Netta, Nebraska, Nina by Anu Kay
A Pakistani tour guide falls for an American visitor and remembers her even long after moving to the USA himself.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
Pappu once lived in Karachi where he drove foreign tourists to the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro. The five-thousand-year-old city was magnificent. With its broken-down majestic ruins, brown and gold in the afternoon sun, the steps that now led nowhere, the rutted small roads that emptied into courtyards of homes where people had lived their lives long ago. He had taken many people around the old buildings, given them the tour of the citadel, the granaries and told them many a story. The Mound of the Dead – that was what the words meant in translation. Pappu told visitors everything he had read up from old books, and stuff that he made up on the spot, or improvised as he drove along, the stories in his head mingling with their chatter behind him.
It helped he knew a bit of English. In his job, one had to. But the sound of other languages, the musical intonations, the swinging rhythms that made up words he could never understand, filled him with a strange longing. His heart swelled, his head filled with dreams of all these countries he wanted to visit, be a part of. He felt a tingling at his back, as if he was growing wings, appurtenances to take him across every meaningless border and line that divided nations.
The white people he drove around liked him. One even said that he must go abroad, for he could sell anything he wanted, he was just so expressive. It made Pappu laugh. ‘My English, it not so good.’ And the professor type to whom he had been speaking, and who like everyone else called him Pappu for they found ‘Parvez,’ his formal name, somewhat difficult (Par-vaiz? Purrvej?), patted him on the shoulder and said something like: ‘Oh, there are all kinds of people everywhere, speaking all kinds of English.’
When people talked like this, almost in a jokey way, Pappu dreamed of the impossible. That he would finish college, go to university, and get all the degrees he had left unfinished. And then he would have a proper job, maybe in the government, and he would have a chauffeur driven car, and perhaps even a bungalow in one of the nicer parts of Karachi.
Things hadn’t quite worked out for Pappu. His father, who worked as a clerk in the university’s accounting department, was killed when a shootout broke out between different political factions. His father had gone to meet an older relative who lived in the heart of old Karachi, a parking fracas set off an argument, and his father, who had stopped for a cigarette, got in the way of a stray bullet.
As a family, Pappu’s mother said often, they came in the way of bad things. ‘It’s like even if we stand aside in a corner, evil spirits and bad things will find us and lay us low.’ For all her bitterness, his mother remained devout, rooted to her faith in god and in government. Pappu remembered the rounds of government offices he made with his older brother, asking for compensation, filling up forms, the same form for different government departments, recounting his father’s death, the incidents before and after, in the exact same sequence, before one government official after another, only to be told that because the postmortem report for his father listed cardiac arrest as the cause of death, the government wasn’t liable to pay compensation.
There had been nothing wrong with their father, the siblings knew that. A stray shot had injured him, and he had fallen, gotten into cardiac shock, and died. His body had lain in the parking lot for hours before someone from the relative’s home had called them from the hospital. One official tried to help. ‘If you can change the postmortem report, get eyewitnesses to detail what exactly happened, get another doctor, things can change.’ Parvez and his brother knew he was asking for a bribe. They would think it over, his brother said, but once they were back home, he refused.
‘We must make a case,’ he spoke through gritted teeth, holding back his anger and frustration. He looked in turn at Pappu and their mother. ‘Someone must know how he got killed. We could get his old health records, and show the police, the judges, he had no illness, nothing. One fine day, a man can’t just drop dead.’
His brother’s words fell into a silence, hopelessly deep in the hollow drum of their hearts. But it was true. People were indeed dropping dead, from the bullets that flew everywhere, as battles raged in the streets between the different political parties. The next day, Pappu lied to his mother. He told her he was going to college. Instead he visited the street where his father had been last seen, and the hospital in Khokrapar he had been taken. The old relative, his father’s cousin, greeted him with tears, embraced him affectionately and took him around, to show him things, the exact spot where his father had been found.
Pappu noticed the board moments later. Lifting his head to wipe the sweat off his neck, he read: The Sindh history tours: information and travel guides, a lopsided, blue on white board that hung across the street where his father had walked his last steps in front of a tea and cigarette stall. ‘It is a proper shop now, not just a tea stall,’ said the old relative, gesturing toward the plastic chairs under an awning. ‘It’s for the soldiers, they are here all the time now.’
But neither the tea stall owner nor any of the regulars had any knowledge of what had happened to his father, or of anything that happened that day. Tinged with apologetic laughter, their prevarications were so predictable. That more than a month had gone by, there were so many customers, so many army men too, and so much happening. The relative pulled a sad face as he saw Pappu off at the bus station. ‘Maybe you should think of getting a job, it will help your family.’
