And the World Changed (48 page)

The children were yelling. “Throw it! Throw it!”

“Zia!” I was only a few years older than him, but in our families that still had some power. “Zia!”

He turned and looked at me. There was terror in his face. I must have sounded like his mother. But the crowd was pushing now. He turned his back on me, arched his arm back. I saw it was our kitten in his hands. Its body sailed through the air, and it landed on the railroad tracks.

It could have still been living when the train came.

“Zia!” I screamed and ran to grab him, but all the boys
scattered and ran down the alley laughing. “Zia! Zia!” But my voice sounded like nothing under the tracks of the screaming train.

When I walked back, my throat felt like it had a rope tied around it. The old Italian had limped out into the back alley and was looking at the ring of blood on the cement. The horrible feeling in my stomach felt like vomit. He looked at me, and the concern left his face. It became filled with the look I saw from all the other Italians. A look of hate.

Then I knew they were right. We were bad. We were as dirty as all the old Italians said. We didn't know how to take care of life. We didn't know how to grow anything, and when we touched the world it died.

VARIATIONS: A STORY IN VOICES

Hima Raza

Hima F. Raza (1975–2003) was a poet, critic, and academic. She was born and brought up in Lahore and graduated from Kinnaird College, Lahore. Abroad she earned degrees from The University of New South Wales, Australia, and the University of Sussex, UK. Raza taught English literature and creative writing at universities in Lahore and London. She published two collections of experimental poetry:
Memory Stains
(Minerva, 2000) and
Left-Hand-Speak
(Alhamra, 2002). The latter forged new directions in Pakistani English literature with the bilingual poems “Us in Two Tones” and “In Translation,” which employ both English and Urdu as integral parts of the text. In 2003, she was killed in a car accident in London.

“Variations: A Story in Voices” is one of Raza's few short stories and develops the themes of duality, distances, and thwarted love, which run through her poetry collections. The use of three voices, as well as poetry and prose, accentuate the sense of a collage, built layer by layer. Raza's portrayal of unrequited love is intertwined with themes of exile and the idea of occupying “the spaces in-between”: Even the
jamun
berries that she refers to have an indeterminate taste—neither sweet, salty, bitter, nor sour. She knits together Britain and Pakistan with ease, while acknowledging the ambiguities of identity. One character's muddled liberalism provides a humorous sidelight to the often painful dilemmas of Raza's immigrant characters.

• • •

VOICE I: SUSCEPTIBLE

THE FARAWAY FACTOR

A friend who lives far away from Lahore's brief winter calls me out of the blue to talk about homesickness. He does not miss that city of smog and choking sunsets per se; only the four walls that mark the compound of his parents' house. I am intrigued by this nostalgia and ask him to divulge more. The list is something like this. The sound of his two-year-old German Shepherd's scratching at the verandah door, the purple aftertaste of
jamuns
, the smell of August rain, his mother's voice. I point out that at least half his list is made up of generic items—the monsoon spreads its wings over most of the country and
jamuns
are not confined to his address—but he remains unimpressed, resolutely wistful. I ask whether he knows the English name for
jamuns
, oval shaped berries usually consumed with salt, which makes the insides of the mouth pucker and the salivary glands
work overtime. He doesn't think there is an English translation for this fruit or the experience of eating it. We both agree it's better this way.

That night I repeat the conversation in my head and keep stumbling over the word “home” in two languages. Something broken, unhappy, to be kicked in the teeth and run away from, to miss from a distance, to dream about in black 'n' white. I cannot bring myself to image it any other way. At least not yet. Home wavers between silence and schizophrenia, holding back, biting tongues, locked doors, and the season of sad questions. I am a stranger here, a tentative observer of the stories that seep out from the edges of this frayed metropolis.

You shared a wise insight with me one night—“Never date someone who lives more than five miles away from you.” The simple assurance of knowing that your lover's touch and smell is a short drive away is enough to keep you there, sometimes long after “the thrill is gone.”

I watch you woo them, win them, and worship them. I watch the tables turn and see you left behind, licking your wounds while they mysteriously fall out of love, follow the urge to try other flavors, and transfer you into the new best friend. It would be nice if I could simply fall out of love with you.

Over the years I have cherished quite a few. Wrong ones, weak ones, well-intentioned but confused ones, and every time I've had to negotiate a man, he came with the distance tag attached. In fact the only instance when boy and girl lived in the same vicinity was at age seventeen. He was my first and least complicated love. I was bored senseless in six months.

I seek out these specimens. The ones who live at least an ocean away, the ones you can miss so beautifully without ever having to really know them. The ones who allow you to fantasize for a month, or even a year, and sometimes the wondering is worth it. Then there's you. I have imagined your smile from a different time zone, from next door, walking behind you, lying next to you . . . and you have no idea.

