Trespassing (32 page)

Daanish laughed. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this from you! Are you saying I can only stay if I’m silent?’

‘This college is giving you aid.’

‘So I’m a beggar? And beggars can’t choose? Has it
occurred to you that by asking questions, I’m living up to your country’s ideals better than you are?’

Now Liam laughed. ‘You know nothing about this country. Let me tell you the first thing you should know. All Americans have experienced prejudice. That’s why our ancestors had to leave their homes in the first place, and come here.’

Daanish took a deep breath. ‘That may be true. But whatever it was your parents or grandparents had to put up with, the fact is that you never did. Now you’re not the persecuted any more, so don’t turn to that every time your country screws another. People who fled here to escape being dumped on are now doing the dumping. Still you think of yourself as the victim.’

‘I didn’t say I do. I just said that Americans know what it’s like.’

‘And I’m saying you don’t.
You
don’t. Even if your forefathers did. Yet you want the kind of news that says you do. You want to hear about being wronged. Not about who you’re wronging. A bombing raid kills hundreds in Panama or Iraq, it’s not even on the news. But an American is harassed anywhere outside the States and it’s the lead story on every network.’

Liam flicked his hair back. ‘I’ve got class.’

‘That’s why you care nothing about breaking international laws or the effects of the sanctions. They hate you, remember? So it’s okay to kill them.’

He walked away.

Seven months later, when Daanish’s father died, Liam insisted on dropping him off at the bus station. Daanish wondered how he’d found out, but didn’t ask. He liked to think that in the months of estrangement, indirectly, Liam had still enquired after him.

As he mounted the bus, Daanish knew Liam was trying to catch his eye.

‘I’m really sorry, man,’ he said.

Several thousand deaths couldn’t make him remorseful, yet Daanish’s father’s death could. Still, he was glad to have his friendship again, though he never told him that.

None of his old friends were in Karachi any more. They were in the US, either doing summer internships or pretending to. Anything so they didn’t have to come back. Literally, anything. Two friends in New York City toiled in the subway, one in a mezzanine news-stand, the other as a ticket-seller. It was risky work, sometimes worse than a taxi-driver’s. Anyone attempting it was an immigrant, or an immigrant-aspirant. Either way, an alien. Was that better than this? Better than knowing the house at least was yours and the meal waiting? Was the future here even more uncertain than in the NYC underground?

Outside, the house under construction stood sopping and unattended. The workers had stopped coming since it began to rain. He’d seen Salaamat walk around the skeletal foundation once during the downpour, perhaps missing the cups of tea he’d shared with the old worker in the late afternoons. He’d not come back, yet Daanish still looked out for him, feeling he was there, and maybe even wishing it. That was how little there was to do.

Each time he saw Anu, she reminded him that their savings would last eight, maybe nine years. But then she’d kiss and bless him, saying her son was her insurance.

Some insurance: he was a sack of useless bones. The doctor was right. He’d chosen the wrong profession.
You will spend your life fighting others then come back here only to fight your own. Think!
He had the statistics for murdered reporters. And for those jailed. And for presses destroyed. When he shared these with Anu he knew she hadn’t listened. She watched her own crickets: she plotted his marriage. He remained supremely indifferent to her antics, as if the plot revolved around someone else. Someone he used to be, but no one she knew. And no one his father would ever know.

He sat with the lacquer box on the dirty white rug. The crickets hopped aside as he stretched his legs. Once again when he looked inside his father looked back. He was perhaps his age. No sign of balding, no sign of anything really except happiness. Daanish squinted, wondering at the building in the background. The photo probably dated from his father’s student days in London. Not a doctor yet. Not a groom yet. Something about the way the scarf fluttered and the nose reddened made him smell the crisp autumn air of Massachusetts. Even the brownstone tower, the neatness of the green grounds sweeping to the right of the frame – it could have been downtown Southampton or Springfield in not England but New England. It could have been him and Nancy, or Becky.

