by Ali, Samina
Sameer had returned not much earlier and had raced straight to the shower without a word to me. Again, the metallic click of the bolt. When he came out, he had a dingy white towel wrapped about his waist, hair flat across his crown and forehead. His damp feet left prints on the carpet. He crouched before the suitcase and dug around. When I saw he was trying to put on my jeans, I took them from him and slipped them on myself. I told him I wanted him to take me to Marina Beach.
It was close enough to walk to, and leading from the main road down to the water were makeshift stalls selling seashells constructed in every design I could think of: strung together with silver wire to make earrings and gaudy necklaces, bracelets; large conch shells turned over to form ash trays and pen holders, paper weights with Allah or Ganesh or Shiva inked in; boxes adorned with penny-colored shells. The air stank of fish, though when we came upon the beach, the only boats I saw were no larger than canoes, the wood warped and cracked, dilapidated, so I knew they hadn’t been used in some time. The real fishing boats had probably gone out at dawn, when I had been just rising from sleep.
I took up a piece of driftwood and scrawled Sameer’s name in the sand, remembering, against my will, how Raga-be had written in the dirt before bringing me up to the roof. He hadn’t said a word to me since he’d returned. He kept his hands dug inside his pockets, head bowed, eyes averted. I could have been walking alone.
“Do you know someone in Madras?” I asked, crossing out his name.
He finally turned to me, surprised. “What are you talking about?”
“You were gone all night. In Hyderabad, it’s one thing, you’ve got relatives and friends all over. Here, where did you go?”
“There is no other woman, Layla, I assure you of that. You needn’t fear any such digressions, I swear.”
“Yes, you told me that before—” and Roshan had confirmed it, park, school, home, such was his trajectory, “—but I can’t help but wonder …”
“Listen to me,” he said, then shielded himself behind me to light another cigarette. He’d been smoking one after another since we’d left the hotel, right through breakfast, his dosa left untouched. “When I left the room last night, I was just intending to go get more cigarettes, maybe take a walk or something. But I ran into a friend of mine … I didn’t know he was here. I was just trying to figure out what he was doing here … It got late, I hardly slept on the train, and I was tired. We’d been fighting so much! I fell asleep there, at his place, with him.” After a moment, he said, “See, baby, you have no reason to worry,” and kissed my forehead. He walked off before I could ask any questions, his black boots splashing through the waves, the thick soles caked with sand. Overhead, gulls called each other as they followed him, then swooped down to peck at the cigarette butt he cast in the water.
I was carrying my sandals in one hand, jeans rolled up to my knees, the freest I’d been in India. I was growing tired of being confined to limits, especially those involving my husband. I threw the driftwood into the waves and watched it plummet out of sight, then resurface. The gulls squawked and blew off. A jumbo jet was leaving a white streak across the pale sky, and I thought how, eighteen years before, my parents had been here with me, getting their visas, planning their future, together. If they had remained in India, my father might have still taken on another wife, but he would never have thought to divorce my mother. Standing now where the two must have strolled, the water licking my feet, though at that time I must have been cradled in my parents’ arms, I saw the long stretch of time compressed into the straight line of the horizon before me and felt the heavy weight of abandoned hopes, of lives lived in ways we never imagined for ourselves.
I felt his gaze on me before he reached my side. The cigarette smoke mingled with the scent of salt and fish.
I said, “My mother returned to the U.S. with my father. They went back the same day we came here. She denies to me that she wants him back as her husband, but he’s the only thing she craves. Now she’s going to watch his sons. The surrogate mother, the surrogate wife, without Sabana there—without me there—she’s going to finally live out the fantasy of how her family should have been.” I smirked, adding, “I can’t believe she still loves him.”
He was standing very close, facing me as I faced the bay, his chest against my arm. “How did you know you didn’t love him? You left, even after your … night together. He’s right, why didn’t you stay with him, you gave him your virginity for God’s sake, that’s not a small thing, not for a Muslim woman!” His voice was agitated and rising and he stopped himself and blew smoke over my head. He pressed his forehead against my head so that his lips brushed the top of my ear. “Did you leave him only because he was forbidden to you, being an American man, or did you know—how did you know you didn’t love him?”
Because he couldn’t provide me what I needed, a life. And now, even the little he had provided me that night seemed to be ending the one I had tried so desperately to make with my husband.
“The more you stay away, Sameer, the more I think about that night. It’s beginning to take on a significance it hadn’t … he’s the only one who’s ever touched me.”
Sameer threw his cigarette aside, then his thumb dove into the waist of my jeans as he pulled me close. “Let’s go back to the hotel room right now I want to … I need to make love to you, Layla … right away.”
HE WAS LYING on top of me, crying.
The curtains were half drawn, not against the rain today, but the bitter sun. He had tried to force his body to perform, much like Naveed had tried to perform to the music of the brass band that was not meant for dancing. Cold, mechanical touches that made me think of those pornographic articles he’d sent me, written in his own hand. The body’s functions, not the heart’s, though his lips kept insisting he loved me, that he would do anything to keep me. In the end, he could not do the one thing I wanted.
