The Return of Meena Pathan

CHAPTER 1

Meena Pathan decided she would build bridges the day her father became a widower, and the languid wooden bridge her mother was crossing collapsed into the frothing waters of the Swat river. Her civil engineering professors said that she took great care to focus on the safety of the structures she was designing, often compromising beauty, which she acknowledged she did not have an eye for.

‘We should have had a sit harness for these positions on the bridge,’ she tells the Project Lead now, as she watches how long it takes the site workers to position the steel plate into position.

James, her supervisor and the Project Lead, nods. ‘Spot on,’ he says. ‘It’s only when you get out here and see the workers you realise it’s not just about the structure. You have to think about the surroundings, the reality of the weather when workers start constructing it, and the people who will eventually use it every day.’

Meena and James are on a site visit in Stratford. London is preparing to host the Olympic Games exactly two years and four months from now. The clock couldn’t be moving faster as the city races to put in place the infrastructure, sewage system, roads and bridges that will transform Stratford into the home of the London Olympics. When Meena arrived here four years ago, work had already started in this run-down area of London. She never got to see the electricity pylons or the local landmark that was a graveyard of thrown-away fridges and burnt down cars, but she has heard about them. East London is getting a facelift. Engineers, architects, workers and even politicians all over the country have come together as if London is going to war.

She looks down from the crane which has lifted her up to the position where the new footbridge has been installed and a temporary deck bolted just for the Games. Everything has been meticulously planned. After the event, these sections will be removed and relocated.

The wind at this altitude is rushed, unhindered by nearby traffic or trees, making the loose ends of Meena’s headscarf wallop against her face. Exactly sixteen feet. Precisely the distance her mother flew down as the rotting wooden bridge caved under her feet. They never found her body. But Apagul, Meena’s aunt, insisted that if they searched the sugarcane and wheat fields along the riverbanks closest to Peshawar, where the river emptied all its joys and sorrows, they were sure to find her there.

Meena’s phone vibrates in the pocket of her trousers. One single missed call.

‘Your father?’ James asks, a smile teetering at the corner of his mouth.

When Meena started at Buro Happold three years ago, James, not yet a Project Manager, was just a few years senior to her. He and Flo were the only people on the team who hadn’t expressed shock when they discovered that she called her father every day.

Meena nods. Without looking at the phone, she knows it’s Daaji. Whenever he wants to talk to her, he gives her a single missed call. ‘I’ll call him back from the office.’

Meena slips her phone back into her pocket and puffs steamy air onto her glasses, avoiding her colleague’s look. She wipes them with the border of her shirt. When she looks up again, James’ blue eyes are still on her.

‘What does he think of you working in a place where most of your coworkers are men?’ James asks her as they head back to their office.

‘My father’s very different from the people in London. He believes a woman can do everything that a man can, and a lot more.’

James laughs and squeezes her shoulders. Meena stiffens, and James instantly drops his hand, a salmon glow tinting his fair cheeks. Meena blinks, pretending to read the stop names on the underground map. She likes James but she isn’t used to any extra attention from the male sex. Apagul always said it wasn’t in Meena. She could never attract a man, especially a good-looking one.

James clears his throat. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Construction is a very male-dominated industry even in London. And the site visits can be a bit rough for the ladies.’

Meena pushes her glasses up her nose, squinting at what seems like microscopic text. ‘Can they?’

She almost steps on James’s foot as a hand taps her shoulder.

‘Flo? What are you doing here?’

Their colleague sways her blonde hair. Until she met Flo, Meena had been grateful that while she didn’t possess her cousins’ beauty, she could boast of an IQ that they didn’t have. She also believed that one could possess either of the two, not both. But whenever she looks at Flo, beautiful and elegant, with a mind sharp enough to be hired by an engineering firm, Meena finds herself coveting physical traits she’s never yearned for before.

‘Want to have some lunch before heading back?’ Flo asks them, as the train pulls in.

‘I have to make a call,’ says Meena. Daaji will get worked up if she doesn’t call back soon enough and that wasn’t good for his heart. Especially after the stents.

She hurries into the train, and the two fall into step behind her. She smothers the guilt creeping in, secretly pleased that they dropped their plan altogether for her. Other than her father, James and Flo are the only ones who make her feel like she is important. She won’t admit it, but they are her friends.

Back in the office, Meena rings her father from her laptop. They have a deal. If Daaji gives her a missed call, Meena calls him back on Skype first but if he fails to answer, she calls on the landline. This ensures that they minimise expensive phone bills while maintaining consistent communication.

