The Sea and the Cemetery
Sophia Naz
Saira put down her pen, crumpling her writing into a ball and lobbing it across into the wastebasket. ‘Drivel’ she muttered, ’pure hackneyed crap’. She longed to conjure up worlds as visceral as Nin’s houseboat on the Seine but abstraction kept creeping in. If her mother was alive, she would have called it seelun; was there an English work for it? Sea-mold? It made everything rot. Perhaps the only way was to write herself into the story.
Hanging on at the fringes of the hive, their upside down lives nocturnal as bats, were subclans of beggars, destitutes, prostitutes, gamblers, addicts, mentally ill, mildly suicidal and moonshine-drunk racers of donkey carts, all flocking on Thursday nights to the seaside shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, who according to legend, still protected Karachi from cyclones some seven centuries after his death. For them, the Sea and the Saint were synonymous, potent opiates offering brief respite from airless hive cells plagued by daily power outages and toxic incense of burning trash.
That day Saira had felt the grip of an inchoate longing pulling at her, as surely as if there was a real fist bunching up the loose fabric of her kurta at the breastbone and dragging her out of the apartment. It was not yet May but the heat was stifling, exacerbated by the throttling of the wetlands that accompanied each new land reclamation. The Sea of her childhood was an old woman’s hand, soft with mottled blue veins from which leapt the thin cursive of feathery grasses punctuated by clouds of white egrets and yellow lapwings. Karachi rested on the palm of the Indus delta. Unlike Lahore which boasted a Delhi Gate and Delhi which boasted a Lahore Gate, its urban radius began at the Khara-Dar, or Salt-Gate at its southern sea-edge and Mitha-Dar or Sweet-Gate where the Lyari river once flowed with life giving fresh water. Lyari rhymed with pyari; beloved, holding layer and lyre and lori, or lullaby in the lapping of its sediment rich waters.
Both gates had been torn down by the British when they conquered Sindh in 1860. All traces of them had been long obliterated but the names still stuck, like a piece of flesh-pink gum on the underside of a heavy jackboot. Since then the thrust of the City had been unrelentingly upward. Phalluses rose up as clock towers, bell towers and church spires. The conquerors marked their territory in edifices of piss colored sandstone. A classic case of subtext drowning out the message, thought Saira as she swerved through the chaos of auto rickshaws, minibuses, pedestrians and dangerously overloaded trucks at the Teen Talwar roundabout. All the traffic was trying to squeeze into a narrow orifice of road leading to Clifton Beach at the same time and nothing was moving. An old woman with her fingers repeatedly pointing to her mouth was at her left window and a youngish girl, perhaps thirteen, her daughter or granddaughter echoing the motion at her right. Saira sighed and reached in for loose change, taking care to only open the window a crack as she slipped them each a ten rupee note.
A long time ago, prior to muscular stone, brick and concrete, before acquiring the manacles and the moniker of maleness, in other words before the many-headed entity known as the City; there was a She, a fisher village named Mai Kolachi; that old woman had gone underground a long time ago. Swept aside, pushed over, dismantled, bulldozed yet somehow clinging on like a marooned banyan root in a crack of sidewalk. The denizens of the new City were as tenacious as their motherly forebears. The last time Saira had come to Seaview the police had been busy demolishing so-called ‘illegal food stalls’ yet here they were again, row upon row doing brisk business all along the beachfront. Realising she was thirsty, she parked her car in the McDonalds lot, pressed a damp fifty rupee note into the attendant’s hands and hopped onto the low concrete sea wall to get some coconut water at the nearest shack.
The late sunlight was starting to soften but she still kept her sunglasses on inside the shade of the flimsy blue tarp, barely anchored by bamboo poles and fraying polythene sandbags. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she noticed a man sitting in a plastic chair scooping out morsels of soft white coconut flesh and slipping it between his lips like tiny fish. A man so dark he appeared to be almost indigo. He could have been Sheedi but his hair was straight and silky. He was intent on extracting every last morsel from the coconut and did not look up when Saira sat down in the chair next to him. This itself was an anomaly in an environment where navigating the minefield of the male gaze was a daily hassle. Here it seemed as if he was the one avoiding eye contact. Saira stole a sideways glance. He was dressed in white, a linen shirt and pants. The shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows revealing prominent veins and long elegant fingers. If she spoke to him would he assume the stance and manner of every other male out to trap a female fly?
