by Arif Anwar
“What are the chances?” He removes a toolbox from the back of the car. “It doesn’t normally take long, but I need something to brace the jack on.”
Rachel sighs with exasperation. “Fine. But do try and hurry, Joe.”
They descend and sit on a log embedded on the beach as Joe begins his work. Claire removes her shoes and sinks her toes into the sand, where the day’s warmth lingers.
She gestures to Rachel’s made-up visage. “So, when did Harold get back?”
Her friend looks away.
Claire is mortified. “For goodness’ sake, Rachel.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t tell me you’re having an affair.”
Rachel is sullen. “You of all people should know what it’s like to not have a happy marriage.”
“I certainly do not! What are you implying?”
“Come on, Claire. You’re here. He’s in Imphal. You hardly ever talk about him. And when you do, I don’t hear in your voice that you miss him. And how hard is it for him to request a transfer if he wants to be here with you?”
Claire sputters, Rachel’s words a cold slap. In the first year of their marriage, she and Teddie could hardly be kept apart, writing lengthy missives to each other in the period when he was assigned to Cairo and she was still completing her medical training in London, exchanging parcels, his maddeningly creative—alluring Arabian perfumes contained in bottles shaped like daggers, boxes of dates packed in straw, and once (what would become her most cherished gift) a tiny vial of sand that he claimed to have scraped off the stones of the Great Pyramid. Her parcels—containing everything from writing paper, spats, shirts from Hawes & Curtis, a barograph and shoes with soles of vulcanized rubber—were less exotic in comparison, predictions of his needs rather than divinations of his wants. So she compensated for her lack of imagination with affection; when he returned to London they would rush to each other, their meetings collisions of physical and emotional need.
It is true that she has not much thought about her husband while he has been in Imphal. And she is unsure which is worse—the fact that they have not written each other since he left or that she is only noticing this now.
She mounts a weak defense. “He’s a colonel. The Japs already have Burma and are about to invade Bengal, for heaven’s sake. Wingate needs him in Imphal. And we have a million sick patients and just four doctors here.”
Rachel opens her mouth as though to answer, but closes it with a snap. She frowns. “Do you hear that?”
Claire focuses and is about to say no, when she hears it too. A faint whine growing stronger by the second. An air-raid siren begins keening, its plaintive wail swallowed by the ocean’s hungry maw. They rush toward the trees, the women hand in hand, their row forgotten; Joe brings up the rear. They huddle under the stand of pines as the buzz builds to a roar. Rachel points to the darkening eastern sky and shouts.
She sees it then. A bomber, gliding down in a straight line toward the beach, a trail of smoke from its tail fluttering like a pennant of defeat. On its body is the flag of Japan—the red sun on a white backdrop stark against the veil of the fast-falling dusk.
Shahryar & Anna
Washington, DC
SEPTEMBER 2004
SHAR receives a phone call at home on Saturday. He does not recognize the number, but the voice on the other end is unmistakable.
“Hey, Niten,” he says. “New number?”
“I’m calling from the office. Yes, on a Saturday. Such is life.”
“You have to put in the crazy hours to make the crazy money,” Shar says with a laugh. He met Niten when they were in George-town, years before. His friend is close to making junior partner at a K Street law firm.
“How’s the battle to stay in this beautiful country of mine?”
Shar briefs him on his encounter with Ahmed and the subsequent meeting.
“Is he the only person you’ve met with?” Niten asks when he finishes.
“I’ve talked to others. But he’s the most positive of the bunch.”
“Hold on,” Niten says. There is the noise of him opening a drawer. “Tell me the guy’s name again.”
Shar does, spells it for good measure. “Why, though?”
“Just want to look him up. I don’t want to speak ill of my kind, but I trust immigration lawyers about as far as I can throw them. Let me run him through my network and see what the verdict is. How much is he asking for a retainer?”
“He doesn’t want anything now. Said he has a sliding scale and that his fee is affordable.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
After a pause, Niten asks, “Why did you leave all this stuff until so late, Shar?”
