Chapter 4
Standing outside Aaliya's door, Zain took a deep breath, then knocked. He had no idea if what he was doing was right, but he was going to give it his best shot.
She didn't answer his knock, but then, he hadn't actually expected her to; so, balancing the tray in one hand, he took his key out of his pocket, inserted it into the lock, opened the door a crack, and saw that all the lights in the room were out. Raising his eyes skyward, he murmured as he stepped into the room, "Please don't let her be wearing white."
Aaliya came awake slowly, reluctantly opening her eyes against the bright light and trying to focus. For a moment, she lay in bed blinking at the light, gradually coming awake enough to realize she was seeing her landlord standing over her, a tray in his hands.
"What are you doing in here?" she asked, frowning and pulling herself into a sitting position, but there was no real fear in her voice or even much interest. The truth was, she was so tired her bones ached and nothing could make her feel very much.
"I brought you something to eat," he answered, setting the tray down on the desk by the window. "It's food from one of the best restaurants in New York."
Aaliya rubbed her eyes. "I don't want anything to eat." As she came awake more fully, she looked through the living room toward the closed door of her apartment. "How did you get in here?"
Smiling as though it were all a great joke, Zain held up his key.
Aaliya pulled the covers up to her neck. With her wakefulness was coming anger. "You lied to me! You said you didn't have a key. You said-" Her eyes widened as she pressed herself back against the headboard. "If you come any closer, I'll scream."
At that moment, an ambulance went down Lexington Avenue, and the ear-piercing screech through the half-open window was so loud it practically made the curtains shake. "Think anyone would hear you?" Zain asked, still smiling at her.
Aaliya was now, indeed, beginning to feel, and the panic rising in her showed on her face. Trying to remain calm, she folded the blanket back and started to get out of bed, but Zain caught her arm.
"Look, Aalu," he said, his voice pleading. "I'm sorry I somehow gave you the impression that I'm a sex pervert. I'm not. I kissed you because-" With a boyish grin, he stopped speaking. "Maybe we better not go into that. What I want from you is more important than sex. Maybe not nearly as nice, but in the long run, more important. I came in here to talk to you about Taha Hussain. I want you to get me in to see him."
Abruptly, Aaliya stopped trying to pull away and looked at him as though he were crazy. "Would you get your hand off of me?"
"Oh, sure," he said. He'd meant only to hold on to her elbow to keep her from running from the room, which she looked like she might do, but instead, he had spread his fingers and was moving his hand up her arm. She was by no means the most desirable-looking woman he had ever seen, because she looked as though she hadn't had a bath in days, her hair was greasy and tangled, there were black circles of fatigue under her eyes, and her lovely mouth had a downward turn to it. But in spite of the look of her, Zain had never in his life wanted to climb into bed with a woman as much as he wanted to with her. Maybe spring was getting to him. Maybe he needed to spend a long weekend in bed with one of Nafeesa's friends. Or maybe he needed Aaliya.
Releasing her, he stepped back from the bed. "I think we need to talk."
When Aaliya looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was ten minutes after eleven at night, she took a deep breath. "The first time I met you, you nearly attacked me. Tonight you used a key that you swore you didn't have to unlawfully, not to mention discourteously, enter my apartment in the middle of the night. Now you ask me about a man I've never heard of. And you ask why I should be upset. Mr. Abdullah, have you ever heard the word privacy?"
"I've heard lots of words," he said, dismissing her comment as though his being in her private apartment meant nothing. Instead of considering her rights, he sat down on the edge of the bed, facing her.
Aaliya again started to get out of the bed. "This is intolerable."
"I'm glad to see you're angry. At least that's better than sleeping your life away."
"What I do with my life is none of your business," she snapped as she got off the bed and grabbed her father's robe.
Turning to the tray behind him, Zain lifted the napkin that covered the basket of bread and took out a roll. He bit into the delicious bread, then with his mouth full said, "Don't put on that robe. It's too big for you. Don't you have something girly?"