He rolled off me and sat on the side of the bed, hands raking his scalp. He was bent over, the knobby ridges of his spine like a snake trapped inside his flesh. “You must know this isn’t about you,” he said, his voice barely over a whisper. “This is … I cannot tell you how much I needed to make love to you today, for me. Bloody hell, for me! You should not feel ashamed, you should not feel there is anything … lacking in you. There is something severely lacking in me, or so I am beginning to think.” He threw his head up to the ceiling and his cheek glistened with tears. “I am afraid that maybe I cannot go on being your husband.”
I sat up and stared at the back of him. When I said I loved him, it was to say that I believed the clay that had been used to mold him had been split down the center to shape me, his wife. “What are you talking about, Sameer? You promised you would never abandon me.”
He sat as he was, back hunched, head turned up, letting the tears run down his face as freely as his mother did. “I tried to make love to you, I sincerely did. But when I touch you,” he raised his hands before him and stared at them as though they were alien to his body, “there is something holding me back, something I cannot push past, some sort of invisible wall between us. I wish I could explain to you … or even to myself.” He bowed his head in defeat. “I want nothing more than to be able to make love to you, Layla … even now. Please understand I am not a man given to faith, but I did have faith in this marriage. I did have faith that I would be able to make you happy.”
I wrapped my arms about his waist and pressed myself to him. “This is my fault, Sameer. I shouldn’t have pushed you, not right after telling you about the pregnancy. I thought that maybe if you made love to me then it would be your way of forgiving me. I didn’t think you .. I just didn’t think. I’m sorry. Please …”
He jerked away and stood before me naked. His nails scratched at his head again. “No, Layla, you are not listening. I’m telling you, this has nothing to do with you. There is a wall that you cannot see—that I did not see till now—that is between us. You are so beautiful, Layla. You are … you read yourself
what Nate had to say. Men are attracted to you, but I … I am afraid of what’s happening here. I still don’t believe … but how else can I explain …” He dropped on his knees before me and gripped my face, the muscles of his arms and chest flexing. His eyes were wild in a way I’d not seen before, unhinged. The loss of control he so feared. Spit flew from his mouth as he spoke. “Look at me, Layla, look at me. Do I not look like a man to you? Do I not look like I can satisfy … whomever I please? So tell me why I can’t touch you—what is keeping me from touching you, Layla! Tell me!”
ONCE more THOSE back alleys, this time rushing through them with my husband.
Nothing had changed. Not the road, so narrow the taxi had to drop us off at the head, and not me, hidden in a black veil, and not those darting eyes. His now, not Amme’s.
I was surprised he had agreed to come along on this journey, but perhaps my husband felt there was nothing left to lose. He was, after all, the same man who had no patience for Allah and his scriptures, his expectations of us. And without Allah there is no demon, just as there is no darkness without light. Alim, the Arabic word for all-knowing, and one of the ninety-nine names of Allah. Seeking one out now, on our honeymoon, was like seeking out a marriage therapist. Counsel and insight, healing, not exorcism, was what we wanted. Desperation that leads one to count on a stranger, come what may.
Sameer stopped at a slim door and compared the house numbers to those scribbled in blue ink across the fine lines of his palm. A mol’lana from Thousand Lights Mosque had told us where to find him. Zakir was his name, the alim’s, and I realized the moment the mol’lana had said it that I had never known the name of any other alim.
Sameer gripped my arms and stared into my face with those piercing eyes. “Are you sure about those dreams? Are you sure he said he’d never let me touch you?”
I reached up and caressed his handsome face. “I want nothing more than for us to be happy, don’t you understand?”
He sighed before rapping on the door. Immediately, it opened and a frail child stood before us. She was wearing a Western-style dress, the hem of which came down to her knees, exposing ankles as thin as her wrists.
Sameer stared beyond her a moment, but there was no one else in the small stone foyer, so he crouched before her and gently said, “We have come in search of the alim.”
But she didn’t seem to hear him. She was gazing up at me with frightened eyes, as though I were some sort of demon, and I released the fabric of the chador from around my face and smiled at her.
A woman’s voice called from one of the inside rooms. “Haven’t I told you not to keep opening the door, Sadia? You know I can see what you’re doing from here. I can see you no matter where you are.”
The child did not move from the door. “A woman has come, looking for Bhabha.”
“Another woman? See, I told you not to keep opening the door. Aie, since you’ve been born, you’ve given me no peace. Ill-fated girl.”
Sadia hung her head.
I edged back into the alley. It was as though I had entered my own past.
She grabbed my hand and pulled me in, saying, “Amma, should I let her inside?”
“Now that you’ve opened the door, Sadia, she must be let in. mustn’t she? Tell her to wait in the angan while your bhabha finishes his prayers. Don’t invite her inside the house, Sadia. Tell her I can hear her footsteps so I’ll know if she tries to sneak in where she’s not invited. Remember that, Sadia, never invite them into the house or they’ll become real.”
