Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

‘Well, that you had a bad accident, and that it changed you.’

‘What a gentleman. Anyway there are plenty of people to tell you lies about me. And truths for that matter. I hope you don’t think I’ve been going around boasting about my near-death experience.’

He turned off the Grand Trunk Road, under the bridge leading to Peshawar, through a little village. Passersby turned to look at them, the large gray jeep with a pretty girl wearing enormous white-framed sunglasses, and a man in Western clothes. They turned down onto what seemed like a streambed, Murad driving with concentration, working the car through difficult sections, backing up and trying a different route. The smell of dust filled the jeep, and soon a fine white layer covered the plastic of the dashboard. Continuing, following a more or less usable track, they came out on a sandbank broad as a football field ceded by a curve in the Indus. Murad drove partway across and turned off the engine, facing out to the water.

‘There it is.’

‘It’s amazing. How did you find this? It’s like a secret hidden valley.’

He had stepped out of the jeep, taken a pair of binoculars from the back seat, and was scanning the hills all around. She noticed the worn strong leather case for the binoculars, earlier had noticed a pistol in a tooled leather holster lying concealed between the seats. She liked that he had well-used solid things, this car, the gun and binoculars, and she liked that he carried a gun, but without making any display. In an emergency he would be solid, would take care of the problem.

‘An army friend flew over in a helicopter and told me about it. It took me a whole day to find a way down, following these dry watercourses. Even goats can’t find much to eat here.’

Walking out onto the sand, she took off her sandals and carried them in her hand. The place seemed immense and empty, a huge bowl of rock, with the cool river running through it, the blue and white stripes of the two tributary rivers beginning to mingle, a confusion at the middle of the stream. A breeze blew off the water, increasing the loneliness, rolling up a tube of sand, which snaked in front of her, rustling softly.

She looked around, at the hills, bare all around, the parked jeep seeming to glow, tiny against the backdrop. ‘You know what’s amazing, we’re actually alone here. That never happens in Pakistan.’

‘I’m pretty sure we are alone. That’s what I was checking with the binoculars.’

Throwing herself down on the soft sand, wriggling to make herself comfortable, she said with a little laugh, ‘You’re a real belt-and-suspenders kind of guy.’

He brought a rug and a basket from the car, placed the rug carefully on the sand, and then poured them each a glass of white wine.

They drank, looking out at the river, silent.

Taking sand in her palm, she let it stream out between her fingers, blown away by the wind.

‘I’m really moved. Thank you for bringing me here.’

‘I was afraid you wouldn’t like it. You probably don’t often go out of the city.’

‘I don’t, but I wish I did. I’d like to live in the country. Sometimes I think I’d like to live alone on an island.’

He opened the picnic basket, had clearly made a great effort, a baguette from the French bakery, expensive cheeses, grapes, chocolate, nuts, little chicken sandwiches, and then Pakistani food in containers, more food than they could possibly eat.

After lunch, he went behind the jeep and came out wearing shorts, carrying a towel, his body slender and brown, legs muscular, a thin trace of hair below his belly button. His head was mounted well on his shoulders, the shoulders set back. Walking far upstream, he disappeared around a pile of enormous boulders, while she sat musing, the sun warm on her back.

Silently and very fast, he came sweeping into view out at the middle of the river, his head small and black against the dark green water, caught in the boiling current. Sheltering her eyes with her hand, she watched, knowing she could do nothing to save him, feeling irritation and regret wound together, at this abrupt sinking of her frail butterfly hopes, this stupid ending, the mess. As she lunged up to run across the sand, panicking, he waved to her, floated on his back for a moment, turned over, and began to swim in toward the shore with a precise motion, turning up his head to breathe at every second stroke. He took a clever angle against the river sweeping him away, and at the far point, where the curving bay ended, he splashed ashore.

Approaching, walking on the harder sand at the edge of the water, he stood above her, almost dry, glistening from the sun. ‘That was pretty goddamned cold,’ he said. ‘I’ll admit that!’

She threw him the towel, squinting up at his face, which seemed black against the sun behind him. ‘You scared me. I thought you were drowning.’

‘Not this time. There’s a bit of Persian poetry that my father quotes: Standing there on the shore, / What do you know of my troubles, / As I struggle here in midstream .’

He sat down, facing almost away from her. ‘You have to admit, that’s a pretty apt quotation.’

‘Very impressive. Or maybe it’s a bit too literal, if I wanted to be picky.’ After a moment she said, ‘I’m not going to sleep with you, you know. I decided that, while you were swimming or drowning or whatever you were doing.’

‘I must say, for a girl from a good Punjabi family you say the most astonishing things. Let me guess: you swore to God that if I survived you would renounce me forever. Or I should say, swore to some unspecified life force.’

‘I know, The End of the Affair . I saw the movie. But it’s sort of true. I really did think you were finished. And I doubt I could get home alone in your car. Not to mention the scandal. Imagine explaining what we were doing together in this place. I wouldn’t even bother to try, I’d dump the body outside your parents’ gate at night.’

He laughed. ‘I’m glad to know you were focusing on the really important aspects of the problem.’

‘Not at all. I didn’t push you in the river, you were showing off. You’re a grown-up.’

‘Very laissez-faire. You do your thing, I do mine.’

‘Exactly. Companions on a social venture.’

‘I see. Well, let’s have another drink.’

As she sipped from her glass, watching him over the rim, she said, ‘Or maybe not for a long time.’

‘You keep bringing it up. And how do you know I’ll sleep with you?’

‘Oh, that’s easy. It’s written all over your face.’

He lit a joint, and she wished that he hadn’t, looking over at him as he passed it, wanting him not to get drunk, not to smoke, to do drugs. Of course, he’d been at Princeton, he must have more or less gone through all that, rich Paki stanis at school in America almost invariably did — in her single year at NYU, failing, not even taking the spring semester exams, she herself received an entire parallel education, going around with an Iranian boyfriend three years older than herself, who took bumps of coke all day and night. As Murad sat facing the river, aloof, the breeze raising goose bumps on his bare arms, the towel pulled tightly around his shoulders, she felt immense tenderness toward him.

The experience of that day stuck with her, strange as if seen through warped glass. The scent of fast-moving water, the immense flow of the Indus, the dry flat light reflecting off the sand — all this seemed alien and harsh and therefore consistent with the intensity of Murad’s approach to her, which was not in anything he said, but in the way that at every point in their interactions he seemed to maintain contact with her, to be interested in her, and to have planned his responses to her. He reassured her, held her up to a standard that she didn’t quite comprehend, an unconventional standard, raw and entirely between them — and then found her sufficient by it. If initially his fixation on her had appeared menacing — she had been excited by it — now she saw in it something benign and heartfelt, a spontaneous resolution that he had made in her favor, an impulse to belong to her and be with her. It struck her that she had been alone with him by the river, no human being for miles around, after spending at most half an hour chatting with him at a party — and yet she had been perfectly comfortable. How many Pakistani men would that be true of?