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She is ready. The first egg plops softly in the hollow beneath her womb, and the rest follow, unstoppable now. The fishing nets glisten in the moonlight with small fry. How long before she dips into the waters again?
A boy, not yet fifteen, lights a K2 and leans back into the ridge of a dune. Long locks tumble over his shoulders and flare in the wind. Between puffs, he kisses the end of the cigarette, so content is he. The turtle watches him watch her when most defenseless. But she knows him; all the turtles do.
Her eggs are smooth and oval, like a naked woman’s shoulders. The boy caresses his cheek, wanting really to caress the eggs, wanting really to caress the shoulders.
His locks billow and his mood is suddenly ruffled by thoughts of his father and uncles, who did not go out tonight. They say the foreign trawlers have stolen their sea. They trespass. Fish once abundant close to shore are now disappearing even in the deep. And the fishermen’s boats cannot go out that far, even for the fish still left to catch. An uncle tried. It was he who was eaten. His family mourns the brave man’s drowning, and his father’s decision to break with tradition. They will move to the city. The boy will go first. But he is afraid, as afraid as the turtle is, of the men in the huts.
He pulls on his cigarette and wonders at the turtle. She meets his gaze with the soothing, crackly wisdom of his grandmother. He shuts his eyes and drifts into soft sleep.
Then he jolts awake: voices. Glancing quickly at the reptile, he sees her still giving birth. But dawn is tinged with foreboding. The shadow of a man stretches upon the dune beside him and creeps forward. The boy ducks. Squinting toward the huts, he sees a woman, naked below the knees, waiting. The intruder walks into view, stumbles and farts. He will not even rob the turtle gently. The boy bristles with anger, wondering what to do. He decides quickly. If the man takes a single egg, he will take the woman.
A shaggy arm crooks toward the nest, and waits, ripe fingers nearly scraping the reptile’s orifice for a gift. The boy dashes. The woman screams. Others emerge from the hut’s interior. The intruder hurtles back. The egg drops safely into the sand a fraction of a second after he is gone.
Their first kick dislodges a knee. Long hair is a hindrance, he thinks, as they use it to drag him over the line of rocks circling the hut’s porch. If I live I’ll never wear it below the chin again. There is salt in his mouth. Salt and gravel. His blood and his teeth. He swoons, but instead of their blows, he hears shells split. Thud! Crack! The men are pelting him with the eggs.
A moan rises from the pit of his groin, up to an empty cavity below his chest, shrugging its way higher, out of his nose, his ears, and mouth. He vomits oyster-white albumen and curdled vitellus, bloodied placenta, and something green. Liver?
Though blind with pain, it is he alone who sees the mound of the mother meandering silently back home.
Part One (#ulink_5e72466e-6b92-54bb-a87e-d64b7e4549df)
DIA (#ulink_9d39347e-7766-592d-ad4b-6d9ac95553ad)
1 Detour MAY 1992 (#ulink_ed6e1775-c14f-5c96-a0cc-1b87999744fb)
Dia sat in the mulberry tree her father had sheltered in the night before his death. A large man, he’d been limber too. Squatting had come easy. The crowd below had included journalists, neighbors and police. They’d asked if it were true: was he getting death threats?
Her father weighed ninety kilos and hunkered like a gentle ape, shuffling about in the foliage, appraising his audience with two small brown eyes that flashed like rockets. Every few minutes, he mustered up enough nerve to shake some berries. When they struck a particularly distasteful newsman or auntie, he slapped a knee with glee. Then he wept unabashedly.
The tree had been planted the day Dia was born. Her father had said the sweet, dainty, purplish-red fruit was like his precious daughter when she slid howling into the world. So when he tossed the berries at the throng, Dia, watching from inside the house, knew he was calling her. But her mother insisted she stay inside.
‘He’s gone mad,’ she whispered, clutching Dia. ‘I shouldn’t have told him.’
Told him what? Dia wondered.
