Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  Advance Praise for Radiant Fugitives

  “Radiant Fugitives is a rare marvel, an intimate epic of faith and family, love and politics, knit together by a magical omniscience of profound compassion.”

  —PETER HO DAVIES, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

  “Elegantly crafted and luminously written, Nawaaz Ahmed’s first novel is a fearless exploration of the clash between identity, sexuality, and religion.”

  —MANIL SURI, author of The City of Devi

  “With a fine sense of the complex relationships among women kin, Nawaaz Ahmed has crafted an exquisite tale that explores the contradictions, love, compassion, and forgiveness in a family divided by tradition, sexuality, rivalry, religion, patriarchy, and geography.”

  —SUSAN ABULHAWA, author of Against the Loveless World

  “A tender and heartbreaking love letter to San Francisco, to family, faith, tradition, and all the ways we get lost in them, Radiant Fugitives is richly drawn, poetic, and mesmerizing. Nawaaz Ahmed is a marvelous and intricate storyteller.”

  —NATASHIA DEÓN, author of The Perishing and Grace

  “Radiant Fugitives indeed glows. This is such a beautiful novel, full of light and luminous sentences. Reading it felt like basking in a generous and lucid intelligence. Ahmed writes his characters and their worlds with honesty and compassion. This is a writer to watch, a voice we need.”

  —MATTHEW SALESSES, author of Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear

  “Lyrical and deeply moving, Nawaaz Ahmed’s Radiant Fugitives is about the search for love, acceptance, and family, both chosen and received. The novel is bighearted and clear-eyed, a stellar debut.”

  —VANESSA HUA, author of A River of Stars

  “Nawaaz Ahmed’s remarkable debut novel brings to life a loving family torn apart by parental rejection, clashing values, sibling rivalry, and geographical and emotional distances. Radiant Fugitives is a profound and in-depth exploration of our common humanity, and the ways in which we are more alike than different.”

  —WALLY LAMB, New York Times bestselling author of I Know This Much Is True

  RADIANT FUGITIVES

  For my family

  Contents

  Prelude

  One: 2010

  Two: 2003–2008

  Three: 2010

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Prelude

  1

  My life outside my mother’s womb has just begun.

  But what a beginning: I’m bathed in a harsh light, buffeted by jarring noises from all directions, and besieged by cold hands and instruments that prod and squeeze.

  Doctors and nurses circle me. They apply suction to clear my airways of fluid and pump air into me to trigger my breathing. But my lungs have so far refused to cooperate.

  Consider this: I’ve spent nine months cradled in my mother’s body. During that time I was mostly asleep, suspended in a warm amniotic sea, my head and body and limbs secure. I was soothed by the regularity of my mother’s heartbeats. My world was small and safe and familiar, interrupted only occasionally by lights and sounds from the outside. And even those arrived muted by my mother’s flesh and bone, the light tinted by her blood. I knew my mother’s voice, and little else.

  Yet, I’m now expected to welcome a world I know little about, wrenched from my mother’s embrace.

  A mother who is already dead. Her heart no longer pumps what little blood remains in her body, lying splayed on the operating table. Beside her, a doctor is furiously trying to revive her, his hands massaging her heart via the six-inch incision in her abdomen through which I was lifted out just a minute ago.

  The doctor compresses her heart’s chambers to coax them into action again, all the while issuing commands that others rush to carry out. They’re working hard, these men and women, as if they believe—and fear—they still hold my mother’s life in their hands.

  As for my attendants, they’re anxiously awaiting a sign from me. Particularly, a lusty cry that will indicate my lungs have inflated and that I’ve accepted my admittance into this world.

  2

  Is this to be the extent of my experience of my mother—these few moments in the operating room when I still feel linked to her, the umbilical cord only just severed, the oxygen that flowed through her body still flowing through me? Taking a breath and crossing the threshold of this world will sever my remaining connection to her and consign her to the shadowy regions of my subconscious.

  I would like to think I have more choice: I could hold my breath and be granted a longer respite. A few moments more, to grieve what I’ve lost, to appraise what I’m about to enter. For what world handicaps a child at the same time it receives him?

  My mother’s name is Seema. Which means face, something of her I will never see, or frontier, something I must leave behind.

  How twisted it is: to be able to properly mourn her, I must not cry, for with the very breath I take to cry, I will leave her behind.

  All that I will carry of her is what she has left imprinted deep within me.

  And the name she’s given me: Ishraaq.

  Sunrise. Radiance.

  3

  What cosmic irony that I, who am birthed at my mother’s darkest hour, am to be named for the day’s rosiest light.

  Wasn’t the warning evident in the hour of my conception, during an obscured dawn?

  The night before, my yet-to-be mother Seema returns to a home that’s barely visible in the fog. It’s early February in San Francisco. The fog has already rolled in, and it now shrouds Twin Peaks, so there is no house to see, only its faint outline.

  The living room is dark; the kitchen and dining room beyond are an orange glow. A bottle of red wine stands open on the dining table next to two empty glasses. My yet-to-be father Bill is not downstairs—the air is too still, the light too steady.

