Arden's Quadberry

Rana walked in the afternoon heat down to the street corner. He watched his feet pass over the black surface, dusted with the mustard yellow of oak pollen. There was something rich and fine about the dust – a fine gold to the modest neighborhood in which he walked.

He stepped up into the shade of a looming elm tree, its teardrop leaves all round him, and greeted the dark man already waiting in the shade. The man was dressed in black jeans and a red shirt, with another black shirt slung over his shoulder; he kept peeling the red shirt off of his chest to cool himself. When Rana asked him the time, the man ignored the large watch face on his wrist and flipped open the tiny phone in his hand.

“4:49,” said the man.

“Thank you,” said Rana. “Which of the two buses are you taking?”

“Whichever comes first,” peeling the red shirt again.

The two of them stood on silently in the cooling shade. Rana noted the electric blue cars on the busy road to the east, watched one bus pass and then another take his shade companion away. Across the elm yard, a shaggy blond poodle was stretched out in weedy grass. Seated in a lawn chair beside the dog was a frail old woman with dark purple sunglasses on. The dog stretched and rolled over indolently; one leg stayed straight up in the air. The woman toed a bowl of water the dog’s way. Neither leg nor dog moved any further. Rana was about to wish for a life so still, but then noted that he, and not the dog, had the shade. When he looked again, the woman was standing and slowly guiding the dog through the front door. She then sat back down in the sun.

“Eyes are shot,” said the woman to an audience that could only have been Rana. She’d thrown the remark forty feet to reach him. He reluctantly walked out of the shade, her shade.

“I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?”

She hiccupped a laugh. “Oh, not me; it’s Dime. Couldn’t see a dimwitted grasshopper if it peed on her.”

He walked a few feet more into the sun. “Dime is your dog, then.”

“Dime is my bosom pal, my young friend, and Dime is dyin’.”

“I’m sorry —”

“Bloody cancer in that leg she likes to stick up. Guess she likes the sun on it. I’d buy her the damn sun, if I could.”

“Something for the pain, perhaps?”

“Only thing for this pain is pure D death. Till then she can stink up my sheets all she wants. Poor thing’s hardly got a bladder left to speak of – leaky as an old bucket, little darlin’.”

Three blocks away, Rana saw his bus stopped at the intersection. He nodded his head to walk toward the street —

"Why don’t you set a spell? Care for some tea?

The number 8 bus blew by his stop as he was formulating his polite regrets.

“Why don’t I prepare a cup for you?”

“Nonsense. Got a jug right here.” She leaned down to retrieve a two gallon jar from its perch in the tall grass in front of her. A white top was screwed down tight and several tea bags floated in the tea water.

She nudged her sunglasses back atop her skull and took a good look at Rana. “You’ll be wanting sugar in yours, I expect.”

“Yes, please.”

“Well, sorry. Not gonna. Orwell may not agree with me about cooking in the sun, but I completely agree about no sweets. That ain’t tea – it’s candy.”

“Orwell is your husband?”

“Don’t I wish. Actually, I don’t. Consumption bit that boy good. Looked worse than me when he died, and only 47 at that. Helluva thing.”

“Orwell was a friend, then.”

The old woman was incredulous now: she gave Rana’s madrona-colored skin and shalwar-kameez no slack. “Orwell, my good man – George Orwell – wrote the last century’s biggest nightmare, a nightmare we still haven’t figured out the half of. The nightmare wasn’t dictators far off in the wild blue yonder; the nightmare was them’s right under our own damn noses.”

Rana was no fool; he’d just not known George bloody Orwell to be as opinionated about tea as he was about farm animals.

“I don’t know about biggest nightmare, ma’am. I believe General Zia wrote a fair masterpiece himself, only his wasn’t in a Garamond font.”

The old woman wrinkled her nose up at him in a way he imagined she used to sixty years ago, to enchant a younger generation of tea-drinkers. “General Zia? Touché.” Her smile turned grim. “My apologies.”

“Please. No need. It is water under the bridge.”

“It is never that, my friend. Never that. Blood, maybe, but never water. Come help me with this jug, if you would.”

Rana followed through the front door with the warm jug of tea, its color a fair match for the color of his forearm. For some reason, given the weedy state of the front lawn, he’d expected an inner version of the same. Not the immaculate white carpet and furniture, set off by French doors in the back leading into an overflowing English-style garden wrapped round a lovely old brick fountain.

“I leave the front ragged on purpose. I find it works better than burglar bars.” A bright male cardinal flew to a perch just outside the back door. Rana felt that he and the woman had been blessed.

She took the jar from him and walked to the open kitchen, left of the back doors. “Yard temp, right? Please, take a seat.”

He was sure any resistance to tea plans was futile, so he walked to an overstuffed chair that looked inviting. Behind it was the door to an immaculately white bedroom. On the bed, to the right of a rotary fan, Dime was sleeping soundly. Until he saw the faintest rise of the dog’s chest, he wondered if it was the final sleep.

The woman was back beside him. “Here you go, Mr. —”

“Rana. Rana.”

“Here you go, Mr. Rana.”

“No. Please. Just Rana. My first name.”

“Yes. Well, then. Rana – I like that. And I am Margaret. From your Zia comment, I take it you are not from round here?”

“Lahore.” It was a delight to finally not have to draw a map. Who would have thought it, in this shabby little village of San Antonio?

“You’ve read Naipaul?” – reaching behind her to an overstuffed bookcase. She pulled out the familiar grey book.

He smiled. “I have read him. And I have traveled with him.”

“Have you? And how is —”

“Forgive me. I should say that I have traveled with him here,” pointing to his heart.

“I understand.” She set the book down beside her on the couch. Her hand smoothed out the white cushion. “Done a bit of that myself.” She picked the book back up. “This book —”

“Yes. All of it. All of it. Or, all of my country. I cannot speak for the others. But I can imagine.”

“Zia…Zia was a very wicked man.”

“General Zia was a very religious man, Margaret.”

“But —”

“Please. I will not offend you. In your West, it is so easy to call someone wicked, or like your President, evil. That misses the point, it lops off too much understanding. If you start with the crucial point of General Zia’s fervor, you begin to understand the truth of all righteousness – be it Islam or Christian: religion kills. And it kills back. Mrs. Herring – I believe, had she been there – could have just as easily hung Mr. Bhutto.”

“You know of her.”

“I’ve been to Houston’s libraries, too. I walked Westheimer, wandered the streets of River Oaks. Often enough was asked to help carry out the garbage, even in my shalwar-kameez. Does this look like the uniform of a slag heap?”

He had not expected so much emotion to rise. He’d thought it was all tightly wrapped in his silent conversations with Naipaul. Now, here, in this white shrine of a living room, he felt thirty years of bile spilling out onto Margaret’s immaculate floor.

“Margaret. I am very sorry.” He set his glass of tea on the table beside him and rose to go.

“No. Rana. Please stay.” She walked over to him, and gently pushed him back into the chair. There was no force: a cool, gentle touch.

“We will finish this,” she said.