cement roof to see what had happened, and in the distance, they saw a cloud of white smoke ballooning unnaturally in an otherwise cornflower-hued sky.

  In the next day’s Lahore Times, they would learn that the cloud of smoke had been caused by an explosion near the vegetable market some two miles away and had left twenty-six people dead. But they didn’t know all that as they were watching the smoke-balloon billow and rise and then quietly condense and disappear from the roof terrace of their office building.

  His boss broached the subject again on the stairs down from the roof.

  ‘So, what do you think? It will be a huge growth opportunity for you. If I didn’t have six children in school, and a mother-in-law who refuses to die, I would have gone myself. You are young, unencumbered – will you go?’

  ‘No,’ Yusuf replied simply, and left it at that.

  This job proposition he mentioned to his wife in passing that evening while changing out of his office clothes into the loose-fitting traditional garb that he wore at home. He had historically not spoken to her much about what went on in the office, mostly because she had never expressed any real desire to know about it. Yet, this time, something made him want to tell her. So, he recounted the conversation that had transpired with his boss, ending with, ‘Of course I said no.’ Her reply surprised him more than anything had surprised him since the night of their wedding.

  ‘I want to go,’ she told him.

  ‘You want to go? Why?’

  ‘I think we should go, that’s all.’

  ‘So, you will be far away from the temptation of the English teacher?’

  She looked at him. ‘That was unnecessary,’ she said coldly.

  Yusuf, unable to meet her hard gaze, dropped his own. ‘You are right. I am sorry. That was unnecessary, I admit, and yes, cruel. But I said no because of you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. We are comfortable here. And secure. You have help, servants – cook, driver, watchman. We have our families here, for support, and our friends, your friends. Our own people. We will always be second-class citizens there, minorities, outsiders, by the food that we eat, by our language, by our god, by our skin.’

  He looked at her and saw that her eyes had grown a strange fire in them, specks of gold that lit up her face, and with it, the entire room.

  She said, ‘Think of the opportunity. For you. The freedom. For us. We can bring up our children in a world where they can dream.’

  ‘To dream is a luxury, Zoya. You need to have other things before you can dream. Power, money, status. They will be paying me next to nothing by English standards. We will have no help. You will have to do all the housework yourself. I mean, I will help… I will try… but… I don’t think you are thinking of the downsides. This is our home.’ But he hesitated at the mention of children, a kind of tenderness filtering his eyes.

  ‘Home is where you feel safe. I feel stifled here, Yusuf. Look at what happened on Ferozepur Road today. A life full of terror gives you no space to dream.’

  ‘Zoya, I already said no.’

  ‘Well, tomorrow morning, go say yes.’

  And that’s how Ameena’s parents had ended up in Manchester.

  Where she hadn’t been particularly religious at home, in England, Ameena’s mother became devout by her own standards, abdicating whisky and adopting the hijab, trading in one form of liberation for another. Ameena’s father, who had considered himself only moderately religious in Lahore, found himself swept along by her newfound fervour, for it is hard for the weaker of a married couple not to be pulled towards the inclinations of the stronger, just like it is near impossible for a man in strong waters to resist being swept away with the tide.

  It would be equally easy as it would be difficult to understand the reasons behind Ameena’s mother’s heightened faith. For it is always equally easy as it is difficult to understand what forms faith in the first place.

  Perhaps it had to do with being in a land where she found there was so little of it.

  Perhaps it had to do with being so far away from a land where there was too much of it, for one tends to miss what one does not have, only once it has been lost.

  Or perhaps it had nothing to do with that at all.

  Perhaps it had to do with what she carried around with her for years, some kind of deep, penetrating, unspeakable loss.

  Perhaps it is loss that forms faith.

  It would be ironic that years later, this same deep, penetrating, unspeakable loss would be exactly what would cause her daughter to lose her own faith.

  Perhaps it is loss that takes faith away.

  Easy come, as they say, easy go.

  1.9

  Ameena’s room-mate was a tall, skinny girl from Pleasantville, New Jersey called Peggy Lannifer.

  The day Ameena landed in America and arrived at the apartment straight from the airport, Peggy opened the door to let her in and said brusquely, ‘I just want you to know I advertised for a room-mate because I needed the money and a nicer place to live in than I could afford alone. That’s all there is to it. I’m not your friend. If you want friends, you’ll need to look for them somewhere else. I don’t do that crap, so save yourself the effort.’ Ameena’s smile faded but she nodded as she walked towards the smaller of the ‘flex 2 beds’ that Peggy informed her would be hers, dragging her heavy suitcases behind her.

  She shut the bedroom door, leaning against the flimsy, carelessly painted wood with her eyes closed. She’d been holding her breath, without even realising it. She exhaled deeply, opened her eyes and looked around the room, its sparse furniture, its unfamiliar smells, and then when she sat down on the bed – her bed – she felt an acute anxiety and an aloneness and a sadness for everything she had left behind. For several minutes she sat like that, on the edge of the bed.

