Trespassing

For the first time during the flight, Khurram appeared crestfallen. He was not naughty, wouldn’t they believe him? No, explained Daanish. Khurram’s mother looked away. She needed no explaining.

And then the bean-pod did a funny thing. It swung to face the direction from which it had just come. It nosed upward. It increased altitude. It sped back across the Atlantic at such speed the hair of the naughty passengers blew this way and that. The sky turned from sepia to gold. The sun bobbed alongside again. On arrival, the passengers brushed their hair into place, collected bags, and stumbled out on to a sunny college campus. Daanish consulted his watch: 4.35. He was late for work.

2 High Volume OCTOBER 1989 (#ulink_1e4a6436-6ec6-58a2-beb3-fe0d395d5f37)

‘You’re late,’ barked Kurt, manager of Fully Food. He had a football-shaped head on a boxer’s body gone soft, like Lee J. Cobb in Twelve Angry Men. To him his workers were Fully Fools.

‘Hey Kurt,’ Daanish muttered. ‘I got held up.’ He swiftly brushed by before Kurt could get started. ‘Held up? This is a high-volume job.’

Daanish hung up his jacket, bound the knee-length apron, adjusted his cap, and entered the dish room. The kitchen reeked of sweat, bleach, stale greens, ranch dressing thrown in vinaigrette, cheese dumped in orange juice. Wang from China and Nancy from Puerto Rico said hi when he took his place at the sink but no one else bothered.

He started hosing down a copper pot that reached halfway down his thighs. Particles of ravioli sprayed his eyes and lips. The fare tonight was pasta and meatballs, mince pie, mashed potatoes and gravy, pan pizza, and the usual salad bar. Daanish learned each day’s menu not to prep his palate but to prep his muscles and olfactory nerves. Starch and gravy were the meanest to clean. The crust of that pan pizza would be a bitch. He chuckled at how readily he’d picked up such phrases, though barely two months had passed since his arrival. Turning off the hose, he started scraping off the glutinous residue of Reddi-Mash from the pot’s interior with a knife. The smell made his stomach weep. He’d skip dinner again.

His mind replayed the day’s events: woke at seven after a bad night (his roommate came home drunk at three in the morning again, and with his usual timely expertise, proceeded to vomit once inside the door); breakfast (tea and an English muffin) alone as usual; Wayne’s class at nine; bio at eleven; lab at two. After work he’d go for a swim and march straight to Becky’s. His family kept calling to ask, ‘So, how is it?’ What did they expect? What did he expect?

Nancy passed behind him with a stack of plates. She nearly slipped on the sodden floor but caught herself in time. ‘Pendejo,’ she hissed. Then to Daanish, ‘Better wear those rubber gloves, pretty boy, or your woman won’t have you.’

He gave her a mischievous grin. ‘She will.’ Still, he briefly examined his bare hands. Steam and bleach were turning them to flakes of goose meat. Nancy slapped the gloves beside him. He slipped them on.

When the student diners finished their meal they piled the trays on a conveyor belt that rolled inside to Wang and Youssef. Wang, square-framed and sticky, emptied the contents of each plate into a massive trash can, whipping thick colors inside it. Youssef, a sleek Senegalese, scoured the silverware and glasses. Nancy piled the plates and carried them to Amrita from Nepal, who soaped and rinsed them. Ron, an African-American, loaded dollies. Vlade, Romanian, did too.

Daanish hadn’t told Anu that his scholarship entailed spending twenty-five hours a week under Kurt. Let her think he was asked to do nothing but bend over books, to become a man of letters. Why confess he bent over sinks, scouring away letters – of alphabet soup? In Karachi, he’d only entered the kitchen to be fed. Becky teased that mommy spoiled him. She could talk. She sat outside in the dining hall, worrying about her waistline while daddy paid the bills.

Once, over the phone, Daanish had told his father about the job. The doctor had little to say. He’d given him advice once and only once on the drive to the Karachi airport, when seeing Daanish off. His warm smoker’s voice asked his son to remember it. Then he added, ‘Hold your head up high. Life is yours to build. One day you’ll look back and laugh at the spaghetti in your hair.’

Daanish battled with the pizza tin. His back was to the others but he heard Ron swear. Turning, he saw Youssef struggle with several glasses drenched in blue cheese dressing dribbled generously with strawberry sauce and strewn with granola. In one of the glasses a napkin shaped like a wafer carried a message from the other side of the belt: Eat me.