Pappu had returned, not to meet the old relative, but because that strange board, hanging askew, away from the tea and cigarette stall, intrigued him. Now he stood under that same board, his shoes scratchy on the gritty stone steps, and raised a hand to ineffectually straighten it. His kurta brushed against the damp, soot-coated walls, and he knew his mother would know, like she always did, where he had been. He remembered the bullet that had caught his father by accident, and while he wasn’t afraid, it was just better to be cautious.
An elderly man at his desk, far inside the shop, looked up startled as Pappu stepped into the shop, right where a sliver of light from a half-open window fell on him. Pappu was surprised at the darkness inside. There was really nothing in the shop but for two tall aluminum shelves lining the walls, haphazard with old books and files, whose musty smell filled the room and made Pappu reach subconsciously for the big handkerchief he always carried in his pocket. The man dropped his pen and stood up frightened. ‘There’s nothing here. Don’t shoot.’
Pappu placed his hands across his chest and managed a half-smile. He was so used to random police checks any place, anywhere, the gesture was now natural to him. The older man laughed, a husky short laugh that somehow made his head flop toward his chest. He came forward, placed his hand on Pappu’s shoulder and apologized. Later, many would tell him, even Nina, that it was his smile. It was disarming, the tiny clefts that emerged on his chin, and the attention it drew to his pink perfectly curved lips.
It was Wali Khan Chacha, a retired scholar in the university’s department of history of which he, Pappu, had just been a student, who put him in touch with the Sheraton Hotel, one of the city’s oldest and most luxurious. They were always looking for guides, to drive the American and British tourists to Taxila and Mohenjo Daro. ‘You do know driving, don’t you?’
Pappu had lied to him, and to the manager at the hotel who took his interview. It was all terribly informal, the retired professor’s words carried weight, and Pappu knew he could have gotten away with anything he said, as long as it was not too farfetched. He could drive, he said with an insouciance that came easily, and for the first few months, he did drive without a license. He never gave the police a chance to catch him, he was always careful, and it was the hotel that bribed the inspector into issuing him a license. They simply slipped in some rupee notes along with an official letter, telling the inspector that Pervez Khan, employee of Sheraton Hotel, needed a license in lieu of his lost one.
Pappu was soon popular. Tourists who came sought him out, for he had been recommended by earlier guests. Even the logbook in the hotel, placed strategically in front of the heritage curio shop, spoke highly of him. The guide who took us around. The guide who knows everything. He was just fabulous. And a great driver. And everyone knew who they referred to.
But there was one that mentioned him by name. Pappu knew her handwriting the moment he saw it. Pappu is just wonderful. And in another place, some comments down, there was his name again, in the same handwriting. We cannot wait to return. Pappu has promised to show us more places.
Her name stayed with Pappu. He remembered how he waited to hear her say it, tell him her name as the introductions were made. Everything that came off those smooth, articulate western tongues – even the simplest things like telling someone your name – took time, just in the manner they chewed gum meticulously and slowly. The other guide, Ali, told Pappu the whole thing was a sham. ‘They chew gum and take their time to think. They aren’t as silly and easy with their money the way we think. Everything is thought over, everything calculated. They just don’t want to give you that impression.’
But he could never have such thoughts about Netta. She was the research scholar he had taken around with the man who had been her boyfriend then. She had written those words about him in the hotel logbook. And done it twice. That is what Pappu did not understand too well, the compliment repeated, and she had done it in a strange, secretive way. He understood that, but not the reason behind it.
Yet he came back to read her words again and again, see her writing on the blue single-lined page. He analyzed her handwriting on different pretexts – had she had written the first bit in a hurry and remembered more later? Or had her pen run out of ink and she had to ask for another? Or was it because she didn’t want people, especially her boyfriend, to know? But Pappu couldn’t linger or loiter too much around the logbook, for there were always crowds around the heritage shop. Well-dressed moneyed people who looked at him in that abrupt sweeping way he knew so well. And the superior hotel staff were always ready with a rough word, especially when the white tourists were around. Cruelty always needed witnesses.
He knew this: that the handwriting was clearly hers, Netta’s. And she had left him her card, with her number and personal email on it. Ali had advised him never to take these whites too seriously. ‘They will say that you were wonderful, that they will miss you, and you believe it, just as you do with all the nice ways they greet you in the morning, but that really means nothing. It’s how they are, how easy they are with their feelings.’
Pappu had heard these old truths many a time. They were passed down like pearls of job advice from one guide to another.
