YOU ASKED ME IN YOUR LETTER about lost loves. There is a certain pleasure in remembering them, is there not? In looking them up and being startled by what the years have done to them (surely they have not done the same to us), in laughing at our foolishness to have once been so besotted, so heartbroken, over someone who would come to this. It’s easy to feel we escaped something. But then we go to bed and they show up in our dreams, and our dreams remind us of the truth that we would have loved them all the same. But I can’t look up Daniyal, the boy I want to tell you about. He was in the news, everywhere, a few years after I spent those afternoons with him while his parents were in Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage. How strange that someone blown to pieces—pieces no one could recognize, pieces his parents were forbidden from going anywhere near, not that they could, he was so far away from them by then—could be everywhere.
I have to tell you what a pleasure it is to be able to write to you, to hold your letters, from so far away—Australia, who would ever have thought—in the lamplight. That is how I read them, imagining your small, pale hands from the last time I saw you, when we were twelve in the British school in Qatar. How transgressive of our parents, not to send us to the local Pakistani school, to pay instead three times as much for a school run by an English woman with the surname Griffin. The school, naturally, had a griffin as its mascot, emblazoned on our report cards, our uniforms. Griffin: a mixture of lion and eagle. King of the beasts, king of the air. That is what we were supposed to embody.
The girls who went to the Pakistani school had to wear shalwar kameez, but we got to wear skirts. Our parents bought us the largest size, so they would fall below our knees and be more modest, but we wanted to be like the white girls from Italy and Holland and England and America, who had come with their parents to this miniscule Middle Eastern country, just a speck on the shoulder of Saudi Arabia. So we left the house with our skirts billowing, and in the hot courtyard we rolled and rolled up the waistbands until we were, almost, like the white girls.
Do you remember learning Beatles songs in music class (the illicit thrill of singing “I want to hold your hand” in a strict Muslim country where nobody held hands) and learning to play the piano? Outside school, my parents never let me take lessons. It was too Western. Take only the good things from white people, they always said. What exactly the good was, they never specified, since everything we asked for—sports, music, sleepovers, the movie theater—they said no to. So while the girls from Italy and Holland and England and America were returning to their villas in the white peoples’ compounds and heading down the stairs for music lessons, we were heading down the stairs with long scarves for Quran class. We made up names for the boys we liked. Door for your crush, Window for mine. I stared at the Door all day, you said to me on the phone from your living room. Later you told me your mother scolded you for not taking school seriously. I couldn’t stop looking at the Window, I said to you from my phone in the hallway. Daydreaming all day, my mother huffed.
That’s what brought us together. There weren’t many like us in the school. We said peeza instead of pitza; we were proud to be living in a foreign country, while the white girls complained about being in a backward desert. The teachers were like most of the students, white. Mr. Caddick, our English teacher, how you and I snickered at his name. But when we went around the class reading lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or when we read Hamlet and Ophelia fell to us, we lost our incredulity. We were thoroughly converted. When we read Antony and Cleopatra we could not stop saying to each other, the tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow, in dramatic voices we thought sounded mature and grown up. Shakespeare became the voice of our longing. It wasn’t until I read Edward Said many years later that I realized what they had done to us, Caddick and the others, but it was too late. The school, the griffin, had done its work. I still don’t know who the emir of Qatar was at that time, or any history of the country. In all those years, we didn’t read a single page of Arab or Muslim literature. Did such a thing exist?
Remember when they gave us glossy brochures about a pen pal program? How fascinating it seemed, to exchange letters with students in other parts of the world. But like music, like ballet, like everything else the white kids were doing, my parents didn’t want to pay postage for these letters to a blond boy in Belgium or a darker but nonetheless equally corrupting influence in Portugal, so you and I never participated. These letters now fulfill that old longing.
I was going to tell you about Daniyal, because you asked me about lost loves. When I moved to Canada at twelve and you moved to Islamabad the following year, after your father lost his job and the country wouldn’t let him stay…. Oh, not only were we outsiders in the school, we were looked down upon by the Arabs. They didn’t see us as fellow Muslims; they saw only our darker skin, only brawn to build their souks, donkeys to be shoved together in apartment stables. Yalla, Yalla, hurry up, hurry up, I hear them saying even now when I think of those years in Qatar. But we both left that world, that country, which left no impression on us at all, so shielded were we from it. We knew only the school with its magical griffin.
