And the World Changed

by Muneeza Shamsie

  Three people on her street—all Caucasian. Smoke belches and curdles from the site, subsumes the neighborhood in an acrid haze. She positions her mask over her face and walks north. Two people pass her and glare. Is she imagining it? On the first afternoon, a woman outside the deli said, These fucking Arabs! I don’t understand them. Then, looking at her closely, said, You’re not Arab, are you? I mean, you’re not Palestinian?

  At Houston Street she shows her ID to a South Asian police officer, forces a pinched smile. People cluster on either side of the blockade. As she crosses the street it feels as though she has left a country behind. Four men shove past her; one of them mutters something loud and incoherent.

  Earnestness is not what the city is about and she wears her sin too close to her skin. She flags a cab, 11th Street and 1st Avenue, please. She does not say Madina Masjid. The driver peers at her through the rearview mirror. He is brown and complicit. It is Friday, the day of communal prayer.

  The woman feels she is driving through a palimpsest. A new city, an altered reality has layered the streets on which she has not been permitted to walk for the past few days. The few people out of doors cluster around posters of the missing, reading their lives, learning the maps of their bodies, the birthmarks and tattoos that render them unique. She wonders about the people alive, the ones putting up the posters, going from wall to wall with tape, watching the sky for rain.

  The car stops at a red light. She cannot believe that the man who fucked her seven days ago hasn’t bothered to email, to call. She cannot believe she is thinking of him still and that she has thought more about him than at any other time, in any other year. She cannot believe she is becoming this sort of woman, the sort of woman who baffles her.

  A voice rasps through the window: I’m going to fucking kill Osama. I want you to know I’m going to get him.

  Okay, okay, very good, the driver says like he’s soothing a colicky baby.

  The man at the window looks at her, says: I’m telling this cabbie here I’m going to kill Osama. He has a scruffy orange beard, a thin pasty face. The light turns, the tires screech, the driver swears under his breath in Punjabi.

  Once out of the cab she wraps her hair in her dupatta. There are three photographers and two white journalists in denim skirts and bright stockings. There are no Muslim women in sight. But it is Friday, she thinks, they must be inside. She approaches a man in a mustard kurta-pajama, asks for the women’s entrance. He looks over the length of her body, tilts his head. Why? Do you want to pray? She disregards him and walks into the squat building. There is office carpeting, sheetrock walls; it smells like someone’s cooking. There are only men. One says, Yes? as if she were a foreigner. It is evident to them she is not a mosque-goer; she lacks the protocol.

  Where are the women, please?

  No women here, he says abruptly and opens the door to let her out.

  Standing in front of this mosque she feels stripped to the bone. Shameless; adulteress; wine-drinker: Her jeans seem to say this to the men, as do her boots and the fact that she is here alone on a day when the women are secure at home.

  You are here, she thinks, in this city, among things and people, vehicles and street vendors, but you cannot say a word. The sins of this life seem as flat as copper pennies ground under heeled boots, worthless as vanity, lost in dirt. There is a sudden newness to the street, there is a sudden stark separation of the soul from the world that sifts around and through the body. You are here, she thinks. When you awake tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, this is where you will be.

  RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP

  Soniah Kamal

  Soniah Kamal (1972– ) was born in Karachi and grew up in Britain, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. At sixteen, she moved to Lahore with her family and was educated at The Lahore Grammar School and The Lahore College of Arts and Sciences. She graduated with honors in the United States from St. John’s College in Maryland and received the Susan Irene Roberts award for her thesis, “On Prince Charmings, Frogs, Love Marriages, and Arranged Ones,” based on Vikram Seth’s novel, A Suitable Boy. Kamal’s short stories and essays have been published in the United States, Canada, and Pakistan, and in the anthologies Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality (Seal Press, 2006), Letter from India (Penguin Books India, 2006), and Neither Night nor Day (HarperCollins, 2007). She writes a weekly column, “My Foot,” in the Pakistani newspaper The Daily Times. She lives in the United States, has traveled extensively across the country, and has long wanted to write a road-trip story.

