One morning, three days before her departure—shortly after calling Emirates Airlines to reconfirm her seat back to Chicago—Zahra set out for Seaview, where she walked every morning. She parked the car, strapped her camera to her side, and began to briskly walk along the seawall. As always, she found herself remembering her morning tea with Amita, their races to the subway station, and their evening walks through Kolkata’s Horticultural Gardens. Now that her break from Chicago, a city almost halfway on the other side of the world, was coming to an end, she thought of the long cold nights in the library with Juana and Rathna as they struggled to complete courses that seemed so distant from their respective homes in India, Pakistan, Mexico, and the escape they sought by exploring the city beyond their campus.
The monsoon wind increased and she braced herself against the spray that hit her body. It was high tide and rough waves covered almost all the silver gray sand. In less stormy seasons, Seaview looked different: In the evenings, the beach was filled with families who rode camels or horses, enjoyed tea, or simply watched the surf. But Karachi waters during monsoon season were always turbulent.
Zahra slowed down a little, toying with her aperture. She focused her camera lens on a little girl who sat cross-legged on the seawall. The girl had ratty hair and no slippers; as she stood up on the wall to balance herself against the wind and spray, Zahra clicked. Then, she put the camera in its case and turned around to greet the strong breeze herself.
As she walked along, Zahra drew out her mobile phone and texted Juana words she’d been repeating to herself ever since she had landed in Kolkata: Not coming back to States. Need to sit still longer. Will call you. With a deep sigh, she deposited the phone in her pocket, continuing to walk, at a slower pace.
She decided that later that evening, she would phone Juana and explain her decision. Juana would probably disagree and say: “Once you start something, you owe it to yourself to finish.” But maybe after Zahra explained to her about taking pictures, Juana might understand. Maybe then Juana would say, “It’s important to know yourself and your neighbors.” For Juana, from Mexico, knew all about her roots, closed borders, and neighboring countries at war. Zahra was certain that Juana would continue to fight for the rights of the undocumented, and that the protests against sending U.S. forces to Iraq would only increase. As for her graduate program, Zahra knew that there was nothing there that she hadn’t already learned in Kolkata or could not learn in Karachi.
As she watched the cresting waves of the Arabian Sea, three seagulls floated above her without moving their wings. Every now and then, when a gust pushed them in a different direction, they flapped their wings ever so gently to redirect themselves, then rested, floating again.
LOOK, BUT WITH LOVE
Uzma Aslam Khan
Uzma Aslam Khan (1969– ), a novelist, was born in Lahore, grew up in Karachi, and was educated at St. Joseph’s College and St. Patrick’s School. She earned degrees in the United States from Hobart and William Smith College and the University of Arizona. She has lived in Lahore since 1998 with her American husband, the novelist David Maine. She has taught literature and creative writing at the Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, and at The University of Arizona in Tucson, and has been a distinguished visiting writer at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in Honolulu.
Khan is the author of The Story of Noble Rot (Penguin Books India, 2001), and Trespassing (Penguin Books India, 2003), which was short listed for a Commonwealth Prize and tells of a brutal murder during Karachi’s ethnic violence in the 1990s. Her third novel, published in 2008, is entitled, The Geometry of God (Rupa). Her books have been translated into several languages, and she has written articles for various newspapers and journals worldwide, including Drawbridge, Counterpunch, and Dawn.
An extract from Trespassing, “Look, but with Love” points out the gradual destruction of age-old coastal communities in Karachi—a new breed of trawlers has destroyed the livelihood of traditional fisherman, including the protagonist, Salaamat. His search for survival leads him to Karachi’s bus workshops, which, together with the country’s trucks and buses, are largely owned by Pathans—tough, light-skinned migrants from the poor, northern, landlocked areas of Pakistan that border Afghanistan. At the workshops, the Pathans mock Salaamat as a dark-skinned man and as a foreigner. The excerpt lays bare Pakistan’s complicated national dialogue about migration and notions of homeland; and the ethnic conflicts that have beset overcrowded cities like Karachi, where every community fights for space.
