WINNER: "Thousands of Longings Like These"
“'Thousands of Longings Like These' is a capacious work of literary art outstanding in its balance of the intense and the banal. It’s a heart-rending story of a love that persists beyond the artificial obstacles placed in its path. 'I realize I am still wearing your jacket and leave without taking it off.' I can barely express how deeply this work impressed me.”
—Iryn Tushabe
Y
ou are late to your own engagement party.
I am waiting for you in your parents’ living room where we spent so much time as boys. People that lined the perimeter of our adolescence have gathered around the furniture. Backrests and cushions are draped in richly coloured dupattas borrowed from women’s shalwar kameez, but the chairs are the same as they have always been. Through spaces between bodies, I can see Naila sitting on the sofa, surrounded by guests. They ask her questions, leaping excitedly from the present to the wedding, honeymoon, and several other milestones. Occasionally, as though to punctuate her responses, Naila lifts her hand for women, and sometimes a man, to admire the band around the third finger. I have never seen the ring before, have not been the trusted friend to whom you bared your hope, nestled inside a small velvety box. I want to feel betrayed, but can’t.
At first, your absence does not disturb the lively conversation in the house. Later, your name becomes an increasingly frequent sound, rising up like smoke from circles of chatting guests. A scrum of the same two repeated syllables—Raza—buzzes in the air, expanding the longer you remain missing. Eventually, almost everyone has tried your number and checked with someone who might have seen you elsewhere. When you are nearly an hour late, your father takes my elbow and pulls me into the kitchen.
“Salim, do you know something?” he asks, standing under the cabinet where your mother used to store cereal. For a sliver of a moment, there you are, 13 years old, reaching for a cardboard box and swallowing a mouthful of its contents straight from the bag—something I had seen you do so many times after school. I kept your secret when Seema Aunty remarked about your lack of appetite at dinner.
“No, Rizwan Uncle,” I answer honestly and feel the worry bloom for the first time inside my own chest.
Before I can try to be helpful, Rizwan Uncle’s hand is on my shoulder, comforting even though he doesn’t intend it to be. He gently moves me aside and wades through the guests, calling, “Seema! Call Fizza. Wasn’t Raza going to pick her up?”
Seema Aunty does not respond before I walk out of the kitchen and find myself standing in the foyer. The corridor is narrower than I remember from four years ago. Coats hang on hooks along the wall, bloated and taking up too much space. The mass of outerwear absorbs the loudness of the party and I am alone.
I feel the lingering heat of a body against my back, as though you have just taken it off and put it around my shoulders.
I sift through the pile looking for my parka, but my fingers brush instead against old leather. They know instantly what it takes my mind longer to recognize. It is your jacket. In high school, you had worn it on as many days as the weather permitted, and even on some when it didn’t. The toffee brown is faded beige in the same places as always. I check whether anyone has joined me in the entryway before putting it on and opening the front door. I feel the lingering heat of a body against my back, as though you have just taken it off and put it around my shoulders.
Outside, it is the coldest November in Toronto since you left for university—since I last stood on this porch. I walk onto the driveway and look back at your parents’ house, dressed in twinkling lights for the festivities. In the other direction, our old middle school is visible from where I stand, separated by the street and a large field, green in the summer, but muted now. We sometimes raced to your doorstep, bounding across the grass after class. You started to lose more often toward the end of our final year when I gained a few inches above you. We grew and the house stayed the same size, sitting in this same place all of these years.
I walk down the street and inspect the road around the corner. There is no sign of the green Subaru Legacy Wagon, once your father’s and now yours. I have known the car as long as I have known you.
At 12 years old, I had no appreciation for the winter season. In my second year in Canada, I could not yet tell the difference between the airy winter sunlight and its heavier summer sibling. I only felt cold and dreaded the thought of the many lunch hours I would spend shivering outside. I stood counting the minutes until the bell would ring when I heard, “Come to jummah, Salim,” in a boy’s voice that, unlike mine, hadn’t yet started to break toward manhood.
My eyes were shut against chilly wind and remained stunned closed at the sound of my name. I was surprised that anyone had learned it by the end of my first week at a new school. There was a pressure against my arm, prompting me to look at who was speaking to me. The boy was wearing a hat pulled low over his forehead and a scarf wrapped over his nose and mouth. I could see only his large, round eyes—level with mine and the colour of tea before a splash of milk. He had his hand on my sleeve as though we were already friends. I couldn’t feel his palm or fingers through the thick of my clothes—only layers of fabric pushed closer to my body, almost warm.