  Seema busies herself in the kitchen, transferring the food she’s brought—takeout from Pakwan, Bill’s favorites: lamb saag, achaar chicken, and naan—into serving bowls. She doesn’t turn at the familiar tread of Bill’s steps down the stairs, not even when she senses him directly behind her in the dining room.

  “I could smell the food the minute you entered,” he says, standing by the table, pouring out wine. She’d parked in the driveway so as not to announce her arrival: the garage door creates a racket when it winches up.

  He hands her a wineglass, kissing her lightly on the cheek. He hasn’t changed much in the two months since she’s last seen him. He’s even wearing his favorite tan sweater, which he may have worn the day she left. One difference—he’s back to wearing glasses, like the very first time she saw him, looking more like a professor than the lawyer he is. She sips the wine, glancing around the kitchen and dining room for other signs of change. Everything is preserved the way she remembers. She’s sure she’ll find little changed in the rest of the house too.

  As if by unspoken consent, they slip into familiar routines. Seema sets the table, while Bill reheats the food in the microwave. They help themselves to the naan and curries and raise their glasses in a silent toast. They bend their conversation to safe topics—the literal fog enveloping their home, the metaphoric fog blanketing the country.

  “I didn’t miss the fog here one bit,” Seema says. She’s been subletting in fog-free Mission.

  The other fog has been harder to avoid. The drama over the Affordable Care Act—the Democratic Party’s plan to extend health insurance to the uninsured, a signature priority of President Obama’s first year in office—has dominated news cycles for the last six months. She lets Bill hold forth about it: Bill works at an insurance company as in-house counsel and is privy to the latest insider information regarding the wheeling and dealing happen
ing in Washington.

  “He’ll get it done, see if he won’t,” Bill says.

  Seema has less faith. The opposition seems to have already won. Obama has ceded too much—both to insurance companies and to his political rivals—without a fight; what’s left may perhaps not be worth having at all. But she doesn’t want tonight to devolve into another argument about this. That’s not what she’s here for.

  “Bill—” she says, interrupting him, holding the wine to her nose, inhaling, letting the fumes flood her brain in a dizzying rush. She sets the glass down and extends her hand toward him.

  He stops talking, pats his lips with his napkin with extra care, his hand evading hers. “You’re right,” he says. “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  These are exactly the words she was about to utter. She’s not sure if he’s still talking about the healthcare bill, though he’s no longer looking at her. Her voice cracks as she seeks to confirm: “What isn’t going to work?”

  “I don’t think you’ll ever be ready for a child.”

  She swallows all the words she practiced on the drive up the hill. She hadn’t expected him to give up so readily. He’s making it easy for her, as he’s always done. She should be relieved, but she’s surprised at how much the words hurt, coming from him.

  “I agree,” she says, as if they’re discussing weekend plans.

  They turn their attention back to the food. Bill returns to his pet subject. The healthcare bill will be the best thing since FDR’s New Deal, he says. She lets his voice lull her. Bill’s confidence is calming, comforting, as always. She reaches across the table to take his hand, and this time he doesn’t draw back. They finish the food, one hand clasped in each other’s, like lovers.

  When dinner is done, they clean up and put away the dishes. They finish the bottle of wine and open another.

  “Stay,” he says, when they’ve finished that one too. “You can’t drive back like this.”

  She’s glad he asked her to stay. She’d been thinking she’d have to call for a cab if he didn’t, though technically this is still her home. They change into their nightclothes and fall into a bed they haven’t shared in two months, holding each other as they fall asleep.

  But the wine, after the initial soporific effect, wears off, and Seema wakes up earlier than she normally would, restless with the beginnings of a hangover. She gets out of bed without waking Bill, opens the door to the fire escape, and lets herself out onto the narrow landing.

  She stands high above the city. From here she could see the entire sweep of the bay if not for the fog. Instead, there is no city, no sky. There is only this—the shivering fabric of her nightdress, the wet fingers of the fog, the landing’s cold steel rungs pressing up against the soles of her feet. The earth and the sky pass in and through her.

  Whenever the fog thins she can make out the house down the hill. A light is on, and through the window, two figures—indistinct, like ghosts—sit at a table, cups in their hands. But it is herself she sees as unreal, insubstantial—a wandering sprite, enviously peeping in on the warm reality of other people’s homes.

  She turns when she hears the door to the fire escape open. She tenses as Bill joins her at the railing. They stand side by side, only their little fingers touching, staring at whatever part of the city the winds choose to reveal. Now the faint necklace of the Bay Bridge, now the lights of cars dipping and rising on Market Street.

  “It’s a very lovely view,” Bill says.

  It’s the view that sold them on this house, despite its location in the fog belt. “I’ll miss it,” she says.

  “I’ll have to look for another place too.”

  “Do you have to?” A sense of loss sweeps over her now, as she imagines their home stripped bare. She has moved a lot in her forty years. From Chennai to Oxford, to New York, to San Francisco, to Boston, then back to San Francisco. And within these cities so many dwellings she so briefly called home, only to pack everything up in neat little boxes and move again. She’s become an expert at that.

