by Ali Sethi
“That’s always good,” said Tara Tanvir. “Simple guys are so much better at the end of the day.”
Samar Api was watching her window.
The jeep went past the houses and the lit windows, gathering speed as it climbed the bridge, and left the billboards and the blinking clusters behind them to the night.
“You know something?” she said.
I said, “What?”
“When the car goes on the bridge?”
“Ya.”
“It’s like everything becomes amazing. You know?”
I had no recollection of the experience.
She turned on her side in the bed and said, “It’s like you see everything at once, the houses and the sky and the trees and the long line where the sky meets the houses. Then you roll down the window and the wind is in your face, and the music is playing, and it’s like you’re so high. You know?”
I said, “Ya, ya.”
She sat up, placed her palms on the mattress, then stood up on the bed. She lifted the hem of her T-shirt and placed her finger on a small round bruise.
“He hit you?”
“No, dumbo,” she said, giggling, and then came down to whisper it in my ear: “It’s a love bite.”
She went out a few times a week, and not always with Tara, whose name was still associated in the house with truancy and the other unnamed outcomes of excessive freedom. So she said she was going to have her threading done at the beauty salon, and required Barkat to fetch her in two hours. And she signed up for afternoon classes with a mathematics tutor who taught in the Lyceum building on the canal. Once she had to go out for a friend’s birthday party at a restaurant, and there was no one in the house to take her; Daadi had sent Barkat in the car to find a plumber in Canal Park.
She called Tara’s house but Tara had gone out with her mother. The Far Eastern maid gave no time for calling back.
There was no one now.
She was desperate.
I called Isa and asked him if he wanted to go out for a drive.
They came, Isa and Moosa, and waited in their Swift in the driveway.
“Thanks so much, you guys,” said Samar Api. She was dressed for the birthday party: she wore black jeans and a black sweater with no sleeves. Her hair was straightened and fell to her shoulders and from there curled upward. She leaned in repeatedly from the back of the car to give directions to the restaurant, and Isa complied unquestioningly. Moosa was sitting beside him in the front and had the look of someone who is aware of being watched by many people.
“Smokes?” he said after she had gone. The drive was already a success, his role in it undisputed.
“She’s a nice girl,” said Isa. “We should all go out together, like in a group.”
The holy month of Ramzaan arrived that year in spring. Daadi went to the utility store in Main Market and bought a month’s worth of supplies, tins of Dalda cooking oil and heavy plastic sacks of sugar and salt and ground black pepper and chaat masala powders that came in colorful cardboard packs. An afternoon was spent stocking and stacking the many tins and sacks and boxes in the kitchen cupboards. An electric water boiler and a frying pan with a stainless-steel lid came from Al-Fatah; the pan was kept in a cupboard, but the boiler, which came with a one-year warranty agreement written out in many languages on a pamphlet, was stationed for convenience above the fridge, next to the tea bags and the jar of powdered milk.
At night there were sounds from the mosques, some nearer than others, indecipherable murmurings that overlapped continually, like the work of an untiring nocturnal species.
At twilight Daadi awoke. She switched on a lamp. With her feet she felt for the slippers by her bed, found them and wore them, and went into the bathroom to perform the ablutions. She said her prayers in the dressing room, then made her way across the veranda to the kitchen, where she ate the sehri meal in silence with Naseem. They were the only ones fasting. (Barkat claimed to suffer wind-related pains in his stomach and believed that they exempted him in his old age from observing the injunctions.)
At school the canteen stayed open. But it was sparsely occupied: the eaters came in sprinklings and ate their lunches quietly, away from the hordes of fasters, who played fiercely and competitively in the grounds and then went back to their classrooms flushed with thirst, seeking to make impressions on their teachers, who were mostly female and took note.
Fasting—A Pillar of Islam.
It was a test we had to take in class. The higher marks went to those who had written from direct experience.
“This is absurd,” said my mother. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to see the principal.”
“No!”
“Why!”
“You can’t!”
“But why?”
“Just no, you can’t, please, you can’t . . .”
The sun drowned for the day and Daadi went to stand in the driveway. She walked along it once, twice, then continuously and at a pace that gave the activity the appearance of sustained contemplation. She stopped now, looked up at the sky, and heard the climbing call of the siren that signaled the end of the day’s fast.
The clattering kitchen cart brought food: samosas and pakoras and jalebis on plastic plates, fruit chaat and dahi ballay in bowls. But Daadi broke her fast in the old way: with a pinch of salt, a glass of water and a single shriveled date.
The television was roused.
And the visitors arrived: Suri-Saaji, Hukmi-Shafto, Isa-Moosa, Aasia- Maheen. I came from my room and Samar Api emerged from hers. My mother was the last to arrive and brought descriptions of the traffic on the streets outside, oddly unfamiliar after years of driving in the city with the range of people’s endurances.
“Where are you going?” she said.
We were going out.
“But where?”
I said, “To a restaurant.”
“But there’s food here,” she said, and indicated the things laid out on the table. “It’s been made for you. It doesn’t look nice when somebody goes out of their way to feed you and you say that you want to all go out instead.”