“My dad’s parked over there,” he said, turning and gesturing to the half-visible parking lot obscured by the school building. I couldn’t see any cars next to the yellow buses—the kind I had not grown used to seeing outside of a picture book. “You should come with us.”
My father had brought me to Friday prayer a handful of times in Karachi, and never after we left. I hadn’t thought about a masjid in over a year and even then was imagining the immediate shelter of a heated vehicle rather than the walls of the house of Allah. Still, I welcomed the word, “jummah,” passing between us like a secret handshake.
I nodded, took a step forward, and let the boy lead me behind the school. He pulled his scarf and hat off on the short walk, revealing freshly cropped hair that seemed too short to be worn in the cold. A man with a matching neat haircut was sitting in the front of the car we approached, rubbing a cloth over the lenses of his glasses. When he saw us, he put them back on and smiled.
As soon as we had climbed into the back, the boy’s father greeted me brightly, “Assalamualaikum!”
“Walaikumassalam,” I returned easily, like a rhythm I knew how to complete, even though I had heard it seldom recently.
He continued in Urdu, asking me the things I had already grown tired of answering in English. How long in Canada? A little over a year. Where did we live? Ten minutes away in the apartment building by the community centre. Any siblings? No, just my mother and me. And yes, I was liking school.
The boy turned to me and mouthed, “sorry.” Sharp light pushed into the car from the window behind him, piercing his ear, making translucent skin glow yellow and bright red. His eyes remained in shadow, looking black although I knew they were brown. Their colour was constant and unmoving until he smiled, drawing lines at the corners of his eyes, somehow making them shine. I smiled back at him—my ears burning now, too.
At the masjid, we were surrounded by men and boys in familiar white topis with their pants rolled up above their ankles. Several of them came up to greet us, pleased to see the boy and his father again, and me, for the first time, by association. They made space for us in the rows they had already formed, and we, in turn, moved for those who came later. Each time, there was enough room for the next arrival. A place waiting for every person as though they had already been seen before walking through the door.
After prayer, when we had sifted through the racks in the foyer and collected our shoes, we were stopped outside the entrance by a friend of the boy’s father. The two men spoke while we waited. I could see their car from where we stood and noticed then that it was green. The colour was deep and mixed, not flattened even under the midday sun. I thought of a pond at night shrouding what lived there in dark teal and jade, saw the ripples run under the door handles, until a voice stilled them: “Raza, go wait in the car.”
As he took the keys from his father, the boy became you.
After our second jummah together, you invited me to the house where everything would happen for the rest of my childhood. I ate dinner that night with your family. Around the table, there was Hira, already attending university downtown while we were still in middle school, but kind enough to take an interest in me. Then Zaid, whose quick temper—that flashed and then was gone—I witnessed during that first meal together. And then you, youngest and beloved as was expected, yet with an aura of responsibility that seemed atypical to me as I watched you help clear the table.
Earlier, you had shown me the room you shared with Zaid. From the way each brother’s belongings remained confined to their side of the space, I could tell that you had both grown increasingly reluctant to share. Even on that initial visit, you told me that you would be moving into Hira’s room soon when she moved out to be closer to campus. Instead, she would stay and we would spend the next two years in that bedroom that was yours and Zaid’s, taking turns sprawled out on the mattress and leaning against the foot of your bed.
My thoughts were in the future, and the past was with me too, and then there was the fleeting present inside that glass rectangle. I was in charge of cutting it away so that it could be looked at later and become present again.
You would get Hira’s room after she got married. On the day of her baat pakki, when the upcoming union had been confirmed, you teased her with a pretend eviction notice. She threatened back that maybe she and Faisal should live at home after all. Everyone laughed and Rizwan Uncle remarked that it would have been a perfect moment for a photo. He asked if I would take a picture and entrusted me with the family camera once I agreed. I looked at all of you through the viewfinder, thinking of the print that may sit in an album one day. My thoughts were in the future, and the past was with me too, and then there was the fleeting present inside that glass rectangle. I was in charge of cutting it away so that it could be looked at later and become present again.
I walked around transfixed with the camera after I had done my duty. I learned later that you had been watching me when I thought you were busy with guests and chitchat. For my 15th birthday, you handed me a small, black point-and-shoot. It was all you could afford then, and you vowed, “I’ll get you a better one. And you’ll go to art school.”
I didn’t tell you that I was going to join Mehraz Uncle at his used car dealership after high school. I thanked you and left your house for the usual tired evening silence at home. My mother, who had run out of colloquialisms in her second language from a day of telemarketing, would be slumped on the couch, perhaps nodding off. I had never considered any goal other than finally letting her rest.