While examining the photograph, Daanish remembered the ones of his parents on their wedding day. Where were those black and white prints that used to be on the table near the doctor’s chair? There’d been the groom in a pavilion strewn with rose petals. Beside him, his shriveled father, still devoted to Pakistan’s first English-language newspaper. The doctor’s long-suffering mother pressed against her sixteen-year-old daughter-in-law, whom she offered a cup of milk. Four on a couch with a curtain of roses around them. A groom with
an MD from London! Dr Shafqat, the rising, dashing star. The photographers clicked and clicked.

In another, the doctor drank from the cup his mother presented him, exactly where Anu’s lipstick mark must have been. The photo didn’t show the mark but that was their first kiss: on a china cup. Wasn’t it worth savoring? Apparently Anu didn’t think so. Yet, though she turned her back on that day, she wanted to duplicate it for her son so now she could hold the china cup.

Shaking his head, Daanish put the box away.

It was only drizzling softly now. When he returned to the window, a man walked through the cavities of the unfinished house. He was creeping forward like a chambered nautilus, sealing the smaller spaces, carving larger ones with each stride. A man with hands clasped behind him and a cloth around his head. The wind licked his kameez as his shadow stretched from one concrete division to the next.

Maybe it was the worker who wanted the visa. No, he was too short. It must be Salaamat. He was glad the last few times with Dia they’d not used him: he’d seen too much already. It was not simply infuriating but humiliating. How dare he look at her – he who probably never had a woman unless he paid for it! His presence put Daanish in the same league. If his eyes tainted Dia, they completely soiled him.

It had been days since he and Dia last met. Though he wanted her, he could wait. She wasn’t going anywhere. It was pleasant to think of that. She’d be pacing the spaces of her own mansion, hands behind her back, thinking of him. It seemed she kept an ear out for the phone to ring. When he called, she almost always answered, with a delightful pant, as though she’d run to him. He was beginning to like the fact that his time with her was infrequent. It was hard to get, hence more intense when he got it. And when, such as these days, he couldn’t, it was all he had to look forward to. So did she. There were no other distractions. No catching matinees, or
tunes at a club. She waited for him. She counted the minutes. She ran to the phone. She wasn’t running into boys on her way to the laundromat. She was always indoors. And even within, her space was heavily guarded. If he had to enter her world with caution, well, so did everyone else. It left him feeling exquisitely secure.

The reclusive shadow did not reveal itself and Daanish turned to the drawer where his shells used to be. There was nothing there now except the silk thread. He picked it up. A few particles of sand remained from the time he’d taken it to the cove to show Dia. Maybe he’d call her later today. Maybe he wouldn’t.

Two days later, when the rain finally halted, a lean sunlight gradually commenced soaking up the runoff gutter water in his street. Daanish decided to do something for Anu. He’d go to the Housing Society water office and bring home a tanker. It would get him out of the house, please Anu, and even make a good bit of news. He could finally tell Liam what he was doing here.

But it struck him that he’d absolutely no notion how to go about the business. He had, in fact, no notion how the house ran at all. Who paid the bills and where? How much did a tanker even cost?

When he asked Anu, she said he was a dear for wanting to help her and handed him a hundred rupees plus a file the office would need. Then she told him to be careful. ‘It seems everyone is getting kidnapped these days. It’s even worse than before you left. You’ve no idea!’

He especially hated it when she declared he had ‘no idea’ because the doctor had ‘sent him away’. He blew her a quick kiss.

The car was still dead so he began walking to the main road for a taxi. There were tiny islands of dry concrete between slimy puddles as thick as the soup in airplane toilets. The air was entirely saturated, enveloping him in a dense funnel. The sun warmed this moisture-funnel and he began to sweat, all the while hopping from one dry patch to the next. He passed Khurram’s house, looking up at the hideous glazed domes and brass balcony. Throughout the rains, the lights circling the verandah were the only ones to be seen on the dark, putrid street. He wondered again what Khurram’s father did. Khurram refused to say. All three cars were gone. Salaamat was nowhere in sight.

He covered his nose when passing the large patch of land where the neighborhood dumped its trash. Polythene bags hung on tree limbs and telephone wires, plugged open gutters, tumbled along driveways. He turned onto a side street, wanting really to head back to his room. His powerlessness overwhelmed him. How could he even think clearly when his body struggled at the most basic level: for water, electricity, clean streets? What could he begin to do here? And yet, somehow, millions survived. Was it survival or immunity? Was there a difference?

