Trespassing (29 page)

The sea was swollen and raw, rising above her waist as they headed for the sandy enclosure between the boulders. Jellyfish lined their path. They dodged them while scurrying, occasionally spotting other life blown to land: a baby sting ray, its tail wagging in the surf, and any number of shells.

The cove was as sublime as it was worrisome, she thought, leaning into Daanish as he leaned into the rock. The sky was a solid slab of gray. It growled, very softly, as though her head rested on its hungry belly. ‘You’d think others would have discovered this place by now.’

‘I keep fearing that,’ he answered, wrapping his arms around her from behind. ‘People attract people. The minute a crowd passes through, I’ll lose my childhood paradise.’

She kissed him lightly on the neck. ‘Green apples,’ she whispered. ‘That’s what you’re made of.’ Her arms rested on his. His the color of ochre, hers a shade lighter. Copper. His carpeted with hair. She smiled, recalling how this had elicited minus-points the first time she’d examined him. Brushing his lower lip over her lanuginous upper one, he said she wasn’t exactly hairless herself.

He wore shorts, and this made reclining against him all the more intimate. She ran her hands over his long, lissome legs: shaggy, even along his inner thighs, and wonderful to tug. She tasted his collarbone, where the necklace hung. The shells were salty and damp. Her nose rested against a small one he
called a Venus Clam. It was milky white with thorny black v-shapes sprawled across its front. The back was smooth, as bone ought to be.

‘Any idea why it’s called that? Venus Clam? After all, you have others more beautiful.’ With anyone else, she wouldn’t have asked. But Daanish was as intrigued by the origins of things as she was. It was what had united them. They’d begun with a beginning, as she liked to think of it.

‘No idea. Guess away.’

‘Well, she’s said to be born in a scallop. So I’m wondering if the scallop’s cousin, the clam, got the name by mistake?’

‘That’s weak.’ He licked the bend of her ear.

‘You know Venus, or Aphrodite, wore a girdle that smelled so bloody good even land-locked gods found a way to get to her. That much I know. It’s why we call intoxicating scents aphrodisiacs.’

‘Um,’ he bit the other ear, hard, ‘in the case of this particular goddess, the magic appears to be right here, in this peculiar organ on the left side of her head.’ He pulled her closer to his chest, breathing loudly.

She was getting that feeling on the soft flesh of her cheeks. It was sweeping down to the cups of her breasts. She wanted, more than anything, for him to touch her there. But she pulled free. ‘Come on, Daanish. Humor me. Tell me more about your shells.’

He looked at her. Then he tilted his head toward the ocean, as if to say, Look at where we are, and how alone we are, and how rare this is. We can talk any time, but we can’t always do this.

She hung her head, ashamed.

But then he rubbed his thumb against her cheek and asked, ‘Do I make you nervous?’

And all she could do was nod.

So he pulled her back against him and talked. He spoke of the link between mollusks and mythology. Venus was not the
only god or goddess to have shells named after her. There was the New England Neptune. Triton’s Trumpet …

She loved his voice. The medley of accents, the American slang interspersed with proper English.
Mere
and
come about
one minute,
whoa
and
bucks
the next.

‘Hindus also value a particular shell. It’s said the Vedas were stolen by a demon that hid them in a left-handed chank. Vishnu dove deep into the sea and salvaged them. These days, a left-handed one can fetch a hefty price. Couple thousand bucks I’m told. By the way, I used to have a right-handed chank. No idea where it went.’ He went on.

Remembering Sumbul’s warning, she loved him all the more fiercely and cut in, ‘Take your shirt off.’

Again, that quizzical look. But he pulled the T-shirt over his head. ‘Anything else?’

‘No.’ She rested against his bare chest now. ‘Continue.’ She pierced the flesh under his necklace with her teeth and rubbed his taut, spherical shoulders, thinking, These are the first I ever kissed. And with each caress, she repeated it: the first earlobe, the first cleft of a chest, the first slope of a stomach.

