A Deconstructed Heart (11 page)

“Come sit over here, love,” said Ella, beckoning towards a floral sofa. The sun was setting outside, and the last pink and purple rays flooded the sitting room, and Amal found herself thinking of a fairy garden. There were photos on the mantelpiece, of a young Frank Minton with his police force friends on a fishing trip, and many of Ella and Frank, arm linked in arm. There was someone who looked like Ella’s sister, but was perhaps an old photo of her mother. There were children, too, and Amal wondered whose they were.

“Frank is at the Rotary tonight. I’m not expecting him back for another 40 minutes or so.”

Amal had not even thought about the fact that this might be Ella and Frank’s teatime, and how awkward it would have been to drop in on them at that hour, but Ella was sitting on the sofa next to her and smiling, so she relaxed.

“I don’t really know why I’m here,” she said quietly. “I just couldn’t go home, right now. I mean, I will, I don’t want to impose on you,” she added quickly, but Ella just nodded.

“You’re young. You need a change of scene sometimes. You’ve had a lot placed on your shoulders.”

Amal felt a sob catch in her throat, and tears were dropping from her eyes before she could stop them. She remembered being six and crying when she had a nosebleed on a hot day, her shoulders shaking over the bathtub as her father held back her hair, and she remembered her shock at her body’s failure.

She heard Ella get up and felt a tissue pushed into her hands. Ella was rubbing her back, and Amal remembered that she was the wife of a policeman, and had probably comforted many people. Real tragedies, she thought to herself, deaths and murders and bad stuff. She searched for the words that could explain this emotional outpouring, but she felt like a fraud as she spoke, as if she were
 in a bad play, trying to remember her lines.

“It’s just… it’s just so weird.” She started to fray the edge of a tissue as she spoke, tearing strips at even intervals along the length. “Sorry, I’m just tired, I guess. I don’t know what I expected. It’s the same everywhere. Everybody’s going or gone, or doesn’t want to know anymore. I thought I could do this, I thought he’d help me.”

“You mean Mirza, darling?”

“Rehan. He just pissed off when things got complicated.”

“Ahhh.” Ella was silent, but her hand was still firmly rubbing Amal’s back. There was a small porcelain figurine of a fruit seller holding up an apple for sale on the mantelpiece. The young girl’s body was jauntily cocked, her sculpted blouse slipping off one shoulder, her head thrown back lazily to shout out a price or call a customer. Amal stared at the statue, at the green, glazed apple balanced on her hand, the fingers slender and tapered.

“I think you should stay,” Ella was saying. “You can sleep here tonight, get a break for a change.”

Amal was alarmed, but Ella waved her away. “No, I’ll talk to him, or Frank will. You need a change of scene, you can’t keep on like this. He’s going to have to realize the toll this is taking on you. Maybe then he’ll see some sense.”

She did not hear the conversation with Mirza Uncle. Ella stepped out after plumping up some pillows and putting a duvet around Amal’s shoulders. When she returned, she went straight to the kitchen, and Amal soon smelled something like meat pies cooking. She wrapped the duvet around her tightly and fell sideways on the sofa.

It was dark when she awoke. On the coffee table in front of her was a covered dish and a glass of milk. She ate her dinner cold, too shy to tiptoe into a strange kitchen and microwave her meal. She could hear heavy snoring coming from upstairs, and the sound was comforting. She was surprised to realize how often she had been alone at night, first in her childhood home, and now in Mirza Uncle’s house. She thought of Ella and Frank lying upstairs in their sleep, one arm thrown over another’s body, as she imagined it, a waltz of dreamers, their snores and deep sighs like a conversation that would never stop.

In the morning, she got up and walked around the living room, looking at the crystal figurines, touching the purple wooden curls and cones in the jar of pot-pourri on the television set. There was a set of green photo albums in the bookshelf, and she pulled one out, but then thought better of it, and slid it back into its place. The doorbell rang, and she found herself at the door to the hallway, trying to see around Frank Minton’s large frame.

“Ah, Mirza,” he said.

His hair was sticking up at the back, and she thought he looked shrunken inside his pajama kurta, like a nocturnal marsupial wincing from the light. He looked at her as he stood on the welcome mat, Frank and Ella parting in front of him like a pair of French doors. “I’m afraid I need your help again, yes, I’ve made quite enough mess of things.” He stopped and smiled sheepishly. “We must find him together because he’s our family, isn’t he?”

