Ahmed Kamal Naqvi was the only son of a great landowner on the shores of Anchar Lake, in Kashmir, when he was married to the first daughter of Hasan Abdullah, a businessman who had been instrumental in bringing the hydroelectric plant to Gandarbal. (Or so Samina might have begun his story. Her father's reluctant recollection lacked the clarity of chronology or its sense of enlarging proportions.) It was said in Srinagar that half the Valley of Kashmir had once belonged to the Naqvis, and in the 1950s Ahmed's father still owned rice paddies near Bandipur and Mulberry trees in Kangan. They had a summer house in the mountains above Sonamarg, where the forest gave way to very old cultivated stands of walnut and almond trees; a small house on the Jhelum, south of Srinagar, where the cherry trees were dependable and an uncle grew prized pumpkins; and a haunted estate on the west bank of Wular Lake in which no one but servants had lived for a generation yet the fruit trees still bore. All this in addition to the tidy farm on the Anchar where Ahmed had grown up and where his parents lived for most of the year. They grew rape seed and linseed on this farm and pressed them for the oil.
It was not a narrative at all when delivered by Samina's father, much less a family history. But he could be tricked or provoked into brief bouts of nostalgia, more often laced with dismissive bitterness than inflated by pride (although the bite of the former suggested the loss of the latter), and now and then he would still linger over a memory as if he'd found a forgotten heirloom. This had literally happened once: a silver tea set wrapped in purple velvet in a chest beneath out-of-style saris. Tea on the Anchar in the lakeside pagoda; tea first thing in the morning, in the mountains, with both hands wrapped around the cup for warmth -- new details were polished to the surface. But when the pot was as deeply shadowless as it must have been in Kashmir, he placed it on a high shelf to tarnish.
Mr. Abdullah, the bride's father, had worked and then invested in industry rather than land, and his financial prospects were better than the Naqvis' (who sold off another estate each decade), but he had never enjoyed a proper view from a porch, or the shade of an orchard, or the taste of an apricot picked from the tree. He had grown up on a dirty street in the old city, had worked in the Government Match Factory in Baramula when he was young and managed the Rifle Half-Wrought Factory after he married well, and even now, in the ripeness of his affluence, his house in Gandarbal was flanked by a busy market on one side, where flowers were left to rot at night, and a tannery on the other. He didn't mind this. He was that rare Kashmiri who couldn't care less what color the Chinar leaves were this month, or how the saffron harvest in Pampore had turned out. Yet his disposition -- perhaps even his soul -- had survived this indifference. He was a cheerful, even-tempered man with as little interest in his daughters as in sunsets. He had never learned how to speak to his wife. He had no sense of his eldest daughter's unhappiness in his house, and the views from the many windows behind which the Naqvis lived had no influence upon his decision to give Farzana to this family. They were wealthy, not excessively devout, and they spoke Urdu instead of Kashmiri in the home -- these were his criteria. But for years, his daughter would thank him for the gardens and groves that he'd wisely delivered her to, and he would smile and say, "Anything for you, Beta. You know that."
Farzana was happy with Ahmed, too. He was lazy and opinionated, but most of his opinions seemed to be the right ones, and he took pride in his indulgence of his wife. He dressed her in Pashmina shawls and very fine raffel phirans, embroidered at the neck and hem. In a boat, he would put his arm around her before they were far from shore -- he never worried about the boatman -- and he coaxed her onto his lap in the evenings on the veranda of the house he'd chosen for her, despite the workers who watched from the cherry trees or the uncle in his pumpkin patch. Ahmed had made, she felt, the best choice: the small house on the Jhelum River, which was pretty and private, hidden from the road, but only a few kilometers from the markets of Srinagar.
Samina's responsibility, she liked to think, though it was probably only her desire, was to press her father for his isolated details and instances and arrange them into this romance of his -- a story, once assembled, too pretty and misfortunate to have befallen ordinary people. He pretended to believe the family history was an inheritance she'd be better off without, but of course he knew that his reserve cultivated her curiosity. She took liberties, but only to the extent that liberties were necessary in order to evoke the daily grain, and she could fill gaps by inferring from her father as she knew him, far from Kashmir, reduced and dilapidated -- but still romantic. Most intriguing was to imagine things from his first wife's point of view.
For five years Farzana was happy and then happier. They had a son -- Asif -- and they spent each July at the house near Sonamarg, in the mountains, where the shade under the almond trees was cool. Octobers they spent on the farm with Ahmed's parents, when the Chinar leaves were their most brilliant red. All summer and into the autumn they would make day-trips to the haunted estate on the Wular to pick apricots, pears, and then apples, but Farzana would not allow the family to spend a night behind the rotting jalis of the house. If it became too late to go home, they took a room at an inn that had also belonged to the Naqvis once -- it was the house where Ahmed's dadi was born. When Farzana visited her parents in Gandarbal, it wasn't only the ripe smells and the cramped rooms and the dingy city views from the roof that she found so dispiriting. Most of all, it was the sense of confinement attached to living in the same house year-round. What did her mother ever look forward to, she wondered, especially now that all her children had been married? What did the seasons mean to her except snow, rain, or humidity -- one inconvenience traded for another?
