The Storm

by Arif Anwar

  Karl greets her at the door to Shar’s house. “He’s upstairs, packing his bags.”

  He lays a fatherly hand on her shoulder as she is about to start up the stairs. “He’s a good boy. You’re lucky to have each other.”

  She nods and continues her ascent, aware of his regard, uncomfortable with the burden of expectations. I guess Shar hasn’t told him.

  In his room, he is filling a suitcase on his bed. He embraces her when she enters. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Don’t be silly.” She feels the room darken for a bit, and sways.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Sorry, just tired.” When he continues to stare, she says, “Don’t worry about me. Focus on your packing. Have you booked tickets?”

  “Yes. Expensive as hell, but I had no choice. My flight is in the morning.”

  “I’ll take you to the airport,” she says, then goes over to hold him again, unsure of what else to add. “It’s going to be fine. I know it. How’s your dad now?”

  “He’s better, but can’t talk yet. At least Mother and Rina are by his side.”

  “That’s the nanny who raised you, right?”

  “Yes. She’s always been a part of our family. My mother calls her the prime minister to her president.” He laughs.

  The curtains flutter from a cold breeze, the soft hiss of rain. “Do you want some food? I have sandwiches.”

  “No, but I can get them for you.” She starts to head down to the kitchen.

  “Val, do you want to stay here tonight?”

  She hesitates. “Shar, of course I can, and want to, but as a friend. I hope we’re still on the same page on this.”

  He nods. “You can stay in the guest bedroom. I’ll talk to Karl. I’m sure he’s okay with it. I haven’t told him what happened yet, but I guess this would be a good time.”

  She smiles. “Then I’ll stay.”

  THEY drive to Dulles in the morning. His flight is Dragon Air 216, at eleven. Going the wrong way to Bangladesh—LA to Tokyo to Bangkok to Dhaka. A forty-hour trip.

  He does not have time to inform his thesis supervisor about his father, so Val volunteers to deliver his letter explaining the situation. Karl, who insisted on accompanying them, is the lone backseat passenger. Niten, Shar’s closest friend in America, is in Niagara Falls, visiting his parents.

  “I don’t think I’ll be gone that long,” he says, in better spirits this morning. He called home again over the course of the night and learned that his father was already stronger, better, sitting up in bed and talking. The doctors assured his family that the danger of a second heart attack was minimal. Rahim would be home within the week.

  They arrive well ahead of schedule, finish checking in and decide to have breakfast at a Johnny Rockets in the terminal. They order. Shar declines the bacon—a stricture that always amuses Val, given his lack of inhibitions toward alcohol. He denies any hypocrisy in the act—I just can’t, no matter how delicious. Eating something versus drinking something is totally different.

  He devours his eggs and hash browns, talking excitedly about how much he misses his family, Rina, Dhaka. She takes half-hearted bites of her cream cheese bagel. They rise together when his flight is announced on the overhead speakers. Karl tells them to go ahead without him, shaking Shar’s hand, wishing his father a quick recovery. Val recognizes the kindness of the gesture, intended to give the couple a measure of privacy during their good-bye. But a part of her wishes he had not.

  She gives him a kiss on the cheek at the gate, wishes him a safe trip. He goes through the gate. Turns to wave. Before long, the 737 is lumbering to the runway. Val stands and watches it ascend the horizon until it is a shining metal shard in the sky. Only then does she go to the bathroom so she can throw up her breakfast.

  SHAR calls her soon after reaching Dhaka. His father is back home, “but I’ve never seen Abba this serious,” he says, his voice low. “He said he has something important to tell me. I told him it can wait. It’s probably about his will. I think his heart attack scared him.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she lies. In a corner of Val’s mind where she dare not look yet, a small but persistent realization is growing.

  “Tell me about Dhaka,” she says.