Sven called it the “Wrecking Ball”, but the gathering to take down the tent was a washed-out affair because of an unexpected storm. Vanessa ran to and from the house in her bare feet, bringing in one item lying on the lawn at a time. Kiran found a wheelbarrow, and they threw in a pile of books and papers. Amal stood with her uncle and the Mintons, watching the tent in its stages of decay until only the wooden framework glistened in the rain. Soon, the students were hammering at the joists, and only the long bones lay in the grass. Amal watched her uncle carefully, but he was quiet. He had carried in the chessboard, slowly and deliberately, the pieces positioned as if a game had been abandoned mid-battle. Ella had helped clear the coffee table of mail, and he had put down the board. Only then did he look around him; Amal thought he was swaying slightly, like a man standing on a rocking boat.

“It’s time for a new lick of paint,” said Frank jovially, “spruce up the place; a new look will do you good.”

“Perhaps,” said Mirza. “Yes, I think that is a good idea. Only, later.” He smiled at Amal. “First, we have work to do, and I think you can help me, Frank. What do you know about tracking down a missing person?”

“Your wife …” said Frank, looking at Ella.

“No, not at all, a young man of my, of our acquaintance, you must have seen him around here. A student of mine, Rehan.”

As he shared the details of Rehan’s disappearance with Frank, Amal watched her uncle, reaching for the phone one moment or patting the sofa to invite Frank to sit down, and she thought of creepers reaching out from his body to knot him into the house. Or perhaps the house was reclaiming him, one proprietary gesture at a time.

The students hurried into the house, shoulders hunched against the downpour that was now making lapping waves down the length of the sliding door; the remains of the tent were lost in the dark. Sven was shaking out his hair with big meaty fingers, and Amal thought for a moment that he could be a long lost son of Frank. Kiran was still outside, trying futilely to light a cigarette, shrugging his shoulders.  Vanessa was crouched at Mirza Uncle’s feet, adding some details about Rehan, as Frank took notes on a blotter from the telephone table.

After half an hour, Frank pulled his heavy frame up from the sofa. “Well, he hasn’t been reported missing, so there’s hope there.  Official resources we can use, although they won’t pull out all the stops because he’s not a minor.” asked Frank. “I don’t think he’s far, all the same. Seems like an emotional upset, not a planned thing. Those types are vulnerable, though, to be exploited… you know,” he said.

“He needs us,” said Mirza Uncle. “We did not know how much before now.”

After everyone left, Amal returned to the living room, where Mirza
Uncle was already laying down on the sofa with a blanket she recognized from the downstairs closet.

“This is for today,” he said. “I am quite beat, as you would say. Tomorrow things will be as they should,” he paused, “in all things.”

She washed up in the kitchen as quietly as possible, listening for the soft snore of deep sleep. When it came, she moved through the house, silently removing the photographs that still remained of Naida Aunty and stacking them in a pile in a corner of the garage. She moved her own things out of her uncle’s bedroom and took them down the hallway to the guest room. She went back to his room and opened the windows, letting the velvet night breath heavily into the room; she changed the bedsheets, dragging out a dark duvet from the airing cupboard in the hallway. She brought up some of the books from the tent, and arranged them in the bookshelf by the window and placed a blank writing pad and pen by the bedside table. Back in the guest room, after she had dressed for bed, she climbed onto the hard mattress and pulled the thin sheets over herself. She thought that the small, plain room was something like the tent: narrow and defined and strangely comforting since it placed no demands on her for action and decision. She remembered being a child, and loving the idea of sleeping in Snow White’s glass coffin, warm and cosy inside, while rain beat on the glass, but as an adult, she knew that was only the lulling appeal of death. She wondered about Rehan, about whether she could rescue him with a kiss or whether he thought she had already poisoned him.

Mirza was dreaming of Eid when he was a small child, clutching the anna his father had given him to buy peanut brittle at the bazaar. The glitter of lanterns made the road fit for a royal procession, and everywhere, his head turned to take in the crowds of women and girls, resplendent in their Eid finery, eating out of greasy paper cones. He smelled channa and chaat masala on the air, and the sour-sweet smell of fresh ox droppings as his father led him into the deepest heart of the bazaar, down an alley to an open doorway, where an old man sat on his haunches. It was Khan Sahib, who beckoned them into the cool interior of his home. Even in his sleep, Mirza was in wonder at his memory of that house, a place he had not seen for over forty years. There was the picture of a man pulling a rickshaw that Khan Sahib’s youngest had made with colored string and tacks; the watercolor of a peacock his wife had painted hanging in the sitting room; the servant, Biloo, who was cutting aubergine into paper thin slices. Mirza remembered his high cheekbones and deep laugh, but he only glanced up from his work as the dream-child Mirza walked past.

