Lights

He’d heard rumours about Maliha long before he met her. Adnan was just a teenager when her first show came out and he was fascinated by her. There wasn’t a boy his age who wasn’t. Rumours were what this industry ran on and now they dogged him with a jealous intensity. He’d been seeing Maliha for six months when a make-up artist mentioned to him, offhand, that she’d heard she was getting married to a businessman. A man from her past, she said. A man she’d gone to school with.

How romantic, she sighed, after all these years they found each other.

And Adnan thought about putting his fist in a wall. Theirs was a secret affair and fraught with complications from the start. Being with Maliha was something that had taken over his brain.

It was not that he had never had a girlfriend before. But with Maliha it was different. He’d had to unlearn everything he knew about her. Now, he never read the magazines, not even in the dentist’s waiting room. He filtered out gossip when it was about her. When his mother and sister watched reruns of her first show, sighing over the doctor she would eventually fall in love with and marry, Adnan walked out of the room. It was hard to maintain. In the first blush of his feeling for her, he’d been sick with wanting: wanting everything, to consume every piece of information available about her on the internet, watch every clip of her twice. Her beautiful voice, soft and clear. He still did not tire of hearing her talk.

They had met for the first time on set. She was lighting candles on the coffee table and having an argument with the director. Her famous long hair brushed back into a bun, so you couldn’t tell that it went all the way down her back.

So this is our new star, she said. She took his hands in her own. Her skin was soft like butter. If he gripped hard enough, he felt, he could slice through and meet his palm.

In the drama, he was marrying her niece. His part was small, perfunctory. She was the centre of the drama, a widow who was only just discovering that her husband had a whole other family, a wife and two children in a different city. His was the B-plot, a wedding to provide a backdrop for her storm. He watched her on the set, glowing as she left her dressing room, touching the make-up artist’s shoulder in a laugh. Seconds later, she was quietly weeping on the set. She turned from light to dark and back again, a switch going off behind her eyes. There was nowhere else to look when she was in the room. She collected light. When he watched the first episode of their show on television, with his family and friends all crowded into the living room, going into hysterical shrieks every time he was on screen, he found all his embarrassment melting away, replaced by a different heat. He had no relationship to his own face on the screen. He was only watching for her.

And this new show was her comeback, a return to the screen after a long time away. She’d had a child in that time, father unknown. The rumours around her took flight again, but the moment people began watching they couldn’t stop. All of a sudden, the market flooded with red saris, like the one she’d worn in the first episode. Headlines proclaimed that she had not aged a day, printing pictures of her from 15 years ago alongside ones now, marvelling at the sorcery. Women’s magazines cluttered with articles on how to maintain a youthful complexion like hers. The country became addicted to her again, and so was he. On set, Adnan found himself following her. He’d wait outside her dressing room with a cup of tea. It was easy enough to disguise at first. He was so new, so unlearned and she was so generous with her time.

At the end of the day, she had him go over his lines on the empty set. Sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed, watching him stutter in a linen suit. His tongue thickening in his mouth when she came up towards him, caught his chin in her hands.

“You can’t be so stiff,” she said. “The rest of these men just shout and get it over with. But you have so much more than that in you.”

His body statued to the spot. Maliha was touching him. Her smoky voice, familiar and foreign all at once, was so close to him. Her mouth dimpled and round as she released him and walked back to the sofa. The slip of her pelvis as she moved. The glow of the mirror on the other side of the stage and, for a split second, the two of them together in the glass.

Then just when he’d lapsed out of hope that anything could happen between them, she invited him to her house for lunch. Her son was at cricket practice. The house was empty, the cook and maid out for the afternoon. She served him herself, filling his plate as she stood by his chair. When she leaned to put it down in front of him, it became clear what was about to happen. The shiver in his hand as he ate.

“When did you know you wanted to be an actress,” he asked.

“I think I always knew,” she said. “My sister says I was such a drama queen, there was nothing else that would have suited me.”

Her pretty shoulders, the sun coming through the shutters to light up her hair. She reached a hand across the table to touch his wrist.

“Some of us are just born for it,” she said. “Like you and I.”

And just like that, he believed it. Since he’d started acting, it had been a strange and awkward business. He found himself pinched and powdered and hurried to set. The lights too hot on his face and nothing felt like he thought it would. Only in these moments with her did it keep any of its magic. Here was this woman, inviting him to her house. He’d never been alone with a woman in her own house before. Other trysts had always happened abroad or in hotel rooms in distant parts of town, fast and unsure — “hurry, they’ll be wondering where I am” — and over quicker than he could register they were happening.

The unimaginable glamour of sipping tea across from a woman, in her own kingdom. Their bodies slipping together as he got up to change the music, breathing close to where she was putting away the cups. Her home, put together with care, as jasmine-smelling and soft-lit as he’d ever imagined. The posters of old Bollywood movies on the walls. Square cotton pillows on the floor and coffee tables cluttered with coasters and books. Her calligraphy was not religious but verses of Faiz instead.

