An Unrestored Woman (24 page)

Ethan looked at her. “Why aren't you eating?”

She took a bite. She swallowed it. He'd proposed this trip to Italy and when she'd asked him why, he'd said, “I'm concerned.”

“Concerned?”

“Wouldn't you be? All you do is sit in the flat. You don't go out, you don't pick up the phone. Do you even eat?”

“Do you think it's right,” she asked him after a few bites, “that we lost a child before the third leg?”

It took him a moment to understand but she knew he did when he wrapped his hand into a slow fist. Safia put down her fork. She thought then that she should take it, his hand, his fist, and kiss every knuckle. Move over those mountainous stretches of skin—white and taut with rage—her lips lingering, breathing in what was left, what might be salvaged. But she only sat there, looking at it. She had no arms to reach out. No lips with which to kiss. And that rage: she felt it too.

*   *   *

They stayed. Safia and her parents moved into their own flat in New Malden and her father took a job as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company. Her mother stayed at home. Safia changed schools, and changed once again when her father took up the post as head chemist at a company in Twickenham. Safia was barely aware of her parents; she spent most of her time reading
Anna Karenina
, staring out of schoolroom windows, and wondering what it would be like to kiss Count Vronsky.

On her sixteenth birthday Safia and one of her classmates snuck out and went dancing at an underage club in London Bridge. One of the boys on the dance floor—some boy who'd been watching them all night and looked West African, the thick lips, the piercing white eyes against the dark of his skin, who made Safia think that the race of men would continue on and on, that death was no match against the beauty of such men—leaned down and said, “Follow me.”

She did. He led her to a small room next to the loo. He edged her against the wall, with its dull pink wallpaper stained and peeling against her back. Then he kissed her. Just like that. As if she'd asked him to. He smiled and said, “You're cute. But that friend of yours, the blondie, now she's a stunner.”

Safia stared up at him.

“Think you could get her over here?”

She yanked her arm away from him. “
Khusra
,” she yelled into his face. She smiled faintly; so she remembered some Urdu, after all.

“What?” he said. “I said you were cute, didn't I?”

She pushed past him and through the line of people waiting for the loo. “Eh, eh,” he yelled after her, “you Paki slag. What's got into you?”

Safia looked back. The bright of his eyes still shone through the crowd of people, but then someone passed in front of him and she was sucked again into the mass of bodies, and in that moment she had a strange and unsettling intimation. A trace of something she'd always sensed, of something her mother had long ago said, and of a thing that that African boy knew: that she wasn't home. That home wasn't Lahore, and that it wasn't London. Not really. And that home had never been a thing she'd found. It was a thing she'd lost.

*   *   *

It was eleven o'clock. The melanzane hadn't yet arrived. Ethan looked at his watch. “You think we'll make it?”

Safia took a sip of her wine. They were staying at a monastery in the Oltrarno. “It's architecturally significant, Safia. You should appreciate that. From the time of the Medicis,” Ethan had insisted. And it was charming: the narrow streets, the artisan shops, well away from the tourists and crowds north of the Arno. Florence, too, delighted her. She wandered the churches, the Duomo, stood in front of the religious paintings at the Uffizi, and tried to find a single piece of art that didn't derive its beauty from suffering. The suffering of a mother, mainly. She couldn't. The monastery itself was full of Renaissance-era frescoes, and there was the pleasure, unexpected and lovely, of being woken from a nap by evening vespers. And though it had a nightly curfew, midnight, they'd reasoned—searching the Internet a month ago in their London flat—that it would hardly be a problem getting back before such a late hour. The waiter, whom Ethan tried to summon, was busy seating a group of six at a table next to theirs. “What an hour to
begin
eating,” he said with wonder.

Safia looked through the umbrellas at the stars.

