Nabil and Fatima

1986

I saw them first when Nabil drove around our neighborhood in his new blue Suzuki motorcycle with his sister, Fatima, in the backseat. Nabil had a smile, with a sense of mischief, and his green eyes could see through my pretend indifference.

"I am from Kabul," he had said, coming up to me one winter morning, covering the short distance between us and the vast cultural mores that divided our upper-class wealthy neighborhood in Delhi, "I am Nabil."

You don't talk to an Afghani, my mother had warned repeatedly.

"What is your name?" he asked in English as we both waited for the "U special", the bus that took us the North Campus of Delhi University.

I don't know if Nabil noticed the white knuckled grip as I clutched my jhola bag.

When I told him my name, he sounded exasperated, "Why do Indians have such long names!"

He never called me by my name.

Instead, he called me "Shahira" meaning "one who is poised to gain much fame" he had explained with a small laugh.

Nabil was attending evening classes at Delhi University to finish his degree in English literature which he had started at the University in Kabul before fleeing for India.

"I want to be a writer," he had said one day while we waited for the bus.

"What will you write about?" I had asked, finding it hard to imagine him reading stories in English to a roomful of writers and poets in Kabul.

Nabil must have noticed the half amused look on my face. He had retorted with equal amusement, "I will write of Afghanis who come and live among foreigners like you."

Whenever we had a chance, always at the bus stop, always in the mornings, we talked about our shared love of J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye". We vehemently disagreed about the book's many possible interpretations but agreed that each of us had a bit of Holden Caulfield in us.

Nabil and Fatima lived three houses down from mine. In Kabul, they had lived comfortable middle-class lives; their father, a physician, had been working for the UN. Their mother had prided herself to be a tribal princess with lineage to the Mughals of Samarkand.

After the Soviet invasion of 1979, many Afghan families, like Nabil and Fatima's, began to arrive in Delhi. The early refugees had to bribe border officials to buy a safe passage to India. The family had money only for Nabil and Fatima's trip. Their parents stayed back in Kabul hoping to find a way to India later in the year. They traveled in buses and paid taxis plying between Afghanistan and Pakistan into Punjab. In India, they received generous monthly subsistence allowances from both the US state department and UNHCR. Many arriving refugees eventually hoped to immigrate to US, UK, Germany, and other Western countries.

"Come and visit my sister," Nabil had said one morning.

I went over to their barsati floor apartment that evening. It was clean and well-lit but minimally furnished. Fatima offered me showrma she had cooked and showed the shawl she was stitching.

She was younger than Nabil and wanted to go to college. She was finding it difficult to get admission because she had no proof of finishing high school. She wanted to study medicine, she said, like her father.

Nabil showed me family photographs and the few possessions they brought with them across the borders – a finely embroidered prayer mat, a gold cross pen, Nabil's books – Salinger, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fatima's knitting kit. They had few friends in Delhi, some Afghan families they knew from Kabul and some they befriended upon arrival.

"Indians don't talk to us," Fatima had said accusingly.

"And we don't talk to Indians," Nabil had interjected, casting his eyes on Fatima with gentle admonishment.

Nabil wanted to walk me home afterward.

"No!" I said.

I could tell that he had heard the tinge of panic in my voice. I felt embarrassed.

I was leaving to study in America, I told Nabil at the bus stop the following spring. He smiled but this time with a soft shade of sadness. He had told me about wanting to go study Literature in New York and "visit New Hampshire" where J.D. Salinger lived.

"I will come and visit you Shahira," he said, touching my arms lightly for the first time, "maybe you and I will go have some chai without your mother knowing." His smile widened. For a moment we both were delighted to transgress cultural mores.

"Will you write to me?" he asked. I sensed a slight urgency in his voice.

I wrote to Nabil Siddiqui three letters after I came to America. I never received a reply.

2008
The circuitous lanes of Lajpat Nagar, the crowded market in South Delhi, are always teeming with pedestrians. I enjoy shopping in Lajpat Nagar, not for the things I buy, but for soaking the noise, to smell the incense, to watch the women haggle with paanwalas. The bindis, wedding bangles, sunglasses, belts, sandals, and garlands made of marigold, cover every space of the open-air market.

