AFTER AN HOUR IN the tunnel, Shahid’s legs started to cramp. He had been in a crouch the whole time, worried about getting his pants dirty by sitting on the layer of rubbish there. He reached out a hand slowly, and even more slowly he brought his fingers down. He was afraid of feeling something damp, something soft, but it was dryness that he touched. Paper, or leaves, maybe. He shifted until his body was above his hand and lowered himself onto whatever it was that was not rotting wetly. He straightened his legs and, in the relief of the blood flowing, he sucked in his breath and the smell of dirty water from the open sewer made him choke. A breeze started to blow into the tunnel and he took off his shoes and socks and wiggled his toes in the air. A few more minutes went by, and then, overcome with tiredness, lulled by the breeze, he lay down completely, his head on his shoes. It was a little after midnight. From the road outside, the sound of the traffic had gone away; only the odd car whisper-rushed, or a truck sped by noisily. It was peaceful. He closed his eyes and slept. When he awoke, the day had begun. He crawled out of the tunnel, went home, showered, and went to work.
______________
A few weeks after this, he went with Mira to a party. The two of them had gotten engaged six months ago, when everything in Shahid’s world seemed to be happening on schedule; when he could explain the restlessness inside him as just extra, unchallenged energy, so he had taken up running, then a new language, then the possibility of a different job. Mira sometimes laughed and said as long as he didn’t take up an expensive hobby he could do whatever he liked. They had become best friends in college, and their engagement had been inevitable.
She laughed at something he said as they walked up to their friends’ house. He had not told her about the tunnel.
The party was Rafi and Sara’s one-year-wedding anniversary celebration. By the time Shahid and Mira arrived, dinner had been laid out. The guests were allowed to respond to their respective hungers and go to the main dining area as they pleased. For almost two hours the serving dishes—the ones elevated on metal stands with small candles underneath—were refilled as needed by the staff. In this crowd of people who had graduated only a few years ago, in these rooms full of comfortable pieces of furniture, under the flood of words from friends and acquaintances, everyone’s faces lit up by soft yellow lights, Shahid felt warm and happy, and calmer than he had in a while. He felt connected to all of these people’s dreams and hopes and ambitions. He felt concern when they brought up their parents’ health, and when they discussed work performances and the anxiety of being bypassed at their companies for fast track lists to bigger roles. He was full of wordless admiration for Hina when she told him about her father’s cancer treatments. He remembered, from what Mira had told him, that she worked almost around the clock and had two children now and her husband was a dull, successful person in the banking world. He was full of praise for Anisa who, after just one year as a trainee in a marketing department somewhere, had made a right-turn into the art world. He remembered she had always painted, large canvases of autumn trees with leaves covering the ground, and winter scenes of snow-covered limbs of other kinds of trees. For a while now she had been painting whirling dervishes.
“Have you been to Turkey?” Shahid had stupidly asked her last year, at someone’s wedding, after Anisa had shown him a photo on her phone of her recently finished work. “No,” she had replied. “These images come to me in a dream.”
She showed him new photos at the anniversary party now. Shahid did not understand them; they seemed to him more like streaks of colors in a suggestion of figures and less like actual figures, or incongruent backgrounds of tall buildings or highways instead of the earlier, more peaceful blues and greens. He put his incomprehension down to a lack of understanding about art in general.
He wasn’t even irritated by the things Ahmed said to him and Mira.
“Are you still stuck selling at that terrible detergent brand?” Ahmed asked.
Shahid nodded.
“And are you still saving lives or whatever it is you do at the Women’s Welfare Association?”
Mira said, “It’s great, so eye-opening, you know.”
Shahid was proud of Mira for choosing to do the kind of tough work that her job asked for. Right here in these rooms were the very embodiments of reasons to want to live. Art, love, procreation. Even the easing of an elderly parent’s life toward death was a reason to want to live. His night in the tunnel—and, before that, his running out of his office, driving recklessly, parking next to the sewer drain, and crawling into that space filled with garbage—all that seemed far away, like a dream.
By eleven o’clock, a few guests had gone home. The women who remained stood in corners in small groups, their talk more confidential now. The men sat on sofas, their exchanges also of a deeper kind, their laughter a little more ironic. There were jokes about commitment and death, old professors, new bosses, and the government. By half past eleven Shahid had laughed and commiserated and shaken his head so much his temples were beginning to hurt. He was jiggling a knee. He realized he was hungry, and he sat with that sensation for a little while, puzzled, because he thought he had eaten almost constantly since he had arrived at the party. He decided to find Mira. He hadn’t seen her almost all evening. There had been a moment, earlier, when he thought she was standing by the table, looking at him, but when he got there she had left the spot. He was feeling tired now. The warmth that had grown inside him from being in the middle of sincere humans was dissipating now. He was remembering the tunnel again, the clarity he had received in there. He mumbled an excuse to the others near him. He started to walk from room to room, forging a narrow passage for himself through the eating, chatting people, looking for Mira. It had become more urgent that he talked to her. What was he going to say, though?
