PART THREE — Nida

PART THREE

Nida

Two Days, Which Is Longer Than It Sounds

Chapter Seven

How Connections Find Their Way

The city is smaller than it appears. Not geographically — it is geographically vast, sprawling outward at its edges with the urgency of something that has not been told where to stop. Smaller in the human sense: in the way that the people it contains are connected through webs of family and neighborhood and school and friendship that make the distance between any two people shorter than the distance between strangers should be.

Zakariya met Nida because of Saad. Saad had dated a girl named Nida for several months. The relationship had ended in the way such relationships end — with the sadness of two people who were genuinely fond of each other and genuinely unsuited for the long term, which is one of the more honest varieties of ending. And Nida was, as the city's web would have it, the cousin of Zara.

Zakariya knew this in the abstract — Saad had mentioned it once, in passing. It had not registered as significant because significance depends on what you bring to the information, and what he brought to it was not yet formed.

He met her at a gathering. One of those gatherings that cities produce endlessly — part social obligation, part genuine pleasure, assembled through the intersection of several friendship circles. She was standing near the window. She had Zara's family somewhere in her face — something in the structure, the way she held her head at a slight angle when she was listening. He noticed this and filed it without examining what the filing meant.

They talked for most of the evening. She was sharp in the way that does not perform itself — the sharpness appearing in the specific word chosen, the observation made without setup, the willingness to say the thing that social convention did not require but that made the conversation real. He liked this without complication. Numbers were exchanged. Conversations continued.

Perhaps there is a variety of connection that exists specifically in the condition of not-yet-knowing — in the window before the full picture is clear, before the context arrives to complicate the simplicity of two people finding each other genuinely interesting. In this window, something real happens. The two days were real. They simply ended before they could become something else.