It can be hot, even in winters, in Lajpat Nagar.

I walk up to a vendor on a shaded side street, selling sugarcane juice on his cart and order a glass. Behind him, I notice, a busy makeshift food stall serving a family of six. A few rickety chairs and tables are formed together and an earthen oven burns on coal in the corner. I see a man placing a series of dough on the oven as he keeps a watchful eye on the grilled skewers of meat.

A woman, in Salwar Kameej, walks up to the family seated on the table and serves them sheesh kebabs and naan.

I see her small frame and the white chunni carelessly draped over her head. She looks tired; the hand-stitched shawl falls off her shoulder, as she struggles with the plates. She looks up and catches my eye. She asks lackadaisically, more out of habit than intent, "Memsahib, do you want some kebabs?"

"No," I say. She peers at me and looks away. She notices how tightly I am holding the glass of juice in my hand. "You should return your glass to that bhai over there," she reminds me in fluent Hindi.

It can't be, I think.

"Fatima?" I hear my voice break in recognition.

She turns around; her tired brown eyes size me several seconds. I expect her to walk away. Instead, she lingers.

"You look the same," she says, finally.

I don't have words.

"How are you?" I ask.

Fatima smiles Nabil's smile. It reaches up to her eyes. "I am good," she says, in the English I remember her speaking, "As you see." She points to the food stall.

She and her husband have built the stall together, she says, selling kebabs for the past ten years. They have had a steady clientele and even got the coveted "permit" from the Lajpat Nagar Traders Association which makes their stall "valid" in the eyes of the police and municipality.

Her husband, Mokhtar, an Afghani refugee like her, and the cook, live in a two-bedroom flat in the lower middle-class neighborhood of Govindpuri. They have three daughters, she says.

I can barely hear what she is saying. Nabil, I think, Nabil.

"And Nabil?" I ask hurriedly.

"Shahira," she remembers to call me by his name, "He went back to Afghanistan in 1994 when money ran out."

Once the wall came down in Berlin and the Soviet army left Afghanistan, she says, the Americans and UN discontinued all financial help to Afghan refugees in India. She had asked Nabil – begged him – not to return but he wanted to find their parents who never made it to Delhi. "It is better to be poor in Kabul," he had said, "than be poor in Delhi."

Fatima goes to the back of the stall and pulls a photograph out of her worn-out purse. It is a photograph of a Nabil taken at Goel Photo Studios in our old neighborhood. His green eyes look at me, asking, "How did your studies go in America, Shahira?" "Did you visit New Hampshire?" I touch the photograph, as if hoping it would come to life.

Soon after he reached Kabul Nabil joined the Afghan armed forces, Fatima says.

I must ask what I fear.

"Did he join the Taliban?" I ask haltingly.

"One does not join the Taliban," Fatima says with a sudden frown, "one is made to join the Taliban."

It is not the answer I want to hear. A man who enjoyed reading Salinger and Faulkner, wanted to be a writer, could not be made to join the Taliban. I wanted to shake her, yell at her, don't you see, there is something profoundly wrong with what you are telling me.

Fatima and Mokhtar have decided to stay in India though they are unsure if they could be citizens.

"My girls are going to an English medium school," says Fatima proudly, "Blue Bell's School." Here, she says, we have a decent life, what would we do in Kabul?

The last she had heard from Nabil was soon after 9/11 when he was preparing to fight the American army. There is no postal service between Afghanistan and India and whatever news Fatima receives is from returning friends or rare phone calls from Kabul of old neighbors or relatives. No one has seen or heard of Nabil in eight years.

"My tears for Nabil have dried," she says softly.

She lowers her head. We stand there for several moments, mourning the loss of worlds between us.

I promise to write to Fatima Mokhtar Siddiqui and visit her flat in Govindpuri. We embrace and part.

My tears for Nabil have yet to dry.