The girl released my hand and walked to the center of the foyer. Sameer closed the door behind us and came to stand by my side. Beyond Sadia were two more doors, both covered in green curtains, and to my right was a curved staircase that led to the second floor. She stopped in the middle of one of the square stones and squeezed the sides of her feet together. Her hair was parted down the center and braided into two loops. Around her neck was a thin gold necklace. I expected a small pendant to read Allah, but there was nothing on it at all, just a thin gold line that might have been a stray strand of hair.
“Amma says you are to wait here while Bhabha finishes his prayers. She says she is happy you are visiting because we have not had visitors for many months, not since she changed the house numbers to confuse the demons.” She leaned toward us, her small feet remaining squeezed together, and whispered, “But the demons are inside.” She tapped her head before fleeing into one of the inner rooms.
HE WAS YOUNGER than I had expected. Not much beyond his early thirties, though with his heavy beard it was hard to tell for sure.
He did not invite us inside the house, nor to the room on the second floor, from where he had just emerged. He kept us standing in the stone foyer, while he sat on the bottom step, his long kurta draped over his knees, legs pulled in to his wide chest. From deep in the house, I could hear Sadia, sometimes screaming, sometimes laughing, and the mother singing the same tune over and over.
“What kind of help have you come seeking?” he asked, digging his fingers around inside his beard.
Sameer glanced at me. I shook my head. I had never been the one to reveal myself to an alim.
After a moment, Sameer stepped closer to Zakir and stooped down to him, then rose up again. Finally, he said, “We are having trouble with intimacy. No matter how much I want, I cannot get close to my wife. A wall,” he said, his hands rising to show this, but then they clasped together, unable to explain. “What I am saying, Zakir sa’ab, is that I need your help. You must show us a way through this … difficult situation.”
So there it was, our problems confessed without apology, and without all the hesitation and reluctance, the back and forth I was so used to. The abruptness embarrassed me further, and I stared at Sameer’s boots as I waited for the alim’s response. Certainly he would now want to know my part in all this, what I had done to push my husband away—repelled.
But Zakir remained silent, and, after a while, I glanced over at him and, without intending to, met his gaze. He didn’t avert his eyes. There was something about the way he watched me that I found very familiar, not my husband’s hypnotic, penetrating stare, but something I had been desperate to see for some time now. A look of tenderness that had drawn me to Nate, making me single him out. I covered my face with the veil.
Still, he kept his eyes on mine as he turned his palms up and began reciting prayers in Arabic, ones I had not heard before. When they came to an end, he took in a deep breath as though to begin others, but merely sighed and shook his head, his lips turned down over some regret. “I am sorry you two have come all this way, but this is not a case …” He stopped and turned to Sameer. “My powers are of no use; I think you know this.”
Sameer was quiet a moment. Finally, his head dropped and a hand rose up to massage his forehead, as though to smooth out the deep lines. “Let us go, Layla,” he said.
I stepped toward the alim, staring into his eyes as intently as I had into Nate’s. “You must help us, please, this is our honeymoon.” Then I remembered the money Amme had handed me at the clinic, some of which I had brought along, and added, “I will give you whatever you want.”
HE CAME TO our hotel room that night, arriving exactly when he said he would. Outside, the mild showers had turned into another torrential downpour, though he came into the room completely dry, not even carrying an umbrella. For all I knew, he could have been in the lobby for hours, waiting for this instant.
Just as I, up here, had been waiting for his arrival with an impatience I used to feel with Nate, wondering why it took him so long to follow me, onto the bus, into my room. When I was finally sure he would come, I had dressed for him, choosing what I wore with as much care as I did tonight for Zakir. What was it I was feeling, this strange collapse of time? Stepping back into my past, indeed, right into the very night I had for so long been driving away. The time had come for me to face my demon, drive him away.
Zakir showed up entirely clean-shaven, the skin on his face radiant,
and I hid a smile behind my duppatta. So he, too, had done some primping for this meeting. Now he looked even younger than I had originally thought, perhaps only in his late twenties.
Without glancing at me, he set the green bag he was carrying onto the round table and asked where I had last seen the demon. I was sitting on the bed, facing his back, the nape of his neck, and I wanted nothing more than to see those eyes, that tenderness.
“I think you may have misunderstood, Zakir sa’ab.” Sameer said, using his most formal Urdu. He kept himself by the balcony door, blowing smoke out into the wet night, and I could not help but think he was keeping as far from the alim as possible, perhaps wondering how he’d let me convince him of this in the first place. “The demon Layla sees,” he went on, “is one of the mind—perhaps even of her own making, her imagination. He visits her only in dreams.”
Zakir turned to him and crossed his arms over his chest. The collar of his loose kurta ran down the center of his chest and it opened slightly to expose dark hair. Hair on Nate’s chest, too, which I’d run my fingers through, memorizing him, our first and last night together. The alim said, “Demons don’t appear out of nowhere, do they, Sameer Bhai?”
Sameer’s gaze faltered, and he flicked the cigarette out the balcony door. Just the pounding of rain, no thunder at all. “No, they don’t,” he finally said, the lamppost behind him shedding a sickly yellow light that reminded me of Nafiza, the jaundice that was rising up her flesh.