Moth Smoke

  One night I’m doing this, sweating in the heat, my body lightly powdered with moth dust, when a car honks outside the gate.

  It’s Mumtaz. She says nothing when she sees me, shirtless and clutching a badminton racket. I take her up on the roof.

  ‘Ozi’s out of town,’ she says. ‘And Muazzam’s crying like mad. I left him with Pilar. I had to get out for a while. I wanted to see you.’

  ‘Would you like a joint?’

  ‘Please.’

  I have one rolled and waiting in my cigarette pack, so I light it and pass it over.

  I watch her face in the glow of the burning hash and tobacco. She seems worried.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ I ask.

  She passes the joint back to me and watches me smoke it, but she doesn’t answer. Then she reaches out and wipes sweat down my shoulder with the blade of her hand. ‘What were you doing?’ she asks.

  My fingers are trembling and I drop the joint so she won’t notice. The tip breaks off, smoldering separately from the barrel between my feet. ‘I was killing moths,’ I say. My shoulder burns where she touched me.

  ‘I want to kiss you,’ she tells me.

  I can hear my breathing.

  Her fingers curl through mine and I close my fist, holding them there. Our eyes meet and I look away, but she leans forward, leans until her forehead presses against mine and her hair falls around my face and her breath touches my lips.

  She kisses me.

  And we’re touching and tasting, roving each other, and I’m overcome and afraid of her and willing all at once. We shiver, the hair on our bodies rising as the night heat bakes dry the sweat and saliva on our skin. I’m pushed down on the roof, worn brick pressing into my back. She takes a condom out of her handbag, one hand stroking my throat. Then we make love, and as my eyes follow the curve of her body above me, I see the moon, round, perfect, the color of rust, burning like a flame to her candle.

  She takes me and keeps me.

  It’s like someone’s died. I hold her tight, muscles tense, pulling away from the bone. And I know she knows what I’m feeling, because the tears on her face mix with mine.

  Afterwards, when she leaves me lying there, I smell the moth dust mixed in with her sweat and my sweat on my body.

  10

  the wife and mother (part one)

  I’m sure we’ve already met, Lahore being such a small place and all, but let’s reintroduce ourselves so there’s no mistake. I’m Mumtaz Kashmiri. You’re probably anxious to know about Daru and me, everyone else is, but you’ll have to be patient, because I’m going to tell my story my way and Daru doesn’t appear for a while.

  Where to begin? Certainly before Muazzam was born. Definitely before I got married. Before I went to America? Hmm. No. We haven’t the time to go that far back just now.

  Let’s start in New York City, my senior year in college. The scene is the East Village, a little before midnight, on the steps of a fourth-floor walk-up on Avenue A. The date is important: October 31. Halloween. I’m dressed as Mother Earth (rather ironic, as you’ll come to see). My roommate, Egyptian, English major, is improvising around the Cleopatra theme again. This year there’s a sun motif. Ra, you know. Last year it was more Leo.

  So there I am, trudging up the steps, the wheat stalks on my head hitting the ceiling, when I see this cute desi guy in a white shirt and black trousers, looking ridiculously out of place but very comfortable at the same time. He catches my eye as I pass and says ‘Hi,’ but I ignore him, because the last thing I want to deal with tonight is some conservative boy from the homeland with nothing to say. I just hope we aren’t related and don’t know anyone in common.

  The party is great. I down some excellent ex, low on zip but high on joy, if you know what I mean, and make out with one or two acquaintances. But at some point (you saw this coming) I find myself on the fire escape with the brown boy I’d seen before. We’re dancing, just the two of us, and his name is Ozi and he’s wickedly sexy, and what the hell, we spend the night together.

  So that’s how it all began. Nine months later we were married. My fault, of course. Because I should have known better. I should have known I wasn’t the marrying sort, even then. But I didn’t. Besides, I was in love.

  Let me say a few more words in my defense. Ozi was magnificent. He was gorgeous, a fantastic lover, open-minded, smart, charming, funny. And he was, is, the most romantic man I’ve ever met. He feels love deeply and he’s almost belligerent about showing it. Not that he isn’t horrible to most of the planet, he is. But if Ozi loves you, you know it. You can swim in it, get a tan. Or rest in its shade, if you’d rather.

  Still, I shouldn’t have married him. He proposed during a snowstorm in March, looking cold as only a Pakistani man in America can. And I said yes. Because I was in love with him, and I had no idea what marriage really meant, and I didn’t know myself, yet. And because of all the other wrong reasons, because of what every mother, aunt, sister, cousin, friend, every woman from home I’d ever known had always told me: that an unspeakable future awaits girls who don’t wind up marrying, and marrying well (well being short for ‘wealthy Pakistani bachelor’). All of that advice, which New York had laughed out my window and into the Hudson, came rushing back to me, sopping wet, in that instant, and stupid or not, I said yes.

