Trespassing (31 page)

Anu was the only one delighted with the intensity of the rains. It didn’t matter that the electricity was out for seven or eight hours at a time, that she was stuck in a sweltering kitchen without even a pedestal fan, or that the house she spent so much time complaining about aged considerably with every storm. Inclement weather meant her son stayed home. Their barely functional, twelve-year-old excuse for a Datsun was entirely nonfunctional now. The day Daanish turned the ignition and it clicked dead, she’d beamed.

If he hated her for smothering him, the next minute he grew so guilty he loved her more. If he loved her more he spent less time shut in his room and more time shut in her love. But that made him hate her more. He remembered her often as she’d been the day he arrived from the airport: standing at the front door with arms open wide, firmly positioned between him and his aunts, his things, his past. She rolled comfort and isolation into one soft embrace. The fact was, he wanted both.

When not with Dia, lethargy steeped him. He woke in a stupor, gazing out at Karachi with narcotic dullness. The air was a whirlwind of opium-thick grime and smog – it latched on to his collar and screamed: Stop! Rest! Do nothing at all! And when he tried to fight, he only sank deeper in inertia.

He’d sit with a pencil and pad in his room and try to order his disorder the way he’d once classified his shells:

1. Aba’s absence

2. Anu’s presence

3. Heat/humidity

4. Noise. Always noise. Construction, neighbors, children on the street, generators, loudspeakers. Never a moment of natural silence, the kind in the sunken garden. Or the cove.

5. Dia

He’d throw the piece of paper away. All he’d written was trivial. That was the problem. His problems were not tangible monsters. They were tiny invisible bacteria. The monsters were the strikes in the city, journalists killed, burgeoning beggars. Recently, a devoted social worker had fled because his life was being threatened. No one had ever threatened Daanish’s life. Shantytowns were mushrooming. He had a house. In that house, the closer life pressed against him, the more he could think only in headlines. And in a city of eleven million, life pressed very, very close.

There were roaches bending backwards in the shower drain. Crickets chirping under the no-longer-pristine white rug. Dia had told him an interesting fact about crickets: not all of them could sing, and the ones that did sang with wings. They rubbed these together in a dance and the dance sang. Crickets with no rhythm pretended otherwise. They hung around the dancers and when the latter drew mates, they sidled up to female crickets and said: ‘Hey baby, I’m the singer in this band!’ Some singers never got a girl, and some liars did. And some crickets
amplified their song by dancing in a burrow. The hole became a trumpet, like loudspeakers in little underground mosques. Daanish entertained himself for hours picturing maulvi sahibs rubbing wings together in a dark tunnel. It was either that, or the big picture: toppling governments, ethnic hatred, foreign aid, sanctions on Iraq, eighty per cent of the world’s wealth in the hands of fifteen per cent of its people.

What could he possibly do about any of that?

Was he to become a journalist in America, a country that taught students of journalism
not
to unearth the big picture, only to come back here and find he too needed a cleaner, less overwhelming truth?

Was that
his
filthy truth?

There were ants on his toothbrush. So the ad had lied. The product did have sugar. The toilet paper plugged the toilet. The tanker did not show so there was no water to flush the toilet with anyway. And when the rain fell and the power shut off, there was no fan to air out the stench in the toilet. It drifted all the way down the hall. It crept under his door and under the rug where the dancing crickets sang. Could crickets smell human shit?

If Daanish had a filthy truth, he hoped Dia could save him from it.

One day when there was a break in the rain the postman rode his bicycle through the flooded street, dropping a bundle of mail in a puddle by the defunct Datsun. In that bundle there was a letter from Liam. It was on top of a pile of bills and didn’t get too badly soaked.

Dear Daanish,

It’s been two months since you left, but no news. Didn’t I tell you not to be a stranger? So what’s up, man?

