Trespassing (3 page)

The woman was nodding sagely. Her fingers wrapped around each piece, the grooves of her flesh searching new grooves to slide along.

He offered her names. ‘That one that looks cracked my father found in Japan. It’s a slit shell. Those two dainty pink ones are precious wentletraps. They used to be so rare the Chinese would make counterfeits from rice paste and sell them for a fortune. But now the counterfeits have become rare.’ Daanish had been given both the real and the false. He asked the woman to tell them apart.

She smiled but wouldn’t play along. Daanish’s names and histories mattered little to her. It was enough that the shells felt good and made beautiful music. After rubbing each one, she returned the necklace and abruptly asked, ‘What do you do in Amreeka?’

‘I study.’

‘Are you going to be a doctor or engineer?’

‘Um. I don’t know.’

Her shrewd eyes darted across his face. Then she turned away, back to her silent place. Occasionally, she looked around the plane and boldly examined the others as if chairing a secret inquisition.

It would have served no purpose telling her he wanted to be a journalist. She’d question the profitability of his choice. He’d been questioning this himself. Like Pakistan, the US was not the place to study fair and free reporting. In the former, he risked having his bones broken. In the latter, his spirit.

But journalism intrigued him for the opposite reason his other passion, shell-collecting, did. One kept him in tune with his surroundings while the other demanded dissonance. One was beautiful on the outside while the other insisted he probe into the poisonous interior, like a diver. He’d tried to explain this to a father who’d grown increasingly unhappy with the choice. In one of their last discussions, Daanish retorted that the profession was in his blood.

His soft-spoken, introverted grandfather had been the co-founder of one of the first Muslim newspapers in India. The paper had played a major role in advocating the cause of the
Pakistan Movement, and been praised by the Quaid-i-Azam himself. Daanish was taught early that in British India, when it came to the written word, Muslims lagged far behind the Hindus and other communities. Prior to the 1930s, they didn’t own even one daily newspaper. His grandfather had helped establish the first. As its maxim, it quoted a member of the All-India Muslim League:
To fight political battles without a newspaper is like going to war without weapons.
The paper sharpened its weapons. The British responded by banning it, imprisoning Daanish’s grandfather, and leaving the rest to the Muslims themselves: the co-founder was shot dead by a fellow-Muslim in his office.

After Pakistan’s birth, his grandfather was released and the family moved to the new homeland. But ten years later, for reproaching the country’s first military coup, he was again imprisoned.

Decades later, in his last letter to him, Daanish’s father wrote, ‘Do you want to throw away the opportunity to educate yourself in the West by returning to the poverty of my roots? You will fight Americans, only to find you also have to fight your own people. This is not what your grandfather languished in jail for. He once warned me, “Only the blind replay history.” Think.’

Daanish hadn’t answered him. He hadn’t explained that when it came to a Muslim press, it wasn’t just the subcontinent that was impoverished. He had only to dig into the reporting on the Gulf War to know it was won with weapons that exploded not just on land but on paper. Yet few fought back.

Next to him, Khurram snored. His Nintendo showed a score of 312. The discman was turned off. Daanish considered borrowing it, maybe listening to Ice-T.
Freedom of Speech … Just Watch What You Say.
When he’d first heard those words he knew they must reach Professor Wayne. So he included them in a term paper. Wayne slashed out the citation in thick
red lines and added
no pop references.
Daanish argued that the coverage on the war was at least as pop as a rap song. Later, foolishly, he wrote about it to his father. The doctor advised him to change to medicine or risk a life of regret.

They were entering Germany, journeying through a tunnel of shifting darkness, now black, now thin sepia. Frankfurt in twenty minutes. The ladies and gentlemen of the bean-pod were requested to kindly fasten their seatbelts and extinguish cigarettes.

‘We’re landing,’ Daanish’s companion awoke and beamed.

‘Sleep well?’ asked Daanish.

‘Oh yes, I always do.’

The bean-pod slanted downward. Daanish’s stomach lurched. The lights of Frankfurt danced outside his window. Mini-wheels grazed the runway. Lilliputian engines slowed, and then there was another announcement. Only those ladies and gentlemen holding American, Canadian, or European passports could disembark for the duration of the stopover. Those naughty others might escape, so they must stay on board.