It was one late October, only some months ago, when he was engaged as guide to take Robert and Netta to the old ruins. It was somewhat hot, he remembered, but they were dressed too flimsily, and the lady especially. He knew not to stare at her, but as she was seated just behind in view of the rearview mirror, he could see her bare shoulders, and when she turned a certain way, he caught a glimpse of her cleavage. She had a way of placing Robert’s palm against her cheek, then smiling at him dreamily before Robert gently eased his hand away. Pappu could understand why. It was hot, despite the small fan running just behind him, blowing its air faintly over the passengers at the back. Pappu moved between discretion, and alarm. He was afraid of being caught staring, and cautious too, especially when the car stopped at traffic lights, or crawled when in the sudden midst of rambling herds of cattle, or other slow-moving traffic. People stared at her through the windows and looked down at her from their vantagepoint seats high on a bus.
He had tried to speak up once, desperately trying to draw their attention but the fan moved, whizzing loudly, turning this way and that. And he had finally succeeded when they stopped at a roadside dhaba for tea. A place that was safe, as Pappu had vouched once they set off, things were clean, and the cups were washed carefully.
‘Madam you need to be careful,’ and Robert and Netta looked at him in surprise. As if they were taken aback by the very fact that he could speak. In complete sentences, and not in the ingratiating, half-embarrassed way other guides spoke their English, their sentences a disjointed, stumbling stream of broken-up words.
Netta emerged from the car, languid and utterly unself-conscious, and the strap on her left shoulder slid loosely off. Pappu averted his gaze quickly. But not the others in the dhaba, though Netta had instantly pulled it back, and placed her arms around herself. The silence stretched longer than necessary. He caught a stupefied look on the assistant’s face, and the dhaba owner glowered, looking disembodied where he sat, enveloped in the smoky haze that emanated from the big cauldron of tea, and the pan next to it where a stream of samosas swirled in hot oil.
‘Madam,’ Pappu hesitated, wanting to tell her things the right and proper way. She had to be decorous, place the scarf over herself, but he was confused. Over the shoulder, or should she cover her head too?
Netta dabbed at her face with a tissue (he always provided a box of scented tissues in the car) and smiled uncertainly. Pappu heard the silence around him, and then the boyfriend asked.
What’s your name again… Par…?
‘You call me Pappu,’ he said, louder than usual, smiling broadly.
‘Easy and simple,’ she said. ‘So, Pappu, tell us more about yourself.’
They were more friendly when they were back in the car, where he did manage to get her to roll up the window. Hot wind, madam, he said gesturing with his hand around. Close window. Maybe when he spoke like a guide, they would take him seriously.
There was another hour left to go before they reached Mohenjo Daro, and by then they were already quarreling. Pappu had no idea how it had started, for he had been concentrating on the road ahead, where the trucks, now free on the highway, swerved dangerously and erratically. But he saw how her face turned red slowly, and the jerky movements of her shoulders, and soon he couldn’t pretend to be deaf, for they were slapping and punching each other, on the wrist, on the thigh. They were discreet after all and didn’t want to be seen in the rearview mirror, but he caught the abuses.
When he finally braked to a halt in the lobby of the small hotel at Mohenjo Daro, the car was heavy with a stunned tired silence. But Pappu did not look them in the face, not even when she demanded a separate room at check-in. The stuffy yet bewildered clerk tried to explain that no extra rooms were available, everything was booked in advance. It was the peak tourist season. But Netta leaned forward, her hands taut and strained on the wooden rails that separated her from the clerk, and said in loud, jerky tones that she would cancel her reservation if he didn’t oblige. She needed another room, that moment, that very minute. Robert drummed on the desk, stared at the ceiling, evading the clerk’s pleading looks, and supremely deaf to Netta’s petulance. At last, teary eyed, she flounced off to the lobby, away from the elevators leading up to the rooms, oblivious to every watching eye. Pappu tried to pacify them. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘please tell madam.’
But Robert moved away from the front desk, his jaw set, his eyes averted.
‘There are no hotels around, sir,’ Pappu almost whined, and the clerk nodded, his pen tapping to his every word.
‘Her problem,’ he said, still unmoved. Pappu hated him then, for his imperious rudeness, and himself for his forced servility, and the effort it took him to be persuasive and cajoling.
‘Please sir, not safe for madam to go anywhere else. Your duty, sir.’
Robert turned and laughed then. Pappu smelt the garlic and ketchup on his breath. ‘My duty? So I play the knight here, like you.’ Then he said something, that he, Pappu missed, but there was that nasty smirk on his face, and a gleam – of malice? – appeared in his eyes. Netta and he were so ill-suited, Pappu thought.
‘Sir,’ he said again, putting a soft entreating note into his voice, ‘even hotel not safe for women alone.’
