Uber

FICTION

by Zehra Habib

          Zainab waited in front of her apartment building—a taupe brick structure ugly as a barracks—amid the bloom of June. Two suitcases, a stroller, and a car seat lay on the walkway in front of her. Her son, a seven-year-old wearing a backpack and glasses, dug a stick into a patch of ivy. A second child tugged on her hand with all the weight of a two-year-old body. Zainab tried to strap a toddler harness on him, afraid that he’d bolt into the road.
         He looked up at her with round brown eyes. “No, Mama. No doggie.”
         “Don’t run, then.” She wouldn’t be able to keep up with him if he did, not with a backpack on, and a purse slipping off her shoulder. She stuffed the harness into a suitcase and held her son’s hand tighter.
         They stood in the shade of a pine. She picked her son up to show him the pine cones growing together on the same tree: the male, crumbly and short-lived; the female, green and tight. With the passage of time, the female cones would unfurl, drop their seeds, and grow dark, sharp, and rigid. But for now, they trembled together on the branches, hopeful and expectant.
         A white Toyota Camry pulled into the loop in front of the building. The driver rolled down his window and asked Zainab to confirm her PIN. He then popped open his trunk and got out. The driver went to help Zainab with her luggage, but she had already put the backpacks, stroller, and suitcases into the trunk. Then she opened the door and got her children into the car, and was busy looping a seatbelt securely through the back of her son’s car seat.
         “May I help you with that?” the driver asked.
         “No, I’ve got it.” Within seconds, Zainab plopped her two-year-old into his car seat and helped her older son with his seatbelt. She carried her purse—a black leather satchel with golden clasps—into the back seat with her, before sitting down herself. As she closed the door, she left the odor of warm tires and car exhaust on the street, and smelled instead the driver’s scent, of wood and sap and musk.
         She checked her booking. Muhammad.
         The driver sat down, swiped on his cell phone screen, and asked, “Where are you going? I need to confirm my route.”
         “Airport,” Zainab said, her voice deep for a woman, yet soft. “Terminal two.”
         Muhammad switched off his music and put his car in drive. An Atif Aslam song had been playing, not one from his Bollywood oeuvre, but still not one Zainab listened to often. The man was clearly one of her own.
         “Don’t turn it off. I like it,” she said.
         He turned the music back on, setting the volume lower than before. Zainab’s older son smiled, gaps where his front teeth used to be. “He’s Pakistani, Mama. Why don’t you salaam him? And why are you speaking in English?” Her son’s new glasses made his face look wise, and she almost did what he suggested, but it was too late. It would be awkward to start over another way. Besides, she knew better than to speak the language of home, of intimacy, with a stranger—a young, male stranger, at that. English would maintain a formal, businesslike distance. She shushed her son.
         Muhammad drove the car through the loop. Behind the rows of vehicles in the parking lot, willow branches skimmed the surface of a pond, where female mallards swam with their ducklings. The males tucked their heads beneath their wings, lazing together in the shade, separate from their broods.
         “I used to live here, in this apartment complex, in this same building,” Muhammad said.
         “Did you?”
         “It’s a great community, full of H-1B visa workers and their families. Quiet, educated people who are helpful when you need them. I now live in the neighborhood behind that building.”
         The ranch-style houses behind her apartment complex were all older, built in the 1950s. She had looked them up on Zillow when she first moved there. Renovations made them modern and liveable, though nobody’s first choice. To live in one meant the owner had to be handy. The two-car garages built in the backyards were often statelier than the houses in front. Still, a house was a house, and Zainab didn’t need reminding that she didn’t live in one.
         Her older son looked out the window at the cars on the road. “Mama, you can get a car like that,” he said, pointing to a Mercedes. “Then you can stop borrowing Baba’s car, and go anywhere you want.” She looked at him sternly.
         Meanwhile, the younger child had nodded off, his chestnut curls crushed on one side by the car seat. Anticipating a few moments of peace, Zainab stroked his pink cheek, bruised from landing against the edge of a chair the day before. Despite maximal babyproofing and minimal furniture—no lamps, coffee table, bed frames, or TV set; just a desk, two sofas, and the dining table he jumped off of—he still found ways to get hurt. Her two-year-old always fell asleep in cars, but waking him up quickly to get him moving fast enough in the right direction at the airport—with luggage—would be hell after his nap. And the ride, according to Muhammad’s navigation software, would be seventeen minutes short.
         “Excuse me, what kind of phone is that?” Zainab asked Muhammad.
         “Which one?” He gestured toward two phones in separate holders on either side of the steering wheel.
         “The one with the square corners. My old phone had square corners.”
         “Android, right?” he asked.