  Before I knew it, I was showing him off at South Asian Student Association parties, enjoying the horrified jealousy on the faces of my prim and proper colleagues. Yes, Mumtaz, that slut, had bagged herself a prince, which meant there was one less out there for them. My friends adored him. My parents were thrilled. The summer after we graduated, he from law school and I from college, we were married in Karachi by the sea.

  For a while, life was perfect. His parents bought us a beautiful one-bedroom with a view of Washington Square Park. I had a fabulous, virtually nonpaying editorial job at a magazine start-up. Ozi was doing sixty hours a week of trusts and estates for a big law firm and, surprisingly, loving it.

  It’s not hard to remember what things were like then, in that first year of our marriage, when we were so good together, even if my memories are a little colored now by what happened later. We went out all the time. We danced like crazy, both of us sweating and stripped by the end of the night. We had insane sex. Once, we were caught on Ozi’s desk by his officemate, who later swore he hadn’t seen anything and always blushed when I spoke to him at the firm’s cocktail parties. But the best part of it was the talking. I was completely open with him. Almost, at least. More open than I’ve ever been with anyone else. I remember what it felt like to tell him how my father used to beat my mother, once so badly she lost her hearing in her left ear. How my brother never cried, not even when I almost died of pneumonia and he spent the entire night awake with me in the hospital. How upset I was when I finally got my period, at fifteen, because I’d accepted that it would never come. Ozi made me feel so known. He made love to my insides, filling desperate gaps and calming unbearably sensitive places.

  And I brought his secrets out of him as well. I remember him trying to make a joke of the fact that he’d been molested by the owner of a tropical-fish store, who fondled Ozi through his track pants as my husband, then eight, tried to buy a pair of kissing gouramis. I became tender toward his obsession with cleanliness, his need to shower and wash his hands and brush his teeth many times a day.

  We were growing together, and I was happy.

  Then I got pregnant.

  I’d always been a condom person, but since I was regular and we’d both tested negative, Ozi and I switched to the rhythm method. Which can be almost as reliable as the pill. Almost. I told Ozi about it sadly, because I’d decided to have an abortion. But he was ecstatic. I’d never seen him so happy. He told me I had to think about it for a week. And he did something I still haven’t forgiven him for: he told his mother. She flew out to New York immediately, bringing gifts and advice. It’s amazing
what the gene pool will do to perpetuate itself. Anyway, when she left, I told Ozi I hadn’t changed my mind. But I did have a tiny doubt, and he noticed. He asked me to wait another week, which I did, and he used the time to do everything he could to convince me to have the baby. None of it worked, really, not even his home screening of Disney’s Jungle Book, which I love.

  But I could see how much he wanted to have this baby, and it moved me. I decided to take another week to think about it. Then another week. And the more I thought about it, the less power I seemed to have to end it. I felt guilty. More than that, I felt selfish. I tried to convince myself that I wanted the child as well, that childbirth was an expression of female power, that it would make our bond even stronger. So the week turned into weeks. Eventually we had a sonogram done, and after that, the idea was a little person, growing, and it was too late to turn back.

  I resigned myself to it. Or maybe I saw it as a kind of martyrdom. Sacrificing myself for something noble: for love, my man, the species. I don’t think I realized how frightened I was until the third trimester, when the nightmares started. Nightmares inspired by the Discovery Channel. Visions of being eaten alive by larvae, like some poor animal stung by an insect and made into a host for its eggs. Ozi, my friends, even people at work asked me why I looked so upset. But I could hardly tell them. Most mothers glow when they’re pregnant. I sweated.

  Labor hurt like hell. I swore like a sailor the entire time. When they gave me the baby, I thought of A Farewell to Arms, because it did look like a skinned rabbit with a wrinkled old man’s face. I asked if something was the matter with it and they said it was perfectly healthy and a boy.

  The baby started sucking on my breast, and it seemed to know what it was doing, so I let it be. Ozi said, ‘You look like you’re in shock,’ and I said, ‘So would you,’ and the nurse said it was only natural. Meanwhile, I kept feeling the cropped stump of the baby’s umbilical cord pressing into me, and eventually I got so sick that I threw up. The next day they wheeled me out of the hospital like a cripple, but then I had to walk to a cab.

  At first, the baby was like science class. I learned how to use new equipment, how to pump, sterilize, clean, burp, wrap, powder. And the experiment, my son, seemed to be going well. I stared at him for hours, because he was such an odd little thing, with his big head and eyes like slits and fat, slow hands. He was new, and he kept me busy, and for a while I didn’t worry.

  Ozi couldn’t get enough sex in those first few months after Muazzam was born. Which was fine with me, once I’d had a little recovery time, because my drive had always been more powerful than his. You learn a lot about your man when you become the mother of his child. Ozi began drinking my milk and talking like a little boy when we made love. Now, I’m no prude. I’ve done my fair share of role-playing, and I’ve sampled all kinds of kink. But this, coming from him, took me by surprise.

  Not that I minded. What I did mind was that we had no time to talk about ourselves anymore. We just played with the baby and watched the baby and screwed, and then he went to work and I stayed home. When we did talk, it was almost always about Muazzam.

