Splinter

‘It was 9/11 wasn’t it? I know that’s what started it all.’ He said in that new defeated voice of his which irks her more than the previous tones; the hurt/bewildered, the sullen/angry, the can-you-see-how-patient-I-am-being? She finds herself retaliating by missing her father’s voice, that authoritarian boom which brooks no argument, the clipped cool diction of a man in charge. She misses other sounds too, like the breathy inshallah and mashallah at the beginning and end of sentences, and her mother’s melodic chant from the dinning room where she reads surahs every evening.

She shook her head impatiently, his words worse than salt, worse than chili pepper. Causing all her little annoyances to flare up with a vengeance. What were all those years of talking for then? Those intense issue-filled discussions which kept them awake into the half-lit hours of dawn. The amazed smiles they shared when they would see the first bits of flickering light steal in through the dorm-room window. Those reckless moments robbed from precious hours of research; their blue-lit faces resting on the backs of the library carrels, inches apart. Breathing into his face and inhaling the minty tang of his exhalations, feeling they were truly twinned with every hyper-caffeinated word they exchanged. What was the point if now she must let things out in cautious measures? She stares at him balefully and expels a sentence of six untruthful words: “Of course not. It’s us.”

They were the couple, everyone said so, back in those days. The lightness of him, the gold hair and blue eyes around her dusky skin, like the demarcation of borders of countries in an atlas, setting her aglow. Her lilting tones, impossible to remove the sing-song from her voice entirely even after so many years of struggling to, melding with his New England twang that to her still sounds like acorns falling on rustling red leaves and Maine lobsters splashing around in the bottom of hallowed-out boats. They make a strange song together, a ghazal-ballad, the restless lament of distanced lovers.

Later on, alone on the four-foot slab of dusty concrete they graciously call their balcony, emptying her lungs of smoke that floated away in blue-white coils, she had to admit to herself that it was after 9/11 that the little things started to get to her. The way his eyes would widen sorrowfully and his tone lower to almost whisper-strength when PST-afflicted people spoke of firefighters and crumbling towers while streaks of wet spread across their faces. Why do they hate us? Why do they hate us Aaleen? That question always turned to her. Why me? she would want to shout. He’d get this whiteness around his eyes, like a mark of pain setting into his skin and his lips would go all spongy. The 9/11 mania, the group catharsis which seemed to infect everyone they knew would set her throat closing, she’d stick to small quick nods and uh-huhs, didn’t know who to look in the eye while John played sweetly with her fingers and was sincere and rational as he spouted on about frustrated ambitions, super-power domination, splinter-group militancy and rising insurgencies. She almost hated him in those moments.

The blondness of his hair against his collar, surely not normal for a grown man to have hair that fair? All her women friends were frank about their dyed golden locks, told her that blondes grow mousy with age..so how come the years hadn’t darkened him? Her arm against his, chocolate on yogurt, caramel syrup on milk-foam. Her skin seemed to grow darker with the years, with each day they spent together. Their hair on the pillows at night, her black streaks snaking out like alien tendrils to seize his short sun-streaked mop. One night in a Vermont woodman’s lodge he had kissed his way up her lower legs and told her she smelt of honey and coconuts; a palm-tree breeze ruffled his collar bone and settled on the bone jutting out at her hips as she relished her exoticness.

‘Why didn’t you ever learn anything about cricket?’ her tone peevish, blistering.
‘What?’ he looks up from the Sox game, bewildered.
‘It’s the one sport I really used to love.’
‘Sweetheart if you want we can try and get some of the Asian sports channels on satellite. No problem, I’ll look into it.’
She wants to hit him, smash something, scream a bit.
It’s her fault anyway, she never tried to teach him about stumpings and leg-before-wickets and silly mid-ons or offs. He’s never even heard of Imran Khan and in all those grad-school years of watching the ball games at Fenway Park when had she ever bothered to mention his name either? It makes her seethe now, it’s like cricket and guilty memories and being made into the local authority on Islam are all tied into one knot which he has unpick if he wants to pass the test.

She met him junior year at the Palestine Solidarity March organizing committee meeting. They screamed themselves hoarse all the way to Washington on the mini-bus: Hey Hey Ho Ho, we support the PLO. She loved the black and white keffiya tucked securely around his neck and his cherubic face which he got mercilessly teased for. They got married in the second year of his PhD programme, in winter break when they flew to Karachi and he briefly morphed into Yahya Mohammad during their vows while she peeped out of a crinkly red veil and felt like a Christmas ornament.

He loved biryani, that was what he always said. It was true; she has seen him in the kitchen with eyes shut and nose poised over the large steel pan which had the rice simmering inside and bits of dough clinging to the outside, the old-fashioned way of keeping in steam, the way her mother had taught her. The spices would be in her hair, turmeric stains on her fingers and the garlic-stink coming out of her pores but he would wrap his arms around her right there in the kitchen so that she felt like one of the spicy botis, waiting for him to suck the marrow right out of her.