Maybe it was punishment. Maybe people of different races weren't meant to marry. Maybe their babies died. The thought made sense, in a way. We'd roamed away from each other all those hundreds of thousands of years ago; there must've been a reason. There must've been an explanation. But it was ridiculous, of course; she had loads of friends who'd married out of race and had had beautiful healthy babies who cooed and gurgled and woke up in the mornings.

Had
she
done something wrong? Her mother had been so ashamed she hadn't told anyone of her engagement to Ethan for three months. Her father hadn't spoken to her for two. Her grandfather had blinked, and looked away. But that had been years ago, before the wedding. And back then she'd been young; she'd thought weathering something was like passing a moment, like waiting in a rain. Eventually, sooner or later, you knew you'd find yourself inside, by a warm fire, in dry clothes. Now she knew better: weathering was a thing that had nothing to do with rain and nothing to do with fire. It was you, anywhere—in warmth, in rain, on a ferry on the Ravi, in a square in Florence—it was you, everywhere, in all the palaces of the world, broken.

*   *   *

She left secondary school and studied architecture at London South Bank, doing moderately well but without the zeal of her fellow students. After graduation she landed an internship with a small architectural firm in Kings Cross and moved into a flat with two other women. Within the first week at her new job she was restless. “All I do is design the bloody boil-in-bag aisle at Marks and Spencer,” she complained to one of her roommates, Tabitha, “and even that as an
assistant
. The team leader said to me today,
actually said to me
, Tab, he said, ‘Safia, you're not taking boil-in-bag very seriously, are you?' What does he want me to do? Shag one? That's what I should do. Design an aisle for shag-a-bag.” Safia was drunk, and her team leader was Ethan. Within a year they'd secretly moved in together—on the other side of London from Safia's parents and without telling them—and Safia had left the firm to pursue a course in art history. But that too came to nothing and by the time they were married Ethan was telling his friends and family that Safia was “exploring her options.”

But Safia was doing nothing of the sort. She wasn't exploring; she was waiting. And though she wasn't sure what she was waiting for, she decided that waiting, even when it had no clear end, was a fine way to spend one's time. It even held a certain inexplicable charm. Then her waiting was over: a year and a half after they were married Safia was pregnant.

*   *   *

Ethan wiped up the last bits of melanzane with bread. It was forty minutes till midnight. Safia thought for a moment that it might be nice not making it back by curfew. They'd have to sleep in one of the squares. Or on a bench along the Arno. Maybe even huddled under one of the trees in the Boboli Gardens. But somewhere without a roof. That was the part that most delighted her. She pictured it: the soft summer breeze, the thick blanket of stars, the scent of water. She'd never slept in such a place and it beckoned her in the way Minoo's cries had beckoned her: with a thrill, a rush of sorrow, concern, and such a sudden and electric feeling of life that the hair on her arms stood on end.

A young couple walked past them, eating gelato.

“I think she would've preferred it,” Safia said, “to ice cream, I mean. What do you think?”

Ethan began to speak but then seemed to change his mind. It was so like him these days, Safia thought. Talking and talking but then silencing himself when something so needed to be said. It mattered, didn't it? Whether she would've liked ice cream or gelato, whether she would've gone to Oxford or Cambridge.

The pasta arrived. When Ethan cut open a ravioli the thick milky taleggio oozed out like sea foam, studded with glistening shavings of pear. He took a bite. “Saf, you gotta try this,” he said, holding up a forkful.

She looked at him. His thick fingers, the dripping pasta, the cold of the metal. What would it feel like—that fork—scraping against her neck, her wrist, her heart. And that knife, the ones the Italians were using to cut their steaks, what would that feel like gliding along the inside of her thigh. It would make a line; she could draw a map. And
that
would be the true country. Not this one, and not the one she lived in, and not the one she'd left.

“I think I'll just have some coffee,” she said. He nodded, looked at his watch. They had twenty minutes left.

*   *   *

Safia looked through the gap in the umbrellas. The stars spun. They rattled in the sky like bones.

*   *   *

Ethan paid the bill and looked again at his watch. “Safia, we've gotta go,” he said, springing from his chair. “Now!”

