By Sheba Karim

The morning that I remembered, I couldn’t feel my hands. It was cold in New York and my fingers were numb and swollen. I was sitting at my desk, pressing them against my styrofoam coffee cup, when Mihir appeared.

“The cold is a cruel witch,” I told him, “who can only live by taking the warmth of others. The more warmth you have, the more she will steal.”

“Right,” Mihir said. He draped one skinny arm over the side of my cubicle. “Did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

Mihir paused. He relished his gossip like an Auntie, savoring it on his tongue for a moment before releasing it to the world. “Parveen Babi is dead.”

Parveen Babi!” The styrofoam cup broke between my hands, bleeding lukewarm coffee onto my desk.

“She was found in her apartment. Apparently she was dead for days and no one even knew. They say she was schizophrenic. Sad, isn’t it?” He pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped a spot I had missed. “You seem upset,” he said, eyes inquisitive. “Did you know her or something?”

“No, nothing like that.” How could I explain it when I myself didn’t understand? When my own memory of it, so long forgotten, was now coming back to me much like she did, mysterious, halting? “I need some air,” I said and pushed past Mihir, through the maze of cubicles, into the elevator with its running display of stock quotes and out the revolving glass doors. I started to walk, to nowhere in particular but in the same direction as the wind, and slowly I began to remember.

For the first years of my life, I lived in my Dada’s house, which had a large garden with jasmine and guava trees and a veranda where my Dada and his friends would sit and play chess for hours. I, as the only male grandchild, was the privileged son who could do no wrong in my Dada’s eyes, and whatever I desired, I received. If I wanted to play with a particular toy that my female cousins were using, my Dada would order them to give it to me. My cousins pouted and complained, but they always obeyed in the end. It was, after all, just the way things were.

But when I was eight my mother and I left the comfort of my Dada’s house in Karachi to join my father in Dubai, the fledgling city in a desert. From the second we exited the airport I hated it, the heat so oppressive it squeezed my brain like a vice, making it painful to breathe or think.

Our apartment in Dubai was small, just four rooms, in a four story building surrounded by other ones just like it. Everywhere you turned there was brown: brown buildings; brown roads; and, of course, the brown sands of the desert that surrounded our neighborhood, endless and unforgiving.

My father would leave for work early in the morning, before I woke up, and return late at night, after I had gone to sleep. We knew no one, except for a few people in our building and my father’s cousin, who lived in a neighborhood even more remote than ours. During the days it was only my mother and I, confined in our four square rooms. It was a ground floor apartment and the windows had thick metal bars across them to prevent someone from breaking in. Sometimes we would go to the shops, where an amalgam of the world’s brown peoples would be shopping, the condescending, largely uneducated Bedouins, the Indians and Pakistanis, the fairer Lebanese and the darker Sudanese. But mostly we stayed inside. My mother cooked in the morning, than cleaned, and in the afternoons she would pace, from the kitchen to the living room, from one bedroom to another, twirling the ends of her dupatta in a harried sort of dance. I was young but I could see the change in her. The loneliness was making her skin crack, fine, dry lines crisscrossing her face and the backs of her hands, more and more each week, until I worried that she would crack so much she might break.

One afternoon my mother came into my room waving one of my toy trucks.
“You left this in the living room,” she said. “How many times have I told you not to leave your toys here and there?”

“Sorry,” I told her, but I was not sorry. I had gone from a world of toys at my disposal in Karachi to a mere few here. I would leave them wherever I wanted.

“Get that look off your face,” my mother snapped.

I lay down on the floor and thrust my feet in the air, pointing them at her. After learning the year before that Buddhists believed this to be rude, it had become my favorite insult. “No.”

She bent down and slapped me twice, a forehand followed quickly with a backhand, the flashing sapphire of her ring scraping my left cheek. Before I could even start to cry, she repented. “Irfan, Irfan, beta, I’m so sorry,” she said, trying to take me in her arms, but I pushed my feet against her stomach.

“I want to go home,” I told her.

“But this is home,” my mother said. She sank to the floor. I examined her face. The blacks of her eyes looked hollow.

