I cannot find a tea shop in Peshawar that plays the broadcast of My Brother. The locals do not consume such bawdy humor in public. The austere desperation, palpable on the streets, does not foster the kind of anonymous camaraderie I experienced in Karachi. I find a few DVDs of past episodes, but I have seen them all, and watching them in isolation, the actors seem bleached, their double entendre hollow, the dancing girls garish. So Hamyouk Hussain’s rubab expands, fills the holes in my life, becomes my whole life.
The cars come to me often for repair. I watch the local news enough to recognize a pattern; stories of skirmishes and increasing U.S. security actions inevitably portend the arrival of an SUV or a Mercedes at my shop. Sometimes they come on the back of a flatbed lorry, or towed slowly by another car. Occasionally I will hear a story about spare parts, the salvageable guts of some car or another being transported over the Khyber pass on the back of a mule, or in a bullock cart. I never see the conflict that causes these mechanical injuries, the seemingly endless series of bullets from an automatic weapon that rip up the side of a car, the explosives that will shred an engine, leaving burnt and twisted metal in their wake. I have made my deal with Sheikh Omar. I will work on these cars, I will deliver my magic, not from a shop on a public lane, not in a place like the shop in Karachi, where at any moment the ISI or the police might approach, but from a place where I am protected, buffered. I did not want to be holed up again, no more cockroach-style existence. I want the more sophisticated shielding that the Sheikh could arrange.
So I am able to listen to my music in the open air of a tiny courtyard. Occasionally small birds come to visit the blooms of the potted plants I have acquired, sip the water from a little bowl I have placed outside. Three consecutive walls stand between me and the shop. On the other side of the courtyard wall, I spend my sleeping hours in a small, but well-lit room, and when I wake I wash myself from a bucket of water beneath the tap and watch the dirty suds disappear down a drain in the tiles. Beyond the second wall, another room houses a locked metal case with the tools that allow me to repair their cars. The tools I have assembled seem to suggest that I am part mechanic, part electrician, part programmer, and to their eyes, part magician. And beyond the third wall are their cars. They do not see me when they come in. I try to know as little as possible about them or the men who deliver their cars. My assistant, a teenaged boy handles the initial formalities. Only when the drivers are gone do I come out to hear the report from the boy, to make my own diagnosis and plan for the vehicle’s rehabilitation.
In the evenings, like tonight, I enjoy the cooling air, I eat the meal that the boy fetches for me and I sit and talk. I imagine her with me. I imagine this courtyard is just a small cabana off the main courtyard in our Moroccan home. In these silent conversations, Kathryn and I talk about the boys, about how they have grown, about how much Michael is reading and how Andrew has mastered the tricycle. I can hear their laughs and shouts just over the wall, I hear the splashing of a fountain. And the jasmine flowers give up their perfume. And sometimes, like tonight, I sit with her until the sun sets and the moon rises and I lay back on the charpoy hearing her whisper in my ear, feeling her hair brush across my shoulder and I remember the curves of her body. I remember them so vividly, can almost feel them so accurately through my fingertips, that my sex responds. And when she opens her legs to straddle me, when I slide my own hand around me, entering her in my mind, my nerves are on a hair trigger. So this hand that coaxes inanimate objects into motion all day, needs only offer the briefest conjugal touch this evening to achieve the release, the desired and dreaded outcome. For as soon as I ejaculate, I see the walls that I allow to confine me. The distance—that seconds earlier had seemed malleable—telescopes out into an impossible expanse.
I wash myself and slide my feet into my chappals. I need some air, I need to see other people. I open the door out from my courtyard and follow a maze of narrow passageways through the compound. I can hear the sound of cooking pots and women with coarse voices scolding children to sleep. I hear the slosh of water in laundry tubs, the crack of bed sheets hung out to dry. The rambling path through the servants’ section of the compound eventually leads to a small alley where ragged cats hunt for rice or bits of gristly meat from the discarded rinsewater.
I quickly fall in step with a group of men passing by, their Kashmiri-style embroidered caps framing their foreheads. I wish to hear their conversation, to walk for a change with others, not as a lone fugitive.
In town I scan walls and shop windows for advertisements. At last I find it, the reason why I wanted to be in Peshawar. Hamyouk Hussain will play a concert a week from tonight.