Farzana's husband, however, was not as happy during these years. When they went to the farm on the Anchar, he spent more time fretting over yet another poor harvest than enjoying the lake. At Sonamarg the walnut trees were being cut down and stolen, one at a time, to be sold to local artisans, and at Kangan the silk worms were disappearing from the mulberry tress, mysteriously dissatisfied. His father could not bear to sell any more property, but ran a deficit every year. Ahmed had to find an income, but it seemed impossible in the valley. His father wouldn't allow him to work for an employer, or go into politics. Either would make their desperate circumstances clear. And in any case, it was hard to imagine embarking on such work -- where would he find the time for it, with all the small migrations to arrange, all the opening and closing of houses which depended upon the finicky schedules of harvest?
So he moved, with his wife and son, to Delhi, where he had gone to university. It was the same retreat his two uncles had already made. They helped him find a large house in Gurgaon, at the edge of the city, where his wife could keep a garden and his parents could comfortably live as well when they faced their insolvency or discovered how much they missed him. The city was just as dusty and crowded and loud as he'd remembered, but what a pleasure it was to put his engineering degree to use in his uncle's firm and be among the old formulas and finger a slide rule again. He felt that he had been a part of India's past in Kashmir; now he contributed to her future. He loved having no more than the most immediate concern about the weather: what is it doing on my head?
But now his wife was unhappy. She fought with the servants and sneered at Delhi fabrics and ornaments, at the odd notions they had about embroidery, and she couldn't find friends she was able to respect. She had a second son -- Khalid, who fussed and demanded her attention all day long (which suited her; Asif, from the start, had been too dreamy and self-sufficient) -- and the birth demanded a trip back to Kashmir. They went for three weeks and ended up staying all summer. The mountains were higher and whiter than they'd ever been, the lakes a deeper blue, the seed crop was strong again, and the mulberry trees were full of cocoons. Every evening in July, Ahmed would say, "We really must go -- tomorrow we begin packing," and every morning he'd become newly involved in the plans for a hunt, or the hiring of pickers. When the day finally came, Farzana would not be consoled for most of the train trip. Asif shot a girl with his pea-shooter and only Farzana's swift anger -- she slapped him until his ear bled -- made her stop moping and begin to look forward to Delhi: to how little she presumed the gardener would have managed without her, and what she would do to him if he hadn't watered the Dahlias.
One day, one year, somewhere in this period -- Samina's father was never quite clear about when -- Ahmed was driving home from work for lunch when a woman on a scooter appeared beside his car. He had a strangely extended instant in which to consider her. It was very rare, then, to see a woman alone on a scooter; she must be Hindu, he thought, especially since her shalwar kameez was rather immodest, with short sleeves, and her hair was loose, trailing behind with her rupatta. She darted in front of Ahmed's car, and his driver ran into her. The front bumper only tapped her back wheel, but it was enough for the scooter to skid and tip. When she over-corrected, it flipped back in the other direction and flung the woman into the air -- across traffic, with nothing but cement and steel beneath her. Surely she would be killed. But she landed on a cow, which had been lounging by the road, half asleep in the heat. The woman fell onto its flank. The cow opened its eyes and let out a complaint. And the two broke away from one another, mutually disgusted.
All the traffic had stopped. Ahmed got out and hurried to the woman. "Are you all right?" he asked. "Can you speak?" She said, "My scooter?" She was standing up, or trying to -- for an instant, it seemed she would walk away (and this was the surprisingly common result of accidents in Delhi: Ahmed had seen men with blood pouring from their heads beep their horns to part the crowd and drive off). But she lost her breath and sat down heavily on the cement median where the cow had been. "Where does it hurt?" he asked. "Try to relax. You must drive more carefully!" She couldn't speak, but she was pointing -- to her scooter, which lay in the road, the traffic beginning to flow and clot around it.
Ahmed had to plead with the woman before she would let him drive her to his doctor, and even then she relented only because she still couldn't quite breathe when she stood. She had cracked a rib, but that was all she had suffered apart from a few scrapes and bruises. Ahmed told her (as it turned out, she was Muslim -- her name was Undala) that she should, by all rights, be dead, but she wasn't convinced. She bad-mouthed the cow and acted like a prisoner in the doctor's home. She wouldn't believe the doctor when he said she couldn't go -- that she wouldn't get farther than a few steps -- and she had to try and fail before she gave Ahmed an address where he might find her brother.
It was in Chandni Chowk, the old market. There was no door on the street at the address. A filthy stairwell led to an apartment over a kulfi shop. Ahmed knocked for some time before a man shouted "Get lost" from inside. "I've come about your sister," Ahmed called back (hoping he had the right place -- hoping he wasn't headed for a cracked rib himself before the day was through). "Undala." He waited. When there was no answer, he added, "She's been in an accident." Her brother emerged with his coat on. He was careful not to let Ahmed see into the apartment. "Who are you?" he wanted to know, and Ahmed, not thinking clearly before the man's bulk and scowl, said, "I'm the one who hit her."
