The Long Sweep of History

Prehistory and the Vedic Era

It was during the unusually warm autumn of 1997 – my sophomore year as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago – that I first met her. Autumn in Chicago is, as far as I’m concerned, the most perfect season to be found anywhere in the world: the air is crisp, the evenings are long, the breezes blow inward from the lake and drench the nearby neighborhoods in the pleasant smell of freshwater before the long freeze of winter. We stumbled into the same intermediate Spanish conversation class together, both of us well-versed in the formulaic foundations of high-school Spanish classes, able to conjugate verbs and ably describe trips to Mexican grocery stores that we never visited.

My first year of college had passed in a blur of sex and graffiti and hip-hop concerts at out-of-the-way venues, the sort of dizzying urban experience that I had wanted when I chose to attend college on the south side of Chicago. I had done well enough in my freshman classes to pass them all, though not well enough to prevent my academic counselor from suggesting to me that there wasn’t any shame in accepting the fact that I wasn’t necessarily the right fit for a prestigious school like the University of Chicago.

Her snidely elitist comment was all the motivation that I required to decide to dedicate myself more fully to my studies, and I entered my sophomore year determined to make her eat her words regarding my academic abilities. This commitment to excellence, of course, lasted exactly as long as it took to became entangled in the turbulent relationship that I found when I first spoke with the girl from Spanish class.

Colonization

Yo soy mujer. Y tú?

Yo soy hombre. No soy mujer. Qué tipo de comida te gusta?

A mí me gusta… tacos.

De verás? Te gustan tacos?

No. I… uh… No me gustan tacos.

“I don’t know why I said that,” she blurted out, her light brown face flushing red with embarrassment.

I shrugged. “It’s just a practice conversation. It doesn’t actually mean anything. You could tell me that you liked eating glass and the professor wouldn’t mind as long as you conjugated your verbs properly.”

She looked at me and smiled. “You’re right.”

I returned her smile. “First time for everything.”

“Do you find that works?”

“What?”

“The false modesty,” she answered as she twirled of lock of her curly black on her left index finger. “The self-deprecation approach to picking up college girls.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to work on the wealthy widow demographic, so I decided to give it a shot with a less cynical target audience. So,” I continued, my stomach clenched tightly with anxiety, “is it working?”

She chuckled gently. “It might be,” she replied. “Don’t get ahead of yourself now. You were doing so well before – there’s no need to jump the gun.”

I nodded. “I gotta admit, though: I’m doubtful that we could ever move beyond the problems that have come up during our first conversation.”

She knitted her eyebrows in confusion. “What problems?”

“Well, I already know that you have a loose relationship with the truth. We’ve just started speaking and already you’ve lied to me.”

“When?”

“Oh, like that whole I like tacos ruse isn’t going to be a metaphor for all of our future interactions. How will I ever know when you’re telling the truth and when you’re reverting back to your old habits?”

“That’s a good point,” she concurred, nodding her head seriously. “If I can lie about tacos, I can lie about pretty much any food. First she lied about tacos, and you said nothing, because you’re not Mexican. Then she lied about pasta, and again you said nothing, because you’re not Italian. Wait, are you Italian?”

I shook my head.

“What are you, then?”

“Ah, the quintessential American question,” I smiled. “What am I? Ukrainian, I guess, though not really. I’m… nothing, really. A mutt. I’m white.”

“So you won’t get offended until I lie about, what? A cheese sandwich? Noodles and butter?”

“Peanut butter and crackers,” I corrected her.

“I’ll be sure to stay away from that minefield.”

We left class together that afternoon, walking close enough to each other to ensure that our arms would continually brush up against one another, lost in a conversation so important and delicate that I couldn’t remember a word of it once it was done. We might have stumbled into a restaurant or a café or a museum or perhaps we just kept walking until the moon rose into the nighttime sky and our jaws tired from conversation.

It doesn’t matter what we said or where we went. We were young and naïve, free from the burdens of adulthood, independent enough to make our own schedules while still insulated from the outside world by the long arms of our parents.

She was the daughter of successful Pakistani immigrants, a girl born in the western suburbs of Chicago who had been uneasily straddling her hyphenated identity: here an American, there a Pakistani; here a devout Muslim, there a rebellious feminist; here optimistic and effervescent, there depressed and occasionally suicidal.

