Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  Chloe is twenty-five, a graduate student in women’s studies at Oxford, a core member of the Avengers. It’s with her that Seema attended her first Avenger meetings and her first protests: for the immigration rights of gay partners and against Clause 28, which declared illegal actions that could be considered as promoting homosexuality in schools. It’s with Chloe that she shared her first kiss, in Chloe’s darkened flat, after returning from one of those events.

  And it’s with Chloe that she will now kiss for the first time in public. Look at them as they pose on a stool in front of Rodin’s sculpture of Dante’s embracing errant couple! Chloe has rolled her sleeves up to expose her sculpted arms. Seema sits in Chloe’s lap, their legs entwined. Chloe’s hand rests on Seema’s thigh, Seema’s hand is around Chloe’s neck.

  They make a passable imitation of Rodin’s sculpture, but there’s one major difference: whereas the marble lovers are frozen with their lips apart, as if punished for eternity, the lips of these flesh-and-blood lovers are locked, their supple tongues free to seek each other.

  5

  Bill calls Seema twice over the next few days to check on her foot. She politely declines his renewed offers of help. The following weeks go by in a desperate haze of meetings, presentations, and strategy sessions, work made all the more dissatisfying now because Seema keeps intruding in his thoughts. The few hours he spends every night at his apartment feel even more desolate than before. He moved to San Francisco after Mame’s death last summer, from the condo in Oakland where they’d lived together. He misses Mame all the more now.

  He broods over Seema and begins to follow the news on Iraq closely, reading everything he can lay his hands on. He fantasizes about wowing Seema with his newly acquired knowledge at some anti-war meeting in the city. Josh urges him to call her, even threatens to call her on Bill’s behalf.

  In mid-March, Bush issues an ultimatum: Saddam and his family have two days to leave Iraq. And two days later, as promised, missiles rain over Baghdad. Bill watches the coverage on TV as the assault begins. As predawn skies flare into light, and cloud clusters bloom soft and pink, like roses, he plucks up the courage to call Seema.

  She’s surprised to hear from him but not displeased to have someone to rant to. She savages Bush’s announcement—We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization, and their religious faiths. We have no ambitions in Iraq!—and speaks of herself ravaging Bush: “I’d like to tear his eyes out from his dumb face and scratch more furrows into his forehead.”

  He’s both startled and bemused by the intensity of her anger, as if the assault on Iraq were somehow personal. Mame has drilled into him that anger is never the answer: you kept your head down, you worked hard till you reached a place where you couldn’t be touched.

  He suggests meeting up for drinks, to help take her mind off the matter.

  She makes a counterproposal. There are to be protests downtown in the morning, in front of businesses profiting from the war—does he want to join her? “We have to do something, even if it will have no effect. They want us to feel too powerless to even protest.”

  He hesitates. The run-in with the police during the march unnerved him, and tomorrow will surely be worse; besides, he has work. But he can’t let this opportunity to meet Seema slip away. He agrees to pick her up at eight in the morning.

  Josh gives his blessings: “You don’t believe all that leftist crap, do you? But if it’s for a girl—what the hell. The company is going down the drain anyway. Just don’t get arrested.”

  Bill is at her doorstep at eight sharp, nervous from the sleepless night, not knowing what to expect. She comes out wearing a khaki trenchcoat and knee-high black boots. Her hair is pulled back tightly, not a single strand straying, and she’s lined her eyelids black, so her eyes appear to flash. There’s a hard glitter about her—buttons, belt, zippers—as if she’s armored.

  “Yowza!” he says. “Are you planning to take the city hostage?”

  “That’s the idea,” she replies, climbing into the car.

  An intoxicating joy wells in him as they drive downtown. Already the city feels different—with Seema beside him—burgeoning in its chaos. Some streets appear cordoned off, and side streets are jammed with cars nosing their way around blindly, diverted from the main thoroughfares. A few intersections are blocked by crowds seizing the center, with no one to stop them, as if the police have abandoned the city. Bill and Seema park and make the rest of their way on foot.

