Chapter 5 Salma
Salma
My father’s call has disrupted my ghosts, calling them forth to take care of their unfinished business. I, who have been so good at keeping my history in its place, am now having difficulty doing so. The past is seeping out.
I know where Abu now lives because he told me. But what about Ami? How has she spent the last generation? Did she get help?
I walk around my house, tidying things that are not out of place, dusting surfaces that have no dust on them. Leonora paces, meowing discontentedly.
I thought the event had severed the memories of my family, literally burned them from me.
For a long time, I felt nothing. There are photos, of course.
The image tells me the long-ago day happened, but I don’t remember having lived the experience.
It is not an actual memory with an emotional echo, just a curious absence as though I am watching a token of someone else’s history.
The photograph documents something that happened to some people.
I am a stranger, and the people in the pictures are strangers.
Except. The side-eyed expression, the tilt of the head, the slight furrow of a brow.
These are coded messages understood only by me.
The one-dimensional piece of paper is not able to hide the shadow of the person inside.
It is understanding a stray bit of dialogue in Urdu in a movie.
It is hearing a conversation in English at the next table in a restaurant.
I do not have to try and decipher the language or glean meaning.
It is automatic and below conscious thought.
With no effort on my part, I understand the feelings of the people in the picture, as clearly as if it was captioned.
Here, Asma, hair flying in the wind, eyes crinkled, coming off a roller coaster.
She looks free—the sun highlights the red in her hair—but by the way her head is pulled back, I can see that she is annoyed and the smile on her face is fake.
Here, Ami stirring a pot on the countertop griddle we used as a stove.
She is uncomfortable, worried. I’m struck by how she peers over, barely able to see its contents.
Here, Abu in a rare photo with Ami. They are at a botanical garden with life erupting all around them.
They stand at a distance apart from one another.
It is plausible that they are two strangers walking next to each other.
Abu’s head tilts to the ground, and Ami is turned away from Abu, as though looking behind her.
There is something about the way Abu’s hand is open that I can tell he is motioning Ami to follow.
In this time of my remembering, the memories—the real ones—come with no warning.
The events feel as though they happened yesterday.
The memories are as sharp and painful as cut glass, possessing the same intensity and fervor with which I have been suppressing them all these years.
They have cut through the fabric in which I was ensconced, drawing blood and gasps.
In a perverse way, I am relieved; the bleeding makes me feel good.
It reminds me what it is like to feel again.
Rife with frustration, laughter, misunderstandings, corporeal presence, the memories come like a deluge of rain, slipping through my fingers.
They come so fast, so many, I cannot capture them all.
I can only hope to gather a few before the rest wash away in a silvery rush.
And in their wake is the thing I have managed to avoid.
The guilt. The crippling, corrupting, sense of responsibility. For what I did and for what I didn’t.
We hurtled back to Rosebud in Abu’s taxi, the darkness of the road ahead snuffing out all feeling.
My forehead tipped against the cold glass of the window, and the heat blasted on my feet; the fifty-seven-mile trip had never felt so long.
The stars became clearer and brighter as we pushed deeper into the interior.
I pretended to be asleep, but Abu was having none of it.
Was there alcohol at the party? Was there dancing?
Were there boys? My monotone, one-word answers insufficient, he started asking questions that required me to string a sentence together.
Who did Asma talk to all night? What were these people like?
Was she with me the whole time, or did she disappear?
How did she hurt her hand? The man missed nothing.
I mumbled strictly factual responses, too tired to protect either of them.
I had questions of my own. What was Asma thinking as she ran up the steps to her dorm?
Was she blaming me for my father’s comments?
And what was the deal with that Ruby woman?
Only a few hours before, I had been driving on the other side of the highway, annoyed at my mother.
She had picked me up from school, parked in the middle of the sea of school buses.
Asma and I handled Ami’s small breaches of protocol—the things that American parents understood without needing to be told—differently.
Asma would be furious, impatiently explaining the rule to Ami, again, or making a snarky comment.
I thought that the emotional expenditure was rarely worth the time or headache.
She had little to no long-term memory. Plus, I felt guilty when I saw how a hard word crushed her spirit.
I had only been driving for six months but was already a better driver than her.
Ami had learned to drive as an adult and never lost her discomfort and fear behind the wheel, using her brake as frequently as the accelerator.
But that didn’t stop her from talking nonstop about the dangers lurking on the road and how to avoid them.
She had chattered away without saying anything, wondering aloud if Asma’s hair was growing out and whether she had enough warm clothes at school and if she was studying hard or wasting time with other activities.
I had tried hard to tune her out just like I was trying to tune out my father.
The night’s natural illumination radiated, the corn stubble otherworldly. Watering ponds gazed back at the immense night sky with a glassy stare.
To listen to Abu, Asma was selfish and a narcissist. But that wasn’t true.
Her sin was one of an overabundance of drive, not a lack of empathy.
She was singularly focused on getting what and where she wanted; the impact on us, her family, was secondary.
He told me about some Pakistani girl who was in medical school and had just gotten engaged to a Pakistani boy from Portland, like that was some huge achievement.
At first, I thought it was an urban myth—every Pakistani immigrant’s model female child—and then I remembered the girl.
Aisha was one of the girls from the broader Pakistani community who were not part of our mosque.
She was into horses and, at least when I knew her, resembled one.
Big-boned and square-jawed, she was one of the few nice girls from that group of wealthy families.
I don’t know how Ami and Abu met them, but we started visiting them the summer I was in the sixth grade, driving into the city every weekend for get-togethers at one of their oversize homes.
The kids were a different variety of Pakistani American than Asma and me.
They took piano lessons, played soccer, had horses, and possessed the clueless confidence of wealthy children everywhere.
Their mothers piled their plates high with food, and they ate a fraction of what was placed on it; the rest went into the garbage.
And at the same time, they wore salvar kameez, spoke in Urdu to their parents, and had memorized sections of the Quoran.
The fathers were all doctors, and none of the mothers worked.
The adults socialized in gendered cloisters, the fathers in one room, or sitting outside in warm weather, and the mothers in another room.
The discussion among the women was a combination of gossip about people we didn’t know and backhanded shows of wealth.
“I told Pervez to not get me that Mercedes coupe, hai? I already have the Mercedes SUV.” Sniff.
Look at ground in boredom. Elicit sounds of sympathy from the other women in the room.
Ami was out of place in every way. She didn’t know the people they were talking about and had nothing to brag about.
She looked lost, looking at people as they talked but entirely not there.
At first it was unclear why we were traveling an hour each way to spend time with people with whom we were all so clearly uncomfortable and had so little in common.
We may have eaten the same food, understood the same language, and worn the same clothes, and even though, through the eyes of Americans, we were interchangeable, we were very much not the same.
It was still an open question whether the vestigial social hierarchies from our homeland could be flattened in the benign American Middle West.
One day, Abu said, “How hard can it be? It’s making sure nurses come on time and people pay their bills.”
And then I understood. He was looking for a different way to make a living. A steady income not dependent upon the generosity of strangers and ambiguous tipping norms, one where his physical safety was never in question.