A curtain shifts slightly to the right and a woman, freshly bathed, blond hair coiffed, a cigarette in her slim hand, watches a dark man walk slowly as if he has all the time in the world. He peers carefully into the garage of another residence, six houses away down the street. He looks at a couple of recently acquired antique cars that reek of paint. After he studies them for a long time, he gazes at the Mercedes parked on the next driveway. He continues walking and pauses to glance at a three-car garage, a new addition to what used to be a Colonial, but is now an elegant pillared residence. The raised garage door reveals a Saab and junk: wires and cables and boxes. 

The blonde stubs her cigarette in the ashtray and leaves it balanced on the edge. She notices the man check the windows of the Colonial to see if anyone is watching him. His eyes sweep the street. She takes a step back until she thinks it’s safe to look out again. She pulls out her cell phone from the pocket of her bathrobe and dials 911. “There’s a black man peering into garages in my neighborhood. I’m terrified. Can you send someone over? I wouldn’t be surprised if he turns out to be a terrorist or something.”

The 911 dispatcher calms her down, coaxes her to give her address, and tells her not to panic as there’s a cruiser in her neighborhood. A couple of minutes later, the police car pulls close to the curb where the man is. The blinds on a window in the house on the opposite side of the street are opened by a nonagenarian. 

A stocky police officer jumps out of the cruiser. “What are you doing in this neighborhood?”   

The dark man looks at him angrily and points to a house in the direction he walked away from. “I asked you a question,” the police officer says. The man shakes his head. “Are you Indian?” the police officer shouts. “Do you speak English?” The man reaches into his pocket and is about to retrieve something when the police officer strikes him down. He falls face-down on the ground. “Tumne kya kiya?” the dark man asks. He is handcuffed and pushed roughly into the cruiser. 

The blonde is relieved when she sees the cruiser leave with the stranger in the backseat. Could the secret intelligence organization of another country have sent the dark man to sabotage her plans? She will never know what happens to him. She slips off her bathrobe, relieved that it was a close call and nothing more. She puts on a floral suit, knots a scarf around her neck, and attaches a brooch below the left lapel of her collar. Madeleine Albright would have been proud to have worn the pin — a dragon with fire breathing out of its nostrils. The blonde enters her garage and drives a Honda to Boston. She steels herself to be the woman she wouldn’t have wanted to be more than a decade and a half ago. The Charles River is particularly beautiful with the afternoon sunlight glinting off its waves and a couple of sailboats floating on its waters. 

At the Museum of Fine Arts, the blonde flashes her membership card to the attendant who tells her she’ll have to check in her tote at the cloakroom. She nods and a security guard asks her if it’s her first visit. He looks at her porcelain skin, blond hair, blue eyes, and considers her to be harmless, unlike the Arabs, whom he doesn’t trust in the least. He doesn’t even notice her sneaking past the cloakroom. With brisk strides, she finds the perfect nook to plant her tote and she quickly walks out of an exit door. The woman now gets into another car, where she transforms her appearance in a way that would have put a butterfly emerging from a cocoon to shame.    

Anjali, the managing editor of Vibrant City, looks at the online edition of The Boston Globe to take a break from work. Right at that moment, she spots a video that shows her father’s face and she clicks the play sign. She almost faints when she sees the police officer make her father fall to the ground as if he were a criminal. The newscaster comments that a nonagenarian recorded the whole interaction on his cell phone, but he wasn’t the person who called in to report a suspicious person in the neighborhood. Anjali hasn’t been formally introduced to the old man, but the Chinese woman who lives next door to her told her he’d been successfully treated for lung cancer more than a year ago. She views the online video again in disbelief, but there is no doubting the veracity of what she’s seen. Her phone rings for a long time. 

