Uzma Khan - Trespassing

Khurram’s face lit up. ‘How interesting!’

‘She keeps dropping hints about settling down, whatever that means, and a few days ago I heard her discussing “the girl” with my aunts. I came into the kitchen and Anu was saying, “I still think she’s right for him despite what happened.” I never got to know who she was, or what happened, before my chachi started coughing wildly.’

Khurram slapped his knee. ‘It’s sounding like marriage all right!’

‘It’s absurd. My father would have vetoed her plans immediately.’

Khurram shrugged. ‘Maybe you’ll like her.’

‘Have you ever noticed how women here walk?’

Khurram grinned. ‘That’s usually what I’m looking at.’

‘Sweeping dupattas,’ Daanish began to mimic the cumbersome cloth with his arms, dramatizing as he continued, ‘kurtas catching in chairs, shalwar cuffs slipping over stilettos, hair in saalan, saalan in nails. And let’s not even talk about hairspray!’

Khurram laughed while Daanish took mincing steps around the rock, tripping, puffing out an imaginary coif, spraying it. ‘Yaar,’ said Khurram, ‘I love it when they do such things! It’s so,’ he smacked his lips, ‘so tasty!’

‘Mind you,’ said Daanish, ‘I learned American women spend just as much time in the toilet.’

Khurram covered his mouth with pudgy fingers and giggled. ‘How many did you know?’

Daanish waved his hand dismissingly. Then he looked up at Salaamat. ‘I wonder what he’s thinking?’

‘You can say anything in front of him. He’s deaf.’

The man had not moved a muscle. He still stared blankly ahead, his curls jostling each other gaily.

Daanish continued, ‘I knew many. And they all groomed. They just did it differently. And when they get older, here they plot weddings, there they buy hormone replacement aids! Shit. I come back here to find my father dead and mother scheming.’

It was the first time Daanish had used the word dead. It whirled around his head, leaving him momentarily stunned.

Then he saw death everywhere.

It whistled in the crevices of the steep, serrated rocks, crashed on the surf, screamed in the current, crawled behind Salaamat’s vacant stare. It scattered around him as bone: on the cord around his neck, on the rock, on Salaamat’s sculpted face. Bone underground, yielding yarns of golden thread. Bone in the ocean, vomited somewhere far, for someone just like the doctor to find and bring home to a son, in a case of bone.

Crouching in the sand, he buried his head between the bones of his knees, and was transported back to an evening with Anu.

They sat in the kitchen, waiting for the doctor. Earlier that morning, his father had returned from a conference in East Asia. Daanish sat at the table, wanting to run up to his room and touch the beautiful gift the doctor had brought him: a chambered nautilus, coiling in a counterclockwise curve. It was the first and only gift his father had given him directly. He was too proud of the find to risk it going unnoticed. Daanish wanted to hold it in his palm, gaze at the iridescent whorl, picture the animal that had once lived inside the many rooms of mother-of-pearl. He wanted to follow it through each chamber with a feathery gill of light, and watch how each was sealed off as the creature grew into the next one. He wanted to know why this particular specimen had grown in a different way, twirling sinistrally instead of like its right-handed siblings. What did its relatives — like the wandering, leggy argonaut — have to say about it? And he wanted to ask what it was like, being a member of a family that was over two hundred million years old. How did today’s animals compare with the mighty dinosaurs?

As Daanish ruminated, the food got cold. He didn’t know why, but every time his father returned from a voyage, the food just sat. Anu would reheat it twice, maybe even three times. Then she’d say to him, as she did that day,’ You should eat. You have to get to sleep.’ And she’d watch her son in the silence of the kitchen, occasionally muttering about their dwindling bank account and the loan on the house that was still pending, even though the house looked like it had existed when the dinosaurs did.

She was peeling him an apple when at last the doctor appeared. Without a word, he sniffed the chicken karhai, eggplant and daal. He took one bite.

‘Is it cold?’ she asked.

He pushed the plate away. She repeated her question. He slammed the table with his fist. ‘That’s all you ever have to say: Is it cold? Do you want more? Are you well? Is it good enough? Woman, why can’t you ever make conversation?’

She stared at him. Daanish, feeling he chewed too loudly, tried to swallow an apple quarter whole.

Earlier, he knew, Anu had asked the doctor how the trip went. She hadn’t been complaining. She’d just asked. He hadn’t answered. As long as he remembered, it was the doctor who never made conversation with her. He yearned, suddenly, for her to say so. But she looked away. He yearned then to hold and comfort her. But would that be deceiving him? He stared at the man whose large amber eyes flickered with rage. It was as if the hair in each thick brow waited to be plucked and dunked in the cauldron behind his eyes. This wasn’t the same man who took him to the cove.

Daanish swallowed a second apple quarter whole — Anu had begun paring another. He didn’t even want to be in the cove today. He wanted only to be with the nautilus. No, to be the nautilus. With ninety arms to swim away, and twenty cabins to roam.

Slowly, Anu rose, returned with a clean plate, and placed the newly pared apple gently by the doctor’s rejected main course.

‘This is driving me mad,’ he bellowed, storming out.

Daanish heaved a sigh of relief. He could stop eating the apple now. ‘What’s driving him mad?’ he asked Anu.

She said, more to the apple peels and congealing saalan than to him, ‘The fact that he has not come back.’ She began listlessly putting away the food. He watched her, small and plump, with a ruby stud like a bloodstain on her nose.

He ran upstairs. The doctor was there, waiting, the nautilus in his giant hands. ‘Did I tell you its brain is highly developed? Scientists say it has evolved to the complexity of a mammal’s.’

Daanish looked up from his knees.

Khurram smiled awkwardly. ‘I thought you’d gone away.’

‘That’s what happened to my father,’ Daanish mumbled. And then, louder: ‘My mother needs me.’

Khurram nodded. ‘You are all she has now. Go with whatever she wants. What will it costing you? You’ll make her happy, and seeing her happy will make you happy. With your responsibilities taken care of, you can for to go back to Amreeka with no guilt.’

‘But what about the girl? I don’t even know her.’

‘She will go where you are going, when you are ready. And there will be plenty of time to know her,’ he winked.

Daanish frowned. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Why? So many people are doing it that way. They are happy, aren’t they? Look, your saying yes will make the girl’s family happy too.’ He waved his arms. ‘Everyone will be happy!’

‘I wish I could be like you.’ Daanish gave him a quizzical look. ‘So merry and shameless.’

Khurram stood up. ‘Stop thinking. It will be working out. Let’s have cold drink.’

On the way to the car Khurram continued chirping, pausing only when they had to cross the ragged rocks again. The more Daanish listened, the greater became his uncertainty, and the more he was charmed by Khurram’s clear-cut thinking. Maybe Khurram wasn’t a simpleton, after all.

‘Where will it be?’ he asked Daanish. ‘Mr Burger or Sheraton?’ Daanish let Khurram decide.