Trespassing (44 page)

‘Don’t butt in again,’ he snarled. ‘I have to support my mom,’ he took a deep breath, ‘and the best way is to work in a country that bombs others but lets me in. They could just as easily let
them
in and bomb
me.
I have to find a place in that puzzle.’

Dia chewed her cuticles till she tasted blood. ‘Have you finished?’

‘All yours.’

‘Do you have any idea how completely humiliated you have made me feel? How naked I felt when your mother walked in on us? I’m still feeling filthy. And you said nothing to her in my defense. They were blaming me, not you. That’s something you’ll never have to understand.’ She crouched on the carpet.

Daanish was silent. ‘Perhaps I should go,’ he murmured at last. ‘We’re only making things harder for each other.’

If they hung up now, neither would call again. Riffat had said this would be their last conversation, and Anu had not wanted it at all. The clock ticked.

His voice was gentler when he added, ‘This might be a strange thing to say but I can’t help wondering about your mother. I admit I have blamed her. But I’ll try to look beyond that. I have a picture of them, you know. They made each other happy.’

She let the tears flow now. Then, ‘You were right. I should go.’

‘Right. Good luck, Dia.’

She snorted, ‘Luck!’

‘Well, this is hard, you know. So, don’t be a stranger.’

‘What?’
she choked.

He’d hung up.

Outside in the garden, Dia wiped the sweat off her face with the edge of her kameez. She stared at the page on her lap. Today, finally, she’d fill it. Then she’d go inside and look closely at herself in the mirror, the way she’d been doing for days. The face was changing; there was less and less of Daanish in it.

She adjusted her position on the plush grass and shut her eyes. Her mother had her farm. Daanish had Amreeka. Nini, possibly, had Daanish. Everyone had a plan but her. Maybe there was something that needed to be done before she could find one. But she didn’t know what, and she didn’t know who to ask.

She picked up her pen again. Maybe she did know.

Nini and Daanish retreated into the past. The Emperor and Empress molted a fourth time.

He was enormous, nearly ninety kilos, with slouching shoulders and a thick neck. She was slender and poised,
even after bearing two sons. The boys were sleeping in the shack next to the shed where the silkworms would be housed. The couple watched their children sleep. Then they tiptoed out into the clear night. They were naked and held hands.

It had rained the day before, a light, steady patter that polished the stars and stirred the earth, so the creatures dreaming in its bowels stretched and tasted something brisk. The irrigation canals gurgled a salient song. Mansoor told his love there was plenty of groundwater in this land she’d been gifted, which she wanted transformed into a silkworm farm. He said he was proud of her, that he was the luckiest man in the world: two boys asleep in the cottage, a beautiful wife by his side, a second business on the way.

A sliver of a moon hung before them. It cast a soft, lambent light on her cheeks and her brown curls shone like copper. Fireflies orbited her navel. He touched her there. ‘If we have a third child,’ he said, ‘I hope it’s a girl.’ And then he planted a kiss in the small cool pit, and she laughed. The glowworms dispersed, fluttering like saffron ribbons, leaving them in a trail of gold dust.

They ambled between the mulberry seedlings only recently sowed. The ground was wet, their footsteps muffled as a cat’s. A nightjar called her mate. Bats brushed their ears. Riffat said it was both beautiful and frightening at this late hour, with not a soul about and a graveyard just up the road.

‘Kings and queens lie there,’ he said. ‘They rest side by side, just like I want us to.’ When she shuddered, he added, ‘In the meantime, you should squeeze into me.’

She wrapped her arms around his globe of a stomach and they came to a clearing. ‘This is where I want to plant the lost dyes of this soil. The colors are faster than synthetic ones and they smell good. Plus, it’ll help me feel that I’m at one end of a cord that leads back thousands of years. The cord is here,’ she said, pointing to her navel. He kissed it again, and again
she laughed. In the clearing, husband and wife made love as easily as shedding skin.

Afterwards, he sat behind her and she leaned into his chest. From the highway came the sound of a car. They listened as the engine pitched into the next day. He twirled the curls at her temples and asked, ‘What if you had the chance to do this all over – from our wedding, to our sons, to this moment right now, and whatever lies ahead. Would you marry me again?’

She looked up at his chin, touched it. His flesh was scabrous and left hers tingling. ‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘Of course I would.’

‘Don’t go near the huts along the shore,’ his uncle warns.

The boy rests against a dune, far from the huts. He wants to please his mamu. He wants his seekh-kebab locks, his cigarettes, his job that puts him in the driver’s seat of a long and beautiful van. So he won’t even look at those huts.

His mother is in her grandmother’s teahouse. The old woman died today. She was more than a hundred. The women bathe her so her soul ascends to heaven in a quiet boat. Then the men can bury her outside the shrine of the great martyr. In the old days, when a fisherman drowned at sea, he became a hero and got a shrine all his own. But now there are more martyrs than land, and anyway, the men don’t drown while fishing, they drown while swimming up to the great ship and peeping inside the portholes.