She drew the curtains and turned towards him. In the newly darkened room, she took the bangles off her wrist with purpose.

The son was never around at the same time as him. He only ever saw the litter of him, the school books and empty bottles of Coke, the weights he left in the living room and sometimes just the general mess of him, socks discarded by the door, greasy half-eaten plates of biryani stuck in the refrigerator. It was not so different from the sluggish trail he’d left through his own house as a teenager, not even that different, probably, from him now.

Her ex, the father of her son, was only ever brought up in slices of information. He knew that he’d been married. That she had gotten this apartment so they could be together, and in the beginning, it had been difficult and very lonely. “Sometimes I think I had a baby just so I wouldn’t be on my own in here,” she said to him, in a rare flash of honesty.

Her son was eight years younger than him. Her ex was 20 years older. In bed at night, he worked the mathematics of the age difference between the four of them, where they would all be at each year of his life. It kept him up, again and again and again.

Before he went to London, he’d asked Maliha to meet him for coffee. This was unusual and it took some persuading. Most of the time, she balked at the idea of being in public with him. They’d never discussed it but she had a way of circumventing Adnan’s suggestions, turning dinners out into ones at home, insisting she never went to the cinema though he’d run into her there before. She was careful with his feelings: it was important to her, he realised, never to demonstrate explicitly that she was holding him at arm’s length.

They were filming in Lahore. She was staying with friends and he was in a hotel. The day before his flight, she agreed to meet him but only in the hotel coffee shop. She was there before him, even though he was only staying upstairs. The table she’d chosen was behind the large potted plants, their wide fronds hiding them from the rest of the room. She had her sunglasses on, even though they were indoors, her head tipped forward over the menu so he could see the gold handles on them through the black of her hair. Afterwards, she excused herself to the powder room and encouraged him to go up without her. She would follow, she would only be a minute. Insisting in her quiet voice, with a finger on the pulse in his wrist, so he had no choice but to obey.

Upstairs, she sat on the bed while he packed. Her lit cigarette in mouth, it was 10 minutes of watching him ball trousers into his suitcase before she took over. She got him to order up more coffee and rooted through his things with an unprecedented domesticity. He watched the line of her waist, the strong muscles of her hip as she bent to catch a discarded tie off the hotel carpet. Everywhere the light was gold, the overhead bulbs, the sun dying in the sky through the large windows with curtains thrown pink. She grabbed her endless hair with both hands and twisted it to one side of her neck.

“You were making a mess,” she explained, smoothing a shirt into place.

He shook his head at her. “You just can’t help yourself,” he teased.

He wanted to grab her around the waist and hold her. Even after all this time, it was impossible to touch her unless she came to him. It was like this all the way up to when they got in bed; she initiated. He followed. The complicated dance of it, where he could see all the things he was not allowed to do, guess the rest.

He wanted to ask about the businessman. He wanted even to ask her to marry him, as if by doing so he might be able to prevent her marrying someone else.

In the end, she slipped out while he was in the bathroom. The smell of her perfume, jasmine and roses, hung in the air.

He made sure to bring sweaters, even though it was July. From his sister, he knew that the weather was tricksy, in constant flux. It was his second trip. Most of the time he left the country, they went all the way to America, where his uncle and grandfather lived. It was his first visit alone, something he’d been looking forward to for a long time. All through his sister’s wedding, his real anticipation had been for this holiday, getting to visit her in London. And now that it was here, he was cold about the whole thing. All he could think was that he’d rather be with Maliha, or at least somewhere in the country, at least still in her orbit. He could not shake the feeling that this time in the hotel room, her long hair sweeping over his face as she said goodbye, would be the last time he saw her. By the time he got back, everything could be different. The blinking stars of her life past him.

On the plane, he sat by the aisle and looked past the sleeping bodies to the small blue circle of sky, the city disappearing beneath the clouds. He slipped headphones on and watched an old movie. The girl on screen with thickly-lined eyes, her hair plaited to the side and her mouth darkly lit in the black-and-white scene as she swished her hips around a garden. The man, following. His hand on his heart.

The announcement was in the papers and on the news when he landed. His sister had a cable box, got all the Pakistani channels that her husband hated. They were sat down for dinner when it flashed across the screen. It was in the opening section of one of those talk shows. Two pictures of Maliha, one from her youth and one now. The new one showed her getting out of a car, in a green sari, with her sunglasses on. The headline read: Actress gets engaged to mystery man. The host of the show began speculating if he was the father of her son while her guest contradicted her.

Adnan stood up and switched off the television.

“I don’t think we should have the tv on during family dinner,” he said.

The rest of the night, eaten out in silence. The slight drone of the washing machine in the background. He would think of her every time the jasmine bloomed. He would think of her when he began to move in this world as if he belonged.

Sarvat Hasin was born in London and grew up in Karachi. Her first novel, This Wide Night, is published by Penguin India

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