Giving him a look of disbelief, she defiantly shoved her arms into the sleeves of the big flannel robe. The man really was too much to bear. "I suggest that if you want something... girly - what an old-fashioned word - you should go elsewhere."
Her tone, her hostility, not to mention her direct request that he leave had no effect on him as he ate the rest of the roll. "I'm an old-fashioned guy. I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Aaliya had her hand on the doorknob, and when he warned her, for the first time she felt fear. With her back to him, her hand on the verge of trembling, she didn't turn to look at him.
"Ah, Aalu," he said, annoyance as well as exasperation in his voice, "you don't have to be afraid of me. I wouldn't hurt you."
"Am I supposed to believe you?" she whispered, trying to be calm, trying to hide her fear, but failing. "You lied about the key."
Zain could hear the fear in her voice, and he didn't want her to be afraid of him - that was the last thing he wanted from her. Slowly getting up from the bed - no sudden movements - he went to her, but she continued facing the door. Very gently, he put his hands on her shoulders, then frowned when she drew her body together, as though to fight off the coming blows. As gently as though she were a wounded animal, he led her to the bed, pulled the cover back, and directed her into it, smiling at her in a way that he hoped was reassuring.
"No," she whispered, her voice almost quivering with fear.
It was obvious that she thought he wanted her in bed so he could more easily attack her - or worse. Never before had any woman thought Zain was a rapist. Never had a woman been afraid of him and he didn't like it, but more importantly, he damned well didn't deserve her
fear.
"Oh hell!" Zain said as he pushed her down on the bed where she landed in a tumble of bedclothes. He was sick of being thought of as some sexual deviant who regularly attacked his tenants. Walking away from the bed, he turned back to glare at her. "Okay, Aalu, let's get some things straight between us. So I kissed you. Maybe according to your rules I should be hanged for that, or at the very least castrated, but we live in a permissive society. What can I say? We have people selling drugs to children, serial killers, child molesters, and me. I kiss pretty girls who look at me like they want me to kiss them. Unfortunately, the law doesn't punish sickies like me."
Crossing her arms protectively under her breasts, Aaliya set her mouth in a tight line. "What's your point?"
"The point is, you and I have work to do and I'm tired of waiting for you to come up for air."
"Work? I don't know what you're talking about."
It took him a minute to realize that she was telling the truth. "Did you read your father's will?"
Anger as well as pain surged through her, but she stamped the pain down. "Of course I read it. I know its contents anyway."
"Then you didn't read it." His sense of frustration was building. "I really wish you would go away."
"I'm not going away, so you can save your breath. I'm tired of seeing you skulk about, not eating, not taking an interest in anything. How long has it been since you left this house?"
"What I do or do not do is none of your business. I don't even know you."
"Maybe not, but I'm your guardian."
Aaliya looked at him, opened her mouth to speak, closed it, opened it, closed it again. This man was insane. Guardians were something out of Gothic novels, not real life, and even in novels, guardians were not given to twenty-eight-year-old divorced women. If she could get him out of this room, she was going to pack a bag and leave this house forever.
It was easy for Zain to see in her eyes what she was thinking, and it made him angry. She was going to listen to him if he had to tie her to the bed. Instead of tying her up - she'd no doubt take him to court for that - he picked up the tray of food and set it on her lap. "Eat," he commanded.
Aaliya wanted to refuse, but she was too afraid of him not to obey. When she hesitated, he spread something on a piece of toast and held it in front of her mouth. He had an expression on his face that made her think he was capable of holding her nose and forcing her to eat, so Aaliya reluctantly opened her mouth. It was pt de foie gras, one of the most heavenly things she had ever tasted in her life. As she chewed, she relaxed a bit and took the second piece of toast he offered from his hand.
"Now," Zain said, "I'm going to talk and you're going to listen."
"Do I have a choice?" She was on her third piece of toast. Maybe she was a bit hungry after all.
"No. No choice at all. You're not very good at listening, are you? You obviously didn't listen to your attorney when he told you to read your father's will."
"I am an excellent listener and I meant to read it." He was spreading pt on warm toast nearly as fast as she could eat it.
