Though by the third day she started deferring to Sonia’s taste, and started looking the better for it, Farhana’s feeling of insignificance was only to increase.
On that third day, we heard it on the news: A bomb exploded in a hotel this morning, killing one foreigner and seven Pakistanis. Wes wondered if instead of heading north for the mountains we should be heading west across the Atlantic.
“You’re not the target,” I said, and Farhana complained I wasn’t being sympathetic.
“Sympathetic? One foreigner dies and seven locals. Where’s his sympathy?” I didn’t say, Where’s yours? We were again weighing lives against each other, one against seven, relevance against irrelevance. Instead of answering me she called out to Wes, and, while I watched, they both strode into the kitchen, where my mother was to lavish them with yet another ridiculously complicated meal.
The next two days, we spent apart. And unfortunately, the nights. We’d barely slept together in the weeks before leaving San Francisco, but since arriving in this city, where lust was a life-size secret, I wanted her again. Farhana was reserved. Why did I want her if I didn’t want to hold her hand? she asked, when I sneaked into her room. The question astonished me because, obviously, the answer was born of it. I wanted her because I couldn’t hold her hand. Or any other part. A quick fuck is a dead end, she said, forcing me back to my room.
Instead of focusing on events in the house, I focused on events in Waziristan, on the Afghan border, where lust was no secret at all. The local tribes of Waziristan harbored Arabs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Chechens, and Chinese Uyghur Muslims. Some of them were fleeing the war in Afghanistan, but others were fleeing their own governments. Waziristan’s tribal chiefs welcomed everyone except Pakistanis from outside their own tribe. Call it hospitality. Irfan and I decided the entrance to Waziristan should have a statue holding a Kalashnikov and a Quran. Give me your tired, your poor… the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these to me—unless they’re Pakistani!
“And what about Pakistan’s hospitality to the US?” I said.
Irfan thought about it. “Give me your missiles, your drones… the furtive raptors of your teeming war. Drop these on me—because I’m Pakistani!”
We were sitting in a café with four other friends. The café had tinted windows and a smell that suggested no one ever came here, except our large and fair-skinned waiter, whom we decided looked just like Tahir Yuldashev, the Uzbek mentor of the Waziristan lord Baitullah Mehsud. Until this summer, there’d been a ceasefire between Mehsud and the Pakistan Army. Since the end of the ceasefire, Yuldashev was again supplying Mehsud with Uzbek bodyguards hardened from decades of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Yuldashev, and Central Asia in general, captured our imagination more than the bombings in our own city. We still didn’t know who’d bombed the hotel. We were already resigned to never knowing. Yuldashev, on the other hand, was organized and known. For instance, he’d raised an army to avenge the American bombing of Shahi-Kot Valley in Afghanistan in 2002. That was organized.
Three years later, we still didn’t know why America had called the bombing Operation Anaconda.
“Ask him,” Irfan pointed to the waiter hovering near the door.
We waved him over. I said, “Why name the siege of Shahi-Kot in Central Asia after a water snake in South America?”
The waiter walked outside for a smoke.
“They think we’re an extension of Vietnam,” answered Irfan.
“Are there anaconda in Vietnam?”
“What would you rather they had called it?”
“Operation Cobra.”
“Too typical.”
“Operation Antelope?”
The war had the benefit of giving me something to discuss not only with my friends in place of my failure as a boyfriend, but also with my father, in place of my failure as a son.
One morning, the newspaper carried a cartoon that moved the ice between us by a few millimeters. It was this. A white hand belonging to a white man with a top hat and stars and stripes gives a brown man in tattered clothes money. The brown man, delighted, starts sewing together a doll. In the next panel, the same white hand gives the merry tailor twice as much money. This time, the brown man, fuming, tears apart his invention, dress, beard, et al. For those who didn’t get it, the caption read: Pakistan spends billions of dollars destroying what it spent millions of dollars creating.
My father chuckled. I chuckled.
Two days later, we were in Islamabad.
On the bus up, Farhana picked at her lip. She said nothing even when the bus broke down and we waited three hours for another one. All foreigners had to register with the military almost every hour, so the bus kept stopping and everyone was forced to wait for her and Wes. No one complained, not even those with six or seven children at their knee. I didn’t know if Farhana’s aloofness had to do with annoyance at these stops (curiously, Wes was cheerful throughout), embarrassment at keeping the bus waiting, or if it was aimed only at me. Some holdover from Karachi? Or did she imagine I had the power to prevent the stops? Or that I was mocking her for thinking she would be treated as if from here? She was courteous with the passengers; overly courteous, in fact, telling Wes repeatedly how friendly and dignified everyone was, as if he needed to be told. She was even courteous with the military men, who delighted in chatting with her, who would not have delighted in chatting with her had she not been a guest. They were even more delighted to have their picture taken (with my camera! That she despised!) while proudly displaying their guns. Afterward, they offered Wes a free lesson in Automatic Weapons 101 that he gladly accepted. The people on the bus waited, some cheering, others in dignified silence.
It wasn’t till we reached Naran that I finally learned what was bothering her. We were at a shop that sold Kashmiri shawls and fleece blankets and I bought her one of each saying we were going to need them. I could tell she liked the shawl. It had a silky lightness and a reversible pattern, black on one side, white on the other, and on both, cherry-colored embroidery of interlaced vines. But she turned away and began looking at a row of walnut-wood salad bowls. When I draped the shawl around her shoulders she said it made her feel cheap the way I thought I could win her back so easily.
“Why do I have to win you back?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“We buy each other gifts all the time. I don’t do it to gain anything. Do you?”
“You didn’t hear me.”
“Did you?”
“Why is Irfan with us?”
Irfan and Wes were outside the shop. We could hear Wes telling Irfan that he’d always wanted to see India “from the other side.” We could hear Irfan’s silence. (What would I say to that?) We could hear Wes add, “This doesn’t even look like Pakistan.”
“Why’s Wes with us?” I turned back to Farhana.
She sighed. “We’re here on work. You know that.”
“I thought we were here because you wanted to return to your country?”
Her neck turned red.
Finally, she said, “I like Irfan
