The Zanzibar Wife

  7

  “Rise and shine!” Ariana offered the driver a fistful of rials with one hand and gently shook Rachel’s shoulder with the other. The poor thing had slept the entire way over from the souk and must have still been groggy, judging from the way she was silently and obediently following Ariana through the massive carved doors, under a gold-domed ceiling and across a floor so shiny she could practically use it to check her lipstick. It must be the jetlag, she thought as they descended a lushly carpeted staircase and headed outside.

  The resort was stretched out like a rubber band between a range of rocky mountains and the shores of the Arabian Sea, and seemed to go on forever, the white and earth-toned buildings leading one into the next. Almost seven hundred rooms and a five-star rating, she had been told. Ariana paused at the head of a hedge-lined brick path, under the lengthening shadows of the gently blowing palms that were keeping the desert heat at bay. To their right a row of smooth brown rocks seemed to float atop the water’s surface, like giant globs of mocha frosting poured straight from the bowl. Further down, the sandy beach was dotted with square white umbrellas and matching lounge chairs, only a few of them occupied by the diehards who remained to soak in the last of the daylight hours. A pair of camels ambled toward them, led by a short man in a flowing white robe holding one rein in each hand, while on the backs of the spindly beasts bounced two small children, their blond hair glowing from the sun low in the sky. Couples strolled lazily down the path in burqas and bikinis, headscarves and Bermuda shorts, turbans and baseball caps. And everywhere it was quiet, with only the early evening birdsong of larks and warblers piercing the calm desert air.

  “What the fuck are we here for?”

  Ariana jumped at the sound of Rachel’s gravelly voice. “For cocktails!” she answered brightly, taking Rachel’s arm and leading her briskly down the pathway. “Isn’t this lovely? We really should have booked here, don’t you think?” In fact, it was the concierge at their hotel who had told Ariana about the Shangri-La, after she had grilled the entire front desk staff about where she might find some craftspeople in the area.

  “What about in the fishing villages I’ve heard of?” she’d asked.

  “Fishing villages?” The check-in guy swept his arm toward the sea outside the lobby windows. “We are all fishing villages.”

  “So how about the masks? There are supposed to be women who make masks?”

  “You will see the masks in Nizwa, the old capital,” the concierge said. “You are going there also?”

  Ariana nodded her head. “And the Bedouins? Where can I find Bedouins?”

  “They are in the desert,” the bellman answered. So Ariana had booked a trip to Wahiba Sands for the next day, certain that they would be able to find something for Rachel to photograph. Rachel had seemed satisfied with the plan when Ariana told her about it in the taxi, before she fell asleep. Now, as they settled into facing wicker armchairs in a rooftop bar, Rachel didn’t look satisfied with anything at all.

  “Brilliant! It’s two-for-one happy hour.” Ariana smiled broadly over the leatherbound menu. Rachel ordered a Scotch and dug into the mixed nuts before the server even had a chance to put the bowl to rest on the glass-top table. “I’ll have a virgin margarita, please. On the rocks. With extra lime,” Ariana said, “if you don’t mind.”

  With the first few sips of her drink Rachel’s mood seemed to improve a little. Who wouldn’t be happy sitting under a sky like this, a soft gold gauze morphing into a thick purple carpet draped above the sea. Through the window behind them a throaty lounge singer was clumsily plunking away at a piano. Rachel winced. Ariana laughed. The server returned with an apology for the racket and a fresh bowl of nuts.

  “Ma fimushkila. Shukran,” Rachel answered. No problem. Thanks.

  “You speak Arabic?” Ariana asked.

  “A little. Came in handy sometimes for my job.”

  “Which job was that?” Ariana realized she hadn’t yet learned a thing about this woman, which was quite unusual for her considering they’d been together for almost an entire day already.

  “I’m a photojournalist. I was a photojournalist. Mostly in conflict zones. Wars. Coups. Revolutions. Sometimes natural disasters.”

