Seher Fatema Vora is a Pakistani-American editor and writer based out of the Bay Area. Her work can be found in the Baltimore Review and is forthcoming in Corvid Queen.
Six thousand miles over land, ocean, and ocean again, and yet the view was the same.
The apartment was smaller, the tiny window in the corner barely hinting at the strait beyond the hill. It gave me hope that perhaps I’d see something new; but in the end, I looked and looked and it was still all water and bridges, the same as what I’d left behind. It seemed it was my destiny to be forever stranded this way, an unwilling peninsula.
The only difference was the noise. The wind and the waves, even as they looked benign, sounded heavier here—the longer I listened, the more I could hear them, voices whispering stories of crossings and battles a thousand years old. Though it fascinated me, I found that I expected it, too. Crossing land and sea wouldn’t take me away from the war. The war was my life. The war was inside.
Jang. In Urdu, jang is war, the blood and the sinew, the boom and the bang. For me, it’s a word that implies not just worldly carnage, but the turmoil of the soul, too. My name is Aliya Jang, and it’s my heart that’s a battlefield. Dil hai meydan-e-jang.
San Francisco to Istanbul, peninsulas over, and jang was still jang.
Until it wasn’t.
. . .
At some point I decided to stop willing the boxes scattered across the apartment to unpack themselves and went for a walk instead.
Despite the fact that a bustling university stands in its midst—Boğaziçi University, one of Turkey’s best and my home for the next four years—the Rumeli Hisarüstü suburb on the northern part of Istanbul’s European half is its own bubble of quiet. If ever there is a place in this sultan of cities to stop and actually hear what the wind is saying to you, it’s on the hills of Rumeli. The locals will tell you about the old stone fortress that lies a few miles north; they’ll recount days spent drinking çay and playing backgammon, wild nights in Taksim Square or the nightclubs of Ortaköy, where they partied until dawn, drunk on rakı and good times.
What they won’t tell you is about the times they spent in silence, standing on hillcrests and staring down into the depths of the Bosphorus; moments to be had and to be experienced alone. For me, those moments were at first unwelcome. True, the wind did its work and whispered into my ear—yet the words, stolen from my own heart, were of battles I did not want to relive and stories I did not want to remember, coming together in a tone reminiscent of my brother’s. But his soft-spoken voice, laden with love and with poetry, was one I would never hear again in any language of this earth.
. . .
I settled nicely into a routine after the first few weeks. Get up in the morning. Walk up the incline from my apartment to the shuttle stop, which in turn would ferry me down yet another hill to the South Campus, where the best views were and where all my classes took place. Eat lunch at the dining hall. Trudge back up the hill, get back in the shuttle, and shuffle my way back down into my apartment.
I kept my phone buried at the bottom of my bag to avoid the temptation of looking at it. I’d never been close with my parents, and calls from the person I most wanted to speak to would not come, never again. The phone wasn’t heavy, but for the weight of my brother’s now-defunct number inside, reminding me constantly of that universal consolation: Don’t despair, the dead are still with you when they’re gone.
Of course they are. They are in every thought you have, every regret you suffer, every want you long for. And so the battle with my memory raged on, but I was becoming an anonymous face in the sea of this new life, and it suited me just fine.
. . .
Looking back, it’s easy to wonder how a small change has the potential to completely alter the course of your life. If you had taken a different turn. If you had waited an extra minute. In my case, if I had not forgotten my wallet at my apartment that day, and realized that I could not pay for the cup of tea that kept me on my feet and fighting through afternoon classes. Would life have moved on? Or would fate have smiled, not in defeat, but in anticipation of “next time?”
. . .
His name was Jeong-soo Kim (“But call me Jeong”). He was from San Francisco, too, at Boğaziçi for just one semester, unlike me. I didn’t want to take his money for the tea, and I didn’t want to introduce myself back, but I found that I liked the way his name bounced on my tongue, so I did both. I had the urge to ask him where he was really from; I stifled it, remembering how annoying it was to be asked the same question. The irony of it almost made me laugh out loud, which surprised me so much that the laugh died in my throat.
I hadn’t had any cause to laugh in a very long time.
Jeong was staring, so I explained myself. He actually did laugh. “Fair enough,” he said. “I was born in Busan.” I barely had time to recall a port city on South Korea’s southern tip before he spoke again.
“We have the same name you know, Jeong and Jang.” He pronounced them the same way, with a dipping “uh” sound to join the consonants.
Then, in an overly-exaggerated accent: “So, where you really from?”
