Prone to nostalgia, Najwa keeps her distance from memories, good or bad. It doesn’t help. Memories insist upon themselves in moments when, uprooted, one must take stock of what she has: twenty-two boxes, a bedframe, a dining table with one chair; the photograph hung the wrong way.
It was hung vertically so that the horizon bifurcated sky and sea like a wall rather than a floor, its stark gray line an impenetrable barrier between everything on either side of the water’s edge. Left of horizon: the sun before it set; one wispy cloud. Right of horizon: dark water; the black-scarfed head of the woman she’d met on shore, surfaced during a swim.
It wasn’t an artistic choice, hanging the photograph this way. It was the only frame she had. She’d stolen it from a chest of drawers in the formal living room of her parent’s home, setting it on the plastic-wrapped couch until she finished rummaging. The frame had one screw eye and an easel back placed so that every photo had to be a portrait, or at least a vertically oriented landscape. None of it mattered. The photograph would have to come down now that she was leaving, and still, she wanted from it more than it could offer.
She, the woman in the water, had smelled like clove cigarettes.
It had only been a few years since that day at the sea in her so-called motherland, but developers had finished building the power plant on the beach and begun building the oil corridor into mainland China. In the capitol city, aspiring workers were learning Mandarin rather than English in the basements of the internet cafes. Najwa had forgotten that the woman in the water’s name was Suri, though if she waited, it might have returned to her.
For her part, it was enough that it had been 52 days since her release. She was moving to a bigger city. She had an apartment there. No job, but enough left in the $5,000 her father had collected in an investment account for her to pay the deposit. The day ahead was dedicated to a close. She wore loose jeans, her hair tied in a knot at her neck. Her frame was long and solid, and had anyone shared the home with her, they might have said something about her misdirected worry, the way it focused on a photograph rather than the boxes that still needed to be packed. But it had always been easy to lose herself in memory. And that day had been a purposeless day, the day by the sea, a day she had woken up with her father, who was tall like her but seemed to feel everything much less intently, his placid face always bagged with fatigue so heavy it seemed bored. She asked him simple questions over a usual breakfast such as “Doesn’t it feel empty now that everyone else has left” and “Is it a vacation if this was your home?” to which her father responded that if he was forced to do nothing all day, by whatever logistics of power outages and poor Wi-Fi then, yes, it was a vacation. He didn’t address the question of home.
After breakfast, her father dressed in the small windowless room they shared, adjusting the mosquito net that Najwa had carelessly and fatally left open. He went out and made his way to the sea, so green it was almost black, a liquid forest in a sunless place. Najwa watched him from the hut. On the drive in, he told her that the beach was built for French and British tourists back when French and British tourists visited their country. The faces of the visitors have changed now but the effect was the same.
“Don’t you think it’s strange,” Najwa asked him when he came back from his swim, “that they’d let another country build a nuclear power plant right on the nicest beach?” “Strange, how?" he asked, “The country needs power.”
Power was gray and concrete and smoking. Small beside the sea. Everything else—the muddy-white of the stray dog sniffing the fire, the crust of a forgotten samosa on the countertop, the blue of her Baba’s shirt, and his resignation to the water that soaked through it—reflected the faint sun.
The water was choppy in January. It was hard not to think of the base of the world, which for a brief, fire-lit moment, had held them all the evening prior.
Najwa and her father had been in Karachi for a cousin’s wedding, the only representatives from the American Muzafars. When the wedding ended, they were invited to spend a few days at a hut—bare, concrete—like the power plant—with three walls and an opening towards the sea. An uncle rented it from the local villagers year round. They drove in that night with two more cars of family. More huts were borrowed from their friends. Her uncle had plenty of friends. They grilled lamb chops on a charcoal grill and took Jack Daniels out of the bottoms of coolers from the trunks of the cars for whiskey cokes.
After the lamb chops, the refreshing of drinks, and the twelfth cigarette, everyone gathered around the fire in front of the hut to share blankets and stories, squeezing onto benches and camping chairs. The chat was scattered—gossip, politics, a child’s recent acceptance to an American university. Najwa’s father sat next to a man with arms like a bear. Every so often the man would burst into agreement with whichever man spoke to him, waving the bone of what was once a chop. It was the man’s wife who goaded him into the story, her voice soft and sparkling like the glitter on her cheekbones. The man first shook his head no, motioned his arms, said not a word, but then he raised his bone as if to say enough and fine. The bonfire set the tone and the dark and rushing waves silenced the group as his arms grew wide. His shaved face opened too.
