And the World Changed (34 page)

Tonight there is no more of that—but more to blame for the state I'm in, there is for one, the breeze. It carries a train's whoa-whoa cautioning over to where I am about to fall asleep, transporting me back. Back to a house on Upper Mall where, around about the same hour, every night, perhaps at midnight, a passenger train, the Tez Gam or the Shalimar Express or perhaps another with a different name and purpose—cargo, perhaps—would go rattling by, trundling onward through the sprawl of the dead and the living crammed up against each other. Mian Mir, a human and concrete tapestry, just beyond the high walls of the serene compound where I lived. A densely packed graveyard competed with squatters' settlements of multi-layered, illegal, overnight constructions housing refugees: those fleeing riots at Partition; then war-ravaged border villages during '65 and '71; and more recently from the deprivation of the countryside. The graveyard's existence was assured, having been there for centuries; it had history on its side while the squatters did not enjoy this luxury of permanence, newly arrived in comparison and without leases to the land.

Tonight for me, it's the shores of the Aegean Sea, at a hotel called Kismet where, on the wall in the lobby, there are dozens of photographs. I peer at the one with two sun-tanned young people wearing white holiday gear who lean into each other as they pose with their backs against the balustrade on the terrace of the hotel. The caption tells me that they are the King and Queen of Denmark on their honeymoon back in 1966, having stayed in rooms 201 and 202. “Not separate rooms, surely,” I
muse out loud. “Presumably a suite, but then who knows what arrangements lead to a marriage.” The bellboy is unsure of my joke but laughs anyway. He stands beside me and gives me his unhurried attention since there are only a handful of guests in the hotel this evening. He knows his job well: He is there to please. I look at him. He must be my Sher's age. Just shy of thirty? My eyes may have lingered too long on his face. I note self-consciously that he moves closer to me as he points out another photograph. There is something about my manner that always brings on such unsolicited attention. I am at a loss to figure out what it is.

Two other testimonies to the hotel's excellence and as a choice of destination catch my attention: a photograph of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and another of a lady called Kenize Mourad, Princess of Kutwara. I remember her from a copy of a society magazine I read not too long ago. The story of a woman, an Indian princess by birth, born in Paris to a Turkish mother on the eve of World War II and the Nazi invasion, born to a mother who escaped from an unhappy marriage into wealth in Kutwara. I imagine marigolds,
ittar
, rubies, diamonds, peacocks, and elephants. Listless elephants from which escape was sought. Turbulent times those, of war and uncertainty, of high romance and history.

The bellboy, having shown me to my room and placed my bags on the table, throws open the doors leading to the balcony and steps out. I follow. The fragrance of lemon blossoms just below in the garden mingles with the sea air. He points out the view of the open sea, the Greek island on the horizon and the nightclubs along the shore, then he turns and looks into my eyes. Perhaps you would like to visit one tonight? I realize, half-dismayed, half-flattered, that he senses an old and lonely soul in me, perhaps after my earlier comment on the nuptial attitudes of Danish royals and the far too long gaze upon his face. Or perhaps there is the less complex economic explanation, tipping me off to tip generously. The tourist season, it seems, will be slow
this year. And the horn of a cruise liner in the distance, just as I am falling asleep, disorients me completely as she glides into the night. I have my piece of red embroidery with its winking and smiling mirrors spread out as a cover over the light wool hotel blanket that covers me inadequately. Outside, above the lemonaided breeze, as a crescent moon rents open with its light, a sliver in the indigo sky, and rises steadily over the sea, it seems to whisper a rebuke to me. It's the first of Muharram and I've postponed a trip back home to Lahore yet again. Would it not have been the occasion to return? To watch the Zuljana make its way to Karbala Gamey Shah; watch the procession in Shalmi, enter the Lal Haveli inner courtyard from a latticed balcony for the
maatam
on the night of the ninth? To listen to the beating of hands against chests keeping time with the dirges of the believers, the powerful, frightening rhythm of sweet sorrow. To weep for atonement, to merge sorrow into an eternity of grief. And I am forever postponing return because too many things, too many places, always seem to get in the way. “It's nice to have you stay but go away, moon,” I mumble in a traveler's weary whisper, “stop chasing me relentlessly with the same refrain wherever I venture.” It's Ephesus this time. Revisiting history instead of mourning it. And yet, there it is, I am back. With you. A sardonic grin; a swagger in my walk, a
khais
memorably slung over one
boski
-swathed shoulder. Eyes that impossible shade of home brew. Wearing an expression hard to decipher, just a little bemused, a little amused, a little tired. I lean my body against the wall, cross those polo-playing, horse-riding legs of mine and shoot you that look, like I'm firing. I don't get it. That look. I-couldn't-give-a-shit look. A little bit like, “Fuck it, let's blow this joint” look. And you're thrilled. I've thrown you that look, you're the chosen one tonight for that fuck-it look. We were the very best, weren't we? The best kind that can ever be, deciding to live our lives together. So simple, that decision, between you and me. You and me. You, beloved, my perfect accomplice, my escape hatch, my haven from a match made by parents. We had
saved each other it seemed.

