Tunnel Vision

by Shandana Minhas

  I screeched off down the narrow lane, leaving the gate wide open behind me and forcing old Mrs Pereira to lift her dress and hop nimbly onto the pavement. I couldn’t care less.

  AWARAGARDI MAIN HAD SAY GUZAR

  JANA CHAHIYAY

  LYRICS OF POPULAR GHAZAL RENDERED RECENTLY

  BY PAKISTANI POP SINGER SHARIQ ROOMI

  ~

  Saad was waiting for me outside the dealer’s showroom, standing beside his car looking fresh and at ease, as if the whole of Karachi’s industrial traffic wasn’t passing behind him. He had that quality, that ability accessible only to the very centred or the very rich, of carrying his atmosphere with him. Regardless of the surroundings, he seemed to exist in a bubble of purified air. Enlightened? Oblivious? Who knew what he was?

  ‘I hope you haven’t been waiting long,’ I began as I parked behind him and strode over.

  ‘Just a few minutes.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Oh it’s okay. I was actually just enjoying the sights,’ he sighed with pleasure, eyes practically glazing over. I turned to look where he was looking and saw row upon row of well-groomed luxury cars, their squeaky clean glass windows reflecting the soft morning light, all the cars seemed petrified in soft focus.

  ‘They’re just boxes with wheels, you know, to use for getting from point A to point B,’ I said as we began walking over to the nearest one, ‘why must you invest them with this spiritual depth they don’t have?’

  ‘Who said anything about spiritual depth? I like cars because they’re a combination of exact and inexact science, mechanics and beauty, it’s really very simple.’

  ‘If you say so. Have you thought about a colour?’

  ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ the jealousy crocodile surfaced in the scum-covered pond of my mind and began creeping towards shore, where the rest of me lapped gently at the water, ‘what about a powder blue Corolla?’

  ‘You know,’ there was no hesitation in his voice, ‘it’s funny you should say that because Najma’s sister has one of those and I have to say I was tempted.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘Oh yeah. But she let me take it for a test drive and it just didn’t feel right.’

  ‘It didn’t?’ Oblivious, that’s what he was. Not rich or enlightened, just plain clueless. Stupid.

  ‘I think the powder blue was all wrong. Great car. Pretty girl, even,’ he grinned and glanced mischievously at me, ‘but I didn’t think you would look that good in it.’

  ‘Oh I won’t?’ I might as well marry that old divorcee and raise someone else’s children, I thought, Saad’s would probably all have significant birth defects, not to mention be buck-toothed and dense, ‘though of course most women would pale in comparison to Faryal.’

  ‘How do you know her name?’

  ‘We met her at Najma’s once, remember? Or did you forget I was there?’

  ‘Don’t be crude,’ he said, and I flared up, the spark from my bout with Ammi becoming a conflagration.

  ‘But I am crude. I haven’t had the benefit of your exalted education and opportunities. The sandpaper of privilege hasn’t polished me. The only way I’d be caught in one of your clubs would be in the bakery with the other tarts.’

  Saad laughed, then stopped abruptly when he got a look at my face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Something’s wrong.’

  ‘Back off,’ I said fiercely, ‘can’t you just leave me alone?’

  Saad recoiled, and for a second I saw myself as he did, wide-eyed and snapping jaws, a street cat lunging for him. Bitter as glass and twice as sharp. That was me, his great girlfriend.

  ‘All right,’ his civility shamed me. He should have snapped back. ‘Why don’t we go someplace for breakfast? Someplace quiet.’

  ‘No. We came to find you a car and we’re not leaving till we get you a car.’

  ‘Seriously Ayesha, we can do this some other time, when you’re not upset.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m upset? Maybe I’m just like this every morning? We’ve never met so early before. Maybe this is how I am before I get into work, the real me.’

  ‘You’ll feel better after we eat something.’

  ‘I’ve already eaten.’

