by Puja Guha
“Yes, absolutely, I’ll come back to you,” Mariam almost choked, but even though the words sickened her, she knew how much she meant them. She would indeed do anything if it meant keeping Aliya safe.
“I know you never wanted to leave me. Even when you pretended to be scared, or acted like you wanted to run away, I know how much you loved me,” he hesitated, “how much you still love me.”
Mariam opened her mouth, she should agree, she had to say something to mollify him enough that he would release Aliya. Instead, she took another step toward him, willing her legs to move forward. She advanced slowly, her heartbeat ringing through her ears, as if she were approaching her execution.
For Aliya.
A voice in the back of her mind shouted at her, compelling her to come up with a plan, perhaps she could get away once he had let Aliya go?
There has to be a way to fight back.
She squashed the idea as she continued forward—there was no point, she would always be the victim, he would always have the upper hand. The only way to ensure Aliya’s freedom was to give up her own.
When she was halfway across the room, Tareq set the gun down on the coffee table and bridged the remaining distance toward her. With his left hand, he reached out and yanked down on her hair, jolting her chin upward.
“You were always mine, Mariam.” He smacked her, the force slamming her into the far wall of the living room and knocking the wind out of her.
Before she could catch her breath, he had pounced on her once more. His left hand threw her head down toward the ceramic tile and she only just managed to break her fall with both hands.
Mariam got to her knees, panting and sobbing.
This will never end, this is my life now.
“Get up,” Tareq grunted, then shouted again, “I said, get up!”
She struggled to her feet, and he used his forearm to push her up against the wall, constricting her windpipe.
“Tell me you love me,” he said in a cutting voice.
“I—, I—,” Mariam tried to get the words out, they should have been easy enough to say. They would end her pain, at least some portion of it, but she had never been able to say them, not even when she was nineteen and life bound to this man. “I lov—”
“Say it!” Tareq released her throat and used both arms to hurl her to the ground. She crashed into the coffee table, and it disintegrated around her, the shards of glass piercing the skin on her right arm and face.
On the floor surrounded by glass, she recalled who she once was, the same instance from years earlier flashing through her mind. The sensation of her concussion from his attack twenty-five years before flooded over her, along with the recollection of the day in the hospital when she had finally decided to free herself. The moment that she had chosen to walk away, to end her life as a victim.
I did it then, I can do it now.
Her fingers closed around a shard of glass, and the voice in the back of her mind returned, the one that she had tamped down earlier.
Fight back, you can fight back. You don’t have to be the victim anymore—
She kicked out as she felt Tareq climb on top of her, but his weight across her back pinned her to the floor. Stars flickered in her vision as his fist connected with one of her ears, and she flailed backward, attempting to stab him with the glass, but all she got was plain air. She lashed out several more times to no avail until she went limp, he was too heavy, and he had overpowered her.
At least it’ll be over soon. She gave up.
“You know you want this,” he whispered into her ear as his hands clawed at her hips.
“Mom!” she heard Aliya scream, but she sounded far away, as if from another life. “Get off of her!” She cried out again, “Mom, get up, fight back!”
Tareq grunted and pressed even more of his weight into Mariam’s back, the glass fragments cutting into her face. He stood up, and the pressure on her torso eased. It took her a second to start to move, she was in so much pain, but she had to stop him—he was going toward Aliya.
“Shut up, little girl. Don’t you see, you want her to fight back, but she wants this as much as I do.” He approached the chair where Aliya was tied up and dealt a slap across the right side of her face, followed by another one on the opposite side. The chair tipped over and landed on the ground. Tareq kicked at Aliya’s knee with a resounding crack, and she screamed, the shrill sound piercing the air.
Mariam scrambled to get to her feet, she couldn’t tell where the pain stopped, and her body began. She willed her muscles to move, she had to get up, had to move faster, when she heard a loud crash at the back of the house.
Raj appeared out of nowhere and launched himself into Tareq’s side. They fell to the ground, rolling over the floor in the far corner of the living room, and dealing punch after punch at each other.
Pushing her palms into the ground and ignoring the stinging in her hands, Mariam finally managed to stand. She searched frantically.
Where’s the gun?
She had seen it on the coffee table before she smashed through it, it had to be somewhere. A second later, she caught a glimpse of it at the base of the couch where it had fallen when the table shattered.
Her hands shook as she grabbed it and turned toward the corner of the room. Aliya was struggling against the rope binding her to the chair, and Raj and Tareq were still on the ground. Mariam pointed the pistol forward, but her grip wasn’t steady enough to aim properly especially with how much they were moving.
Before she could process her options, a loud crack split the air. The remnants of an old glass vase from the living room side table now strewn all over the floor. Raj fell back against the wall to the left of Tareq’s now limp body.
“I never liked it anyway,” he said panting, looking over at Mariam.
Her hands quavered as she inched closer.
Did Raj really stop him?
Raj was safe, he was out of the way of the shot. She could end this now, end this man who had hunted and haunted her, who had tainted her entire life.
“He’s out cold, Mariam.”
