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From Interpreter of Maladies, Thumpa Lahiri

When Mr. Pirzada

Came to Dine

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing

confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his

family. His name was Mr. Pirzada, and he came from Dacca, now the capital

of Bangladesh, but then a part of Pakistan. That year Pakistan was engaged

in civil war. The eastern frontier, where Dacca was located, was fighting for

autonomy from the ruling regime in the west. In March, Dacca had been

invaded, torched and shelled by the Pakistani army. Teachers were dragged

onto streets and shot, women dragged into barracks and raped. By the end of

the summer, three hundred thousand people were said to have died. In Dacca

Mr. Pirzada had a three-story home, a lectureship in botany at the university,

a wife of twenty year, and seven daughters between the ages of six and

sixteen whose names all began with the letter A. “Their mother’s idea,” he

explained one day, producing from his wallet a black-and-white picture of

seven girls at a picnic, their braids tied with ribbons, sitting cross-legged in a

row, eating chicken curry off of banana leaves. “How am I to distinguish?

Ayesha, Amira, Amina, Aziza, you see the difficulty.”

Each week Mr. Pirzada wrote letters to his wife, and sent comic books

to each of his seven daughters, but the postal system, along with most

everything else in Dacca, had collapsed, and he had not heard word of them

in over six months. Mr. Pirzada, meanwhile, was in America for the year, for

he had been awarded a grant from the government of Pakistan to study the

foliage of New England. In spring and summer he had gathered data in

Vermont and Maine, and in autumn he moved to a university north of

Boston, where we lived, to write a short book about his discoveries. The

grant was a great honor, but when converted into dollars it was not generous.

As a result, Mr. Pirzada lived in a room in a graduate dormitory, and did not

own a proper stove or a television set of his own. And so he came to our

house to eat dinner and watch the evening news.

At first I knew nothing of the reason for his visits. I was ten years old,

and was not surprised that my parents, who were from India, and had a

number of Indian acquaintances at the university, should ask Mr. Pirzada to

share our meals. It was a small campus, with narrow brick walkways and

white pillared buildings, located on the fringes of what seemed to be an even

smaller town. The supermarket did not carry mustard oil, doctors did not

make house calls, neighbors never dropped by without an invitation, and of

these things, every so often, my parents complained. In search of

compatriots, they used to trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester,

through the columns of the university directory, circling surnames familiar to

their part of the world. It was in this manner that they discovered Mr.

Pirzada, and phoned him, and invited him to our home.

I have no memory of his first visit, or of his second or his third, but by

the end of September I had grown so accustomed to Mr. Pirzada’s presence

in our living room that one evening, as I was dropping ice cubes into the

water pitcher, I asked my mother to hand me a fourth glass from a cupboard

still out of my reach. She was busy at the stove, presiding over a skillet of

fried spinach with radishes, and could not hear me because of the drone of

the exhaust fan and the fierce scrapes of her spatula. I turned to my father,

who was leaning against the refrigerator, eating spiced cashews from a

cupped fist.

“What is it, Lilia?”

“A glass for the Indian man.”

“Mr. Pirzada won’t be coming today. More importantly, Mr. Pirzada is

no longer considered Indian,” my father announced, brushing salt from the

cashews out of his trim black beard. “Not since Partition. Our country was

divided. 1947.”

When I said I thought that was the date of India’s independence from

Britain, my father said, “That too. One moment we were free and then we

were sliced up,” he explained, drawing an X with his finger on the

countertop, “like a pie. Hindus here, Muslims there. Dacca no longer belongs

to us.” He told me that during Partition Hindus and Muslims had set fire to

each other’s homes. For many, the idea of eating in the other’s company was

still unthinkable.

It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same

language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate

pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their

hands. Like my parents, Mr. Pirzada took off his shoes before entering a

room, chewed fennel seeds after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol, for

dessert dipped austere biscuits into successive cups of tea. Nevertheless my

father insisted that I understand the difference, and he led me to a map of the

world taped to the wall over his desk. He seemed concerned that Mr. Pirzada

might take offense if I accidentally referred to him as an Indian, though I

could not really imagine Mr. Pirzada being offended by much of anything.

“Mr. Pirzada is Bengali, but he is a Muslim,” my father informed me.

