Uzma Khan - Trespassing

Salaamat started walking too, soon catching up with them. The wind ruffled her hair and dealt with their words similarly: tangling and tossing them up and back, at him. Teasing, stinging. He was the subject of their conversation.

‘There was no other way, Dia,’ Daanish was saying. ‘I had to ask Khurram for his car and driver or Anu would have asked too many questions.’

‘You could have only asked for the car. We could have driven here.’

‘Yes, but Khurram had to take his own car. This is his father’s. He’s terrified of getting it scratched. I don’t blame him for not trusting me that much.’

‘But it’s embarrassing that he’s in on us. I’ve known the family so long. What do you suppose he’s thinking?’

Hadn’t they realized how close he was? Perhaps not — he always moved with great stealth. It was how he’d escaped the camp. It was why he was still alive.

‘Don’t worry,’ Daanish touched her cheek tenderly, ‘maybe I can find a way to take our own car. Except it keeps breaking down.’

They fell silent. Salaamat had to re-light his cigarette. Of course in the ad, even on top of the Himalayas, the wind couldn’t touch it.

Dia’s apricot shalwar was soaked through and when the tide pulled in, Salaamat could see the backs of her legs. And her buttocks. She’d been only twelve when he’d first seen her, a gleeful bowler in her father’s arms. And now here she was, giving herself to another man, her clothes transparent, her honor more reckless than the breeze. But then chastity did not run in their blood.

Daanish took something out of his pocket that Salaamat couldn’t see.

‘I’ve been keeping this to show you,’ Daanish said. ‘It’s what I got when I boiled the cocoon. Your hair’s a thousand times more jumbled than this, and I love that about you.’ He proceeded to tell her how he’d twisted it while puzzling over the length.

‘A thousand meters,’ she smiled.’ And all a single piece. You wound it around your arm, just like I always imagined the Chinese Empress must have done. Funny, but I was thinking of her the day I first heard of you.’

‘And with what warm feelings did you think of me?’

‘If I remember correctly, I said: shit!’

Salaamat exhaled peevishly. He was sick of it, sick of being a witness, sick of being dragged into worlds that were not his. He was chaperoning the lovers because the Amreekan boy had to pretend he was with Khurram. Why was this his problem?

Still, he kept listening.

Dia said, ‘After I cursed you I cursed poor Nini.’

‘Don’t, Dia. It’s taken so many phone calls to get you to see me. Don’t spoil it.’ He put his arm around her waist.

Salaamat licked his lips. An unwanted pleasure pressed the pit of his stomach, sweeping down to his groin. He imagined his own hand in the dip above Dia’s wet behind. It would slide down and squeeze her wanton spheres. The way she walked in the waves, swaying, almost tripping … With every step that succulent bottom screamed for him.

She said, ‘Was I always meant to be here with you today, Daanish, or is this a diversion? If we never meet again, will I be back on track?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sometimes I play this game. I go back in time and imagine how different things would be if one tiny incident hadn’t occurred. If, for instance, Nini hadn’t brought me to your father’s Quran Khwani, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have slid the silkworms down her shirt, you wouldn’t have fed them, and we might never have spoken at her house. Perhaps you’d be here instead with Nini. And what would come of that? What’s to come of this?’

Daanish released her. ‘I’m not drawn to her, you know. I agreed to the tea just for my mother.’

‘And would you consider marrying her just for your mother? Can you spend a lifetime with someone simply because you’re expected to?’

‘Most of this country does,’ he answered shortly.

‘That’s exactly what she says. Perhaps you ought to marry her.’

Salaamat exhaled again. Their first row. It was touching.

Daanish said, ‘Look, I know this is weird for you. It’s even pretty weird for me. But you’re not making it easier by asking impossible questions. You told me yourself: Nini’s been distancing herself from you. Maybe it’s time you did the same. And just for the record, I could never marry a woman with a mother like hers.’

She said nothing but took his hand again, then giggled. ‘I like your accent. No, accents. A combination of sounds.’

They paused and Daanish began filling her free hand with shells. ‘The last time I was here, Salaamat told me these pen shells used to be harvested for the thread they spun. He said cloth could be made from it. Marine silk — whoever heard of it?’

‘Well, he’d know.’ She used a half of the iridescent shell as a plate for the smaller ones. Then she looked back and noticed him. Pointing quickly to a boulder ahead of them, she muttered, ‘Let’s go there.’

‘Good idea,’ Daanish agreed cheerfully.

An uninvited Salaamat followed.

She climbed up, settling in the same incline as Salaamat the day Daanish had come here with Khurram. Then too Salaamat had been the silent witness.

The wind was in Dia’s face. She greeted it with eyes shut. Daanish slid beside her. Salaamat stood next to the boulder. The two men stared first at each other and then at Dia, both resisting the urge to plant a quick kiss.

She was not pretty. Her nose was long and bent, body too lean, brows thick and unsculpted, and skin, this close up, scarred. She had a deep gash above her right brow, and another mark — the scar of a particularly unsavory pimple — just above a fairly standard mouth. She even had faint whiskers. Yet, Salaamat’s groin began to ache again.

Dia asked, ‘What are you looking at?’

Daanish replied, ‘Guess.’

‘Well, if it’s me, I don’t see what you see.’

‘Do you like me?’

She laughed. ‘What?’

‘Do you like me?’

‘Would I be here if I didn’t?’

‘Say it then.’

She laughed again, whispering something to which Daanish replied, ‘So what? Anyway, he’s deaf.’

‘According to his sister, only when he wants to be.’

‘Forget him, okay? Say it.’

‘I like you.’

‘What?’ he shouted. ‘Did anyone hear anything?’ He called down to Salaamat, ‘Did you hear anything?’

‘Stop it,’ she protested.

‘Then say it again, louder.’

‘I won’t if you make a scene.’

Daanish waved his arms, threw back his head. ‘It’s just us, Dia. Us and a heavy gray sky on a day in July, at three in the afternoon, with not a sound in the air but the waves thrashing against this rock, where we sit, alone at last. For the first time in ages, I’m in the present. I’m not waiting for some plane to pick me up and drop me somewhere else. I’m here. And it’s beautiful. Later tonight, you’ll lie in your bed and ask: “What if I’d said it louder, as Daanish wanted me to? And what if I’d kissed him, as he wanted me to and as I also wanted? How much sweeter the day might have been.”,’He breathed in her ear, ‘Then kiss me.’

She did.

Well, thought Salaamat, perhaps the Amreekan had learned something in Amreeka after all.

She’d said: he’s only deaf when he wants to be. Salaamat smiled. People were deaf and blind and dumb exactly when it suited them.

He could tell them that. He could share what he’d heard said all those years ago in the tomb of a governor dead six hundred years. A tomb strung with an old fisherman’s net to keep bat shit off the painted floor. He could spoil their moment. No, he could tell them their moment was already spoiled.