  He does. It is not even two years since he left, but the city already feels different to him, like a young cousin who has crossed into puberty in his absence. Billboards advertising cell-phone service line the highway. Late-model cars choke the roads, darken the horizon with smog. He must reacclimatize to being chauffeured around instead of driving himself, to the subtleties of tea rather than the bluntness of coffee.

  They chat some more. It is late at night in DC and early morning in Dhaka. Val is yawning. Shar promises to call again soon.

  THE next day is a busy one for Val. She spends four hours in the morning at her World Bank internship, attends Arabic class in the afternoon. Feeling much better, she eats a full order of basil fried rice for lunch and meets a friend for drinks in the evening. She and Jennie—a fellow Drexel grad who is now a junior accountant in the city—meet on the second floor at Lindy’s Red Lion, where the windows look out to Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Jennie’s hair is tied up in a professional bun. In her dark pantsuit she looks older than her twenty-four years. Val shrinks slightly, aware of the contrast her gray sweatpants draw—she was at the Bally Total Fitness nearby for a quick workout on the StairMaster, but could only manage twenty minutes before losing her breath.

  Jennie shakes loose her hair and stretches her finger-entwined palms toward the ceiling until her joints crack. “Jesus, I need a beer!”

  “Jesus is right on that. Long day at work?”

  “You’ve no idea.” Jennie leans forward. “A whole day spent reviewing dumb P-and-L statements, all that on top of studying for my CPA. You’re lucky you can take the time to smell the roses while you figure stuff out.”

  Val is defensive. “It’s not exactly a vacation.” What is it about women that the most innocuous things they say to each other still seem barbed? Or is she being too sensitive? “I have the internship, classes, learning Arabic . . .”

  “Uh-huh.” Jennie is looking past her shoulder. “I think that guy’s checking you out.”

  “It’s you he’s checking out. No one would look at me twice the way I’m dressed.”

  Her friend is still preoccupied with her alleged suitor. Her head swivels back to Val. “He’s cute!”

  “Buy him a drink.” She wonders where the server is. She and Jennie became friends at Drexel because they ran in the same circles. But she always found her self-involved. Apparently, little has changed since then.

  “Looks like a senior out with first real ID. I probably look like his mom to him. Besides, he was looking at you, babe. Turn around and see.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Oh right, you’re dating that Indian guy. What’s his name again?”

  “He’s from Bangladesh, not India.”

  “Sorry. Where’s that anyway?”

  “Right next door. It used to be a part of India before the British left.”

  Jennie shakes her head. “You know so much random stuff. I can’t believe you actually went and lived there.” She shudders. “I could never do that.”

  Their server arrives—a harried young woman in T-shirt and jeans. “Hi, did you want some food today?”

  Jennie orders a burger. Val, fries.

  “Anything to drink?”

  “I’ll have a pint of Heineken,” Jennie says.

  The server looks to Val. “I’ll just have a club soda and lime.” She turns to Jennie, who is nonplussed. “Sorry, a bit too much to drink last night. Still nursing a hangover.”

  “You do look a bit pale. Must’ve been a good party.”

  “Something like that.”

  “So what about this guy? You see a future with him?”

  “We broke up, ac
tually. Just last week.”

  “Oh, sorry, babe. How come?”

  “It’s a long story.” She tells Jennie the general outlines of her reasoning, excluding what happened at Blue Ridge Mountain to protect Shar’s dignity. Airing her misgivings about the relationship to Jennie feels like a betrayal, selling a precious memento in a yard sale. Perhaps she is the one at fault. Her mother’s divorce poisoned her faith in relationships, marriage and children. The responsibility of raising her and her brother occupied every last precious corner of her mother’s selfhood. She wishes she could reimburse her mother for the time she lost.

  Their drinks arrive. Then food. She shepherds the conversation toward safer pastures: Jennie’s career, her classes. Jennie becomes even more demonstrative and brazen by her second beer, and Val begins to enjoy herself at last, the stresses of the last few days dissipating.

