Zaid and I sit in a tea shop, a dirty cat weaves in and out of the chair legs, hoping for scraps. Today we indulged in a sheesha, both taking long draws from the hose of the water pipe. As we exhale like lazy dragons our conversation grows quiet. I watch the street. Peshawar is a town of men, dominating the streets, driving the cars, making the noise. But I can feel the energy of the women. From behind the walls of every home waft their smells, their sweet sweat, the rose water in their hair, uncovered in the privacy behind the walls. I haven’t talked with a woman in years, only imagined Kathryn’s words.
“My wife,” Zaid surprises me by speaking. “Is every woman like this after too many years of marriage?”
“Like what?”
“Only eating and arguing. No attention to me, no respect for my manhood.”
I wait for him to continue.
“Oh, what would you know of a wife anyway?”
I bristle. “I had a wife,” I say defending myself. “But…something happened.”
He takes another draw from the pipe. “Well, I guess if all the wives were good, we wouldn’t need Lucky Lane,” he says of the nearby street lined with brothels. “You never go?”
I shake my head.
“Sometimes I wonder if you are really a man.”
“Me too.” I cast my eyes away. “Me too.”
Two weeks later when Zaid brings me my evening meal, I leave the food on a stool and follow him out.
“Would you…”
He turns, curious.
I feel as though we have shifted positions and I am now sub-servient to him. “Would you take me with you…you know…to Lucky Lane?”
He looks relieved. Nods and smiles, “When?”
“Tonight. Before I change my mind.”
“Eat your dinner, brother. I’ll be back.”
I sit with a woman in a cramped room, barely large enough for me to stand next to the bed. I am nervous, like a schoolboy. I wonder if she will like me. I wonder if I will be able to perform. I think for a moment, that Kathryn will know. How could I face her again? Such a string of stupid thoughts.
Wrinkles spread across her forehead like a map of suffering. Without rising from the bed, she begins to unzip her kameeze, her glass bangles tinkling on her wrists. I touch her hand to stop her. Her skin is so soft.
“What’s your name?”
“Noor,” she says looking at the floor. Light. Like Queen Noor. Like the Koh-e-noor diamond.
I’m sure this is not her real name, but a hopeful moniker for this dark room.
“Where are you from?”
“Here,” she says without expression.
“In the city or outside the city on a farm?”
“On a farm.”
“What kind of farm?”
“Apricots.” Her answers are so perfunctory, I know she must be lying.
“Do you have children?”
Suddenly she looks at me, her green eyes clear. She nods. She holds up two weathered fingers.
“Boys? Girls?” I ask, trying to draw her out.
“They were boys,” she practically whispers with a voice that cuts like sandpaper.
I sit down next to her on the bed. “What happened?”
“Landmines.”
I wait.
“We are Afghan. The fighters came, looking for men. My husband went with them, thought maybe he could earn some money. The orchards weren’t producing much because of drought that year.” She holds the hem of her kameeze for comfort. “So he sent us to stay with his brother, closer to the border. My husband didn’t come for months. The boys…you know boys…eight and nine years old…they wandered around the farm…trying to stay away from their uncle, he was too strict. One day they went too far, walked down a path where they shouldn’t have.” She raises the hem of her kameeze to cover her face, as if she were reliving the whole scene. “When my husband’s brother brought their bodies back on a cart, I couldn’t even see their faces…the mines…”
I place a hand on her shoulder to comfort her.
“Who designs a weapon like that? To blow up a grown man’s hip? Don’t they know there are children in the world? As tall as a man’s hip?” She wipes her face, takes a drink of water from a cup next to the bed. “After that I left Afghanistan. What purpose would I have had there without a husband or children?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, you didn’t come here for this,” she reaches again for her zipper.
“No.” I reach again for her hand. “I’m sorry.”
And she leans in to me. I move closer to her, so she can rest her head on my shoulder. I hold her like that, feeling her silent tears soak through my shirt until a little bell rings to indicate my time is up.
Noor’s story stays with me—like salt from her tears on my skin. For a week I imagine every wire I see in a car engine could trip a mine. Every time I sweep out the corners in my courtyard, I wonder whose ghosts I untrap. I cannot sleep at night, imagine I hear the ghosts knocking on my door, scratching at the walls.