“Well, why not?” you had said of her, that very lovely pick of the crop chosen by everyone for me. Everyone, but me.

“She's beautiful!” you had said.

“She's stupid-dull. What more do you want me to say?”

“C'mon! She's gorgeous!” you said.

“So is the cover of a girlie magazine. Only thing is, I could use a magazine to light a fire to keep me warm or as shade from the sun. She, on the other hand, is a total waste of space.”

“God, you are mean. You do have a point though, she is rather chilly,” you giggled.

“Tundra-atic! She just has to come into a room and the temperature drops by at least ten degrees. She could be Lahore's answer to load shedding as a substitute for air conditioning.”

“Ouch!”

“What?” I protested. “It's true. And boring as hell!”

“She is pretty!” you teased.

“Stop going on like a jammed CD. She is pretty, there's no doubt about that, but beyond that there's not much else. I mean she's gorgeous, I want to be her, I mean I want to be her body, I don't want it!”

“She's a beauty! Look at her eyes—gorgeous!” you persisted.

“Sure, nice shape, but where's the light in 'em, where's the cheer? I tell you, if it weren't for those rocks, those huge two-point-five-carat diamond studs punctuating either side of her face, she'd be lacking any redeeming sparkle.”

“Ouch!” you laughed.

“And her conversation, oh my gawd!” I continued, “Her conversation is mainly to refute any of my ideas or concepts with her standard,
‘That is not the way it should be!'
”

“Listen, don't you think it would be a good idea to let your parents know that you're not interested in getting married, at least not to a woman?” you suggested.

“Are you crazy?” I screeched.

“They are your parents. How long do you expect to continue lying to them?”

“Forever, just like they have to each other.” I was firm.

“What?”

“No one needs to know about what really goes on in one's head,” I said impatiently.

“Would you consider marrying me?” you had suggested softly.

“You don't want that!” I was floored.

“I'd like to have a baby!” You were so matter-of-fact, simple.

“Right. Let's get hitched.” I was simple too.

“Thanks. Love you.”

“Love you.”

But we got fucked, didn't we? We made a mess of it. I blame them all for it, for our child. The entire city. How can it be that no one stopped? For godssake, a car accident, a child lying on the side of the road, a busy street at the busiest hour, and no one stopped. At the corner of Zafar Ali Road and Upper Mall, and no one stopped. How could they not have stopped? Because it wasn't one of them? Not one of theirs? They didn't think it could be Sher? Everyone knew us. Everyone! It's my fault. How could I have let him go in a rickshaw with the ayah to school that morning. I was in a hurry, had to get to work, needed the car to pick up clients on the way to the Kutchery, the High Court. How could I have done that? And when I finally got to the hospital you were there, leaning against the wall. You wouldn't look at me. Sher was gone. That was it. You wouldn't look at me.

