by Ali Sethi
She said, “I’m fine,” and tugged correctingly at her sweater. The umbrella was like a prop.
He was standing there.
She said, “I lost my way. I didn’t know how to get back.” The way she said it, with the attempted poise, implied that she now knew the way.
He said, “I can show you.”
And she didn’t allow herself to say anything to that.
The walk back to the street was surprisingly short (she wasn’t lost—she had strayed only a few hundred yards from the main track), but the welcome twist of that encounter made the following few minutes pause and stretch with new significance. His explanation was credible: he had been browsing the woods for pinecones and fallen branches to burn later that night in a bonfire—his friends were hosting a Tambola night at their hotel, a game like gambling—he said it was harmless and a lot of fun and pointed to the venue, a circular lawn enclosed by low white walls that emerged into the clearing of the street. So they weren’t far from each other, and the proximity was almost poetic, but also pressing, since it immediately raised the question of what she should do next. She didn’t want to appear too keen and decided to moderate her responses: she listened cautiously and then approvingly to the sound of her own voice as it hummed and provided agreement to the things he was saying. She was listening but barely: the fact of him was more engaging. His eyes were following his feet on the ground. She was trying not to look at him, and the effort made her rigid; even her small laughs were jagged, laughs of concession and not the casual collusion she was trying to suggest. She took the leap: she asked for his name. He said his name was Sami Shirazi. He said it like that, the full thing, and it was as if a schoolboy had stood up to say it for a teacher in a classroom. Then he told her that he was from Lahore but had lived for some years in Risalpur, which was a few hours’ drive from here—he had been enrolled there in the Air Force Academy. And she thought it explained the steady, unthinking way he had of asking questions and then answering them; she made a funny face; he saw it and responded with a blink—an unexpectedly difficult moment in which they found themselves facing each other—and she looked away and repositioned the dupatta around her shoulders, still walking, and he began to provide a detailed review of the things his training had involved: he listed the various positions and titles in order of increasing importance—pilot officer, flying officer, then flight lieutenant, then squadron leader—and she heard in them a swishing speed, already out of reach, like the far-off peaks she could see on the horizon.
“What are your views on the army?”
He was surprised.
“This general and his chappies,” she said, growing into the role.
“Oh,” he said, “they’ll go away.” He said it lightly, with a short dismissing frown and a nod.
“You think so? I don’t think so. He’s been here for two years. And what have you done about it? Nothing. Have you seen his face? He lies through his teeth: elections today, no, tomorrow, no, no, the day after that . . .”
She was walking faster.
And he laughed in agreement, a laugh of surrender.
She said, “Do you think they’ll hang him?” And even as she listened and appeared to solemnly consider his answer, she was aware of the impulse that made her follow the movement of his mouth, the way his upper lip protruded slightly and the faint slanting hair above it; and she was ashamed because she wanted to kiss it, and was ashamed now for reasons that she couldn’t identify and separate and then consider on their own, each with a different weight.
She said, “I am so ashamed. I can’t even think about it. I don’t know why we don’t do anything.”
They had slowed down. He was walking and looking at his shoes, frowning with the intensity that suggests an inner conflict.
“That’s my house,” she said, and explained that it wasn’t hers, she was only staying there for a few more days and then she would go back.
“Where?” he said.
“Karachi.”
“Oh,” he said.
They were standing outside the open gate.
His hands went into the pockets of his trousers. “So come by,” he said, and gave a quick nod that sent his hair falling into his eyes, and then a toss that sent it back. “Bring your friends, anyone you like, it’s a family crowd. We’re having a band and there’ll be dancing.” He enacted a scurrying away with his fingers and smiled helplessly, as if to say that dancing, though unnecessary, was a not uninteresting pastime.
But she said nothing and went inside.
She told Nargis in the evening. They went into the bedroom and Zakia said,
“I have to tell you something.”
Nargis said, “What?” and crossed her arms over her chest. She was smiling to show that she couldn’t be surprised.
Zakia told the story. And it got reduced as she told it, became clear in new ways, and ended without a conclusion. She saw that nothing important had happened, that the consequentiality was a feeling and not real.
Nargis found in it a small reflection of her own dilemma and said, “You should go. I don’t see why you shouldn’t. No one should be able to stop us from doing these kinds of things, you know.”
The lawn was bright with lights. They were strung around the trees in hoops, in jagged lines along the walls, and culminated in two towering lamps with bent necks that watched over the entrance like a pair of proud parents. The circular tables on the lawn were filling slowly with married couples who were now having to make conversation with one another, an imposition necessitated by the rigid fact of eight chairs to a table. The children were more direct about their feelings: those who got along flashed across the grass in squealing trains, and the outcasts returned to their parents with complaints.