The brother followed him to the doctor's office and immediately carried Undala away (not seeming to notice her winces and the tears that formed at the corners of her eyes). They had all forgotten about the scooter -- Ahmed and his driver had lifted it into the huge trunk of his Ambassador before taking Undala to the doctor -- until her brother knocked at Ahmed's gate that night. He'd been given directions by the doctor. He was still in a lousy mood, still in a hurry. But by then Ahmed had been thinking about the two of them for several hours: about the way she had passed by the window of his car just as his absent gaze had turned in that direction; about the sense of irresponsibility and abandonment attached to her; and about the squalor and secrecy of the apartment above the kulfi shop. It would be one thing if these people were peasants, but peasants didn't dress so fashionably, much less own a car and a scooter. It would be another thing if they weren't Muslim. Something was wrong, and Ahmed felt he'd been called upon to intervene. So he dared to ask the brother if he could visit Undala. To be certain she was recuperating, he said -- he felt responsible (although it was a stupid thing to admit). Her brother wedged the scooter into his car and said she'd be fine.
"Yes, but I'll have no peace of mind if her recovery should... if she might need some assistance... You understand that she must see my doctor again?"
"She doesn't want anything to do with you," her brother said. And he drove away. What where they hiding? Everything about this brother seemed brutal, yet he had passed up a virtual invitation to take advantage of Ahmed, even after he had seen this house and Farzana's gardens. He hadn't even asked for a bit to repair the scooter.
Farzana, of course, was relieved to have the whole episode over with. How lucky they'd been that the police hadn't gotten involved, and that Ahmed hadn't needed to hand out a single bribe. She soon forgot about the woman on the scooter. But Ahmed caught himself watching for her in traffic (especially in the spot where the accident had happened, an intersection he passed through every day), and he remembered how a small cut had followed her cheekbone perfectly and welled with blood and begun to drip as she sat on the median, and how he had instinctively reached out, prepared to touch this stranger's face, to wipe the blood away. But she had seen the half-gesture. She had touched the cut herself, looked at her fingers. She hadn't seemed startled or upset by the sight of her own blood -- instead, she'd looked at him with accusation in her eyes. She knew what he'd meant to do, and for all her immodest freedom, she was suddenly a Muslim girl (though Ahmed hadn't learned she was Muslim yet; that was the moment in which he should have guessed). Where were her parents? Why wasn't she married? Where did she live? Not in the apartment above the kulfi shop -- something about the way she had provided the address had made it clear that was only the place to find her brother. One day when Farzana sent Ahmed on an errand in Chandni Chowk he stood across from the doorless stairwell and tried to look into the windows of the apartment, but all the shutters were closed. The crowd bumped and parted around him. Why had she been thrown into his path, then saved by God, if a single fruitless day was the extent of the contact they were meant to have? What had he failed to do for her?
That summer (it made the most sense, to Samina's mind, if it was that same year), Ahmed and his family returned to Kashmir for another long visit. Again, the crops were unexpectedly strong -- for the third year in a row it seemed his father would run a profit -- and now everyone pressed Ahmed to move back home. He had done his part, they said. His Delhi income had provided the extra capital his father had needed to catch up on overdue repairs and improvements, to turn things back in the right direction. Farzana's father, impressed by Ahmed's surprising industry, had arranged a good position at the hydroelectric plant, and Ahmed's own father had even consented to this idea, having resigned himself to the dawn of employed Naqvis. But Ahmed had become accustomed to living apart, in a proper city, where people could still surprise you and the house you lived in was one you had chosen yourself; where his friends were not all the sons of his father's friends and might, in fact, be Tamil or Bengali, from Calcutta or Kerala, from simple families, even -- the sons of police officers, or shop owners. This summer in particular he had noticed that a trip from Delhi back to Kashmir was like falling down a funnel: everything narrowed, and the days, despite the moves between houses, were the same as they'd always been. No one had ever met anyone new, or ever shared a meal with anyone in any appreciable way different from themselves, and no one could see anything wrong with this. If it was only he and Farzana, fine. After all, the place was still beautiful, and certainly it was an easier life he was being offered. But this summer, for the first time, he couldn't stand the idea of raising his two sons at the wrong end of the funnel. They'd turn out stunted and provincial without realizing all they'd missed. Ordinary people would shrink from them, and resent them.
But he couldn't explain all this without insulting both families, of course, and he couldn't say "No -- never," so he said "Not this year -- not yet" and took his wife and sons back to Delhi, where Farzana punished him by firing the help (he'd become friends with them all -- with the driver, the gardener, the cook, the ayah) and hiring new people whom she seemed to choose for their ill tempers, laziness, ugliness. She turned the household into the sight of a simmering, continuous conflict with no possible resolution--another Kashmir, he joked, to his friends at work. Ahmed retaliated by working late, often through the weekends, and, eventually, by makings friends with even the new servants (except the gardener, who didn't like Muslims -- who wouldn't allow his son to step through their door and once beat the boy when he discovered Vikram had eaten a samosa from Ahmed's kitchen). But Farzana found better revenge. Whenever Ahmed reached for her, she pulled away ("She would have nothing to do with me," was all Samina's father said) -- first with excuses and then without, with only scowls of dismay. Worst of all, she began to turn their sons against him. She told them their father didn't care about their welfare and preferred to spend his days apart from them. They annoyed him, she said, so they should stop running to him and clinging when he got home -- if they kept it up much longer he'd probably send them away to boarding school. Khalid, the younger son, repeated all of this to Ahmed. He wanted to know if it was true. But Asif simply believed it and said nothing. He wanted to go away to school, he soon decided. He and his mother began to insist that Ahmed send the three of them to Lucknow, where the boys would enroll at La Martinière. If broadening his sons' experience was so important to him, Farzana said, what better way?
