Amina squinted up at the squat embassy building. The sole entrance remained stubbornly closed while applicants were herded into orderly queues by armed ushers. Next to her, Ahmed hunched against the wind, his six foot frame a lean and flimsy barrier against the chill seeping through Amina’s pashmina, into her tired bones.
“You have the keys, right?”
She asked him this question every hour since they had stolen away and every hour he was required to prove his reliability. He nodded and patted the side pocket of his Levi’s. The keys were the first thing he had picked up the day before from his best friend, Kamran. They planned to stay at his family home in Lahore tonight and fly to Istanbul the next morning.
Her father would have discovered her disappearance and theft by now. Amina imagined him shocked, then angry, then in dogged pursuit. There was no version of him that would allow the dishonor of a disobedient daughter to pass unpunished. In his world, only blood washed out dishonor. Three years ago, her father had provided one of several alibis for the neighbor who had shot his teenage daughter for bringing home a college admission form without his permission. The following week he helped Amina apply for engineering school, filling out the form in his precise handwriting. “I want you to go to college bachay,” he said when she hesitated in taking the application forms from him, “I know you’re not a disobedient daughter.” She hadn’t been one till two months and one week ago when she married Ahmed in secret.
Amina held the braided handles of her worn leather bag tight to her chest. While Ahmed had been busy figuring out their sanctuary, she had been stealing from her father. But was it really stealing if she claimed the only inheritance her long dead mother had left her? she wondered. She replayed the events of the last eight hours. She had said good night to her father at around 10 as he left to meet an old friend visiting from Karachi. After his car screeched out the gate, she walked into his bedroom and stolen her late mother’s gold jewelry and five hundred and ten thousand rupees from the safe. Out of his three children, only she had the code. A half hour later, she tiptoed past the chowkidar’s chair as he stood in the garden, cigarette in hand, flirting with the cook. Ahmed had been waiting for her at the tea stall down the street from her house. The train to Lahore departed at eleven fifteen. She left her home to run away with a boy not meant for her. Amina imagined that of all the sins she had committed last night, stealing would be the one her father would find easiest to forgive.
She inched closer to Ahmed. His heavy grey shawl offered warmth and familiarity as she held onto one tasseled end and anchored herself in that moment. Lahore. A night in a borrowed house and finally a plane out into the world. Moments stacked onto moments, life meted out in careful, unprescribed, unsafe doses. All of their choices over the past three years had led them here, waiting in the cold sun with strangers.
She hadn't yet told Ahmed that her father had been calling for the past three hours. Forty-seven missed calls. Fifteen per hour, a call every four minutes. And one text. When will you return from the funeral? She didn’t need to decipher what he meant. In school when she had wanted to stay back for no reason except that she wanted to, her father would call the principal and let her know Amina had to attend a family funeral. No one questioned dead relatives. Everyone knew their biradari were spread across the country and her father was the informal hub of it all, even though he had rebelled and left farming for a life in a city far from the heartland. She imagined his text was his way of telling her he would cover for her. It would be easy. Her two older brothers were off trekking in the Himalayas with some friends and the only other people who would have noticed her absence were the servants. Her father could tell them he had driven her to the airport for a flight out of town for the funeral. He never let the drivers take her around after dusk anyway. And if the story didn’t line up perfectly, well who would dare question him.
If his message was for real then maybe she could’ve told him. Told him she didn’t want to marry the man whose name and photo and LinkedIn profile he had shared with her three months ago. How differently would that conversation have gone if only she had been brave and her father had been a different man.
“He’s a good man. I met him. He’s smart, has his own house in Lahore. You will be happy, bachay. You love Lahore!” Her father had revealed details about the man only a few years older than her with the barely concealed excitement of a conjurer with a captive audience.
Amina picked at the threads unraveling at the embroidered border of her shawl. “Baba, I don’t want to. And I still have a year of college left.”
“I promised them, bachay. You know I would never make the wrong decision for you. He will treat you well…or I will deal with him.”
