A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

  Beneath this sky, in this park tucked away from the main freeway, a side of her husband she has not often seen is brought out: this could be how he appears when he is relaxing. He comments on the cloudless sky, the birds that sing with voices that do not pester quite as much as the ones by his window.

  “But, Baba,” Hadia says to him, “they are the same.”

  The sun, still in the center of the sky, does not burn. Rafiq lies on his back and cushions his head on his interlocked hands. Layla pours lemonade into paper cups and passes them into the eager hands of her children. Days like this, days out, just the five of them, are rare. Her children are buzzing with the knowledge of its uniqueness. They might have thanked Rafiq a hundred times.

  “It’s a lovely way to spend a Sunday, isn’t it?” she says, regretting immediately how calling attention to the loveliness of a thing diminishes its magic. Rafiq, his eyes hidden behind his dark sunglasses, nods solemnly. Amar looks up at her, radiant, she imagines, from considering himself responsible for the day. After dinner yesterday, before the plates had been cleared and the children sent to bed, he asked if they could go on a picnic and Rafiq said, why don’t we do that? Layla had smiled, surprised at the spontaneity of her husband, and said she could make food they could take along. Hadia said: tangerines. Huda said: lemonade. Amar said: river. We can try, Rafiq said to them, I might know a place for us.

  There is a river nearby, past the trees that surround them, past where the meadow dips beyond their sight. The sound of water moving, the gurgling, tugs at Amar and he taps her leg when he hears it. Huda points to a far-off playground and asks Rafiq if he will take them there after they’ve eaten. They are asking for things openly, without hesitation, pausing for a moment after they do before Rafiq’s nod, out of fear that their good fortune has run out and soon routine will resume.

  “It was a good idea, Amar,” Layla assures him, using the kind of voice she always strives for when speaking with her children. He responds with a brighter smile, pleased with himself, looks to his sisters to see if they have noticed the praise.

  They eat lunch cross-legged on the sheet, cradling the plate Layla has prepared for each of them. Layla made cashew curry chicken sandwiches, rich from the taste of peppers, crunchy from the lettuce. Hadia compliments them, and for once Huda does not complain about the taste of the chicken, masked as it is in sauce and spice. When they are finished they share tangerines and stories from Hadia’s and Huda’s classrooms that Amar listens to so seriously, popping the tangerine slices into his mouth and chewing slowly. He always watches them intently when they speak of school. He is only four and Layla thought to skip preschool and wait until kindergarten, not wanting an empty home just yet. He is fascinated by that unknown world. When they drop Huda and Hadia off, she looks back at him in the rearview mirror, how he stretches his neck to watch wide-eyed and openmouthed as his sisters join the crowd, their lunch boxes swinging at their sides.

  After they eat, Huda asks again about the swings and Rafiq lets her climb onto his back for a piggyback ride. Hadia follows them.

  “Do you want to go?” Layla nudges Amar. They watch as the three of them make their way, Huda laughing when Rafiq mimics a trotting horse. Amar shakes his head, presses his tongue against the inside of his chubby cheek.

  Layla stands and brushes the crumbs off of her yellow shalwar kameez and scans the meadow—the playground, the sparse picnic tables, some occupied with families not unlike her own, young children and young parents.

  “Come with me,” she says, bending down a bit so he can reach her hand. He holds on and she pulls him up, he is still light enough for her to do so with ease. The sound of water guides them.

  Before they have disappeared into the trees that will block Rafiq and the girls from her sight, she turns back to see they have reached the swings. Rafiq touches the back of one and sends her forth just as the other lands against his palm. From where she stands he appears exactly like the kind of man she would want for the father of her children, a man who knows how to lift them onto the rubber seats of the swing, knows with what gentle force to push them, knows how something as small as saying yes to a picnic would please them so uncomplicatedly. Amar lets go of her hand and walks ahead. It takes so little, just the slightest touch of his hand against their backs, and their bodies soar, their laughter reaches her, and she is shocked by a plunge inside her. Her affection for Rafiq surges and she wonders if she has ever loved him the way she loves him now.