I was irresponsible and fatally romantic, given to fits of righteous indignation and self-serving anger: the sort of kid who was fortunate that he missed out on the sixties because he never would have made it through to the other side. I thought that school was a ludicrous waste of both time and intelligence and spent as much time as possible rebelling against my many privileges, trying my best to engage in various acts of self-sabotage in an attempt to rid myself of the thick layer of guilt that I wore over myself like a penitent’s hair shirt.

We fit together perfectly, in the sort of nonsensical way that only teenagers can understand and make work. We acknowledged and then ignored our many differences, believing that the sheer force of our infatuation could overcome any obstacles in our way, as though the static electricity that we inadvertently created when we’d rub against each other on the long, hot nights spent in each other’s company could light our path through the inscrutable darkness of the world outside of our embrace.

Due to her constant and gnawing fear of our relationship being discovered, we spent a lot of our time together skulking in the shadows, stealing kisses and touches while others turned their eyes, sneaking in and out of each other’s arms and whispering reassurances to each other that one day we’d be able to hold hands as we walked down the street together.

Over the next two years I met her friends, her older brother and her two younger sisters, her cousins who were of an age with her, and things progressed between us, albeit in stormy fits and starts. We wanted to be together, of this we were sure, but sometimes the fear of the tempest around us cowed us into cowardice and we pushed each other away, desperate to find an easy answer to a complicated problem.

Her father had already decided that she would one day marry a proper Pakistani man, a man with brown skin and thick black hair, a man who spoke Urdu and prayed salaat five times daily, a man who would work outside of the house and earn a large salary while his daughter stayed home and raised their children. While he had yet to find this man and secure his daughter’s agreement to his well-laid plans for her life, he was confident that it was only a matter of time until his oldest daughter would be settled into a neatly-arranged marriage and he would be the proud but aloof Dadi to a gaggle of giggling grandchildren.

I, of course, was the embodiment of her father’s darkest dreams, the nightmares that haunted his sleep and turned his face red with anger: I was an ambitionless History major, a mongrel boy who was the product of a marriage between a schoolteacher and a garage-door installer, someone unworthy of his daughter or his family’s illustrious history and genes.

I’m not sure what compelled her to invite me to her parents’ home, whether it was some kind of momentary psychosis, an elaborately-staged rebellion against her parents’ wishes, or just a weary sort of fuck-it attitude, but one evening I found myself seated at their oversized dinner table, surrounded by expensive china and polished silverware, my stomach clenching and gurgling in fits of terrified anxiety.

I bobbed and weaved my way through the two-hour ordeal, wishing that there were minute-long breaks every three minutes, a corner man to advise me on strategy, and a cut man to stitch me up and tend to my wounds.

When it was over we left the house together and drove around her neighborhood, an exclusive gated community dotted with enormous houses, luxury automobiles, and security guards who constantly walked around the premises.

“How’d I do?” I asked, rocking back and forth in the front passenger seat, unable to calm my stomach.

She shrugged and pursed her lips. “Well, he didn’t kick you out of the house, so that’s a good thing.”

I turned my head to her and threw her a shocked look. “Your dad’s been known to kick people out of the house?”

“No, but then you’re the first boy I’ve ever brought home,” she answered.

“But you thought he might kick me out?”

She smiled. “The possibility had crossed my mind.”

I nodded nervously.

“You did fine,” she offered soothingly. “Really, you did better than fine. I think he might even like you.”

“I think he choked on his roti when I told him I was a History major.”

“I’m a History major,” she replied.

“But he already knows you’re hopeless,” I retorted. “He might have had some hope for me.”

We drove around aimlessly for hours that night, watching the Moon and the stars amble across the infinite darkness of the nighttime sky as her car sliced through the deserted streets, barely-audible music playing in the background as we talked and dreamed and touched each other, desperately hoping that we had finally pushed our way out of hiding, that our relationship could now be celebrated under the warm embrace of the Sun, that the dirty secret of our love could finally be made public.

She was right: things had gone well. We got the run-down the next morning from her two sisters, who had both overheard their parents discussing the dinner.

“Dad likes him,” the youngest one said.

“So does Mom,” the middle sister added. “She might divorce Dad and try to marry him.”