"Like you meant to take a bath?" He wanted to insult her and make himself believe that she wasn't the sexiest female he'd ever seen. But even when she should have been so unappealing, he had several thoughts about what he'd like to do to her delicious - perhaps that wasn't the right word just now - little body. If she could read his mind, she really would be afraid. He'd like to see that tongue of hers on something besides the piece of pt that had fallen to her wrist.
"If you don't want to be around me, you could always leave. You have my permission," she said. Now that she was fully awake, now that her fear of him was lessening, she was looking at him. He had on a soft, dark brown cotton shirt and jeans, and he should have looked respectable, but she could see the outline of his chest muscles under the shirt. While he was slathering pt on bread and handing pieces to her, he was eating just as much as she was, and when he chewed, his lower lip - that beautiful full lower lip - moved. She looked away.
"I'm not going to leave until you've heard everything. When were you planning to start looking for your grandmother?"
That startled Aaliya into looking back at him. How did he know about that? "I am an adult and I-"
Zain grunted. "That's what I thought. You had no intention of looking for her, did you?"
"It's not any of your business, is it?"
"It's entirely my business. Did it ever occur to you to wonder who was to check your research? Who was to approve what you'd done and say you'd done enough searching so you'd get the money your father left you?"
Aaliya paused with a piece of toast on the way to her mouth and stared at him. No, not one of those questions had entered her mind.
Knowing he had at last piqued her interest, Zain got up, went to the wine safe and took out a cool bottle of white wine. He knew there were several bottles of wine in there because he had put them there in preparation for Aaliya's arrival. Now, he had correctly guessed that every bottle would still be there. She may have problems, he thought as he looked in the safe and saw every bottle he'd put in there still sealed, but she was no drinker. Opening the bottle, knowing exactly where the corkscrew was, he took the wine back to her bedroom and poured two glasses full, frowning at the look on her face. "This is not a prelude to a seduction, so you can stop looking at me as though I'm a satyr. Drink it or not, your choice. I'm sure that someone as uptight as you is probably too prudish to do something so wild as drink a glass of wine."
Curling her upper lip at him in a sneer of what she hoped looked like contempt, she took the glass, drained it, then handed it back to him for a refill.
Zain laughed. "A real sailor, are you? Any tattoos?"
Aaliya didn't bother to answer him, but she wished she hadn't drunk the wine. She had not eaten very much, and the wine was already going to her head, yet she desperately needed to be alert right now, not fuzzy-headed and relaxed as the wine was making her feel. "Not any tattoos I'm going to show you," she heard herself say, then grimaced, for she had always been the very easiest of drunks. Half a glass of wine and she was dancing on tables - or at least thinking about dancing. It was something about her that had always disgusted Zeeshan, but he had managed to cope with the problem. As always, he figured out a solution to all of Aaliya's "problems": Because she had no head for drinking, he didn't allow her to drink.
Looking down at the tray across her legs as he lifted the cover, she saw a fat, succulent steak smothered in sauce. "I don't eat meat," she said, looking away.
"Why not? You don't like it?"
"Where have you been for the last century? Haven't you read the reports on meat? Fat content. Hardening of the arteries. Cholesterol. No fiber."
"Is that all? The air's worse for you than any steak. Eat it, Aalu."
"My name is Aaliya, not-" She didn't say any more because he shoved a piece of meat into her mouth. When she chewed, she found the flavor to be divine, really truly divine. Continuing to chew, she remembered that she had first given up meat as a way to cut down on their grocery bill.
"Hated that, didn't you?" he said smugly, watching her.
She ignored his comment. "I thought you wanted me to listen to you. Would you say what you have to say, then get out of here?" Cutting another bite of steak, he started to feed it to her as though she were a child or, perhaps, as though they were on far more intimate terms than they were, so she took the fork from his hand and fed herself. He didn't seem to notice the look she gave him when he picked up her salad fork and began helping himself to part of the steak. Aaliya tried not to think of the scene: her sitting at the head of the bed, him sprawled across the middle, his head near her knees as they both ate from the same plate.
"Ever hear of Liqayat Shareef??"