She fell silent then. But what if she had said something. Said no. Kept saying no. After all, her father had never denied her anything. The trick she had learned early was to never ask for anything he would deny her. As a young girl, Amina had clung to him until he recognized the woman in her. The distancing had been so gradual that she had missed it till it’s inevitable conclusion. A slight hesitation when he first said no to dancing in the rain with her, a firm pat on the head and a closed door in her face when she had asked to join him on a weekend trip to Dubai, and then the day he refused to lift her up to see the wandering monkey doing tricks. That monkey could juggle five cricket balls at a time. Or seven. An odd number for sure. But Ahmed was no wandering street performer. He would be a permanent fixture, a forever reminder to her father that his only daughter had not been his to bestow. No, there was nothing she could’ve said then.
Everything she could’ve said to her father about her prospective marriage she had said to Ahmed. Or was it the other way around? Everything her father should’ve said to her, Ahmed had.
“Do you want to marry him?” Ahmed had asked.
“No, I think we should get married.”
“We can do it next week ok? It’ll take me a few days to find someone to do the nikah.”
“Yes, next week. Thursday. I always stay late on Thursdays so no one at home will notice.”
It had been almost anticlimactic, the brief trip into an unfamiliar neighborhood, a hasty signing of the marriage contract with Amina’s right to divorce helpfully canceled out by the officiant who drew the line at helping a woman elope with an exit plan for her exit plan, Ahmed’s mother’s old ring hanging from a necklace around Amina’s neck. They submitted their passports and visa applications to the embassy two days later.
It was Kamran, their only confidant, who had volunteered his family home for their night in Lahore as they planned ahead for when the visa confirmation emails would come. “I’ve always wanted a younger sister and if I had one I think she’d be just as brave as you,” he said when Amina had stammered her gratitude to him. She had become friends of sorts with him at the wedding where he had been one of two witnesses to their secret marriage. He sent her drafts of his poems and she emailed them back with grammatical corrections. Ahmed was delighted to share Kamran though Amina was far less tolerant of artistic angst than him. “Bhai jaan, let’s go for chai”, she’d say every time Kamran complained about magazine publishers refusing to give his art its due. Kamran never said no to her and promised to be their first visitor once they settled in their forever home after passing through Türkiye. Amina promised to frame and hang his first published poem in their house. There were oceans to be crossed before either of their promises could come to pass. And the passport window was still closed.
It finally opened at eight and the line started to move at a glacial pace, the chill in the air having thawed only slightly. Amina kept her face half hidden in her shawl, keeping a lookout for any familiar faces. Her father was only five hours away by car. Queuers passed around their bags of nimco and an old uncle a few places away from Amina peeled oranges while his wife held the bag. He carefully stripped the rind away from the soft center, baring the veined, juicy center. A pulpy mess ran down his fingers. Amina shook her head when he offered her a sweaty wedge. Ahmed took it in her stead.
“You could have taken it, ok. They were just trying to be nice.” His voice was a bare breath on her cheek.
“Why?” Years upon years of stolen moments and sometimes she felt she was a stranger to him still. He would never know all of her, never be bored with her, never be tempted to abandon her. As long as she could keep him curious, she could keep him. This was probably not what her paternal grandmother had in mind when she had lectured a teenage Amina on how to keep a man. Men are simple creatures, bachay. Be the mother they wish they had and they will be your slaves. Then go ahead and do what you want. He may be the king in his house, but life indoors is a game of chess and the queen is all-powerful. So Amina parceled out versions of herself to a man without a mother. Her mind outstripped his and yet she held onto his shawl like a lifeline while he chatted with strangers in a queue.
The old couple were out of oranges to share but the man still had plenty of stories and a ready audience in Ahmed, eager to listen to his plans for their first trip to Türkiye.
“We could’ve moved there ten years ago you know, but your uncle had other priorities.” His wife interrupted.
“Aray bhai I have responsibilities here. No need to bore the poor boy with all these ghar ke maslay. You make everything about yourself.”
