The Royal Abduls Read online

  She had a decent living situation, her brother and his family nearby, and a lab full of colleagues with shared knowledge. But she couldn’t get used to being around so many people after seven years tracking between a quiet state university and the mountain field site; in both places she was left very much to herself. In California, she’d had Matt and a few—well, two—good friends. But mostly she kept to herself, out of the fray of graduate school politics: identity politics, sexual politics, even political politics held no interest for her. She liked her work—indeed her mother, Matt, her advisors, and even Mo had at one time or another accused her of being a workaholic—and wanted to get it done with a minimal amount of schmoozing along the way.

  She tried to prepare herself for the transition from the West Coast to DC by exchanging her flannel shirts and Timberlands for button-up shirts and canvas sneakers, by cutting her too-long hair. She vowed to quit smoking and swearing, and to learn to be nice, DC polite; she’d be a city girl and get along with people. So far she was smoking more than ever, and she hadn’t made a single friend.

  That first night at the Cheetah and Monkey, everyone drank too much, suggesting the anxiety that Amina would soon learn Chris nurtured in all his underlings. The food seemed all the same, variations on tandoori and greasy orange-colored sauce. A fat colleague with a pencil-thin mustache leaned too close to Amina after the rice pudding. He had been very nice to her in the first days, helping to set up her computer and showing her how the samples were organized, but now he was very drunk.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you Arab or Pakistani or what?”

  “I’m Indian.” I’m American is what she should have said, but she couldn’t stand going through that dance at the moment. First night out with your new coworkers, she reminded herself. Be DC polite.

  “Oh! Like this restaurant!” He seemed pleased by this. “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  He stared some more. “Are you a lesbian?”

  “Not currently.” She started to get to her feet, anxious to get away from the personal turn he had taken.

  “Have I offended you in some way?” His words were slurred and he leaned into her chair, pinning her coat beneath his arm. His head hovered somewhere around the level of her chest.

  She shook her head, standing and pulling her coat out without apology. Her head swam a little from all the wine. She felt lonely for Matt, for anyone friendly, for someone who knew her and didn’t have to ask what she was as though she herself was some species of insect. To always be foreign to some seemed suddenly too cruel, and she was exhausted. And drunk, she reminded herself, as she waved a vague goodbye.

  “Amina,” Chris called out from across the table, noticing her for the first time all evening. He sat too close to Anjali, who had been in the thick of the conversation all night. “Welcome to Washington, DC. I hope you realize how lucky you are.”

  “Exactly what I was just thinking,” she said.

  On her second visit to the Cheetah and Monkey, Amina and Omar were seated at a table for two under the canopy of a Rajasthani tent. She wore a sequined tunic that her mother had given her, and Omar wore his tiger T-shirt. It was very romantic, and her nephew looked thrilled.

  Omar, it turned out, had been researching more than Indian royal families. Instead of Amina giving him handy tips on how to eat, the meal consisted of her saying “I don’t know” in response to questions about what different Hindi words meant, and where exactly places like Mahabalapurim and Maharashtra were, and how many dishes you were supposed to order for a festive versus a family meal.

  After they had finished struggling with the menu, he started pointing at things around the room and asking what they were. The Cheetah and Monkey, she then realized, was not really an Indian restaurant at all, but rather an imitation of a nineteenth-century colonial idea of what an Indian restaurant was. There were old, antique-y artifacts all over the place, and they all probably had a use at some point, but she didn’t know what they were. They finally asked the waiter, who was about seventeen, sexy, and quite probably Pakistani.

  “Can you tell me, what is that?” Omar asked, pointing. His accent was muted but still present. He was pointing at a wooden piece with lotus shapes cut out of it.

  “Umm.” The sexy waiter looked puzzled and sucked his teeth. “A mold?” he suggested. “For baking things?”

  “I thought people didn’t use ovens in India?” Omar asked. He had a real worried look on his face, like he’d gotten something wrong on a test.

  “Yeah, that’s actually sort of true.” The waiter nodded, looking surprised to discover this fact in his head. “Don’t know, kid. There’s lots of stuff here, you know what I mean?”

  Omar nodded like this was a great and portentous truth, and the waiter exited with a look of relief.

  Amina and Omar both practiced eating with their hands, which made for some amusing moments. Amina gave up at the galub jamun, which was gooey with sugar syrup, but Omar picked those up too, and licked his fingers afterward. But the conversation lagged once Omar realized she didn’t have all the answers to his Indian trivia questions. He even managed to discuss cricket with the waiter while Amina paid the bill, but the waiter didn’t seem to know much more about the game than Amina did.

  Back at her apartment, Omar was quiet. He spent a lot of time looking around at her things—which were few and vaguely ethnic in origin, relics and gifts culled from her time in graduate school alongside the decorative items that her mother insisted on periodically giving her in hopes that she would develop an interest in interior design. She hadn’t. She had lived with Matt in California, when she wasn’t at the field site, in his attic apartment close to the university. Most of their accumulated possessions had stayed with him.