  Downtown clamors with the honks of cars and the din of protestors. The mystery of the missing police is soon solved. The crowd at Embarcadero is much smaller than on the Sunday of the march, but the city’s entire police force seems to have gathered here. At one intersection, a group of eight protestors, in orange overalls, have chained themselves together to newspaper racks dragged to the center. To prevent their circle from being broken, they hold hands through thick pipes, and iron chains run between bicycle locks around their necks. Almost two dozen policemen surround them, with glass shields and three-foot wooden clubs. The sidewalks are lined with more police, preventing supporters on the pavements from breaking free and going to the aid of the group in the center. An officer with a bullhorn screams, “If you don’t disperse we’ll arrest all of you.”

  The supporters don’t obey but instead chant, “Stay strong, this war is long.”

  Seema pushes her way through the crowd toward the front, beckoning Bill to follow with one backward glance. This is more confrontational than he’d expected, but he plunges in behind her. They come face-to-face with an impassive policeman, his arms outstretched and linked to policemen on either side in an attempt to contain the crowd, as firemen in goggles, armed with circular saws and chain cutters, approach the group in the center. The supporters grow louder as it seems more and more likely that the firemen will succeed. They thrust themselves forward trying to break the cordon, only to be shoved back.

  Tiny in front of the huge policeman, Seema is a spark of fire—skipping, darting, hissing, throwing herself at the policeman as though she means to bust through. Bill hovers protectively by her, ready at any moment to interpose himself between her and the policeman. He feels compelled to provide a foil for her, shaking his fist and screaming full-throated with the rest.

  A cry goes out, “Don’t let them be arrested!” The firemen have cut through, and the police are closing in on the eight protestors. The supporters surge in a concerted push, the cordon is broken, and the crowd floods the intersection.

  In the confusion Bill loses Seema. He looks around frantically—she’s darting toward the center. He races after her and grabs hold of her hand, having no idea what he’s doing, or what she or the crowd intends to do now.

  The next few minutes are a blur. He follows Seema, running this way, then that, through the disarray of uniforms and batons and shields, forming a ring of protection first around one orange-clad protestor then around another. He doesn’t think this will work—how long can the crowd protect the protestors before the police start arresting everybody? But then the strategy becomes clear: to hamper the police enough, giving the protestors time to melt away. Already some of them have shed their overalls and pipes and chains and merged with the others. Before he knows it, another shout goes up: “All clear!”

  The crowd disperses rapidly, and he sprints after Seema toward an unguarded stretch of pavement. People lining it pull apart to let them through. He leaps through the opening, over the edge of the sidewalk as though clearing a high hurdle, and the opening closes up again behind him.

  He doubles up, gasping for breath. Seema leans against the wall, a hand on his shoulder. She appears to be shaking, her face contorted. Is she hurt?

  But she’s actually laughing, a silent laughter that wracks her entire body, and he finds himself joining her, his eyes watering. When they both recover sufficiently to totter, supporting each other, to check on the road, there are only policemen and firemen in the intersection, picking up the dis
carded pipes and chains and orange overalls, dragging away the abandoned newspaper racks.

  Bill intended to spend only a couple of hours at the protest, but Seema’s company is exhilarating, the excitement addictive. They join crowds blockading the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. They shout chants in front of the Transamerica Pyramid against the military-industrial complex fronted by the Carlyle Group, to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing. They have lunch and spirited discussions with other protestors they’ve befriended, and their group swells as the day advances. Traffic has been wrestled to a standstill. Cars and buses are abandoned everywhere, and intersections continue to be blocked by sitters and bicyclists. The police arrest protestors where they can, but their group manages to free quite a few by surrounding the officers and harassing them into letting the arrested go.

