Parveen

Between the muffled sensation of her oblique breast softly pushing into my ribcage and inhaling the stinted smell of feminine hair, that fleeting sensation remains etched in my memory. I had run into Parveen that day at a grocery shop. She was carrying her younger brother at her waist as most poor women do in Pakistan. Having walked through a maze of paved city streets -- from her home to the marketplace -- was tiring for her as the burden of the child she was carrying grew increasingly intolerable. Our chance tryst in that shop was propelled by fate and by her need to unload the child so she could walk and breathe normally. It was during that exchange that her sudden nearness underwhelmed me — her luminous eyes, a tolerable nose and a set of perfectly carved lips, the touch of her breast and the strange smell coming from her hair, all numbed my senses.

Enthralled by the lure of her femininity, I became her admirer. My eyes would follow her in every corner of the choppy neighborhood wherever she would announce her arrival, curved, and wrapped in a white chador.

Parveen grew up from a nondescript preadolescent into a siren without warning or prior notice. She lived next door to me, and being a few years her senior, Parveen’s mother used to ask me to help her with the homework or to draw floral arrangements for her embroidery work. Looking ordinary and unassuming, I never paid attention to her. She was there like the little neem tree in the backyard, stoically derelict, growing imperceptibly, adding layers, dimensions, leaves and tufts.

But it was different now. In some devious ways, I imagined that Parveen began to touch all the sore spots of my masculinity. I walked tall before her, lavishing my inescapable charms upon her like a rooster, pretending to ignore her, leaving her no choice but to enter my space and live there as a tenant. I would buy fish from the market and deliver to her door telling we caught too much that day. I would leave my maroon college blazer in her house with the golden monogram inscribed on the breast pocket with my picture inside to dazzle her eyes. I would talk to her mother incessantly ignoring her stymied, introverted presence in the house. But then, before I would leave, I would always peak in her room to say hi.

One such day I came to see Khala Ji. The front door was ajar and the hushed house begged me to walk in. And I walked in with heavy footsteps. Khala Ji was not home. Babu Ji was at work. In the backroom where the family’s lehafs and blankets were stacked on a raised bed, Parveen was folding the laundry. I went in unassuming, held her face lifting up a little and buried my full mouth on her quivering lips. My first kiss! My heart pounded and wanted to abandon me. Parveen shrank but did not protest. Her face was flushed but she did not move. She was docile --lips still parted in a trance. Face lifted. The back of her head still resting against the raised bedding. Her eyes were stirring, trying to make some sense of the pristine emotion. I could have kissed her again, and again. But the sensation that gripped me was numbing. She stood there motionless and could fall down. I touched her gently under the chin to break the spell and left without saying a word.

We were very stolid in our dealings. Parveen would never remit a hint of what had transpired between us, making sure she would never be found with me again, alone. I wondered whether she remembered anything. Her veneer remained hard. Not trying to understand anything, my narcissistic ego drifted to other promising ventures. A year later I joined the Punjab University and moved to Lahore. Conditioned by my vexed relationships with deft girlfriends and my own need for personal gratification, the years in Lahore transformed me into a self-absorbed hedonist who defined relationships with people by the ratio of their earning potential. By the time I finished my MBA my ex-girlfriend’s daddy arranged a job for me with a multinational with the condition that I married his twice-detoxed daughter who had learned to loathe the limits of conventional life style. I agreed.

In the meantime, I received a letter from Parveen’s old friend saying that if I ever loved Parveen I should go see her and marry her immediately. I did not know if I ever loved Parveen. The complexities of life in my current surroundings had woven a thick layer of insensitivity for others. I did not think that one sporadic kiss with a hapless creature five years ago amounted to feelings of genuine love. I wrote to her friend that I never felt any specific feeling for Parveen and it was ridiculous that she would ask a friend to convey her feelings for me, if that was what she wanted. “Timid creature!” I thought and shrugged her off.

I am living in New York with my wife and a three-year old. I guess I have a stable life. What was very shaky in Pakistan is considered stable and normal in the States. I have a small circle of friends. We have our weekend episodes to bury the drudgery of life. Occasionally, we both see a shrink to help us sort out life on a monthly basis. But who doesn’t need help, if one can afford it?

Somebody wrote to me that Parveen died after suffering a long, painful bout with cancer. The doctors had removed part of her left lung. After a while the whole lung had to be removed. Then they cut off part of her leg and finally, the entire leg was amputated. She finally died. Parveen never complained. Never cried. She used to give away her own medications to poor patients on the ward. Long before her death, before her illness, Parveen never smiled. I was told.

In the epochs before recorded history, women dominated the dynamics of communal life. They were “the repository of all culture, of all benevolence, of all devotion, of all concern for the living and grief for the dead”. When gods were female, that era was “one of intense and unimaginable equality in which women mated promiscuously, producing a sense of universal relatedness”. The male-dominated systems that emerged subsequently placed women under the protection of individuals. Parveen asked for my protection. I spurned her hand and prescribed painful, lonely death for her.