Paré, Evergreen N0.54, May'68

On one such night, Nadhira said, "Why must he disrespect? The police ask only that he do it in private."
"Should one be ashamed to eat in public?"
"It is the Holy Month." Religion could really draw her out. Otherwise she mostly just glowed with a mesmerizing calm. But her inclination toward quietude, toward people-watching and eating in silence often found me flustered, like I had succumbed to passing anonymously on a distant planet. So sometimes I used religion to liven things up.
She said, "I hope when I return you'll have found another place." After Ramadan she was taking off on a five-month group tour of Asia. We hadn't been apart since near when I arrived, a year before. "It's so, are you even aware that you're the only expat here who lives like this?"
The muezzins' cries splayed humorlessly through the city smog. Nadhira and those around us stretched for plates of dates, rice, fish and sambals. I recognized the "Osama" twins from the printing press (called so because of their long grizzly beards), the old gossipers with the nurse's union, and a prostitute or two, fixtures in those pink-lighted doorways.
"I do, too." I said.
I'd in fact have moved sooner, at least to a place with a view, but I couldn't afford to. Editing jobs had declined (mainly I suspect because I pushed copy in the opposite direction required of the state-controlled press). And Nadhira was not cheap–she demanded things: clothes, meals, stays in hillside bungalows. Then there were abortions, three altogether, which I'd had to pay for, because she'd have just as soon quit the modeling to start a family, with or without me.
Strange now to think that I was her first non-Muslim friend, and that if not for the modeling, which I'd urged her to take up, she may well have fallen the other way, into the atavism that her family had raised her to believe was The Strait Path, that a year ago had seemed unwaverable.
Some things were better then–how mindful she had seemed of everything I said.
And on days we met at the commuter rail she would bury her face in my chest, leaving it there until I whispered, enough, after which she'd peer up at me in a rapturous daze.
I often warned her (after reminding myself) not to get too close; we could never work. I knew, mainly through Dad, what men and women are capable of–above all, abandonment. And I didn't want to be the one to shatter her innocence, her connection with God and culture. Not in that way, not in any way. So I told myself.
With each abortion, my sense of guilt grew, to the point that, while sitting across from Nadhira during this pious indulgence in surfeit, I couldn't bring myself to broach the topic–though Christ how we needed to. She was two months Late, and once she left, my opinion would hardly matter. She'd go right on through with it, I was sure–she had a real deaf and counterintuitive streak–return home all bloated up, rearing to drop, despite what her family might say, despite not having a name picked out or even a pair of shoes and cap for the little bugger.
To my horror, everywhere I turned I suddenly saw children, through scissoring legs and the steam of boiling noodles, leading the blind in search of coins. A woman was changing a baby's diapers inches from where a man was hacking a chicken to bits. I listened. Not a weep to be heard. It was rare they cried. They were the cutest children I'd seen anywhere: soft and tan, with thick tussled hair, full lips, big soulful eyes.
This had led me more than once (usually before insisting Nadhira go for an abortion) to envisage settling in these parts, raising one, with a young beauty like herself. It seemed a sure way to confirm my own path, distance myself from the confusion of my own blood. The brown and white factor seemed inconsequential; I felt if we loved and nurtured the child with our full selves, he would possess no confusion over it.