A fever attacked Imran. Fright and Kuhl both held me tightly.
After some hesitation and a lot of thinking about arguments for and against, we decided to visit him in his tiny flat. It wasn’t an easy decision, since he shared it with five other Pakistani male students. “We’ll say we are his relatives,” said Kuhl. But no one asked us.
There was no lift in the building. The ground floor was occupied by an ancient pub. We walked up the four flights in silence, Kuhl leading the way. We stopped in front of the door to the flat, unsure of ourselves. Kuhl adjusted her hijab. “We’ll say we are his relatives,” she said again.
We knocked. A tall young man wearing iPod earbuds opened the door. Kuhl greeted him in Urdu, but he couldn’t hear her. He stepped aside to let us in, leaving the door open. Kuhl and I stood there in the middle of the sitting room. There were articles of clothing everywhere, and empty pizza boxes piled up on the table along with some open cans of soda. The young man waved at the room to the right. We went in.
Kuhl walked steadily over to the bed where Imran was lying. I remained in the doorway. She leaned over him and gave him an awkward, tearful embrace. I felt a shiver go through me. This portrait had been drawn when I was still outside the picture frame. This love belonged to the two of them; I was simply there on its threshold. A witness, but also there to be witnessed, the onlooker who gave the picture a surround: an outside. The picture frame left no fuzzy boundaries: it wrapped firmly around a pair of lovers in an embrace. Like an artist’s sketching pencil about to attempt a crude first draft, I was immobile, unsure. I stood there in the doorway, on the threshold, without any ground to stand on, without any colors to add to this picture. I was lost in this little room where Imran’s fever seemed to hike the air temperature upward. A curtain of colored beads hung between the room and a dark passageway that must lead to the bathroom; every now and then, a faint light coming from within fell on the beads, producing flashes of color as it bounced off. On the wall behind the bed hung a big poster of the cricket star Imran Khan. I had no idea whether or not our Imran was a cricket fan.
His clothes hung in a plastic wardrobe, the collapsible kind, neatly and carefully organized. There seemed no connection whatsoever between his very orderly room and the living room, as if his room had been set down in this flat by mistake. I wanted to put my hand out to touch Imran’s shirts, to run my fingers along the buttons and the spaces between, where Kuhl had said her spirit clung. The small table held a neat stack of very big books on top of which sat a stethoscope. I imagined Imran listening to my heartbeat, the two of us laughing as if we were playing a silly game. Then I heard his voice calling me. So he had noticed I was here. I went closer to him. To them. “Hi, Imran. How are you? I hope you are feeling better.” His eyes lit up for a moment and he smiled weakly, half sitting up and then leaning back. He was wearing a white undershirt. Drops of sweat ran down his neck. My hands ached to reach out and wipe away the dampness, but Kuhl’s fingers were already there.
As her hand rubbed his neck gently and the drops of sweat vanished, the image filled my mind. I loved this—seeing her hand caressing his neck. I wanted Kuhl’s hand to stay there, and I wanted to go on staring at this picture, on and on. He was a peasant, he said, as strong as an ox, and he would get better quickly. Kuhl laughed as she brushed tears from her eyes, and the veins in his temples pulsed. Her eyelids trembled open and shut. My heart fluttered like the wings of a bird beating at the air.
Kuhl knelt down at Imran’s head, chatting away, and I stood at his feet. Everything about her was lovable. Imran looked at her and then at me, back and forth. The light in the room was low; it was an overcast day. But the glow in Imran’s eyes as he looked at me lit the whole room and inflamed my chest. I could feel his sweat running down my neck, and Kuhl’s tears running down my cheeks. I could hear the soil of farm fields—the fields Imran had worked, the plot my grandmother dreamed of—in Kuhl’s throaty laugh. I could see the strength and health there, behind his quizzical smile. He asked me to go and fetch us some juice from the kitchen, just asked simply and straightforwardly, like someone making a request of his sister, or of his wife.
I tried to find some glasses but I was defeated by the chaos in the kitchen. I opened a cupboard and saw a stack of small, shiny colored bowls. What a familiar sight! The long-ago memory made me smile.
Our neighbor Shaykha had complained time after time that her plastic dishware, which she would wash by sitting on the edge of the falaj and dipping each bowl in, was disappearing. By the time she would have finished washing the rest of the kitchen things, the little bowls would have vanished. She would have to return home carrying the basin of kitchenware but without her shiny plastic bowls.
