Kara’s music had struck me in a way unlike anything I’d heard. Her voice seemed to me both apologetic and confident at once. It also carried with it a familiar accent; the way she pronounced her d’s and t’s reminded me of the old film sets in the Northeast, in which a character might speak with a kind of Robert De Niro accent. I couldn’t help but feel this was artificial, because in her conversational voice, the accent was nowhere to be found. Rather, she spoke with more of a Midwestern accent — devoid of much variation, but at least soothing in its predictability.
On that first night, when she spotted me from the stage and offered a slight smile, I felt as though I had caught the gaze of an old friend. As the pink stage light shined on her, it rendered her dress a strange fleshy color. Her white skin turned a light violet, and her blonde hair shimmered in a sharp magenta. Seeing her up on stage in that damp bar, I found that Kara’s music only seemed to add to her quietness.
Her band was brilliant, but trapped somewhere in its own world. Their approach, rather than to extend a hand to the audience through their music, seemed more like an attempt to expand their bubble until everyone in the bar had at least cast a serious glance in their direction. Their slow-moving music had cast a silence on everyone and imposed a pall of contemplation upon us. A few young women to my right swayed side to side, undulating with the changing rhythm and flow, catching up with their movements as though traversing a river — asymmetric, cold and unfamiliar until one has acclimatized.
After the band’s set was over, Kara found me and told me she recognized me from one of our college classes that we’d taken together five or six years ago. It was a Religious Studies course, but I suppose the class size was too large for me to have noticed her; though evidently, she had seen me there.
Our friendship began as our conversation slipped from her musical influences — a litany of obscure names I had never heard before — to our lives. She’d just moved to the city a short while back. I, obviously, had lived there for a while. She asked me what I did. A little buzzed from the beer I’d been having, I jokingly told her I did pottery.
“Pottery?” she seemed unconvinced.
“Yep. I really like…” I stammered, trying to think of things related to pottery.
“Like what?”
“Clay. I really like clay.” I replied, more confidently this time. “Sometimes, I spread clay out over my studio table and just lie in it. My skin is clay-colored, so I just blend in.”
Kara broke into incredulous laughter, then stopped herself, still unsure if I was telling the truth or just strange. When I afforded her a wry smile, she resumed her laugh, picking it up right from where she had left off. Her laugh, like her singing voice, was quiet, but charming.
“So where can I see your paintings, then?” she asked, leaning across the table to make her voice heard as the bar became rowdier.
“Luckily, not a hospital.”
This time, I think she didn’t understand the joke. She leaned back and gave me a strange look. She could probably tell I was trying too hard.
We exchanged numbers and parted ways that night after she gave me a polite wave.
Over the next few times we met, she introduced me to the rest of her band. The drummer, Kyle, wore a mustache, long hair, and a black leather jacket almost whenever I saw him. His boyfriend was the bassist, Jerry, whose angular face was made sharper by his messy fade. Ricky, a gaunt man with bright blue eyes, was the guitarist. He had a handsome smile, and offered me a cigarette whenever I visited the group at their studio.
Kara and I began meeting at least once a week. Sometimes we’d meet for coffee, other times for dinner. I showed her my studio and my work. Just as I understood her music, she understood my paintings. Her questions were less about the idiosyncrasies of the technical process of producing art, and more about the themes I painted about. She provided me with helpful feedback whenever I asked her. Often, her advice seemed to encourage me to trust my viewers and take a more restrained approach in my work. That made sense, given her music was so controlled and reserved even in its experimental form.
“I think the imagery in this one is a little too sharp. You can afford to let the viewer imagine what you’ve painted explicitly in this part,” she once said, lightly waving her hand over a region of a painting I was still working on. More often than not, I heeded her advice.
She introduced me to True Detective. I’d never even heard of the show before, but I grew increasingly fond of it, until it was I who took the initiative to invite her to my apartment to watch the show together. I was captivated by the narrative and the character development. I was intrigued by how the main character had become obsessed with the case, how it took on an almost religous meaning for him. We finished the show in a week.
And I introduced her to Qawwali. I told her how popular the music was back in Pakistan. She—expectedly and unexpectedly—loved it. Sometimes, we’d sip chai in my studio while listening to Abida Parveen or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—she grew increasingly fond of the former. I’d paint, she’d watch. She told me I looked handsome when I stepped back and half-closed my eyes to observe my own work.
One evening, as we walked a few blocks to attend a friend’s art show, our conversation somehow turned to our ancestries.
“My mom’s side of the family is Jewish,” she said. “I end up thinking a lot about the Holocaust. My grandparents survived it, but their brothers and sisters were all murdered.” In her voice I heard a quietness even greater than what I was used to when listening to her. As I watched her speak, I saw that her eyes had been captured by a superficial distraction a couple blocks down as she continued.
“I think their experiences ended up filling them with a kind of bitterness. Maybe even a paranoia. Nowadays they’re really pretty far-right in their own views.”
I nodded. “I think that’s understandable to some degree. They went through a systematic extermination campaign. That level of destruction is permanent, even if it’s internal for them now. That grief has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?”
She also nodded in agreement, but I realized I’d interrupted her because she’d paused with her mouth just slightly open, as though she was about to add something.
“I try to tell them it’s hypocritical but they think I’m too naïve. The truth is that now I don’t even get along with my family that well. These political debates are just a small stupid example. My parents don’t care much for my music career. They don’t ask me about my life since I moved here, to the city.”