Zakia was standing in the ballroom near a cavernous fireplace, in which there were logs but no fire. She was wearing an embroidered shawl over an outfit that belonged to Nargis, a silk shirt and a sweater and jeans, which she’d needed only a belt to wear, although the feeling was still one of heightened physicality. She was comforted by the shawl. It made her stand with her chin slightly raised, as though all embroidered-shawl-wearing women were cold and proud. Behind her the jaunty encouragements of the jazz band continued; there were some people in the ballroom but not enough to start the dancing. She had arrived on time, acting out of a new sense of duty, and had felt an early elation when she encountered him on her way inside.
“Hello!” she had said. She was smiling with her teeth.
“Oh, hi!” he said, but had gone on running.
“Where are you going?” she had cried after him, and allowed herself the note of a whine; the distance between them had rapidly increased and was paradoxically liberating.
But he had shouted, “Just setting up!” and had then disappeared behind a wall.
Now she stood beside the unlit fire and felt foolish.
“Zakia!”
It was Nargis. Moeen and the painter and another girl they had met at the party were with her. Zakia saw that they were smiling at her and waving, and she knew from this that Nargis had told them and brought them here for the show.
She kept smiling.
“Hi!”
“Hi!”
“Hi!”
“Oh, hi!”
She was kissed with cheeks on cheeks. Nargis kissed her, the painter kissed her, the other girl kissed her and then Moeen shook her hand. It was quick and right.
“Where is he?” demanded the painter.
Nargis was grinning.
Zakia said, “O God,” and flickered her eyes and made a face but also kept the smile to show that she did not feel what they all thought she did.
They were waiting.
She said, “He’s outside.”
“Who’s he with?” said the painter.
“No one,” she said.
“Oh, she wants him,” said the painter, and looked away as though the game were up.
“Stop it!” said Nargis to the painter, and s
macked his arm.
They laughed.
Her smile became rigid.
Moeen said, “Drinks?” to puncture the swelling silence, and at once they all agreed and were freed into chatter.
Moeen came back and said, “They don’t have it here.”
The painter said, “What?”
And the other girl said, “I don’t believe this!” in a high, tremulous voice and with a delight in her disappointment.
“They don’t have it here,” said Moeen again. He was genuinely surprised.
Zakia said, “It’s banned,” and wanted also to say that this was not the East Coast of America.
“That’s the whole bloody problem!” said the small little thing with the high voice, and Zakia thought that she could tie her up and punish her and experience a new kind of pleasure.
“I’ll go to your house and get it,” said Nargis practically.
And the painter said, “Don’t you touch my bartender.”
After that the people did come. And the dancing began. Nargis returned to the crowded ballroom and had to push and squeeze past the bodies. Zakia was standing with the others in a circle, which extracted a commitment but also gave protection. Nargis produced a small plastic bottle from her handbag; the liquid inside it was clear.
“Ooh,” said the painter, and rubbed his palms.
“Shall we?” said Nargis.
They opened the bottle and drank from it.
It came to Zakia.
“Come on,” said the painter.
Nargis said nothing.
And the other girl laughed and said, “Don’t force her,” and then looked away in a kind of dare.
Zakia took the bottle, held it, watched it, put it to her mouth and closed her eyes.
“She’s doing it!” cried the painter, and clapped.
She scowled. The taste was vile but the heat inside was new.
Nargis said, “Take it from her.”
The painter said, “Give it here!”
And it became a joke in which she was newly acquainted with alcohol and they were all oldly acquainted, and they were trying to take the bottle from her and she wasn’t letting go.
“Give it here!” cried Nargis, and laughed.
And Zakia drank more of it.
Then she was dancing with them in the circle, and then outside the circle, dancing first with Moeen, a friendly little dance, and then an extravagant dance with the painter, who held her and danced slowly and majestically, with exaggerated swaying movements, and the look on his face was a mock-serious one that she first found funny and then sad; and then she was laughing through her tears and they were laughing with her, and she knew she was separate from them but also had nowhere else to go, so that crying became the only way and swept over her and was fulfilling.
“Excuse me,” she said, and went past the bodies.
And they didn’t stop her.
She cried until she was outside, beyond the warmth and back into the cold. She saw that he was sitting on a bench in the darkened patio, smoking a cigarette that he now threw away.
“I was waiting,” she said.
In the dark her tears were invisible.
“I came to find you,” he said. “You were with your friends.” And then he said, “I thought you might not like it . . .”
She walked over to the bench and lowered herself carefully into the place beside him. She sat very straight, with her back stiff and her hands folded for stability in her lap. The chairs in the garden were empty. The people had all gone, but the lights in the hoops around the trees and in the jagged lines along the walls were still on.
She spent five more days in the mountains. And on the seventh day, when they were returning in the same car, Zakia tried to explain to Nargis what it was like.
“It’s this feeling,” she said, and found that she could say no more. She knew it well enough by now to recognize the things it did to her.
“It’s love,” said Nargis.
That was sudden and frightening.
“Not yet,” said Zakia.
“I hope not,” said Nargis.
“Why?”