When Shar says nothing, Niten adds, “Look man, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my place to ask.”
“No. No. It is. I’ve been asking myself the same question.”
“Have you told Anna why you weren’t here for those first three years?”
“No. Neither has Val. Every time I think about telling her, I convince myself that she’s not old enough.”
“That’s true,” Niten says. “But maybe you never are.”
SHAR calls Katerina on Monday, after work. Apart from him, his office—a three-story brownstone on Wisconsin Avenue—is deserted.
“I was calling to see if there were any developments,” he tells her when she answers the phone. “I have barely two months left on my work visa now.”
“There are some things that Mr. Ahmed is working on. But as he said, this is an unusual case, Mr. Choudhury. We’re doing the best we can, but a lot of it will depend on you.”
“If it’s an issue of payment, I can certainly—”
“I have some clients waiting,” Katerina interrupts. “Why don’t we talk about this in more detail in person?”
“I can hop in a cab during my lunch hour tomorrow.”
“No. I was thinking that we could meet outside of work. Sometime. Just you and me. Maybe this coming Friday. Around seven. Do you know Dragonfly in Dupont Circle?”
“I do.”
“Well, I’ll see you then.”
“See you.” He ends the call, more puzzled than ever.
HE has Anna for the entire afternoon the next day. He collects her from school and they travel to Chinatown, to her favorite restaurant, where sushi labeled and covered with transparent plastic lids passes by on a conveyor belt.
Anna eats California rolls through deconstruction, nori hanging off her plate like iridescent black tape. She finishes the first and is working on the second when she asks if they eat fish in Bangladesh.
His thoughts flash to Jamir, whose fate was so tied to that of the sea. “Yes. It’s a land of rivers. Some people even eat it three times a day.”
“Oh.”
“I used to eat fish with my hands, just like you,” he adds, eager to trap her interest before it evaporates. “But it was cooked, and” —he rubs together an index finger and thumb—“I had to pick out all the bones.”
He pays the bill when they finish and realizes that he has few ideas for the remainder of their time together. There are two hours still before he is to return Anna to Val.
They stand in the courtyard between the MCI Center and the Gallery Place. A movie and sports event have concluded simultaneously. People stream out.
He kneels so that they are level. The gesture makes him feel weak. “What do you want to do next?”
He considers suggesting the scavenger hunt at the National Gallery, which was nearby. They discovered it last year. They were in the museum, standing before Christ Cleansing the Temple, tucked in a corner of the East Wing. In it, against blocky architecture and a sapphire sky, Jesus was resplendent in a blood-red robe as he whipped a group of usurers, his pose imbued with a dancer’s grace. In one corner of the painting, a naked boy reached out for a parent lost in the pandemonium.
He was explaining to her the meaning of the artist’s name, El Greco�
�The Greek—when he noticed a girl and her mother scribbling something on a piece of paper, gesturing to the painting with excitement. Consulting the security guard solved the mystery. It was a scavenger hunt. Children were handed a piece of paper with clues they must find in the paintings and sculptures in the labyrinthine floors of the gallery. Anna loved discovering them the first day, being awarded a Lincoln Memorial pin for successful completion.
But he remembers now how her enthusiasm for the game dropped with subsequent visits.
“I’ve an idea,” he says. “We can go to Air and Space. There’s a new exhibit on World War Two bombers from Japan that I really want you to see.”
She shakes her head. “I already did that last week.”
“With who?” He speaks before realizing that he may not want the answer.
“With Da—with Jeremy.”
A part of him—the one not immediately engulfed by irrational jealousy—is grateful to Anna, amazed that she would have such consideration for his feelings at this young an age.
He manages a smile. “You can call him Dad. We agreed on that, remember?”
Ichiro
Central Burma
MARCH 1942
Lieutenant Ichiro Washi sits at his desk, leaning over a leather-bound journal. He is in a hospital that has been converted into a makeshift garrison for the conquering Japanese. The three other officers in the room are all asleep. Not daring to turn on the bulb that hangs over him, Ichiro uses the light of the moon streaming in through the window to write.
