After the first few days
had passed, she found herself slowing down, moving to the quiet rhythms of the empty house, a furry tail passing under her nose her signal to rise. She would move first to the window, her forehead pressed against the glass in silent prayer until she saw the tent bulge for a moment as her uncle moved in his sleep. The grass outlining the one-sleeper tent from the Mintons was bright green, the dew brushed off the morning silver-gray of lawn. Sometimes she could almost imagine that the tent was shrinking as if it were being reclaimed by creeping grass blades, swallowed by the soil.
She would head down to the kitchen, followed by Moriarty, to start the kettle and lay out a plate of cat food. She did not like waking him
—after that first start of consciousness there would be a moment’s disappointment in his eyes when he saw her.
He would shamble into the house, and she heard the sound of a toilet flushing indoors as he emerged. He was self-conscious about these small forays inside. Amal knew it was not because they were usually connected with his bodily functions. Once he came in to get a book while she was eating her cereal and he would not look at her. He moved quickly through the house, head down, and only looked up as he stepped outside again.
As the day brightened and the last car doors slammed as neighbors left for work,
Mirza read his poetry books, or marked essays from his students and Amal would move dust around nonchalantly with a torn vest she had found under the kitchen sink, watching reruns of sitcoms. At lunch, she would stick her head inside the fridge and make a variation on toast and omelets. “Domestically challenged,” her father used to say proudly of her, enjoying how this would provoke her mother. On the second day, her uncle gave her money to pay for take-away fare delivered by local restaurants, but after a week, just the sight of a polystyrene box could make her feel sick.
She asked for directions to the local grocery. “Take a right outside the house and a left at the second traffic light. About fifteen minutes down the road, there’s a Safeway. And before you go, bring me my checkbook that’s on my office desk, some envelopes and the bed tray which you’ll find in the drawer underneath the stove.” He then set about settling his bills al fresco. As she slung a canvas shopping bag over her shoulder, she watched him through the kitchen window, bending over his accounts, a steel pen flashing beneath his busy hand. It was like a detail from a miniature of a Mughal courtyard that she had seen on a school trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
When she returned from the supermarket, she made a quiche with a ready-made crust and sliced open a bag of pre-tossed salad. “Gourmet,” said Mirza approvingly. They sat on the blanket, dusk smudging away form so that their hands seemed to make brushstrokes through the air. A few crickets chirped, one close, one further, and she imagined the millions of pairs of eyes glittering in this patch of overgrown grass. Several birds were making low dives, fussy about their choice of roosting perch. Their bodies were stark against the last light of the sky, disappearing into a rush of glistening feathers as they swooped, rising to become cut-outs once more on branches silhouetted against the clouds.
Mirza Uncle was asking her questions about her coursework and her friends. “It’s fine… I see Anjum, sometimes, and Maria, and some people she knows. I’ve usually got so much work, I just like to get it finished straightaway before it piles up. It’s just fine,” she said, embarrassed by the sour smell of loneliness that was surely rising off her like body odor. He patted her hand gently, “I’m glad you came, beti, it’s good to have family around,” and she nodded, looking at the fork in her hands.
The next morning, she turned over the gold-rimmed teacups that had been draining on the countertop since the evening before, afraid that their delicate china handles would snap off in her hand before she could break the suction. Her uncle was still asleep. She watched as a strong wind was flicking through the pages of the book he had been reading and a plastic bag skittered past the tent, flattening itself against the fence. Above, gray clouds were herding in the sky. A storm was coming.
Chapter
5
When they lost their first child, he hadn’t understood. When the wail began that made the neighbors pound on their door, he had stared uncomprehendingly at her, an ocean roaring in his ears that blocked out all other sound. Afterwards, when he had left her sleeping at the hospital, he drove home and pulled the sheets off the bed, wadding them up and pushing them down the apartment rubbish chute. He vacuumed and cleaned every surface of their home and returned to the rubbish
chute once more, dropping in the overnight bag they had once packed with its impossibly small sailor suit.
There had been more losses over the years. When he reached to hold her at night, she was only hip, shoulder and elbow, her face turned into the pillow, her hands holding the edge of the bed as if to hold herself in place against a hurricane that might blow her into his arms.