As the familiar du-du-du-dum sequence rings in the headset, Meena sifts through her emails. The contractor she was scheduled to meet in the afternoon has asked to move the appointment to the next day, but the architect has confirmed. Meena taps an impatient foot as her father’s greetings arrive, decelerated by Pakistan’s legacy internet infrastructure. The offset of next-to-nothing calling charges on Skype is the pain of a conversation that feels like slow-motion effects applied on sound.

‘Apagul wants to see if you look ok.’

‘It eats up the bandwidth,’ she says, not wanting her aunt’s scrutinising gaze on her. ‘You should turn yours off too. Your voice is breaking. I can’t hear anything.’

Her father's voice comes as a stuttered speech about the situation in Swat.

‘Do you know that smugglers are using the river to pilfer forest timber and stolen goods on bamboo rafts?’

She sighs, relieved to hear the same old news repeated. ‘I do,’ she says, and takes a hungry bite of her sandwich, layers of salad, tomatoes and cucumbers stacked on a slice of cheese, ‘and I also know that Apagul buys all the kitchen appliances and shampoos from the smugglers market in Peshawar.’

Her aunt protests in the background reminding Meena she is listening. It annoys Meena how anyone can be a guest to her Skype conversation with her father, given that the computer sits in the living room.

Despite its small population, Afsardara is never short of stories on the state of the crops and fields, or gossip about the villagers, and now lately the Taliban. She checks the news back home as frequently as she follows weather updates in London.

‘It’s the middle of the working day here,’ She reminds him it’s not a good time to deliver the spiel he has planned for her. ‘Are you feeling alright? I’ve been trying to reach Zaman Kaka about your medication but he doesn’t answer.’ Zaman is her father’s oldest friend and the only doctor he trusts.

There’s a lull on the other side before Daaji continues, ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you. Zaman isn’t well.’

‘For heaven’s sake Changez,’ Apagul argues in the background. ‘You don’t have to involve Meena in this.’

For as long as her aunt is talking, Meena ignores the conversation. The pitch of Apagul’s voice has had that effect on her from the day her father’s elder sister decided to move in with them. Apagul considered it her responsibility to monitor Meena’s upbringing in the absence of a mother. Meena opens the latest designs she was working on before the site visit. She hopes whatever her father and aunt are arguing about, will sort itself out. Because currently the positioning of the beams in her design don’t satisfy her. Meena hates unnecessary complications.

‘Zaman is unwell,’ her father repeats. ‘He should see his son.’

Meena stops moving the beams around in the digital drawing. How had she been so wrong with the stress calculations? She cracks her knuckles.

‘That boy doesn’t have a clue about how Swat operates. We know that from last time,’ Her father waits for Meena’s response, but continues when he doesn’t get one. ‘It’s worse now. The Taliban are in every nook of Swat. An Englishman shouldn’t risk his life coming here alone.’

‘Will you risk Meena’s life for him? Is he not man enough to come to Swat on his own?’ Apagul says.

‘My daughter’s better than an Englishman. She’s better than any man.’

A slapping sound whistles in Meena’s ears drawing her back into the conversation with Daaji. She can tell that Apagul is striking one palm against the other, ‘This is what has destroyed her prospects of marriage. When will you understand she’s a girl and not a man?’

Her aunt’s fussiness is jarring and makes Meena dislike the designs even more.

‘It has nothing to do with being a man. Any foreigner will be a target for the Taliban. And Meena is a smart girl. She knows this terrain better than any Englishman, in fact better than any man I know of.’

‘It’s 2010, not 1945. There are cars and a driver to drive that man up here,’ Apagul counters. She appeals to Meena instead, complaining that her brother is the cause of her palpitation and high blood pressure. ‘Talk some sense into your father. He should be thinking about your marriage. Women don’t stay young forever.’

Apagul, a spinster herself, lived with an incessant fear that her niece would die unwed and childless. At twenty-six, the prospects of marriage were stale for Meena. All of Meena’s female cousins were married and exponentially delivered children as their years of nuptial bliss progressed. The concept of optimal timing when it came to marriage was infused into the Pathan girls like a drip. For Meena, however, things had turned out differently.

During her university years she had a few suitors — well, one to be precise— a scrawny-looking boy who looked up to her. Literally. She had protected him from the jokes of the taller and smarter classmates with a sisterly affection, so it hadn’t been very charming when he proposed to her. There were others who made an attempt to approach her because they had few choices, primarily because she was the only girl in their class of Civil Engineering or because the idea of choosing a class fellow for marriage was more appealing than being thrust into an arranged marriage. Those potential suitors backed off after a failed first conversation or when they heard about the broken engagement and the runaway groom. Because broken engagements were an alarming signal.

