An Infidel in Paradise (10 page)

“Some people take it off the heat and let it sit,” says Mr. Akbar, breaking the silence. “But, of course, it’s up to you.”

I crouch down again and take the kettle off the brazier, placing it on a rough-hewn patio stone. I look up at Mr. Akbar and catch him smiling at me before returning his gaze to his plants. I take my seat again and continue to watch my bug. He hasn’t moved much since I left him. I wonder if he’s a good bug or a bad bug, and I imagine him spending his entire existence in Mr. Akbar’s greenhouse, thinking it’s the whole universe. Perhaps he has extended family on a neighboring plant and he visits them on special occasions.

“The milk is on the shelf there.” I jump a little when Mr. Akbar speaks. “It’s already open.”

I take the can of condensed milk and look at him for directions.

“You could pour it in the kettle and put it back on to boil, if you like,” he says. “That’s one way of doing it.”

I watch as the creamy milk swirls into the inky blackness of the tea. I don’t ask how much to add, but pour until it looks right to me. I put the kettle back on the brazier and resume sitting. I don’t see my bug at first and look around for several minutes before I catch sight of him on the stalk, making his way down to the earth.

“How much sugar to add is really a matter of opinion,” says Mr. Akbar. “And, of course, a matter of the waistline for some, but you and I don’t have those worries.”

I crouch down to the kettle again, taking it off the heat. Mr. Akbar puts teacups and a jar of sugar on the table, hunting for a spoon while I pour the tea. I watch as he adds two heaping teaspoons of sugar to his cup and takes a sip, swirling it around in his mouth.

“I think this is the best tea I have ever had,” he says.

I add a teaspoon of sugar to my own cup and take a tentative sip. I smile in agreement.

W
e all watch Guul as he brings in another plate of food. I offered to help, twice, but he looked at me as if I was suggesting he’s not moving fast enough. In fact, he’s moving too fast. Soon the table will be full and he’ll retire to the kitchen, taking with him the only thing we can pretend to focus on to avoid the total weirdness of our mother at the dinner table on a weeknight. No one knows where to look. It’s such a singular event, even Mandy is stunned into silence. And, of course, we all know why she’s here.

It’s what I said to her about never being around. But her presence is not an acknowledgment of the problem; it’s a continuation of the argument. Her sullenness hangs over us like a storm cloud. I said she’s never around, so she’s proving me wrong and leaving no one in doubt how inconvenient it is. She’s a busy woman, with far too many responsibilities to have time for family dinner.

The silence echoes off the walls as Mom smoothes the napkin in her lap and stares out the window at our tiny backyard. If we opened the French doors, we could probably hear the family next door sitting down to their own dinner. The houses are that close, an identical line of seven rectangular blocks, each separated by ten feet of grass and an eight-foot wall.

I wonder if the uniformity is meant to be reassuring. Even the furniture, although it belongs to the mission and will stay with this house when we move on, is identical to the furniture in Canadian embassies the world over. When Vince explained this to me many years ago, I didn’t believe him. I carved my name on the underside of my desk in Kenya, convinced my very own desk would show up when we moved to Thailand. I was triumphant when I walked into my new bedroom and there was my desk, but when I looked underneath, the surface was clean, unmarked by my trespass, as if my previous life had no more substance than a play performed in multiple settings with interchangeable actors. With such order and predictability, it seems impossible that individual lives can unravel so chaotically.

“How was school?” Mom asks finally, still gazing at the ten feet of dead space. It’s not clear whom she’s speaking to. There’s a long pause as my siblings and I exchange looks.

“Emma?” she says, turning to me.

I stare back at her.
What do I say?
A beautiful boy showed me where a man died trying to protect racist
misfit kids like me and warned me to watch my step. Perhaps I could tell her I feel like I’m disappearing. I feel like the threads of my life have become so tangled and broken that I can no longer see the pattern of me.

“Fine,” I say.