The hub of an all male-underworld, the bus workshops of Karachi are made up of men who have left their families behind in villages. They express their memories, desires, and aspirations by painting the exterior of trucks and vehicles with vivid images of natural beauty, mythic characters, and complex calligraphy, including the words “Dekh, Magar Pyar Sey” (Look, but with Love), which gives the story its title and also becomes a metaphor for Salaamat’s obsession with a provocative dream woman painted on one of the buses who becomes a substitute for romance and desire in his real life.
• • •
APRIL—JUNE 1984
In Karachi, Salaamat learned new words fast. The sand of his village was replaced by granite, mud with cement, fish with scraps of rubbery mutton, and that too on good days. He smelled no salt in the air, only smoke and gases that made his chest burn. The moon was dimmed by lights a thousand times brighter than those the trawlers had burned. The brightest were for weddings: little colored bulbs strung from trees and rooftops. An entire house could light up like a private galaxy. Women did not sit outside homes, wedding or not, smoking. At first, he barely saw any at all. And there were ways to cross the rivers of asphalt without being hit by wheels.
For days after entering the city Salaamat sat on roadsides watching, stunned by the variety of wheels. On the beach, he’d seen weekend visitors ride down the shoreline on motorcycles, but he’d never known how many kinds of vehicles there could be. Now here they were, whizzing by him, vehicles each with names he longed to know. At a paan and tea stall (the tea was wretched but he learned to drink it) that hired him, he asked regulars to teach him. While painting the paan leaves with betel juice, he timidly repeated: Nissan, Honda, Suzuki, Toyota. It helped him forget how differently those around him spoke. Here he was not merely half-deaf but half-dumb. Avoiding speech, he quietly studied how the car models changed depending on the year, and formed opinions on which color best suited each style.
But what he loved most were the buses. He accidentally said so one day. The customers laughed, sucking on supari. “Every man dreams of having a car and you dream of buses!”
He explained his tastes to no one.
The buses were decorated as lavishly as boats for the annual fair at his village. They were boats that rocked on a solid sea. He studied the designs, drank in the rich colors, memorized the names of the shops that made them, all in Qaddafi Town. He learned this was near the eastern outskirts of the city, and as soon as he’d saved enough money Salaamat hopped onto one such bus.
The interior was pink and gold, and in each corner was a different picture: fish dancing; storks wading; a lofty crown; parrots with girlish eyes, preening. The tranquility of each scene contrasted with the activities of the commuters who spat paan juice everywhere, extinguished cigarettes on fish fins, blew their noses on crown jewels. The sea salt he’d been unable to smell since coming here ate into the paint and left the interior crusted with rust. The bus shook with its load; five men hung from each of its doors and many more stood on the fenders, thumping the bus when it was time to jump off. Salaamat kept asking the conductor for Qaddafi Town. Finally, the man grabbed his kurta cuff and pushed him out.
Knees wobbling, Salaamat entered the first bus workshop he passed. It was called: Handsome Body Maker.
Seven buses were parked inside, in various stages of construction. A large man stepped out of an office, gruffly asking what he wanted.
“I . . . I want work,” Salaama
t replied.
The man turned toward the office, shouting something incomprehensible. Two others appeared. The mighty one who was Handsome, opened his palm and shook it rudely under Salaamat’s chin. “Wah! We should thank the Almighty the foreigner has come to us!”
Only one of the others, bald as an egg, laughed. Touching Salaamat’s locks he said in a high-pitched voice, “A pretty boy like you should have no problem finding work.” He turned to Handsome, adding, “You are Handsome but he is Pretty.”
“But he’s so dark,” protested the rose-cheeked Handsome between chuckles.
“It’ll rub off!” said the bald man.
The third man was the smallest. He had a thin mustache and heavily oiled hair, and as yet had not cracked a smile. He squinted, “Where are you from?”
Salaamat tossed his head proudly and named his village.