Such disappointments would shatter any girl from Afsardara, an inconspicuous village tucked in the mountains of Swat in the Northwest of Pakistan. Instead, Meena tells herself that the only person disappointed had been Apagul, who after Daaji’s retirement from the Army, had finally given permission, in fact, pushed for Meena to be sent abroad after the completion of her Bachelor’s degree. She had wanted nothing more than to move back to Afsardara.

‘It will be best if she disappears for some time,’ Apagul had acquiesced with her brother’s wishes, too homesick to stay back in the city for Meena’s sake any longer. ‘Perhaps then the villagers will forget all that happened, and hopefully someone will want to marry her.’

What Apagul considers as misfortune, Meena has used to her good luck.

Meena had taken the first opportunity to send applications to MSc programs in Structural Engineering in the UK. America was too far away and too suspicious of Muslims, and it would be easier to hop on a plane from London and return home if her father needed her.

Now, four years later, Apagul’s croaking voice over the fragile internet connection does little to frazzle her. Meena takes a sip of the chai she brought to work in her coffee mug. At the office she can only get coffee from the machine or the British version of steeped tea topped with cold milk. Neither appeal to her palate. Chai for her is tea leaves simmered in boiling water until the last of its tannins are squeezed out giving the drink a thick richness. So she makes her own tea at home, or buys from the desi convenience store on the corner of her street.

‘Zaman has prostate cancer,’ her father’s voice finally comes through firm and uninterrupted. ‘It’s an advanced stage. That’s why it’s important that he see his son as soon as possible. Taimoor Khan must come to Pakistan to meet his father. I know it’s not easy for you after what happened but I also know that only you can do it.’

‘What?’

Meena spurts out the chai, sprinkling the keyboard with sticky brown dots. More liquid spills onto her trousers until she sets the cup on the desk, at a safe distance from her laptop.

‘You heard me right Meena,’ her father says, ‘Consider it your mission to reunite Taimoor Khan with his father.’

Apagul breaks out into expletives, forcing Daaji to drop the call and leaving Meena staring at the sudden silence of the screen.

Meena takes off her headset and wipes her mouth with the back of her sleeve. Mission. That’s what Changez Pathan, a retired Army officer, referred to the things he asked his only daughter to do. As if Meena and Meena alone had been handpicked for something significant. Meena wasn’t paying attention to much of the conversation but she did pick up the lines about Taimoor Khan. How could she not? Apagul and that man were the two people who reminded her every day that despite all the brain cells she had accumulated over the years, she was nothing without fair skin and good looks. And now her father was asking her to walk into the wolf’s lair and convince the man who ran away a day after her engagement to him and left his father alone to face the shame of it all, that it was time to make amends with his dying father.

CHAPTER 2

Meena was not a jilted lover. And neither could the brief encounter with Taimoor Khan eight years ago be called a relationship. Although it had not exactly happened that way, neither colleagues nor friends would ever understand that at eighteen, and perhaps even now, Meena would pick any man her father chose for her.

If she were to write an executive summary of the scenario, the way she frequently does in her work, she would strip it to the bare minimum.

Zaman Khan, her father’s childhood best friend, and his son Taimoor were visiting Pakistan. A chance encounter between Meena and Taimoor, in a village community where people of the opposite sex could only be together if they were siblings or married, had caused slightly more than an uproar. (Here she would reference with a footnote for further reading of Sir Olaf Caroe’s ‘The Pathans’ for those who found such an explanation dubious). It had led their fathers to hope that there was something flourishing between their children. Without consulting either, they decided to solidify their friendship into a relationship by declaring the engagement of Meena and Taimoor, then twenty. It was all very sudden for the young Meena and surely must have been startling for Taimoor, who was as much a foreigner to Afsardara as he was to Pakistan. She never got the chance to evaluate her feelings for him. Because before she could react to the circumstances, Taimoor Khan disappeared. He escaped in the middle of the night without informing anyone and particularly his father. It was rumoured that he took one of the local buses from Mingora, the closest city, because there was no local transport from Afsardara, which only had a dirt road to call its own. He must have caught the first bus at dawn because by the time anyone realised he was missing, his plane was halfway through to London.

This is the most concise explanation of Meena’s broken engagement, which when she tested on her first flatmate, failed miserably. The girl accused Meena’s father of forcing her into marriage against her will— something she had heard happened frequently to Pakistani girls. After that, Meena was careful never to mention stories of the runaway groom. Even James and Flo, with whom she was unrestrained about many things, knew nothing about the runaway groom.

That is why, as Meena weaves her way through London’s gargantuan underground, and sends a quick, Hi, Meeting someone. Reaching BH by 11, to James, she offers no further explanation.