That night, I lay awake feeling a lightness I had never known was possible. Beside me, Nazir was breathing shallowly, wide awake too. Outside, it was so dark and still that I could hardly hear a thing; neither the whooshing of a car nor the distant howl of a dog. With no sound to ground me, I lost all sense of place and time. I could hear blood rushing in my ears, but it could just as easily have been the sound of a billion stars and suns journeying around their galactic core.
“Are you asleep?” Nazir asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I will ever sleep again. You’ve cured me of the need for sleep.”
He hummed in laughter and I felt a low rumble in his chest. “Well? What’s it like to be a wayward woman?” He asked.
“Oh, so we were circling back to that.”
“Mmhm.”
“Is that why you are awake?” I turned to look at him. I could not see his face in the darkness but it felt important that I do so.
“I just would hate for you to be conflicted about this,” he said.
I was not conflicted. If anything I felt raw and renewed, like a serpent that had just shed its old skin. I could not say so for fear of divulging too much, so I hedged and changed the subject.
“Did you ever want to marry?” I asked.
“Sure. I’m not opposed to it.”
“Was there ever someone you considered…?”
“I almost did, once, when I was twenty seven. But her family got in the way at the last second and preparations fell apart.”
“Why?”
“Hmmn…” he considered his words carefully. “She was out of my league.”
“Like a caste thing?” I asked tactlessly and regretted it immediately. He shrugged.
“Something like that.”
I reached out and squeezed his hand to say what I could not say aloud.
“Do you only date Indian girls?” He exhaled a chuckle. “What? Is it a ridiculous question?”
“No. Kareena was actually Arabic. Anish was Indian but Angie wasn’t. Those are the only ones you need to know about, if we’re going there.”
“We might as well.”
“We’ll definitely come back to you after this. I think I went too easy on you earlier.”
“Tell me anyway,” I said. He sighed, seemingly resigning himself to the task — not grudgingly, as I felt no hostility from him. Rather, he indulged me and I was glad for it.
“After Kareena there was Anish. A lovely girl, agreeable and homely.”
“Homely?”
“Yeah, I know how that sounds but she was. She wanted a big brood as soon as possible. She had this grand vision of recreating what she’d grown up with — having come from a big family, and I couldn’t give her that. She didn’t want to live in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere and I’d just been transferred here for work. There was nothing I could do. We tried to make it work, you know, as people do. But it got to where I started to doubt my abilities and second-guess my decisions. I lost my confidence… it didn’t end well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. It’s all part of the journey.”
The third was Angie, a woman he’d met at work. She was leading an environmental non-profit research team, something to do with ecosystems, he’d said.
“My boss hates facilitating these kinds of things so I often find myself chaperoning on his behalf. She had access to a knowledge base that I never would’ve come across if I hadn’t met her.”
“Sounds like she really had an impact on you,” I said with a tinge of sourness. Any praise from Nazir was high praise, and I was not above jealousy.
“I’d always thought of myself as an environmentally conscious person, given my work. But she was the first person to ever make me truly consider how we are inhabiting the world. How man-made systems of government and economy relate to ecosystems and all other life that depends on these natural habitats.”
“So your high school crush, a sweet and homely girl, and what sounds a lot like an intellectual? There is no pattern here.” I said. I had hoped knowing his relationship history would illuminate why he’d taken a liking to me but I could not place him.
“Be kind. Those were my identity crisis years. I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be. Which parts to whittle away and which ones to amplify.”
“So what happened with the last one?”
“This is going to sound funny but I always felt a bit fetishized.”
“What? In what way?”
“She thought that my lifestyle was cute, like, permanent glamping or something. She used to say that a lot.”
“Couldn’t that be a compliment?”
“Mmmh… it was a little condescending.”
“Maybe so, but that’s a bit frivolous for a dealbreaker, no?”
“It wasn’t that alone. It was a combination of many little things. Like she had this fantasy of being with a brooding man-in-uniform who was just bookish enough to match her intellect and that was my role. She didn’t like it when I deviated from it. Like, when she found out that I don’t actually enjoy first person shooter games, that was a point of contention.”
