Every time I was with Kuhl, she told me—over and over, she told me—that she was going to confess everything to her family, and then make her marriage permanent, and live it, out in the open. But despite these decisions, months passed without her taking a single step to implement them. She was terrified at the prospect of a confrontation with her family.
One early afternoon in late autumn, we were watching the leaves fall, like mute witnesses to a paradise being lost before our eyes. Suroor was sitting between us, her slight, delicate frame rigidly straight, while Kuhl and I were leaning back in our seats. But when our eyes met, I had to acknowledge how inadequate people’s little strategems tend to be. All those ties and constraints that people really believe they have undone on their way through life, with all the steep and difficult leaps that life holds. What I saw was despair. I saw Kuhl’s thin paper kite colliding with one lamppost after another as it climbed skyward, and then tore to shreds.
“If only my family’s love wasn’t on condition.” Her voice was low, more like a quiet sob than a set of words.
“Their love for us doesn’t set any conditions,” Suroor said.
Kuhl didn’t speak again right away. But then: “If only their love weren’t conditional on my following a path determined by their choices.”
Suroor was uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was taking. Her face darkened and abruptly she suggested that we go to get coffee at the corner kiosk, a tiny place barely big enough for the vendor and his barista equipment. We cupped our hands around the warm, delicious, welcoming brew. It was a pleasant distraction for Kuhl, even if it was only a fleeting one.
What I was seeing now was a kite that Sumayya and I had made for Sufyan, a little boy at the time. We spent hours with my grandmother, making a frame out of firm reed stems that she had gathered from the fields of our village. I could see the long, shiny ribbons dangling from the kite, glistening in the cold autumn sun. Their shine seemed reflected in Kuhl’s eyes. In a different way, the ribbons seemed to twist, glinting, around Suroor’s slim fingers and onto the cup of coffee. Did my grandmother’s love set conditions? Her love just seemed there, simple, like the air that meant I could breathe, without thinking about it; given freely and generously, bestowed as the sun gives its light, freely enough to allow me to see my way ahead. Her love had to be deserved, it was true; but it left no obligation. My grandmother never made me feel—or made my father or brother or sister feel—that we were in debt to her. We deserved her as we deserved to be alive, and breathing, and turning our faces to the sun.