There’s another long silence. Dad would never have let me get away with that. He would know that
fine
is a word designed entirely to communicate its opposite. He would probe deeper, dig out the pellets of truth, like a surgeon removing shrapnel so the wounds could heal.

“Vincent?” My mom moves on.

“Fine,” says Vince. I look at him sharply.
What’s wrong in his world? A fight with Hip-Hop Barbie?

Mom sighs like maybe she does get it and lifts up her fork to push food around on her plate.

“Kirsty McDonough is having a party, but I’m not invited,” says Mandy glumly.

We all turn to her, but no one speaks. I’m not sure if Mom’s trying to work out a solution to Mandy’s crisis or calculating how much longer she has to sit with us.

“Why didn’t she invite you?” asks Mom, trying to sound sympathetic.

“She’s mean,” says Mandy predictably. “She invited everyone on the compound but me.”

“Where is she from?” asks Mom, perking up a bit.

“I don’t know.”

Mom looks at her. She’s disappointed in Mandy’s failure to collect relevant details. She’s not used to people presenting her with problems that haven’t been fully
researched. How can she do her job with only partial facts? She waits. Perhaps Mandy will suddenly remember some mitigating detail that will show she’s not wasting Mom’s time.

“I don’t know,” repeats Mandy, her bottom lip pushing out.

“Well, you need to find out,” says Mom firmly. “I’ll contact her parents and sort this out, but you need to follow up. Get me a phone number.”

“Oh my God,” I say.

“Do you have something to say, Emma?” asks Mom. Obviously I have something to say. I just said it.

“Well?” she prompts.

“You can’t contact the kid’s parents,” I say, struggling to keep my voice even. “Do you want to make Mandy even more unpopular than she is now?”

“Emma, your sister is not unpopular!” Mom snaps, giving Mandy a reassuring look. “If you can’t say something positive, don’t say anything at all.”

This time, the silence goes on forever. I sculpt mashed potato towers and smash them down with my fork. Mandy shovels in food with surprising determination for a kid whose entire social life is about to be torpedoed. She must have some kind of basic survival instinct. Even Vince, who finished his whole meal the night Dad left us, has been buttering the same bread roll for longer than it took to knead the dough and bake it. Mom is back to staring out the window. Guul pokes his head around the door, checking to see
if we’ve all left the table or died en masse from virulent food poisoning.

“How’s your job going?” asks Vince suddenly, giving us a collective jump.

“I have to go to Karachi tomorrow,” says Mom with evident relief at the change in subject. “There’s a consular issue.”

“Death or drugs?” asks Vince.

“Drugs. A twenty-year-old kid caught with opium from Afghanistan.”

“In prison?” he asks.

“Yes, they haven’t let anyone see him yet, but I met with the minister today and he assures me they’ll let me in.”

“Will you rescue him, Mommy?” asks Mandy trustingly, reminding me of a time when I was actually proud of Mom’s work.

“I don’t have the power to do that,” says Mom, sounding genuinely regretful. “I’ll check on him, make sure he’s being treated fairly. I’ll take him a care package, food and blankets, and see whom he wants me to contact. I’m sure his family will want news of him. But if he did what he’s accused of, there’s not much more I can do.”

“I wish you could save him,” Mandy sighs.

“I do too,” says Mom, her eyes lit with more passion than she’s shown all evening. “He’s so young, not much older than you, Vince. Maybe we could look through our books tonight and find some for me to take down to him. I’m sure he’d appreciate that.”

“Wait just a minute,” I say. “Am I the only one who finds it a little hard to get worked up over a drug dealer?”

“Conditions in the prisons here are horrific,” replies Mom. “Any caring person would find it heartbreaking to see a young man throw his life away like this.”

“But he’s the one who threw it away. He made a choice. No one forced him to make a quick buck selling heroin to little kids.” The anger is back, ferocious and unbridled. The second the words leave my mouth, I can think of a thousand arguments against what I’m saying. Hell, at my school in Manila, I spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to demand more humane prison conditions after Mom came back with horror stories from one of her visits. But at this moment, everything Mom says makes me want to scream.