They dashed out of the Piazza della Passera. Down the Via Maggio. Across the church of Santo Spirito. The narrow streets and alleys rang with their footsteps. She'd occasionally spy a lighted square at the end of a side alley, or the sounds of a television streaming out of an open window, but mostly the streets were deserted. And for all the world they were the only ones left in it.

Ethan was in front of her. “I know a shortcut,” he said.

They ducked under a stone gate. She caught a glimpse of a chubby gargoyle above her head, its tongue sticking out and laughing. The face of a baby. “Minoo,” she whispered under her breath, “why'd you have to leave so soon?”

“What did you say?” Ethan called back.

“I said, how long?”

“A minute or two, at most.”

They strode faster. Safia was nearly running to keep up. Her feet pounded cobblestone; the soles of her shoes felt as flimsy as paper. The roar traveled up her legs, burst across her back like a scream. Her body, her body, her oh so lonesome body ceased. She ceased. And all that existed was her stone, her feet, her flight. That West African boy had been right: her friend's straw-colored hair, its glint of gold, was the light of the world. But she—she and he—
they
were the dark beyond. They were the universe, entire.

Ethan, turning a corner, was a blur. A few steps in front. He said something over his shoulder. What was it? Just two words—and she asked him to repeat them because they were true, they were the only truth left in the world.

“I said, ice cream,” he said, taking in deep mouthfuls of air. “I think she would've preferred ice cream.”

The tears streamed down Safia's face. She nearly laughed.

Why? Why a pebble, why a baby, why a distant shore? Why did they all have to disappear into a brown and murky depth?

There was no answer.

There were only those two words. And they held her as if in an embrace.

Ethan's arm swung back and she knew that soon, one day soon, she would take it. Take it, hold it, pull him to her and say, Enough. This moment is enough. How young we are. How old our sorrow. I want to wake. I want to wake as lovers are meant to wake. And this grief: this grief we must leave. Leave in one of the many airports we will pass, maybe a train station in the Alps, a bus depot in Rome. Leave, because it is not meant for us. Leave, before it has a name. Before we give it room. Before we seat it, like a friend, at our table.

“There,” Ethan said, pointing to the monastery. But it was on the other side of the long square. The lights had been turned off. The dim of the doorway narrowed. “Run!” he shouted.

And so she ran.

Her old grandfather: sitting alone, quiet all of these years, in a London flat. She understood now. She saw him: a boy of nine, alone in the world. He'd begun again. Maybe she could too.

She sprinted faster. She could no longer feel her feet. Only her breath was left. Deep, pulsing with the power of kings. We leave. We leave the places we're born, the places we're meant to die, and we wander into the world as defenseless as children. Against such wilderness, such desert.

The warm night air cradled her, lifted her up. There was someone at the door; Ethan waved frantically. How long the journey, she thought. How far away that abode of peace. And yes, its doors may close. Its lights may dim. And it may not even be for us to enter. But this, Safia thought—running and running and running—
this
is how you begin.

 

G
LOSSARY

aam:
mango

almirah:
wardrobe, cabinet

amchur:
a tangy mango-based powder

anna:
former monetary unit of India and Pakistan, equal to 1/16 of a rupee

ayananta:
solstice

beedi:
a thin, cheap cigarette popular in India

beti:
girl

bhai:
brother, friend

bhelpuri:
a savory snack food made by combining puffed rice with other ingredients

biryani:
an Indian dish made with highly seasoned rice and meat, fish, or vegetables

Brahmachari:
bachelor

Brahmaputra:
a trans-boundary river flowing through northeastern India

brahmin:
a member of the highest caste in Hinduism, traditionally a priest

burqa:
outer garment worn by women in some Islamic traditions

chai:
spiced tea

chal:
move

chappals:
sandals or slippers

chikoo:
tropical fruit

choot
or
chutia:
a derogatory term for vagina, used to refer to a fool or useless person