“But Aunty, you look so young. You have a lot of time to explore the world.” Ahmed defaulted to making peace but Amina wanted to know all about the ghar ke maslay that prevented this manicured woman with perfect burgundy highlights from making her dreams come true.
“How can I, beta? Your uncle has five sisters with sixteen children between them, mashallah. And I’m always standing behind them in line.”
“Aray, that’s enough now”, her husband’s voice grew shriller. “Where’s the other bag of oranges? Give it here.”
“It’s ok Uncle. We have some almonds. Very delicious. Please try some!” Ahmed the peacemaker couldn’t resist sharing their only food. They had bought the bag of roasted, salted almonds at the station not knowing how long they would have to stand in line at the embassy. Amina didn’t want to share it at all, but Ahmed was lord bountiful as he passed the bag around. He gave of himself to everyone and they all loved him for it. In the darkness when she let herself think about all the things she would not say out loud, she wondered why a man who didn’t need her to love him orbited her, why he had done so since the day they met.
On that day, Amina had been standing with the daughter of a family friend in the courtyard of the largest public university in the city. Two young men came up to them to distribute campus maps for the first-years. While the others chatted about the professors most likely to pass first-years, she had caught Ahmed staring at her bare wrists. She hastily pulled her sleeve down and one-handedly buttoned the cuff. That slash of nakedness was a secret between them alone. Their eyes met and he hadn’t looked away, unembarrassed at being caught. And Amina had not been ashamed of being looked at by him. How novel it had been to be seen without expectation. He didn’t covet even as he was curious. Those moments had fueled her fantasies until they found their secret corner in the ancient campus library. She hoarded them, the moments between them, one after another, recalling them in sequence and out of step, rolling memories like dice in her palm. The first meeting, the wedding, secret whispers in the library, secret joyrides in borrowed cars, secrets upon secrets, multiple lives in multiple realities and all of them led to that day, a desperate escape to merge all her realities into one life.
It was midday by the time they were called to the front of the line and their passports were handed back to them. Amina flipped through to the six inch square stamp, the facts of their lives barcoded onto the page. Necessary but not sufficient. They still needed to make their way to Lahore, some four hours away by train. The trains were running on a limited schedule after a derailment yesterday and the discovery that one of the arterial tracks named after the last white man to rule the subcontinent had rotted away. Empires built tracks intended to last forever but even empires were no match for the ravages of time and hungry hands that rip up train tracks to sell for scraps.
“Should we take a taxi?” Ahmed said.
Amina mentally calculated how much it would cost. They could afford it if they skipped lunch and she hadn’t been hungry in days. Luckily for their budget, her appetite was the first thing to go when she was stressed.
The taxi dropped them off a block away from the station, its width unable to navigate the bicycles, motorbikes, rickshaws and carts crowding the entrance. They walked onto the platform ten minutes later. Porters ran around in their red uniforms, zig zagging between trolleys, people and vendors, sidestepping wandering children and loitering youths. Amina parked herself on one of the benches, watching over their bags while Ahmed stood in line to buy tickets. She sat up straight like the nuns had taught her, the straps of the bags dug into her shoulders. It would be harder for someone to snatch their bags if she was tangled up in them too.
The train pulled into the station just as Ahmed ran back to her. A uniformed conductor hopped out, his voice boomed over the platform and summoned forth his prospective passengers who rushed the doors not knowing when the driver would decide to pull away from the station. Amina climbed up first and hurried to a window seat in the middle of the compartment.
Fifteen minutes after the train pulled away, the conductor stopped by to check their tickets. “Oho, newlyweds, yes? I can always tell, you sit so close together. Aray bhai where can she escape to now?” Amina stared at the button shaped little thumbprints in his cotton candy cheeks framing the harshness of his reddish teeth. Her father had never made her sit in the public compartments. If they ever had to take the train somewhere, he always paid for a private family compartment. But those rules no longer applied. In fleeing his rules, she had also abdicated his protection.
