by Arif Anwar
He has begun to spend more time with Niten since that day in the library; now he consults his American friend on how to proceed. Niten suggests that he just call Val and ask her out, but Shar balks. His affairs back home were all products of months, and sometimes years, of unacknowledged attraction between him and the girls he pursued.
“Just rip off the Band-Aid,” Niten insists.
HE wakes one morning soon after and heads to a pay phone in a quiet corner of the campus. It rained the previous night; the puddles on the sidewalk are filled with leaves and sunshine, the air clean.
He punches in the seven digits of her number on the square aluminum buttons, the carved numbers grimy with use, each confirming tone a bell tolling his doom. It is 9:35. Her office has been open for five minutes.
She answers on the third ring. “International students’ office. Valerie Neider speaking.”
He freezes. A part of him hoped to find the answering machine on the other side, the synchronicity of an actual conversation making rejection that much more painful. But his voice is steady when he speaks.
“Hi. It’s Shar. I came by your office last week.”
“Oh, hi! How are you?” she asks, the recognition and enthusiasm seemingly unfeigned.
“I’m good. I was wondering if you wanted to go out for a coffee sometime,” he says in a rush.
There is a pause. “I don’t drink coffee.”
He flounders in space. He expected rejection to feel painful, but at that moment, it just feels like nothing.
“So, how about I have a tea with you instead?”
He leans against the pay phone and closes his eyes, the cool metal soothing his forehead, the hammering of his heart overwhelms his senses, but by the end of it they have somehow agreed to meet at Peet’s on Friday.
NITEN is less impressed when briefed over lunch at Food Factory in Arlington, with platters of pink tandoori chicken, spicy raita and naan spread before them.
“Just coffee? That’s it?”
“It’s a first date. Isn’t that what’s done here? I don’t want to—how do you say it—come on too strong?”
“But it’s clear that you both like each other. So why do something so wimpy as coffee?”
His appetite vanishes. “I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe we should go to the movies?”
Niten dips a drumstick into the raita and brings it to his mouth without spilling a drop. He chews thoughtfully and swallows. “That’s not great either. It’s your first date. And you’re going to sit and stare at a screen for two hours without getting to know each other?”
“Why don’t you give me some ideas then, Mr. Dating Guru?”
“Well, maybe you can go to a later show. Have dinner first.”
In the end, he takes none of the options offered, instead calling her on the day of their date to suggest a late afternoon stroll along the Mall, to which Val agrees readily.
On the day, she is waiting for him on a bench along the crushed gravel pathway that lines the Reflecting Pool. She rises and smiles as he approaches, taller than he remembers, standing shoulder to shoulder with him.
A gray screen of clouds drapes the horizon behind the Lincoln Memorial, hiding a melting sun. Val’s hands are thrust into the pockets of her wool duffel coat, the same one from that day in front of Lauinger. As they walk in the general direction of the Washington Monument, he finds that his nervousness has disappeared.
She tells him that she is from Reading, Pennsylvania, which is between a small town and a city in size. Has he heard of it? No? John Updike is one of its famous sons, she reveals.
He knows the name, having found Rabbit, Run as a teenager in a pile of old books in his father’s closet. It was the 1963 Penguin edition. The cover, composed of a red background juxtaposed behind sketches of a man’s face and a woman’s bare torso, had intrigued him, though after reading through a quarter he abandoned it in favor of the science fiction, fantasy and horror novels that held his attention in those days.
But fearful of inviting further questions, he tells her that he has not heard of Updike.
She is in the second year of a master’s in International Development. She was in Bhopal, India, on an internship the previous summer—a difficult time in which she contracted chikungunya and pinworms and was briefly hospitalized.
She asks him about Bangladesh, questions that make it clear she knows much more about the country than the average American: Are the people still resentful toward the Pakistanis after the war? What is the country’s current relationship with India? Has he visited the Hill Tracts in the south where the aboriginal populations reside?
She knows of Muhammad Yunus, she tells Shar, who founded a bank with the aim of providing financial services to the poor. Of Fazle Hasan Abed, who built a rival organization called BRAC—serving millions around the country.
He tells her that he met Yunus when their families lived in the same neighborhood in north Dhaka.
“You’re shitting me!” she exclaims, and immediately blushes.
He laughs. “Bangladesh is both large and small. Like Reading in that sense. Slightly more crowded, though. Imagine if half of America decided to move to Iowa.”
They stroll past the Mall, time left behind in the slipstream of conversation. Evening falls and against the streetlights, the loose hairs on Val’s ponytail glow like filaments. They find a Peruvian restaurant on Eye Street and continue their conversation over ceviche, lomo saltado and beer.
Val’s parents divorced when she was nine, her brother ten. Her father was an auto mechanic who moved to Shippensburg to live with his girlfriend afterward. Val’s mother dated but never married or settled into a long-term relationship. For eight years, she dutifully drove Val and her brother to Shippensburg every other weekend. Val remembers hot summers in her father’s backyard, limeades served by her father’s girlfriend, Jeanie, as sour and bitter as the beverages she made.
“Why international development?” he asks to change the subject.