Robert’s elbow dug quick and sharp into Pappu, and he winked as he passed Pappu to reach where Netta sat, her head resting against the sofa, her eyes closed. He nudged her roughly, bent to say something quickly, right into her ear, and then he helped her to her feet. As they moved past him, hand in hand, Robert patted him on the shoulder, with a ‘see you man’, and Netta laughed, suddenly gay, ‘Good night, Pappu, catch you tomorrow.’
He slept in the car, for the accommodation the hotel provided for drivers was shoddy and cramped. Four men had already taken up much of the space in that narrow windowless room by the time he arrived. Pappu stretched out on the driver’s seat, flipping it flat, and his face looked up to the hotel front, the rooms rising above, and the flashing neon lights that blazed out its name for miles around. The light remained on in the fourth floor room that he knew was theirs, 402, and he saw Robert appear in the balcony, to smoke. Netta joined him soon after, and Pappu held his breath, as he waited for a suspenseful movie moment to unfold. They never looked down, and of course they couldn’t see him. They did not know they had a witness that late at night as they stood there on the balcony, and then kissed, and Pappu found he could not look away, not when she lifted her top and Robert pressed his head down to where her skin was now exposed.
Did she smell of perfume, or of dry, collected sweat? The faint musky odor that he had smelt on some of these white people. Unlike the heavy earthen smells his own people carried.
He did not glance once at Netta the next morning as they headed on – toward the touristy places around Mohenjo Daro, and then the ruins of the old city itself. Robert and she did not quarrel any more. But it was as if she too sensed things were not quite right with Pappu. Or, as Pappu would only understand many years later, it was the way women toyed with men, when they understood their infatuation. A couple of times, she had locked glances with Pappu in the rearview mirror. And she had asked him one too many questions about the ruins, as Robert took his photos and smoked, and several times Pappu felt her arms brush against his, as he guided her up the stairs, and then she asked him to take her photo with her cellphone. When she looked at the photos he had taken, he felt something stir in him. She was holding the phone he had held only moments ago, her fingers placed just where his had been. She was seeing herself as he had seen her only moments ago. Her head thrown back, her scarf flowing in the breeze, her smile for the camera, only for him.
Ali, the senior guide, had told him to never read much into anything. Just do your job. They are free in their behavior, and you will expect too much. They are, and he remembered how Ali had spat into the earth as he said the word next, bitches, they can feel the heat anytime.
Pappu thought of that as he watched her looking at the photo, and waited for her reaction. He smiled in relief at her okay, the thumbs up she showed him as she laughed. Later that night, there was a fight again, right on the balcony where he saw them again clearly. He saw Netta reach for Robert’s collar, how he pulled away, and slapped her, and their voices rose once in the quiet night before they retreated inside.
He was to do nothing, just keep his head down and do the job: he remembered this advice of Wali Khan Chacha, the old professor, and Ali, the senior guide who was a sort of mentor. Nothing, unless the tourists behave in a really suspicious way, and you pass on their information to the government. But Netta and Robert had just been a quarrelsome couple, who would soon break up. Pappu knew this, just as he knew that she was already unhappy, her misery plain on her face every time he looked at her in the rearview mirror.
‘Are you married, Pappu?’ she asked when he took them around the old bazaars of Karachi.
He had blushed. Suddenly he imagined being with someone, a woman soft as she was and yet shy, and he felt his loneliness even more. No.
‘Do you have someone?’
‘No, madam,’ he said, wanting to be serious, wanting to end this conversation and still blushing.
It was the first time he had been asked this, the first time a woman had asked him these questions, and that is why, he would tell himself later, he loved her. Netta understood his loneliness. There was more to her than her spoiled petulance. He had no wish for more intimacy or even to know her better, but then she left him her card, complete with phone and email. 600 S, Jackson Street, Omaha, NE 68106. He kept it safe, and close to him. To Pappu, it was okay to love someone especially when there was no hope.
Twelve years later, after Netta had asked him the question about his marriage, Nina reminded him again. By then Pappu had moved to Baltimore where Ali’s cousins ran a taxi business. He took his time, slowly familiarizing himself with the city, its streets, and the wide, sweeping country beyond it that began just moments down I-87. This time, he passed his drivers’ test easily, even the computerized one, and drove the Civic, the Elantra, and then the Corolla – the easy to maintain, fuel-efficient car models the agency preferred – with practiced laconic ease. Sometimes he wondered why every second white woman he saw on the streets appeared to resemble Netta. Perhaps she thought of him in the same way, one brown man easily melding into another, making all of them so forgettable, so anonymous.