And life went on. If Sher had been in our car instead of a rickshaw would they have stopped to help? How many of them were our friends who passed by that day, without a second look at a child bleeding to death as a frantic woman tried to stop a car, any car, for help? It took her an hour before someone stopped. An hour! How did that happen? But you look away, not from all of them, only from me. My best friend, the keeper of my being. The one who ran to me for all things to be escaped from, the one
I escaped with. I ran. Because this was not about you, this was not about me. This was about all the goodness we could ever be. An impossible shade of home brew, that I could not safekeep. That look away from me said all this to me. How could I have let this happen? My needs were the sole reason for Sher to be in a rickshaw that morning. Life goes on and I spend it, rescuing each day and running as far away as possible from the look that you will not look at me.

And you have not tried to reach me though I have sent you a postcard from each place. One today. At this time of the year it's unseasonably quiet. But even then, for so long now things have been my companions. Winking, whispering, cautioning, rebuking, smiling, soothing. I've spent the day gazing at the cerulean landscape from a canvas chair. From time to time I glance at others around me. As outsiders, barring conversation on history, what else can we say for this place that we find ourselves in for a short interlude? With no sense of the place and its people, its daily rituals, the other guests and I are left with banal commentary.

“Glorious sunshine!”

“Isn't it?”

“Pity the lack of tourists!”

“I know! I worry! The coast is almost free of tourists.”

“Yes. The people here worry they may not come this year, the tourists, what with September 11 and now the threat that Iraq may be bombed. The bellboy said as much in the lobby earlier and so did the taxi driver!”

“Yes, our guide mentioned it as well!”

“Such things would damage the tourist industry, the hotel industry could collapse.”

“But Ephesus would still stand.”

“Ah yes, well thank God for that!”

“The Gods!”

“Yes, yes, indeed!”

It's not clear why it declined and ended, everyone says it's
because the harbor silted up and it lost its port. All economic reasons. But surely life is more than economy, more than that? More than news? It's about the favors of gods and goddesses. It's about mothers and their grief. Artemis, Nike, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Fatima, Zainab. The same story over and over again. Though my grief runs far too deep, I concede it is also about fathers and sons.

At Ephesus there are the clay pipes still intact underneath the marbled streets. Evidence of a water and sewage system, a direct connection between the longevity of empire and the availability of public utilities, this I quip to a well-paid and appreciative guide. With you in mind, I think of having a photograph of me in front of the pile of excavated clay pipes with the senate in the background, you would appreciate the significance. But of course I don't, there's no point. Then there is the positioning of the grand library opposite the town brothel. Legend has it that there was an underground passageway connecting the two. I can just hear it now, old Marcus Maximillinus calling out, “Darling, I'm off to the library!” Sher would have said that, wouldn't he? And we would have stood there laughing with our beautiful young man.

The longing has been so intense, so intense that I can't seem to ever get back. Difficult this, to imagine a place that exists without me, and exists with me somewhere else. Indispensable to me. If I go back, what if it might not be there? The there, where I was. So I carry it with me, intact, the way I left it. Only thing is that I've taken the embroidery out of the frame, it travels easier. Perhaps tonight over dinner, where I will be asked to be joined by another guest, equally alone, I can make up a story about who I am. A lie is so much easier as a way to tell the truth. With all the photographs in the lobby serving as subliminal props, I will build a story about a drawing room, a well-appointed one, redolent with perfume, cigar smoke, and whiskey fumes, its sofas spilling over with guests who've known each other over generations, smug, at ease, exclusive, and
excluding, and at home. Here, women battling bulge and boredom with their anorexia-induced stick bodies and big heads, looking much like giant lollipops, strike poses of gaiety. They try to ignore the dizzying amounts of food around them, taking note only of each others' blow-dried and uniformly tinted hair, glittering bijoux, forms, and fashions. Here, their men, bloated with self-indulgence and marinated in liquor, swollen faced and pot-bellied, congregate in corners nursing whiskies, trying to forget their existence.