  She still had a couple of unpacked boxes but mostly, left on her own, she tended toward a minimalist ethos. She didn’t have much that was really Indian, and that seemed to be a let-down, because Omar asked again if she had been to India. She said yes, but it was a long time ago, and he sat down to watch TV again in something like defeat.

  Whatever Omar was looking for, his need was real. She felt a twinge of guilt about the cricket match, but then she told herself to forget it; he’d be happier anywhere than with her. In bed, she fretted for an hour or two, angry with herself for not showing him a better time. Tomorrow, she told herself, tomorrow; and finally, she slept.

  5.

  Amina forgot to set her alarm, and the next morning she woke late to find Omar glued to the TV, watching Johnny Quest on the Cartoon Network in Spider-Man pajamas. Johnny’s sidekick was an Indian boy with a ruby on his turban. She’d forgotten that detail, but now she remembered how Mo used to love the show when they were kids. Back then, Johnny’s sidekick was the only Indian they saw besides themselves and their relentlessly assimilating parents.

  She made coffee for herself and hot chocolate for Omar, and they sat on her sad futon to watch the thrilling conclusion. She noticed he was holding something silver in his lap and she leaned in to take a closer look.

  He held it up helpfully. It was the knife from India.

  “What are you doing with that?” She stopped herself from warning him that it wasn’t a toy.

  “I just like it,” he said. “I like to have it with me.”

  She assumed this had something to do with his emperor-of-India familial fantasy and decided to change the subject.

  “Are you excited to go over to Davy’s?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just something Mom set up.”

  “Oh. Does that mean you don’t like to go over there?”

  He shrugged again. He’d never mentioned any friends to her, and from what she’d seen in his classroom, he didn’t have many. But she wasn’t going to probe him on what was probably a sensitive subject.

  After serving a pathetic breakfast of cold cereal and warm juice, she slipped into old jeans and a pair of sneakers
and drove Omar over to Davy’s house. This turned out to be a largish townhouse on the northern edge of Georgetown, painted in patriotic blue and red. Amina kept the car running and let Omar out. He walked slowly to the door like he was going to his execution, never once looking back to her. A woman answered the door, a sleek little creature in calf-colored pants and a soft sweater.

  “Very nice to see you, Mrs. Madsen,” she heard Omar say in a ringing Johnny Quest–sidekick accent. Amina felt like yelling at him to stop, and she hated herself for it. Mrs. Madsen waved to her with a shiny smile and she waved back. Poor Omar, she thought, but she drove away anyway.

  The afternoon dragged; she found it almost impossible to concentrate on grasshoppers. Instead, she spent two hours lying on her bed in a frozen state that resembled a coma, thinking of Matt.

  He had written to her recently, telling her news of the department, the status of his thesis, the weather. It was sweet of him to send an actual letter in addition to the occasional emails they exchanged. They had met in her first week of graduate school; they had a class together, a core course that he had dropped the previous year. This, she would soon learn, was only the tiniest echo of a larger pattern: he had trouble finishing things. He had started out two years ahead of her, but was now three years behind, frozen in a thesis-writing stasis that showed no signs of abating.

  He had chestnut hair and startlingly pale skin and large, rough hands and a high, soft voice that soothed her and complemented her own brusqueness. It seemed reasonable to him to suggest that they marry and start having kids before there was any sign that he was nearing the end of his study. When she was applying for jobs, he’d encouraged her by promising he’d be by her side. But when she was awarded the postdoc, he balked, suggesting they marry first. They argued until Amina finally admitted she wanted the postdoc more than she wanted children. “Then how can I go with you?” he countered, and she didn’t know how to answer that.

  After 9/11, when she had thought for hours that Mo might be dead, and as the small towns around them raised their proud American flags, she felt like her time in California was up. She needed to return to the real world, to know her brother and be with people who looked like her. She left for this new world with no idea of how lonely it would be.

  She reread Matt’s letter, wondering for the thousandth time if she’d made a mistake. She knew her parents were puzzled—and her friends in California were amazed—that she’d left a perfectly reasonable mate at her age. Her mother in particular was filled with what seemed to be a personal sense of indignation, as though Amina had left her and not Matt. This seemed a little rich to Amina, after all the years that her mother had chided her for staying with a man who did not marry her. To everyone, it looked like she had chosen her career over love, when really it was so much more complicated than that.

  At three-thirty, she roused herself and sat at the computer again. The paper was due on Monday, and she needed to not just finish it up, but smarten it up. Right now it read like a tax document. There was no evidence of her own interest and capability, or of Chris’s vast experience, just a droning recitation of facts.

  This wasn’t the kind of science she had wanted to do, not the kind she had set off to grad school to do. The best days had been in the field, away from people. Her earlier papers had expressed the transfixion she had felt; they had a buoyancy that brought them attention. Now that she was stuck in a lab all the time, analyzing instead of finding, retrieving, discovering, the light had gone out in her work.