Raj’s voice was right in front of her, but she ignored it, the weight of the gun still heavy in her grip.
I wanted to be the one who stopped him.
She cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger, and the shot rang out through the now quiet living room.
She slid to the ground next to Raj, the gun going limp in her hand as he enveloped her in his arms. “It’s over, Mariam, it’s over. He can never hurt you again.”
The pistol fell from her fingers, she could scarcely believe it.
It’s over.
Austin, USA – Two months later, July 2016
Mariam was still glowing as she walked the trail running alongside the Colorado River. She hadn’t stopped since early that morning when she finished her last interview at the Austin Police Department. The ordeal with Tareq was truly and finally behind her, and she could be herself—something that she hadn’t appreciated properly until she’d been through a number of therapy sessions. She was winding down the frequency of her sessions, and the nightmares were rare now, holding little power over her. She had grown to appreciate herself and the life that she had built. Even if I didn’t do it alone, she acknowledged with a smile, her life had been the product of her own choices, combined with the impact of circumstance and many other people, good and bad. Dinah, Raj, Janhvi, Aliya… even Tareq, all of them had influenced who she was today.
And Ritika.
She stopped on one of the pavilions jutting further out onto the water from the boardwalk and leaned against the railing, soaking in the late morning sunlight.
“Thank you, Ritika,” she whispered, taking in the view of the river, with the greenery and skyline superimposed against it.
You gave me my life back. You gave me myself back, gave me the opportunity to figure out who that was.
I never really appreciated that till now.
Mariam stood there for a few
more minutes, reflecting on the events of the last year, all of which had brought her to this moment of peace.
After much debate, she and Raj had decided to tell the detective at the precinct the truth—to share who Tareq was to her, and how she had gotten away from him during the Gulf War.
“I never intended to stay Ritika Ghosh after we got out of Kuwait,” she had explained, “but I was so scared of being culpable in Tareq’s death that I couldn’t work up the courage to be myself again. It was just easier to stay Ritika, no one except for Raj really knew her. She was an orphan, so she didn’t have a family, and neither did I. The only paperwork I had in India was under her name anyway, I didn’t have a British passport or anything like that, the way Dinah did.”
“Why come forward now? Tareq is dead, you could have just claimed that he was a stalker from your time in Kuwait—no one would have known he was your husband,” Detective Sigmund had asked.
“If therapy’s taught me anything, it’s that I have to stop running from my past, I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist. Our demons always find us,” Mariam shrugged. “So, I decided to come clean. Besides, Ritika deserves more of a memory than that.”
Mariam took a deep breath, that moment playing on loop in her head as she stood out on the pavilion. The detective had listened to her story, taking several pages of notes on a faded yellow legal pad along with recording their discussions. He had interviewed both Aliya and Raj about her history with Tareq, along with chronicling the attack at the house, even noting how quickly Aliya progressed in physical therapy after the injury to her knee. At the end of the interview this morning, Detective Sigmund had changed his mind about moving forward.
“I have a sister who was in an abusive relationship. She never married him, but it took her over a year to leave him.” He looked away, his eyes moving to the ceiling before he met Mariam’s gaze again. “She couldn’t talk to me about it until it was all over, but I never understood why, not until we talked about it a couple of days ago. Much like you, she said she never wanted to be that person again. That she was so conflicted about whether it was her fault that it had happened to begin with. With all of that, she never acknowledged or affirmed how much of a victory it was when she did something about it, when she finally chose to walk away.”
The detective reached out and tapped a button on the recorder. “I’m not going to move forward with this. You deserve to have your life. I understand why you did what you did, why you hid who you were.” He exhaled, “I’m going to get rid of this file, and you’re free to go. You can still be Ritika M. Ghosh, because that’s who you are now. A few years of your past shouldn’t define your entire future.”
Mariam stared at him in disbelief.
I’m free to go?
She couldn’t fathom that her life could return to the path that she’d been on before she had found out that Tareq was still alive.
Detective Sigmund had stood up to shake her hand, “As far as I’m concerned, Tareq Al-Salem was someone who started stalking you when you were in Kuwait, and followed you to Austin after you attended the embassy event in D.C. When he attacked you and your family, you defended yourselves, and once you were able to get to his gun, you shot him in self-defense. That’s what my report’s going to say.”
After the interview, she had walked out with a weight off her shoulders. Raj had wanted to celebrate, to take her out to lunch before they headed over to the University of Texas campus for a pre-graduation reception for Aliya, but Mariam had chosen to take some alone time by the river instead. The trail had always offered her peace, the view of the water and the sun reminded her of the walks that she and her mother used to take along the seaside in Kuwait. Mariam breathed deeply—the detective was right, she was Ritika M. Ghosh now, and while her life in Kuwait was part of that identity, it wasn’t the only part.
She felt some guilt about shooting Tareq; he’d been more or less neutralized at that point, but if she hadn’t done it, he would have kept after her for life. Those ghosts had to be put to bed, and although she wished there had been another way, reality was never that simple. His memory would continue to haunt her to a certain extent, but she had relinquished the grip that it held over her—after all, she was the one who had finally taken control of her destiny.