For the first time during the flight, Khurram appeared crestfallen. He was not naughty, wouldn’t they believe him? No, explained Daanish. Khurram’s mother looked away. She needed no explaining.

And then the bean-pod did a funny thing. It swung to face the direction from which it had just come. It nosed upward. It increased altitude. It sped back across the Atlantic at such speed the hair of the naughty passengers blew this way and that. The sky turned from sepia to gold. The sun bobbed alongside again. On arrival, the passengers brushed their hair into place, collected bags, and stumbled out on to a sunny college campus. Daanish consulted his watch: 4.35. He was late for work.

‘You’re late,’ barked Kurt, manager of Fully Food. He had a football-shaped head on a boxer’s body gone soft, like Lee J. Cobb in
Twelve Angry Men.
To him his workers were Fully Fools.

‘Hey Kurt,’ Daanish muttered. ‘I got held up.’ He swiftly brushed by before Kurt could get started. ‘Held up? This is a high-volume job.’

Daanish hung up his jacket, bound the knee-length apron, adjusted his cap, and entered the dish room. The kitchen reeked of sweat, bleach, stale greens, ranch dressing thrown in vinaigrette, cheese dumped in orange juice. Wang from China and Nancy from Puerto Rico said hi when he took his place at the sink but no one else bothered.

He started hosing down a copper pot that reached halfway down his thighs. Particles of ravioli sprayed his eyes and lips. The fare tonight was pasta and meatballs, mince pie, mashed potatoes and gravy, pan pizza, and the usual salad bar. Daanish learned each day’s menu not to prep his palate
but to prep his muscles and olfactory nerves. Starch and gravy were the meanest to clean. The crust of that pan pizza would be a bitch. He chuckled at how readily he’d picked up such phrases, though barely two months had passed since his arrival. Turning off the hose, he started scraping off the glutinous residue of Reddi-Mash from the pot’s interior with a knife. The smell made his stomach weep. He’d skip dinner again.

His mind replayed the day’s events: woke at seven after a bad night (his roommate came home drunk at three in the morning again, and with his usual timely expertise, proceeded to vomit once inside the door); breakfast (tea and an English muffin) alone as usual; Wayne’s class at nine; bio at eleven; lab at two. After work he’d go for a swim and march straight to Becky’s. His family kept calling to ask, ‘So, how is it?’ What did they expect? What did he expect?

Nancy passed behind him with a stack of plates. She nearly slipped on the sodden floor but caught herself in time.
‘Pendejo,’
she hissed. Then to Daanish, ‘Better wear those rubber gloves, pretty boy, or your woman won’t have you.’

He gave her a mischievous grin. ‘She will.’ Still, he briefly examined his bare hands. Steam and bleach were turning them to flakes of goose meat. Nancy slapped the gloves beside him. He slipped them on.

When the student diners finished their meal they piled the trays on a conveyor belt that rolled inside to Wang and Youssef. Wang, square-framed and sticky, emptied the contents of each plate into a massive trash can, whipping thick colors inside it. Youssef, a sleek Senegalese, scoured the silverware and glasses. Nancy piled the plates and carried them to Amrita from Nepal, who soaped and rinsed them. Ron, an African-American, loaded dollies. Vlade, Romanian, did too.

Daanish hadn’t told Anu that his scholarship entailed spending twenty-five hours a week under Kurt. Let her think
he was asked to do nothing but bend over books, to become a man of letters. Why confess he bent over sinks, scouring away letters – of alphabet soup? In Karachi, he’d only entered the kitchen to be fed. Becky teased that mommy spoiled him. She could talk. She sat outside in the dining hall, worrying about her waistline while daddy paid the bills.

Once, over the phone, Daanish had told his father about the job. The doctor had little to say. He’d given him advice once and only once on the drive to the Karachi airport, when seeing Daanish off. His warm smoker’s voice asked his son to remember it. Then he added, ‘Hold your head up high. Life is yours to build. One day you’ll look back and laugh at the spaghetti in your hair.’

Daanish battled with the pizza tin. His back was to the others but he heard Ron swear. Turning, he saw Youssef struggle with several glasses drenched in blue cheese dressing dribbled generously with strawberry sauce and strewn with granola. In one of the glasses a napkin shaped like a wafer carried a message from the other side of the belt:
Eat me.