         “Yes. My husband bought me an iPhone last month. I had to take it back.”
         “The best phones have square corners.”
         “They look nicer and are better for reading.”
         “Exactly. The display looks so much cleaner.”
         “Right,” she said. “Are you Indian or Pakistani?”
         “Pakistani.”
         “Us too. Which city are you from?”
         “Islamabad.”
         “Oh, Islamabad. I’ve heard good things about that place. It’s clean and built on a grid. But I’ve only ever visited Karachi. Do you miss it?”
         “Of course. But I like it here, too.”
         “My husband doesn’t. He keeps saying we’ll go back, any year now. We never buy nice things, never talk about putting down roots.”
         “Something’s missing from his life here. He may be lonely. He should go back and visit.”
         “He can’t. Not until his passport comes back from immigration. And they’re taking their time with his paperwork.”
         “After that, he should go. My friends are there. I just got back from spending time with them.”
         “You’re lucky they’re still there. My husband’s friends are all over the world—some in Canada, Australia, the Gulf States, where we used to live, and a few scattered in America. Where all would he travel? And they’re no longer working in their fields, but managing gas stations, Vitamin Shoppes, restaurants, or driving trucks, or . . .”
         “Of course.”
         Muhammad’s terseness invited little other response. Zainab leaned her head back in her seat and closed her eyes, thinking of what she might have said to put him off. She felt ashamed for mentioning her husband. Had she perhaps portrayed him, and therefore herself, in a bad way? She knew better than to project a negative impression of her family. Zainab tried not to think about him much, but felt surprised that he was all she could talk about. She still remembered their last conversation.
         “I won’t be able to drive you to the airport. Take an Uber,” her husband had said.
         “You know how hard traveling with kids is.”
         “It’s a short flight home, for you at least. Two hours instead of twenty-four. I can’t miss this interview.”
         “I know, I know. Get processed, get the passport, and then—”
         “I’ll be able to visit my sister in London. I’ll be free to go home,” he said, as if his home could never be the one they’d been making together for years.
         But Zainab had been married long enough to know that one person, no matter how perfect, could never really be everything to another. Nothing her husband said or thought bothered her anymore. He likely needed time to mellow before he could be the man she needed him to be, and she would wait for that, just like her mother had waited for age to wear down her father’s rough edges. But lately, life seemed like a lot of waiting.
         Immigrating to America wasn’t their original plan. Zainab had lived with her husband in the Middle East for years. After their second child was born, her husband lost his job in Saudi Arabia, where the economy fell with the price of oil. They needed to plant their family somewhere. Rather than return to Pakistan, her husband took advantage of Zainab’s United States citizenship and immigrated to America. He wanted a better life for his children, along with the rights, privileges, and dignity that came with American citizenship, the breezy confidence. The alternative was maintaining his current citizenship and enduring the dismissive looks or suspicion from airport security, or worse, the detainments in airports, as if his present passport, among the weakest in the world, were a guarantee of terrorist proclivity and a badge of shame. He felt lucky to have even gotten into Trump’s America, in spite of the Muslim ban.
         Meanwhile, Zainab wanted out. She winced every time she heard about a mass shooting and felt there had to be a better place than her home country to raise children—Qatar, perhaps? Somewhere that people of color, Muslims, immigrants, women, and schoolchildren were not under threat. If not the best of all worlds, then, where in hell was the least of all evils?
         One year later, lockdowns, racial violence, work-from-home, online school, and the fear of death from coronavirus poisoned Zainab’s days. She waited for news of a vaccine, or for any good news at all. Worry seeped into their apartment like a colorless vapor. Then, her husband bought a desk. He converted the second bedroom into a home office. They still hadn’t bought bed frames, so they pushed the mattresses together on the floor of one bedroom.
         Some nights, long after she had brushed three sets of teeth and tucked two children into bed, Zainab would find herself unable to fall asleep, and would go to her husband in the living room.
         She’d tell him she was worried, about nearly everything. He’d sit in his recliner, chewing on a thumbnail, staring at his phone in the dark. What do you want me to do, he’d say. I’m more worried than you are.
         When he wouldn’t do anything to comfort her, she’d tell him this place didn’t have enough room to hang a towel, let alone four, not with him hanging his clothes on every rod and hook. When he wouldn’t look up, she’d raise her voice, asking him how long he’d be throwing their money away on rent. He’d look up from his phone and tell her it was his money to do with what he wanted, and that she needed to trust in God more, and in things less. She’d say her father always made sure they lived in houses of their own. He’d tell her to speak Urdu—English made him feel talked down to—and would remind her that the economy was nearing recession, interest rates were high, and that interest was haraam anyway, and why hadn’t her father taught her that?