  Amina and Omar survived the second night watching old movies and eating popcorn, reclining together in their pajamas against all the pillows in the house on the folded-out futon. She asked him about his day at the Madsens’, but he didn’t say much. He’d appeared at the door instantly when she pulled the car up and honked, like he’d been waiting for her, which she supposed said everything she needed to know.

  They watched The Philadelphia Story, which she owned because it was Matt’s favorite movie and he’d given her the DVD when she left. Omar showed his good taste by laughing and seeming awestruck at the same time. His eyes were wide at the horseback riding in formal clothes and the swimming pool with dressing rooms, and Katharine Hepburn’s sculpted Egyptian goddess dress at the ball the night before the wedding. Amina loved that Omar appreciated it, this relic of an old America, an America where quick wits were like money and even actors projected intelligence and learning. She wondered whether for him, as it did for her, such social accomplishment seemed more tantalizing than beauty. She let him stay up until midnight, and they found a Humphrey Bogart movie playing on Bravo.

  Sunday morning she took him to brunch—that at least was a new word for him—at a restaurant near her apartment. He had pancakes and she ate a farmer’s scramble that made her too full when combined with approximately six cups of black coffee. In spite of the agonized look on his face—which she chose not to interpret as pleading—she dropped him off at the Madsens’ again around noon so she could get to work.

  Back at home, she sat at her desk determined not to make a repeat of the waste of the day before. She juggled paragraphs, made notes for the introduction, and checked citations. Chris had done the early research, compiling DNA proof that suggested they had a bona fide stable hybrid zone on their hands. She planned to pick up the data analysis where he had left off, adding in some of the perspective she’d brought with her from California, to try to balance submission to his authority and precedence with her desire to put in more of her own ideas.

  She thought he was wrong, for instance, about what kind of hybrid zone it was; he thought that the physical environment was the most important factor in how these insects behaved, while she found it more interesting to look at socially constrained tension zones. A paper had recently been published in one of the major journals about deviant female behavior in simians. Some hybrid female baboons seemed to lack the genetic predisposition to be herded in harems by nonhybrid hamadryas males. They had to be constantly reminded of their social duties, and the minute a male stopped being vigilant, they ceased appropriate behavior. The work moved on from the genetics results into much more interesting social inquiry about the implications of those results.

  This was what intrigued her, the type of research that had set her mind afire in the field. It felt like cheating to ignore what was obviously the most interesting direction.

  But this was not her job now. She needed to concentrate. She sat in her chair in a slouch and chewed on the remnants of her fingernails, trying not to smoke. The ends of her hair fell forward in her face and she brushed it away without bothering to do anything to fix it. She stared at the screen for forty minutes before she got up and took a shower. She considered plucking her eyebrows. She wondered if Anjali plucked hers. She made more coffee and sat down again.

  Finally, she picked up the phone and called her father.

  “Dad,” she said, “it’s Amina.”

  “I know it is you,” he scolded her, in what she now thought of as Omar’s accent.

  “And I knew that you knew,” she said to annoy him. “Dad, I want to talk to you about Omar.”

  “What about my grandchild? How is the boy?”

  “Has he been asking you about India a lot?”

  She could hear her father exhale. “Asking, I don’t know.”

  “But you’re telling, and he’s listening?”

  “Amina, I am telling him because he wants to know, even if he does not ask. What does Mohammed tell him? Nothing.”

  “You never told us much either. I’m just worried about him, that’s all. He’s making up stories about being from a royal family and talking like a cartoon.”

  “A cartoon?”

  “I mean he’s acting like he comes from an eighteenth-century Indian family, like something he read in a book.”

  “First you say cartoon, now you say something in history?”

  “Dad,” she said.

  She could almost see him shrug. “The boy is curiou
s; he finds what he can. You could help him.”

  “What do I know about India?”

  “Don’t be thick-headed. He wants more than facts.”

  She hung up the phone troubled. I am not a people person, she thought. She preferred animals, or insects, or just plain trees, any trees.

  Except Omar. She liked Omar. And today she had abandoned him. Those hours when she hadn’t known where Mo or Marcy or Omar were or if they had been where the plane had crashed or if she would ever know her nephew, the realization that she might have lost them had led her to leave Matt behind and move here. So what the fuck was she doing?

  Amina saved her document and got up from the desk. She went to her closet and found a newer pair of jeans and a nice pair of loafers, and a clean, unwrinkled turquoise T-shirt and smoothed her damp hair with her fingers, praying it would stay flat. She examined herself in the mirror for an extra moment: her thick black hair, her average body, her medium-brown skin, never fair enough for her mother. Her chin was long, and the end of her nose tipped just slightly downward. She wondered what Mrs. Madsen saw when she looked at Amina, and she hated herself for wondering.

  She left the paper as it was, turning off the computer. She got in her car and drove to Davy’s house.

  Mrs. Madsen answered the door, looking taken aback.

  “I’m sorry to come by without calling,” Amina said, “but I have to pick up Omar.”

  “Omar!” Mrs. Madsen called in one direction. She turned back to Amina with a perfect smile, showing her even white teeth. “Is there a problem?”