He found her talking to a female servant who was filling a tray with used dishes. Mira seemed to be offering her help but the woman kept refusing with a polite but forceful wave of her hand, and, eventually, she walked away determinedly, bearing her heavy tray all by herself.
“Do you think this table is beautiful?” Mira asked Shahid. “I think Sara got it custom-made.” Then she sighed.
“You sound tired. Would you like to go home? It’s getting late anyway.”
“No, no, let’s stay. It’s nice to see all these people again. It’s just… did you see that poor woman’s clothes? So worn out.”
“I’ve quit my job. Yesterday. I’m not with the detergent company anymore.”
“You’re changing jobs? When did that happen? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“No, I’m not working at all. I’m not joining a different company. I don’t want to.”
“You don’t want to work.”
“No.”
Mira looked at Shahid. “But you were doing so well. You told me. Last quarter’s targets met and everything.”
“Yes but I don’t want to do that anymore.” He took a deep breath to steady his voice but when he spoke again he sounded more excitable and irresponsible. “I don’t want to make myself care about graphs about dirty clothes or focus groups about whether people like blue packaging or green.” Mira was staring at him now, so he couldn’t stop even if he’d wanted to. “Or active ingredients, or deadlines. Or performance reports.”
“What about us? We’re supposed to get married!”
Somebody from the drawing room wandered in just then, a friend of a friend. Shahid and Mira rearranged their expressions but the person grinned and said, “Ooh! Trouble. Don’t worry, it all works out in the end.” He gave them a thumbs up and retreated.
Mira picked up right away. “My money can only get us groceries. Are we going to live forever in your one bedroom apartment in Saddar?”
“There are other things that are so much more important than that, Mira.”
Mira’s eyes were wide and her nostrils flared. Shahid didn’t think it was a look of anger. He chose to believe she was still surprised.
He said, “Do you remember years ago when we’d protested in front of the Press Club?”
“Yes, Shahid, I remember. It was, like you said, years ago.”
“Do you remember how great that had felt? How purposeful?” He reached for Mira’s hand but she jerked it away. “I want to get involved in life like that again. Be with actual people.”
“I already do that,” Mira said, trying to keep her voice low, but she was angry, so it came out thin and squeaky. “You’re supposed to do what you’re good at.”
“But the things I’m good at don’t matter.”
At that moment the servant came back, her tray filled with clean glasses this time. Mira and Shahid became quiet again, watching the woman work. She glanced at them, set down the rest of the glasses hurriedly, and left.
“Do you hear how you sound?” Mira asked. “You’ve got a degree. You’ve got a future.”
And now he was angry as well. Angry and misunderstood. “Do you know where I was a few nights ago? A tunnel. I left the office and spent the night inside this stinking, dirty place because it was better than another minute at my desk. And you know what else? I felt happy there. I thought about things. About our real purpose here. And how we need to live in a truer way, with courage and sacrifice. We should be where the refugees are, where the natural disasters are, and not cocooned from all that.”
With a mixture of disbelief and resignation, Mira said, “I’m going to end up like that maid” and walked out of the room.
Shahid watched her go, suddenly deflated. His stomach growled and he looked confusedly toward the assembly of food on the table. He picked up a spring roll and ate it in two bites. Then he ate two more. His hunger appeased, some of the conviction he had felt that night in the tunnel came back to him. Once again, life seemed large and nebulous and exciting.
Searching for water, his mind still trying to mold his feelings into a shape he could explain to his fiancée, he went into the kitchen, and saw the maid washing dishes, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. On her left was a pile of wet plates. She saw Shahid but did not say anything. He grabbed a dishcloth. “Let me help, please.” He picked up a plate and dried it and found a place on the counter to set it down on. The maid glanced at him despairingly. “There’s no need to, sir,” she said, almost pleadingly.
“It’s OK,” he said, feeling more confident. “It’s good to help. We’re all the same.”
In silence, they worked side by side. Shahid felt almost ebullient again. If there was any misery or discomfort emanating from the woman he did not feel it. He had dried six plates when suddenly the maid said, “Please, sir, I will do the work now.” There was force in her voice. Shahid set down the dishcloth and gave a brief nod. His hands had begun to tire anyway.
