Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

‘Very nice,’ said Sohail, looking around at the apartment, which had high ceilings and diminutive fittings. A woman on the stereo sang in French, and his mother had lit candles.

‘It belongs to Brigadier Hazari,’ said his father, sitting down again in front of the fire.

Rafia and Helen had moved into the living room. The mother leaned down and looked at Helen’s necklace, an Afghan tribal piece, silver with lapis.

‘Isn’t that pretty.’

‘Sohail gave it to me. It’s one of my favorite things.’

Rafia said to Sohail, turning and smiling at him, ‘Will you get Helen and yourself whatever you want — it’s in the kitchen.’ Then to Helen, ‘Come sit here by me.’

Sohail brought a drink for Helen and one for himself. His father sat back in the sofa, his drink on his knee, and looked sedately about the room. Rafia began.

‘I promised Sohail not to embarrass him, not to say how much I’ve heard about you.’ She had little dimples when she smiled. ‘But it’s true, he keeps telling me about you, it’s sweet.’

‘Ma, please. That makes me sound like I’m fifteen,’ said Sohail.

‘It’s the simple truth. And why shouldn’t I say it, it’s nice to see you happy. But please come help me with dinner. Bring your drink.’

As mother and son went into the kitchen, Helen heard Rafia whisper to Sohail, ‘But she’s so pretty.’

Helen was left with Mr. Harouni, who did not seem disposed to conversation. He looked complacently at the fire, his glass sweating. After hesitating to have a drink, Helen had accepted a white wine, reminding herself that she was an adult. Now she took a sip of the wine, trying to relax. She had been sitting up erect, halfway forward in the seat.

Still looking into the fire, Mr. Harouni observed speculatively, ‘Sohail was very happy at Yale.’ She waited for more, but the father seemed to be content placing this statement on the table between them, a sufficient offering.

‘He really was, Mr. Harouni. He’s been happy as long as I’ve known him.’ She wanted to be as straight with his parents as possible.

‘Please, call me Amjad.’ The thick tweed of his suit and the smallness of his hands and feet made him appear to Helen like an expensive toy. He spoke very quietly.

She decided to press on, to maintain even this slight momentum of conversation. ‘His life in Pakistan is so different, at least from what I know. But he has an American side, what I think of as American. He’s very gentle — I don’t mean Americans are gentle, they’re not. But it’s easier to be gentle in a place where there’s order.’

She paused, took a sip of her wine, waited for a moment.

‘Go on,’ said Mr. Harouni.

‘He and my mother got along well, even though — she’s a secretary in a little Connecticut town, and she has a house with cats and a garden. He liked that. At first I thought he was pretending, but he wasn’t.’

‘It’s a wonderful country. There’s nothing you people can’t do when you put your minds to it. I admire the Americans tremendously.’ He sipped from his glass, the ice cubes clattering. ‘So many of our young people want to live in America — I suppose Sohail as well.’

‘He talks about it,’she said cautiously. ‘But he talks about Pakistan a lot too. When he and I first met he told me stories about Pakistan for hours.’

‘And what about you? What would you like to do?’

‘I want to be a doctor. I just sent out my applications to medical school.’ She blushed as she said this, the color unevenly creeping up her fine-grained cheekbones.

‘On the East Coast?’

‘In New York, maybe. When I was little my mother would drive me to the city, to the Museum of Natural History or the Met, or sometimes we would just walk around looking at the stores and the people. I’ve always wanted to live there.’ She paused again, conscious that she might sound pathetic. ‘It feels like the center of everything. And it’s not the way it used to be, it’s safe and clean, you can walk through the park at midnight.’

The father looked at her with an expressionless face. ‘Perhaps Sohail can set up a branch of our company there.’

Sohail had come in and heard this last part of the conversation. He sat down on the arm of Helen’s chair, put his hand on her shoulder, and said, ‘Now you’ve seen it, Helen. That’s as close as my father comes to humor.’ He leaned forward, took his father’s empty glass, and stood up. ‘I warn you, this man has more factories than your mother has cats. Watch out for him. Stick to name, rank, and serial number.’

Mr. Harouni smiled appreciatively.

‘We both want the same thing — what’s best for you,’ said Helen in a flirtatious tone quite new to her. ‘Why would I need to be careful?’

They had dinner at a small table under a spiky modern chandelier painted with gold leaf, Mr. Harouni sitting at the head and filling their bowls with bouillabaisse, saffroned and aromatic. Rafia tasted hers from the tip of her spoon and said, ‘It’s good. It’s from Quintessence — that’s the new chic place, supposedly.’ Sohail poured the wine and then turned down the lights, so that the table was illuminated by candles.

A bateau mouche glided by on the Seine, its row of spotlights trained on the historic buildings along the quay, throwing patterned light through the blinds onto the living room wall. For a moment they carefully sipped the hot stew.

Helen felt she should break the silence. Just as she was about to begin, Rafia turned to her.

‘Do you know, Sohail was almost born in Paris?’ She sipped from her spoon, looking at Helen sideways. ‘I was in London to have the baby, and I was enormous and felt like an elephant — so I begged Amjad to come over with me and let me pick out some outrageous outfits. I thought I’d have my girlish figure back the day after I delivered.’

Sohail beamed across at Helen, his face framed by two wavering candles. ‘You can tell this is one of my mother’s tall tales — by the simple fact that she’s never begged my father for anything. If she had said she ordered my father to Paris it might have been true.’

‘In any case, you were almost born here, in the HÂtel d’Angleterre.’

‘I wish it had happened,’said Sohail. ‘For a Pakistani being born in London is about as exciting as being born in Lahore. Paris would be glamorous.’

Rafia tilted her head toward Helen. ‘Where would you have liked to be born?’

‘I’ve never thought of that. The first time I met Sohail he asked me where I’d like to be buried.’

‘In seven years of dating, that line has never once failed.’ Sohail appeared to be saying the first thing that came into his head, filling up the gaps in the conversation.

‘Don’t be flip, Sohail. Amjad, where would you like to have been born?’

The father, who had been drinking his stew with the equanimity of a solitary patron in a busy café, looked up from under his brows.

‘I suppose in the happiest possible home. And not in India, I think. And not in Europe. Perhaps in America.’

This interested Helen, relieving her irritation at the conversation between mother and son, which seemed too practiced, as if they were performing together, and in their display excluding her.

‘Why America?’ she asked. Her oval face reflected the light of the candles.

Placing his forearms on the table, still holding his spoon, Mr. Harouni looked for a moment over his wife’s head at the opposite wall. ‘You know or you correctly assume that I was born into a comfortably well-off family. All my life I’ve been lucky, my business succeeded, I’ve had no tragedies, my wife and I are happy, we have a wonderful son. The one thing I’ve missed, I sometimes feel, is the sensation of being absolutely free, to do exactly what I like, to go where I like, to act as I like. I suspect that only an American ever feels that. You aren’t weighed down by your families, and you aren’t weighed down by history. If I ran away to the South Pole some Pakistani businessman would one day crawl into my igloo and ask if I was the cousin of K. K. Harouni.’