The Scatter Here Is Too Great (5 page)

That's what you want now.

But here you are faced with two old, very old women who cared for you when you were too young to know what caring meant or how it is done—or if it is even necessary. At that point in your life, you were simply selfish: you wanted love but were incapable of giving any back.

You are still being selfish.

Would you be able to bear it in case the worse happens to them?

You feel trapped.

Your head's still hurting. You lie low.

Just twenty minutes ago you were watching your mother place an orange slice into Noor Begum's toothless mouth. She chewed the orange slice in her mouth until it was a thick lump of tasteless threads. She seemed to have lost the capacity to gulp down her food. You fell into thinking about her; how you found her at the airport, after years, and like this; she would have died in a garbage dump if you had been late. How did this happen? Her once luminous skin was now a wreckage of wrinkles; the wild-ivy of creases shrouded every inch of her face and hands.

As Noor Begum churned on the orange slice, your mother gave you a long, broken look. Clearly, she was shaken to see her this way too. Then she inserted her two fingers in Noor Begum's mouth, and surgically removed the lump swathed in gluey saliva. She asked you to get a glass of water from the kitchen. But in your mind you were trying to decipher the look your mother gave you. You knew what it meant: “That's what happens when kids abandon their parents—” You felt she was accusing you for abandoning her and, perhaps, your father.

You felt angry.

You wanted to remind her who was in error. You wanted to tell her that nothing you had done to her could ever match up to what she did by forgiving your father after how he punished both of you for years. That there was no graver offense than what happened last week when you found your father in this apartment—and you had turned around and slammed the door shut on his face and shot down the stairs. That just because you had not spoken to your mother since then did not mean that you were not enraged. Yes, you wanted to tell her how angry you'd felt at seeing your father in this apartment. Not only that. You wanted to remind her of all her mistakes: that accepting and supporting your father in his work was a mistake; and sticking with him was even worse. That while he went out and got drunk and recited poetry to a bunch of runaway
charsis
, she never stopped him—in fact, said, “He cares for the world more than you or I or everybody who criticizes him”—that was a mistake. And now, after years of disappearance from your lives, now that his poetry and his fucking communism and his revolution were dead and he was a raving old lunatic, to accept him back into her house now, to comfort him—
precisely
when it was right to leave him to himself for the way he had punished both of you for years, YEARS—was her worst mistake of all.

You did not say this.

You just gave her an angry glance in return. It was the kind of glance that children give their parents when they know exactly the kind of total power they have over them and when the temptation to shatter them with one word, one phrase, is overwhelming, but something—just the vague knowledge perhaps that the mess they create would be too great to gather—holds them back.

(Did your son ever give you this look? He didn't. He battered you with indifference instead.)

You got up to get water and that's when you caught sight of the skin of your mother's head through her hair. Her hair was now very thin; and oiled, they stuck on her head. All of a sudden you realized how old she was. You felt sorry for what you were thinking and for your hard, angry glance. Maybe she did not mean to accuse you with her look. Maybe she simply pitied Noor Begum and cared to share how she felt with you.

You brought her the glass of water and took your place against the window—a safe distance away from the workings of the two women. Your mother was sponging the orange juice coursing down the sides of her mouth. Your initial feelings of pity and disgust for Noor Begum had now subsided and you found yourself in some other, more liminal space between your childhood and the present. Now you felt sorrow for her. Deep sorrow. It reminded you of things.

Noor Begum lived in a house of dirty-pink walls toward the end of your lane. It was your neighborhood before your father decided he had to be closer to the railway workers and you all moved to this apartment near Cantt Station, where now your mother lived alone.

You were eight then. In those hot, sticky afternoons, you walked through the front door of Noor Begum's house into the room where you and seven other kids assembled in a loose semicircle to read the Qur'an. You all sat on a small worn-out green carpet at the center of the room. It's fuzzy to think of it now: those afternoons next to the large window through which the sunlight sent in shadows with perfect edges now seemed suffused with a dull sense of mystery. You recited Arabic for an hour, and after reading for a while, descended into a lull, a dizzy drone. Your bottoms hurt from sitting on the ground.

You daydream about those slow afternoons in your chilly air-conditioned office in a shopping mall overlooking the sea. You even had a chapter about Noor Begum in the book you are writing about yourself, about your successful career, all about your humble beginnings and how you faced those challenges and rose to where you were now. Yes, you were a success. You owned the largest video game playland in the city. You had started small, in a rented shop under an apartment building. Now you owned an entire floor in the most upscale shopping mall in the city. You had a passion for games too. Even the title of your book,
Run
, was inspired from the video game Pac-Man. The game embodied your ideals of living a successful life: get the dots, avoid the ghosts, move up one level at a time. No shortcuts, no exits, and absolutely no pauses whatsoever. You believed in a relentless cutting down of the unnecessary—thoughts, imagination, ideas—which had been the reason of your success.

