A Little Slice of the Moon: Stories
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University of Central Florida STARS Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 2005 A Little Slice Of The Moon: Stories Fatima Rashid University of Central Florida Part of the Fiction Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Masters Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STARS Citation Rashid, Fatima, "A Little Slice Of The Moon: Stories" (2005). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019. 606. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/606 A LITTLE SLICE OF THE MOON: STORIES by FATIMA RASHID B.A. State University of New York, 1999 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Fall Term 2005 ABSTRACT A Little Slice of the Moon: stories is a collection of short stories that explore the struggles of various characters to find their place in the world. And the world, despite its familiarity, can be a hostile place. The characters in this collection learn that families are a fragile lot, that every desire contains a paradox, that the Road of Life can seemingly be grasped by the horns, but that the future twists and turns, yet never escapes the past. And it is the past that haunts these characters’ lives. One word, one act, impacts a lifetime. In A Little Slice of the Moon, Khalid traces the devastation of his ‘new’ life and his alienation to everything around him back to a youthful error. In The Thousand Trees Orchard, the arrival of Mahjabeen, Laddo’s deranged and possibly dangerous sister, teaches Laddo the difference between fleeing the past and embracing it. In Dead Woman’s Pass, Priya tries to outrun her malevolent qismet, and in doing so, almost loses herself as well. Isolation, physical or emotional, is a primary element in many of these characters’ lives. Whether the isolation is self-imposed or results from circumstances beyond their control, these characters realize that where they are matters less than what they’ve done. They learn that confronting themselves—who they are, who they were—is the only way to break free from the past and make peace with themselves and with the world around them. ii For Haroon, Who survived spaghetti and peanut butter Umar, Raniya, and Afeefah, Who babysat while they themselves were babies Muneeza, Sufia, Kinza, and Zahrah, Whom I’ll never exchange for a bushel of words. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to Jeanne Leiby, my thesis advisor, who convinced me that I can write and who proved invaluable in pointing out my strengths and weaknesses. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS A LITTLE SLICE OF THE MOON............................................................................................... 1 THE THOUSAND TREES ORCHARD...................................................................................... 24 THE POUTLRY FARMER’S WIFE............................................................................................ 57 KAHKASHAN ............................................................................................................................. 89 SHEREEN’S TREASURE ......................................................................................................... 115 DEAD WOMAN’S PASS .......................................................................................................... 141 v A LITTLE SLICE OF THE MOON On the plane, flying toward a country he’s turned his back on for twenty years, Khalid remembers what he has never really forgotten. He remembers how he left Paposhnagar at nineteen with the stink of fish radiating from his hands and hair, his nose and lips bleeding from his mother’s fists. “Go die like a ghoons in the gutter,” she screamed the last time he saw her. Her hair, prematurely gray, swung about her face as she flung books at him, then plates, porcelain flowers, a footstool, whatever came to her hand. His father and brothers tried to quiet her. Don’t curse your own son. A mother’s words strike like an arrow, deliver like a promise. But the words and fists flew no matter what. “No one needs a piece of misery like you. Dafa hojaw. You’ve been nothing but trouble since you were born.” And trouble was his middle name, Khalid told his wife Shagufta, years later, when they were newlyweds, when Abdullah floated inside Shagufta’s womb, multiplying by millions of cells each minute. “I fell off roofs, dived off a cliff once and almost drowned,” Khalid said. “Once I tried to clean this stray cat with gasoline and she caught fire.” He spun his tales with a storyteller’s instinct, molding them into escapades worth laughing about. And Shagufta laughed, about the 1 twelve stitches on his scalp, the broken ankle, the motorcycle accidents, his teachers in grade school begging to be fired unless he was expelled. He didn’t tell Shagufta why he’d left home, of course. That knowledge he kept tucked inside him, like a broken tooth wrapped in a dirty handkerchief. Shagufta assumed he’d come to America for the reason all desi illegals did: money. Money to send back for siblings’ educations, debts, a better house, sisters’ weddings. In a survey of desis, sisters’ weddings would no doubt top the list, Khalid thought. But Khalid had no sister to worry about. Not anymore. So when he backed away from his mother and stalked out of their white-washed concrete home, her words drove him, not necessity. “Did you hear what I said? I’ll bury you with her. You, your future, your fishing rods—” He slammed the door behind him. He didn’t imagine then that twenty years would pass before he saw his mother again. He didn’t think further than the end of the street, or maybe a friend’s house, or the chai-wala’s at Paposh Plaza. Boys from respectable families didn’t leave. Not if they married, not if they won the lottery. So Khalid imagined he’d slink home at nightfall, avoid his mother for a while. Then one day, he’d clutch her feet and beg her to forgive him. All things blew over, he thought. But as he plowed down the street, whispers and furtive stares stirring in all directions, his father came after him, kicking up a plume of dust. He grabbed Khalid’s shirt and brought him to a standstill. Khalid watched as his father struggled for breath, leaning heavily against Nazar the Tailor’s dusty maroon Toyota. Age had ambushed him. This morning he’d left the house humming Iqbal, reeking of Brut cologne, a lunch tin stuffed with paratas swinging from his hand. Now his skin sagged and so did he. When Khalid pictures that day across a distance of 2 twenty years, he sees himself, a lanky boy all elbows and jeans, facing his saggy-skinned father on the sun-baked road. He wills his father to grab that boy by the nape of the neck and drag him home. In reality, his father straightened and pulled a bundle of ill-stacked faded rupees out of his khameez pocket. “It’s not your fault,” he offered, holding out the money. Khalid froze. His father thought he was leaving. And that knowledge jarred Khalid more than his mother’s fists. A few lines from his father’s favorite book, Idioms and Quotations, rambled through Khalid’s mind. Some storms are best left un-weathered, a road once walked can never be un-traveled. “Three lakh,” his father said. “It’s your brother’s college tuition. You can pay it back when you get to America.” America, the Land of Milk and Honey. Where the streets glimmered gold, the stars shone during daytime. And Khalid had begged to go, hadn’t he? Begged and nagged his parents since he’d finished Intermediate. So many boys had gone ahead, and the dollars they wired back showed in the cars their families drove and the hoity-toity way they spoke. But being sent away was another thing entirely, even if it was to America. Later, when Khalid told Shagufta how he’d entered the US, on foot across the Mexican border, she didn’t believe him. “That’s crazy,” she said, lying behind him, one leg slung over his, on the multani coverlet in their moonlit bedroom. Her skin stretched, bluish, across her stomach, and Abdullah kicked through it, drumming Khalid’s back. “Desis don’t do that. I mean, why didn’t you just buy a fake visa?” She knew all about fake visas, having arrived in the US on one herself. But unlike Khalid, 3 Shagufta had immigrated at the age of four, with her parents and several siblings, so her English didn’t suffer from a desi accent like his. “I thought that’s what I was getting, a US visa,” Khalid said, “and the next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Mexico.” He gave her the impression that he’d been a naïve teenager, hoodwinked by crooked men. The truth was, his father’s three lakh covered nothing better than a Mexican crossing. But when his father held out those rupees, they appeared enough to accomplish anything. Or perhaps on a day like that, nothing. Khalid didn’t whoop like an idiot or shake hands with every man he knew, or jump on his Honda 125 and take off to celebrate at The Pink Panther with his friends. A day earlier, he might have. But the world twisted around him in a distorted dream, like life viewed through a shard of glass. He stunk of fish and sea water, Khalid suddenly realized, and something else, harder to pinpoint and define. His little sister Syra lay lifeless at home on the drawing room couch, the turquoise of her jumper running and staining the white brocade.