  By afternoon, Bill is inured to the sight of protestors in handcuffs, though still shrinking from encounters with the police himself, Mame’s censures continuing to prick. Seema seems unafraid of being arrested, though she celebrates every protestor freed as a small victory.

  In the evening, people pour onto Market Street, and an impromptu march wends it way toward the Civic Center Plaza. Darkness descends over the city, and the plaza is lit by the soft halo of candles as the marchers settle into a vigil.

  But seated now on the lawn with candles in their hands, Bill is disquieted by Seema’s transformation. Wearied lines appear on her face. In the hush of the flickering light, the fire and fury of the day have given way to resignation and despair.

  He asks, “Are you okay?”

  She says, “None of this matters, of course. We can march all we want, we can fight all we want, it’s no better than sitting here kumbayaing with these candles. Nothing will really change. Whatever progress we make will be because they’ve already figured out how to use it to their advantage. They’ll throw scraps at us to distract us from what we’re about to lose. Even these protests are just to keep us distracted and occupied. Don’t you feel that way too?”

  Bill knows what her question alludes to—the color of his skin, his experiences as a Black American. He’s avoided such conversations even with friends, and were he to find himself embroiled in one, he has managed to maintain a noncommittal silence before changing the topic. But he’s aware of something pressing against the boundaries that had been his self a month ago. And he can’t ignore Seema’s appeal, although he doesn’t know what she expects.

  “My father died in prison,” he says, the words sticking in his throat. “He’d joined the Black Panther Party while he was in college.”

  She sits up. “Wow! I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  “He was arrested a few months before I was born. I’ve only seen photos of him. His parents brought me up. They always used to say you beat them by being better than them. And that’s what they brought me up to do.”

  “Why was he arrested?”

  “I don’t know. Mame—my grandmother—rarely spoke about him.” He regrets now that he didn’t pressure her. Mame had always maintained a tight-lipped silence about his father, though his presence hung over Bill all through his childhood in the yellowing photos hanging in her bedroom. What little she told Bill was when he was leaving for college, and then just the bare facts.

  “He died of a ruptured appendix—at least that’s what they told Mame. He was only twenty-five, and he’d been in prison for four years. Mame didn’t want me ending up like him.”

  “Your grandmother must have been through a lot.” Seema’s face is gold from the candle flames, softer now if more remote. He’s hypnotized by the play of light on her cheeks and lips, eyelids and earlobes. “What about your mother?” she asks.

  “Mame spoke even less about her. Maybe she belonged to the party too. I don’t think they were married. She stayed with Mame for the delivery. But a few months after I was born she left us and disappeared. No one knew where.”

  “I’m sorry.” Seema strokes his hand.

  He hesitates, overcomes his anxiety that perhaps he’s moving too fast, and puts an arm around her, drawing her toward him, something he’d wanted to do all day.

  She doesn’t pull back and even rests her head on his shoulder briefly. “I’d love to see some photos of your father,” she says.

  “Mame’s things are still in boxes. Come home, and you can go through them, while I make us some dinner.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Yes, he’s sure, he says. A dinner with Seema would cap a most incredible day, though he feels guilty using his father this way, having forgotten him all these years.

  6

  Bill decides on a simple shrimp and grits, and collard greens, picking up a few groceries on the way.

  The smell of crisping bacon reaches her in his spartan bedroom, where she rummages in the box he’s placed on the bed. She doesn’t ordinarily eat bacon, a vestigial unease from her Muslim upbringing, but she tells Bill, “I’ll have it the way your grandmother made it.”

  She has found photos of Bill’s father—black and white, some framed, some loose, all fading—from toddler to youth. She can see Bill in his father at his oldest, in what seems to be a high school yearbook photo, posed in a white jacket and shirt, with a bow tie, and a rose clipped to his lapel. Bill’s father is spectacled too, his eyes through the glass presenting a brooding studiousness. She’s a little disappointed: the photos seem innocuous—tame, almost—not what she expected of someone who joined the Panthers. “Are there any more? Any later photos?”

