by Ali Sethi
The ricksha entered the high black gates of Tech Society, and the cars were instantly visible. They were parked in rows outside a small steel gate, which was open and led into a house: the men were standing in a circle in the garden; the women sat on benches on the patio. The house was moderately sized, the walls painted an unassuming beige and lined along the top with flowerpots, which seemed to be the only attempt at decoration.
A slim girl in a black shalwar kameez was going around with a roster. She was tall and dark, had her hair in a small bun and wore a locket that touched her collarbones and slid from side to side when she moved.
“Forms,” she said, and held them out. She was chewing the gum in her mouth with indifference; her eyes looked away and her mouth made a bubble, which grew until it popped.
A name was called. Three women rose hurriedly from a bench and were led away by the tall girl.
Samar Api sat on the abandoned bench. We could hear the surrounding conversations, the expressions of curiosity and willingness. One woman was starting to tell another about her divorce, staring with frank, bloodshot eyes at her listener; another sat with her elbows on her knees and swayed herself on the bench, her face smothered in her hands. A man stood behind her and looked out onto the lawn; a woman sat next to her on the bench and stroked her back.
“Zaki? Do you think it’s wrong?”
Her name was being called.
“You’ve come so far, Samar Api . . .”
“I know, I know.” She was conflicted.
The voice from inside was calling out.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “We can come back later.”
But she had already stood up.
The tall girl swept in through a door and then a hallway, lit weakly by white light, and now came to another door. She knocked. A voice spoke from inside. The girl opened the door and went in.
The woman was sitting at her desk. And it was littered with objects of organization: there were pens and pencils and colored markers in a mug, a ruler and a paper cutter, a device for punching holes in sheets of paper, a stapler settled next to a stack of staples, a round glass paperweight and a calendar opened onto a picture of sunflowers.
The woman was sitting behind her materials, beneath a large framed calligraphy of a Quranic ayat, and was lifting papers from a pile on her desk. She glanced at the papers, stacked them and returned them to the pile.
She smiled.
Her eyes were small and friendly behind her glasses.
“Hello, beta,” she said, and consulted the form in her hand. “Samar.”
Samar Api smiled.
“A nice name,” said the woman.
Samar Api kept smiling.
The woman went on stacking her papers.
“Oh,” she said, noticing, “please sit, please sit.”
We sat in the two chairs on the other side of the desk. The chairs were comfortable; the room was suddenly deep. The windows were small and located high up on the walls.
“What would you like to drink?” said the woman. “We have Pepsi, we have 7UP. We have Fanta also. Would you like to have Fanta?”
Samar Api declined for both of us.
“Dieting?” said the woman.
“No, no,” said Samar Api, and laughed.
“You don’t need to.”
“I’m not!”
“Promise?”
“Promise!”
“Good,” said the woman. “I am trusting you.”
Samar Api licked her lips and folded her hands in her lap.
“So,” said the woman.
“Yes,” said Samar Api.
“You want to know your future.”
“Yes,” said Samar Api.
“Very well. Come here, please.” The woman was patting a stool by her side.
Samar Api left the chair and went to sit on the stool. It was high, and made her appear taller than the woman.
The woman asked for her hand.
Samar Api held it out.
“The other hand.”
“Oh . . .” Samar Api extended her right hand.
The woman received it in both of hers, and held it carefully, caressing the skin and folding and unfolding the fingers.
“Moisturizer.”
Samar Api laughed.
“Nivea?”
“Oil of Olay.”
“Oil of Olay,” said the woman, nodding. She was looking at the open palm. “The lines are all good. Some curves here and there but overall you are on the right track. You don’t want fame—am I right? Yes, you see: the line is fading. But that is all right. You don’t desire fame. You are not that kind of person.” She was speaking with a mixture of certainty and doubt, making statements that were posed as propositions.
“What about my love line?”
“Yes,” said the woman, “let me see.” She wasn’t surprised by the question; she brought her face near the palm and trailed a finger along it, frowning and muttering to herself in concentration.
Samar Api looked at me.
The jinns were invisible.
“Yes,” said the woman, and sat up, removing her glasses and placing them on the desk. “I see it. You are in a good place. You follow your heart. That is good, that is very good, though you should also listen to your mind. It is our greatest gift, after all, the mind. It is unbelievable.” She tapped the side of her skull. “The mind is what directs us in life. I always tell this to my clients: Allah has said that man makes his own fate. That does not mean He doesn’t know. Of course He knows; He is the one who has made us! But we are also given choices. At every turn in life. Oh, yes. What is fate? It is the boundary. But within that boundary we have a lot of room for making choices.” The woman went on to explain the relationship between fate and choice, which were not, she insisted, the opposites they were held to be, but components in a larger system of reinforcements. Then she gave a set of predictions: Samar Api was going to make some choices in the next few weeks that were going to alter the course of her life, and some discoveries that could prove difficult. The important thing to remember was that the world was made of presences, and it was for us to find the right ones. “Seeing is believing,” she said. “What you see is what you know. The more you see, the more you know. As long as you remember that, and take it with you everywhere, nothing can harm you. But you must teach yourself to see.”
