Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke

For a while, life was perfect. His parents bought us a beautiful one-bedroom with a view of Washington Square Park. I had a fabulous, virtually nonpaying editorial job at a magazine start-up. Ozi was doing sixty hours a week of trusts and estates for a big law firm and, surprisingly, loving it.

It’s not hard to remember what things were like then, in that first year of our marriage, when we were so good together, even if my memories are a little colored now by what happened later. We went out all the time. We danced like crazy, both of us sweating and stripped by the end of the night. We had insane sex. Once, we were caught on Ozi’s desk by his officemate, who later swore he hadn’t seen anything and always blushed when I spoke to him at the firm’s cocktail parties. But the best part of it was the talking. I was completely open with him. Almost, at least. More open than I’ve ever been with anyone else. I remember what it felt like to tell him how my father used to beat my mother, once so badly she lost her hearing in her left ear. How my brother never cried, not even when I almost died of pneumonia and he spent the entire night awake with me in the hospital. How upset I was when I finally got my period, at fifteen, because I’d accepted that it would never come. Ozi made me feel so known. He made love to my insides, filling desperate gaps and calming unbearably sensitive places.

And I brought his secrets out of him as well. I remember him trying to make a joke of the fact that he’d been molested by the owner of a tropical-fish store, who fondled Ozi through his track pants as my husband, then eight, tried to buy a pair of kissing gouramis. I became tender toward his obsession with cleanliness, his need to shower and wash his hands and brush his teeth many times a day.

We were growing together, and I was happy.

Then I got pregnant.

I’d always been a condom person, but since I was regular and we’d both tested negative, Ozi and I switched to the rhythm method. Which can be almost as reliable as the pill. Almost. I told Ozi about it sadly, because I’d decided to have an abortion. But he was ecstatic. I’d never seen him so happy. He told me I had to think about it for a week. And he did something I still haven’t forgiven him for: he told his mother. She flew out to New York immediately, bringing gifts and advice. It’s amazing what the gene pool will do to perpetuate itself. Anyway, when she left, I told Ozi I hadn’t changed my mind. But I did have a tiny doubt, and he noticed. He asked me to wait another week, which I did, and he used the time to do everything he could to convince me to have the baby. None of it worked, really, not even his home screening of Disney’s Jungle Book , which I love.

But I could see how much he wanted to have this baby, and it moved me. I decided to take another week to think about it. Then another week. And the more I thought about it, the less power I seemed to have to end it. I felt guilty. More than that, I felt selfish. I tried to convince myself that I wanted the child as well, that childbirth was an expression of female power, that it would make our bond even stronger. So the week turned into weeks. Eventually we had a sonogram done, and after that, the idea was a little person, growing, and it was too late to turn back.

I resigned myself to it. Or maybe I saw it as a kind of martyrdom. Sacrificing myself for something noble: for love, my man, the species. I don’t think I realized how frightened I was until the third trimester, when the nightmares started. Nightmares inspired by the Discovery Channel. Visions of being eaten alive by larvae, like some poor animal stung by an insect and made into a host for its eggs. Ozi, my friends, even people at work asked me why I looked so upset. But I could hardly tell them. Most mothers glow when they’re pregnant. I sweated.

Labor hurt like hell. I swore like a sailor the entire time. When they gave me the baby, I thought of A Farewell to Arms , because it did look like a skinned rabbit with a wrinkled old man’s face. I asked if something was the matter with it and they said it was perfectly healthy and a boy.

The baby started sucking on my breast, and it seemed to know what it was doing, so I let it be. Ozi said, ‘You look like you’re in shock,’ and I said, ‘So would you,’ and the nurse said it was only natural. Meanwhile, I kept feeling the cropped stump of the baby’s umbilical cord pressing into me, and eventually I got so sick that I threw up. The next day they wheeled me out of the hospital like a cripple, but then I had to walk to a cab.

At first, the baby was like science class. I learned how to use new equipment, how to pump, sterilize, clean, burp, wrap, powder. And the experiment, my son, seemed to be going well. I stared at him for hours, because he was such an odd little thing, with his big head and eyes like slits and fat, slow hands. He was new, and he kept me busy, and for a while I didn’t worry.

Ozi couldn’t get enough sex in those first few months after Muazzam was born. Which was fine with me, once I’d had a little recovery time, because my drive had always been more powerful than his. You learn a lot about your man when you become the mother of his child. Ozi began drinking my milk and talking like a little boy when we made love. Now, I’m no prude. I’ve done my fair share of role-playing, and I’ve sampled all kinds of kink. But this, coming from him, took me by surprise.

Not that I minded. What I did mind was that we had no time to talk about ourselves anymore. We just played with the baby and watched the baby and screwed, and then he went to work and I stayed home. When we did talk, it was almost always about Muazzam.

I started to get bored. And then I started to get frightened. Because when I looked at the little mass of flesh I’d produced, I didn’t feel anything. My son, my baby, my little janoo, my one and only: I felt nothing for him. No wonder, no joy, no happiness. Nothing. My head was full of a crazy silence, the kind that makes you think you’re hearing whispers and wonder whether you’re going insane.

Meanwhile, Ozi was having a ball. He enjoyed building tax shelters in exotic places. His clients took an instant liking to him, and his golf game improved. His friends at the office said he might even make partner. And he loved his son. He would come home exhausted, much too exhausted for sex or a quiet conversation over a glass of wine, but not too exhausted to play with Muazzam until he went to bed.

I felt neglected, resentful at being the one left at home when I hadn’t wanted to have a baby in the first place. Things came to a head when Muazzam was six months old. I decided I wanted to work full-time again. Ozi was shocked. He said Muazzam was too young. I said if he felt so strongly he could ask for paternity leave. But he won the argument. He won it with a low blow. He looked at me like I was a stranger and asked if I loved our son at all. The question destroyed me. I started sobbing and I couldn’t stop.

I’d done everything I was supposed to. I’d played with Muazzam and read to him, even though he couldn’t understand a word, and bought him clothes and fed him with my own body and cleaned his shit with my own hands. I felt so guilty. I knew there was something wrong with me. I was a monster. But I didn’t want to be. Staying with my baby was the right thing to do, what everyone expected of me. My mother would agree with Ozi. Even my friends. So I gave in. I said I’d write freelance from home.

I didn’t tell Ozi why I’d cried. He didn’t ask. He just hugged me. And even though I needed him to, it felt empty. Ozi had found my weak spot. He may not have understood why, but he now knew he could make me do things I didn’t want to do. And that’s an awful power to give one person in a relationship. It killed our marriage. I think it would kill anyone’s.