  ‘So early?’ Saad’s breakfast was brought to him at his desk every morning at 10 o’clock by a white-coated peon retained for that very purpose. Freshly squeezed orange juice, hot buttered toast, one half-boiled egg prepared meticulously in the ‘executive corner’ of the cafeteria kitchen, as per instructions from his mother. Spoilt brat, driving around with hot girls in powder blue Corollas, I hoped he’d crack his soft-boiled egg some day to find a perfectly developed chick, killed by his gluttony.

  ‘It’s not early Saad. Look around you,’ I gestured widely, ‘you see all these people walking or driving by? Well most of them have been up since before dawn, praying, preparing, ironing, cleaning, dropping kids to school, beginning the long commute to work, burning their fingers on hot pans. These are normal people. I’m a normal person. Most of us don’t get served breakfast every morning by a white-coated waiter with instructions from Mommy.’

  ‘You don’t seem very normal to me Ayesha,’ he said gruffly. Accusations of undue privilege always got a rise out of him.

  ‘The only thing abnormal about me Saad, is you.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means you and I, we aren’t right.’

  ‘There you go from point A to point F again. I don’t know what the matter is but can you please try and localize the explosion instead of letting it ignite everything?’

  ‘Everything is connected, you idiot. Everything. Why don’t you get that?’ My unhappiness and his oblivion. His privilege and my misery.

  ‘Can we please have this conversation somewhere else?’ Saad lowered his voice, ‘everyone is looking at us, including the dealer. He opened the showroom especially for me because he’s a friend of my father’s. I don’t want this getting back to my parents.’

  A crowd had gathered around as the argument, my side of it anyway, had escalated into shouting. An audience on tap: that was just one of Karachi’s myriad charms.

  ‘But your parents would love to hear of it. Brawling in a public place, they’ll say, we told you that girl had no class. Drop her now and get into Faryal’s powder blue Corolla immediately.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about my parents.’

  That stung. It really did. I didn’t know anything about his parents, apart from the sense of boundless entitlement gleaned from meetings with his father the Overlord, because he had never formally introduced me to them. I’d never spoken to his mother on the phone even, forget be invited to her milad soirees like Najma and her sister. Saad had told me I was lucky, they were the most boring and pretentious events imaginable, having more to do with diamonds than deities. But I would have liked to experience it for myself rather than imagine it.

  ‘I don’t know anything about them. Of course I don’t. I’ve only ever met your father twice, and that’s counting the AGM. You’ve never introduced me to your mother, you don’t like to talk about them so how am I supposed to know anything about them?’ My voice rose to a shriek then tapered off. I could see Saad’s lips moving but couldn’t make out what he was saying, his reply was lost in the din of a passing tanker’s horn. The instant audience poured closer to compensate for traffic sound. Folding chairs, it struck me, that’s what they need, folding chairs to carry from place to place.

  ‘What did you just say?’ but Saad had already turned away and was walking back towards his car. I caught up with him, fell in step.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We’re going to be very late if we don’t leave.’

  ‘We’ll go in a minute. Tell me.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I said, you’ll hear something horrible and negative anyway, the way you�
��re behaving right now.’

  ‘So I’m badly behaved, am I?’

  ‘See?’ Saad had reached his car, was opening the door, looking sadly at me over the top.

  ‘Why don’t you train me then, you son of a bitch? Like your friends do with their dogs at the Kennel Club? I don’t have much pedigree but I’m eager to please.’

  Why was I grinning? I could feel my mouth stretching upwards to my ears, but I don’t know which part of my brain had sent it there.

  Saad got in. In a flash, without thinking, I opened the passenger door and slid in next to him, the captive audience safely out of earshot. He didn’t look at me, just gazed into the distance over the steering wheel.

  ‘Saad,’ the words tumbled out with a terrible urgency, as if my mouth wanted to get its two cents in before demon Ayesha kicked in again, ‘marry me. Marry me and I won’t be angry anymore.’

  His silence pinned me to my seat for what seemed like infinity, but the dashboard clock told me not even a minute had passed.When he finally turned to look at me, I fled, unable to meet his eyes, stumbling out of the seat and practically falling on the road. Ripping the keys out of my bag I dashed to my car, fumbling with the keys before I managed to open the door and dive in. My ears were stinging, my nose beginning to tickle as blood rose to cover my humiliation. I screeched off. I didn’t know if Saad had gotten out of his car or come after me. I didn’t know what he had said, if he had said anything at all, when he turned to look at me. I never looked back.