“Therefore he lives in East Pakistan, not India.” His finger trailed across the

Atlantic, through Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and finally to

the sprawling orange diamond that my mother once told me resembled a

woman wearing a sari with her left arm extended. Various cities had been

circled with lines drawn between them to indicate my parents’ travels, and

the place of their birth, Calcutta, was signified by a small silver star. I had

been there only once and had no memory of the trip. “As you see, Lilia, it is

a different country, a different color,” my father said. Pakistan was yellow,

not orange. I noticed that there were two distinct parts to it, one much larger

than the other, separated by an expanse of Indian territory; it was as if

California and Connecticut constituted a nation apart from the U.S.

Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting

George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, and

we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in

his hair. During tests we were given blank maps of the thirteen colonies, and

asked to fill in names, dates, capitals. I could do it with my eyes closed.

The next evening Mr. Pirzada arrived, as usual, at six o’clock. Though they

were no longer strangers, upon first greeting each other, he and my father

maintained the habit of shaking hands.

“Come in, sir. Lilia, Mr. Pirzada’s coat, please.”

He stepped into the foyer, impeccably suited and scarved, with a silk tie

knotted at his collar. Each evening he appeared in ensembles of plums,

olives, and chocolate browns. He was a compact man, and though his feet

were perpetually splayed, and his belly slightly wide, he nevertheless

maintained an efficient posture, as if balancing in either hand two suitcases

of equal weight. His ears were insulated by tufts of graying hair that seemed

to block out the unpleasant traffic of life. He had thickly lashed eyes shaded

with a trace of camphor, a generous mustache that turned up playfully at the

ends, and a mole shaped like a flattened raisin in the very center of his left

cheek. On his head he wore a black fez made from the wool of Persian

lambs, secured by bobby pins, without which I was never to see him. Though

my father always offered to fetch him in our car, Mr. Pirzada preferred to

walk from his dormitory to our neighborhood, a distance of about twenty

minutes on foot, studying trees and shrubs on his way, and when he entered

our house his knuckles were pink with the effects of crisp autumn air.

My father rapped his knuckles on top of my head. “You are, of course,

aware of the current situation? Aware of East Pakistan’s fight for

sovereignty?”

I nodded, unaware of the situation.

We returned to the kitchen, where my mother was draining a pot of

boiled rice into a colander. My father opened up the can on the counter and

eyed me sharply over the frames of his glasses as he ate some more cashews.

“What exactly do they teach you at school? Do you study history?

Geography?”

“Lilia has plenty to learn at school,” my mother said. “We live here

now, she was born here.” She seemed genuinely proud of the fact, as if it

were a reflection of my character. In her estimation, I knew, I was assured a

safe life, an easy life, a fine education, every opportunity. I would never have

to eat rationed food, or obey curfews, or watch riots from my rooftop, or

hide neighbors in water tanks to prevent them from being shot, as she and

my father had. “Imagine having to place her in a decent school. Imagine her

having to read during power failures by the light of kerosene lamps. Imagine

the pressures, the tutors, the constant exams.” She ran a hand through her

hair, bobbed to a suitable length for her part-time job as a bank teller. “How

can you possibly expect her to know about Partition? Put those nuts away.”

“Another refugee, I am afraid, on Indian territory.”

“They are estimating nine million at the last count,” my father said.

Mr. Pirzada handed me his coat, for it was my job to hang it on the rack

at the bottom of the stairs. It was made of finely checkered gray-and-blue

wool, with a striped lining and horn buttons, and carried in its weave the

faint smell of limes. There were no recognizable tags inside, only a hand-

stitched label with the phrase “Z. Sayeed, Suitors” embroidered on it in

cursive with glossy black thread. On certain days a birch or maple leaf was

tucked into a pocket. He unlaced his shoes and lined them against the

baseboard; a golden paste clung to the toes and heels, the result of walking

through our damp, unraked lawn. Relieved of his trappings, he grazed my

throat with his short, restless fingers, the way a person feels for solidity

behind a wall before driving in a nail. Then he followed my father to the

living room, where the television was tuned to the local news. As soon as

they were seated my mother appeared from the kitchen with a plate of

“But what does she learn about the world?” My father rattled the cashew

can in his hand. “What is she learning?”

We learned American history, of course, and American geography. That

year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary

War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock,

and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill

mincemeat kebabs with coriander chutney. Mr. Pirzada popped one into his

mouth.