The laugh, it turned out, still would not form. But a smile did, unfurling across my face. “Pakistan,” I said. We both took a sip of our tea, and that was that.
. . .
Being a foreigner in Turkey was a different experience depending on where you were really from, I discovered.
Revealing that I was American meant making myself an easy target for vendors and buskers everywhere; telling people I was Pakistani yielded much better results. I first experienced this at the university computer lab, when the librarian cast a disinterested eye over the Turkish-looking name on my student ID, did a double-take, and then—surprise—asked where I was from. Upon hearing the answer, she told me to sit down while she fetched us a tray of tea and biscuits. We spent an illuminating half-hour exchanging common words between Urdu and Turkish: shehr/şehir for city, afsana/efsane for story, dost/dost for friend.
“In Turkey, there are many different words for friendship,” my new friend told me. “But dost is one of the highest.”
. . .
One Saturday, Jeong and I ventured into the lower part of Istanbul’s European half for lunch in the strait-side fish markets of Karaköy. Jeong insisted; he had heard the fish there were the best in the city. I had begrudgingly started to think of him as more than just an acquaintance, so in service of our budding friendship, I agreed to come along. Covering my nose to block out the briny stink in a way that didn’t betray my disgust for seafood took a great deal of concentration, so Jeong was left to answer when the owner of the waterside shack we chose—a well-rounded Turkish grandfather with the warmest smile I’d ever seen, despite a missing front tooth—asked us the million-dollar question.
“Korea,” Jeong answered, sending me a thumbs-up behind his menu.
The owner was delighted. “Koreli!” he cried with gusto. “My brother!”
Jeong looked pleased, but understandably confused. The owner hastened to explain. “Our people fight together,” he insisted, gesturing wildly. “Fight in war, many years ago.”
“You fought in the Korean War?” Jeong asked, perplexed.
“No, no, not me. My brother, older brother, Mehmet. He is there still. He find peace there, in Busan.”
Busan—the location of the United Nations’ only official cemetery, filled with unmarked graves. Was it possible to find peace so far from home? I could see that this man believed his brother had, and I was surprised to find that I believed it, too.
“I was born in Busan,” Jeong offered. I thought the shopkeeper might keel over from the ecstasy of this new discovery, but it was the look in Jeong’s eyes that captivated me. They had a sadness in them, sympathy for loss, but were also filled with a true affection. A strange blend evoked by the thread of fate tying him to this man we had encountered only by chance.
“So, he is dost?” I asked the owner, with a hint of a grin.
Our host turned his attention to me. “Pakistani?” he said knowingly. Something in my heart softened, and just like that, the grin became a smile. I nodded and now he beamed at the both of us. “Then you are dost, too,” he said, and swept off, only to return with a complimentary dessert plate and extravagant promises to make us anything that we wanted.
. . .
Just as Jeong felt a connection to the shop owner that day, so I began to feel a connection to him. It scared me, to feel linked to a person this way again—but I was more fascinated with the way that I let myself accept it, instead of fighting to push him away as I had been fighting everyone else. I tried to find a reason for this, and kept landing back on one of the first things he’d said to me.
“When you said we have the same name, did you mean that literally?”
We were holed up with our Turkish language textbooks at our favorite coffee shop in Bebek: an area a mile down the steepest hill in Rumeli where the rich and famous of Istanbul sequestered themselves in pastel mansions next to the crystal-blue waters of the Bosphorus. I felt no shame that our chosen haunt was a Starbucks. It was four stories high and had the best terrace on the street.
Jeong shrugged. “Maybe. What does jang mean in Urdu?”
“War,” I said. “What does it mean in Korean?”
Jeong didn’t answer right away, taking a sip of his tea and staring out the window. The view of the Asian side, skyline pierced at intervals by minarets that gleamed in the reflected sunlight, was spectacular.
“It’s a lot of things,” he said, after a few seconds of contemplation. “Good emotions, sad emotions. The ones that define a person, the ones that tie them to others.”
“It means love?” I asked, surprised. How could two words that sounded so similar mean such opposite things?
Jeong shook his head at me, smiling slightly. “It has a deeper meaning than just this,” he said. “I don’t think you are ready for it yet.”
. . .
Jeong. In Korean, jeong is more than love. It is a bond of the heart, is love, trust, and truth. And the truth was this: In the span of a few short months, Jeong-soo Kim had become part of my world. The battlefield was fading, calm waters flowing in on gentle tides to take its place. As I listened to the wind howling through the early morning fog during my solitary walks, I could still hear my brother’s voice at the edge of it sometimes. But each incident was fainter than the last, and I felt guilty. Like wounds on my heart were healing instead of just scabbing over.
