“This Is What We Could Have Been” by Roohi Choudhry (fromThe Kenyon Review‘s Nov/Dec 2015 issue), opens with the highest of stakes: Armed extremists have taken over a primary school in Karachi. A father, Nadeem, fights his way through soldiers, journalists, and fellow parents, looking for his neighbor Zubeida, a woman who walks his daughter to school together with her own younger brother. For a few sentences we hold on to the same sliver of hope as Nadeem: Perhaps the children, Marya and Ali, arrived late enough to avoid being taken hostage? But Zubeida soon flatly tells us, “They’re inside.”
Nadeem and Zubeida spend much of the story helpless, waiting for news. Neighbors offer condolences. We learn that Nadeem is a widower and Zubeida is an orphan raising her younger brother. They’ve been leaning on each other in small ways for the last two years (Zubeida cooks pink rice for Marya’s seventh birthday dinner, Nadeem helps Ali with homework), forging a friendship that Nadeem realizes could theoretically become something more (Zubeida is “a single young woman, barely ten years younger than he”). Out of both respect for Zubeida and the need to be scrupulous about appearances, he and Marya have only ever visited at “chaste hours.”
Now Nadeem and Zubeida struggle to turn to each other without either raising neighbors’ eyebrows or building a possible relationship on a shaky foundation of trauma. The reader is invested in the children’s survival, but also in the fragile, tentative comfort these two people might be able to offer each other: We imagine the future that might be possible if the current crisis can be survived.
Spoilers from here on out: The army retakes the school; the children are released. A different version of the story might end here, with a sigh of relief. But Choudhry’s story continues, exploring some of the damage wrought by the ordeal. Both children have been preached at, told that their parents and teachers are sinners. Marya will barely eat or speak, and when she does, she tells Nadeem, “It’s not right, for a father to raise a daughter by himself!”
Desperate to comfort and safeguard his daughter, Nadeem clumsily proposes to Zubeida. She agrees, with a look of “determination, but also, defeat,” and Nadeem realizes that the cold, practical deal they’re striking will supplant whatever else they might have been to each other. That sense of loss appears in the story’s title, as well as the way Nadeem feels about his entire country. Wistful memories of his late wife lead him to memories of his childhood in a version of Pakistan he mourns: “He was sick with something he could not place, but it was not nostalgia.”
The feeling is fiercer, more sorrowful, more poignant. It is a feeling that Choudhry deliberately set out to capture, writing in an interview with KR that, “For me, the children and their loss of innocence represent so many of the very precious aspects of my homeland that have been transformed by violence.” The story is a masterclass in how an author’s ideas about a place can feel not superimposed on a narrative but absolutely organic to her characters’ lives. As Choudhry says, “It’s true that I had my own feelings about Pakistan and poetry and violence that I chose to express through writing fiction. But once Nadeem and Zubeida came into being, it was their experience and opinion of those themes that mattered, not mine.”
A decade ago, when this story was written, I think readers in the United States might have been quicker to see those experiences and opinions as specific to some other part of the world, not here. But the intervening years have made more inescapable how “This Is What We Could Have Been” is particular in its setting but also universal in its concerns. There are, after all, many forms of extremism, many ways for a country’s politics to mutate, for violence to become accepted or pervasive, for wildly different ideals to duke it out in ways that damage both combatants and bystanders. This is a story where everyone survives, and yet so much has been lost. It is both wistful and gutting, even more so now than when I first read it.