“Leave them,” said Daadi.
We went to Pizza Hut. It was a famous American restaurant that had opened recently on a quiet road, named after a war hero, that had since become an exceedingly popular place to open restaurants. We were going to eat the iftar meal that consisted entirely of pizzas. At the restaurant Tara Tanvir was going to meet Isa and Moosa for the very first time. And she was bringing her cousins Tina and Sara, who had arrived from America and were staying with her until the end of Ramzaan.
The parking lot outside the restaurant was full; we had to park between two trees in a service lane. Isa locked the car and mentioned the possibility of a car burglary, a thing that was on the rise these days, especially in residential areas.
But the restaurant had seated crowds at the tables and songs playing from hidden speakers and smoky frosted windows. The paintings on the walls showed men in rowboats with their mouths wide open, ostensibly in mid-song, though the artist had rendered them in a way that suggested they were going Aaaah for a doctor.
Samar Api said we had seats in the smoking section, which Tara Tanvir and her cousins had already occupied.
“Nice . . .” said Moosa, looking around and nodding.
“Hi, you guys,” said Tara Tanvir, and introduced her cousins. “This is Tina and this is Sara. They’re here from California.”
Isa and Moosa were nodding. The specificity was tantalizing.
“Hi,” said Tina.
“Hey,” said Sara.
They were quiet for most of the evening.
Tina, the older one, had bright brown hair that fell over her forehead in a fringe, and two conspicuous front teeth that appeared in a persistent glint between her lips, giving her a look of being constantly on the verge of comment, while Sara, the younger sister, was darkly pretty, and sat with her shoulders hunched and her hands tucked mysteriously under the table. She made no contrib
ution to the conversation and seemed instead to watch it with amusement, as if making notes for a re-enactment. When the pizzas finally came each girl took one slice and kept it on her plate.
“You guys not hungry or something?” said Isa. It was the first time he had spoken directly to the sisters.
The question threw Tina into a turmoil. “No,” she said, “it’s not, like, I’m not hungry or something”—she shuddered to resettle the fringe—“even though like, I’m not super-hungry, like hungry-hungry, but more like: who knows what’s inside that . . .”
“God knows,” said Sara, and widened her eyes nightmarishly.
For most of the time Tara Tanvir talked out of a need to fill the newness, though she was also genuinely enlivened by the presence of Isa and Moosa, who were unaccustomed to her chaotic charm and also, as she had earlier noted, too young for her liking; but they formed the kind of audience that by its very attentiveness makes room for a performance to take place, giving even the unintentional aspects a weight and meaning.
“We should go now,” said Samar Api. She had been waiting.
“Oh,” said Tara Tanvir, who wasn’t finished yet.
“Tara and me,” said Samar Api, “we have to go photocopy our notes.”
“Okay,” said Tina.
Sara said nothing.
“Ya,” said Tara Tanvir.
“Ya,” said Samar Api.
They sought their handbags.
“You guys?” said Tara Tanvir. “Be nice to my cousins. Take them out or something. We’ll meet you guys back here in a while.”
Tina wanted to know how long it would take them.
“Not long,” said Samar Api. “We’ll be back in an hour or so.”
We went for a drive. Isa drove the car and Moosa sat beside him in the front, and I was seated in the back between the sisters, both of whom sat facing their windows.
Isa lit a cigarette and passed it to Moosa.
Sara asked to use the lighter. She received it unthankingly and began to run her finger through the flame.
“Cut it out,” said Tina.
Sara didn’t.
“Cut. It. Out.”
“Make me.”
We feared that this would now happen in the car.
After a while Sara said, “Anyone have pot in this car?”
“Like what kind of a pot?” said Moosa. It was his turn to attempt optimistic contact with the aliens.
“No, dumbass,” said Sara. “I mean pot, like weed, like grass. You understand?”
Moosa didn’t.
“You got that?”
Moosa was overwhelmed.
“Yes? No? Yes-no-yes?”
“Ignore her,” said Tina. “She can be a total bitch.”
“Hey!” Sara had felt this to be a distorted portrayal of the kind of person that she was.
“You so are,” said Tina.
“Whatever.”
“Bitch.”
“Freak.”
We drove to the Shadman housing colony and parked outside a dimly lit house that belonged to a boy who was famous among Isa’s friends for his drugs. Isa and Sara went inside the house, and Moosa and I waited in the car with Tina, who said she didn’t feel like answering questions about life in California. So we listened to music in the car until Isa and Sara returned with their eyes red, and we drove all the way back to Pizza Hut, where Tara Tanvir and Samar Api were waiting without their photocopied notes.
“He’s getting all possessive,” she said.
She was sitting on her bed. She had locked the door and switched on the bedside lamp.
“It’s interesting,” she said, and began to tell the ceiling: “Like today he goes I don’t want you wearing jeans. First I didn’t get it, I thought he was joking. But then he got all serious. He goes no, you can’t, buss, I’ve said it now and you can’t. I was like, Oh my God, Jamal, calm down! Ek dum, he’s all quiet-type. He goes”—she couldn’t help smiling—“he goes you don’t understand how I feel. I was like well well well, look who’s talking!” She sat up and put the knuckles of one hand on her hip and held out the palm of the other. “I mean then he should tell me how he feels, you know?”