“When did you get married?” asked the old woman seated across from them, clicking an ivory tasbeeh in her hand. Amina hid her face in her shawl, breathing in the fading scent of home.
“Just last week.” Ahmed wove a tale of a grand wedding, days upon days of celebrations, dholkis, milaad, mayoun, mehndi, baraat, walima, two families conjoined in eating, gossiping, teasing and competing over the size of the wedding gifts. No, we didn’t have time for a honeymoon, I have to go back to work. Yes, it’s really sad, but you know these private companies they care nothing for people wanting to live their lives. Yes, we do have plans for a honeymoon. She wants to see the beach in Karachi and I have always wanted to drive a jeep in the Thar desert rally. No, no plans for children just now, we want to enjoy their lives for bit. Yes, it is selfish of us but happy parents make happy children and our parents are young yet, they’ll live long enough to coddle grandchildren, inshallah.
Inshallah, inshallah, the passengers around them echoed, praying for the long lives of the people who were, in that moment, far more likely to wish both their children to die in agonizing, if not inventive, ways.
Amina wondered if that was the wedding he had wanted. Hours upon hours of meeting people known only to their families. Her pretending to be happy to be shown off laden with gold and the expectations of everyone around her. Him laughing at risque jokes. Both of them dreaming of escape. Instead he got a wedding with two witnesses and three guests in a dingy little room behind a mosque neither of their families would have ever dreamt of praying at. In all the time of keeping their marriage a secret, he had never mentioned a dream wedding to her.
Amina stared out at grassy hills changing into plains and fields, bare land showing no hint of the lushness that came to life every harvest, and pretended to ignore the squirming child in his mother’s lap next to her. He whined every time his mother pulled him back from the father reading the newspaper out loud to the stooped, white haired man sitting across from them. It was election season and one of the front-runners, a rebel interloper in the political world of pedigree and money, had just escaped an assassination attempt. The two men lamented at the state of the world. War and strife and cruelty everywhere, all the foretold signs of the end of times. Soon Ahmed too was invited into the conversation, his vociferous defense of the renegade politician put down to his lack of life experience. All the while, Amina studiously kept her back towards the mother and child who sought the attention of the man who looked anywhere but at them.
The compartment smelled of sweat and fried food and smoky corn by the time the train reached the next station. More Allah hafiz, assalamalaikum, can I put this bag right over your head and can you move over, my child wants to sit next to me. Hell was an unending train ride with strangers who had children and food and could not shut up about the election. For the fifteen minutes that the train halted at each station to pick up new passengers, Amina scanned the entrants for her father or another familiar face, reminded herself of the exit right behind her, re-counted the number of bags sprawled over the floor, noted all the hurdles she would have to jump over. Luckily she was wearing her sneakers. Vigilance was exhausting, made even more so by the need to avoid looking like she was monitoring everyone.
Amina rested her eyes between stations, then dozed off for real. Her head lolled on Ahmed’s shoulder as her bag slipped out of her hands and landed at his feet. One of the zippered side pockets burst open, the paper trail of their escape leaking out. Amina was a meticulous record keeper. She asked for extra copies of all their receipts and had all their important documents in triplicate. Gently letting her head hang back, Ahmed got down on his knees to gather the paperwork.
It was nearly dusk by the time they reached their final stop and Amina was barely awake. Ahmed flagged a rickshaw from among the throng hovering around the station and loaded it up with their luggage. A beat up old gym bag and a shiny new backpack she had given him when he won the gold medal at his graduation last month. Their new life together would be built on stolen gold and forbidden dreams and the ruined honor of families who would never sit down for a meal together.
