Trespassing (17 page)

Daanish noted all this in his journal, growing increasingly motivated. Here were a few courageous reporters. Surely it would be interesting to compare these reports with others?

He moved on to the popular press, struck by its sloppiness, its glaring inconsistencies. One magazine wrote that Iraq’s military was invincible but then bragged that the government could and would contain it. Another said officials persevered to avoid Iraqi civilian casualties, then quoted a general saying the number of civilians killed did not interest him. It was as if the reports were censored but not proofread.

  *  *  *  

Hours later, Daanish stepped outside. Walking aimlessly through the college grounds, he gradually made his way downtown, his neck sinking deep into the collar of his jacket. The wind had picked up during the afternoon. The darkness, at barely five o’clock, had set like cooling lacquer. He passed cafés piled with students and checked his pockets – not even two dollars left from his last paycheck, and the next would be cut. Stopping at a window, he looked inside. A woman carried a glossy black mug of steaming hot chocolate Daanish could almost smell. He pulled away.

The streets were still aglow with Christmas lights. Wreaths and colored balls hung from eaves. Ferns brightened almost every shop window. From one store blew the soft refrain of children singing carols. Ahead of him, beneath an orange street light, a group of friends met and exchanged tales of New Year’s parties. Becky hadn’t needed him to be her ethnic escort this time.

He passed a few shops with war stickers. One touted a cruise missile and read:
This One’s For You, Saddam.
Another showed a warhead detonating. It said:
Say Hello to Allah.

Around him the air was cold and gay, verging on euphoric. He wanted something hot. He walked back to the café. He’d spend his last dollar after all.

But at the doorway, a heavyset man blocked his entrance. ‘We’re closing,’ he said. Daanish cast a quick look inside. No one seemed in a hurry to leave. Walking back down the street, he glanced around. The friends who’d met under the street light were entering the café.

In the following days, other Muslim students began relating similar incidents. One said someone had scribbled
Go home, Towelhead
on his door. He’d never worn a towel on his head, or a turban either. Graffiti was painted across the brick wall of a warehouse:
Save America, Kill an Arab.
A mosque was attacked, as was a Lebanese restaurant. And in the media,
in place of war coverage, articles condemning Islam gained prominence. All the while, bombs dropped on Iraq every thirty seconds.

On average, it took Daanish twenty minutes to read each article. On average, the air raids killed twenty-five hundred Iraqis daily. Approximately thirty would lose their lives by the time he’d finished reading how much
they
hate
us.

The girl did not return. Not the next day, nor the following week. Daanish, pacing over the graying rug, was growing desperate for a way to fly out the wrought-iron grills of his bedroom window. He resolved to meet absolutely no more mourners.

Below, Khurram’s driver arrived with a pot of tea. Daanish called out to him.

The workers continued hauling and laying cement or else paused with the old man for tea.

‘Hey!’ Daanish called again, louder.

A young man balanced on top of the foundation wall a few feet lower than Daanish’s window, looked up. He nudged his chin questioningly. Daanish pointed to the driver. The man pointed too. Daanish nodded. ‘Call him.’

‘Did you talk to the President about my visa?’ asked the man.

‘What?’

‘The visa!’

‘Call
him,’
Daanish again pointed to the driver.

The worker settled into a crouch. His toes curled around the unleveled edge of the wall. He began picking specks of dry mortar off his feet, preparing to sit under the window all day.

‘All right,’ Daanish hissed. ‘I’ll work on it. Now
call
him.’

The man hopped down, returning with the driver. The latter looked up, composed as always.

‘I’m going to give you a note for Khurram. Please wait,’ said Daanish.

The other man offered, ‘He’s deaf.’

‘What?’

The man muttered something and spat.

‘What do you mean he’s deaf?’ asked Daanish. ‘I’ve spoken to him before.’

‘You’ve talked in his right ear. Like this he’s deaf.’

‘Well,’ Daanish felt his temper rise. ‘Can
you
tell him, in his right ear, please, what I just said?’

‘When will I get the visa?’

‘Shit,’ growled Daanish. He stamped to his desk, not his desk – a small, blanched, wimpy thing Anu called a desk – and scribbled a note to Khurram:
Can I borrow your car for the day? If you’re free, join me? I want to go to the beach. My mother would be less likely to object if I didn’t go alone, especially if you came to get me. Soon I hope, Daanish.
He stuffed it in an envelope that he folded into a plane. He tossed this between the diamonds of the grill, down to the driver, who, happily, still waited. Unhappily, so did the other. It was he who caught the plane.

