FISH TANK by Hananah Zaheer
There is a new fish tank in the office.
It belongs to the new girl. Her name is Miss Sidra. She went to college in America. She is younger than us. She is different. And she is our boss. Every morning she has strutted in through the revolving doors of Siddiqui Center, smelling much too flowery for the Metro and Waterways Department elevator, no scarf, dark glasses on her head, and her lips: red, bright, wrong.
On Tuesday she stood next to Boss and took aim at us with her smiles when he introduced her as our project manager.
“Engineering degree,” he said. “Bright,” he said, “asset to our country.”
And if we didn’t know Boss was just like us, we could have sworn he touched her waist as he waved her to her office.
Wednesday she said, Hey, guys and waved her hand, delicate and sure, on the way to her desk behind the glass wall. Hey, guys? We are family men. All four of us. We work all day and draw up plans for the new Metro lines. We ask for digging permits and sit in government offices and let our shirts soak up our sweat until our plans for Metro expansion get stamped. We send money to our parents and save a little in the bank. We pick up bags of rice and baby diapers on the way home. We sleep next to our wives, who cover their heads and will only let us touch them in the dark. We don’t become too familiar with women who are not them, and we don’t, ever, say, Hey, guys.
On Thursday she came in carrying one of those expensive suitcases, the ones you can buy fake copies of in Hyperstar near Fortress Stadium. Pumpkin Face, the boss’ secretary, said it was a real Louis Vuitton.
She had tested the suitcase, she said, anyone can tell by tugging at the zippers.
“Worth two lakhs,” and the way her eyes looked you would have thought she was the one who owned it.
Imagine. Two years’ worth of our salary sitting by her desk. We just looked at each other and filled in surveillance request forms with our leaky Eagle pens. That afternoon Miss Sidra stopped by our desks and told us she was going to Islamabad for the week.
We should leave all the forms on her desk, she said.
Is your husband going too, we asked?
“You don’t need a husband to travel,” she said, and laughed without any care for how the sound splintered our space.
We were irritated, we could say that. Our wives preserve our space. Our wives keep our homes whole. We would never expect different from our wives. And we would never admit that when Miss Sidra laughed, the way her eyes shimmered under the dash of green above her eyelashes made our hands clammy.
When we took a break from drawing up plans, we sat in the lunchroom with our parathas and daal and wondered what kind of man would marry her. Someone modern, we guessed, someone who smelled of smoke and wood and citrus, someone not like us. We wondered if she even knew how to cook.
After the weekend, on Sunday, Pumpkin Face brought in a fish tank for the office. There were seven fish in there, blue and yellow and striped and gold, swimming around and through a small shipwreck. She put the tank by her desk and said Miss Sidra said we needed some color around here.
“One for each of us,” Pumpkin Face knocked at the glass and laughed. “It was her idea.”
We all went to take a look. Imagine: animals, in an office. We wondered what was coming next, plants? Offices are fluorescent lights and rolling chairs and the sounds of Xerox machines and ringing phones and people and the smell of day-old sweat. Offices are not aquariums. We all thought this, but we did not say that out loud.
She seems different, we said instead, different from us.
Then Pumpkin Face leaned back in her leather office chair and ran a fingernail across the mole just above her heavy breasts and looked up at us. Sort of a Lux Soap girl look.
“Do you want to know about her?” she asked.
We did. So she rocked back and forth, a fat-bottomed pear in her chair, and told us that Miss Sidra lives near the army bases in Cantonment.
“Alone,” she said, “that new apartment building down near Sarwar Road . . . he knows,” and cocked her head in the direction of Boss’ office and pursed her lips together as if she were trying to prevent something from escaping.
On Monday, after we finished debating whether we could propose a Metro bridge over the Chenab, we gathered in One Eye’s teashop right outside the Siddiqui Center. We sat on the rickety wood chairs on the patio, and threw scraps of our samosas to the stray mutt that sat near his new, old Kawasaki.
Miss Sidra was very smart, we agreed.
Miss Sidra was very foreign, we agreed.
Miss Sidra was very young, we agreed. Too young.
We needed to talk to Boss.
He is one of us, we said, he will understand.