It was already very late, the night he picked up Nina, soon after her call. ‘I was at a client’s,’ she explained, as she sat at the back, her head against the seat. She spoke in that nonchalant lazy voice that had always made him angry in the beginning. But now he shrugged, he didn’t care really. Like her, he had given rides to many other nurses from the same hospital, especially when their shifts ran late, or they had to go to see a patient urgently. Nina looked out dreamily, she lifted her bouncy, wavy hair against the seat, and he wanted to tell her of the many heads that had rested against it, in a similar way. The chatty girls pulling at their braids, the Chinese man with the dandruff and gentle smile, and the couple who had tried making out at the back, till he had asked them not to.
‘They keep you late, these patients,’ he said, making his voice go deliberately casual. Surreptitiously, he checked her face in the mirror, as she lay with her eyes closed. Long sweeping lashes, he once told her, as he gently touched them with his finger. At the memory, he revved up, turning sharp to take the ramp to the expressway.
‘It doesn’t matter to me, the time,’ she said, sleepy. ‘Like you.’
‘With me, it’s different,’ he said roughly.
She laughed, her eyes flashing open now, the streetlights fell on her skin and turned it a shiny bronze. He wanted to be with her then, knowing that he hated her, and still he couldn’t resist her.
‘You are a man, and you are not married, and so it’s all right with you, I get it,’ she drawled. ‘I am not married too, and unattached. So I have all the time in the world.’
‘Even for a drink?’ He said it before he could stop himself. Only six weeks ago he had gotten into a fracas with another man at the Mirch Masala restaurant on Frederick’s Main Street. He remembered the man clearly, a hefty, mustached man, with an iron bangle on his wrist that gave him away as someone (a Sikh, perhaps) from Punjab, a state in India close to the border with Pakistan. Here, on another continent, far from their home countries, they were all desis, but history had made them enemies. But Pappu hadn’t been thinking of the big picture then. He just didn’t like the way the other man had brazenly tried to flirt with Nina. Sitting down at her table, where she was having a cold beer by herself, and trying to start a conversation about things back home. And Pappu had rushed in, like an idiot. He was left with a strained wrist that hurt for a week, while his friends, the other cabbies, tried to pacify the other man’s – Amrit Singh’s – relatives, asking them not to press a case.
Fortunately, a night’s violence hadn’t been able to break the goodwill that existed between the desis. The Sikhs and the Muslims were from two sides of the Punjab, a region divided up between India and Pakistan once the British left in 1947. Now in a huge country, four or maybe five times the size of their original homeland – wasn’t the US double India’s size? – they stuck together. It was the accepted and unuttered truth. The color of one’s skin shaped community and granted safety.
Pappu had apologized to Singh, visiting him at the Baltimore Park hospital some days later. Amrit Singh was stretched out like a walrus sunning itself on white sand, watched over by his cousins. His father, Baldev Singh, soon appeared. He shook Pappu’s hand and said he would soon start looking for a girl for Baldev to marry; it would keep him in check. ‘Not to worry, Khan sahib,’ the father had said, and that made Pappu feel strange. He realized then he was as old as his father, who had been only 45 when he died.
‘You live dangerously, don’t you?’ Nina asked now, after a short silence, as he drove the car toward Fielding Road. ‘After what happened that evening?’
‘It’s over now,’ he shrugged. He wanted to tell her more, about not going off to drink by herself, that it just wasn’t done, but stopped. Men like him, they had never been able to set the rules anywhere. And Nina wouldn’t take kindly to it. He didn’t want long periods of silence between them, the kind that happened when he spoke out of turn. In all these years of knowing her, driving her, and her friends at times, in his cab, he now knew well to hold his tongue.
They were near her house now. He wished she would call him upstairs, the way she had done three or four years ago, the time she had shared a flat with her friend, Anjali. Now Nina lived alone, in a more upscale area. ‘What’s over?’ she asked, leaning over the window, and pulling up her dress straps decorously. ‘It’s not ever over for me. I know the things said about me. All the gossip about me. And you are in it too.’
She had her half-smile on, it made a dent appear in her right cheek. It was brief, just a lift of her upper lip, as if depending on his response, she could turn off her smile, and put on quite another expression.
Pappu looked away, rubbing his hands against the wheel. He hated himself at these moments of confusion, wishing he could have stopped himself from saying those words and inviting her out in the first place. He made himself out to be one of those desperate for love, and for a woman whom everyone said fell for anyone wanting to take her out, give her a night out.
‘I am busy, you know. Next time, call someone else.’
Then he had swept off, leaving her on the sidewalk, and when he looked back, she was swinging her bag as she went inside.
It was the winter of 2002, the first time he met Nina. Though Nina later told him that they had met before this, a time of which he had no conscious memory. He only remembered the afternoon his uncle asked him – fairly ordered him actually – to pick someone up from the airport.
‘A lady coming from New York, and there’s no one else at short notice, so here’s the key, take the Toyota.’
