In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (22 page)

‘I was being serious. I like people who actually do something useful, though I don’t seem to meet them very often.’ She allowed that he had crossed the first barrier. ‘But anyway tell me about something else, something interesting.’

‘First, can I get you another drink? And I’ll bring one for myself.’

On the verge of excusing herself, she looked at him, his thin supercilious features and silver-minted look, which she had once admired in young rich Pakistani men and long outgrown – and then against that, the appearance of strength, of vigor, reflected in his posture, sitting relaxed and looking agreeably out into the night.

‘All right. Champagne. Tell the bartender it’s for me, otherwise he’ll say he’s run out.’

He didn't make a pass at her – in that evening’s mood she would have rebuffed it with a jet of ice – and when they had talked for more than half an hour, quite easily, until she found herself laughing, on a whim she gave him her cell phone number.

‘And now let’s go dance,’ she said, putting down her glass, which had long been empty.

‘I don’t dance. I stopped when a girl told me I look like a chicken wading through melted tar.’

She laughed. ‘Well that’s sad, because that’s pretty much
all
I do. Goodbye then.’ And she walked away, down the steps, and into the crowd, into the party.

She vaguely expected him to call the next day or the one after that – their conversation had been more substantial than such encounters usually are, and she had volunteered her phone number – but when he didn’t she shrugged it off, saying,
‘Tant pis.’

As it happened her phone rang on one of her alone evenings, as she was sitting by the fire, a cup of tea beside her, reading – nothing, chick lit, something easy.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ he began, and she rolled her eyes, simultaneously taking a lock of her long straight black hair and curling it around her forefinger. When she didn’t respond, he added, ‘I meant to say, this is Murad.’

‘Actually I recognized your voice.’

‘That lets me off the hook, I suppose.’ Then, after a pause, ‘Are you busy?’

‘Not really. I’m sitting in front of a fire, reading an extremely bad book.’

‘I’m surprised, I assumed I’d hear pounding music in the background when you picked up.’

‘Not tonight. I’m alone, drinking tea, and generally practicing to be an old maid.’

‘Look, this may seem a bit sudden, but remember you told me about going to Kaghan with your father? Well, I thought about driving to Attock and going for a picnic along the Indus. It’s pretty interesting, the Kabul River flows in, and it’s brown, and for a long way downstream it stays separate from the blue Indus, so they run side by side, like two stripes. Right where we’ll go they start mixing together.’

‘A metaphor, I suppose.’ She said this more evenly, less ironically than she intended. Sitting by the pool at the lake party, she had told him about fishing in Kaghan as a girl – it had been on her mind, and she had let herself go to that degree.

‘You don’t know me very well. But I can bring a certifi cate of good moral character from my grandmother if that would help  ...’

‘That’s fine, I’ll take your word for it. I’d love to. When?’

‘How about this Saturday?’

‘How about the next one.’

‘At eight. Or no, you’re probably not up. At ten. I’ll pick you up. I know where your parents’ house is.’

And abruptly, he hung up, just as she was about to say, ‘That sounds a bit creepy.’

Putting down the phone, she cringed, thinking of her old maid comment, which sounded self-pitying, and worse, sounded as if she were sitting alone dreaming of matrimony.

‘This is a rather posh vehicle – for the poor nephew of a rich Makhdoom.’

They were driving along the Grand Trunk Road, under the eucalyptus trees planted by some briefly energetic government.

‘I couldn’t do without it. I live in this thing.’

‘It looks brand-new.’

‘It’s ten years old. My driver takes brilliant care of it. Back and forth we go, to my farm – I stay there a couple of weeks, and then I start going crazy and I drive back to Islamabad for R&R. Ten hours on bad roads.’

‘Ah, the famous vegetables.’

He looked over at her, smoothly changing gears, driving very precisely in the heavy chaotic traffic, buses swaying past with passengers on the roof and hanging from the doors, terrifically overloaded trucks grinding along, painted with elaborate scenes of a mountain paradise, snow-capped peaks like a child’s painting, Shangri-La, or of fighter jets, babies, pneumatic film actresses.

