The medallion swayed like the hands of a clock gone haywire, backwards and forwards, turning minutes into seconds. Inscribed on its one side was the word Shifa. Healing. Underneath, the doctor’s name: Shafqat. Affection. His own father had presented it to him when he returned from England. On the medallion’s other side was the Pakistani flag. Daanish belonged to that flag. He’d come back to it, the doctor declared, better than he had himself. The key-chain bobbed when he said it.
And it danced down the tree, tapping uproariously as it went. The grass was fluorescent and a touch moist. He ran his fingers through it and the pores of his skin opened as he welcomed each sensation. A barn owl swooped across his vision. The moon began to rise. He slept soundly till dawn.
Her fair skin set off a head of dark, crinkly hair. She held him close, thanking Allah for bringing him home safely. Had the scene occurred under a street light in his college town, passers-by would be faintly embarrassed, if not repulsed. He thought if she said, ‘Thank you Jesus for returning him to me,’ instead of ‘Thank you Allah …’ people would smile or snicker but not think her a fanatic.
He shut his eyes. Never before had he stood in this house plagued by how others might see him. He tried to clear his head, to instead enjoy Anu’s welcoming arms, flabbier now than when he last embraced them, three years ago.
Khurram and his family waved goodbye. The handsome driver’s eyes pierced his own, turning a hint green. ‘You are my friend now,’ Khurram called out. ‘Anything more I can do for you, I am just down the street.’
‘Such a nice boy,’ said Anu as the car drove away.
Lurking behind her, Daanish now saw, was the shadow of his father’s eight sisters. It grew closer, a single mass with sixteen tentacles, pawing and probing like Siamese-octopi. He was being welcomed just like Khurram had been at the airport, but he did not desire it.
One arm caught his throat. ‘You poor poor child! How your father loved you!’
Another tugged his hair, fighting with the first, ‘How exhausted you must be! Come into the kitchen with me …’
A third whipped his cheek and cried, ‘You look sicker than our own! Were you in Amreeka or Afreeka?’
A fourth spun him from the waist, ‘You’re just like he was at your age!’
A fifth yanked his shirt-tail, ‘Who did you miss the most?’
A sixth, ‘Me!’
Seven, ‘His father, ehmak.’
And eight, ‘Look how his jealous mother keeps him all to herself!’
It was true. While they jerked and pinched her only child and hurled insults her way, Anu still held him, and now they were all entangled, resulting in a chorus of loud protests from small bodies in the arms of each aunt, small bodies with wills and suckers of their own. He fell headfirst into their lair.
‘Ay haay,’ shoved Anu. ‘Let the boy sit down at least.’
She gripped what little she could find of Daanish’s arm, disentangled it from the others, and with determined possessiveness, led him into the kitchen. The others followed like a school of squid. ‘Sit down, bete.’
Scowling at his aunts in black and the babies in their arms, Daanish pulled a chair up next to Anu. She emptied several plastic food containers into metal pots then lit the burners of the stove. His aunts continued making observations, their children still shrieked, but at least no one touched him.
‘I’m really not hungry Anu, just tired,’ he protested weakly. ‘You haven’t even told me how you are.’ She never shared. Just fussed.
‘What is there to tell? Allah has returned my son to me safely, even if He chose to take my husband.’
Her back was to him but he knew she was crying. Softly – tears never interfered with her work – but steadily.
How differently his father would have received him. In place of his mother’s flurry, a thick veil of smoke would infuse the air as he sucked one Dunhill after another. He’d ask what it was like there. Daanish would only select details that would tickle him: the ghostly reflection of an opossum on clear summer nights; pink-haired waitresses with pierced noses (the doctor would guffaw at this perversion of his most favored female accessory, the nose-pin); having a wisdom tooth extracted to lite music: ‘Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you’; children delightfully camouflaged for Halloween. Anu never absorbed curiosities.
She was saying, ‘I wanted so much to come to the airport but who would drive? Your one chacha has the flu and I didn’t want to trouble the other again. He went twice to the airport already but the flight kept getting delayed. We didn’t know – none of the airline people answered the phone. You must be so exhausted.’ She stopped abruptly. Tears stained her face. ‘How do you like the new table? I got it soon after you left. Your father never even noticed. You can have one just like it when you settle down.’
He frowned. Settle down?
‘Your father took too long to shed his restlessness. That’s why you had him for barely twenty-two years. If you do it earlier your family can see more of you. To settle down is to do the world a favor.’
‘Oh Anu.’
The doctor would call this her logic. He’d say it the way he said her blood. It was the subject of most of their fights, he having migrated from Hyderabad, she from Amritsar. She traced her ancestry hundreds of years back to the Caucasus. Hence her pristine white skin, which, to her dismay, Daanish hadn’t inherited (though she consoled herself that darkness hardly mattered as much in a boy). The doctor said it was pathetic how people grasped at anything to prove they carried foreign blood. And since the foreigners – from the Central Asians to the Macedonians, Arabs and Turks – were conquerors, it was the half-teaspoon of conqueror’s blood that made people like Anu gloat over their pedigree. ‘Everyone here has a master-subjugator complex. No one takes pride in being a son or daughter of this soil,’ he snapped at her once, scooping up a mound of earth from the yard and throwing it back impatiently.
One week later, he was gone again, traveling across the seas, bringing back shells for Daanish.
Anu arranged several steaming dishes before him. Their rich cardamom and ghee scent on this early morning, after Daanish had traveled some seven thousand miles and been sleepless for nearly as many hours, gave him a headache of astounding symmetry. Commencing at the forehead, it cleaved his skull evenly in two, like a coconut shell. It was as if the two halves were trying to find the one-in-a-million combination that could fit them together again. He gazed in agony, first at the dishes, then his mother, then at a baby cousin who’d escaped from his mother, and raced toward him on all fours.
‘I’m tired,’ Daanish muttered again.
‘Boti!’ the child squealed. The mother, delighted by her young one’s forwardness, hurried to the table. Resting her wide hips on a cushioned chair that went pish! she proceeded to feed her child one of the dishes Daanish’s mother had set before him.
‘You’re tired because you’re hungry,’ Anu stressed, scowling at