  “Runaway Truck Ramp” explores both the sensitivities and misunderstandings of cross-cultural communication and how preconceived ideas of The Other are both challenged by and can percolate into a relationship. The title evolved from Kamal’s fascination on the U.S. highways with the steep, runaway truck ramps by the side of roads that appear to her as if they were leading to the heavens, although, of course, the truck goes up, slowly slides back, and ultimately comes to a stop. Kamal equates the ramps with life itself, “which seems promising in the beginning but slowly one realizes that more and more one is living in the past, i.e. has reached the zenith of the ramp, and is now falling back into memory and what might have been.”

  • • •

  I was in the hospital’s chapel when he came in, said, “Excuse me, thought this was the smoking room,” and would have left had I perhaps not been howling, my blue mascara measled over my reddened face, a million crumpled tissues spilling out of my lap.

  “Are you,” he said, “okay?”

  I managed to nod and he insisted on getting me a cup of water, which I downed.

  “I can go or . . .” He sat next to me on the wooden pew right in front of the pale green-gowned Mary cradling a baby Jesus.

  “My mother just died.” I doubled over with fresh sticky tears. “Oh God, it’s sounds so dreadful, just saying it.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Three years coma-ridden,” I tried to focus on Mary’s gown chipped by her little toe, “but once we bury her there’s no hope of ever seeing her again and that’s what makes death, death and shit, it’s all too much.” I blew my nose and wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. “I keep feeling like I’m going to fall down and what if I can’t get up again?”

  “Smoke?” He held a hard pack between incredibly long fingers.

  “Under the circumstances,” I said and lit up.

  “Name’s Sulaiman.” He held the paper cup for me to ash in. “But if you can’t pronounce it just call me Sully.”

  “Michelle,” I said and because my mother had always maintained displaying polite interest in other people no matter what, I asked, “Doesn’t it offend you, having to change your name so it isn’t mispronounced?”

  “Offend no, feel sorry, yes,” Sully paused, glancing at the altar, “because there are so many names you people cannot pronounce.”

  We should have never met again, Sully and I, except that I’d left my Memoirs of a Geisha in the chapel (I’d been expecting to go on reading to Mom, not for her to die) and the front page was inscribed with my name and address and Sully, being a conscientious individual, decided to return it.

  I invited him into the kitchen where he sat on an orange bar stool, his long legs dangling on either side, his thighs spread wide. “A complete stranger could have gotten hold of it,” he said. I told him about my heart attack when I found out my Dad was cheating on my comatose Mom and that, after two hours of deliberation, I’d decided to allow Dad to be human and to regress into childhood myself.

  “I used to inscribe books in the sixth grade and somewhere that habit, along with jump rope, got lost and so I’m trying to reenact nice bits of my life before my heart takes off with it completely.” I pulled a pineapple magnet off the fridge door. “I want to stop being the girl who feels guilty laughing because her mother can’t. I want to learn to skate a perfect figure eight. I want to drive through . . . oh, Africa.”

  “I’m going to be
driving to California.”

  Dad was not happy with my plans.

  “You’re going on a three-day, possibly longer, trip with a complete stranger?”

  “Not complete.”

  Sully and I had been meeting almost daily for three months. When Mom fell ill I’d dropped out of college to be with her as much as possible and Sully, from Pakistan, had just graduated from UC Boulder and was waiting to hear back from job interviews. We both had plenty of free time to indulge in coffee or curries, matinees at a dollar cinema he hadn’t known was a block away from him, or tossing a Frisbee around in the park, or walking through Scandinavian Designs, pretending we were furnishing our house.

  He prefers bamboo. I like faux fur in oranges and greens. He likes tall porcelain vases. I like intricate crystal. He likes tea in a fine china cup with a saucer. I like good-sized mugs that weigh down my wrists. He could live in the ocean. I’m not that fond of water.

  He tells me that I unnerve him, the way I watch him, as if he were a bird so intent on following a worm that it doesn’t know there’s a cat waiting to pounce. And why do I stare at his fingers so?