The next day my mother left and returned with a video cassette. “I borrowed it from Radha Auntie,” she said. Radha Auntie was an Indian woman who lived upstairs from us who my mother would occasionally visit. It was a Bollywood movie, and, looking at the tapes, my mother and I both saw the same thing. A pastime to keep us occupied during our long, hot afternoons. Salvation via VHS.

We watched one movie a day, my mother returning the cassette in the evening and borrowing another. That week I discovered the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She possessed every attribute of beauty: long, thick hair; glowing, cream-colored skin; a slender, noble nose; full, pouting lips. And her eyes, bright and wide and perfectly tapered at the ends, and the color of them, the most endearing shade of brown, so sweet and moist, they could surely make an ocean out of a desert.

“Who is she?” I asked my mother.

“Parveen Babi,” she replied, then cast me a sideways glance, amusement tugging at the corners of her lips. “Why? You like her?”

Like was not the right word. The truth was that, from the minute she walked onto the screen, I had begun to worship her. She was a goddess, an Indian Aphrodite, emerging from the waves of Juhu Beach on a sea shell into the arms of an adoring populace, the glow of her hair rivaling that of the sun. Who better to receive my earnest worship? When, at the end of the movie, she died a dramatic death, her white sari soaked with blood, I shuddered with despair, worried that this was the end of my goddess.

“Why are you crying?” my mother said. “She’s not really dead. She’s in other movies besides this one.”

Wiping my tears with my arm, I thanked Allah for granting her a multiple film career, if only because it gave me the chance to see her again.

That night, as I dreamt of my Dada’s house, of tree branches hanging low with the weight of ripe guava, casting their shadow on chess players sitting in the moonlight, I heard someone whisper my name. I opened my eyes to see Parveen Babi standing at the edge of my bed, wearing a black leather skirt paired with a nearly transparent white blouse and tall black boots, revealing her shapely legs. Even her knees were beautiful. I sat up in bed, and she spoke.

“Hello Irfan,” she said.

I had always disliked my name, but the way she said it, the consonants rolling tenderly off her tongue, made it sound like the most desirable name on earth.

“Parveen?” I whispered.

“It’s me,” she said, and ran one manicured finger across the length of my cheek, pausing briefly at the cut caused by my mother’s ring. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No,” I said, thinking I would endure a thousand cuts upon my skin if it meant Parveen Babi would run her finger along them.

“Sweetu. Such a brave boy. You don’t like it here, do you?”

I shook my head, wondering how it was that she knew so much about me. Could it be that as I was watching her in the movie, she, in turn, was watching me?

Parveen sat on my bed. I could feel the flesh of her buttocks pressed against the side of my leg. “I know what it’s like to feel alone,” she said. “It will get better. Remember I am here.” She leaned over, kissed my forehead, and disappeared.

The next morning the nagging question of whether or not it had all been a dream was answered when I looked in the mirror and saw on my forehead the faint outline, in red, of a pair of lips.

That afternoon my mother and I watched another movie starring Parveen Babi, but this time, as we watched her sing and dance, I knew she was singing and dancing not for Amitabh, but for me. This was our secret, and I held onto it the way a child hugs a stuffed toy, fiercely, happily, with full rights of possession.

I stayed awake for as long as I could that night, waiting for Parveen’s arrival, and eventually fell into an uneasy sleep. I was woken not by the melodic sound of her saying my name, but by my mother shaking me.

“Get up!” my mother said. “It’s almost nine.”

I rubbed my eyes. The sun streaming through my window meant only one thing -- I had been betrayed. “She didn’t come,” I said. “She lied.”

“What are you taking about?” my mother asked.

I contemplated telling her about Parveen’s visit, but decided against it. She would not understand, and might tease me, or worry that my mind was impure. “Nothing.”

The small hope I held that she had just been delayed somewhere and was on her way diminished when she did not appear the second night, or the third. I told myself to forget her, but every time I closed my eyes I saw her silhouette burned into my eyelids, the inward curve of her waist, the outward curves of her hips and breasts, the swinging locks of hair, the elegant line of her leg from thigh to calf to the point of her heel.

But on the fourth night she returned, this time more hesitant, calling my name not from the edge of my bed but from the doorway. “Irfan.”

“I thought you weren’t going to come back,” I said.

