nonfiction: Zehra Khan

TANGERINE

 

My mother-in-law called me down from my bedroom to sit with her in the lounge. I was her American daughter-in-law in Pakistan, a match that my aunt had arranged. She reclined on the sofa and cataloged all the women my husband could have married. Aunts who promised their (very young) girls to him, lovelorn cousins with whom he refused to dance at weddings, government officials at whose houses my mother-in-law accepted tea and cookies but rejected daughters–the list of heartbroken women was endless. I sat upright, sweating in the lounge, wearing jewelry and a silk dress frosted with sequins and beadwork, per the customary yet uncomfortable dress code for new brides in Pakistan. What had I done, I wondered, to have to hear such a lecture? I didn’t feel proud for marrying the man everyone wanted. Instead, I took my mother-in-law’s words as a warning for me to keep the family happy, because her son deserved more than I could offer.

“There was one girl from Kabul,” my mother-in-law said, spitting into her fist the seeds of a tangerine, then in season. “She was beautiful. He wanted to marry her, but I didn’t like her. If you want I can show you her picture.”

A girl from Kabul, in a photograph I hope never to see. But the mind paints imaginary portraits in the absence of real ones, and writes fictions that are more magnificent or horrendous than the truth. A girl from Kabul, I suppose, with arched brows and a shawl draped carelessly over her hair. She sits with her arms wrapped around her knees, a smile on her half-parted coral mouth, an orange blush gracing her heart-shaped face, the Hindu Kush in full splendor in the distance.

Pashtun lore is based on hallucinations about fairy women in diaphanous robes with shining eyes who come down from the mountains to meddle in human affairs. This legend extends to real women: ask any Pakistani and he or she will tell you with a shake of the fist and a wrinkle of the brow that Pashtun women are white as milk and more beautiful than any other women in the world. Extreme beauty comes with an extremely protective father or husband, so the story goes; hence, not many people have ever seen one of these beauties. They usually stay home, out of sight, or wear the burqa in public. To some men, we unveiled women are cheap displays, like gems in a showcase, but these veiled creatures are like the diamond the jeweler keeps behind the counter, the rare, unseen jewel. For my husband at twenty-two the mountains trembled with the beating of his heart for this girl from Kabul, bewitching as the summer rain, who veils herself from me forever. My impulse, then, is to imagine her, and to allow her to seduce me.

She was from Kabul, which could mean one of three things: either she traced her family lineage to a single male who was born in Kabul, or her parents were from Kabul, or, maybe, she herself had left the Afghan capital and spent the interim of her life in Pakistan. I don’t know what made her (or her single male progenitor) leave the highlands of Afghanistan for the seaport city of Pakistan–whether war, or, quite simply, economics, I can’t imagine. I only know that she made her presence felt through wires and waves when my husband was still in engineering school, when he picked up his ringing cell phone, though he did not recognize the number, one day several years before our wedding.

“Hello, As salaam-u-alaikum?”

A female voice on the other end murmured the name of her friend into the receiver.

“I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.”

A few seconds later, the number flashed on the cell phone screen and my husband answered again.

“Hello? Wrong number still. No problem. Allah hafiz.”

A minute passed. My husband closed the door softly (his mother was completing the afternoon prayers in the lounge outside his bedroom) before he picked up the ringing phone.

“Call it destiny, my dear. I could be the one you’re looking for.”

My husband began sneaking away from college and taking her out for lunch, the both of them exchanging sideways glances over cups of fresh orange juice. He loved the way her hands fell like flowers into her lap when she sat next to him in his car, or how she covered her head immediately when she heard the call to prayer. He talked mostly, so she didn’t have to say much. He loved the orange flush of her cheeks and the sticky coral imprint her lip gloss left on the inside of a spoon, as much as I love the sound his teeth make when he bites into a hard-boiled egg.

Eight months later, my husband’s father carried a basket of confectionaries and Pakistani tangerines to a house in another part of Karachi. He came back home an hour later, setting the basket of confectionaries and Pakistani tangerines on the coffee table in the lounge with a thud. My husband bolted upright on the sofa, all of his nails bitten to the quick. He began to chew on the skin on the tips of his fingers.

“What did they say?”

“There will be a wedding, but not yours. She’s been promised to a cousin since childhood. I can’t believe she never told you a thing like that.”

My husband lay back down on the sofa. “Peel me a tangerine, Ammi,” he said, grabbing one from the basket and handing it to his mother, who had been reading the Quran next to him. He laid his head on her knee, sucking on the flesh of the fruit. He repeated her name in his head. Kulsum. A name that sounded too much like kissing or bussing to be forgotten easily, though he’d try. A month later took an engineering position in a town in the east of Pakistan, throwing himself into his work and staying out late at night. Six years later, when his closest friends started getting married, he called his mother and asked her to find him a girl to marry, a good, pure girl, so he could be a dutiful husband to the woman of his mother’s choosing.

*

Darkness is another form of the veil, not allowing us to see. At night, a few months after our wedding, I checked my husband’s forehead with my palm, and kissed the back of his neck. He had been cycling in and out of a fever all night. “What are you doing?” my husband yelled. “Your hands are cold.”

My husband had asked his friend to bring him a crate of Pakistani tangerines, the only food he craved. In the middle of the night, I peeled the segments from the heart of the fruit, separated the seeds from the flesh with my fingers, and fed them to him, learning to be patient with a man who was selfish in his sickness. I thought about having an affair with one of the Lebanese men I met through work, or filing for divorce and going back home to my parents in America.

“Go to sleep,” he said, after the fever subsided. “I love you.”

“Why do you love me?”

“Because you’re not demanding and you take care of me.”

“Is that reason enough?”

He turned his back to me and fell silent.

In the morning, my hair spread upon my pillow like a bird’s wings. I did not come down from a mountain, and my origins were well defined, but that didn’t make me any less desirable.

“Get up,” my husband said. “Come on, get up.” He called me first his sister’s name, then his sister-in-law’s, then his sister’s again. What other name would he call out, I wondered, before finally saying mine? “Come on, now, dear, you’ll be late for work.”

I replayed in my mind all the faces, arms, and bodies of the men I had loved in America before I met my husband, the ones I’ll never tell him about. I am like a fruit held too tightly but not eaten, the juices breaking through the cells to leak on the inside without bruising the rind. I had loved many men before, but now I loved anew. The list was not endless but poignant.

 

ZEHRA KHAN is from the U.S. After completing a Master’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering, she served as a civilian engineer in the U.S. Air Force. While taking a break from her chosen profession, she worked as an editor for an English-language magazine in the Middle East. Her work has been featured in Two Review, Windmill, and World Literature Today 2 in the U.S. and CityPages and Bazaar in Kuwait. She lives in Kuwait with her husband.