  “Mumma,” Amar calls with urgency, “let’s go.”

  He waits for her a few feet ahead, holding out his hand.

  “Speak in Urdu, Ami,” she reminds him. Ever since Hadia first learned English in school it has been difficult to make any of them speak in Urdu. They speak in English and so quickly that they sound like little trains zooming by. They act as though it were the superior language, the more stylish one. She has to make it a game at dinner to encourage them. It confuses her. Urdu is the language she and Rafiq speak with one another and all they ever spoke with the children, but one goes to school and the others pick it up like wildfire, as if they’ve forgotten their own tongue entirely. It worries her: if they so easily lose their own language, what else will be lost?

  The wind lifts her yellow orni up like a kite and it covers her face. Amar begins to laugh and laugh. Rafiq has heard him and he turns around. Layla restrains the orni and waves, points to where they are walking and Rafiq nods. She catches up to Amar and grabs hold of his hand, so small in hers. He won’t let her hold his hand for much longer. As they walk downhill the grass becomes a tangled mess then just dirt, Amar pulls her along, and Layla realizes she wants another child. Rafiq would not want another—he was an only child and had been against even having a third. Just one more, she had said after Huda, and after a few years Amar had been born. After the scare that was Amar’s birth and the stressful first weeks of his life, it would be even harder to broach the topic of a fourth. Amar leads her down the slope and they try to steady their footing. Another child. A boy, for Amar to have a brother. A baby that would extend that feeling of a small hand in hers for a little longer.

  When they first glimpse the water, Amar rushes forward and asks to be allowed in. Layla hesitates. Recently, she heard of a child, a little girl, no older than seven, playing in a river when her parents turned their backs for just a moment. The current rising and quickening without warning, the girl swept away, struggling to lift her head above the water. Layla shivers, reaches out to touch the soft hair of her son, moves it from his eyes.

  “Can I, Mumma?” He uses that irresistible and manipulative voice that he, like all children, perfected so early on. She does not remember being a child capable of such powers.

  The water before them is not cause for alarm. The river seems shallow, more like a creek; it moves quickly but with an unthreatening swiftness. The deepest end is likely no deeper than her knees, and she sees the soft surface of rocks, their edges worn away from time and the rush of the current. Amar can stand on them and move from one to the other without cutting his feet. She kneels and removes his shoes, and he begins to tap her shoulders excitedly, as she rolls his jeans up to his knees, tight enough that they won’t fall, and she steps back and watches him turn to the creek, take it all in. How it must appear vaster to him than it does to her. He extends just one shaky leg forward, dips a toe in and pulls it back out again, testing the temperature, then he steps forward without looking back. She finds it strange that she feels a tinge of hurt that he does not turn back. The water ripples at his presence and quickly re-forms around him.

  The tip of each wave looks painted gold, dashes here and there where the sunlight shimmers. She watches her son bend down to feel the water flow between his fingers and it seems impossible to her that something would break this precious space, or how she feels here, how the wind and the birds and the gurgle of water sound like music. It feels impossible that ther
e could be days when it was not like this for them, her children’s fingers sticky with tangerine juice, her husband so calm, his face so relaxed, that when he lies on their picnic sheet she wonders if he has fallen asleep. Amar cups the water in his hands and throws it up and laughs and it feels as if nothing could interrupt the bliss of the moment, bliss as bright as the sun that glimmers on the water, as light as her daughters’ girlish laughter, as light.

  “Mumma,” Amar calls out to her, standing in the center of the creek, cupping the water in his hands and releasing it. “Come!”

  Layla shakes her head but he begins to gesture with his hands to call her, little drops flying from his fingers. Her son is persistent and demanding, he knows what he wants and is devastated if he does not attain it. It alarms her: how little it takes to darken his mood.

  “I can’t,” she replies, cupping her palms around her mouth so her voice can reach him.

  “Mumma, please! Feel how cold.”

  “My clothes will get too wet, Ami.”

  “Roll them like me. Please, Mumma.”