When she picks it up, her agitated father, who can’t speak a word of English, tells her he’s lying down in a bed in Lahey Hospital. Breathing heavily, he summarizes what happened.  A police officer approached him. He pointed to their house to let him understand he lived in the neighborhood. He attempted to get his cell phone out so he could call her and have her answer the police officer’s questions, but the man knocked him to the ground. Anjali interrupts to ask him if any of his bones are broken. Her father ignores her question. How could the officer have treated him like this? He hadn’t broken a single law. Anjali tries to calm her father down. “I’ll be at the hospital in less than an hour.” When she asks him how he is again, he gives the phone to a nurse who speaks to her. Tears escape from Anjali’s eyes when they finish talking.

In the elevator, she jabs the basement button with indignation. She feels certain her father was suspected of being a terrorist because of his dark skin. She guesses he’d only been taking a walk in the neighborhood. She wishes she hadn’t brought him from India to help look after her child, but he’d considered it his mission to take care of his only grandchild, especially since her son had recently lost his father. She thinks how her father and her son are defined by their curious natures. Her father always wandered around exploring the houses he was invited to. He would open closets and boxes in his hosts’ rooms, much to her mortification. Once her father opened her dresser drawer to see what was inside. He closed it again when he saw that it only contained her underwear.

As she drives to Lahey Clinic, Anjali turns on the radio. Hoping to get an update about the horrifying incident, she switches channels. On one station, the host interrupts his own program about apiaries to make an important announcement. A bomb went off at the Museum of Fine Arts and killed two visitors. Two dozen people, including a baby, were injured. Thousands of dollars of artwork were irretrievably destroyed. Anjali, of all people, knows only too acutely that there’s nothing more priceless than a father, husband, son, brother, mother, wife, daughter, sister. 

No one could possibly feel safe from the machinations of terrorists after 9/11. Not after two of the three planes that carried out the attacks took off from Boston. To think that her husband once told her when they were taking the T that a couple of guys in their compartment looked like terrorists. What if he’d actually seen one of the hijackers?

The last time she’d gone to the MFA with her husband, she recalls being offended by a guard. He instructed her not to point her pen at a painting by John Singleton Copley. “If the pen falls from your hand, it could damage the canvas,” he said. Anjali hadn’t even been close to the behemoth masterpiece, Watson and the Shark. Embarrassed, she immediately put her pen in her bag and tried to focus on the painting. “There’s something not quite right about the shark’s head and the water’s not bloody enough. Still, Copley created a riveting scene,” she said.

“Don’t you feel sorry for the boy, dear?” her husband asked, throwing an arm around her shoulder. 

“Yes. Fortunately, he survived the attack. When he became a successful merchant, he commissioned the painting himself. His success didn’t stop there. He became the mayor of London.” The guard watched Anjali as if she couldn’t be trusted.

Now, however, she doesn’t care about how she was perceived by the guard when her world was still intact.

Lying on the hospital bed, fighting the kind of pain he’s never felt before, Anjali’s father regrets his decision to come to America. In the first place, he shouldn’t have allowed his daughter to study in this country. Then she wouldn’t have married an American and she wouldn’t have been a widow. The next minute he discards his disloyal thoughts about his son-in-law who’d been respectful and loving to him. He will tell his daughter to return with him to India. He doesn’t know he won’t ever be able to walk again and that he will be a liability to her. 

When the blonde reaches Logan Airport, she tries to maintain an air of detachment, even though the level of security is at its highest. She looks like a typical American tourist, not like someone who has been recruited to plant a bomb by a terrorist organization no one has yet heard of. On the plane, an Asian journalist helps heave her carry-on to the overhead compartment. As her plane takes off for Paris, she hopes the nice security guard wasn’t one of her victims. The next minute she anticipates the enjoyment she’ll feel when she’s in the midst of the beautiful paintings and sculptures in the Louvre. She wonders if she will be entrusted with another mission. The journalist, who is in an adjacent seat to her, and is on the look-out for a prospective bride, thinks the blue-eyed blonde with her fair skin will be perfect for him. “Have you been to Paris before?” he asks.

– Tara Menon