“Fooled by god himself, the great whale was trapped beneath the sea, destined to carry the weight of the world,” the man began, and it became clear to Najwa that he was drunk. Each of his words sunk heavy into the sand.
“These waves wash wounds,” he said, gesturing to the sea. “Carve rocks by their existence. Carry unfathomable dust along shorelines and into darkness as easy as breathing. As easy as the breath of the whale. As easy as following the shoreline into the darkness where the water remains blue-black. They say you can swim past schools of fish into the depths, into oceanic caves. Find the blood-red mountain at the root. It would be hubris to imagine humanity built atop the ruby, but remember that it is about the whole world. Remember that under the red mountain is the bull. Kuyutha. Remember that his forty thousand eyes see only the ruby and the black. That our earth could fit like a grain of sand inside its nostril. The Nun. The base of the world. Kuyutha breathes and on the surface, the waves rush the shore. Kuyutha remains still and who’s to say he misses how it felt to graze, to gore with any of forty thousand horns. Even he is resting on a whale, a whale who was fooled by Allah himself, tempted by his own lust, to carry the world above him. Who’s to say if any of it’s true, though from time to time the earth shakes, Kuyutha riotous for his freedom like anyone inside a cage, his feet pawing,” a crescendo, “the whale beneath–”
And at this, the friend of her uncle threw his bone into the fire with a dum. Embers flew. He was smacked by his wife. One woman put out the coal that had fallen on her wool chador.
Someone laughed loudly in the commotion. The group scolding began and fizzled not unlike the embers and then the gathering resumed discussion of other friends and other parties. A second cousin turned to Najwa, who was still thinking about the story, to ask if she was seeing anyone. She said, yes, I’m seeing someone and walked past him to the party, unbothered by her lie.
The friend of her uncle had gone off. There were fires going at three or four huts. Najwa didn’t know what she’d have asked him regardless. It was hard enough to imagine an eternity attending to the burden of her own mass let alone the mass of the world. Every so often, Najwa felt herself pulled towards the center of the earth and stretched horizontal in response, her consciousness curling into her ribcage. This happened first at a rooftop in New York, when she realized she had absolutely nothing to say to anyone around her and she wanted desperately for words. Fireworks were bursting in celebration of a freedom she didn’t believe in. It happened a second time during her cousin’s wedding. Her mother was weeping with her cousin’s mother, seeing the newlyweds off. Najwa could hardly see for the world pressing in.
What she wanted in those moments was to feel nothing. Nothing, so tantalizing behind the thin veil between her and eternity. She apologized to the whale for her weight and thought of the stars, wondering why some were allowed to transcend and some were destined to be crushed beneath the weight of everything.
Everyone left the next morning. It was a Monday, and most of them worked. Some litter and a forgotten sweater, pale yellow, marked their absence.
“What’ll we do today,” Najwa asked her father when he returned from his swim, and he gestured at the expanse of the beach. It wasn’t that her father was resigned, she thought, but that his unfailing logic led him to believe in a finite answer to anything that for Najwa might have caused existential disruption. He called it her “urge for melodrama.” Once there were words for it, she began to dismiss it herself.
Najwa picked up a book she’d been trying to read and sat with it until she heard tires skittering over the gravel.
In the car, she saw a family of three. Two parents, a daughter in a black hijab. They waved getting out of the car and received waves in return. Najwa set down her book and walked away from them, towards the edge of the beach, where the rocks built a path towards the power plant, not a glance at the car.
Cold rocks might never warm with just a body’s warmth. They can be thought of as a scar, grown white. Najwa wants the same thing as anyone: to be pummeled by the waves without drowning. Why else stand in the ocean and wait? It didn’t matter that in January, at the end of a disillusioned year, she decided to want nothing, to empty herself of want, only to find that it was impossible.
“Smoke?” the stranger from the car asked, having expanded into a person beside Najwa on the rocks. Behind the stranger, there were more rocks, more huts, then sparse trees, the expanse of sand, and the village at a distance.
Najwa handed her a cigarette and the box of matches. “Are you allowed,” she might’ve inquired, but she didn’t. The stranger seemed Najwa’s age or younger. She had a smooth and plain face, undistinguished except by the dark hair growing on her cheeks.
