The doctor laughed, thumping him lightly on the back.
In the cave, Anu poured out the tea. The pearls around her neck were cold and ravishing. Tears, as large as each stone, welled in her eyes.
He continued explaining. ‘Strictly speaking, this is not a shell. It’s a nest made by the octopus, and it’s at this tapering end that she pockets the eggs and carries the whole thing with her – a purse, cradle and ship all in one.’
‘What happens when the babies are born?’ Daanish asked, his eyes wide with anticipation.
‘Good question. When the thousand little baby argonauts hatch, she rejects the cradle, so children like you can have them. It’s a miracle, isn’t it, that something as flimsy as this can survive the thrust of the sea and surface unharmed?’
The child nodded fervently. Behind her tears, Anu’s guipure blurred into spray.
‘Argonaut,’ the doctor continued, ‘was also the name of those Americans who went West in search of gold. That fellow we saw on TV just this morning could be a descendant.’
Ah, thought Anu, here he was again: the prospector. He’d appeared like a sign to give her hope, but how naïve she’d been! Well then, she would no longer count on signs. If she continued waiting for the doctor, she’d be left behind both him and Daanish.
When they got home later that evening, she took off the necklace and left it carelessly in the hall. He carried it to her saying she did not appreciate the shape of his love. He was suddenly and inexplicably enraged. ‘It may not appear as you want to see it,’ he shouted, ‘but if you weren’t so blind, you’d see it exists!’
Curiously placid, she wondered where. In the trips to the South Seas and places she couldn’t even name?
Where? In his study? Anyone could become an expert just by reading. But she didn’t need a single page to tell her why he never discussed anything he read with her. It would thin his expertise. It would fatten hers. It would mean that she too could explain things to Daanish.
Where was his love? In all those high-society parties he dragged her to, just to embarrass her?
In the food he never liked?
The conversation he never made?
Her lineage? His want of it?
Or in her only child, whom she knew even then would be sent far away, for, pah! education.
Coolly, she fingered the pearls strangling his strong, healer’s fingers and brushed his large pink nails with her own. ‘Give it to the one who sees where. Tell her I send my love. I’m sure she’ll understand the shape of it.’
His mouth opened in momentary shock, snapped shut, and then he was off on an unconvincing tirade. He stumbled and once even stuttered, not having had the chance to look up counter-arguments in a book.
She turned, delighted with the audacity she’d never known herself capable of. She was riding the roiling sea, a panner of gold, a sailor with eight long silvery arms and a purse with Daanish kicking inside.
She had learned how to swim.
Anu walked back to Intensive Care. Still no news. The doctor’s brothers too had arrived. His sisters continued to sob and exchange stories from their childhood, all of which proved how they knew him better than she did – the woman he’d wedded, by their own arrangement, twenty-three years ago. She shed no tears. She pictured her son bending over his books in America, his thick brows slightly furrowed, turning page after page, getting excellent marks on every test. He was so bright. He must have put on weight in that land of plenty. She’d memorized every photograph he’d sent, but he’d been clad in so many layers it was impossible to detect any changes. He looked just as sweet and loving as ever. He was going to be a great man.
Suddenly there was a frenzy. Nurses were in and out of the room. She asked why and demanded to see her husband but they brushed by her. She peeped inside the door but was swiftly ushered back. She saw him briefly on the bed beneath a forest of tubes: silver hair, ashen cheeks, thin, wrinkled eyelids. He’d been unconscious now for over nine hours.
‘What did you see?’ demanded his sisters. ‘We should know.’
Perhaps she’d been too harsh that day. She saw the pearls in his fingers. He’d not even looked at her for the following two excruciating weeks, till at last she’d begged for his forgiveness. That was the last time, sixteen years ago, that she’d ever answered him back. Earlier today, when he called her, she’d simply run away. Now she was left alone with the tortuous guilt of watching him die. No, she wasn’t even allowed to watch. Sitting down heavily beside his sisters, she held her head in her hands.
Another nurse stepped out, followed by Dr Reza, a distinguished colleague of the doctor’s. Dr Reza was exhausted and did not have to say anything. The sisters began to howl. So he had died, as he had lived: outside her presence, in another place.
She shut her eyes, resolving to grow no older waiting for Daanish to return.
It was almost noon and the house had filled with mourners. Daanish had still not awoken. It was time to take a break from the Quran reading. Anu brought out tea and sweets. Several stylish wives were present. Many of them, she knew, could not read the Quran. She watched their lips move, feigning recitation, and wondered if the doctor saw it too. She still felt his presence in the house, absurdly, more even than when he was alive. He had probably watched while she finished re-furnishing Daanish’s room. Had probably frowned when she took away all the books he’d given him, right down to the shelves on which they rested. Would he come down from his new other place to stop her? She believed if God disapproved of her actions, He would tell her. But the doctor was rather powerless now.
All he could do was watch her next move.
While the mourners refreshed themselves with tea, she climbed up to Daanish’s bedroom. He slept, as always, on his stomach. A white sheet covered him from the waist down. His suitcase remained unlocked but on the new white rug she’d thrown next to the new bed lay the few things unpacked from his carry-on: dental floss, a razor, socks, underwear, a novel, a ballpoint pen. The bag was unzipped. She snooped around inside it. Another book; the doctor’s Kodak camera that he’d passed on to Daanish; a lovely eggshell and lacquer box the doctor had brought back from his last trip; an envelope. On the new bedside table lay Daanish’s shell necklace. Anu fingered all his things, trying to understand what they meant to him. With some – the necklace, camera, lacquer box – she knew already. But not the books and envelope. She read the covers: Edward Said, Kurt Vonnegut. She’d not heard of either. Anu mouthed each name several times, softly. The Said had been heavily marked.
She opened the lacquer box. A label in block letters read, BIVALVES. There were a dozen different brightly colored shells, some smooth, others furrowed. Daanish’s note was dated June ‘89 – two months before he’d left. Sheer muscle power. By snapping its two valves, a scallop, for instance, can swim many dozen feet per bite. At the cove one day, Aba first told me about giant clams. ‘Four feet long!’ he said. ‘They live right here, in our very own ocean.’
Anu quietly shut the box.
Next she examined the envelope. It contained letters from the doctor and herself and a stack of photographs. She glanced at Daanish: he neither snored nor stirred. The boy would probably not wake up till evening. Settling on the rug, she began looking through the pictures.
The first few were of Daanish and a very handsome boy with golden hair in a beautiful garden. In some pictures the garden was covered in snow. In others it was ablaze with color. She smiled at her son lolling on the grass, frowned that in one he seemed to be smoking, and panicked when in yet another he appeared to be in a tall tree, balancing the way he always had on a bicycle: standing, and with hands in the air. But always, though dark,