  “Really? How exciting! And now you just do this sort of thing?” Ariana swept her gold-bangled arm across the horizon.

  “This, and some other stuff.” Rachel looked down at her drink.

  “Well that must have been frightening, what you used to do. Is that why you stopped? Felt like you’d pushed your luck as far as it would go or something of the sort?” Ariana could see a no turning into a yes before the word left Rachel’s mouth. And that was as far as her answer went. Behind them, the piano player was butchering the tall, tan, young, lovely girl from Ipanema, limb by limb.

  “So you worked in Arab-speaking countries?” Ariana tried again.

  “Arab-speaking, Pashto-speaking, Turkish-speaking, Dari-speaking, you name it. Wherever trouble called.”

  “Wow. The things you must have seen.” Again, Ariana waited for Rachel to share more. Even for a pro like Ariana, Rachel was proving to be a tough nut to crack. “So you’ve been to Pakistan?” she prompted.

  Rachel nodded, her attention diverted by a little lizard scaling the wall beside them.

  “Lahore?”

  Rachel nodded again.

  “That’s where my family is from!”

  “Really,” Rachel responded, her eyes remaining on the tiny reptile. “Have you ever been there yourself?”

  “Of course! Maybe once a year with my family. These days it seems to be mainly for weddings, or funerals. But you, how did you become a photographer?”

  Rachel shrugged. “I’ve been into it since high school. You know, school paper, yearbook, that sort of thing. How did you become a fixer?”

  Ariana shrugged back. “Oh, you know. The way anybody does.” She busily squeezed a fresh lime wedge over the melting ice in her glass. “So how did you go from yearbooks to wars?”

  Rachel fastened her short hair into a clip she’d pulled from one of the many pockets of the brown vest she never seemed to take off. “It just kind of happened, I guess.”

  “Really?”

  Rachel yawned. “I started a couple of years after nine-eleven. It was kind of easy to get jobs back then, if you hustled and were willing to go places most people were no longer willing to go. And I did, and I was. What about you? How long have you been doing what you’re doing?”

  Ariana laughed. “It feels like forever.” They sat in silence for a moment, Ariana struggling to find a way out of this game of verbal volleyball before Rachel figured out the truth. She waited until the other woman finished her drink to lob the next question. “So what was it like?”

  “Like? What was what like?”

  “Living like that. Being in all those dangerous places. It must have been terrifying, am I right?”

  Rachel shrugged her shoulders. “At times. But not always.” She swatted at a flying insect with her damp cocktail napkin. “Back when I started, it was a crazy time. Lots of partying—drinking, dancing all night long. And sex. Lots of sex.”

  Ariana’s raised eyebrows spoke for her.

  “It was different. A different time, different circumstances,” Rachel explained. “It was like you’d meet and it was instant family, because you never knew what was going to happen next, to any one of us. Does that make sense?”

  Ariana nodded, watching Rachel as she absent-mindedly rubbed at a small tattoo on her forearm. Was it a globe? Some sort of face? “But the things you’ve seen,” she continued, “I can’t begin to imagine what that must have been like.”

  Rachel paused before returning her focus to Ariana. “Sure,” she finally answered. “Things could get a little wonky. But …” She twisted around in her chair in search of the waiter. “Landing the front page of a newspaper or magazine? Nothing can beat that.”

  The night sky became thick with stars. From the lounge behind them
the singer ended her set to a round of tepid applause. “So you don’t drink at all?” Rachel asked before draining her glass and trading it in for a new one.

  Ariana shook her head. “No. I was never interested. And honestly? I really hate it on dates when supposedly devout Muslim guys try to get me to take a taste. Happens quite often. That totally pisses me off.”

  “I hate dating.”

  “Me too,” Ariana agreed.

  “You date a lot?”

  “I’ve done my fair share.”

  “So why haven’t you married?”

  Ariana choked a little on the cold, tart liquid hitting her throat.