Today, up in the tree, a book of fables pressed heavily in her lap. The weight was partly psychological. She should have been studying. She’d failed an exam and ought to be preparing for the retake. Instead she flipped through the book’s pages, where lay miscellaneous clippings about history and bugs. She found a page ripped from a Gymkhana library book and read it aloud:
‘Silk was discovered in China more than four thousand years ago, purely by accident. For many months Emperor Huang-ti had noticed the mulberry bushes in his luscious garden steadily losing their leaves. His bride, Hsi-Ling-Shih, was asked to investigate. She noticed little insects crawling about the bushes, and found several small, white pellets. Taking a pellet with her to the palace, with nothing but instinct she ventured on the best place to put it: in a tub of boiling water. Almost at once, a mesh of curious fine thread separated itself from the soft ball. The Empress gently pulled the thread. It was half a mile long. She wove it into a royal robe for her husband, the first silk item in history. Since then, sericulture has remained a woman’s job, in particular, an empress’.’
Dia tucked the stolen page back into her book. The best episodes from history were of discovery. She liked to slow the clock at the moment before the Empress thought to drop the cocoon into the water – just before she metamorphosed into a pioneer. What had moved her not to simply crush the little menaces, as most people disposed of pests today? How relaxed and curious her intellect had been, and how liberally she’d been rewarded!
The setting fired Dia’s imagination too. It would be an arbor at the top of a hillock, with plenty of sunlight, a long stone table, basins, and attendants ready with towels and disinfectants. When they’d made a circle around the Empress, Dia commanded the minute hand to shift. The Empress dropped a cocoon into the water.
It shriveled and expelled its last breath: a tangle of filament the Empress hastened to twist around her arm like candy-floss on a stick. The attendants gawked. Their mistress was sweating. The wind was soft. The sun snagged in the strand, a blinding prism growing on the arm of the Empress, as if she spun sunlight. When the sun went down she’d cooked all the cocoons from the imperial garden. Miles of thread hung in coils around both her arms. The attendants dabbed at her brow and helped her down the hill, back to the palace. The Emperor called for her all night. But she couldn’t sleep beside him with arms encased so. The maids burned oil lamps, dias, and she sat up alone, occasionally looking out at the moon and down at the mulberry trees, making a robe for her husband that by morning would reflect the rays of the sun, and by next evening, the moon.
Dia smiled contentedly. Now she’d play What If, and retell the story.
If, for instance, the Empress Hsi-Ling-Shih had suspected how her discovery would shape the destiny of others, would she instead have tossed away the threads, never to speak of them again? If she’d known that a thousand years later, several dozen Persians would pay with their lives for trying to smuggle silkworms out of China, would she have made that robe? If she hadn’t, perhaps one of the many innocent daughters of those murdered men might have one day stood the chance of discovering something else.
Would the Empress have squashed the caterpillars if she’d known what would happen twenty-five hundred years after her find? If so, the Sicilians who’d been trying to make silk from spider webs wouldn’t have kidnapped and tortured their neighbors, the Greek weavers, to elicit their knowledge. Instead, the Greek weavers might have lived to a ripe old age, and one of them would perhaps have borne a great-great-grandchild capable of unraveling … the mystery of Dia’s father’s death?
Or, what if the Empress had seen even further into the future? Seven hundred years after the agony of the Greeks, history repeated itself. Now it was the Bengali and Benarsi weavers who suffered. If she’d known how the British would chop off the nimble thumbs that made a resham so fine it could slip through an ear-hole, perhaps the Empress would have trampled over the maggots. Then the subjugated nation’s exchequer would not have been exhausted importing third-rate British silk.
If all that wouldn’t have stopped her, then would the death of Dia’s father?
Dia stopped the clock and reconstructed the scene.
His mangled body drifted down the Indus, past one coastal village after another. The villagers had seen too much destruction to care about yet another corpse. They stood with sticks pressed into the muddy banks and stared in silence. Finally, after four days, word reached a coroner. Mr Mansoor’s bullet-ridden remains were heaved out of the river like sodden fruit and the village psychic swore that for five hundred rupees she could wring him back to life. She demanded one toenail, a dot of his saliva, another dot of his sweat and one of his seed. At the latter a few onlookers snickered. Dia recognized two reporters from the night her father was up in the tree. She lunged for them, but was gently ushered aside by the cook Inam Gul. But she’d already seen the only part of her father left uncovered: his bloated feet, themselves a blue and branching river. Inam Gul tried to cover her ears but she heard the rumors: his kidneys had been shot through with electric currents, his thumbs snapped, arms sliced, and he’d been made to walk on spikes and broken glass. Because of his weight, the barbed bed had cut through bone.
