The Company We Keep (37 page)

Islamabad, Pakistan:
DAYNA

T
he next day there’s a little celebration at the ayah’s house in Rawalpindi, the sister city of Islamabad. Rafiq insists on driving us, worried we won’t find our way there ourselves.

Just as we come to Rawalpindi, Rafiq turns left across the divide in the highway, scraping the car’s bottom. He turns down a dirt road into a jumble of one-story brick houses. People squat in doorways with small propane stoves, children play in the road, and there are goats everywhere, eating garbage. Everyone turns to watch us go by. I notice the women are in saris, but with their faces uncovered—this is a Christian slum.

When we’re through the village, Rafiq cuts across a field where men are making bricks from mud, dung, and straw, and then down a rutted path. We come to a small lake spanning the road. As we drive across it, I realize it’s an open sewer.

Rafiq tells us that this is where Reela lived for the two months before Bob arrived, with the ayah and her family.

I’m exhausted now and feeling selfish, and just want to celebrate with the three of us. I ask Rafiq if we can just stay for coffee and go back to the bungalow.

“But she’s already prepared dinner,” Rafiq says.

We pass a square, unfinished brick house, which Rafiq says is a
church. We slow down to a crawl so the SUV can make it over a ditch. I never see another car.

We finally come to a stop in front of another unfinished house. Sheets hang in the spaces where glass is meant to be. Like many structures in this part of the world, this one has an unfinished second floor, rebar poking into the sky, waiting for someone to find the money to finish it. The front door looks like a salvaged piece of old metal. Swarms of mosquitoes hover everywhere.

The ayah opens the door to a clean and tidy house. She steps outside and takes Reela from me, and then introduces us to her husband, mother, grandmother, an uncle and his wife, and three cousins—Reela’s first family. They’re all delighted we’ve come.

They show us into a small sitting room with a wooden bench covered in a brightly colored sheet and a half-dozen plastic chairs. Off the room is a closet-size kitchen with a propane stove on a stone ledge. There’s no sink, and instead a hole in the floor with a drain. There are buckets of water in a corner—there’s no running water in the house. The only light is from a single bare bulb, which flickers. Rafiq sees me looking at it and says that we need to leave before eight when the power goes off, adding it will stay off until the next day. I ask why they don’t have rolling power outages like the rest of Islamabad. “Nobody cares about these people,” he says.

The ayah’s family takes us up concrete steps to the unfinished second floor. There’s a good view of the surrounding area, most of it a wasteland where people are trying to grow gardens. Salvaged bricks are piled here and there. On the roofs nearby, other families sit outside among the rows of carefully arranged cow-dung piles being dried for cooking fuel.

As Reela is gently passed among the ayah and her mother and grandmother, I get Rafiq to take our picture before it’s too dark. At this point I’m almost broken with gratitude for these people.

Dinner is a feast: chicken, dal, rice, and salad. For dessert there’s
a
firni
, a sweet rice pudding topped with pistachios. At the end the family gives Reela a blond-haired baby doll that sings the ABCs in English.

After dinner another relative passes by, holding a baby boy the same age as Reela. His head is malformed, and he cannot sit or hold his head up. He’s dressed in bright new clothes, and his father is obviously proud of him. I have to wonder what will happen to the boy. It’s doubtful he’s ever seen a doctor, and he probably never will. For that matter, I’m sure the ayah’s husband has never seen a dentist. He has a tooth that sticks out of his mouth at a right angle.

As we drive away, I ask Rafiq if the ayah’s house is anything like the one where Reela was born in Faisalabad.

“No,” he says, “there’s no electricity or water there at all.”

I’d like to think this is what we’re rescuing Reela from, trying not to admit to myself that something absolutely precious is being transferred from the “have-nots” to the “haves.” If only we can love her as much and as well as these people do.

Lahore, Pakistan:
DAYNA

T
here’s nothing like frequent-flier miles—to be precise, 150,000 of them. It was enough to get us to Islamabad and back to California. They rack up fast when you renovate a hundred-year-old Berkeley brown-shingle Craftsman house, and charge everything from the Toto toilet to the Dacor French-door refrigerator with a bottom freezer.