“I wanted to get away,” she says, her eyes on the empty beer bottle, which she rotates by its base. “Going to school here instead of Penn or Pittsburgh was the first step.”
“Why natural disasters?” she asks in turn, referring to the topic of his thesis.
“Our country has a love-hate relationship with water. Bangladesh is flat, just a few meters above sea level, and we have all these incredibly wide, long rivers that dive toward our country from the springboard of the Himalayas, bringing the rich alluvial soil that makes Bangladesh so fertile that it can sustain a hundred million people, the same rivers that flood every summer with the monsoon rains and displace millions. But the storms are much worse in terms of death tolls. They lash our southern coast every year. The damage is unthinkable sometimes. The storm in November 1970 killed a half million people overnight because no one was warned.”
She raises a hand to her mouth. “My god. That’s horrible.”
He nods. “Indian ships had warning that Tropical Storm Nora was developing into a typhoon and headed to the coast of East Pakistan—as Bangladesh was called back then. But the relationship between India and Pakistan was so bad that the warnings were not passed on, or maybe they were and ignored. The West Pakistanis dominated the East back then, and even in the aftermath of the typhoon, with hundreds of thousands of corpses and livestock rotting in the sun, they took slow, grudging relief measures. They even turned down assistance from India, which we could have used badly. Many scholars think that is what really planted the seed for the Bangladesh War of Liberation that happened five months later.”
He does not tell her of another precursor to his interest, his childhood memory of the seashore, a day of black skies and keening winds—and running hand in hand with an unknown figure toward a great house to escape a storm. His parents have gently dismissed this memory as the work of his imagination whenever he has mentioned it, and over time, he has convinced himself that it must be so.
When the bill arrives, she reac
hes for her wallet without hesitation. He raises a hand. “Can I get this one?”
“No! Really? I’m perfectly capable and happy to pay.”
“Then why don’t you get the next one?”
“So, there’s going to be a next time?”
He smiles.
The server arrives—a young woman in white and black, her ash-blond hair tied in a ponytail. They thank her for the service and food. She leans over to collect the check.
“I just want to say that I think you two are adorable. Your children are going to be beautiful.”
They laugh—uneasy with the compliment—and head for the door.
“I should’ve left a bigger tip,” he says.
THE following week, they go to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at Loews at Waterfront. Later, walking up an alley and before late-night kabobs at Moby Dick, they kiss on a bridge over the canals.
They spend weekends walking from one end of the vast Smithsonian network to the other, browsing the outdoor stalls at Eastern Market, where he buys for her a shawl of gold brocade on blue, amusing her by demonstrating the stylish way men wrap them around their shoulders in Bangladesh. After she makes him excavate the Bangla books stored in a trunk in his closet, they spend an afternoon drinking milk tea as he helps her trace the characters on parchment paper, spelling her name in his native letters, practicing until the shaky pencil outlines gain the thickness of confidence and they must switch the lights on to continue.
During their courtship, he worries about things he cannot control—disapproval that he spots in the eyes of shopkeepers and pedestrians, minute scowls or the tiny bending back of lips at the sight of them holding hands or kissing, often so brief and subtle he wonders if he is imagining it. She tells him of her Indian boyfriend—the son of the head of a local NGO—whom she met while volunteering for flood relief, over the course of several rainy afternoons. Their romance was brief, covert, and ended when she left India. But stored in a shoebox in her closet she keeps photographs of the two of them. Seeing these, Shar feels jealous that Val was once so close to someone who, at least superficially, resembles him.
In these early days, the canvas of their relationship is a blameless white, but as the weeks and months pass, he begins to sketch on them dark and troubled visions of how his parents might receive the news of him dating a foreigner. He summons himself to the witness box to testify to his motives for dating Val—are his feelings genuine, or merely fueled by the thrill of dating an American? His imaginary prosecutor poses the same questions to Val—asking whether Shar is the understudy, a pale(r) stand-in for the man she left behind in India. The one she really loves. When they sleep together, the indecency of the act, his lifestyle in this new country, inculcated in him through a lifetime of steeping in the amorphous brand of Islamic morality that permeates his homeland, overwhelms the sense of intimacy and love that it should engender.
He confesses these fears to her, including his concern about the fate of their relationship once his program at Georgetown ends. Her response, that they will cross that bridge when they come to it, he finds less than reassuring.
She seems to be standing still, so he runs closer to her instead. One night he tells her of a dream he has had since childhood—of waking in a hut, the sunlight shining through many blazing apertures in the thatch roof. Playing with chickens in a dirt courtyard, his feet nestled in the hot sand of an unnamed beach, holding the hand of a woman whose dark skin makes the green of her eyes starker still.
“That is a strange dream,” she says. “How many times have you had it?”
“Too many to count,” he says. They are lying in bed. A feeble July breeze crawls through the window of her Tenleytown efficiency. The sheets stick to their backs.
“Maybe it’s from something you read once? A movie you saw?”
“No.” He shakes his head, unable to find the words to express that this dream, like that of him running to escape a storm, does not feel imagined, the product of a mind alone. They are relics washed up on the shores of his being.
Other than his parents and now Val, he has only spoken of this dream to Rina, the woman who helped raise him. She told him to pay it no mind.
