I Read, Much of the Night, and Go South in the Winter
By Jane Struthers
I was born in a village just on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan. Which I guess makes me Pakistani. Not “Pakistana” or “Pakistania” but Pakistani, same as my brother. It’s funny, in a world where being born as a woman makes such a difference, we have no special word for it.
I grew up not twenty kilometres from the border with India. I never went, of course. We can’t go. Tourists cross easy enough, but those passes aren’t made for us locals.
When I was fourteen years old, and my parents took me out of school, ready to marry me off to some local boy from the village, I ran. I scampered up the orange tree and down the crumbly side of the white stucco fence, and I never looked back.
That was ten years ago, now. I met a like-minded man on the fringes, whose birth name was Zafar but he chose the name Tristan. My birth name is Fatima, but I live my life as Marie.
I don’t have a home. I wander. I don’t have a husband, though I walk with Tristan when it’s convenient, and I enjoy his embrace. I don’t have a daughter, though I have a son who is seven years old, who is not mine and not Tristan’s, whom I found following us home one night in the bitter cold of a high mountain pass. His name is unknown, but we call him Atiyyah, which means “gift” in Urdu.
That night I lay awake, listening to Atiyyah breathing gently beside me. This isn’t unusual, my restlessness. But Tristan was there, not out wandering, and this was unusual. We were almost a family.
I heard Tristan stir. I said, in English, “You are awake.”
He replied only after a minute of silence. “Likewise you should be sleeping.”
I said, “The night is my hour. Or, hours.”
“Hour.”
We had taught ourselves English this way. It was neither of our first languages, nor our second. I was Punjabi, and Tristan came from over the border, in Afghanistan, where his family was Pashtun. In school, we had both learned to speak Urdu, but we did not communicate in it. With each other, we spoke in English.
I said, “The night is my hour. When I was young, it was the only time that I had to imagine that I lived somewhere else, to pretend that I was someone else.”
“Now you can live where you please,” Tristan said. “You do not have to live here.”
“I do it for him.”
It was dark; the moon had set, yet the stars were bright specks through the heavens, and the Milky Way glowed with an otherworldly force. Atiyyah’s face, sleeping, was peaceful. Almost smiling.
I didn’t speak for a long time, Long enough I thought that Tristan would have nodded off again. But he didn’t. He lay there, breathing beside me.
“He deserves a house,” I said, “A mother. A father. A normal life.”
“We all would like many things,” Tristan said. “Some, we get. Some, we do not.”
I said, “It’s for the child.”
I was thinking of the time, many years ago, when I went sledding. It was my first time seeing the snow. Lahore gets to be over forty-five degrees in the summer, and we never have snow.
It wasn’t my parents who brought me. It was a kind-hearted neighbour. He drove me and my brother and sister to Hunza. We trudged up the hill through the snow, many times, only to experience, again and again, the joy of flying back down it.
I thought of my sister then, two years my elder, whom my parents did manage to marry off when she reached fourteen. They married her to one of the cousins of that selfsame family. Her husband was a mechanic, who worked on motorcycles and auto rickshaws. Growing up, my school friends an I had called him Snotty, because his nose was always running. But his family was generous. The dowry sustained my folks for a year, maybe longer.
I thought that Tristan had forgotten our conversation. He had not. It is only that he likes to be sure of a thing before he says it.
He said, “We did not choose this child. This child chose us. He chose this life.”
I said, “Maybe he did not know what he chose.”
“Children know,” said Tristan.
Softly through the still night, I heard the notes of the call to prayer. Soon, the sun would be coming. I knew that this is what the noise meant, even if I did not heed it. I didn’t pray five times a day. Once, maybe, maybe twice on a Friday.
Tristan said, “If he wanted something, if he wanted more, he would make it known.”
I said, “Maybe he doesn’t know what he wants.”
The last notes of the call to prayer fell silent. Somewhere in the distance, the birds started screaming. But other than that, there was silence. No traffic. No one out in this empty field, where we had slept on the edge of civilization.
Tristan said, “How can you want what you cannot imagine?”
The sun was rising, dyeing the clouds a light orange, the colour of the flavoured orange drinks you could buy at the stores. Tristan and I had no money to spend at the stores. We lived, day to day, on the kindness of strangers.
I saw Tristan glance down to the bundle beside him, to our child, who was not our child, but was our child, despite it all.
“He’s waking."
THE END