He does not appear as happy as he was a moment ago. Layla looks down at the shalwar that covers her legs, not wanting to reveal them. She turns around and can’t see Rafiq from here. He must still be swinging the girls. She looks back at Amar calling her, unaware of what he is asking of her.
The slope protects them from view. Here it is just she and her son. She can decide how they move through the world, to each other. She can do this. Bend down and lift her shalwar and join him. What does it matter? She ties her orni at her hip so it won’t get away, she rolls up her shalwar a little bit, then a little more, until it is just above her knees. Amar claps, throws water into the air, the splashes descend like the tails of a golden firework. Her legs are pale. The breeze is colder on bare skin than she imagined. She cannot call forth the last time the sun saw her skin. She feels like a girl. Amar notices nothing—not her nervousness, not her hesitation. Yes, Mummy, he shouts in celebration, as though they had been playing a game and she had given him the correct answer.
She steps into the water and is surprised not only by how cold it is, but also how refreshing. She looks down at her feet that appear contorted. She chooses each stone carefully and thinks: this is what it is to be alive. This is what being alive can be like. What would Rafiq say if he saw her? Mum-ma? Mum-ma? Amar is saying it like a cheer and Layla realizes she cannot control her laughter, so unrestrained and inaccessible before now. The stones are smooth beneath her feet. The current both insistent and relenting. This is a moment that lifts and becomes a memory even as it is happening, and she knows this will be the meadow she will try to return to, her son’s voice the sound she will try to recall.
One day she will look back and think: It was not bad. We were so blessed. There were days like this. Sunny and beautiful, when Amar looked up at me as I reached him in the river and said, I’m so happy we did this, Mumma. Days when Rafiq’s mood was as carefree as a ripple of water in a stream. There were times when I watched Hadia unpeel the skin of the tangerine with tiny thumbs and fingers with such precision and technique—the peel not tearing once—and I thought, how did she learn how to do that? I was certainly not the one to teach her. And she offered the tangerine whole to her brother, did not demand a piece in return, then peeled one for her sister before she even asked, and Huda rose to say, I’ll throw the peels away, and maybe it was the same thoughtfulness that touched me that made Huda want to do something in return. Huda cupped her hands and Hadia let the peels fall like little petals into her sister’s palms, and I thought, these are my children, mine, laughing together, and that is when I met Rafiq’s gaze and he looked like I must have, swelling with so much pride it was apparent on his face, on mine, so apparent that we both had to look away, made shy from the force and depth of a feeling we did not expect.
PART THREE
1.
THE WEDDING HAD BARELY BEGUN AND ALREADY LAYLA COULD not locate Amar. Layla had been frustrated when Hadia had said she wanted a mixed wedding—an unsegregated wedding marked a family who valued entertainment over adherence—but as she searched the hall for her son now, she felt grateful for her daughter’s insistence.
Across the hall she met Rafiq’s gaze. As though the look on her face were enough to convey her fear, Rafiq began to scan the hall. Layla stepped out into the lobby where guests mingled, held small plates of appetizers and sipped juice from thin glass flutes: pineapple, orange, mango. There he was. She could spot the outline of her child in an instant. He was looking down at his plate, nodding along to a conversation. She stepped closer. His suit sharp and his hair combed, he was more than presentable, he was handsome, someone she could point to with pride and say yes, that one there is my son.
Amar was speaking to a woman. She was facing him and was partially obscured by people walking past.
“You found him.” Rafiq appeared at her side.
The people blocking her view stepped away. The woman turned her head enough for a sliver of her profile to be glimpsed. It was her, Amira Ali. Rafiq studied Layla as though waiting for her to react.
“Should we be worried?” he asked.
The Ali girl had wasted no time in finding her son. The sight of the two of them together unearthed an old discomfort. She looked to see if Seema was nearby but she was not. Amar and the girl spoke unattended.
“No,” she said, and not sure who she was reassuring she continued, “it has been years.”
She smiled at Rafiq, but quickly turned back to them. Amar was not looking at her. Amira Ali was the one speaking. Even from a distance Layla could note the playful tilt in her head as she looked up at Amar, how her hair danced as she moved. Her son played with the food on his plate but did not lift his fork. Layla had not seen Amira Ali in years—she had moved across the country for college, visited infrequently. She had never come again to their home, not even after Amar left.
Amira stepped away from Amar and walked toward the main hall. Amar seemed unbothered by her departure. Layla let out a breath she did not realize she had been holding. Rafiq returned to mingling; many of the attendees were his coworkers or his oldest friends from Hyderabad.
Layla watched Amira Ali walk. Girlishness had left her: her cheeks had lost their fullness and given way to high cheekbones, an angular and attractive face. Her lips painted and lashes darkened. She was poised, her spine straight, her step steady. Her childhood charm was now confidence. She maneuvered through the crowd unaware that Layla was watching, and Layla was hit with the strange sensation of realizing she had left something behind and forgotten to turn back for it. But what was it, she wondered, as Amira Ali reached up to tuck her dark hair behind her ear, revealing that heavy, ornate jewelry of Hyderabad, the circular gold earrings with the emeralds and dangling pearls. It would be impossible now, years later, to retrace her steps, and find again what it was that had slipped her mind, what she had forgotten to turn back for.
* * *
OF ALL HE had predicted, all he had feared or hoped for, Amira suggesting they meet in private had not even occurred to him. Nor had he thought he would respond so effortlessly, with no pride or hesitation keeping him from agreeing. It repulsed him: that all the work he had done to convince himself he no longer wanted her, did not even want to hear from her, could be so quickly unraveled.
The piece of chicken and samosa on his plate. He should force himself to eat but his hands trembled. He could not look at her while she spoke. But as she walked away with her posture of being seen, he had looked.
“There’s a courtyard on the other side of the hotel, down a long corridor, empty this time of night,” she had said.
It was the same corridor that led to the hotel bar.
“We could meet there?” she asked.
He had not known what to say. So she continued, saying maybe when the nikkah and speeches were done—when people sat down to eat dinner and everyone was distracted. She had formed a plan. Perhaps she had hoped he would be here just so they could execute it.
By the time she disappeared into the main hall he was in a state of disbelief. That they would meet again. That even if they did not speak to or see each other, they still felt that care and curiosity. For three years now, he had returned to their last conversations embittered at the thought of being discarded. But seeing her now, the deep green of her dress with the red accents, her golden shoes he concentrated on while she spoke—any bitterness was made insignificant by the overwhelming sight of her. And the chance to once again step toward a place that would be made theirs.
* * *