Escape

I wonder why Daddy didn’t come with us. Perhaps he was busy again. Perhaps it was because of the grown-up talk he and Mother had in loud voices before the lights went out. Mother calls them disareements. Sometimes, when Mother tells me off, I don’t feel like talking to anyone either.

Infecshun. conservashun, not-a-ruffian, disareement.

I see chotu’s feet poking out from beneath the blanket. He isn’t wearing shoes.

Uncle Kapil doesn’t drive like Daddy. When Daddy drives, mother sits in the front and chotu and I are at the back. And Daddy always drives fast. When I sit close to the window, I can feel the wind hitting my face.

But this is different.

Mother is sitting at the back with me and she has made me sit in the middle – far away from the window. I try to go close to it so that I can see what the trees and the river are like at night but she holds my wrists and shakes her head.

“Sshh.”

And she puts her finger on her lips.

It always takes us very long to drive to Dhaka. When Daddy, Mother, chotu and I drive to Dhaka for a vaycaysion, we leave after Munaf serves us lunch and we reach just when the sun sinks and the moon has come out.

I wonder if it’s Dhaka that we’re going to right now.

When Uncle Kapil finally stops the car, we’re at the airport – only we don’t go in through the big metal doors and into the pretty room with purple flowers. Instead Uncle Kapil takes his car towards where the airplanes have been parked. I see many airplanes.

Big ears.

Long noses.

White and green.

We go towards a plane that looks a lot like the lizard in my cupboard. Greenbrown. Black eyes. It’s not like the airplane we took when we, Mother and me, took Bhai to Lahore.

There’s no staircase next to the airplane either. Just a ladder. I think they forgot and had to use the ladder because they were in a hurry. How will we take chotu up the ladder? Daddy would have picked him up and taken him up the ladder on his shoulder.

Where is Daddy?

My eyes burn and nose hurts and I want to sniffle like Mother.

“Tbara, tbara! They’re coming!”

Uncle Kapil is the first to lose, like Daddy. He carries both me and chotu up the ladder. He must be strong.

Mummy comes up behind him.

The airplane isn’t like the one we took to Lahore from inside either. The seatbelt is like a jacket. There are no pretty ladies in greenbrown clothes either. They didn’t wear saarees like Mother but were still pretty. They gave me crayons and colouring books.

Uncle Kapil’s gone and the plane starts to move. It rocks and moves like a car, only much louder. If I wasn’t playing The Game and had said something, I wouldn’t have been able to hear myself.

I can sit near the window now and I see the sun rising. I wonder what Daddy is doing back home. I wonder if Munaf has made him breakfast.

Mother holds my hand and says that we’re going to Khala’s place for a while and that we’ll come back soon.

Soon is what they first said when Auntie Pam and Rufus first left the Tea Gardens.

Soon is what they said when the gates were locked and I asked when I’d be allowed to play outside again.

The plane turns and flies over the blue sea.

I wonder what soon means.

Zuha Siddiqui is an aspiring journalist, undergraduate student at LUMS and writes under the influence of occasional bursts of inspiration.