  At the FTC traffic light I read my story on the back of a truck and wept, not caring that the hawkers could see me. Then the accident happened. The last time Saad had seen my face, it must have looked like my mother’s.

  NAMAZ PARHO ISS SAY PEHLAY KAY TUMHARI NAMAZ PARHI JAYAY

  GRAFFITI

  ~

  The marionette on the hospital bed began a dance of agitation. The bed rattled, IV shook, things beeped and the canola sighed resignedly to itself and withdrew from flesh without much prompting. Adil squawked ‘what’s happening to her?’ to the nurses who rushed in from the station outside to join red nails. They ignored him and set about pinning my arms to my side with practiced ease. People flooded into the room, Dr Shafiq in the front, and Adil was quickly ushered out with a ‘we’ll let you back in as soon as we can.’ I settled, soon, but Dr Shafiq was looking worried. A tiny frown line marred his otherwise smooth forehead as he chewed pensively on his lower lip. The nurses flocked around him like bees to honey. How come there were such few male nurses? And female doctors?

  ‘This is not the best possible thing that could have happened,’ Dr Shafiq said to no one in particular.

  ‘Yes sir,’ a nurse murmured as if in response to a private conversation. One of her colleagues shot her a curious glance.

  ‘I remember this happened to that mother of four we had in here last month,’ she chimed in.

  ‘The mother of four, right,’ the doctor replied, ‘do you recall what we did?’

  The first nurse prattled something as he nodded his head, their limbs seemed to move independently of their mouths. He was unusual, this one. Not stingy with what he knew, not afraid of burdening their poor female brains with matters too complex for them to understand. No wonder they adored him. And that they adored him was obvious, to everyone but the good doctor himself, of course.

  Dr Shafiq remained clueless. That’s the attractive thing about very smart people, they’re oblivious to the emotional undercurrents that swirl around them. I wished I had been smart in my lifetime, but what difference would it have made? Would life be easier to wrestle into submission if we were governed by impulses like pleasure and principle rather than insecurity and guilt? Would that have enabled me to rise above the emotional constipation and misdirected frustration that riddled my own household? Then again, who knew what the doctor’s home life was like, or what he was like with his wife, if he had one. Maybe he slapped her. Twice. Every morning.

  ‘Have Dr Altaf on standby,’ he was saying to the nurse nearest the door, ‘if the pressure doesn’t ease soon we might have to try and relieve it ourselves.

  ‘You’re a pretty girl,’ he remarked to my limp form suddenly, ‘don’t make me do ugly things to your cranium.’

  He walked out, most of the others scuttling after him. Two of the nurses gave me the evil eye as they passed.

  Pressure? What pressure? Who was he talking to? What was he talking about? And was that really my ex-boyfriend standing playing cricket with Adil in the corner?

  AAP NAY KIS SAY BAAT KARNI HAI?

  MAINAY SIRF AAP SAY BAAT KARNI HAI

  PHONE PICK UP LINE IN THE DAYS BEFORE CALLER ID.

  ~

  It was my ex-boyfriend Omar playing cricket with Adil in the corner. They were using three IV poles as the wicket. And a taped tennis ball. Didn’t they realize this was a hospital? Someone could get hurt.

  ‘She’s awake,’ Adil grunted as he bowled

  ‘ CHAKKA!’ Omar roared as he swung the bat. The window shattered. Adil was going to be cut to ribbons by the flying glass, except there wasn’t any. He turned to me and smiled.

  ‘Ashoo, you won’t believe who’s here to see you!’ he sounded annoyingly cheerful, like he’d discovered a million rupees in his bottle top.

  ‘Hello Ayesha,’ Omar stood by the bedside looking distinctly uncomfortable, shoulders hunched and hands tucked into his pockets in a stance I knew well. He’d used it frequently in class when delivering presentations or answering questions. It meant he was shy, and scared. Not that he’d ever admit it of course. Show me the man who can be honest about his feelings, and I’ll show you the sari and lipstick hidden in the back of his closet.