Against the advice of his parents and uncles, Ahmed refused. He didn't trust his wife any longer -- he had developed, in fact, a profound mistrust of her. He was especially frightened of what she had done to Asif, who was now ten. It wasn't only that she had turned the boy against Ahmed; she seemed to have confused him in some deep and damaging way, first by keeping all her affection from him when Khalid was born and then, in recent years, by giving it back but in the service of an agenda. The more Asif became her ally against her enemies (not only Ahmed and the servants -- against the vegetable man, too, and the tailor, and against the wealthy Hindu families who lived in the houses on either side of hers), the more she doted on him. The boy had become cruel. He borrowed her resentments with cool innocence. He wouldn't play with the son of one of the neighboring families, who had once been his best (perhaps his only) friend, and when his father asked him why, he said that Pankaj was a filthy pig-eater (which wasn't even true -- the Singhs were vegetarians). Ahmed described to his daughter, years later, the way in which his first-born son had said this: with what impassive conviction. As if the argument would simply be settled by this fact. And how Asif had listened to the speech his father had launched into (which began in anger but ended in a desperate attempt at reason and a fumbling explanation of compassion) with a wary look on his face, leaning away, as if the unimportant preliminaries of speech might progress at any moment to the blows of the real lesson. He was becoming unreachable, Ahmed felt. Something had to be done.
Ahmed told Samina that he had thought (perhaps unreasonably, he admitted) he might never see his sons again if he let Farzana take them to Lucknow. He thought she might disappear with them, and might even be assisted in this endeavor by her parents. It was only for his sons, he said to his daughter, much later, that he had left the house in Gurgaon to his wife and rented a smaller house across the city, and taken the boys with him.
One day in February (Samina had a month for this "one day"; she didn't know the year, but it must be 1967 or '68), on one of the visits the boys were making across the city to their mother, Asif flew kites on the roof with the gardener's son, Vikram. It is a competitive sport in India. You buy string which has been dipped in glue and then in finely-shattered glass, and the kites are extremely nimble in experienced hands. The goal is to cross lines with your opponent, drive your kite hard in one direction to cut their string, then lift your kite, quickly, and send it into tight spins until your line has tangled with the string dangling invisibly from the dead and drifting kite. Then pull it in, a captured enemy. Vikram had taken three of Asif's kites. After the third one, Asif crossed the roof to him, his hand held out as if to shake, and surprised Vikram with a punch to the stomach. When the boy was doubled over, Asif knocked him down and wrenched Vikram's arm behind his back and cut into the soft flesh between two fingers with a length of the glass-covered string.
"Pig-eater," he said, as Vikram cried and ran away. "If you ever come back in this house I'll kill you." This is what Vikram reported to his father, the gardener. His hand bled down his arm. While Vikram's mother cleaned and bandaged him, she wanted to know what her husband intended to do about this. Was he going to let them murder her son? She was overheard by Farzana's driver, out in the yard, who saw the gardener walk to the tool shed (it was incredible to Samina -- it always had been; it was excessively violent and strangely inconsequential in the manner of a fairy tale; it was probably the source of her fear, which, more than time or expense, had kept her from going to India until she was in her late twenties and married) -- saw him emerge with a pair of shears.
The driver watched the gardener trot across the yard to the main house, where Asif was alone on the porch swing. The driver had sensed that something terrible was about to happen -- he called to the gardener and began to follow the man -- but for some reason the boy sat quite still. Without saying a word, in a rush -- as if taking care of an unpleasant errand -- the gardener pulled Asif from the swing, pinned him to the ground, and applied the shears to his wrist. He meant to cut the boy's hand off. Asif screamed and flailed, and the driver screamed too -- by the time he reached the boy, the gardener was halfway across the yard again, the shears still in his hand. When Farzana saw Asif she panicked. She held his hand against his wrist but she didn't staunch the bleeding properly, and she made the driver take him all the way to her doctor instead of the nearest hospital. The gardener and his family disappeared that night. They were found in Amritsar, months later, and he was tried and convicted, but only of inflicting an injury which led to the boy's death, not of murder. He was in prison for a short time, made shorter by the protests of his wife and her family. Incredible. What kind of country is that? Samina had grown up wondering. Sometimes she wondered how her father could have wanted another child. A new baby must have been her mother's idea -- a consolation for Undala.
In the wake of Asif's death, Farzana and Ahmed could not quite stand the sight of one another. They were quickly divorced, and Khalid was given to Farzana. Neither parent had felt capable of making a decision about what to do with the younger son -- he was six, sweet tempered and nervous. They were both afraid of him. In the end, they had let the imam decide whose house he would live in.
Then -- at some point -- Ahmed saw the woman from the scooter again. She was behind the wheel of her brother's car this time, passing by again, still alone, still pulling away from him. It seemed to Ahmed that he was being given one more chance at a test he had failed. "But in this instance," he told Samina, "I was as alone as she. I could see her with different eyes."