Daniyal, Daniyal. I am getting to him, to the ghosts of who we were.
Those early years in Canada were terrible. We came to Calgary, out in the west, because it had oil, because my father thought he would find a job there quickly. Mrs. Griffin and the teachers had made us imagine, believe so fervently, that the West was where all beauty and knowledge lay. That the cold and the Christmas season brought a time of transcendence. The girls from Italy and Holland and England and America made us think there was wealth and beauty and art at every corner. Perhaps that was their experience—their fathers, after all, were paid much more than our fathers. But Calgary was desolation. It was so cold when we came, in January. I had never experienced cold like that. It dipped to thirty below zero, and the air felt like a solid block. It froze nostril hairs, pricked cheeks like so many sharp pinches. The snow fell and fell in clumps the size of postage stamps. We bought snow boots, ugly things, like garbage bags weighted with stones wrapped around our feet. And how we trudged, through thickets of snow that first January. In the building we moved to, above and below us were two other families who had just moved. All the fathers were without jobs. We slipped down the sodden aisle of the bus with our heavy grocery bags. My mother, afraid of white people’s germs, avoided the basement laundry and washed our clothes in the apartment sink, and they never fully dried.
There weren’t many Pakistanis in Calgary then. Fear on either side was rampant. Even after we bought a home in a middle-class neighborhood and parked a brand-new minivan in the driveway, when we went for a walk, a child on his lawn yelled at us to go home. One year my father vowed to sell everything and move to Pakistan, where we had not lived for more than eight years. We packed everything and gave away our furniture. This was when we were still in the apartment. With such excitement my father talked about the superior schools in Pakistan, where we would learn so much more, where there was real rigor, where fruit grew plentifully and mangoes were so sweet they made people crave the coming of the terrible summers. We arrived in Islamabad. The hills rose up, flush with greenery. The massive villas filled us with hope that that kind of life could finally be ours. Here too were white people, trawling Jinnah Super in their sleeveless shirts and baggy trousers. Get out of my land, I practiced saying to them, in my head. As they walked, paths opened before them through the crowded market.
But then my father and I went to the school he had been talking to us about. Froebel’s, it was called. You must know it, having lived for so many years in Islamabad. Froebel’s, I said to myself again and again, readying myself for the interview with the head of the school. Froebel’s, I thought, what kind of name was that? It did not sound Pakistani. Its motto: veritas et virtus. Latin. So in Pakistan, too, Pakistanis were renouncing themselves. My father blazed into the administrative office, head held high. I had not seen him like that in many years. He was like a flag, unfurled, flapping, voluble. He said we had moved from Canada in pursuit of better education. The administrator, I have to say, was a little taken aback. Yes, yes, better education, he stammered. As the conversation went on, something seemed to die out in my father. Perhaps it was the wet smell the air conditioner was creating in the room, something slightly moldy, or the cracks in the paint that had not been patched over. Walls in Pakistan are forever flaking paint. Everything has to be repainted every few years. The peon shuffled in with water, and something in his servility, this display of wealth and class and educational disparity, must have struck a match in my father. When an algebra textbook was brought out as display of the school’s educational standards, I looked at a page and couldn’t solve the problems. My father grabbed the textbook. He was angry at me, I knew, as he often was. He held the book up to my face, but the paper, so flimsy I could see the writing on the other side, ripped. My father swung to the administrator. This is what you call an education? he shouted. These transparent pages that rip at the touch of a hand? Have you no honesty in demanding such high tuition when your textbooks are barely fit to be scrap paper? I thought how in Pakistan he could shout. In Canada he never shouted; he could never raise his voice. Pakistan was in shambles, he declared. I didn’t fully understand what came over him. I was only glad that I wouldn’t be going to Froebel’s, where the algebra would surely have killed me. We returned to Calgary at the end of the summer, and we got an apartment in the same building as before, sandwiched between a new set of immigrant families.
