by Chaitali Sen
Omar frowned at the cover. Arifah had never told him anything about John and Mariam working on a book, so this object was a mystery to him in more ways than one. Every time she thought about telling him, it made her irritable.
“Mariam helped him with the book,” she informed Vic.
“Yes, obviously. Her voice is everywhere in it.”
Yet she only saw John’s name on the cover. She didn’t know what she expected, really. It was John’s book, mostly, but that love Vic talked about, that love, she was certain, came from Mariam.
Omar opened the book, leafing through the pages carefully. He still couldn’t read any of the words himself but he found the pages of photographs and peered at them. She supposed she could read it to him. Mariam would want her to read it to him.
“Have you spoken to John?” she asked Vic.
“I received a letter from him. He sounded hopeful.”
“Yes. Mariam is hopeful too. Malick is taking care of them.”
“Malick is a good man.”
Omar interrupted, asking for his glasses.
“They’re on the coffee table,” she said, and he got up himself to look for them. While he was out of the room, Arifah made a confession.
“I tried to convince Mariam to stay, after the riots when she told me she had changed her mind. You know they were going to separate?”
“I knew a little about it,” Vic said.
“I told her what a hardship exile is. I reminded her about my father’s suicide.” She didn’t know why she was confessing this now to Vic, but she was ashamed of herself and wanted to lighten her conscience.
Vic patted her hand. “Exile is hard, Arifah, you’re right about that. And what mother would want that distance from her daughter?”
“Yes,” she cried. “You understand, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Will John survive it? Will he take care of my daughter?”
She had finally overwhelmed him. He stared at her helplessly.
“Oh, never mind me, Vic. I’m an old lady. All I can do these days is feel loss. I think when we get old, we become like children again, only thinking of ourselves. All I see is that she left me. She was my life and I’m alone now.”
“You’ll join them one day.”
“No,” Arifah said adamantly. She refused to entertain that dream.
Omar came back with his reading glasses. It seemed so cruel to call them reading glasses. He sat back down and busied himself with the pictures again. He pointed to the words, trying to make sense of them, or just pretending to read in front of Vic, to save face. She looked at him with pity. This man, her husband, had tormented her for thirty years with his damaged heart. He was never capable of loving her properly. Mariam had been right about their farce of a marriage. She had been right to run away from that, but had she learned from it? Had she found something better?
Vic pushed his chair back, getting ready to depart, but he did not get out of his seat. He started to tell a story, and Omar looked up from the book, wanting to hear it.
“Mount Belet was an experiment for me,” he began. “I don’t think my parents or I had any faith that I would last there. I didn’t know how to behave around other people.”
“That must have been difficult,” Arifah said.
“John and I were thrown together in our first week. I got to know him a little and I realized he would be a good model for me, that if I tried to emulate him I might get through my four years there. I watched him, copied him. I learned everything I needed from him. I wouldn’t have survived without him.”
Arifah could see that. John moved easily in the world, probably even more easily in his youth, and that must have captivated Vic as much as it had captivated Mariam.
“One day,” Vic continued, “he and I were sitting in the student union arguing about something. I liked to provoke him into debate because that was my idea of conversing. He was in the middle of a sentence when he stopped suddenly to look out the window. I couldn’t understand it, how he could have been there in front of me, engaging with me, and be gone in an instant without even moving his body. I looked out the window to figure out what could have distracted him so completely, and saw a girl standing by a tree. She was looking up at our window, smiling and waving. This beautiful girl. I looked back at him, curious to see how he would respond. He lifted his hand like this.”
Vic demonstrated, lifting his hand ever so slightly, laughing as he showed Omar and Arifah. “She must have thought he was ignoring her, or that he hadn’t seen her after all, but it was obvious to me, Vic Arora, to whom all other subtleties of human behavior were indecipherable. He was in love with that girl. He was so in love he could hardly move. I knew it before either of them did.”
Vic was still laughing. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his nose. Then he settled into a profound silence. He was that boy again, watching, afraid of making a mistake.
“And I envied her,” he said. “Very much.”
Arifah understood that he had not misspoken. Vic had fallen in love once too, and no one had witnessed it. She didn’t know what to say. He was pensive, but not ashamed of his candor, and she was full of admiration for him.
He rose and said his goodbye. Omar stood and shook his hand.
She walked him to the porch. “Will you be going far, Vic?”
“Not far,” he said. “You’ll hear from me again.”
“I do hope so, Vic. I do hope you’ll come back one day.”
He squeezed her hand and kissed her cheek, and ran out under his umbrella into the dark rain, out to the car that was waiting for him.
Arifah went back to the kitchen and poured more tea for herself and Omar. She sat next to him with the book between them, and started reading out loud.
Chapter One. Alexandria.
The land I think of as home came from another continent. It was pushed to the summit of a high mountain and crumbled into the hills of my childhood.
“It’s quite lovely, isn’t it?” she asked Omar, wondering why there was a sadness to everything that was beautiful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are no words to express my gratitude to Betsy Lerner and Michael Reynolds for believing in the potential of this book before it was fully realized on the page.
Several works helped me absorb the language of geology. John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World and Richard Fortey’s Earth captured the poetry and passion of a geologist’s work, and F.J. Pettijohn’s Memoirs of an Unrepentant Field Geologist gave an endearingly enthusiastic history of American academic geology during its formative years. There were many more, and I hope that in my fictional treatment I have done justice to a discipline I admire very much.
To Sharbari Ahmed, Sue Benham, Rob Benham, Elisabeth Cohen Browning, Shari Getz, Jon Greene, Jo Ann Heydron, Donna Johnson, Swati Khurana, Ed Latson, Seela Misra, Rose Smith, and Kirk Wilson, thank you for all your support and encouragement. You helped me see this through. I am grateful also to Jo Ann Heydron and Bharti Kirchner for reading early drafts, and to my teachers at Hunter, Peter Carey and Jenny Shute, for everything you taught me. Big thanks to Amin Ahmad for your generous feedback, your sharp eye and analytical mind.
To the first generation of SAWCC women in New York City, and all my NYC people, thank you for dreaming with me.
I am forever grateful to Soyinka Rahim and Rinku Sen for repeatedly talking me off the ledge, to Jude and Scott Benham for giving me so much space and time, and to my mother, Bharati Sen, who inspires me every day. I love you all dearly.
This book is for my father. I wish you were here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chaitali Sen was born in India and moved to the U.S. at the age of two. She received an MFA from Hunter College. Her short stories have been published in The Colorado Review, New England Review and Juked, amon
g others. She lives in Austin, Texas.
She was awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.