There was a contradiction between Samina's father's eyes and his steady grin when he remembered India--a gap left to negotiate -- but she never felt she had the proper space to do it in because he watched her too carefully, measuring her reception. The attention was probably what made her press him to tell these stories, more than anything. "Very lucky for me, it was the driver's day off. I had to go very fast to keep up with your mother -- forty kilometers per hour. I was explaining through the windows, you see."
"She didn't remember you?"
"Not at first. 'I almost killed you -- remember? On the scooter?' But for all I knew she had been thrown from that thing a thousand times."
Less than a year later, against his entire family's wishes, Ahmed married Undala, and they were shunned in good, old-fashioned style: unvisited, uninvited, surely unmentioned in the houses in Kashmir and Delhi. "What did they object to so strongly?" Samina asked, but he shook his head. "I don't know, beta. They don't bother to explain themselves."
He was soon politely excused from his job. Undala made him send out an announcement of their daughter's birth but no one in the family responded to it. This was 1970, when it was still easy for a doctor or an engineer to emigrate to America. Ahmed came first, alone, with an uncle of Undala's in Rhode Island to sponsor him, and when he found work in Providence, he sent for his wife. She had talked him into the move. She seemed to have much less to leave behind. It was hard to say whether she took to America or not: She never spoke of returning to India, but on the other hand, she never bothered to learn much English and one would be hard pressed to call the life she assembled here a happy one. Ahmed threatened to move the three of them back each year when the lease was up, but by the time Samina was doing well in school the threats had melted into fantasies: he would retire there, he insisted, and they would live in a beautiful part of the country, far from Delhi or terrorized Kashmir -- in Goa, perhaps, or Darjeeling, where their daughter would want to visit them often. He never did go back, though -- not even to visit.
Incredible -- as in, not entirely credible. Among many other things, Samina wanted to know how they came to marry. How did he woo her with no parents between them to moderate -- such an exotic courtship? When did he tell her about the murder of Asif? Was that what first made her sympathetic to him?
But here was the catch: You couldn't ask about such things, and the details in this part of his history were especially thin, because Asif's death acted as a sort of black hole, pulling everything too close to it down into its devouring emptiness, into what must be the essence of her father's unhappiness and into his dull look and pinched lips and the shake of his head that signaled the end of his recollecting for the day, or that he'd already told her too much. Samina's mother was only the epilogue to the story, of course, skipped through in summary mode.
"But it isn't true," her mother said.
She spoke in Urdu, and every year Samina's Urdu slipped a bit further -- she understood the words still, ninety percent of them, but often she was afraid she didn't quite recognize the shadows of subtext that fell between.
"What isn't true?" she asked, in English. "What part?"
Her mother said, "You would be a smart girl not to believe any of it. You should leave him alone, your poor father. It's not that he lies to you, beta, but he doesn't know what is true anymore."
Your poor father -- it was a title that had little or nothing to do with immediate circumstances. She might call him that when he was eating his steak or when they were on vacation somewhere and he was perfectly cheerful, swimming laps in a motel pool. But how could Samina keep herself from wanting to know all about what had happened in India if it was still what defined him so? She had been left with the dregs of his life -- of his first life, when probably no one had called him poor anything. She had a right to know. "Wait a minute," she insisted, "what's not true? Did you really land on the cow? Did the gardener try to cut Bhaiya's hand off? What are you saying, Ammi?"
"Let it be, beta," her mother said.
"Forget 'let it be.' You can't just suddenly tell me the stories are all lies and then say 'let it be.'"
"I am not going to sit with you and contradict his word behind his back. I am saying let him be. Now this conversation is closed."
Samina sensed she had hit one of her mother's brick walls and did give up -- though she didn't have to. Whether it was worthwhile or not, she could fight with her mother all night; she could call her mother stupid, use her own advantage with two languages ruthlessly, throw reason and good sense at her mother's superstitions until they were both exhausted and satisfied. Her mother invited such battles (as she had again in this conversation, dropping a bomb like that but turning it into a dud, letting it lay there unexploded). But Samina had never been able to argue with her father. Not a word. Nor question him aloud. His authority came from his unhappiness more than any sense of power or threat of discipline. He was cracked down the middle -- what if she knocked too firmly on the wrong spot and split him open? She couldn't tell him, "Ammi says your stories aren't true," and see what emerged. That route wasn't available.
Her mother, unfortunately, wasn't interested in history, personal or otherwise. Even when Samina asked her questions for which the answers must surely be flattering she wouldn't speak about her past. What about your wedding -- tell me what you wore? Tell me about the scooter -- how fast did you go? You must have been daring, riding a scooter alone at that time? When Samina was younger she had tried the questions she was more interested in: What did your parents think? Where were your parents? What was your brother like? Who lived over the kulfi shop? But these would not only fail to flush answers, they would make her mother angry.
"That is water under the bridge," she liked to say, in English -- one of the handful of phrases she'd adopted with relish. You could tell they had a particular force, to her mind: she deployed them as clinchers, the last word on the topic.
"What's done is done," she also told Samina, often, except she used this one incorrectly -- it had a question mark at the end and referred to the future instead of the past. It seemed to mean "you've made your decision? You're sure? I can't change your mind?" She was dedicated to changing Samina's mind, at all times, but she also had a deep sympathy for stubbornness. No one was more stubborn than she was. She wanted to know when what's done was done, and if that was true, fine -- far be it from her to waste any more breath on the topic.