She was pondering this question when the stranger’s phone rang and he answered in rapid French. Perhaps he is Tunisian or Moroccan she thought to herself. When he got off the phone and she sensed that he was about to leave she finally asked. ‘Are you from North Africa?’ The man smiled slyly, ‘No, actually I am from Baluchistan.’ Saira could tell that the surprise in her face was an expression he had become accustomed to. ‘But I was brought up in Paris from the age of five. A French couple adopted me through a UN program.’ ‘A French speaking Baluchi! So how long have you been back?’ ‘About a year. I wanted to find my birth family as soon as my French parents told me where I really came from at the age of thirteen but they insisted I finish University first. Would you like to walk? I think these people want our chairs.’
The Sun was a blotchy pomegranate, the kind that sold for two hundred rupees a pop at fancy Defence Market fruit stalls. Swarms of people were crowding the beach. They walked side by side, the distance between them close enough that occasionally a gaggle of young men would make rude remarks in passing. ‘So did you find your birth family? What was that like?’ ‘To be honest it was very disappointing, all they were really interested in was money. I suppose I should have expected that but it still hurt.’ So what did you study in University?’ ‘Linguistics, philosophy and French literature, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Derrida, Simone de Beauvoir, I am taking a gap year before I go back to the Sorbonne for my Masters. Do you always wear those dark glasses? The sun is going down. I would like to see your eyes before it does.’ Saira blushed, ‘I wear glasses to avoid eye contact with random men who harass me on the street, and it also allows me to scope them out without being noticed’ ‘I see, and were you scoping me out just now?’ Saira felt a warm quiver in her belly. ‘Perhaps’ ‘That’s refreshing, because mostly women have ignored me since I came here, I know it’s because I’m dark. It’s ironic, I was used to the racism in France and thought I would come back and find a sense of belonging here but instead one of the first slurs I heard was habshi, which brought me full circle back to the banlieues outside Paris where everyone mistook me for North African'' ‘I'm sorry it’s been such a disappointment. Once upon a time there used to be a Spring festival called Basant, people used to celebrate its advent by flying kites. It was a tradition to coat the strings with ground glass to cut down a rival’s kite. Basant has long been banned but the ground glass just migrated to people’s tongues’ They paused for a moment to admire the slow melting pomegranate sun as it disappeared, juice and dribble staining the sky. Saira realised she hadn’t thought to ask his name. As if reading her mind he turned away from the sunset and looked at her. ‘My given name is Bilal but everyone calls me Bijou, of course here they pronounce it Beeju,’ he laughed ‘What’s your name?’
Saira wondered if she should give her real name and decided against it. ‘My name’s Uljhana, Uljhana Zulf’ ‘What does that mean? My Urdu is threadbare.’ ‘Not going to tell you,’ she teased, ‘Not yet.‘ ‘A woman of mystery and a flaneuse to boot! Would mademoiselle like to ride a camel with me?’ She knew the camel ride was an excuse for Bijou to place his body in contact with hers and the thought filled her with erotic anticipation. He hailed the nearest camel driver and after a brief haggle they mounted the dromedary. As the camel rose, Bijou took her generous dupatta and wrapped it around both of them like a shawl then slid one arm around her waist in a slow sensuous snake like motion. ‘Yes?’ He breathed the question into her ear, Saira replied by taking his hand in hers; exploring the delta of its palm and the long riverine fingers that flowed from it. ‘The Sheedis would welcome you as one of their own, they’re migrants from Africa that settled here centuries ago. Visit Manghopir during their annual festival, there’s nothing like it, the ‘pir’ is an ancient crocodile, he’s fed raw meat by his devotees!’
‘Do you play an instrument?’ she asked ‘Several, but I have a favorite’ he whispered, bringing his fingers to his mouth, wetting them and slipping adroitly under the waistband of her shalwar. His fingers found the nub of her clit and began to stroke in the manner of a pilgrim circling a shrine, quickening his pace as she began to swell and silken. With his other hand Bijou reached in under her bra, fingers grazing one and then the other nipple. The hump of the camel between her legs adding to the sweet sensation, Saira gripped the swaying sides. A knot of pleasure was steadily tightening within her, fed by the electric tension of the precarious situation. She felt the wave crest, then break, in little electric sparks. The cloth saddle beneath her was wet. Bijou slipped his fingers out of her and slid them in his mouth. ‘You are a cat made out of electricity’ he whispered in her ear, ‘When can I get more?’ Before she could reply the camel driver stopped and ordered his animal to sit. The ride was over. ‘I must go home, it’s getting late and my father will get worried.’ Bijou reached into his wallet and took out a card. It read, in French ‘Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune’ - Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal. On the other side, below Alliance Francaise Karachi, it said, simply, Bilal Marri, French Instructor and below that a cell number.