The consultation lasted less than an hour. Afterward we were shown out onto the patio, where the girl with the roster collected the consultation fee and gave us another set of papers to fill out, a form called Client Response. Samar Api checked all the “Excellent” slots and wrote “Bloody Amazing!!!” in the “Any Other Comments You Might Have” section. The first words she spoke to me were in the ricksha. “He will see,” she said. “I will show him.” She flung aside the flap at her window and looked out at the warm, fading light.
10
Zaki, I’m not going to call him.”
She had decided to withhold herself until Jamal came to his senses. He was going to have a realization, she believed, and accept that he had lost her to his own detriment. And then he was going to regret it.
It filled her up.
In the mornings she took her time to dress for school. She showered in the bathroom and stood before the mirror in the dressing room with the blow dryer screaming at her hair. She combed it and pinned it, then leaned into the mirror and carefully applied her lip gloss to a tense, toothless smile.
At school, during lunch break, she walked with the new friends to the canteen and then across into the sports field. They talked and they laughed. Sometimes they walked past Tara Tanvir.
“You should see the look on her face. She’s still acting all superior, all I’m-too-good-for-you-type. But it shows on her face. She’s burning inside. It’s so obvious. I don’t even feel like talking to her now.”
Instead she talked at night on the phone to a boy called Sohail. He was a friend of Jamal, or an acquaintance, as she had put it—one of the o
lder boys with whom he had a hello-hi relationship. They met on weekends at a farmhouse in Bedian, where they drank whiskey and played cards. Sohail was in a good position: he was removed enough from Jamal to not know of the girl with whom he had had a misunderstanding, and near enough to know what Jamal was doing these days.
Samar Api took his number from one of her new friends and called him at night.
“So tell me,” she said. “What have you been up to?”
Sohail had never met her. He said, “How did you get my number?” She could hear the smile in his voice.
She said, “I just got it, na. Why are you acting all offended-type?”
Sohail said, “Okay.”
She said, “So tell me, na. What are you doing?”
Sohail said he was lying in his bed at the moment, touching the hairs on his belly and staring at the ceiling.
She laughed. “And?”
And he was drinking water.
“Why water?” It suggested a preference for alcohol.
Sohail said he drank water to drain his tension. He managed his father’s gas plant in Sui and drove there once a week to carry out an inspection, a procedure he now described in unnecessary detail.
“What are your friends doing these days?” she asked, returning the conversation to her area of interest.
He said his friends were doing nothing these days.
“Nothing?” She was disappointed. “Nothing whatsoever?”
“Nothing,” said Sohail, who didn’t want to talk about his friends. “What are you doing right now?”
From Sohail she learned about an upcoming ball at a mansion in the Old City, a benefit organized by a medical society for the blind. Sohail said he was going with his friends from the farmhouse. The ball was strictly guest list, he said, and the tickets were limited and expensive.
She influenced him with pleas and taunts into buying tickets for her. And in return he asked her to meet him at a restaurant.
She called the ricksha driver. She had taken down his number on her palm on the day of the outing to Tech Society. (He had recited the digits in Urdu.) A man answered the phone; there was noise behind him, a chaos of people and cars on the street; there was a surprised pause when the ricksha boy was named, and then a distant shouting. The noise in the background continued until the ricksha boy came to the phone and shouted all his answers into it as though he were speaking to someone in another country. He came the next day to collect us from outside the gate, and we went to Polka Parlour on Main Boulevard, where Sohail turned out to be a very large person well past his boyhood, with rare strands of hair combed carefully across the bald back of his head. He spoke in a breathy drawl, blinked sarcastically and laughed at his own jokes, and ate two banana splits for dessert. He told Samar Api she was prettier than she had sounded on the phone. Samar Api said Sohail was a pleasant surprise too and didn’t finish her strawberry milkshake.
And when we left the restaurant we had two tickets to the ball.
FIFTY EASY WAYS TO LOSE THE FLAB AND GAIN THE ABS!
You know the drill when it comes to losing weight—take in fewer calories, burn more calories. But you also know that most diets and quick weight-loss plans have about as much substance as a politician’s campaign pledges. You’re better off finding several simple things you can do on a daily basis—along with following the cardinal rules of eating more vegetables and less fat and getting more physical activity. Together, they should send the scale numbers in the right direction: down.
Start by stocking your fridge with the right ingredients. Here’s a list of things any dieter will do well to grab at the grocery store:
Scottish Smoked Salmon: High in proteins and omega acids, this is a must for any diet. Apply generously over nonfat cream cheese and a toasted whole-wheat bagel. There’s breakfast.
Cooked Shrimp: You can find these little babies in the seafood section. But watch out for impostors! Shrimp in curry or cocktail sauce is a known friend of flab.