  “It’s too big for a single person,” Bill begins, but stops when he notices her crying. Now the city is doubly blurred. He holds her as she sobs on his shoulder. He massages her fingers.

  “You’re cold,” he says. “Let’s go back in.”

  Is it love, or is it the chill embers of love flaring one last time before dying out? Is it just bodies seeking warmth and shelter, turning to what’s nearest? They’re back in the bedroom, in bed, the comforter pulled over them. They’re clinging to each other, their faces proximate, their lips touching. Their whispered words are swallowed by their mouths.

  4

  By chance—or is it fate?—my mother ovulated the night before. An ovarian follicle ruptured, releasing an egg, which nestled at the end of her fallopian tube. Ordinarily, her hormone-releasing intrauterine device would have prevented the sperm my father ejaculates into her from reaching the egg. But Seema had the IUD removed the very first week into their two-month separation, so she could imagine herself once again as the woman she was before she met him.

  Of the more than a hundred million sperm that start their way, a tiny fraction reach the egg. It requires the collective efforts of hundreds of sperm to dissolve a path through the cloud of cells that surround the egg, so that one sperm can fuse with it. How they whip their tails and swing their heads in frenzy, activated by the chemicals the egg secretes!

  Finally, one sperm succeeds, transferring its unique genetic cargo from my father, which combines with my mother’s DNA and determines me.

  What a miracle of conception, even if unintended and unwanted.

  5

  Now, not quite nine months later, my mother lies lifeless in an emergency ward in San Francisco, while my father treads the marbled floors outside, a dark silhouette pacing the stark hall. Bill never expected to be here, having had little contact with Seema over the term of the pregnancy, and none yet with me.

  He can’t help but wonder: Did he in some way have a hand in delivering us to this fate, by severing all relations with Seema on their divorce and signing away his parental rights to me?

  6

  Two other people in the hospital also claim kinship to me.

  My mother’s mother, Nafeesa, waits with Bill. She’s pressed against a far wall, tiny in that cavernous room, subdued as a shadow in diffused light. Her thoughts are focused and obstinate, continuing a precise litany of hopes and dreams for Seema and me, as if to keep from considering any future that doesn’t include us all together. For how can she even bear to speculate that she who came to assist in a birth has instead precipitated death?

  Somewhere in the hospital, my mother’s sister, Tahera, is searching for us. She doesn’t yet know the extent of the crisis, but because she’s a doctor herself, her mind is already mired in the looming possibilities. How is she to face Nafeesa and Seema after the events of the day? And if something were to happen to Seema, how is she to keep her promise and assume responsibility for me, consumed by guilt and remorse at her part in the evening’s tragedy?

  7

  Grandmother, did you know that the immature egg of me was present in Seema’s developing ovaries when you were pregnant with her, by the time she’d grown to the size of your palm? My future was being initiated within you even as Seema’s was beginning to unfold. And just as you could never have imagined then the shape Seema’s life would take—a shape that includes the two decades you barely got to see her—you can’t begin to imagine now the shape being impressed on mine.

  Grandmother, do I have you to thank—or blame?—for summoning your other daughter, Tahera, to meet us in San Francisco? For it seems now that it is Tahera who will hold and feed me, her lullabies that will rock my sleeping, her words that will guide my first steps. It is her I will come to call mother when I am able to utter the word.

  I see her clearly, this substitute, running toward me through a maze of hospital corridors, her hijab fluttering, her jilbab tripping her up, her face
flattened and blanched by unforgiving fluorescent light.

  One

  2010

  1

  Tahera came into my life barely a week ago, joining the two other women already awaiting my arrival in San Francisco: Seema, my mother, and Nafeesa, my grandmother, who came all the way from Chennai, India, to be by her daughter’s side, defying her husband Naeemullah’s wishes. Tahera flew in from Irvine, Texas, leaving behind her husband, Ismail, and her son and daughter, Arshad and Amina, to fend for themselves. The three women are gathering together for the first time in more than fifteen years.

  Here is Tahera, last Thursday evening, waiting at the baggage carousel at San Francisco International Airport. She stands a little distance away from the grating steel plates, while passengers mill around the circling luggage. Her black hijab is pulled low over her forehead, pinned at the neck, framing her face. She has tucked away escaping strands of hair. Her jilbab is a muted indigo, its soft folds falling to her feet, the fraying hem trailing on the floor. Only the tips of her dull black shoes can be seen.

  She’s told her mother she’ll take a cab to Seema’s apartment; they’re not to bother coming to the airport to pick her up. So the sight of Seema and Nafeesa walking toward the carousel startles her. Instinctively she shrinks back, pressing herself against a nearby pillar. Then, hoping they haven’t seen her yet, she attempts to lose herself in a clump of passengers by the conveyor belt, feigning preoccupation in identifying her luggage so she can buy herself a few extra minutes in which to ready a smile and a greeting. The tap on her shoulder comes quicker than she expected. Nafeesa stands behind her, smiling. A smile—saintly tired—plays on Seema’s lips too, her arm draped proprietorially across Nafeesa’s shoulders.