He started to remove her kameez, but she bit him, hard, on the scant bulge of a love handle, and pushed his hands away. ‘Don’t touch me till I allow it.’ She licked around his silken nipple, flat and swirling, her tongue a needle reading a minute musical record. The tiny crater in the album’s center rose, and the tune was the shudder running down his gut. She was a microscopic particle caught in the spin and it didn’t matter if she eventually blew away. She moved to his thighs, where his smell was strongest, and touched him through his shorts. It thrilled her that he’d stiffened even before their first kiss.

He was on precious shells now, uttering names like the Glory of the Seas, like Junonia, between gulps and pants. ‘The Glory was so rare …’

She tapped the cold metal button of his shorts, and released it.

They met every other day, always following the same pattern – a tense, silent drive followed by giddy love at the cove. Even when lying under him, she found a way to peer out at the needlelike rocks rising on the opposite end of the beach, waiting for a shadow, a gun, a pirate flag flapping on the horizon. The more she loved, the more paranoid she became. She held Daanish the way she’d held herself when her brothers had forced her to shower alone in the dark.

At the farm, Sumbul hammered her with questions. Dia found she didn’t even enjoy the silkworms any more. She neglected her graphs. She couldn’t read. Inam Gul was in the way. So was her family. Alone at night, she felt his palm on her stomach sliding slowly down. He marveled at her softness and said the scent of her dampness on his fingers would linger. It was what helped him survive the hours they weren’t together. She asked him to describe it. He brought his hand up first to his nose, and then hers. ‘I want to say like mushrooms simmering, only that doesn’t sound as good as it is. But I love mushrooms, you know.’

She slept in a cloud of heat and green apples. And in her dreams, admitted: I don’t know him.

The thought plagued her once in daylight, while they lay together in the sand. He was nuzzling her armpit, she watching his slick penis sway, discreetly testing the air, searching. She gently pulled away.

Rubbing the back of his neck, she said, ‘Daanish, you never speak of your life in the US.’

He looked up and frowned. Then: ‘I appreciate that you don’t ask me to.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s just too much to think of. Specially,’ he sniffed her hair, ‘when I’m so peaceful with you.’

‘Can we walk?’ She sat up and dressed.

He sighed, but pulled his shorts on.

Neither had the courage to amble naked down to the surf. Though they never said it, the cove’s insulation made them even more nervous when they left its only mooring – the boulders. They both looked anxiously around as though still naked.

The gray clouds drooped even lower than in past weeks. There was lightning to the west and the thunder clapped nearer than ever. They hopped over bluebottles, examining the creatures washed ashore. There was a foot-long deep-sea fish without eyes, and even, to Dia’s dismay, a porpoise. She paused, moved by the beauty of its sleek snout, the rings of its closed eyes, and the smile, kind and forgiving, even in death. ‘Water kills,’ she murmured.

‘No. It brims with life.’ He kissed her forehead.

She told him then about failing her exam.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Nothing else.

She watched him pluck cowries and walk into the waves to rinse them. He’d gone to another place. He could do that – simply squeeze into a knot and shelve the wad away. It was why, after nearly a month, she had to admit –
Oh Sumbul, why are you haunting me!
– she didn’t know him. And in another month, he’d go completely to that other place.

‘Daanish, I want you to share more of your other life with me.’

His face closed.

‘You know everything about the only one I have.’

‘I know only what you choose to tell, and the rest is all right.’

He walked one step ahead of her. His spine was a dark, sinewy ladder. She lifted a finger to touch each bow of muscle, but changed her mind. He raced on, two paces ahead now.
Finally, she said, ‘This isn’t turning into a very good day.’

When he turned back his eyes were stern, chiding almost.

‘You look so angry!’ she cried.

‘Fine. What do you want to know? How can I satisfy some warped, magical notion you have of this other life of mine? How about the fact that it’s where you learn to be despised, absolutely? Sound like fun?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Daanish. What have I said?’

‘Well then think before you speak.’ He was shouting. ‘Dammit, don’t be all pathetic like my mother.’

Turning away, she walked quickly back up to the boulders. Tears streaked her cheeks and she started to run. She was still running while collecting her sandals and purse, as if stopping would be the end of her. When he caught up she started running toward the rocks on the far side, over which lay the road. He pulled her arm and she screamed, ‘Drive me back. Now.’

‘Stop a minute.’

‘Now.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he tightened his grip. ‘Sorry.’

‘I want to go back home.’

