Trespassing (18 page)

Daanish looked up at Khurram and suddenly blurted, ‘I’m
only twenty-two but I believe my mother’s already thinking about marriage.’

Khurram’s face lit up. ‘How interesting!’

‘She keeps dropping hints about settling down, whatever that means, and a few days ago I heard her discussing “the girl” with my aunts. I came into the kitchen and Anu was saying, “I still think she’s right for him despite what happened.” I never got to know who she was, or what happened, before my chachi started coughing wildly.’

Khurram slapped his knee. ‘It’s sounding like marriage all right!’

‘It’s absurd. My father would have vetoed her plans immediately.’

Khurram shrugged. ‘Maybe you’ll like her.’

‘Have you ever noticed how women here walk?’

Khurram grinned. ‘That’s usually what I’m looking at.’

‘Sweeping dupattas,’ Daanish began to mimic the cumbersome cloth with his arms, dramatizing as he continued, ‘kurtas catching in chairs, shalwar cuffs slipping over stilettos, hair in saalan, saalan in nails. And let’s not even talk about hairspray!’

Khurram laughed while Daanish took mincing steps around the rock, tripping, puffing out an imaginary coif, spraying it. ‘Yaar,’ said Khurram, ‘I
love
it when they do such things! It’s so,’ he smacked his lips, ‘so tasty!’

‘Mind you,’ said Daanish, ‘I learned American women spend just as much time in the toilet.’

Khurram covered his mouth with pudgy fingers and giggled. ‘How many did you know?’

Daanish waved his hand dismissingly. Then he looked up at Salaamat. ‘I wonder what he’s thinking?’

‘You can say anything in front of him. He’s deaf.’

The man had not moved a muscle. He still stared blankly ahead, his curls jostling each other gaily.

Daanish continued, ‘I knew
many.
And they
all
groomed.
They just did it differently. And when they get older, here they plot weddings, there they buy hormone replacement aids! Shit. I come back here to find my father dead and mother scheming.’

It was the first time Daanish had used the word
dead.
It whirled around his head, leaving him momentarily stunned.

Then he saw death everywhere.

It whistled in the crevices of the steep, serrated rocks, crashed on the surf, screamed in the current, crawled behind Salaamat’s vacant stare. It scattered around him as bone: on the cord around his neck, on the rock, on Salaamat’s sculpted face. Bone underground, yielding yarns of golden thread. Bone in the ocean, vomited somewhere far, for someone just like the doctor to find and bring home to a son, in a case of bone.

Crouching in the sand, he buried his head between the bones of his knees, and was transported back to an evening with Anu.

They sat in the kitchen, waiting for the doctor. Earlier that morning, his father had returned from a conference in East Asia. Daanish sat at the table, wanting to run up to his room and touch the beautiful gift the doctor had brought him: a chambered nautilus, coiling in a counterclockwise curve. It was the first and only gift his father had given him directly. He was too proud of the find to risk it going unnoticed. Daanish wanted to hold it in his palm, gaze at the iridescent whorl, picture the animal that had once lived inside the many rooms of mother-of-pearl. He wanted to follow it through each chamber with a feathery gill of light, and watch how each was sealed off as the creature grew into the next one. He wanted to know why this particular specimen had grown in a different way, twirling sinistrally instead of like its right-handed siblings. What did its relatives – like the wandering, leggy argonaut – have to say about it? And he wanted to ask what it was like, being a member of a family
that was over two hundred million years old. How did today’s animals compare with the mighty dinosaurs?

As Daanish ruminated, the food got cold. He didn’t know why, but every time his father returned from a voyage, the food just sat. Anu would reheat it twice, maybe even three times. Then she’d say to him, as she did that day,’ You should eat. You have to get to sleep.’ And she’d watch her son in the silence of the kitchen, occasionally muttering about their dwindling bank account and the loan on the house that was still pending, even though the house looked like it had existed when the dinosaurs did.

She was peeling him an apple when at last the doctor appeared. Without a word, he sniffed the chicken karhai, eggplant and daal. He took one bite.

‘Is it cold?’ she asked.

He pushed the plate away. She repeated her question. He slammed the table with his fist. ‘That’s all you ever have to say: Is it cold? Do you want more? Are you well? Is it good enough? Woman, why can’t you ever make conversation?’

She stared at him. Daanish, feeling he chewed too loudly, tried to swallow an apple quarter whole.