“One can only hope,” he said, reaching for another, “that Dacca’s

refugees are as heartily fed. Which reminds me.” He reached into his suit

pocket and gave me a small plastic egg filled with cinnamon hearts. “For the

lady of the house,” he said with an almost imperceptible splay-footed bow.

“Really, Mr. Pirzada,” my mother protested. “Night after night. You

spoil her.”

“I only spoil children who are incapable of spoiling.”

It was an awkward moment for me, one which I awaited in part with

dread, in part with delight. I was charmed by the presence of Mr. Pirzada’s

rotund elegance, and flattered by the faint theatricality of his attentions, yet

unsettled by the superb ease of his gestures, which made me feel, for an

instant, like a stranger in my own home. It had become our ritual, and for

several weeks, before we grew more comfortable with one another, it was

the only time he spoke to me directly I had no response, offered no

comment, betrayed no visible reaction to the steady stream of honey-filled

lozenges, the raspberry truffles, the slender rolls of sour pastilles. I could not

even thank him, for once, when I did, for an especially spectacular

peppermint lollipop wrapped in a spray of purple cellophane, he had

demanded, “What is this thank-you? The lady at the bank thanks me, the

cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me when I return an

overdue book, the overseas operator thanks me as she tries to connect me to

Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at

my funeral.”

It was inappropriate, in my opinion, to consume the candy Mr. Pirzada

gave me in a casual manner. I coveted each evening’s treasure as I would a

jewel, or a coin from a buried kingdom, and I would place it in a small

keepsake box made of carved sandalwood beside my bed, in which, long ago

in India, my father’s mother used to store the ground areca nuts she ate after

her morning bath. It was my only memento of a grandmother I had never

known, and until Mr. Pirzada came to our lives I could find nothing to put

inside it. Every so often before brushing my teeth and laying out my clothes

for school the next day, I opened the lid of the box and ate one of his treats.

That night, like every night, we did not eat at the dining table, because it

did not provide an unobstructed view of the television set. Instead we

huddled around the coffee table, without conversing, our plates perched on

the edges of our knees. From the kitchen my mother brought forth the

succession of dishes: lentils with fried onions, green beans with coconut, fish

cooked with raisins in a yogurt sauce. I followed with the water glasses, and

the plate of lemon wedges, and the chili peppers, purchased on monthly trips

to Chinatown and stored by the pound in the freezer, which they liked to

snap open and crush into their food.

Before eating Mr. Pirzada always did a curious thing. He took out a

plain silver watch without a band, which he kept in his breast pocket, held it

briefly to one of his tufted ears, and wound it with three swift flicks of his

thumb and forefinger. Unlike the watch on his wrist, the pocket watch, he

had explained to me, was set to the local time in Dacca, eleven hours ahead.

For the duration of the meal the watch rested on his folded paper napkin on

the coffee table. He never seemed to consult it.

Now that I had learned Mr. Pirzada was not an Indian, I began to study

him with extra care, to try to figure out what made him different. I decided

that the pocket watch was one of those things. When I saw it that night, as he

wound it and arranged it on the coffee table, an uneasiness possessed me;

life, I realized, was being lived in Dacca first. I imagined Mr. Pirzada’s

daughters rising from sleep, tying ribbons in their hair, anticipating

breakfast, preparing for school. Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow

of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada

really belonged.

At six-thirty, which was when the national news began, my father raised

the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a

book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention. On the screen I

saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of

unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety

over the Indian border. I saw boats with fan-shaped sails floating on wide

coffee-colored rivers, a barricaded university, newspaper offices burnt to the

ground. I turned to look at Mr. Pirzada; the images flashed in miniature

across his eyes. As he watched he had an immovable expression on his face,

composed but alert, as if someone were giving him directions to an unknown

destination.

During the commercial my mother went to the kitchen to get more rice,

and my father and Mr. Pirzada deplored the policies of a general named

Yahyah Khan. They discussed intrigues I did not know, a catastrophe I could

not comprehend. “See, children your age, what they do to survive,” my

father said as he served me another piece of fish. But I could no longer eat. I

could only steal glances at Mr. Pirzada, sitting beside me in his olive green

jacket, calmly creating a well in his rice to make room for a second helping

of lentils. He was not my notion of a man burdened by such grave concerns.