Sumayya decided to form the Sherlock Holmes Detachment for Solving the Mystery of the Missing Bowls—chief detective, Sumayya. She assigned me the duty of watching the area to the right of the canal, while Sumayya kept her eyes on the left side. We soon discovered that Fattoum was stealing the plastic bowls, and we followed her. She descended to the falaj’s first ford, where the women swam, concealed from onlookers by the simple roofed structure there. In the darkness and emptiness there, and in every ford above it, Fattoum dropped her excrement into a bowl and set it on the water, to be dragged by the current to the next ford, where a woman engrossed in her bathing would scream at the disgusting sight.
Sumayya caught Fattoum in the act. Shaykha hit Fattoum over and over with the thick rubber soles of her flip-flops. The Sherlock Holmes Detachment succeeded in its mission, but that was the day on which I fell into the clutches of Fattoum and her brother, Ulyan, who punished me whenever they found me alone, without Sumayya. They discovered my weak point easily: it was my hair. Ulyan yanked at my hair viciously while Fattoum slapped me and rubbed dirt into it. I was never able to mount a successful resistance, until the day when my grandmother threatened them and I was delivered from danger.
I came back from the kitchen with the pineapple juice that Kuhl loved. Her face was beaming now. Had Imran deliberately sent me out of the room so that he could kiss her? “Just imagine,” said Kuhl merrily. “His eminence the doctor won’t take any medication.” Imran smiled, animating his already attractive face to which the fever had given a noticeable sheen. I teased them. “You doctors, all of you—you won’t practice what you preach!”
“My mother always fought fevers by hanging amulets around my neck,” said Imran. I pulled up the one chair in the room and sat facing them. Now we did form a triangle. I began to tell them the story.
I was nine years old, and weak with fever. My father took me to the clinic and we came back with a strip of pills that didn’t have any effect. It seems I began to babble, and my mother broke out in sobs. My father led her away to her own bed and called out for his mother Bint Aamir to stay up with me and nurse me. My grandmother picked up the strip of medication and threw it in the waste bin. She went to Shaykha’s house and brought back a fresh egg laid by one of Shaykha’s hens just that morning. She asked my father to write the letter ص on it nine times, in three rows of three each. And on a fourth line, beneath them, he was to write a word that didn’t appear to mean anything, عجميطة. Next, my grandmother wrapped the egg in a linen rag and grilled it over the fire. She made me eat it. She put the eggshell back in the linen and bound it to my left arm. The next day, Sumayya pretended she was ill so that Gran would make the strange and wonderful hen egg for her. Sumayya pinched her cheeks until they were good and red, and stood next to the cooking stove until her skin felt like it was burning. Then she ran to my grandmother asking for the egg. But all my grandmother did was to pound some dried coriander together with some white sugar and feed it to her. Then she hung a fever talisman around Sumayya’s neck, one that our grandmother Athurayyaa had written out for our father when he was a child. As soon as my grandmother was too busy feeding Sufyan to pay any attention to us, Sumayya opened up the talisman and we began reading it.
IN THE NAME OF GOD THE MERCIFUL AND BENEFICENT. GOD ALONE IS SUFFICIENT FOR US, AND GOD IS THE MOST PERFECT MANAGER OF OUR AFFAIRS. ALL POWER AND MIGHT IS UNTO GOD, GLORIED AND GREAT IS HE. WE SEND DOWN FROM THE QUR’AN THAT IN WHICH THERE IS A HEALING. O FEVER, APPROACH NOT MANSOUR IBN SALMAN.
Sumayya was furious because it wasn’t her name that was written in the charm. She immediately shook off all signs of her fraudulent fever and went back to work building tiny grave sites for birds and lizards outside our house.
My story delighted Kuhl, and even Imran clapped his hands. “Tell us more!” But there wasn’t anything more to tell. I hadn’t gotten the fever again, but my mother’s sobbing spells never stopped.
On the way back from Imran’s flat, Kuhl put her hand in mine—a warm, soft hand that not long before had wiped away her beloved’s sweat. We were silent; but it was a peaceful stillness that walked along between us. It was only a fever, after all, and he would recover quickly.
Two days later I went back there, on my own. I stood in front of the pub and looked up, trying to make out which window was Imran’s. I stood there for a few moments, staring upward, trying to catch the winking reflections of light against the bead curtain. I went in and began climbing the stairs. Two floors up, suddenly, there were beads winking in my head, the string of beads belonging to the gypsy woman who used to go through our village begging for a few dried dates. I saw her blood running dark next to the necklace, which lay in pieces in the dirt, and I lost my balance. Kuhl’s soft hand needed to be holding mine, to support me and keep me steady. I turned and walked down the stairs. As soon as I was in the street, I ran as fast as I could.