I know how distance becomes engraved in the hand and eats you up from the inside. The space between us—I can trace its structure with my eyes closed, can hum its tune while painting my toes, and then pretend it doesn't matter when you walk in the door. Just like that.

Masks.

She suffers from unreasonable expectations and operates in the hypothetical; creating alternate endings, erasing beginnings. A woman somewhere between young and old but age, like reason, is a relative thing. She has ten fingers and ten toes. The rest is a jumble of fluctuating dimensions. She's not good at keeping up with changes . . . they simply drag her along most times.

She talks about a hundred things, except the maddening beauty of a particular name that drowns in her eardrums and reemerges through her eyeballs, in a hopeful wetness.

       
It's not fear but foolishness that holds us down.

       
Us,

       
Just a collection of other peoples' words, stories,

       
Mostly incomplete, not thought through.

       
When will I stop measuring my life against you?

       
When will I hear your voice like a distant waterfall

       
But not move toward it?

Men find comfort in the familiar. I know you like Diet Coke better than most beverages. You take your whiskey with water, your coffee with sugar, chilli sauce with almost anything. I pay attention to the details and memorize them but I don't know any intimacies. Are you a good kisser? Do you hold your girlfriend's hand for no reason? Are you tender when it matters? The things I'll never know and can't properly imagine with you.

As a recurring symbol, the telephone suggests that you are holding an intimate confidant one step short of total trust . . . using a cellular phone implies that this problem travels with you
(the online dream dictionary).

I was trying to call him but the signal kept breaking up. Later, in the same sequence, he materialized on my doorstep and we played with a dog. Can't find the interpretation of “oversized golden labrador” anywhere. Clearly there is a plan but I am not able to understand its workings. Clues come in the shape of coincidences, dreams, instincts, vague ideas that can mean everything and then only as much as we want them to mean.

THE GAMES BEGIN

“I can't say no to you,” he said earnestly enough, quite out of the blue. And with that single, simple declaration, undermined my oh-so-subtle attempt at being wondrous, flirtatious, mysterious under a blazing sky, the music of flies, the threat of watching eyes.

Not the most romantic setting, you understand.

Tried a different approach the following day. Tried to tell him about the positive and how he helped me accentuate it. About windfalls and him being one. That was so subtle, even I lost the point midway.

       
Hello, Mr. Congeniality.

       
Mr. Hook-me-up-with-a-jazz-CD,

       
a jog in the park, a shag in the dark,

       
the element of surprise backfired (again).

       
Did he get it?

       
Almost . . . but I helped him overlook it.

I've been waiting for a long time. Four failed relationships later I'm still waiting, except my patience is running thin, my temper is quick and I'm tired of having to explain it. At almost thirty, I'm left with pretty slim pickings—middle-aged males see me as “viable game” and even most of them want college girls . . . I have three words for you, pal: dirty old man.

I'm in a tight spot here and it's not going to get any easier
as gravity does its thing on my body and cellulite appears in all the wrong places and suddenly people don't turn around to look when you walk past them.

Damn.

The things women do to impress men include the usual list of stupidities related to physical appearance: four-inch stilettos so he'll forget you're a borderline midget, and push-up bras that feel like the crucifixion and make you look like Pamela Anderson's almost-sister. But there are other idiocies also embraced by women in their attempt to “fit in,” to make the men they covertly woo think that they are really “like one of the guys” (chilled out, laid back, generally unflappable) with the added bonus of possessing feminine wiles. . . .

I dated a skater when I was thirteen. It lasted two weeks because I got tired of scraped knees and bruised elbows. At that age similar interests simply equaled affection, and while we'd like to think that people outgrow this trait as they mature, our instinct remains to seek mates who are mirror images of ourselves in one way or another. In this particular case vanity got the better of me, and I decided that the sweat of trying to win the skater's affections was not worth the hassle. But most women display a lot more spunk than me in this regard.

Take Leila for instance, an old chum who has totally lost her marbles since becoming infatuated with a “biker boy” half her age. Last weekend I saw her hanging on for dear life, perched on the back of this young man's latest toy—a monstrously large red motorcycle that seemed capable of breaking the sound barrier. In all the years I've known her, Leila has never gelled with automobiles of any shape or size. After failing her driving test thrice she declared she was “not meant to drive but be driven, darling!” So imagine my shock at seeing Leila's attempt to descend from her beau's bike in the style of an action hero—except Leila's athleticism failed her at the worst possible moment and she almost cracked her skull on the pavement. Naturally she did
not admit to injury at this point and leaped to her feet a little too quickly (she was seeing stars) to announce, “Absolutely fine, darling. Just lost my balance. When can we do this again?”