So this was the environment for us Pakistanis in Calgary at the time we moved there. We burrowed together, like animals for warmth. That is how I came to know Daniyal’s family. There were dinners every weekend. Where else could we go, in the cold? It was unthinkable for my parents to take up activities like skiing, and even though my father was working at a proper job now, no longer as a security guard, he could not imagine seeing white people socially outside of work. Every weekend we traipsed to one house or another of a Pakistani immigrant family. Every weekend I heard two conversations, either about Pakistan’s political and economic decline or the difficulties we had as immigrants in Canada. We passed furniture amongst ourselves, drove each other’s cars, even bought houses from each other. We young people—now I was seventeen and about to go to university—hung out in the basements. We watched TV or talked. Some of the more daring kids brought out joints. We got to know each other in ways we could not with other kids our age, even though we didn’t have the same reservations about white people as our parents. God, we wanted to be nothing like our parents. Isn’t that how all first-generation kids feel? Daniyal was one of the boys I met. He was not brash like the other boys, trying to show off with tales about white girls. He was serious, a little reserved. He was beautiful, with a physical assurance other boys didn’t have, a confidence in his eyes as he looked back at me, with those long eyelashes. Upstairs, the conversations were changing, becoming only about one thing. They were about 9/11.
I can never admit this outside these pages. If I told a white person this, every suspicion they have of us would be confirmed, but the predominant feeling about 9/11 was: Now you understand what it feels like to be us. We had felt inferior for so long, made to thoroughly feel that we were less. For instance, I was made fun of because of my pronunciation and accent, but no matter how many times I corrected people in school, they refused to say my name the right way, until I myself started saying it incorrectly.
None of us was particularly religious. That was the interesting thing. Religion was more about community identity for us then. But 9/11 changed everything. It was what followed that really did it. Stories spread about students evicted from university programs with only a semester left, parents separated from their Canadian- and American-born children, humiliating interrogations at airports. I had started university by then, and all over campus televisions were rolled out, showing news of 9/11. Earlier that same year, the Gujarat earthquake, perhaps you remember, had killed more than twenty thousand people and injured eight times as many; our family friends frantically called loved ones back home, tried to scrounge up money to send. Terrible things happened in our lands, and we went to school and no one knew anything about them. But after 9/11, even in chemistry class the professor suspended the lecture for the day so we could talk about it. The suffering of the Americans obliterated any suffering we had ever felt—Daniyal spoke these words across the coffee table in one of the basements in Calgary with a quiet confidence while the others stammered and spat.
The heightened discrimination, the fear, was the force that made my parents finally leave Calgary. My sister and I stayed and got an apartment, and when we realized we could share a room and rent out the other one, that’s when Daniyal and I collided. His sister was the one who took the other room, because it was closer to the university where she was also going, and she would not have to commute from the suburbs, and because our families had known each other for years. She was a promising student, preparing for medical school. I began to see Daniyal in a new environment, in our apartment.
Oh, I cannot remember everything that happened. I thought at first the attraction was one-sided. He dropped off meals and groceries for his sister from time to time. He had a car and took us all out for frozen yogurt or to Wendy’s, and he and I ate burgers made of forbidden meat. Once on a weekend, my sister, his sister, and I were smoking hookah. We had a pipe. It made me think of the paintings of odalisques I’d seen in art class, those Eastern concubines lying indolent and prone, open, by Ingres and Renoir and Delacroix and Comerre and so many others. It made me think of Edward Said. It was a very intimate experience to smoke the hookah together.
Many years later, I once smoked it with my husband, when he first brought me here to Houston, before we became incomprehensible to each other, and we were so overcome that we parked in a secluded spot and made love in the little white Volkswagen hatchback we had in our first year of marriage, unable to wait till we got home.
Through the smoke, I saw Daniyal enter the apartment. He smoked with us that day. The next time he came, his sister and mine were away at classes. He knew their schedules. And we made love in the apartment. He told me his parents had left for Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage, and that’s how I knew he was angry. He said we had to stop repressing pain with religion like that.