One morning, after ten years of trying for a baby, they had been talking about planting rose bushes in the front garden; the neighbors were always attentive to their gardens, and they couldn’t “look as if they came from the gao”, said Naida. “We’re always the last to mow our lawns, it’s such a cliché, the Indian fam-,” she paused, and then began again, “The Indian couple with the run-down garden. It’s embarrassing. We might as well just bring in a couple of goats to complete the look.” Her hair was still wet from her morning shower and glistening black spirals swung forward as she sipped her tea. It had been four months since the last miscarriage, and she had just begun smiling again and making plans and all he knew was that he wanted so badly to be near her that he broke the unspoken rules between them. He touched her cheek and his hand slid down to stroke her neck. He felt her pulse beneath his fingers like a bird trembling in his hands, waiting for the rush of panicked wings if he made the wrong move. But it was already too late.
“Who are we kidding?” she said, standing up and pouring the rest of her tea into the sink.
“Yes, you’re right, maybe not rose bushes. I’ll ask Frank whether azaleas would be a good idea,” Mirza said quickly, his toast sliding into the dustbin although he was still hungry.
He had been an hour early for his first lecture that day, and sat behind the locked door of his office, eating a dry flapjack from a vending machine. Outside, he heard the rattle of keys as the janitor passed by, switching on the lights in the hallways. There was a metallic cough as the furnace started up, and Mirza took off his shoes and pressed his cold feet against the lukewarm air coming through the vent under his desk, the smell of carpet fiber and stale socks filling the room.
“It’s still early.” Stacy passed him a cup of ‘chai’, a coffee-house concoction so sweet, it made his jaw ache. He sipped slowly in his colleague’s office. Usually he left half in his cup as he left—“So sorry, I let it get cold”—and he often thought of bringing a thermos of his own imported Indian tea to share with her, but never did. He had come over as soon as he saw the light go on in her office, on the other side of the quad. Between the four sides of the department building was a small garden with a bench, which the faculty referred to as the ‘prison yard’.
Stacy Marshall was a professor in his department, ten years older, and had been Mirza’s friend since he started at the university. She was American, and the faint trace of her accent after thirty years of living in England was still enough to intimidate her fellow professors in department meetings when
ever necessary.
She hated teaching and would have taken an early retirement, except that her husband had been forgetting things for the past year. He had forgotten his way home that previous spring, in a downpour, and had returned home soaked through after wandering up and down familiar streets for hours. She had taken back her resignation.
Whenever there was a new hire in the department or another unpopular policy set by the Chancellor, Stacy telephoned Mirza and invited him over to her office, where he sat in a torn leather armchair. On her desk and on every shelf were pots of cacti (“I don’t have time for anything that can’t fend for itself.”) When he was new to the university, Mirza had at first been uneasy about sitting with her alone in her office on seminar breaks, but he soon suspected that she found him rather sexless, and the thought was comforting. He felt the same way about her.
“She’s different now,” he said, drawing furrows in the brown leather with his thumbnail.
Stacy was moving around the office, stopping to collect several textbooks with brightly colored tabs quivering between the pages. With her pure white hair and heavy limbs, Mirza was reminded of a polar bear moving across ice. She stood in front of him.
“When I was young and used to give a shit, I used to attend all those seminars from cutting-edge movers and shakers in the field, you know the kind: “On the Edge of the Chasm: Construction on the San Andreas Fault”, you name it. I’d pack my bags and leave Phillip for a week with a pan of lasagna and a couple of Pot Noodles. Wherever I was that week, I knew that six o’ clock British time, he’d be sitting down to eat his dinner. And there’d be a place set for me, knife, fork, plate, glass. And at six thirty, he’d wash his dishes and put away mine, untouched. Knife, fork, plate, glass. Every day. Until I came home. And now, I don’t go anywhere, I sit next to him at dinner, right next to him, and it’s like we’re strangers at different tables in a restaurant.” She dropped the stack of textbooks on her desk. “It was always going to be different, you just didn’t want to believe it until now.”
Mirza nodded. The furrows on the armchair looked like fresh plough lines in a field. In a few days from now, the scars in the leather would darken. She was picking up her purse, and Mirza knew it was time to leave for the first lectures, but before he could stop himself, he heard himself say “She’s leaving me behind,” and he was annoyed at the plaintive childishness of his voice.