If four thousand years ago the Empress had never discovered silk, where would Dia be now?
The elders tried to teach her that Fate could be postponed – maybe by a year or several hundred, by his naughty sister Chance – but not altered. How one’s destiny unfurled was not to be second-guessed. Perhaps it would take a longer story, with unexpected players, but eventually, it followed the course that it was meant to take.
Eventually. The timing nagged. Who could tell actual time from postponed time? If all detours lead to a predetermined outcome, it hardly mattered, then, if one was early or late, if a meeting was held today or tomorrow, if a letter was couriered or the stamps pocketed. People talked of how the country was in a state of transition. Soon the dust would settle, and miraculously, the violence in Sindh that had claimed her father, among others, would vanish. But they couldn’t say when, how, or who would bring about the course that was ordained. In fact, they liked to add, come to think of it, the dust hadn’t settled anywhere – even the industrialized West had problems. In fact, it had never settled. What else had history shown? The river always flowed into the sea. Which branch entered first was irrelevant. Leave tomorrow, they advised, in God’s hands.
Only her mother believed otherwise. She said the elders wanted to saturate the world in indifference, to wrap a bandage around it that would hold back all the things that could move the country forward. It was all a ploy to keep things working in their own favor. Take marriage, for instance. They wanted it to remain a union that suited them, not the couple. She told Dia the worst thing she could do was listen to that, and perhaps was the only mother in the country to repeatedly warn her to marry only out of love, not obligation.
* * *
With the book in hand, Dia made her way swiftly down the tree.
The garden exploded with the twittering of tufted bulbuls and squawking mynas. Jamun and fig trees were in bloom. She turned down a path that led to the pergola beyond which her family had taken tea every evening, barring rain. With one brother in London, and the other in love and computers, now only she and her mother were left to keep the tradition.
The thought of visiting the silkworm farm tomorrow lifted Dia’s spirits. The caterpillars had begun spinning their cocoons. Though they were notoriously private when conducting their artistry, in previous years she’d learned an art of her own: stillness. She could freeze even in a room with humidity of over seventy per cent, with sweat dripping from her brows, and binoculars swiftly fogging up. She’d watch tomorrow.
But then Dia remembered a promise to a friend. Opening the kitchen door she stopped in mid-stride and cursed, ‘Damn that Nini! Why am I so nice?’
The cook looked up. He hadn’t covered the chapaatis to keep them warm. Dia scowled, wrapping the bread herself, while the cook pretended not to notice. ‘Why am I so nice?’ she repeated for his benefit.
Inam Gul shook his head in agreement, adding, ‘Mahshallah, you are so very nice.’ He was toothless, benevolent, and instantly forgiven.
‘That stupid Nissrine wants me to accompany her to a Quran Khwani tomorrow. She’s going just to look at the dead man’s son. Says he’s supposed to be good-looking and is studying in America. Can you imagine how shameless she’s become?’
He commiserated, ‘You’re too nice.’ A dribble of yogurt hung on his chin.
‘Wipe your chin or Hassan will get angry – first you let his chapaatis get cold, then you finish all the yogurt.’
The cook licked away the evidence. ‘I had just a teaspoon.’ His arthritic fingers stuck a point in the air, indicating the size of the spoon.
‘That’s the second lie you’ve told today. Since one was for me, I’ll tell one for you too.’
Grinning, he opened the refrigerator and began scooping up the last of the elixir.
Dia continued, ‘I’ll go for exactly one hour. If Nini wants to stay longer, she’s on her own. I can’t believe it! If she has no respect for herself, at least she should respect the dead. What’s she going to do, pick him up, with his father still warm in the grave?’
When the plastic yogurt pouch was empty, the cook chucked it in the wastebasket, hiding it deep among the waste. ‘The dead will be watching.’
