“No,” he said, stiffening and moving away.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be gone soon. I’m not after anything, so just relax.”
Except I was after him, which meant it was time to move to Phase Three Alternative (nostalgia aborted, try alcohol instead). I took him into the kitchen. “I bought us some samosas—there’s a shop down the street which still manages to find all the ingredients. Plus my parents have been getting rid of all their wine before the move to Switzerland, so we can help ourselves.”
He sipped warily from his glass as we sat on the couch. “This one’s a Merlot. I’ll open a Cabernet so you can compare the two.” Later, I had him try a Pinot as well, wondering just how amused my father would be to see all the half-drunk bottles from his collection. “Which one do you like best?”
My man preferred the Cabernet, the most conducive choice (alcohol percentage 14.3 as opposed to the Pinot’s paltry 11.4), so that’s what I refilled his glass with. He rebuffed neither the arm that presently snaked around his shoulder nor the hand that casually patted his thigh. I tried again to kiss him, and this time he didn’t resist. The feel of his mouth transported me—through beaches and balconies, bedrooms and barsatis, all the spots I’d ever been with him. In an instant, this was no longer a farewell romp I was trying to engineer, but a replay of our entire relationship. A Broadway tribute, a Bollywood spectacular—the nights we’d spent, the years we’d shared. Karun’s face glittered from a giant screen which rose and stretched in all directions—I wanted to unhook it from its moorings and wrap it around myself.
The Fourth and Final Phase called. “Let’s go back into my bedroom,” I whispered, taking his arm to lead him from the sofa. He freed himself from my grasp, and remained seated. I tried again, saying we’d be more comfortable, it would be cozier, but to no avail. “I can tell you want to, Karun. Besides, I’ll be out of your life for good soon.”
For a while, he just sat there, breathing hard. Then he spoke in a quiet voice. “I shouldn’t have come. Even this, even what we’ve been doing—I feel so ashamed, every minute I stay.”
“So I see you haven’t forgiven me yet. Do you want me to apologize again?”
He gave a short, humorless laugh. “That part I actually get, Jaz. You are who you are—there’s little more to say. I can’t claim any surprise coming here today, only a little disappointment that after all this time you still can’t think beyond sex.”
The words stung, they felt uninformed, unfair. How to get across the years of yearning I’d endured, not to mention the flood of emotion unleashed today just by kissing him? The sense of incompleteness that had dogged me, the day-to-day contentment I’d failed to regain? “So all the letters I wrote, all the efforts I made don’t count? You think they were just to get you back in bed?”
“Isn’t that where you were just trying to lead me?”
“Perhaps I only wanted to hold you. To remind myself of how your body felt. Anything further would still have been an expression of my love—it’s what completes the two of us. You have to forgive me, Karun, for missing you so much. For thinking ahead to Switzerland or wherever I end up. Perhaps you could give me something to cling on. If we’re never going to see each other again perhaps it wouldn’t be so hard.”
He hesitated, but not enough to give me hope. “I’m sorry, Jaz. I can’t do it. Not to Sarita, I can’t. Thanks to you, I know exactly how it feels to be in her place.”
“But why would she ever know?”
“No, Jaz, that’s the way you think, not I.”
“Really? And I suppose you’ve been completely honest with her, have you? Told her everything about us?”
“That whole part of my life is done for—I left it behind when I met her. Marriage is about the future, not the past—I didn’t ask her about herself either.”
“How perfectly convenient. I didn’t know it worked that way. You complain I’m still the same, but in my eyes, you’ve grown immeasurably, Karun—as a hypocrite. My great shining example. At least back then you only lied to yourself, instead of trying to delude your wife as well. Is that why you came here without her today—to work on your marriage?”
“You’re right. It was a mistake.” He shot up from the couch and headed to the door. This time, I’d left the key in the lock, and he was able to open it.
“Be sure to give Sarita my best,” I yelled, as he slammed the door behind himself.
THE ZURICH DIRTY BOMB attacks occurred on September 11, four days before my family’s departure to Switzerland. Explosions along the Bahnhofstrasse and at the university hospital left large swathes of the city uninhabitable. Similar strikes followed later that day in New York, London, Rome, Toronto, and Frankfurt. As if the choice of date weren’t incriminating enough, jihadi literature turned up near two of the bomb sites, and a video claiming responsibility, by a new Al Qaeda-like group, appeared on the internet.
Those anticipating the next big terrorist incident for the past several years may have sighed with relief that it had finally occurred. They might have pointed out that despite widespread panic and disruption, the damage didn’t approach that caused by a single thermonuclear explosion. But the real destruction in this case, illustrating just how much this September 11 heir had evolved over its parent, came with the ensuing cyber attacks. The dirty bombs were merely the gunshot starting the race, signaling hackers with fingers poised over keyboards to launch their malware.
Five weeks later, the Jazter still marvels at how quick and easy it was to unravel the order of the entire world. First came the news hoaxes, saturating the internet, whipping up the panic already frothing in place. A fake suicide truck attack on the hastily called NATO summit in Brussels was so convincingly reported that even CNN listed the names of heads of state supposedly felled. Warnings of an imminent electromagnetic pulse over the U.S. touched off hysterical runs on banks all the way down to Mexico and Belize. Meanwhile, the armies of cyber bugs on the loose found crevices to crawl through even the most impregnable firewalls. They invaded enough strategic nodes and sources to wrest control of the entire global news network.
Perhaps this was the greatest genius of the cyber jihadis: the monopoly they clinched on information. They realized how helplessly addicted the population had become to knowing in this information age. So what if news was tainted or unreliable?—people needed their daily fix. They would gladly swallow the most improbable rumors, the most outlandish fabrications, to quell the ravenousness within. Even the Jazter, always a voracious consumer of news, succumbed to this junk food urge.
Not that some of these inconceivable scenarios didn’t turn out to be true. The viruses had gained cunning by now, learned to down bigger game. They sabotaged power stations and exploded gas lines, bewitched airliners over the Atlantic into executing suicide dives. People could no longer separate reality from fabrication, trust the ground they walked on, the world they lived in. Did Morocco actually invade Spain? Did a string of reactors really blow up in France? The actual answers mattered less and less, as panic (and despondency) increased.
But harking back to the early days right after September 11, the one irrefutable fact was that Switzerland immediately rescinded my family’s visas. Their government pushed through an emergency law overnight, banning all Muslim visitors. My father scrambled to find another country that would accept us, but similar bills popped all over, effectively shuttering the West. The only options that remained were Islamic states, particularly those in the Gulf.