  Because I’m in love with them—so long, so delicate, like white opera gloves—but I don’t say so. Instead I tell him I’m a writer and so I stare at everything for research purposes.

  I tell Erin, my best friend, he’s so interested in my work and always reads immediately what I give him and says it’s nice, but when Erin tells me reading is not the equivalent of caring, I just roll my eyes and remind her that she has yet to read what I gave her ages ago.

  Erin and Sully had met at a sport’s bar where we were watching the Denver Nuggets take on the Minnesota Timberwolves and were, as far as I was concerned, enjoying pitchers of beer and chips and salsa, watching the halftime game filler of America’s Stupidest Criminals, when Sully said, “I guess all Americans are good, but why are so many so stupid?”

  I laughed, and laughter was good for me but Erin, her hands curling around her beer mug as if it were a cross, said, “How can you just generalize like that?” She jabbed her tortoise shells up the bridge of her nose. “I mean, how do you dare?”

  “Don’t worry,” Sully said signaling the waitress for another pitcher. “My people—we’re all cunning and competitive and class and color conscious like crazy.”

  “I don’t care what—”

  “The whole world,” I said, kicking Erin under the table to shut up, “is fucked up,” but Erin didn’t shut up and, in fact, proceeded to gang up with Dad over my not going on any trip with Sully.

  That I lived at home still didn’t change the fact that I was old enough to do what I wanted, and anyway I told Dad that he’d be glad to have me out of his and his new wife’s hair. Though he said, “No, no,” I could see that I’d scored, and in the end the only condition I agreed to was that we’d take my car, since Sully had been planning to sell his in California anyway and could just as well do so here.

  So it’s Tuesday morning. Bright, sunny, crisp. I pick up Sully. He takes a look at the large moving trailer attached to my Jetta and claps. I glance at his one backpack and clap back.

  We stop for gas and munchies. I get cheese dip, ruffled potato chips, and a Dr. Pepper. Sully indulges in a pack of mild cigarettes and a bag of assorted suckers. By the time we hit the interstate he’s licked through a blueberry and a sour apple.

  “Are you going to miss Denver?” I ask.

  “No,” he says with purple lips and tongue.

  “Not even your friends?”

  “You asked about Denver.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “One’s a place,” he rips the wrapper off a cherry sucker, “the other are people.”

  “Don’t people make the place?”

  “They make it tolerable, I suppose.” He bites off a chunk the sucker. “My fiancée’s the romantic one.”

  Whenever he mentions his fiancée I feel a sudden sadness, like when I picture lynching trees or the unsinkable Titanic doing just that.

  “She sends me taped passages from books she’s read. And letters. Lots of letters.” He tapped his T-shirt pocket where I could make out the outline of a folded envelope.

  “She’s learning to bake an orange chiffon cake and plans to take Chinese cooking classes next. She’s—”

  “A cook?”

  Sully frowned. “Why do you women always put each other down?”

  I want to lean over and kiss him.

  “Do you like her?”

  “She’s demure. I like that.” He lights a cigarette. “Women here are . . . as if asking them to sew a button on my shirt is insulting their very integrity.”

  “Hey! Sew your own damn buttons.”

  “See.”

  “But why wouldn’t you sew?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” He takes a long drag, the long cigarette a mere stub between his straw-long fingers. “And I do sew my own buttons.”

  “Bet your fiancée can’t wait to sew for you.”

  “She won’t have to. Tell me,” he glanced at me, “what do you like? In a man.”

  “Shit!” I swerved.

  “Yeah?”

  “No, I mean, did you see that roadkill? I couldn’t even tell what it was.”

  Sully craned his neck out of the window, we’d left it far behind, whatever it had been, lying there in the middle of the highway, a fat, furry carcass, jumbled up.

  “It just makes me so sad,” I said as we left Colorado and entered Wyoming. “A hit and run no one could care less about.”

  I didn’t tell him that I liked in a man what I’d seen in him: glasses of water and book returns and sewing himself and his fiancée not having to, his swan-wing fingers, his profile, smooth curve after curve, not like some men with protruding foreheads, huge noses, or receding chins.