They reached their destination in thirty minutes. It was a residential neighborhood nestled in the middle of a city grown too quickly to make room for the dreams of the thousands who streamed in every year. Thankfully no one was in the street, a bout of load-shedding had plunged the neighborhood into darkness made hazy by the winter smog that swallowed this city alive every year since the brick kilns moved in. The last thing they needed right then were neighbors wondering why strangers were coming to stay in their neighborhood. Amina counted out the fare, rubbing each note between her index and middle fingers. Ahmed handed the money over to the driver with a smile, a handshake and a promise to call him when it was time for them to go again in a few hours. Bags slung over shoulders, they hurried in, the oiled joints of the heavy wrought iron gate silent. The last of her phone battery fueled a torch to light their way as they walked past the house to the chowkidar’s quarters in the back. His rooms would offer them sanctuary that night. Amina entered first, her handbag clutched to her chest. Ahmed set their bags down by the door opening into the kitchen.
Mini-stove atop a terrazo counter next to the barred window, a blue plastic table with three mismatched chairs, wooden cabinets above the counter, no fridge and a pedestal fan more rusted than not. A propane gas tank sat next to the counter. Amina hoped it was empty. An old gas tank blowing up in the night would bring the neighbors out for sure, load-shedding or not.
“It’s not that bad. We can make it work.” Ahmed said.
Amina inspected the room in the light of the phone. “It’s disgusting.” She turned to him, the salted almonds they had for lunch bitter on her tongue. Their voices clashed, mingling, clanging, swirling, metallic in their tang.
“Think positive thoughts, sonay.” Gold, he called her, when he delivered sage advice, when he was impatient, when he felt like it.
so-nay, so-o-o-naay, sonay.
The sound frissoned down Amina’s spine, licking at her nerve endings. Like the first time. She had been in the library searching for a book of poems by her father’s favourite poet, a trader like him. Both men comfortable with love contained in verse, the meter of emotion well-defined, the rhythm of desire predictable. Ahmed had found her on her toes, reaching for the book. Can I help you? She had pointed to her quarry. Here you go, sonay. It had been a shocking intimacy, surprising for him too as he had stuttered an apology. Like he’d been thinking it and his tongue decided to utter it without checking with his conscious mind, without consideration of improprieties, without knowing that she had been starved to hear it said. Sonay.
Afterwards, they met in that corner of the library every time their breaks coincided. They sat across from each other, sometimes reading in silence, sometimes whispering, Amina’s sleeves daringly rolled up to her elbows, Ahmed’s feet unshod. In the corridors they communicated in a secret code. A silent message in her eyes when Amina wanted him to walk right past her in the airy corridors. A slight shrug to drop her chaddar off her shoulders before she covered herself back up so that he could see she had worn their favourite colour. Amina felt like a man in those moments, always in control, always primary, always the sun.
She traced the dusty table and thought of her room cleaned twice a day by the maid hired just for her. Even on her laziest day, her maid would be ashamed to call this place clean.
“Are you sure the chowkidar won’t return tonight?” Amina said.
“Yes, yes, he’s gone to his village for a month to organize his daughter’s wedding.”
“A month? How can he afford a month-long wedding?”
“Kamran’s parents.” Ahmed told her about their fondness for the girl. They had paid for her entire education - a mid-range private school a step above the open-air public school in her neighborhood, extra tutoring for English and a public university for a degree in finance. Even her interview at the bank where she worked had been set up at the recommendation of Kamran’s father who played golf with the CEO every week. Amina rifled through the drawers in the kitchen looking for candles, blinking past the burning in her eyes. Her phone battery was about to die any minute and there was no telling when the light would come back on.
Ahmed’s eyes followed her around as he talked, a constant touch as she lit a half melted candle and switched off her phone. He looked at her like she deserved to be loved. How he came to that conclusion, she did not know. Lovable women were available, permitted to desire and to be the fulfillment of desires. They lived, loved, longed, took.
When she let herself think of the future, Amina thought of all the girls who would come after her. They would hate her for being the reason they would never get to live the lives they wanted. Ahmed thought their families would come around eventually. Separated by caste and creed and a dislike of anyone who couldn’t trace their pedigree to the same village somewhere in the open plains seven generations ago.[1] It was easy for him to say that. Amina knew that if they made it out, his people would visit them for Eid dinner next year. She’d cook karahi and they’d complain about the namak mirch. Her family, on the other hand, they defied even Ahmed’s optimistic imagination.
