An Infidel in Paradise (2 page)

On Compound C, the other Canadian compound, there’s a girl, Michelle, only one year older than me. She’s a senior like Vince. I can already tell she has her eye on him. She hardly left his side last week at the welcome dinner, and she’s phoned every day since, taking him shopping in Rawalpindi and out to eat at the local excuse for a fast-food restaurant, showing him off to her friends like a fashion accessory. It’s not that I want to spend every minute with him, but we used to be close and – with all my friends thousands
of miles away – I don’t know if I can bear losing him as well. I feel the prick of tears, but no way am I crying on the First Day.

It’s a short five-minute drive from Compound B, where we live, to Compound C. In fact, everything in the diplomatic enclave is within easy walking distance. Embassies from all over the world are crowded together with homes and apartments for embassy workers. Most embassies have a commissary, sports facilities, even a restaurant, so diplomats can last for days without ever going outside the surrounding walls.

We pick up Michelle, who sits unnecessarily close to my brother, and head for the gates out of the enclave. Half a dozen heavily armed soldiers are milling around at the entrance, smoking
bidis
and looking bored. One leans into our van and stares at each of us intently, as if he’s trying to memorize our faces. I plan to roll my eyes at him when he gets to me, but when our eyes lock, I change my mind.

I can’t explain it, but it’s happened to me before. I see someone – in a crowded bazaar or on a railway platform in the middle of nowhere – and suddenly they’re all I see. Everyone else, all the noise and confusion, drops away, like in the movies when they cut the sound and zoom in on the heroes. I don’t know why it happens with some people and not others, but I feel this connection, like I know this person. Not their name or the boring details of their life, but really know them, their humanity, maybe their souls.

In this moment, the army fatigues, the rifle and pistol, the heavy mustache all seem like props. I stare at the man’s gaunt, hawkish features and into his dark brown eyes. And I wait. I know he feels it too, and any moment he’ll smile or maybe nod in recognition. But abruptly, The Hawk looks away, steps back, and waves us through like swatting flies. I look down at my palms. My bitten nails have left crescents of blood.

Just outside the gates, I see the beggar woman where she always sits, her acid-burned face peering out from under her veil like a reproach. I feel a rush of guilt that I forgot money for her today. Walking to the gate to give her a few rupees has been a daily ritual since I spotted her the day we arrived. According to Mom, she was burned by her own husband or in-laws. I’ve seen beggars before, but the agony this woman endured at the hands of her own family, before being abandoned at the side of the road like garbage, compels me to return day after day. And every time, as I trudge the wide, shaded boulevard to this spot, I fantasize that she won’t be here. That someone – her husband, her parents – filled with remorse, will have come back for her, taken her home, begged her to give them a second chance to love her.

Mandy leans over the back of my seat. She and the other little kids have taken the two middle rows. Michelle and Vince are in the back, leaving me the whole front row to myself. I guess I should be pleased.

“How long till we get there?” Mandy asks.

“Forty minutes.” I timed it when we came out to register.

“Why’s it so far?” She’s whining again.

She’s right, though. It is a long trip. Like the diplomatic enclave, the school is deliberately built on the outskirts of the city. Unfortunately, it’s on the opposite side, and we take the farm-tour to avoid main roads or anyplace we might encounter the “local population.” We’re like pariahs. Our entire existence is set up to minimize contact.

The first week here, I tried to leave the enclave to do some exploring on my own. In Manila I walked from my house to the mall all the time, but here I didn’t get as far as the front gate before soldiers escorted me home like an escaped felon. I tried to tell them I was allowed to go where I wanted, but they didn’t speak English and – to be honest – I’m not sure I have the same freedoms here. Mom spends half her time telling us what a great adventure we’re going to have living in Pakistan and the other half telling us to stay inside the compound. You’ve got to wonder what kind of adventure she has in mind with a bunch of other Canadian kids in a space the size of a football field.