His uncle, or tayaji – father’s older brother by connotation, though Mir Mehmood was a distant relative – had finally lost patience. Pappu had been moping for too long, and, as he did understand by then, he was expected to figure things out about other people, in another country. It was up to him to adjust and fit in. It was he who had to abandon his dreams, once and for all, the ones he had held onto despite his father’s death, and even after the loss of old Wali Chacha, the kind professor, whose shop in Karachi was one day sealed off by the army. The maps he had were used as evidence that he had supplied them to CIA agents. Wali Chacha returned from jail a broken man and had put Pappu in touch with the men who offered to take him to America.
‘Get out of this country, son. It’s for your future if you want one,’ he said the last time Pappu saw him. It was the most practical advice Pappu had ever received.
In his early days in Baltimore, Pappu thought often about running into Netta, or of going to meet her. It took him only some weeks to realize that America was a huge country, spread out across a continent like a man with a giant bulge. It had so many different time zones, and it took 40 hours, or a bit more, to drive nonstop from east to west. And his tayaji, Mir Mehmood, laughed at him outright when he asked if Nebraska was close. ‘Nebraska, who goes there?’ And tayaji had stared, laughing again, and Pappu was glad he hadn’t shown him Netta’s business card, turned up at the edges, smudged in places with his frequent touching, but still safe in his wallet.
America, Pappu felt, was incomprehensible in its hugeness. Even a small part of it was packed with almost the entire world. One part of New York – he realized the time he was there once – was totally different from another, barely ten minutes away. There were bits of countries packed away in every little part of the city. When he rode the subway, he heard different languages, people speaking in so many ways, each one looking so different from the other. Everyone comfortable in their own skin, while he felt exposed, raw, totally vulnerable. They looked at him in ways he was not used. Men and women and everyone else. The more he traveled around the city, taking the subway, following the different colored lines on the map overhead and as the wheels churned and cranked under him, the more the certainty grew that he would never meet Netta again. When he saw couples kiss each other, as they walked along the Hudson riverfront, or as they sat across each other on the white wrought-iron chairs at Bryant Park, he remembered things he had somehow let himself forget. Now, whenever he sat anonymous and ignored in a public place, loud with people and their packed lives, these memories returned with a fire that made him desperate to find Netta. There in the stairwell of the old haveli at Hyderabad, when Robert had gone out to fetch his film rolls, she had asked him those teasing questions again. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
And when he had blushed – he blushed now at the memory and his own naivete – she had placed her hands on his shoulder, almost pulling his kurta. Then leaning down, for she stood a step higher than him, she kissed him. He remembered the zing-like thing that passed through him, her taste of something minty and creamy, and that perfume too. A stuffy sugary smell left on well-pressed clothes. Her hand was on his shoulder, as she placed small kisses around his lips, before she abruptly stopped, when they heard quick heavy steps. And in a minute, Robert was rushing up, a bottle of water in hand, his mouth bubbling over with the swigs he had taken, and the film roll in his other hand.
Netta rubbed her forehead, smiled up at Robert. She exclaimed with some affectionate irritation that he had kept them waiting a long time. Pappu felt the swelling on his lips, a terrible coolness on his forehead, and her last quick glance on him. A warning, he had assumed then. Was it also a promise?
All the time he lived in Queens, taking people down to New Jersey, and even after when he moved to Maryland, that possibility of driving to Nebraska remained with him. The memory of that kiss came back to him every time he looked at Netta’s business card, packed away in his wallet, just behind his mother’s photo.
Late in 2001, in his early days in Baltimore, he felt, before he heard, the abuse hurled at him. People shouting words across the sidewalk and muttering at him as they crossed. Someone threw a slipper at him the time he walked out of a Starbucks. It was some weeks after 9/11 and he hadn’t realized yet how totally the world had changed, for everyone, even for him. A band of assassins, he heard them say, just as they passed him. Other things too, with the spittle often brushing his cheek, and he always wiped it away, one quick swipe of his finger. Terrorist, they kept chanting after him, never letting up.
Once he felt a shoe strike him on the ear, and he ran right into a barber shop. But there had been no respite there either. Three big men in sunglasses and bandannas had followed him in, and he felt nothing after that first blow. A Chinese man in the neighboring laundromat had called his tayaji up, and then had taken Pappu to the hospital. He had already been warned by Mir Mehmood not to draw attention, to lie low, to wait for tempers to ease. We are all evil in their eyes, beta. They think we did it, those attacks. Things will never be the same.