  Omar looked down at me and ran a finger parallel to my arm, almost but not quite touching it, respecting propriety. Astral or not, I felt a tingle where my spine would be. ‘Last time I was in a hospital the situation was reversed. I was the one in that bed.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Adil looked quizzical, but uninterested. ‘You remember?’

  ‘I was just a kid when you two were together,’ Adil said, flustered, ‘that is, I assumed you two were together. I mean, I don’t think we’ve ever really met before. Didn’t you take a beating for her or something?’

  Adil laughed at his own joke, then shushed when Omar said, ‘Something like that.’

  ‘No, seriously?’ Adil asked again.

  ‘Let’s just say I took the beating because she was the girl. I would like to state, for the record, that if your sister were a man she’d get beaten up at least once a week.’

  ‘Yes, she is a regular little scrapper.’

  Patronizing pigeon-holing pricks. If I had indeed been a man, my aggressiveness, for want of a better word (though strength of character did spring to mind, to be quashed by the bulldozer of my modesty) would have been seen for the asset that it was. It was a dog eat dog world regardless of whether you were a man or a woman, something that probably hadn’t yet permeated the membrane of love created around these two by the women in their lives. In fact, if it weren’t for women, most men would just up and die from emotional exhaustion, boredom and hunger. That’s why the savages in the tribal belt remained savages, by keeping ‘their’ women confined they scuppered any chances of personal evolution. But wait. Then how to explain what happened to America? Never mind, the point was if I were a man, I wouldn’t be a ‘regular little scrapper.’ I’d be prime minister Ayesha (President General Chairman NSC Ayesha if I wanted to have any real authority).

  Ah Omar, I thought, you always made me feel so good about myself, like the things that made me different were the things that made me good. When had I lost that feeling? Was it before I met Saad? Was it because of Saad? Did my mother pinch it when I wasn’t looking?

  ‘How’s your mother?’ Omar asked.

  Adil stiffened a little, ‘Fine, fine. Doing well.’

  ‘Really? Where is she? How come she wasn’t fielding?’

  ‘Er … she went home. She didn’t br
ing her whites.’

  ‘Ah, okay.’

  ‘I told her to rest for a while and come back for the second innings,’ Adil grew more confident, ‘I hope she has a good long nap. She’s old. This strain might be too much for her.’

  ‘Right, I wanted to say salaam to her, that’s all, though I don’t even know if she’d remember me.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll see her later if you’re still around,’ Adil began to fidget, then blurted, ‘listen, great seeing you! But I gotta jet! I really need to call my girlfriend and tell her to bring an extra pair of false eyelashes to the soyem for my mother.’

  ‘Will she be doing the make-up?’

  ‘I think so, if she agrees. I’d ask Ayesha who she wants, but,’ they both looked critically at me, ‘she’s so miserly with her honest opinion there really isn’t any point, is there?’

  ‘Of course not. Take your time.’

  Patting his shoulder in gratitude, Adil exited smartly, pulling his cellphone out of his pocket as he moved in his impatience to call Farah. How nice it would have been to be immune to reality too.

  I hadn’t seen Omar for years. If I hadn’t been in a coma, and he hadn’t been imaginary, the silence would probably have been awkward. As it was, there was just silence. I studied Omar’s face as he studied mine, the broad shoulders and strong fingers, almost but not quite touching mine, awakening my old friend the magic tingle, and his tilted cheekbones rousing memories of Saad. I noted other similarities and realized that if men were commodities, I preferred one brand to all others. Consumer loyalty. Now, what would I buy with my bonus points?

  The attractive:unattractive ratio for Pakistani men was something like 1:100,000. Attractive was not the same as good-looking of course; good-looking was a rarer subset, the good-looking:ugly ratio being 1:10,00,000. There were many beautiful women. Especially in Lahore.

  Karachi women didn’t like Lahore.

  It was only logical that competition for attractive men was fierce. We were supposed to be trained from birth to strive for the impossible, that is, find, tempt and land an attractive Pakistani man.