She went through three of the matches before Najwa cupped her hands around the end to protect it from the wind. The stranger had long fingers, the pronounced knuckles of someone who often cracked them, and perfectly ovular nails. The stranger inhaled, coughed, and admitted, “I never smoke.” Najwa’s smile was crooked—eked out despite herself. The stranger asked how old Najwa was, and they discovered they were the same age. “Suri,” the stranger said, hand outstretched.
Suri was studying to be an optometrist.
After a moment, Najwa had to ask.
“My father sent you over here.”
“You thought you were mysterious walking over here alone. I was just following you.”
Mysterious. Najwa pressed it to her palate. Melodrama. She resisted an urge to jump up and dive into the water fully clothed only to emerge laughing as if to prove that she wasn’t.
“I get it,” Suri began without letting Najwa respond, too familiar for the fact that they had just met, which endeared her to the part of Najwa that wanted to skip anything that resembled not knowing. “I hate cleaning my apartment. It’s always better after I’ve done it and then I feel absurd.” Her face held a thrilled seriousness. “You know what I mean. I hate to cook but I love the food. Then I love to cook, but I hate to clean. Every aspect of the thing becomes the joy of the thing, the thing you hated, the thing you love then hate. It’s all so cliché. Ambivalence is much preferred.”
She paused, as though waiting for Najwa to agree. Najwa kept her eyes on the sea, and then, uncomfortable, on the rock. Suri continued, “You know I had a friend. His girlfriend of several years dumped him because he was going nowhere in life.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say about your friend,” Najwa said softly. The waves rushed.
“What did you say? Speak up.”
“That’s unkind to say about your friend,” Najwa said, louder than to outspeak the water.
“It was true. He’s better now. But then, he thought they would do their whole life together. I suggested we get tea one afternoon, since he was so sorrowful and still, but his driver was occupied and so was mine, so we had no way of meeting up. I thought, what a shame neither of us drives. You can’t relate.”
“To not knowing how to drive?”
Najwa did, but she also knew that if she’d grown up here she would not know how to drive. “I do.”
“You’re lucky!” Suri continued: “I told him we should learn. So we started together that weekend. Our driver taught us. He was a young man. Closer to our age than he looked. He was a good teacher, showing us around side streets, keeping us off the main road. Neither of us was very good. We couldn’t even park, but we took the car and went on the road ourselves. My friend was a better driver than I was, but even he hit a few cars. Small dents, we didn’t let it get to us.”
“And did it help your friend? Learning to drive?” Najwa’s eyes stayed on the ocean, the way it seemed so dark but crashed colorless against the rocks.
“Not really, but it was a foundation. Before you ask, no, we didn’t get together. I thought about it, but we were just friends who had always been friends, and he was depressed, and I had my own problems. It wouldn’t have been the thing. Anyway, I was scared, as you can imagine, that he’d do something stupid. He made constant jokes about everything being worthless, made fun of me to push me away until I asked him to stop.
“One day, we drove out of the city. Outside Karachi, it’s all dirt roads and trucks until you find the river, which we did. He was acting so strange, barely talking. We sat by its banks under a tree we quickly realized was growing guavas. I asked him to climb up with me, and he hesitated but he did. They were perfectly ripe, oh God, I can’t even tell you. We climbed into the tree and got the guavas. We began eating them sitting up there. At first we were talking and eating normally, and then he kept eating them. One after the other. Not talking at all. Then he started throwing them into the river. I begged him to stop but he kept doing it. I begged him to stop. When he stopped, I asked him, why are you wasting the guavas, and he said, I was ready to die today. I never thought I’d find a guava tree. He had prepared for this to be our last day together. Had a rope and some dozens of pills waiting for him at home, a method to be decided on, I guess. Anyways, he didn’t. It was the guavas. Have you had them?”
Najwa looked at her companion, her arcadian smile. “That happened in a movie once.”
“I like that movie too,” Suri replied, her smile unwavering. “But the fruit is the only part of the story that is a lie.”
“Did you study film,” Najwa asked.
“No. But I like movies. What happened to your friend?”
“He’s fine. He’s moved to Berlin for some technical job.”
Najwa had long since finished her cigarette. The girl asked her for the butt, and put it with hers in a small sequined bag she had draped over her shoulder.
