One
Thursday, October 11
It is autumn and I am at university in England. I’ve never known autumn. Where I grew up, the monsoon cooled into a mild winter that the trees did not think it worth changing color for and in a matter of days it went straight to the infernos of summer. Here, the light is green and gold, and in the rectangle of trees framed by my window, russet and burgundy leaves drift from the sky, alive in the moving air. It’s quiet enough for me to hear their soft rustle as they touch the ground and the nib of my pen scratching on blue aerogram paper. I am fine, everything was okay on the plane. All the houses looked the same from the air, like toys. The grass is a different shade of green.
“You always manage to get away, you always have it easy,” my sister’s voice keeps saying in my head. Those had been her parting words at the airport though she did not utter them out loud.
Tia has three years of school to finish, is defeated every day in her tussles with books. She can’t get beyond 50 percent in any exam and cries, “What’s the point of reading about gauchos and flamenco? I want to be in Argentina!” She has other plans for herself, ever changing save for one constant: they involve glass, not paper. Mirrors, camera lenses, dancing on glass, pouring cocktails into a glass. She has a low, rich voice, she has only to start her lazy humming of “Tall and thin and young and lovely” and people stop to listen. Her long, slender feet show that she has many more inches to grow. She wants to leapfrog over her school years and find youth, acting, filmmaking without the slog of a college degree.
“What do you mean, what’s the news? Is there ever any news at this dump?” she wailed the other day on the phone when I called. “Now you’ve gone, I can never leave. I’ll be stuck here, looking after Amma my whole bloody life.”
“So much drama, Tia,” I said. “Which book are you living in these days? Not Little Women, I’ll bet. Where is Amma right now, anyway?”
“Still at work. And I’m busy too,” she shouted, slamming down the phone. She’d be scowling and throwing punches at her reflection in the mirror next to the phone as if she were aiming her blows at me. Of this I was sure.
I spent the rest of the day sick with remorse about my sarcasm, picturing Tia in her room, music exploding through her locked doors while she skulked inside, hating me more with every angry yowl of electric guitar. Her door would stay shut till late at night and my mother would keep knocking louder and louder. “Come out and eat, Tia . . . What’s going on, Tia? . . . Tell me what’s wrong.” If I were home, I’d charge out for a run—needing to get away—whatever the time, however unbearable the heat.
I’m good at exams, but Tia is wrong, I didn’t have it easy doing them and I don’t have it easy now. I am broke here, on a scholarship that believes in enforcing virtue through austerity. The scholarship comes from the grandly named Farhana Abdulali Endowment for Girls’ Education and is meant for Muslim girls. That didn’t discourage Begum Tasneem Khan, who had her shrewd eyes trained on me through most of my final year at school though I did not know it. One afternoon I was summoned to the principal’s office and I went in filled with dread but left clutching application forms.
“Why don’t you apply,” she had said. “No harm trying.”
The people who run the scholarship are connected to her through a network of feudal relationships and I suppose her billowing magnificence ensured that they did not dare bring up the matter of my religion. Or they thought that my years in a Muslim school had made me a bit of this and a bit of that.
One of the interviews involved a dinner with the grandees of the city, watching like prospective in-laws, my mother said, to see if I knew a fork from a knife and could make vivacious small talk and laugh, but not too loudly. She advised me to stick to food minus wings and legs, so it wouldn’t fly off my plate. When the day arrived, I could see Begum Tasneem on the other side of the dining table in the banquet hall, across a white battlefield glittering with silver and crystal. She was among many solemn people. She didn’t look in my direction as the kind old butler whispered in my ear that I would be served each time from my left side, never the right. On his next foray he murmured, “Sit straight, child, take a napkin.” I realized that the stiffly folded flowers standing at attention in silver holders were meant for use. I stole glimpses at the others and tried to be ladylike, delicately dabbing my lips every now and then, and restrained myself from diving under the table in panic when the napkin slid from my knees to the floor. Once the blur of chandeliers, silks, and silver had resolved themselves into particulars, I noticed a girl further down the table at the same instant that she puffed her cheeks, squinted her eyes, grinned at me, then put on her formal face again. We didn’t exchange a word, but after that the evening became easier.
Weeks later, Begum Tasneem summoned me to her many-windowed office. I remember the blue glazed vase of spider lilies on her side table, the rows of group photographs on the wall, my hard-beating heart. The morning light, filtered by gauzy curtains, was behind her, giving her an otherworldly glow, and the air was perfumed by the lilies. The day had arrived. It felt as if I had been transported to one of those folktales where a god tells a bewildered human being: “Speak, what does your heart desire? It shall be yours.”