“I will never be a victim again,” she said softly to herself. She had said those same words so many times, in her head and out loud, but this time they rang true.
A FEW HOURS later, Mariam stood in front of the mirror in her bedroom wearing a knee-length fuchsia dress with spaghetti straps and a conservative swoop neckline. Her arms were bare other than the silver bracelet she was wearing. Her mother had once worn a bracelet like that, but it had been lost with her jewelry collection after the Gulf War. The weekend before, Mariam had seen this piece, which looked similar, at a street fair on South Congress Avenue and had purchased two of them on a whim. The other one was for Aliya, a graduation present in memory of her grandmother.
After brushing out her hair, Mariam glanced at the bed where she had laid out a cardigan to wear over the dress—but decided against it. Austin had moved into full-fledged summer, and the evening was warm.
They left early so that they could stop at a nearby wine bar, where they grabbed a table outside. Mariam sipped on her glass of Nero D’Avola and waved as she saw Dinah and Nadia down the block. After the ordeal they had all been through together, Aliya had thought it fitting for them all to be at her graduation, as she moved past this major milestone.
After several hugs, Dinah and Nadia settled down across from her and Raj. Placing his hand on her shoulder, Raj looked at Mariam and excused himself.
“I’m going to go meet Aliya a little early, give you guys some time. See you there in a bit?”
Mariam nodded and once he had left for the car, Dinah grasped her wine glass with white knuckles, her voice filled with trepidation. “Mariam, what happened with the detective?”
Mariam smiled, she had decided to wait to tell them in person rather than letting them know earlier when they were boarding their flight. “Everything’s okay. He’s dropping the whole thing.”
“Oh, thank God. I’m so glad we get to go to the graduation today with this whole thing behind us, with all of it behind you.”
“Me too,” Mariam agreed. She turned toward Nadia, who had remained quiet other than their initial greeting, “How are you doing?”
“Could be better, but I’ll get there,” she answered softly. “I’m so sorry again, all of this, it happened because of me—”
Mariam shook her head, “No, come on, we’ve been through this. Tareq hurt all of us, I wasn’t his only victim.” Her smile widened, she was able to say the word victim without the pain that previously accompanied it.
What happened doesn’t make us weak, in fact, overcoming it means that we’re strong.
“Thank you again for understanding,” Nadia looked down at the napkin on her lap. “I think the trauma counseling is helping, but honestly, I’m still struggling.”
“You’re doing all the right things—trust me, I’m a poster child for therapy these days,” Mariam said with a nod.
Dinah sighed and raised her glass, “I’m stopping all of this bittersweet talk now—to the case being closed, and Tareq being truly behind us.”
Mariam clinked her glass against Dinah’s, wondering if should say more.
There’ll be no more victims.
She waited till they each had a sip, and then changed the subject, broaching their plans for the next few days. When they reached the venue an hour later, Mariam paused as she got out of the car, taking in the sunlight that made the grass sparkle as if it were the setting of a scene from Lord of the Rings. She reveled in the moment, she had accepted her past and moved on—despite her protests to the contrary, she had been apprehensive about seeing Nadia, worried that she would blame her for what had led to Tareq’s return even if intellectually she knew that it wasn’t her fault. Instead, Mariam found herself l
ight and free, she didn’t need to blame Nadia, and she was grateful that she could help her to move forward past the trauma of his attack. A few months earlier she had no doubt that seeing her would have put her completely off balance, but today she was ready to greet the day and celebrate Aliya’s big moment.
They met Raj and Aliya on the lawn, and Mariam looked at her daughter with a teary smile. “You’re finishing your Master’s now, I can’t even believe it.”
Raj’s voice cracked as he gave Aliya a hug, “You know, you’re my little girl, but you grew up. I’m so proud of you.”
“I love you, Dad.”
Mariam watched the two of them, fighting back tears, she couldn’t believe this was her life.
My family, my life.
Her eyes grew watery despite her best efforts and she smiled through them.
They were about to head into the reception hall five minutes later when they heard a stream of sirens coming down the street. Mariam stopped and looked in the direction of the sound, an ambulance and a fire engine were speeding toward them. The vehicles flew past where they were standing on the sidewalk and turned right at the next street corner. When the sound faded away after a few seconds, Raj reached out and grabbed her hand; he was trying to be supportive, he knew now how the sirens used to affect her. Mariam smiled at him—the memory of the sirens the night of her concussion in Kuwait was still with her, but it no longer held her hostage. Nor did her life with Tareq.
That past is part of me, but it does not define me.
I often find the task of drafting the Acknowledgement page to be as daunting as the story itself. There are so many who have contributed to my writing career, making me the storyteller I am today. Without each of them, I may never have written a single word.
First and foremost, I thank you, the reader. By opening this book, you have joined me in a journey back in time when the Gulf War disrupted so many lives. While Mariam is a fictional character inspired by events of the war, I felt a kinship with her as she pushed on through difficult days in her quest to survive and emerge the victor in her own story. Thank you for believing in her and her strength as much as I do.