This was long before Samina went to India and also before she had met her husband. She was a freshman at college. She'd been away from her parents for three months before flying back for Thanksgiving -- the longest three months of her life -- and suddenly, upon her return, she could see the depression draped and hanging in every room of her house, darkening the windows, dulling conversation, oozing from the walls and encasing the three of them, forming a shell, shutting out the world. (The windows were always closed in this house -- the heat, or else the air conditioning, was always running, muffling whatever the street outside might have to offer, departing from whatever the day's weather might convey.) "Depression" -- a silly word, an indulgence. It was for someone else, of course -- for Americans, for white people. But it was her family, she suddenly realized. Her father with his self-defeating philosophies and his poor diet and his fear of the unexpected; the absence of change or potential for change; the twelve-hour nights -- all that thick sleep congesting the house; their lack of friends or neighborly relations or dinner engagements or family beyond the three of them (plus the occasional phone calls from Khalid, which were brief and strangely devastating: although no one ever brought up the past or spoke of anything personal and Khalid was always cheerful and curious and well prepared with recent events to offer from his life, the household would be in a state of shock for a day or two after his calls, Samina's father almost unreachable, missing meals, Samina and her mother stepping delicately between rooms). Depression. Anyone in America could probably make the diagnosis. They were who people described on daytime talk shows.
But the three of them had always been this way. Which meant India was to blame. It was mourning for Asif, wasn't it? For what her father had let him become in addition to his terrible death? It was being shunned by family -- the guilt and bitterness and the sense of being misunderstood. It was the sense of living in the aftermath of lasting mistakes. It must be missing India, longing for Kashmir. Wasn't it? What wasn't true?
She tried asking Khalid. He was seven years older than her and, at all times, he felt sorry for her. On the phone, despite the expense of the long-distance connection, he always teased her about her Urdu and made fun of her Americanisms and held her responsible for whatever Hollywood trash had lately reached him in Delhi, but all this made it clear that he thought she had gotten the short end of the stick -- that he was relieved to have landed with his mother instead of his father. "So I'm chatting with my mom about the bad old days," she told him on the phone during the Christmas break, in English, trying to turn it into something of a joke, "the scooter and the cow, and why Abba wouldn't take you guys back to Kashmir, and Bhaiya and everything, and she just hauls off and says, 'It's not true, you know.' That's it. I'm like, 'What's not true, Ammi?' She's like, 'Well I wouldn't believe any of it if I was you. Sucker.'" Khalid was laughing. "It's not a laughing matter," Samina said. "She won't tell me what she meant. I said, 'So you're telling me my life is a lie, basically, but you don't see any reason to get into what the truth might be? Lovely.'"
Depression: that was why they didn't know anybody. Other people had family friends -- two of her roommates at college had known one another since third grade, for god's sake. That was why Samina had no one she could talk to. It was no use getting into it all with friends who weren't Indian -- too much to explain, and they were often interested in the wrong details, in the servants or the mangoes or the logistics of arranged marriage. Besides, it was an embarrassing history -- she had a vaguely shameful family -- and her parents would be mortified if they knew she had exposed them. Depression, it turned out, was why she would never marry. Her mother could hardly dig up one eligible boy a year to press upon her, and even these came through distant connections and back channels, from uninformed families. But perhaps that was as much as Samina could ever aim for, and a limitation her mother had accepted, since their own family, of course, was about as disgraced as could be. "Tell me what she meant, Bhai-jaan." Once, briefly, she had experimented with calling him Khalid -- it felt strange either way, but it was clear he preferred the proper title. "I mean it. I need to know."
"How would I know?" Khalid asked.
"Don't be coy. I can take it."
"You are barking up the wrong tree, Samina." He liked the occasional Americanism as well, collected them from these movies he was addicted to. "They don't tell me anything. I probably know less than you do."
"But I know lies. And you remember things."
"I was a child. What I remember is that it was easier to get ice cream after they lived in separate houses. I remember picking cherries right off the tree at the old house on the Jhelum, stuffing them in my mouth. Do you want to know what we were eating back then? That I can tell you."
"But there was an Asif? You had a brother? He really died?"
"I have a feeling your mother meant something more subtle. Do you want to know what my mother tells me about our father and your mother? That they're cursed. All I need to know, as far as she is concerned. And Bhaiya? God knows what she would do if she ever heard me mention him in this house." And it was true that he had begun to whisper into the phone.
Why did Samina's marriage have to be arranged, anyway? As the product of an entirely unsanctioned marriage, shouldn't she be the solitary Muslim Indian girl with the right to resist, to make her own choice? Shouldn't she too be permitted the pleasure of being pursued?
Not at all. If Samina had not been so well equipped by her father to see her mother's hypocrisy, she would have thought that marriage (much less romance -- a concept her mother pretended to regard as something between a superstition and a fallacy) could never kindle without at least one set of parents in the room making clumsy conversation, stuffing the contestants with food while the four of them sat some distance from one another -- no cheating !-- and waited for the magical, empty thing to be asked or answered (what could it possibly be?) which would bind them all, win them the prize. It wasn't until Samina returned to college and began to come back home equipped with better questions, and this new desire to ferret out the lies, that her father told her the most romantic details of his own romance: her mother's loose hair and blowing rupatta; the cut under her eye which he had nearly reached out and touched; and the details of their second unlikely encounter, when he had chased her through Delhi and pulled up beside her into oncoming traffic.