I wondered if the reason he was always so smartly dressed was in

preparation to endure with dignity whatever news assailed him, perhaps even

to attend a funeral at a moments notice. I wondered, too, what would happen

if suddenly his seven daughters were to appear on television, smiling and

waving and blowing kisses to Mr. Pirzada from a balcony. I imagined how

relieved he would be. But this never happened.

That night when I placed the plastic egg filled with cinnamon hearts in

the box beside my bed, I did not feel the ceremonious satisfaction I normally

did. I tried not to think about Mr. Pirzada, in his lime-scented overcoat,

connected to the unruly, sweltering world we had viewed a few hours ago in

our bright, carpeted living room. And yet for several moments that was all I

could think about. My stomach tightened as I worried whether his wife and

seven daughters were now members of the drifting, clamoring crowd that

had flashed at intervals on the screen. In an effort to banish the image I

looked around my room, at the yellow canopied bed with matching flounced

curtains, at framed class pictures mounted on white and violet papered walls,

at the penciled inscriptions by the closet door where my father recorded my

height on each of my birthdays. But the more I tried to distract myself, the

more I began to convince myself that Mr. Pirzada’s family was in all

likelihood dead. Eventually I took a square of white chocolate out of the box,

and unwrapped it, and then I did something I had never done before. I put

the chocolate in my mouth, letting it soften until the last possible moment,

and then as I chewed it slowly, I prayed that Mr. Pirzada’s family was safe

and sound. I had never prayed for anything before, had never been taught or

told to, but I decided, given the circumstances, that it was something I should

do. That night when I went to the bathroom I only pretended to brush my

teeth, for I feared that I would somehow rinse the prayer out as well. I wet

the brush and rearranged the tube of paste to prevent my parents from asking

any questions, and fell asleep with sugar on my tongue.

No one at school talked about the war followed so faithfully in my living

room. We continued to study the American Revolution, and learned about

the injustices of taxation without representation, and memorized passages

from the Declaration of Independence. During recess the boys would divide

in two groups, chasing each other wildly around the swings and seesaws,

Redcoats against the colonies. In the classroom our teacher, Mrs. Kenyon,

pointed frequently to a map that emerged like a movie screen from the top of

the chalkboard, charting the route of the Mayflower or showing us the

location of the Liberty Bell. Each week two members of the class gave a

report on a particular aspect of the Revolution, and so one day I was sent to

the school library with my friend Dora to learn about the surrender at

Yorktown. Mrs. Kenyon handed us a slip of paper with the names of three

books to look up in the card catalogue. We found them right away, and sat

down at a low round table to read and take notes. But I could not

concentrate. I returned to the blond-wood shelves, to a section I had noticed

labeled “Asia.” I saw books about China, India, Indonesia, Korea.

Eventually I found a book titled Pakistan: A Land and Its People. I sat on a

footstool and opened the book. The laminated jacket crackled in my grip. I

began turning the pages, filled with photos of rivers and rice fields and men

in military uniforms. There was a chapter about Dacca, and I began to read

about its rainfall, and its jute production. I was studying a population chart

when Dora appeared in the aisle.

“What are you doing back here? Mrs. Kenyon’s in the library. She came

to check up on us.”

I slammed the book shut, too loudly. Mrs. Kenyon emerged, the aroma

of her perfume filling up the tiny aisle, and lifted the book by the tip of its

spine as if it were a hair clinging to my sweater. She glanced at the cover,

then at me.

“Is this book a part of your report, Lilia?”

“No, Mrs. Kenyon.”

“Then I see no reason to consult it,” she said, replacing it in the slim gap

on the shelf. “Do you?”

* * *

As weeks passed it grew more and more rare to see any footage from Dacca

on the news. The report came after the first set of commercials, sometimes

the second. The press had been censored, removed, restricted, rerouted.