  He does not appear as happy as he was a moment ago. Layla looks down at the shalwar that covers her legs, not wanting to reveal them. She turns around and can’t see Rafiq from here. He must still be swinging the girls. She looks back at Amar calling her, unaware of what he is asking of her.

  The slope protects them from view. Here it is just she and her son. She can decide how they move through the world, to each other. She can do this. Bend down and lift her shalwar and join him. What does it matter? She ties her orni at her hip so it won’t get away, she rolls up her shalwar a little bit, then a little more, until it is just above her knees. Amar claps, throws water into the air, the splashes descend like the tails of a golden firework. Her legs are pale. The breeze is colder on bare skin than she imagined. She cannot call forth the last time the sun saw her skin. She feels like a girl. Amar notices nothing—not her nervousness, not her hesitation. Yes, Mummy, he shouts in celebration, as though they had been playing a game and she had given him the correct answer.

  She steps into the water and is surprised not only by how cold it is, but also how refreshing. She looks down at her feet that appear contorted. She chooses each stone carefully and thinks: this is what it is to be alive. This is what being alive can be like. What would Rafiq say if he saw her? Mum-ma? Mum-ma? Amar is saying it like a cheer and Layla realizes she cannot control her laughter, so unrestrained and inaccessible before now. The stones are smooth beneath her feet. The current both insistent and relenting. This is a moment that lifts and becomes a memory even as it is happening, and she knows this will be the meadow she will try to return to, her son’s voice the sound she will try to recall.

  One day she will look back and think: It was not bad. We were so blessed. There were days like this. Sunny and beautiful, when Amar looked up at me as I reached him in the river and said, I’m so happy we did this, Mumma. Days when Rafiq’s mood was as carefree as a ripple of water in a stream. There were times when I watched Hadia unpeel the skin of the tangerine with tiny thumbs and fingers with such precision and technique—the peel not tearing once—and I thought, how did she learn how to do that? I was certainly not the one to teach her. And she offered the tangerine whole to her brother, did not demand a piece in return, then peeled one for her sister before she even asked, and Huda rose to say, I’ll throw the peels away, and maybe it was the same thoughtfulness that touched me that made Huda want to do something in return. Huda cupped her hands and Hadia let the peels fall like little petals into her sister’s palms, and I thought, these are my children, mine, laughing together, and that is when I met Rafiq’s gaze and he looked like I must have, swelling with so much pride it was apparent on his face, on mine, so apparent that we both had to look away, made shy from the force and depth of a feeling we did not expect.

  PART THREE

  1.

  THE WEDDING HAD BARELY BEGUN AND ALREADY LAYLA COULD not locate Amar. Layla had been frustrated when Hadia had said she wanted a mixed wedding—an unsegregated wedding marked a family who valued entertainment over adherence—but as she searched the hall for her son now, she felt grateful for her daughter’s insistence.

  Across the hall she met Rafiq’s gaze. As though the look on her face were enough to convey her fear, Rafiq began to scan the hall. Layla stepped out into the lobby where guests mingled, held small plates of appetizers and sipped juice from thin glass flutes: pineapple, orange, mango. There he was. She could spot the outline of her child in an instant. He was looking down at his plate, nodding along to a conversation. She stepped closer. His suit sharp and his hair combed, he was more than presentable, he was handsome, someone she could point to with pride and say yes, that one there is my son.

  Amar was speaking to a woman. She was facing him and was partially obscured by people walking past.

  “You found him.” Rafiq appeared at her side.

  The people blocking her view stepped away. The woman turned her head enough for a sliver of her profile to be glimpsed. It was her, Amira Ali. Rafiq studied Layla as though waiting for her to react.

  “Should we be worried?” he asked.

  The Ali girl had wasted no time in finding her son. The sight of the two of them together unearthed an old discomfort. She looked to see if Seema was nearby but she was not. Amar and the girl spoke unattended.

  “No,” she said, and not sure who she was reassuring she continued, “it has been years.”