‘Just let me explain something. Please.’

They were standing at the mouth of the cave. The tide dashed up her legs. She’d worn her kameez backwards but wasn’t going to take it off in front of him again.

He released her. ‘Dia. Let’s go back to the other end. Please. Five minutes. Then if you still want me to, I’ll drive you back.’

She didn’t like standing here, with the sea crashing into the cave and the walls bellowing like a furious monster awakening.
Thud! Ewow!
The mild terror she always felt when the ocean wrapped around her was all the more acute now, with the fiendish cave on one side, and a fiendish lover on the other. She knew which one to walk away from.

He squatted in the sand between the boulders and patted the space beside him. She sat on her haunches. ‘Dia, how can I put this? Being with you helps ground me. Yes, it’s as simple as that. May I?’ He sneaked closer, winding an arm around her shoulders. She sat still.

He said that ever since leaving his country, three years ago, a tiny rent had formed in the center of him. ‘Right here,’ he put her finger in his navel. ‘Like a zip unfastening. I wasn’t even aware of it till I came back. And now I realize the zipper has fallen so low, I’m sort of, well, divided. I think that’s what happened to my father. These days, I look in the mirror and see him.’

It was the first time he’d mentioned him, outside the context of the doctor’s quarrels with his wife. Dia could never bring herself to speak of her own father. She leaned into his shoulder.

‘You’re lucky you’ve never left home,’ he continued. ‘And I guess I don’t want you to. When I speak of America, I take you there. But I want you to stay here. Put crudely,’ he kissed her forehead again, ‘you zip me up.’

She considered this, but didn’t like it. Was this another way of saying she was only good to him if kept ignorant?

‘You speak of the cheating at your exam,’ he pressed on. ‘There’s cheating there too, you know. Everyone thinks
there
is different. It isn’t. The deceit is more covert. The shell is more beautiful. But the interior is just the same.’

When she still said nothing, he added, ‘Do you think we can forget my outburst?’

He spoke more, as on their first time alone. This made her love him again: he’d learned his voice soothed her, just as he’d learned how to touch her. He described a town with gray-stone buildings in fields of rolling green. His campus had no gates; the windows bore no grills. She let her head slide into the crook of his arm, imagining turrets and buttresses, concocting sharper smells in a climate with four seasons and
little dust. He wasn’t making his other life sound like this one at all.

She thought of the rooms in her college: airless and dingy, with wooden benches women had to fight over to make room for themselves. The stench always made her head reel, but all that was nothing compared to the books and the instructors, who tested students on how well they regurgitated passages, word for word. No discussions. No questions. When the teacher got tired she asked one of her ‘pets’ to read, and more than once, Dia had seen a teacher lay her head down and sleep.

No, she didn’t believe Daanish. He, who had the opportunity to see more of the world than most, was cruel to deny her even the option of hoping it held more than a room in an attic, with women squeezed into each other, a teacher snoring on her desk, and no questions asked.

His heart pounded under her cheek. She asked, ‘Could we do this there, Daanish?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Could we hold each other, just because we wanted to, and not have to hide it? Because if so, how can you say it’s just the same?’

He traced her jaw with his thumb and tightened his hold.

She reached up to stroke the point where his side parting met the back of his head, but the first raindrop of the season touched him first. It was loud and fat, and Daanish shook his hair and laughed. The rain quickened, drumming in a steady stream, while the sand whipped around and layered them. When she kissed the back of his neck, she tasted rain and grit and bit sinew and watched the prints her teeth left behind in the moist sand.

Normally, the monsoons were Dia’s favorite time of year.

Before daytime storms turned to week-long affairs, before gutters spilled, electricity was cut off, telephone lines burned, cars stalled, and grief afflicted thousands of flood victims, there were crepuscular days lulled by pattering on rooftops, rich smells, bright hues, and a steady, puissant breeze. Best was when the rainfall softened to cool drizzle, driving the tiny, furtive creatures she loved out into the open. The torpid snail emerged, leaning far out of its shell, creeping up walls and staircases like an errant knight. Earthworms slithered, dragging fallen leaves back down to their burrows. Ants swarmed, mating in the moist air. The leggy cranefly sipped moisture from grass.