“That’s gross,” she answered before hanging up the phone and smiling at me. “Well, you passed the test.”

“So what now?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t think we’d get this far.”

Independence

I wish that I could say that there was a fiery confrontation that ripped us apart from one another, a scene worthy of the movies, a fight replete with memorable repartee where we split ourselves so totally asunder that the mere thought of the other would fill our throats with bile.

Alas, our ending came without much melodrama: we more or less drifted apart, a garment pulled slowly and expertly until, at last, the final thin string holding it together popped under the constant pressure, leaving two smaller, tattered pieces of fabric.

So what happened?

After she graduated from college we fell out of touch, a thick wall of silence descending between us that left a black void where once there was love and touch and lust. I graduated one year later and, finally surrendering to my wanderlust, packed my bags on a whim and moved to Taipei, Taiwan. I spent a year there teaching English, studying Mandarin, exploring the small island, and, for the first time since she and I had parted, falling in love once again.

I returned home feeling rejuvenated by my time away, knowing that I had passed through some informal initiation ritual into the cult of adulthood, believing that the future was mine to dictate and the possibilities were infinite. I had, however, been irretrievably lost to the magical lure of traveling, and no sooner had I made my way back home than I started planning my next move, a multi-year trip to Quito, Ecuador.

Not wanting to waste any time, I booked my ticket and packed my bag, leaving myself a little more than a month to spend with old friends and family before again leaving the world of my childhood behind.

Somehow, during this tight window of time, she and I reconnected: a phone call, a stamped letter, a chance encounter on the crowded sidewalks of the city. I don’t remember how we resumed our torrid affair, and the truth is that it doesn’t matter.

We spent a dizzying weekend together, rediscovering the intensity of our union with one another, pressing our hands deeply into each other’s damp flesh, losing our fingers in the thick growth of hair on top of our heads as we pulled and yanked and pinched and sighed and swore we’d never part again.

She was moving to Cairo, Egypt, in pursuit of a postgraduate degree, and did not know when she’d be returning. Suddenly I was torn in two, unable to stomach the thought of being away from her any longer, and willing to go anywhere with her and to be anything for her.

And then, with a level of sincerity and courage that I can no longer muster, I asked if I could join her in Cairo.

I should have sensed that something was wrong when she hesitated. I should have understood that things had changed beyond repair, that our lives had diverged and no matter how hard we tried we would never be able to revive what had already been dead for years.

Eventually she agreed to let me join her, but it was too late. I never boarded that plane to Cairo, and, except for an incredibly awkward night in a crowded bar downtown a few years later, we never saw each other again.

Looking back, it all seems so inevitable, though the past always feels obvious when studied through the lens of the future. Of course it was: the relationships of twenty-year-olds, no matter how pure and beautiful and fulfilling, aren’t supposed to last forever. Such partings are painful and difficult but, in the end, necessary to allow for the growth and development needed to mature into adulthood.

Partition

It’s been more than ten years since last we spoke, though I do occasionally make use of the wonders of the internet in order to see where she is and what she’s doing.

The last time I checked she was a visiting professor at a prestigious university in Lahore, Pakistan, enriching the global conversation about social space, structure, and Self, reminding all who are lucky enough to listen to her that we can and should do better with the world that we create all around us.

Meanwhile I married an Indian-American girl, had two daughters, and now divide my time between Chicago and Gujarat, a state in central India. I am a writer and an elementary school teacher, though most of my waking (and would-be sleeping) hours are spent as an overworked and overjoyed stay-at-home dad to my little girls. I write this, in truth, as I sit inside of my in-laws’ home here in India, my girls playing and screaming together in the next room, listening to the soothing cacophony of honking horns, firecrackers, barking dogs, and screeching children that supply the nightly ambience here.

Is it really any surprise that she ended up in Pakistan while I ended up on the southern end of that demilitarized zone in India? Two people, once so close as to be inseparable, now so distant that they are effectively unintelligible to each other, a war and civil strife creating the seemingly insurmountable barrier that keeps us apart. A shared set of memories is now all that binds us together: a tenuous past that is part fact, part daydream, and part wistful reminder of a time that has slipped from our grasp and left us with nothing more than our memories and our hopes with which to try to make sense of this mess.