A plane passes in the sky. After a few minutes, another one. They hum as they move, a tiny red light blinks on one side, a white one on the other. The stars take turns brightening. Her calming voice inside rises to comfort her: It’s okay, it’s okay, you will be all right.
Lately, in school, Hadia has felt herself losing some of her old motivation. Paying attention in class, doing well, they felt like old habits. She catches herself wondering what the point is—a question that has never occurred to her before. All anyone talked about was where they dreamed of going to college. Her friends had a reason to work hard. She would always stop before the indent in the pavement. The map of her life would never extend beyond the few places her parents dragged her to. She was fifteen already, soon she would be eighteen, she might attend a local university or community college, but either way, a proposal would come, and she would pack her bags and abandon her credits, live with her husband wherever he was, have her own children to drag from family friend’s house to mosque to home again.
Still, she tries. Maybe only out of a fear of disappointing Baba, maybe a desire to make him proud. But there is also that singular pleasure of receiving her projects and tests and seeing that A+ next to her name, reading comments from her teachers in the margins. And nothing compares to the promise of stepping into a classroom knowing she will step out a different person. That she could learn something that would change the way she saw the whole world, and her place in it. There is even the private hope that if she does work as hard as she absolutely can, there is a chance she will be able to sway the outcome of her life, and maybe one day a door will be presented to her, and an opportunity to walk through it.
Behind her there is the creak of the front door opening. She hopes it is Baba. That Baba will sit next to her without getting angry at her for lying barefoot on the pavement. She does not want it to be Mumma. She has begun to expect nothing of Mumma, who would only make her apologize to Baba. But the footsteps are quick and uneven and soon Amar is standing over her, blocking the moon from sight with his upside-down face.
“Why are you such a weirdo?” he says.
“Go away,” she says, but when he steps away from her she realizes she does not want to be left alone. Amar walks to the magnolia tree, and Hadia sits up to watch him stretch and climb onto a branch and tug at a blossom until a few petals fall down. He half prances as he walks back to her, takes a seat beside her, and sprinkles the petals on her. She flits her hand in front of her face and ignores him. When she lies back down he lies down too. They watch the sky. Another plane passes.
“How do they know to avoid one another? It is so dark up there.”
She does not answer him. He continues, “Do they plan schedules months in advance when people buy their tickets? And what about unexpected storms?”
“Stop it,” she says.
“Stop what?” He turns to look at her.
“Trying to make me talk to you normally.”
She waits for a while before saying, “How did you know I was here?”
“Window.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No.”
She looks at him and narrows her eyes.
“Huda.”
They turn to the stars again. She has those shuddering after-crying breaths, but they are becoming less powerful. She senses him look at her anyway. The plane has passed almost completely, and he points to it as it goes, its little blinking red light, its hum.
* * *
THE EVENT IS under way. Amira will arrive, possibly soon. Amar scratches off a speck from the face of his watch, a gift from his father for his eighteenth birthday, a decent brand, but one bought in a store. He imagined his father letting the salesclerk pick it out for him after he realized on his way home from work that he had forgotten to buy him a gift. His father sits beside him, busy with his appetizer. Amar only touches the yogurt chaat dish to move it around in circles with the tip of his spoon. They are at the nikkah of someone from their community, and Amira confirmed that her family would be attending. By now he could not even note the way the hills greened in winter without wanting her there to note it with him. He is no better than those terrible clichés in books and movies and Bollywood songs, the people doodling in the margins, getting lost on their way home, staring up at the sky instead of sleeping.
He has good news he is saving to tell her in person. He had been in danger of failing high school and in all honesty had begun to entertain the idea of dropping out, doing something else for a change. He had gone as far as to research a list of successful people who had not made it to college, and was going to present it to his mother if his classes continued as bleakly as they had been. When he told Amira this, she sent him the longest e-mail he had ever received, explaining why he had to make an appointment with his counselor and stay in school. The reasons were numbered under three different headings; CONSIDER YOUR FAMILY, she wrote, CONSIDER YOUR PRESENT MOMENT, and lastly, CONSIDER YOUR FUTURE (OPPORTUNITIES, ETC.). He could not argue. She made a fair point. And besides, he did not want to argue. She had never articulated how she felt about him, but how thoughtfully she imagined his predicament was proof she cared.
It has been months since the death of Abbas Ali. There were times when he rose in Amar’s thoughts as though he were still alive, as though he had just not seen him in a few days. Other times the remembrance of him always carried that sense of loss. He and Amira had written e-mails back and forth every few days since he knocked on her bedroom door. They had yet to speak on the phone or meet in private, and if they saw each other it was only in the moment before the partitions went up in the mosque. Last week, her letter confessed how her family was not sure if they wanted to attend the wedding of the community member. It felt too soon. Her mother was especially affected: Amira described her mother’s grief like a spell, conjured up without warning in the midst of a conversation or a simple task. My eldest son, she would overhear her say sometimes, my first, at which her father would remind her, yes, but not our only. They had a family meeting to discuss it and in the end it was her father who told them that the forty days of mourning had long passed, and they had to be brave now, and being brave looked like resuming their old life, its celebrations as well as its obligations.
Amar looks up as the two Ali boys enter—still odd, to remind himself not to look for the third—and he looks back at his own father, until his father nods to him and Amar knows he is free to go greet them. He extends his fist to Kumail Ali and Saif Ali, and they pound theirs against it. Then, moved by the memory of Amira’s letter describing how they had to discuss if they were ready to attend tonight, Amar hugs each of them in turn, taking them both by surprise.
After a while, he excuses himself and enters the hallway, and there she is. That first glimpse of her. She lingers by the drinks table. Tall glasses filled with juice. Orange and a kind of pink—maybe guava. When she looks at him they both smile, thinking the same thing, or so it feels. He pictures a tight rope connecting them, invisible to everyone else. She lifts a glass to her lips. He leans against the table, faces the crowd, watches people enter the hall, greet each other, and separate into the ladies’ or the men’s.
“Do you think we can?” she asks. She is not facing him. She takes another sip. Her bangles clink.
Every letter exchanged since that first scrap of paper left on his pillow seems to have been leading up to this moment. In his last e-mail he mentioned that maybe there was a floor in the hotel where they could meet, where no one would have any reason to go. She had not replied, and he had deleted it from his sent mail.
Now he speaks. “Ten minutes, seventeenth floor.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
But she laughs. He looks to see if anyone has heard her. She lowers her finished glass onto the table, a pink stain of lipstick on its rim.
“You first. Fifteen minutes,” she says, and he watches her walk into the ladies’ hall.
* * *