“Emma?” Mandy leans forward over my seat again.

I stare out the window.

“Emmaaaaaa?” She draws out the last syllable like a zombie gurgle. She knows I hate it when she does that. “Emmaaaaaa.” Now she’s punctuating the gurgle with jabs to my shoulder. “Emma! I’m hungry. Can I eat my snack now?”

Mandy never used to ask my advice on anything, but since Dad left, she doesn’t make a move without consulting me. It might be flattering if I didn’t know exactly how misplaced her trust is. I let Dad slip away without lifting a finger to stop it. She was too little to pick up on the clues, and Vince’s a guy; covert passions never make it onto his radar. But I knew something was wrong.

Dad always used to take a break from work to swim with us after school. I’d float in the pool and recount my day. Even if it had sucked, I felt better the second I hit the water. Dad wasn’t great with the wisdom, but he listened, and Zenny, our maid, would come out with cold drinks. She’d sit with us too, cracking jokes that were so lame they were funny. Dad laughed harder than anyone. And then he didn’t.

At first, I thought maybe he just wanted to be alone with us kids. A look would pass between them as she laid down the drinks, like he was warning her not to stay. They’d both look away too fast, and she’d make some excuse about needing to get back to the kitchen. I thought maybe she’d done something wrong, and he didn’t want us to know.

Until I caught them.

It was late one night. Mom was still at work or at some event – typical for her. I’d said good night to Dad hours before, but I couldn’t sleep. I came down to the kitchen, and there they were, not kissing or even touching, just sipping tea and talking.

They didn’t see me. I slunk back to bed and never spoke of it. I told myself there was nothing to worry about. My dad wasn’t capable of that kind of betrayal.

Like I said, Mandy really needs to find a more competent advisor.

“Don’t you have snack time at school?” I say finally. “You should wait.”

“But I’m hungry now.”

I rummage in my bag, pull out an apple, and offer it to her. I’m not trying to be generous by doling out my own food, but I packed her lunch myself so I know she has only one sandwich and exactly four cookies, and I don’t want her eating the cookies now. They’re homemade chocolate chip and worth more here than a cure for leprosy – which is totally out of control, by the way, and I’m pretty sure there is a cure for that. Anyway, we brought the chocolate with us. You can’t even buy chocolate chips here, and the local chocolate is about as appealing as dirt, so no way is she wasting the cookies.

The fact is, Mandy doesn’t make friends easily, which seriously sucks when you consider she has to make all new friends every two or three years. So not to put too fine a point on it, but the cookies are bribes. I’d rather she didn’t eat any of them herself, but at a minimum she has to give a couple away. I’ve gone over this with her about a billion times. I’m truly sorry that chocolate chip is her favorite and that she has to use them to bribe people to be her friends, but like Vince said, this is our life, Mandy needs to deal with it, just like the rest of us.

She’s eyeing my apple like Snow White after the big sleep. I know she’s debating whether to demand something better, but finally she takes it.

In other circumstances, I might have enjoyed this drive. Unlike our yard, the wheat fields show lingering life, a dried-out but hopeful green. In contrast, lumpish oxen erupt wartlike out of the brush every few feet, but their bovine complacency, as they chow down on their surroundings, is strangely reassuring. The occasional farmer seems non-threatening, pausing to gawk at our white faces hurtling past.

I’m used to being stared at. This is my seventh year in Asia, and I spent three in Africa before that. I won’t say I like it, but I’ve come to view my own skin with a kind of detached reverence. I know it has a power, a life of its own. It gives me a status beyond my years. And it can get me killed.

We didn’t have a school van in Thailand or the Philippines. It was always just the three of us with our driver. We’d fight over whose turn it was to sit in the front. Vince would always insist on giving Mandy a turn, even though she’d spend the entire trip turned around in her seat listening to us. Vince and I would talk about mutual friends, but we’d save the really juicy gossip for when Mandy wasn’t around. Sometimes I’d rant about teachers. Often Vince would bore us to death with details on some random sport. It’s weird how you don’t know you’re happy until you aren’t anymore.