  At ten they step out to streets full of carousing students, dodge a laughing couple chasing each other.

  “You taking the metro?”

  “I am, but go ahead. I need to pick up some contact-lens solution.”

  “This late at night?”

  Val forces a laugh. “I’m afraid it can’t wait.”

  THREE hours later, her hand trembling on the receiver, she calls Shar. Partway through, as she is inputting the plus sign and the area code for Bangladesh—880—it dimly occurs to her that she should have bought a phone card for this call. She does not have an international plan and has no idea the rate MCI will charge her.

  She is in no state of mind to note his subdued tone when he answers, his lack of surprise that it is her calling him rather than the reverse. “I really need to talk to you about something,” she says. “Is this a good time?”

  His tone is flat. “I actually need to talk to you too.”

  “Okay. You go first.”

  He does. He speaks for more than an hour, during which she does not, cannot interrupt him, during which the news she has called him with becomes no more than the daytime moon to the sun of his own revelations. Present, but unseen.

  He says that the night before, his parents summoned him and Rina into the drawing room. Holding hands, his father and mother told him that he was the son of a man and woman he may no longer remember. He laughed at first, thinking it a joke, that his parents were recreating the melodramatic reveals from the Indian serials that had recently taken over Bangladeshi television. Then he began to wonder if they had simply gone mad from the stress of his father’s illness and Shar’s prolonged absence from Bangladesh. But he saw the determination in their eyes as they continued speaking, as they brought out a cloth bag containing the two artifacts that belonged to his birth parents.

  For more than two decades, Rahim, Zahira and Rina had been burdened with the secret they carried. They had endlessly debated whether and when to tell him, but as he grew taller and stronger and his memories of the hut by the beach, of his mother and father, faded, the lie became easier to maintain, the truth more difficult to explain.

  “I . . . I don’t know what to say, Shar,” is what Val manages when he finally stops speaking. “What’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been pinching myself all morning. They’ve left me alone, as though I’m some dangerous animal that’ll bite if they get close. They’re overwhelmed with guilt. The burden is heaviest with my . . . with Rahim. He said he took so long to tell because he couldn’t forgive himself for what he did to my birth mother. He was afraid I’d judge him for betraying her.”

  “And do you?”

  “I don’t know what to feel. A part of me is angry, sure, but another asks what I’d have done in if I were in their place.”

  “What was in the bag?”

  He tells her.

  “That’s so unusual. Do you have any idea where they came from?”

  “Rahim knew a little about one of them. The other we’re not sure of, yet. All I know is that it was sent with me when I came for shelter that day.”

  “You’ll need some time to process this—”

  He tramples over her words. “I’ve talked to Rina. Told her that I want her to take me to Chittagong. To the village. I want to see where I was born.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “I’m sorry. I interrupted you. You called to tell me something.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Tell me.”

  She takes a long breath. “Do you want me to take your car for an oil change? It’s due per the sticker.”

  “Oh, okay. Yes, sure. Thanks.”

  Seconds pass in which neither speaks.

  “Val?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’ll have to be here until I’ve figured out what this all means. I don’t know how long that will take. I guess in that sense, what happened that night at Blue Ridge was a good thing.”

  She squeezes her eyes shut, making tears race to the bottom of her cheeks and drip onto her gray hoodie. But when she speaks, her voice is calm. Warm and strong. “Yes. It was for the best.”

  “I care for you very much.”

  “And I you.”

  “Thanks, Val. Was there anything else?”

  “Not for now. Get some rest. Keep me updated on what’s going on.”

  She puts the phone down. It’s two in the morning. A light breeze blows through the window of her kitchen. The dim light above her stove is the only one on in her apartment.

  On the dining table before her are five home pregnancy test kits that—in a fit of obsessive compulsion—she arranged in neat alternating rows. In the small window at the center of each kit floats a blue “plus” icon.