“Because,” said Nargis, and shifted around complicatedly in her seat, “there’s a price to pay for that kind of thing.” She was implying that she herself had paid that price.
“I’ll pay it,” said Zakia.
And Nargis said, “Good. I’m glad. That’s the right approach. I’m really glad you’re thinking like that.”
The car took them down to Islamabad, and from there a plane took them up in the air and south to Karachi. On the way Zakia thought about Sami, thought about meeting him again, then thought about her parents and decided that there was nothing to tell them yet.
At home her parents were waiting. Mabi was in the kitchenette, Papu was on the balcony. Her younger sister, Shazreh, was not at home. She was out with friends. But it was late. Zakia couldn’t imagine Mabi letting Shazreh stay out that late. She wondered if they had changed in her absence.
She deposited her suitcase by the door and was struck by the smallness of the suite. Seven days in the mountains, in that large house, with open spaces everywhere, had shown this to be a confinement. She went to the balcony and parted the billowing curtains. Papu was sitting in his wrought-iron chair and reading a book under the burning light.
“I’m back,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, and looked up briefly from his book. “Do sit down.”
She took the chair next to him. In the silence the breeze was like an intimation.
Mabi came to the balcony and sat down on the third chair. They were all here now, all except Shazreh.
“Where’s Shazreh?” she said.
“That’s what we have to talk about,” said Papu, and tossed his book on the table. “You tell her,” he said, meaning Mabi.
Zakia’s first thought was of a hospital.
“Why should I tell her?” said Mabi. “She’s your daughter too.”
It wasn’t a hospital.
“Fine,” he said, and cracked a knuckle. “Your sister has run off.”
“Run off?” She looked from one parent to the other. It was too good to be true.
“Not run off,” said Mabi, who had prepared these words for the world, and did not have the ability to distinguish between that world and the members of her own family. “She is with a man. A man who wants to marry her. It’s been going on for quite some time, apparently.”
“Who is he?” asked Zakia. She was surprised because Shazreh hadn’t given her the slightest indication.
“I don’t know his name,” said Mabi, though it was unlikely that she didn’t.
“His family is in Canada,” said Papu.
“Well,” said Zakia, “that can’t be bad . . .”
“Good or bad, I don’t know,” said Mabi. And she sighed.
Zakia was tempted to leave. But here she only had her room. Her time with Sami was suddenly imperiled and she felt she had to tell someone.
“I say we get them married,” said Papu with an awkward movement of his fingers that seemed to enact the elopement as well as parental absolution.
“What are you talking about?” said Zakia. “She’s still at university. She has to finish her degree.”
“Degrees don’t matter,” said Papu.
“Yes, they do,” said Zakia.
“Didn’t do anything for you,” said Mabi.
She felt the wound and then the numbness. The life she had glimpsed was lost.
She got up from the chair and went inside, back into her room.
Nargis graduated in June and came back to Karachi. She was going to marry Moeen. Her parents tried to dissuade her, failed, and disowned her. She moved with some of her possessions to his house in Lahore.
Zakia went to stay with her.
“How are you?” she said.
“Oh, I’m fine,” said Nargis. She was living in the upstairs portion of a small house, in a room that had a large, square opening in one
of its walls for an air conditioner that was on its way. The leaves and bark of a tree outside were visible through the opening.
“Have you talked to them?” said Zakia. She meant Nargis’s parents.
“No,” said Nargis, and it was difficult for her to say it but not as difficult as it would have once been. “I haven’t.”
Nargis had hardened. It made Zakia nervous.
“Will you?” She wanted to ask the right questions, the old soothing questions, the ones with the obvious answers.
“No.”
They were quiet. It was afternoon, and the sounds from outside were of the birds in their nests.
Then Nargis said, “It’s not a free country.”
And Zakia sighed.
But Nargis said, “It’s not,” and went on to describe the new punishment for thieves: they would have their hands severed by special surgeons, who had to know the extent of the amputation and the location of the incision, whether it would go up to the wrist or not. Nargis said she had learned about it from a woman she knew, a lawyer who was trying to challenge the new laws in court. “She’s an NGO type,” said Nargis. “They only talk about politics.”
Zakia said, “You’re making friends here.”
Nargis put out her cigarette in the ashtray and said, “I suppose I’ve made friends. I’m trying to make them. They’re all Punjabis here.” And she smacked her forehead and delivered a line in a Punjabi accent, which was crude and comical. Then Nargis said, “When are you going to meet him?”
And Zakia said, “Tonight.”
“Are you going to his house?”
“No, no,” said Zakia. “His mother is there.”
Nargis said, “It’s good like that. Stay away from the in-laws.” And she described some of her own encounters with her mother-in-law, who resented interference but also complained when Nargis didn’t show an interest.
“You can’t win,” said Nargis. “That’s my conclusion.”
Zakia sighed again, as though she understood. Her own view of Nargis’s new life was tinged with fascination.
She said, “What should I wear?”