Tonight, my third sleepless night, I go to my courtyard again, dark in the moonless night. I lie on the charpoy looking up at the stars, wheeling their way through the sky, dragging time with them. I imagine these ghosts, who they might have been, where they might have been going. And not only the few who may be here, but the millions, maybe billions of people, unable to continue their journey on this earth. Noor’s children, my father, the people on the freeway, the Palestinians, the Jews, the Indians and Pakistanis crossing the British line of partition. The stars shine and I think of Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, El Salvador. Which country? Which peoples? Which group has passed through history without war and atrocity? Where have people not killed and been killed in retribution? I stare at the night sky long enough to distinguish the stars from the satellites. How do we decide who should die and who should live? Don’t we all live under the same heaven? These words catapult across my memory. I sit up, touch my finger where I once wore a ring. I stay here, remembering, suffering, until the fist hint of daylight reaches into the night sky.
I go back to Lucky Lane the next day, pay enough money in advance so I will have several hours with Noor.
When I enter her room, she nods. “I expected you’d come again.”
“Why?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “I see a lot of men, you’re different. Sit.”
I do as she says, don’t touch her. I look around the room more carefully this time, taking in the color of the walls, originally a bright orange, now faded, stained, patched in places with plywood squares. I resist the heaviness of the walls, focus on Noor, on the light. “Can I tell you a story?”
She nods, shows me her glass-green eyes.
“You had another life before. I did too. That life ended when my father was killed. An American drone attacked a wedding. He had gone to Dargalabad for the wedding—out of loyalty to a friend.”
“Where was your life before?”
“I lived in America. I had a wife…”
“A Pakistani wife?”
I shake my head. “American.”
She raises her eyebrows in surprise, the lines in her forehead deepening.
“I killed that life when I took my family’s revenge. I had no choice.” I look away from her, notice the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling in the corner. “I had children with her. Beautiful boys. The older one was so smart, so thoughtful. The baby was just an infant.”
“How long since you’ve seen them?”
The bulb illuminates a tattered calendar on the wall, displaying a month long past. The year displayed in both the Western calendar and the Islamic calendar. Two worlds living in parallel times, different epochs. “Almost two decades since I have seen them.”
“They are still alive?”
I look back at her.
“I think so.”
“What are you doing here?” She stands, grabbing at my hands to pull me up. “If they’re alive, you have to go to them. Boys need their fathers. If you’re lucky enough to still have your children, how dare you leave them?”
“I can’t just return, though. I would be arrested.”
She pauses.
“Why?”
“We…I…I was involved…with another man…in a bombing.”
She sits again. “Where?”
The doors in my heart, hoarding my truth inside, yield to this woman, opening, one after another until this room in a brothel becomes a confessional, this prostitute—my confessor. And when I tell her the whole story, omitting no detail I can remember, she sits, open faced before me.
“Who are you?”
“I am Rashid Siddique.”
Her eyes grow wide before narrowing skeptically. “Rashid Siddique? The man who took revenge for the drones? I heard that story. Before I was married, I heard the men say that name, they repeated any story about beating America. But Rashid Siddique is dead. How can you be here?”
I run my fingers across my forehead, feel how the years have eroded lines in my skin too. “I guess it was written for me.”
“You have to go to your sons. This must be why you’re still alive. What other purpose do you have?”
I think over the familiar contours of my life: the endless string of broken cars, the habit of chatting with my assistant, sitting through an occasional musical performance. What purpose do any of these things serve? What would change if I were to abandon any of them?
“I have no purpose.”
“I’ve thought I have no purpose either,” she reaches out and strokes my hand. “But today I think I’ve endured these years here in Peshawar just so I could meet you and tell you to go back to your family. Al-hamda’allah, you still have a family.”
I shift my weight on the cot, a spring creaks, she smiles.
“I’m so glad you came to me, I’m so happy you will be reunited.”
She sounds so convinced, her words so determined, as if in this tiny room, her words had pivoted the entire world, a tremendous force unleashed by a powerless woman.
“It is written?” I seek reassurance.
“It is written.”
I take her hand gently in mine, raise it to my lips and kiss it. She closes her eyes. “Please,” she squeezes my fingers in return, “please before you leave, be with me as if you were my husband.”
I close my eyes as well, allow the moments to pass so that we might imagine; the past, the future, the things that were not, but yet still could be. And my hands float, as if recently untethered, up her arms. I feel the contour of her neck, the tender skin of her face, the warmth of her breath on my palm. And this touch enlivens me. My body takes over, moving, acting, in ways so long remembered, so long imagined, now as real as the lightness of this woman next to me.