Uzma Khan - Trespassing

But Anu caught up with them. ‘You haven’t read a word today,’ she protested. ‘And I haven’t seen you all morning. I was so worried. I didn’t know if I should disturb …’

‘Anu please. Khurram’s waiting.’

Khurram smiled without any apparent haste.

‘Why don’t you read too?’ Anu suggested.

Khurram opened his mouth but Daanish pushed him out the door. ‘He can’t.’ And then, pleading, ‘I’ve hardly left the house since coming back, Anu. Everyone needs to breathe.’

‘But where are you going?’ She frowned. ‘Why can’t you breathe in here?’

He left without answering.

They drove through neighborhoods like his own that had, till just a few decades ago, lurked under the sea. Sweeping boulevards had cropped up with designer boutiques, video shops and ice-cream parlors. He said, ‘Here too, all people want to do is shop and eat.’

‘What else is there?’ asked Khurram. More somberly, he added, ‘I was thinking about visiting many times but didn’t want to disturb. Salaamat told me about your father’s death.’ He pointed at the driver.

‘Oh, is that his name?’ In the rear-view mirror, Daanish caught a glimpse of the jutting cheekbones, and the elusive, opalescent eyes. ‘How does he know?’

‘Well, all the neighbors knowing. I’m so sorry. Your father must have been very young.’

‘At heart, yes,’ mumbled Daanish.

‘And you the only child.’ Khurram shook his head. ‘There’s being a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.’ He pinched Daanish’s shoulders as if to squeeze some of it off.

‘I suppose so.’

‘You must be very busy,’ Khurram persisted.

‘Actually, no. There’s not much for me to do. The legal end’s been taken care of by my uncles, the domestic routine’s in my mother’s hands and I’m really just a, just a … I don’t even know. Proof of a better life? Evidence that my father lives on? Anu gets hysterical every time I leave the house. She knows every new case of kidnapping, murder, robbery, you name it. I think keeping track of national tragedy helps her cope with her own.’ Words he’d been biting back forced their way out haphazardly now. ‘I haven’t talked this much since our flight together. My school friends are all in the States. I wish there were an internship or some other job I could do, but there isn’t, not in anything that interests me at least.’

‘Well,’ Khurram again thumped him. ‘You are having me.’ He continued trying to console him, all the way to the cove.

Once there Daanish thought: I have this.

He had wondered if he could stand being here without his father. Now he had the answer. His footsteps were light as he clambered swiftly over the needle-like rocks on the western shoulder of the inlet, too elated to notice any cuts. Salaamat too crossed the mound with graceful ease; Khurram alone complained.

Daanish threw his head back. Anu had refurbished his room and taken away his things but she could not touch this.

The gray, shirty sea spilled with a hiss up the slope of sand toward him. The water was too rough for swimming, he had to settle for simply walking. Washed ashore were the ocellate cowries, blue mussels and pen shells that greeted him every time he made this walk. He upturned many of the pen shells. All were empty or crushed.

‘The live ones are buried,’ Salaamat said. His locks flapped around his sharp jaw like birds around a spire of granite.

‘I’m not interested in the meat,’ answered Daanish. ‘I just like the shells. I used to collect them.’ He spoke in Salaamat’s left ear and anyway, the wind swept his words away.

The driver continued, ‘They attach themselves to underground stones with golden thread. In the old days, people wove cloth with the thread.’ It was the most he’d ever volunteered on his own. Just as unexpectedly, he wound his words back up, turned and walked calf-deep in the water, straight as a sheet of iron even when the current pulled. The dusky blue horizon cut him in two, just at the hips.

Daanish returned to combing the shore. There were some of the less common shells — sand bonnets, spiral babylons, a mitre just like the one around his neck. There was even a shattered tiger cowry. He’d had a perfect specimen of each in his collection. Anger toward Anu began to rise again.

Khurram caught up with him, panting, clutching a mobile phone. One toe bled. ‘I don’t know why we come here. We passed many nicer places on the way, with people and food stalls.’ He looked around him. ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘Nothing here!’ Daanish laughed. ‘Look around! What more do you want?’

Khurram winced when the surf hit his cut. He sighed. ‘Where to sit?’

Daanish pointed to a cluster of boulders at the opposite end. ‘My mother always sat there.’

‘No shade, yaar,’ he moaned.

‘There’s a cave in there,’ Daanish indicated the sheer rocks they’d just descended. ‘But the tide’s too high,’ he added. They walked toward the boulder he’d called the shoulder-boulder as a child. Daanish remembered Anu sitting there, fitting in the knurl perfectly, her little figure balancing like a top as she sewed. The doctor and he would dig around the rock’s base, finding little more than the husks of the chiton that clung to the boulder’s surface.

Khurram tied a handkerchief around his head and moved inland, where the sand was plush and powdery. He began to cheer up a little, telling Daanish all he’d done since returning from the visit to his brother. Most of it involved looking after his father’s business.

‘What kind of business?’ Daanish asked.

‘Oh,’ Khurram examined his toe. ‘Business.’

‘What kind of business?’

‘He imports things.’ Khurram stuffed his phone in a pocket.

‘Can you be any vaguer?’ Daanish rolled his eyes. ‘What things?’

Khurram adjusted his handkerchief and paused. He looked ridiculous: a round head wrapped in a square of cloth, paunch jutting over a belt, trouser cuffs dragging a ratty line of rope.

‘What things?’ Daanish repeated.

Khurram smiled mysteriously. ‘Metal things.’

‘That explode?’ Daanish ventured.

Khurram reflected. ‘No. Well, sort of yes. Mostly they lock.’

‘Oh. So your father imports from China — padlocks?’

‘No, from the US and Europe. But yes, you could be calling them padlocks.’

‘You’re being very enigmatic today.’

‘I am not knowing big words like that,’ Khurram replied.

They reached the shoulder-boulder. It was taken. Salaamat had stationed himself there, gazing out at the sea as Anu had done. She’d watch him wear his fins and clean his mask, an aquamarine shawl around her shoulders, lace on her lap. The shawl had blinked at him like a lighthouse as he swam away.

Khurram settled on a small rock that tilted into the base of the shoulder-boulder, offering partial shade. He shifted, adjusting himself so he could both be out of the sun and stay balanced on the rock’s bowed crown. Salaamat continued to stare ahead. Daanish squatted in the sand, studying a tide pool between the boulder and Khurram’s rock. There were sea cucumbers and a sprinkle of black sea urchins. He’d pointed these out often to Anu, who’d never seen his underwater world. At such times it was the doctor who sat apart. Rarely, if ever, did the family enjoy a three-way conversation. Daanish didn’t know when it happened but at some point in his life he’d been asked, non-verbally, to choose between them. He frowned, swirling the tide pool with a stick, gently poking a winkle. The animal immediately scurried back into its fist of bone.

Daanish looked up at Khurram and suddenly blurted, ‘I’m only twenty-two but I believe my mother’s already thinking about marriage.’