‘You can find me at the Alliance on Wednesdays. Private lessons too, I hope we can meet again soon!’
‘Thank you for the ride. I enjoyed it very much, à bientôt! ‘She began walking away from him, back to the parking lot. ‘But wait! I still haven’t seen your eyes!’ Saira turned back and answered without removing her sunglasses, ‘The moon’s just a cold dead rock, it’s people that make you homeless’ before disappearing into the night.
When Saira awoke the predawn sky was a freshly laid egg; daybreak was yet to usher in a yellow yolk of sun and frying frayed nerves. On her bedside table a large conch shell, emblem of her beloved sea, sat on top of an article about Bilal Marri. Next to it was her notebook in which an imaginary encounter with the handsome Baluchi Frenchman had taken her on a magical implausible ecstatic camel ride.
Saira’s home was an apartment on the fifteenth floor of Rimpa Plaza in the once coveted, now passé downtown. Her father had bought it as an investment during one of many real estate booms but they had been forced to move in hurriedly after their old apartment building adjacent to the Clifton Bridge collapsed during a particularly heavy monsoon killing seventy-four people including Saira’s mother. Death and the rains came so suddenly out of the blue, the last glimpse Saira had of her mother was her corpulent figure gently snoring as she took her daily siesta, she remembered closing the bedroom door softly so as not to wake her as she snuck out to grab an ice cream cone at Baskin Robbins just down the street.
What happened next was an odd mixture of soft and hard sensations. Screams sharp as an avalanche of knives. Panic in the pounding rain and then an odd pause, as if a giant was taking a breath before the next onslaught. A jumbled rubble mountain jigsaw puzzle of bewildering juxtapositions. LPG canisters next to a mangled bangled arm next to a hulk of jagged concrete and rebar next to a ribboned head, the whole human-animal-vegetable-mineral man-made mess a massive indigestible morsel. If an asteroid collided with Earth this is what everything would look like, was Saira’s one lucid thought before she descended into a shocked daze that would last for hours.
It took a week to recover the bodies. All that remained of Saira’s mother when they finally dug her out of the rubble mountain was a vague pulp, too broken for the ritual washing, they just cocooned her in muslin and buried her in raw earth, planting frangipani in lieu of a headstone. It was nightfall by the time they returned from the graveyard. All the plots in the city proper had been taken and on such short notice the closest ‘dou gaz zameen’ or two handspans of burial ground was more than eighty kilometers away in the scrublands beyond Malir, far north of her mother’s beloved Abdullah Shah Ghazi Shrine. The morning papers were filled with lurid headlines of the catastrophe; buried almost as a footnote among the small print was the detail that the builder’s whereabouts were unknown.
Buried also in the recesses of Saira’s purse for almost a month was a letter from Stony Brook University. It had arrived on the morning of the calamity. Saira had not wanted to open it until her father came home, had wanted to see the joy in his eyes if it was an acceptance and wanted the solace of his shoulders if it was a rejection. Now it was the opposite, she knew acceptance would mean separation from her father, sending him into a dangerous tailspin. On the other hand, if she didn’t go, knowing she had a scholarship, the graveyard of possibilities would haunt her forever. Saira felt envious of Bijou, going back to the Sorbonne, but then there was the loneliness so firmly entrenched in his eyes.
Her mother had possessed an extraordinary talent at origami. She would close her eyes while folding paper into amazing delicate shapes. Irises, rabbits, antelopes and that enduring symbol of freedom, the crane, magically appeared out of the self-imposed blindness of her birthing hands. When Saira was eight years old her mother had taught her how to fold a sheet of paper into a boat in this tactile way. It was time. Saira closed her eyes, took a deep breath, reached into her purse and folded the unread letter into a boat. The tide was just going out. She knew a place by the big rocks to the east of the beach where the current was strong. The boat bobbed around for a while then began drifting out to sea. Saira watched it disappear into the horizon before heading back into the teeming.
*
Sophia Naz is a poet, author, editor and translator. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry. Her work features in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Singing In The Dark, Meridian, Poetry At Sangam, Poetry International Rotterdam, The Adirondack Review, The Wire, Chicago Quarterly Review, Blaze Vox, Scroll, The Daily O, Cafe Dissensus, RAIOT, Ideas And Futures, Chapati Mystery, Guftugu, Pratik, Gallerie International, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Madras Courier, etc. She is the author of three poetry collections; Peripheries, Pointillism, Date Palms, and Shehnaz, a biography. Open Zero, her fourth poetry collection, will be published from Yoda Press in 2021. Her site is www.SophiaNaz.com.
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