‘Maybe you could send her away when she comes to get me. You know, say I’ve got diarrhea or something. She wouldn’t want me embarrassing her by running to the toilet every few minutes.’ The cook enjoyed that. ‘Or maybe I should embarrass her?’ He enjoyed that even more. His fingers caressed the air as he tried to picture it. Dia was inspired. ‘Yes, that’s what I should do. But how? What should I do? Help me think of something to mess up her plan.’
The cook licked his lips and thought seriously for a while. He scratched the white wisps of hair that puffed up around his head like down and hesitated, mumbling again, ‘The dead will be watching.’
‘Tomorrow, I promise, a lot more yogurt,’ Dia urged.
He whispered the scheme in her ear.
DAANISH (#ulink_75a80784-90db-5722-bf25-74d770d3c6f8)
1 Toward Karachi (#ulink_61d4408a-dcf5-5a17-a805-b06fc7645125)
At the time the cook plotted against him, Daanish awoke some thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic. Once sleep receded, he returned to his earlier occupation of churning over the same conundrum as Dia: the passage of time. Neither would ever know they churned simultaneously. He didn’t know her. He could hardly say he knew himself, strung as he was atop a plump canopy of clouds that glittered red and gold, the sinking sun bobbing along beside. Below, hidden from view, tossed the ocean once before traversed, in the opposite direction. That had been three years ago.
Twenty-one hours earlier, he’d been boarding the Peter Pan bus from Amherst to New York City. Liam had seen him off. He’d said, ‘Going home’s jarring enough for me and mine’s just a few hours away.’
Liam was not given to gloom and Daanish wished he’d bid a more reassuring goodbye. ‘You sound like the angel of fucking death.’
This elicited an equine grin. ‘I mean: going home means facing you’ve changed. Listen to yourself. You never swore before coming here.’
‘I did. You just didn’t understand.’ Daanish nudged him fondly and saluted farewell.
‘Write if you can. Don’t be a stranger.’ Liam stepped back as Daanish mounted the bus. ‘And,’ he caught Daanish’s eye, ‘I’m really sorry, man.’
On the ride to Port Authority Liam’s counsel wove in and out of the dogwood branches lining the interstate, the square suburban yards dotted with plastic bunnies and dwarves, the stores with names like Al Bum’s and Pet Smart, the clockwork efficiency with which passengers embarked and disembarked. Don’t be a stranger, said the disheveled porter who shuffled after him on to the frenzy of 42nd Street. Don’t be a stranger, frowned the driver of the taxi Daanish flagged down halfway to Grand Central. Don’t be a stranger, repeated the manhole covers bouncing under the weight of the fastest cars Daanish had ever seen: Mustang, Viper, BMW, Lexus. And when he finally reached his terminal at Kennedy Airport, the rows of angry travelers turned to him and gestured, Don’t be a stranger. The flight is twelve hours delayed!
Khurram, the passenger assigned the seat next to his, returned from the toilet. He reeked of in-flight cologne and other treats. ‘Luckily, not too bad,’ he exclaimed, beaming. He was referring to their prior discussion of whether, nearly seven hours into the flight, the toilets would be tolerable. Normally, within the first hour, they became open gutters in the sky. The toilet vomited chunks of brown, yellow and red, with the flush serving only to chop up the chunks. Reams of toilet paper poured out of the waste disposal and twisted across the cabinets as if the passenger who sat on the toilet seat had suddenly discovered graffiti. Used diapers filled the sink. However, those who braved this torture could always be assured a generous supply of cologne.
‘I think it’s Givenchy,’ Khurram continued happily, patting the fragrance deeper into his round cheeks.
He must have poured an entire bottle on himself, thought Daanish, feeling his chest contract. ‘You mean you think it was Givenchy.’
In the aisle seat sat Khurram’s small, self-contained mother, with feet neatly tucked under her kurta. The son, easily twice her girth, leaned across Daanish and pointed at the sun bleeding scarlet over the world. ‘So beautiful,’ he shook his head approvingly. ‘You getting best view.’
Was this a hint? Should he offer to swap? And be wedged between a bursting rumen and piercing female eyes? Not a chance. He looked out the window and said, ‘Somewhere in the world, the sun is just waking up.’
Khurram leaned further and raised a hand as if to exclaim, Wah! Just imagine!