“A machera!” the skinny man sneered. “No wonder he’s black.”
“There are no fish here, meri jaan,” said the bald man, wagging a finger. “Of course, if you’re clever, you can catch other things.”
Salaamat cleared his throat. “I’m clever and can learn a new trade. I ask only for food and lodging and will work as many hours as you need me to.”
The men looked at each other. Handsome said, “For an ajnabi you speak confidently.”
The bald man again fondled Salaamat’s locks. “Keep him. He speaks well.”
Handsome smacked his back and declared, “Then, Chikna, I’ll let you decide what to do with him.”
The skinny man interjected. “We can’t allow an ajnabi in here.”
“Since when have you owned this place?” Handsome retorted.
The skinny man said nothing, but Salaamat understood his gaze. This was the one to watch.
There were four doors behind the buses. Toward these Chikna now led him. Pointing to the small bundle in Salaamat’s hand, he asked, “Is that all you have?”
Salaamat nodded, looking closely for the first time at the seven buses. He stared, trying to understand their progression from one stage to the next. The first was just a skeleton—a brown mass of metal plates with four wheels. But the last was a glinting gem.
“That’s called a chassis,” Chikna pointed to the first. “The bus owner gives us that and we do the rest.” After a pause, he added, “How old are you?”
“About seventeen.”
Chikna shrugged. “I’ve been working here since I was seven. Maybe it’s too late for you.” He pushed open a door to a storeroom. The floor was strewn with painted strips of steel, chains, wires, paint cans, stickers, hubs, brushes, lights, a pile of crowns, and lopsided, childlike sculptures of eagles and airplanes. “You can sleep here.”
Salaamat dropped his bundle inside.
“There’s a toilet at the back,” Chikna continued. “Our families live in there,” he pointed two doors down. “You can eat with us, but we’ve had our lunch. Can you wait for dinner?”
Salaamat nodded. He hadn’t eaten but wasn’t going to say so.
Outside, more workers were arriving. “What can I do now?” asked Salaamat.
“Today, just watch. Tomorrow you’ll start with me.” He walked away.
Salaamat shut the store’s door and moved toward the buses. He wound his way around each, coming finally to the last. He then stood and took every detail in.
The exterior was painted a glittering magenta. Along the sides were nailed the strips of metal with garish floral patterns that he’d seen in the storeroom. The bottom edge of the bus was ringed around with chains ending in hearts. Wings figured elaborately everywhere: There were flying horses painted near the headlights and a sculpture of an eagle with a foot-long wingspan attached to the fender. The top wore a sort of palanquin, a bed of intricately worked metal, with the front decked in one of the airplane structures also in the store. The plane looked like a ship’s figurehead. Attached to one wing was a national flag, while on the other a sign read: PIA. Whoever painted the bus had not simply wanted it driven but sailed, and not simply sailed but flown.
But the best awaited him at the back. Here was the most beautiful woman Salaamat had ever seen. She had eyes the size of his palm, a sensuous nose, and plum-like lips half hidden behind a flimsy cloth held in a henna-dipped hand. On her right side was written, “Look. But with Love.” She did exactly that to him.
Salaamat was spellbound. The harder he stared the more certain he felt that she blinked, then blinked again. Her lips twitched in a smile she attempted to restrain, but failing that, she covered more of her face with the transparent dupatta.
“Ah, I see you’ve met Rani,” said a voice. Salaamat forced himself away from the picture. It was Chikna. “She’s a naughty one, I’d be careful. And don’t let Hero see you get too close. He’s very jealous.”
“Hero?”
“Him,” Chikna pointed to the skinny man who was painting two buses down. “You two already started on the wrong foot. And now Rani seems to find you as pretty as I do.” He tilted his head and raised a brow saucily.
“What does Hero do here?” asked Salaamat.
“He’s our painter. He made Rani. He loves everything he does. He’s in love with himself.” Chikna tweaked Rani’s cheek roughly.