I had barely burned through my second roll of film when you brought me to the photography section at the public library and pulled books with me. I spent that entire first afternoon captured by only one volume from the pile we amassed. “We’ll have to come back,” you declared, establishing our frequent after school pattern for the better part of high school. Eventually, we exhausted the local branch’s supply, but I wanted to keep going, and you indulged me.
Your favourite was Sally Mann’s Deep South, a strange collection of landscapes from an artist known for her portraits. I had chosen it at random for its inaugural viewing. You were waiting that day, as you often did, while I scanned the shelves. I glanced over at you, and felt struck, as always, to see you without the activity that usually milled around you. Outside the library, you were team captain, or youth group leader, or class president. Here, you sat and met my gaze. Your hand was covering your mouth, but I knew you were smiling.
I brought the hardcover over to you. It was thin enough to be mistaken for a children’s story book. Its pages were dense and murky, leading us far into the lush of leaves and black of shadow. When we flipped to a photo of a clearing, I heard your breath catch in your throat when you noticed a brilliant orb deep in the background—haunting the image like a ghost, or watching it like God. You grabbed my hand and squeezed it in place of an exclamation, surprised to perceive the light that had been there all along. While we looked at the rest of the book, you let our woven fingers hang in the space between our chairs. When you finally looked up, you dropped my hand immediately. I followed your sightline. A woman in a shalwar kameez with a stroller and a toddler was browsing the stacks in front of us. She could have been one of your mother’s friends. Maybe a neighbour. A volunteer from the masjid. Or she could have been no one.
I also looked at pictures without you. Magazines that had somehow made their way into the house without a subscription and the free daily newspaper served my fascination. Old family photos didn’t occur to me until I found a box of them when my mother had asked me to retrieve something else. She couldn’t tell me how they had ended up in a sewing box in our storage closet. Most of them showed assembled family members on trips, or birthdays, or weddings. Others were portraits from mysterious ordinary days, the subject in unremarkable attire, in a room I couldn’t identify. There was one photo more cryptic than the rest. Two boys were in the foreground, their faces and bodies lit with flash and the rest of the image cast in an evening blue. They were in uniform with stern expressions to match, but looked just shy of old enough for soldiers. Their hands were clasped although they stood apart.
“Who’s this, Ammi?” I asked, bringing the photo to my mother.
“Hassan Mamoo.” I recognized him then. My mother’s brother who had famously gone to a prestigious military boarding school in Pakistan.
“How old is he here?”
“17. Maybe 16?”
“And the other boy?”
“Don’t know. A friend or a classmate.” Then, anticipating my question, she added, “They all did that. It was normal for them.”
A week before our high school graduation we were alone in your house for the first and only time. We came through the front door expecting some variation of the usual chorus: Seema Aunty’s eager salaam followed by the clatter of her saucer and teacup on the coffee table, Zaid complaining that you had taken his shoes, or hat, or watch without asking, the faintest sound of music from Hira’s room before she married and left, and, if he was home, Rizwan Uncle’s heavy footsteps rushing to the door, as though we were visitors he had been waiting to receive.
We busied ourselves with our shoelaces for as long as we could manage. Neither of us knew how to address the silence filling the hallway. It stood in the air like mothballs in an old suitcase, which somehow make it look more empty, spelling out that the family has long since been unpacked across continents.
“Let’s try them on,” you said eventually, referring to the ties in the thrift store paper bag by your feet. Half an hour and a bus ride earlier, I had watched you search for them, carefully feeling the fabric and studying labels, asking me to agree that we would never have found what we wanted at the mall. I let you choose for me, just as I had accepted one of Zaid’s old suits when you insisted that I wear one to the ceremony. “You can borrow a shirt,” you added going up the stairs, anticipating my excuse not to play dress up.
In your bedroom, you took your suit from behind the door, where it had hung, covered in plastic, since you had bought it. You were impatient to wear it, but more impatient to give your valedictorian speech, collect your diploma, and put that on the wall instead. I pictured it next to the budding vines Hira had painted along the doorframe when the room was hers, tracing the mural with my thumb. After years of announcing your plans to conquer the space as soon as she was gone, you hadn’t painted over them. I looked at the flowers and listened to the cloth drag against your skin, the clinking of the belt buckle as you fastened it, and finally the crinkle of the paper bag as you reached for the tie.
I searched for sameness in your face, but found only the changed, sharper line that now led from your cheekbone down to your neck.
“Here,” you handed me the second tie from the bag, took a shirt from your closet, and pressed it to my chest. “I’ll show you how to do it.” When I had done up all the buttons and slung the tie around my neck, we faced each other, and I watched you. I followed your hands making the knot, pursued the mole on your pinky through the loops. Once you were finished, you smoothed the silk between your lapels and, instead of walking out of the room to find a mirror, tilted your chin up toward me to ask my opinion.
