Trespassing. Uzma Aslam Khan
Daanish’s birth, her ovaries had had to be removed. It seemed that in her presence, the women always took particular pleasure in repeating the names of those who’d better proven their reproductive worth. But they would never have the pink bloom on her cheeks that her pure blood gifted her.
Across the table, the increasingly incensed doctor was saying, ‘What is the point of banning horse racing? I tell you, people will continue to do as they please but under the table. The Prime Minister is sowing the seeds of corruption with one hand and buying off Islamists with the other.’
‘We’re heading for another military coup,’ sighed the Iranian. ‘Another US-backed martial regime.’
The meal arrived. Hers was placed before her: stuffed shellfish. She disliked eating fish. She preferred them drifting between her ankles, at the mouth of the cave. They were silver and gold then, but cooked they simply stank.
‘Don’t use the fork,’ the doctor leaned across and whispered.
What was she to do, eat with her fingers, here? She flushed. Some of the others heard and laughed – at her.
‘The spoon,’ he urged.
She glanced nervously around the table, and her worst fears were realized: all eyes rested on her plate. She broke the cheese crust with the end of a spoon. It was surprisingly cold. Scooping up a small morsel she began nibbling miserably. Then she noticed something like a bullet where the fish’s belly must have been. She did not want any more.
The doctor boomed loudly, ‘Don’t you like it?’ Laughter.
‘Not hungry,’ she muttered.
‘Just two more bites,’ he urged.
She picked up the spoon again and probed around the bullet. There was another one. And another. Her face would explode with the blood rushing into it. Giving her husband a last, desperate look, she plucked out the first lump with her fingers. Seven more rose with it. The crowd gasped: she held a string of gray pearls.
He helped her wipe them, then fell into a lengthy description of the rarity and size of Tahitian pearls. ‘I’m afraid the meal is uncooked,’ he said more to them than her. ‘I couldn’t possibly have had them bake it!’ Uproar. Applause. Her hands and clothes a sticky mess, smelling putrid. Her insides as hard and lifeless as the gems. He couldn’t afford this. She’d tried to tell him as much each time he gave her gifts. So now he performed in public.
‘How eccentric!’ a sophisticated wife shrieked, eyeing the doctor with a mixture of fascination and horror.
‘How lucky,’ the one who overdid it whooped.
And the one who met the film star at the parlor declared, ‘What an entertaining husband he must be!’
As their enthusiasm grew, she understood they expected her to wear the necklace. She left for the toilet, returning with the polished stones around her neck. Even when dessert arrived no one noticed she had not eaten a thing, though her neck was the object of the ladies’ minute, chilling study, and the doctor of their coquetry and awe.
But then the following morning, optimism returned.
The six-year-old Daanish was in the television lounge with the doctor. She worked in the kitchen, preparing a picnic for the cove. Woozy with the heat, she decided to carry the small tub of lentils she was washing to the breezy lounge. On the television appeared a dusty old white man. His fingers and face were chafed beyond any others she’d seen in his race. Nor did his voice carry the smooth, metallic timbre typical of goras. Most amazing of all was what he did with his hands: exactly what she did! He dipped a crewel-like pan into a river, brought up sand, and sifted – but for what?
‘Gold,’ the doctor explained to Daanish. ‘He’s content to live a life waiting for the odd nugget to fill his cup. Though he’s spent over half a century doing it, he’s still as poor as the dirt that hides his fortune. Some men won’t give up.’
Well! thought Anu, her fingers pausing in the yellow-tinted water. She studied the prospector’s sturdy, startling blue eyes and ropy physique. She followed the cracked gray mouth as it spewed strange, chewy sounds. Her fingers idled pensively. She smiled. For a brief, exciting moment she connected with a man. Not the one stretched across most of the couch (who’d still not noticed her bunched at the end) but the one from a different world. The one who understood that it was the spirit with which she waited that made the effort worthwhile. That commitment itself was reward.
A commercial break. A cheerful Anu packed the lunch and tea. The prospector was a sign of better things to come.
It was time to go to the beach. On the way out, the doctor asked her to wear the pearls. Her face fell. The shame of yesterday threatened to rekindle. Should she ignore him? Deciding against it, Anu hurriedly clasped the string around her neck.
At the cove, the doctor and Daanish cleaned their masks, adjusted their snorkels and were gone. She settled in the cave with her lace, working today on a tablecloth. Once again, she wondered what they would see. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine it. But something was wrong. Her sewing was uninspired. The cave, instead of being the respite she’d known it to be, felt alien. The giant’s foot pressed even closer to her head. She knew what it was. She was feeling the weight of the pearls. They circled her collarbone like lead pellets, each to her what it must have been to the crustacean itself: a blemish, a pustulate growth. Sand in her rediscovered joy. Cysts on her ovaries. She tried focusing on the salt blowing on her lips that was always strangely healing, and on the guipure in her hands, but neither offered any comfort. She thought of the prospector with hands like hers, always sifting, searching. But even he eluded her now. She put away the cloth and began laying out the sandwiches.
Daanish returned, shivering, shrieking, ‘The water’s getting cold!’ She warmed him with a towel. At the mouth of the cave, the doctor dried himself in the sun. Daanish joined him.
‘Come and drink your milk,’ she summoned Daanish. To the doctor, she announced the tea.
He stayed outside. So did Daanish, who began lifting stones, peering into tide pools, digging.
‘You don’t want sand to dirty your milk, do you?’ she called.
He looked at his father, awaiting his direction. The man gazed moodily away.
She repeated, ‘The tea will get cold.’
For a moment, nothing. Then an impatient, ‘Can’t you see I’m not ready yet?’
She waited.
In amongst the neritic clutter around the doctor’s hairy legs the boy declared he’d found a prize. He presented it to his father, who held it up. From inside the cave Anu could see the shell was thin and petal-shaped. The sun filtered right through. It shimmered like a translucent slice of skin.
‘A paper nautilus,’ said the doctor. ‘Aristotle called it an argonaut. I’m uncertain why. Perhaps it had something to do with Jason and the Golden Fleece. Do you know the story?’
Of course not, thought Anu. When it came to questions, the doctor heavily favored the rhetorical kind. Daanish blinked at him lovingly. The child had buried himself in the sand. A hint of his red swimming trunks poked through. He’d washed the nautilus clean with the water in his pail. It glistened like a ribbed eggshell. He took it back from his father gingerly, as if afraid it would slip from his fingers like sea foam. ‘No,’ he whispered, afraid his breath might blow it all away.
‘The Argo was the name of the ship that carried Jason. Those who went with him were called Argonauts – sailors of the Argo.’
Explain, explain. That’s what the doctor loved to do. But only she knew the things he could not explain.
‘And if you look at it this way,’ he plucked it again from his son, who licked his sandy lips nervously, ‘with the narrow end down, then, it looks like a billowing sail, doesn’t it?’ Daanish winked, trying hard to see it. ‘The animal that makes it is an octopus. Riding along with it in her arms she must look like a sailor.