‘Indeed, the famous vegetables.’

She had decided on Western clothes, white linen bell-bottom pants, a fitted emerald-colored blouse, which suited her complexion and her black hair, and sandals rather than something more practical – like a girl in a commercial for Bacardi rum, she told herself, looking in her dressing room mirror. Now she put one foot up on the dash, keeping it there for a long moment, glossy red nail polish, high arch. Rolling down her window, she put her bare arm out, the breeze soft, fragrant with eucalyptus blossoms, fields of yellow mustard blossoming out to the horizon, then the beginning of the hard country, the frontier.

‘So, do you often invite bad girls for picnics along the Indus?’ she asked.

‘Oh no. You’re actually the first bad girl I’ve known well enough to ask.’

‘Very funny. Do you know, I’ve done some research. You went to college at Princeton, where you drove around in a Porsche. Your mother passed away two years ago. Your father and your uncle haven’t spoken for years, your uncle sits in the Assembly – and your father is bedridden.’

‘Not guilty on the Porsche. Even if I had had the money, I’m not quite that much of a twerp.’

‘And you’re either stuck up or shy – I heard both versions.’

‘Or maybe just schizophrenic, playing it both ways.’

‘Not in the report. Though it does occur in the family.’

‘My God! Is this stuff available on the Web or something? Pakidesigroom.com.’

She folded her arms, shaking her head, saying in a kittenish coy voice, ‘That’s it, I’m done. A complete description of the specimen.’ And then, having set it up, slyly, ‘I won’t ask what you’ve heard about me.’

‘Well, that you had a bad accident, and that it changed you.’

‘What a gentleman. Anyway there are plenty of people to tell you lies about me. And truths for that matter. I hope you don’t think I’ve been going around boasting about my near-death experience.’

He turned off the Grand Trunk Road, under the bridge leading to Peshawar, through a little village. Passersby turned to look at them, the large gray jeep with a pretty girl wearing enormous white-framed sunglasses, and a man in Western clothes. They turned down onto what seemed like a streambed, Murad driving with concentration, working the car through difficult sections, backing up and trying a different route. The smell of dust filled the jeep, and soon a fine white layer covered the plastic of the dashboard. Continuing, following a more or less usable track, they came out on a sandbank broad as a football field ceded by a curve in the Indus. Murad drove partway across and turned off the engine, facing out to the water.

‘There it is.’

‘It’s amazing. How did you find this? It’s like a secret hidden valley.’

He had stepped out of the jeep, taken a pair of binoculars from the back seat, and was scanning the hills all around. She noticed the worn strong leather case for the binoculars, earlier had noticed a pistol in a tooled leather holster lying concealed between the seats. She liked that he had well-used solid things, this car, the gun and binoculars, and she liked that he carried a gun, but without making any display. In an emergency he would be solid, would take care of the problem.

‘An army friend flew over in a helicopter and told me about it. It took me a whole day to find a way down, following these dry watercourses. Even goats can’t find much to eat here.’

Walking out onto the sand, she took off her sandals and carried them in her hand. The place seemed immense and empty, a huge bowl of rock, with the cool river running through it, the blue and white stripes of the two tributary rivers beginning to mingle, a confusion at the middle of the stream. A breeze blew off the water, increasing the loneliness, rolling up a tube of sand, which snaked in front of her, rustling softly.

She looked around, at the hills, bare all around, the parked jeep seeming to glow, tiny against the backdrop. ‘You know what’s amazing, we’re actually alone here. That never happens in Pakistan.’

‘I’m pretty sure we
are
alone. That’s what I was checking with the binoculars.’

Throwing herself down on the soft sand, wriggling to make herself comfortable, she said with a little laugh, ‘You’re a real belt-and-suspenders kind of guy.’