I’m at Iris’s house for the week. Her folks are real cool. They’re building this house in the woods in N. Vermont,
real close to the Canadian border. It’s just about complete. There’s pine trees and elms, and days are in the mid-60s. Not another house for miles but we do have visitors: bears! It’s like living like Grizzly Adams, man (and Grizzly Iris, no doubt). We’ve been eating more blueberry pie than we know what to do with, and Iris even tried making blueberry ice cream. Du-ude! Maple syrup flows like water around here. Iris’ mom makes bitching pancakes. I must have put on ten, twelve pounds. Although maybe not: I walk and swim and chop wood.

Her dad did a lot of the building on the house himself. He’s tight-mouthed and tough like a bull, but I think he’s finally warming up to me. Yesterday, when I was helping him lay tiles in the bathroom, he told me this joke and I think we really bonded. Then all five of us (Iris’ mom and sister too) went for a dip in a nearby lake. As her dad said, it was cold as a witch’s tit.

Iris is still my queen. She played again at a church and again had everyone in awe. We go into town alone sometimes. Catch a matinee, hear some tunes. Have lunch at this diner where she’s going to work for the next month before college reopens. And I’m going to have to go home to D.C. next week. But then she’ll visit some weekend.

Hey, I heard about the chaos in Karachi. What’s going on there, man? The television made it seem like a damn civil war? Give me your news, okay?

Stay alive,

Liam.

P.S. Iris’ dad’s joke: An 80-year-old man starts going out with a 20-year-old woman. The doctor tells him to be careful. It might not be good for the heart. The man shrugs, ‘Well, if she dies, she dies.’

In the weeks following the success of Operation Desert Storm and the television broadcast of the biggest ticker-tape parade in history, Daanish stopped writing in his journal. A silent terror seized him, leaving him incapable of articulating anything any more. He finally felt what he’d been meant to feel since the first air strikes: nothing. He really didn’t know if anything had happened after all.

Only once did something speak to him. He clutched it in his hands, words by Vonnegut about a previous conflict:
The war was such an extravaganza that there was scarcely a robot anywhere who didn’t have a part to play.

He recited them while rinsing pots at Fully Food. There was Robot Wang who scraped ranch dressing and beef and rolls into trash bags that Robot Ron tied and heaved onto his back like Dick Whittington off to seek his fortune in a great city. Robot Nancy had simply quit. She was going to take parttime classes in a community college and work a real job. ‘Not like here,’ she said, ‘in the united fucking colors of Benetton.’
At the bus station, he gave her a robot kind of kiss and the next day, a robot from Trinidad replaced her. Daanish never bothered introducing himself, nor did anyone else.

It continued like that into the fall. He barely even wrote to his parents. Sometimes the phone rang in the hall and he heard a student pick it up and say, Who?
Day-nish?
He knew it was his father but didn’t answer when the messenger knocked on his door. He’d always remember that: he hadn’t answered all his father’s calls. The following year, he’d be dead.

Most of all, Daanish avoided Liam. The two had hardly spoken since their argument outside Hallmark, even though he’d gone to Iris’ recital. The notes had scraped his nerves and from the way Liam clenched his jaw Daanish knew he couldn’t concentrate either. Afterwards, they both congratulated Iris excessively and then Daanish took a taxi back to his dorm. It had cost everything he had, but he wasn’t going to wait for Liam to offer a ride.

Increasingly, Daanish retreated to his sunken garden to watch the season change. And to reflect on his friend. Looking up at an old oak, he remembered climbing it last fall, while Liam photographed him from below. He’d almost fallen off when Liam hollered, ‘Why do women have vaginas?’

‘No idea.’

‘So men will talk to them.’

Daanish snorted: ‘Not in my country.’

Liam guffawed. ‘You’re living in the wrong place, man! Here’s another one: why do women take so long to orgasm?’

‘Who cares?’

‘Oh, you knew it already!’

And in the winter, the two had come here often to enjoy the chilling silence, occasionally puncturing it with chatter. But they never discussed the war.

