‘So I could go four years back into the past, realize what was going to happen if I married Ozi, and say no when he asked.’
My head begins to throb, full of blood, stuffed by the excited pumping of my heart. I open my eyes. ‘So it was a mistake?’
She turns onto her side. Her breast brushes my shoulder. ‘I have no clothes on. I’m with you. You’re not my husband. I’ve clearly made a mistake somewhere.’
‘Did you ever love him?’
She nods. ‘I loved him. Did you?’
‘I think so.’
‘So what happened?’
Something is caught between my teeth. I pull it out: a hair. Maybe an eyelash. ‘I don’t know. A million things. There were problems even when we were kids. He was vicious, full of himself. And when he left, we drifted apart. Maybe I just realized what he was all along: not a good guy. A bastard, really. A self-centered, two-faced, spoiled little bastard …’
‘Stop.’
The sharpness of her tone makes me realize I’m getting carried away, and I bite down on my words. But I feel myself choking on all I’m leaving unsaid.
‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to lie here and attack Ozi. It isn’t right.’
‘You said it was a mistake to marry him.’
‘For me, yes. But which one of us is the problem? Ozi’s a good father. He’s sweet. He’s generous. He’s smart …’
I feel the muscles in my chest contract. ‘He’s rich. He’s got everything he wants. He’s perfect.’
She pulls back. ‘Why are you so bitter?’
‘He’s a bastard.’
‘There’s no reason for you to be jealous.’
My mouth is wet with unswallowed spit. ‘If you think he’s so wonderful, maybe you shouldn’t be here.’
She watches me, her eyebrows rising, wrinkling her forehead. ‘Are you serious?’
I realize she’s getting angry. And I don’t want to fight. ‘No,’ I say. And when she doesn’t respond, I add, ‘I’m sorry.’
She’s quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t think I should be married to Ozi. But not because of him. Because of me. I’m really not all that nice. I don’t think I’m the sort who should marry at all.’
‘That isn’t true.’
She smiles. ‘You don’t know me that well. I’m a bad wife. And I’m a worse mother.’
I put my arm around her and she presses against my side. ‘You’re just stuck in a bad situation.’
She shakes her head. ‘I chose my situation. No, it’s deeper than that.’
‘What is?’
‘Where am I right now?’
I stroke her back. ‘With me.’
‘And what about my son? He’s at home. He misses me. But I leave him with Pilar as much as I can. I can’t help it. I’m flawed. A bad design.’
‘It’s normal. Everyone gets tired of their children sometimes.’
‘I’m not talking about getting tired sometimes. I don’t know. I don’t think I can explain it.’
‘My mother didn’t spend every minute with me.’
‘No?’ Her belly swells against my side with her breathing.
‘Of course not. She worked, for one thing. And I went to school during the day, sports in the afternoons. And at night I went out with my friends.’
‘But when you were home together?’
I think of my mother and feel myself starting to slip, a sudden weightlessness, the dip in my stomach as a car crests a hill, fast, the uncertainty that entered my life the day she died. I pull Mumtaz to me. ‘We used to talk. We were close.’
‘You see. I hear it in your voice. Muazzam is never going to speak of me that way.’
‘You don’t know that.’ I kiss her, softly. ‘You’re wonderful. You make me feel completely cared for.’
She stops breathing and stares at me for a moment, almost a glare. I pause. Then it passes. Her body relaxes, her waist sinking deeper into the bed, the curve from her shoulder to her hip becoming more pronounced.
‘Maybe that’s why I’m here,’ she says. She doesn’t smile, but she kisses me back, and both of us shut our eyes.
Sometimes when Mumtaz is with me, moving about the house, I watch her. I’m mesmerized by her posture. She stands with strength and poise and supple flexibility, like a village woman balancing a pitcher of water on her head as she walks home from the well. Shoulder blades pulled back. Chin up.
The muscles of her neck flare, taut when she turns, when she inhales before speaking.
She has the long torso of Sadequain’s imagination. And solid, strong legs. One half slender, one half less so. A mermaid.
Her breasts are small and wonderfully round. One hangs half a rib lower.
Her fingers are thin. Nails short, unpolished. Veins raise the smooth skin of her hands before subsiding into her forearms. Roots feeding blood to her grip.
She curls and uncurls her toes without thinking when she sits.
And her mouth is wide and alive.
I commit her to memory.
When I’m alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he’s ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there’s nothing I can do to stop her.
And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it just because I’m pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humor, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can’t do?
Has she fallen in love with me?
As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that maybe she has.
And one day, after many joints, as we lie replete in bed, as I play with her hair and she kisses my hand, I realize that she watches me. That she touches me not just with tenderness but with fascination.
And my mind starts to whirl.
Suddenly I think I’m about to understand.
She’s drawn to me just as I’m drawn to her. She can’t keep away. She circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her husband and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She’s risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation.
And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she’s not just a candle. She’s a moth as well, circling me. I look at her and see myself reflected, my feelings, my desires. And she, looking at me, must see herself. And which of us is moth and which is candle hardly seems to matter. We’re both the same.
That’s the secret.
What moths never tell us as they whirl in their dances.
What Manucci learned at Pak Tea House.
What sufis veil in verse.
I turn her around and look into her eyes and see the wonder in them that must be in mine as well, the wonder I first saw on our night of ecstasy, and I feel myself explode, expand, fill the universe, then collapse, implode like a detonation under water, become tiny, disappear.
I’m hardly aware of myself, of her, when I open my mouth. There is just us, and I speak for us when I speak, and I must be trembling and crying, but I don’t even know if I am or what I’m doing.
I just say it.
‘I love you.’
And I lose myself in her eyes and we kiss and I feel myself becoming part of something new, something larger, something I never knew could be.
Union.
There are no words.
But after.
‘Don’t say that,’ she says.
And faintly, the smell of something burning.
When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I’m worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city.