He hit an intersection. Into his moisture-funnel swirled car-exhaust. The horns drained him further. Drivers flickered lights even at daytime. There was no sidewalk, no zebra crossing, and there might as well have been no traffic lights. A lame beggar sat on a plank with wheels in the center of the road. While Daanish dodged two Toyotas, the beggar chased him, dashing like a contestant in a luge-race, wheeling himself forward with his hands. Catching up with Daanish, he reached out and grabbed his shirtsleeve. Daanish ran faster, inadvertently wheeling the man along.

A taxi stopped. Daanish leaped inside, panting, ‘The water office.’

Days after the pre-rain strikes, many shops were still closed
and hardly any fruit-stalls had been set up. The driver said, ‘First I missed work because of strikes, then because of rain.
Allah malik hay.’

Still collecting himself, Daanish said nothing.

‘How are they supposed to get here?’ the driver continued. ‘When all the buses are burning and there’s curfew in the streets, how are they to lead normal lives?’

In the rear-view mirror Daanish saw he was a wiry man with eyes heavily rimmed with kohl. The mirror was bedecked with a prayer the Prophet had read when traveling, a photograph of the Kabbah, beads and a scented pine. The dashboard was sprinkled with blue and yellow stickers in the shape of flowers and hearts and the steering wheel was upholstered in a shaggy red rug. The car reeked of sweat-soaked lavenders.

In the mirror, the driver’s eyes scrutinized Daanish too. ‘You don’t look like you know much about curfews.’

‘No,’ Daanish confessed. ‘Just about water on the streets and none in taps. I’m going to get a tanker.’

‘Ah!’ The driver chuckled. ‘See how there’s no one around? They’re all trying to get a tanker!’

What if he knew Daanish had recently returned from Amreeka? He’d laugh them both off the road.

‘You should have brought your sisters along,’ the driver pursued. ‘You know they always let women through first.’ When Daanish said nothing he added, ‘I see documents. Good. You should at least be carrying documents.’

‘I’m glad you approve,’ Daanish muttered.

The car stopped outside a building and Daanish paid. The man drove away, bemoaning, ‘What is normal any more?’

When Daanish walked inside the gate he saw it was not a building but a wide expanse of dirt, on each side of which stood a desk. Both desks were surrounded by a mob. Daanish chose the desk further from the gate; it looked a little less swamped. He stood at the back, attempting to
get in line, knowing he was an idiot for trying. As soon as two people tried to stand in series, the one at the back stuck his head forward, which led to the first nudging the second back in line by popping out himself. While the two danced sideways, newcomers simply cut ahead. Eventually, Daanish began doing the same.

But he couldn’t get too far. Standing on his toes, he tried to steal a glimpse of the official hidden behind the mob, but he only heard angry customers shouting at the man, and then at each other. The voices rose and a full-blown stampede appeared imminent. And all for water. It was that tail-biting frenzy he’d felt in his uncles. That inbreeding of disappointment, as if they were all stranded on an island in a long-forgotten sea.

Returning to the back, Daanish was immediately met by a man so emaciated his gray polyester trousers flapped around his hips and legs like a skirt on a scarecrow. To Daanish and a handful of recent arrivals, he declared, ‘How will our nation prosper if we can’t even make a line!’

One of the newcomers was a stocky woman with a dupatta around her head. She cut straight to the front. The men reluctantly let her through, grumbling that women who grumbled about how hard they had it ought to have it harder.

‘Like in the West!’ Scarecrow said. ‘No one respects women there. These are the sound traditions of our country. Reverence of the female!’ He turned to Daanish. ‘I was a student at the University but it is closing for weeks. Everywhere you looking students joining politics. Almost everyone in engineering has gun.’

Daanish wondered why everyone cried to him. Anu, the taxi-driver, now this man. Then there was the worker who insisted Daanish could get him a visa. What was he, a healer’s son? Yes! He grew miracles on his fingertips!