  “Shit.” Rachel shook her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, but I’m really not very good at this stuff. I’m not much of a girl’s girl. I guess I’m just more used to being around guys.”

  Ariana shook away the apology with a wiggle of her hand. “Not to worry. It’s sort of a long story. But it’s not like I don’t have anything going on.”

  Rachel laughed. “I can tell that by the way your phone has been dinging and pinging and chirping every time I’m with you.”

  Ariana felt her face grow warm. “That’s nothing serious. Just a couple of clowns back in Dubai. They’re not what I’m looking for, and I seriously doubt I’m what they really want either.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Looks, money, smarts, power—you know, the usual things.” Ariana laughed.

  “Well that shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Rachel said with a smirk.

  “Seriously, what matters most to me is having someone I can trust.” She traced a puddle of water pooling around the bottom of her glass with her finger. “I actually was married once.” The words seemed to spill out of Ariana’s mouth on their own. This wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she shared with everyone.

  “So what happened?”

  Ariana took a deep breath. “Well, there was this boy. From Lahore. The son of good friends of my parents. He was just a year older than me.”

  “And?”

  “You really want to hear all this?”

  “Why not?”

  “Okay. Well, I guess it was sort of predestined. The relationship was encouraged by both our parents: his because they knew they wanted their son out of Pakistan, mine because it seemed a proper match. And me? I thought he was the love of my life.” Ariana sipped at her drink, her eyelids hanging with the weight of her lashes.

  “So?”

  “So, he came to England as soon as he got his fiancé visa. I should have seen what was coming, but you know what they say about love.”

  “I do,” Rachel said.

  “And so, when he dove into the Western world head first—and I mean all the way down to the sub-basement floor—even before the wedding, I turned that blind eye. I simply would not let myself accept what was right in front of me. It wasn’t until we’d been married a year that I actually let myself consider the fact that he had become a womanizer and a drunk.”

  “Ouch. So then what?”

  “Well, lucky for me my father had seen it as well. It was my dad who convinced me to dump him and get on with my life.”

  “And your mom?”

  “It was a bit harder on her. She loved him like a son, had known him all his life. And there was the problem of his parents—her friends—back in Pakistan as well.”

  “Tough.”

  “Yes, it truly was. But my father was amazingly supportive, and so it was off to university for me.”

  “So what happened to the boy—I mean, your ex?”

  Ariana shrugged. “I’m not sure. I suppose he probably stayed on in London. His family was quite furious with us all. I doubt my parents ever heard from them after that.”

  Rachel nodded. “So do you still want it? To be married, have kids, the whole thing?”

  “Of course I do. Who wouldn’t?”

  Rachel shrugged. “Me?”

  “Oh, please. I don’t believe that for one second.”

  “Okay, you’re right. I’m just kidding.”

  Ariana raised one eyebrow. “Really?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s just not where my head is these days.”

  “Sometimes I wish I felt that way. I swear, I’ve seen so many weddings you’d think I’d have my fill.”

  “Always a bridesmaid, right?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Seriously, then why haven’t you remarried? You seem to be attractive enough.”

  This time Ariana tried hard not to overreact to Rachel’s awkward approach. “Thanks, I guess.” She tossed her hair back over her shoulders.

  “So really, what is it?”

  Ariana hesitated for a moment before responding. “Well, it seems as though at least part of it is that most guys who share my values, the ones who are not just looking for sex and are sincere about marriage, aren’t interested in someone my age.”

  Rachel tilted her head sideways, confused.

  “You know,” Ariana explained, “they want someone to start a family with.”

  “But you’re not too old for that, are you? How old are you, anyway?”

  “Thirty-five, almost thirty-six. Okay, so maybe I’m not too old to have one kid, or maybe two, if I hurry. But regardless, they are all looking for the young ones.” Ariana poked at the ice with her straw and let out a little laugh. “You know, sometimes I wonder if I’m cursed.”

  “Yeah, don’t we all.”