Amina hurried into the next room, the plate with the tottering, flickering candle in her right hand. Ahmed followed behind her into the bedroom.
“I think this is them, the chowkidar and his daughter.” Ahmed handed her a photo frame off the bedside table.
The thin balding man in a starched white shalwar kameez in the photo had his arm around a petite girl, holding her diploma in his other hand, her head tilted towards his chest, his head held high. He was proud of her. The girl with perfectly tamed hair, wearing red lipstick. The girl who looked nothing like him, smarter than all his clan put together. The girl who would not live the life his mother lived or his sisters or his wife. She would leave him behind and he was proud of her, the girl that he helped make. Amina put the photo back, face down.
Ahmed was still talking. He told her the chowkidar’s daughter was marrying one of her classmates at college. It had been a big scandal in their village until Kamran’s father who employed most of the men from the village to cultivate his extensive hereditary lands told them to back off if they still wanted to get paid. When the man you had mortgaged generations to in exchange for seeds, water access and fertilizer told you to get over something, even honorable men tended to get over things pretty quickly.
“Yes, well he doesn’t have to worry about what people will think. These people have no honor any way.”
“Sonay.”
“Yes, yes I know. I’m being mean. How come a chowkidar is ok with his daughter doing whatever she wants. It’s not fair!”
"Is that why you bought the ticket to go back?”
"How did you know about that?”
"It fell out of your bag on the train. I put it back, promise."
"Oh.” She untangled the fringes of her shawl, worrying the frayed threads.
"Do you really want to go back?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“Ok. Ok, sonay. We’ll do whatever you want. Go to the train station and go back. Or go to the airport. We have time. And you already bought the ticket.” He laughed as though it was no big thing for her to have spent their scarce funds on a ticket they both knew she could never use.
“Do you mind? That I got the ticket.”
“I just wish you told me, sonay. If you go back…I don’t know what they would do to you.”
“I know I can’t go back. I know. I just…I just thought what if I could.”
There were some truths the acknowledgment of which love could not survive. If she accepted that there was no way back he would know he was all she had. Absolute power corrupted absolutely. And a man with absolute power over a woman was destined to be a villain. Maybe not all men. But enough men that all women needed to be careful.
Amina walked away to explore the rest of the space, leaving him standing in the room. The bathroom looked clean…ish. There were no towels. Her bathroom at home had four rotating towel sets, in lavender, turquoise, peach and ecru, in the softest Turkish cotton. She had that in common with her father, their love of soft luxuries. And their love of getting their own way.
Ahmed called out to her from the kitchen. Golden arches frowned at her from the paper bags on the table as she entered. There had been only just enough time to grab some food at the station before they headed here. He laid out his shawl on one of the plastic chairs for her to sit on. She placed the candle between them.
They were starved now that the initial adrenaline rush had worn off and no longer pretended to have better manners than they actually did. He reached into the crumpled bag, took a burger out of its paper wrapping and passed the bag to her. She peeked inside and rifled around the napkins and the condiment sachets to retrieve her fish sandwich. Amina scraped at the tartar sauce congealed on the side of the bun. They counted out the ketchup and mustard and divided it up. Half of the ketchup for her, all the mustard for him. Amina watched as he bit through layers of cold meat and wilted lettuce.
“You should’ve taken that scholarship.”
He coughed and shook his head, his voice thickened with half-chewed meat. “Not without you.”
“It’s a miracle I made it to college the past three years.” Amina said.
“You deserved to go more than I did. I knew the first day I saw you that you would be the best of us all.”
“Do you even remember that day?”
He described the voluminous embroidered shawl that was her uniform, the slash of her naked wrists peeking out of the shawl, the shiny copy of Fundamentals of Physics she had already annotated using multicolored index tabs. That’s how he learned purple was her favorite color. It was a happy accident that found him loitering in the section housing dusty frontier memoirs of British colonel poets a few weeks later. That day she had been searching for a book her father had recommended.