. . .
“Do you think we were destined to meet?” Jeong asked me one day, during a break between classes. We’d made enough progress in our friendship to now lay claim to our own “spot,” a bench on a vista between Boğaziçi’s North and South Campuses. It was a popular ledge, boasting a panoramic cityscape of mosques, crumbly old multi-stories, and spindly Judas trees shedding blooms, split by water and bracketed by two sprawling bridges: Fatih Sultan Mehmet on the left and the Bosphorus Bridge on the right. The spot wasn’t exclusively ours by any means, but today it was by some mystery free of its usual gaggle of students.
For once, I welcomed the quiet. It enveloped us in a kind of warmth, even while that ancient Anatolian wind whipped around us, its velocity increasing as winter crept ever closer.
It took me a minute to gather myself and give him an answer. Then I opened my mouth and realized I didn’t have one.
“Why?” I asked instead.
Jeong shrugged. “Bridges and names,” he said, gesturing at the view. “They look the same, but dig underneath the surface even a little and you find all the differences. Still…it’s the surfaces that bring us together.”
“And how do surfaces distort our perceptions, Aristotle?” I teased, bumping my shoulder to his. Of late, he had developed a habit of waxing poetic on his favorite Greeks, something I was sure his Turkish professor of philosophy found exasperating. He didn’t play along, for once.
“I just think that there is more to it than this,” he said. I remembered what he had said about me not being ready, and then what I had read about the meaning of his name after he had demurred from telling me.
“So what does jeong really mean? Am I ready for it now?”
He smiled. “I think you already know,” he said, and reached for my hand. I let him take it. His was larger than mine, soft and limber, and suddenly, without warning, I felt some piece inside me click into place. It was so jarring that I tensed up, but to my credit, I didn’t let go.
He noticed but said nothing, simply raising an eyebrow and indulging my silence.
Finally, I asked, “What about my jang?”
Jeong’s eyebrows pulled together in a frown. “I know what that means.”
“It hasn’t changed,” I said, willing him to read between the lines the way he always wished me to. I did let go of his hand now, feeling suddenly cold. The wind was acting up, shrieking in a language that I didn’t want to know. Jeong didn’t look hurt—the distant look came back into his eyes as he tried to see beyond what I was saying. He knew, of course, that there was something I wasn’t telling him.
Dil hai meydan-e-jang. The philosopher in him was clearly itching to push past the surface I’d veneered.
“Perhaps you are only thinking of it in one sense of the word,” he suggested at last. “Does it have any other meaning?”
“No,” I said. “A war is a war.”
. . .
It was Jeong’s last question that eventually led me, a couple weeks later, to the remainder of my unopened boxes: to the only one marked by handwriting that wasn’t mine. The label, written in Urdu, read “shayari.” The books inside were special, beloved, and even as I could not bear to part with them, I couldn’t bring myself to let them see the light of day either. But for the first time since I’d sealed the box with packing tape, the nastaliq scrawl on the flap didn’t stop me in my tracks. I tore at the cardboard with purpose.
Perhaps too quickly. The sight of the slim volume on top, along with the overwhelming swell of old paper smell, almost knocked me backward.
I sat staring at my brother’s stacks of poetry books, paralyzed by the foreboding feeling that it was his soul I’d released instead of just dust and odor.
. . .
Ashiq would have loved Istanbul. The mosques, the noise, and especially the wind. He was the kind of person an old wind would slow for, knowing it had finally found someone to listen to the tales it had to tell. Always at his best in extreme weather, my older brother. Life had pulsed through him at the prospect of all that energy, the same way it terrified the rest of us.
It wasn’t the weather that killed him, though. It was a bullet, full of energy of a different kind, hateful and malevolent. A dispute over something trivial. It could have been a parking spot, could have been a hand in a pocket, could have been nothing more than a look taken the wrong way. I don’t remember what it was, exactly, because the grief rendered it insignificant. But I understood that hate causes people to see and hear only what they wish to, even as the rest of us are left devastated in our litany of whys. The man who murdered my brother saw only his brown skin, perhaps heard only his voice forming the syllables of an Urdu greeting. Why, for him, was that enough?
Ironic that my brother’s name, Ashiq, in Urdu is an expression of the deepest form of love, but the bullet that ended his life last summer was driven by hatred. He wasn’t a soldier, but he was a casualty of war just the same. His heart was a green field, but his surname was Jang. Was that destiny, too?
