She made her way into her favorite café and walked down the stairs with a mug in hand to the book-lined basement—a haven of warm lamplight, worn armchairs, and strong coffee. Punched keys on the keyboard to wake her laptop, barely registered from overfamiliarity the desktop picture of her mother as a young woman of the 1980s, big hair and chunky earrings, dropping a kiss on Isma’s infant scalp. As a matter of morning routine, she opened the Skype window to check if her sister was online. She wasn’t, and Isma was about to click out when a new name appeared on the online contacts list: Parvaiz Pasha.
Isma lifted her hands off the keyboard, set them down on either side of the laptop, and looked at her brother’s name. She hadn’t seen it here since that day in December when he’d called to tell them the decision he’d made for his life without any consideration of what it would mean for his sisters. Now he would be looking at her name, the green check mark next to it telling him she was available to chat. The Skype window was positioned so that her mother’s lips were touching it. Zainab Pasha’s slim, fine-boned features had skipped Isma and passed on to the twins, who laughed with their mother’s mouth, smiled with their mother’s eyes. Isma maximized the Skype window so it filled the entire screen, encircled her throat with the palms of her hands, and felt her heart’s reaction to the sight of his name in the high-speed propulsion of blood through her arteries. The seconds passed, and there was nothing from him. She kept watching the screen, just as she knew he was watching his, both for the same reason: waiting for Aneeka.
A few weeks earlier, at Hira Shah’s condo, a strange music had cut through the sound of Hira slicing potatoes—a whistling, high-pitched twang. Isma and Hira checked phones and speakers, placed ears against walls and floorboards, stepped out into the corridor, opened closets, entered empty rooms, and still it kept on, eerie loveliness, impossible to pinpoint as any known instrument, voice, or birdcall. A neighbor stopped by, looking for the source. “Ghosts,” he said with a wink before leaving.
Isma laughed, but Hira drew her shoulders in tighter, reached out to touch the evil eye that hung on her wall, which Isma had always assumed to be merely decorative.
The music kept on, coming from everywhere and nowhere, following them as they moved through the apartment. Hira, gripping her knife, whispered something that turned out to be the Lord’s Prayer—she’d been educated at a convent school in Kashmir. Finally, the supremely rational, razor-minded Dr. Shah said they should go out for dinner despite the unpleasant hail. Perhaps the sound would have stopped by the time they returned. Isma went upstairs to the bathroom to wash the grime of concealed corners off her hands. While standing at the sink, looking out of the window beside it, she saw the source of the music.
Running down, she caught Hira’s arm and pulled her out of the backdoor entrance, ducking her head against the hail. All along the redbrick building, end to end, icicles hung from the eaves, a foot or more in length. Against these broadswords, pellets rained down and made music. The acoustics of ice on ice, a thing unimaginable until experienced.
Pain swerved at her then, physical, bringing her to her knees. Hira moved toward her but Isma held up a hand, lay back in the snow, and allowed the pain to roil through her while the hail and icicles continued their synthetic-edged symphony. Parvaiz, a boy never seen without his headphones and a mic, would have lain out here for as long as the song continued, the wet of snow seeping through his clothes, the thud of hail beating down on him, uncaring of anything except capturing something previously unheard, eyes hazy with pleasure.
That had been the only time she had truly, purely missed her brother without adjectives such as “ungrateful” and “selfish” slicing through the feeling of loss. Now she looked at his name on the screen, her mouth forming prayers to keep Aneeka from logging on, the adjectives thick in her mind. Aneeka must learn to think of him as lost forever. It was possible to do this with someone you loved, Isma had learned that early on. But you could learn it only if there was a complete vacuum where the other person had been.
His name vanished from the screen. She touched her shoulder, muscles knotted beneath the skin. Pressed down, and knew what it was to be without family; no one’s hands but your own to minister to your suffering. We’ll be in touch all the time, she and Aneeka had said to each other in the weeks before she had left. But “touch” was the one thing modern technology didn’t allow, and without it she and her sister had lost something vital to their way of being together. Touch was where it had started with them—as an infant, Aneeka was bathed and changed and fed and rocked to sleep by her grandmother and nine-year-old sister while Parvaiz, the weaker, sicklier twin, was the one who suckled at their mother’s breast (she produced only enough milk for one) and cried unless she was the one to tend to him. When the twins grew older and formed their own self-enclosed universe, there was less and less Aneeka needed from Isma, but even so, there remained a physical closeness—Parvaiz was the person Aneeka talked to about all her griefs and worries, but it was Isma she came to for an embrace, or a hand to rub her back, or a body to curl up against on the sofa. And when the burden of the universe seemed too great for Isma to bear—particularly in those early days after their grandmother and mother had died within the space of a year, leaving Isma to parent and provide for two grief-struck twelve-year-olds—it was Aneeka who would place her hands on her sister’s shoulders and massage away the ache.
Clicking her tongue against her teeth in remonstration of her self-pity, Isma pulled up the essay she was writing and returned to the refuge of work.
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By midafternoon the temperature had passed the 50 degree Fahrenheit mark, which sounded, and felt, far warmer than 11 degrees Celsius, and a bout of spring madness had largely emptied the café basement. Isma tilted her post-lunch mug of coffee toward herself, touched the tip of her finger to the liquid, considered how much of a faux pas it might be to ask to have it microwaved. She had just decided she would risk the opprobrium when the door opened and the scent of cigarettes curled in from the smoking area outside, followed by a young man of startling looks.
His looks weren’t startling because they were exceptional—thick dark hair, milky-tea skin, well-proportioned features, good height, nice shoulders. Stand on any street corner in Wembley long enough and you’d see a version of this, though rarely attached to such an air of privilege. No, what was startling was the stomach-turning familiarity of the man’s features.