Khan Sahib did not speak to Mirza in his dream, but led his father to a darkly lit room, where a chessboard waited. Mirza tried to speak, to ask “Is that for me?” but he was ignored. He watched his father play, and lose, as each piece was systematically eliminated, placed one by one into a breast pocket. “You must submit,” said Khan Sahib, speaking to his father. “A king is nothing by himself.” Mirza did not know what happened next, but Khan Sahib was suddenly angry with him. “What are you staring at, bekoff?” he shouted. Mirza looked at his father, but there was no person at the end of the hand that was holding his, only a white space. He felt the fear of a child, and pulled his hand away as a sandal whizzed past his ear. Khan Sahib was throwing shoes at him, but the barrage of missiles seemed to be unending, and young Mirza turned and fled down a passageway that led into another room, where Khan Sahib’s wife was at a sewing machine, her bare foot pumping the pedal, a bright pink cloth rippling under the needle. She did not look up.

He kept running, feeling his breathing coming faster and his throat dry. His father was nowhere to be seen. He raced down one narrow hallway, only to find that the walls grew closer and closer to each other until he found himself wedged into a corner, with only a thin slice of light to press his eye against. He could see people walking close by, snatches of bright scarves and the tinkle of the rickshaw wallahs’ bicycle bells, but when he shouted, he could not be heard above the honk of horns and shouts of vendors. He no longer heard the slap of sandals behind him, but he pulled deep breaths in his sleep, the fear still acute. He turned again and hurried through a door he had not seen before and found himself in a pale green room with a flowered curtain against the far wall that looked strangely like the shower curtain in his bathroom. When he pulled it aside, he found himself gasping in the blinding light of the street while bazaar-goers pushed past him, oblivious.

Chapter 16

Frank Minton came back to them with a list of telephone numbers, former addresses, previous employers for Rehan. The flotsam and jetsam of a life, thought Amal, they no longer had meaning without his warm body, it was no better than if someone had given her a ticket stub he had once used.

“The desi network should have taken care of this,” complained Mirza, “we always used to be in each other’s business.” Amal pointed out that Rehan’s mother would have heard news of her son by now if the gossip network was working.

He had slipped between the cracks by simply letting go, and now he was moving with people who had similarly sloughed off the old loyalties. For a moment, she wondered if he was homeless, but she could imagine him roughing it on
a couch or hard floor, making his wudu in someone’s cracked basin, the solidarity of poverty hardening the will, purifying it to a cold and joyless thing.

They needed to find him soon. The summer was almost over, and Amal was worried about his place at the university if he did not return. She told her own university that she needed medical leave, but the secretary had sounded dubious, and without a doctor’s note, Amal knew that it was not going to work for long. One morning, she stepped out of the house and called Mirza Uncle’s university with questions about applying. When the prospectus came rattling through the letterbox a few days later, Mirza picked it up and handed it to her with a smile, and she blushed. Her vision of university, however, had Rehan in it, walking with her to class, or laughing with her over a coffee at the cafeteria, and she knew how absurd that was right now, for many reasons, the first being that he was throwing away his future like a dying man spends money.

They were traveling to London today to see if anyone at his nearest mosque knew where he was living now.

“It’s a fairly cosmopolitan m
asjid,” Mirza had said, “ lots of immigrants from North Africa, Bosnians. There’s a good chance someone may have seen him at Friday prayers.”

“So what do we do?” asked Amal. She was angry at the whole situation, at the prospect of chasing a man who was no longer interested in knowing her, and she wanted to be difficult, to demand answers she knew her uncle could not provide.

“Well, we start there…” his voice trailed off for a second, “and then we just keep going. We’ll find him, beti.”

“And that’s it? Because even if we do, what makes us more likely to succeed than his mother? We’re not even family.”

“And that is why we might have a chance. Rehan’s family has been shattered by his father. He needs to come back to something more than disappointment. He needs to belong again.”

“To belong? To belong to what?”

Mirza put his hand on Amal’s head and smiled. “To belong to someone, the way that only someone who loves and is loved can belong.”

