People Want to Live by Farah Ali

Author:Farah Ali
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McSweeney's Publishing

For about nine days, it rained almost nonstop. Roads flooded but people crossed them joyously, hitching up shalwar and pants. Umbrellas were optional. Schools closed for a whole day to celebrate the end of the worst heat wave in forty years. Some of the poorer people died because of electrocution. Kamil wrote a small piece on how they should have known better than to bathe in puddles where wires had fallen. He showed it to Saba, and, late at night, she used those pages to scrub the toilet.

His minor success seemed to have made him generous toward her. He asked her one night about her work, but she didn’t have any interesting details to relate. She told him that they had switched from blue sticky notes to green ones.

She was surprised when he came home one evening with a new handbag for her.

“You never get anything for yourself,” he said, gentle admonition in his voice.

She hung the bag from her mirror. She knew where it was from. It had swung from the post of the cart of the man who sold fake bags and shoes at the corner of their street. When she lay in bed, she saw its bright, golden clasp gleaming cheaply in the dim light. It reminded her that the building she lived in was old and a sickly shade of yellow, that most of the year the trees and shrubs outside hung dispirited and dusty, growing out of cracks in footpaths, and that no amount of rain could give them beauty. Maybe she and Kamil had never had a chance because of the street they lived on—narrow, dirty, trapping the heat that poured from the sky in the day, releasing it in waves from the melting asphalt in the night. Even rainwater couldn’t flow down it gracefully: already there were plastic bags and pieces of food from vendors’ carts mixed in it.

She had seen handbags like that when she was small, in apartments like this one on streets like hers. Always, the women holding them wore bright maroon lipstick and clutched their men around the waist on motorcycles, or walked fast through marketplaces holding the hands of little children who wore shirts with words on them like “sweet girl” or “cool guy.” Her mother had been one of them herself, had had friends like these, and Saba used to visit them with her, wearing an ironed frock. When the women talked about their husbands, who were tailors or butchers or electricians, they used pronouns because Saba was sitting with them. She understood anyway, listening to every word while pretending to be absorbed in eating the biscuits. The topics hardly ever changed: their men’s tempers, excesses, and taciturn ways.

Like everyone else, though, Saba had been sure she was going to have it different, and better.

______________

The rain stopped. Kamil told Saba that he wanted to drop her off at work. He wouldn’t listen when she said that she could go on her own, so she agreed and got onto the motorcycle behind him.

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