A loud thwack, metal meeting bone. From the table in the center, Farzana has grabbed the flower vase and swung it at Aslam. He staggers backwards with a moan, flailing for Farishta’s support. But the Angel has retreated into the other room. Aslam tumbles to the floor, blood spurting from his face onto a balding rug. Between his caterwauling and the sights exposed when the sheet around his waist shifted, I’m not sure which is less appealing. The cut on his forehead isn’t deep, though. As always, he’s going to be fine. I consider the rest of the damage: the glass top on the wicker table is cracked from breaking Aslam’s fall; the flowers that were packed in the vase are scattered around the room, having flown out from the impact of Farzana’s swing. Polyester petals separate from the plastic branches under our feet as Farzana grabs my arm and leads me out the door.
15. After the discovery of our transgression, Farzana and I were apart for four months and twenty-three days. I remember it as though it were yesterday. “You should have seen them, Ammi,” Aslam said when their mother made it to the chamber of all-that-shouldn’t-be. “They were doing such dirty things.” Farzana and I had gathered ourselves by then and were standing as far apart as possible: she, by the door, twisting Aslam’s collar; I, by the window, praying for the watery sunlight to consume me like an ant under a loupe. Farzana tried to defend herself. “It was just some silly games, Ammi,” she said, shoving Aslam into the wall. “Bela’s idea. We were only practicing—” But her mother would have none of it. She slapped Farzana, the abundant whiteness of the woman’s arm trembling from the impact. Her face was ablaze with a rage I hadn’t thought her capable of. As I walked out of their house, gaze sewn to the floor, she said to me in a voice that made my stomach drop, “I’ll be having a word with your parents.”
One night, during the fourth month of our separation, I saw two forms shifting in the dark on Farzana’s gatepost. The twin wails that sounded like babies pinched awake were unmistakable: it was Nabeela-Jameela. The decrepit cats were trying to make their way from Farzana’s house to mine. Nabeela scaled the electricity pole on the street and Jameela followed; Jameela labored onto a branch of the cassia tree and Nabeela followed. To get to my window they would have to reach the end of the longest branch of the cassia tree, jump onto a bough of the jacaranda outside our house, then make it all the way across. They couldn’t do it—not with their half-blindness, their arthritis, and their scabs. But the cats persisted. Mewling to one another in the night, they half-walked, half-dragged themselves across the cassia. There, they hemmed and hawed until Jameela jumped and missed, save for a claw lodged in the jacaranda bark. Nabeela followed and a minute later, the never-dying cats came through my window and into my arms.
They stayed with me all night, curling their bony selves into the angles of my limbs, offering little sandpaper licks to clean my face of tears. At the crack of dawn they were back at their obstacle course, slipping, falling, and surviving at all the same spots on their way to Farzana’s house. Most of the neighborhood was still asleep but Farzana was at the gate, cooing to her half-blind cats. I caught her eye and she smiled, then gathered the cats in her arms and went inside.
It seemed incredible that Nabeela-Jameela had survived that trip. I wondered the next day if I’d imagined it all, but the evidence was there: dirt-brown wisps of cat hair on my bed, sore patches on my cheeks where they had licked my tears. Maybe they really were immortal. Maybe they could survive anything, as long as they had each other. The thought gave me hope, shone a light on something beyond the despair and humiliation of those bleak months. It challenged the voice that had settled in my ear, repeating over and over that I was going to end up alone.
A few weeks later, our parents allowed us to be friends again. Farzana’s mother wouldn’t talk to me; I was no longer offered an array of kebabs when I went over. This was also when she started cultivating the contemptuous look that turned my vital organs to kheema. Yet the important thing was that Farzana had finally convinced her we were just playing around. She blamed the magazines and their purported suggestion that we needed to prepare ourselves for future husbands. “We will never do things like that again, Ammi,” Farzana said. “We know it is ridiculous and weird.” Those last words stung, but I agreed immediately and enthusiastically because it meant I would have Farzana back.