The mosque was down a side street that was almost as narrow as an alley. Amal looked up and saw “fuck off pakis!” written on the wall in silver spray paint and half-scrubbed out, no doubt by the efforts of the mosque-goers. The author had taken the trouble to draw a star where the dot over the ‘i’ belonged, making the statement oddly pretty, even cheery. It doesn’t even matter what we say, thought Amal, we just want to be seen and heard. But the people rushing into the mosque did not glance up as they shuffled
through the door, women heading upstairs while men took off their shoes and placed them on the shoe racks in the hallway and moved into an inner room. The building was small and crowded with the rush of office workers squeezing their Friday prayers into their lunch hour. Amal heard French and Arabic and something she could only guess was Bosnian as the congregants took their places for the midday prayer.

She sat behind a lattice, people-watching, as she sometimes loved to do at train stations. Forgetting the Islamic principle of modesty and where she was, she gazed outright through the whorls and curlicues of the wooden lattice that overlooked the hall downstairs at the men hurrying to their positions. Next to her, she felt the line get crowded as more women joined the line where she stood. A heavy African woman in voluminous layers stood shoulder to shoulder with her. She wore a jilbaab, but Amal wondered if there was a business suit underneath, whether she worked at an office nearby and ran meetings, or if she was heading out to meet a friend for coffee when the prayer service was over. The prayer was starting, with the conclusion of the azan, and Amal tried to move in unison with the congregants, wondering if it was clear to anyone around her that she did not know what she was doing.

She had not prayed since the Eids of her childhood. When she was very small, she would sit by her mother’s side and play with her new bangles. When she was older, she would be her mother’s shadow, moving up and down to her movements and moving her lips silently as if real words were falling from them. There were no words now. She made each movement slowly and stiffly as her inexpertly wrapped headscarf threatened to loosen about her ears and come undone.

When she finished, she sat through the sermon. She was lost by the terminology and frequent words in Arabic. As the congregants replied to words said by the Imam, there was a whispering of sibilant sounds that at times reminded her of a brook rippling, and at others called to mind the sounds of birds in their nests at dawn. Then the Imam made a few announcements about parking in the mosque car park and an upcoming fundraiser, and that seemed t
o be a cue for everyone to rise. She moved with the crowd into the lobby where Mirza Uncle was talking to a short, wiry man with gray hair and beard and black eyes and an older, darker man, wearing a suit blazer over his shalwar.

“Amal, this is Dr. Khan, he is very active in this masjid and Brother Jilani. They know Rehan.”

The man with dark eyes greeted her kindly, and continued his conversation, “If he is not in touch with his mother, then that is no kind of Islam. The worry he is causing her is disgraceful. Very out of character, I’m sure of it,” he turned quickly to Amal, and she wondered if he thought she was a sister or cousin with real claims on Rehan. Brother Jilani was looking at her with curiosity, but he smiled when she caught his eye. Mirza Uncle did not explain her relationship to Rehan to the doctor, and so she just nodded.

“The thing is,” Dr. Khan continued, “he was our best volunteer. Always here when I needed him to carry things for the banquets, drive a refugee family here or there in my van, that sort of thing. A nice young man.” He sighed. “This is not right.”

The other man spoke with a Bradford accent, and he was friendly and relaxed, as if he was talking about the weather. “Well, we see it once in a while, innit? Young men dropping off the radar. They don’t come to the masjid anymore, their parents are frantic. They have given up hope for some reason, can’t find a job, get married, have the sort of opportunity their parents had. Someone somewhere has convinced them that they are right to remain hopeless.”

Dr. Khan spoke again, “This is not what we worked so hard for, coming to this country for a better life, building masjids for them, struggling to get them into good schools. They lost the plot.” He was still for a moment, and Amal thought of how an object rests when it is thrown up in the air, only to move faster than ever on its way down, and sure enough, it was with a burst of energy that he said, “Well, God-willing you will be successfu
l. Try that number I gave you”—Mirza Uncle patted his breast pocket—“and tell him this old dog can’t do this work anymore without him. We need the youth around here to step up; we’re tired!”

He stepped out of bed carefully and reached for his jeans on the floor. He dressed slowly, looking behind him, but there was no movement in the house, only the sound of deep breathing from the room next door. Outside, the street was empty, the lamps creating small islands of light on the wet pavement. The phone booth was by the newsagent. He put some coins into the slot and held the receiver in his hand for a long time before dialing. The numbers summoned themselves to his index finger without thought or conscious memory, but when he heard the line ringing he felt his blood rush to his head and drum furiously in his ears. He hung up before the second ring and rubbed the back of his head, looking at the change in his hand. He dialed a different number now, waiting this time until he heard the click of the receiver being picked up.