  I started to get bored. And then I started to get frightened. Because when I looked at the little mass of flesh I’d produced, I didn’t feel anything. My son, my baby, my little janoo, my one and only: I felt nothing for him. No wonder, no joy, no happiness. Nothing. My head was full of a crazy silence, the kind that makes you think you’re hearing whispers and wonder whether you’re going insane.

  Meanwhile, Ozi was having a ball. He enjoyed building tax shelters in exotic places. His clients took an instant liking to him, and his golf game improved. His friends at the office said he might even make partner. And he loved his son. He would come home exhausted, much too exhausted for sex or a quiet conversation over a glass of wine, but not too exhausted to play with Muazzam until he went to bed.

  I felt neglected, resentful at being the one left at home when I hadn’t wanted to have a baby in the first place. Things came to a head when Muazzam was six months old. I decided I wanted to work full-time again. Ozi was shocked. He said Muazzam was too young. I said if he felt so strongly he could ask for paternity leave. But he won the argument. He won it with a low blow. He looked at me like I was a stranger and asked if I loved our son at all. The question destroyed me. I started sobbing and I couldn’t stop.

  I’d done everything I was supposed to. I’d played with Muazzam and read to him, even though he couldn’t understand a word, and bought him clothes and fed him with my own body and cleaned his shit with my own hands. I felt so guilty. I knew there was something wrong with me. I was a monster. But I didn’t want to be. Staying with my baby was the right thing to do, what everyone expected of me. My mother would agree with Ozi. Even my friends. So I gave in. I said I’d write freelance from home.

  I didn’t tell Ozi why I’d cried. He didn’t ask. He just hugged me. And even though I needed him to, it felt empty. Ozi had found my weak spot. He may not have understood why, but he now knew he could make me do things I didn’t want to do. And that’s an awful power to give one person in a relationship. It killed our marriage. I think it would kill anyone’s.

  But it takes a long time for a good marriage to die, and even a dead marriage can pretend to be alive, with habit as respirator and heart machine. We stayed in America for another two years and people thought we were happy. We were invited everywhere. And we entertained lavishly. But we never could find a babysitter Ozi approved of. Every month or two he made me get a new one.

  Sometimes I would explode at Ozi, and then he would take me seriously, almost become the Ozi I’d fallen in love with. But only for an hour or two. After a while I found that I was getting angry at him just for attention, which made me feel like such an infant that I stopped doing it. Ozi still came to me when he needed to be held and comforted, and I was so lonely that I was grateful for the opportunity. But my resentment grew. I had two selfish children on my hands, and they were making me miserable.

  I started drinking Scotch, neat, during the day.

  I didn’t tell anyone how I really felt. Not my best friends. Not my mother. And certainly not my husband. It was a new experience for me. I’d never been ashamed of anything I’d done in my life. But this wasn’t something I’d done. This was me. Not an act but an identity. I disappointed me, shamed me. So I hid my secret as well as I could. And to do that, I had to hide it from myself.

  Perhaps the strangest thing of all was what I was writing. After trying my hand at a few edgy pieces and finding it a nightmare to get them published, I wrote an article on lullabies for a women’s magazine. Really. I put an international spin on it, interviewing friends who came from all over the planet. Enough to put anyone to sleep, I thought. But I was wrong: it was a hit. The magazine was flooded with letters. And I was asked for more. So I did one on herbal remedies for diaper rash and vegetable balms for baby skin. Another winner.

  I kept writing, glad for the distraction from the constant demands of my son. The income was important to me, as well. Between Ozi and his parents, we had everything we needed, but the idea of taking pocket money from my husband had begun to grate on me. So I managed to earn some financial independence writing about parenting, little hypocrite that I am. It was satisfying in a strange way, and in a not so strange way, too. The strange satisfaction came from at least being able to write about motherhood well. It helped me hide from myself. And the not so strange satisfaction came from learning that I was a good writer, feeling new muscles growing in my back, wing muscles, the kind that mean you’re learning to fly.

  But it wasn’t the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn’t feel any passion to write about the place. I didn’t give a damn about local politics, I wasn’t moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world had a center, and that center was here. ‘The world’s a sphere, everyone,’ I wan
ted to say. ‘The center of a sphere doesn’t lie on its surface. Look up the word “superficial,” when you have a chance.’

  Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World Club’s bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn’t have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one had wanted to believe he was the first so badly). I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. I became tough. I had fun. I learned so much.

  But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I’d danced enough. I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was.

  Then Ozi decided he’d had enough of being a well-paid small fish in Manhattan. His father needed him, and he wanted to go home. I agreed. I was desperate for a new start, too. So we took a deep breath and jumped and landed with a loud splash one summer in beautiful Lahore.

  But Lahore wasn’t the answer. I didn’t know anyone, I had nothing to do, and I hated living with Ozi’s parents.

  At least Muazzam’s new nanny was a blessing. For the first time since before he was born, he wasn’t completely dependent on me, and that was liberating. I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my time, and then about what I wanted to do with my life. My twenty-sixth birthday reminded me that I was still young.