"Yet another person we do not have in common," she said jauntily, pointing her fork at him. She definitely should not have drunk that glass of wine.
"Liqayat Shareef is - was - a writer of murder mysteries. He didn't write very many of them and they didn't sell well, but they received some critical acclaim because they were so well researched. All of them were about gangsters."
Her mouth was full of steak and she kept sipping on the second glass of wine. The two of you should have gotten along splendidly as that's all you read about." As soon as she said it, she blushed.
Zain grinned knowingly. "Been snooping, have you? By the way, thanks for putting my clothes away the day Tehniyat had to leave."
Aaliya looked down at her plate so he couldn't see her red face.
"Anyway," Zain continued, "Liqayat Shareef was actually named Zain Abdul Kaleem, and he was my honorary uncle, a friend of my grandfather's, and I was named after him. Uncle Zain lived in a guesthouse on my father's land in Colorado, and I spent a lot of time with him when I was a kid. We were... buddies," he said softly.
Aaliya stopped chewing when she heard the barely concealed pain in his voice, for she understood all too well how it felt to have people you loved die. Reaching out her hand to him, she pulled back before touching him.
Zain didn't seem to notice as he kept eating and talking. "When Uncle Zain died three years ago, he willed everything he owned to me. There wasn't any money, but there was his library of books on gangsters." He smiled at her teasingly. "The books you've seen."
"I'm sure they're your own taste in literature." She speared a cherry tomato before he could take it.
"He also left me work he'd done on a biography of a big-time gangster"
"named Dr. Taha Hussain."
"The man you think I know."
Raising one eyebrow in praise of her memory, Zain didn't answer directly but made a stab at the last bite of steak, then just as he was about to eat it, offered it to her.
Aaliya almost took it, but then shook her head. "I really wish you would finish this story and leave." The intimacy of this shared meal was not something she wanted to continue.
Removing the last cover from the tray, Zain revealed a deep dish of chocolate mousse. Aaliya started to refuse, but it looked so rich and dark and creamy that before she knew what she was doing, she had dipped her spoon in it at the same time that Zain dipped his.
"Where was I?" he asked, leaning back, licking his spoon while Aaliya watched him, wondering if he was always so at ease. "Oh yes. The biography. I read what work Uncle Zain had done and became interested in this Taha Hussain. I'd just finished the course work at school and I was at loose ends, so I thought I might continue what Uncle Zain started. So I decided to move to New York and continue researching. When I was moving Uncle Zain's books, I found the file folder."
When he said no more, Aaliya looked up at him. "Is that supposed to intrigue me? Am I now supposed to ask, What file folder?'"
"I could stand a little interest on your part, yes. But I can see that I'm not going to get it." He filled his spoon with mousse. "The folder was simply labeled Maasuma' and inside was a newspaper photo of you, your grandmother, and your dog."
Aaliya put her spoon down with a clatter. "My grandmother ran away when I was eight months old. There is no photo of the two of us."
Leaning on his elbow, he looked at her intently, without blinking, as though trying to relay some message to her.
"Oh," Aaliya said. "That picture." It had taken her a while to remember, not that she remembered the incident, but her grandfather had told her what happened."
"Brownie," she said at last. "I was staying with my grandmother, and I crawled into a pipe in a ditch in the backyard."
"And you got stuck, and your grandmother called the fire department."
"And a bored newspaper reporter looking for a story happened to be at the station that day so he came with the firemen, but it was Brownie who saved me."
"Your dog crawled into the pipe, bit into your soggy diaper, and pulled you out of that pipe. The reporter took a picture of you, your grandmother, and Brownie, the wire services picked the photo and story up and sent it around to papers all over the country, where it was seen by my uncle Zain Abdul Kaleem as well as the rest of the world. Uncle Zain cut the photo out and wrote Maasuma in the margin. All through his notes a woman named Maasuma is mentioned." He looked up at her, studying her.
"Maasuma was Hussain's mistress." When Aaliya didn't jump out of her skin at this news, as he was hoping she would, he leaned back on the bed and put his hands behind his head. "I think Maasuma and your grandmother are one and the same."