Daanish was thinking that there were some people who rode the subway all day simply because they had nowhere to get off. He was beginning to enjoy the length of his journey. He was afraid of landing.
Had his father ever felt this way on one of his numerous voyages around the world? Had he dreaded returning to his wife and son? Did travel do that? Daanish couldn’t say. He’d become a traveler only three years ago and then been grounded: classes, work-study, papers, girlfriends. Now he was jolted again. In eleven hours, he could have all that he’d left behind. No, not all. Not his father.
Down in Karachi, at this moment, was the Qul. Perhaps his father’s spirit dwelled among the scarlet clouds, and would drift through this very plane. The inch-long plane bang in the middle of the Atlantic floating in the screen of the satellite monitor. Daanish was inside it too. He could wave to himself. He did.
Khurram looked up and grinned genially. He was happily consumed by a slew of fancy gadgets purchased in the land left behind: a discman, hand-held Nintendo, mobile phone, talking calculator. He warmly demonstrated the marvels of each invention. The talking calculator in particular amused him, so Daanish punched numbers and a deep voice announced them legato for all those too moronic to know any better: one-thou-sand-nine-hun-dred-and-nine-ty-two mi-nus one-thou-sand-nine-hun-dred-and-eigh-ty-nine e-quals three.
‘Well,’ smiled Daanish, ‘I’m glad someone else can verify how many years I’ve been away.’
He was offered the discman and pocket disc album. Most of the CDs were country, a few pop, and one rap. He pictured Khurram first in cowboy gear, then gyrating with Madonna, then dissing mother-fuckers. He laughed. Don’t be a stranger. Well, Khurram in costume was no stranger than American yuppies chanting Hare Krishna, or smacking the sitar like a percussion instrument. No stranger than Becky inviting him to a party because he made her look ethnic. ‘My friends think it’s about time an exotic face entered our circle,’ she’d casually explained. No stranger than Heather and her girlfriends dancing around corn crops to beckon the earth-god, ‘just like the American Indians did’. She was an atheist, she equated his religion with fanaticism, she could not explain the origins of the name of her home state, Massachusetts, but she really understood those Indians.
‘Your choice?’ he enquired of the Ice-T record.
‘Oh no, my niece’s. She said it is very good and I would like.’ As a second thought, he added, ‘My mother and I were visiting Bhai Jaan in Amreeka. He has a business. Very successful.’
‘What business?’ asked Daanish. But Khurram, lost in his toys, didn’t answer.
The satellite monitor showed Daanish in a bean-pod gliding over the Bay of Biscay. He looked out the window but it was too dark so his full-grown self had to believe the miniature self.
His father had flown over this very shore nine years ago, to attend a medical conference in Nantes, France. He’d spent his last hour there doing what he always did on a visit to any coast: combing the beach for Daanish’s shell-collection. He’d not found much: a few painted tops, limpets and winkles. The real treasures came later, on his trips to the warmer Pacific. Some of those beauties were strung around Daanish’s neck. He twirled them in a habitual gesture Nancy likened to a woman playing with her hair. The larger shells he’d left in Karachi. In about ten more hours, he could see them again. This filled him with more joy than the prospect of uniting with anything else at home, even Anu. Then it terrified him. He’d hold his shells in a house that no longer held his father and where he’d hold his mother for the first time since she’d become a widow. He feared she’d cling.
He tugged at the necklace. Khurram’s mother, with a face as crumpled as a used paper bag, leaned across Khurram exclaiming that the shells made beautiful music. Daanish unclasped the necklace and offered it for her inspection. The woman’s thin, serrated lips sucked and pouted while she fingered the shells as if they were prayer beads.
When she paused at a tusk-like one Daanish told her a story about a diver who’d been paralyzed by the sting of a glory-of-the-seas cone, shaped just like the orange cone she was rubbing. Seventy feet beneath the surface of the sea, he’d hovered in total darkness, knowing he could never kick his way back up to life. When the body was found the oxygen tank was completely empty. Daanish tried to imagine the terror of hanging in a frigid dark sea without air. As if watching myself diminish, he thought. As if the dying could actually see their fate: it could shrink into a two-inch cone in their hands. He shuddered, wondering what his father had seen in his last hour.