Some days, many days, only a death toll was announced, prefaced by a

reiteration of the general situation. More poets were executed, more villages

set ablaze. In spite of it all, night after night, my parents and Mr. Pirzada

enjoyed long, leisurely meals. After the television was shut off, and the

dishes washed and dried, they joked, and told stories, and dipped biscuits in

their tea. When they tired of discussing political matters they discussed,

instead, the progress of Mr. Pirzada’s book about the deciduous trees of New

England, and my father’s nomination for tenure, and the peculiar eating

habits of my mother’s American coworkers at the bank. Eventually I was

sent upstairs to do my homework, but through the carpet I heard them as

they drank more tea, and listened to cassettes of Kishore Kumar, and played

Scrabble on the coffee table, laughing and arguing long into the night about

the spellings of English words. I wanted to join them, wanted, above all, to

console Mr. Pirzada somehow. But apart from eating a piece of candy for the

sake of his family and praying for their safety, there was nothing I could do.

They played Scrabble until the eleven o’clock news, and then, sometime

around midnight, Mr. Pirzada walked back to his dormitory. For this reason I

never saw him leave, but each night as I drifted off to sleep I would hear

them, anticipating the birth of a nation on the other side of the world.

“Smile or frown?” I asked.

“You choose,” Mr. Pirzada said.

As a compromise I drew a kind of grimace, straight across, neither

mournful nor friendly. Mr. Pirzada began carving, without the least bit of

intimidation, as if he had been carving jack-o’-lanterns his whole life. He

had nearly finished when the national news began. The reporter mentioned

Dacca, and we all turned to listen: An Indian official announced that unless

the world helped to relieve the burden of East Pakistani refugees, India

would have to go to war against Pakistan. The reporter’s face dripped with

sweat as he relayed the information. He did not wear a tie or a jacket, dressed

instead as if he himself were about to take part in the battle. He shielded his

scorched face as he hollered things to the cameraman. The knife slipped

from Mr. Pirzada’s hand and made a gash dipping toward the base of the

pumpkin.

One day in October Mr. Pirzada asked upon arrival, “What are these large

orange vegetables on people’s doorsteps? A type of squash?”

“Pumpkins,” my mother replied. “Lilia, remind me to pick one up at the

supermarket.”

“And the purpose? It indicates what?”

“You make a jack-o’-lantern,” I said, grinning ferociously. “Like this.

To scare people away.”

“I see,” Mr. Pirzada said, grinning back. “Very useful.”

The next day my mother bought a ten-pound pumpkin, fat and round,

and placed it on the dining table. Before supper, while my father and Mr.

Pirzada were watching the local news, she told me to decorate it with

markers, but I wanted to carve it properly like others I had noticed in the

neighborhood.

“Please forgive me.” He raised a hand to one side of his face, as if

someone had slapped him there. “I am—it is terrible. I will buy another. We

will try again.”

“Not at all, not at all,” my father said. He took the knife from Mr.

Pirzada, and carved around the gash, evening it out, dispensing altogether

with the teeth I had drawn. What resulted was a disproportionately large hole

the size of a lemon, so that our jack-o’-lantern wore an expression of placid

astonishment, the eyebrows no longer fierce, floating in frozen surprise

above a vacant, geometric gaze.

“Yes, let’s carve it,” Mr. Pirzada agreed, and rose from the sofa. “Hang

the news tonight.” Asking no questions, he walked into the kitchen, opened a

drawer, and returned, bearing a long serrated knife. He glanced at me for

approval. “Shall I?”

I nodded. For the first time we all gathered around the dining table, my

mother, my father, Mr. Pirzada, and I. While the television aired unattended

we covered the tabletop with newspapers. Mr. Pirzada draped his jacket over

the chair behind him, removed a pair of opal cuff links, and rolled up the

starched sleeves of his shirt.

For Halloween I was a witch. Dora, my trick-or-treating partner, was a witch

too. We wore black capes fashioned from dyed pillowcases and conical hats

with wide cardboard brims. We shaded our faces green with a broken eye

shadow that belonged to Dora’s mother, and my mother gave us two burlap

sacks that had once contained basmati rice, for collecting candy. That year

our parents decided that we were old enough to roam the neighborhood

unattended. Our plan was to walk from my house to Dora’s, from where I

was to call to say I had arrived safely, and then Dora’s mother would drive

me home. My father equipped us with flashlights, and I had to wear my

watch and synchronize it with his. We were to return no later than nine

o’clock.

“First go around the top, like this,” I instructed, demonstrating with my

index finger.

