‘Dot, how did you know/Yellow, Emerald, Ruby when/All your world was grey?’ I said, pulling a new jar of instant coffee off the shelf.
‘Ah. Wizard of Oz as philosophical conundrum.’ He laughed as he took the jar from my hands and punctured the foil with the tine of a fork, slashing from side to side to widen the rent, and then held the jar up to his nose. His eyebrows rose in mock-pain. ‘Ed, will you recall/The scent of coffee beans when/All you have is instant?’
‘One syllable too many,’ I pointed out, though I couldn’t help laughing back.
‘I knew this girl in New York — an English girl, always in search of a new expression. When she wanted to say someone had a screw loose she’d say, “He’s one syllable short of a haiku.”’
I was suddenly ashamed of my prickliness at our first meeting. ‘New York, huh? Is that where you picked up your coffee snobbery?’
‘Uh-huh.’ He poured water from the kettle into his mug and mine, with the wristiness of a spin-bowler. ‘It was my home until a few months ago. Lived there for ten years. Loved the place. The day I arrived I thought, I can just be myself here. Not my mother’s son, just me. You know what I mean?’
‘I have some idea,’ I found myself saying, though normally I would not have allowed myself to be pulled into this particular avenue of conversation. But there was a lightness about him today, which made him seem… I couldn’t find the word for it. Not boyish; it was hard to think of Ed as boyish.
‘Yes, of course,’ he smiled. He reached out as if to touch my shoulder, but in the last moment changed course and took hold of the sugar-bowl behind my head instead. Then I knew. The word I was looking for: irresistible. Something about his lightness, his assurance, was calling to mind all those men in screwball comedies from the 1930s. Men who’d crack one joke and smile one smile, and that would be enough for you to know the heroines would live happily ever after with them, with great sex lives, lots of laughs, and endless parades of parties. Even if the idea of endless parades of parties normally seemed unbearable, those men with their smiles and charms would make you forget that. If you can be this, I wanted to say, why are you ever anything else?
‘So how do you feel about being here rather than there?’ I tried to keep all tones of coquetry from my voice.
‘Have you seen this?’ he said by way of answer, passing me a magazine he’d carried in with him. It was the new issue of Asia Now, with an old picture of Shehnaz Saeed on the cover, and the words SHE’S BACK! emblazoned across her shoulders.
‘Yeah, the security guard outside was looking at it when I walked in. Amazing. She hasn’t even stepped on to the set yet, has she?’
‘Stepped on to the set? She hasn’t even seen a script. And here she is, on the cover of the largest-circulating magazine in Asia. On the cover. My mother! Fifteen years she’s been away from the public eye, and here she is on the cover. Can you beat that?’
‘Congratulations,’ I said, handing the magazine back to him. I knew his last question was merely rhetorical, but I couldn’t help hearing it as one-upmanship, and I found I wanted to say something cutting.
He took the magazine back, and shrugged. ‘It’s nice for her. The warm embrace of the spotlight, and all that.’
I had made him self-conscious about his own joy, I could tell. And though I was slightly guilty about that, I was also inexplicably irritated about the cloud of filial smoke into which the promise of a parade of parties and laughter and great sex had vanished. What self-respecting thirty-one-year-old single woman would want the man across from her to transplant himself from a screwball comedy into an episode of Happy Families?
‘So.’ I smiled brightly at him. ‘New York.’
‘New York. Yeah.’ He shook his head. ‘God, I loved it. Really, truly. I had the best life there; I had my job, my friends, my rent-controlled apartment, my local gym, a place round the corner for Sunday brunch which made Eggs Scandinave you would not believe.’
‘And then?’
‘And then the Towers fell.’
‘And you stopped being an individual and started being an entire religion.’ I said it in a haven’t-we-all-been-down-that-road tone but he didn’t seem to notice.
He let go of the sugar-bowl without disturbing its contents, and made a vague gesture of acquiescence. ‘The thing of it is, I was never more a New Yorker than on that September day. But even then, almost right away, I knew. There are these moments,’ he held up his thumb and finger, lightly pressed together, as though a moment were held between them, ‘when you think, now history will happen and I can do nothing but be caught up in it.’
Extraordinary, that someone who’d grown up in Pakistan could say a thing like that, utterly straight-faced, as though history hadn’t been breathing down our necks all our lives. You weren’t looking, that was all, I wanted to tell him. When history seemed to touch your life less obviously, when it happened somewhere out of sight, when seeds were being sown and there was time yet for things to work out differently, you weren’t looking. When my mother warned you, you weren’t listening.
He would hardly have been more than a boy when she left, I had to remind myself. He wasn’t responsible for making her words worthless.
‘It wasn’t anything specific that made me decide to leave,’ he continued, rinsing out his coffee-mug. He was too involved in his own story to see I wasn’t keeping pace with him any more. ‘It was just everything, everything over the last year.’ He wiped his hands on his sleeves, dragging his fingers across the blue cotton and leaving wet imprints that looked like the shadows of elongated fingers clutching at his arms. And then he started off. The INS. Guantanamo Bay. The unrandom random security check in airports. The visit from the FBI.
‘Look, you don’t have to do this.’ I cut him off just as he finished saying ‘The Patriot Act’. ‘It’s OK to tell me you were laid off.’ It was the ‘it wasn’t anything specific’ line that gave him away. It was always something specific; there was always that precise moment when you felt everything inside you break.
The anger on his face then was of a particularly male variety, one passed through the generations, which must have had its origin the first time a cavewoman told a caveman she knew the reason he was vegetarian was his inability to use a spear.
‘I was laid off because I’m Muslim.’
There was something in his tone that said, ‘You can’t possibly be expected to understand anything outside your little world,’ and it was that, more than the unjustified nature of his anger, that made me react as I did. In my most condescending tone I said, ‘Yes, it is comforting to blame our failures on the bigotry of others, isn’t it?’ So you gave up your Eggs Scandinave, whatever they might be, and moved back into the cushy life of the Karachi elite. And you think this is being caught up in history?
For a moment his entire face changed, something hard and cold settling on it, and then he was smiling and leaning back on one elbow, saying, ‘Are you always this unpleasant in the morning or is it just the instant coffee? Will our relationship undergo a remarkable upswing if we meet around a percolator from now on? I’m prepared to carry one on my person at all times when you’re in the vicinity.’
There was an instant in which I thought he knew in practice what I only understood in theory: the falseness of character, the malleability of it. With that knowledge he could step from light to dark, from joker to knave in a heartbeat. But then I understood he was only playing with masks. Screwball comic hero, devoted son, angry young man, condescending jerk. ‘Will the real Eddy please stand up?’
He pulled himself upright, and stepped closer to me. ‘He will, if you will.’
‘We’re back to that again, are we? Look, you’re not entitled to get to know me. OK? That’s not a right you have which I’m depriving you of. That’s not how it works down here on Planet Earth.’