  But then she stood up and tugged at the chain of the blind that covered her window and as she tugged down, and it rolled up, she gasped at the splendor of her own unveiling, for in front of her, so close she felt she could reach out and touch it, she saw the illuminated jagged spire of the Chrysler Building. And then the other buildings, countless buildings with no name, penetrating the midnight-blue sky, bright from the light of a thousand windows, each window telling a thousand stories. That’s what Ameena saw the night she landed in America, as she gazed through the window of her tiny room – she saw a city that, like a clandestine lover, held in her bosom a million untold stories.

  She took this thought with her when she went to sleep that night and somehow, despite it all, despite this… this grim room-mate-person that lived in the next room and probably slept with a gun under the pillow, it made her feel less alone.

/>   By daylight, she was disappointed to note that the magic of the Chrysler Building had faded somewhat, just one more tall building melting into a plethora of others, chameleon-like, as if its real beauty emerged only when it lost its powers of camouflage.

  But this was significant, she later realised, the dual aspect of the Chrysler Building, in her understanding of New York City, this bastion of urban modernity. Because things worked differently here than what she had been accustomed to. At home, Ameena felt, the fear came at night – the dread and the loneliness and the other innumerable diseases that linger around us, threatening, if we allow them, to afflict our minds. Night brought darkness. And it brought disquietude. But then, as it lifted, so gradually did the darkness, and by the time the sun rose in the morning, nothing seemed as bad, and the troubles of the night seemed less frightening, as if somehow the daylight had, if only temporarily, driven away the despair.

  Not so in New York. New York, she would learn, was a city unlike any other, a city that wrote its own rules. New York came alive at night, alive with hope and radiance and the promise of dreams. The night lights that shimmered and danced – in the towering buildings, in the larger-than-life billboards, in the walking-talking adverts, in the entire 185,360 square feet of Times Square – all brought with them an energy and an urgency and a kind of hypnotic dreamlike beauty, and suddenly everything was possible, and you – YOU! – lay at the heart of this possibility. But then, the night would pass, and in the morning, all of that would vanish and melt. In New York, in the cold light of day, you were indistinguishable, just like the buildings, one body among eight million others, camouflaged in order to survive. You were everybody; you were nobody.

  As for Peggy, this too for Ameena was a kind of learning. A truth: human beings are varied, complex and unpredictable. They act in certain ways for certain reasons. She has read about this in books. She has studied this briefly in social science class. Anthropology it is called, all about how humans are a social tribe, how our responses to other people are deeply ingrained, how we crave or reject companionship, feel empathy, measure the emotions of friend and enemy alike, judge each other’s intentions and plan strategies for personal social interactions. She has studied this, and so perhaps has Peggy, because very soon, the two women work out, anthropologically, how to stay out of each other’s way.

  And so, beyond the obligatory smile or the cursory ‘hi,’ when, despite their best efforts, they happened to find themselves in the communal spaces, no words were exchanged. The women stayed mostly in their respective bedrooms and one usually used the kitchen when the other was out, which Ameena found to her great relief was quite often the case with Peggy. She didn’t know what Peggy did, but found that the other girl often left before she woke and returned after she’d gone to bed. Sometimes she would be gone for days, leaving handwritten notes on the dining table with nothing but four numerical digits in sets of two, separated by dashes, and Ameena had no idea what that meant until it dawned on her in a moment of epiphany that in America the month comes before the day, and she realised that for whatever it was worth, this was Peggy’s way of informing her that she was travelling and would be back on the date mentioned on the note.

  And so, like this they carried on, until that day when, thanks to a rescheduled flight, Peggy came home one day early to find Ameena in the kitchen. ‘Oh hi,’ Ameena said, awkwardly, overcome with a kind of extreme self-consciousness, ‘I’ll be done soon.’

  ‘That smells good,’ Peggy remarked, and Ameena found that she was both surprised and surprisingly pleased and it surprised her that she was pleased, that it mattered at all.

  ‘Really?’ she said cautiously. ‘I’ve always thought of myself as quite an awful cook! If my mum was here, she’d be standing over me with her hands on her hips and a list of everything I’ve done wrong.’

  At that, Peggy smiled. Woah, Ameena thought, it smiles? But it was the first time she properly noticed how beautiful the other girl was – fine, high cheekbones, big, green, almost doll-like eyes, and her skin, pale and clear and smooth like glass.

  ‘It’s chicken curry, my version of it at any rate. Would you like to try some?’ she asked quickly, aware that she’d been openly staring.

  ‘No thanks,’ Peggy said formally, ‘I wouldn’t want to eat your dinner.’

  ‘There’s more than enough for two. Have some, please. I’d like that.’

  And as simply as that, because sometimes in life you have to be willing to take a chance on people, over a dinner of Uncle Ben’s microwaveable rice and Ameena’s anglicised Pakistani chicken curry, a truce of sorts was called.