When he came to, Mir Mehmood, and the other cabby, Wasim, were leaning over him, before the head nurse he would know later as Anjali shooed them away. Not so close, not so close, she said, and they spun around, shaking the IV pole, almost toppling it over before she lunged forward and caught it in time. She was agile despite the heaviness of her gait. With her wide hips and heavy-lidded eyes, she moved slowly around the ward, and between cubicles, and he watched how neatly she tucked in the bedclothes around him, arranged the medicines, and lifted the blinds just behind. All this without jolting his arm and leg now trussed up in a cast, and half lifted from the bed. He was thinking of the expenses, and of the humiliation. The wounds would heal, but the images of the boys spitting at him, tearing his kurta, would haunt him for a long time.
That night, the one he always forgot about, was the first time he met Nina. He had always believed that he had seen her that first time when he had picked her up at the airport, when she returned from New York. But there was that one night, their first time together, Nina reminded him of their first meeting. ‘We both saw each other at our worst,’ she said. And he struggled to remember the time she spoke of. She was the nurse on night duty, a stand-in at the last moment for someone else, and she had been around when the friendly police official came calling. Pappu vaguely recollected a woman’s presence, a blue uniformed figure with a soft urgent voice, who wanted him to make a statement so the crime could be filed as a hate act.
All Pappu remembered was Wasim’s hissed warnings, Mir Mehmood’s face set in worry, and the way his leg hurt, as the policewoman brushed against it, once and then again. He saw the look in her eye, a certain gleam that told him her action was deliberate. ‘I fell,’ he managed, painfully.
She raised her eyebrows, and then looking around quickly, she leaned forward, ‘You are lying. And lying to save your skin.’
It was then, Nina said, she had intervened. ‘That woman was almost falling over you on the bed,’ she giggled later.
‘If that is even half-true, I would remember,’ Pappu responded, half-facetiously. What surprised him about Nina was her inability to take things seriously, especially when it most mattered. Like her father’s death in that Dominican air crash only some weeks after 9/11. He had gone to pick her up at the airport, it was a month or so since his injury and his uncle told him it was time he got on with his life.
In his cab, the Toyota Corolla, she sniffled and wept, and her nose turned red slowly and still she insisted she was angry, more than sad. Angry still with her father whom she had so recently lost, despite the fact that she would never see him again.
‘Don’t give me the tissues,’ she told him in the cab, ‘I am not sad. He gave us nothing but trouble.’
‘You can’t say that about your father,’ he responded heatedly. He tried to remember what her friend, the head nurse Anjali had told him on the phone. She had called once she had known Pappu would be at the airport when Nina would fly in from New York. ‘She will be a little upset. It happened so suddenly and funerals can be very upsetting,’ Anjali had said, her voice was measured and heavy on the phone, like the government officers he remembered from his time in Karachi, who took their time ponderously over every file, ‘so please take care.’
‘Take the tissue,’ he insisted, and then she did. When she got off, she asked for his number. ‘I might need you again,’ was what she told him. She passed him her business card, and he felt the scratch of her nail on his hand. He was man enough to know what she meant.
Nina was a slim woman with long wavy hair that fell to her waist. But there were her brown eyes that could look teasing one moment, and flash angrily the next, and then that crooked smile. She was easy to picture, and easy in other ways too. She showed no embarrassment when he suggested a hotel for their first time. Neither had she shown much shyness. Nor had he, he acknowledged. And they had both laughed over it, that time in the hotel room. They spent the night before he dropped her off to the nursing college, where she was taking yet another course, this time in physiotherapy.
Those early days with Nina were his happiest. She was saucy with all that she knew and he didn’t mind, for he was shy and curious. Though there were the other days from his past he held dear, the time he had been a guide. The days spent driving out of Karachi, the long dusty journeys into the heat of the country.
These other thoughts came to him as he read Nina’s teasing message, and he thought hard before replying. He didn’t want to give himself away as too gauche. People saw him differently, he wanted to tell her, without wanting to sound boastful. There was the film crew that had come to Silver Springs once, to make a film about a woman from Afghanistan who had set up a restaurant, and he had been offered a role. ‘A waiter who sees his boss cry and offers comfort, can you do it?’ one of the assistant directors had asked, her eyes crinkled as she looked up at him, the sun turning her acned skin a brilliant burning red. That had been so close to the truth he had flushed – he thought of how Nina had taken the tissue from him, her face only inches from him in the cab – and the woman assistant director looked at him with interest. When she came up to him asking about restaurants nearby, and if he was free to act as guide for them, he said yes. He liked this stuff and by now he knew how to read a woman’s interest in him.
This new, terribly creaky sophistication he had picked up made him feel he could be indifferent toward Nina. Still he could not stop the flame of wild anger that swept through him whenever he heard anything about Nina. And this strange thing between them persisted. Some nights together, some hanging around, and hours of getting used to each other. They met twice a month at times, sometimes there was a gap of three or four months between meetings, and they texted each other a lot. He was never one to make long conversations over the phone. Besides, she laughed openly at his broken English, even if she called it cute. And then he had that fight in that restaurant, one that had left him with a bruised hand, and a swollen eye.
