The Royal Abduls Read online

  “No, not at all. I just realized there was someplace I have to take him.”

  The woman nodded, but looked like she was waiting for Amina to say something more. They stood uncomfortably for another minute. “Davy!” Mrs. Madsen called again. “Marcy’s told me so much about you,” she finally said to Amina.

  “Really?” Amina said.

  Mrs. Madsen smiled at her again, with an ingratiating tilt of her head. “We’re so happy to have people like Omar in our life. And you. You’re a scientist, Davy said?”

  Amina nodded. From a doorway that was emitting loud TV noises, a boy emerged—a largish-for-twelve, sandy-haired boy who was, Amina realized, the towel-head culprit from science day. Omar followed, his head down, but his chin snapped up when he saw her standing there.

  “It’s very unusual, isn’t it?” Mrs. Madsen continued. “I mean, for a woman of your faith.” Amina gave her a blank stare, puzzled for a second. “I know how hard it is for Muslim women,” Davy’s mom added.

  Ah. The narrative clicked in for Amina; she was the oppressed and Mrs. Madsen wanted to be the righteous sympathizer. This was what Mrs. Madsen saw when she looked at her.

  “Our family is not exactly part of the Taliban.” Amina said, guessing that Mrs. Madsen hadn’t met Mo yet. “And Omar and I have to go.”

  Her nephew came and stood beside her with a confused look. She said, “We have to get to the cricket match!” and his face lit up.

  “Cricket?” Mrs. Madsen said behind them.

  Amina turned and said, not without sarcasm, “It’s the game of our people.” She marched Omar out to the car.

  6.

  By the time they arrived at the playing field, it was mid-afternoon. The field was out in Bethesda, reminding Amina yet again of the odd multiplicity of DC, the way it was no state and yet many states, one city connected without borders to many others.

  The cricket pitch was surprisingly crowded. There were cars parked in the lot and up on the grass at odd angles, and as they got out of her Honda she could see a crowd in the bleachers, the occasional Sikh turban or embroidered skull cap floating on top like florid cake decorations.

  They walked up to the sidelines, and she bought Cokes at the snack stand and then found seats, high up in a corner. She had done some research, and it turned out that cricket matches lasted forever. A test match, which this was, was an abbreviated version, narrowed down to three days. She thought she understood why it hadn’t caught on in the US—what TV station would devote three entire days to one match?

  Omar seemed bright and alert, so she started to tell him things without him asking. She defined wicket, googly, and century. She made fun of the white outfits. She picked people out of the crowd and made fun of the clothes they were wearing, too. Omar remained silent but attentive. Just as Amina had exhausted her store of information and insults, Anjali appeared.

  “Hey!” Anjali said, smiling as she climbed the risers, heading straight for them. “I’m glad you made it.”

  She was showing less skin than usual, in a long tunic over jeans, with beaded, tasseled Moroccan slippers. Her hair was in two braids, and she had a jet bindi between her eyes. Omar sat up straight.

  Amina was almost relieved to see her. “This is my nephew, Omar.”

  He held out a hand and Anjali shook it, laughing.

  “So you’re the cricket fan, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been to a match before?”

  He wagged his head from side to side. Anjali laughed again.

  “In India, did you know, moving your head like that can mean yes?” She was teasing him, and he was delighted.

  “Is that really true?” He said this with just the hint of an accent, like her clothing had set a precedent.

  “Yep. Hey, my brother is on the team—you want to meet him later?”

  Omar nodded, this time smiling.

  “Thanks,” Amina said to Anjali over his head.

  “No problem.” Anjali flashed her fetching smile again and left.

  The match went into the evening. Amina bought snacks from the kebab cart and extra coffee for herself. Anjali came and went. Omar brightened whenever she was near. It was a sunny, not-too-humid fall day—a perfect day—and Amina relaxed, enjoying the sun on her skin. She felt comfortable in the crowd, and this surprised and pleased her; she told herself it was the contrast with working at home alone all the time.

  Omar spent a lot of time looking around him, being sure to clap his hands when others did. Anjali had pointed out which was her brother’s team, and he rooted for them like a die-hard fan, jeering at the other side with utter loyalty. Anjali’s brother was tall and turbaned. Amina hadn’t realized Anjali was Sikh—why would she have?—and had a hard time imagining her in her hipster jeans at a family dinner with the bearded man on the field.

  Around five o’clock, Anjali reappeared with ice cream bars. They sat together and watched as a batsman headed toward a century—a hundred runs—then cheered as Anjali’s brother caught him out just before he reached the mark. The next batsman stepped to the plate, and Anjali turned and looked at Amina over Omar’s head.

  “Amina,” she asked, “where did you go to grad school?”

  “California.”

  “Did you like it?”

  Amina paused, considering how to answer. “Like it? No. I did not like graduate school.”

  “Why not?”

  She could tell Anjali that her first advisor had wanted her to sleep with him and she’d had to change to another. She could explain how the woman she’d called her best friend had begun sleeping with Amina’s ex-advisor. That no one would help Amina at all, except Matt, and when it came time for grants every year, she’d always had to apply on her own. That all in all she’d just been relieved as hell that they conferred the degree on her in the end, which they mostly had to do because against all odds, she’d had her name on an article published in Evolution, which had attracted some attention. But why go into it with someone who had already gone over to the dark side?