So much was uncertain then. I myself was drifting in the wind. We had no expectations. It was just a fancy that took us. Many years later, when news came that he had joined ISIS, that he had blown himself and dozens of others up at an army base outside Baghdad, I had long since left, had moved to Rome, where I could finally disappear into the crowds, where my brownness was indistinguishable and unremarkable, where I felt truly myself. No one reached out to me. No one pieced together the connection between us. His father, who had been a professor at another university in Calgary, changed the family’s last name. They packed up and moved to Pakistan. Their son had done something no one could accept. The masjids in Calgary shut or became shuttered. Radical youth who had been connected to Daniyal were rooted out. There were so many of them. Homegrown, they were called, but had there been a home? A new wave of scrutiny began. I learned all this offhand from my parents on a phone call. They didn’t know, of course, what had happened between me and Daniyal years ago. They didn’t know why I couldn’t speak when they told me he was dead, what he had done. They didn’t know that in the noisy vestibule of a crowded museum in Rome, near a display of shattered amphoras, all the strength left my legs and I fell to my knees. Those cold years in Calgary had forged a bond between the Pakistani families, and even spread across the world they stayed in touch. My father had tried calling Daniyal’s father but hadn’t been able to reach him, and when he finally did, Uncle A—’s voice had turned hoarse. He could barely speak, my father said. Daniyal’s sister became a teacher at an ordinary neighborhood school in Lahore. She did not study medicine as she had wanted, did not become a hematologist, did not marry.
I think about the journey the news reports say Daniyal took, to Syria first and then to Iraq, where he rigged a vehicle with explosives and drove into a military compound. He had taken on an Arab name by then, though when I knew him he didn’t understand Arabic and had no desire to learn it. After Calgary, were the dust and heat of the Middle East strange to him? Did he hear Yalla, yalla too? Did he have to peel away layers of himself to do what he did, or was it that he had to bury himself under even more layers? The dozens that died, how did he think of them?
The lives we touch and are touched by are so many. I have never told anyone about Daniyal. Back then I felt I had been one of the few people who knew him. After the first time we slept together, we lay in bed and watched the light come in through the windows. It was one of those rare days when frost clings to every branch, and yet the sun comes out, brilliant and clear. From where we lay we couldn’t see the snowdrifts outside the apartment, the gray slush on the road. Quietly he rose from the bed. He went to the window, where ice crystals had formed on the other side of the glass. He put his hand up to touch them, but the window was double-paned, the constellations of frost out of reach. He said how beautiful it all was, this world, this feeling of opening and satiation, that nothing else could ever compare to this.
And so that’s what I mean, that while he is everywhere on the internet, he is nowhere. I cannot look him up. The boy with the glittering eyes, the afternoons between us—that person is gone. Perhaps it was just the effect of the hookah. I left my husband. The frost on the glass melted. The snow on the branches lost its hard and beautiful edge. Daniyal stopped coming to the apartment. Soon I left for Rome, and what was meant to be a semester abroad turned into a permanent departure.
I met another one of our classmates in Rome. It really is a small world, isn’t it? No, not Christina, with her thin gold necklaces and constant sniffling, her insistence on taking the lines of Helena and Hermia both. Though she was from Rome, I never looked her up. Avril Pinto. Oh, we overlooked her then. She was a dreamer in the griffin school, barely visible. I had heard that she moved to Rome, though her family was from Kerala. She had become a singer and was singing in some local joints—people are never what you think, I have learned that. Avril showed me around Rome, and we walked and walked. You could never walk in Qatar—it was too hot, there were barely any sidewalks, and neither could you in Calgary in the endless winter—but in Rome I walked away what I felt about Daniyal, and I truly did find beauty everywhere, but not the sort our teachers had told us about—or I should say, not only that sort. It was in the most surprising things. It was in a small golden tap in a hollow where two alleys met, where I bent my head and took long drafts of water on a blisteringly hot day. The glittering rays of the sun were reflected in the drops of water. The constellation of lights was almost blinding. It was a moment when things came into focus, when there was a sudden clarity, and I thought of Daniyal, his hand on the window, searching and not reaching.
With that, I wait eagerly for your letter, and I know it will be long and lush, like the letters we always wanted to write when we were young, to the pen pals we did not have.
Sarah Malik Sayed is a Pakistani writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times and The Globe and Mail. She received a grant for fiction from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and is at work on a novel.
Image credit: Nathan Anderson. Unsplash, 2016.
