She hung her head, ashamed.
But then he rubbed his thumb against her cheek and asked, ‘Do I make you nervous?’
And all she could do was nod.
So he pulled her back against him and talked. He spoke of the link between mollusks and mythology. Venus was not the only god or goddess to have shells named after her. There was the New England Neptune. Triton’s Trumpet …
She loved his voice. The medley of accents, the American slang interspersed with proper English. Mere and come about one minute, whoa and bucks the next.
‘Hindus also value a particular shell. It’s said the Vedas were stolen by a demon that hid them in a left-handed chank. Vishnu dove deep into the sea and salvaged them. These days, a left-handed one can fetch a hefty price. Couple thousand bucks I’m told. By the way, I used to have a right-handed chank. No idea where it went.’ He went on.
Remembering Sumbul’s warning, she loved him all the more fiercely and cut in, ‘Take your shirt off.’
Again, that quizzical look. But he pulled the T-shirt over his head. ‘Anything else?’
‘No.’ She rested against his bare chest now. ‘Continue.’ She pierced the flesh under his necklace with her teeth and rubbed his taut, spherical shoulders, thinking, These are the first I ever kissed. And with each caress, she repeated it: the first earlobe, the first cleft of a chest, the first slope of a stomach.
He started to remove her kameez, but she bit him, hard, on the scant bulge of a love handle, and pushed his hands away. ‘Don’t touch me till I allow it.’ She licked around his silken nipple, flat and swirling, her tongue a needle reading a minute musical record. The tiny crater in the album’s center rose, and the tune was the shudder running down his gut. She was a microscopic particle caught in the spin and it didn’t matter if she eventually blew away. She moved to his thighs, where his smell was strongest, and touched him through his shorts. It thrilled her that he’d stiffened even before their first kiss.
He was on precious shells now, uttering names like the Glory of the Seas, like Junonia, between gulps and pants. ‘The Glory was so rare …’
She tapped the cold metal button of his shorts, and released it.
They met every other day, always following the same pattern – a tense, silent drive followed by giddy love at the cove. Even when lying under him, she found a way to peer out at the needlelike rocks rising on the opposite end of the beach, waiting for a shadow, a gun, a pirate flag flapping on the horizon. The more she loved, the more paranoid she became. She held Daanish the way she’d held herself when her brothers had forced her to shower alone in the dark.
At the farm, Sumbul hammered her with questions. Dia found she didn’t even enjoy the silkworms any more. She neglected her graphs. She couldn’t read. Inam Gul was in the way. So was her family. Alone at night, she felt his palm on her stomach sliding slowly down. He marveled at her softness and said the scent of her dampness on his fingers would linger. It was what helped him survive the hours they weren’t together. She asked him to describe it. He brought his hand up first to his nose, and then hers. ‘I want to say like mushrooms simmering, only that doesn’t sound as good as it is. But I love mushrooms, you know.’
She slept in a cloud of heat and green apples. And in her dreams, admitted: I don’t know him.
The thought plagued her once in daylight, while they lay together in the sand. He was nuzzling her armpit, she watching his slick penis sway, discreetly testing the air, searching. She gently pulled away.
Rubbing the back of his neck, she said, ‘Daanish, you never speak of your life in the US.’
He looked up and frowned. Then: ‘I appreciate that you don’t ask me to.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just too much to think of. Specially,’ he sniffed her hair, ‘when I’m so peaceful with you.’
‘Can we walk?’ She sat up and dressed.
He sighed, but pulled his shorts on.
Neither had the courage to amble naked down to the surf. Though they never said it, the cove’s insulation made them even more nervous when they left its only mooring – the boulders. They both looked anxiously around as though still naked.
The gray clouds drooped even lower than in past weeks. There was lightning to the west and the thunder clapped nearer than ever. They hopped over bluebottles, examining the creatures washed ashore. There was a foot-long deep-sea fish without eyes, and even, to Dia’s dismay, a porpoise. She paused, moved by the beauty of its sleek snout, the rings of its closed eyes, and the smile, kind and forgiving, even in death. ‘Water kills,’ she murmured.