Pride carried her father into specifics there: how he reached to roll down his window, signaled for her to do the same, had to brake and fall behind her again to keep from plowing through an ox cart, but pulled out once more, sped up (she never slowed down for him, he said), managed to explain who he was, and finally, a number of death-defying attempts later, talked her into pulling over just to let him buy her a pakora and a cup of tea. Samina was afraid to use these details against her mother -- afraid she'd be told that none of them were true. But even when she said to her father, "So romantic!" he replied, "Not at all," and his grin collapsed (as if she'd tricked him into making false claims). "I had run her over, you remember. I knew she must be from an unstable family situation. I felt terribly guilty, beta -- that is all. I thought I would never get another chance to properly apologize." He looked at Samina as only he could -- begging her to believe him (now it did seem obvious: he had all the mannerisms of a liar) -- so what could she do?
"But did you find her attractive, Abba?" she asked. "Tell me the truth," she said, but as if pleading for special favor -- without hope, really. He shook his head and frowned. "No no no -- nothing like that. You don't understand. This thing is very different in India." Which thing? Attraction? Did he really believe that?
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When she fell in love for the first time, late in college, Samina thought: So this is what it was like for my father. And she finally guessed what the lies her mother alluded to had been. It was only a matter of timing -- that her parents had been lovers while he was still married. Samina had sensed that the pieces of his story concerning her mother and those concerning Farzana didn't fit together properly. He hardly ever spoke about the two women at the same time--as a matter of fact, he acted as if they were sets of memories kept in separate drawers in his mind. The love affair -- the overlap -- would have probably been an easy enough leap for anyone else to make, but she supposed she had really believed (an unexamined belief) that Indian people -- at least Muslims, at least those she knew -- were incapable of such desires, much less the reckless decisions and actions that trailed them. Also, if her parents had once been in love, shouldn't it show still? Shouldn't there be something more between them now than this pragmatic and slightly irritable symbiosis of nursing and resignation?
Nothing about Samina's own love affair was as audacious or bravely inconsiderate as her father's. If Nicholas wasn't Indian or Muslim, in every other way he was a good catch: a hard worker from a well-off and respectable family (his father was a professor, as Nicholas would be -- following in the family footsteps was always considered a plus); a graduate student properly older than her, ambitious but mild-mannered, and willing to bend over backward for her parents. He wanted to wait for their approval before he married her -- for as long as necessary -- though Samina wouldn't hear of such patience. She probably never would have developed the slightest interest in him if he hadn't already been so kind and patient with her for so long, though. She used to drag him to the movies she was interested in so that she wouldn't have to go alone and risk being pitied, and make jokes about her family in front of him, and let him carry her grocery bags from the car -- all the things it was fine to do with a friend, but not with a suitor -- yet he never took advantage of her naïveté. He lingered with her in her car, in front of his apartment, after the movies, chatting idly, unwilling to leave her side, giving her every opportunity to recognize what this was and reveal to him the slightest sign that she wished to be kissed, but eventually he always heaved a sigh, pretended to be regretful only about the work that waited for him at his desk, and cheerfully, bravely said, "So maybe we'll do something tomorrow? If you have time?" Poor man. When they were finally kissing, she loved the sly, slightly dirty sense of humor that emerged, just for her -- invisible to the world -- and she loved the way he touched her, the strength hidden in his thin arms, and liked to imagine that other people must assume he was a delicate or even a timid lover (if they thought about this at all -- but now, at the newly provoking sight of him, she wondered how anyone couldn't).
With Nicholas, Samina felt deeply reckless, and divided off, and dismissive of her prior life. And it occurred to her that her father, unintentionally, had all but admitted that he too had been gripped by love, unexpectedly and inconveniently, late in life. In Delhi, he had said, unlike Kashmir, there were "different people" -- people he had met on his own, who had broadened him, revealed his provincial limitations to himself. Undala was who he must have meant (whether he realized it or not), and her brother, both of whom wanted nothing to do with the Naqvis. You get transformed, remade -- by love. Arranged marriage doesn't do it in the same way. Or not if you're the man, perhaps. What could make him turn his back on Kashmir and the cherry trees? Not his work. Not some handful of friends (whose names he couldn't even recall when Samina pressed). He was lying when he said he worried his wife would steal his children from him, wasn't he? Or if that was true, perhaps it was a fear he could only have if Farzana had discovered he had a lover. Who could say to what extent he had sacrificed his family for Samina's mother? If they had all returned to Kashmir, or if he had let the three of them go to Lucknow -- then Asif would still be alive, wouldn't he?