We thought we should talk to him before she got back from her trip. So on Friday, after prayer, we met at the corner of Aziz Bhatti Road and Sarwar Road. We went to Rahat bakers and pooled our money and bought a Black Forest cake. Then, even though it was a weekend and everyone knows the boss doesn’t like to be disturbed on weekends, we walked to Boss’ house, which was five gates down from the bakery. We rang the bell at the blue gate and told the guard we were from the office.
Boss knows us, we said.
Then we waited. From between the bars of the gate, we saw an imported Mercedes. When the guard wasn’t looking, we took pictures with our phones to show our kids.
We rehearsed our question. Which was: Do we really need animals in our office?
We looked at each other and nodded. That was the safe question, the right question. We could not say that we were hiding from our families that we now worked for a girl, or that the clerks from the other offices were taking trips to us to sign our papers, or that already she was making our wives’ woven and coconut-oiled braids smell different to us: Miss Sidra was unravelling our worlds.
So when Boss came to the gate, we said just that. We are not sure we like having fish in the office, we said.
To which Boss replied that is this what we were wasting his time with, and maybe a touch of life is what we needed.
We even double-checked. Needed, sir, needed?
“Needed,” he said. And then he lifted his chin and looked at us and asked if fish was what this was really about. Did we maybe have issues with anything else? Miss Sidra, maybe?
We did not, we said. After all, we worked at the Metro Department. We were the ones helping Lahore get a new world-class transport system. We were all about progress.
But, we said, it is different in the office now.
Boss laughed.
We held on to our pride because if we lose our dignity, we lose everything. We worked hard for our jobs. We grew up in poor homes, we learned English by stealing books from libraries, and we looked for jobs that made our mothers proud.
The office had been working well before, we said.
“We are not in the village anymore,” he said, “or the last century.” Then he told us to take our narrow, simple, middle-management minds home.
On Sunday we came back to the office. Pumpkin Face found us at our desks.
“I heard you got in trouble this weekend.” Her middle shook with laughter. “Boss is not happy.”
We kept our heads down at work that day. We did not look at Miss Sidra when she swayed by us to the fish to drop food in and tap at the glass, and we did not look at Boss even though we could tell he was behind the glass wall, watching us.
But our chests felt tight and our faces felt hot, and we were aware of the fish swimming around and around in their glass tank.
That afternoon we met at One Eye’s again.
We drank our tea and we talked about how Boss had lost his mind, his pride, his manliness.
Could we talk to Miss Sidra ourselves, we wondered? Could we tell her we were distracted?
We had never contemplated a thing like this before. We felt scared but we talked and talked, and the more we talked, the more our words expanded. At first we felt a little bold, but soon boldness poured onto our tongues hotter than tea.
We had to believe in something.
We had to stand for something.
Enough, we decided. We handle this ourselves. But not in the office, we have reputations. We will call her at home.
On Monday morning Boss wasn’t in the office. We went to Pumpkin Face.
We need Miss Sidra’s phone number, we said.
She rubbed her hands over her fat arms and said, “Why?”
We told her we needed it and maybe it was none of her business.
“It’s always been my business before what happens at this office,” she said and crossed her arms.
We knew she was right, so we said we were sorry and that we really needed to talk to Miss Sidra, and would she please give us the number.
And Pumpkin Face smiled and then leaned forward on her desk, spilling out of her shirt and all, and said she didn’t really know.
But we knew she knew. She just wanted something. So we kept our voices calm and asked her what, what would it take for us to know.
She pretended to think.
“A bag,” she said finally, “like hers.”
Gray bag, we said, never.
We felt hot and brittle-edged, like cracked glass. Men like us build careful, respectable lives.
We don’t buy bags for other women, we said. We knew that our salaries together could never buy a thing like that.
Pumpkin Face stretched her eyebrows to her forehead, lifted her shoulders, and said, “Okay then, okay.”
What okay? we wanted to know.
“Okay, then I guess you won’t know,” she said.
We huddled inside the men’s room. We cursed Pumpkin Face. We used language that seared even our ears. It scared us that we were so angry. Before Miss Sidra there were no fish; before her there was no language. We decided we could not wait longer.
It was Monday evening.