I agreed.
“I guess boys are like that,” she said, and sank into the pillows behind her. “Girls are just not made that way. Girls just talk and talk. Even when there’s nothing to talk about they talk. I guess God has made them like that for a reason. It’s written in the Quran, man! Look at nature: everything is there for a reason; birds and bees and flowers are all so different from each other . . .” Her hands were flying around in demonstration, as though nature with its abundance of miracles had come into her room.
Then she said, “Zaki? Do you think it’s wrong that I’m like all this in Ramzaan?” She motioned to herself and to the air around her.
I said, “It’s possible.”
She said, “I don’t think it’s wrong if you’re serious, like if you’re thinking five years down the road . . .”
“That’s true,” I said.
“You think so?”
“I think so.”
“Heina?”
“Ya, ya.”
“I also thought so.”
“Ya.”
“Ya,” she said, and continued: “It’s like everything depends, you know? Like a few days back I was thinking all these thoughts, like what if nothing happens in the end, what if something bad happens, khudanakhasta, and it doesn’t work out”—it was difficult to face—“between me and Jamal”—she had said it—“and we don’t get married and all. Then it’s all wrong. Then it’s always been wrong. And all of a sudden I was so scared, I was like Allah Mian, please, please let it work out”—she was rocking herself with her hands pressed together—“and then sometimes, like right now, I just sit back, and I look at the situation”—she motioned frankly to the situation, which was here now—“and I think: do I really want this? Is this how I want to do stuff? Like sneaking out and all. But then I can’t do anything else either. Like there’s no way I could tell my mother. Jamal’s parents have to go and propose properly and even then I can’t tell my mother that I’ve been like all this. But then I think it’s worth it, because it’s me who has to make it work out in the end.”
I said, “Do you love him?”
She was surprised. “I mean obviously, Zaki . . .”
“Do you guys like . . .”
She couldn’t see it coming, though she knew it was.
“Like . . .” I did a tumbling of the hands.
“Obviously not, Zaki! What kind of question is that? I mean he wants to, probably, I don’t know, and in any case I wouldn’t let him, no, Zaki, obviously not.”
The following week she was caught.
She and Tara were returning to the tuition center in Tara’s jeep, returning before the two hours allotted to her math lesson had ended and it was time for her collection.
But Naseem was already parked in the lane outside the building.
They saw each other emerging from unexpected cars.
“Get in,” said Naseem. Her door slammed. She was breathing through her nostrils alone, back and forth with effort, from the shock and the outrage that follows an exposed deception.
Barkat started the ignition.
“Tuition,” said Naseem. “Going to my tuition. To study.”
Samar Api tried to speak.
“Not a word,” said Naseem. “Not a word to me now. There is no need.”
From her own car Tara Tanvir was watching the scene with curtailed involvement, even as the cars drew apart and began to fade from view.
“Naseem,” said Samar Api.
“No,” said Naseem. “You will answer to those who wait for you at home, those who pay for your tuition and pay us to drop you and fetch you and wait for you outside in the heat. No need to tell us anything—we are only servants.”
They came home and she followed Naseem into the kitchen.
“Don’t talk to me,” said Naseem.
>
Barkat shut his eyes and shook his head despairingly, and raised a finger of silence to his lips.
But Samar Api lingered in the kitchen with explanations.
“Leave,” said Naseem. “Leave now or I will go inside and tell on you.”
She returned to her room.
“Bloody Naseem.”
I asked to know what had happened.
She told me. “I mean it’s madness. She’s a bloody servant, she should know her place, you know?” It was her turn to be indignant, her turn to be deceived.
“She saw you?”
“Ya, but so what!”
“I’m just asking . . .”
“Ya, but why are you taking her bloody side?”
“I’m not taking her bloody side!”
“Okay, fine then, fuck off, okay?”
And she went into the bathroom and unleashed the shower, and stayed inside for a long time in the hiss.
By evening she had decided to apologize.
She went to the servants’ quarters at the back of the house. In the dank courtyard, in the spreading dark, Naseem was squatting by the tap above the drainage and clobbering a soaped shalwar in the water. The latrine door behind her was lit from within; there was a flushing sound, and Barkat emerged with his face wet. He stood by the door and wiped his face with the hem of his kameez.
Naseem looked up and saw her. She returned to the washing.
“Sorry, Naseem.”
Naseem didn’t respond. She was no longer angry. She was washing and rinsing her clothes with resolve.
Barkat came forward with a chair. He settled its delicate legs on the floor, then settled himself carefully on the seat. He leaned back in it, then leaned forward and entwined his fingers.
He said it was not his place, being a servant, to speak on an occasion that did not involve him directly. But he would speak today in his capacity as an elder, an elder speaking to someone who was still a child.
Back in her room, her confidence restored, Samar Api asked to use the telephone and brought it into her room to call Jamal.
But he already knew. Tara had called him in the afternoon and told him about what had happened at the tuition center. He said Tara was distraught too, and anxious to know what had happened when Samar Api went home.