He looks outside for inspiration. The moon hangs a palm’s breadth above the horizon, its reflection undulating like a ghostly finger on the Irrawaddy, which traverses the length of the country before emptying out into the Andaman Sea near the port of Rangoon, the capital of Burma and the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, a city whose conquest has consumed the nights of Japanese commanders with fever dreams.
They came in like a pincer, the Japanese, through Tenasserim in the south and Pegu in the north, with plans for the two armies to join hands in Rangoon in a month’s time, an event whose prospects brighten by the day.
They never expected their invasion of the country to be this simple, in this land of mountains that create endless mazes of peaks and valleys, where an ambush could hide in any of the jungles that look so majestic from above but in actuality pulsate with tropical disease and parasites. Given the land’s natural resistance to invasion, the pathetic fight put up by the British was completely unexpected. Now the mood in Ichiro’s division is one of simmering excitement, seasoned with a tinge of disbelief. The suddenness of their success has lent everyone—from the highest-ranked general to the common infantryman—a swagger to their walks.
A breeze blows in through the window. Ichiro breathes in deep the alien air of this land, scented with the must of rich red earth and the sinuous perfumes of cannas, margosas and bougainvillea.
As an infantry pilot, his first view of the country was from the sky. Beholding the rich textures of greenery, the rows of hills and mountains folding into endless patterns, cradling villages in their valleys, their summits tipped with pagodas painted a glinting gold, he thought Burma a young land, wily and wild, an impression quickly disabused once he stood on the ground, feeling miniscule before the enormous reclining Buddha in Win Sein Taw Ya, receiving the curious stares of young women with thanaka-yellow faces, witnessing the somber processions of maroon-robed monks collecting their morning alms.
As he looks out upon the Burmese night, the foreignness of his surroundings makes him gasp for home; a voice in his head bellows so loudly and suddenly that he shivers—you will die here.
His mind unshackled by this foreboding thought, he leans over the blank page of his journal to write, his fountain pen skating across the paper’s surface in neat cursive English until a cramp settles into his hand, and his back aches from leaning over. The moon rises high up in the sky, its cratered face obscured by a beard of clouds. From the rubber forests, the lonesome calls of foxes and other creatures of the night drift in.
Ichiro returns to his bed, carefully tucks his journal into a pillowcase, and lays his head down onto its hard surface. His heart and mind spent on paper, sleep finds him quickly.
HE rises full of purpose the next day, the melancholy that entangled him the previous night burned away by the clear sunshine that streams in through the window. He dresses and heads out.
He seeks out a teashop by the river, takes a seat near the window. The morning is chillier than the night. Vines of mist curl along the water’s surface. The occasional steamer passes by, horns blaring.
Before him is a battered thermos full of green tea that is so ubiquitous here, filled hot and ready for any customer to tuck into, but this morning he orders two by-products of British rule in Burma: samosas filled with a savory potato filling and a cup of lahpet-ye, black tea made with milk and sugar. They arrive quickly, the tea making his head buzz after a few sips. He smiles. A beverage of action rather than contemplation.
Yet he is the only one smiling in the shop. The other patrons look away when he tries to meet their eyes; the ones that do not, seem unfriendly. This is no surprise, for the Japanese never expected to be greeted as liberators in this fiercely independent country.
He spots his friend picking his way across the street. Tadashi raises a hand in greeting when close and nearly slips on the moss-slick pathway separating the shop from the main road, setting off a roll of snickering among the teashop crowd that falls into a dismayed murmur when he enters. Tadashi is oblivious to the lack of welcome as he marches straight to Ichiro, who holds up a piece of paper triumphantly.
Tadashi inspects the leave form. “Honto? How did you manage this?”
“I saved each can of salmon mother sent my way. Set aside five cigarettes from each box of rations. In short, I’ve been showering the CO with gifts for months.”