‘Have you talked into his right ear?’ Daanish asked dryly.

He nodded and passed the driver the paper. The driver walked to Khurram’s house.

‘And?’ said the man.

Daanish slammed the window shut.

He sat on his bed, waiting. Then he sprang up nervously,
itching for something to do. At last he moved to the drawer with the cocoons. ‘I’ve decided to boil you, after all,’ he announced. ‘But only one. Which will it be?’ He stared at the trio of wooly pellets, picturing a thick white ribbon curled inside of each. While elbowing their way to shape, he was sure the creatures twitched their antennae, watching him.

Also in the closet was the lacquer box, with the photograph he’d not put in himself. Staring up at him was his young father, so young his hairline showed no sign of receding. His shoulders were bunched against the clouds. A maroon scarf lay stylishly over one shoulder. His jacket and trousers, though, were the same frayed ones he’d worn till his last winter. In the background rose a brown tower. The streets were swept, paved, orderly. His mouth was wide open in the hearty, leonine laugh Daanish heard in his dreams. A woman held his hand. Not his mother. She was spry, short-haired, boyish. Her brown skin was smooth and flushed, as if she’d been jogging. She too appeared cold and delighted.

What was the picture doing here?

What did Anu want, anyway?

He put the box away irritably.

An hour later, there was a loud knock. Daanish stumbled to unlock the door.

Khurram bustled inside. ‘Arre, you send message then go to sleep. It is nice for to see you again.’ He hugged him fervently.

Daanish hung limply in Khurram’s arms. He smiled. ‘Just give me five minutes.’

Once ready, he locked the door and led Khurram hurriedly out the kitchen, avoiding the relatives who called after him.

But Anu caught up with them. ‘You haven’t read a word today,’ she protested. ‘And I haven’t seen you all morning. I was so worried. I didn’t know if I should disturb …’

‘Anu please. Khurram’s waiting.’

Khurram smiled without any apparent haste.

‘Why don’t you read too?’ Anu suggested.

Khurram opened his mouth but Daanish pushed him out the door. ‘He can’t.’ And then, pleading, ‘I’ve hardly left the house since coming back, Anu. Everyone needs to breathe.’

‘But where are you going?’ She frowned. ‘Why can’t you breathe in here?’

He left without answering.

They drove through neighborhoods like his own that had, till just a few decades ago, lurked under the sea. Sweeping boulevards had cropped up with designer boutiques, video shops and ice-cream parlors. He said, ‘Here too, all people want to do is shop and eat.’

‘What else is there?’ asked Khurram. More somberly, he added, ‘I was thinking about visiting many times but didn’t want to disturb. Salaamat told me about your father’s death.’ He pointed at the driver.

‘Oh, is that his name?’ In the rear-view mirror, Daanish caught a glimpse of the jutting cheekbones, and the elusive, opalescent eyes. ‘How does he know?’

‘Well, all the neighbors knowing. I’m so sorry. Your father must have been very young.’

‘At heart, yes,’ mumbled Daanish.

‘And you the only child.’ Khurram shook his head. ‘There’s being a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.’ He pinched Daanish’s shoulders as if to squeeze some of it off.

‘I suppose so.’

‘You must be very busy,’ Khurram persisted.

‘Actually, no. There’s not much for me to do. The legal end’s been taken care of by my uncles, the domestic routine’s in my mother’s hands and I’m really just a, just a … I don’t even know. Proof of a better life? Evidence that my father lives on? Anu gets hysterical every time I leave the house. She knows every new case of kidnapping, murder, robbery, you name it. I think keeping track of national tragedy helps her
cope with her own.’ Words he’d been biting back forced their way out haphazardly now. ‘I haven’t talked this much since our flight together. My school friends are all in the States. I wish there were an internship or some other job I could do, but there isn’t, not in anything that interests me at least.’

‘Well,’ Khurram again thumped him. ‘You are having me.’ He continued trying to console him, all the way to the cove.

Once there Daanish thought: I have this.

He had wondered if he could stand being here without his father. Now he had the answer. His footsteps were light as he clambered swiftly over the needle-like rocks on the western shoulder of the inlet, too elated to notice any cuts. Salaamat too crossed the mound with graceful ease; Khurram alone complained.