“Hello?” He almost couldn’t make out the man’s voice, so loud was his own heartbeat.

“Hello? Rehan?” There was
a long silence. “Oh God, Rehan—”

“—”

“Your mother told me you left. Say something! Rehan, I need you to—” There was a low woman’s voice murmuring in the background. He put the receiver down and put his hand back in his pocket, the small change imprinting his palm as he walked home with his fists squeezed inside his coat pockets, leaving a sour metallic smell.

Mirza turned up the room fan in the hotel and wiggled his toes, each one
separately, to let the cool air soothe them. They had planned on returning home that evening after making a few enquiries, but he had persuaded Amal to allow him to book two rooms at a hotel in London, under the pretense that they could rest. The truth was that his niece had lived in a bubble with him for three months and needed a chance to remember what the world looked like again.

The cold air on his toes made him sigh. His feet had been crushed inside his shoes all day, swollen in the heat and by the endless walking from the mosque to the Chatterjee’s, whose number had been given to them by Dr. Khan. They were a lively middle-aged couple who had met Rehan when he worked on their extension with a group of building contractors.

“Bit of a cowboy outfit, quite honestly,” said Mr. Chatterjee, “not official or anything, but he did a good job”—here Mirza gave a grunt of approval—“made sure the others were doing it properly. Did the job in six weeks instead of two months, I was right pleased.” He said quickly, “I hope he’s alright.” The others in the group were not a bunch of laughs, Mr. Chatterjee continued, but they were polite. That had been three weeks ago, and although Mr. Chatterjee had a phone number for someone called Basith, he had not been able to get through to the group since, even though they were supposed to return to paint a few nicks on the door trim. Mr. Chatterjee cheerily pointed out each nick and ding for their attention and Mirza asked for their coats. Not much to go on, he thought, and he could see the tightness in Amal’s smiles as she said “thank you” for the cup of tea and “yes, the extension lets in a lot of light” as she looked at the floor and made all the well-timed nods and noises required until they were out in the street and she was wiping her tears on his sleeve jacket. He had comforted her, and coaxed her into arranging a ‘girls’ night out’ with her friend Vanessa. He saw her off at the tube station and turned back to the hotel, where he collapsed on the bed and snoozed past dinnertime. When he woke, he checked the clock and hurried to wash his face and flatten his hair with a sprinkling of water. He left the hotel and walked to the nearest underground station, buying a spicy lamb shwarma pita on the way from an Arab diner and eating as he walked, mopping up grease at the corner of his mouth from time to time.

Dusk was approaching as he entered the Evergreen Valley graveyard. Birds were calling in the trees, one or two swooping low over the graves as they found a preferred roosting spot. The grounds were well maintained, and nothing had changed since his last visit ten years earlier. He found Stacy’s headstone easily. He saw that
Phillip Marshall was buried next to her, and was strangely relieved. He had imagined Phillip shuffling through a lonely fog after the sudden death of his wife three years ago, not knowing that the love of his life was missing. It had been her turn to save a place for him.

It was getting dark and harder to read the gravestones, so he walked slowly back to the cemetery gates. He wondered if Khan Sahib was lying near his wife, but the Islamic practice of burying men and women separately made him think that was unlikely. Surely, now he was finished at last with his hopeless student, Mirza, he would be free to dream of his wife for the rest of eternity. Mirza knew that Naida, whom he had loved and held and hoped to raise a family with, would never lie by his side again.

Amal let herself into the hotel room late. She had looked for the light under Mirza Uncle’s door but could hear him snoring heavily. She sat on her bed and took in the pleasant, noncommittal decor that had not distracted her earlier as they planned their day that morning. It was no more than an idea of comfort, of home, or even of luxury, like a studio set or a model home. She flicked open her phone and scrolled back through previous calls. She found that she had to go back two months for the last message from Rehan. He had sent a text with a “Sorry we fought. We’ll talk soon.” She snapped the phone shut. They were heading back to Trenton the next day. She undressed for bed and climbed in, without taking off her makeup or brushing her teeth. As she lay back on the pillow, she went through each memory of Rehan: when she first met him; their conversation in the garage; Mirza Uncle’s outdoor lecture; the trip to her family home. She revisited each memory in a different order as if she were shuffling a deck of cards. Just as she finally fell asleep, she caught a ripple of fabric in her mind’s eye; a t-shirt the bright color of citrus deepening to orange marmalade and then brown, growing darker shade by shade as sleep took hold of her, until the moment when all color drained away.