The Snowman, and the Man of Ice

Suroor stepped outside our triangle because I could no longer go along with her discomfort. I knew that her feelings were based on perfectly understandable moral principles, an anger that stemmed from the errors of other people, the irritation felt by those who are perfect with those who lack their perfection, or rather, against those who persist in their imperfect ways, and continue making their mistakes. Specifically, the errors of her sister, Kuhl. Sins and errors of passion: that was not something for which one could be absolved.

Before Suroor stepped out of this trio we had made, she told me that Imran was like dried grass, a brittle, fragile, but stubborn stalk clinging to a marble column, and that no matter how stubborn the stalk, fragility would in the end prevail, breaking down that obstinate loyalty. The stalk would not be able to hold on; against that marble column it would break or crumple, the wind carrying it off like any ordinary, ephemeral twig. And with that, Suroor pushed aside one rib of the triangle with her thin, elegant fingers—fingers that would never be set on fire by the touch of a lover—and walked out. She did not even turn back for a single look. And then Imran, so very thin and yet as different as could be from a flimsy length of straw, soon replaced the side of the triangle that had been pulled away. Kuhl had hinted once about what she saw as the rather limited attention he paid to other people, but I came to see things very differently.

In Lahore, on the only school trip he ever took out of his remote village, he saw the way the skyline seemed to blend into the towers on either side of the old castle’s gate, and it left a permanent mark in his mind. He tried to draw his classmates’ attention to this singular and powerful impression, but he soon realized that they could only react to tangible objects, while his sensibility stretched further. For the first time, he sensed that at the very base and core of this world was a tiny aperture through which time itself crept. His sarcastic classmates made fun of him when he tried seriously to explain this notion of time’s prodigious, yet tiny, puncture in the universe. From that moment on, he made every effort to conceal what he really thought and felt, and he worked to develop means of self-defense against the ability of human beings to hurt other human beings.

I put my hand out to Imran, and I saw my thumb disfigured and black. I thought I stepped toward him but I found myself almost leaping, trying to span a much vaster distance. I realized uncomfortably that I was fleeing the sound of my grandmother calling out, her voice coming thinly from the isolation of her room. I found that my head was spinning on the ice. My head collided with Imran’s chest. But his chest was carved from stone and it shattered my head into slivers that landed on the street. The children were picking up these ice shards, and trying to make a snowman. I saw my eyes in his icy eyes. I saw my shattered nose in the snowman’s carrot nose.

I was spending whole evenings here just staring out at the ice and snow. I would phone home, to speak to my mother and father and Sufyan, and I always sent my affectionate greetings to Sumayya. One time, my mother handed the phone to her, but Sumayya would not say a word, which in turn stopped me from saying anything. It was a conversation I didn’t know how to start. It was up to her to say something. Anything at all, some nonsense like: “Mrs. Hiba is a fat, burned loaf of bread!” Or something from the past like: “Stab Fattoum with a pencil if she tries to attack you.” Or, “Don’t scream the way you did at my grandmother’s funeral.” Or, “Watch out that the boys don’t destroy the brown lizards’ graves, otherwise their tails will turn into whips and they’ll come after us.” Or even, “If the spiny-tailed lizard pounces, it will cling to us and it won’t let go until seven cows in the heavens and seven cows on earth are lowing.” Or, “Get Gran to understand that Samira Sa‘id isn’t Samira Tawfiq.” Or, “You take the bread to Gran. I have other things to do.” But she didn’t say any such thing. She didn’t say a word. So I was silent. My mother took the receiver and ended the call.

It was Sumayya who taught me to slink into the kitchen at noon to mix powdered milk with sugar and then to creep away with a fistful of the delightful mix. It was Sumayya who warned me against ever admitting that I hadn’t memorized the poems we were supposed to learn for our class in oral recitation. It was Sumayya who taught me to always take a seat at the very end of the very last row, so that I could memorize the lesson by listening to all the other girls who had to recite before I did. Sumayya tutored me on how to say ayy luf yuu to the blond son of the English teacher. At home, Sumayya got me to put on a performance, insisting that I really did need an increase in my allowance in order to buy colored pencils for drawing class—so that she could take the money and buy Mustafa Qamar’s latest cassette tapes. Together, we glued the chicken feathers onto Sufyan’s back and pretended we were going to throw him from the top of the wall so that we could see him fly, all because we wanted our mother to see us and be so frightened that she would actually dash across the courtyard without putting her shoes on first. Sumayya shouted, “Look at elegant Lady Merchant’s Daughter running barefoot in the dirt!” We tossed Sufyan into my father’s arms, and then my father chased us with a whip.

We had a lot of confidence in life (now I would add under my breath, “more than we should have had”). Confidence in our youth, our pleasures, the paths we were taking, our house and home. Confidence that the word broken did not exist. We walked through the streets hand in hand as if our interlaced fingers could be undone by nothing short of death. And death was a mere shadow, a remote thing somewhere out there. There was no cause to dent our happiness by thinking about it. The house was ours; it never crossed our minds that there could be any possibility of losing it. Sofas and beds and pillows and windows and doorknobs and the Sony cassette player and school bags—it all belonged to us. We didn’t feel a moment’s uncertainty about anything. To press our cheeks down against the old carpet in the sitting room in an attempt to imagine the kings of the jinn perched on the chandeliers above: that was what happiness meant.

And we had the trees my grandmother had planted in the garden, we had shoots growing in pots, clothes hanging on hangers, opened letters sitting in drawers, spoons and forks and knives and plates on the kitchen shelves. We had my mother’s fragility, and my grandmother’s fierce will; my father bringing us gifts from his travels, and Sufyan’s amusing little bouts of troublemaking. All of it was ours, and we didn’t doubt that for a moment. We didn’t ask, not even once, whether we were right or wrong to think as we did. What we had was certainty and contentment and pleasure in life. As far as we knew, no dictionaries yet included the word broken, let alone multiple definitions for it.

We did not cross out the days on the calendar hanging on the wall. We did not turn the pages, we did not keep old newspapers, or add new sections to our picture albums, or hang old photographs on the walls. We did not save up our smiles or our dance steps for a later time when we might need them. We did not count the glasses of tea or the cups of coffee we drank.