  “I didn’t seem to fit in,” she said in curt summary.

  Anjali nodded. Amina noticed that the bindi was loose on her forehead.

  “Yeah,” Anjali said, looking down, her voice almost shy, “I don’t feel like I fit in with our department, either.”

  “You seem to do okay,” Amina said.

  Anjali looked up at her and met her eyes, the edges of her mouth turned down and vulnerable. “I do?” she said. “I didn’t think so.”

  Before Amina could say anything, Omar suddenly reached up to Anjali’s face and pressed the bindi into her forehead.

  “Your third eye was crooked,” he said, in his finest Apu voice.

  “Thanks, Omar,” Anjali said, putting an arm around him and tickling his ribs. The batsman was called out, and the teams switched sides.

  When the match ended for the day, Anjali came to find them again.

  “Let’s go meet my brother!” she said to Omar. They led the way for Amina, hand in hand, toward where the players were milling about on the edge of the field, shaking hands with each other and greeting friends and family as they arrived from the stands.

  Anjali walked right up and introduced them to Prakash as he loaded up a blue duffel bag. He had a stern mouth and dreamy eyes over a trim beard. He bent over to take Omar’s compliments, a giant over a bean sprout, before Anjali hustled Omar off to meet some of the other players.

  Prakash and Amina shook hands and he said hello in a deep, smooth voice that made the back of her neck tickle a little.

  “What do you do when you’re not playing cricket?” she asked.

  “I run a bookstore,” he said.

  She wasn’t sure what to say to that. “I’m a biologist.”

  “Then you must read a lot of books.”

  “Not really,” Amina said, then regretted it. “I mean, not so much anymore, now that I’m out of grad school. I learned to hate them there.”

  He actu
ally picked up on her ironic tone and answered back in kind. “You might learn to love them again in my bookstore.” He produced a business card and she took it in silence.

  Where was Omar?

  “You can at least give it a try,” Prakash said.

  “What?” Amina asked.

  “My store. It’s near the Mall, easy to find.”

  “Oh. Thanks, but—”

  Omar ran up to show her a ball he’d been given, his voice gushing with excitement. Prakash waved, his silver bracelet flashing in the late sun, and left before she could say anything else. Her hands were sweating and had a slight shake as she took Omar’s ball in hand and admired it.

  “Amina-Auntie, it was so much fun, don’t you think?” His accent she was now used to, but where had he picked up the auntie?

  “That’s chachi, to you, Indian boy,” she teased, giving him the Hindi term. He looked surprised.

  7.

  On Monday, Amina dropped Omar off at school before work. Marcy and Mo were due back in the afternoon, and he could take the school bus home as usual. He exited the car with his backpack, saying thank you and goodbye in one breath, and she felt pleased with herself for having survived it all unscathed.

  At the lab, she handed in her draft, and everyone else contributed their sections, and then they all waited to see what Chris would demand in the way of revision. There was a kind of hush as the week began, a calm before the storm; no one expected that he would like the work they had done. She tried to concentrate on other things.

  In the middle of the week she was called to the phone in the common space outside her office. She was puzzled about who it could be and more flabbergasted still to discover that it was Anjali’s brother, Prakash. After a shocked silence she hoped had not lasted too long, she recovered.

  “How did you get my number?” she asked.

  “My sister works there, remember? The number is the same.”

  “Ah.” Her cheeks were hot, and she let her hair fall forward and surround her face. She was not going to date him. She was not.

  “So.” He seemed very patient.

  “So?” She glanced around to see if anyone was listening.

  “Aren’t you wondering why I’ve telephoned?”

  “I am,” she said. She looked down and noticed that the laces on one of her sneakers were untied.

  “It’s only that I was thinking,” he began, his deep voice slowing down, “that Omar might like to learn how to play cricket. And I lead a kind of informal group of kids that gets together to practice on weekends. Maybe you’d like to bring him this Saturday.”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Omar’s not mine. I mean, he’s just my nephew.”

  There was a pause. “Scientists are funny people.”

  She giggled a little in spite of herself. “I guess I can bring him sometime. I’ll call his parents and ask about this Saturday.”

  “Good,” Prakash said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “And then sometime maybe we can go to lunch,” he said.

  “Okay.” The word just came out, before she could think.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. But not this week, because I’m still working on—”

  “The report, yes, I know. Anjali seems concerned about it as well.”

  “Scientists are funny people,” she said. She hung up and then realized, mortified, that she had a date.

  She phoned to ask if she could take Omar to the cricket practice, and Marcy said that she’d ask Mo if he wanted to go too. After three emails and a series of voicemail messages, it was finally determined that Mo was, as always, too busy.

  Mo was waiting with Omar at the door when she arrived at their house wearing sweatpants and Reeboks. He looked tired, and didn’t invite Amina in.

