Tunnel Vision (28 page)

‘
Is it something I said? Something I did? Something I didn
'
t do? Tell me what it is and I
'
ll do it.
'

‘
No Omar, there
'
s nothing you can do about it, it
'
s just that I
'
m not ready for a commitment.
'

‘
Then we
'
ll wait another year, I
'
m sorry I pushed it, I was just excited.
'

‘
But I know I don
'
t want any commitment from you.
'

‘
Is there someone else?
'

‘
Don
'
t be silly.
'

‘
Are you not attracted to me?
'

‘
You know I am,
'
and I was. But when was attraction ever a recipe for a successful marriage? My parents had been attracted to each other, touching, glancing, brushing almost constantly, but where had it taken them? No wonder desire wasn
'
t a factor in Pakistani romances, it just led to chaos, jealousy and unwanted pregnancies. That
'
s why pretty women ended up with bald men and screen heroes looked like stage rejects. We just weren
'
t prepared to deal with love and lust together. I was no different, whatever Omar might think.

‘
Then what is it?
'

‘
I don
'
t love you,
'
the words seemed to take on a life of their own, growing like ravenous children feeding on the tension between us, ballooning till they filled the silence, the car, the world. Reducing the headlights that had appeared in the rear view mirror into insignificant details.

‘
But you might one day!
'
his devotion was touching, in an academic way. I wasn
'
t really touched, just curious. Was this the whimper of a heartsick lover or the mission statement of a future stalker? Just last month a student at another college had killed his girlfriend before killing himself after she turned down his proposal.

‘
I doubt it, Omar.
'
To emphasize my disinterest, I began checking my nails for signs of vitamin B deficiency. Omar lowered his head onto the steering wheel. A helmeted head popped through his open window and said,
‘
Do you have a nikahnama?
'

That
'
s when Omar burst into tears.

DRIVER KI ZINDAGI BHI AJAB KHEL HAI, MAUT SAY BACH GAYA TO CENTRAL JAIL HAI

BACK OF BUS

~

T
he policeman at his window drew back in surprise, then asked for a nikahnama again. It only made Omar cry louder. Helpless, he had appealed to me across Omar
'
s bent head.

‘
What happened Bibi?
'

‘
Yes Omar,
'
I
'
d remarked conversationally,
‘
why are you crying?
'

Euphoria had been skipping through my veins suddenly, a perverse, heady delight that swept reason and compassion away. Omar had eventually managed some semblance of calm, handed the anxious policeman two hundred rupees and driven me home in silence. In the two weeks left on campus, he studiously avoided me, walked right by me at convocation and for all practical purposes ceased to exist for me in life beyond KU boundaries. I heard about him occasionally, from mutual friends, but he never got in touch. Neither had I. Yet here he was, a mursheed to my paralysed pir.

‘
He worships you, you know,
'
Kulsoom had said as he
'
d walked by the week after we
'
d broken up, a study in upright, male stoicism.

‘
I can tell by the way he
'
s crawling after me on his knees begging me to take him back.
'

‘
Apparently yesterday Imtiaz asked him to tell, now that you weren
'
t together, how far the two of you had gone.
'

‘
Did he say as far as all the knowledge in China?
‘
Cause that
'
s what I would have said.
'

‘
He said if Imtiaz asked him again he
'
d break all his fingers. And if anyone else asked him or he heard they asked someone else he
'
d do the same to them.
'

‘
But his fingers didn
'
t ask the question! I would have threatened to break his mouth.
'

‘
It
'
s romantic.
'

‘
Why do men always want to break things anyway?
'

‘
You
'
re a fool.
'

‘
Then part me from my money and go buy us some samosas.
'
I waved twenty rupees in her face.

Imtiaz walked by as I waited alone for her to come back. I winked at him. He walked faster.

‘
So how far did you go?
'
Kulsoom came back with extra chaat masala in her free hand, and we enjoyed a regrettably brief silence while we sprinkled and swallowed before she dived back into the inquisition.

‘
You know all this interest in sex is really quite unhealthy.
'

‘
Probably. So?
'

‘
So?
'

‘
Is that why you broke up?
'

‘
Look, we Pakistanis have got a great strategy when it comes to sex. We
'
re obviously having it,
'
I waved a hand towards the street children hollering over the boundary wall, the couples canoodling under trees, the men walking hand in hand down the street,
‘
but we don
'
t talk about it. Because talking about it is when the problems start. Why do you want to upset the apple cart?
'

‘
Thinking of apples always makes me sad.
'

‘
You
'
re a sad woman Kulsoom.
'

Truth.

‘
So you
'
re not going to tell then?
'

I looked at her till she looked away.

‘
I
'
m only asking because Uzma,
'
she pointed to a hijabi sitting under a tree reading a book of Omar Khayyam
'
s poetry,
‘
wanted to know if Omar was any good.
'

‘
Does she know God is omnipotent?
'

‘
Don
'
t know. Shall I go and ask her?
'

‘
Tell her he
'
s phenomenal. Tell her it was almost a spiritual experience.
'

‘
Tauba tauba!
'

‘
Hey I
'
m just trying to bring her closer to God!
'

The day before graduation I went looking for Omar. I spotted him in the cafeteria through the portholes in the door. As I entered I noticed he wasn
'
t alone; Uzma was having tea with him. He looked up, I thought hopefully, as I walked towards him, then away as I walked past.