But what we have to look forward to now is thirty-six hours of flying with an eleven-month-old baby we met just six weeks ago. I might have thought it was impossible not long ago, but she’s part of me now. I melt at every smile, every giggle, every little acknowledgment that she understands we’re going to take care of her, feed and love her. She easily curls up with me and reaches for me like I’m hers, and she’s mine.

At the Etihad Airlines check-in counter, we anxiously wait while the attendant checks our tickets. We were on hold for at least an hour with United, trying to figure out how to get us routed back home. Because of Reela’s Pakistani passport, she cannot land in Kuwait without an onward ticket, and, traveling as an infant, she has no ticket of her own. But United has seen it before, and issues a “fake” ticket so she can board our flight. It took forever, though, and our phone bill is going to be immense.

Islamabad—Lahore—Abu Dhabi—Kuwait—Washington, D.C.—Chicago—Los Angeles: that’s our planned route home. And the last person to have any say over our court-appointed guardianship of this abandoned baby girl we’ve come to adore is a Pakistani immigration official in a green uniform, complete with felt beret and sidearm.

“Passports,” he says officiously, sticking out his hand.

Bob’s passport has pages added more than once from all his travels. I’m terrified that somewhere in there is a stamp from Tel Aviv or something else that will cause a problem. The official goes through it page by page, as if looking for a reason not to let us board. Reela studies his face as if she’s deciding what he’s up to.

The man hands back Bob’s and my passports as if he’s disappointed, then picks up Reela’s brand-new Pakistani passport, empty except for the U.S. visa. And then, page by page, he examines the notarized court documents granting us guardianship. He’s like a law student looking for some small anomaly.

“Where are her parents?” he says, looking at Bob and then me.

Bob tells him that her mother died and her father couldn’t afford to take care of her.

He looks again through her passport and keeps one page open with his thumb.

“May I ask you something?” he asks.

This is where I wait for the inevitable, where the disdain comes through in his voice and where I feel so guilty for taking a child away from her own country. I’m racking my mind for how I’ll explain why we didn’t adopt from our own country.

“Why didn’t you adopt a Muslim child?” he asks instead.

I start to answer, but Bob does first, explaining how under Pakistani law we can only adopt a Christian child.

The man slowly looks through Reela’s passport one more time.
I hold my breath, waiting for him to ask us to step aside so he can talk to his superior, or for him to send us through some unmarked door where all of the past six weeks will suddenly vanish in a small airport interrogation room.

“Take good care of her,” he says, and waves us through.

DAYNA

I
t’s me who first spots my father at Orange County airport, at the bottom of the escalator. There’s a big grin on his face when he sees me with Khyber in my arms. There’s no doubt about it: he’s delighted for me, for us. But just as we’re pulling out of the airport parking lot, he says that he’s leaving early the next morning on a trip with his “other daughter.”

It isn’t the first or the last of painful moments like this. Later, when I find the chance, I tell him that I feel as if I’ve been replaced. “Well, you were gone,” he says. And there it is, the truth.

I lied to myself for a long time that I didn’t have to be nearby to keep family bonds. I convinced myself that things would be the way they always had been when I finally came back home. Oh boy, did I get that one wrong.

In the end, family all comes down to what Bob says about spying: you either tend the human element or watch what’s really of value slip away.

Khyber is three now. She’s loving and happy, a home full of laughter and joy. We keep in contact with her father, Adham, through his bishop in Faisalabad. Adham is now married to his deceased wife’s sister. I still stay in touch with my ex–husband, who’s happily remarried. Bob’s ex–wife was delighted when she heard about Khyber and sends her gifts from around the world (she’s still at the State Department).

I read somewhere that an adopted child’s life doesn’t start the day the child’s adopted. Like anyone, the child’s history and family began a thousand lifetimes ago. I need to remember that Khyber’s mother was her first mother, and that her father made a decision that changed both his and our lives forever. I can’t do anything other than plan that Khyber will be able to see him and come to know him and her birth family. The bishop has invited us to stay with him when we come to Pakistan, and I hope we will soon be able to take him up on his offer.