This time I remained silent and continued to listen. Kara’s voice was steady, but it maintained its quietness. I was reminded of her singing voice, with its strange juxtaposition of boldness and airiness.
“What about your family?” she asked me, interrupting my thoughts of her.
“Well, I think you know the highlights. We’re from Pakistan, and we’re Hindu. My grandparents and their parents decided to stay in Pakistan during the Partition.”
“Why didn’t they go to India?”
I was taken aback by her question. She must have realized this because she immediately apologized.
“No, don’t apologize,” I smiled. “I do think about that quite often. I suppose my grandparents thought the migration was too dangerous with the mobs and the murdering.” She nodded as I went on. “I get really angry at them about that sometimes, actually. Look at how Hindus these days get fucked over in Pakistan. Even our temples. I went to this temple once, in a place called Malot. It was totally destroyed,” I exclaimed, cutting my hand through the air as though it could further emphasize the image of the ruins that I was picturing. “Not by some mob torching the place, but by apathy. Forgetfulness. People just forgot it was there. And then it just eroded. The wind and rain chipped away at the exterior carvings so much that today you can’t tell which deity that temple was built for anymore. There’s goat shit around it everywhere because the shepherds bring their animals to graze there. There’s a bat infestation. It has weeds growing all over it. Think about that. A thousand years of history, just sitting there, growing weeds.”
Kara’s gaze was now intensely focused on me. It seemed as though she was trying to gather whatever information she could from my facial expression, as though this, too, was music she could listen to and understand intuitively.
“I do miss Pakistan. I just feel really hurt by it."
She probably noticed the moisture in my eyes, because just then, she leaned over and placed her hand lightly on my cheek. Her fingers gently disturbed the hairs of my beard in such a way that the sensation of her touch did not leave for rest of the evening.
After the show at the gallery, we decided to grab takeout and hang out at her place. On our walk to my favorite Chinese takeout restaurant, Kara lit a cigarette, which we both shared. Then, she took my hand and laced her fingers through mine.
Later that evening, I put on a playlist with my favorite qawwalis, and as Kara and I smoked a couple joints Ricky had given her, we gazed up at her apartment ceiling in silence. It had been painted white with the kind of coarse texture that reminded me of what the undulating surface of a swimming pool looks like from underwater—constantly in flux, making new angles for the light to stream in until one has held one’s breath for too long. In that moment, it felt as though the ripples in the water-paint were being shaped by Abida Parveen’s voice, colliding with one another, dancing in ecstasy for a God I had only briefly come across, the way I might encounter a friend in the city on my way to grab some paints.
And in that moment of ecstasy, I felt close to Kara in the same way, too. We were nowhere near each other, as the couch she was sitting on was on the opposite side of the coffee table from me. But I felt her presence within me, as though she were occupying a part of my soul, sitting in my chest and staring out at the rest of the world the same way I was staring at her ceiling.
This turned out to be the last time I saw Kara for a while. Just a few days later, her band set off on a tour, filling a Mercury Villager minivan with amps, guitars, bases, drums, and somehow, the band itself, hitting up a bunch of obscure bars in big cities, a venture supported entirely by their earnings and even a little bit of savings, which is why they booked nights in motels as opposed to hotels wherever they went. Kara almost never replied to my texts. She was too busy with the constant rehearsals and traveling. I knew better than to take it personally.
By the time she came back, I suppose I’d lost my own feelings of closeness towards her from the night of the ceiling. The mythology I had constructed of us suspended in some strange sinusoidal ecstasy punctuated by the qawwals’ voices had melted away. It was as though our memory itself was the temple I’d seen at Malot, back in Pakistan, where carvings of God gave way to brush strokes of wind, water, and weeds. Back then, at the temple, I had found myself in silent worship. My prayer then, like all my prayers since, was an acknowledgement of divine presence, and nothing more or less than that—it had lost its specificity to the erosion. I realize now that to pray for anything specifically is to partake in absurdity.
Kara did invite me to a gig when they all got back from tour. I made my way across the city to the small humid bar, where my glasses fogged up as soon as I stepped through the door. I found a place to stand, leaning upon a thin wooden column, watching my back constantly as the servers brushed past me giving everyone their drinks.
Kara saw me from the stage and smiled. She waved me her gentle wave and I once again found myself taken back to the night when I first saw her. Her voice reverberated through that cramped bar and took over me as I swayed with the crowd with a beer in my hands. I was moved by it immediately. And then I started paying closer attention to the lyrics.
Now when we motor through the fields
I ask you if you’ve watched me heal
I asked you if it rained today.
You’re not telling me, boy of clay.
Oh, my boy of clay,
aren’t you gonna say?
Oh, my boy of clay,
aren’t you gonna say?
The temple bells might ring tonight
So why won’t you listen to my plight?
A stream of interconnected thoughts laced their way through my consciousness. Kara and I had found each other at the impossible confluence of two parallel lines. Maybe there was a bend in the dimension of the plane. From then on, there was little else we could have done but to worship the right moments if we were fortunate enough to realize we were in them. There was a kind of inevitability in our lives that had led us to this song, but not the kind that sucks one into something. Rather, our inevitability manifested itself in the sighs and gazes that defined our frivolous meditations as we grappled with the fragility of every moment we had together and the mechanicate needs that had come before them.
I didn’t stay for long after the band finished the song, and began to make my way out of the bar, shuffling through laughing groups of friends and couples. As her gaze traced my movement towards the exit, hiding behind a smile with which she thanked the crowd for its applause, she didn’t look worried.