Moth Smoke (23 page)

‘I’m here.’

‘I want to see you as much as Ozi sees you.’

‘I’m best in small doses, believe me.’

My rib twinges, but she slides her hand under my shirt and onto my chest, and then I must breathe more softly, because I can’t feel the pain.

We lie naked in bed, a small chocolate cake with a red-and-white sparkling candle balanced between my nipples, fizzing and smoking merrily. Two weeks out of hospital. Two months without electricity. Three months since I lost my job. Twenty-nine years since my first smack on the bottom, the first time I cried.

Today is my birthday. My family has already been by, honking at the gate until the neighbors started shouting and
they had to go away. I’m not ready to face them yet. And I wanted to be alone with Mumtaz. She tells me to make a wish. I wish for work and money and air-conditioning and a healed rib and a new tooth and ten good fingers and my ex-best friend’s wife. Then I blow out the candle. It takes two tries, and makes me wince.

‘Don’t tell me what you wished for,’ she says.

‘It would take too long,’ I say. And I grin, because at this moment, with her beside me and an undisturbed afternoon ahead, I feel almost happy.

She takes the plate off my chest and strokes my hair.

I shut my eyes. ‘What would you wish for?’ I ask.

She thinks. ‘Perfect foresight, a little courage, and a time machine.’

I smile. I like the slow rasp of her voice, the way she draws out her words. ‘Why?’

‘So I could go four years back into the past, realize what was going to happen if I married Ozi, and say no when he asked.’

My head begins to throb, full of blood, stuffed by the excited pumping of my heart. I open my eyes. ‘So it was a mistake?’

She turns onto her side. Her breast brushes my shoulder. ‘I have no clothes on. I’m with you. You’re not my husband. I’ve clearly made a mistake somewhere.’

‘Did you ever love him?’

She nods. ‘I loved him. Did you?’

‘I think so.’

‘So what happened?’

Something is caught between my teeth. I pull it out: a hair. Maybe an eyelash. ‘I don’t know. A million things. There were problems even when we were kids. He was vicious, full of himself. And when he left, we drifted apart. Maybe I just realized what he was all along: not a good guy. A bastard, really. A self-centered, two-faced, spoiled little bastard …’

‘Stop.’

The sharpness of her tone makes me realize I’m getting carried away, and I bite down on my words. But I feel myself choking on all I’m leaving unsaid.

‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to lie here and attack Ozi. It isn’t right.’

‘You said it was a mistake to marry him.’

‘For me, yes. But which one of us is the problem? Ozi’s a good father. He’s sweet. He’s generous. He’s smart …’

I feel the muscles in my chest contract. ‘He’s rich. He’s got everything he wants. He’s perfect.’

She pulls back. ‘Why are you so bitter?’

‘He’s a bastard.’

‘There’s no reason for you to be jealous.’

My mouth is wet with unswallowed spit. ‘If you think he’s so wonderful, maybe you shouldn’t be here.’

She watches me, her eyebrows rising, wrinkling her forehead. ‘Are you serious?’

I realize she’s getting angry. And I don’t want to fight. ‘No,’ I say. And when she doesn’t respond, I add, ‘I’m sorry.’

She’s quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t think I should be married to Ozi. But not because of him. Because of me. I’m really not all that nice. I don’t think I’m the sort who should marry at all.’

‘That isn’t true.’

She smiles. ‘You don’t know me that well. I’m a bad wife. And I’m a worse mother.’

I put my arm around her and she presses against my side. ‘You’re just stuck in a bad situation.’

She shakes her head. ‘I chose my situation. No, it’s deeper than that.’

‘What is?’

‘Where am I right now?’

I stroke her back. ‘With me.’

‘And what about my son? He’s at home. He misses me. But I leave him with Pilar as much as I can. I can’t help it. I’m flawed. A bad design.’

‘It’s normal. Everyone gets tired of their children sometimes.’

‘I’m not talking about getting tired sometimes. I don’t know. I don’t think I can explain it.’

‘My mother didn’t spend every minute with me.’

‘No?’ Her belly swells against my side with her breathing.

‘Of course not. She worked, for one thing. And I went to school during the day, sports in the afternoons. And at night I went out with my friends.’

‘But when you were home together?’

I think of my mother and feel myself starting to slip, a sudden weightlessness, the dip in my stomach as a car crests a hill, fast, the uncertainty that entered my life the day she died. I pull Mumtaz to me. ‘We used to talk. We were close.’

‘You see. I hear it in your voice. Muazzam is never going to speak of me that way.’

‘You don’t know that.’ I kiss her, softly. ‘You’re wonderful. You make me feel completely cared for.’

She stops breathing and stares at me for a moment, almost a glare. I pause. Then it passes. Her body relaxes, her waist sinking deeper into the bed, the curve from her shoulder to her hip becoming more pronounced.

‘Maybe that’s why I’m here,’ she says. She doesn’t smile, but she kisses me back, and both of us shut our eyes.

Sometimes when Mumtaz is with me, moving about the house, I watch her. I’m mesmerized by her posture. She stands with strength and poise and supple flexibility, like a
village woman balancing a pitcher of water on her head as she walks home from the well. Shoulder blades pulled back. Chin up.

The muscles of her neck flare, taut when she turns, when she inhales before speaking.

She has the long torso of Sadequain’s imagination. And solid, strong legs. One half slender, one half less so. A mermaid.

Her breasts are small and wonderfully round. One hangs half a rib lower.

Her fingers are thin. Nails short, unpolished. Veins raise the smooth skin of her hands before subsiding into her forearms. Roots feeding blood to her grip.

She curls and uncurls her toes without thinking when she sits.

And her mouth is wide and alive.

I commit her to memory.