Eventually, alone in the garden, Daanish slowly began to feel his pulse again. The nuthatches were preparing for winter.
So were the honeybees, circling around him less with each day. Petals curled and dried, and the color came early to the leaves. A tiny leg of sensation kicked inside him. After many months, he found himself compelled to again make sense of what had been effaced.

He enrolled in a journalism class with a different professor. But like Wayne, she steered discussion toward consumer happiness. If the public wasn’t getting the story it wanted, it was being exploited. She called the right story ‘soft news’ and showed videos of anchor personalities that made the softness the softest. Unlike Wayne, she asked for no journals.

Daanish never interrupted her but still continued his search in the library.

In a medical journal one day, he found a letter written by a conscientious objector, a Marine who’d spoken at protests throughout the war before turning himself in.

Daanish read the letter.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr are heroes but my greatest hero is Mohammad Ali. No politician or activist can understand the shame of being asked to serve your country but refusing. A man on a hunger strike feels cleansed. Maybe he sees God. But a man who says no to an oath feels like a coward. He feels like a wuss. Like no God could ever love him. He hangs his head and wonders if he’s a man or a sick nothing. Ali knows. And now look: people in every corner of the world are crazy for him.

I grew up the fifth child of a white laborer from Indiana. A hod carrier whose every second was taken up by water and sand. What were the right proportions? That’s what my old man cared about most. Mortar and stone. He liked to say that stone was the oldest construction material in the world. Before wood, before brick. He was carrying on a tradition left behind by people who must have looked very different from him. The Druids. The Pharaohs. He
was poor but he was no fool. He had respect for those who came before him. And he wanted me to keep building too, but differently. None of his kids became hod carriers.

I joined the army at seventeen and it sent me to college and gave me health insurance. I was nineteen when training for the Gulf War began. Most of the faces around me were not white. They had been lured, like me, by the promise of security. But most of them started wondering why they were fighting for a country that didn’t give a shit about them. Yeah, they had the right to vote now and they could own land – a step up from many Americans who fought in World War II. But they came from neighborhoods racked by crime and illness and they knew they were only going to see more of it. From being the victims of despair, they knew they’d become its agent. They asked why the wealthier kids weren’t willing to fight for their country. They are the ones who ought to have enlisted. They are the ones who ought to say thank you.

The numbers refusing to go to Saudi Arabia started rising. This was not reported in the media. We were only shown kissing our girlfriends goodbye. That’s good business, and that’s what corporate America is all about. The best brand. We have the most famous in the world: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, Kodak. And now another: Desert Storm. They want you to buy it, today.

Daanish made a photocopy and put the journal away. Then he tried to picture the Marine, the son of a hod carrier. What exactly had pushed him to take this stand? Was it a moment, a face, a nightmare, a prayer? A combination of things more abstract? He’d wondered the same many times about his own grandfather.

Daanish kept digging, finding the most detailed analyses of the war and its outcome in other medical journals and in the European and Asian press. The library carried these
– it was just a matter of finding them. Maybe the doctor’s game had given Daanish good practice.

He learned that earlier in the year, an International War Crimes Tribunal had been held, astonishingly, in New York City. The tribunal, presided over by judges from many different nations, had found the US guilty of breaking nineteen international laws. The American media did not report this but many foreign papers did.

Daanish’s heart raced: In New York City! Wasn’t it something that a country would host a council that condemned it? It proved freedom of a kind that perhaps no other nation enjoyed did exist here. Yet the media wouldn’t make use of it.

A few days later, he saw Liam. It was a bright blue afternoon in October, with benign cushiony clouds and a wisp of a breeze that was sometimes warm, then suddenly cold. Liam was leaning into the wall of a building, buttoning up a flannel shirt, books on the grass.

‘Hey,’ Daanish said.

‘Hey,’ answered Liam, forelock in his eyes.

‘What’s up?’

Liam shrugged. ‘Nothing much.’

They walked and eventually Daanish asked him if he’d heard of the tribunal.

Liam shot back, ‘No. Educate me.’

Daanish stopped walking. ‘Why are you so defensive all the time?’

Liam moved on, but then turned back. ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’