The woman was nodding sagely. Her fingers wrapped around each piece, the grooves of her flesh searching new grooves to slide along.
He offered her names. ‘That one that looks cracked my father found in Japan. It’s a slit shell. Those two dainty pink ones are precious wentletraps. They used to be so rare the Chinese would make counterfeits from rice paste and sell them for a fortune. But now the counterfeits have become rare.’ Daanish had been given both the real and the false. He asked the woman to tell them apart.
She smiled but wouldn’t play along. Daanish’s names and histories mattered little to her. It was enough that the shells felt good and made beautiful music. After rubbing each one, she returned the necklace and abruptly asked, ‘What do you do in Amreeka?’
‘I study.’
‘Are you going to be a doctor or engineer?’
‘Um. I don’t know.’
Her shrewd eyes darted across his face. Then she turned away, back to her silent place. Occasionally, she looked around the plane and boldly examined the others as if chairing a secret inquisition.
It would have served no purpose telling her he wanted to be a journalist. She’d question the profitability of his choice. He’d been questioning this himself. Like Pakistan, the US was not the place to study fair and free reporting. In the former, he risked having his bones broken. In the latter, his spirit.
But journalism intrigued him for the opposite reason his other passion, shell-collecting, did. One kept him in tune with his surroundings while the other demanded dissonance. One was beautiful on the outside while the other insisted he probe into the poisonous interior, like a diver. He’d tried to explain this to a father who’d grown increasingly unhappy with the choice. In one of their last discussions, Daanish retorted that the profession was in his blood.
His soft-spoken, introverted grandfather had been the co-founder of one of the first Muslim newspapers in India. The paper had played a major role in advocating the cause of the Pakistan Movement, and been praised by the Quaid-i-Azam himself. Daanish was taught early that in British India, when it came to the written word, Muslims lagged far behind the Hindus and other communities. Prior to the 1930s, they didn’t own even one daily newspaper. His grandfather had helped establish the first. As its maxim, it quoted a member of the All-India Muslim League: To fight political battles without a newspaper is like going to war without weapons. The paper sharpened its weapons. The British responded by banning it, imprisoning Daanish’s grandfather, and leaving the rest to the Muslims themselves: the co-founder was shot dead by a fellow-Muslim in his office.
After Pakistan’s birth, his grandfather was released and the family moved to the new homeland. But ten years later, for reproaching the country’s first military coup, he was again imprisoned.
Decades later, in his last letter to him, Daanish’s father wrote, ‘Do you want to throw away the opportunity to educate yourself in the West by returning to the poverty of my roots? You will fight Americans, only to find you also have to fight your own people. This is not what your grandfather languished in jail for. He once warned me, “Only the blind replay history.” Think.’
Daanish hadn’t answered him. He hadn’t explained that when it came to a Muslim press, it wasn’t just the subcontinent that was impoverished. He had only to dig into the reporting on the Gulf War to know it was won with weapons that exploded not just on land but on paper. Yet few fought back.
Next to him, Khurram snored. His Nintendo showed a score of 312. The discman was turned off. Daanish considered borrowing it, maybe listening to Ice-T. Freedom of Speech … Just Watch What You Say. When he’d first heard those words he knew they must reach Professor Wayne. So he included them in a term paper. Wayne slashed out the citation in thick red lines and added no pop references. Daanish argued that the coverage on the war was at least as pop as a rap song. Later, foolishly, he wrote about it to his father. The doctor advised him to change to medicine or risk a life of regret.
They were entering Germany, journeying through a tunnel of shifting darkness, now black, now thin sepia. Frankfurt in twenty minutes. The ladies and gentlemen of the bean-pod were requested to kindly fasten their seatbelts and extinguish cigarettes.
‘We’re landing,’ Daanish’s companion awoke and beamed.
‘Sleep well?’ asked Daanish.
‘Oh yes, I always do.’
The bean-pod slanted downward. Daanish’s stomach lurched. The lights of Frankfurt danced outside his window. Mini-wheels grazed the runway. Lilliputian engines slowed, and then there was another announcement. Only those ladies and gentlemen holding American, Canadian, or European passports could disembark for the duration of the stopover. Those naughty others might escape, so they must stay on board.