“You could toss it,” Najwa said, but her companion did not. In the silence, the waves continued, as they had when they were speaking. The birds spoke to each other from the ground, and the girl began whistling a non-tune as though speaking to them.
“They can’t understand you,” Najwa said.
“I don’t have anything to say to them,” said the girl. “And you? Was there something you wanted to say?”
“Nothing,” Najwa responded. Between rope and pills, she’d choose pills. Easeful.
The day had grown brighter and Suri rose, saying she wanted to swim. She set down her bag next to Najwa and peeled off her outer layers showing the wetsuit she wore beneath. Leaping from the rocks, she dove in. She swam with broad strokes, a dot of black on the gray of the sea. Najwa looked at the camera facing her from the bag Suri left. Looked out and saw Suri still swimming. She picked up the bag and stood. When she returned to the hut, Suri was still in the water but had stopped where she was. She floated on her back, still for a moment but for the undulations of the water, then rose, her head bobbing again as she looked around her. She seemed to recognize where she was and returned to her back.
Najwa took the camera out of Suri’s bag and took a photograph. Instead of putting the camera back, she hung it around her neck.
“I don’t like it when you smoke, Najwa,” her father said to her.
“I didn’t like it when you smoked either,” she replied. She put on her swimsuit and dressed over it. She returned to the shoreline with the same book waving to Suri’s mother next to their own hut. Najwa took a photograph of her with the sky looming. Suri looked like her mother. Najwa did not note that she’d waved back despite Najwa’s lack of a salaam, though she had. Najwa opened her book but did not read. She forgot that she’d meant to eat.
Suri returned to the shoreline and walked slowly through the sand to Najwa. “It’s been forever, hasn’t it.”
“We only just met,” Najwa replied.
“Of course. And how will anyone know what you’re about if you don’t say? If you don’t say, how will you know either?”
“Have you seen the power plant,” Najwa asked.
“Of course I have. I know what you’re thinking, but aren’t the Chinese better than the Americans? It’s good there will be more jobs for the village. I hope they maintain it well.”
The fisherman walking down the beach had long white hair and an armful of seashells. He said his salaam to Najwa’s father and asked if he could sit. Najwa, still on the shoreline, saw and stood. She returned as the man had begun helping her father light a fire, followed by Suri.
The man remarked on the grayness of the day, to which her father replied that its beauty was kind of terrible.
“A poet then,” the man said.
“But you look the part better.”
The two men laughed together, the fisherman’s laugh heartier than his frame. Noticing Najwa and the companion who’d followed her he pointed to the shells he’d left at the edge of the hut’s surrounding wall. Each shell had been beaded onto brightly colored threads.
“From this beach,” her companion asked, and they were. The girls were offered necklaces, and Najwa, wary of being sold something after years of American conditioning was reassured that they were being offered as gifts. Her father asked if the man would bring them fish, and the fisherman agreed. Each young woman took a necklace, Najwa receiving a set of small conches threaded on deep purple that she’d eventually hang on her wall. Najwa turned to her companion.
“Your family won’t miss you?”
She and Suri looked to the cottage next door where her parents were sitting in two side-by-side chairs, one occupied by a book, the other by the paper.
“We live together. I don’t think so.”
A stray dog made its way around the house sniffing towards the neighbor’s fire until it was shooed. It limped slightly. Its tan hair was matted. Suri did not take Najwa’s hint about the parents and asked the fisherman how things were in the village.
The fire had been lit. The man paused. He asked if they had heard about what happened two days prior, and everyone shook their head. He spoke in a rapid Urdu Najwa could not understand. She turned to her father, “What happened?”
In every pause, a rushing. The birds pecking at the sand. The dog lying down.
They sat quiet for a moment. Inna lillahi wa inna illayhi raji’un, said her companion and her father repeated it, and the fisherman repeated it. And Najwa did not know to repeat it, so she remained silent. The fisherman looked to the fire which had grown big and remarked on how big it had grown. "You’ll need your fish," he said, and he left to retrieve one.
“What happened,” Najwa insisted.
“A girl was found washed up on the beach,” her father explained, “Just married a few months ago. They’re saying she swam out in the night, that she was caught in the wrong tide. But a neighbor says she’d been arguing with her husband. Who knows? There are riptides.”
Suri shook her head, and Najwa thought she might say something. She didn’t. There was the sea keeping time’s measure, its push-pull marking cycles of birth, war, and quietude.