I didn’t examine the colours or pattern like you wanted. Instead, I noticed the hair that had fallen over your eyes—still as big and brown as the first time I saw them. I had to look down at them now, standing taller than you. You pushed the strands back, your fingertips grazing the parting along the middle of your head. The haircut that used to be too trim for you to carve a path into it was gone. I searched for sameness in your face, but found only the changed, sharper line that now led from your cheekbone down to your neck. With the stiff white collar already making a mark on your skin, it was as though you had never worn the leather jacket lying across your bed. Suddenly, you were dressed to leave me and all I could think of was keeping you there.
My fingers moved from my own neck to yours, touching you like I never had before. I pulled your face toward mine, feeling the point of your jaw at the base of my hand. I closed my eyes, like clicking a shutter, and begged the world to freeze. But you slipped your fingers between my palm and your cheek, peeling me away. “Salim, wait,” you whispered. And then, with your forehead resting against mine, again you demanded, “Wait.” As though there was an answer for us. As though all we had to do was look forward to its arrival.
After graduation, working at the dealership slowly chewed up my hours and swallowed them. Through June and July, I rarely saw you outside my own mind. I pictured us still standing there in your room as we had at the start of the summer—statues with ties around their necks—as if my wish had been granted and time had turned to stone when I touched you. But the clocks had kept their pace and the day that you would leave for university drew near.
Finally, when August had grown thin enough to thread through a needle, you called me from the main floor of my apartment building. The night had been clotting for hours after sunset, hours after we would have usually seen each other. Through the phone speaker, I heard the car keys tangling with your voice, restless and excited, when you asked me to meet you downstairs. You spoke as soon as you saw me in the lobby, as though you were rushing to muffle a thought.
“Want to go for a drive?”
I could feel a twisting in your body as you said the words, making the ground roll under our feet. All of the thoughts I had held back flooded through me then like grains of sand through cracked glass. I was too afraid to ask if you meant what I hoped. But then you looked at me in a way that made my blood rush and erased everything else. In the calm, I heard your heart making a new sound—turning instead of beating. When I opened my mouth to answer you, instead of the torrent of questions, I heard only the steady hiss of a yes.
We sat together in the front of the car, puncturing the years-long tradition of the backseat. You were behind the wheel where Rizwan Uncle had been before and I was beside you in Seema Aunty’s usual spot. The interior felt damp like waiting for rain. When I tried to roll the window down, it stayed as if the humidity had glued it in place. But I knew it had been stuck shut for months. You let the air in from your side instead as you drove down the highway. I didn’t know or care which one. I trusted you to take us some place we could be together.
We barely spoke and couldn’t measure our time on the road with conversation. It could have been two hours or 20 minutes when you said you were thirsty and stopped at a gas station. I stayed in my seat while you went to the convenience store.
My fingers landed at the corner of my own eye, thinking of the grooves that marked the same place on your skin if even the hint of a smile touched your mouth.
Through the passenger side window, I watched you select your drink and make your way to the cashier. He looked like someone who would have blended in at one of Seema Aunty’s weekend affairs, chatting in Urdu with the other uncles. As you stood there talking to him, fluorescent ceiling light painted a bright edge along your body. I thought you may have been laughing as the white outline along your shoulders rose and fell. The car was parked too far away for me to see your features pull into the shape of the grin I knew well. My fingers landed at the corner of my own eye, thinking of the grooves that marked the same place on your skin if even the hint of a smile touched your mouth.
Your chosen bottle of soda sat on the counter between you and the man behind the register, growing warm. I imagined condensation speckling its plastic surface, thickening slowly like hair along your jaw after a shave. In the time you had spent inside, it seemed that the label should have turned slick and peeled off, fallen in to a pool that had dripped around the base. Had I been the one to fetch your drink, we would have already driven further into the night. But friendship was your habit and you spoke to this stranger as though it was all you had come to do. I became impatient, making a bet with myself about when I would walk into the store and summon you back, but all I did was wait.
When you eventually returned, I didn’t sense the change. You pulled out of the gas station. You must have gone the other way, but I didn’t notice for a while. I realized that you had decided to go back when we were already nearing our neighbourhood. Just as I began to feel desperate for an explanation, I remembered the store clerk. You must have already wondered what I wondered then. What would he have seen taking us in together? Boys like his own sons and nephews with dark hair, dark eyes, and bodies the colour of earth. With names he had heard before, that settled on his tongue with ease. Brothers, perhaps—one a little taller than the other—begrudgingly running an errand. Maybe convenient teenaged friends, tied together by time and place, out to roam the streets and spend another evening of which they had too many. Or he may have ventured nothing at all, nothing to pair and keep us fused. Every judgment somewhat true and, for that reason, also false. I felt the conclusions suspended above us, a sky of clouds with no final colour behind them. I knew you would drop me off at my apartment building and leave Toronto the next morning.