We cleaned up our desks and locked up our drawers and picked up our briefcases and left the office at five. But we didn’t walk to the bus stop and we didn’t go home. We stood under the dusty awning of the teashop and watched red taillights blink impatiently down the road.
At 5:23 Pumpkin Face came out of the revolving doors.
“You people still here?” she yelled across the distance.
We ignored her; she was no longer one of us.
At 5:45 Miss Sidra came out of the front door. She climbed into a white Corolla that was parked in the second parking spot in front of the door. We brushed back our hair and rushed toward her. Our hands were ready to knock at her window. We would be polite but firm. We repeated this to ourselves. Polite but firm: The fish have to go.
Miss Sidra’s car backed up just as we got to it. Into our thighs. We stumbled, we smacked our hands on the trunk of the car.
Oy, we said, hey, stop!
Then, because we care for protocol, Madam . . .
Her tires spat dirt backward and into our noses and eyes. We choked, we coughed, we tried to grab at the car again, but she was at the stoplight already, taillights red.
Enough, we said, enough. And we meant it because our faces were glowing red, too.
We are patient men. We are men who saved for years to buy apartments in Shadaab Colony, we are men who waited years before getting married, we are men who are used to trying. But we are also men.
We ran back to One Eye’s. We jumped on his Kawasaki, all four. We clung to each other and we followed Miss Sidra. She was quick and led us down the road into traffic. We swayed and held on and sped. Trucks and vans honked. Someone could have asked us what we were thinking, but there was only her at the center of our vision, and everything else fell away.
By the canal taillights blinked and swam all over the road. In front, all the way down, there were blue flashes. All traffic was stopping. We slowed down, too.
We felt the hot burn of the road in the soles of our shoes. We weaved between cars and bikes.
We wondered how far could we follow her. Could we follow her to her house, we asked? Should we?
Maybe, we said, maybe.
We were far from home.
But then we saw Miss Sidra stop. She pulled over to the side of the road.
Okay, we said, okay.
We turned toward her, weaved through Suzukis and trucks and Pajeros.
This is it, we said, and we held on to each other when the motorbike swayed toward her.
Finally, we said, and we tried to sound like we were battle-ready.
There she was, right there, out of her car now, standing on her toes to look ahead at the blue lights, her arm resting on the open door, her car by the side of the canal, nowhere to drive to. There was our chance.
And then she saw us. She met our eyes. And there we were, holding her attention, made immovable by it. We thought she might wave at us. We thought we might respond. We readied ourselves. But a smile spread on her face, and her head turned a little to the side as if to say What are you doing? and then she shook her head and looked away. We stopped the bike. It sputtered, choked, then became still.
The hot fury we had felt earlier was gone, and our legs shook and we felt like we were fish thrust into clear, open air. We looked at each other and our wide eyes and our wild hair and dry, open, lips.
We are not men who lose control like this. We are not men who let women see how they affect us. We are not men who follow women on motorbikes.
Look at us, we said. Look at what we look like.
This is not okay, we said, this is not right.
We spat on the road.
She was not aware of us anymore, even though we were standing one lane and two cars behind, even though there was a straight line between her and us to the left of the black-and-yellow taxi and past the matching blue Vespas. She just stood, separated from our world, with her sly red lips and her loud flower smells and her too-shiny skin, and lit a cigarette and breathed the smoke out into the air.
In the middle of honks and diesel fumes and a slow, glassy dusk, we knew we had lost. It burned our skins to know this. And, even though we did not say this to each other, we could almost see what might have happened if we had revved the engine, if we had run a straight path to her. We could see her body limp, all of us in the air, her glasses flying off her head, and her face turning this way and that way, and it looking like she was hanging on the front of One Eye’s new, old motorbike. We could see her in the canal, legs bent, forehead split open, eyes wide and hand by her head as if she were saying, Hey, guys!
The fish, Miss Sidra, we could say. Can we talk about the fish now?
We didn’t say it to each other, but we know we considered it.
It was late on Monday evening, and the lights were moving on the road again, and she was leaving. And we had to go back home too, to our children and wives and parents and to our office, where the fish will swim around and around, us watching through glass, until they are dead.
Hananah Zaheer’s stories have appeared in Gargoyle, Moon City Review, Willow Review, Concho River, and Word Riot.