Amina had tried to tell him that every extra hour she had spent in the library had been a debt she had repaid with interest. Repaid in the ever present fear that someone would wake up one day, realize she was getting ready for college, and tell her to stop pretending she had anything to do outside in the real world. She dressed in the dark so no one would notice the light in her room, and left home with the sleepy family driver as everyone prepared for fajr. Going away on scholarship would have been too much to ask of fate. Even God’s miracles had some limits.
“Everything will be different now”, Ahmed continued. “Get ready sonay, we’re going Lahore to Istanbul to wherever we please.”
“What time is our flight?” Amina had heard this before. The life he imagined for them – travel and food and a life lived by their own principles - it was a life unimaginable. Unimaginable in the sense that she did not know how they would ever reach a place where that life may be possible. If there was ever a lack that she acknowledged within herself, it was a lack of imagination.
“Five A.M.”
What she really wanted to do was to tell him the truth of his dream. Tell him that they set off alarms just by existing. They drown people like us, she wanted to say to him, starve us in cages, use us for target practice. We are walking carcasses, stinking up white shores, reddening their seas. We do not get to please ourselves.
She remained silent. Amina knew his love of impossibilities was all his late mother left him with. His only memories of her were watching pirated Disney movies together. Every Saturday morning, mother and favorite son sat in the lounge with their aanda paratha breakfasts and watched a tape and then rewound to listen to the songs on repeat all afternoon while his older brothers and father played cricket outside. In dreaming of happy endings he dreamt the dreams of his mother. Amina would do nothing to take that away from him. The ending of their story would teach him soon enough.
He smiled at her with all his teeth, blinding white after last week’s dental appointment with his mother’s favorite brother. “Let’s clean up this mess, don’t want the chowkidar to come back and start spreading stories that the house is haunted by jinns who eat McDonalds.” They worked together in silent harmony, gathering wrappers, folding up paper bags, wiping ketchup stains off the table. A light bulb turned on outside, its muted glow filtering through the thin curtains. The respite of complete darkness was over. He hummed something about a tale as old as time under his breath and she pretended not to hear him as she plugged her phone into the outlet next to the pedestal fan.
They walked back to the room together, side by side, a respectable distance apart, taking turns to wash their greasy fingers with water. Amina washed first, it was bad enough she had to share a soap and a towel, she was certainly not going to go second.
In the bedroom she watched him unbutton his shirt and walk towards her. They undressed each other in silence. His buttons were easy. Her zippered kameez resisted his unpracticed fingers. He snagged it on the skin on her neck and she flinched, her mouth dry.
“Sorry, sorry”, he muttered and kissed her neck, his wet tongue licked the salt off her skin. She leaned back into him, not yet ready to be contained by him. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears, a rush of sound pounded against her skull. She imagined he could hear it too. She turned to him then, unwilling to risk further accidents, and lifted her shirt. He watched her out of terrified eyes, his hunger rippled off him in waves. There was no audience that demanded his subtlety. His lust for her was a palpable physical presence, vines binding them together.
They were clumsy together. They avoided each other’s eyes, pretended to know more than they did, and were betrayed by their awkwardness. He wheezed as he rolled to the side, panting like her father’s pet labrador. Amina grabbed at the sheet, its roughness made her skin throb.
“Sorry, are you ok?” He caught his breath. He was joyous, wallowing in the nest of sheets they had created together. He rubbed at the mole on her arm, the ridges of his fingertips abrasive. Amina was silent, avoiding his eyes. It took more thinking than she had imagined to make two people fit. But he was warm and he loved her and she had been cold for years. Amina pressed closer to him.
“We fit, right?” He removed his arm from under her head, stretching it and wriggling his fingers. “We fit.” She looked up at him from the flat, ratty pillow, her fingers caressing the scratches on his shoulder. He would feel them tomorrow, maybe the day after. Till his last breath he would feel her marks. She closed her eyes and sought the colors in the darkness, her breathing slowing down, matching his.
“Can you get me some water?”
