A Place for Us

After the plates had been cleared away and the leftovers packed in boxes, Baba ordered desserts for them all, a rare treat—mango with sticky rice and fried roti and fried ice cream. Hadia returned from the restroom to find an elegantly wrapped box where her plate had been, with shiny gold wrapping paper and a plush bow.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Amar asked, when her reaction had been to just stare, to poke down an ear of the bow.

“Do you know what it is?” she asked him, and he nodded.

She looked at each face—all four of them eager and excited, even Mumma’s wide smile, how Mumma dipped her head to encourage her. Hadia spoke to herself then: It does not matter what is in this box. Be so happy, so visibly grateful when you open it.

She did not tear the wrapping but tugged gently until the tape came free and folded the paper to save it. Opened the box and there, elevated on a small stand, was a watch—the watch—Baba’s, her Dada’s. Now, hers. She looked up. Baba was waiting for her reaction. Of course she had seen it before—Baba wore it on special occasions, he had let her hold it when she was a child, and she might have even slipped it over her wrist. The delicate gold rim, the perfect circle, its black hands with tiny tear-dropped ends, its most gentle tick. She had never been gifted something so simple but also ornate, so obviously valuable at first glance, unnecessary and undreamed of until the moment that it was given to her, and she knew then that she would wear it the same way she carried her last name, with pride.

“Are you sure?” she could not help but ask.

It was his most cherished possession. Baba was never sentimental, but this watch he would draw from his desk drawer, polish, and return to its box again. She had never imagined it one day being hers. Amar was smiling softly at her and tearing his tissue into small squares.

“For all you have done,” Baba said, and it was clear by the look on his face that he was happy with her reaction, that she did not even have to pretend.

“But, Baba, isn’t the watch for a man?” she asked him later, when they were alone in his study.

“Who says it is for a man?” Baba asked her. He straightened his papers by hitting them against the desk.

She thought for a moment.

“Men?”

Baba laughed.

“Exactly,” he said.

She had worn the watch at dinner and had not taken it off since. Baba held her wrist up. It was a little big on her, but in a way that she liked, a reminder of what it signified.

“It’s yours now,” he said to her. “It was always going to be yours, Hadia. The only thing I did not know was when it would be the right time to give it.”



* * *





IT IS COOL inside the kitchen, and the light too is cool, the sun having moved its way over the house. She brings down the blender from the cupboard and the yogurt, milk, and mango pulp from the fridge. She sets them on the counter, all in a row, by size. She likes to set out all the ingredients and pause before she begins to mix them up. And then Abbas Ali is in the hallway entrance, his hair damp, half sweaty still in his white shirt.

Her mother is upstairs napping and Baba is out of town and her sister is volunteering at Sunday school, her brother and all the other boys outside. She pours milk with a slightly shaking hand, she can feel the glugging of the milk from the flimsy plastic handle, and droplets fly from the spout to speckle her arms and shirt.

“Amar says you are leaving in a week.”

She just smiles and manages a quick nod. She measures sugar into a cup. Abbas will not be going away for college. He will be going to a community college nearby until he can transfer. There is something about the boys from their community that disappoints her: they do not work as hard as they could, there is a listlessness about them, a lack of longing for another kind of life. They could be anything, go anywhere. With no one to deny them. Any word that is said against them is only to ask: where have you been, and why did you go? How lucky to have a question like that directed toward you. They are the young men of their families. They carry the family name. Everything is designed to cater to them, to their needs, to bend to their wishes. But they just gather in each other’s front yards and reenact the same summer afternoons.

“I didn’t congratulate you,” he says. “Is it odd to say I was really proud of you when I heard?”

“No, it’s nice. Thank you.”

She is so shy, so spare with her words. He will think she does not want to speak with him. She begins to blend and they can’t hear each other anymore anyway. The blender hums and her hands shake with it. She hopes her mother will not wake. Abbas stands in the hallway still, his head tilted, a hand in his hair, not looking at her but also not turning away. She will have to leave him too. A small departure. But still one. When she is done she begins to pour the lassi into little plastic cups. He steps into the kitchen and takes the blender from her.

“I can help,” he says. “Let me.”

Afraid to be in the same small tiled space with him, she steps quickly to the refrigerator, touches the side of her arm that he knocked when reaching for the blender, then busies herself by freeing tiny ice cubes from the ice tray, plops them into the cups he has filled. They work in silence. She feels heat, beneath her cheeks, spreading to her neck, a heat from the awareness that they are creating something together. How they are both aware. He is so meticulous. He pours the lassi and then bends down to examine it at eye level, as if he is in chemistry class and checking if they are all equal, and he nods to himself when he decides they are. She laughs and he looks up with a half-smile, knowing she is teasing.

“Which one will be yours?” he asks.

She points to one and he pours a little extra.

“This is my absolute favorite,” he says when he is done pouring the drinks, and he places them on the plastic floral tray she hands to him.

“I know,” she says, and she knows her face must certainly be red. But he is not looking, he is concentrating on balancing all the little cups of lassi, even hers, on the tray and carrying them out with great care. He watches the cups with every step, and nods to her in a way that tells her to follow him, and she follows, of course she follows.

“Will you visit?” he whispers, because they are in the hallway now and their voices can easily drift to her mother’s bedroom.

She looks at the straight line of his neck as they walk, the vein that might always be there or might just be there after playing in the heat, the rise and dip of his shoulder. She likes that her sight expands when she is looking at him, likes that she is capable of feeling affection for something as small and specific as a bloom like a berry on the back of his neck.

“Every long break,” she whispers back.

Then they are outside and surrounded by others. In the sunlight Amar takes the tray from Abbas and Abbas reaches for the cup that is hers and hands it to her. Hadia looks back to the door. She presses an ice cube down until it is submerged, then tastes the sweet, sticky lassi left on her fingertip. She has done well. It is delicious.

Abbas Ali asks, “Stay for a minute?”

As though he knew what she was debating—to do what is proper or to do what she wants, a little longer with him, given that their time together is already so short. And Amar has not registered anything, he is just chugging his lassi as quickly as he can.

“Slow down and enjoy it,” she calls to him.

Abbas says to her, “When have you ever known him to?”

“Never.”

They laugh together. Then turn to watch Amar crush the plastic cup and drop it onto the ground, as if he were a teenager at a party. Some of the boys clap. Abbas Ali, the eldest Ali boy, the one face she has always sought out in a crowd, looks up at her with his face lowered, so that his eyebrows are raised, so that his eyes look bigger, his expression earnest, and when she looks at him, when she lifts the cup to her lips, when she nods that she will stay, he smiles to himself and looks away, past her, maybe to the magnolia tree, maybe to the street, maybe directly to the setting sun.





6.

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