‘Sick mother-fuckers,’ said Ron, sealing the trash and slinging it over his shoulder.

Kurt hovered over Amrita, his favorite prey. She was slow with the washing, especially when attempting not to be, but never missed a crumb. Kurt rested knobby knuckles on his hips and thundered: ‘How did
I
get this far? By
working.
You think everybody gets the chance to work, Anna? You know how many people bang on our doors begging for this? This is a high-volume job. You’re lucky to have it.’

She bit her lip and dropped a plate.

‘Would you believe it!’ He threw his hands up. Amrita gathered the broken pieces but instead of disposing of them in the bin reserved for shattered ware, she quickly thrust them in the recycle bin. ‘Would you believe it!’ he repeated. ‘Is it any wonder they call it the developing world?’ He followed her from the wrong bin to the right one, insisting the first
hadn’t been cleaned out properly. Then he trailed her back to the dishes. ‘A high-volume job, Anita,’ he continued. ‘How do you think we built this country?’

Ron stopped wheeling a dolly of Mayo-Whip and glowered. Nancy gave Daanish a look that said: Kill Kurt and I’ll love you for ever. Everyone else merely chugged along. Like machines, thought Daanish, wanting badly to touch Nancy.

Kurt continued, ‘We didn’t do it by standing around, that’s for sure. You can keep hoping the work will go away the way they do back where you come from, but it’ll only
pile up.’

When he finally left the dish room, Nancy said to Amrita: ‘Don’t worry girl, he couldn’t find his dick with two hands and a map.’

Daanish wanted to console her too but didn’t know how. Instead, when Vlade wheeled silently by, he was suddenly reminded of bullock carts on the streets of Karachi. The soulful Masood Rana resounded in his ear:
Tanga walla khair mang da.
The cart-driver asks for contentment.

At 9.45 he removed his Fully Food gear, picked up his jacket and stepped out into the crisp mid-October air. He ought to go home, shower, and work on a paper. Instead, he walked up the hill to Becky Floe’s house.

They’d met just over a month ago at the gym. He was lurching out of the swimming pool and on to the sopping tiles when he saw her lime-colored swimsuit and tadpole-like toes inches from his chest. The nails were painted pink to match her freckled flesh. She was broad, heavy-bosomed, about five foot six, and proclaimed: ‘You’re so graceful, Day-nish.’ His chlorine-blazed eyes blinked. He’d never seen her before, but she even knew his name. He’d forgive her inability to say it. For the first time in his life, he’d been sought.

She held his hand as he walked her home. The weather had become suddenly warm – Indian Summer she called it. Her potato-colored hair dripped onto an aquamarine T-shirt
that read
Choice.
He wondered if that was the name of a band.

She wanted to know all about where he was from. Was it just like India? He wasn’t sure why she needed this reference because she’d never been there either. She’d left her country just once, last year, for a month in Mexico. When he described his food she said it sounded, ‘Just like in Mexico.’ So did the climate, the traffic and beggars. The people, the passion, the politics. The music, corruption and drugs. That month, she explained, had been priceless. It made her understand all that was authentic.

‘So, did you grow up in, like, a palace or something?’

‘Oh no,’ he laughed, ‘my father’s a doctor.’

She eyed him quizzically, as if unable to believe the Third World had doctors. The look quickly turned to disbelief when their conversation progressed to his job at Fully Food. ‘You’re a doctor’s son but you need financial aid?’ In the sunlight, her unshaven legs changed from blonde to strawberry.

‘Well, yes.’ Realizing she wouldn’t be convinced till he quoted figures, he clarified, ‘In Pakistan, on average a physician earns about ten dollars an hour. While this is extremely high compared to the national average, it’s not enough to send a child to America on, is it?’ In the following years he would come to repeat these figures numerous times. He’d say, with far more exasperation than the first time, ‘Not everyone who’s brown or black is either dirt poor or filthy rich. There are in-betweens.’

Becky continued to look uncertain. Then she kissed him lightly on the cheek and sent him back down the hill.

He’d never expected to be pursued by an American woman. Walking to his room he wondered if he had been, might have been, would be again, or should he forget it?

Two days later, she invited him into her room. It was littered with books like
The Woman Warrior, Sexuality and American Literature,
and
Intercourse.