  “No, I mean literally cursed. A clairvoyant told me so once.” Ariana regretted the words as soon as they were out. “Not that I normally choose to get involved with those types of things, just so you know,” she quickly added.

  Rachel shrugged her shoulders. “To each their own.”

  “Honest. It was my friends who made me do it.” Ariana remembered the day Farrah and Badia dragged her with them to the fortune-teller, giggling and joking around as if they were simply going for manicures or getting their eyebrows done. The veiled woman had zeroed in on a petrified Ariana, handing her a fistful of shells while coaxing her to focus on the parts of her life that needed change, the things she most wanted to understand. Then the shells were tossed. If the woman hadn’t been so spot-on about a few non-negotiable, factual elements of Ariana’s life—how many nephews she had, where she was from—she would have maybe been able to dismiss the whole thing. After all, the woman was clearly not a holy person. But though she tried everything she could to shake it off, Ariana could never forget what her shells had shown. “Seriously, I truly believe one shouldn’t mess with that kind of thing. It goes against everything I believe in.”

  “Well, I’m with you on that one,” Rachel agreed. “The same thing kind of happened to me once with my friends. I ended up at a psychic downtown. You know, one of those little storefront places with neon signs in the window? She read my cards, and told me my aura was full of negative energy. But she promised she could clean it for a mere four hundred dollars. And then she begged me to give her a good review on Yelp.”

  Ariana forced a laugh, her mind still on that afternoon with the clairvoyant. “You know,” she said as she rested her chin on her hands, “sometimes I just get really tired of being single, don’t you?”

  Rachel nodded, her eyes seeming to focus on something in the distance. Their drinks finished, they sat in silence, Ariana frustrated—and a little impressed—with the realization that Rachel had gotten way more out of her than she had meant to share, that she had actually been able to beat her at her own game.

  8

  “Kwhari!” Sabra shouted a goodbye to her friends as she hurried around the corner toward home, her black-and-white uniform flapping behind her like the feathers of a wind-blown penguin. Her after-school Islamic studies had been a total bore—the same old lessons about what you should say to your future husband, what you should not say to him, what you should do to keep him happy, what you should not do to avoid making him mad. Blah blah blah. She thanked her lucky stars that she and
her sister had moved back to the city, where girls did not marry so young. And she thanked them even more for giving her a sister like Miza, who told her practically each day, including when they spoke that very morning, how Sabra would someday go to the university, how she would someday become a very important woman who would help others who had no voice, and how she would someday make Miza even more proud of her than she already was.

  “Jambo!” She waved hello to the same three gossiping old men she passed every day, slouched back against the painted mural of the giant shark with its mouth wide open, looking as though it were about to swallow them whole. Jaws Corner, as it was called, was busy as usual, the motorbikes weaving in and out as the neighborhood took care of its errands, the street lined with fruit sellers perched behind buckets of mangoes and papayas and jackfruit, the yellow bananas still bright in the afternoon shade. Sabra’s stomach protested loudly, anticipating the savory chapati Hoda would have waiting on the kitchen table, the soft flat bread still warm from the pan.

  From the end of the narrow street their home welcomed her like a beacon, its clean white facade standing out in sharp contrast to the peeling buildings on either side, their balconies cluttered with clotheslines and their railings draped with armfuls of laundry optimistically left to dry in the moist sea air. Looking up, she could see the windows of her own room already shuttered behind brown wooden slats that Hoda had closed against the swarms of mosquitos the setting sun would bring.

  Sabra hopped up the two stone steps and heaved her shoulder into the massive arched door, its brass studs pressing against her spindly arms, its carved teak reluctantly giving way to her forty-three kilos of force. Taking the worn wooden stairs two at a time, she sprinted the three stories to the flat, flinging open the apartment door with the last of the pent-up energy left by a long day in classes. She was about to shout out a hallo to Hoda when she heard a familiar voice, one that made her stop silently in her tracks.