Uzma Khan - Trespassing

Dia wrapped an arm around her gut, trying to shake the picture of Nini marrying the man on the other end of the line. The one with the comforting, lilting voice. Yes, even now, she could hear that lilt. And feel the smooth stomach strung with muscle and just barely, a little hump to each side. She’d always thought she wouldn’t mind if those love handles grew, if that was what was imminent. She could smell him too. And she could lean into him, even as he pushed her away. Even as history pushed him away. She insisted, ‘But you said she was nothing to you! Think about that if nothing else!’

‘Dia,’ he replied, ‘what do you want? Don’t pretend things haven’t changed …’

There it was again: What do you want? She cut in, ‘Pulling Nini back into the equation is not what I want. I’ll tell you what I do want. Answers. Tell me — would this have happened anyway? Even if our parents never knew each other? And tell me this: do you need another zipper now? Or are you just going to leave yours open all the time?’

‘Screw you!’ he shot back. ‘You’re just mad because for the first time in your pretty, sheltered life, you’re up against a wall.’ He was panting, hurling incomplete sentences at her: ‘That’s why you’re attacking me!’ She could hang up. She could just hang up. ‘Well I’ve been up against more walls than you could ever imagine …’

‘I don’t want your self-pity.’

‘Aba’s dead. I never knew him. He cheated on my mother …’

‘Almost ditto for me,’ she interrupted.

‘Don’t butt in again,’ he snarled. ‘I have to support my mom,’ he took a deep breath, ‘and the best way is to work in a country that bombs others but lets me in. They could just as easily let them in and bomb me. I have to find a place in that puzzle.’

Dia chewed her cuticles till she tasted blood. ‘Have you finished?’

‘All yours.’

‘Do you have any idea how completely humiliated you have made me feel? How naked I felt when your mother walked in on us? I’m still feeling filthy. And you said nothing to her in my defense. They were blaming me, not you. That’s something you’ll never have to understand.’ She crouched on the carpet.

Daanish was silent. ‘Perhaps I should go,’ he murmured at last. ‘We’re only making things harder for each other.’

If they hung up now, neither would call again. Riffat had said this would be their last conversation, and Anu had not wanted it at all. The clock ticked.

His voice was gentler when he added, ‘This might be a strange thing to say but I can’t help wondering about your mother. I admit I have blamed her. But I’ll try to look beyond that. I have a picture of them, you know. They made each other happy.’

She let the tears flow now. Then, ‘You were right. I should go.’

‘Right. Good luck, Dia.’

She snorted, ‘Luck!’

‘Well, this is hard, you know. So, don’t be a stranger.’

‘What?’ she choked.

He’d hung up.

Outside in the garden, Dia wiped the sweat off her face with the edge of her kameez. She stared at the page on her lap. Today, finally, she’d fill it. Then she’d go inside and look closely at herself in the mirror, the way she’d been doing for days. The face was changing; there was less and less of Daanish in it.

She adjusted her position on the plush grass and shut her eyes. Her mother had her farm. Daanish had Amreeka. Nini, possibly, had Daanish. Everyone had a plan but her. Maybe there was something that needed to be done before she could find one. But she didn’t know what, and she didn’t know who to ask.

She picked up her pen again. Maybe she did know.

Nini and Daanish retreated into the past. The Emperor and Empress molted a fourth time.

He was enormous, nearly ninety kilos, with slouching shoulders and a thick neck. She was slender and poised, even after bearing two sons. The boys were sleeping in the shack next to the shed where the silkworms would be housed. The couple watched their children sleep. Then they tiptoed out into the clear night. They were naked and held hands.

It had rained the day before, a light, steady patter that polished the stars and stirred the earth, so the creatures dreaming in its bowels stretched and tasted something brisk. The irrigation canals gurgled a salient song. Mansoor told his love there was plenty of groundwater in this land she’d been gifted, which she wanted transformed into a silkworm farm. He said he was proud of her, that he was the luckiest man in the world: two boys asleep in the cottage, a beautiful wife by his side, a second business on the way.

A sliver of a moon hung before them. It cast a soft, lambent light on her cheeks and her brown curls shone like copper. Fireflies orbited her navel. He touched her there. ‘If we have a third child,’ he said, ‘I hope it’s a girl.’ And then he planted a kiss in the small cool pit, and she laughed. The glowworms dispersed, fluttering like saffron ribbons, leaving them in a trail of gold dust.

They ambled between the mulberry seedlings only recently sowed. The ground was wet, their footsteps muffled as a cat’s. A nightjar called her mate. Bats brushed their ears. Riffat said it was both beautiful and frightening at this late hour, with not a soul about and a graveyard just up the road.

‘Kings and queens lie there,’ he said. ‘They rest side by side, just like I want us to.’ When she shuddered, he added, ‘In the meantime, you should squeeze into me.’

She wrapped her arms around his globe of a stomach and they came to a clearing. ‘This is where I want to plant the lost dyes of this soil. The colors are faster than synthetic ones and they smell good. Plus, it’ll help me feel that I’m at one end of a cord that leads back thousands of years. The cord is here,’ she said, pointing to her navel. He kissed it again, and again she laughed. In the clearing, husband and wife made love as easily as shedding skin.

Afterwards, he sat behind her and she leaned into his chest. From the highway came the sound of a car. They listened as the engine pitched into the next day. He twirled the curls at her temples and asked, ‘What if you had the chance to do this all over — from our wedding, to our sons, to this moment right now, and whatever lies ahead. Would you marry me again?’

She looked up at his chin, touched it. His flesh was scabrous and left hers tingling. ‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘Of course I would.’

‘Don’t go near the huts along the shore,’ his uncle warns.

The boy rests against a dune, far from the huts. He wants to please his mamu. He wants his seekh-kebab locks, his cigarettes, his job that puts him in the driver’s seat of a long and beautiful van. So he won’t even look at those huts.

His mother is in her grandmother’s teahouse. The old woman died today. She was more than a hundred. The women bathe her so her soul ascends to heaven in a quiet boat. Then the men can bury her outside the shrine of the great martyr. In the old days, when a fisherman drowned at sea, he became a hero and got a shrine all his own. But now there are more martyrs than land, and anyway, the men don’t drown while fishing, they drown while swimming up to the great ship and peeping inside the portholes.

His uncle points to it. ‘You see that anchor line?’

The child nods.

‘When I was your age, we’d dare each other to swim out and touch it. Even in the summer months, when the sea was a ferocious brute, sucking you in with long, slimy tentacles.’

The boy squeals.

‘When we reached the line, we’d bounce up and wave to the others waiting on the beach. Want to try?’