“Well. Call me if you need any help. What’s your name?”
“Noor.”
He was wiping his hands on his jeans when the kitchen door opened and the host, Rafi, walked in with an empty plate in his hand.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing in here?” Rafi said. “Do you need anything? Coffee? Tea? Noor, bring us some coffee, please.”
“I really don’t want any, thanks,” Shahid said.
They went back out together. The configuration of the people on the sofas had altered a bit. Now there were more of those who had gone to school with Rafi. There seemed to be an unspoken sense of togetherness among them. They occupied a continuous length of space. When Shahid appeared, they smiled at him and shifted, automatically making room for him, because he was one of them.
Back in school Rafi’s house used to be called the Palace. Those in the circle whose parents had to save all their lives to be able to send their son or daughter to the best school and then the best university in the city—whose mothers had to choose which of their gold bracelets from their own long-ago weddings to sell to afford part of the tuition fee and which to keep for their child’s future marriage, and whose fathers worried about telephone bills and car repair bills and the electricity bills in the summer when the one air-conditioner in the house was almost never off—they called Rafi’s house the Palace, a place of refuge. There, they could leave dirty bowls piled in the sink, eat fistfuls of the cereal Rafi’s father got for him on his travels to the US, have two air-conditioners on in two different rooms at the same time, do their homework in front of a music video channel where the skin and the makeup and the music would have sent their middle-class mothers and fathers into paroxysms of shock. There were a few in the group whose families had been luckier with wealth—modest investments made by a grandparent that comfortably cushioned the next two generations, or fathers who did exceptionally well at work, were ruthless and clever, had climbed the ladder of success, and proudly called themselves self-made. These boys and girls—one or two of them—called Rafi’s house the Palace with a sense of irony. A sense of: “Our parents actually worked to get where they are but I suppose this world is meant to be unfair,” because Rafi’s family’s wealth was of the old, inherited kind. There were mills involved, and farms outside the city, and buildings in the city, and rumor had it that half of an island belonged to them as well. All these facts were softened by two things: Rafi’s house, though palatial and always the right temperature, was filled with old, slightly worn out things; and Rafi himself was a kind, quiet person who preferred to drive himself to school, and, later, to university and his internships and everywhere else, instead of having his driver drive him around.
Words and fragments of sentences drifted into and out of Shahid’s consciousness. He tried to pay attention to what these people were saying; these were serious words. Confessions of frailty, of lack of confidence in new ventures. Someone mentioned an old incident—“Who was that boy who got accused of cheating in an exam?”—and they remembered his name eventually. Niyaz. A college friend—a later friend—asked, “What happened?”
The school friends shook their heads and gave low half-laughs which were not real laughs. Well, they began. It wasn’t just because Niyaz wasn’t a great student. Used to fall asleep during class sometimes. But, they continued, that teacher had never liked him anyway.
Goodness, the college friends breathed out. Why? Shahid frowned and nodded occasionally; he knew the story.
But he couldn’t sit still anymore. Had Mira called a taxi and left?
She was in a small sitting room, staring at a painting of a Mughal hunting scene. “This is ugly,” she said. “Where were you?”
“I was with the others,” he said. He felt better because she had talked about a painting.
Mira crossed her arms. “Which tunnel was it?” she asked. “The one across the road from my office.”
A few seconds passed by in silence, then Mira said, “I asked Sara what those pretty red flowers in her garden were called and she said she didn’t know, she never knows what her gardener plants. He just hands her a bill and she pays him whatever it says. I’m sure she doesn’t even know when she runs out of milk. It all just—happens. Do you know, she and Rafi are going to have a baby. It will be here in December. Just as she’d planned, she told me.” She paused, then said, “Have you thought about your mother?”
Shahid thought about his mother, who lived in another, smaller city. She had been a widow for almost eight years now and had long looked forward to the day her son would go out into the world and earn the living that was sorely needed to ease her financial burdens. He also had a little sister who was finishing school, and even as he found his work increasingly burdensome to his spirit, he had kept sending them money, and those women in his life had kept thanking him and recounting to him the many, many uses that money had.