His uncle points to it. ‘You see that anchor line?’

The child nods.

‘When I was your age, we’d dare each other to swim out and touch it. Even in the summer months, when the
sea was a ferocious brute, sucking you in with long, slimy tentacles.’

The boy squeals.

‘When we reached the line, we’d bounce up and wave to the others waiting on the beach. Want to try?’

The boy hesitates. He grew up in the city and does not know how to swim. The best he can do is suck on a hookah like his great-grandmother did, before she died.

‘Come on,’ coaxes his uncle. ‘It’s the winter now. The sea is calm. She isn’t hungry. She’ll spit you up even if you try to slip into her bowels.’

‘Why don’t you do it?’ the boy blurts out.

His uncle laughs. ‘That’s a child’s game!’ His ringlets blow in the breeze and smoke twists out from his nostrils. His van waits on the road. He has returned to his village for the first time since he left, many years ago. He’d told the boy he did so only for fear of Sumbul. ‘Your mother is far, far more vicious than any sea,’ he’d winked.

The boy now asks, ‘Where do you go in your van?’

‘Oh,’ he slides into the dune, his thick black feet sinking into the cool sand, ‘I pick up boxes full of very heavy things and deliver them to a shop. That’s my work.’

‘Can I come with you?’

Again he laughs. ‘Listen. If you swim out to the anchor line, I’ll take you with me next time.’

The boy hangs his head in shame. He can’t do it. Not even for the honor of riding beside his mother’s magnificent brother. He stares at the pale expanse of beach stretching around him.

‘Okay, I’ll go,’ his uncle sits up. ‘You stand right here like a lighthouse. When you see me surface, blink your lights. Like this.’ He waved his arms. ‘Agreed?’

The boy nods but is still too ashamed to look up. He takes his place, watching the older man saunter to the water’s edge, take off his kameez and slink into a swell.

While he waits, something distracts him. Tiny mounds of grain erupt first beside one foot, then the other. A little boat trundles out, replete with oars and even a rudder.

‘What’s this?’ he says to the air.

No one answers.

Something tells him they are the turtles he has heard about. Baby ones. ‘Come back!’ he calls his mamu. ‘Look at this!’ He beckons the distant cluster of aunts and uncles around the teahouse. But no one hears; they are all busy. He is alone, and yet the beach is a flurry of lumbering saucers the size of his palm, bursting out from under him, all heading for the sea.

His instinct warns of danger: gulls soar overhead, dogs pad overland. He follows the migration, waving both arms, scanning the water for his uncle. But the anchor line alone cuts the glassy sea.

Then he hears his mother call. ‘Lunch is ready! And bring your mamu too!’

The child frowns. He is busy but his mother would say he is too young to be busy. Kneeling, he picks up a hatchling and turns it upside down. The creature’s feet wriggle imploringly and the boy giggles.

His mother calls once more. ‘Hurry up!’

He frowns again. When his uncle surfaced, he would expect him to be here, blinking like a lighthouse. He can’t leave. But why hadn’t Mamu appeared yet?

In his hand, the baby turtle continues to squirm. Some of its siblings have reached the surf. ‘All right,’ he says to the one in his grasp. ‘Time for you to go too.’ He puts it down. When his mother calls a third time, angry now, he casts an anxious look out at the sea then hurries to his great-grandmother’s teahouse.

Halfway there he looks back. Still no sign of Mamu. More turtles melt into the waves breaking on the shore. A few remain tentatively where he’d last seen them. Then
he observes one – perhaps the one he’d lifted – making for the huts. You should be going the other way, he thinks. He decides to tell it.

Jogging over to the hatchling, he picks it up and turns it around. The little creature’s legs again wave in the air. The child squats and gently releases it. Touching ground, the turtle immediately bursts forward, this time toward the sea, as though its course had never changed.

I am grateful to the outstanding, independent-minded writers and journalists whose efforts formed the basis of my research on the Gulf War. While space does not permit them all to be named, I do want to single out one book:
The Fire This Time
(Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark. This finely documented analysis, which the author presents simply, with compassion and outrage, is strongly recommended to anyone seeking a view of the war that challenges the one presented by the US Government, with the cooperation of the mainstream media.

I am also grateful to Dave, for being my most insightful critic, for giving me the time and space to complete this book, and most of all, for our love; V.K. Karthika, for opening the envelope and discovering my first novel; Laura Susijn and Philip Gwyn Jones, for launching me farther than I ever dreamed I could go; and my parents, for their continued love and support, prayers and generosity of spirit.

Uzma Aslam Khan grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of one previous novel,
The Story of Noble Rot
. She has taught English language and literature in the US, Morocco and Pakistan, and now lives in Lahore with her husband, author David Maine.
Trespassing
has been published around the world and been translated into several languages.

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THE STORY OF NOBLE ROT