Every First Day, in every new school, Dad would slip a note in my lunch bag. That was
our
tradition. I always pretended like I didn’t know he was doing it, but all morning, sitting in strange classrooms, surrounded by kids ogling me as if I had six legs and an exoskeleton, I’d think about that note. It didn’t matter what it said. It was always some parent drivel anyway, about what a great kid I was.
Seriously, do parents really think we believe that junk?
But somehow it helped. Even if I didn’t read it – and sometimes I wouldn’t until I got home – I knew it was there. I knew he was there.

“How long?” Mandy has the tenacity of a tick. I wonder when she’ll find the note. I don’t know if Dad used to leave notes for her as well. I always thought it was just our thing, but I couldn’t take the chance. I’d like to think I at least had some originality. When it came down to it, though, I spewed the same BS he did all those years. I tried to fake Mom’s handwriting. Like Mom would ever do something like that.

“Almost there,” I say.

I’m as desperate to finish this trip as she is, yet dreading our arrival. Suddenly the miles of empty brush give way to the high fortress walls of the school, as startling as a pyramid in the desert. We stop just outside the gates while two guards use a mirror attached to a long rod to check under our van for bombs. We’re cleared through, and the driver pulls into the parking lot and stops. When the doors open, a sudden blast of heat sears my flesh. Lightheaded, I slide across the seat
and try to hop down but catch my foot at the last minute. Seconds before my face would have hit the pavement, a firm hand encircles my upper arm and swings me up in a surprisingly graceful maneuver. I land against the chest of my rescuer, my free arm instinctively reaching up to grab his shoulder. All we need are ice skates and it would be a perfect ten.

I’m about to share this insight when I look up and any intelligible thought evaporates. I’m gawking into the face of a boy who is surely the product of genetic engineering. He is that beautiful.

“S
orry,” I mumble, looking into the thickly fringed green eyes of the gorgeous godlike creature while my heart does little cartwheels in my chest.

“Don’t apologize. It’s not like every day starts with a pretty girl falling into my arms.” He smiles and it’s like being zapped by a Taser, not that I’ve ever been zapped by a Taser, but I’m pretty sure this is what it would feel like. It’s a good thing he’s still holding me because I may just swoon in his arms. And I’d be only half-faking it.

“Mustapha!” A loud voice shatters our magic moment.

We both jump and take a few steps back as the beautiful boy drops his hands.

The girl striding purposefully toward us could be his twin. Tall and slender, she has the same pale olive skin and glittering green eyes. She puts a hand on his arm.

“Everyone’s been looking for you,” she says to him, completely ignoring me. “You have to see Saalima’s
new cell phone. I’m going to ask Daddy to buy me one.” She flicks back a strand of glossy black hair, adjusts her
dupatta
, which is already draped perfectly around her neck, the ends fluttering down her back, and she eyes him impatiently. She still hasn’t acknowledged my presence.

“Didn’t your father just buy you a new phone last spring?” He chuckles.

“That was months ago,” she pouts. “Come on, you have to see it.” She pulls at his arm.

By this time, I’ve decided I must have become invisible, so I’m startled when he turns back to me.

“I must go,” he says, “but it was a pleasure. Try to stay on your feet now.” He beams one last heart-stopping smile, but it’s the girl who takes my breath away. She shoots me a look of pure hatred before she escorts him away.

By now, the other embassy kids are out of the van, and Vince and Michelle are trying to get Mandy to remember the name of her teacher.

“It’s O’Grady,” I say distractedly, still watching the departure of the god-creature and Angry Girl.

“Oh, Mandy, you’re so lucky,” gushes Michelle. “She’s, like, the nicest teacher in the whole universe. And I know exactly where her room is. Do you want Vince and me to take you, sweetie?”