Short Story: 'The Stranger'

by Edith Critchley

A small metal plane flies through the sky which, in the past few hours, had dimmed to a smoky red, not unlike that of a small campfire, but instead as if the whole sky were ablaze, smouldering in darkness. The plane is too far away to see which companies' colours adorn the wings and nose, but the white shadow it creates, and small buzzing sound it emits informs him it is of moderate size, almost definitely commercial; an army plane wouldn’t fly over such a crowded area, in hopes to not antagonise possible fundamentalists and extremists that always fester in the hot sun. They remind him of those colonies of extremophile bacteria which could survive on the side of volcanoes for decades no matter how much-molten lava you pour over them.

The ending of the day puts him on guard: the enemy always becomes more erratic in the softer hours before dusk, or at least that’s what his briefer has told him in a glossy room in the newly constructed base in Cleveland, that has stunk of fresh paint and tacky white veneer. It doesn't smell like that here. Lahore feels foreign in all ways, plants are brown, brittle and threatening, creating a landscape only occasionally punctuated by a resilient evergreen or cement building. Spices like cardamom or cinnamon carpet the floor under which the weekly market is held, after flying off in storms of dust after a particularly enthusiastic salesman's pitch to passersby. These granules bake under the hot sun during the day, releasing fragrances into the square, not unlike the perfumes his mom would don when she was in a good mood and it was almost Christmas.

He walks slowly down a row of cafe-esque establishments that serve milky sweet chai tea, as well as other meat-based dishes which men, sat on plastic chairs, tear apart with their fingers. Haven't their mothers taught them anything? In the heat of one of these establishments, where clanging pans orchestrate a symphony so loud in its performance it imitates raining gunfire; a man catches his eye. He is burly and large, 6”3 or so dressed in casual waiter’s uniform. The apron is stained but doesn't fit him. He would have made an exceptional football player. The waiter, from under his heavy brow and with crossed arms, watches him too. Their eye contact is only broken by the grey curtain acting as a door to the kitchen waving in the dry wind. Its curved contortion covers the waiter's face, but instead chooses to leave their ominous stature in full view. The soldier feels a prickle of movement on his neck, and braces instinctively for some sort of impact. Maybe it is playing too much football or that thing the specialist assumes he’s probably been infected by after his last deployment. The thing that makes him shout at his ex-girlfriend when she would shut a cupboard too loudly or that would keep him up at night and turns the softness of his bed into some kind of contorted cell. But he doesn't like to think about that.

A third man, dressed in Pakistani attire, taps gently on his shoulder;  the softness in his approach was a shock, and caused him to turn with a start. He was a small man, compared to the other, with small brown eyes and a boyish face that was interrupted halfway down by a tangled beard, which made up for what the man lacked in height with this beard’s mere volume. He spoke in a perfect American accent, if somewhat shrill, and in that fancy way northerners from Ivy League colleges do, with every syllable pronounced fully, forcing their knowledge of everything, including the ways words are supposed to be pronounced down your throat. The little man has noticed the lingering gaze on their beard and misinterprets his shock at the man's genteel appearance to some sort of fear or ignorance toward his beard.

He is observant or perhaps a good guesser. A cup of tea sounds good actually. Besides he is probably just a friendly passerby who wants to practise his English. It also wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on the watchful man in the kitchen. He sits on a chair that is perpendicular to the kitchen wall, allowing him to peek through the fraying curtain whenever the wind allows. The chair creaks warningly under him, he can feel it flex under his full weight, but perhaps foolishly sits fully in it anyway. Trying to relax in case his companion is really as observant as he claims.

The man notes out loud that he still wears his jacket, and true he is boiling, particularly with the metal on his holster branding his skin, but revealing a handgun resting under his sweat-drenched armpit feels like an unwise decision, particularly in such bizarre company.

Ah - he has seemed like one of those Ivy League types, he's not the only one who’s observant. The man speaks, rather critically, of his time in America. Every time he reaches some sort of fixed point in his story, something that seems important to the narrative, his lips curly upward as if he is smirking, his lips visible only slightly under his mass of hair. He continues talking about himself. But the soldier doesn't bother to concentrate, he instead watches Lahore: things are happening fast now in the square around him. Chairs clang as people rise from their meals, cars start and sputter somewhere in the distance. Women in blue paint-covered jeans stride laughing past the cafes, fairy lights prematurely above what will soon become the market, blinking distractingly, saturating the sky with light. Like the fireflies that used to swim past his window at home. Every time he glances over to the kitchen the heavyset man watches back, he let the chai tea burn. Its dark sugariness floating through the air like fairies in the books his sister read him as a baby, landing, softly, sharply on his tongue. 

Mistress twilight has now arrived, her velvet purple cloak helping blur vision so that all that the soldier can see is the stranger’s glinting eyes. His thoughts succumb to blurriness too, he senses the darkness and the fire but doesn't make any attempts to leave. His chair creaks, the man drones, the waiter watches, the lights become fire flies, and the sugar dances like fairies. He fails to notice the army plane that flies overhead.

This is a creative writing response to Mohsin Hamid's novel, 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'.