  She smiled at Rafiq, but quickly turned back to them. Amar was not looking at her. Amira Ali was the one speaking. Even from a distance Layla could note the playful tilt in her head as she looked up at Amar, how her hair danced as she moved. Her son played with the food on his plate but did not lift his fork. Layla had not seen Amira Ali in years—she had moved across the country for college, visited infrequently. She had never come again to their home, not even after Amar left.

  Amira stepped away from Amar and walked toward the main hall. Amar seemed unbothered by her departure. Layla let out a breath she did not realize she had been holding. Rafiq returned to mingling; many of the attendees were his coworkers or his oldest friends from Hyderabad.

  Layla watched Amira Ali walk. Girlishness had left her: her cheeks had lost their fullness and given way to high cheekbones, an angular and attractive face. Her lips painted and lashes darkened. She was poised, her spine straight, her step steady. Her childhood charm was now confidence. She maneuvered through the crowd unaware that Layla was watching, and Layla was hit with the strange sensation of realizing she had left something behind and forgotten to turn back for it. But what was it, she wondered, as Amira Ali reached up to tuck her dark hair behind her ear, revealing that heavy, ornate jewelry of Hyderabad, the circular gold earrings with the emeralds and dangling pearls. It would be impossible now, years later, to retrace her steps, and find again what it was that had slipped her mind, what she had forgotten to turn back for.

  * * *

  OF ALL HE had predicted, all he had feared or hoped for, Amira suggesting they meet in private had not even occurred to him. Nor had he thought he would respond so effortlessly, with no pride or hesitation keeping him from agreeing. It repulsed him: that all the work he had done to convince himself he no longer wanted her, did not even want to hear from her, could be so quickly unraveled.

  The piece of chicken and samosa on his plate. He should force himself to eat but his hands trembled. He could not look at her while she spoke. But as she walked away with her posture of being seen, he had looked.

  “There’s a courtyard on the other side of the hotel, down a long corridor, empty this time of night,” she had said.

  It was the same corridor that led to the hotel bar.

  “We could meet there?” she asked.

  He had not known what to say. So she continued, saying maybe when the nikkah and speeches were done—when people sat down to eat dinner and e
veryone was distracted. She had formed a plan. Perhaps she had hoped he would be here just so they could execute it.

  By the time she disappeared into the main hall he was in a state of disbelief. That they would meet again. That even if they did not speak to or see each other, they still felt that care and curiosity. For three years now, he had returned to their last conversations embittered at the thought of being discarded. But seeing her now, the deep green of her dress with the red accents, her golden shoes he concentrated on while she spoke—any bitterness was made insignificant by the overwhelming sight of her. And the chance to once again step toward a place that would be made theirs.

  * * *

  AS MUMMA INSTRUCTED, Hadia sat far enough away from Tariq that two hands could rest between them. She made sure to not laugh too loudly, to not touch him, to not appear, in Mumma’s words, shamelessly eager to be married. It was an absurd expectation placed on women: that they agree to marriage without appearing as though they wanted it. That they at least display innocence. Hadia never understood what was so threatening about a woman experiencing a desire and being unafraid to express it. But on the stage now, she complied with Mumma’s wishes, remembering how Mumma had told her, “You chose your husband. He is not Shia. Please do us the kindness of not making it appear so obviously a love marriage.” She was getting married to who she wanted. Her mother might say it like an accusation, but the fact remained true. She had won the biggest battle: the battle that would determine the rest of her life.

  She and Tariq had just begun to see each other when Amar ran away. Even now, she was not sure if it had been a coincidence, that what had been previously dormant in her friendship with Tariq had suddenly bloomed and intensified. At first Hadia had hesitated. To be with him. To maybe marry him. He was not Hyderabadi and he was not Shia. He did not speak Urdu. And though he was, in many ways, familiar to her, he was also relaxed in his approach to his faith in a way that was new to Hadia. He had smoked weed in college and had tried alcohol. He did not feel guilty when they began to spend time alone together, the way she had at first. He prayed but struggled to maintain a disciplined routine.