He made an initial incision and drew the knife around. When he had

come full circle he lifted the cap by the stem; it loosened effortlessly, and

Mr. Pirzada leaned over the pumpkin for a moment to inspect and inhale its

contents. My mother gave him a long metal spoon with which he gutted the

interior until the last bits of string and seeds were gone. My father,

meanwhile, separated the seeds from the pulp and set them out to dry on a

cookie sheet, so that we could roast them later on. I drew two triangles

against the ridged surface for the eyes, which Mr. Pirzada dutifully carved,

and crescents for eyebrows, and another triangle for the nose. The mouth

was all that remained, and the teeth posed a challenge. I hesitated.

When Mr. Pirzada arrived that evening he presented me with a box of

chocolate-covered mints.

“In here,” I told him, and opened up the burlap sack. “Trick or treat!”

“I understand that you don’t really need my contribution this evening,”

he said, depositing the box. He gazed at my green face, and the hat secured

by a string under my chin. Gingerly he lifted the hem of the cape, under

which I was wearing a sweater and a zipped fleece jacket. “Will you be

warm enough?”

I nodded, causing the hat to tip to one side.

He set it right. “Perhaps it is best to stand still.”

The bottom of our staircase was lined with baskets of miniature candy,

and when Mr. Pirzada removed his shoes he did not place them there as he

normally did, but inside the closet instead. He began to unbutton his coat,

and I waited to take it from him, but Dora called me from the bathroom to

say that she needed my help drawing a mole on her chin. When we were

finally ready my mother took a picture of us in front of the fireplace, and

then I opened the front door to leave. Mr. Pirzada and my father, who had

not gone into the living room yet, hovered in the foyer. Outside it was

already dark. The air smelled of wet leaves, and our carved jack-o’-lantern

flickered impressively against the shrubbery by the door. In the distance

came the sounds of scampering feet, and the howls of the older boys who

wore no costume at all other than a rubber mask, and the rustling apparel of

the youngest children, some so young that they were carried from door to

door in the arms of their parents.

“Don’t go into any of the houses you don’t know,” my father warned.

Mr. Pirzada knit his brows together. “Is there any danger?”

“No, no,” my mother assured him. “All the children will be out. It’s a

tradition.”

“Perhaps I should accompany them?” Mr. Pirzada suggested. He looked

suddenly tired and small, standing there in his splayed, stockinged feet, and

his eyes contained a panic I had never seen before. In spite of the cold I

began to sweat inside my pillowcase.

“Really, Mr. Pirzada,” my mother said, “Lilia will be perfectly safe with

her friend.”

“But if it rains? If they lose their way?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. It was the first time I had uttered those words to

Mr. Pirzada, two simple words I had tried but failed to tell him for weeks,

had said only in my prayers. It shamed me now that I had said them for my

own sake.

He placed one of his stocky fingers on my cheek, then pressed it to the

back of his own hand, leaving a faint green smear. “If the lady insists,” he

conceded, and offered a small bow.

We left, stumbling slightly in our black pointy thrift-store shoes, and

when we turned at the end of the driveway to wave good-bye, Mr. Pirzada

was standing in the frame of the doorway, a short figure between my parents,

waving back.

“Why did that man want to come with us?” Dora asked.

“His daughters are missing.” As soon as I said it, I wished I had not. I

felt that my saying it made it true, that Mr. Pirzada’s daughters really were

missing, and that he would never see them again.

“You mean they were kidnapped?” Dora continued. “From a park or

something?”

‘‘I didn’t mean they were missing. I meant, he misses them. They live in

a different country, and he hasn’t seen them in a while, that’s all.”

We went from house to house, walking along pathways and pressing

doorbells. Some people had switched off all their lights for effect, or strung

rubber bats in their windows. At the McIntyres’ a coffin was placed in front

of the door, and Mr. McIntyre rose from it in silence, his face covered with

chalk, and deposited a fistful of candy corns into our sacks. Several people

told me that they had never seen an Indian witch before. Others performed

the transaction without comment. As we paved our way with the parallel

beams of our flashlights we saw eggs cracked in the middle of the road, and

cars covered with shaving cream, and toilet paper garlanding the branches of

trees. By the time we reached Dora’s house our hands were chapped from

carrying our bulging burlap bags, and our feet were sore and swollen. Her

mother gave us bandages for our blisters and served us warm cider and

caramel popcorn. She reminded me to call my parents to tell them I had

arrived safely, and when I did I could hear the television in the background.