To be honest, you've been writing your book for an audience of one. You wanted your son to read the book because you knew he was a reader, or at least he was until two years ago. It'd been about two years since you last had a real conversation with your boy. He had refused to see you after your wife left you over your affair with the woman in the office. (To this day you do not know how your wife discovered. She had such precise details there was no point in arguing. You suspect that that bitch sleeping with you told your wife herself.) You had tried to explain to her that it did not
mean
anything to you. It was . . . just . . .
something . . .
without emotion or thought. It was
nothing
really. Nothing. But it was all over very quickly. She stepped out of your large luxurious house in Defense with her son and moved to a small apartment with an exorbitant rent on Tariq Road you were not allowed to visit. Your son, seventeen then, refused to see you afterward. She worked a job plus she had her savings of years with you—she had been smart that way—she kept her money separate from you. Your son was nineteen now. He drove his mother's battered little FX. You saw him last week outside the new McDonald's. He was visibly upset when you approached him. But your heart raced. He did not move when you put your arms around him. He had grown up radically in a few months. Broader shoulders, sharper eyes, more confident and aloof the way he stood. You felt his warmth, smelled the odor of his sweat. You wanted him to sit with you but he said he had to go. You were a little pushy but then you noticed the girl who was with him. You realized this probably wasn't the best time. So you said good-bye. You asked him to call you. Call you tonight. You will be waiting. Will you call? Yes. Good.

Needless to say, he didn't call. You waited, trying your best to explain to yourself his point of view; that he was hurt; that anybody who had gone through the same would do the same.

That was your life now that you did not understand. And you started to write out of a desperation because you felt this might help you make sense of your life. Also, because evenings had become unbearable. And you wanted your son to know. You wanted him to
know
you. Learn from your experience—there was so much you wanted to share. Ask you questions. Say, Wow, Baba. You are the best.

So you wrote about your life and Noor Begum and things and their reasons.

You suffered a bout of nostalgia while writing the chapter on Noor Begum. You wanted to write about the awkward squats as you sat loudly reciting the Qur'an, say how your foot felt grinded from bearing all your weight while sitting on the floor, the rapid
tak-tak
of the ceiling fan as it spun the air with its dusty blades, the dizziness . . . But you wrote: “Noor Begum's house provided the comfortable environment for Qur'an lessons and my early lessons in disciplining myself into working through boredom.” Yes, instead of writing what you
felt
, you wrote about
lessons
about disciplining yourself—but really, you knew that lessons are derived only afterward. Discipline was something you admired only in theory. Your life and success were not a result of discipline, rather a series of smart choices and knowing what to do when opportunities present themselves. You were a big believer that every person, no matter how poor or unfortunate, gets at least
one
shot at a breakthrough in life. But you wrote about discipline regardless because, well, you did not want your son to get the wrong idea. You didn't want him to misinterpret your words and see you as an
opportunist,
which he probably did already.

That was the strange problem with writing, you had discovered. Meaning never matched the words, and words always evaded the thought. Before you had started writing, you could picture the clean arcs of your life. You had clear ideas. But what finally made it onto paper was circular and loopy and joined at the wrong ends with everything else. It messed up the whole picture. So you abstained from saying too much. You described Noor Begum as the “perfect teacher who never fell ill” and moved on. You didn't say anything about her small, healthy, luminous face, her extraordinary almond eyes filled with dark pupils, her glowing skin, wheaty complexion, her thin lips, her calmness as she sat with a vegetable bowl on her lap and heard you all read aloud.

You wanted the whole thing matter-of-fact; you despised the poetic. Poetry, all of it, reeked of the kind of idealism your father embodied. You were everything because of your father: he was your model of what not to be. You'd learned your contempt of idealism, of poetry, of philosophizing from him. You believed in the two-dimensional simplicity of Pac-Man. The clarity of where to go and what to avoid available at all times.

You've expressed your views on poetry and poets in your book in no uncertain terms. “Poets,” you've written, “are hungry and curious creatures—but only about what's inside them. And the only way they usually know to get there is by tearing themselves up at the seams. They are always scattered inside. They only know how to tear themselves up.” These were the most poetic lines in your book, and needless to say, they were inflicted at your father.