  Another truth: women don’t take long to share intimate details of their personal lives with each other. Men take years. Occasionally they discuss such things on the golf course. Most times they simply talk about sex in the abstract. Women, also, talk about sex, but never in the abstract, and mostly only when sex becomes perverted. To men, sex is almost never perverted. And so.

  Over dinner, unprompted and perhaps for one of those anthropological reasons that are too complex to comprehend in one go – or a lifetime – Peggy disclosed to Ameena that she had been abused as a child by her stepfather, a brutish man who ended up breaking both her body and her spirit. He had started touching her, she said dispassionately, when she was three. At ten, she was giving him blow jobs, at thirteen they were having full sex. When at fifteen, she finally mustered up the courage to tell her mother, she was met by a staunch refusal to believe that any of it had happened at all. ‘Instead of confronting him, my mother accused me of seducing her husband,’ Peggy said with a small shrug of the shoulders, but her face, Ameena noticed, was expressionless. ‘She told me that I was trying to steal him from her. Where does one even go from there? Anyway, I don’t need your pity, I’m removed from all that now, I just wanted to tell you, that’s all. If I’ve come across as some kind of cold, heartless bitch, it’s not personal. I just don’t… I guess I have trust issues with people. You’re all bug-eyed by the way.’ Embarrassed, Ameena blinked her eyes purposefully, twice, and Peggy laughed. And then Ameena laughed and after that, something between them changed.

  The next night when Ameena came home from work, she found Peggy sitting on the living room sofa reading a book. As she had become accustomed to doing, Ameena nodded in acknowledgement, but continued to walk towards her own room, but then Peggy said, ‘Hey, I bought this bottle of wine, if you wanted to share it with me?’

  For some reason, Ameena remembered in that white-dove moment, when she nodded and smiled and saw the barely discernible hint of relief in Peggy’s green eyes, the photo of the Afghan girl on the cover of the National Geographic all those years ago, Sharbat Gula, whose parents were killed when she was six years old during the Soviet bombing of Afghanistan. How many secrets, Ameena wondered, must she have hidden in those green eyes that had taken the world by storm? How many secrets and how much pain? And for how long?

  1.10

  ‘You. Yes, you, don’t look so surprised, you and you and you and you and you and you.’ Hershel E. Horowitz, Founder and CEO of The Witz Agency, a small, heaving man with a smooth bald head and a very pink face upon which he sported a thin, carefully manicured moustache, pointed his left index finger vigorously at the four men and two women around the table. ‘You lot are the brains of the agency. The brains. The grey matter. Up here…’ he said, finger moving to his forehead just below a perfectly threaded left eyebrow, ‘…and we need what’s up here to do what we do. And what we do,’ he said, pausing dramatically, ‘is branding.’

  He looked around the room and, not seeing the desired impact of his words, continued with slightly – but only very slightly – less gusto.

  ‘Now, branding is a complicated word and it’s getting more complicated by the second because it faces extinction. Yes, you heard me. Extinction. Look around you. No, not around the room. At the world. Look at the world around you. Everything is the
same these days – body wash is body wash is body wash and toilet paper is toilet paper is toilet paper. People aren’t buying the cuddly puppy any more. No sir. They want it strong and gentle, hardy and soft, luxurious and cheap – puppy or no puppy.’ He sighed loudly. ‘It’s sad. Very, very sad. Just plain depressing, if you ask me. I mean, there was a time not that long ago when all you needed was a cute lil’ puppy to sell toilet paper. But now? Now that’s just not cutting it any more. Now they want aloe vera. And they want it for free. It’s doom and gloom, people, and you see that in our clients. The spark’s gone from their eyes. And the money’s gone from their wallets. Gone. Gone the way of the spark. Finished. Kaput.’

  Here, Hershel surfaced for air. Gulped. Plunged back in.

  ‘The truth is, folks, that our clients are disillusioned. They believe – and rightly so – that there is nothing left any more to differentiate between their product and that of the competition. This is serious stuff.’ He nodded then once – seriously – and indefatigably soldiered on. ‘Branding, as you all know, used to be one of a few remaining forms of product differentiation, and now it’s dying. Forever. And clients can’t cope with it. They can’t cope with it because if there is nothing left any more to differentiate between their product and that of the competition, then there is nothing left any more to differentiate between themselves and the competition. This is an existential crisis, folks, plain and simple. No surprises here.’

  He tapped his knuckles on the table twice.

  ‘Knock, knock.

  ‘Who’s there?

  ‘Client.

  ‘Client, who?’

  A pause.

  ‘Get it? Client, who.’

  Another pause.

  Hershel looked around the room. Nodded solemnly, six times. Six blank faces stared back at him. Onward he went.

  ‘And so, the mantle falls on us. It is a grave responsibility, but a vital one, and we must take it on. Because we know, we know, that the reason our clients can’t cope is because they are clients. Clients trapped within the constraints of their own sad, uncreative little minds. That’s where we come in. We step right into this dying, decaying, extinction-facing mess. And we’ – another dramatic pause – ‘rebrand branding.’