The Poor Dears

One day Cathy picked up the packet which had been lying on my table for the whole week and asked, “Aren’t you going to mail it?”

I was in the other room, so I asked, “Mail what?”

“This packet, addressed to Miss Naima so-and-so, Karachi?”

I returned to my study and asked her, “Do you know what’s in it?”

“Two hundred feet of Scotch magnetic tape … made of polyester, right?”

“Is that all?”

“Well, the tape is enclosed in a cardboard box which is wrapped in soft padding. You have had the housemaid wrap the whole thing in cloth and sew it up and then enclose it in this manila envelope.”

“But the tape—what’s on the tape?”

“Your message for the girl—isn’t that rather obvious?” Cathy said, returning the packet on the table.

“No, I wish it were that simple. For then, I would have either mailed it myself or asked you to mail it for me.”

“Your friend Faik’s message, then,” Cathy said, thinking hard, “or maybe Faik’s mother’s voice … for that sallow-complexioned, good-looking, middle-aged woman?”

After a while she asked jokingly, “Which of these two, the girl or her mother, is likely to be the central character in one of your future novels?”

I remained silent.

“Still hung up on mothers, eh?” Cathy continued. “When are you going to outgrow this fixation? Why not the young lady …”

But I remained impassive. My expressionless face prompted her to probe, “Well, aren’t you going to answer?”

“Cathy,” I began, “every single day for the past week I have thought of mailing this packet but have put off doing so for one reason or another. You have no idea whose voice I have taped on it.”

“Well, whose voice?”

I ignored her query and continued, “I have been thinking all week long whether I should send the packet to Naima. I ask myself, now that I have got the tape and have gone through the trouble of having it neatly packed, why not take it to the post office, have it weighed, put the stamps on it, and mail it? But then I think, suppose I later regretted it, nothing would stop the packet from reaching her. I am finding out, for the first time in my life it seems, that whatever you have committed to another ceases to be yours.”

“What, for instance?”

“For instance the arrow committed to the wind, the dead body to the earth, and …”

“There you go again,” Cathy interrupted. “It is the Eastern man inside you that makes you say all this.”

I continued. “Cathy, I am unable to decide what to do with it. Once or twice I have even run my fingers over the wrapping to see if it has gathered dust and then laughed at the foolishness of my act. There is no dust here. How can there be any in cold countries? Perhaps I am driven to do so by my desire to find out how long it has been lying on my desk. You see, in the East, they judge the length of time passed over a thing by the amount of dust it has collected.”

“Hold on, let me grab a pen and notebook,” Cathy said in dead earnest. “I guess this must be part of the book you are writing now.”