Homeland Elegies(60)

By the time I hit puberty, the dreams stopped—or at least I stopped remembering them, which is what Mary Moroni would suggest my sophomore year in college when she taught me the trick with the pencil. I alluded before to encounters and apprehensions prognosticated by my collegiate nightwork, but these were mostly visions of trifles: a classmate in the same blue sweater and orange pants she walked into the auditorium wearing the next day; the final score of an upcoming varsity football game dreamed about three days before it took place; a bazaar stand in an African country where I was haggling with a vendor over melons, this on the eve of an economics exam on which the final question involved the particulars of the East African melon trade (which we’d never discussed—either East Africa or melons). The only such college premonition to touch me in any personal way was of a violently pink room glimpsed during a wet dream and suddenly recalled by the offensively pink tiles of a bathroom on the third floor of the ladies’ dorm across campus where—later that semester—I was losing my virginity in a shower. Over the years, I stopped paying much attention to these inexplicable ruptures of the time-space continuum—stopped paying attention, that is, until attention was demanded. As a boy, I’d dreamed of my great-grandmother’s death, and thirty years later, I would dream of her daughter’s death. I saw her picking fruit in a pomegranate grove. She fell, and I awoke. The next day, my grandmother died of a heart attack. Two days before 9/11, I dreamed of an attack on Manhattan.

I trust I’ve made my point, namely, that there was history behind my inclination to take Asha’s kooky confessions at face value. Perhaps our shared proclivity for omens was nothing more than self-involvement masquerading as communion with the numinous; perhaps it was a New World outcropping of our forebears’ superstitions. I’ve stopped trying to understand it all, and though I offer my account here with self-restraint (for, reader, I could go on), I can’t renounce this bizarre tendency simply for the sake of preserving what little reliability I may still possess as narrator of these songs and stories. I have to own it; this brand of crazy is fully baked into me.

*



Much of the foregoing I’ve shared in hopes of offering a bare minimum of context for a startling conclusion I would come to nine weeks into my relationship with Asha—if a relationship is what you could call it, considering that Asha was still very much with Blake the entire time we were together—namely, that she was my match, the person meant for me, and, against my better judgment (for I knew she didn’t feel the same way), that she was the woman I would and must marry. Our sexual connection, the quirky familial and orphic concordances, all these certainly fed my conviction, but the decisive piece was infinitely more banal, or at least less outwardly remarkable. And it crept up on me.

We were in a Starbucks on the Upper East Side. We’d been walking for hours, and I was tired. We went inside, and I took a seat at an empty table. I watched her order herself a cup of tea and select a packet of chocolate-covered cookies for us to share. At the condiment counter, standing next to a hunched elderly Jewish woman, Asha tore open a packet of sweetener and mixed it into her cup. As she reached to toss the stirrer, the older woman stopped her and made a comment. Asha then handed her the stirrer, which the older woman now used to stir her own drink. When she was done, she and Asha shared a smile, and the older woman tossed the stirrer away. As Asha watched the older woman trudge to the open door, the expression I saw on Asha’s face was one of tenderness to which, I dare say, even the great Raphael could not have done justice. After the older woman was gone, Asha came to join me, offering her cup for a sip. As I drank, she ran her smooth, tea-warm palm along the side of my face. I felt simple, small, calm; without worry or complication; I felt at home.

Back at my place, I chopped onions and garlic for the murgh karahi and dal tarka she made us for dinner. We ate with our fingers as we watched a true-crime special on TV. Yet another husband had killed his spouse to be with a new lover. Our sex that night was different. It was the first time I cried in her arms, and when I woke beside her the next morning, the light in the room—bleeding through the blinds—was a brisk, bright gray. It was a clear, quiet light I didn’t recognize. There was not a thought in my mind as I lay there listening to my heart thrum softly in my chest. I turned to face Asha’s sleeping profile, and a shard of a dream suddenly gleamed inside me: Asha and I are both in traditional Pakistani dress; I’m applying kohl to my eyes; she lifts her pink kurta to shave her underarms; I see her belly; she’s pregnant.

I studied her face as she slept. By that morning’s unusually pristine semilight, her skin was the color of pekoe and turmeric. My own skin—darker, a shade of murky copper—had long been the source of a central confusion: since childhood, I’d felt a visceral disgust for the sickly tints of the white skin I saw everywhere around me, the blanched arms and legs, faces the color of paste, flesh devoid of warmth or human glow, a wan affliction incomprehensible to me except as something to be hidden; I’d felt all this since childhood, and yet, paradoxically, the fact that my own skin was not white had only ever seemed surpassingly strange. Indeed, later, through my adolescence and early adulthood, the experience of seeing myself in a mirror took me aback. It was nothing about my eyes or nose or lips—nothing about my face except for its tarnished-penny hue. In my complexion alone I saw a person I didn’t recognize, someone who, had I seen him in the school hallways or at the mall or municipal swimming pool, I would have thought did not belong here. I knew that about myself because I knew that was how I saw others who looked like me. My likeness in the mirror was a reminder of something about myself I always chose to forget, something never available to me except when confronted by my appearance: that though I didn’t feel “other” in any meaningful way, I clearly appeared only that way—at least to myself.