“Here I am,” she said, and walked towards me. She looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her. Her face was flushed and her breathing loud, as if she had just been running from something, and she radiated an intense energy, like a brilliant comet racing through the sky, putting the stars to shame.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You will wait for me?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, but I did not want to wait. I asked Allah to make her take me away with her, to the land of songs and dances and inevitable justice, where I would never be alone, but at her side, always. But her eyes were looking past me, as though they could see right through the walls of my room, all the way to the desert, I sensed her mind had already moved on to her next destination, and, suddenly, without a kiss or a goodbye, she disappeared.

The next morning I stayed in bed, singing the male parts of all of the Parveen Babi songs I knew, hoping to become her equal. My mother paused in my doorway, a pile of dirty laundry hiding her protruding stomach. “You really like Parveen Babi, don’t you?” she said.

“I am going to marry her one day.” This statement did seem at all ludicrous. After all, we were already lovers, at least in the verbal sense.

“She’s too old for you,” my mother said.

“Abba is twenty years older than you,” I pointed out.

"Yes, but I am not a movie star.” She gazed, frowning, into the depths of the clothes in her arms. I wonder if she was seeing what might have been in the reds and pinks of her shalwars, in the whites of my father’s underwear. But I did not think of this back then.

“That’s true, you aren’t,” I said, and went into the living room to practice dance moves.

In spite of my diligent rehearsing, Parveen did not come back. The following week I started school, and suddenly my days were filled with classes and boys my own age, Naveed and Rohan and Srinath, who invited me to play cricket with them. I had never played sports in Karachi, preferring the quieter games of my Dada’s house to the rowdiness of the street, but, eager to make friends, I agreed. One afternoon we crossed a series of dunes to the cricket grounds, an expanse of gray mud in the desert. After watching the older boys play, they allowed me to bat. It was an instant exhilaration -- the grip of the bat at my hands, the rush of making contact with the ball, the approving cheers from the older boys as you made your runs.

When I got home my body ached from playing. I was so tired that I went to bed right after dinner, eager to get up tomorrow and do it again. I fell into the deep, peaceful sleep of someone who is physically exhausted but emotionally content, only to be woken by the familiar voice.

“Irfan.”

I refused to open my eyes. “No,” I said. “I’m too tired. Go away.” I put my pillow over my face in such a manner that I could still see hers, which looked lovely yet pained, a strange, almost ethereal sadness in the edges of her lips and eyes. “Fine,” she said, and, after kissing the top of the pillow, she left, and I could not fall back asleep again.

She did not return until the following week. The next day we had our most important match yet, against a team composed of boys two classes ahead of us, and had practiced for three hours after school. That night I was dreaming of the match, of hitting a sixer and my teammates carrying me on their shoulders, shouting my name.

“Irfan.” It was not a shout, but a whisper. Parveen was sitting next to me on the bed, one arm spread across the headboard.

“I need my sleep,” I told her. This interruption could cost us the match tomorrow. “Go away.”

“Irfan,” she said, taking my hand in hers. “Don’t you love me?”

“Go away,” I repeated, and hid my face under the covers.

“But Irfan –“ she began.

Deciding that drastic action would be necessary, I got out of bed and grabbed my cricket bat from the floor. Then, holding it tight, I hit her on the head with it. She shrieked and doubled over, shielding herself from another blow with her elbows.

“I don’t love you,” I said. “I hate you.”

She stood up, backed away. Her body was shaking but her face was composed, mask-like in its steadiness. “Goodbye,” she said, and walked out of the room.

If I said that I felt remorse as I watched her leave, trembling, I would be lying. In my mind I had no choice. We both needed to move on. It was, after all, just the way things were.

Parveen never returned, and I, busy with cricket, school, friends, and, much later, girls, forgot her.

After I left the office I walked hard and fast, my breath rising like steam from my nostrils before dissipating into the grayness. I stopped when I reached the river, which seemed appropriately dark and turbulent, as if it, too, had heard the news. Sitting down on a bench, I wrapped my arms around myself to protect my warmth and began to repeat her name. Parveen. Parveen. It was an apology, a eulogy, a request for forgiveness, unheard, perhaps, and unheeded, but comforting all the same. Parveen. I sang it in my head, stretching out the syllables. Paaaarveeen Paaaarveeen. Then, rocking back and forth to its iambic rhythm, I wept for the death of my first love.