         He’d then open the window, his cheeks reddening, letting in a blast of cold air. She’d tell him he married her not for love, but for America, a country she found more frightening every day. He wasn’t the patriot she married, but an opportunist. She’d shut the window so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. He’d tell her to open the window, and that he’d divorce her if she kept talking. She’d tell him not to say it twice more, not when he really didn’t mean it. He’d say he really did mean it. She’d say he could remarry someone younger. He’d say he preferred the bachelor life, that she’d worn him out and that he was too old to start over. He’d tell her to go home to her hypocrite father, get her old job back, and take her ugly kids with her. That if she weren’t American, he wouldn’t be so far from home. She’d tell him his family wanted this for him, too, otherwise they’d have made it easier for them to return to their homeland, rather than asking vapid, excited questions about his new country while drinking servant-brewed tea in marble mansions, lounging on the bed with the gold-painted wooden headboard Zainab’s mother had given her in her dowry, bragging to jealous relatives about a son in America. He’d hang his head, unable to admit their hand in his situation, but goddamn the day he married a woman who’d grudge someone a bed she couldn’t use. She’d step toward him and try to hold him. He’d step back. He’d slam the window open again. You’re suffocating me, he’d say. He’d pound his head with his fists and threaten to jump off the balcony, for lack of better options.
         Then Zainab would leave the room, her hands clasped over her mouth to stop herself from saying more. She would slink into the bedroom and close the door. Then she’d lie down on the mattresses on the floor between their two sleeping babies and kiss the roses in their cheeks, the lovely flush of blood they inherited from their Pashtun father. At midnight, her husband would creep into the bedroom. She’d pretend to be asleep while he’d kneel to kiss their children’s faces.

         Zainab felt it best not to mention her husband again. Thinking about him made her jaw clench. She couldn’t recall whether she had told Muhammad too much, or only imagined that she had. But even if she had, she still wanted to talk. To converse with another adult—not a child—was an uncommon pleasure, with silence a close second. Muhammad had a bearing, a gravity, she found trustworthy. Zainab wondered what she might say to prompt him to speak, and took courage in the idea that she’d probably never see him again.
         “I was doing IT,” Muhammad said, suddenly.
         “What?”
         “I was in IT, working in an office, and now look at me. I’m not working in my field, either. I’m driving an Uber. It’s the economy. Maybe when the pandemic lifts, things will get better.”
         “Maybe, but it may take a few years. Are you willing to move?”
         “Yes, of course.”
         “That might help. It is a big country.”
         Zainab looked at the back of his neck and his shoulders, his crisp pink shirt the same shade of Kashmiri chai as her valima dress years ago. She thought it suited his olive skin and black hair well. Strange, she thought. She might have met him through school or work if she’d been lucky, but most other gatherings or events in their culture were segregated by gender. She had to be engaged to her husband even to be able to talk to him. This struck her as a more socially acceptable way to meet a Pakistani man. If things don’t work out, I’ll just ride in Ubers, she thought, while one child slept and another watched cars pass on the highway.
         “Where were you from in Pakistan?” Muhammad asked.
         “I was born here. My parents were from Karachi, but we’re Punjabi.”
         “So are we. But my wife is not.”
         “Neither is my husband.”
         “We have our ways; everyone else has theirs.”
         “I know what you mean.”
         “Did you like Karachi?”
         “There has to be a better city in Pakistan,” Zainab said.
         “There are. Some places are so lovely, when spring comes, you can’t help but feel gladness in your heart.”
         She wished he would drive her there now. “I don’t like Karachi. Also, I hate my cousins.”
         “Why?” Muhammad asked.
         “They’re rich. Who doesn’t hate the rich?”
         He laughed. “Maybe you’re right. But I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t pretend to be one of them.”
         The car hit a pothole. Zainab lurched forward, bracing herself against the back of the driver’s seat with one arm, while flinging her other arm across her sleeping child’s body.
         “Are the kids okay?” Muhammad asked.
         “They’re fine. We had our seatbelts on.”
         “I’m sorry,” he said. “They won’t believe me back home—they want to believe the streets are smooth as glass—but the roads here are always in need of repair.”
         “It couldn’t be avoided.”
         If not for the seat between them, she might have touched his back. Zainab took off her sunglasses and looked up. She and Muhammad were framed together in his rearview mirror. She studied her own face. She hadn’t even worn blush. Why hadn’t she? After the boys were born, she had bobbed her hair and traded heels for Skechers, forgoing fashion for practicality. One could mistake a spot on her cheek for a beauty mark, she hoped. The bags under her eyes she blamed on the children. At the end of the day, when the kids slept—and her husband in his recliner hissed clouds of guava vape, scrolling alone on his phone—she felt somewhat like her old self. She reposed in the husk of her mind, smooth and solitary. She read on her phone, dreamed, and gave herself over to private thought. Those moments belonged only to her, and they were worth the dark circles.