Begum Tasneem’s voice seemed to come from somewhere near the lilies and was scented by them. I had been given a scholarship to a grand university in England, I would have to go at the end of September, and they would take care of the flight too. The curtains stopped swaying and the light shimmered for a few seconds. Almost in the same breath, with an ironic smile, she said, “They won’t let the scholarship go to your head, the endowment. They’ve measured out the money to make sure you come back educated—but also frugal, virtuous, grateful. A good girl.”
Then she dismissed me with a wearily elegant motion which was both a wave and a gesture toward the door. “If I know you, Sarayu,” she said, “you won’t let a little bit of poverty get in the way of a lot of enjoyment.” Her green-blue eyes, usually watchful and impersonal, seemed amused, and maybe she was even smiling a little as she returned her gaze to the open file in front of her.
Every part of the Farhana Abdulali Endowment is parceled out: the fees go straight to the university; dormitory bills are paid to the college; the rest must suffice for food and books and the occasional movie and is remitted monthly by an aged Abdulali who lives by the sea near Brighton. I have not met him, nor know how to reach him. Each time I cycle past the Japanese lanterns outside an enchanting restaurant on my route to lectures, or examine a noticeboard crowded with advertisements for concerts and plays, I want to tell him an extra hundred pounds would make not the tiniest difference to his life but would transform mine.
Abdulali austerity means there are times I don’t have enough in the bank for a three-minute international call, and so I slip a fifty-pence coin into the phone box and wait for my mother to pick up the receiver and say hello. I know the call will disconnect immediately. She will know it was me, and I know too the place by the door, next to the long mirror, where she had to be standing as she answered the phone only to find the call cutting off. For the time it takes to breathe one breath, we are together, at two ends of a fine string across continents and oceans.
At the end of each day, if I can’t make myself go back to my empty room, I go to the library, and if not the library I use a key I have been given to the basement of a church down the hill from my college. The basement contains a pottery studio, free for students to use if they have signed up for the ceramics society. I feel as if I’ve dropped into a secret cave through a rabbit hole—where the lights stay on, the kilns, tools, and wheels are tended by elves who do their work unseen, where stocks of material are magically replenished, and you can come in at any time of day or night. I’ve never known anything so luxurious.
For the hours I am at the wheel I don’t have to deal with new people. I don’t have to tell them what I am studying or where I am from or smile with pleased astonishment when they say they’ve always wanted to go to India. Besides, there is warmth, there is a kettle and tea bags, there is a tin always filled with fat, chewy ginger biscuits. The wheel turns, I place a ball of clay on it, I cover the clay with both my hands, and if I close my eyes I have the planet spinning in my palms to the hum of a motor. I don’t want to leave the studio, I want to bring in a camp bed and books and be a hermit.
Tuesday, October 16
My solitude did not last. This evening, after only about a week in my cave, I could tell there was someone else there when I unlocked the door. I sensed a presence before I saw anyone, felt outraged, trespassed upon. Instead of damp earth, I smelled aftershave. I could hear the radio warbling, water gushing from a tap.
The atoms around me rearranged themselves into an unfamiliar pattern. I turned to leave. But the sound of water stopped and a voice asked if there was someone out there.
At first sight I was startled by the person who came away from the sink. I could see she was a girl, tall and slender, but her rolled-up sleeves revealed the shoulders and biceps of a young man. Her legs were planted onto the ground as if they had grown out of it, long and muscular. In the low-ceilinged basement where I’ve already got used to being alone, she filled the entire space. Then she smiled at me and I felt myself uncoiling.
She offered that smile but did not follow it up with words. She went back to work as self-assured as one who had been making pots forever. She took out three or four large slugs of clay from the store and kneaded them into one big lump, putting all her power into it, then cut it into slices with her wire tool. She went to the scales on the right-hand worktable and divided the clay into several six-hundred-gram chunks. All of this she did with a focus that blocked out her surroundings.
Once she had an orderly line of identical balls by her wheel, she climbed onto the seat and took a black-and-white scarf from a jeans pocket. I was trying to keep making whatever I’d begun, but it became more and more difficult to keep my eyes off her. She made a triangle out of her scarf and put it over her eyes, then tied a knot tightly behind her head so that she was blindfolded. After this she groped around for one of her balls of clay and started to center it, switching her wheel to a fast spin. In a few moments there was an improbably perfect shape rising in height between her seeing, feeling fingers.
The basement had begun to feel like a safe haven to me. With this tall, muscular, blindfolded stranger, it throbbed with an unfamiliar and menacing energy. The radio she had turned on played a song that urged everyone to always take the weather with them, but I can’t see how that is possible if a single alien presence can alter a place this way.