“Then, you have only one choice,” said Stacy, gently pushing him out of the door in front of her with a copy of Structure and Symmetry, “You have to start running.”
Looking back, now, he realized that a young marriage is defined by action: conversations, even heated arguments, touches shared, decisions made. After the years file by, he thought, they are defined by stasis: the things left unsaid, the empty bed.
She had pulled away a long time ago, he realized, and in his fear of losing her, he had only wanted her more. He had filled the house with people and crammed activities into their spare hours as if he were sowing the ground with jewels for her. He invited members of his department over for dinner parties where Naida served lamb roasted in Indian spices and kheer for dessert. He reached for her at these parties, the only time he could touch her. “You’ve met my wife.” A hand on her elbow. “Let me introduce you.” A squeeze of her shoulder. “After you, ladies.” His fingers brushing the small of her back as she walked away from him.
There were Indian parties, too, at first. An image from New Year’s Eve came back to him and he shook his head, not inviting that memory. He thought of the Hyderabadi Society picnics at the park, Hindi movie screenings, Ramadan iftars. Some events were segregated, and he enjoyed seeing her as she emerged from their bathroom, fully dressed and made-up. As they drove to the event, her perfume and the clink of her bracelets made him want to drive more slowly. He watched her as she disappeared into a separate room, and sometimes heard her laugh with the other women, waiting for the evening to be over, for the moment when she would stand at his side again. If the event was in their home, he would be ardently helpful, like a boy scout, lifting down heavy serving dishes and polishing the silver, glancing at her from the corner of his eye as she checked the seasoning or floated flower petals in crystal bowls.
Afterward, at night, her face washed, she slid into bed noiselessly and he closed his eyes, not even
daring to scratch his nose until he heard the deep, slow breaths that told him that she was finally asleep. He would lie awake, reliving the days’ events in his mind, replaying the moments when she might have turned to him, taken his hand, touched his face with desire. He woke each morning like a new thing, washed in salt, eyes puffy, stumbling in the first light slicing through the blinds.
He would go downstairs to clean up. The non-Muslim guests brought bottles of wine, which he poured down the sink, feeling slightly sick at the fumes as it splashed into the white basin. The corks became pincushions for Naida’s sewing box, and she stuck flowers or candles into the bottlenecks until they had more makeshift vases than they could use.
Soon, she began smashing the empty bottles, using the broken glass to make mosaic-decorated flowerpots and paving slabs, spending hours arranging and re-arranging the shards to create swirls of colored glass that winked and sparkled in the garden. She took an art class and made oceans of blues and greens, caught in place by grout. Crystal forests of green bloomed icily on side tables and picture frames. The blues and greens were soon not enough, and Naida began smashing old china cups and hand-held mirrors—much to Mirza’s superstitious dismay—and bangles.
The crude results of her first attempts, the door-stops and ashtrays, made way for elegantly finished pieces. Large slabs with people, their jagged glass contours urgent with movement, arms raised to carry buckets of water across Sahara-like plains, or to shelter eyes from the noon sun in an iridescent Indian sky, people so full of life it seemed that only the grout was holding them in place. She worked for hours, snipping glass with heavy tile shears, or smashing glass objects wrapped in an old shirt, his, with merciless swings of a hammer. She came into the house after hours in the garden or in the garage, her hair escaping from the clumsy knot which she had made to tie it back, her fingers nicked with small cuts from the glass pieces. If she had been mixing dye into the grout, the lines on her palm were outlined in black soot, and Mirza was reminded of the telltale gunpowder grains that he had heard
about on television that entered a person’s palm when they fired a gun.
She took her offerings to craft fairs and brought them all back dejectedly in the beginning. As the contours of her work acquired grace, she was able to make a few sales and spent the money immediately on new materials. A corner of the garage was filled with large bags of grout, like cement, coating everything with a fine layer of
gray dust. There were coils of chicken wire and buckets of plaster of Paris, sacks of river pebbles, Italian glass with gold streaks through the tile, like marble, round red lozenges that looked like blood when Mirza held them up to the light, cupped in his hand. Sometimes he came when she was out, and, rolling up his sleeves, he dipped his hands into the sacks and tins filled with smooth glass, feeling the glass pebbles slip through his fingers, so cold that the hair on his arm stood on end.