Samina trusted her suspicions when her parents resigned themselves to Nicholas so readily. She didn't leave them much of a choice -- she and Nicholas virtually eloped, with only his parents at the ceremony -- but her own parents capitulated and forgave her and were immediately kind to their new son-in-law as, she imagined, only a couple who had been in love themselves, and had acted rashly and selfishly for it, could be. When she finally went to India and met her father's family, she wasn't surprised to learn that Asif, on one of his visits to his mother, was said to have told Farzana that his father often went out in the evenings, leaving the boys with the ayah. It was a woman, Asif had said, who waited for their father on the street and drove away with him. This was the crux of the narrative, in India. There was no mention of Lucknow or La Martinière, or of a marital argument over returning to Kashmir. (Goodness, no -- Farzana was much too proper and traditional to argue with her husband, Samina was told, and besides, she never left Delhi, did she? Everyone had expected her to retreat to her parents' home when she lost Asif and the divorce had left her alone with Khalid, but she didn't.) In India, every aspect of the story turned on betrayal. Even Asif's momentary cruelty to Vikram was explained and forgiven by what the poor boy was said to have witnessed in his father's house. Here the story was almost too neat and filled-in, but Samina found this version more credible than her father's. And Farzana had turned out to be an ordinary woman: unsmiling (like most women her age in India) and not especially accommodating, perhaps -- possibly as stubborn as Samina's mother -- but polite enough, sane, level-headed compared to impulsive and over-generous Khalid, and not noticeably impaired by hatred. Nothing about her suggested a woman who would maliciously turn her sons against their father. People change, of course -- but all for the better, despite a scarring loss? Samina's father had lied broadly, subtly, more or less continuously. It's not that he lies to you, her mother had said, years ago, but he doesn't know what's true anymore, and here in India Samina supposed she understood why her mother couldn't explain further -- how she couldn't have teased the fabrications out from the truth even if she'd wanted to. But she wouldn't want to. The trade for truth was never to her advantage. What had her brother solicited from the rich man who'd injured her? What arrangements laid the foundation for this marriage as well?
The family in Delhi talked Samina out of visiting Kashmir. Too many kidnapped tourists; Nicholas would stick out like a six-foot invitation for trouble. Although she and Nicholas were shuttled between households and meals with surprising hospitality in Delhi, no one offered to put her in touch with her father's parents (though it was implied that they were still alive). Her father was that rarest entity in India: an only child. Like Samina, more or less. Yet he had left his parents, and never come back. They disappeared from the narrative at an early stage. Samina still found it difficult to contradict her father, and she'd been terrified of revealing her marriage to him -- terrified for his sake, not her own -- but she did want to hurt him, too. She always had, hadn't she? She wanted to surprise him, at least. To leave an impression. He had come to her fully formed, pounded into something misshapen yet stable, like a car crushed into a tight cube of scrap metal, and nothing she'd done to him -- not even this marriage of hers, remarkably -- had made an additional dent. Just as nothing she could do for him would ever made him happy. Had he wanted to hurt his parents, too? It would have been tradition and wealth rather than depression that made them compacted and tough, but he must have delivered quite a blow. Maybe he'd succeeded. Maybe he'd shattered them.
On the long flights home, when her stomach finally turned sour and kept her awake (three weeks in India, and it was airplane food that got her), she began to realize all of this -- the whole grubby, outmoded drama -- was of little consequence to her any longer. The truth and shame in it, the disgrace of her birth, the bereaved household it had formed, even her father's immunity to her -- now that she had Nicholas, it all became surprisingly unimportant. She and Nicholas would do what they could for her father, of course. They'd be good to her parents, visit often. She would still worry about them. But she and Nicholas were equally resilient and discrete and dent-proof, in their own way. They had plowed safely through India, with pilfering touts and taxi drivers and beggars and first-met relatives equipped with ungenerous implications. Unreliable train schedules and uninformed guides and rain and even a freak dump of hail at Mussoorie, in the mountains, had all bounced off them harmlessly. They were never out of one another's reach, even when they weren't in the same room. They didn't have to touch or speak -- they didn't require eye contact, even -- to flick the busy world away. Yet they did touch -- touched in public in India because Nicholas was American. Pretended ignorance. And it was a fluent touch. They had never had to fumble as strangers, as her father had with his first wife and almost all her cousins and aunts and uncles had, once. When they whispered together it was with jokes (seldom at anyone's expense, but how would they know that?) or weird, intimate forms of slang that no one in her family would have understood -- they spoke their own language. (They spoke his language, naturally, but a gurgling, cloying dialect of their own happy devising.) Marriage was meant to extend the family -- in India it was. It was supposed to bind you tighter to all of them. They picked your spouse with this in mind, the two families conspiring above the couple, then they put you in a room in his house with this chosen stranger and of course you were meant to fail. You were meant to need them, still, long for what they provided and he couldn't. You were not supposed to marry and find yourself happily free from them.
But she had -- Samina was. And it was exactly what she wanted. On the airplane she decided she wanted to be free of everyone except this person she had chosen, who had chosen her -- no blood or shared background and not the slightest approval to ease those choices or poison them with responsibility. She had made her own family, small as could be at the moment, though it would grow. And she didn't want it to blend with the family she hadn't chosen (who would never have chosen her). No, to hell with blending. Let it replace them. She'd been living as if her history was theirs -- stupidly, as if India was her country. She'd grown up longing for orchards she'd never seen, and silk worms. All her life, when anyone said the word "Kashmir," although they usually spoke it in an infamous and banal political context, a mental image with the quality of a memory had come to her mind: of the shade under the Chinar trees in a courtyard overlooking a lake and the mountains.
She'd been wasting her time. Imagine if she'd never met Nicholas, she thought, wrapping her arm through his while he slept. She'd be wasting it still. Let her history begin now.