“Oh, so you felt like your real life was just a fantasy escape for her,” I put it together.
“Exactly.”
“Is it possible that you pushed her away because she reminded you of feeling powerless with your first girlfriend?” I asked, and here I knew I was pushing but I was curious how far I could stretch his indulgence.
“Oh, the psychoanalysis is in!” he said. Hmmn. Not too far then. Fair enough. He is not a pushover.
“Lower your cannons. It’s not psychoanalysis. I’m just making an observation.”
“You think I could’ve made it work?”
“I think the power imbalance made you uncomfortable. The idea that she could just return to her life at will.”
“Sure, I can concede to that. It was not an unfounded fear, seeing as she did eventually do just that.”
Ah, so a concession absent of pride, egotism, argument, avoidance or counterattack was possible? Who knew?
“Do you have the same fear? With me?”
“Oh, so that’s what that was about,” he said. “Well, no. Not with you. I’m not who I used to be, and you’re not them. You are cheri.”
“And you? Who are you now?”
“Me?” he kissed my shoulder. “I am the one who’s here.”
***
The next day, I had an excursion to Ngare Ndare Forest on my itinerary. It wasn’t on my usual circuit so I’d arranged for a local guide to take us on a hike along Ngare Ndare river. We would stop at one of the waterfalls that drained into a blue pool for a swim and a picnic. Then, we would end the day’s tour with a canopy walk which promised a fair chance for an elephant sighting.
All morning, I buzzed and glowed, hardly noticing the burn in my muscles or the strain in my breathing during the hike. When my guests were difficult, I was patient and magnanimous. I may even have enjoyed the trip more than they did, albeit with a tinge of loneliness that was not present before. It was not enough to simply have an experience myself, not when another I could share the experience with had appeared. Now, I was in a state of constant echolocation, mapping his absence until I could return to him.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, while my guests lounged on rocks and splashed around the pool, I took out my phone. I had a missed call from Mom, seventy messages on my group chat with Jill and Noni, but nothing from Naz. I had a fleeting fear that he had lost interest in me — evidently, he had not cured me of anxiety. And having drank from his well and been nourished by it, such a development felt terminal to me.
Of course, that was not Nazir’s way. Towards evening, he called to say that he’d put in for some time off. His bosses had readily agreed to it. His team had just apprehended a couple of poachers responsible for setting up snares in the park and this helped.
On the drive back, a light shower dotted the cruiser’s windscreen. The pull of home intensified and I was surprised to find that I was not thinking of my hotel room, which was now alien to me, but of Nazir’s veranda, with a fire in the chimenea and Celeste curled on a mat, grooming her kittens. Nonetheless, I swung by Elyon House and washed the day away.
At Naz’s, a cat I had not met yet emerged from the long grass meowing and demanding for snacks.
“That’s Cosmo, our resident male,” Nazir said, coming down to meet me.
“You named your cats Cosmo and Celeste?” I asked, allowing him to embrace me. God, the smell of him. “I thought you didn’t know anything about stars.”
“I don’t. It was either that or Cocoa and Mocha,” he said.
“I like yours better.”
There were sausages on the grill, just starting to brown out. As if in answer to my prayers, he’d lit a fire in the chimenea. Inside, he was frying a batch of bhajia on the gas stove and had to go back and forth between the grill and the stove. I insisted that he relinquish the stove to me — I was no good with a grill — but Naz turned out to be one of those people who prefer to cook alone.
“I have it all mapped out. You can pour yourself a coffee in the meantime,” he said pointing me to a flask of hot water.
“Do you always make such elaborate dinners or is this all for me?”
“Yes,” he said, and left me chuckling to myself.
It was new, this trust bestowed to me. I did not think anyone capable of it but here he was, gently peeling his layers for me to see, to witness, to delight in. And what I saw was a man so vast that my fullness could neither diminish, nor threaten him. I was free from shrinking myself, free from dimming my light so as not to outshine him. Free to wonder, who could I be when I wasn’t always guarding against being made into someone else’s villain?
It was both daunting and exhilarating. What strength was this? What wondrous creature was this?
***
To be continued…