         Zainab looked away from her reflection and back at Muhammad, at his smooth brow, at the calm, intense way he focused on the road ahead. She thought back to when she last drove her husband’s car and couldn’t even see the back seat headrests—only the car behind her. She realized that she could see the driver, but he couldn’t see her. Her imperfections didn’t matter. Only from her vantage point, for seventeen minutes, were they in the same frame.
         Before marrying, Zainab had worked for the Air Force. There she made friends with lieutenants, most of whom had married right out of Colorado Springs. One of them had been First Lieutenant Leah Grant, the daughter of a white father and an Indian mother, a caramel-toned, green-eyed girl who read McSweeney’s and Tolstoy PDFs on her computer during lunch. At twenty-five, she was older than Zainab by two years, at an age where a gap of two years still mattered.
         One day, Leah’s husband stopped by his wife’s cubicle to bring her a sandwich.
         “Isn’t he cute?” Leah said, as her husband, a blond dream in BDUs, walked away. Despite being married, she had posted her profile on a dating website.
         “Why?” Zainab asked her.
         “Just to see if I’m still marketable, and to what kind of guy.” She twirled the rings on her slim brown finger: a thin, white gold wedding band, and an engagement ring with three tiny diamonds for past, present, and future. “Don’t worry. I never use my real name. But sometimes I think that if I’d waited, at least until the national average age for marriage, I would have found the one.”
         “Your husband’s such a nice guy.”
         “Maybe,” Leah said, staring at her computer monitor. “You know how everything you get has an expiration date? Well, maybe so do relationships. Not the blood ones, but the ones you shop around for. Maybe marriages go bad, too. We either leave them, or stay, and drink the sour milk, like everything’s fine.” She said this with a smile—she said everything with a smile—as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
         A few cakeless anniversaries later, Zainab understood what Leah meant.
         Meanwhile, the driver pulled the car in front of the departures terminal.
         “Which airline is it?”
         “This one. American.”
         “Here we are then.”
         “I . . .”
         “Yes?”
         “Nothing. I . . . it’s nothing.”
         Zainab looked out the car window. People came and went, with phones pressed to their ears, standing near their luggage, waiting for their rides, all wearing face masks: disposable blue ones, simple black polyester, or colored and printed cotton fabrics, an attempt at disconnection, of protecting people from one another. The ride had been too short. To her, as long as the journey was smooth, going there felt better than arriving. Muhammad parked the car and opened the trunk.
         Zainab’s older son opened the door and stood on the curb, putting his backpack on while managing a carry-on with wheels. She nudged her two-year-old awake, pulling him out of his car seat and onto the curb next to the automatic doors. Zainab unbuckled the seatbelt and ripped out the car seat, looking behind her to check if her children were still there, her mind everywhere at once. The stench of car exhaust and combusted jet fuel rose up toward her.
         “Mama, why couldn’t Baba drive us?”
         “Hold your little brother’s hand, please.”
         “May I help you with your bags?”
         “I got it, thanks.”
         “Mama, mama.” The groggy two-year-old stuck out his bottom lip and looked about to cry, bewildered by the change in his surroundings. Where had she put that baby leash? She feared he would run.
         “If you ever need another ride, remember my name.”
         “Mama.”
         “Ow, he bit me. I don’t want to hold his hand.”
         “Shush, shush.”
         The air was warm on her bare face. The flight wouldn’t depart for another hour and a half. Zainab slid on her black satin face mask. She would help the boys adjust theirs before checking in. Then she’d take off their shoes if she had to and throw their tablets in the bins at the security checkpoint. After that, she would take them both to the bathroom and try to go, too, locking the little one in with her. Then, the boys might sit through a snack before staring at airplanes. She’d call her father to tell him she’d be home soon. Her husband may have still been in his interview, so she’d wait for him to call her, whenever.
         “Sister,” the driver said. Zainab had already turned away.
         “Sister!”
         She turned around.
         “You forgot your purse.” The bump must have pushed it farther beneath his seat.
         She looked into Muhammad’s face. It seemed kind, unharried, without the irritation she was used to seeing in her husband’s face. In another life, she might have sat in front with Muhammad, listening to his music, breathing in his scent. She grabbed her purse and marched into the airport with her children and her things. She clutched the strap where Muhammad had touched, imbued with the warmth of his hand, ever tighter.