“Yes, yes”, he leapt out of the bed, nearly tripping on the sheets that trailed behind him.
“And my phone too! I plugged it in next to the fan.”
She heard cupboard doors opening and closing, glasses clinked. The dark shadows had crept indoors, their edges blurring the outline of the bed, the lone light bulb glimmering through the bathroom door no match for a night made for escape. Amina’s head felt fuzzy, hollow like melons with their seeds scraped out and the strands drifting. He brought her a glass of water and her phone. Had he even washed the glass? She drank with her eyes closed not wanting to see any stains that she would have to acknowledge. She wished for a warm bath, some lavender oil, lots of bubbles and an hour by herself.
“Sonay, what do you think of this place? These rock cliffs, they’re in Scotland.” Ahmed had added more photos to the album he had been building since they married. It had started as a joke. Where are you planning to honeymoon, the wedding guests had wanted to know, all of them aware of the clandestine nature of the ceremony they had celebrated. Ahmed listed all the cities housing a Disney resort while Amina wanted to go to every city featured in the last Mission Impossible. Stock images from Google Maps, personal photos uploaded on Trip Advisor, blogs by digital nomads who never had to beg strangers for entry into their dream destinations. He had them all organized into a route through amusement parks and ancient cities, along coastlines, past mountain ranges. She wanted to add a safari in Kenya to their list after the only female professor in their university moved there following her diplomat husband and started posting about her weekly drives through Nairobi National Park on Facebook. A lifetime’s worth of living in a hundred and sixty six photos.
She nodded along, swiping her own screen as he moved on to extol the virtues of rocky beaches versus sandy ones. Some day, if they lived that long, she would tell him why she hated the water. The fickleness of waves hid who knew how many millennia worth of secrets. There were enough unknowns she needed to survive and there was nothing remotely attractive about abandoning her fate to changeable water.
Silence fell between them. An approximation of years of familiarity. Amina stared up at the spider web above the bed that had escaped the chowkidar’s efforts to keep the place habitable. The barely visible threads loomed over her, reflecting the moonlight filtering through the threadbare curtains. They were entangled with mathematical precision, the pattern in the chaos known only to the spider, spinning with singleminded precision, never second guessing, never wavering. Her father would never let them kill spiders in the house. He always made the servants remove them and release them outside. “Spiders are miraculous creatures, bachay. They can make a home anywhere. If we can’t live with them, we should let them go.” But she could not spin impossibilities and her father would never let her go. He had seen her Allah hafiz text but hadn’t responded to the farewell. She hoped he would not respond in person.
Amina turned her phone off and Ahmed set the alarms before he got back into bed. Five more hours, then four and three and two and one until they went onward, airward, away ward. Anywhere but here. Ahmed fell asleep almost instantly, to Amina’s relief and resentment. Here then was another thing she did not know about him. She counted cobweb threads, recited Ayat ul Kursi, turned away from Ahmed, turned towards him and drifted off to the sound of his gentle snores so like the white noise machine she had left behind. She dreamt of monkeys and beaches and a little girl sitting on Ahmed’s shoulders. She reached for the little girl, afraid the giggling child would fall. They laughed at her, Ahmed and his daughter. Amina laughed with them and woke up to Ahmed’s snores.
He woke minutes after her and before the first alarm rang. She had never seen him wake up before. He yawned and stretched and struggled with the sheets tangled up around his legs. His hair fell into his face, his eyes had little white crusts on the inside. Amina didn’t know this version of him, didn’t know what to say to him, this stranger who slept beside her, who gave her the only blanket.
He yawned again and looked up at her, smiling, always smiling at her. “I’ll call the rickshaw walla. Are we going to the train station? Or the airport?”
“Airport. We’re going to the airport.”
Contributor Notes
Qursum (she/her) is an immigrant writer from Pakistan. She is a Kweli, Tin House and VONA alumna. Qursum is currently at work on a short story collection and a picture book about mangoes. Her work has previously appeared in The Lumiere Review.