He pours tea for them both, feeling satisfied that matters are coming together as he intended. Tadashi appears ambivalent, perhaps feeling dragooned into accompanying him. But Ichiro has an inkling that the destination he has in mind will appeal to his deeply Buddhist friend: Bagan, a valley strewn with Buddhist temples, many nearly a millennium old and of legendary dimensions.
IN the end, it takes less effort to convince Tadashi than he imagined, and the two men rise before dawn the next day to pack haversacks with pickled plums, rice, natto and salted cod. They take water bladders, a detailed army map of central Burma, and two infantry Type 38 rifles in case they encounter the unexpected.
At the camp gates they present the leave form to the soldiers on duty, who wave them through when they see the CO’s signature. They look out to the road that lies before them. Red. Rock strewn. It winds away south, fading into a valley made deep by the cobalt shadows of dawn.
Their destination is a multi-hour hike along Nyaung-U Road, which runs through to Mandalay like a purple serpent. They set off on the mostly abandoned road. The central Burma heat is stifling even in the morning, and the men soon must strip to their undershirts, tying their fatigues across their waists. The occasional pedestrian or cyclist they encounter gives them wide berths.
Around noon, they stop at a roadside shack to eat their lunch. Afterward, Tadashi consults a map while Ichiro procures from the elderly owner two cups of palm syrup, a light sweet drink refreshingly cool on this hot day. The man trembles visibly as he serves them, and refuses the money—Japanese-branded Burmese currency—offered him. Knowing this cannot be from lack of need, Ichiro leaves the notes under their cups.
For the next hour of their march, hills draped thick with trees and greenery close in, fall away, a cyclical geologic dance that ends when the road nearly bursts out into a wide valley. They stop. Before them is a vast plain. A crucible broiling yellow-brown in the heat. Dense with scrubs and bushy peanut and palm trees, it shimmers and beckons. They take shelter beneath a bodhi tree by the road.
“How much farther?” Tadashi asks, panting from
the heat. He has tied a bandana on his head to protect it against the merciless sun. “We’ve not thought this through. We are halfway through our water. We should have filled up at the shack.”
“We’re here already, look.” Ichiro points to the distance. At the limits of their vision, they can see temples dotting the landscape, too far away to ascertain their states of ruin.
Tadashi squeezes in between gnarled tree roots that form a rough cradle, closes his eyes. “We have time. Can we not rest here until the sun softens a bit? They say that the Buddha gained his enlightenment under the shade of such a tree. Perhaps if I take a nap I’ll gain insight into why I let you talk me into this.”
Ichiro chuckles. He takes out his journal and a pen from his belt holster, opens to a blank page. “Very well. How long do you think you need?”
Already asleep, Tadashi does not answer.
Ichiro smiles. The landscape is inspiring him to write.
Prior to his division’s arrival in Nyaung-U, he was part of a forward detachment, his mission to fly over territory they were advancing on in anticipation of ambush. Of enemy installations, there were none, the British having abandoned the heart of the country to mass defenses at the Assam border. He found instead a valley strewn with innumerable temples. Awestruck, he took the plane down so low he was nearly skimming the tops of the tall palm trees that stood like silent sentinels, his wings close to grazing the great stone monuments—ancient and unearthly.
He had flown over Bagan then, but now he wished to walk through, to touch the stone with his hands and breathe in the mystic air. But he did not want it to be a solitary experience. He had met Tadashi during university, where they were both students of philosophy before enlisting for the army. Their friendship had only gotten stronger during their brutal training, the worst of which they endured by turning their faces to the heavens for courage and sustenance. He to Jesus, and Tadashi to Buddha.
He knows his friend has a gentle soul, and in his heart, just as questioning of this war that they fight in. Although Tadashi is less quick to utter his doubts, in the moments when Ichiro has felt the most despair, when the still pool of water inside him has been the most turbulent, he has only to look to Tadashi’s quiet fortitude to will himself to endure.