First novella from Moazzam Sheikh's San Francisco Quartet, a slow motion walkthrough in pre-pandemic San Francisco.
He couldn't tell her, not yet, but thought about it, wished he could, that when he made love to her, he resisted thinking about Manto's famous short story Thanda Gosht, fought off the image of the dead woman being fucked. That in turn made him revisit a rather mediocre French noirish film Icy Breasts, although the connections between the blue meat metaphor of the story and Alain Delon's cold stare thriller were a stretch of the imagination. He couldn't help it. He could never muster the courage to ask her whether she closed her eyes because she couldn't stand looking at his face or preferred conjuring up the image of someone in her past, lost in the crowd, someone dead. He allowed himself to marvel at the possibility that deposits of coldness could hide and survive even beneath the warm flesh. His sight ravished the ethereally lucid beauty of her face, his nose inhaling the micro smells of her freckled skin as his tongue and lips devoured the salt mines of her bruised terrain. He didn't know, couldn't know, behind the closed windows of her eyes, if she was soulful or icy. Mostly he believed that it was her, or most women's, way of focusing, not on the person but pleasure. To him pleasure was secondary to pleasing, but both were subservient to the person. His mind did wander, for all sorts of reasons but only fleetingly, for man is but an idea made of distractions and forgetfulness. Was he in love with her? Yes, he was, he could say. Was she in love with him? He couldn't be sure. No, he was certain, or was he? she wasn't, couldn't be in love with him. Did she love someone else? That's where things got complicated. They often talked about it, his love, her love, his love for her, her love for him and that's where things got twisted and hurtful and awkward.
"Witty and wise, Sheik's novel follows the amorous adventures of Aslam Rana, adrift between women and literary rivalries in San Francisco--a comic yet probing tale of contemporary mores and the ultimate quest for connection."--Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen
Fiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Women's Studies.