Earlier, he knew, Anu had asked the doctor how the trip went. She hadn’t been complaining. She’d just asked. He hadn’t answered. As long as he remembered, it was the doctor who never made conversation with
her.
He yearned, suddenly, for her to say so. But she looked away. He yearned then to hold and comfort her. But would that be deceiving
him?
He stared at the man whose large amber eyes flickered with rage. It was as if the hair in each thick brow waited to be plucked and dunked in the cauldron behind his eyes. This wasn’t the same man who took him to the cove.

Daanish swallowed a second apple quarter whole – Anu had begun paring another. He didn’t even want to be in the cove today. He wanted only to be with the nautilus. No, to
be the nautilus. With ninety arms to swim away, and twenty cabins to roam.

Slowly, Anu rose, returned with a clean plate, and placed the newly pared apple gently by the doctor’s rejected main course.

‘This is driving me mad,’ he bellowed, storming out.

Daanish heaved a sigh of relief. He could stop eating the apple now. ‘What’s driving him mad?’ he asked Anu.

She said, more to the apple peels and congealing saalan than to him, ‘The fact that he has not come back.’ She began listlessly putting away the food. He watched her, small and plump, with a ruby stud like a bloodstain on her nose.

He ran upstairs. The doctor was there, waiting, the nautilus in his giant hands. ‘Did I tell you its brain is highly developed? Scientists say it has evolved to the complexity of a mammal’s.’

Daanish looked up from his knees.

Khurram smiled awkwardly. ‘I thought you’d gone away.’

‘That’s what happened to my father,’ Daanish mumbled. And then, louder: ‘My mother needs me.’

Khurram nodded. ‘You are all she has now. Go with whatever she wants. What will it costing you? You’ll make her happy, and seeing her happy will make you happy. With your responsibilities taken care of, you can for to go back to Amreeka with no guilt.’

‘But what about the girl? I don’t even know her.’

‘She will go where you are going, when you are ready. And there will be plenty of time to know her,’ he winked.

Daanish frowned. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Why? So many people are doing it that way. They are happy, aren’t they? Look, your saying yes will make the girl’s family happy too.’ He waved his arms. ‘Everyone will be happy!’

‘I wish I could be like you.’ Daanish gave him a quizzical look. ‘So merry and shameless.’

Khurram stood up. ‘Stop thinking. It will be working out. Let’s have cold drink.’

On the way to the car Khurram continued chirping, pausing only when they had to cross the ragged rocks again. The more Daanish listened, the greater became his uncertainty, and the more he was charmed by Khurram’s clear-cut thinking. Maybe Khurram wasn’t a simpleton, after all.

‘Where will it be?’ he asked Daanish. ‘Mr Burger or Sheraton?’ Daanish let Khurram decide.

From the clouds, it looked as if a forest of yellow butterflies starting off on some mammoth migration had suddenly lost its bearings. The creatures flew into each other, pirouetted and fell, reversed direction, landed in heaps, or else on straw, bark and brick. And when they broke free, Daanish drifted with them.

He saw rows of gray bungalows with families on their porches. The star-spangled banner flapped on shingle rooftops. More butterflies flew by, most still yellow, though a few were pastel pink or blue. They peeped through the slots of the porch floor-planks. Others splayed on the grass beneath. Still others wound between the fingers of the happy waving families on streets named after Columbus and Cortes.

Daanish flew, covering towns in seconds, like a camera scan for Hollywood or ABC News.

A familiar figure stalled outside a flower shop on Bartholomew Boulevard. Daanish hovered in the sky, intrigued. Below was himself, sauntering past a Hallmark gift shop.
The shop’s windows too were strewn with butterflies. They bore words that said,
We Kicked Ass; Our Colors Don’t Run; Everybody Party.

‘It’s the biggest parade in history,’ said the shopkeeper as he held the door for an old lady in a dress splashed with sunflowers.

She nodded, clasping a little brown bag with greeting cards and colored bows in one hand, and a terrier with a yellow butterfly between its ears in the other. ‘Makes you proud, doesn’t it? Our boys did so well.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Have a nice day, dear.’

Daanish saw himself striding over to Liam’s Rambler. Was that the expression he always wore? His brow was creased, jaw clenched, back stiff, gait undecided. He hopped impatiently on the pavement. He kicked the post from which Colonel Sanders watched him with a yellow butterfly on his elfin beard. He glanced at the flower shop, then back at the car, then down another street. He was asking himself: Why should I wait for that bastard? He was reasoning: Because he’s not a bastard.