At Dubai airport on the way back from vacation in Pakistan he almost punched a man. She felt tired and listlessly drank her Costa Coffee while he vented spleen.
‘How could he wear that Allie?’ I mean the idiot is in the middle of an Arab country.’
She shrugged. ‘There was no point getting into a fight with him. I don’t even know why you bothered.’

‘Patriotic my ass! What a jerk. I just wish that some of these other people had the guts to say something.’

He stared at an Emirati man in white sitting a few tables away with his hijab clad wife clutching her Prada bag, three chubby kids digging into chocolate croissants. His American self bristling at their apathy for God’s sake. He reminded her of a high-school athlete, a jock-side to him that she wished she could be proud of. She can see the things that flicker across his face, read the thoughts there even as she has learned to shield her own.

They had been standing behind the guy in the T-shirt, a shirt with a map on it, the whole Muslim world stretching from eastern to western borders and yet looking like a paltry insignificant thing, muffled by the superimposed shades of a shadowy flag, all brilliant blue and red and stars and stripes. A lovely statement, so easily understood, but just in case you missed the point there were words there too: Operation Enduring Freedom emblazoned over the whole thing. It was all about ownership, that’s what Aaleen got and what John tried not to. No decent American would kick a sick dog or kick a dog at all for that matter. Because after all John couldn’t start hating himself could he, not the way that she was starting to, easier to rage at some unknown identity-threatened fellow American. Hate the ignorant pig but don’t throw the baby out with the bath-water is what John would say to Aaleen if he could still read her face like he once used to. If John hates the strutting and the cockiness and the bullying, well what she hates is a self-belief that is so ingrained and innate it is lapped up with mother’s milk. She comes from a place where doubting yourself and scorning others is the norm; where you learn early on to teeter with the changing winds and never cling to firmly to any one thing

She loved John and the hot-dog man who trundled his wares right outside her office every afternoon promptly at 1pm. She loved the way he called her honey and had the kosher bun fully loaded and waiting for her before her feet hit the pavement. She loved the jostling line of cabbies outside central station, the fact that the men spoke to each other in about ten different languages and yet their tongues all echoed the staccato beat of the city; long gone was the softer paddy-field, sugar-cane, corn-tortilla, hot slow afternoon chitter-chatter. She even loved the construction workers who yelled ‘Chiquita Chiquita!’ as she hurried by, happy to be in her chiquita-skin, glad to have left behind the young girl from St. Joseph’s College with long plaits dangling down her shoulders and starched white cloth covering her budding pubescent breasts. Glad to have left behind the scenes of a mother in a misty spice-infused kitchen and a father in the sanctity of a far-removed study reading newspapers.

‘Oh wow! That colour looks so good on you.’ Jean who is John’s recently acquired TA says wide-eyed and gushing, as Aaleen stares down at her orange blouse and wonders why she hears the you stressed more than the so.

This same girl had looked equally wide-eyed when they had met a month ago during the Dean’s informal afternoon tea.

‘I didn’t know your wife was foreign John! She’s gorgeous!’

Aaleen loathing her name again, so easily turned into Aileen, Eileen, Ellen even, feels as though she is caught fooling people, playing a sleight of hand. She would have preferred not to have to cope with that grating itch she gets when confronted by people’s pleasant yet surprised expressions when they meet her for the first time. Maybe she should be something more obviously different like Fatima or Aliyah, but even those names have been taken over and absorbed into this country which leeches things from everywhere and spits them out indifferently.

It’s stuck under her fingernail; she cannot get it out. Tweezers held shakily in her right hand are useless with their blunt painful stabs. Her second tool of choice is a tiny pinhead, burnt black by the match that sterilized it, eased under the skin and leaving a smeary red trail in its wake. She is sure that all this probing has done is shove the splinter further into the pink and purple recesses, the defenseless meaty bits of her. Her hands and fingers covered with a million points of sensation, flaring nerve-ends that send signals along neural pathways which lead right into some deep grey bit of her brain are all now screaming pain. She uses the fingernails of her other hand to try and ease the sucker out, but no such luck. Now she imagines the bit of something, (wood? not sure, but what ever it is) rotting within her and leading to blood poisoning, septicemia, infections that will bring swelling and fever and boils which will burst and spew their filthy fluid.

‘Show it to me.’

John takes her hand without waiting for any reply, you don’t need responses or permissions at this stage of life, there’s some comfort in that. Holds her fingers steady under the halogen bulb angled over the desk covered with scribbled bits of his lecture notes and a cup smeared with coffee dregs. She feels a bit of a sting as he does something, probes her finger with sudden force.