During your last year at university, we spoke only a handful of times, and didn’t see each other at all, but in March, you called and insisted that I meet your fiancée. I had never been sure whether to expect such news from you and, when it came, I didn’t know what to make of it. Even if it had been inevitable, your announcement seemed to be too early when we were freshly 21. You told me only that she was a business student you had met taking an elective course for your engineering degree. And that her name was Naila. I didn’t know if you kept the rest from me as an apology.
We agreed that you would pick me up at the dealership and the three of us would have dinner. When I went to the front office to meet you, I saw your back covered in a coat I hadn’t ever seen you wear. A strip of nape was visible above the collar. You had cut your hair short again like when we were boys.
“I heard there’s a used car salesman here who doesn’t own a car. Had to see him at work.” You turned around half-smiling at your own joke. The usual creases took their place by your temples even as you hesitated. For a moment, you seemed to search my face for permission to be familiar after our long separation. Then you changed your mind, abruptly lurched forward and pulled me into a hug. “Salaam.”
On our drive to meet Naila, you asked about people we knew. You kept trying even after I had little to say about anyone you brought up. “You know I don’t really see anyone anymore, Raza.” I had only been connected to everyone we knew through the masjid. And I couldn’t remember the last time I had prayed shoulder to shoulder with anyone.
I decided to forget that dinner with Naila before we even sat down in a booth with her. I was able to keep everything from leaving any lasting impression, except for this: in the middle of a sentence, without even needing to look at her, you lowered your hand to Naila’s restless fingers on the tabletop. You closed your hand over hers. Nervousness that I hadn’t noticed before instantly loosened its hold on her body. I knew then how you had managed to be missing from my life. There was a door inside you. You had walked through it and loved Naila.
I tried to look at her then as you saw her, heard for the first time the trace of a song in her soft voice. She was hidden almost entirely behind long, black hair when she looked down, timid when speaking about herself. But now, her face was radiant when she met my eyes to ask me a question. You must have thought she was beautiful. In my own perception—because it was the only matter in which I still had any say—I couldn’t allow her to be quite beautiful enough for you.
A drumbeat from your parents’ house startles me as I stand on the corner willing your headlights to emerge from the quiet of the neighbourhood. I decide to turn back, hoping the sounds of music mean you have finally called and put everyone at ease. I imagine you apologizing for your absence, first to Rizwan Uncle: Sorry, Baba. It took forever to find Fizza Aunty’s new place. 15 minutes. Don’t let anyone leave. To the party next: I’m so sorry, everybody. I tried to get the Raza from Manor Road to fill in, but it turns out this is the kind of thing where you have to submit the original. And then I wish for you to turn your attention to me, but can’t imagine what you would say.
When I enter the living room again, there are girls sitting by Naila’s feet singing old marriage songs and playing dhol. I know there is no good news yet when I look at Naila’s lap. She is twisting her fingers, sliding rings on and off, wrenching her hands to match the wringing in her mind—the same fidgeting you soothed on the day that you introduced us. I watch her for a few minutes until I hear a commotion at the entrance of the house. The news swells through the throng of people and breaks into pieces when it reaches me. An accident. Hit by a driver making a bad left turn. Pins dig into my chest until I see you making your way through the crowd, unharmed. You repeat assurances to everyone in the room, “I’m okay. I’m okay. Yes, really. Alhamdhulillah, not even a scratch.” Naila rushes past me to join you in the hallway. The sight of the couple finally together alleviates everyone’s distress over your delay. I try to let it comfort the other reason that has stung the back of my throat all night.
Later, I overhear you tell someone, “The car’s gone. Completely wrecked.” I stop listening, afraid that anything further will crumple it in my memory. In my mind, I undo the ruin of the car and place it safely back into that August four years ago. I can see it standing at the gas station with us framed inside its windshield. We are cloaked in the darkness inside the car. Our bodies become black and wooly, like the moss and bark from the photograph in that slim hardback. I imagine our faces shining, spreading luminous like the sun in that clearing until the light is all I can see—light that has been there all along with no before and no after, no moment where you will turn to go back.
When I leave my thoughts and open my eyes, I am back in your parents’ house. I realize I am still wearing your jacket and leave without taking it off.