Sometimes, Shahid wondered if the proof of the worth of his existence was that he woke up from every sleep. He knew what happened to souls at night; while bodies slept, the souls left them and rose up to God. If the person was meant to have another group of hours—a day, a week, months or years of them—their soul would return to their body and the person would open their eyes. Of course, there were other ways to depart. When he was a child, he used to be afraid that his aunt, a person of volatile moods, would shoot his mother and father and her own mother too. It was a scary thought, but a little bit exciting. He did not think about death in a morbid way; he did not find it morbid. He did not wish for it, did not want to hurry it up. (About what happened after death all he knew was that angels visited one in the grave, after which there was to be a resurrection and a reckoning.) When he thought about not existing on Earth, it was by way of examining his life in contrast to an un-life. Who would miss him? And for how long? His parents, his fiancée, his close friends. Was there someone’s life he had touched who would come to know of his passing and feel a pang of sadness? He had once heard a story of a woman who, every week, went to the house of an elderly couple to try to sell them plastic combs. The wife always shooed her away, but the husband always went after the woman and bought a comb. Later, when the husband died, the comb-seller sat on the ground and cried and cried. The wife, astonished, asked the woman what was wrong. The woman said, “He was a very kind person.” Shahid wanted a stranger to become dissolved with grief over his absence.
“I have some ideas…” he began now, but he could not continue because he saw Mira caressing the engraving in the wrought iron column of a lamp. His eyes went to the heavy base, also full of patterns, making an indentation in the carpet. He knew nothing about carpets—his own one-bedroom apartment had only a thin one—and he wondered if Rafi and Sara knew how many square feet of carpeting their home had. The only time Shahid’s shoes had touched bare floor in their house was in the kitchen. Even there the tiles seemed to have an unstainable quality. And here was Mira, wearing shoes with no heels; toenails with no nail polish sticking out of them; her hair, cut in a plain style, dull after a hard day’s work with sad women. He imagined her looking more and more worn out each year, scrubbing dishes the way he had seen the maid do if they could not afford to hire help.
“Look,” he said. “I know I must do the getting up, the going to work, doing something sensible and maybe worthwhile. The bringing home the—the being the foundation and the pillars and the roof of our future family. I’ll go back to my job.”
Mira looked up. “You’re clever with your work. If you just keep doing it then I can keep doing the only thing I’m good at. We will flourish, you’ll see. And, after a few years, you can look at other options, right?”
Shahid nodded, tired now, feeling as if a great fever had left him. The maid entered the room they were in and began to collect cups and mugs from various surfaces. Shahid supposed she was good at that, though there was nothing glorious about it, nothing she would be remembered by.
He murmured, “What a life.”
Mira saw where he was looking and said in a whisper, “It’s appalling how Rafi and Sara treat her.”
She had misunderstood him. He said, “What? No. Rafi’s so humble, he’d never mistreat anyone.”
“It’s his wife Sara. She told me she’d loaned the maid money for her younger sister’s treatment or wedding or something. Now the poor woman can’t even just get up and quit.”
“Well. That’s definitely not good.”
“We’ve got to get that maid out of here.”
“Sure, we could drop her home. Too late for a bus.”
“That’s not what I mean. Every day that she works in a house like this she’s reminded of the wasteful, luxurious ways of a tiny percentage of humanity. Let’s do a good, meaningful thing. Let’s rescue her.”
“OK. Yes.” Shahid nodded hard. Mira was right. Rafi was a good, simple person who used to iron his own shirts and then had married a woman who thought nothing of keeping a maid up late because of guests.
Mira had already left the painting. Shahid followed. In the kitchen they saw Noor dragging a five-gallon water bottle across the floor toward the dispenser. Shahid watched, his heart beating fast, as Mira strode over and gently put her hand over Noor’s.
“It’s past midnight. Aren’t you tired?” she said.
“It’s OK, madam,” Noor said.
Mira made her voice lower. “They don’t pay you well, do they?” Noor’s eyes, red with sleep, became big. “Sir and madam are good people.”
Mira took Noor’s hands in her own. “They’re some of the best. But look, you’ve been working all day and now you’re lugging heavy bottles and cleaning up while sir and madam sit around and laugh with their friends.” Mira paused and turned her head slightly in the direction of the drawing room. A second later, a peal of laughter came all the way into the kitchen, the unmistakable sound of Sara’s mirth. This was followed by a deeper guffaw from Rafi.
Mira turned back to the maid. “We can get you out of here. We can take you to your house. With your skills you could be earning double, triple, more than what you’re earning right now.”
“I could recommend you to some people I know,” Shahid said, not sure whom he had in mind.
“But what will I say to sir? And madam?” Noor said.
“You won’t have to explain anything to sir.”
“Nobody should have to live like a slave. You are worth more than this,” Mira said. “I’ll help you pack. Where’s your room?”