It wasn’t until I opened that box that I finally understood. We shouldn’t want for people to be with us after they’ve gone. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un, we Pakistanis say: to God we belong and to God we shall return. We should let the dead be. We should let them go. Because if we don’t—if we keep asking, why—our hearts become their prison, and neither one of us can be free.
. . .
“I want to read you something,” I told Jeong the next time I saw him.
“As long as it isn’t Plato,” he responded easily. His admiration of the Greeks did have limits, after all—and the unfortunate Plato had fallen to the bottom of the list by virtue of his disagreements with Aristotle on the nature of ideal forms. No surfaces were perfect.
I sent him an appropriately exasperated glare and pulled out a carefully stowed sheet of paper from my bag. Jeong looked curiously at the heap of Urdu script trailing haphazardly across the page, but asked no questions as it trembled in my hands. Taking a deep breath, I started to read, first the original Urdu, and then, for his benefit, a rough translation I’d cobbled together:
“Raat yuun dil me teri khoi hui yaad aiiye “At night, your lost memory returned to my heart
“Jaisay viraaney me chupke se bahaar aa jaaey “As spring creeps back to those places abandoned
“Jaisay saharon me haule se chaley baad-e-nasim “As the morning breeze gently sweeps the desert
“Jaisay bimaar ko bewaja qaraar aa jaaey… “As peace comes unforeseen to one who ails…
“Faiz Ahmed Faiz,” I concluded. Jeong nodded; even he had heard of Faiz, that most famous of poets, pride of Pakistan, heart of our nation. Again, I knew he was trying to see between, but he looked at me as he did this, and I could not hold his gaze.
“It reminds me of my brother.” Beside me, Jeong was still. A moment later, his slim fingers once more found their way to mine, weaving them together.
“His name was Ashiq,” I continued, pulling strength from the pulse of life in his hand. “We don’t have the same name, you and I, but the two of you did. I think you would have liked him.”
“If that was his voice reading,” said Jeong, fingers tightening ever so slightly, “I know I would have.”
I swallowed, struggling to find the words despite knowing that he needed none. “I came here because I wanted to find some peace. I was trying to let him go. Instead, I turned his memory into poison and left everything of myself behind with him.”
Jeong listened to me ramble. He let me pour myself out and when I had finished, I still felt empty. But it was different now. It wasn’t hollow.
He lifted my hand up so that my arm was suspended: a bridge between us, between my heart and his. “That is you,” he said. “Your grief. It’s part of you. But you must not forget that it is not just you.”
His next words wrote themselves into my very being.
“You see, this,” he said, tracing a nail down the protruding green line of the vein in my wrist, “is an ocean. And this,” he pressed two fingers to my heart. “This is the world.”
. . .
Winter arrived definitively in the next couple weeks, the increasing speed of the wind accompanied by icy sheets of rain. Then came the annual week of snow that, year after year, every Istanbulite remained unprepared for, and with it the end of the semester.
Six months. It felt like years.
The weather seemed to worsen with every bit of himself that Jeong packed into his suitcase. On his second-to-last day, I came over with the intention to help; but, unable to find anything helpful to do, I convinced him instead to enjoy his last days of the Istanbul air and brave the elements with me. The snow, mercifully, had stopped falling, and we trekked through the unplowed drifts on Nişpetiye Road, up the hill and onto campus for one last look at our favorite view.
I slipped my hand out of my pocket to thread it through his arm. He rested his cheek on the top of my head and the two of us stayed that way for a while, forgetting the cold to stare at the panorama of the Bosphorus that had become the backdrop of our relationship over the past few months.
“I owe you a tea,” I said finally.
Jeong huffed a laugh, but didn’t move. “I’ll miss you, too,” he replied. “Will you write?”
I laughed outright. He meant email, of course, but I knew if I sent him actual letters, he’d gather them up one by one to keep in a box, close to his heart.
“I will,” I said. “When the wind tells me to.”
He laughed with me, his other arm coming around to wrap us together in a tight hug. “I won’t have to wait long then,” he said.
I wished, for one moment, that he could stay. But I knew he had to leave; and although it saddened me, I was not adrift. I didn’t have to prepare. This wasn’t like before. He would always be somewhere, and that somewhere was tangible, another city of water and bridges and fog. The wind was quiet there, but it would remember, and carry stories to me here.
“You are more than just a heart in a war,” he said, and in the soft breeze of his voice, it felt like a promise.