‘Sick mother-fuckers,’ said Ron, sealing the trash and slinging it over his shoulder.

Kurt hovered over Amrita, his favorite prey. She was slow with the washing, especially when attempting not to be, but never missed a crumb. Kurt rested knobby knuckles on his hips and thundered: ‘How did I get this far? By working. You think everybody gets the chance to work, Anna? You know how many people bang on our doors begging for this? This is a high-volume job. You’re lucky to have it.’

She bit her lip and dropped a plate.

‘Would you believe it!’ He threw his hands up. Amrita gathered the broken pieces but instead of disposing of them in the bin reserved for shattered ware, she quickly thrust them in the recycle bin. ‘Would you believe it!’ he repeated. ‘Is it any wonder they call it the developing world?’ He followed her from the wrong bin to the right one, insisting the first hadn’t been cleaned out properly. Then he trailed her back to the dishes. ‘A high-volume job, Anita,’ he continued. ‘How do you think we built this country?’

Ron stopped wheeling a dolly of Mayo-Whip and glowered. Nancy gave Daanish a look that said: Kill Kurt and I’ll love you for ever. Everyone else merely chugged along. Like machines, thought Daanish, wanting badly to touch Nancy.

Kurt continued, ‘We didn’t do it by standing around, that’s for sure. You can keep hoping the work will go away the way they do back where you come from, but it’ll only pile up.’

When he finally left the dish room, Nancy said to Amrita: ‘Don’t worry girl, he couldn’t find his dick with two hands and a map.’

Daanish wanted to console her too but didn’t know how. Instead, when Vlade wheeled silently by, he was suddenly reminded of bullock carts on the streets of Karachi. The soulful Masood Rana resounded in his ear: Tanga walla khair mang da. The cart-driver asks for contentment.

At 9.45 he removed his Fully Food gear, picked up his jacket and stepped out into the crisp mid-October air. He ought to go home, shower, and work on a paper. Instead, he walked up the hill to Becky Floe’s house.

They’d met just over a month ago at the gym. He was lurching out of the swimming pool and on to the sopping tiles when he saw her lime-colored swimsuit and tadpole-like toes inches from his chest. The nails were painted pink to match her freckled flesh. She was broad, heavy-bosomed, about five foot six, and proclaimed: ‘You’re so graceful, Day-nish.’ His chlorine-blazed eyes blinked. He’d never seen her before, but she even knew his name. He’d forgive her inability to say it. For the first time in his life, he’d been sought.

She held his hand as he walked her home. The weather had become suddenly warm – Indian Summer she called it. Her potato-colored hair dripped onto an aquamarine T-shirt that read Choice. He wondered if that was the name of a band.

She wanted to know all about where he was from. Was it just like India? He wasn’t sure why she needed this reference because she’d never been there either. She’d left her country just once, last year, for a month in Mexico. When he described his food she said it sounded, ‘Just like in Mexico.’ So did the climate, the traffic and beggars. The people, the passion, the politics. The music, corruption and drugs. That month, she explained, had been priceless. It made her understand all that was authentic.

‘So, did you grow up in, like, a palace or something?’

‘Oh no,’ he laughed, ‘my father’s a doctor.’

She eyed him quizzically, as if unable to believe the Third World had doctors. The look quickly turned to disbelief when their conversation progressed to his job at Fully Food. ‘You’re a doctor’s son but you need financial aid?’ In the sunlight, her unshaven legs changed from blonde to strawberry.

‘Well, yes.’ Realizing she wouldn’t be convinced till he quoted figures, he clarified, ‘In Pakistan, on average a physician earns about ten dollars an hour. While this is extremely high compared to the national average, it’s not enough to send a child to America on, is it?’ In the following years he would come to repeat these figures numerous times. He’d say, with far more exasperation than the first time, ‘Not everyone who’s brown or black is either dirt poor or filthy rich. There are in-betweens.’

Becky continued to look uncertain. Then she kissed him lightly on the cheek and sent him back down the hill.

He’d never expected to be pursued by an American woman. Walking to his room he wondered if he had been, might have been, would be again, or should he forget it?