‘No. It brims with life.’ He kissed her forehead.
She told him then about failing her exam.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Nothing else.
She watched him pluck cowries and walk into the waves to rinse them. He’d gone to another place. He could do that – simply squeeze into a knot and shelve the wad away. It was why, after nearly a month, she had to admit – Oh Sumbul, why are you haunting me! – she didn’t know him. And in another month, he’d go completely to that other place.
‘Daanish, I want you to share more of your other life with me.’
His face closed.
‘You know everything about the only one I have.’
‘I know only what you choose to tell, and the rest is all right.’
He walked one step ahead of her. His spine was a dark, sinewy ladder. She lifted a finger to touch each bow of muscle, but changed her mind. He raced on, two paces ahead now. Finally, she said, ‘This isn’t turning into a very good day.’
When he turned back his eyes were stern, chiding almost.
‘You look so angry!’ she cried.
‘Fine. What do you want to know? How can I satisfy some warped, magical notion you have of this other life of mine? How about the fact that it’s where you learn to be despised, absolutely? Sound like fun?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Daanish. What have I said?’
‘Well then think before you speak.’ He was shouting. ‘Dammit, don’t be all pathetic like my mother.’
Turning away, she walked quickly back up to the boulders. Tears streaked her cheeks and she started to run. She was still running while collecting her sandals and purse, as if stopping would be the end of her. When he caught up she started running toward the rocks on the far side, over which lay the road. He pulled her arm and she screamed, ‘Drive me back. Now.’
‘Stop a minute.’
‘Now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he tightened his grip. ‘Sorry.’
‘I want to go back home.’
‘Just let me explain something. Please.’
They were standing at the mouth of the cave. The tide dashed up her legs. She’d worn her kameez backwards but wasn’t going to take it off in front of him again.
He released her. ‘Dia. Let’s go back to the other end. Please. Five minutes. Then if you still want me to, I’ll drive you back.’
She didn’t like standing here, with the sea crashing into the cave and the walls bellowing like a furious monster awakening. Thud! Ewow! The mild terror she always felt when the ocean wrapped around her was all the more acute now, with the fiendish cave on one side, and a fiendish lover on the other. She knew which one to walk away from.
He squatted in the sand between the boulders and patted the space beside him. She sat on her haunches. ‘Dia, how can I put this? Being with you helps ground me. Yes, it’s as simple as that. May I?’ He sneaked closer, winding an arm around her shoulders. She sat still.
He said that ever since leaving his country, three years ago, a tiny rent had formed in the center of him. ‘Right here,’ he put her finger in his navel. ‘Like a zip unfastening. I wasn’t even aware of it till I came back. And now I realize the zipper has fallen so low, I’m sort of, well, divided. I think that’s what happened to my father. These days, I look in the mirror and see him.’
It was the first time he’d mentioned him, outside the context
of the doctor’s quarrels with his wife. Dia could never bring herself to speak of her own father. She leaned into his shoulder.
‘You’re lucky you’ve never left home,’ he continued. ‘And I guess I don’t want you to. When I speak of America, I take you there. But I want you to stay here. Put crudely,’ he kissed her forehead again, ‘you zip me up.’
She considered this, but didn’t like it. Was this another way of saying she was only good to him if kept ignorant?
‘You speak of the cheating at your exam,’ he pressed on. ‘There’s cheating there too, you know. Everyone thinks there is different. It isn’t. The deceit is more covert. The shell is more beautiful. But the interior is just the same.’
When she still said nothing, he added, ‘Do you think we can forget my outburst?’
He spoke more, as on their first time alone. This made her love him again: he’d learned his voice soothed her, just as he’d learned how to touch her. He described a town with gray-stone buildings in fields of rolling green. His campus had no gates; the windows bore no grills. She let her head slide into the crook of his arm, imagining turrets and buttresses, concocting sharper smells in a climate with four seasons and little dust. He wasn’t making his other life sound like this one at all.