Salaamat had to stop himself from fighting him for he could see Rani wince. “I want to make a bus just like this one,” he blurted. “I want to learn to make all these things. Including her.” Rani hid behind her cloth and Chikna threw his bald head back and laughed.
THE PRICE OF HUBRIS
Humera Afridi
Humera Afridi (1971– ) is a New York-based writer of Pakistani origin. She was born in Lahore, spent her early years in Karachi, and left Pakistan at twelve with her parents for the United Arab Emirates. She earned her degrees in the United States at Mount Holyoke College and Carnegie Mellon University, and was the recipient of a New York Times Fellowship at New York University where she earned an MFA in creative writing. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and several anthologies, including Leaving Home (Oxford University Press, 2001), 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11 (NYU Press, 2003), and Shattering the Stereotypes (Olive Branch, 2005). Currently, she is finishing her first novel and teaching at Western Connecticut State University.
She says that she “endeavors to capture the dissonance that arises from the incommensurable worlds” her characters inhabit. As a woman belonging to the Pathan Afridi tribe, she carries with her the consciousness that she, “a northern Pakistani tribal outcaste walks the streets of New York” while her ancestral home on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan is often described as the “world’s most dangerous place.”
Set in New York a few days after 9/11, “The Price of Hubris,” a version of which first appeared as “Circumference” in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, welds the crisis of the bombed city with the pain of a young Pakistani American woman who finds herself abandoned by her lover and regarded as an enemy in New York. In the story, the young woman is confronted with the post-9/11 prejudices that blame all Muslims for the attack on New York and consider all dark-skinned foreigners Muslims. Alienated from distant Pakistan, she makes an attempt to bond with fellow New York Muslims and faces yet another exclusion, this time in the mosque, where Muslim women are not allowed to participate in congregational prayers.
• • •
The woman has trained herself to wake up to precise images: aquamarine sea, limestone villas, sand the color of caramel custard, and a canteen crackling with newspapers and conversation. For a week now, she has awakened to this collage of all the beaches she has known.
Each morning the dream fills the barren plain that has been her mind since he left exactly one week ago; each morning the dream dissipates more quickly. She uncurls herself from her ajrak duvet. The yellow of pomegranate rinds and the warm reds of madder that had thrilled her when she bought the block-print comforter from a handicraft store are invisible now. She reaches for the remote and turns on her
radio. She has no television; she is still new here.
Less than a mile from where she lives there is a world destroyed, mangled, spitting fumes of burned steel, flesh, and plastic. The price of hubris, the radio announcer posits, based on a comment made by a right-wing televangelist. The woman slides her feet out of bed but keeps her head on her pillow and listens. Today has been declared a national day of prayer and mourning. The barricade north of Houston Street has been lifted. She is free to roam beyond the circumference of the five square blocks where she has been zoned for the last four days since the attack. Anxiety prickles at her, anxiety about this strange new freedom.
She has three tea bags left—she has been conserving her rations as there have been no deliveries below 14th Street—and she steeps one now in a white mug and slips on her jeans and prepares to venture beyond the frontier. She will buy her first newspaper; she will buy sugar. She searches for her ID card, removes the stud from her nose.
Her lover—though after this last time, could he really be called that?—said: We should leave it at the level of skin. No telephone calls, no email. This woman who had moved alone to the city three weeks ago cannot get her lover’s words out of her head. She mutters them, remembering the breadth of him against her, wishing she’d said them first. She slings her surgical mask around her neck, rummages in her closet for a dupatta. She is not devout, nor one to carry the baggage of tradition, yet she gropes around for a scarf to cover her hair.
She thinks of her husband. He will call soon from the home they had shared till three weeks ago. She will miss the call. On the fourth day after this world was sabotaged, she knows that the other man, the one with whom she has this arrangement, this mutual exercising of lust, will not telephone. Each time, in the days following his visit, the sensation of his presence dissipates, but now she does not let him out of her head. To do so will mean creating space for the horror outside.
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