He brought a rug and a basket from the car, placed the rug carefully on the sand, and then poured them each a glass of white wine.

They drank, looking out at the river, silent.

Taking sand in her palm, she let it stream out between her fingers, blown away by the wind.

‘I’m really moved. Thank you for bringing me here.’

‘I was afraid you wouldn’t like it. You probably don’t often go out of the city.’

‘I don’t, but I wish I did. I’d like to live in the country. Sometimes I think I’d like to live alone on an island.’

He opened the picnic basket, had clearly made a great effort, a baguette from the French bakery, expensive cheeses, grapes, chocolate, nuts, little chicken sandwiches, and then Pakistani food in containers, more food than they could possibly eat.

After lunch, he went behind the jeep and came out wearing shorts, carrying a towel, his body slender and brown, legs muscular, a thin trace of hair below his belly button. His head was mounted well on his shoulders, the shoulders set back. Walking far upstream, he disappeared around a pile of enormous boulders, while she sat musing, the sun warm on her back.

Silently and very fast, he came sweeping into view out at the middle of the river, his head small and black against the dark green water, caught in the boiling current. Sheltering her eyes with her hand, she watched, knowing she could do nothing to save him, feeling irritation and regret wound together, at this abrupt sinking of her frail butterfly hopes, this stupid ending, the mess. As she lunged up to run across the sand, panicking, he waved to her, floated on his back for a moment, turned over, and began to swim in toward the shore with a precise motion, turning up his head to breathe at every second stroke. He took a clever angle against the river sweeping him away, and at the far point, where the curving bay ended, he splashed ashore.

Approaching, walking on the harder sand at the edge of the water, he stood above her, almost dry, glistening from the sun. ‘That was pretty goddamned cold,’ he said. ‘I’ll admit that!’

She threw him the towel, squinting up at his face, which seemed black against the sun behind him. ‘You scared me. I thought you were drowning.’

‘Not this time. There’s a bit of Persian poetry that my father quotes:
Standing there on the shore, / What do you know of my troubles, / As I struggle here in midstream
.’

He sat down, facing almost away from her. ‘You have to admit, that’s a pretty apt quotation.’

‘Very impressive. Or maybe it’s a bit too literal, if I wanted to be picky.’ After a moment she said, ‘I’m not going to sleep with you, you know. I decided that, while you were swimming or drowning or whatever you were doing.’

‘I must say, for a girl from a good Punjabi family you say the most astonishing things. Let me guess: you swore to God that if I survived you would renounce me forever. Or I should say, swore to some unspecified life force.’

‘I know,
The End of the Affair
. I saw the movie. But it’s sort of true. I really did think you were finished. And I doubt I could get home alone in your car. Not to mention the scandal. Imagine explaining what we were doing together in this place. I wouldn’t even bother to try, I’d dump the body outside your parents’ gate at night.’

He laughed. ‘I’m glad to know you were focusing on the really important aspects of the problem.’

‘Not at all. I didn’t push you in the river, you were showing off. You’re a grown-up.’

‘Very laissez-faire. You do your thing, I do mine.’

‘Exactly. Companions on a social venture.’

‘I see. Well, let’s have another drink.’

As she sipped from her glass, watching him over the rim, she said, ‘Or maybe not for a long time.’

‘You keep bringing it up. And how do you know I’ll sleep with you?’

‘Oh, that’s easy. It’s written all over your face.’

He lit a joint, and she wished that he hadn’t, looking over at him as he passed it, wanting him not to get drunk, not to smoke, to do drugs. Of course, he’d been at Princeton, he must have more or less gone through all that, rich Paki stanis at school in America almost invariably did – in her single year at NYU, failing, not even taking the spring semester exams, she herself received an entire parallel education, going around with an Iranian boyfriend three years older than herself, who took bumps of coke all day and night. As Murad sat facing the river, aloof, the breeze raising goose bumps on his bare arms, the towel pulled tightly around his shoulders, she felt immense tenderness toward him.