When Aaliya didn't say anything, just kept cleaning out the dish of mousse as though he'd said nothing, he looked back at her. She was looking sleepy again. "Well?" he asked impatiently."
She put down the empty dessert bowl. "Are you finished? Have you told me what you wanted to tell me? You think my grandmother was the mistress of a gangster. Okay, you've told me, now go."
For a moment, he could only blink at her. "You don't have an opinion on this?"
"I have an opinion on you," she said softly. "You have been reading too many of those gangster books. I didn't know my grandmother, but she was a regulation grandmother, cookie baking, that sort of thing. And her name was Ghazala. She was not a gangster's moll - is that the right term?" She put her hand up when he started to interrupt her. "And besides that, what does it matter if she was? Now will you leave?"
Rolling over to his side, he frowned at her. "It matters because I think your grandmother was in love with Hussain and bore him a child. Taha Hussain just may be your real grandfather."
At that Aaliya very slowly, very carefully, set the tray to one side, got out of bed, and walked to the door. "Out," she said as though talking to someone who didn't understand English. "Get out. In the morning I will find another place of residence."
As though she hadn't spoken, Zain rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. "Your father thought Hussain was his real father."
"I don't want to hear anymore," she said louder. "I want you to leave."
"I'm not going to leave," he said without looking at her.
Aaliya didn't say a word, but if he wouldn't leave, she would. Stepping out of the room, she started down the stairs.
Zain caught her in his arms before she reached the bottom of the stairs. She struggled against him, but he held her easily, his arms about her body, her back against his front, and as she struggled against him, Zain felt his desire for her growing. He could feel her body against his, her hips, her breasts, her thighs, all touching him. "Be still, Aalu," he whispered, sounding desperate, which he was. "Please, please be still."
There was something odd in his tone that made Aaliya stop struggling and go perfectly still in his arms.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said, his voice ragged, his lips near her ear lobe. "You have nothing to fear from me. All of this was your father's idea, not mine. I told him he should ask you to help me find Maasuma, not force you to do it." Still holding her close to him, he moved his face to touch her neck, not kissing her, but feeling her softness, smelling her skin.
With a sharp jerk, Aaliya pulled away from him, then leaned back against the stair rail. Her heart was pounding in her breast, her breathing deep and irregular. When she looked at him, she saw that his heart was pounding too and his skin was flushed.
"You want to sit down somewhere and talk about this?"
"No," she answered. "I don't want to talk about anything, nor do I want to hear anything you have to say. I don't want to hear your made-up stories about my father or my grandmother or about anything else for that matter. All I want to do is leave this house and never see you again."
"No," he said, pleading, but there was something else in his eyes. "I can't allow you to leave. Your father gave me the care of you and I mean to be worthy of his trust."
Aaliya blinked at him several times before she was able to speak.
'Gave you the care of me?' You mean to be worthy of his trust'?" She didn't know whether to laugh or run away. "You sound like something from the past, something from the Middle Ages. I am an adult woman and I-"
Abruptly, Zain's face changed. "Oh the hell with it. You're right. Who am I to take any of this seriously? I told Ghulam this was a dumb idea. I told him he should give you your inheritance with no strings attached, but he insisted that this was the only way. He wanted you to find out the truth."
Zain threw up his hands, palms up in surrender. "I give up. I'm not a good jailer. First I let you stay alone in a room until, as far as I can tell, you're on the point of suicide, then I play the heavy and try to make you do what you don't want to do. You are an adult and you can make your own decisions. You're not interested in any of this, so go on back to bed. Put a chair in front of your door if you want - that should keep out even a dedicated pervert like me. In the morning I'll call a real estate agency and help you find somewhere else to live and I'll give you back your rent money. Why don't you take that computer equipment with you because I don't know what the hell to do with it. Good night, Miss Haider," he said, then walked down the stairs, turned, and went into the living room.
Shaking from her wrestle with him, shaking from all of it, Aaliya slowly went back up the stairs.
Cricket
Anupamaa
