I can understand it,” she said. “Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived.” “Millions arrived in our country,” Saeed replied. “When there were wars nearby.” “That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.
What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.
Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels – with fewer pages of plot to them – are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs are still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.
Saeed went with his father to pray on the first Friday after the curfew’s commencement, and Saeed prayer for peace and Saeed’s father prayed for Saeed and the preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pry for the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he thought the righteous to be.
The blast wave that passed through my sister’s office doubtless passed through devout Muslims, atheist Muslims, gay Muslims, funny Muslims, and lovestruck Muslims – not to mention Pakistani Christians, Chinese engineers, American security contractors, and Indian Sikhs. What civilization, then, did the bomb target? And from what civilization did it originate?
In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.
Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping the youth and the country through teaching and research merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.
Soon a rhythm was established, and it was thereafter rare that more than a few waking hours would pass without contact between them, and they found themselves in those early days of their romance growing hungry, touching each other, but without bodily adjacency, without release. They had begun, each of them, to be penetrated, but they had not yet kissed.
But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.
Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother’s corpse and screamed, and Saeed’s father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.
To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and awaits its fate, if only for a while.
The biggest lesson is you get the country you work for. If you sit back and simply allow your country to be, it is highly unlikely to be the kind of country you want. You have to be active.
Not – please understand me – that I was convinced that I had made a mistake; no, I was merely unconvinced that I had not made a mistake. I was, in other words, confused.
They are pursued by a pair of hawk-faced men dressed in black and white: both forbidding, both hungry, but one tall and slender, the other short and fat. Two reflections of the same soul in the cosmic house of mirrors, or uncanny coincidence? It is impossible to say.
Lightning flickered above the city, a crescent moon sneered through a gap in the clouds. The boutique huddled against the storm, a tiny island of light on an unlit street.
Mumtaz has six moles. Two are black: behind her ear and on her hip, in the trough of the wave that crests at her pelvis. Three are the color of rust: knuckle, corner of jaw, behind knee. And one is red, fiery, at the base of her spine, where a tail might grow. I touch them and know them because I watch her like a man in a field stares up at the stars, and I love her constellation because it contains her story and our story, and I wonder which mole is the beginning and which is the end.
Ozi made me feel so known. He made love to my insides, filling desperate gaps and calming unbearably sensitive places.
I know I’m standing still, but I feel like I’ve stumbled and I’m starting to fall.
She’s finished her cigarette but hasn’t put it out properly, so it’s still smoking in the ashtray. I crush mine into it, grinding until both stop burning.
Power comes from becoming change.