Seconds later, Liam came out of the flower shop, his forelock and grin partially concealed behind a large cluster of pink zinnias and yellow irises. He twirled them proudly for Daanish’s inspection. ‘I always get irises for Iris, though zinnias are her faves.’

Daanish scowled, ‘You could have done us a favor by choosing a different color at least. All this glorification in yellow is sickening enough.’

‘There’s glorification in every color,’ retorted Liam. ‘The ribbons are yellow but the ticker tape’s a rainbow. Does that mean I can’t get my girlfriend flowers?’

‘The war’s destroyed hundreds of thousands of people. Your media calls it a work of art, and your people wave pompoms.’ He pointed to the ribbons and the tape. ‘Doesn’t it enrage you?’

In response, Liam tossed his head. His forelock fell back over his eyes like a curtain.

Daanish nodded. ‘I’m so happy for you. Bravo. You didn’t lose like in Vietnam. You’ll never lose again.’

Liam climbed into the car and unlocked the passenger door. Daanish got in. Liam said, ‘Iris is giving her first public recital today. That’s the only reason I’m celebrating.’

Daanish’s heart raced. Since the war began, he and Liam had said nothing about it to each other. It was as if, by staying silent, Liam was telling him: I’m not a part of it. And Daanish’s silence replied: I’m afraid to know you. Really know you.

But now, he had to know.

‘You’re not celebrating the war, Liam, but you’re not exactly worked up about it either. You said nothing when your country began the air strikes, nothing when all the propaganda glittered from your television …’

‘Will you drop the bit about
your?
This isn’t
my
war. I didn’t start it. Hold these a minute, would you?’ Liam handed Daanish the bouquet so he could wear his seatbelt.

‘I’m not your fucking vase,’ Daanish answered. ‘I’m trying to talk to you. I can’t believe how bloody smug you are.’

Liam arranged the flowers carefully on the backseat. ‘You don’t wanna go you can get out now.’

Daanish gaped at him. Not this – not Liam too. Liam and Wayne were different. He took a deep breath.

If he got out of the car, he knew Liam’s anger would pass sooner than his. By the time Liam arrived at the recital, he’d have found his loveable, demented, equine grin. For him, nothing would change. He’d think of Daanish with a slow shake of his head. Perhaps his lips would tremble a little. He might even be hurt. But he’d never give a thought to the things Daanish desperately needed him to think about.

Behind the wheel, the olive pupils of Liam’s milky-green eyes darkened. His lips really did tremble, though just barely.

Dammit, thought Daanish.
He’s
hurt. About which
I’m
to feel guilty. How did Liam manage to make willful ignorance look like innocence? How did he make Daanish look like the villain? Perhaps this was the greatest power of a superpower.

Up in the sky, Daanish took one last glance at Bartholomew Boulevard. There was Liam, blissful, beautiful and wronged. Daanish flew away, aware that he was about to say, ‘Let’s forget this then.’ He would go to the recital.

Now he skimmed rather than hovered above ground. The world blurred. When next it cleared, he was standing at the foot of his parents’ bed, listening to their alarm clock with the BBC chime.

It was seven o’clock, time for the doctor to wake up. Anu was in the kitchen. Daanish waited patiently, the ambergris candles discovered – his father had hidden them in an airline sick bag, amongst his dirty linen. Daanish had lit them. They smelled like khas, like grass beginning to smoke. His father had given him a clue: whale vomit. He’d found them. He was giggling. At last the doctor stretched awake. ‘Ah, Daanishwar! My clever boy.’ His chest hair was damp with sweat. Daanish buried his face in it, carefully holding the candles up. The clock rang again: four bells ascending, four descending. ‘My clever boy,’ his father repeated. Daanish breathed deeply the perfume wafting around them.

But before he could hold the scent, it vanished. An air current sent him flying forward again. It dropped him in the fourth row of an auditorium. The room had him awestruck. The chairs were cushioned. Desks never rattled. Wall-to-wall carpeting. Controlled temperature. Acoustics so crisp he could hear nails scrape denim when the student in the first row scratched. The plush blue carpet was like a woolen blanket, freshly laundered with Squeeze for extra softness, coating the atmosphere in a pleasant hum. In Karachi, his school had seating on one level. Tall students were asked
to sit at the back, where the teacher was invisible. By age fourteen, Daanish, the tallest boy in the school, could only keep up with lectures by sharing the notes of short boys.