The list was long, and culminated in a colorful weekly schedule that included recipes and timings for meals. Samar Api tore it out of the magazine and attached it with Scotch tape to the wall.
She returned to the magazine. She was looking for the advice column. She slapped away the pages and they sent up a slew of sad, rich smells.
“Found it,” she said.
It was spread out over two pages, arranged around a hazy picture of a couple passing like ghosts through a bedroom. Below it was a picture of the Agony Aunt herself, a middle-aged woman in a black outfit, with black spectacles and short, spiky hair, and a wide and carefree smile.
“Listen to this.”
Hi,
I am a thirty-year-old receptionist. I had been dating this guy for some months. I felt we had a connection. We had the same taste in food, in movies, and we shared a sense of humor. The sex was great. Lately he stopped returning my calls. I can’t think of anything I did wrong. I know I was needy sometimes, but that was my only flaw. My girlfriends say I should move on and start looking for other guys. Part of me wants to believe them. Part of me is lonely and misses him. I don’t know what to do!
Torn,
Dallas, TX
“It’s just like my situation,” said Samar Api, and read out the Agony Aunt’s response.
Dear Torn,
Sounds to me like your guy has moved on to other (not greener) pastures. It’s brutal, but it’s the truth. How long has he been acting cold and distant? And, more importantly, how much longer do you want to put up with his behavior? Your girlfriends are right: move on. And next time, don’t act needy unless you really want something from your significant other.
Remember: neediness is often an extension of your own anxieties. Give your self-esteem a boost, and start by disconnecting that phone!
“O God, it’s so true!” said Samar Api. She looked up from the magazine.
“Neediness is”—she sought the page—“an extension of your own anxieties.
O God! I’m just never going to act needy again. Never ever again.”
She spent some minutes reading the horoscope.
And then she was searching in the drawer.
“What are you doing?”
“Wait.”
She found the measuring tape, an old one of Daadi’s that was coiled around a magnet and snapped violently when released. She stood on tiptoe and wound it round her waist. Her stomach was sucked in, and she was trembling with the effort; she read the measurement and let it go. The tape snapped.
“Twenty-seven inches,” she said. “That is not acceptable, Zaki Shirazi. It has to be down to at least twenty-four in time for this ball.”
It was drastic.
“I’m going on a diet,” she said. “I have to. Glass of orange juice in the morning, glass of milk at night. You lose a pound a day. I’ve tried it.”
The Liquids Diet began in the morning. Samar Api awoke and went into the kitchen and squeezed herself a glass of orange juice. It was more than a glass but she threw the rest away. And she refused the other items on the table—the porridge, the bread and the butter and the jam, even the tea—and said that she had eaten too much the previous night. Daadi was surprised but not to the point of concern, and failed to note it again in the afternoon, when Samar Api returned from school and didn’t ask for the leftovers from lunch. At dinnertime she came into Daadi’s room, piled a plate and took it back into her own room. And in the morning the empty plate was returned.
She borrowed an outfit from one of her new friends. She described it later as a halter-neck shalwar kameez, a semiformal outfit that could be worn to a ball. The friend had said it was a revealing outfit and had expressed her concern.
“Which only shows you,” said Samar Api later, “that you can’t trust anyone these days. Imagine what they would say if I told them everything. Imagine.”
She said I had to wear a suit. “Obviously, Zaki. It’s a bloody ball!”
I stood before my mother in her room.
She was talking on the phone. “Yes, Zaki?”
I told her I wanted money.
“What for?”
“For buying.”
“Buying what?”
“Things.”
“Sorry, Afraaz. Go on. How many senators?”
I went looking in her handbag.
“Afraaz, just one second. Stop it, Zaki! Stop it! What are you doing? Give it back to me.” She was looking inside the bag. “Doesn’t grow on bloody trees, you know?” She wagged the wallet scoldingly. “I want a receipt. I want a detailed account of how you spend it. And I want the change.”
Isa and Moosa took me in their car to Pace, the new shopping plaza on Main Boulevard. There were many in Lahore now, but Pace had grown famous for the escalators that connected its five levels. The news had caused waves of curiosity and excitement among the shopping populace. Little children treated it as a ride: they went up and down the moving stairs, holding on to the banisters and grinning at the people going in the opposite direction. But for others it was unexpectedly difficult; on the second-floor landing our path was blocked by a woman in a burqa who was unable to step on the stairs. Her family was standing behind her, urging her to take the step. She was trying: she held her daughter’s hand and raised her foot, brought it forward and then down and then back again. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Behind her a queue was forming. Someone shouted and told her to get out of the way. Her husband now took her hand and stepped onto the escalator. And she went up with him, screaming, her hands at her ears.
The Suits ’n’ Boots section was located on the fifth floor. The faceless mannequins had the stiff bent postures of break-dancers. One wore a suit made of a shiny black fabric. I touched it. The material was scratchy.
“Nylon,” said Isa.
“Why you buying a suit?” said Moosa.
I said I was going to a ball.
Moosa made a joke about it.
“So where is this ball?” he said.