It was in order to prevent myself from impolitely focusing on Erica’s wheat-colored limbs that I asked her if her shirt had belonged to her father. “No,” she said, rubbing the fabric between her thumb and forefinger, “it was my boyfriend’s.” “Ah,” I said, “I did not know you had a boyfriend.” “He died last year,” she said. “His name was Chris.” I said I was sorry and told her that it was a fine shirt; Chris had had excellent taste. She agreed, saying that he had been quite the dandy, and rather vain even in hospital. His nurses had been charmed by him: he was a good-looking boy with what she described as an Old World appeal.
Arriving in town, we found a café near the harbor with tables shaded by blue-and-white umbrellas. She ordered a beer; I did the same. “So what’s Pakistan like?” she asked. I told her Pakistan was many things, from seaside to desert to farmland stretched between rivers and canals; I told her that I had driven with my parents and my brother to China on the Karakoram Highway, passing along the bottoms of valleys higher than the tops of the Alps; I told her that alcohol was illegal for Muslims to buy and so I had a Christian bootlegger who delivered booze to my house in a Suzuki pickup. She listened to me speak with a series of smiles, as though she were sipping at my descriptions and finding them to her taste. Then she said, “You miss home.”
I shrugged. I often did miss home, but in that moment I was content to be where I was. She took out her notebook — it was bound with soft, orange leather; I had previously seen her scribbling in it during moments of repose — and passing it to me with a pencil said, “What does your writing look like?” I said, “Urdu is similar to Arabic, but we have more letters.” She said, “Show me,” and so I did. “It’s beautiful,” she said, meeting my eyes. “What’s it mean?” “This is your name,” I replied, “and this, underneath, is mine.”
We stayed at our table, talking as the sun set, and she told me about Chris. They had grown up together — in facing apartments, children the same age with no siblings — and were best friends well before their first kiss, which happened when they were six but was not repeated until they were fifteen. He had a collection of European comic books with which they were obsessed, and they used to spend hours at home reading them and making their own: Chris drawing, Erica writing. They were both admitted to Princeton, but he had not come because he was diagnosed with lung cancer — he had had one cigarette, she said with a smile, but only the day after he received the results of his biopsy — and she had made sure she never had classes on a Friday so she could spend three days a week in New York with him. He died three years later, at the end of the spring semester of her junior year. “So I kind of miss home, too,” she said. “Except my home was a guy with long, skinny fingers.”
Later that evening, when we went out for dinner with the group, Erica chose the seat opposite mine. Chuck made all of us laugh with a series of uncanny impersonations — my mannerisms were, in my opinion, somewhat exaggerated, but the others were spot on — and then he went around the table and asked each of us to reveal our dream for what we would most like to be. When my turn came, I said I hoped one day to be the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability; the others appeared shocked, and I was forced to explain that I had been joking. Erica alone smiled; she seemed to understand my sense of humor.
Erica said that she wanted to be a novelist. Her creative thesis had been a work of long fiction that had won an award at Princeton; she intended to revise it for submission to literary agents and would see how they responded. Normally, Erica spoke little of herself, and tonight, when she did so, it was in a slightly lowered voice and with her eyes often on me. I felt — despite the presence of our companions, whose attention, as always, she managed to capture — that she was sharing with me an intimacy, and this feeling grew stronger when, after observing me struggle, she helped me separate the flesh from the bones of my fish without my having to ask.
Nothing physical happened between Erica and me in Greece; we did not so much as hold hands. But she gave me her number in New York, to which we were both returning, and she offered to help me settle in. For my part, I was content: I had struck up an acquaintance with a woman with whom I was well and truly smitten, and my excitement about the adventures my new life held for me had never been more pronounced.
But what is that? Ah, your mobile phone! I have not previously seen its like; it is, I suspect, one of those models capable of communicating via satellite when no ground coverage is available. Will you not answer it? I assure you, sir, I will do my utmost to avoid eavesdropping on your conversation. But you are opting to write a text message instead; very wise: often a few words are more than sufficient. As for myself, I am quite happy to wait as you navigate the keys. After all, those girls from the National College of Arts have only just finished their tea, and the pleasure of their presence on this street will persist for a few moments longer before they disappear — as inevitably they must — from view around that corner.
Chapter 3
WE LOCALS treasure these last days of what passes for spring here in Lahore; the sun, although hot, has such a soothing effect. Or, I should say, it has such a soothing effect on us, for you, sir, continue to appear ill at ease. I hope you will not mind my saying so, but the frequency and purposefulness with which you glance about — a steady tick-tick-tick seeming to beat in your head as you move your gaze from one point to the next — brings to mind the behavior of an animal that has ventured too far from its lair and is now, in unfamiliar surroundings, uncertain whether it is predator or prey!
Come, relinquish your foreigner’s sense of being watched. Observe instead how the shadows have lengthened. Soon they will shut to traffic the gates at either end of this market, transforming Old Anarkali into a pedestrian-only piazza. In fact, they have begun. Will the police arrest those boys on their motor scooter? Only if they can catch them! And already they are streaking away, making good their escape. But they will be the last to do so. The gates are now being locked, as you can see, and those gaps that remain are too narrow for anything wider than a man.
You will have noticed that the newer districts of Lahore are poorly suited to the needs of those who must walk. In their spaciousness — with their public parks and wide, tree-lined boulevards — they enforce an ancient hierarchy that comes to us from the countryside: the superiority of the mounted man over the man on foot. But here, where we sit, and in the even older districts that lie between us and the River Ravi — the congested, mazelike heart of this city — Lahore is more democratically urban. Indeed, in these places it is the man with four wheels who is forced to dismount and become part of the crowd.
Like Manhattan? Yes, precisely! And that was one of the reasons why for me moving to New York felt — so unexpectedly — like coming home. But there were other reasons as welclass="underline" the fact that Urdu was spoken by taxicab drivers; the presence, only two blocks from my East Village apartment, of a samosa- and channa-serving establishment called the Pak-Punjab Deli; the coincidence of crossing Fifth Avenue during a parade and hearing, from loudspeakers mounted on the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Association float, a song to which I had danced at my cousin’s wedding.