She thought of the rooms in her college: airless and dingy, with wooden benches women had to fight over to make room for themselves. The stench always made her head reel, but all that was nothing compared to the books and the instructors, who tested students on how well they regurgitated passages, word for word. No discussions. No questions. When the teacher got tired she asked one of her ‘pets’ to read, and more than once, Dia had seen a teacher lay her head down and sleep.
No, she didn’t believe Daanish. He, who had the opportunity to see more of the world than most, was cruel to deny her even the option of hoping it held more than a room in an attic, with women squeezed into each other, a teacher snoring on her desk, and no questions asked.
His heart pounded under her cheek. She asked, ‘Could we do this there, Daanish?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Could we hold each other, just because we wanted to, and not have to hide it? Because if so, how can you say it’s just the same?’
He traced her jaw with his thumb and tightened his hold.
She reached up to stroke the point where his side parting met the back of his head, but the first raindrop of the season touched him first. It was loud and fat, and Daanish shook his hair and laughed. The rain quickened, drumming in a steady stream, while the sand whipped around and layered them. When she kissed the back of his neck, she tasted rain and grit and bit sinew and watched the prints her teeth left behind in the moist sand.
3
The Blending of the Ways
Normally, the monsoons were Dia’s favorite time of year.
Before daytime storms turned to week-long affairs, before gutters spilled, electricity was cut off, telephone lines burned, cars stalled, and grief afflicted thousands of flood victims, there were crepuscular days lulled by pattering on rooftops, rich smells, bright hues, and a steady, puissant breeze. Best was when the rainfall softened to cool drizzle, driving the tiny, furtive creatures she loved out into the open. The torpid snail emerged, leaning far out of its shell, creeping up walls and staircases like an errant knight. Earthworms slithered, dragging fallen leaves back down to their burrows. Ants swarmed, mating in the moist air. The leggy cranefly sipped moisture from grass.
She’d step cautiously along her brilliant green lawn, absorbing it all: a residual raindrop on a single leaf, causing it to shudder like a hiccup; hoverflies swilling mist; bulbuls diving for dancing gnats. She’d feel things so poignantly it was as if the flaccid sky had sunk into her bones, teaching her to see life up close, closer than anyone else. When a thin, flaxen light cut through the clouds – the clouds that were in her – she could hear earthworms die, and aphids sweat honeydew. When the sun descended and the air turned tawny, bulbuls sang more vibrantly, as if the rain had cleansed their vocal cords. At nightfall, she’d slip into the deliciously chilled, damp sheets that smelled of rain, and think, as she so often did at the farm: God is here; God is detail.
But this year the before period never came. The first storm continued for three days, and Dia felt a reality devoid of meaning press against her. On the drive back from their last meeting at the cove, Daanish’s car had stalled several times and she’d had to flag a taxi. Slick with mud, she’d passed Inam Gul on her way up to her room. She hadn’t wanted to get into a Sumbulesque discussion, so insisted she’d been at Kings and Queens. He was silent, tentative – not the Inam Gul she knew.
Since then, Daanish had called to say his car had still not been repaired. None of the mechanics were picking up their phones and he couldn’t go out looking since all the roads around him were knee-high in putrid waste. They wouldn’t be able to meet again for days. He was leaving in less than three weeks.
Her own neighborhood was cloaked in a darkness only earthworms would celebrate: for the last twenty hours they’d had no electricity, and in the refrigerator, food was beginning to rot. Mosquitoes invaded, as did the drone of generators.
On the fourth day, she squatted on the muddy doorstep, looking helplessly around her. The rain fell like a sheet of armor. It had a point to make, and would continue making it as obstinately as it damn well pleased.
The creatures that thrived on its fury taunted her, for they were free to court each other, while she and Daanish alone were not. A bright emerald frog hopped by her damp feet, croaking with gusto. Its throat ballooned to three times the size of its head and it blinked with lust. Slugs wrapped frilly feet around each other in wild abandon. She thought, Daanish would love to see this. Perhaps he did, at that very moment, in his own house. So why weren’t they together?