When Nina had taken him to the hospital, her presence had prompted teasing and a lot of disparaging from his friends. ‘She’s quite loose,’ said Wasim. ‘All the rich homes she goes to, as a therapist and nurse, but who knows.’ Who knew really? Once Pappu shadowed her. He waited for her outside a white Georgian house on Stevens Road and he saw the middle-aged white man who drove out with her in a coupe. He believed his friends then. Her sophistication was such a giveaway. She knew how to handle her drink and was turned out always so right. It came with years of living and being with the rich.
‘You spend time with me, and for what reason?’ he asked her once, as gruff and short as he could be. He wanted that to be a leading question of sorts.
She shrugged and replied dismissively. ‘I have work to do, Pappu.’
It was so like her not to reply directly to anything he asked.
‘And you call me when you want, when you want me,’ he went on, surly now.
‘And you come too, don’t you?’ she said, slowly, arching an eyebrow, that indescribable dent in her right cheek.
Driving away quickly then, he felt humiliated in ways he had never before. He waited for days then for her to text him. Their quarrels were always far too short, the silence after that stretched for too long, sometimes for weeks, till she needed him, or rather his cab again. When he met her again, it was accidental, and it had been months. Time in which he found the business card she had left him, the first time, no the second time they met. It was in the dashboard drawer, and flipped toward him the moment he opened it. Her name, where she lived then and no longer, and the number still unchanged. Her name etched in black, sharp against his finger, and the kohl mark to the right. She had been crying in the cab. He stared at it for a long time, before opening his wallet and placing this new card over the old business card he carried for a long time.
He didn’t need this new card, after all he knew her number, it was saved in his phone. And he had never been able to throw away old stuff.
He saw her at a memorial meeting for someone they had both known once, quite a prominent desi who lectured on Buddhism and other vague things.
He saw her first and remembered how their last meeting had been a year or so ago. The way he had rushed away in his car and had never said sorry. Nor had she called him, even if she just wanted a ride. Now he was planning to return to Karachi, the first time he would return since he had come to Canada. His mother was not well. When he heard the speeches being made, everyone sadly reminiscing about the person gone, he wondered whether such things would be said about him too, when he died. Would anyone have anything good to say about him. He knew then he hadn’t done much, had hardly done anything, had no one to really call his own. Except for some brief moments, for some days, or maybe only for some hours, when he had had a girlfriend. And the one moment of total intimacy he had experienced was now far back in his past, so faint and nebulous that in trying to dredge up the memory of Netta’s kiss, he lost the magic he had experienced then. He had spent so much time holding onto that moment that he no longer remembered what it had felt like. Instead he thought of Nina and all their many irresolvable arguments, the exchanges that could never have a solution.
He felt a numbness then, a wish to close the door to every doubt he had, and in this way, he let thoughts of Nina slip into his head, and his heart. She was not the same. It pleased him that now at the meeting she looked older. A line down her right cheek, and there were silver strands in her hair, though, he knew this was the current fashion. Maybe she had changed too. Maybe she was more mature.
But he hadn’t known that she wore glasses. She was still thin, or even more so, and she was again dressed too loudly. Red wasn’t the right color for a memorial service.
She was peering down at the paper she read from, and he knew it was her glasses. They kept slipping down her face, making it difficult for her. One finger tried to hold up her glasses, and so the papers slipped from her hands, and in spite of the dull seriousness of the occasion, there was low laughter.
One day, at least she might make a speech about him. One day, she would write some words for him somewhere and she would make everyone laugh. And so when she was done, he went up to her. A smile played too confidently on his lips, and they both knew why. People who have once been lovers know there are moments when time can collapse, and things can begin just where they ended, even a long time ago.
I always imagined that after you had that fight with Amrit Singh, and after we got you back home, that we would make love, she said. it would have been so different.
But that one evening at the hospital, he said, the news of you and me was all over. They told me I was mad to get involved with the likes of you.
We were mad to get involved, and he reached for her hand, lifted it to his chest and his mouth, where his now half gray, half black moustache drooped over his lips. He was trying to remember this moment. He wanted to save it when he was old, when everything else had gone stale and life was just ordinary. But she reached up, her clipped nails looking pink, her fingers cold, and smelling of something – cotton balls and cream – and tried to clip back the moustache. The faint touch of her fingers, the prickle of hair on his lips, like a feather running over skin, it was all so teasing. Her finger on his lower lip, and the way they kissed. That first long second would fill up his whole lifetime.