Two days later, she invited him into her room. It was littered with books like The Woman Warrior, Sexuality and American Literature, and Intercourse.

While she talked, he kept wondering if this was a date. If so, what should he be doing? All his previous encounters with women had been hasty squeezes in Karachi, inside jammed cars while a designated watchman kept an eye out for the police, who had a radar for unmarried couples. So his interactions with women were feverish and clumsy. He’d never talked to a single one he’d kissed and barely even seen what he’d touched.

Becky abruptly ended her chatter and said, ‘You know, you dream too much. You’ve got to take hold of your life, grab it by the neck and let it know who’s boss. They haven’t learned that in Mexico.’

He didn’t doubt that she’d grabbed her life by the neck. And he did concede that back at home, daydreaming was a favorite pastime. ‘It can be soothing. Life takes its course, and you become a spectator. Sometimes you really have no other choice.’

‘You always have a choice.’ She began stomping noisily about the room, doing he wasn’t sure what. Today she wore a pink T-shirt that said Take Action. Her hair was wet again, from swimming. It dripped on to her shirt so the top halves of the letters were darker, as if taking action. She started drying her hair. ‘You have a choice about every step you take, and if you’re ever doubtful, you should choose to do something about it.’ The hair dryer droned as she waved it about.

‘Sometimes,’ he shouted over the dryer, ‘you’re faced with obstacles that are bigger than you. When there’s no electricity and you can’t turn on the water pump, and it’s a hundred and ten degrees, what choice have you but to sit and let the sweat pour off?’

Grrr, went the dryer, woosh, wap, ee. She appeared not to have heard. In an instant, she was done with drying and shining a mirror.

In their ensuing encounters, Daanish never saw Becky idle. Even while peeing, she crammed her senses with the numerous glossy hair and make-up magazines stacked under her toilet sink. He found the collection odd for a Women’s Studies major, remarking also that it was not displayed with the books on feminism. But he thought it wise to keep these observations to himself. In general, he let her talk, waiting eagerly for the day their kisses would culminate in more. He was nineteen. These days especially, his virginity was making him feel ninety.

Perhaps it would happen today.

He knocked on her door. He could hear furniture screech. She shouted, ‘Who’s it?’

Daanish tried hard to infuse desirability into one small word: ‘Me!’

Nothing for several seconds. Then at last: ‘Can you come back?’

3 Choice January 1990 (#ulink_b41ddf74-968d-50dc-bd4c-f71743025b2a)

Back meant more than two months later, for the New Year’s party where she wanted to appear with someone ethnic. But when college resumed, Becky never opened the door again. So two weeks into Winter Term, he crawled into another.

It was 4.30 in the afternoon, twilight, when he trudged up the hill again, this time to Penny’s dorm. Temperatures had plummeted to sub-zero. Daanish had never known such cold. His winter boots had cost him nearly all his savings from the first term, and he grew anxious. Would the glue dry? The stitching tear? Leather thin? Shoes were notoriously short-lived in Karachi. Here they seemed to wear well. This cheered him, even though he couldn’t stop shivering, despite the thermal vest and leggings, the doctor’s black turtleneck from his London years, two wool sweaters and a down jacket. The jacket he’d purchased only yesterday with the birthday check his parents had sent. He pulled it closer to his chin and felt their presence.

He stepped where the snow was solid, not merely to save his shoes from leather-munching slush-demons, but also for the sound of snow crunching under his boots. Good, sturdy boots. Around him, icicles hung off branches, changing to russet gold in the setting sun. Two crystals suddenly rose upward and grew in size. One sported a handsome cap. They flew into a large dogwood that slouched over the gym where he and Becky had first met, and began to whistle.

It was the high-pitched call that made him realize he’d been looking at a pair of cardinals, and not a flurry of possessed hail. The birds considered him, breasts forward, the male’s crest erect, the female singing again. Daanish paused. His father would have enjoyed this – the frost, the birdcall in the starkness. Back at home, he was probably in his study, smoking Dunhills. Daanish sank lower into the doctor’s woolens. Beneath all the layers, a string of seashells pressed into his flesh.

He’d skipped lunch again – it was hard for him to eat at Fully Food even on his days off. His stomach rumbled. If he’d had an extra five dollars, he’d have walked straight into town and ordered one of those delectable melts he’d seen his roommate eat.