My mother did not seem particularly relieved to hear from me. When I

replaced the phone on the receiver it occurred to me that the television

wasn’t on at Dora’s house at all. Her father was lying on the couch, reading a

magazine, with a glass of wine on the coffee table, and there was saxophone

music playing on the stereo.

After Dora and 1 had sorted through our plunder, and counted and

sampled and traded until we were satisfied, her mother drove me back to my

house. I thanked her for the ride, and she waited in the driveway until I made

it to the door. In the glare of her headlights I saw that our pumpkin had been

shattered, its thick shell strewn in chunks across the grass. I felt the sting of

tears in my eyes, and a sudden pain in my throat, as if it had been stuffed

with the sharp tiny pebbles that crunched with each step under my aching

feet. I opened the door, expecting the three of them to be standing in the

foyer, waiting to receive me, and to grieve for our ruined pumpkin, but there

was no one. In the living room Mr. Pirzada, my father, and mother were

sitting side by side on the sofa. The television was turned off, and Mr.

Pirzada had his head in his hands.

What they heard that evening, and for many evenings after that, was that

India and Pakistan were drawing closer and closer to war. Troops from both

sides lined the border, and Dacca was insisting on nothing short of

independence. The war was to be waged on East Pakistani soil. The United

States was siding with West Pakistan, the Soviet Union with India and what

was soon to be Bangladesh. War was declared officially on December 4, and

twelve days later, the Pakistani army, weakened by having to fight three

thousand miles from their source of supplies, surrendered in Dacca. All of

these facts I know only now, for they are available to me in any history

book, in any library. But then it remained, for the most part, a remote

mystery with haphazard clues. What I remember during those twelve days of

the war was that my father no longer asked me to watch the news with them,

and that Mr. Pirzada stopped bringing me candy, and that my mother refused

to serve anything other than boiled eggs with rice for dinner. I remember

some nights helping my mother spread a sheet and blankets on the couch so

that Mr. Pirzada could sleep there, and high-pitched voices hollering in the

middle of the night when my parents called our relatives in Calcutta to learn

more details about the situation. Most of all I remember the three of them

operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single

meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.

In January, Mr. Pirzada flew back to his three-story home in Dacca, to

discover what was left of it. We did not see much of him in those final weeks

of the year; he was busy finishing his manuscript, and we went to

Philadelphia to spend Christmas with friends of my parents. Just as I have no

memory of his first visit, I have no memory of his last. My father drove him

to the airport one afternoon while I was at school. For a long time we did not

hear from him. Our evenings went on as usual, with dinners in front of the

news. The only difference was that Mr. Pirzada and his extra watch were not

there to accompany us. According to reports Dacca was repairing itself

slowly, with a newly formed parliamentary government. The new leader,

Sheikh Mujib Rahman, recently released from prison, asked countries for

building materials to replace more than one million houses that had been

destroyed in the war. Countless refugees returned from India, greeted, we

learned, by unemployment and the threat of famine. Every now and then I

studied the map above my father’s desk and pictured Mr. Pirzada on that

small patch of yellow, perspiring heavily, I imagined, in one of his suits,

searching for his family. Of course, the map was outdated by then.

Finally, several months later, we received a card from Mr. Pirzada

commemorating the Muslim New Year, along with a short letter. He was

reunited, he wrote, with his wife and children. All were well, having

survived the events of the past year at an estate belonging to his wife’s

grandparents in the mountains of Shillong. His seven daughters were a bit

taller, he wrote, but otherwise they were the same, and he still could not keep

their names in order. At the end of the letter he thanked us for our

hospitality, adding that although he now understood the meaning of the

words “thank you” they still were not adequate to express his gratitude. To

celebrate the good news my mother prepared a special dinner that evening,

and when we sat down to eat at the coffee table we toasted our water glasses,

but I did not feel like celebrating. Though I had not seen him for months, it

was only then that I felt Mr. Pirzada’s absence. It was only then, raising my

water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was

so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters

for so many months. He had no reason to return to us, and my parents

predicted, correctly, that we would never see him again. Since January, each

night before bed, I had continued to eat, for the sake of Mr. Pirzada’s family,

a piece of candy I had saved from Halloween. That night there was no need

to. Eventually, I threw them away.