I looked the Omar in my hospital room in the eye and said what I had meant to say to him that day.

‘
I
'
m sorry.
'

‘
It
'
s okay, Ayesha,
'
he smiled at me before he disappeared,
‘
Uzma had the perfect line and length for a middle order mutt like me.
'

KYA DEKH RAHAY HO?

BACK OF RICKSHAW

~

A
dil came in not a second later, wearing what seemed to be a borrowed smile. This time a nurse came with him to check my drip and the readings on the electronica. The angry janitor was nowhere in sight. I guessed my head-trip was over. It had been educational, to say the least

‘
I spoke to Mamu. He
'
s with Ammi. She
'
s fine, he says, she went to her room and lay down and seems to have fallen asleep. He said her door was open and he could see her from the telephone table.
'

The bed was the socket, she the plug. Recharging.

‘
Then I called Farah just to check, you know? I was worried that she was worried, I generally message her at least forty times a day and today I
'
ve hardly messaged at all.
'

‘
She said she might stop by later to see you. I
'
ve wanted you two to meet for ages, though I wish it didn
'
t have to be like this,
'
his baby fat wobbled like jelly on the edge of a moving plate,
‘
but we don
'
t get to choose these things, do we? We don
'
t get to choose the hows and whys of our lives, or the whens!
'
For a second the mask of perpetual cheer slipped, exposing the sad bones beneath,
‘
We don
'
t get to decide when the people we love leave us.
'

As if to illustrate his point, the horse and cattle show that was admitting a person to AKU bustled in again. This time it was an elderly man on the gurney, a harried-looking woman bustling after him like a tired sparrow desperate for feed. He was taken into the cubicle next to mine. His wife, if that
'
s who she was, stood in one corner wringing her hands. Her man looked terrible, listless and grey, already a ghost. Both Adil and I watched in morbid fascination as he was docked into the glassed-in cubicle next to mine like a battered aircraft returning to its carrier after yet another dogfight. Medicine really was the science of denial.

I
'
d often felt grubby about the exploitative nature of the industry I worked for, wanting to shower at the end of the day, wash off some of the guilt by association. We didn
'
t understand one hundredth of what we claimed to, yet we continued to market our
‘
cutting edge
'
knowledge. Slapping a patch on gangrenous wounds, sending people right back out to fight another day, the bravado with which we insisted that man could transcend anything physical reality threw at him, it was strange ultra-conservatives didn
'
t get after us. Though of course they were too busy hollering about the decline in the urban woman
'
s morals to worry about non-issues like pharmaceutical malpractice. And the PR department had our defence all ready should anyone question the
‘
experimental
'
nature of some of our products. That
'
s why we were Ashraful Makhlooqat, wasn
'
t it, because the brain elevated the body beyond the reach of tribulations that affected other animals. I admired other animals more than I did my own species. Other animals were civilized enough to cull their weak, their old, and their infirm. We liked to let them suffer because it made us feel better about ourselves.

At least we don
'
t let our elderly die alone. If only cultural superiority were that simple. We were like an old facçde on a movie set, all gracious living and clean curtains from the front, termites and beams in danger of imminent collapse at the back. Sure we kept our elderly relatives at home with us, sometimes. As unpaid domestics, or doorstops if wheelchair bound. Then there were all those old people deposited at the gates of charity homes every year by children claiming they were mentally ill. The parents cried and denied it. The children ignored them and left after signing papers saying the parents were not to be released to anyone else on any condition.

And sometimes after retirement the elderly became the dominant beasts at home, terrorizing errant sons and new daughters-in-law with equal abandon, demanding observance of archaic rituals that had obviously brought them nothing but heartache and bitterness.

Were we culturally superior to others? Who cared? It wasn
'
t about superiority as much as it was about equality. All societies were equally fragmented, all people were equally conflicted. All candidates for euthanasia were deserving of it.

On the plus side, we weren
'
t invading other countries and killing innocents. Perhaps later? When we got strong enough to avoid blatant retribution.

I was learning a funny thing about mood swings. If you went into a coma, they went with you. Would I have them even in the afterlife, would they condemn me to a yoyo existence beyond the grave, sole occupant of the bullet elevator between heaven and hell? Would even death not be able to stop me turning into my mother? No wonder I wasn
'
t frightened of it.

Someone was frightened though. The old woman with the patient in the cubicle next door was standing at the foot of his bed as people bustled around him, gazing at him as if she felt a blink would make him disappear, closing her eyes would negate his existence. What was it like to be married for decades, I wondered, did it exhilarate, infuriate? Did love ebb or flow? Did they still have anything to talk about? Did they even talk any more or just meticulously observe each other, alert for signs of physical collapse? Would I ever know first-hand? Did I even want to risk losing the strong will, self awareness, ambition and clarity education, opportunity and exposure had gifted me at the altar of juvenile dreams?