ON a Saturday in September, they take a long drive through the Blue Ridge Parkway in a rented convertible. There is a touch of coolness in the morning air as they follow the road, twisting around peaks, rising above a valley covered in cloaks of mist run ragged in places by trees crowned with fall’s incipient fire. They have a picnic lunch in a meadow recumbent on a mountain, spreading their blanket on grass brilliantly green in the sunshine and shot through with wildflowers. Here they sit and eat homemade chicken sandwiches—a recipe he learned from his mother—with diced chicken and cucumber sautéed in butter, salt and black pepper.
The day concludes when they pull into a bed-and-breakfast nestled on a ridgeway, where, following dinner, Shar and Val walk out to a back porch opening out to an expansive vista of the valley below. Sitting on wooden chairs as dusk falls and the fire in the brazier before them subsides to glowing embers, they sip red wine that stains their mouths the color of the evening sky, wrap themselves in a silence that Shar interprets as one borne of familiarity and contentment.
He wishes to tell her that he loves her, that he can not only imagine a life with her but sees it as inevitable. He opens his mouth, only to hesitate as last-second nerves overtake his resolve. But the hard, square press of the box in his jacket pocket—one he intends to reveal to Val in moments—reassures him. He forges on through the uncertainty.
He takes her hand. She turns to offer him a smile. In the dying light, he cannot see that it is strained, that it does not reach her eyes.
“I’ve something to ask you,” he says.
Valerie
Washington, DC
SEPTEMBER 1994
They decide to drive back the same night, forgoing the room they had booked for the weekend at the inn. This time the rental’s canvas top stays up, the atmosphere in the car sullen and stormy. Shar drives in silence as Val quietly cries, her face turned away from him. His proposal caught her completely unawares. In recent days she had been gathering the nerve to gently end their relationship, because despite caring about him a great deal and cherishing his sweetness, she could not see a future together. They are opposites in the most important ways—while she craves adventure, he prizes safety. While she strains to leave home, he cannot wait to return to his.
Even if they were to somehow reconcile those differences, at only twenty-five, she is not ready to leave so many future doors unopened. She had hoped that after these months together there would be a natural separation that would ease matters, a widening fork between them as they approached the ends of their respective programs. She has told him how excited she is to have received an internship with the World Bank, shared her enthusiasm for her Arabic classes, clues to which he remained cheerfully immune. She saw the weekend getaway to Blue Ridge as an opportunity to bring their relationship to an amicable close. But Shar had other ideas.
These were the thoughts she tried to marshal and articulate when he started to speak on the porch, a moment when her heart and mind clenched in panic as she recognized what was coming, rendering what emerged from her mouth halting, inconsiderate, abrupt. As she spoke, she could see him shatter and crumble before her eyes, and found her tenderness toward him tempered by irritation at his obliviousness, his self-absorption. God, how could you not know, Shar?
She hated herself for that.
They come to a gliding stop before her apartment building in Tenleytown, the street abandoned this late at night, drenched in the sodium glow of the streetlamps. Shar alights and goes to the trunk to unload her luggage. She steps out to the sidewalk. He wheels the small American Tourister suitcase to her.
“Do you need a hand to take it up?” he asks, his first words in two hours.
She shakes her head, her eyes still red. “Shar, I’m sorry that . . .”
He raises a hand. �
�It’s okay. Don’t apologize. I should have seen it coming. I’m sorry to have put you in that position.”
“I won’t say something trite like ‘let’s stay friends,’ but it’s an option for us, one I’d very much like to take.”
He nods, not looking her in the eyes. “Thank you. Yes, sure. Maybe.”
He walks over to the driver’s side. “I’ll wait until you’re inside.”
True to his word, he drives away as soon as she closes the door to the foyer behind her, not waiting a second longer than he needs to.
DAYS pass in which she does not hear from him, a period in which she is also circumspect about reaching out, respectful of the space and time he needs to recover. One evening, a week to the day since that fateful evening in the Blue Ridge Mountains, she is contemplating a friendly call to see how he is faring when her phone rings. She answers it to find Shar on the other end. Her joy and relief are soon replaced by concern when he speaks.
“Val, I just got a call from Dhaka,” he says, his voice cracking under the strain. “It’s about my father.”
He contacted her immediately after receiving the call about the heart attack. Rahim was in the hospital, conscious and recovering, but Shar was still frantic with worry. Rina called him with the news—Rahim and Zahira were sitting on the wrought iron swing in the back lawn, sipping their morning tea. Upon hearing the newspaper man ring the front bell of their gate, Zahira left her husband’s side. When she returned, a copy of the Daily Star tucked under one arm, she found him kneeling on the ground, his face contorted with pain, the legs of his perfectly white slacks stained by grass and tea.
“I spoke to the doctor over the phone,” he tells her. “He said it was a ‘garden variety’ heart attack. Can you believe it? Like it’s some species of snail.”
She drives over to see him the same night. She takes her usual route through Mass Avenue, the road mostly free at this time of the evening, all the while trying to ignore the headache pulsing at her left temple. All week she has dealt with a low-grade fever and nausea. It could be the flu.