A Knife for Samara
by
Sohaila Abdulali
The F train left the Broadway-Lafayette station and groaned its way towards West
Fourth Street. “Just another minute!” I said cheerily to my two-year-old, and
Tom, my husband, strapped her into her stroller. Then there was a judder and a
shriek of outraged metal and we stopped again. A skinny man with oily black hair
sat across from me reading a book with “Therapy” in the title. “Shit!” he said,
and kept reading. The rest of us waited.
After some minutes the conductor went through the usual announcements. Please be
patient, moving shortly, etc. etc. Ladies and gentlemen, this is New York. We
sat, being patient. Samara looked inquiringly at us – we were due at her uncle’s
birthday party and she had cake to eat.
After some more time, the conductor announced that the train operator was going
out to check some debris on the track. They had to find out why the emergency
brake had kicked in. “Shit!” said the skinny man with the therapy book. We sat.
Then the conductor, sounding cheerier, said that there had been garbage on the
track. The operator had removed it and was on his way back. We told Samara the
cake was imminent. The train started. Then it stopped.
“Shit!” said the skinny man. “Attention, ladies and gentlemen,” came the
conductor’s voice. “There is a person on the tracks. He seems to be running
around throwing garbage, and we have to wait for someone to come and remove him.
Please be patient.” We were patient. We were patient for forty-five minutes
until we heard an explosion and looked out of the window to see a wall of orange
flame outside our car. Everyone stood up. Everyone made moves to leave. I pulled
Samara out of the stroller and into my arms. Hold your child close, don’t let
anyone hurt her. We couldn’t leave, but we all moved toward the rear, away from
the fire and the smoke. The conductor’s voice came again.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please move to the front of the train.” That was where
the smoke was worst. But we went, a shuffling army of quiet watchful wound-up
people. Samara whimpered. Everyone covered their faces with cloths. The man with
the therapy book disappeared. I had the urge to jump on Tom and kiss him madly
and tell him he is the love of my life, but he knows that, and we have other
things to attend to, like our traumatized baby, and the smoke going into her
little lungs.
We sat there for another hour and a half, this random collection of New Yorkers.
We didn’t know if we’d get out, we didn’t know what had happened. There was a
group of Indian men at the end of the car, chatting quietly. I imagined them
telling each other stories about how they were on the train from Lucknow to
Gorakhpur, stuck for seventeen hours because there was a group of marauding
fundamentalists in the next compartment. A subway fire in New York? No big deal.
There was a white woman next to
me, buried completely in her striped scarf, eyes shut. Suddenly she reached into
her purse and produced a keychain with a morbid little plastic hooded figure
attached, and presented it to Samara, who was most entertained, for about two
minutes. After some time a woman standing behind me pulled out a folded Kleenex
with pictures of birthday cakes, hats and balloons printed on it, and gave that
to Samara, who was delighted and tore off cakes to give my brother for his
birthday. Tom and I told her stories, sang her songs, grabbed goodies from
people who offered them. An older Chinese lady, elegant and silent, who
obviously had no idea what was going on, offered her a giant orange, and then a
knife. No one had ever offered Samara a knife before. We took the orange and
said no to the knife. I looked up and met Tom’s eyes.
It was not an easy part of parenthood, realizing that your willingness to die
for your child, your vast and deep and terrible love for her, your devotion that
burns blisteringly in your blood and sinew, does nothing, nothing, to protect
her. It was worth exactly as much or as little as the orange that the kind
Chinese lady offered. The world could eat up your child and spit her out, and
your love will do nothing to stop it. We should have known that when the World
Trade Center fell in front of us when she was a newborn, but now, surrounded by
smoke, we learned it again.
A serious young man who plugged up his nostrils with Kleenex gave her a
stuffed koala. She played with it briefly and handed it back. A smiling black
man pulled out a pen and a postcard of a serene Buddha in Hong Kong and she drew
on that. She
cried. She stopped crying and sang, “Happy Birthday.”
Then the conductor told us to go back to the rear of the train; we were finally
being evacuated. The disturbed man started all the explosions and fires. Later
we found out he wasn’t hurt. The first woman to step off the car onto the narrow
ledge along the subterranean wall looked back and was suddenly a diva. “Goodbye,
everyone,” she yelled jubilantly and walked out. We all laughed.
I crawled along the ledge, clutching my daughter. Up four flights of dirty
smelly steps, to the cheery shouts of firemen: “Small child on the way!” I
emerged, disoriented, pulled up by strong hands of smiling firemen (I want to
kiss every fireman on the planet). Suddenly we were in the world again, coming
out of a hole in the ground on Sixth Avenue, and there was a waiter in spotless
white bearing a tray with a linen cloth and a tall glass of cold water and ice.
“Would you like a drink?”
We drank. We saw the skinny man again. He was clutching his therapy book and
gabbling excitedly into his cell phone. We trembled. We sang happy birthday and
ate a lot of cake.
| Sohaila's writing has
been published in India, the US, England and Canada. She
continues to write and publish both fiction and non-fiction.
She lives in the Lower East Side of New York with her
husband, neon artist Tom Unger, and their daughter, Samara.
Visit her website at
www.sohailaink.com. |
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of the closing doors...