Suroor led me to Kuhl, and there we were, three figures in a picture. The frame closed around us—Suroor, Kuhl, Zuhour—and did not let anyone else in. Then Suroor pushed one edge of the frame open and stepped outside the picture. But we remained three because Imran stepped in. Three figures in a picture, but now they were Zuhour, Kuhl, and Imran. We pulled the sides of the picture frame back together stubbornly, enclosing our triangle. We went along with our roles, while playing the game of exchanging places, and we didn’t much pay attention to what we were doing. Or perhaps we did not want to pay attention.
Every morning when I woke up, the room was still dark, and my destiny waited for me. I would stare out at the breaking light and tell myself, “Dawn. It’s another day.” But my destiny had already come to pass. I walked right into it on my own two feet. The sides of the triangle were closed in on the three of us in a tight and perfect fit. I longed for every step I took, and I loathed every step I took, just as I longed for and was terrified by every obstacle along the way. I sat with Kuhl and Imran in the Three Monkeys, my hands shaking with the fear of abandonment and the dread of togetherness. Every vein in my body pulsed with readiness, and every bit of me was straining, on edge. Waiting: that word summed up who I was. And this fate—which would not and could not take any other course, which moved along the path that I wished for fervently and feared terribly—was not in some future, it was right here. It crouched on my back and I carried it wherever I might go. I covered it up beneath a lot of talk about anything and everything. Everything but that fate itself.
We were sitting together, on the café’s patio, beneath the open sky. I was longing to tell the two of them how much I loved them. But I couldn’t. I was frozen in my torment, tongue-tied in my destiny. In the proximity of Imran’s hair so close to my fingers, in the tone of his skin, in Kuhl’s dimples, so prominent and rosy whenever she had the bliss of being together with her beloved, the essence of this first and elemental desire for union that eludes all description.
Kuhl was talking animatedly about her well-worked-out graduation plans, and as usual, Imran was silent. I couldn’t pinpoint the source of his silence. Apprehension, or indifference?
Looking at him, I could see the child he had been. Barefoot and hungry, coming out of his mud-brick home at dawn, the green cotton boll splitting to reveal strands of cotton, and Imran bending to pick it carefully with his slim, precise fingers. He was not allowed to go to school through the whole of the cotton-harvest season, even when the cotton was not soft enough yet to be used for any purpose other than pillow stuffing or the heavy warp of rough blankets. A pair of fearsome eyes was always watching. There was a whip at the ready, and a red-hot iron spike with a sharp skewered end, and a bale of spiteful rancor that was beyond understanding. Even on the day his little sister was born, among heaps of cottonseed, he was not given permission to stop working in order to help his mother. He kept hearing her, the weak voice calling out for water, on and on until the sun went down and they all returned to the house, his father walking ahead, followed by him and his mother, clasping the newborn wrapped in a rag.
I finished my coffee. Suddenly Imran said that he hoped he would be able to visit my village. I invited him to come and see the bitter orange tree at our house, not telling him that it had died with my grandmother’s death. Would these slim fingers, which had been rescued from the roughness of peasant farming, clasp the dried boughs of the dead bitter orange tree and return it to existence through the secret of this primary desire, this life-giving union? Will you swing, Imran, on the thick bough that was Sumayya’s swing? Will you feel uncomfortable lying flat beneath the tree on a mat thin enough that under it you can feel the pebbles, Imran? But they are stones that speak, that breathe. You have to sit and swing your legs over the short branch of the bitter orange tree. You have to see the way the clouds fuse together and cling to the gray mountain peaks, and to call out my name, so that the peculiar echo resounds tens of times, as if strange, hidden creatures are holding your shout in their embrace, magnifying it. And you will know, then, that you seek to shout out the name of what is yours, and what must be there with you.