When the man came back, Najwa’s father had already situated the fire to put a grill on its top. The man cleaned the fish and they sat together to season and cook it. Suri’s parents came over and Suri was natural with them. Everyone spoke to everyone, empty clatter to Najwa’s mind, which sought the ocean floor. At the base of the world, there was a whale who wanted and was trapped. At the edge of the sea, Najwa imagined walking out, no gun at her back, walking until she sank, until her mouth bubbled, until the waves carried her back empty as an hourglass broken in a fall.
Najwa never thinks about the arguments she had with the man who used to stay in her apartment or the way that one night, she woke up to him on top of her, and said nothing, and stared at the wall, the place where there was a crack, the crack she’d covered with a photograph she conveniently needed to hang longwise that it might cover more of what was there. Memories insist upon themselves, but there are things one can forget.
Having taken the photograph off of the wall, Najwa walks into the half-empty living room. She considers the paint-chipped walls, the baseboards that she’d meant to caulk to stop the insects who crawled through from outside. Even in the city, the buildings fight the dust and water only to be eroded.
Sometimes Najwa still greets Death, “Are you still there?”
And Death responds, “Are you still there?” The ever presence, not a thing outside of her but an instinct from her root. The first time Death appeared, Najwa was picturing the thinness of the veil. She was beneath him and he had a hand around her throat, and she was convinced it was love. When she asked for more, she was searching for dissolution and she was right there, so close that thirty seconds longer she might have been a dandelion beneath her mother’s breath.
She told her psychiatrist at the hospital that she thought about method but never made plans. She’d checked herself in, but she never could tell him that she spoke to Death, who made everything easier. She could say, “Good morning,” and Death, polite and patient as it was unknowable would say, “Good morning.”
“Will I always carry you,” she might ask, and Death would reply, “Will I always carry you.”
In her lowest moments, when Death quietly expands inside her, reaching a long arm behind her ear, extending a leg into her shoulder, she quietly asserts that she is not ready. In a museum, she saw a crisply drawn still life of a skull and pomegranates. A bouquet bloomed beside it, perhaps on the last day before a wilt.
To live and be open to the possibility and to be a flower anyway. That’s a part of it too, that Najwa is not a flower but might call herself one. She thought about never being able to choose if one is crushed under the foot of a dog run out to the backyard, the kick of child searching for a ball.
“You’ve really found your stability,” the psychiatrist said before signing her release papers, and Najwa smiled, feeling the bull snort beneath her.
Once the fish on the beach was nothing but picked bones, Najwa asked her father about the whale and her father said, “What whale?” And Suri said, “What whale?” and Najwa, unsure of what else to do, told them, “The whale at the base of the world,” because after everything settled at the previous night’s barbecue she had been able to find not the friend of her uncle but the wife of the friend of her uncle and she asked her about the story.
The woman wore a plain black tunic over jeans. She wore gold sandals. She had wide hands and skin speckled by acne scars that must have been decades old. Najwa had asked, “What was the story your husband was telling us?” and the woman replied, “It’s just a myth. That at the base of the world there’s a whale, Bahamut, carrying a bull, Kuyutha, on whose head there’s a ruby mountain, on whose head there’s the world,” so Najwa told the same story to her father and to Suri and as she told it she followed the shoreline to the base of the ocean with her words, noting the nearly descended sun that would never reach the whale.
At the end of the story, Suri asked, “What does it mean that God used love as a trick to support the world,” and Najwa let surprise crack on her face like concrete above a weed. That night, when they kissed, Najwa pulled away from Suri, as if to tell her that there was no place for either of them in each other, regardless of how they spoke. They weren’t children. They couldn’t spend a day together at the beach and treat it as what it was. Najwa went back to her tent in the dark, following the light from the fire by the hut.
Najwa didn’t say goodbye to Suri when she told her father she felt ill and that they should leave that night. Her father shook his head, but he agreed to drive back to the city. Nor did she ask Suri if she could take the camera. She paid $12 to have the roll developed when they returned to the home they’d chosen. The other photos were mostly of Suri’s family. Najwa looked for a photo of the friend from Suri’s story, and didn’t find one. She did find a still life of fruit on a plate, and Najwa assumed the small spheres were guavas, but it was hard to tell in black and white. She did not feel guilty about having to reach to remember Suri’s name—there was no better way to exist. A memory without a name is an eternal thing.