When I’m alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he’s ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there’s nothing I can do to stop her.

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it just because I’m
pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humor, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can’t do?

Has she fallen in love with me?

As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that maybe she has.

And one day, after many joints, as we lie replete in bed, as I play with her hair and she kisses my hand, I realize that she watches me. That she touches me not just with tenderness but with fascination.

And my mind starts to whirl.

Suddenly I think I’m about to understand.

She’s drawn to me just as I’m drawn to her. She can’t keep away. She circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her husband and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She’s risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation.

And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she’s not just a candle. She’s a moth as well, circling me. I look at her and see myself reflected, my feelings, my desires. And she,
looking at me, must see herself. And which of us is moth and which is candle hardly seems to matter. We’re both the same.

That’s the secret.

What moths never tell us as they whirl in their dances.

What Manucci learned at Pak Tea House.

What sufis veil in verse.

I turn her around and look into her eyes and see the wonder in them that must be in mine as well, the wonder I first saw on our night of ecstasy, and I feel myself explode, expand, fill the universe, then collapse, implode like a detonation under water, become tiny, disappear.

I’m hardly aware of myself, of her, when I open my mouth. There is just us, and I speak for us when I speak, and I must be trembling and crying, but I don’t even know if I am or what I’m doing.

I just say it.

‘I love you.’

And I lose myself in her eyes and we kiss and I feel myself becoming part of something new, something larger, something I never knew could be.

Union.

There are no words.

But after.

‘Don’t say that,’ she says.

And faintly, the smell of something burning.

When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I’m worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city.

The rains have finally decided to come.

I sit down on the lawn, resting my back against the wall of the house, and light an aitch I’ve waited a long time to smoke. Suddenly the air is still and the trees are silent, and I can hear laughter from my neighbor’s servant quarters. A bicycle bell sounds in the street, reminding me of the green Sohrab I had as a child. Then the wind returns, bringing the smell of wet soil and a pair of orange parrots that swoop down to take shelter in the lower branches of the banyan tree, where they glow in the shadows.

A raindrop strikes the lawn, sending up a tiny plume of dust. Others follow, a barrage of dusty explosions bursting all around me. The leaves of the banyan tree rebound from their impact. The parrots disappear from sight. In the
distance, the clouds seem to reach down to touch the earth. And then a curtain of water falls quietly and shatters across the city with a terrifying roar, drenching me instantly. I hear the hot concrete of the driveway hissing, turning rain back into steam, and I smell the dead grass that lies under the dirt of the lawn.

I fill my mouth with water, gritty at first, then pure and clean, and roll into a ball with my face pressed against my knees, sucking on a hailstone, shivering as wet cloth sticks to my body. Heavy drops beat their beat on my back and I rock slowly, my thoughts silenced by the violence of the storm, gasping in the sudden, unexpected cold.

The parrots the monsoon brought to my banyan tree have decided to stay awhile. There’s been a break in the downpour today, and I can see them from my window, swimming in and out of the green reef of the canopy like tropical fish, blazing with color when the sun winks at them through the occasional gap between storm clouds.

Along with parrots, the rains have brought flooding to the Punjab and a crime wave to Lahore. Heists and holdups and the odd bombing compete with aerial food drops and humanitarian heroics for headline space on the front pages of the newspapers. Looking out on the soggy city, I pretend to move my hand through a table-tennis shot, but I’m really reenacting the slap that sent Manucci away, wondering
how a little twist of the wrist could have such enormous consequences.

What am I going to do? I don’t know how to cook or clean or do the wash. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to learn. The only people in my neighborhood who don’t have servants are servants themselves. Except for me. And I refuse to serve. I’m done with giving. Giving service to bank clients, giving respect to people who haven’t earned it, giving hash and getting punished. I’m ready to take.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asks me.

‘Parrots,’ I tell her.

She gets out of bed, picks up my jeans, and puts them on, rolling the waistband down so they don’t fall off her hips. ‘Do you have a shirt I can wear?’ she asks me.

‘Nothing clean,’ I answer.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

I take a white undershirt out of my closet and sniff it. Smells neutral enough. She puts it on and walks out of the room, her bare feet avoiding the dead moths and the puddles near the windows.

‘You need a replacement for Manucci,’ she says.

‘I can’t afford one,’ I reply, following her.

She sees what she’s looking for, a box of matches, and lights her cigarette. Then she sits down on the couch and pulls her legs under her. ‘I’m going to give you some money until you find work.’

I sit down next to her and shake my head. ‘I don’t want any more of Ozi’s money, thanks.’

She kisses me. ‘Well, once you’ve started having an affair with his wife, taking his money doesn’t seem like such a big step.’

I rub the corner of her jaw with my chin, feel my stubble scratch her skin, turn it red. ‘I don’t want to be having an affair with his wife.’

She smiles. ‘Tired of me so soon?’

‘I’m serious.’

She shakes her head and looks away. Her hair covers the patch of redness. ‘Don’t do this.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t make this into something it isn’t.’

‘What isn’t this?’

‘This isn’t a courtship.’

I tug at the bottom of her undershirt. My undershirt, on her. It’s old, the cotton very soft, fraying slightly around the collar. ‘This isn’t just sex.’

She turns and looks at me. One hand covers mine, stops my tugging. ‘Nothing is just sex. I care about you. I need this right now.’

‘I love you.’

‘Stop saying that.’

I pull on her shirt again, gently. ‘Do you think you can go back to Ozi as though nothing ever happened?’

‘Daru, I don’t have to go back to him. I’m married to him. I’d have to leave him to go back to him.’

‘But you started this.’

She takes my hand off her shirt. ‘You didn’t exactly resist.’

‘But you’re the one who made it happen.’

‘I just got over my guilt first.’