Imran traveled to his village—a village without a name, somewhere in the Pakistani hinterland. Kuhl lost her equilibrium.
She wanted to write to him—the little love notes that you hear about in songs. She wanted him to know that in his isolation and distress over a life of deprivation and want, that her spirit was hovering, enfolding him. That if she could not change a single line in what was written for him, her fingers were long enough that even from here she could touch his hair and stroke it.
She wanted to talk to him about desire. How it burns, truly burns, how the stinging pain of it surprises you, reaching the deepest recess of your heart, and you don’t understand how to transcend it.
Kuhl talks to me about this desire that burns, and I imagine you. I imagine you through her eyes, Imran. I imagine your hair, at the line where it meets your neck, and I imagine myself stroking it. And I dream that you are feeling—in this precise moment—my finger twisting a short lock of your hair around itself. That your fingers are spreading my hair out across a white mattress, to look at it. I imagine my hair twirling like the spinning swings in amusement parks. I am mad for you; I am mad with you. I am Kuhl, and I want to give you the milk from my breasts, so that you will be my son. To give you the honey of my womanhood, so that you will be my man. To feel you patting me on the shoulder, and then you will become my father.
Imran traveled, his body all gentle feeling and all hardness, displaying the utmost unconcern toward humanity and concealing the most vivid interest in people. He traveled when death had just closed his father’s eyes—those eyes that had always and ever radiated a fiery accusation at his son. Imran was always in the wrong. Accused of error if he acted; at fault if he intended to act; sinning if he did not act at all. His very presence was subject to danger. When his father died and the danger vanished, Imran finished his degree and traveled immediately to his village, where he would become the man of the household.
Kuhl was waiting.
The two of them led lives in which imagination occupied a very narrow margin. They loved each other, they were partners in desire, and so they married. But I, standing at the head of the triangle, had let imagination fill the whole space of my life. I made the imaginary my life. I loved them both, and I desired their union, and our union. I was happy enough living with imagination. It was imagination that developed and tended my strength of will, while reality was smashing it to bits.
Kuhl and I are alone in the Three Monkeys Café. I want to speak. But silence is what we have. I want to ask about the corner of his mouth. About his fear of people. About how he left without making any promises. I want Kuhl, this sad woman across from me, to shout out his name. And I want to shout with her. Imran! I want to say something about different cloth, about how the weave of his trousers was not spun along with the weave of her skirt, and so it all unraveled. If only it hadn’t come apart. If only grace had come down from a merciful heaven allowing me to cleanse their two hearts every dawn. Every dawn.
But what we had was silence. It is not merciful, silence, nor is talk.
In the beginning, my spirit roved across her face. In the end, my spirit wandered restlessly amid the walls of the Three Monkeys Café.
And then my spirit landed on your balcony. It dived into your pillow, drank from your cup, buried itself amid your books. It embraced your wife. The abandoned body, Imran. Kuhl’s body. A body whose steps are no longer steady. Its gaze is not steady. And the roaming spirit cannot come back, nor can it rest.
The source of my companionship—what I mean to say is, my solitude. Don’t touch my spirit as it moves restlessly through your café, for it is nothing but a sad shadow now. My friend—what I want to say is, my beloved. My beloved—what I need to say is, my partner, my other half. My husband.