  Omar didn’t seem to mind that his dad wasn’t coming. He was wearing a very large Redskins jersey—typical of Mo not to point out the ironies therein—and new sneakers, and his feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

  “Thank your aunt Amina,” Mo told him.

  “Thank you for taking me to play cricket, Chachi,” Omar said.

  Mo looked sidelong at Amina, his eyes narrowed. Just when Amina thought he was going to ask where Omar had learned to call her that, he took a step back and put the door between himself and Omar. “What time will you be back?”

  Amina shrugged. “A few hours? I’ll call.”

  She worried about her brother; they were too much alike in their willingness to immerse themselves in work and forget about more human things. Their father was always working, with their mother’s constant support, and they seemed to have absorbed his work ethic, each in their own way. Even during their trip to Florida, Marcy had confessed to Amina, Mo had kept in constant contact with the office. His only concession to leisure was to read the entire paper every morning on the beach while she swam.

  At the field, Prakash was readily visible in a turban, black training pants with white stripes, and a fitted Real Madrid soccer jersey. Amina had to admit to herself that he looked pretty sexy. He took Omar and introduced him to the other kids—a racially mixed, unathletic-looking crew dressed in clothing from assorted sports other than cricket: football, basketball, baseball, dodgeball.

  Amina stretched out on the grass with a genetics journal and a notebook. It was an unusually warm day, and the ground was dry and soft. The kids practiced throwing and batting in pairs, and then worked together as a group on some drills. Omar seemed to be doing fine, though he was, as usual, the embodiment of seriousness. There was something relaxing about listening to children play. She even closed her eyes, half listening as Prakash offered orders and explanations in a voice that somehow sounded familiar.

  During the break, Prakash handed out drinks and oranges, and soon Omar trotted over to her.

  “Don’t you want some Gatorade?” she asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “How is it, the cricket?”

  He smiled a little. “Did you see me pitch? Prakash said my googly has potential.”

  She laughed. “That sounds good.”

  “Amina,” he asked, “I mean, Chachi?”

  “Yes?”

  “What does desi mean? All the boys were talking and they asked if I was sure I’m a desi. Am I?”

  “Oh.” Amina sat up. “Yep, kid, you are. It just means India: from India.”

  “Like born in India?”

  “Not necessarily. I mean, I’m no authority. But I think it just means that you are of Indian heritage, and that we definitely are.”

  “Even though we aren’t Hindi?”

  “Hindu. And yes, no matter what religion we are, your grandparents still came from India, and so did their parents and so on from that.”

  Omar looked relieved. “That’s what I thought.”

  When practice was over, she knew she should thank Prakash, as Omar’s resident parent, but she was nervous that he would ask about lunch again. She ran her hands through her hair, pushing it back behind her ears, and walked over at what she hoped looked like a casual pace. She offered her appreciations, and he thanked her in return, his deep brown eyes meeting hers and holding there until she blushed and looked down.

  “I would still like to get that lunch, Amina.”

  She hedged, aware that at that exact moment he was very handsome. Very handsome, with a smile that flashed like a warning.

  “I’m still working on that report,” she said. “But maybe I’ll see you at the next practice.”

  He looked skeptical, rightly so; she waved her journal and notebook in the air as if she was proffering evidence. She didn’t want to seem rude, but how could she date this man? He was too sweet and normal; he was Sikh; he played cricket. And she was in no condition to be in a relationship; hadn’t everything with Matt only proved that she was not the right lover for this kind of man?

  In the car, Omar did seem happier than usual, bouncing in his seat as he chose the radio station he liked. She felt
buoyant as well, her heart skipping a little as she went over the interaction with Prakash.

  “Maybe your dad can take you next time,” she said.

  “Dad has a lot of work,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  She nodded.

  “So does Mom,” he offered, in fairness.

  “I’ll take you when they can’t, how about that?” she said. She tried to study him and drive at the same time, but every time she looked over at him, he was already looking directly at her with his air of expectation. Was there something more she should say?

  Her own strategy, as a child, had been brute endurance. She had always done what everyone asked of her, but with her eyes fixed firmly on escape from her mother’s antifeminist expectations. To her mother she was ever the disappointment, an average-looking girl who would not grow up to be a beauty and who was too smart for her own good. She had Mo as her companion—and then Marcy when they started, and along the way assorted geek friends whom she was bonded to more out of solidarity than affinity.

  Some people looked back on childhood as a perfect time, the very locus of shelter and comfort and contentment. Amina remembered it now with an almost claustrophobic feeling, as a time of helplessness, a time when she had been without the power to change her own circumstance.

  This was the feeling she thought she recognized in Omar. And she didn’t know how to help him. Cricket was a start, but it wasn’t enough.

  8.

  In reality, the report had been revised in an end-of-week frenzy, and the lab was now focused on preparing a new proposal for a grant Chris had decided—unilaterally and with ten days to the deadline—they should apply for. The grant was not to fund a presence at the field site, but instead to hire more analysts to pore through genetic data. Amina could see the writing on the wall: more DNA sequencing, less real-world investigation.

  Charts were being finalized and contributions sorted. Chris demanded her draft of a preliminary report on her progress even before she’d gotten into her office on Monday morning.