Her indignation proved convincing, and Noor pointed toward a small, dark corridor at the back of the kitchen. Mira took her elbow and Shahid followed slowly, not sure if he should, but wanting to very much. The maid’s room was small, a single bed and a dresser taking up most of the space. He stood outside, watching Mira pull out a small suitcase from under Noor’s bed and fill it with clothes from her dresser. From the top drawer, she took out a jar of face cream, a comb, and a small bottle of perfume and packed them.
“You’ve seen madam’s dressing table, right? When you go to dust it?” she asked. “I’m sure it’s crowded with at least ten bottles of perfume, three hairbrushes, and things she’s forgotten about in all those drawers. And she probably keeps her jewelry locked somewhere in there, away from servants.”
That was clever of Mira, Shahid could see. On Noor’s face, her tiredness and nascent feelings of injustice solidified into a simmering anger. She said, “I am not a thief. If after all these years of faithful service madam cannot trust me, then there is no point in me staying here. I am ready to go.”
Mira zipped up the suitcase and handed it to Shahid. It weighed so little that he felt a pang of real pity for the woman. She owned so little. He pressed his lips; they were doing the right thing. Mira covered Noor up with a shawl and they left quietly through the kitchen door. They walked past the guard at the main gate, down the street to where Shahid had parked his car. He fumbled in his pocket for the key and thought, I was last here yesterday. He knew it was an absurd thought, like saying, “I’ll see you next year!” on New Year’s Eve, as if next year were months away. But at that hour, with the street completely quiet except for the sounds of Mira and Noor’s shoes hurrying toward him, he felt as if an age had gone by since he had arrived.
They established Noor in the back seat with her small suitcase next to her. “She lives in Akhtar Colony,” Mira told Shahid. “Lock your doors.” He started the car, and soon Rafi and Sara’s well-lit, colonnaded house was behind them. Shahid wanted to say something celebratory to the maid but he could not decide upon the correct sequence of words in his head. Eventually he said, “Congratulations!” but he was so aghast at how flippant he sounded that he fell quiet.
Mira asked Noor, “Who lives in your home?”
“Only my mother and little sisters, madam. I have three sisters.”
“Do they go to school?”
“Yes, madam,” Noor said with some pride. “All three. I’ve always put all my money for their education.”
Shahid vowed to himself to supply generous amounts of cash to Noor for as long as she needed. There was silence for a long time in the car. Noor told Shahid where to turn left and where to go straight. They reached a very narrow alley and Noor said that’s where her house was. Shahid stopped the car but kept the engine running.
“Is it far from here?” Mira asked.
“Only the sixth one on the right.” Noor’s voice sounded small.
Shahid reached for his wallet and pulled out a few notes. “Here. Take these.” Mira unwrapped her scarf from around her neck and put it in Noor’s hands. Shahid took off his watch and put it on top of the scarf. Mira found a tiny bottle of perfume in her bag and added it to the other things.
“You are too kind, both of you.” Noor’s voice had tears. “God bless you and your children, your families, forever and ever.” She made a neat bundle of her presents, tying the corners of Mira’s scarf. She had some difficulty getting out and then pulling the suitcase off the seat. Shahid wondered if he ought to help her but he could not move from his seat; the street was so dark and the area so unsafe, so unknown to him. He sat hunched forward, holding the steering with both hands. Eventually, Noor managed to get out of the car with her belongings. She turned toward the dark alley and began to walk. Soon, Mira and Shahid could only make out her faint outline. They heard her knock on a metal door, low and hesitant. They waited for it to open, Noor and Mira and Shahid. The two in the car thought, Would she be let in? Was her house a place where she would be forced to keep out? Where would they take her? What would their friends say? Would Rafi and Sara find out what they’d done? After two or three minutes, the door creaked open and Noor stepped through it, and the door shut.
“Well,” Shahid said, releasing his breath. “We stole our friends’ maid.”
“We saved her. We did something better than anyone else there tonight. We did an act of charity.”
He supposed that that’s what they had done.
When Shahid reached Mira’s house, she got out of the car and said to him through the window, “You know, I bet we’d be much nicer to our maid.”
Inside his apartment, he changed his clothes and brushed his teeth. He put away two books from a chair to a shelf. He hung his towel on the back of the chair. He brought a pencil into alignment with a pen. He pulled back the curtain a little. Other windows were still unlit. In a couple of hours, people would wake up and eat and get dressed. They would say goodbye and hello and climb into and out of cars and buses and fill the roads and then empty them. They would do this every day.