  They sift through the box, through old church circulars and scrapbooks of clippings on gardening tips. They finally find another photo, tucked away in a brown-paper cover in Mame’s Bible. Untouched for many years, this one is very well preserved, startling in its clarity.

  Bill’s father is older here, though he still looks very young. His spectacles glint so fiercely his eyes can barely be made out. But still the brooding mouth. He wears a black jacket and a white turtleneck. On his head—his hair now an Afro—is a black beret. On the jacket’s lapel is pinned a white badge, though Seema can’t tell what’s on it. It takes her a moment longer to notice, in the shadows, the rifle slung across the shoulder.

  “He’s beautiful,” she says, envying the resoluteness stamped on his bearing.

  “I never saw this one before.” Bill takes the photo from her. “I can see why Mame kept it hidden from me.”

  He studies the two photos side by side, this and the yearbook photo, one washed out to a placid yellow paleness, the other fierce in its intense black-and-whiteness. “Night and day,” he says. “You looked like this in the morning, in your trenchcoat and boots.”

  She laughs. “He’s the real deal. I’m only playacting. I wonder what he went to jail for.”

  They sip wine, then dine on the creamy grits, the juicy shrimp, the bacon adding a crunch to the collard greens and a smokiness she savors. She’s impressed by his culinary skills—she has none—and impressed, too, by his exhaustive knowledge about the events leading up to the war.

  When he asks about her family, she says, “I don’t like talking about them.”

  “Why?”

  All she needs to say is My father cut me off when I came out as a lesbian. The day is beyond date territory now, and she should have clarified earlier. But she’d ignored many openings, reluctant to bring the day to an end. Bill’s eager and anxious willingness to please her, to accommodate her wishes while protecting her from their consequences, is a novel experience—a princely masculine courting, almost a revival of the princess days of her girlhood. And his father is the real deal. She takes a deep breath. “I really like you, Bill.”

  He notes the implicit but and freezes, fork-speared shrimp midair. His face falls. “You’re married. You have a boyfriend.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Your family wants you to marry an Indian—a Muslim. Or—you don’t date Black men.”

  She snaps her fingers. “You’re right on both counts.”

&n
bsp; He throws down his fork. “You know—Indian women and racism, what’s up with that?”

  “I don’t date any men. Period.” She speaks sharply, upset by his accusation of being racist, though it’s her fault for making a joke about it.

  He stares as if he doesn’t understand her, then as if he doesn’t believe her. Her continued silence and unflinching gaze must have convinced him, for finally he says, dully, “You don’t look like a lesbian.”

  “I don’t know what you think a lesbian looks like. Ever seen the Dyke March? We’re all kinds.”

  “You’d have gotten tired of me soon, anyway. I’m only a boring lawyer, I don’t even look interesting, unlike my father.” He chuckles resignedly. “And Mame would definitely have not approved of you.”

  “Bill, I really do like you. I wish we could be friends.”

  He clears away the dishes. When she’s leaving, he swears that he won’t hold on to hope of things changing between them. But yes, he doesn’t regret the day at the protests, and he’d like to remain friends.

  7

  Though there’s little hope of it happening, Seema thirsts for Saddam Hussein to teach America a humiliating lesson, for supporting him as long as he remained compliant, only to disown him when he asserted his independence. Anything less than humiliation would spur American imperialism, she thinks, becoming another feather in the cap for American exceptionalism.

  She remains outspoken about her sentiments, despite alienating many of her American friends—even Fiaz, who, while decrying the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes, supports getting rid of the tyrant and, now that the war has been launched, desires a quick, successful end to it.

  “Thank God I’m not an American citizen,” Seema says. “I wouldn’t be able to live with the hypocrisy.”

  “You are living here and enjoying its freedoms,” Fiaz points out.

  They’re colleagues as well now, since Seema’s return from Boston. These discussions have strained their earlier companionship.