Excerpt: “The Dying Sun and Other Stories”  - Winner of the CWA Book of the Year Award for Indie Fiction

By Syed Afzal Haider

Blind Date

 

 

Smelling an unfamiliar fragrance on my old jacket, I thought of my first Lithuanian, Ilona.

 

I once had a blind date—actually, someone else’s blind date. Sal, a fellow countryman and a classmate at the American Institute, called and asked me if I’d like to take out his blind date. He said he couldn’t do it—other things had come up, namely that he had a sure thing going. I said yes. I had nothing going.

 

When I walked up to the corner of State and Washington, Ilona was already there, standing under the Marshall Field clock, 7:05 P.M. Ilona had brownish-blond hair, large pale-blue eyes, a slim short nose, and thin lips. She was attractive; I liked her.

 

I knew instinctively we wouldn’t work out. I don’t trust thin lips. Dressed in a bright yellow crepe silk dress. She looked radiant, in the reflected setting August sun. She was friendly. She smiled, said hello, and held my hand.

 

Her hands were cold. I didn’t say my name. Sal’s advice: “We Indians, Mo, we all look alike to the whites.”

 

“What shall we do?” I asked, not knowing what had been discussed and planned.

 

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

 

“I’m starved,” I said, looking across the street at Ted’s Steak Dinner for $3.98. “Do you have a place in mind?” I asked.

 

She suggested a Hungarian place that has since closed down. But when I think of it now, the Marshall Fields, Ted’s Steak House and the Budapest Inn, in the Loop where elevated train tracks bend at Wabash Avenue. They are all gone.

 

We sat at a table for two in the Budapest Inn. In Budapest everything was red: red carpet, red tablecloth, red napkins, red wallpaper. Ilona was reading a handsomely printed menu bound in red leather. The place was expensive. I wondered if I had enough money. The only thing I knew about Hungarian food was goulash. After careful consideration of time, place, and money, I ordered the most inexpensive goulash. She ordered a glass of house red wine and no dinner. She said she was not hungry.

 

My goulash arrived. It was red, like her wine, and the color of her yellow dress began to change. She said she was a teacher, taught English to the seventh graders in a Lansing, Illinois, Catholic school. Her parents were Lithuanian, and she had grown up in Berwyn, Illinois.

 

Ilona was beautiful, at times hauntingly stunning. I could rarely look her in the eyes. I could tell she liked me. I wanted her, and I could tell that she would be kind, but I don’t trust women with thin lips.

 

“Why did you decide to study Aeronautical Engineering?” she asked.

 

“I am Mo, not Sal,” I wanted to correct her. I was learning to build bridges. I was studying Civil Engineering.

 

My goulash was mediocre. I picked at it playfully with a beautifully carved fork. Being used to eating with my hands, I always admired the fancy gadgets mankind has invented to eat their food. To work with your hands and not get your fingernails dirty is the art of good eating. She sipped her wine slowly and asked if I were enjoying my goulash.

 

“Yes, it’s fine,” I said, avoiding her eyes.

 

She asked me if I read much poetry.

 

“No,” I said. Living in Datia, India, I used to read poetry by Ghalib and Iqbal every day in Urdu, but I didn’t want to bother her with details and old stories.

 

She said she loved reading poetry. It was one of her passions. Some nights, she said, she’d forget to fall asleep, reading poems.

 

“Do you have a favorite poet?” I asked, to carry on our conversation.

 

“Too many.” It was the poems, not the poets that engaged her passions.

 

“What poems do you know by heart?” she asked.

 

“Not many,” I said. “One or two.”

 

“Which ones?” She asked.

 

“‘A Thing of Beauty Is a Joy Forever,’ and ‘What Lips My Lips Have Kissed.’”

 

She didn’t order another glass of red wine, the waiter left, and I continued to drink water with my goulash. I had enough money when I paid our bill.

 

We walked out of the restaurant holding hands. There was a chill in the August wind blowing in from the lake; her hands were still cold. She shivered walking east toward Michigan Avenue. I offered her my jacket, but she declined. When I insisted, she said if she took the jacket, I’d be cold.

“That may be true, but men are supposed to offer jackets to their dates. I’ve seen it in so many movies,” I insisted.

 

She smiled and accepted my offer. Under my blue blazer, the yellow hue of her dress changed into a shade of blue. she looked smashingly gorgeous.

“Name three of your all-time favorite movies?” She asked.

 

“A Streetcar Named Desire, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and Eight-and-a-Half.”

 

She turned and looked at me.

 

“Eight-and-a-Half!” she said with a smile, squeezing my hand. “Tell me about it.”

 

I was supposed to kiss her at this time, and I wanted to kiss her like Burt kissed Deborah in From Here To Eternity. I wanted to hold her tight in my arms but if I kissed her once, I would want to kiss her again. If I kissed her again, I would want to see her again. If she were kind to me she would want more, and that I would not be able to give. She is the serious kind, with thin lips. I should have kissed her, but I didn’t.

 

She squeezed my hand one more time. Then she let go.

 

From the black leather handbag that she was holding in her other hand she took out an old train schedule. Looking at it with her large eyes squinting in the bright streetlight, she said, “If we walk a bit briskly, I could make the next train to Lansing.”

 

At the train station, just as the 9:50 pulled in, she took off my jacket and held it in her hands to help me put it on. She gave me a light hug, holding me tenderly for a moment. She said quietly, “I know you’re not going to call again, but I had a good evening.”

 

She kissed me gently on the lips and got on her train. I stood on the platform until the two yellow lights of the moving train turned into one yellow hue.

 

Smelling an unfamiliar fragrance on my old jacket, I thought of my first Lithuanian, Ilona, who didn’t get to know even my name