Monday, October 22
Her name is Karin Wang. A different Chinese first name had been given to her at birth in Malaysian Borneo, but she hadn’t cared for the sound of it and had shrugged it off. I carry my old life around in an ever-present backpack that makes me ache from its weight while Karin appears to have sprung from the earth, unencumbered by parents, siblings, family, past. She’s jettisoned all of that. “I am Malaysia’s Olympic hope, that’s what they call me,” she said when we were next muddying our hands on neighboring wheels. This time she was working without her blindfold and had replaced her earlier silence with nonstop chatter. “They had a picture of me in the paper every time I won something. Golden girl, that’s me.”
Her father kept the cuttings in a scrapbook she never looked at. Her own scrapbook had pictures of airplanes, and she traced their shapes with her fingers, knowing that one day she would fly a long distance from the father who woke her up at dawn even on school holidays and took her to the beach where she had to run barefoot on the sand, as fast and as far as she could. He rigged up steel rings and bars for her to exercise on. Every morning she had to have two boiled eggs and salted fish while her brother tried not to look up from his small bowl of rice. Her father watched as she swallowed her vitamins, weighed her, and marked her height off on the wall.
“I’m something between my dad’s guinea pig and a pig he’s fattening, kind of, for the kill,” she said. “I badly want to lose, but I’m too fucking scared of the bastard to do anything but win.”
The way she spoke of him startled me. I tried to recall if I had ever been scared of my father. I could almost see him next to Karin, as if he really were sitting there and listening to her, his forehead furrowed with concern at her bad language. The same look he had with me and Tia through the last year or two when he was certain he did not have long to live and wondered if he could somehow make us grow up double quick.
Karin doesn’t want to run or compete, she wants to study aeronautical engineering and fly planes. But her ticket to escape comes at a price: she is on a sports scholarship. She was offered a place, money, mentorship, coaching, even food allowances—as long as she keeps training for athletics medals and wins a few for the university.
“The further I run away from running, the more they make me run. If I don’t run, I don’t get to study,” she said with something between a grimace and a grin. She dialed up the speed of her wheel so it flew into a blur and the wide-mouthed bowl she had between her hands spun crazily out of shape. She stopped the wheel and slammed her fist into the collapsing clay.
She is an unlikely presence in the studio. On the rare occasions that other students are down there too, they try not to stare when she strides in, muscles taut under neon tights which she wears with calf-length boots. Halfway through the door she starts shrugging off her dark green velvet coat, bought secondhand from Oxfam as I have discovered. Her hair is cut close to her skull apart from a fringe that falls down one side of her small, square face. Her nails have purple polish on them one week, navy blue the next, and before each session she goes through a ritual of removing rings from every finger, peering at her hands, and then biting the edges off her nails so they won’t cut into the clay. I gave her nail clippers sometime after I met her, but I never saw her use them.
It turns out we are from the same college and if we cycle into town together, we go wildly fast downslope, drunk on the danger of it, hands off handlebars. Airborne. I never had the nerve to do that when I was on my own. One evening at rush hour, the bicycle pump strapped to my carrier fell off. I had shot forward by then and was too far ahead to know what had happened, but Karin stopped her bike in the middle of the busy road and held a hand up at the traffic. All the cars came to a screeching halt, she ran across to my pump, picked it up, waved a thank-you to the waiting cars, rode down toward me.
“If you pull this stunt where I come from,” I told her, “I’ll be scraping your remains off the road with a teaspoon.”
Sunday, October 28
Where I come from. I thought I knew where I come from, what constitutes home. Home was my father asking us to be quiet because he wanted to listen to the cricket scores. It was the usual Sunday sounds of the newsreader’s posh voice, the dissonant trumpets of a wedding band, my mother at her typewriter in her bedroom, the clacking of it a shower of pebbles, her fingers moved so fast. A time when Tia and I were still close, when any place was home if the two of us were together with the reassuring voices of our parents who quarreled out of old love.
Sitting here across the oceans, at this table where I can’t see into the darkness beyond the disk of light from my lamp, I see a face reflected back at me in the window glass, and it is as if I am in the room but my face is outside, asking to be let in. I don’t know this face. I need to work out how to reassemble myself.
It is fourteen months and eighteen days since my father’s cremation. Afterwards, we found ourselves by the sea at the Gateway, and I say found because I can’t remember how we got there or why we went, only that it was late in the evening, and there were many murky corners, and an elderly relative lecturing us about the need to be alert, to look out for pickpockets. It was windy. High waves crashed onto the walls and lovers leaned into each other when the spray from a big one burst upon them like a rain cloud. Men thrust screws of peanuts at us, junkies glowed briefly from flames lit under bubbling foil, then returned to darkness. Due east across the black water was Elephanta, to which my father had said we would take the ferry once his heart surgery was done—when he was out of the hospital, ...
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