She began to see her world from his eyes, as if the rain had pulled her into the sea, and all the land dwellers had changed to their earlier, watery state. Insects like the leather jacket suddenly looked more like a cuttlefish, tentacles rippling as it slid along the wet ground. A spider hanging nearby carried an egg cocoon in her arms, reminding Dia of the argonaut Daanish had spoken of. Sopping ivy was seaweed. How she longed to hear him speak of such things in his lilting voice! But the rain beat down, building a wall inside her garden wall.
In that other place of his, which he said was just the same, did weather get in the way of love? She was beginning to think like that. In her mind, phrases were increasingly punctuated with in this country, or, in other countries. She’d never done that before. This had always been the only place she knew, loved, and wanted to be immersed in. It was Nini who’d dreamed of that other. Not her.
But she was getting entangled in aspects of that faraway world Daanish reluctantly shared with her. To get to his classes, he had to cross a sloping wooden bridge above a stream that in winter rang with icicles and in spring, teemed with carp. She’d never known ice. Rain, yes, but not a bank of singing frost. In fine weather, he said students walked the campus barefooted, and discussed assignments with professors under the shade of towering oaks. It all sounded wonderfully intimate and fabulous to her. And though he claimed otherwise, she could read his eyes well enough to know there was magic there for him too. And so she was beginning to understand what he meant when he said he was divided.
The thought of him leaving filled her with more anguish than she’d ever known. It had come to this: in less than a month she’d allowed him to tear most of her old skin off. When they weren’t together, she wanted it all back. And there was no one – no Nini any more – to cry to.
Two days ago, she finally phoned to tell him this. She was amazed at his response: ‘Going away will be easier for me because we’ll always be together, won’t we? I’ll be back in the winter and you’ll be here, waiting, and nothing will change. Now my life has direction, Dia.’
Out on the doorstep, under cover of the seaweed-crawling roof, Dia shivered. The wind picked up. Rain fell at a slant and her
clothes were soaked through. She’d been in drenched clothes a lot lately. Lightning ripped the sky, and the rain crashing on the ground sounded like a herd of camels, racing toward her.
You zip me up, he’d said.
She held herself tight, cold and miserable. The opposite was happening to her.
4
Darkness
Days later, it still rained. The electricity returned then shut off again. Riffat, exhausted from nights of blistering sleeplessness and days of surviving drivers whose aggression feasted on bad weather, stayed home. With no power at his office, her brother, the computer engineer, did too. The household was inebriated with stale air and even Inam Gul was more juvenile than usual. Their company was driving Dia mad.
Candles were lit in every room, casting shadows over walls and floors. ‘I feel a mysterious presence!’ the cook said, pop-eyed.
Dia clicked her tongue in irritation. ‘It’s the KESC. And there’s nothing at all mysterious about them.’
He waved skinny, veined hands. ‘No. It’s the unseen.’
Dia nodded, ‘The KESC.’
From Riffat’s room sounded a snort. Hassan’s. Dia could hear desperate gusts of wind blow as he waved a paper fan. The fan flashed white in the light from the candle on Riffat’s bedside table. ‘The thing I hate the most about power breakdowns is how useless they make me feel,’ he offered uselessly.
Riffat said, ‘It’s cozy. In a sweltering sort of way.’
Dia listened to the chatter by default. Around her, shadows caressed paintings of nudes, and Riffat’s art books slipped in and out of sight, as though jostled by unseen hands. The rugs and cushions smelled of mildew. Inam Gul continued to look around him like a child in a haunted house. Sleepless nights were catching up with them all.
On the roof, the rain continued to pound. Once, it had been sweet music to her ears. Now only the telephone was. It hadn’t rung for her today. Possibly, Anu was swamping Daanish. Bitterly, Dia remembered how she herself had warned Nini: the woman was recently widowed and had only one child, that too a son.
Trespassing Page 23