  He was engaged to be married.

  After the carcass we drove through Wyoming in silence, broken occasionally for a comment or two about how flat it all was and ugly, I said, and Sully expounded on beauty and the beholder, and I told him to stop being so righteous, ugly was ugly, had he ever had a heart attack?

  “How did you have yours?”

  I wanted to be harsh and unrelenting. I wanted to see black and white and fuck the gray . . . something about the animal, the way it just lay there helpless, dead, beyond help, like a coma, a child with cancer, or a teenager trying on a pair of Adidas and suddenly clutching her friend and saying, as I had to Erin, “Something’s wrong. My arm’s killing me, and my chest—I know my boobs aren’t growing”—even in pain and panic the need to be witty, funny, anything but a garbled mess.

  Only when we got to the ER and I was rushed past patients nursing hurts yet to be seen did it occur to me that I could die, that I could die before Mom, and that I didn’t want to die a virgin.

  Erin, who was going to be a virgin till marriage, took it quite well. She had one condition though. “You have to tell me every detail,” she said.

  I lost my virginity to Tyler Harris, Literature 101, as taken with Jackson’s “The Lottery” as I was. My, it felt good to kick him out the next morning from my dorm room. Tyler was peeved, perhaps because he hadn’t gotten to it first.

  “Damn, girl,” he said, “relationship’s supposed to last more than one night,” but my heart was too weak to take anything longer or stronger.

  Essence said I could walk into a room, take a survey, hone in, chat up, take the boy, and dispose of him afterward like well-chewed gum, we the women of the millennium, and that’s what I did: Take Charge. That’s the type I fell under in a Marie Claire quiz. No mooning around and pining for a guy for me, and so here was Sully, I found him attractive, and so why not, except I just couldn’t do my routine—pull him over, fondle him, or just say, “Wanna fuck?”

  I wondered if Sully had ever been sick a day in his life, wondered what he would do if a car smashed into him on a road and he lay there, fresh and shiny, his cockiness leaking out and people just passing by.


  Just passing by.

  In between chatter and silences we listened to tapes. I played everything by Tori Amos, and Sully, songs, he said, by back-home bands like Junoon and Vital Signs.

  He could understand Amos, but I couldn’t tell what his were on about and somehow it seemed unfair that, of the two of us, he of the third world should be the bilingual one. I told him so and he gave me a talk about identity, culture, bi-, tri- and multi-. That’s a well-rehearsed lecture, Erin would say, I said, but when Sully rolled his eyes I decided not to bring up Erin again because I didn’t want anyone rolling their eyes at her, no matter what.

  We stopped after seven hours of driving at a Best Western in Wyoming since Sully had run out of cigarettes.

  “Separate rooms,” he told the desk clerk, a young woman with bushels of brown hair streaming stiffly from her nostrils.

  I stood outside Sully’s bedroom door for a minute, then entered mine.

  We breakfast on burgers. According to Sully there is no other way. He eats with a plastic knife and fork, dipping the bite-sized bun, meat, lettuce, and tomato into a puddle of ketchup in a cardboard tub.

  I take a bite out of mine. Ketchup drips down my fingers. I lick the wedge between my thumb and index finger.

  “That’s very attractive,” Sully says. “Very sexy.”

  He looks at me as if I were a morsel to chew and spit out, or swallow and eventually expel anyway.

  “What’s wrong? You’re blushing.”

  I cannot lean over and kiss this guy this guy because dammit dammit he makes me shy.

  I call Erin from the restroom. This can hardly, she says, be love. Are you rolling your eyes, I ask. She says, why yes. I switch my cell phone off after that. I don’t want her calling to make sure that I’m not falling.

  Today Sully’s behind the wheel. His slinky fingers sink into the steering covered in fur. Sunshine glints off the length of his fingernails. I twine my hands around the headrest, yawn, and stretch. He whistles, looking at my straining shirt and denim skirt riding up over the tan lines on my thighs.