Daanish threw his head back. Anu had refurbished his room and taken away his things but she could not touch this.

The gray, shirty sea spilled with a hiss up the slope of sand toward him. The water was too rough for swimming, he had to settle for simply walking. Washed ashore were the ocellate cowries, blue mussels and pen shells that greeted him every time he made this walk. He upturned many of the pen shells. All were empty or crushed.

‘The live ones are buried,’ Salaamat said. His locks flapped around his sharp jaw like birds around a spire of granite.

‘I’m not interested in the meat,’ answered Daanish. ‘I just like the shells. I used to collect them.’ He spoke in Salaamat’s left ear and anyway, the wind swept his words away.

The driver continued, ‘They attach themselves to underground stones with golden thread. In the old days, people wove cloth with the thread.’ It was the most he’d ever volunteered on his own. Just as unexpectedly, he wound his words back up, turned and walked calf-deep in the water, straight as a sheet of iron even when the current pulled. The dusky blue horizon cut him in two, just at the hips.

Daanish returned to combing the shore. There were some
of the less common shells – sand bonnets, spiral babylons, a mitre just like the one around his neck. There was even a shattered tiger cowry. He’d had a perfect specimen of each in his collection. Anger toward Anu began to rise again.

Khurram caught up with him, panting, clutching a mobile phone. One toe bled. ‘I don’t know why we come here. We passed many nicer places on the way, with people and food stalls.’ He looked around him. ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘Nothing here!’ Daanish laughed. ‘Look around! What more do you want?’

Khurram winced when the surf hit his cut. He sighed. ‘Where to sit?’

Daanish pointed to a cluster of boulders at the opposite end. ‘My mother always sat there.’

‘No shade, yaar,’ he moaned.

‘There’s a cave in there,’ Daanish indicated the sheer rocks they’d just descended. ‘But the tide’s too high,’ he added. They walked toward the boulder he’d called the shoulder-boulder as a child. Daanish remembered Anu sitting there, fitting in the knurl perfectly, her little figure balancing like a top as she sewed. The doctor and he would dig around the rock’s base, finding little more than the husks of the chiton that clung to the boulder’s surface.

Khurram tied a handkerchief around his head and moved inland, where the sand was plush and powdery. He began to cheer up a little, telling Daanish all he’d done since returning from the visit to his brother. Most of it involved looking after his father’s business.

‘What kind of business?’ Daanish asked.

‘Oh,’ Khurram examined his toe. ‘Business.’

‘What
kind
of business?’

‘He imports things.’ Khurram stuffed his phone in a pocket.

‘Can you be any vaguer?’ Daanish rolled his eyes. ‘What things?’

Khurram adjusted his handkerchief and paused. He looked
ridiculous: a round head wrapped in a square of cloth, paunch jutting over a belt, trouser cuffs dragging a ratty line of rope.

‘What things?’ Daanish repeated.

Khurram smiled mysteriously. ‘Metal things.’

‘That explode?’ Daanish ventured.

Khurram reflected. ‘No. Well, sort of yes. Mostly they lock.’

‘Oh. So your father imports from China – padlocks?’

‘No, from the US and Europe. But yes, you could be calling them padlocks.’

‘You’re being very enigmatic today.’

‘I am not knowing big words like that,’ Khurram replied.

They reached the shoulder-boulder. It was taken. Salaamat had stationed himself there, gazing out at the sea as Anu had done. She’d watch him wear his fins and clean his mask, an aquamarine shawl around her shoulders, lace on her lap. The shawl had blinked at him like a lighthouse as he swam away.

Khurram settled on a small rock that tilted into the base of the shoulder-boulder, offering partial shade. He shifted, adjusting himself so he could both be out of the sun and stay balanced on the rock’s bowed crown. Salaamat continued to stare ahead. Daanish squatted in the sand, studying a tide pool between the boulder and Khurram’s rock. There were sea cucumbers and a sprinkle of black sea urchins. He’d pointed these out often to Anu, who’d never seen his underwater world. At such times it was the doctor who sat apart. Rarely, if ever, did the family enjoy a three-way conversation. Daanish didn’t know when it happened but at some point in his life he’d been asked, non-verbally, to choose between them. He frowned, swirling the tide pool with a stick, gently poking a winkle. The animal immediately scurried back into its fist of bone.