  Valerie Neider, alone in Washington, DC, and eight thousand miles from the father of her child, puts her face in her hands and begins to sob.

  SHE wakes sometime after eight, following a fitful night. She forgot to pull the blinds down and the sunlight streaming through the window holds all the final promises of summer, but it takes only a few seconds for her new reality to crash down on her.

  She disrobes from the sweats she slept in and takes a long hot shower. She focuses her mind on the mundane rituals of cleansing. During the process, when her hand gets close to her belly she finds it scurrying away, as though that area of her body is alienated from her now. As though she is invading space belonging to another.

  She shuts off the tap and leans her head against the glass. The steady drip of the tap and her breath the only sounds. No heart beating but her own. But she feels watched.

  There is no nausea this morning, ironically. As though her symptoms just needed her to know the cause before abating. She boils oatmeal even though she is not hungry, and after tossing the kits in the trash, eats at the same dining table she sobbed on the previous night.

  This is not her first scare—there was that one time in her final year of high school, and another as a college sophomore. The second time her period was late enough that she took the test. That was with Paul. He was on the dean’s list, the intramural squash team—a man who turned heads and had his sights set far beyond her when they ended things. He is a corporate lawyer on Wall Street now. They have spoken on the phone a few times, even planned to meet for lunch once when she was visiting New York, but somehow that did not end up happening.

  She never told him.

  She tosses the bowl into the sink and dials Shar’s number. She lost her nerve in the face of his revelation the previous night, but now she must tell him. By her calculations, it is around nine at night in Dhaka. She remembers him telling her that Bengalis like to eat late, joking that they wait for the national flag to appear on their television screens before they set (or in his case, someone else sets) the table. He may be sitting down to dinner right now.

  The phone rings fifteen times and is picked up just when she is about to hang up.

  “Hello?” says an unfamiliar male voice.

  She freezes. Why did she assume that Shar would answer? Her voice sounds timid and whingy to her ears wh
en she speaks. “H-hello . . . can I speak to Shahryar please?”

  “I’m afraid he’s not here,” says the man, his voice raspy but the English impeccable. “May I take a message?”

  “Oh, you must be Mr. Choudhury. I’m so glad to hear you’re better, sir.”

  “Thank you, my dear. Are you a friend of my son’s?”

  Yes. And he knocked me up. She stifles a mad giggle. “Yes, my name is Valerie.”

  “Oh. He speaks so fondly of you. Valerie, I’m afraid he’s gone to Chittagong, do you—”

  “Yes, I know where that is, Mr. Choudhury. Is there a way to reach him there?”

  “There’s no number I can give you. He’s in a very rural area, you see. Is this urgent?”

  You can say that. “No. I just wanted to say hello. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea.”

  SHE would keep calling.

  In those first weeks when she is frantic to reach him there are times when she wants to scream at his parents—who become steadily more confused by the frequency of her calls—that she is carrying his child, that she is frightened and cannot do this alone, even do this at all. But she always demurs at the edges of these confessional precipices. At one point she even suspects that his parents have quietly surmised what is happening, can sense the question on the edge of their lips in the abiding uncomfortable silences that fall. She would welcome it. Would tell them if they just ask. But they never do.

  She writes letters. Letters that she sends everywhere that Shar might possibly be—his home in Dhaka, in Chittagong, even their old address in Calcutta in the vain hope that the search for his past might take him there. Such is her need to reach him that she painstakingly writes the address and name on the envelopes in Bangla, learned from a book she finds on a dusty shelf in the local library. The letters sent to his home in Dhaka are left respectfully on his desk by his parents. The others are like stones dropped into the abyss.

  She shares the news of her pregnancy with no one at first. Not her friends, and especially not her mother, the one person she is most frightened of becoming if she has a child now. She always wanted a child, but at a time and place of her choosing, and every day that she does not hear from Shar, this choice recedes like a shore falling away from a fast-moving vessel, for it is not hers to make alone.