“He has no one, Emma. He’s alone in a strange country, where he doesn’t speak the language or understand the culture. He’s surrounded by people who are hostile to him. You have no idea what that’s like.” My mom looks annoyed and disappointed at the same time.

“I have no idea what that’s like?” I shriek. “Is that what you think? That I have no idea what it’s like to be all alone in a hostile place with no one who knows me? No one who cares about me? You think I don’t know what that’s like?”

“Lower your voice, Emma!”

“I feel that way every day, Mom.” My voice is
cracking. I don’t want to hurt her, but my words tumble out with their own momentum. “Every single day I feel alone.”

Vince and Mandy shuffle uncomfortably and stare at their plates.

“How can you say that? I love you and I’m right here, Emma. I’m not the one who left. Sometimes, I really don’t understand what you want from me.” Her voice catches, and suddenly I’m taken back to a year or so ago. She’s in her bedroom with Dad, and they’re having one of their
private discussions
. We kids have been directed outside, but Vince and I have a pact. One of us always stays behind to listen. We need to know how bad it is. We think if we monitor it, we can somehow prevent the crisis from getting out of control, like watching the brinkmanship of two nuclear powers.

This was a bad one. Dad said he couldn’t live with her anymore. He needed a wife, a companion, not just a breadwinner. Mom said she’d given him everything, a home, freedom to write without the pressure of having to earn, and children. She added
children
like we were just three more items in the ledger of her sacrifices. He said it wasn’t enough, and she said, “I don’t know what you want from me.” Just like that. Just like she says it to me, in that sad confused voice.

I glance at my mom’s face. The wounded look, like I’ve struck her, and in that moment, I know she’s telling the truth. She really doesn’t know.

“I’m going for a run,” I say, getting up from the table and leaving the room before anyone can stop me. But no one tries. They’re as relieved to see me go as I am to leave, and I wonder how long my family has been happier without me.
Do they see my anger always simmering beneath the surface and worry about when it will next burst out? Do they fear me as much as I fear myself?

I don’t bother with the pretense of changing into my sweats. I’ve never been a runner. Even my mom knows that. But I am practically running as I bolt out of the house in jeans and a T-shirt, stopping only briefly at the guardhouse while the gates are opened.

Exiting the compound, I take two sharp lefts, skirting the perimeter between the outer wall and the tennis court. The court, like the pool and weight room on Compound C, is our government’s effort to make up for sending us to a hostile, impoverished country.
Nice try
.

I lean against the fence and stare in at the empty court. It occurs to me I don’t have a plan beyond getting out of the house. I open the gate and let myself into the empty cage. Guilt and remorse, my familiar friends, are already seeping into my body like heat off the concrete. If I could, I would take back everything I said – yet if it happened all over, I know I would say the very same things.

A movement catches my eye beyond the far end of the court. The French compound is just behind us, but
there’s a stretch of no-man’s-land between the two compounds that is used mainly as a garbage dump. Waste disposal, like so much here, is makeshift. I don’t know if the massive festering mound between our two compounds is an agreed-upon dump or simply a convenience that no one bothers to object to, but right now, there are two kids climbing all over it.

My first impulse is to shout at them to get down. I’m sure it’s rife with disease and rats. But I don’t know how to scold in Urdu, so I walk to the end of the court for a closer look. It’s a boy and a girl. The boy is maybe a couple of years younger than me. The girl’s face is smeared with grime, and her baggy tunic doesn’t give anything away, but I’d put her age close to Mandy’s.

They eye me warily as I approach, yet they don’t stop what they’re doing. The boy scrambles across the mound, picking through it and occasionally throwing pieces of garbage down to the girl, which she shoves into a large canvas bag. I try to figure out what they’re collecting, but there seems no logic to it. Tin cans, scraps of wire, even a moldering chicken’s foot all make their way into her bag.