‘It’s out. See?’ he holds up something balanced on his forefinger, a speck which he flicks away.

‘All better.’ He gives her hand one last squeeze before turning back to the papers.

John has always been a walking cornucopia of first aid treatments and techniques. Small cuts, insect bites, frozen shoulders are all the micro-events of life that bring out the best in him. His hands are deft and quick with the application of band-aids, the pouring out of measured doses of bright-pink Pepto and the opening of child-proof Tylenol caps. He murmurs reassuring words, firm words that tell her she will be just fine as soon as she imbibes his prescribed cure. She used to find it such a refreshing contrast to the doleful fussing of her mother and grandmother,
‘Headache?’ Nani would purse her wrinkled lips and shake her head as Aaleen lay in a miserable heap on her bed strewn with her school-books. ‘What did you think would happen after eating your lunch with a frown on your face?’

It was never about the medicine that might help you or finding a quick cure; it was a forensic search for the root cause of the ailment. It meant studying the body from head to toe, scrutinizing the whole day and how it was spent in a careful balance of good acts and thoughts or misdeeds. Illness came from some deeper affliction, something hidden beneath the surface of things so just handling the most obvious symptom was a stupid waste of time Nani said.

Stomach ache was because of worry as anyone would tell you, left-arm pain was because of some deep sadness not tended to, neck stiffness or pins-and-needles in your legs came from guilty idleness, fever because of unrestrained bad temper. Boils or blisters or puffy oozing sores were the result of eating too many mangoes on a hot day without thinking about the cool glass of milk that should always accompany the consumption of mangoes so really they were because of thoughtlessness. Cramps were the worst thing of course, for cramps attacked you for only one reason and that was for bottling in felt injustices.

She accepts all of John’s medicines and never tells him of her family’s home-made diagnoses that she endured for years. Once in the midst of an awful episode of bad sushi induced food poisoning, retching miserably into the toilet-bowl she had told him that in her mother-tongue instead of saying ‘I feel sick’ you said ‘my heart has gone bad’. He laughed at that, said it was colourful and poetic.

John wants her to be a surgeon. He tells her that the bits that are causing this drift can be dealt with, handled. He wants to have those things carefully incised and then to go back to the casual intimacy, the ease of being a couple who are on the same path. She knows that surgery is just not an option, not unless he can peel off his entire skin and don hers instead. The books and the Urdu lessons and the ACLU special lecture series on Islamophobia he spear-headed are just not going to be enough. The signing of campus petitions ensuring foreign students be allowed to wear their veils and standing up to the blank-eyed airport officials harassing an elderly bearded man in wrinkled shalwar are not enough.

‘It’s band-aids John, it’s all just band-aids,’ she says to him cruelly and even that does not deflate him. She can see in his eyes the flickering thought that maybe there is no hope for her, that she is delving head-first into the sort of chaotic madness they were also unified against.

She sits down heavily on the top step, inches from the apartment’s door. Paper bags leaking chicken fluid and the aroma of Florida oranges are strewn around her. You could so easily be invisible in this city; it is one of the things she has always loved about it. At the corner shop no one even glanced her way as she perused the aisles ticking of the mental list of what was needed for dinner. The guys having their heated conversation near the check out could so easily have been tuned out, but her ears now seem intent on finding painful things.

The groceries are left decorating the door step, so that when John will come back some hours later he will squash a bunch of grapes and leave a trail of purple juice running down the hallway into the kitchen. He will set the things on the counter and search the rooms for her and not finding her will get anxious, push his fingers through his hair. He will dial her on the cell phone and its endless ring and then the sound of the message service coming on will make the pulse in his temple beat a bit harder. He will return to the groceries and start methodically sorting them, wetting his fingers from the condensation on the milk carton and tell himself that she is all right.

She is sitting near the water on a park-bench. The sun is out and the air smells as fresh as though it has blown in from a country lane. Runners, cyclists and dog-walkers are a passing sound and light show of this city she lives in. A man in black sweat pants and hoodie struts by jiggling his head and snapping his fingers in time to some tune no one else can hear. Aaleen has sat on this bench a hundred times or more; its grooves are as familiar as the lumpy cushions on the couch they bought the year they both graduated and which still takes up most of the space in their living room. She closes her eyes and hangs her head over the back of the bench, her hair trailing down is speckled red by the sun. She feels just as though she is sitting under the jamun tree in Nani’s Clifton house. When she was a child she would stuff her mouth with the pulpy fruit that stained her lips and fingers purple and then climb to the second highest branch and hang upside down with her knees tucked behind her. She would let her arms drop down towards the dusty earth bellow and as she swing there she was certain that everything great was still ahead of her.

There is a shift of weight and the park bench creaks slightly and when she opens her eyes John is sitting next to her holding out a cup of her favourite take away coffee.